#the people who run award shows are rich people | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

taexoxosgf · 1 year ago

Text

ACROSS THE ROOM

PAIRING idol!mark lee x idol fem!reader

WORDS 6.4k

SYNOPSIS You were just so beautiful. The type of beauty that seemed unattainable. The type of visual Mark would never approach because he concluded that there are already a million people at your feet.

WARNINGS both are hot (yes, this needs a warning), fluff if you squint (rlly hard), smut, vaginal fingering, oral sex (male & fem receiving), unprotected sex, rough sex, multiple orgasms, missionary, doggy, slight hair pulling

NOTES repost. my old account is gone because i’m the dumbest bitch on earth.

February.

It had been two years since your group debuted. The award show season had just concluded and one idol group would host a party to celebrate all the hard work throughout the year.

You practically lived at the company at this point. Eating, sleeping, and spending all your breaks there. SM Entertainment has strict schedules regarding breaks and recovery time which has you constantly feeling as if you’re doing one thing after another.

Idols would rarely have any time for themselves or to let loose. Between the busy schedules and performances, there was scarcely any time for family or friends.

It’s only been two years, and you applaud other groups in the same company who have been slaving away for the past few years. But that was the price for fame and riches. Maybe it is worth it to some people. It was for you.

The art of music and dance was all you loved since you were a little girl. Performing for your family or school talent shows, your love for music never fizzled out as it did with some individuals. It could happen in the future, you think. You’re still early in your career, so you hope to become more optimistic; content with what you have.

This year, the group that was hosts is NCT. Groups from big companies such as HYBE, JYP, YG, etc. were in attendance. Since it was a rare occurrence, the boys split the cost of the mansion. It was such a brilliant idea to do this, you thought. There were so many of them, and it probably didn’t even make a dent in their bank accounts. It was a small price to pay so idols could freely interact without the pressure of cameras, and old friends could reunite.

Even though your group was in the same company as many of the artists, it was difficult to have time for conversations due to busy schedules and different practice areas. And it was almost impossible to run into each other at the company due to its vast size. The possibility, if you could guess, would be about five percent. If artists of the same company rarely saw each other, imagine how difficult it would be for artists from different companies to be companions or friends.

It was easier to become acquaintances to friends if two idol groups had overlapping comebacks. Music Bank, Show Champion, M! Countdown, etc. gave a lot of free time in between to hop over to different waiting rooms to converse with your colleagues. Your group was especially close with G-idle, showcasing false surprises every time your comebacks would be in the same time frame.

Your close friend, Soyeon, stands beside you, her right hand holding a red solo cup.

“So you never hang out with guys, and you haven’t fucked a guy since last year?”

“Nope, I don’t intend to tonight. And you know how hard it is to hang out with idols of the opposite gender. ”

Her hands soothingly rub against the sides of your arms. “No, no, no. I’m not having any of that tonight. When do we get a chance to roam free? No judgment, but this dry spell is getting out of hand.”

You scoff at your friend before continuing, “Unnie, these are basically our coworkers, I don’t know.”

She rolls her eyes at you before standing in front of you, face-to-face, “Oh come on, don’t be a buzzkill babe. So you’re telling me you don’t think anyone is attractive in this house full of hot people?”

Her question causes you to scan around the room and outside the backyard. Your eyes halt for a split second, but continue scanning around, pretending it never happened.

“Oh, I saw that,” she points at you. “There is a guy you wanna fuck!”

Throwing your arms down in a huff of disapproval, you’re about to give in to Soyeon’s frenzy. “Girl, could you be any fucking louder?”

“You better tell me now, I caught you bitch,” she playfully slaps your arm.

You bite your lip slightly, contemplating revealing who it is. Looking up at her, she’s staring at you with anticipation. Her eyes grow wider by the second and you’re not surprised when you’re giving into her puppy dog eyes.

Your hands fall on her shoulders as you close in on the space between the two of you. “Mark,” you whisper.

“Oh my god!”

You wince.

“I fucking knew it! I always thought you guys would look hot together.”

“What? You thought about this before?”

“Maybe. But that’s not the point. I swear I saw him eye you, and only you when you guys got here!” she’s already jumping and pushing you to the backyard before you can get another word out.

You try your fucking hardest to push back against her, but it’s no use. Her drunk ass is already overpowering you.

Mark is beside the pool playing with some of his members and others from different groups. Tossing the ping-pong, the millisecond has him hoping it can make it into the red cup charged with alcohol.

“Fuck,” his failure causes him to throw his head back.

“You fucking suck, I’m three cups from winning bitch!” Yeonjun yells from across the foldable table.

His success in the third remaining cup has him rejoicing, and he daps up his teammates.

“Now give the ball to Sunwoo. He’ll land it at the house next door,” Mark retorts.

“Aw, you’re about to lose, so you’re talking out of your ass.”

“You’re so drunk, you know that?” Mark laughs, ignoring his friends' behavior. He’s stepping away to let the following person use their turn.

He’s looking around at all the people at the house. This was the one night of the year he looked forward to. Just friends having fun and letting loose, no cameras, no one to judge or inspect his every move or facial expressions.

He spots you and Soyeon against the glass sliding doors. You look so fucking hot. Your top accentuated the curve of your waist so well, and he noticed the mini skirt on your body rides up a little more every time he steals a glance at you. The top you wore showed the perfect amount of cleavage and your perky breasts are on display for everyone to see. He wants to be the only one to see them fully. He wants to be the only one to see you naked in front of him.

Oh, how he would love to fuck you. He couldn’t help it. You look so delicious standing there, with your pouty lips and doe-like eyes. Your perfect body and silky hair.

To be honest, he noticed you at the company and could never work up the courage to start a conversation with you. News flash: this has literally never happened to him before. It was never difficult to speak confidently to anyone until you. His extroverted personality suddenly does a one-eighty whenever he contemplates approaching you.

You were just so beautiful. The type of beauty that seemed unattainable. The type of visual Mark would never approach because he concluded that there are already a million people at your feet.

He recalls the few times he passed you in the halls and you politely bowed. Or when your recording sessions would overlap slightly, and he would hear your voice in the studio. Or when he passed by you in those tight clothes that barely covered your body practicing with your group.

Mark couldn’t lie, you were the most attractive out of all of them. He personally thinks, no one could compare, but he has yet to discover what you’re really like. Not the personality you convey on-screen.

This only happens once a year. It was an opening for him to finally converse with you. The company, media, or fans wouldn’t have a clue about it. There would be no confession to them, the perfect chance to shoot his shot. The only thing holding him back would be rejection. At this point, the opportunity is too tempting to ignore as soon as he spots Soyeon pulling you outside the home.

This is so embarrassing.

You and Mark make eye contact as Soyeon drags you out the door. He doesn’t pretend to look away.

“Come on! Move!”

“No! Oh my god! Stop!”

Soyeon finally stops with the physical force, and you both stare at each other. Her eyes move from your eyes to his, another way of telling you to get on with it.

“Think about it, this is the one day of the year where you’ll really get the chance, and with no judgment. Or sneaking around,” she adds in the last part, hoping you would miss it. And you definitely didn’t.

She’s stern on her point, supporting it over and over again with more reasons. The persuasion is working, you think. And now, you’re seriously contemplating it. What’s the harm? Rejection? Embarrassment? You don’t even know if he wants you.

But maybe she’s right. You’ll most likely never run into him after today, and if you do, it probably won’t be until the same time next year.

“I don’t want to hear for months after today what could’ve been. You’ll spend so much time regretting it. I know you better than yourself,” Soyeon adds further.

Her words finally fuel your courage to make a move. “Okay, just give me a second to build some confidence, meditate, or something,” you’re shutting your eyes to soothe the nervousness away.

“Mhm, but maybe make it fast. Hot guy my twelve o’clock, coming your way. You’ll thank me later!” she quickly warns you as she pecks you on the cheek before making her way out of your line of sight.

There is no time for you to process what’s happening, or to prepare after she utters her last words.

Turning around, Mark is already directly in front of you, your eyes align with his chest and it takes all of you to meet his eyes.

“You don’t seem too happy to see me.”

He was so fine. You just wanted to stare at him. No matter how weird that sounded.

He’s scanning your entire form, taking a moment to drink in your appearance as you respond. “I don’t have any emotions towards you. We’ve never formally met.”

