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glowingbadger · 3 years ago

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Hi it’s me, crawling through the window. Would it be possible to get a crumb of arranged marriage w/ Hubert? His line w/ Dorothea about being willing to get married for politics sake has fueled my brain rot for him.

Good God I need to secure my windows-

I mean HELLO FRIEND ANON YES IT WOULD BE MY PLEASURE

Lol actually though, I have been thinking about this for Hubie since we all started chatting about that arranged marriage stuff! I think it's a perfect concept for him~

This like... got weird while I was writing it though?? Idk man hahaha it ended up on the less-spicy side of what I usually write, and with some very weird dialogue in places... Idk, I hope y'all like it. Maybe if there's interest, I'll follow this up eventually with a more smut-focused piece?

I've been traveling and working so much lately that I just don't even know what writing is anymore or how it works hahaha

TW: A brief mention of non-con

Hubert (FE3H) x Reader ("wife," neutral pronouns)

Arranged Marriage - semi spicy i guess?

"Frankly, he's a pain," Linhardt must be able to see your surprise and confusion written across your face. He goes on, "He's reliable and capable, of course, but also the most persistent nag you'll ever meet. Actually, no-" he glances upward as though to cross reference his own thoughts, "No, her Majesty is worse. But Hubert is a close second to be sure. Always on and on about sleep schedules and proper nutrition and etiquette..." He sighs and closes the massive tome on his lap, as though to close the conversation with it, "frankly, he's an insufferable mother hen. Does that help?"

"Well, it's... Not what I expected," you admit with a shrug, "but thank you all the same."

It's been several weeks since the papers binding you in marriage to Hubert Von Vestra had been signed- and this alone had sufficed. No ceremony, no grand ball, just paperwork and a handshake with your father. A handshake that ensured that, even under the Empire's unification, he would maintain nominal control over his considerable portion of land, and in return, would swear absolute loyalty to her Majesty. It was a beneficial arrangement for all parties, and you were not ignorant to the part you played. You were hardly even a bargaining chip- moreso, a hostage.

Your new husband had made no secret of what manner of harm may befall you if your family were to renege on their deal. Fortunately, you know your father to be a reliable coward, so you have no reason to believe he would be bold enough to step out of line.

Hubert Von Vestra is a terrifying man. A zealously loyal man of storied cruelty and a frigid disposition. His frame looms over you whenever he's near, and though he's hardly placed a finger on you since you'd been given over to him, his mere presence is... arresting. There's a sort of charisma to him that's equal parts frightening and fascinating. Perhaps it's madness brought on by your circumstances, but you can't help wanting to glimpse just the slightest bit into that brilliant, ever churning mind.

Unsurprisingly, he has been resistant to your attempts to understand him. He hardly indulges you in small talk, and if you were the paranoid sort, you'd think he intentionally makes himself busy when you're around. Eventually, perhaps out of sheer stubbornness, you'd settled on a routine of bringing coffee to his study adjoined to your bedroom in the evenings. He'd been visibly surprised the first time. It wasn't until the fourth night that he'd given a curt "thank you." About two weeks in, he'd actually sat back in his chair and laid down his quill pen to receive the cup from your hands. After a month, he'd leveled his narrow gaze at you and said,

"I cannot begin to fathom what satisfaction you glean from playing 'maid' to me."

"Well, I, uhm," you hadn't expected him to address you so directly, but you managed to say, "You... work so hard, I wanted to do something for you, I suppose."

His expression is inscrutable as he replies,

"You are aware that my work was much the same before you arrived."

"I am," you say softly, "But- all the same..." you trail off, and Hubert seems content to let the matter rest. And so you leave him be amidst his reports and correspondence, coffee at his side on the desk. Yet for as unproductive as your exchange might have seemed, it does leave you with an idea. The thought to learn about the man from those who knew him long before your arrival at the capitol.

Your investigation into the true character of your husband does not stop with Linhardt. In fact, his testimony only leaves you with further questions. But perhaps the others would say otherwise; perhaps the United Empire's most up and coming crest scholar simply inspires maternal behavior. This has to be the case- you simply can't imagine that the notoriously ruthless heir of the even more notorious Vestra lineage would be so... Doting.

And yet the more you learn of him, the more contradictory he seems.

Caspar's take is much like Linhardt's- a picture of a man far closer to a school marm than any assassin or master of torture. Ferdinand seems both smitten and incensed by him, oscillating wildly between the two. Then eventually, to your shock, Bernadetta takes the initiative to speak to you about Hubert of her own accord.

"I'm, uh, really so-sorry to bother you!" she approaches with arms drawn close to her chest and eyes resolutely avoiding yours, "I- I just heard that you were... asking about Hubert, so, I, uh..."

It takes some time to prompt her further. You assure her again and again- no, this isn't intrusive at all- yes, you'd very much like to hear her perspective- no, you're not mad at her. In truth, you're endlessly intrigued about what a gentle soul like Bernadetta would have to say about a man feared across the continent. Finally, she manages,

"He's... actually really kind!" she blurts out, as though the words would abandon her if she gave them the window of opportunity. Your eyebrows raise slightly.

"You think so..?"

"Yes, completely-!" she stammers, "I know he's super, super scary, and powerful and spooky and cold and, uh, all of that. But still," her voice falters as she continues, "He only scolds people when they do something dangerous. And he only hurts people to protect others. I... I know he's done some te-terrible things. But... he's always been nice to Bernie," finally, she meets your eyes with an imploring look in hers, "So, uh, I'm really grateful to him. And I think it would be really nice for someone to reach out to him. If... if that's not too weird or anything. For you."

You smile warmly and nod,

"Thank you, Bernadetta. I know it can't be easy for you to come to me with all of this, but... I'd like to try, if I can."

The opportunity doesn't come in the way you expect.

At first, it seems the night will proceed like many others before. You bring a cup of coffee to your husband's desk, setting it down quietly so as to not disturb him. He's silent, but this is common enough, so you head back to the bedroom to undress for the evening. All nights prior, he would lay beside you long after you'd settled in, then rise to resume work in the morning before you woke up- all the while never allowing your bodies to interact in any way.

Tonight, just as you're about to close the door to Hubert's study behind you, long fingers catch around your wrist, visibly startling you.

It's the most physical contact you've had to-date, but he only says,

"One moment."

You whip around to face him, a touch of anxiety evident in your eyes. It's clear in his own that he notices, but if anything, he only seems amused. He steps forward, his taller frame menacing you as he speaks,

"I understand that you have been busying yourself with some manner of investigation as of late."

It takes a moment for his meaning to reach you. When it does, your face burns and you can't bring yourself to meet his scrutinizing gaze,

"Oh, uhm..."

"I assure you, my dearest wife," he says with barely concealed venom, "anything that I do not wish for you to know will be kept from you. Aside from which, your efforts thus far have proven amateurish at best."

Something seems off about his tone. You could understand if he felt uncomfortable or hesitant about your efforts to learn about him, but this seems far more grave, more... business-like. He steps towards you once more, and you step back in turn. Yet before long, you feel your legs bump the edge of the bed. A gloved hand trails a fingertip down your jawline to your chin, then urges you to look up at him.

"Whatever you are planning, my dear, I promise it will be fruitless. You had best rethink how you spend your days before your actions bring you to harm."

"No, I-" your brow creases deeply, your face burns, your body burns hotter and you don't want to consider why, "I've just been trying to learn about you as a person, nothing else. We're- we're married, after all, so..."

He gives an abrupt, dry laugh.

"Ah, so I am to believe that you've been interrogating my allies out of some misguided affection, is that it?"

"Hubert, just listen to me!" for a moment, you feel bolstered, defiant, and you straighten your posture, "You won't tell me the first thing about you- the only way to learn so much as your favorite color is to ask someone who's known you for a decade!"

Briefly, he does seem to consider your words. But his eventual reply is as aloof as any prior,

"If you're no spy or politician, then you're worse- a fool." he says, and before you can respond, he's seized both of your wrists and pushed you back onto the bed. For a moment, the room spins and your voice leaves you. A shrewd eye watches you with cruel condescension as he pins you against the sheets.

"I should think that you'd be well aware what I'm capable of," he nearly whispers, "I personally ensured that the rumors spread through your father's territory and further still. Do you think that anyone would even dare lift a finger to help you if I chose to seek retribution for this recent behavior?" He draws nearer, his grip tighter at your wrists, "Perhaps as punishment, I'll simply take my pleasure from you by force."

Your lips tighten, you take a breath. Then, meeting his gaze directly, you reply,

"You won't."

His visible eye narrows.

"And what evidence do you have to prompt such unfounded confidence? Perhaps you have crafted a flattering falsehood of me in your mind," a mocking smirk curls his lips, "Am I a misunderstood sentimental sort to you, then? A sad, lonely man for you to save?"

You scowl, though you suspect it looks more like a pout to him.

"I don't know what I think of you yet- not completely. But I don't pity you like that, and I don't think you're sad or lonely. I know you're not."

For the first time, it seems that you've caught him off guard. That frigid mask falters for just a moment, and you go on before he can replace it,

"You're surrounded by people who care about you. I've seen it for myself. Whatever you've had to do in the service of your ideals- it hasn't kept the people around you from wanting to know and understand you, even if it's despite you."

Hubert is silent for a moment. His gaze bores into you like he thinks he'll discover some hidden layer if he can just keep digging. Then, he sighs,

"How did I ever become bound to such a troublesome spouse..."

When you wrest your arms from his grasp, his hands fall away with little resistance, and you think that perhaps he had never truly intended to keep you in place by force to begin with. He moves to leave the bed, but your fists find the front of his clothing and tug him back down to you.

You press your lips to his without hesitation, and you can feel him inhale sharply, his entire body rigid above you. His lips are surprisingly soft, his scent like coffee and old parchment, and though your heart threatens to burst from your chest, you hold firmly to him by his clothes. Near imperceptibly, he leans down against you, and your fear, along with any remaining doubts, begin to dissolve. Knowing he won't pull away, you let your hands relax against him, running up his chest where you can feel his own pulse pounding. It's so human, so entirely reasonable and normal. Now, at last, Hubert Von Vestra is merely a man of flesh and bone.

Your tongue meets his naturally, your lips parting in time with his as your kiss deepens to a fevered pace. One hand reaches that sharp, handsome jawline, reveling in the erotic sensation of his mouth moving against yours. And yet, all the while, his hands remain staunchly on the bed beside you. He doesn't touch you- doesn't even let his body meet yours.

It's impossible to tell whether passion or madness drives you to bring your teeth to his lower lip, a single insistent bite communicating desire mounting faster than you can contain. And for a moment, you sense something new; a sound catches in Hubert's throat, a reaction he fights to stifle. Then, he pulls away. His pale skin is tinted a rare shade of pink, and his hair is ruffled out of place enough to reveal both narrowed eyes. His cloak has spilled around his frame to surround you both, and somewhere in your frazzled mind, you imagine that you're caught in some beautiful, velvet-lined trap.

"I- must... return to my work." Hubert says stiffly. He pushes up from you and turns away, leaving you still flustered on the bed behind him. You sit upright, holding your arms tight around your body as you watch him straighten his hair and clothes.

"You, uhm..." your face reddens still as you search for the right words, "you could... join me in bed, if you liked."

Hubert turns to the door of his study, speaking without daring to even glance your way,

"Anything that you offer to me now will be born from the impulse to survive. I have been bargained with before." His shoulders slack just slightly, his voice low and sober, "The proudest nobleman will even sell off his own child to a monster if he feels it will spare him its teeth."

You open your mouth to protest, then shut it without a word. You feel that you know your mind and heart, even in this moment, but you lack the words to convince a man like this. In a feeble attempt, you murmur,

"You don't frighten me, Hubert. Not anymore."

He half turns toward you, though his hand remains on the handle of his study door.

"You yourself said that you do not know what you think of me," he says, "As such, I will not lay a hand on you until the day that you do."

You stare down at your hands in your lap, barely registering the sound of the door clicking shut as he leaves you in the bedroom. No matter how you try to sort out your tangled thoughts, the memory of his lips on yours won't leave them. If anything, it eclipses any sense of reason, standing resolutely in the way of your path to clarity. Letting out a groaning sigh, you fall onto your back on the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling as if it could offer you any advice.

What do I think about my own husband? You wonder, the thought nearly enough to make you laugh. Well for one, he's a pain.

#hubert von vestra #hubert x reader #fire emblem #feh #fe3h #fire emblem three houses #fire emblem x reader #fire emblem imagines #fire emblem fic #x reader

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moonknightly · 5 years ago

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So Ruthless, Darling : Poe Dameron x Reader

Pairing: FO!Poe x Reader

Word Count: 2k

Excerpt: “His devilish smirk still stood and she still looked completely uninterested, as if the knife in her hand was a pen and the blood coating her fingers was merely ink.”

Warnings: Blood, violence, cursing, gets a little heated. Drugs, I guess what could be considered a brief mention of torture? This is...dark.

You fuckers better thank @tintinwrites for making me write this.

Complete darkness. Absolute silence. He was disoriented, the lack of sight and the inability to hear leaving him dizzy in a way he never imagined possible. Two of his senses, completely stripped from him, taken by some unknown drug unwillingly pushed through his veins, the small pinprick of the needle setting his skin on fire as the combination of chemicals swirled into his bloodstream.

It still burned. He could still feel, though moving was a different story, and every sensation felt electric, but not in the way he usually enjoyed, like when her hands wandered across the expanse of his back or when her fingers tangled themselves into his short curls. It was overwhelming — the feeling of the hot sand beneath his bare feet and hands gripping his arms so tight as he was marched towards some unknown location. It hurt, and Poe could usually handle an impressive amount of pain without even flinching.

He could still taste the blood in his mouth, leaking from his split lip, or maybe it was from his bloodied nose, because he could smell the familiar, tangy iron so strongly he was sure that it was the only thing keeping him from passing out at how fucking dizzy he was.

Time was a foreign concept to Poe in that moment. How long ago had he been walking through dark streets, alone and head just a little too fuzzy for the dismal amount of alcohol he had consumed at a bar earlier that night? They had slipped something into his drink too, he was sure, because even drunk he never would have allowed himself to be captured by a lousy group of Resistance members.

Would she be awake yet? Had she noticed that he wasn’t in bed beside her, that he hadn’t made it back to their small ship from the bar?

The idiots who took him definitely didn’t account for her, and the thought brought a proud smirk to his face — one that didn’t falter as the burning sand beneath his feet turned to cool stone, and remained on his lips even as he was forcefully pushed to his knees, the coarse feeling of rope scratching against his wrists as his hands were tied behind his back.

Could the Resistance not even afford a decent pair of stuncuffs?

His head snapped back suddenly, from the force of a fist meeting his jaw. Poe grit his teeth, fresh blood filling his mouth, hot and heavy like red wine. He shook his head, the look in his eye somewhere between lethal and defiant, though they were still unseeing. He hoped that whoever had hit him was standing close enough, because he spit and wanted nothing more than for it to splatter in their face, and it was safe to assume that he was successful even temporarily blind because his actions were met with a blow to the temple from the butt of a blaster.

And he laughed. He couldn’t hear it, but he could feel it in his chest, and he could tell by the way it rolled off his tongue that the sound was dripping with an underlying venom so caustic, he was sure the eyes of his captors held the terror they had hoped he would be the one to feel.

He only felt excitement. He wasn’t worried, had no reason to be. His girl was more than capable of finding him, more than capable of getting him out of this. They wanted something from him, if they didn’t they would’ve shot him back in the streets. The drug hadn’t even begun to wear off yet. She had time. He wasn’t worried.

And the pain — it was almost delicious. The wet, sticky red on his face, the bruise he could already feel forming between his ribs where a boot had just knocked him on his ass before a set of hands yanked him back up to kneel, the friction of the rope against his wrists burning so enticingly.

He liked it.

The more pain placed on him, the more they would endure at her hand.

The thought was erotic to Poe.

But when had the Resistance gotten so dirty?

It seemed a little too dramatic for Organa, but he could remember seeing the familiar symbol stitched onto the sleeve of a leather jacket worn by one of the men — it had been the last thing he had seen before his vision faded to black. He supposed the jacket could’ve been stolen.

But it didn’t really matter. If they were with the Resistance, the carnage left behind would be one hell of a message for their precious General. If not, then it would still be a story, a warning.

The Dameron’s had a reputation for being ruthless, and that would only be further solidified in the wreckage they left behind — in the remnants of the hurricane that his wife would bring.

They had really fucked up.

He took every blow, every kick, every drag of a blade across his skin with complete silence, with the controlled discipline he had learned in his years of serving the First Order. Poe wouldn’t give them even an ounce of satisfaction. They could brand him, and he would only grit his teeth at most while violent pictures of her filled his mind.

Time still didn’t exist to him. All he knew is that his ears were beginning to ring and he could see blurry shapes dancing around his vision. He almost liked the nothingness more than the inbetween.

He guessed another thirty minutes passed, and his vision returned before his hearing, and he didn’t even try to hide it — his eyes following the movements of the one wearing that leather jacket. There were two others, another man with a spotty mustache and a woman, none of them paying any attention to Poe at that second.

They were talking, and Poe didn’t read lips well enough to be able to make out any words other than his name here and there. He rolled his eyes, already growing annoyed with the muffled ringing in his ears.

It was bullshit.

And the blaster fire that sounded throughout the room minutes later only made it worse.

But it also brought that signature proud smirk back onto his lips, his eyes full of delight as he watched each of his captors fall to their knees as they were shot out from under them, their own blasters sitting on a small stone table a few feet away from Poe, completely out of their reach.

Maker, they were fucking stupid.

Organa really needed to get her shit together.

She walked into the small hut, her pace slow, expression almost bored though her eyes showed how truly pissed she was. They were cold, harsh, yet blazing with an unforgiving and relentless fire that he adored to no end.

She didn’t even glance his way, but he caught how her shoulders stiffened, and the way that her hand twitched. She had seen him, and the initial rage she had felt only intensified ten times over.

And Poe watched, that satisfied smirk still on his face, as she let that rage fuel her actions.

Time suddenly made sense again, and he reveled in the twelve minutes and forty-seven seconds his wife spent working her magic. His devilish smirk still stood and she still looked completely uninterested, as if the knife in her hand was a pen and the blood coating her fingers was merely ink. The only other indication that Poe was enjoying this was the callous laugh that flew from his lips as the last body, the man in the leather jacket, fell to the ground with a solid thump, chest still moving with shallow breaths that would only last another minute or two, his eyes holding Poe’s as his wife made quick work of tearing her blade through the thick rope binding him.

He stood swiftly, as if he hadn’t just been kneeling for Maker knows how long, rubbing at the red marks around his wrists before turning, one of his arms encircling her waist while his other hand fell to her ass, pulling into a searing kiss that might have been just a little exaggerated for the sake of showing his lame excuse of a captor just how exhilarating the whole thing was for him. The sinful moan that dripped from his lips however was one hundred percent truth. Watching his wife tear those who tried to wrong them apart was undoubtedly a turn on.

He only pulled away once the urge for his own thirty seconds of vengeance became too much.

Poe wasn’t sporting a smirk anymore, instead choosing to adopt the rather bored expression that still adorned his wife’s face as he glared down at the other man, his fingers twitching at his side as he thought for just a moment. He knelt down, grabbing his jaw with bruising force as he simply looked him over, eyes daunting.

“You made one real stupid fuckin’ mistake,” Poe chuckled darkly, straightening back up to his full height before bringing his foot down onto his face, once just to hurt, to hear the satisfying crunch of bone breaking under his boot, waiting several long seconds to relish in the scream that sounded throughout the room before bringing it down a second time.

All that followed was silence.

He turned away from the body on the floor, his eyes immediately finding hers across the small space. He could see her hands trembling, and the fire that had been in her eyes quickly gave way to another emotion Poe hated to see.

She looked terrified.

But not of him. No, never of him.

Poe slowly closed the distance between them, taking her hands between his, looking down at them, covered in crimson that he knew would stain. He shivered gently, and let the feel of her skin on his deliver another wave of comfort that he would only ever admit or show to her.

“I almost lost you,” she mumbled, her voice breaking his small reverie.

“I would’ve found a way back to you,” he replied instantly, tilting his head to the side. “No way in hell am I going to die at the hand of a few lousy Resistance members.”

His words didn’t seem to do much for her. She only shook her head, mouth falling open and shut again several times as she tried to find something, anything to say.

Poe didn’t give her the chance to even attempt to speak again, though. He took one of his hands, grasping her chin lightly between two fingers, tilting her face up until her eyes met his once again. His other hand softly encircled her wrist, and he held her gaze intently as he brought her fingers up to his mouth, his lips closing around each individual digit as he licked the blood away from her hands, his eyes fluttering shut as he gave her other hand the same treatment.

But he stopped at her pinky, quirking an eyebrow as he slowly offered it to her, his eyes flickering down to her lips as she pulled her own finger between her teeth, sucking it clean, no longer trembling, eyes no longer haunted.

And that damned smirk fell back onto Poe’s face just as his cock twitched in his pants, and he couldn’t refrain from pulling her flush against his torso, dipping his head until his lips found hers in a greedy, passion filled kiss.

He didn’t hesitate to push his tongue into her mouth, pushing past the bittersweet taste of iron until he found one that was entirely and completely her — so familiar, so inviting.

“I’ve got you,” he mumbled against her lips, bending so that his hands could sweep her knees right out from under her, her hips meeting his as he held her tightly against him.

“I’ve got you.”

#poe dameron #poe dameron x reader #star wars #poe x reader #sw #tros #tlj #tfa #poe dameron fanfiction #star wars fanfiction #first order poe

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ymiwritesstuff · 5 years ago

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Controlled Death

Ok so, I thought this idea was good, but I’m not sure if the finished product is as well made as I thought it would be oof. I still hope you enjoy.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 3: Stardust Crusaders

Dio Brando x Reader

Summary: Even when one is able to control where human souls go after death, it’s still one of the most painful abilities there is. And you if anyone knows it.

Notes: Angst, Spoilers for Part 3, Character death

The uncertainty about what happens to one after they die has been the topic of many conversations for centuries. Some believed in some sort of afterlife where the human soul would wander after death, others believed in the bizarre concept of reincarnation. Death was a difficult subject often associated with sorrow and grief. Yet despite these downright horrible aspects of death, no human could ever control where they would end up in after taking their last breath thus making the unknown abyss of posthumous life frightening and grim. No one knew where the soul would go, nor could they throw the most horrible human beings into the depths of Hell as it wasn’t for them to decide.

However when it came to these quite well-known rules of death, there was one exception. And this exception came in the form of your stand. Having the ability to send souls into a dimension that was comparable to Hell itself was.. Terrifying. The dimension was unknown even to you as you had no idea where the unlucky souls ended up in. You could only assume it was a realm without peace, filled with flames of terror and screams of those whom they were painfully burning. The soul would be tortured and tormented for all eternity, as once your stand opened the portal to inferno, there was no escape.

You had always wondered why had you been blessed -or rather, cursed- with such a gruesome ability. The sheer uneasiness and fear you held towards your own ability was enough to make you avoid using its power almost entirely. The only few times you had actually utilized it almost immediately made you regret doing so in the first place. Every time you used its power, you could practically feel your victim’s suffering. No one deserved that. Your stand was a tool meant to be used for utter destruction, only serving as a bridge between this world and the one of death. Needless to say, you never wanted to use your stand again.

Your heart hammered in your chest, your (E/C) filled with tears as you look at the man before you. Dio was panting, his legs bent and bloody, making him unable to stand up properly. The battle was nearing its end, Dio would soon be defeated and it would all be over. No more suffering, no more bloody battles or fear. It would be over as soon as Dio was no longer roaming this world. But in order to achieve victory, you knew what had to be done.

Your expression holds so much pain that it’s almost physically hurting you, your tears feeling like acid on your eyes. Dio’s amber eyes are locked on you, similar pain apparent in them. Your trembling body is barely able to hold you up, your (H/C) hair is a mess and your quiet sobs fill the painful silence surrounding you.

You hated this. You hated it all. Deep down you knew this was the only way to put an end to Dio and you had to convince yourself that he deserved this. He was a monster, a killer, there was no humanity left in him and if anyone deserved to suffer in the depths of the horrible dimension, it was him. But even thinking about sending his soul to utter chaos was painfully stabbing your heart, spreading its poison across your body. It would be over in mere seconds, yet you were sure the simple action would haunt you for the rest of your life, clinging to your soul like a vicious parasite.

No being deserved such a fate. Not even him. It felt as though you had been driven to a corner, unable to get out. The dreadful thoughts were engulfing you, planting themselves within you and all you could do was to endure it. Endure it all and put an end to the man in front of you.

“Do it.” Dio’s voice causes you to finally look at him. His legs are now completely healed and a part of you wishes he would get up and continue fighting so you would get out of this situation. But he doesn’t. Dio remains still, waiting for you to act. The sight of him only increases the amount of bitter tears spilling from your eyes. This wasn’t right. Dio, the most powerful being you had ever encountered, was kneeling down before you, powerless against your stand and waiting for you to put an end to him. His previous confidence was gone, reduced to dust. So this was how it would end? His beloved sending his soul to a realm with no escape, something he had been dreading from the very moment you revealed your stand’s ability.

You desperately try to look for an escape route. You couldn’t let it end like this. There had to be another way. Another way to end the suffering. The attempt to look for a different solution is proven futile when you look at Dio, your eyes pleading him to escape, continue fighting, anything but you’re met with a gaze that’s given up all hope. It feels as if everything around you crumbles into dust, the feeling of devastation and guilt hitting you like a boulder. There was no escape. This was the end.

Your stand materializes beside you, your tears falling to the ground and your trembling hand raises to the air as you prepare to end yet another person’s life. This time however, you feel like you’re being dragged down with him. The ground below Dio disappears, being replaced by a void of nothingness. Demon-like hands shoot out of the portal, harshly grabbing the vampire and ripping his soul from his body in a brutal manner, the sight making your heart break into a million, irreparable pieces. You close your eyes, unable to witness the horror.

Dio doesn’t say anything, despite the excruciating pain. The only pain he truly feels is the sight of you, crying, trembling and so, utterly defeated. He never wanted to see you like this and in this moment feels responsible for your state. He was the reason you were in pain, forced to kill him in such a gruesome way. But Dio accepted it. He wasn’t afraid to die. He never had been. However he can’t stand to see you like this. He knew this cruel fate was going to get him eventually, but why did it have to be like this?

When Dio’s soul is finally detached from his now empty, lifeless body, the hands begin to drag him below the ground, where the dimension of death lies. For a moment it’s peaceful. Just you and him in this world. Together, just like it had always been. For the final time, you look at the man you love as his soul descends further to the ground below. With a quiet, fragile voice, you express your painful regret, secretly hoping it would all end:

“I’m.. I-I’m sorry..”

And then it’s all over. You hear nothing, just your distant heartbeat in your chest. Alone. You’re all alone. You glance at his lifeless body and fall to your knees, cruel cries of sorrow leaving your mouth. Dio was no more, it was all over. Everything was fine again. You fall to the hard ground below, your heart filled with regret and grief. The sobs you let out fill the air around you as you mourn the loss of your one and only. A loss, which you caused.

“D-Dio..”

Humans wished to control death. To send the worst beings to the worst place possible. However, death could never be controlled. Because even when it was, it was still nothing but a cruel curse. A curse which would always live within you, reminding you of the day you killed the man you loved.

#jjba #jojo #jojo's bizarre adventure #dio brando #dio brando x reader #jjba x reader #jojo part 3 #jojo no kimyō na bōken #jjba dio #jojo dio #jojo's bizarre adventure stardust crusaders #jojo's bizarre adventure x reader #dio x reader #jjba dio x reader #angst

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theholycovenantrpg · 4 years ago

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CONGRATULATIONS, EMMA! YOU’VE BEEN ACCEPTED FOR THE ROLE OF DMITRI.

Admin Cas: There’s something so tragic about Dmitri that I love: everything about him is a contradiction. Yet, for all his love and light, he’s also really quite terrifying, and the way you balanced both of those aspects of their character was truly breathtaking, Emma. I thought your reflections on the idea of Dmitri as a sort of wingless angel was especially impressive. In spite of all the things that make them angelic, they can never truly be one with God’s angels. That, after all, is what sets him apart from their brethren; where they are ruination, he is its saving grace. I put this golden prince in your hands without fear that you’ll do wonderful things with him, and I can’t wait to see the directions you’ll go together! Please create and send in your account, review the information on our CHECKLIST, and follow everyone on the FOLLOW LIST. Welcome to the Holy Land!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias | Emma.

Age | 21+.

Personal Pronouns | She/Her.

Activity Level | I’m able to get a reply or two out at least once daily; depending on length, it could potentially be more or less than.

Timezone | Eastern.

Triggers | REMOVED.

How did you find the group? | LSRPG tag.

Current/Past RP Accounts | I delete my character accounts to create a blank blog for my next character account. I save snippets of threads I adore, so I’m so sorry. RIP - xoxo

IN CHARACTER

there is a swelling storm and i'm caught up in the middle of it all and it takes control of the person that i thought i was the boy i used to know.

CHARACTER

Dmitri , the Horsemen of Conquest

DRAW TO CHARACTER

I’ve never been the type to write a sample for a character before fleshing out the other bits first, but Dmitri’s voice whispered, begging to be explored as soon as I read their biography. The first sample you’ll read below was the initial picture I painted and kept throughout this application because Dmitri resembled that of a poor Icarus, who simply overindulged in something not meant for him to enjoy.

I imagined Dmitri in the seconds after creation gasping at the sights of Heaven, reaching back for white wings — only to be met by their bareback. Shoulders aching for the flight of angels, the purity evident in their veins to be his own, God’s presence given at a moments notice.

Yes — I very clearly drew these small, delicate details from a few lines, but Cas wrote this character in such a way I felt the weight of Dmitri’s needs as if they were my own to be met. The biography held me captive to do whatever would be in my ability to give this character justice for what they were never gifted. I still get butterflies reading over the biography and couldn’t stop what followed.

This application is my confession of love for Dmitri, and I would even offer to say this could be read as a fever dream because isn’t that what God would want? His beloved, lastly mad Horsemen to be written in a state of complete and total euphoria for conquest and recklessness… but more importantly, I hope to show how beautifully flawed this character is to desire to be loved by a dead God, and the journey I would take them on to realize their purpose was never tied to God’s needs.

FUTURE PLOTS

SUMMARY: I’ve written these in a format of progression based on what I think could occur first in-game based off of current connections, and Dmitri’s direct link of being a Horsemen, making it far more likely to push said plot first. Each builds upon the other in a sense of a video game character skill branching system. As in, I’ve written some answers or may propose them in a way, which would directly change a plot below it. Hope this helps explain the mess which is about to occur below!

FUTURE OF THE HORSEMEN

what happens to those who were meant to end a world already destroyed?

Their purpose set forth to them by God has come to no fruition as the world destroyed itself, at least in a way. Each Horsemen dealing with their new identity as a mercenary in their own way, but I can only speak from the perspective of Dmitri. When it comes to them, the Horsemen are family. They came from the same Gos as them, shaped from different moments but important just the same. Their future as a whole could be explored by each Horsemen’s motivation. For Dmitri, the idea of leaving them to go elsewhere seems far-fetched at first; a type of daydream when the cleanup after a job is too heavy to stay focused on. If given a bigger glimpse at something else, something Dmitri could find himself desiring to do, I imagine the Horsemen could find a strain.

FUTURE OF THE HEALING

what is the purpose of being one of healing if you watched the wounds be inflicted?

Building upon a strain forming within the Horsemen, Dmitri would first need to experience something so terrifyingly out of character for them to do, which could trigger a wave of events to follow. The concept of using their healing ability seems to be the “fun” direction as this golden boy not being able to save someone caught in the crossfires would be an angst ridden thread to experience. I want to shape his tenderness in a way to correlate with his healing. Dmitri’s process of healing someone is something I haven’t ventured much into yet — but I imagine the sight of it to be something beautiful, almost too beautiful to fully understand what you’re looking at. This light bringer among those who only bring darkness is the difference enough to push the first plot and this one forward.

FUTURE OF THE LOVED AND WORSHIPPED

what does one do with love and praise when all they expected was hate?

Imagine the first time someone witnessed Dmitri healing a mortal. Who was it? What occurred? No one who lives now among the mortals knows, yet their growing affection towards him makes me feel as if he’s gotten his own personal tale passed between them. Here in this new found love among men, I think Dmitri sees what he’s always wanted out of life, rather existence. It’ll be such a wild ride of secret trips to different parts of the world to see if he finds this love and praise everywhere. He’d be drunk over this, but there also comes the dark side of being given something kept from you for so long. Yes, I would love for this beautiful, precious Horsemen to ride happily off into the sunset… but there’s definitely some trauma left from God. Here within this, I find Dmitri’s breaking point could take place and all of the above could shatter.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | yes — given a month’s notice and option to decline? i feel as if the answer would be different depending on how they were to die and character development, if this makes sense.

IN DEPTH

but there is a lightin the dark, and i feel its warmth

in my hands and my heart why can't i hold on?

CHARACTER MOTIVATION

It’s unknown at first- their motivation. Perhaps, God always intended the existence of those who were meant to cause the end of the world to possess no motivation. Life to them, the Horsemen, was simply a story already written down in the stars, yet Dmitri walked out into the New World with the story finished and no part to play in it. Purgatory had warped their glowing essence, satisfying God’s need to prevent prayers said to Conquest over the God of Creation.

Yet motivations can still be rather fickle when they were never intended for you. Dmitri’s creation came from the infinite love God felt for man, yet they were never meant to have this (this being love) as their backbone. No, they were to indulge their fellow Horsemens’ wrath by mending the blows they were destined to cause. Their gift, their healing, their voice. All things given by God to serve a purpose not their own. Somewhere between all of the havoc and chaos of this world, there had to come a time where Dmitri sought to figure it out.

Their motivation laid rotting within the crevices of darkness and filth they called home all these centuries. Purgatory did it’s job more so than God could have ever intended because Dmitri struggled with purpose outside of God’s. Sunshine filled his veins in a way the darkness fed off of and merely left the Horsemen of Conquest bare. So walking out of, rather escaping from, Purgatory to Dmitri awakened this desire for answers. With the death of God, Dmitri discovered their rebirth into something rather ungodly as he wanted to become everything God never intended on him to be: loved.

From this death, Dmitri has discovered a solace with mortals he’d never found with the fellow Horsemen as there’s something to be said in regards to being made last. He didn’t resemble the others completely as he felt a mirror to man more so than his Horsemen. I imagine actions and motivation for him to be teetering currently as his own questions in the regards of ‘what’s next?’ as having a calling as a mercenary never sat well with him. He wants to be loved in a way God had left unspoken between them over the possibility of competition.

SUMMARY: Throughout interactions and inner thoughts expressed throughout this roleplay, I would love to dive into the future plots tying into Dmitri’s motivations above with the balance of being deemed as loved or worshipped. Dmitri needs to be loved, yet I think if it ever rocked towards him being worshipped, it’d be a nice little shift of what truly motivates him. Overall, I find my motivating factor to be Dmitri’s voice and relationships with the Horsemen due to my overall understanding of how much he truly values them. Yes, he’s always wanted more for himself, but there’s always going to be the glimpses of why he is among their ranks. He isn’t pure as the angels or as mischievous as the demons, but I find Dmitri’s complexities something of value as a character in a world without restraints.

IN-CHARACTER PARA SAMPLES

i. DREAMS AND THE HEREAFTER

‘Icarus, my son — your wings are too brittle for the warmth of light. Now, I shall watch you burn with the rest.’ Or was the name spoken across the lips of God dmitri? Did he curve the appetite of man’s undeserving love of their creator by existing? Were his screams - for more - not enough to make the tear from God’s eye a regret?

‘But father, I shall fly with you. We can escape together. No mortal shall ever have to look upon our faces again. We can finally be--’ Scorned brow silenced all of his pleas, bringing the truth to the forefront. Dmitri dreamed before the tear was ever caught and molded into the literal form of his being. They knew of themself from the perspective of God’s eye and convinced themself of something which wasn’t there. ‘Am I never to be free of this burden then? Am I to suffer?’

They painted a world where they crawled from the depths of Purgatory, where their strength came from the purity of man, where God Himself welcomed Dmitri back into Heaven as if he’d never gone. In this recurring dream, God would realize the mistake to tuck away his most prized creation.

The final Horsemen did not deserve the caverns of impermeable darkness Purgatory supplied them because somewhere in the infinite of his existence, he truly believed himself to bare wings.

‘Suffer? Suffer! You are the brilliance of life; my creation. Do you wish to know what I plan to do with you? Follow me, Conquest. Your domain awaits.’

Their eyes open with horror, memories of a man - rather a god who loved him less. A god who created him by mistake. An outstretched arm from active slumber finds its way back onto their chest, an unsteady rise and fall of breaths lost. His own torment from sleep a self-given punishment as he allowed himself to fall into the corners of his own mind. The hidden doors which locked memories long forgotten as he believed himself to be more than he was.

God regretted shedding a tear for out came the brightest of shadows, the technicolor snake of dispute in the form of a golden angel. They were truly no closer than their brethren to bearing wings, but if one deserved them, Dmitri would declare themself so.

Instead of wings, however, cascading down their back, you would find a seeping hole of nothing; a hollowed out mine of what could have become of them. It is the wickedness they hide beneath enchanting smiles, minor suggestions, and lack of resolve which will keep their back bare. Denial being a sort of game which they’ve mastered over the years.

Once, one might have spotted the prospect of gold, sinless existence within them, but they were not created like the other angels, the other horsemen, the other fallen. They were made as the result of emotion, and one knew what followed closely with emotions — mistakes or rather the sins of man.

They were the rotten cavities created over years of divulging in sweets, buried in the crevices of newborn teeth who hadn’t the taste of sugar.

And in their devastation, Dmitri destined themself to find the answers which God withheld from them.

ii. DENIAL IN THE FORM OF SINFUL BEAUTY

“You’re late — again.” A simple nod towards either Nerissa or Viktoria felt enough to find his place among his family, his fellow Horsemen.

One thumb found its way to his temple before releasing a heavy sigh. “Dreams haunt me recently.

“You mean nightmares.” Nerissa could never resist correcting him over something so miniscule as words, yet this simple exchange caused a growing irritation to sprout wings and turn into complete rage.

His temples tensed, nostrils flared with fingernails already cutting at the skin of his palm. “You honestly think I’m mortal enough to switch the meaning of two words, War?” Tongue pressed against the back of their teeth, Dmitri allowed their body to sink into their assigned chair, of sorts. Each had a place within the others home as if each home belonged to all four of them collectively.

“Someone woke up feeling out of place again.” Always Ryuk with a quick word before letting the storm brew on.

“It’s the dreams — I wake up in horror over...” Their eyes, washed in an array of gold, scanned the softness of their palms, the lack of scars on their flesh, the harrowing displacement of havoc in their words, and the deficiency of darkness their fellow Horsemen possessed. “...for it is the dream I can never grasp.”

With the unblemished palm, he wiped away at both of their eyes, trying to remove the hints of sleep behind them. More importantly, he wanted more than anything to remove any attempt of truth being proven by Nerissa’s words.

Harsh snarled laughter came from the corner of their domain, mocking their spiral for something less than what it was. To Dmitri, they saw these dreams as something more of an awakening, uncovering their last moments with God.

“What is the point of man if not to suffer, dear Dmitri?”

“But I am no man!” Fists shattered the monotony of the discussion, calling in the last ounce of sanity any of them could take as they stood from the table. “I am no god.” The once golden irises, which mirrored the glory of the sun’s warmth, now mimicked the lava spewing from a devastating volcano. “I am Conquest, and I shall suffer no more!”

Here in the brilliant, pure light of their anger, their risen voice, the very might of their denial gave birth to something else.

A soft chuckle from the other side of the room destroyed any build up between the others as Viktoria waltzed over to them.

“He’s not wrong… None of us are man, so none of us shall suffer.” Viktoria’s hand draped over theirs with a tenderness they’d only felt from the mortals, but it was enough to show Dmitri the horsemen had the ability to give him what he wanted.

#accepted #accepted: dmitri

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imagine-loki · 5 years ago

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Pride and Prejudice

TITLE: Pride and Prejudice CHAPTER NO./ONE SHOT: Chapter 25 AUTHOR: wolfpawn

ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine Loki was raised on Jotunheim as Laufey’s son after the war, but an agreement was then made that he would wed Odin’s daughter so Odin could secure the alliance of Jotunheim through the marriage. Loki, in turn, was raised to be king of Jotunheim, but how he views Asgard is far different from how Odin’s daughter is raised leading to a clash of cultures as well as uncertainty between the pair of betrothed youths. RATING: Mature NOTES/WARNINGS: Forced Marriage, not all fun and games. My first real step back into the Loki scene in over a year.

Tags - @skulliebythesea @asimovethroughthisworld @blackcherry26-blog @we-shadowhunter2901

Loki could not focus on everything that was being said after that. All he could focus on was the new information that Thor was a Berserker. At that moment, he realised that more than ever, alliances or simply not being against Asgard was all that mattered. He thought there would be a way to overcome Thor in a battle before on the basis of his frenzied approach, the fact the Aesir seemed to be without tact when fighting, a Berserker was not something you could factor for. They were something different entirely. They were not without thought, they simply were able to do so much more than others, they were without fatigue. While the Jotnar would naturally tire, Thor would feel as though a five-hour battle was merely warming up. He was never more grateful for his father’s changing demeanour from the battle king before to the more pacifist nature now than at that moment. He recalled his father forcing him away from his plan to fight against Odin’s decision to end the alliance after everything with Ella. he did not know if his father was privy to Thor’s true nature and had said nothing or if it was good self-preservation that stopped Laufey from allowing him to go ahead with his foolhardy plan, but at that moment he was grateful for it.

When he felt a hand on his arm, he knew by its temperature that it was Ella, looking at her, still slightly startled, he noted concern in her eyes. With a small nod of his head, he looked to see Thor looked at him in confusion and the others with similar looks on their faces before the blonde Aesir and his allies turned and left, leaving the Jotnar and Ella by themselves.

“Arden, could you please alert the others to what we have just learned so we all are aware of the situation?”

“Of course, Princess.”

“Helbindi, I don’t have any request or right to tell you what you wish to do with your time, I merely ask you not allow yourself to be isolated by Nigel, for your own well being.” Ella smiled. “Loki and I will return to our rooms to discuss matters more, if you have no need of him at present.”

Helbindi looked at his brother for a moment while Loki gave a single nod in return. “If you need me, Brother.”

“Thank you, ‘Bind.”

Helbindi left, Ella and Loki watching him as he did. “We need to speak in private.” Loki looked over at her. “You seem to be missing some key information.”

They returned to their rooms in silence, not giving too much attention to any on their journey. When they arrived, Loki sat against a desk while Ella locked the door, specifically ensuring none could hear their interactions with a spell as she did. “You never knew?”

“Of what?”

“Thor. Is that why you thought you could fight all of this?” She asked curiously.

“Berserkers are not real. A myth.” He dismissed, not believing his own words

“In battle, my brother’s eyes glaze over, they are akin to some wild beast, he does not speak, only roars, nothing he sounds makes any recognisable words and none can get him to see sense. It is terrifying to witness. I tried with my seidr to assist once, to settle him, but his mind is blank of anything but the fight at those times. I can assure you, if there were myths before, there is none with regards to my brother. He is without reason and somehow, his strength increases ten-fold at such times. It is why my father must balance the line of coming down hard on him and understanding my brother is trying very hard to control it. The time I put into my seidr as I grew up, he has had to invest in controlling a part of his very self too, just not as I do.” She explained. “I would have thought you had known this, I apologise for shocking you with it.”

“Is it hereditary?” Loki did not know why he asked. There were, of yet, no concerns of Ella being with child, in the months since her illness, they had not even considered such things and she would be showing by now if she had conceived before her illness but that did not stop the worries for the future.

“No one knows. My parents tried to find out, but they could not find any history of it in the family. We simply do not know. There is little reason to suggest any child I would give you would have such traits. Berserkers are sometimes believed to be made more than they are born.”

Loki could not contest her words, he did not know anything on the subject matter to say otherwise. He could only worry privately on the matter until such time as he could discuss it with someone more knowledgeable than himself on the matter. It concerned him if there could be a genetic link. He felt angered if such had been kept from him willfully. Looking at Ella’s features, it was clear she had no intention of lying to him. “Why are you so honest?”

“This marriage has little else going for it, honesty is one of the cornerstones of a good marriage, if we can get that much right, maybe we stand a chance.”

“Most would not share your point of view.”

“Most are idiots out for personal gain, everything you do, everything I do, is for the betterment of those who must depend on our decisions. If we bicker amongst us, how can you tend to your people to the best of your ability? By preventing there from being many issues with me to toy with your mind and time so you can use it better elsewhere.”

Again, as with so many times, Loki found himself startled by her answer. He said nothing in response. There was little to say to her words. She did everything she did for Jotunheim, as she always did. When he walked to the balcony doors, they glowed green for a moment, then opened as she broke their seal that allowed them privacy and said nothing more as she went to read something rather than concern herself with Loki’s thoughts as he went to the balcony.

“What in the realms?”

Worried, Ella rushed to where Loki had been for the past half an hour on the balcony. He was standing close to it, looking over the gardens of the palace. “Is everything alright?” She asked, looking at his appalled face.

“That man is trying to eat that woman.” He indicated to the gardens below, causing Ella’s attention to be brought there. She scanned them to see if there had been such a happening taking place but only saw two youths, not much younger than herself kissing in the small maze that was being grown. She looked again to where Loki was pointing and realised he was referencing the pair. On her figuring out what he referenced as ‘eating’ she laughed slightly. “What is so funny?” Loki demanded indignantly.

“Your interpretation of their actions. I never realised you did not know what kissing was. Do you not have that on Jotunheim?”

“Kissing?”

“How did I never notice?” She admonished her lack of noting such. “Kissing, yes. Kissing is the act of pressing one’s lips to a partner’s as a sign of affection, or if done differently, as a form of greeting.” He looked at her blankly. Ella took a moment to think. “Do you recall last night, how some people pressed their cheek to another’s and made odd noises?” He nodded, having taken note of the peculiar ritual. “That is a kiss too. It’s an affectionate greeting.”

“You are joking?”

“Why would I?”

“Show me.”

“What?”

“Show me how they do it, please.” He recalled his manners after everything.

Ella turned to face him fully and leant up and kissed his cheek. Pulling back after, she studied his face.