“Formally? Did we cross paths at a time I didn’t know about?” The ice clinks against the cup as Mark raises it to sip and his Adam's apple bobs in a thick swallow.

“I don’t know. Maybe you know the answer,” you’re habitually pulling your body towards him. The scent of his cologne laced with weed fills your nostrils and you already feel the warmth of his body radiating off him. You just can’t help it. You wanted him so badly, so badly that you didn’t second guess your obvious signals.

“You’re acting a little too dumb, saying words before thinking them through,” the false confidence is oozing from your voice as you speak. Okay. Maybe you’re drunk and you didn’t know it. If that’s the case, you won’t stop any time soon.

“What do you mean I’m acting dumb?” he follows his response with a chuckle at your assumption.

“You approached me as if we knew each other, then suddenly, you’ve never seen me before?”

“You’ve got it all wrong baby,” the pet name catches you off guard, but it rolls off his tongue like velvet. “We’ve never met, but I’ve noticed you.”

“Notice me? Elaborate,” you wanted to have him explain. Maybe he wanted you as much as you wanted him. You had to be sure. No embarrassment or rejection today, you exclaim to yourself. But you couldn’t jinx it.

“You’re the one I’ve been waiting to see tonight.”

“So you didn’t see me come in earlier?” your orbs follow your index and middle fingers as they walk up his chest. Your fingers stop finally looking at him straight in the eyes, “I call bullshit.”

“I did,” he glances at your hand on his chest before returning to you. “Just was waiting til’ I got you all to myself.”

‘Well… wish fulfilled… So, what is it that you hoped to see me for?”

He looks at you differently, and what you didn’t know was he’s contemplating saying the whole and honest truth or the version that wouldn’t scare your on-screen persona away. The innocent, dainty, girl that would break if you press too hard. But up until now, Mark only knew of that girl.

“Hey, Markie!” Yeonjun walks up from behind Mark, obviously drunk. He’s stumbling around, anchoring himself by putting a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “I see your buzyyys” he slurs while directing his attention to you.

“You’re really so so hot, Y/n. If yous torn Markie here, down, I’m alayz here,” his hooded eyes scream drunk. “Hyung, don’t put that away!” he yells to someone behind you.

You’re turning towards the home to find the person he’s addressing, but he’s suddenly stumbling past you, unintentionally pushing you backward.

You’re off-balanced and as you close your eyes to prepare for impact, it never comes, and you feel an arm wrap around your waist, preventing you from practically eating shit.

Mark's arms are around your waist, sending a scowl back at Yeonjun before directing his attention back to you.

"As I was saying.”

You gaze up at him, your chest now pressed against his.

“What I hope to see you for?”

“Go on.”

Mark doesn’t know what comes over him suddenly, but he’s thinking he should just rip it off like a bandaid because it’s all or nothing.

“Is to have me in between your legs, and you screaming my name.”

“I’d like to see you try,” your eyes move down to his lips. It was so tempting to just pounce on him right here, right now.

It was clear that you both wanted each other as much as the other did. The game you always played with men every so often got you what you wanted, but this time, with Mark, it was almost impossible to keep playing.

Mark doesn’t respond verbally. Instead, he takes his hand to move the hair sheathing your ear. You think he’s about to whisper something, but he begins kissing your neck, trailing down from your earlobe.

“Is that what you like to do? Test people?” his lips are against your ear and you’re caught off guard, doing everything in your power to hold back a moan.

“Yeah, that’s what I want,” you respond softly, eyes shut.

“Be careful what you wish for. It might come true,” he brings his face to yours, and your lips are practically two inches apart. The buzzing in your body doesn’t stop and you’re scolding yourself for wanting to give in so easily.

You notice him biting his lip, content with the effect he has on you.

You lick your lips, “And what if I want it to?”

“You’re all bark no bite baby.”

“If you want me to bite, I will.”

“I have yet to see otherwise,” he whispers against your ear, lip grazing your lobe. Mark doesn’t follow with another word but your impatience and the alcohol coursing through your veins forces you to make the decision.

You close the distance between you two, connecting your lips with his. It was so sudden, but he kisses you back almost immediately, squeezing your waist harder and the other hand instinctively goes to your cheek.

You forget about the world around you, and that people are basically watching you begin to make out with Mark in the middle of the backyard. But the built-up lust makes everyone disappear. You’re both in your own world, with no other thought in your consciousness.

You don’t know what Mark is thinking, but he’s in the same boat as you. He wanted you for so long, and now he finally has you. Following that thought, he doesn’t know what he did in his past life to deserve this, but he must have saved an entire country to be able to receive what he’s experiencing now.

You’re kissing more roughly now, your arms around his neck as he gropes your entire body. Your hands snake up into his hair, and you find yourself pulling his locks as it becomes more intense. When his hand snakes down to your ass, he squeezes, which earns a gasp from you.

Mark takes this opportunity to slip his tongue into yours. Your mouths fit each other perfectly, and you question if the other people you made out with in the past were real, because it has never felt this good before.

After a while, you’re pulling back, Mark struggling to pull himself away from you.

“Easy there,” your forehead is still against his, eyes on his lips.

“You’re so fucking hot,” he husks against your mouth.

Both of your chests are rising and falling at a rapid pace, not realizing you needed to catch your breaths.

“Upstairs, the second door, on your left,” the words roll off his tongue without hesitation.

You’re mutually agreeing, you, with a nod as you slowly part, and your fingers run off his, until the tip of the nail. It’s so hard to control yourself and act as if nothing had just happened.

Of course, people were looking. Some were whispering to each other, the others smirking, and finally, the one’s with a scowl on their faces as they watched each one walk away from the other.

You’re in the room sitting at the edge of the bed as you wait for Mark. You had just sat down and looked around the room. It’s clean and smells husky, but you can tell someone was staying here due to the small duffel bag and clothing scattered across the floor.

And you definitely couldn’t lie, you are so nervous. What would Mark be like in bed? Rough, dominant, gentle, or maybe submissive? It had been so long since you had sex, it felt as if you were a virgin all over again.

You’re amidst your own thoughts when you hear the click of the door. The door doesn’t open carefully, but it’s practically slammed open. Mark doesn’t look back as he closes the door behind him, not even stopping for a single second. The moment he sees you, he’s grabbing your face and smashes your lips against each other. It’s too fast, all of it happening in one motion.

You’re stumbling back until the back of your leg hits the edge of the bed, forcing you to sit back on it. But Mark’s lips don’t leave yours, following you and pushing you slowly until your back hits the mattress. His arms cage your body with his knee between your legs. You feel Mark grab behind the bend of your leg to wrap around his torso while your lips are still attached; Intertwining in perfect harmony.

The buzzing all around your body only seems to grow stronger as he becomes more aggressive. It was like he was so hungry that he couldn’t stop even if someone walked into the room right this instant. You couldn’t lie, it would probably turn you on more.

Mark couldn’t help it, you were just so insatiable, like a drug that he couldn’t get enough of. Like a drug, he could take over and over, without getting sick. He wanted all of you so badly, but only if you were willing to give yourself to him.

The more you dive deeper into Mark, the more he sucks you in, and the more you want him.

The makeout is unforgiving, animalistic almost. “So sweet,” he murmurs against your mouth. It feels too good to open your eyes to him. Your panties are already sticky and if this continues, you’d have to throw them away.

You’re biting your lip as Mark’s lips leave yours to trail kisses down your neck. He’s careful not to leave hickeys as he already knows that your makeup artists would be unforgiving.

But Mark continues to trace kisses down your body, pulling down your skirt and practically tearing off your underwear in one motion. He’s kissing all around except where you need him the most and it makes you whine.

“Tell me you want it,” this statement has you looking down and locking eyes with him.

“Mark, just get on with it.”

“Try again,” at that, he presses circles at your clit without a warning. It’s slow, the pad of his thumb easing over your bud. But it’s too slow, and you need more.

“Mark, Please. I want you,” you mewl, giving in to his demand. The one action already having you fall apart right under his fingertips. Before you know it, you’re instinctively moving your body closer to him, the eagerness exemplifying the level of want when you’re clenching around nothing.

“Yeah?” you don’t see it but the smirk he exudes at your greenlight is much more than subtle. “Don’t have a smart-ass comment now?”