“That is a terribly odd thing to do.”

That only caused her to laugh. “I suppose when you never knew of it before now, it would be. There is also another greeting, done by a man to a woman. He takes her hand.” Loki took hers. “No, you lift it like this.” She showed him how to place his under hers. “And you raise it to your lips and gently press them to the back of it. It is not as common these days, but some people love that manner of greeting if they are old fashioned, the Light Elves think it the greatest greeting.” She explained.

Loki took her words and saved them to memory, hoping that they were true, though he had little reason to doubt such, so that he could use such information in the future. “What is that form of it?” He pointed to the pair below, who had ceased their actions as another came closer to where they were.

“That,” Ella smiled wistfully as she spoke. “That is an entirely different matter altogether.”

“How so?”

“That is a lover’s kiss. One shared only by those with immense feelings for one another. There are different versions of that kiss also, but the type those young people partook in, that is very much amorous and lust-filled. They would rather have full privacy and be tearing off one another’s clothes, were the situation to arise.”

Loki frowned. “It seems almost animalistic.”

“Is not the act of sex? It is base instinct really, the kissing merely is an addition of such.”

“That is nothing like sex.”

“I do not think them overly dissimilar, personally.” Ella shrugged. “You are not used to it, so of course, to you, it is a foreign concept. Both seem incredibly alike to me.” She walked back inside, seeing there was nothing to be concerned about outside. She had barely reentered the living area and retrieved the book she had been reading when Loki rejoined her.

“How do you know the sensation of both?” He asked as soon as she looked at him.

“Because I have laid with you as my husband, which you are entirely aware of, but I have also know the sensation of kissing from another.”

Loki’s eyes widened. “In that fashion?” he pointed out the balcony door.

“Not in such a sloppy manner, but yes, in that fashion.”

“A lover’s kiss?”

“Yes,” she repeated.

“With whom?”

“Why does that matter?” She challenged. “I never once requested information on any of those who decided to share your time with before I came to Jotunheim, it was not my place to question what occurred before me, and the same can be said for your questions of me.”

“Liuilf?” Ella cocked her head slightly, wondering how Loki could even have heard his name. “That guard.” She nodded. “Did you care for him?”

“Of course. I would not have allowed the kiss otherwise. But I had a duty, as I told him, hence why I never allowed it further. Like you, Loki, I am willing to forego love for Jotunheim.”

Loki swallowed at her admission. He was startled that she would confess her feelings for another, a love for another. He had been so focused on the loss of his right to love another, he never thought if there was a chance that she too had suffered such. “You...loved him?”

“Is that so hard to believe? I am capable of love, all Aesir are, contrary to your opinion.” She scoffed. “What is it you wish to achieve from this conversation, may I ask? You clearly are not pleased with what you are hearing and I do not wish to discuss it either, so what is the point of this, I am curious?” Loki did not answer. “It is somewhat rich that you feel insulted by my caring for another from before you when you literally avoided my company to go to another and give out to her about me.”

Loki winced, knowing it was every word of the truth. Part of him was curious as to how she knew it, but he said nothing of that. “I’m sorry.”

“I have not even looked at another since the day I arrived here, I am not at risk of doing so any time soon. We agreed to try this, and I think even you have to agree, I am stubborn enough to go through with this.” She smiled.

Loki could not help to chuckle slightly in return at her comment. “I think you would do it out of spite and nothing more.”

“What?”

“Keep to the agreement.”

“I am the most stubborn creature you will ever meet. Though, you may come second.”

Loki scoffed at her remark and shook his head before frowning. “So, what does that form of this ‘kissing’ work?”

“Well, essentially, it includes placing your lips to a partner’s lips and pressing them together. When it gets more heated, tongues get involved.” She explained.

Loki frowned, not certain if he understood the meaning but not wishing to ask for a demonstration, not liking the idea of anyone else’s tongue in his mouth. His face told his horror at the idea, causing Ella to laugh.

“Here.” She walked forward, but immediately Loki took a step back. Ella laughed again. “No, I am not going to kiss you.” She promised. She walked forward again and though he leant back slightly, Loki did not step back. She used her seidr has she had before, showing him plays she had watched as a youth where the actors kissed as reference. When she pulled back again, he looked just as appalled as before though with a little more comprehension in his face also. “That is kissing.”

“It seems vile.”

“To you. To those of whom are more used to it and who consent to being kissed, it is a pleasant and yearned for experience,” She explained with a sad smile.

Loki watched as she brought her book to a far nook of the room and faced the wall, not engaging with him further, the idea of her kissing another as he had been shown in his head making him feel annoyed, though he knew her pressing her lips to another’s was nothing in comparison to his life before she came along.

#loki #others #submission #Submitted fic #chapter 25 #wolfpawn #pride and prejudice

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wolfpawn · 5 years ago

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Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 25

Story Summary - Based on an idea I had that I submitted to Imagine Loki. Imagine Loki was raised on Jotunheim as Laufey’s son after the war, but an agreement was then made that he would wed Odin’s daughter so Odin could secure the alliance of Jotunheim through the marriage. Loki, in turn, was raised to be king of Jotunheim, but how he views Asgard is far different from how Odin’s daughter is raised leading to a clash of cultures as well as uncertainty between the pair of betrothed youths.

Chapter Summary - Loki is forced to come to terms with something he never expected in Thor's revelation before he is forced to learn of something he never heard of before, kissing, and Ella's knowledge of the act.

Previous Chapter

Tags - @peppermint-j @damalseer @perpetual-fangirl @tinchentitri @inspired-snowflace @raphaelaisabella @alexakeyloveloki @caffiend-queen @devilbat @nonsensicalobsessions @skulliebythesea @majoringinlife @salempoe @lotus-eyedindiangoddess @rookienumber98 @emily-s1263 @ivytoh

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“Arden, could you please alert the others to what we have just learned so we all are aware of the situation?”

“Of course, Princess.”

Helbindi looked at his brother for a moment while Loki gave a single nod in return. “If you need me, Brother.”

“Thank you, ‘Bind.”

Helbindi left, Ella and Loki watching him as he did. “We need to speak in private.” Loki looked over at her. “You seem to be missing some key information.”

“Of what?”

“Thor. Is that why you thought you could fight all of this?” She asked curiously.

“Berserkers are not real. A myth.” He dismissed, not believing his own words

“This marriage has little else going for it, honesty is one of the cornerstones of a good marriage, if we can get that much right, maybe we stand a chance.”

“Most would not share your point of view.”

“What in the realms?”

“Your interpretation of their actions. I never realised you did not know what kissing was. Do you not have that on Jotunheim?”

“Kissing?”

“You are joking?”

“Why would I?”

“Show me.”

“What?”

“Show me how they do it, please.” He recalled his manners after everything.

Ella turned to face him fully and leant up and kissed his cheek. Pulling back after, she studied his face.

“That is a terribly odd thing to do.”

“That,” Ella smiled wistfully as she spoke. “That is an entirely different matter altogether.”

“How so?”

Loki frowned. “It seems almost animalistic.”

“Is not the act of sex? It is base instinct really, the kissing merely is an addition of such.”

“That is nothing like sex.”

“How do you know the sensation of both?” He asked as soon as she looked at him.

“Because I have laid with you as my husband, which you are entirely aware of, but I have also know the sensation of kissing from another.”

Loki’s eyes widened. “In that fashion?” he pointed out the balcony door.

“Not in such a sloppy manner, but yes, in that fashion.”

“A lover’s kiss?”

“Yes,” she repeated.

“With whom?”

“Liuilf?” Ella cocked her head slightly, wondering how Loki could even have heard his name. “That guard.” She nodded. “Did you care for him?”

“Of course. I would not have allowed the kiss otherwise. But I had a duty, as I told him, hence why I never allowed it further. Like you, Loki, I am willing to forego love for Jotunheim.”

Loki winced, knowing it was every word of the truth. Part of him was curious as to how she knew it, but he said nothing of that. “I’m sorry.”

Loki could not help to chuckle slightly in return at her comment. “I think you would do it out of spite and nothing more.”

“What?”

“Keep to the agreement.”

“I am the most stubborn creature you will ever meet. Though, you may come second.”

Loki scoffed at her remark and shook his head before frowning. “So, what does that form of this ‘kissing’ work?”

“Well, essentially, it includes placing your lips to a partner’s lips and pressing them together. When it gets more heated, tongues get involved.” She explained.

“It seems vile.”

“To you. To those of whom are more used to it and who consent to being kissed, it is a pleasant and yearned for experience,” She explained with a sad smile.

#loki fic #Pride and Prejudice #wolfpawn

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qm-vox · 5 years ago

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The Far Realms vs. Obyriths: Cosmic Horror in D&D

Shout-out, once again, to Afroakuma, from whom I learned most of the material I’m about to explain and with whom I’ve had many fascinating discussions about this topic.

It’s ya boi Vox, back at it to complain about RPG shit in an educational fashion again. Remember when I did a whole article about (evil) gods in D&D, arguing that they have more potential than to be used like supervillains? We’re gonna do that again, but this time with incorporating cosmic horror elements into your D&D campaign. Some of this advice may also be useful for games similar to D&D but for the sake of my own sanity I’m gonna confine myself to the one system or I’m gonna be here until my kids are in college.

This article will be broken down into three parts: an overview of cosmic horror’s origin and original thesis (in which we travel my favorite magical land, Full And Complete Context), a breakdown of the Far Realms in D&D (including older takes from late 2e & 3.5, how those changed in 4e, and their ambiguous state in 5e) & how you might use them for a cosmic horror campaign, and a breakdown of Obyriths in D&D and how you might use them in your campaign.

No discussion of cosmic horror is complete without some Content Warnings. Right up front: cosmic horror has its roots in extremely racist fiction, and I’m going to be talking about that straight-up. Also included in this article will be body horror, descriptions of mind control and mental corruption, supernaturally-induced madness, violence, and medical horror, among other things. This is a genre that hit the ‘fuck shit up’ button with its face on fuckin’ Zero Day and does that but again every time we successfully write something in it. Additionally, spoilers for some of Lovecraft’s work will be in here, with absolutely no tags and no warnings before they happen. You have been warned; do as thou wilt.

HP Does A Racism - Origins Of Cosmic Horror

Yeah, I’m about to be like that about it.

In the beginning there was Howard Phillips Lovecraft, an absolute garbage fire of a human being whose personal issues are such a knotted mess that I’m half-sure that the concept of the Ouroboros is just the echo of his bullshit reaching backwards through time. Like many authors of his time, Howie Love here was born into significant wealth, and while his education would be cut short (he had some manner of health problem in high school that ended his attempts at schooling) it was pretty high-quality, as it tends to be when you’re rich and white in the late 1800s. When he began writing his most famous body of work, Lovecraft had three attributes which would shape it: EXTREME racism, an incredible love for the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and every fucking phobia ever turned loose on God’s green Earth.

If you want to know more about that first point, try looking up what he named his cat; Lovecraft was so racist that even other racists thought he was too racist. Mother fucker was so racist that he wrote about the dangers of contaminating one’s bloodline with French-Canadians. His racism made it into all of his works in some way, shape, or form; many had themes of miscegenation, plenty included people of color only as deranged cultists of terrible powers, and as we’ll get into later in this segment the very racism that caused him to do these things also made him write the...let’s say ‘villains’ for lack of a better term, of his ongoing body of work as thinly-veiled stand-ins for white people.

No, really.

Lovecraft’s early work included a few short stories in the American Gothic style, the most famous of which is The Rats in the Walls. It’s a fairly classic story as far as those go, but Howie Love would soon abandon American Gothic for the genre he founded and defined: cosmic horror. Keep the racism and phobias in mind going forward, they’re about to become real important.

Howie Love Clowns On Himself - Themes And Thesis Of Cosmic Horror

While Dagon is generally accepted as the ‘first’ cosmic horror story, I prefer The Colour Out Of Space as the definitive example of the original thesis of cosmic horror at its most clean and clear (it’s also the work of Lovecraft’s that has aged the best; I highly suggest it if you haven’t read it yet!). In it, an alien presence - arguably but not necessarily an entity - crash-lands outside the fictional town of Arkham. Our narrator, a surveyor, coldly investigates the horrors that occur after and learns the sorry tale of a family destroyed by this alien presence as it blights their land, corrupts their bodies, and drives them to madness. The presence leaves, but not wholly; a fragment of itself remains behind, alongside the chilling possibility of a repeat performance.

The Colour Out Of Space, and indeed most of Howie Love’s work, was written at a time in the United States and the United Kingdom where human exceptionalism was the norm. Humans were not merely important, but special, chosen, exalted in nature and placed in a universe whose sole purpose was to be the stage for our domination. The Colour Out Of Space proposed a different idea: that we ain’t shit. Not only is humanity not exalted, but humanity is insignificant, existing at the mercy of fate, able to be casually annihilated at any time by forces we do not understand. It was a shocking proposal when it was published, and though the zeitgeist that gave it power has faded (most people realize we ain’t shit these days, can’t imagine how that fucking happened) it still resonates with many people.

The later works that defined the Cthulu Mythos would build on this theme, introducing powerful beings which claim dominion of Earth or of all reality. You’ve probably heard of most of them - Cthulu is the big one, of course, but there’s also Yog-Sothoth (The Dunwich Horror), Azazoth, Catboi Slim (Nyarthalotep), and many more, not all of which were written by Lovecraft himself. These beings are gods, or else so far above humanity that the difference is academic, and this brings us to the second defining theme of cosmic horror that Lovecraft would lay out, that of forbidden knowledge.

Protagonists in Howie Love’s stories have a tendency to lose their minds. Later authors would chalk this up to the idea that witnessing these gods or their works is so inherently horrifying that the mind simply snaps in their presence, or even that these gods are bound up in the concept of madness (this second one is a rather incompetent reading, not that I’m thinking of any PAIZO in particular that just ran with it in their RPG setting), but Howard’s own work doesn’t always bear that out. The protagonist of Call of Cthulu is not driven mad by that being - he is driven towards the brink by the realization that the Cult is still out there (and coming for his life), and that Cthulu will only rise again. Our viewpoint character in At The Mountains Of Madness realizes he has committed unspeakable atrocities on living beings much like himself by mistake, and that if further explorers come to disturb their slumber they will only repeat the same errors and lead to mankind’s annihilation. It’s not just that these ancient powers are terrifying or even that they are alien, but that to comprehend them is to understand that humans are so far beneath them that their attitude towards us cannot be thought of as ‘benevolent or ‘malevolent’, because we are beneath their notice, lesser in comparison than even a bacterium. In such a context, all humans do is consume resources better used by our superiors, and thus our existence is a profanity upon the divine. The only moral action, the stories argue, is self-annihilation; only ignorance permits us to justify our own existence to ourselves.

Sound familiar? Almost like this is the exact argument chucklefuck racists make about the existence of people of color, Jews, and anyone else they happen to not like? Yeah. This is the part where Lovecraft accidentally made himself the villain of his own work. Congratulations Howie, you played yourself. And since his audience was largely fellow white men also hard up on that whole racism thing, this idea of human profanity tapped a deep well of anxiety. I’m not about to argue that racism is over (it isn’t) and that’s why this vision of cosmic horror is less popular; indeed, it’s retained a pretty solid cult (heh) following, in part because the idea of such beings is inherently kinda terrifying. But I’d be remiss not to bring up the fact that this terror has its roots in racism, so...there you have it.

Other authors also built on the Cthulu Mythos, with Lovecraft’s enthusiastic blessing. These days their works tend to be mistakenly attributed to Howie Love himself, but that’s not actually his fault; they were published on their own, under their own authors’ names, and as far as we can tell Howard never tried to take the credit. These other authors had a tendency to substitute the indifferent divinity and corrupted humans of Lovecraft’s work with direct malice; their vision of these god-like beings was one in which they noticed humanity and did harm to it, creating a movement away from Howie Love’s original thesis (”human insignificance will lead to the unimportant and unmarked event of our destruction” & “seeking knowledge can only lead to self-annihilation”) during his life which only picked up momentum after his death. Indeed, most modern attempts at Lovecraftian horror mimic this overt malevolence, often without even lip service to the original thesis. It’s not necessarily an unworkable angle of horror, and it definitely has bones in with its origins; “God is real and He hates you personally” is a terrifying idea! But this movement away from the cold indifference of stories like The Colour Out Of Space definitely contributed to the current climate of...sloppy adaptations, let’s say.

Not that I’m thinking of any Paizo in particular.

So Should I Use Mythos Content Directly In My D&D Game Or What?

No, because I will cry and tell everyone that you punched my children and kidnapped my girlfriends.

More helpfully, probably not. The presence of other divinities, but especially evil divinities like Erythnul (Greyhawk) or Malar (Forgotten Realms) makes the thematics of cosmic horror pretty fucking weird. If you really wanted to, your best bet is to not use the published system of divinity at all (see the previously-linked article, up at the top of this one) and instead make Lovecraft’s gods the setting’s only gods. That means asking yourself some hard questions about clerics in your game world and possibly divine magic in general - that’s a separate article though - and even then you’re in for a rough row to hoe. D&D’s characters tend to be competent, dynamic, empowered - a far cry from the educated but otherwise fairly helpless protagonists on which cosmic horror tends to trade. Themes of futility in the face of incomprehensible beings don’t really make for good D&D most of the time, not when so much of the system (any edition, it doesn’t matter) is set up to create and reward cunning and heroic struggle. Classic cosmic horror, in the original proposed form, is not a good fit.

Thankfully, we have two solutions to give you what you crave in-house. Let’s start with the one that is somehow both the closer fit and the further fit.

You Have Fucked Up - The Far Realm Overview

Originally introduced in late AD&D 2e, the Far Realm as an idea hit its stride during 3.0/3.5 before getting a major rework as part of 4e’s cosmology, where it became the source of most/all aberrations. We’re gonna go ahead and pretend 4e didn’t happen, not because 4e is bad (and for the love of fuck please don’t start an edition war on my cosmic horror post) but because 4e’s cosmology just doesn’t really fit in with any of the rest. 1e <-> 3.5 is more or less coherent and you can beat 5e into line with a wrench and some harsh language, but 4e...well, anyway.

The Far Realms is outside reality. No, not in another dimension, we know what those are - those are the Planes. It’s outside reality; it is Somewhere Else. “It” is probably even the wrong term, since by definition any place (”place”) that isn’t the multiverse as D&D knows it is the Far Realm. To paraphrase Afroakuma, if the Great Wheel is a Lego brick, the Far Realm is a giant squid; if the Great Wheel is a bowl of Fruit Loops, the Far Realm is the theory that intelligences from Pluto rig the results of major sporting events. The contexts are not compatible. These two things do not go together in any way. Combining the two can only end in sorrow and woe.

So mortals try to combine the two all the time, because we’re dipshits like that.

Every now and again, some truly, monumentally stupid person - usually but not always someone inside reality - breaches the skin that contains reality inside itself, and lets in the essence of Outside. This is a phenomenally bad idea; the immediate result is corruption in both directions as the essence of each form of reality bleeds into the other. Both attempt to ‘scab’ the breach, translating the foreign substances and beings into something more like the reality they have moved to. If a breach happens, there is one of three outcomes. If you are very, very lucky, no being on the other side notices the breach, and you’ve ‘merely’ blighted and corrupted a vast stretch of land, tainting it with something sort of like, but not enough like, Chaos and Evil for millennia to come - maybe even forever. If you’re not lucky, a being on the other side notices the breach and acts to seal it, the ripple of which causes you to not have a nation or continent any more as said corruption absolutely consumes the lands in which you live. And if you are phenomenally unlucky, the being on the other side is just as stupid as you are, and it comes through. The last time that happened the original Gnomish pantheon got murdered. Their homeworld doesn’t exist any more.

There is no ‘good’ outcome. This is the repeated and absolute theme of the Far Realms; whatever your reasons for getting involved with them, whatever you wanted, whatever you were seeking, you don’t get it. Mortals fuck with the Far Realms because our inability to comprehend them leads us to think of them like things we can experience. The scabbed-over beings we meet that are from there (Psuedonatural creatures; see the Alienist prestige class in Tome & Blood and Complete Arcane, as well as the bigger version in the Epic Level Handbook) are Chaotic Evil because that is how reality translates them. They aren’t Chaos, they’re another reality, and their unwilling and unwitting corruption of all around them gets redefined as Chaotic Evil in order to reduce their damage to all of existence to a manageable fucking level. Were you seeking the Far Realms in order to harness power for great change? Get fucked, you can’t control what happens. Were you seeking magical power? Get fucked; the reason people go mad when exposed to the Far Realms isn’t just that the knowledge they gain makes no sense, it’s that the complete lack of context means all of the stuff you killed and stole and lied and cheated for is more or less completely goddamn useless. Trying to escape existence for some reason? One, death is faster, but two, hope you enjoy suffering the entire time you die - and that’s if the breach stays open long enough for you to be able to enjoy death as a concept before you get sealed away in a place where mortality doesn’t meaningfully exist.

You don’t get what you want. This was a bad idea. You fucked up.

5e, the most recent edition of D&D, mainly continues this trend. It has suggestions of the lazier interpretation of Lovecraft’s work tied to the Far Realms, which I heartily suggest you ignore, but some of the other ideas are phenomenal. The Great Old Ones Pact for Warlock has one in particular that I like quite a bit, which suggests that the Warlock-to-be created an unintended connection to a Far Realms intelligence and gained power against both of their wills and possibly without the intelligence in question even noticing. You don’t need to change a lot in 5e’s run to bring out the extant themes of the Far Realms - though admittedly this is greatly assisted by the fact that 5e barely has any Far Realms content to begin with, so there’s not a lot to edit. That also means there’s not a lot to use, so if you want to use Far Realms stuff in 5e you’re gonna have to get ready to spend a lot of time making your own. Which brings us to...

Who The Fuck Funded This Research?!? - Using The Far Realms In Your Game

Considering that all-important theme - “this was a bad idea” - the Far Realms are likely to be antagonistic in nature in your game, even if ‘antagonistic’ isn’t the right term. Published adventures have used Far Realms content as a sort of backdrop (Firestorm Peak comes to mind here) before, and you can easily make Far Realms creatures a more direct problem for your PCs by centering the campaign around a cult or research team attempting to cause a new breach. This could be a great time to engage with player-side themes such as the ethics of magic use, the cost of power, and the burden of responsibility for said power, assuming your group is down for it. Even if they’re not, horrifying monstrosities that by definition have no place in this universe are great to kick in the head(s).

What motivates people to cause a breach? Mainly stupidity, but the special kind of stupidity you only get when someone is highly educated and deeply intelligent. For awhile, in the real world, there was a burst of designers making D20 heartbreakers - successors to D&D 3.5 meant to fix its many catastrophic flaws. Each person thought they had it, the secret to make the system they both loved and hated finally function, and they were all wrong. Causing a breach into the Far Realms is like that. Every sign points to it being a bad idea. Reading the research and spells of the last people who tried it reveals that it’s a bad idea. All of the diaries and primary sources of those who did it and those who stopped them say it’s a bad idea, but that’s okay because I, Wizardhat von Dipshit, am not like those fools. I will be more careful, and the power to reshape the Planes will be mine!