Before you can retort, he’s diving head first, licking a stripe up your slit. It’s a satisfying feeling, a gasp threatening to spill from your lips as the feeling of arousal becomes stronger.

He’s continuing, knowing exactly how to turn you on, knowing exactly how to touch your body, and how to make your eyes roll back. His hands roughly push against the sides of your thigh to prevent you from moving out of place and the dim lights aren’t a hurdle as Mark finds your clit and gives it a sharp suck. It’s just the beginning as he continues slurping and sucking in all the right places, unforgiving as he gives you the best head of your life. Your eyes feel as if they're going to fall out of their sockets at the perfect pressure and pace.

“Fuuu-ck,” it’s stretched out, the same word combining with a previous moan that threatened to come out from the back of your throat.

“You’re so wet,” he rasps against your cunt. “So fucking messy.”

“Mark, don’t stop!”

What you didn’t know is Mark loved giving head. He didn’t need to receive anything in return. Knowing he made his partner cum turns him on beyond belief. Making you squirm and moan his name like a mantra has him instinctively rutting his crotch against the mattress.

You didn’t know he was this good. It’s as if you and he have done this a hundred times before. You’re absolutely drenched, your arousal mixed with his saliva drips down your core. But a mess was the last thing you and Mark worried about.

“Mark, I need more,” you squirm beneath him, your voice sounding already fucked out.

“Is that a demand?” he’s teasing, inserting only his middle finger while awaiting your obedience.

A small gasp leaves your lips before you utter a plea, “Holy shit, Mark, please.” You’re practically whining at this point while your temper and impatience becomes all too consuming.

“That’s better,” he adds his ring finger, adding to the fullness and earning another gasp from you.

“Damn. Thinking about your face when you cum is already making me so hard,” he groans against your cunt and continues to slowly grind his erection against the mattress with no embarrassment. You were already fucked out, but you could see him from your peripheral view, and if it wasn’t the hottest thing you’ve ever seen, you don’t know what is.

Mark’s watching your expressions as he slowly pulls his fingers out before plunging them back in. He doesn’t let up as the slow motion suddenly speeds up, and he has you moaning and squirming underneath him.

He suddenly sucks on your clit in sync with the rhythm of his fingers and your eyes practically roll into your head. “Mark, Mark,” you shout as your thighs begin to quiver and you’re arching your back at the gratifying overstimulation.

"I-I’m gonna cum," your words are barely audible, mingled with gasps and groans, but Mark attentively listens, hearing every sound that emanates from you. He doesn't stop and keeps going in the same motions, only rougher and faster. It's not until he curls his fingers inside you that he finally reaches the sweet spot.

Your orgasm hits you all at once, tears threaten to spill down the sides of your face as the band in your lower abdomen inevitably snaps, and your entire body shakes. Mark sucks and slurps on your clit as if nothing happened, and you're virtually screaming. The obscene sounds fill the room and don't halt until you beg him to stop and he notices the cum gushing out of your body painting his fingers and dripping down your cunt.

“Fuck,” you’re spent, and it’s all solely from Mark’s tongue and fingers. You haven’t even seen his dick yet, and it already tops all the other people you’ve decided to waste your nights with.

“Done already?” The words are like butter, right before he licks another stripe up our sensitive core. “Well, I’m not done with you,” you quiver as he carefully drops the straps of your top, and then, brings the fabric over your head. Your senses seem to be on overdrive today, and you can’t get enough.

Mark's large hands glide from the inside to the outside of your thighs, merely to define the contour of your hips and waist, stopping to frame your breasts, and slowly begins circling your nipples, as if he read your thoughts. “Feel good?”

“Mhm,” the high from one of the best orgasms you’ve ever had begins to finally come down and you notice the lips that hover right above you. Before another thought, your arm hooks around his neck to pull him down onto your lips.

He welcomes the kiss, mouth moving languidly with yours. Both of your bodies melt into each other as the serene moment becomes all too comfortable. His hand continues to press circles on your nipple as the other gently rubs against your waist, eventually moving down to your inner thigh, in an attempt to soothe your spent body. The push and pull of your lips continues on for a few moments before it becomes faster. Mark bites down on your lower lip, but you whimper at the action because of the overwhelming sensitivity.

At your whimper, he lets go to lick over your bottom lip as an expression of remorse. You’re so overwhelmed, it's only now that you remember his very big problem. It’s poking at your hip, and he lets you know he notices your revelation by experimentally pressing his erection against your center. This causes you to lock eyes with him, another smirk adorning his perfect face.

Mark’s cockiness only instigates you to unhook the arm around his neck and move down to cup his erection. You don’t even look down, staring up at him as you palm him through his pants. “You just love playing games don’t you,” but the shaky exhale he withdraws notifies you of the facade.

“Only if you’re playing,” your hooded eyes and bottom lip trapped in between your teeth say much more. The seductiveness of your tone only pulls Mark closer to you, him getting lost in every single sense.

Mark decides at this very moment he's too impatient to withhold any longer. He's had enough. Enough of your doe eyes staring at him as if nothing else matters. Enough with the melodious responses that exit your pretty lips. Enough of the temptation that you are. He's willing to obey every demand, no matter the cost. He thinks that even though you two hardly know each other, it's as if you've done this a hundred times before.

He is already withdrawing from your body to remove his clothing in front of you. The warmth is missed, but now you’re just sitting there in awe, because what the fuck. The large t-shirt he always wore hid his delicious arms and oh so, thin waist. Mark’s towering over you and it’s difficult not to gawk at his figure. The boxers that hug his hips are pulled down, revealing his big cock. You knew it was more than average when feeling the imprint on his pants, but you almost drool at the sight in front of you.

“Like what you see?” he’s emitting the same look, with the corner of his lip tugging up in return for your reactions.

You don't say a thing, instead groaning at his languid movements, legs spread open, upper body propped up with your arms. You continue to watch as he puts his hand over his cock and gently strokes it. Mark bites his lower lip to keep a groan at bay after stroking a little quicker. Watching him fuck himself turned you on belief and it should be embarrassing but the sight was basically straight out of a porn video.

“Let me help you out,” patience was never your strong suit, and the ogling only lasts a few moments before you’re on all fours, inching to the edge of the bed where Mark stands. He lets you, removing his hand before you lick a long stripe up from the base of his cock, then slightly sucking the tip. A smile threatens to come about as Mark twitches at your action.

“Stop teasing before I fuck you senseless against the wall,” he huffs, throwing his head back. Mark was so close to just pulling you off and using you if you let him. You seemed to be taking your precious time, but he was slightly worried he would come embarrassingly fast if you were the one in control here. Anything you did, he seemed to fall apart so easily. Right into the palm of your hand.

The warning was one that seemed like a reward to you, but you regress, pushing him into your mouth in one motion. Immediately gagging, the tip hits the back of your throat fast. It barely fits inside your mouth, and you find yourself using your hand to make up for the remainder. “Shit, that’s it,” he groans at the vibration from your throat as his praise makes you moan, imagining his cock in your pussy later.

You can feel every ridge of his cock in your mouth, hollowing your cheeks, sucking and moving back and forth. He was so big, and the more you took of him, the more sounds came from Mark. It only urged you on further, sucking and bobbing like your life depended on it.

You’re squeezing your thighs together to aid the ache as the sound of the glide of your tongue against his cock is the only thing filling the air in the bedroom. It seems to be the final straw when he uses his hand to twist your hair and pull you off his cock. “Fuck, enough. I’m gonna cum if you keep going.”

You use the back of your hand to wipe off the corners of your mouth before Mark guides you onto your back with his hand still wrapped around your hair, the same hand resting on the back of your head. He's hanging over you once more, and the warmth you longed for returns. Your legs are already spread open, wanting to cure the clenching of nothing in between your legs.

“Are you sure you want this?” he’s biting his lip as he politely runs the hand originally entangled in your hair to push away the ones in front of your face.

“Want you so bad,” your words combine with a whimper because he’s running his cock back and forth over your sensitive folds, collecting as much cum as possible.

He offers a polite smile before he pushes in. It’s slow, but Mark’s size was far from normal, at least, far from what you’re used to. You feel so full and you both gasp at the contact, a grunt coming from him. “Oh my fucking god,” you almost choke on your words, your mouth forming an ‘o’ shape as you adjust to his size. Mark grunts against your ear at your pussy swallowing his dick. If he were to die right now, this is what he guesses heaven would feel like.