The easiest way to make Far Realms creatures for use in your campaign is to start with an existing monster and fuck it up; rearrange its abilities (adding or emphasizing mental attacks and psychic damage, if you can), alter its physical form, and generally just make that shit wrong and fill its blood with spiders. If you want to get more alien from there or make something original, the best guideline I can offer for you is that aboleths were the result of Far Realms taint in the beginning of this reality (it’s telling that the closest thing reality could translate their progenitor into was a Greater Deity).

No one wants power for its own sake, of course, but what your antagonist actually wants is more or less irrelevant because the important bit is that they had every chance to know better and they’re about to make this bad decision on purpose anyway. This is how the Far Realms brings out cosmic horror themes in a heroic context; power that is beyond both mortal comprehension and control, which has no place in this reality and recoils from us as violently as we recoil from it. Like Lovecraft, whose stories revealed a deep cynicism about knowledge and science, your antagonists will be erudite individuals whose ruinous plans are only possible because of what they have learned and, in turn, chosen to ignore. If nothing is done, unstoppable catastrophe will be unleashed, and with it will come madness and desolation. If only some heroes were on hand, eh?

The disconnect the Far Realms has from classic cosmic horror is also the source of why they fit; they don’t belong here. In Lovecraft’s work, it’s humanity that doesn’t belong - we are a blight upon the rightful property of higher beings. The Far Realms are instead an intrusion, something from Elsewhere which doesn’t want to be here as much as we don’t want it here. That helps those classic cosmic horror themes work much better in this context, but maybe you’re looking for something else, something from here. Do the Planes have cosmic horror from within the shell of Reality?

Yes. Oh yes, they do.

Ancient Evil Survives - Obyrith Overview

In the beginning, there was war.

The primordial War of Law and Chaos is the greatest conflict to have ever rocked the Planes. It was so destructive, so all-encompassing, that it consumed entire Material Plane worlds, reshaped the nature of the Planes themselves, and is still happening, even now. It began in the early days of the Great Wheel and was prosecuted by Chaos, led by the self-styled Queen of Chaos, over a single question: should reality be real? Should effects follow causes, should gravity exist, should fire burn and light reveal, should things age and die, should...

The forces of Law said yes to these questions and fought to establish and maintain an order and logic to reality. Chaos fought for an unbound reality, one in which each individual would be completely free to express their own true essence as tangible changes in the existence around them. The War was never truly won or lost, but the imprisonment of Miska the Wolf-Spider broke the backs of the Chaotic coalition and brought the War to a stalemate of sorts, in a reality which, if not dominated by Law, is definitely Law-leaning. Mortals are familiar with the terrible demons used as footsoldiers by the Abyss, the Tanar’ri, who reign yet in that terrible place. But it was not the Tanar’ri in command of Chaos, and not the Tanar’ri who prosecuted that terrible War. Indeed, the beings we now recognize as demons rose up against their creators, the Obyriths, after the imprisonment of Miska. They overthrew the Obyriths in a great slaughter and replaced them as the dominant exemplars of Chaotic Evil.

The Obyriths are not dead. They plan, and they wait, and they wage war and slaughter upon their wayward slaves in the Abyss. Every last one of them burns to reignite the War and achieve their vision of unbound reality, free of the wretched Law and all too weak to survive without it.

Prisoners Of The Flesh - Obyrith Nature

So what are Obyriths? The easiest answer is that they’re demons - the first demons, in fact, which preceded the more famous Tanar’ri (when you think of demons in D&D chances are you’re thinking of a Tanar’ri), and while this answer is entirely correct it is not the whole story. Tanar’ri are famously Chaotic Evil; they revel in corruption and destruction and are driven to maliciously annihilate or taint all they come across. A demon army marching across the land will stop to personally kick every puppy between point A and point B and they will absolutely mutiny against you if you try to stop them from doing so. What is good and pure must be soiled; what exists must be made to not exist, its foundations shattered, its virtues turned against themselves, its values abandoned. Tanar’ri respect only raw might, and only as long as they think they can’t defeat it.

But Obyriths, their progenitors, are Evil Chaos.

Let’s have some examples. This little guy is a draudnu, a kind of Obyrith made from the bones of chaotic celestials which post-dates the ‘end’ of the War by a pretty significant amount of time. They’re on the weaker side for Obyriths.

(You’ll find this boi in Monster Manual V for 3.5 incidentally.)

Take a nice long look. Really take it in - because that’s not the draudnu. That’s the prison of flesh, the scab, that reality has forced on the draudnu, that the terrible Law has locked it within. The actual draudnu looks like it’s inside me God it’s inside me I can feel it growing and twisting it HURTS get it out, it’s seeping into my blood it’s inside me it’s INSIDE ME -

Let’s have another example. This is a sibriex, recently re-published in Mordenkeinan’s Tome of Foes for 5e with no mention of Obyriths, which is a damn shame. They were instrumental in defining the forms of the common breeds of Tanar’ri.

Fun, right? But again, that’s not a sibriex; the actual form of a sibriex is perfection. Absolute beauty and grace. I am nothing compared to this perfection. I am no one in the face of this perfection. My existence can only profane this perfection. I must serve the Perfect One. I must let it remake me and reshape me, I must appease it, I must make amends for the crime that is my trespass upon the reality made for the Perfect One.

Those two are ‘common’ Obyriths, examples of that race of demons which have peers who are much like themselves, but the Obyriths still have extant Demon Princes. The Queen of Chaos is still alive and nursing her ancient hate. Pale Night’s true form is so profane that reality cannot stand its existence; when she reveals it to you, the multiverse destroys your soul so that knowledge of her truth does not exist. Obox-Ob, murdered by the Queen of Chaos, yet exists as an Aspect of himself - and the Planes live in fear of the rise of the Prince of Vermin, whose truth is agony, rot, and corruption, such that even if you magically remove memory of it from your mind you continue to die from the soul outward.

And Dagon plots within the depths of his palace, sponsoring and advising Demogorgon - the Prince of Demons - and contemplating unimaginable lore of evil. The Demon Prince of Depths looks like this.

This is the form carved on blasphemous altars in the depths of the oceans, where sunlight has never reached. This is the form worshiped by mortals who delight in corruption, destruction, and fear, who dream of a sea where vision is a distant memory and predators hunt by the scent of blood. It is the form sought by those who lust for ancient lore, kept in places far from mortal sight and utilized by an evil older than many gods and mortal races, a form whose mere touch can taint a body of water, mutating & mutilating all within and unleashing their fury, their terror, their slaughter, for ages to come. And it is not Dagon. Dagon’s true form, imprisoned within that flesh, is I’m drowning in the cold dark, I can feel my bones breaking, my eyes are bursting, I’m blind and I’m drowning and I can’t die, my lungs are gone, the water is seeping into my blood I’m drowning and I just want to die make it stop I’m DROWNING.

It’s telling that witnessing Dagon’s true form, his Form of Madness, can give even creatures that breathe water, or which do not breathe at all, crippling hydrophobia.

The true forms of Obyriths are not flesh or matter; they are not, by nature, Material beings the way other Outsiders and mortal things are. Their true forms are that you, personally, are going mad. You, personally, are being assaulted, violated, and infected; you, personally, are being victimized, corrupted, consumed, and betrayed. Imagine if the act of pouring flesh-eating beetles into someone’s eyes had a personality, will, and desires - not the person doing it, the act itself - and that’s an Obyrith. They are evil because what they are is evil, much in the way Erythnul is evil. Unlike their creations, the Tanar’ri, Obyriths aren’t in it to kick every puppy that has ever existed. They want to throw off the yoke of the Law and release their unbound forms. They want an existence of darkness and isolation in which all beings are free to express their true essence to the limit of their might and their will.

They just wanna be themselves.

No matter who has to die.

The Foes Of All Reason - Using Obyriths In Your Campaign

Do you enjoy life’s little conveniences, such as cause-and-effect, linear time, predictable & observable physical laws, not having your body boil away beneath the agonizing will of some random asshole, and the capacity to recognize patterns in nature? Then Obyriths are your enemies. As demons, Obyriths can be summoned and are thus easy to use in the sort of ‘guest star’ role that Tanar’ri are often used in, even if it takes a moon-sized pair of brass balls to decide you can contain one. However, this use - while valid - is not a good way to bring out their cosmic horror themes, and since you decided to read an article about cosmic horror in D&D this far down I’m going to go ahead and assume you’d like to do that.

As one of the Planes’ most ancient and active evils - arguably the most ancient one that hasn’t died or otherwise fucked off - Obyriths are absolutely prime for campaigns that deal with ancient lore, primordial conflict, and unreality. If you like the idea of long-burn plots by masterminds with the patience of aeons, Obyriths are definitely for you. For an example of one such story, check out The Tale of the Whale, written by Afroakuma. The downside to using Obyriths in this way is that if you want to do so in canon settings, you need to be prepared to do some absolute fucking deep dives on the lore, which may require access to books or PDFs as far back as 1e & 2e. If you’re using your own setting this problem is lessened, though at that point you do have to manage to sell the ancient nature of such beings in a way that makes them feel suitably eldritch.

For more...let’s go ahead and say modern for lack of a better word, takes, keep in mind that Obyriths are not Tanar’ri. They do not scheme to overthrow the government of a nation; your pale, fleshly shadow of the Law is nothing to them. The plots of Obyriths upend the Laws which underpin reality itself. Could the great contract that details the alliance between the tribes of Men and Cats be found and perverted, turning each against the other in all reality? Could the insects of this realm be infected with the essence of Obox-Ob so that the Demon Prince of Vermin can feast on mortal souls and effect his own return to power? Could a bridge linking the Deep Ethereal to the Abyss be constructed, permitting the sibriexes and their master, the Prince of the Chrysalis, to shape new slaves from the very essence of raw Potential? Obyriths pervert what is and should be, not just because it suits their end goal of chaos unbound, but because corruption and violation is their very nature. It’s how they think, how they move, what they believe in, love, and value.

Obyriths have a lot to suggest for them when it comes to cosmic horror stories in D&D’s context. They bring out direct themes of madness, terrible truth, malign alien intelligence, and reality-unreality. You can comprehend their motives and even their nature, sort of, but their end goal is completely alien to mortal beings; the reality they want would be completely unrecognizable to the denizens of the current one. They are evil as mortals understand the concept, but not in a way that matches or even relates to their peers, which means they act in surprising and unpredictable ways.

All of this of course damages their ability to fulfill the classic cosmic horror thesis, but there’s something to be said about the idea that an alien intelligence, to be horrifying, needs something humans can attempt to relate to. It certainly makes writing for them easier.

If you’re using Obyriths in 3.5, you’re set to go; look for them in the various Monster Manuals, as well as Fiendish Codex. If you’re attempting to use them in Pathfinder, good decision but you’re gonna have some stat block converting to do. Trying to use them in 5e is gonna be the absolute bitch of a job, and I’m not sure where to even start on those suggestions except to note that the signature trait of Obyriths - the thing that makes them them, mechanically - is a Form of Madness ability, where they reveal their truth to their victims. Forms of Madness are mind-affecting abilities which hit all non-demons near the Obyrith, tainting them in some way. You can see some example ideas above, and the ones from 3.5 in the published books I just mentioned, but here’s hoping I can find an expert on 5th Edition’s mechanics kind enough to lend me a hand here.

I hope this article proved helpful to you! As with all of my work, questions and critique are welcome. Thanks for reading!

#D&D #planescape #far realms #demons #obyrith #cosmic horror #body horror #advice #I'm Not Sure How To Use Tags #reblogs welcome #critique welcome

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dorms-fic-archive · 6 years ago

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What are we going through, you and me?

Summary: Faced with an opportunity to address that which he’d thought was long-forgotten, Armin was still able to acknowledge the existence of his own human frailties. (Takes place sometime after the recapture of Shiganshina. Canon-divergent.) [Ao3 | FFNet.]

a/n: And now for something completely different!

Despite the pairing(s) listed, I wouldn't really call this fic purely romantic, at least not in the traditional sense, which is why it's not labeled "romance"; in terms of the themes addressed herein, I'm leaving it up to you to decipher what you will. It's certainly not the happiest story, but it's not complete doom-and-gloom, either. Mild pretentions aside, I haven't written Armin in ages, so this was a nice change!

Title comes from the song "Hairpin Turns", by The National.

It had been three months to the day the Titans surrounding Paradis were all exterminated, yet there was nothing much to be done at present. Rebuilding the damages and consoling the families of those recently deceased took up time, consumed resources, and once the illusion of immediacy fell away it left Armin bitter, yearning for an attack, something, anything to indicate their victory was not so hollowly earned; but that change had already come, and he did not wish to consider that he might for a minute sound like Eren.

To-day: a sunny after-noon alone in the library at Trost’s Legion HQ, waiting for Eren to come back from another series of tests with Commander Hanji; his powers were only beginning to grow, and making guillotines out of crystal was just one proven expenditure. Mikasa was busy enough, training with Captain Levi to assume a similar position; Armin was happy for her, even if it didn’t alleviate his loneliness. Annie made decent company when she decided to tag along.

“Why does he do it?” Armin thought aloud, already knowing the answer. Eren will never be content until he’s sure that his actions are well-earned. It might kill him someday.

“He wants to think he’s in control of himself,” Annie said, matter-of-factly. “What about you?”

Armin hesitated. “What about me?”

“Are you in control?”

“That’s a broad statement. I don’t have the context to answer you appropriately.”

Annie seemed to ruminate on that for a while. “What context?”

He figured she could see it in his eyes, or sense it in his hunched posture; the duality he tried to suffocate, this conflict between the friend he feared to lose and the tenuous alliance he’d formed with her — for now.

(Annie’s betrayal was old news to most who were there when she’d first crystallised herself — and there was really no one left to care about her besides Eren or Hanji. She’s like a bug behind glass, he’d thought, in the days before she’d woken up. A petty nuisance. I don’t know why we’re bothering to keep her.

Though Eren had likely surpassed her in sheer ability, by now; perhaps she was still superior in terms of technique? Supposing Eren’s Titan would be able to consume her — well, it’s called the Female Titan — or was the title more significant?)

“He’s told me before, what he thinks will happen after the Marley arrive. I don’t think he’s too keen on budging,” Armin grumbled.

“Have you asked him lately?”

Armin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Why do you care?”

She shrugged. “I don’t, really.”

Armin considered that. Regardless of his inheritance, he was sure that he had never felt anything towards her before, besides apathy. He told himself in his head until it stuck — but it was something beyond his control, at least theoretically, and he could not afford that kind of vulnerability. It made him leery to talk to her, but it also forced him to try; he would not be cowed by mere hypotheticals. Besides, it was nice to talk to somebody who didn’t expect much in return.

“You’re his friend, Arlert. It’s not my job to be a messenger.”

He had tried talking with Eren. Several times, in fact. It usually went something like this:

“This revenge you want so desperately; it’s not end-all, so what will be left afterwards?”

“We’ll have ended the war,” Eren said simply. He sounded tired, more often these days, in a sense that Hanji’s ruthless testing or the strange new anxiety brought on in a world without Titans could not be faulted for; it penetrated his eyes, went beyond the physical strain. Armin did find it wearisome to keep running around the same concepts like this, day-in, day-out, like military ritual. That was one of the bigger reasons they weren’t talking so much; let Eren come to him for a change, for old time’s sake.

And Armin couldn’t remember the last time they had talked about unimportant matters, but he himself had no patience for triviality anymore. The sight of the ocean had thrilled him, yes — enough to smuggle back a shell with him in his quarters, while Eren had carried nothing at all but his newfound revenge — but that had been some time ago. Armin did not want to see the new cadets that would never quite understand what it was exactly they were being trained for, would never experience the fresh horror of something like Trost, watching your best friend slip away into the belly of a Titan and know you could do nothing but scream.

(There was hardly a need anymore, Armin mused, to strongly emphasise teaching them how to use manoeuvre gear. Give them guns, and instruct them more thoroughly in how to lead each other to victory in human combat — it was only a matter of time, given what he and Eren had seen in flashes, this terrifying, beautiful World Beyond the Walls.)

Eren was the only one who would humour him and listen when they talked about strategy — Annie was becoming familiar, but Armin did not like to dwell on this notion for long, as it incited the same pit of mistrust in his gut; she was never your friend, she may have spared you once, better not to test it, despite what Bertholdt’s memories say.

This ritual began every time he put his thoughts to paper: your name is Armin Arlert, you are sixteen years old, no, seventeen, and you are in the Scouting Legion.

He supposed his friendship with Eren was not something that would last indefinitely, no more than Eren’s relationship with Annie, but nothing was truly indefinite from the human perspective. Mortality was their only constant.

Armin was a patient boy, now nearly a man, though he did not feel like he had grown up very much between the years. Several years of exhaustive military training had hardened his body, but that could be said for any one of them. Now, the miraculous, unexpected nature of his rebirth turned him strange and flawless. Cuts were quick to heal and he did not tire as easily as he had before. Energy was abundant, always itching beneath his skin and muscles.

The Colossus Titan, when he transformed, was nothing like what he had imagined it would be, all those times pulling Eren from the nape of his Titan, feeling the heat of his skin. It was a laborious thing, heavy on his back and in his chest, burning so intensely he knew it would have grievously wounded him as a mortal boy.

It stuck with him upon reawakening in the Garrison’s infirmary, Mikasa at his side.

“Eren’s worried,” she’d confided, “about you.”

Of course, he had thought. Eren is still my friend. We may have our differences, but even so, he’s my friend. He’d die for me still, and I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve him.

All he had said was: “Tell him I’d love to talk.”

“I’m worried about you,” Armin told Eren now, careful to keep his tone clinical. “You shouldn’t push yourself too hard; you’ll be ill-fit for combat.”

“You sound like Mikasa.” Eren wiped his nose, sitting up on the cot. “Both of you worry too much. It’s going to shorten your lifespan.” He flashed him a grin through the crimson blotting his lip; Armin did not reciprocate.

“You don’t talk to anyone about normal things, anymore. All you seem to care about, from my perspective, is this war that we haven’t even started yet. We don’t know exactly what is out there waiting for us.”

“It’s out there, we can’t ignore it forever. And why d'you care?” His tone was oddly brittle, churlish. Armin didn’t understand.

“You’re — we’re friends, Eren.”

“So what? I can look after myself.”

If the right person talked to him, gave him a clear sense of direction, he would probably do almost anything if it meant getting a leg up over the enemy. Armin felt tired again.

“I never asked you to worry about me,” Eren said bluntly. “Not all the time. We can —” he glanced back at him, suddenly anxious “— shit, I mean. I want to look after you, as well.”

“You’re not — this isn’t like what you have with Annie,” Armin said, defensive, “and you know it, don’t you?”

Eren let his hand drop, curling to an empty fist. “Armin,” he croaked. “That’s not what I meant.”

But the emotion was there, bleeding into his voice, the clenching of his jaw. Armin felt light-headed. “What are you saying, then?”

Eren’s face contorted, like he was at odds with himself. “I…” he licked his lips, would not meet Armin’s eyes, “I thought you’d moved on, so.”

Armin resisted the urge to take him by the shoulders and demand clarification. “You replaced me in your mind with someone else? Is that it?” He could not help the incredulity.

Eren’s scowl deepened. “What? Goddammit, no. You’re different from her, but that’s not…” he grit his teeth, “I-I care about you. Both of you, not like Mikasa, and — I don’t want to see you hurt, but… Christ, I don’t know what that means.” He looked miserable within conviction. Armin wasn’t sure what to make of this.

“Does Annie know?”

Eren flushed. “Shit, I dunno.”

Mikasa wasn’t around often enough to give counsel; Armin had never really how much they struggled without her until now. But they were only getting older, and there was the ambiguity of the future ahead of them. They would need to work this out on their own.

“Are you going to tell her, then?”

Eren blenched, but did not answer.

It was a week or so before Eren got back with him; during this time, Armin found it difficult to hold conversation with Annie, who had gone quieter than usual. He threw himself into his duties as a solider and tried very, very hard not to dwell upon ambiguities.

Puberty had afflicted him later than most of his peers in Military Academy, which had kept his mind sharp, of course, but also disillusioned him greatly to the prospect of sex and desire — even now, it was something he treated as inefficient, messy and not something he could afford if he wanted to get ahead in life. Ignoring it was less of an option as he grew older. Masturbation was only a short-term solution; and it was difficult not to acknowledge who it was he circled back to in the end; he had tried blocking this out, thinking about other boys who would never look his way — not a difficult feat. This was hardly the time to address it. But when was that prudent moment, exactly? Was he going to be hoping until the day he died for something that simply didn’t exist outside the boundaries of his ill-fitting, selfish desire to be wanted, like anyone else?

But Eren had said that he wanted him. He wanted him. He would not, could not, dispel this truth from his mind, invoking a dangerous, possibly hedonistic sense of optimism that kept him humming, impatient for what was next.

“Armin.”

“So what did she say?” Armin asked him at last. “Annie, I mean.” Eren didn’t answer immediately. “You did ask her?”

“I think she knew.” He sounded mystified. “She didn’t really say anything. Is that, uh.” He looked hopefully to Armin, who wasn’t sure he liked where this was going — he told himself this firmly.

“What are you getting at?”

“Is it bad?” Eren mumbled, “that I, you know.” They bumped shoulders; in the context of their conversation, it was a strangely intimate gesture.

Armin chewed his lip. “I don’t know, Eren.”

Eren laughed, low and nervous. “Well, I meant what I told you. And…” he chanced a glance at him, “I want to show you, what I mean.”

Armin’s head was spinning. Eren’s hand was rough and sure in his.

“I-I really don’t think that’s —” Armin trailed off, half-hearted.

Eren squeezed. “I want you to know. Not just by me saying it.”

“What about Annie?” Armin blurted.

“Didn’t you talk to her?”

Armin could feel his face go hot. “What are you — oh God, Eren, she’s not my friend.”

Their laughter was shared, anxious. “O.K., O.K., I’ll get her. We can talk —” his thumb kissed the ridges of his knuckles “— about this, someplace quieter. Meet me up at the square to-morrow morning, I’ve got nothing to do before then.”

The place to meet, as it turned out, was a non-descript inn somewhere in Trost’s outskirts. The man at the bar seemed confused when he asked for the names of his fellow soldiers.

“We’re travelling through the city together on down-time,” said Armin confidently; it was a white lie, after all. “We were planning on staying for a while —”

“Three of you?” the man cut in. Armin did his best not to look confused.

“That’s correct, sir.”

“If they’re not out on the town, I expect they’re up there. Already paid in advance. The room’s the second one on your left, as soon as you come up the stairs.”

Armin could barely contain himself. “Th-thank you, sir.” Climbing the stairs with a mounting sense of anticipation, his hand gripping the rail tightly. He barely took in his surroundings, looked instead for the room on the left; the door was closed, which was a little worrying. He heard movement behind the door and lifted his hand to knock.

Someone cursed; footsteps approaching, and before Armin could hope that he’d picked the right room, the door opened and Eren was there. He looked dishevelled, missing his jacket and boots — Armin’s eyes settled on the ridge of his clavicle.

“Armin,” he said lowly. “Glad you could make it.”

“What’s with — oh.”

Eren looked at Annie, who looked back at him half-naked from the bed, and Armin felt a little like dashing out quickly, inconspicuously, while there was still time to forget this had ever happened, but his feet wouldn’t move.

It was Eren who met his eyes again, muttered: “Close the door behind you.”

“Arlert?” Annie, sitting up, eying him intently. Her nudity seemed less indecent in close-quarters — or maybe he was just starting to accept this as a venerable outcome.