“Fuck,” he tests the waters by grinding his hips against you, and it already has your back arching. “You’re so fucking tight,” his hands return to your waist, the arch of your back forced back onto the mattress. His hands are sure to leave bruises, but you couldn’t give a care in the world. Every single movement and drag of his cock against your walls is ecstasy, the delicious burn fueling the awaiting high. “You’re such a good girl. Taking me so well,” he murmurs.

“Mark, please move.”

“So needy,” he rolls his hips against you once more, while his pelvis is against you, “Your wish is my command,” before pulling back and diving back into your heat. “Oh,” a moan escapes your lips at the action. Your eyes are barely open, but those hooded eyes are focused on the Greek god in front of you. You stare at the strained muscles all along his back, his whole body flexing with every movement.

He’s repeating the same pull and push of his hips until there's a consistent pace, every stroke earning more sounds from you. The grip he has on you becomes tighter as he begins speeding up his thrusts.

You’re practically sobbing at the way Mark burrows his cock inside you, fucking you so that you can’t walk the next day. It’s so rough, breasts and body jolting with every movement, and you’re searching for stability by bringing your legs around his waist. You love it rough. Wanting him to use you, use you in any way he wanted. Mark suddenly pulls out almost completely before brutally hitting the spot inside you where you need him the most.

“H-holy shit, Mark.”

He’s so lost in the pleasure, the lewd sounds of his balls slapping against your ass and the feel of your pussy choking his cock like a vice makes it almost painful to hold back his moans. It’s an impossible task though, with you in front of him lost in pleasure, tits bouncing in front of his face with the pretty sounds coming from you. Mark is too close. Embarrassingly close. He wants to prolong this as long as possible because he can’t seem to ever get enough.

“You’re not the sweet, innocent girl everyone thinks you are, are you?” he spits and you’re too fucked out to decipher his words. “W-what,” your words combine with a moan because you yourself feel the forming of another orgasm in your lower abdomen and attempt to meet his thrusts halfway to reach euphoria. Tears are threatening to fall, makeup smeared, but you don’t give a care in the world as Mark continues.

“You act like an innocent school girl who’s gonna break if she receives one insult,” he scoffs. “But you’re not,” before he can finish his string of words, he’s pulling his cock out of you to turn you around onto your stomach. You yelp at the action before you feel his arm hook around your waist, bringing you up to your knees.

“You’re dirty, walking around in clothing that barely covers your body, so what? So you can get fucked?” you gasp as Mark plunges his cock back inside from behind, the new angle making you squirm. He has his lip caught between his teeth as he continues with the pace he exercised prior.

“Mark I-i’ll come,” you're dropping to your elbows after your arms give out. It seems as if Mark is in the same boat as you when his thrusts become faster and more aggressive; if that’s even possible. Your brain feels like a puddle of mush, the band threatening to snap again.

“You got what you wanted,” he leans down to hover against your ear with his chin against your nape, not stopping the addictive pace of his thrusts. “But you got it all wrong.”

“Mark d-don’t stop! Fuck!”

He brings his arm back below you and pinches your clit. "From now on, I'm the only one who gets to fuck you. Got it?" You're not sure if it's the hazy words that come out of his mouth or the way he explores your body, but you're at the point where you'll do anything to get to the goal given that your legs are shaking. You’re so close, and you want it so fucking bad.

“Yes! Fuck yes!”

“So good. Come for me, baby,” He rasps, unable to hide how fucked out he is. With a few more thrusts from Mark, the coil finally snaps and your entire body convulses underneath him. He keeps going even after this, pursuing his high and intensifying the orgasm. You're shaking and sobbing, and it's spreading throughout your body, beginning in your lower belly and progressing throughout. It’s consuming you completely, the addicting high turning your body into a mass of nothing. A moan threatens to escape from your throat, but to no avail, not a single sound comes about.

"Holy shit, so fucking tight," your pussy spasms around his cock, making it difficult for Mark to move, but it's enough for him to reach his, cum painting your walls as he rides out both of your peaks; Your cum and his mix together as it drips down your body.

You feel your entire body collapse back onto the mattress as you come down, and your consciousness battles with the idea of sleep as it wanders.

Not soon after, it finally gives in.

The intense rays of the sun through the drapes forces you awake, eyelids fluttering at the intrusion. You rub your eyes before opening them, and after a few moments, you realize that this isn't your room, and memories from the night before resurface. While twisting your body around to the opposing side, a small smile appears on your lips.

Mark is fast asleep beneath the sheets, his features serene. You simply want to continue watching him sleep with no expression on his face because he's simply, well, gorgeous. But you quickly second-guess yourself and determine that, yes, this is a little weird, therefore getting up to use the restroom to distract yourself was the best decision.

Before your feet can touch the cold floor, a hand wraps around your wrist and pulls you back to your original position. Except, this time, Mark’s arms are wrapped around your entire figure, his chin resting against the crown of your head.

"Let's just stay like this for a little while," he declares, lids remaining closed.

You melt against him, with a small laugh pervading the room, and say, "Okay."

Soon after, you're both falling asleep once more, bodies entangled like they were the night before, but for a completely different reason.

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liliannadelaphinehartifelt · 9 months ago

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Helloo!

Idk if you take requests , but could you maybe write a fic with Human!Alastor and male!reader where reader exaggerates his whole personality to comply with everyone else and is easily exhausted from it and Alastor "relaxses" reader in that way ?

Thank you in advance and have a good day !

Alastor - [ MASQUERADE ]

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A/N: This request really made me brainstorm but I've decided to break it into 2 parts. I hope you'll enjoy it! As always kindly lmk the artist of the fanart so I can tag them and give proper credit! ❤️

WARNINGS: [ SLIGHT NSFW ] + [ MDNI ] + [ SUGGESTIVE THEMES ] + [ MALE READER ] + [ FLUFF…if you squint ]

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“You're on air in ten minutes, Y/n. Pick it up before the host gets restless!”

Your so-called manager barked from the dressing room doorway, giving one last glare your way before strutting off, grumbling a string of curses you'd learned to ignore.

“Asshole…” you scoffed, turning back to the striped mirror of your vanity; the large bulbs that lit it gave enough light in the old stuffy backstage space, illuminating every detail of your appearance.

Not one thing could be out of place.

You wouldn't allow it, committed to your role as a rising preformer in the golden age of the stage, and conditioned to perfectionist standards from years of tribulations

Suffering behind a practiced smile won you your stardom. The ambiguous beauty you possessed helped immensely in your success on the silver screen, but the truest contributor to your fame was appeal.

Humourous, intellectual, but most crucial, sex appeal.

That's what kept your admires enthralled, permanently put you in the limelight from the start, and inevitably earned you considerable amounts of money.

You weren't opposed to being called a child of Dionysus himself, envied by those who wanted you. Still, the burden of putting on a show for everyone every day without giving them a glimpse of your faults was excruciating.

Yet, you chose the burden over sulking in the darkness, remaining among the ordinary when you so clearly had the makings of a star, and your status of high popularity among the masses was proof of it.

So be it if your cheeks ached from smiling at frivolous fans that your laugh sounded less like your own the more you forced it, that flirtations of others felt like empty praises, or that every project you agreed to felt less and less stimulating.

So fucking be it.

Fame is fickle; you knew this all too well, but your existence felt meaningless without it.

Empty.

All the world's riches, the undivided favor you garnered from the public, and the sparkling awards cluttered your penthouse display shelves…

Even with all that at your fingertips, you had yet to feel seen…

Seen and truly adored.

“Two fucking minutes! Get your ass in position. This interview is being broadcast live, remember?” your manager harped at you from the hall, causing you to grunt in frustration before yelling back, “Would you shut your trap?! Fucking hell…I'm coming!”

You set aside the whiskey glass in your left hand, ran your right through your recently styled hair, and checked your reflection one last time.

“It's only a radio show. One little interview and you can go home and get black-out drunk…” the idea of spending some much-deserved time alone after running around doing a press tour brought a sad smile to your face as you stood and exited the dim room.

This would be your last stop, an interview with Louisiana’s prided radio host, and the last person you'd need to put a show on for before returning home.

“Finally…” your manager grumbled as you stepped into the hall, giving you a once over as the two of you strolled down the hall towards the host recording area, “Don't fuck this up. People say this ones a real talker and can make or break ya..” he mumbled begrudgingly.