He was afraid, in the back of his mind, of what he would see when he looked at her — the memory of the surrogate intercepted by its inheritance — but they had known each other before, as cadets, then enemies, now soldiers, and had talked with their own names, and he was sure enough that he possessed memories before the retaking of Shiganshina, a personality that was all his own. But the same could be said of Eren.

“I-I’m not sure what you expect me to say,” Armin muttered, staring intently at the wall above her left shoulder. “I didn’t think you’d get started without me.”

“Is that what you think it is about?”

Armin flustered. “God, no. I don’t — want that to be the reason I’m agreeing to —” he could not look at Eren for very long without his mouth going dry.

Annie frowned. “No one said you had to agree to anything.”

It was Eren who reached out and touched his shoulder; his hands were very warm, and Armin wasn’t sure anymore, what or who he needed. “Armin,” he said, very quietly. “What d'you want?”

“I —” his voice broke; he sucked in a furious breath “— I want to be sure this is my choice, right now, not — anyone else’s.” He did not add that there were several other, less emotionally compromising ways to accomplish this feat. “I don’t want to get in the way of this,” speaking quickly, evasive, “I can leave now, if you —” Eren’s grip on him turned brusque; Armin flinched before he could stop himself.

“This isn’t just about us,” said Annie. “It's… ” she faltered; offering reassurance was clearly not what she was used to, “…you and I, Arlert, we’re not together. So we have nothing to lose.”

“Because you have each other,” said Armin, forcing himself to be patient, because neither of them would acknowledge what seemed to him so laughably, irrefutably obvious.

Her eyes hardened. “Well, you aren’t like Bertholdt, are you?”

Armin shot her a furious look; how dare she bring that up now.

“Enough,” said Eren curtly. Annie relented. “Right, Armin. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want, but. I don’t mind if you stay a little longer.” He had softened at the edges, his gruffness giving way to a kind of reckless certainty that Armin knew all-too well.

“What do you mean, stay?”

“You could watch,” Eren muttered, going pink. “Think about it, then decide for yourself.” He looked once more to Annie; she was sitting up straight, almost impatient. Armin didn’t quite understand when Eren flashed him a cautious grin before walking over to rejoin her.

“Hold on, what about her?” Armin retorted.

Annie blinked. “What about me, Arlert.”

“I —” suppressing the need to roll his eyes, because he didn’t always want to be the sense of reason “— shouldn’t we talk about this, first?”

Annie blinked. “He’s willing, I’m willing, and you’re still here.”

Armin opened his mouth to dispute the point, but what was there to dispute? She didn’t want him the way she did Eren, and he wouldn’t have asked her to feel that way, but — maybe it wasn’t so concrete, anyway.

“You want me to watch,” he repeated. “Both of you.”

He could see the blush splotching her cheeks as Eren rucked down her trousers. No one said anything to the contrary. Armin was still able to acknowledge the existence of his own human frailties; bit his tongue, weighing the desire that he had thought he’d long-since forgotten, but had known to be there all along.

“O.K.,” he said lowly. “You, uh, don’t have to wait for me.”

Annie’s eyes glinted. She took Eren’s face in her hands, muttered something he couldn’t make out at this distance. Eren swallowed dryly.

They were kissing again. A tentativeness persisted in Eren’s hands as he pulled her into his lap, cupping her thighs and stomach and breasts, kissing her slow. Armin wondered if that was ritual, or if he should be thinking about their private lives in detail; in the present, Annie grunted and held Eren to her breast. Armin wanted to avert his eyes completely, but that would defeat the point, so in compromise he tried looking at her face.

They locked eyes and Armin couldn’t have said a word, even if he’d wanted. She seemed to jolt in turn, wide-eyed and flushed, but then she groaned, rolling her hips against Eren’s thigh, mussing his hair.

“Armin,” she tried, the syllables heavy on her tongue, “Armin, c'mere.”

Eren’s shoulders shifted beneath. “Oi, are you still over there…?” he teased.

They weren’t putting him on the spot, but it elicited the same swoop in his gut. They had talked about this before, then. He did not love her, not in this way; but of course, one didn’t need to be in love to fuck another person? Shouldn’t think like that. Shouldn’t think at all, actually.

“Shit —” groaning, she tucked her head away. Eren kissed her in concern.

“Wanna stop?”

“No.” Her voice was small.

“Hey, look. We, uh, don’t have to.”

“Do you want —” she bit her lip, undulating “— this? Us?”

Armin wondered who she was asking, really. Eren shivered. “Fuck, I…” he seemed to forget how to speak a moment, “yeah.”

Annie raised her head. Her eyes were shiny when she called: “Arlert?”

On the bed, in a daze, he didn’t remember getting there. And they didn’t kiss, didn’t touch, just held him. Mainly Eren. He could smell him, this close. Now, kissing him — would she feel left out? — Eren, palming him roughly through his chinos. “You want this, too?”

Armin nodded. “What do you…” going quiet as it struck him that perhaps Eren, like him, hadn’t thought about this in a while.

“Strip,” he told him. “I want to see you.”

Armin unbuttoned himself with trembling fingers. Eren drank him in silently, the same unabashed desire in his eyes.

“You’re beautiful, both of you,” Eren muttered, flushed up to his ears — Annie bit her lip — and Armin felt ten times warmer than he had before. Eren seemed at a loss for what to do with himself after this revelation.

“Armin,” he croaked, nuzzling him, reaching for her. “Annie.” She stretched herself out languidly on the bed, eliciting a low sigh. Armin still felt overwhelmed. “You wanna go first, or…?” he grunted, nudging him with his shoulder, and Armin realised he meant him.

Armin scowled. “You were busy.”

“Now I’m not.” Licked his lips, hesitant, then said bravely: “Want me to suck you?”

Armin stared blankly at him. Even Annie made a little huffing noise in the back of her throat.

“I meant it,” Eren grumbled, going pink again. “I want to.”

Annie made no effort to conceal her amusement; Armin scoffed in retort. Eren took him by the shoulder.

“You trust me, yeah?” he muttered, and the sudden switch to undertones told him that he had not had much practise.

In an effort to save face, Armin said: “I’ll do it first.”

Eren stopped dead. “Shit, Armin.”

“Let me try,” he insisted. He did not add that he was worried he wouldn’t be able to control himself.

Eren shivered with delight, kissing him. “O.K., O.K.” Then put him on his knees — must’ve known, then, what he really wanted — and he ached for what was going to happen. It was Eren who sighed, offering himself promptly.

So Armin kissed it. Eren gasped a little, which was encouragement enough to continue; kissing, tonguing the head, until he was pushed back and Eren was muttering his name, yes, his name, stricken, and it was the same heady rush of infatuation as in dreams, only dizzyingly strong. So Armin took it in his mouth and the hand in his hair drew a fist, tugging him forward. Annie’s weight shifted, came around his back, her mouth soft and sure over his nape and — he moaned drunkenly when he felt her hands curl around him, and Eren cursed, tugged a bit harder.

Armin felt him hit the back of his throat and gagged; Eren cupped his face, mumbling feverish apologies. He wanted Eren at his back, touching him, kissing him; he wanted him inside, he wanted to be fucked, giddy and terrified at the thought, but not in front of anyone else, not Annie.

In the end, Eren didn’t let him finish and he was left gasping, indignant. “Don’t wanna come like that,” he mumbled. “You O.K.?”

“Fine,” Armin grunted, sitting up and blotting at his mouth. Annie kissed his cheek tentatively. “Oi,” he muttered, reaching back for her, “you don’t have to —” melting when she pumped him again, and he moaned “— God, will you just — ah!”

“Shh,” she breathed, catching his thighs and digging in lightly with her nails. “Not yet.”

Armin groaned, his hips churning on air. Eren just laughed hoarsely, leaning in close enough to kiss but speaking soft instead: “How do you want us?”

So Armin rolled over onto his back and Annie was straddling him, cautious; he understood, vaguely, what he was supposed to do and took her by the hips, sank. He felt Eren come up behind him again, nipping his jaw, sitting him up, pulling him back by the waist and grinding recklessly against his ass and — it was too real, all of a sudden.

“Wait —” he gasped, arms back to brace himself insufficiently. “Eren, I can’t.” Too many variables outside of his control; diseases, the lack of any proper lubrication — he felt again like an obstruction, the weight of reality becoming an insufferable inconvenience.

Eren didn’t let go, kissed his neck: “We don’t have to.” The same anxiety echoed in his voice; Armin was light-headed.

It was Annie who gripped his chin, said: “Arlert.” She drew herself up on her knees and sank down slow. It felt good enough that he could relax, somewhat.

Eren, to his credit, wrapped his arms around them both and started to move in tandem. Clumsy, because none of them had ever done this before, but Annie was solid in his lap, kissing him pointedly, and Eren behind him, holding his hips, nose in his hair — he was getting taller every month, it seemed — this was such a simplistic, base way to express affection; Armin tried to think, but it was easier to hold her waist, kiss down her throat to the little jumping pulse in her neck — read once about this, because he was curious about the stimuli that was all — and her breath stuttered, walls squeezing him aptly.

He knew he wanted to move faster but couldn’t, pinned between their bodies, too warm to think with any kind of clarity.

“Wait,” he gasped. “Wait, you two.”

“Hunh?”

“What?”

Their responses were almost synchronous; Armin had to chuckle. “I-I can’t really do much, from this position.”

“Oh.” Eren was sheepish. Annie held his gaze.

“Move back a little,” Armin said to her.

She raised her eyebrows, but obliged; she was pretty enough, he supposed, leaning back on her hands against his knees and exposing herself inadvertently — he didn’t look down, figuring that would be too much. She didn’t look away as she sank onto him again, but her eyes fluttered when he twitched, unable to help his body’s reaction.

She tried a couple more times, panting slyly, grunting in satisfaction once she found whatever she was looking for: “There, Arlert.”

Eren perked up. Armin was trying not to make any noise. Her brow creased.

“Oi,” she said, tapping his chin again. Armin squeezed her hips out of reflex.

Eren reached around and cupped her breast; she hummed, arching forward and Armin wondered if this was too far, too private, but she rocked faster atop him, grabbing his idle hand to place it on her other breast, huffing: “you can touch me, Arlert,” and who was he to refuse?

Eren throbbed insistently against the small of his back; Armin was nearly there himself.

“Annie,” he hissed, “stop, I’m going to —”

She shuddered, raising her hips. “Pull out.”

He did so, and Eren, wrapping a hand around his dick, nuzzling his jaw, groaned, “‘rmin, let me help you —”

And Armin grunted, shunting his body back like they were wrestling. Eren’s mouth curled, capturing him in a feverish half-kiss, their skin wickedly hot like the aftermath of a Shift; he kept fumbling over Armin’s name between rough strokes, kissing harder, thumbing him; Armin, curling into his chest, felt his eyes roll back, knew he was going to scream, so close it almost hurt to be touched; knew that Eren wasn’t going to stop pushing this time until he snapped.

He tried to gasp, or call out but his voice was halting. Ended up coming in Eren’s fist and across his own stomach. When he recovered, Annie was still there, flushed and considering him through her bangs. She also had her hand between her knees, grunted something like: “Jaeger.”

“Armin?” Eren’s voice was thick at his ear, a little strained. He was still hard.

Armin moaned stupidly.

“Shh. That was good, you’re good — you rest for now,” Eren pecked him on the cheek, brief and brusque before he disentangled himself, crept over to Annie and teased, “oi, oi, we’re not done,” hefting her by the waist, he threw her left leg haphazardly over his shoulder and sank into her cunt without preamble.

Armin heard him grunt as she hissed, cursing — turning his head to catch the sight of them, tangled up in each other — Annie coiled her arms around Eren, snarling: “hurry up and fuck me, Jaeger” and they went at it for about half a minute, hard enough to make the headboard rattle, before she lost herself with a hoarse shout; Eren muffled a growl into her neck, pinning her to the mattress — he couldn’t keep the momentum going after he spent.

Annie caught his eye and blushed, like she hadn’t expected him to watch. “Sh-shit, Arlert.”

The uneasy feeling returned, more like envy or guilt — he really shouldn’t be here at all.

“Mm. Armin?” Eren, unravelling himself from her with a fleeting buss to her forehead. “How was that?”

Armin didn’t know if talking was even necessary.

“Arlert?” Now Annie was up, crawling over and gripping him by the shoulders. “Speak.”

He sighed through his nose. “You really need to work on your approach; you’re much too brusque for this.”

Annie stared blankly at him. Eren came over and kissed her jaw, making her suck in a breath. “Ease up with him, yeah?” he chided, thumbing circles into her hips.

“Shut up, Jaeger; he’s fine,” she huffed, pressing into the contact nonetheless.

“I’m right here, you know,” Armin groaned, and for the first time he felt left out in a way that didn’t leave him guilt-ridden.

Eren smirked. “C'mere, then.”

So Armin sat up and turned into his embrace; Eren kept him close, Annie did not reach for him so easily.

I don’t know if this was a mistake. I don’t know what I’m going to tell Mikasa, or if I’ll tell her anything. Maybe she’ll know. Maybe she already knew. I’m not going to think about this now.

“Armin,” said Annie quietly.

Armin hesitated. “Yes?”

“Do you think,” she began, “that you would come to regret this, to-morrow?”

Eren shivered. “No.”

“Not you,” she said, impatient, “I mean Arlert.”

What he said was: “I don’t want to lose either of you.”

Eren pulled them closer, while Annie offered him a tired smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

a/n: I still can't quite believe I wrote this, but I guess I've said that before and it's never stopped me! That said, it's likely going to be a one-time deal. Your feedback is highly appreciated, even if it's not always inherently positive or negative; I like making people think or feel something, even with fanfiction.

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diveronarpg · 6 years ago

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Congratulations, KAITLIN! You’ve been accepted for the role of JULIANA with an FC change to ZOE BARNARD. Admin Rosey: I think we all know how much I treasure Juliana. She’s my little principessa and my heart. Which is why choosing between the applications literally had me sweating because they all represented such distinct aspects of her. But Kaitlin you provided something that I don’t often think of when looking at Juliana: a spine of steel. I thought it was one made of flowery vines, but you’ve convinced me that it is a spine of metal, capable of producing thorns while glinting with jewls. It’s because of this, I have entrusted my daughter to you.. Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character

Alias | Kaitlin.

Age | 21.

Preferred Pronouns | She/her.

Activity Level | I am currently in Florida on holiday, but usually I spend a great deal of my free time online so I’m around and writing all the time! I won’t be able to much (if at all) while I’m down here since I’m moving my sister into college, but in general I can usually squeeze out a reply every day, though sometime I go a few days without posting and then post 6 replies on a single day, so. Do with that what you will.

Timezone | EST.

Current/Past RP Accounts | This is my most recently used account. This one is from around 6 months ago.

Also; Either I’m blind or I can’t find the additional questions section, but long story short I’d wondered if I could use Zoë Barnard as Juliana’s FC? Thanks babes!! Have a wonderful rest of your day reading and stay hydrated!!! Drink water u beautiful, dehydrated bitches!!!

In Character

Character | Juliet; Juliana Rosetta Capulet.

What drew you to this character? | I’m not exactly sure what caught my eye about Juliana two years ago, I could probably find my old application and try and figure it out again, but without doing so, what first broke my heart were the choice of words bolded, the words that you saw fit to emphasize. The words that make Juliana who she is. Thrive. Ghost. Onlooker. Helplessness. Obsession. Lamented. Saint. Blood. Symbol. Succumbing. Love. These words are a patchwork quilt of heartbreak and home building, of a life simultaneously ruined and still being built. She is built from ghosts, trying to stand on her own two feet while trying to balance who she was as a girl with who she feels she must now be as a woman. An onlooker to her own life, she’s both in control and out of it, toying with this feeling of helplessness, and wondering if the control she’s taken to get her father’s attention, to get her freedom, is all worth it. She’s a saint with blood in her future, a symbol of love and loss and light, and all the ways the dark threatens those things.

I’ve never favored girls who are put together. Call me a cliché if you like, but my female muses are an assortment of messes, girls who bear their teeth so they might hide their heart without the world realizing, girls who hide behind a string of lovers because they are terrified of love, girls who burn so brightly they threaten to consume–I’ve never been a fan of the sort of muses who are prim and proper and expect the world to lay itself at her feet without even having to ask.

So at first glance, I’m sometimes surprised that I adore Juliana the way that I do. Or at the very least, that I gave her the time of day to sit and think about her. But I did, and boy is she a mess in her Chanel.

(I actually think she favors the likes of Gucci or Dolce & Gabbana, all bold prints and daring colors with crisp lines, but that’s besides the point).

At first glance, Juliana is every inch the perfect princess that one might expect from Juliet, at least the Juliet from the beginning of the play. As a child she is spoiled, both with material objects and with love. But she was young when her mother died, and for all that her father loved his daughter, he employed his grief tenfold when it came to protecting her. He caged her away, kept her hidden and protected and I think in many ways, this has ruined her.

Juliana is a collection of fatal flaws.

Her love for her father, her desperate, unending love for him, has made her unable to fully recognize that the darkness she was afraid might taint him has already dragged him down. Not even that it dragged him down, that rather he stepped into the abyss without so much as a look back to check on his daughter. She loves her cousin, her darling Tibby, who is cruel and violent and knew the taste of ruin before he’d learned how to walk, who spit on the Montague name before he’d even heard that he was supposed to–she loves him, with a fervor equal to that anger which he directs at the world. The Tiger of Verona, they call him, but she still sees the boy who rode his bike behind her down to the river, groaning and grumbling the whole way, but protecting her all the same. She loves all her people, would die for each and every one of them if there was a call to action that required such a sacrifice.

But love and loyalty are not her only sins–that same father that built her a gilded cage taught her pride, taught her to believe in herself even when he didn’t speak to her. Even when she felt like she wasn’t enough for him, her pride turned itself into a deadly thing. Double edged and sharp as the tip of a blade, her pride is simultaneously unshakeable and unfound. A creature that thrives on attention and love, she can sometimes crumble into herself with a lack of it.

She is loyal, and it has made her blind. She’s been put on a pedestal and it’s made her pride deadly, a corrosive thing that threatens to turn her blood from ichor to mere iron. She is curious, and it is going to put her 10 feet under.

She is an innocent in a world where innocence does not fare well.

I’m curious to see which hamartia, if any of them, will prove her downfall. After all, the best fatal flaws are the ones that are good in moderation. Loyalty with clarity of vision. Pride without hubris. Curiosity with care.

In Juliana, there’s something tragic. In Juliana, there is something magic. And that’s the kind of character any writer would be fascinated with, at least in my book.

Does she have the ability to find balance? Here’s hoping.

(Or not–we need to keep things interesting, after all).

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? | For starters, I think Juliana is one of those wonderful characters that’s caught in an in-between. She’s in a transitory stage, with her fate hanging so precariously in the balance. She’s been afforded the opportunity to break from the chains of her innocence, but she’s also beginning to wonder if perhaps her lily-white hands were not so much a chain but a blessing. And she is wondering that about a great deal of her life, and I am watching and wondering myself which branch of her fate she will choose to walk down.

Here are some paths for her to choose, though I am certainly someone who thrives better when I have other characters to plot with.

(Which, coincidentally, will be another interesting concept to consider with Juliana. Lovely, lonely Juliana, who has been caged and sheltered and only recently brought into the fold of violence that bedecks her father’s hallowed halls, does not know so intimately the men who populate her father’s ranks. She is not overly privy to their personalities, and she is less than friends with a great deal of them. They respect her, to a degree, being the boss’s daughter they must, but she does not know them. She is coming to, slowly but surely understanding her people, and I’m interested to see how someone so isolated will fare in this sea of people).

Okay, tangents aside, some plots. (Sidenote: These are all fairly independent, and some can happen simultaneously where others are branches that, once started down, mean she wouldn’t be able to go down others. It really depends on fellow muns).

FOR KING & COUNTRY. One of Juliana’s guiding lights has always been fidelity, almost as much as love has been; for those whom she loves are those who inspire loyalty within her. It’s said right there in her biography, that she adhered to the commandments her father set forth the way any disciple ought to. It’s a hard line to draw though, where she ought to direct her loyalty and her love. I think this is one of the things about Juliana that appeals to me, that she is such a slave to her love, and at the moment her love for her father and for her country are in line. At the moment, she believes that her father is leading their people the way he ought to (or, at the very least, the best and only way he knows how), and that the blood and ichor spilled are ruinous but have not ruined them yet. But what happens when she reaches that limit? What happens if she comes to the conclusion that Verona is ruled by a gilded elite, one that needs to spill the blood of those lower than them just so she might continue to sit upon a poisoned throne? What happens when a king is not ruling the country, but killing it? What, pray tell, is a princess to do then?

THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Juliana has let the iron into her soul, has tasted darkness and been left hungry; there’s no doubt about that any longer. She shadows the Great Cosimo Capulet, striding through the halls of the Cathedral, and she finds herself intimately familiar with the coppery taste of air tainted by spilled blood, knows what it is to feel the buck of a glock 19 in her hands, and yet. Juliana is bedecked in innocence painted red, a tender-hearted girl with violence at her fingertips, but for all that the violence has been exposed to her, so has her father. It’s a hard thing, reconciling the man who once tucked her into bed at night, a soft kiss pressed to her temple, with the man whispered about among the masses. And those whispers? They speak of the death of innocence. They speak of the cold-blooded, hard-hearted murder of an underboss across the bridge. They speak of a son taking his place as leader of the family too soon and a daughter with pearls in her eyes and kindness woven with steel in her spine. They speak of an unjust loss, and they say it was her father who dared pull the trigger, if not by his own hand then by his order. Juliana is under no illusions; she sees the darkness in her father, sees it leaking into her own heart and threatening to turn her body towards rot, but to think of her father as someone who would underhandedly cross the border into Montague territory to have Alvise Vernon murdered is different from recognizing her father as someone engaged in a battle for power, as someone who kills those who dare cross the Castelvecchio into Capulet territory. She’s not sure though either way if the whispers are true, and that scares her.

ROMAN HOLIDAY. I find the potential connection between Roman and Juliana quite fascinating. You may call me a cliche all that you like, but it’s not even a romantic connection that I seek between the two. It’s a strange thing, but I honestly couldn’t care less about romance when it comes to Juliana’s future–if anything, I’d prefer to see her learn how to love herself, darkness and all, before she falls in love. But quick tangent aside, Roman and Juliana have been left broken and wanting in their lives, and then were taught to fill the void in completely different ways. Both, though, still have that ache sitting in their chest, turning their hearts towards ruin. Roman turned his towards the mob, allowed the wild, brutal thing to be equally as brutal in its hurt as it was in its nobility, as it was in its power. Juliana wasn’t afforded that same freedom, and instead of turning her heart to steel it turned itself to gold, soft and pliable and equally as loyal. Equally, she burned. Their loss turned them honor-bound, turned them fervent, turned them holy. I’m not sure exactly how they might come together (imagine: they meet, masks drawn, in the flashing lights of the Tempest lounge, each knowing exactly who they other is but wanting just for a moment to pretend they don’t), but I can’t help but think about the ways in which Roman might change Juliana–most of them entirely for the better. Roman is someone who has always known his fate, born into glory and taught how to harness it, and I think he could do a great deal to teach Juliana how to lead her people. He is wracked with his own grief, a grief that could fill him with prejudice against her simply for the sake of her name, but if they were to overcome their differences, the pair of them together could turn Juliana into the kind of woman she could only dream of being: daunting, exceptional, inspiring. Apart they are formidable, even if many can’t see that in Juliana yet. Together they threaten to raze Verona to ash and build her back into something golden.