You paid his incessant pestering no mind, flashing him a suave smile as you both stopped before a heavy door, “Don't tell me you're starting to care about my reputation now? Thought you only saw me as a nice money grab…”

Your smile grew as laughter bubled in your chest, seeing the other slowly become agitated at your backhanded comments.

“Why, you little-”

“Oh, don't be rude, sir. You'll spoil my good mood, and god knows sour spirits bring bad luck,” you smirked, enjoying the scrunch of his nose as his expression reflected his true nature, but before he could snap, you pushed the door open and slipped into the soundproofed station room.

What a fucking pain he is…

You cursed the raging man outside, sighing softly as the sound of jazz lingered through the air and the smell of freshly brewed coffee mixed with a distinct cologne engulfed you.

The space felt and looked inviting, relaxing even, but what caught your attention was the man who occupied it.

He sat in a desk chair across the small room, facing a table full of controls and a mic to match. His face was lowered from the device, glasses resting comfortably on the bridge of his nose as he stared at what you assumed was a script for your conversation with him, but the simmering amazement overtook your curiosity about the paper he held you felt hearing him hum along to the song he was airing.

You didn't dare move an inch closer, satisfied with watching and listening to him from afar, oddly entrapped by the silent allure he cast.

It was no mystery that people loved the sound of his voice. You'd be fooling yourself if you said you hadn't found his commentary enchanting, but looking at him in the flesh, you were sure he'd flourish on the silver screen like no other.

He could indeed win the eyes of many…

Yours especially, and to some degree, he had already, but you hesitated to admit it even as he turned to face you.

Oh…. he is a beauty, that's for sure…

That was the singular thought in your mind as he smiled, standing from his seat before approaching you with all the confidence you'd merely portrayed.

“Hello there. You must be Y/n L/n. I'm Alastor Hartifelt. It's a pleasure to meet you, my friend!”

His voice was as smooth, melting into the background melodies inexplicably, and your heart lightened immensely as he held out a hand for you to shake.

“The..the pleasure is all mine, Mr. Hartifelt..” you inwardly scolded your delayed greeting, losing track of your practiced charm relatively quickly in his grasp. Still, in seconds, you recovered from the blunder while returning his smile.

Alastor took you in with a glance up and down your figure, cataloging every detail of your appearance out of habit, but when his gaze met yours, one thought crossed his perceptive mind.

Longing?

How curious…

You hid the familiar emotion well; seeing past the veil of contentment wasn't tricky, and though he was tempted to bring it forth.

You two shook hands briefly but firmly. Alastor stepped back, gliding his hand out to mention towards the recording station. “Come, have a seat, and please call me Alastor. We will be on air after all; formalities aren't necessary for an engaging broadcast.” His smile grew, emitting an unearthly kindness as you nodded in understanding before sitting in the chair opposite his.

“You make an excellent point, Alastor. I hope we enjoy each other's company.” You chuckle softly, feeling a tad nervous for a reason unknown but genuinely harboring a rise in excitement, hearing him respond promptly.

“I have no doubt we will…” Alastor muses more to himself, a delicate edge to his voice as he trailed behind you, and a certain twinge of intrigue rattled your spine at the implication.

For the first time in a long time, you weren't dreading the inclinations of your fame, gradually succumbing to the sparks of joy Alastor evoked with the most straightforward words and becoming surer of the fact as he took his seat next to you.

“Shall we begin?” he implies cheekily, and you reply in a quick, witty fashion, “We shall.”

————-

“Care for a drink, my friend? I believe we’ve earned ourselves a cold glass of whiskey… that is, If your evening is unreserved.” Alastor made the offer moments after switching your respective microphones off, quickly arranging the recording panel to a specific setting as he listened for your response.

Your mouth moved quicker than your mind; a distinct rush overtook at the thought of spending more time with the charismatic radio host, “I'd be delighted to join you. I must agree that our interview went quite well. It's rare to have an easy conversation with a stranger these days..”

Alastor raised a brow, sparing you a glance as he finished sliding keys and flicking switches into place to keep a calming stream of music lingering in his broadcast, “So, I'm still a stranger to you?… My, and I thought we were getting on so well…“

He spurs you casually, an air of hurt in his expression, and it stuns you, causing a red hue to rise on your cheeks, “Th-that's not at all what I meant, Alastor…” Your lower head twinges of embarrassment staining your consciousness, and for the third time that evening, Alastor had chipped away at your charm.

He enjoyed it….

Seeing you falter and conform to his standards, though you didn't need to, at any time, you could've remained indifferent to him and taken your leave the moment he shut your mic off, but you remained.

Solely because you'd grown attached to him or the defect he had on you.

Humbling, genuine understanding, but above all else, validation.

“My dear, I am only poking fun. I take no offense to your words, and I hope you'll grant me the same courtesy!” Alastor reached for you, thumb and forefinger slipping under your chin to lift it, and you obeyed his gesture with a soft smile. “Oh…I…”

You paused, swallowing thickly as he raised himself from the chair, head lowered toward yours as he stood above you.

Had he always been so tall?

So brooding?

You weren't entirely sure, but your heart raced, every nerve in your body tingled with anticipation as if you were a deer caught in his headlights, but you couldn't retreat or evade him.

“You what?..” Alastor cooed quietly, chocolate eyes on fire with an emotion you'd long forgotten but returned subconsciously.

Control.

You needed to be back in control, or the next breath between you two might lead to something…

Your mind played scenario after scenario, beginning to short circuit as he peered down at you, lips only inches from yours, and his other hand reaching to caress your cheek. His touch is searing, warmer than those you'd felt before, intentional, and your entire being buzzed in his grasp as if in a drunken stupor.

He was dangerous… able to tear through your facade easily, which was terrifying.

Polarizing.

Don't let him get any closer…

Keep him at a distance…

You've only just met him...

Warnings rang in your head, but your eyes lowered to his lips, and your voice remained quiet as you responded to his question.

“I" 'd like to have that drink before the night ends. Wouldn't you?"With a gentle nudge of your head and a soft laugh, you draw away from Alastor's touch. The space between you increases, and the ability to breathe becomes less strenuous as you stand to your feet, collecting your overcoat before slipping it on, "I'm not familiar with the city yet, so I'll leave it to you to show me around." The chipper in your tone amuses Alastor; you'd perfected the art of illusion so well that in the clutches of what some might consider an intimate moment, you balked and reclaimed sensibility like it never occurred, though you wished for it to carry on further.

He'd met and spoken to his fair share of actors, learned their ticks and telling habits, and used it against them when he saw benefit in toying with them.

However, being able to see right through you evoked another motive for the host, and he dared to think it was mutual.

"Well, I'd be honored to show you the ins and outs of this lively town I call home so long as you promise to keep up," Alastor retrieves his coat, a heavy jet black trench withered accents paired with matching hat, stylish in all the right ways -presumably warm to be in. Still, you were sure if he ventured into the night dressed like that, any stranger would fear him.

They had good reason to, but you didn't need to know why.

Not yet…

With a coy smile, you followed Alastor out of the station, matching his strides as he paved the way to a nearby speakeasy, "You'll find it quite entertaining, my friend. Few visit at this hour, but my dear Mimzy puts on a vine show regardless!" Your heart skipped a beat at the thought of Alastor being infatuated with another, for what reason you weren't sure, but your disappointment flashed clear in your eyes that he took it upon himself to clarify his remark.

"She is an old and loyal acquaintance. Nothing more. Nothing less."

You perked up at the explanation, face burning with a blush as you raised both hands to dissuade his interpretation of your expression, "I understand. You needn't explain anything to me-"

Alastor halted in his tracks, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips as he peered at you curiously, "Hm, so you did assume we were something to begin with?..."

Shit, was I that obvious?...

"Not at all..." you lie, as calm as ever but internally conflicted.

How could he go about messing with you so boldly?..

And why did it excite you?..

"Your eyes say otherwise, my friend..." he counters your nervous reply with a smug smirk, beginning to walk off as if he wasn't toying with your head, "My eyes?..." you whisper in response.

"They are the doorway to the soul...I've learned to walk through said doors, and you, my dear, hide a lot of fears behind them." Alastor chuckles, ears tingling as you reclaim your spot at his upon reaching your destination. Still, you're less concerned with the dark alley lit with a singular neon sign situated above a heavy lead door and more worried about what he is implying regarding your emotions.

Who was he to know anything?

Sure, he was pleasant to be around, an avid intellectual with a knack for continuing conversation with you, and you had no reason to believe he'd been faking his friendliness to you from the start...

That still gave him no right analyzing you, prod at your exterior with more confidence than necessary, and you intended to let him know it.

A glare beset your expression, mouth open to speak, but you weren't allowed to do so as the lead door swung open.

Alastor guided you close to his side as a gaggle of patrons spilled from the doorway, ranting and raving about the time they had inside. Their rowdy behavior irked him, but you did not comment on the matter as he placed a hand on your back to lead you inside after their dysfunctional departure.

“Drunken idiots,” he mumbled begrudgingly, and for the first time you'd seen the radio host truly bothered. He'd been so composed during your interview, inviting and flirtatious on and off the air, so getting a glimpse of his annoyed state felt like a treat.

At least you knew he had flaws, insignificant but telling ones.

“Um. Alastor, you can..” you paused, unsure if you wanted to let him know he was still holding onto your waist as he led you inside the dim speakeasy. Alastor hummed, irritation gone, and his coy smile widening as you shuffled alongside him. “Y-you can let me go now.”

“Oh, nonsense, my dear! I wouldn't want you to run into unsavory characters like the ones that just passed..”

He quickly navigated the lingering crowd, clearly familiar with the club's layout, and you marbled at its unique atmosphere as he led you through it. “I can handle myself, Alastor,” you tried again to reason, but Alastor was quick to give a response as he ushered you to sit at an unoccupied lounge chair complete with a table and lamp.

“I'm sure you can but I'm rather fond of keeping you close.” He sat next to you after setting his coat and hat aside.

What did he mean by that?..

“How selfish of you,” you feigned disappointment as he shifted to face you with a soft chuckle leaving his lips, “Would you be so kind as to forgive my greed for your attention?” Alastor stares you down, noting how you bite your lip, another nervous tick you'd yet to disregard in his presence. “I'll consider it if you buy me a drink or two..”

The suggestion was meant to sound confident, unmothered by the mounting pressure in your chest, but it came out breathless. You were sure that you'd mastered the art of indiffenece, permanently established a mask of charm, but as much as you wished to maintain the certainty…

Alastair disproved it with little more than a gesture or equally compelling word.

It was unsettling, intoxicating too, but undeniably riveting.

“A small price to pay,” he mumbled, eyes lowering to your lips as you laughed softly and leaned back to admire the other patrons roaming or dancing around. “I never said I was cheap..” you taste him, gaze drifting to him as he shifted closer. You wanted to jump out of your skin as his arm came to rest behind you, head lulling to ward your cheek as he breathed into your ear. The resulting warmth made you shiver, quickening your breaths, and your body tingled with intrigue.

“No…” Alastor affirmed your jest, free hand raising your chin, tilting your head to face him as he continued, “…but you are desperate to be loved. One might say that's just as inappropriate, mon Cher..”

His tone dripped with condensation, a sensual purr loud enough to drown out the jazz and chatter surrounding you, and for a moment, he was all you could comprehend.

You should've felt angry, unsettled even, but his words struck a more profound emotion.

Comfort.

You weren't crazy, a constant wonder for the masses to marvel at and never care about.

Alastor could see you.

He wanted to…

“And so what if I am? Why would it concern you?..” there was no harsh undertone to your question, and it earned a sultry hum of amusement from him. “You've interested me, so I must not ignore your charade. I'm partial to the truth of a person, and you, my dear, abandon it in the hopes of success..”

Spot on.

It is shamelessly hurtful but direct nonetheless.

You clicked your tongue dismissively, attempting to turn your head away from his grasp, but Alastor held you tighter.

A glare crossed your face at the brushing grip he established, but a pool of excitement rushed to your crotch as well.

“I'm not one of your scripts to read, Alastor..” you scoff, rolling your eyes to make your point clear, but he isn't affected by the arrogant gesture.

“My apologies if it seems that way, but my intention to know you, inside and out, is purely innocent...”

“I find that hard to believe…” you retort, very aware of the minimal space between you two, and it became harder to focus on anything else but his soft lips that were stretched thin into a smile.

God, I was doomed from the beginning… you think to yourself as you laugh at your shameless line of sight. “Believe what you wish, my friend, but I enjoy being the object of affection..”

“That's inappropriate to suggest,” you mutter, face burning with blush and your hands raising to grip his wrist and collar. Alastor hummed, amused by your denial, “Mm, I suppose it is…would you like another apology?”

You shake your head, tugging him in by the collar of his shirt, eyes lifting to his, full of determination, “A kiss will do just fine…”

He holds your gaze, checking for mockery, but there is none. “That's the first honest thing you've said all night, mon cher,” Alastor points out in a hushed tone, lowering his head to place a slow kiss on your lips as they pull into a satisfied smile.

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I rewatched Heartstopper for this. Was it helpful? Yes. Did it make me cry harder than the first time I watched it? Also, yes. Will I forever love that show?… (yes). Again, this is just part 1! The second half is being drafted. Please look forward to it. I'm not sure it'll include smut…but I'll debate on that later.

[ BONUS CONTENT + ]

He's so cheekyyyy but I love him for it hehe like he’s just the right amount of ‘cocky asshole’ ya know? ❤️ credit to creator!

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smokesandsonatas · 1 year ago

Note

can i have some headcanons of what our twisted wonderland boys will do after they graduate? you can choose only 4 if there is a limit, thank you so much

Twisted Wonderland characters after their graduation at NRC

- This really tickled my brain so I'm going to write assumptions for everyone. I drafted this around last year then only got to post this right now, haha. -

Heartslabyul

Riddle Rosehearts

After his graduation from NRC, and bagging home the highest honor for an exceptional mage, I can see Riddle furthering his education. If there's such a thing as Ph.D. in Twisted Wonderland, Riddle will pursue that. I can also see him becoming a "Double Doctor," a medical doctor, and a doctor of Philosophy. Not only that but Riddle will also pursue law, along with magical medicine. A doctor and a lawyer, all in one. Riddle would go on to be an internationally recognized mage. He will also be an advocate of Mental Health education, fueled by his past and his mission to never let anyone experience what he went through.

Ace Trappola

I can honestly say I see him being recognized as a famous basketball player or entering the military enforcement of Queendom of Roses along with Deuce. Occasionally, Ace will perform magic tricks along with his brother, which is always a hit of course, someone even offered the Trappola brothers to appear in a reality show but Ace had other plans. In his 3rd year, he will become the Dorm leader of Heartslabyul, while Deuce will be his vice.

Deuce Spade

Will become a high-ranking magical enforcer, his salary will allow him and his family to live comfortably, especially his mom. Once the Queendom of Roses gave Deuce an award as the 'Hero of the Year,' he broke down into tears as he hugged his mom. Will be buddies forever with Ace.

Cater Diamond

Will be a famous vlogger. Be it traveling or fashion, Cater will be a famous influencer. He will also have a successful studio with workshops on how to run a magicam account successfully. If there's a fashion show, he would always be on the VIP list, as he is acquainted with Vil. If he feels burned out, he'll try to stay away from social media. If Cater can't form long relationships, he'll just leave his mark in the world with his vlogs. #LonelyButNotReally

Trey Clover

Owner of a famous bakeshop. His family's shop will prosper under his guidance. On every occasion, their sweets will sold out. One time a magazine listed Trey as the "sexiest pastry chef," and Cater and his other friends will never let him live with it. The Clover's Bakeshop occasionally partners with Mostro Lounge, and when they do, everything sells out within seconds.

Savanaclaw

Leona Kingscholar

He does not need to work, but he is a genius as Leona is still a prince of a noble family. Have you seen those alpha males ads? Leona will be all of that. A CEO of his own company and at the same time a diplomat of Sunset Savannah to other nations. His business started out as a mining corporation, gradually expanding into construction. A noble man who many people - beastmen and beastwomen - fawn over with. A millionaire. A bachelor. Once, Farena, the current king and his older brother, called to meet with him and Leona put harshly down the phone. Leona's reason for doing this? When he realized that Farena tried to marry him off to a noble from some rich kingdom 'for his future'. Leona's reply? Is a simple scoff and a very deep, "Fuck off."