THE LADY VANISHES. Another potential path would be Juliana falls into the iron, consumed by that which she vowed to protect her father from. In some ways, Juliana has traded in one golden cage for another made of silver and bronze, of tougher and more formidable things. Before her father brought her into the fold, she lived a lonely life, to be sure, but it was also lovely and left her sun-haloed and her blood tasting of honey. She attended private school and came home after classes were over, lounging in the backyard gardens, a book by Emily Brontë or some other romanticist cracked open and a bowl of peaches (or cherries or apricots or whatever else she could have possibly desired) on the table next to her. She’d sit before her canvas in a linen shirt and nothing else, paint streaked across the canvas and her cheeks while she poured her heart into the brush strokes. She’d sit at the dinner table with her father and smile and laugh and tell him about her day until he’d quietly excuse herself. Eventually she’d go on to expect it, this quiet departure, and eventually she’d stop minding the quiet. Yes, she led a quiet life, one full of care and peace, and she didn’t mind so much until Vivianne convinced her father to pull her from her cage for a night and show her all of the darkness that she’d been missing. And with the dark came the love of the moon, and the stars, and the cosmos gave Juliana the same love that the sun had formerly shown her. It’s intoxicating, the darkness, the flecks of light that dance across the sky as an evening wears on, the atrocities that men and women will commit in her name, the ones that taste uncomfortably like a drug she never intended to get addicted to. What if she were to give in? I think it’d be a fascinating thing, to see Juliana fall.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. It’s no small secret, Juliana’s innocence. It shapes her every breath, lets each and every member of both mobs form their own opinions about who she is and what she is capable of–all without ever actually meeting her. Boss’s daughter, the delicate flower, the soldiers sometimes whisper when she enters a room. She is the blessed daughter, no matter the grime that’s started to taint her manicure, no matter the blood she spills on her Manolo Blahniks. I’d be curious to see how this innocence of hers fares, and whether or not it will lead to her untimely end. I think this is possibly the least likely of my plot ideas; I find it hard to believe that the prodigal daughter would allow herself to be chained to her innocence, no matter how much she might resent the darkness, but it could be an interesting thought to consider, this kind of oxymoronic concept of fatal innocence. She’s let the darkness is, but will the light burn it from her soul, taking her body down with it? Time will tell.

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON. There’s something terribly haunting about Juliana being forced into a marriage for which she has no passion, into a relationship with a man whom she… respects? Priam Taravella is an honorable man, and she is fiercely loyal and guilty in her innocence, and she would never want to intentionally go out of her way to make a move against this union arranged for her by her father, but this is Juliana. Juliana, who would die for love. Juliana, who would die just to be in love, for some fleeting moment where she could taste love’s tender kiss, for a shared night with a lover who put their mouth to her collarbone and whispered her a new religion. She wants someone to stare into her eyes and show her what it is to go mad for love. Juliana, she loves and she loves and she loves and she has so few directions to direct her love. She has her father, and she has her cousins, and she has her Vivianne, but none are the love she so desperately might desire. The love she so earnestly deserves. It’s no small thing that the last line of her bio is “Icarus and the sun? That was love.” That is what Juliana seeks in life–a love that is all consuming, a love that threatens to burn, a love that she’d be willing to cast the world into flame just to get a taste of. Priam Taravella might be a partner, a brother in arms in this war that she doesn’t want to be fighting, but he’s no sun, and she doesn’t turn to Icarus when he comes near. I want so desperately for her to say this, to speak out against her arranged marriage, to step into the ranks of the Capulets and come out stronger, with a louder voice and with hands that no longer shake, and be unashamed of her hungry heart. She’s a girl born to a bloodied throne–should she not be worthy of it herself? Should she not have a mate to match her hunger?

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | Always. I’m so that bitch.

In Depth

In-Character Interview:

What is your favorite place in Verona?

She knows what she would have said, once upon a dream.

She thinks of the before, when the sunlight tasted like honey and her smile was effortless. When she could walk through the garden behind their villa and not remember the sight of a dark haired woman sitting on the stone bench beneath the olive tree there, spine cracked and a smile on her face as Emma Woodhouse did something to make her laugh. When she spent each summer biking outside of her hometown to the small lake just south of the city, Tibby trailing along behind her at the request of his father. We can’t let the princess get lost, she can still remember him saying, the echo of a mother’s soft laughter still ringing in her head.

She remembers slipping through massive dark wood doors, her little sister in tow, shutting the heavy thing behind her and standing among all of the things that made her mother who she was. A baby-faced Juliana, pulling open drawers and running small hands over the fine silks there, or slipping into the wardrobe at the back of the room where all of her mother’s biggest, warmest coats hung up. She’d bury herself on the floor there and whisper stories to Siena, tall tales of romance and intrigue that she’s read about in the novels she’d found among her mother’s things. She remembers putting on a pair of velvet red stilettos, six sizes too big for her adolescent feet, and wrapping a silken scarf around her slender neck, giggling and laughing as her dark-haired counterpart donned a wide-brimmed hat she’d only seen her mother wear once.

But that life feels like a dream now.

A life lived, surely, but not by Juliana. Not as the woman she is today.

Instead, she thinks of the places she loves now, the places that are privy to the woman she’s becoming rather than the one she’s been forced to leave behind. She thinks of the cathedral and every moment where her father has looked upon her with newfound approval, but must then also think of the blood she knows has been spilt there, the ichor she can’t see but knows is under her cousins fingernails. She thinks of her bedroom, the bed with the white linen bedspread she insisted on even though her father said he’d buy her a silk set, the window with the bench below it where she likes to sit and read the stories her mother once told her before putting her to bed. She thinks of the abandoned easel in the corner of the room, paint dried and the image only half-completed. We learn to love our cages, they say.

She thinks of the Castelvecchio, and the many times she’s sat on the edge of the bridge and stared into the sunset, the colors of the sky daring her to pick up a paintbrush she put down two years ago. But if she must think of the bridge then she must also think of the crimes that have befallen both sides of this conflict that has left the two families broken and wanting.

And then, she thinks of the inbetween.

“The Twelfth Night,” she says suddenly, as though pulled from a trance. “I’ve always loved art, though it wasn’t until recently that I spent much time there.”

How embarrassing, she thinks. Vivianne taught me better; never let them see you blink.

“They have a Rembrandt that just–” she pauses for a moment, inhaling deeply and shaking her head, the image coming to the forefront of her mind. “It’s just absolutely phenomenal. Have you ever been? Their Baroque collection is simply to die for. They have a Velásquez that I promise will steal the breath right out from your throat.”

She pauses, another half beat of her heart where she remembers a cage she sometimes wishes she wasn’t free of.

“Then again, of course, his best works are in Spain. Las Meninas is at the Museo del Prado, if I’m not mistaken.” She’s not, but she knows better than to be impolite. So she smiles, and goes on, her eyes mischievous when she continues, as though she’s letting him in on a secret.

(She pretends she doesn’t feel a pang in her heart when she mentions Spain. When she thinks of a summer spent walking through Madrid while she and her mother visit her aunt, the air warm and full of music that makes her heart sing. When she thinks of a freedom she never got to taste again).

“Everyone always expects me to favor florals, you know. When I say I love art, they expect me to love the impressionists, to say that Renoir and Monet are who I’d lay my heart bare for, or that Degas Dancers in Blue hangs over my bed, but they’re wrong. It’s not that they aren’t beautiful, of course they are, but stand in front of a Rembrandt or a Velásquez for half an hour and it’s just… it’s transcendent. It’s real, but it’s also more than. Monet is beautiful, but Rembrandt…”

She shakes her head again, her chest heavy.

“Rembrandt is sublime.”

What does your typical day look like?

She can’t help it when she lets out a laugh, her eyes glinting like sunlight on the water. She doesn’t blame her interviewer when the breath catches in his throat.

“Is this the part where I demurely evade the question? Bat my lashes and act like my days are top secret?” She is all soft lines when she leans forward in the plush velvet armchair, shoulders curling in on themselves while she twists her mouth into a smile. “None of my days are typical,” she purrs in mock amusement.

He responds, says something he probably thinks is witty. Juliana smiles, but she’s not really listening to him and for a moment her heart isn’t in it.

The truth is that her days scare her sometimes, and sometimes they make her heart sing, and she’s not sure exactly which is worse anymore, or what causes which reaction on what occasion. There are days where the thought of leaving her bedroom terrifies her, where the thought of walking through the streets of Verona will mean having Tiberius at her heels, eyes and teeth hungry for spilt blood. Days where she’s not sure if she hates him or loves him more for it in equal measure. You don’t hate him, she thinks quickly. You hate what this city’s done to him. (She knows better, knows that violence is embedded in her cousin’s heart, the same way she knows the darkness was always in her fathers and it was simply grief that brought it forth–she lies to herself all the same). Then there are days where staying in her cage seems equally as dangerous, equally as terrifying. What was she missing, out there in the world? A world where all was not sunlight and starry nights? The days where her father bids her stay in the house she will stare at the half-finished canvas in her bedroom and wonder–those haunt her the same way her days at the Cathedral do.

She’s caught somewhere in the middle of them, these two lives of hers, and the more time she spends in the in-between the more she begins to see that the pair of them are both light and dark. That they are cages in equal measure, and she loves them both.

(And what, pray tell, would be better to die for? One could say she’s caught between a rock and a hard place, her gilded cage and her blood-soaked title, but she’d call herself lucky, to have a life so full of love, practically brimming over the edge with it).

“It’s changed, recently,” she finally says in response to whatever it was he had said last. “My definition of typical.”

She purses her lips just so, pausing only the bat of an eye before deciding what she may actually be able to tell her companion.

“I used to wake when I pleased, but I’ve begun rising with the sun. I desperately need an espresso in the mornings though–you really don’t want to meet me early morning if I haven’t had a healthy dose of caffeine. I wish I were someone who enjoyed running. They say it’s a good thing to do in the mornings, a way to kickstart your day. Do you run?” Her companion shakes his head, but she’s not convinced he’s really listening to her. His mouth is parted and his eyes are trained on her full mouth; it makes her smile. “No? Well, I wish I did. Perhaps we ought to take it up together. Be each other’s motivators.”

A half-pause. Another moment for her to bask in his staring. She’d always fared well with attention.

“Sometimes I have errands to run, for my father or otherwise. More often lately it’s been something for him, but I can’t always be sure there’s something he wants for me to do, so I’m not sure I’d call it typical.” Her mouth twists, half smile half grimace, as though she must be apologetic for not having a more direct answer. “Someone once told me that each plan is a house of cards, and when a single variable shifts, the whole thing comes tumbling down. I suppose that’s the approach I take when planning my days, what I must consider on any given week, that having a plan for my ‘typical day’ will always falter, that the unpredictability is what’s most predictable now.”

What has been your biggest mistake thus far?

For a half second, just a single moment, she nearly says the unthinkable.

It comes like the whip of leather, a shock lash through her system that she can’t deny, the kind of insecurity she’s never allowed herself to so much as feel, much less voice aloud to a near stranger, no matter how delicious his gaze had made her feel a moment before. I thought I would be enough. It’s a dangerous thought; not exactly sacrilegious, but something close. Something equally as desperate, something equally as ruinous. She’d remember, through no will of her own, the moments between cage and what she’d thought would be freedom, the night where her father announced to her over dinner that he’d like for her to start shadowing him.

(Shadowing. It was a funny word. A dark word for dark work.)

Nonetheless, she took her sun-hungry bones and turned herself into a half-moon girl, a goddess who could live in both the light and the dark of the world, and she’d done it all for the love of a father, for a love she’d been nearly bereft of for years. She’d tasted it in doses, in gifts left out for her the morning after a dinner spent alone, a pair of diamond earrings here or that pair of Gucci loafers she’d been eyeing there. She’d thought, somehow, desperately, inevitably, that this darkness she’d let into her soul would turn her into a girl her father might finally pay genuine attention to, no matter how that darkness might terrify her. We’re all drawn to that which scares us, Vivianne had said to her once, on a dark night with storm clouds on the horizon. Juliana had opened her windows to the rain, had leaned on her casement ledge and wanted in a strange and hungry way to stick her hand out the window, better still to rush through her backyard directly into the thunder and lightning. We feel safest when we know our fears, just as we do when we know our enemies. And if the darkness did bury itself in her heart, then she might know it, might better understand it, might use that darkness to show her father the dangers of such a thing. She would show him that it would suck her in like a drug and spit her back out just as rotten, just as ruined.

For her father, for her family, this was a weight she could bear.

This loss of light.

She should have known that to know the darkness would teach her to love it. Hadn’t that been what Vivianne was trying to tell her? That fears could intoxicate? She’d watched her father fall into the dark violence of the mob for years, sat alone at home in her bathrobe until late in the evenings, staying up until all hours for her father to finally come through their front door. She’d scurry up the steps to her bedroom before he could see her, but she saw it all the same—that way he loved the darkness, that way he welcomed it into his bones with arms open. She should have known; she thought she was conquering the darkness, but it had every ability to conquer her, too.

But she knows beyond doubt that she can say no such thing, that to admit weakness would go against everything that her father and his merry band of murdering men had taught her, and none would ever respect her if she answered as such. But she’s never been very good with dishonesty, and so when she speaks it’s an uncomfortable truth, but a truth all the same.

“Thinking myself invulnerable.”

She will offer no insight, no further explanation to this boy’s question.

What has been the most difficult task asked of you?

It surprises Juliana, the fact that she knows the answer to her companion’s question without much thought.

My name, she wants to say. For my name I may bear the world.

Instead she gives a soft hum, her head tilting to the side slightly while her eyes cast their gaze downwards. There’s a soft smile playing on her cheeks when she studies the lines formed by dark wood on the floor beneath her chair. When the boy had called and asked if they might conduct this little interview in the comfort of her own home, she’d at first been hesitant. The walls of the Capulet villa were hallowed if not hollowed, a private place, a place she’d once been caged and could be again. She couldn’t imagine her father would be pleased she’d allowed a near stranger into their home, but allowed it she had, and she couldn’t be more glad for the comforts of home.

On the mantle above the fireplace she sees a photo of her and her mother, Juliana looking like she was ten, perhaps twelve. There’s a book open on her mother’s lap, and neither seems to notice the camera trained on their moment. Beside the antique lamp on the side table, there’s a photo of Juliana and Siena, faces cracked wide by smiles. Just there, on the frame of the door leading outside, she can still see the scorch mark left behind from a lifetime ago, when she’d sat in the open doorway with Siena while lightning crackled outside, a candle flickering in the early night while the rain beat down on the patio and splashed up onto their outstretched toes. If she’d done this in a coffee shop, like she’d originally wanted, or in the park that overlooked the Adige, she thinks she wouldn’t have been so… real, neither with her interviewer nor with herself. Here her ghosts would keep her honest.

Lips of a rose and a gaze like sunshine, it shouldn’t be a surprise when it’s her title that is her greatest hardship.

The things we love hurt us the most.

“Do you know the story of Peter Pan?” Juliana asks the boy across the coffee table, lifting her gaze from the floor. Her eyes are steady and her hands don’t shake, but she almost wishes that they would, that she would feel some discomfort at the possibility of bearing such weight, at bearing such self-awareness.

“Sure,” he responds, brow furrowed in obvious confusion. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Well, sometimes I can’t help but think myself Tinkerbell,” she goes on, a laugh threatening to bubble from her throat. She’d never actually voiced this thought of hers, this strange connection to a fictional fairy that she feels. She hopes he might understand. “At the very end of the novel, Peter can’t remember her, but we know that she died–she isn’t even afforded a death scene, you know? And she dies because people ceased to believe in her.”

She can see the boy’s confusion still plain as day, oblivious to how she might relate.

She laughs finally, a high and lovely thing, but she understands. She doesn’t quite understand it herself yet.

“I think what I relate to, or at least what I’m scared of most, is that I’m like her, that I’m going to… run the business and no one will believe in me, no one will want to follow me, and I’ll be destined to fail because of it, all before I’ve even really begun.”

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues?

“My thoughts?” She begins, eyes wide and carefully curious. Somehow she cannot deny her amusement.

The arch of her eyebrows rise up, all of her edges turned to sharp and her hair on end. She should have expected the question, surely, but a part of her hadn’t thought this milky soft boy bold enough to cross such lines.

She keeps her heartbeat level and her eyebrows raised, a kind of careful nonchalance.

Her thoughts flash though, for a moment, to all of those many people that this war threatens to ruin, for a moment to all of the many people that Juliana wants to save, wants to love. She thinks of brutal-hearted Rafaella and the girl she had been when she walked into the Capulet daughter life, thinks of all the ways that she loves her newest family, thinks of the cruel words she’s heard were spit at the girls shoulders and how she came out the other side stronger. She thinks of Donatello’s masterpieces and knows her cousin to be something more, something better, something wonderful. She thinks of all her soldiers, those souls who have pledged themselves at her family’s feet, the hands and hearts that will one day be her responsibility, the hungry hands and hearts that she will need to feed. She loves Verona though, and who could blame her when it is not just her soldiers that she considers, her soldiers that she wishes to love. She thinks of a boy across the bridge, with the weight of a world on his shoulders, and the daughter bereft of a father.

She thinks of a man with two children, a body decaying as it lies in a red pool of its own making.

Mutually assured destruction, is her first instinct.

Instead, she responds with a question.

“You know that phrase–’the things we do for love’?” She looking at the photo of her mother and father on the fireplace mantle, can’t help it when her brows draw together slightly. Slowly, she draws a breath and brings her gaze down from the mantle, making sure hazel eyes been blue. “The things we do for war.”

The honey-haired boy across the way looks at her with a question clear in his light eyes.

She supposes not everyone can see the way love and war intertwine.

“I think it’s about time it came to an end.”

Extras:

Mockblog

An unorganized collection of headcanons–some of them from my perspective, some flashes of Juliana’s memory, some otherwise.

i. She is not an early riser by nature, but she’s made herself one by design. While she was still caged, she’d sleep away the morning, slip off her eye mask at near mid-day and stretch herself awake. Since she’s joined her father, she’s changed her habits. She’ll slip out her back door to sip at a cup of espresso while the sun leaks purple and pink all over the horizon, bleeds an orange so bright that sometimes she just wants to reach out into the sky and lick it.

ii. She had given herself to God once, but somewhere along the way it was like religion just slipped out of her pocket. She remembers the nights after her mother and Siena died, remembers the way she tried to crawl into the heart of that darkness to find her belief in Him, but she was met with only shadows; most days she’s okay with that, but sometimes in the dead of night, with nothing there but the darkness, she craves the light that she abandoned. Sometimes, she thinks that maybe she’s better off, that maybe there are pieces to her God that are better off left forgotten. She thinks, if she is to go back to God, then she’d like to go back to Emmanuel, the name some give Jesus at Christmastime. God with us, it says, and it’s a light in the darkness. A beacon of hope. God is with us, in us, always. In things big and small, in our hopes and our dreams, the people that we love. Some days it’s easier to think about someone in the cosmos making the decisions, that idea she would always have a destiny set forth, but for a girl whose blood pumps for love, it’s not hard to imagine that it’s those she loves who set her fate.

iii. You wet your pointer finger and run it around the rim of a crystal glass. It’s like angels, you whisper. Your mother smiles.

iv. Vivianne is staring at a slammed door when it truly hits her. You can never be her, Juliana had hissed, tears in her eyes and fists clenched at her side. It’s then that Vivianne realizes Juliana is glass and steel woven together, and she can’t tell anymore if she’s looking at courage emerging from the fragile, or the vulnerable giving way to strength.

v. She looks at her hands sometimes and sees doll parts, porcelain hands attached to marionette strings.

(She should know better, really. Doesn’t she know what dolls always do in the movies? They come to life. And come to life Juliana will.)

vi. She is an unexpected academic, not for want of knowledge particularly, but more for the sheer fact that a quiet life left her with a great deal of free time on her hands. She filled her time with other things, to be sure, painted a canvas the colors of sunset, read novels that made her heart sing in wonder and light, but she is fourteen when her mother dies and school is finally starting to get interesting when it happens. So, she gives herself to it. Languages don’t come naturally, but she spends hours studying tenses and spelling and starts watching Spanish telenovelas to teach herself. When she learns that, she moves onto harder languages like Russian, all harsh and brass noise but beautiful in it’s savagery. She teaches herself to slip between tongues the way others change their tops, letting Spanish roll of her tongue one moment and French in the next breath. She finds history fascinating, how empires rise and fall, and her bedroom is littered with stacks of books with notes in the margins, and The Art of War sits atop her collection of Brontë novels.

vii. She opens every window that she can. I need to be able to breathe, she’ll say when she casts the windows wide during a thunderstorm.

viii. Things go back to normal.

(Read: Juliana continues reading, continues sitting her mother’s closet and touching clothes that still smell of her mother’s perfume. Read: Cosimo bedecks his elder daughter in gifts, and spends all his waking hours (in truth, he sees her in his sleep as well) worrying about how he’s possibly going to keep her safe. Read: Juliana eats peaches in the fading afternoon light and they still taste like sunshine.)

Things don’t really go back to normal.

(Read: Juliana wakes up in a cold sweat for 6 months straight, an image of milky skin turned sour, purple shadows beneath tired eyes. Read: Cosimo’s gifts his daughter the Tower of Babel and teaches her that she is a saint, that she needs to be protected, that a caged bird is a safe bird. Read: Juliana doesn’t ever want to touch silk again.)

Things go back to normal.

ix. She is not a child, but she is childlike in her wonder, and sometimes her train of thought or her actions can reveal as such. She will hold a particular attachment to her objects, will wonder aloud about something that most people wouldn’t think to question, and has a peculiar preference for human contact that some people can find uncomfortable. She is tactile, still, in nature. Like a child reaches out to touch everything so as to understand, Juliana crosses barriers often and without much thought. She will give hugs in situations where they may not be warranted, touch forearms during conversations, put her hand on a person’s shoulder when she comes up quietly behind them. She will tuck a strand of hair behind a stranger’s ear if they allow her, put her palm to a friend’s cheek when they are in distress.

x. She cannot drink too much champagne, anything more than half a glass really and her stomach will roll–she thinks about the one and only time she stole from her father’s liquor cabinet, a rosy-lipped and doe-eyed little girl trying to impress her golden-haired counterpart. They’d both downed an entire bottle each and then spent the rest of the evening puking in Juliana’s bathroom, but the next morning her house had been quiet and empty and no one ever noticed.

xi. There has been more than one occasion where she was discovered on her casement ledge, sitting precariously on the edge, feet dangling free a bedroom window where the scent of an apricot tree lingers in the air, drifting up from the garden below.

xii. Juliana has exactly four weapons in her current arsenal, though she’s been considering expanding recently, perhaps going to Lucrezia for some training in other methods. The first is a Glock-19 that she was given about a year ago, which feels weighty and foreign in her hands. The second is a balisong, which scares her and exhilarates her in the same breath. Spinning it between her fingers, it looks like dancing. The third is an antique revolver, which while impractical for it’s less accurate, is her favorite. It has a marbled handle and along the metals are intricate etching that make the piece look more like a work of art than a weapon. Her father gave it to her for her 21st birthday. The last is the one that scares her the most: her smile.