Ruggie Bucchi

Will be an assistant to Leona. The next generation of Hyenas will not experience poverty as Ruggie did. His all-around skills will come in handy as a secretary. Ruggie will be a finance speaker. He will sometimes get his hands dirty. What? Hyenas are used to it. Fear not, he's still the same old Ruggie, just a little more rich.

Jack Howl

After graduation, Jack will get a lot of offers to be a professional magift player. Leona will offer to sponsor him tho, so he doesn't need to worry about financial things. Will be an advocate of physical health, his muscular physique is no joke. I can see Jack being a well-known magift player and a track and field competitor, with the help of Prof. Vargas as a head coach.

Octavinelle

Azul Ashengrotto

In every nation, there's a branch of Mostro Lounge. Azul will be listed as the "Top 100 most successful bachelors," along with Jade, possibly Floyd, Vil, and Leona. Azul would go on to accumulate a lot of awards for his splendid business skills. Will own a share in almost all known companies. He'll have to pull strings from Idia to let him invest or buy shares from Jupiter Enterprises. Azul will be compared to the Sea Witch due to how influential he is. Once his mother passed him their restaurant in the Coral Sea, Azul's work will quadruple, and so is his income. Because of him, the mermen's view of octomerpeople will change. But for a darker secret, Azul will be known as the Mediator, and every Mostro Lounge place will be known as a neutral territory for members of the 'other' world. Of course, the Leech twins will still stick with him.

Jade Leech

Jade will inherit their Father's mafia legacy, along with Floyd. The Leech family will prosper under the twins' rule. Jade will open a mushroom business, as to what kind of mushrooms he's selling Jade will smile in response and say it's a fresh mushroom from the mountain. Jade's favorite base of operation would be on land, it's just more fun and chaotic when he watches humans stutter and pass out once he interrogates them. Jade will work as Azul's concierge, working for both him and the Leech family. And in the morning, he'll be the vice manager of Mostro Lounge. But sometimes it does get a little boring. Once a company famous for being greedy with their demands easily relents when they realize it is The Jade Leech that will conduct business with them. Such a shame, Jade would've loved to see the look on their faces.

Floyd Leech

Floyd would be proud of his shoe collection! By now he would have a hundred pair of shoes. Of course, he's still with Jade and Azul, acting as the brawns of the trio. He will make it a point with them to only give him interesting jobs, if it's boring? Floyd would abandon that. One time he learned to drive, he brought his sports car to another country and accidentally got pulled over in the Queendom of Roses, to his surprise it is Mackerel (Deuce) who pulled him over! Floyd paid for the ticket and then went on to hang out with him. Floyd's favorite part of his job is squeezing everyone that owes them unpaid debts!

Though Floyd just doesn't understand why Momma Leech wants to introduce him to a mermaid. Jade is laughing at first, but not anymore once his twin realized that their Momma intends to introduce him to a mermaid too! Floyd will never forget the look on Jade's face - that's probably reflected on him - once their Momma gushes over about 'baby eels'. What? Mermaid eels have little populations. They have to do their part, don't they?

Scarabia

Kalim Al-Asim

Kalim inherited his father's multi-million business. Through his easygoing personality, Kalim is well-loved by everyone. He established business trade routes with almost every nation, while still honoring his personal ones. An example is with the Felmier's, so that their apples will be enjoyed by everyone in Scarabia. The threats grew along with the Asim's already immense wealth. Don't worry, Kalim by now, will know how to defend himself using his unique magic. He just had to know how to reply with the various marriage proposals going his way, it pains Kalim to reject every single one, you know.

Jamil Viper

After his graduation at NRC, Jamil would take a year or two for himself. He will travel across Twisted Wonderland, and by this time Jamil's perception of the world would change. Finally prioritizing himself and is selfish for once. When he will come back, however, he will be met with a warm welcome from the citizens of Scalding Sands and the Asim and Viper family. Jamil would go on to become a successful businessman and bodyguard best friend of Kalim. But this time, they're on equal footing.

Pomefiore

Vil Schoenheit

There's no spotlight if there's no Vil Schoenheit. He will become the highest-paid actor for straight 5 years, until Neige just slightly beats him, running off a few hundred thousand madol. But in the same year, Neige surpassed him in pay, Vil went on to win the Best Actor award for his work in a movie as a misunderstood villain protagonist. His movie even screened in the coral sea! As if there's no stopping him, his successful cosmetics company took off Twisted Wonderland by storm, his eye palette alone is sold out within seconds.

Rook Hunt

Oh dear, Rook will also inherit the Hunt's family business. One moment someone can see Rook in Quendom of Roses then the next he would be spotted on Sage Island. Of course, Rook will not stop admiring beauty and arts! He will fund archaeological studies, theater, art museums, galleries, and even beauty pageants. Rook will be one of the art and beauty industry's most important benefactors.

Epel Felmier

Will be known as the "pretty boy of magift." Not in a bad way, but more like a compliment. His talent is honed thanks to his NRC club. Sometimes Epel would attend fashion shows that present him as a "manly man", you know wearing suits and all of that. Because of his new-found fame, the Felmier's apple business will bloom, in part thanks to Kalim.

Ignihyde

Idia Shroud

Will become the head of S.T.Y.X, but will also manage the Shroud's position in Jupiter Enterprises. On top of that, Idia will develop one of the best MMORPG and FPS games Twisted Wonderland had ever seen. Additionally, Idia won't just stop in developing games, he will also develop magic-infused medical devices that will drastically change the healthcare industry, crediting the Idia Shroud for its invention.

Once a magazine included Idia in their "Top 100 most successful bachelors," he almost sued them if not for Azul, Ortho and his parents convincing him it's a good thing. But Momma and Papa Shroud can't help but wonder when will they have grandkids, the Shroud's need an heir to continue their duties, you know.

Ortho Shroud

Ortho will stay at his brother's side! But his looks will drastically change, if the Ortho from before looks young, the Ortho from the future will have a much taller body, but he will still regain his childlike curiosity. Only the future Ortho is more mature and more open to take time for himself. He will ask Idia to send him off to faraway lands to gather information and to also satiate his curiosity about the real world. Ortho will become independent yet still close to his brother.

Diasomnia

Malleus Draconia

Malleus' coronation is one of the most liveliest and solemn celebrations Briar Valley had seen for the last 5 centuries. Under King Malleus' rule, his kingdom will prosper. Faes and humans alike will come to a much more common understanding. Although the valley still heavily relies on magic, technology will become available, as a courtesy of the friendship acquaintanceship of Idia.

On some days, Malleus will truly get busy. Managing a country and it's affairs is no small feat. Through trades and partnership with every Kingdom, from Savanaclaw to the Coral Sea courtesy of his two alumni schoolmates from NRC, Briar Valley will prosper. It just gets annoying sometimes when the news reporters, the common folk, the fae senators, and even his own grandmother will ask him about an heir. Malleus still needs to find someone who will stay by his side, and it's not an easy thing to do.

Lilia Vanrouge

Sweet old man Lilia is on his way to retirement. In the chapter of Diasomnia, we learned that his magic is running out. Well, all good things must come to an end. Though his eventual retirement in the Land of the Red Dragon came true, he still returned. And Lilia had his fair share of adventures. Because Malleus is busy with the preparations for his coronation, Lilia is there to help him. On the occasion he's free to do anything, Crowley offered him a teaching position in NRC, which is the spot left open by Professor Trein. Lilia accepted, and for a semester he become a teacher, quitting right after to attend Malleus' coronation.

Lilia liked to think a had lived a full life. He was it all. A fearsome general, a caretaker of the young prince, an adoring father, and a good friend.

Sebek Zigvolt

No one dares to Disrespect the King under my watch! That is what he would occasionally say. If one of Briar Valleys' own Fae advisors disrespects Malleus, expect Sebek to speak, and even draw his sword. Yes, he's part human and half Fae but that doesn't mean he's not powerful enough to defend the king.

With this Sebek will grow in closer relationship with his grandfather and his mortal dad. His parents' dentistry business will expand, and for some time Sebek's face is the model of it, which made him embarrassed, yet he still loves his parents nonetheless.