#accepted: juliet #accepted

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is-the-rose-on-your-coffin-door · 7 years ago

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JULIAN ALBERT IS DRACO MALFOY CONFIRMED: The conspiracy no one wanted but everyone is getting

Disclaimer: IRONY AND GENERAL SARCASTICNESS INTENDED

Introduction:

Draco Malfoy, one of the supporting characters in the Harry Potter series, has an intriguing backstory, arc, and character motivations- however, remained greatly unexplored in the novels themselves. Any reading into the actions of the character had to be done exclusively by the fans, as the accounts were given by a main character fixated on hatred toward him, which may have limited the depth the author could have given him. However, the real character development may have been there all along, in the form a completely justified and entirely irrefutable integration of Draco into the Arrowverse.

Anyone who has the third season of CW’s The Flash should have picked up on the clear similarities between the new addition, Julian Albert Desmond, and the character of Draco Malfoy. Not only are the two characters played by the same actor, Tom Felton, but they also bear identical personalities. Draco’s animosity towards Muggle borns is mirrored by Julian’s disdain for metahumans, with both characters believing a class of people to be lesser than they are due to circumstances outside of their control, due to differences intrinsic in their very biology and yet irrelevant to the quality of their character. As harmless initial “antagonists” that merely serve to annoy the main characters by flaunting their superiority complexes and generally being jerks, Draco and Julian represent the unjustified, workaday vitriol pitted against the main characters. Julian maintains the same characteristics that got Draco sorted into Slytherin, only acquiescing to Barry’s plea to lie to the police after Barry agrees to resign from his job- an act that betrays his prioritization of his own desires over the common good. He doesn’t hesitate in lying about his blackouts to avoid incriminating himself.

The list goes on and on.

However, this isn’t the point. Sure, Julian and Draco are similar, but why must they be the same person? The answer is simple. They are, guilelessly, too similar. No significant differences between them exist that cannot be explained. The timing even works out perfectly, with Tom Felton having aged between the final Harry Potter movie and the filming of The Flash, yet still not being as old as he was in the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. This means that Draco had plenty of time for the events of The Flash to occur before starting a family in England. He is 17 when he graduates Hogwarts. If you do the math, the Deathly Hallows epilogue occurs when Draco is 37 years old. Julian reveals that he was 20 when he found the Philosopher's Stone and got his position at the CCPD 3 years later, making him 23 years old. Since Draco’s son, Scorpius, was 11 during the epilogue, that means that Scorpius was conceived when his father was 26. Despite the extensive Harry Potter canon, the year of Draco’s marriage to Astoria Greengrass is unknown, meaning it definitely could have happened in the three years between his appearance in the Arrowverse and his decision to have a child. We know that Draco and Astoria didn’t deliberate having children until they were already married, meaning there is no room for “accidental conception” headcannons, unlike with Harry Potter himself. The timeline here indisputably checks out, so here is the real story of Draco Malfoy, former terrorist operative and possessed meat puppet.

Timeline Synopsis and Defense:

We start with the first major discrepancy between the two accepted timelines, Julian’s sister, Emma Desmond. “But wait,” you say. “Draco didn’t have a sister! He was an only child, which was an important part of his backstory as it fostered his parental coddling. Whereas Julian’s sister was the main drive for his original character motivations, with his grief over her death being the starting point for his ties to Savitar-”

Let me stop you right there. First of all, what a pleasantly well articulated argument. However, you’re forgetting one thing. Flashpoint. The focus of the overarching Season 3 plot, Barry Allen creating an alternate, irreversible timeline? You probably think I’m going to say that Flashpoint created Emma. But no. That’s too easy. I’m using Flashpoint as an example of how Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy created Emma.

The literary abomination that is The Cursed Child, a script that was confirmed by J. K Rowling to be canon despite its innumerable and mind bogglingly abysmal errors, contained a convoluted plotline involving going back in time to prevent someone from preventing something in an attempt to fix the rippling mistake caused by the first prevention. This frustrating writing decision mirrors the kickoff point of the plot in S03E01 of The Flash. This structure is identical but for one thing- in The Flash, a third timeline is created, but in The Cursed Child, the original timeline is restored. However, both stories followed the exact same preventative processes. What gives? Different interpretations and portrayals of the meaning and function of time? Of course not. The true answer is that a third reality was created in The Cursed Child, and this is on top of the third reality created by Barry Allen in which they all lived. However, Flashpoint is the original timeline by the time The Cursed Child takes place, so it’s irrelevant. The point is, it is established that a time traveler cannot remember their new autobiographical history when arriving in a new reality, and must rely on empirical observation to discern discrepancies. That means that when Draco arrived back in the original timeline, he could not remember the changes to his life story, and assumed that it was the same. Scorpius wouldn’t remember either, seeing as he was also a traveler. This tells us that the Draco Malfoy of The Cursed Child has no memory of being a member of Team Flash, and therefore no memory of Emma.

During the events of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Draco found out what was being hidden in the roped off area of the school along with the rest of Hogwarts- information learned upon the fatal altercation between Harry Potter and Professor Quirrell. It was in his nature to be intrigued by the concept of the Elixir of Life, and he would have imagined what he could do with the Stone’s power, even at the age of 11. He had exposure to the idea from a very young age. So, Draco had the means and the inclination to follow up on that desire one day. When his sister died, he experienced alluring hallucinations incurred by Savitar, exactly as he revealed in The Flash. These hallucinations were similar to those caused by the magical Resurrection Stone, likely a property held in some form by the Philosopher’s Stone due to its connection with the defiance of life and death. With a series of complex tracking spells, he was able to find the location in India where Dumbledore had had it hidden all those years ago, financing the expedition easily with his family’s money and apparating to the location with a few witches and wizards.

“Oh, come on,” you groan. “That doesn’t make any sense. The Stone is probably Untrackable, and Dumbledore didn’t hide it, he destroyed it, you incredibly inept-”

SHUSH. I’m getting to that part.

Draco has a history of subverting magical limitations, he managed to fix the set of “unfixable” Vanishing Cabinets, a task thought to be impossible, especially for such a young boy with no external resources. He probably should have died in the process, or at least gotten stuck in limbo, like Montague- but he didn’t. In addition, Draco had the aid of Savitar himself, who yearned desperately for a rescuer. As for Dumbledore, he has lied to Harry before. Several times by omission and outright. When Dumbledore refused to tell Harry things, it was always about his concern for his wellbeing. He lied to Harry for years about his true purpose in the future war, not only to spare Harry the pain, but himself. It would be completely in character for Dumbledore to tell Harry that the Stone that had caused them both so much trouble and pain was gone for good. He would want Harry to have peace of mind about the jarring situation. In addition, it is made clear by Dumbledore’s initial reverence for the Resurrection Stone that he greatly values magical objects of such immense power, and sees their destruction as harmful. I’ve already gone over the thematic similarities between the Resurrection Stone and the Philosopher's Stone, and it stands to reason that he would react similarly to being in possession of both. Dumbledore merely hid the Stone instead, not wanting the sacrifice the potential good it had, unaware of its future ties.That said, he allowed Nicholas Flamel to accept his mortality at last and move on, swearing to the man that no one would use it again.

Upon Draco finding the Stone, Savitar was free at last. He had found his puppet. He murdered the other members of the party before Draco could blink, knocking the man out, taking the Stone, and escaping. Nicholas Flamel had chosen not to reveal certain attributes of the Philosopher's Stone back when he had researched it, there was no use making it more coveted than it already was. The offensive uses of the Stone were antithetical to everything that he stood for, and he realized that everyone was better off not understanding it’s true potential. Savitar, however, understood it. He used it to periodically control Draco to exact his own deeds, the same way Voldemort’s Horcrux controlled Ginny in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

The Muggle police in India were extremely suspicious of him, which terrified Malfoy as he had no knowledge of how the Muggle justice system worked. Not wanting to return to England and face his parents, he went to America instead, assuming the name Julian Albert Desmond. As a result of waking up injured and bloody from blackouts on occasion, he picked up Muggle medicinal practices as a way of treating such abrasions in public, as sometimes he was forced to do. He eventually became so intrigued by the concept of treating wounds without magic that he researched them much further. He told Team Flash that his rudimentary medical skills were from being an army field medic, but it was just a cover for the real reason. When relating elements of his past to others, he would make the due edits to fit to his fake identity. He wasn’t sure how long he would remain in America before he felt the desire to return, so he indulged in some of the delightfully juvenile teachings of Muggle higher education, learning of forensics himself and faking a degree with magic. The subject was one he chose randomly without knowing what it meant. Afterwards, though, he decided to actually pursue employment in the field, at least until he got sick of it and ran back home.

When the results of the particle accelerator explosion, the metahumans, began to show themselves, all he could think of was what would happen to the witches and wizards that were bestowed scientific magnifiers to their already explosive power. He was always on the lookout for such an abomination, yet never found one. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or terrified.

However, everything worked out in the end. With the death of Savitar, he was free of the Dr. Alchemy persona. Eventually he just gave up on reviving Caitlin and returned to England feeling like a more complete person, about one to three years after the events of S03E23. Unfortunately, this series of events remains unknown to Draco as of now, due to the memory issues incurred by the Time Turner and lack of clues hinting as to the divergent timeline. Upon returning, Draco still married Astoria and sired Scorpius, making the short term effects of this timeline upon discovery almost nonexistent.

As you can see, Julian Albert is merely Draco Malfoy in disguise and any other interpretation is eternally flawed. What insipid tale would that of Draco Malfoy be without The Flash to complete it? Perhaps this sordid story is not quite so mellifluous, but a pragmatic approach must be taken to far reaching conclusions such as this. The overlap between the characters should be tacit in its revealing implications. WAKE THE FUCK UP PEOPLE.

#seriously where else was i supposed to post this #also im sorry #the cursed child #the flash #fictional conspiracy #Draco Malfoy #Julian Albert #SERIOUSLY I JUST WANTED TO MOCK FICTIONAL TIME TRAVEL OKAY

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itam-r · 4 years ago

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The Great Illusion

This piece was written for and accompanied by an audio track found here.

The idea of a being, whose intellect cannot transcend the one which it already possesses, being able to determine the nature of its own existence and the motives by which it operates puzzles me. It would seem self evident that any sentient entity with a set amount of intelligence and capacity to operate would assess its state of existence relative to itself. Consider: we humans, as relatively intelligent creatures, may observe the behaviors of comparably simple creatures such as ants and with minimal observation are able to determine the motives that drive them. An ant burrows underground for shelter, tracks chemical stimuli to find food, and communicates to its fellow ants via pheromones about its location and status. The behaviors of an ant are simple to us, but it would follow that to an ant, its behaviors are inexplicable; driven by some unknown force it cannot determine. An ant is not sentient as far as we are aware, but if it were it might conclude that such behavior was driven by its own motives and that it has the ability to choose and determine its own actions. In much the same way, it would then follow that a human cannot adequately determine the reason for their own actions, and would subsequently require a sufficiently more intelligent being to properly analyze and understand its behaviors. This being, much like an ant to a human, might then determine that humans operate under fairly simple patterns of behavior. Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, in his book Ethics proposes a similar explanation of free will: “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” Under this premise, I believe that the concept of free will is an illusion.

The song takes the form of a chronological portrayal of events, with two distinct interpretations of its mythos. The first interpretation is from a biological or human perspective. The song starts with a single line of the bass, repeating on its own to illustrate its solitary and unchangeable nature. This bass line will remain, independent of any outside factors, and acts as the subconscious continuum that both guides and drives the entire piece. Next, the two separate guitars are introduced and directly mirror this continuum. This is meant to signify any two various individuals and the beginning of their lives. The bass shapes their behaviors, and at their birth they are identical and completely subservient to the forces that guide them. As the track progresses, they begin to slowly differentiate and express their individuality. As they mature, more and more choices are presented to them, all the while the subconscious ticks behind, unchanging and explicit in its direction. The two individuals continue their separate existences, seemingly diverging further away from each other as time progresses -- their perceived free will increasing with each move. It is not too long, however, before they begin mirroring each other, progressing in similar ways at different times. They are conscious of their actions, but unaware of their perpetual unconscious, propelling them forward with predictability under an established pattern. As they reach the end of their lives, they once again begin to coalesce in their actions and orbit the force that once bound them much less subtly. Eventually, as they approach death, their choices synchronize with the subconscious continuum, and they realize the futility of their actions and the predetermined nature of life. Only then can they truly be free from the grasp of their own subconscious and live out the rest of their days relieved from the burden of choice. The bass continues on oblivious to the existences of these individuals, growing louder and distorted -- encompassing everything while marking its permanence.

This perspective interprets free will as a consequence of our biological existence. We believe we are making choices that we deem as free, but we generally only make choices that we decide benefit us and so are constrained by this notion. The subconscious will always intervene and correct our judgment if it deems necessary. If you are in danger, you feel pain. If you have been wronged, you feel anger. If you require sustenance, you feel hunger. All of our choices, regardless of how complex, are molded by this framework. As such, while our choices may seem free, they are perpetually guided by our subconscious drive to further our existence.

The other interpretation of this song is from a metaphysical sense. The theory of the big bang postulates that all matter and energy was once condensed into a singular a point and once compressed enough exploded outwards from this location, spreading the mass and energy in discrete forms all across the universe. In this interpretation, the bass acts as the continuum of time and the increase in entropy. As entropy begins increasing and time moves forward, distinct particles are created and begin to enact the complex equation that was started by the big bang. The guitars themselves represent matter and energy, and the forms they take represent increasing complexity. As time moves forward and entropy increases, more complex variations of matter and energy can exist. They further differentiate themselves, increasing the complexity possible within the universe. Eventually, all matter and energy reaches its inevitable end, and as entropy has increased so has the homogeneity of the universe. This is represented by the eventual coalescence of the guitars and bass. The complex and distinct forms once possible have now been evenly distributed across the known universe and the finality of the heat death is reached. Eventually, this homogenous mixture begins to pool and contract, once again compressing all the matter and energy and restarting the entire process.

This perspective sees actions as consequences of the perpetual cycle of the universe. Once the big bang occurs, it begins the calculations of a grand equation that will not resolve itself until the heat death. Humans are created as a result of these calculations, and their actions and decisions exist only to serve the increasing of entropy and the end of the equation. The choices they make were predetermined billions of years ago when the big bang occurred, and so the free will they observe is a mere illusion.

This song is undoubtedly dark and exceedingly depressing, but that’s not necessarily how it should be interpreted. For most, the idea that our choices do not belong to us and are out control is a terrifying thought; but it doesn’t have to be. Great comfort can be found in the solace that we all have a destiny and a direction. No action you take is the wrong one because it is what was always intended to occur. Despite the uncertainty of whether free will truly exists or is simply an illusion, it is what you believe that truly determines the outcome of your existence.

#thoughts2

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queernuck · 7 years ago

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There are a lot of things I’m dealing with right now and honestly, I’ve kind of lost control of them, I think. Boxing day is as good of a day as any to let that all come to the surface, the sort of strange deterritorialization put in place by the end of the year, the space where everyone is scrambling to score for their New Year’s Eve parties and we’re coming up on all of the really good playoff football but aren’t quite there yet and it’s still interesting and fun but you’re like okay we can be done now we are able to call this finished, more or less, I believe

I have a way of relating to people through sexuality and sex as functions of a gendered body were I almost in a way have an inverse structuring of the usual one around sex, it seems? I’m a very affectionate and open person and part of that does include sex, that’s something that comes kind of openly and easily to me in concept but not at all in practice, just because...I don’t really HAVE much practice with it, I have far more experience with lack of experience than I do with any particular means of being sexual it seems? This is also just very true in relationships, friendships, so on, it always seems as if there is some kind of new ground being broken and I am so rarely comfortable with who I am as a person

As a result of this the sort of recursion that realizing that I’m kind of left at a point where I’m unlikely to have sex anytime soon is part of a larger realization about the way that I’ve been living, the isolation I face, which is incredibly difficult to put into words without making it into something petty, something I genuinely do not want to be a part of, something that I feel is vastly different from me, from who I am and who I want to be.

This is the exact kind of turn that creates the worst of what trans women have done to other trans women, the way in which our own suffering becomes the very abuse we put onto others, the kind of repetition of concepts of our sexual body as part of how we experience attraction to others, the sort of desperation and suffering and eventual realization of a kind of violent fetishization, the way that trans women are only given a vocabulary for reaching other trans women that is sexualized, that can only reach out through the sexual. I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to be a part of repeating that, I don’t want to but I just hate how bisexuality, being as a trans woman, the ways that I want to reach out, have become so intertwined with my own sexuality and the ways in which I am allowed to realize myself in both spaces, how it determines as well that which I can see for myself.

If anything, the way that sexuality has overcoded upon my own self is so indeterminable, is such an inexorable process that I need to do what I can to prevent myself from repeating violent tendencies, of forming genuine connection along lines of affinity that are structurally identical to lesbian connection, of course, but not necessarily sexual, the ways in which community among trans women is not founded merely upon our sexuality. It can certainly be expressed through it, and that expression can be wonderful, is so often very wonderful, in the way that trans lesbians find one another and indeed are often finding one another in a fashion that is sexual, but preventing the kind of overcoding that makes it solely sexual.

Sexuality, relationships, these precarities are such a part of effectively all life when living within the prohibited space, the life of taboo, marked by homosexuality, and dealing with that is itself incredibly difficult. It makes us vulnerable, it creates the kinds of vulnerability that lead to grooming, and of course, while the person in question is not a trans woman, their own sexuality and relationship to gender is one that I had at one time felt a lot of affinity for and I am terrified by how he wielded it against us. The way that my girlfriend’s ex, someone who is an ex of my own, who I never quite had a relationship with but who I certainly in some way was in a relationship with, part of a process of consummating this relationship with, and how this was part of a process of grooming that has been awful and traumatic and just so fucking hard.

The result of my girlfriend suffering from the culmination of a process of grooming is fucking horrifying, and in seeing it, seeing how dramatically it has imparted a certain sort of structure of continual retraumatization, is something that in turn hurts me. I do not want to make myself out to be the primary victim, or as if I am claiming some greater affinity or something. Rather, as someone who came to know him through her, who was persuaded in the same ways, who opened herself up to him, who thought of him in a way that was hopeful and looking to a future that simply cannot be, that was never meant to be beyond his own fucking horrid fantasies, his own little world of Oedipal desire, I feel fucking horrid, I am terrified of men, of being with them, of what actually fostering a new relationship with a man might mean for myself. It is something I fear more generally as well, but the specific aspects of it are just...fuck.

And on top of that, the way in which having to navigate understanding that trauma with supporting that the way in which emotions and flows of desire have manifested the same events in different ways for her and I, figuring out how to approach our shared experience through the difference of us as people, the way in which that difference is realized, is something I am obviously working toward but something that is not at all easy.

Most generally, I feel as if I am just full of so much, there is so much overflowing from me, that all of it is just pushing me past what I can handle, that I am at a point of breaking and will eventually be forced past breaking, whether it be by the actions of another (such as my family!) or by taking it on myself. I feel as if I am in an unsustainable situation, as if I cannot and moreover will not be able to handle another year of circumstances like this.

My brother has a girlfriend, he’s going out to Wisconsin to see her after he goes back to DC for a few days. My sister got dumped but has a relationship in waiting anyway. They’re at home, they’ve been home barely a week, and they already talk about not wanting to “sit around all day” on a day where I’ve got a short shift of work, one late in the day, and it feels so...strange. They’re complaining about wanting to not sit around all day when this is the environment I live in, this is where I am whenever I’m not at work. They’re dealing with the same abusive parents as me, sure, but they’re also better equipped for it, they get less of it and get to react with far more violence than I do, they effectively have a vastly different territory that they live in than the one I live in, and attempting to deal with that is incredibly difficult.

There are a lot of parts of it that are all very difficult to deal with, and Christmas eve, seeing family and family friends drinking a whole bunch and being able to say no (in no small part because alcohol by itself is a shitty experience and im not a fan of it lmaooooo) was an achievement of sorts but the way that a specific and structured sobriety has been the basis for this year, the way it has structured my experience as a whole, the way that a habit of sobriety has itself been just that, a habit I maintain out of habit, not out of any reason except the fear of the reprisal of my parents and the lack of opportunity to break it, is part of a sort of proxy for a lack of interaction, feeling starved of any genuine contact with anyone in person, the way that I am just...alone.

I have someone I love, but I’m so far away from them that I feel alone. There are so many lovely people around me, so many beautiful and wonderful people, but I am so scared of hurting them. I am terrified of it. I feel so strange. Dysphoric.

#abuse/#grooming/#transmisogyny/

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lynchgirl90 · 7 years ago

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Ep. 8 Of #TwinPeaks Is David Lynch's Purest Marriage Of Television And Video Art

Adam Lehrer , CONTRIBUTOR

It’s hard to describe how inestimable an impact David Lynch had over me when I first saw Mulholland Drive as a 14-year-old. Something I’ve been discussing with fellow artist friends of mine is the fact that the art that changed our lives the most and still carries the most weight over our own sensibilities is the art that we were exposed to very young, maybe even too young to fully understand what it is exactly that you’re viewing. I developed a taste for disturbing aesthetics at a very young age; when I was about five or six-years-old, my cinephile father would have “movie nights with dad” when my mom would go out with her girlfriends, and he would let my brother and I watch watch Ridley Scott’s Alien, James Cameron’s Terminator, and/or Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop when I still should have been reading children’s books (and boy am I thankful for that).

That early exposure to art, whether it be John Carpenter films, or Brian DePalma films, or Bret Easton Ellis novels, or my favorite music (Wu Tang, Lou Reed, or Marilyn Manson), is still the art that I think about and gravitate back towards even after decades of being exposed to just about everything contemporary art, cinema, literature, poetry, and popular music has to offer. But watching Lynch’s Mulholland Drive for the first time feels like a monumental point of epiphany in my life. A point where I thought to myself, “Maybe I want to create stuff when I grow up.” I had no idea what Mulholland Drive’s fractured plot meant, but its images left me confounded, and fascinated. I loved the dreamy, hallucinatory Los Angeles Neo-noir stylizations of its setting. I had never felt more terrified than when I first glimpsed that monster lurking behind the Winkie’s diner.

That film made me blissfully aware that cinema and art could be a simultaneously erotic, horrific, and thrilling experience. I knew how powerful art could be, but Mulholland Drive gave me my first taste of the sublime. Since then, I’ve been a David Lynch fanatic. I’ve watched all of his earlier films, binge watched Twin Peaks over and over (finding myself asking new questions each time), wrote college essays on Eraserhead and David Foster Wallace’s article that documented Lynch’s process on the set of Lost Highway, have searched out all his early forays into video art, have found merits in his more oft-overlooked output in advertising (his 2009 commercial for Dior is Lynch at his funniest), and have read countless analyses on the man himself and his cinematic language.

So, when you read what I’m about to say, know that I do so with much hesitance, consideration, and ponderousness: the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is the piece of filmmaking that Lynch has been building towards for his entire career. It is a singular cinematic and artistic achievement, and the purest distillation of the multitude of ideas and concepts that live and breathe in the Lynchian universe. I believe that years from now we will be looking upon this single episode as one of, if not the single most, defining artistic achievements of Lynch��s unimpeachable career. Bare with me.

Aesthetically, episode 8 would leave a powerful impression on even the most half-hazard of David Lynch converts. A hallucinatory, nightmarishly kaleidoscopic consortium of images of blood, flames, fluids, and demonic figures spews towards the viewer while Krystof Pendrecki’s tortuously atmospheric soundscapes underline the episode’s inescapable atmosphere of existential dread. Episode 8 is an hour long work of experimental video art, no doubt. But if you have been paying attention to this season of Twin Peaks and you know enough about the mythology of the show and know even more about Lynch’s artistic interests and visual touchstones, then you know that this episode was no mere act of meaningless artistic overindulgence. In fact, this was Lynch telling the origin story that set the entire series of Twin Peaks into place.

This was the origin story of BOB, the demonic force that forced Leland Palmer to rape his daughter for years and eventually murder her in Twin Peaks’ initial 1990s run. BOB, we learn in episode 8, was forged from the the United States' earliest forays into nuclear bomb testing. BOB was already the perfect metaphor for mankind’s capacity for cruelty, depravity and evil, and becomes an even more powerful metaphor now that we know his nuclear genesis. Any Lynchian fanatic will rave to you how delicious this notion is. What David Lynch has done, and in many ways has always been trying to do, is to create a piece of pure atmospheric video art that also works as a classic piece of narrative storytelling. In this episode, Lynch has perfectly located a zone in which vague and aesthetically menacing imagery also serve as clear and precise storytelling and, like the best cinema and storytelling, illustrates a metaphor for modern human existence. While Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, Lost Highway and Blue Velvet utilize video art aesthetics, they are also pieces of storytelling with easily identifiable stories if you look for them (well, maybe not Inland Empire). Episode 8 of the return of Twin Peaks is a mostly dialog-less piece of distorted, haunting images. It is art. But it also still tells a story. The story of a television series no less! This is all the more impressive in that television as a storytelling medium is the most reliant on expository dialog and over-crammed storyboarding.

David Lynch pays heed to the form while mainly utilizing the language of pure image. Who needs a script, and who needs dialog, when you can see that delectably menacing, fascinating and torturous world of Twin Peaks from inside the actual head of David Lynch? Episode 8 was the truest portal to the imagination of Lynch that has yet been put to screen.

I’m sure there are more casual David Lynch fans that are growing impatient with the restrained, at times glacial pace of this new season of Twin Peaks. I however have understood what he’s been doing this whole time. He hasn’t just been making a television season, he has been commenting on the current importance of television in our culture. Television has replaced cinema at the heart of cultural conversation for many reasons. Partly, this has been a result of the groundbreaking work that has been done in television over the last two decades: Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and more recently, The Leftovers have all expanded the possibilities of what people believe can be done with the form. There are also financial concerns: as major film studios continue to spend their whole wads on sure thing blockbuster action and superhero films, auteur filmmakers have had harder times getting their films properly funded. Cable and streaming television services like HBO or Amazon however have the means to give filmmakers the funds they need to realize a vision, and indie filmmakers have resultantly flocked towards the small screen.

Television’s prevalence has had connotations both positive and negative on culture. The negative, in my opinion, stems from its causing people to no longer be able to get lost in a pure, imagistic cinematic experience. Even the best shows are still mainly concerned with story and dialog, whereas cinema is about mood, atmosphere, and aesthetics. When Twin Peaks premiered in 1990, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost (a television veteran) were very much interested in marrying the Lynchian world with the conventional tropes of television: serial drama, mystery, and even soap opera. Throughout its first season, it worked beautifully. Both Lynch aficionado cinephiles and mainstream television viewers alike were captivated, and the series was one of the year’s top-rated. But after the second season revealed Laura Palmer’s killer to be her demonic entity-inhabited father Leland far too early during its run, Lynch’s boredom with the constraints of television grew apparent. The show starts to feel like a standard nineties television show, albeit one with a quirky plot and wildly eccentric characters. Lynch mostly dropped primary showrunner duties to focus on his film Wild at Heart only to come back for Twin Peaks’ stunner of a series finale, when the show’s protagonist FBI Agent Dale Cooper travels to the mystical red velvet draped alternate universe of the Black Lodge, and eventually becomes trapped inside that Lynchian hellscape while his body is replaced with a doppelgänger inhabited by the demonic entity Killer BOB and set out into the world.

In the Black Lodge, Laura Palmer tells Cooper that she’ll see him in 25 years, and that's exactly where Twin Peaks: the Return starts off. It was apparent from the premiere episode of this new season of Twin Peaks that Lynch is benefitting from a new TV landscape in which Showtimes has awarded him full creative control over his product, and he’s directing all 16 episodes of this new season. Also, it’s quite obvious that the technological advancements over the last two decades have enabled Lynch to fulfill the fullest extent of his vision. Twin Peaks: The Return is a much purer marriage between narrative driven television melodrama and Lynch’s hallucinatory experimental video cinematic language. That first episode barely spends any time in Twin Peaks, but spends plenty of time with Cooper in The Lodge. There are some truly unforgettable images in that first episode: a demonic entity appears out of thin air in a cylindrical orb and viciously attacks a young couple having sex, a woman’s corpse is found on a hotel bed with most of her head missing, and who can forget Matthew Lilard, perhaps the newest victim to be inhabited by Killer BOB, in a jail cell accused of murder while Lynch moves the camera from cell to cell until we see the horrifying silhouette of BOB himself in high contrast red and black ghoulishly smiling? But at the same time, Lynch is able to move the plot forward in ways that should be familiar to all television viewers; through procedure, dialog, and plot device. Lynch is still working within the confines of television, but has peppered the narrative scenes with unforgettable imagery. It’s been almost as if he’s been subtly preparing us, the viewers, to not just respond to what we normally respond to in television: story, story, and story and dialog, dialog, and dialog. And to slowly reacquaint us with the thrilling experience that can be derived from watching a set of shocking, beautiful, erotic and terrifying images move along in a sequence on a screen.

And episode 8 of this new series is the pinnacle of this new body of work, and very possibly of Lynch’s career at large. The episode begins similarly enough, with evil Cooper escaping from jail only for his escape driver to attempt to murder him out in the woods. And that is when Lynch kicks it into overdrive. As evil Cooper’s body is bleeding out, a group of dirtied and horrific men called 'The Woodsmen' start picking over his body and smearing themselves in his blood, with Killer BOB himself appearing and apparently resuscitating Cooper’s lifeless body. And then, Lynch proceeds to tell BOB’s, and quite possibly Laura’s, origin stories through a 45-minute nightmarish experimental video art piece. The NY Times has called this episode “David Lynch emptying out his subconscious unabated.” That is totally accurate, and there has never been and most likely never will be an episode of television like this ever again. This episode was video art, but it was also still television, and it also served as a piece of and critique of cinematic and television languages. Allow me to explain.

Episode 8 functions in a way similar to that of the video art of Janie Geiser. Without any knowledge of the world of Twin Peaks or the themes of the Lynchian universe, one could admire this piece similarly to how they would admire the experimental video art of Janie Geiser, and in particular Episode 8 recalls Geiser’s film The Fourth Watch in which the artist superimposed horror film stills within the setting of an antique doll house. Episode 8 uses that same nightmare logic, but empowers it with the budget of a major Cable series. There are also similarities to scenes in Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant Under the Skin when the alien portrayed by Scarlet Johannson devours her male prey in a grotesque nether realm. And perhaps its greatest antecedent is Kubrick’s Big Bang sequence in 2001: A Spade Oydyssey, and in many ways Episode 8 is the hellish inverse of that epic sequence. Like the Big Bang, episode 8 tells an origin story of a world created by an explosion, but instead of a galactic explosion, Killer BOB and his world of evil were born of a nuclear explosion. Brilliantly, Lynch believes that Killer BOB was birthed by man made horrors, going back to something FBA Agent Albert Rosenfield said in the original series about BOB being a “manifestation of the evil men do.” Indeed, in Episode 8 Lynch brings us inside an atomic mushroom cloud set off during the first nuclear bomb test explosion in White Sands, New Mexico in 1945. As the camera enters the chaos and giving view to one horrid abstraction of flames and matter after another, we eventually see a humanoid creature floating in the distance. The humanoid eventually shoots tiny particles of matter out of a phallic attachment. One of those particles carries the face of none other than Killer BOB. The imagery is clear in its meaning: once humans created technology that could kill of its own planet, a new kind of evil had emerged into the world. Killer BOB is that evil imagined as a singular demonic entity.

But enough about the content, or the plot of the episode. There have already been plenty of recaps documenting its various thrilling enigmas: The Giant seemingly manifesting Laura’s spirit as a mutant bug that crawled into a young girl’s mouth via her bedroom window, or the horrific drifter walking around asking people for a light before he crushed their skulls with his bare hands and delivered a terrifying and poetic sermon over a radio airwave, or the impromptu Nine Inch Nails performance that preceded the madness. What is more important to note is the fact that there is a strong case to be made arguing that this episode was the pinnacle of all that David Lynch has ever tried to achieve. Lynch has always been a kind of pop artist. He comes from a background in abstract painting and sculpture, but he also has a deep and profound love for cinema that eventually influenced him to sit in a director’s chair. All kinds of cinema, from the kind of abstract cinematic geniuses you’d expect like Werner Herzog and Federico Fellini, to rigorously formalist filmmakers like Billy Wilder. From Eraserhead on, Lynch has tried to marry the formal conventions of cinema (plot, narrative, tension, juxtaposition, conclusion, etc..) with abstract and surrealist contemporary art. Twin Peaks was initially birthed of his interest in marrying conventional TV tropes, like soap opera and mystery, with that sense of terror art that he got famous for. But nevertheless, the constrictions of TV in the early nineties exhausted, and eventually bored, Lynch and he moved on. But now, he has been able to bend the conventions of television at will in this new season of Twin Peaks, and episode 8 was when he blew them up entirely. This hour of TV finds him drawing on all of his cinematic language and themes, from the surrealist ethos of his subconscious dream logic to origins of evil to the concept of dual identity (as this episode alludes too, Bob and Laura might be each other’s opposites, two side of one coin, if you will), while still working as a plot building episode within a contained, albeit sprawling, television narrative. There is no doubt that this episode will make the broad and at times confusing plot of the new season of Twin Peaks come into focus as it continues.

It was also the most mind-blowing cinematic experience I’ve had in years. And I watch everything. By successfully pulling off this episode, Lynch has also reminded viewers of the overwhelming potency that cinema and moving images can have that other mediums just don’t come close to. There is a lot of great stuff on TV right now, and one could even argue that something like Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers had some jaw-dropping moments of pure cinema. But after watching Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, even the best shows feel like hour long scenes of conversation between people without much cinematic impact (on his podcast, American Psycho author and famed cinephile Bret Easton Ellis argues that television can’t do what cinema does visually because the writer is the one in charge, not the director, but that’s for another think-piece). Episode 8 is a reminder of the power of cinema, art and images. But it also still works as plot device for the over-arching narrative of the show. More than ever before, Lynch has pulled off a piece of work that indulges his wildest artistic dreams while still paying heed to the kind of formalism that television production necessitates. I don’t know about you, but when Twin Peaks: The Return returns for its second round of its 18 episode run this Saturday, I can’t wait to see what Lynch does next. We are witnessing something that will be written about by art historians as much as it will be by academics of pop culture. This is thrilling.

Link (TP)

#Twin Peaks #David Lynch #Mark Frost #Forbes

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randomfanficlounge-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Antisepticeye Dossier

A/N: Vix here with another dossier! These are more or less just thoughts I've been thinking to myself. For me, that's kinda what makes certain fanmade characters of YouTubers interesting to me. You get to sit there and try to discover what makes the character tick and all that. I have seen a lot of people, not all but a lot, of people pursue more of either 'what' and 'how' a character came to be.

Which are very good questions but most of the time, people forget the 'why' portion of the character's existence. Why do they exist? Why do they do what they do? Why are they like this? And so on and so forth. And figured it'd be best to write it all down in case I forget important details and such. Also acts kinda like a FAQ... depending on the question. Also it is subject to change as I tweak it here and there in the future. Remember, I did not create Antisepticeye this is all just my collection of thoughts of how he came to be. Why he came to be as he is now. Anti is relatively new to me but caught my interest and after watching several videos, mostly one that show all the Antispeticeye moments… I sat here and thought about it. Hell I'm listening to the original song, Anti Personality by SecretlyMarkiplier'sBarry, right now as I'm writing this. Fucking good song to be honest.

But since Anti is still new to me, there's not going to be very much information on him here, until I finish my analysis of the character. Enjoy.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Theme: Anti Personality by SecretlyMakiplier'sBarry Name: AntiSepticEye Aka: Anti, AntiSeptic, Anti-Jack Age: N/A (depends on when his concept 'creation' was made which I don't know) [but for now his age is equal to Jack's which is: 27 years old] Height: Exact height as Jack Weight: Exact same as Jack's weight Hair: Exact same as Jack's style, if only a bit more wild and the green fluctuating between a darker or lighter shade than Jack's Eyes: Blue but can at will turn them into a solid jet black Clothing: Originally, he was clothed in dark hoodie and jeans. Currently wears a slimming black T-shirt, skinny black jeans and black shoes. Possibly a type of boot. He also wears a pair of black stud earrings, gothic in type. Unsure if they are the magnetic types or bar bell. Personality: Erratic and demented, Anti is twisted in nature, often giggling and laughing maniacally between bouts of ranting and raving. He has a strong desire to harm others by any kind of means; be it physical, emotional or psychological. He pairs that desire with his desire in scaring others, often interfering Jack's videos with his presence and sliding his beloved knife across his own neck to generate that fear; which he takes great delight in.

But he also harbors a great amount of anger and hatred for the fanbase and Jack himself… as well as a hatred for Darkiplier. Perhaps even a wicked streak of envy a mile long, perhaps jealous of the love Jack receives from the viewers; the fan-base thinking less of the evil entity and Dark being the more popular dark entity.

Granted, that is… debatable. He never truly states his reasons why he's angry. He's also quite intelligent, just because he's insane doesn't mean he's a fool. [Edit:] His intelligence is proven in a recent video 'Kill Jacksepticeye Bio INC Redemption' where he reveals that the entire time the fan-base had believed they had gotten Jack back from Anti, that it had been Anti who was in control and fooling them from the start. Not does make it amusing for him in fooling the fan-base but also agitated that they once again, threw him aside for Jack and mocked him. To which he threatens more harm on Jack 'next time', should the community forget about him or mock him again. He seems to also threaten Jack's other alter egos with harm should they step out of line once more. Anti is growing more confident in his powers and abilities, conducting control over Jack and the other alter egos like a puppeteer. He openly taunts and challenges the Jack's community to 'rescue' Jack themselves, as the alter egos are under his control and power. Weapons: Currently only known to have his beloved knife, but its possible he has multiple blades hidden on his person. Fighting Style: Close quarters with his knife (or knives) as his weapon of choice. Possibly a defensive fighter. Strengths: Aside his possible expert skills with the use of a knife; Anti possesses great agility, similar to Jack obviously. This also gives him great flexibility to dodge attacks and strikes, paired with his knives and possible defensive style; Anti can twist his way around oncoming attacks and slice at his opponents with his knives. It also gives him better chances at striking vital organs and if he manages to get behind his target, go right for slitting the throat.

Be mindful, however, that attacking him at close range is not recommended at the highest degree. With his glitchy movements, striking Anti is almost impossible and even harder to read his movements. Even mid-range and long-range attackers are to be wary, his speed and agility will allow him to close distances in short bursts.

Its gathered that he's able to create illusions and generate fear with those illusions to work in his favor. Its likely he is able to glitch warp in short distances and can interfere and control electronic equipment, namely cameras, computers and microphones. It is uncertain if he can warp into the internet like Virus!Cry can or not; but it is proven that he can cross to other dimensions as shown in Darkiplier VS Antisepcticeye video. Which could lead to possibly have the strength of a tulpa, like Darkiplier.

[Edit:] Anti's powers and abilities are growing in an alarming rate. He has exceeded prediction with his hold on Jacksepticeye. He refuses to let him go and it is concerning that he has been active this entire time since October of last year. It seems that he can control his host and his alter egos like a puppeteer, making them walk and talk as he wishes, or able to interfere with their doings if they attempt to help Jack escape his grasp. Extreme caution is warranted, Anti is a wild card and enjoys every minute of it. Weaknesses: Uncertain. It is not known what exactly are his weaknesses. So only those we deem as 'weakness' will be listed for now. While its possible that Anti can appear at will if he wishes, it seems to only last for a short amount of time. It also seems he can take control much better and faster, if Jack is under stress or terrified and possibly on Halloween. But Anti can also appear if he so much as feels as if Jack or the fan-base 'forgot' him or cross some invisible line with him.

As he is, for now, listed as a defensive fighter, its assumed that he does not have much in attack power, making him more towards a defense/evasion speed class fighter. So its possible for more powerful enemies to overwhelm him if they manage to get a hit in.

[Edit:] It seems there is another weakness Anti shows. His strong desire to be recognized and seeking attention… this is possible that he needs the viewers to pay attention and keep in him in mind for his strength and power to grow. As well as his overconfidence, that could lead to his downfall in the near future… but he is intelligent. His eyes never leave the viewers, his 'puppets'… even if he fails this time, he will learn and grow stronger. Relations: Jack (JackSepticEye) as his host for possessing and lighter counterpart; Mark (Markiplier) destests the man; Dark (Darkiplier) absolute hatred

Fears: Unknown Backstory: Unknown

Theories: 1) I was thinking along the lines that Jack is still alive, because... you know, Anti would have difficulty controlling a dead body and no amount make up and cologne would cover that up. But its possible that, Anti made us and Jack think he died, because there's not enough 'blood' to show that Jack bled to death for his evil counterpart to posses. Remember what Anti says as Jack was playing one game, "Forgotten? Or too afraid to remember?"

Jack could've been SO scared about the action Anti was making him commit in front of the camera so much in Say Goodbye, that he passed out; allowing Anti to take control without realizing it, hence his 'last words' "Help me..." Which could imply Jack was calling for help in the hopes of someone walking into his room and snatch the knife from him or attempt to rescue him before he thought he was dying. So this could mean that Anti needs Jack to be alive (until fans start to think of him as an entirely separate entity like how we recognize Darkiplier is) but unconscious or weak from fear or stress to take control for more than a few seconds. But this is just all in theory, yes I posted the theory in Antisepticeye page in Fandom wiki. 2) Given Anti's ranting in Say Goodbye then in Always Watching, it sounds like he's angry at the fanbase for he assumes to be 'walking all over' Jack… and angry at Jack for being 'too weak' to put his foot down. So its possible that Anti had wanted to protect Jack but with Jack suppressing him and keeping him inside 'for too long', he was denying Anti the right to do so. Locked away and chained where he couldn't lash out, Anti could have gone insane with his desire to help and his rage at the fanbase and then later towards Jack, has cracked his mind. And lost all care of 'protecting' and went for harming and generating fear to get people and Jack to listen to him. Again, all in theory. 3) With the same videos… as listed previously, this theory tilts toward the idea of Anti being a tulpa, a manifestation of the minds of the fan-base and Jack himself, thus being the evil and insane counterpart of the Irish YouTuber. But… no one paid attention to him and became jealous and angry of being 'created' for no reason but to be a whimsical fantasy… perhaps merely a 'copied' idea fans had thought about in relation to Darkiplier.

That could be his source of hatred for them all, just nothing but a copy and not treated equally.

And in his jealously, he sets out to take the attention he believes he deserves… one way or another, doing things that others couldn't do. Possessing Jack and 'killing' him to prove his power (which is very likely an illusion he created to gain easy access to Jack's body) ; and directly challenging Dark for position of 'King' of the… dark realm they're in, to prove he is better and assert his existence to others. [Whether it be Raspy Hill (given that Dark had shooed him away and told him he 'didn't belong' and to 'go home'…) Or YouTuHell (or YouTuDark… whatever the hell the darkside of Youtube is called) or some other dark realm Dark rules over currently.]

The actions he does, the interferences with Jack's videos to openly confronting Darkiplier, could be ways of him not wanting to be taken lightly, thought of as second best or perhaps to not be forgotten. 4) Combining theories 1 and 3…

Anti seems to be a tulpa, a manifestation of the minds of the fan-base and Jack himself, thus being the evil and insane counterpart of the Irish YouTuber. But… no one paid attention to him and became jealous and angry of being 'created' for no reason but to be a whimsical fantasy… perhaps merely a 'copied' idea fans had thought about in relation to Darkiplier.

That could be his source of hatred for them all, just being thought of nothing but a copy and not treated equally.

And in his jealously, he sets out to take the attention he believes he deserves, one way or another... doing things that others couldn't do. Forcing Jack to believe he was dying to easily possess the unconscious and terrified YouTuber. After all, he enjoys harming others, you can't harm a 'dead' person. But he can harm him more than physically, letting Jack suffer in trapping him in his own mind, unable to communicate with the fan-base freely. Even going as far control his movements, watching him with a sharp eye.

This action allows Anti to prove his power as well as instill fear, dominance and control over Jack, his alter egos and the community. Anti seems to grow in power the more people think of him and he continues to fuel that thought to gain that extra strength. This strength allows him keep control over Jack, pretending to be him to fool and taunt the community. Of course, it doesn't take long for Anti to be upset as people don't think of him often as he likes… which is to be evil and extremely feared.

In the video, 'Kill Jacksepticeye Bio INC Redemption', Anti interferes with Dr. Schneeplestein's attempts to save Jack. Taking control of his actions to stall and make things worse, even go as far as nearly getting the doctor to strangle himself with the headphones' wire. This proves his strength in power and being able to take control of others aside from Jack.

Though this is probably because Dr. Schneep is an alter ego Jack has.

Anti rants about being in control and tired of the fan-base ignoring him. Its possible that while in Jack's body and searching around to see what people thought of him (Anti), he sees that people… do not fear him. Instead, they romanticize him and turning him into, what he calls, a 'glitch bitch'… which he doesn't like being seen as and sees it as an insult.

I mean, I don't blame him really. You're an evil counterpart of someone and people think of you as a romantic figure and basically whipped… you'd be pissed too.

It's also possible that he's angry at being mocked in the 'Darkiplier vs Antisepticeye' video. Doing it with Mark, in thinking it would be more serious, only to see it was a mockery of what he wanted to do. Which is directly challenging Dark for position of 'King' of the… dark realm they're in, to prove he is better and assert his existence to others.

This is kinda proven when Anti mocks 'Dark' to 'put on' more make-up; cunningly insulting Mark that he was as weak as Jack and that the world is Anti's since Jack isn't there to stop him. As well as taunt Mark that his best friend is gone and he doesn't even realize it. Though that is merely an assumption. But its still scary to think about… all the youtubers pretending to be their evil personas and yet there was a true one among them.

The actions he does, interfering with Jack's videos to openly taunting the community, could be ways of him not wanting to be taken lightly, thought of as second best; and most importantly, to not be forgotten. [These are currently the theories made so far by this mind… more could be made as more information is found. For the current moment, this report on subject: AntiSepticEye is up to date.] [The document is subject to change as more information is brought to light. And as subject: AntiSepticEye grows in power… there will be more to come.]

#antisepticeye #antisepticeyefanfic #antisepticeyefanfiction #jacksepticeye #jacksepticeyefanfic #jacksepticeyefanfiction #Markiplier #Darkiplier #therealjacksepticeye #antijacksepticeye

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