Silver

I can see Silver honoring his promise to Lilia and staying by Malleus'side. However, that is considering if his feelings don't change. Silver will quickly become one of Briar Valley's most beloved humans, and for some reason, he always gets mistaken as an RSA graduate. Once Vil invited him to cover for a sick model in a fashion show and he declined but Vil already presented his picture to the photographers. For some reason, his picture was leaked to the public and Silver's name is trending for days. Some say he's a child of the king, and others compare him to Neige's beauty. His face was everywhere in magicam, with the hashtags "the most handsome sleepy prince," and the "dreamy prince of dreams."

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queenlucythevaliant · 7 months ago

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Okay, here we go. Rating literary allusions in Taylor Swift songs:

The Outside: "I tried to take the road less traveled by /but nothing seems to work the first few times/am I right?"--Starting off pretty well! She tried to take the road less traveled by, but it didn't make any difference. 8/10

Love Story: Whole song allusion to Romeo and Juliet-- All those 2008 jokes about Taylor not having read R&J weren't funny then and they aren't funny now. It's a fun, satisfying subversion. However, I am going to dock points for the fact that Romeo and Juliet aren't a prince and princess, just rich. 7/10

Love Story: "You were Romeo/I was a scarlet letter"--Is the Juliet character in "Love Story" being publicly shamed? Did she do something scandalous? There are zero other lines in this song to suggest that she did, and a fair amount of evidence that she didn't. This allusion confuses rather than clarifies and tbh this is the one people should've made fun of in 2008. 2/10

New Romantics: "We show off our different scarlet letters/ trust me, mine is better" --Hooray! She figured out what the book is about! This is a beautifully executed allusion, where "scarlet letters" represents a mark of something shameful which, in a fun subversion, is being shown off with pride. Fits the song really well. Most improved award, 11/10

Getaway Car: "It was the best of times, the worst of crimes" (A Tale of Two Cities) -- Goes in the category of "fun wordplay, but doesn't really mean anything deeper" 5/10

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: "Feeling so Gatsby for that whole year" --This is a perfectly serviceable allusion, but not a super interesting one. Sub "Gatsby" out with "nostalgic" and the song wouldn't change at all. She could've done a lot more with the reference, given the subject matter of the song. 6/10

cardigan: "I knew you/tried to change the ending/Peter losing Wendy" -- This works! You get a sense of Betty losing her innocence and choosing to leave James and of it being inevitable somehow. Plus, it imbues the song with a lovely fairy tale quality. 10/10

illicit affairs: "take the road less traveled by/tell yourself you can always stop" -- To take the road less traveled by is to do something risky, unpopular, or unfamiliar, not just to take a route through town where you won't run into people. Not totally egregious, but the regression from Debut is disappointing. 4/10

invisible string: "and isn't it just so pretty to think/ that all along there was some/ invisible string tying you to me."(The Sun Also Rises)--Ugggggh. Okay, so "Isn't it pretty to think so?" is this sad, tired, ironic note in The Sun Also Rises. Brett tells Jake, "We could have had a damned good time together" and Jake says "Isn't it pretty to think so?" because their whole situationship was never going to work. It's not a positive thing; it's pure, bitter Lost Generation irony. Completely out-of-place in a song about how two people we're supposed to believe will actually work as a couple. This one drives me nuts, and I don't even like Hemingway. 0/10

happiness: "I hope she'll be a beautiful fool/ who takes my spot next to you" (Gatsby)--Saying this about an ex's future SO is so... off. Like, the reason why Daisy hopes her daughter will be a beautiful fool is because it's easy. The two situations have nothing to do with one another, and not in an interesting way. 1/10

The Albatross: whole song allusion to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but most notably "She's the albatross/ she is here to destroy you"--The albatross in the Rime is a good omen. The Mariner shoots is for no reason, and the albatross's death is the ostensible source of bad fortune. I wrote a whole separate post on this here. That said, culturally "albatross=bad omen" is common enough, so whatever. 3/10

I Hate It Here: "I will go to secret gardens in my mind/ people need a key to get to/ the only one is mine" -- I like this one a lot. Exactly the right vibe for the song, trying to escape something miserable by going somewhere pleasant. The key is a nice touch. Poor Archibald. 10/10

The Prophecy: "I got cursed like Eve got bitten" --No Taylor, that's not what happened. Famously, Eve was the biter in that situation. 0/10

Cassandra: whole song allusion -- correct me if I'm wrong (I haven't actually read the Illiad), but my understanding is that Cassandra died fairly far into the Trojan war, and not by burning. 4/10

#this probably isn't exhausive lol #but it's what i've got off the top of my head #this was weirdly cathartic to write #you guys know i adore taylor swift but literary allusions have always been my biggest nitpick with her #i would just like to send her to an English class or gently help her out or something idk #tay tay #i'm aware that i'm not addressing Peter off ttpd but that song is such a nothingburger that i really can't be bothered #pontifications and creations #literature makes us more human

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5h-epilogue · 8 months ago

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“ . . . and as you’ve grown up, I continued with running my companies, starring in movies, making music, and I produced my play. Everyone else eventually found happiness in one way or another, thank goodness.”

Nia had wondered how her parents were so rich, how she was able to enjoy such comfortable seating out on the patio she glanced around at now that overlooked an enormous pool — the big, outdoor flower and vegetable garden to the right of it — and the patio also had two flat-screen televisions, a gourmet outdoor cooking area with a grill, and, appropriately, ceiling fans and a fire pit.

“Wow, mom. That’s . . . wow.” The young girl was in a bit of shock. She understood why a filmmaker wanted to make a movie about you. A countless amount of questions ran through her mind about you, her mother, who was considered to be a living legend.

Your beloved chef came outdoors and served you and your daughter a bowl of strawberry chicken salad, your favorite summer meal, which she now knew reminded you of your old, deceased lover, Armin Arlert.

“Thank you,” you said to the chef. “Would you mind bringing me my photo album?”

The photo album.

You mentioned it in your story.

Several minutes later, your chef returned with a brown, hardcover book that Nia had seen a countless amount of times in a reserved spot in the library, but never had she touched it. She couldn’t anyway, as it was on a pedestal display underneath protective glass.

Opening the pages, you showed her several photographs of your younger self.

“These were taken by Levi Ackerman,” you said softly.

“You look really pretty,” Nia mumbled, taking the photo album from you, as you were flipping through it too fast for her liking.

She glanced down at a selfie of you and a dark-haired man at the beach, the decades-old date catching her attention.

“Is that Levi?” She asked.

“Yes,” you replied.

Then, she saw the letter Levi had written to you. She only skimmed across it, having already known its contents from your story, and then, she explored the other pages: where Levi told you to continue filling the photo album with pictures from your past, present, and future.

There was a picture of you with a kind-looking, blonde-haired man, standing side by side in a bakery, hands covered in flour.

There was another picture of that same man in a selfie with her father, who seemed so young.

It was clearly Armin. Not only could she gather that from the details your story provided, but he was one of three people in every photo she stared at who she hadn’t seen in her entire life.

There was a photo of you and Jean in a studio together, you writing something down on a notepad as he studiously adjusted something on the soundboard mixer.

“Wait, was this CS Records or Arlert Records?”

You leaned over, looking at the photo.

“CS Records. See the date? Jean and I were more than likely working on my first few songs during the Eldian Devils tour. I can’t remember who took the picture, though.”

Nia hummed in response.

Next, there was a picture of you and Eren getting married for the first time as young artists in Las Vegas. Underneath it, there was a picture of you and Eren getting remarried in Europe.

The other photos consisted of you, Reiner, and his family the night he proposed, you and Mikasa having lunch near a bridge, a group of friends playing cards around a table, a few pictures of you on stage, on film sets, and at awards shows, Eren’s family, and other pictures of you and your friends who she lovingly recognized.

It was odd to know that, as she looked at all of the photographs of people who she had just seen last week, there were two people in some pictures who would never, ever age. The photos of Levi and Armin existed as a permanent reminder of how they will always be known.

Towards the back of the photo album, there was a picture of you with another man she didn’t recognize, but it wasn’t Levi. It wasn’t Armin.

“Is that Connie Springer?” Your daughter leaned over to show you a photograph of you and Connie dressed in suits and gowns for some sort of event.

“Yes,” you said. “That was my album release party. It was the first night Connie let me out of my bedroom after locking me away.”

“Uh,” Nia frowned. “That’s really-”

Nia interrupted her own sentence, distracted by the very last photo in the photo album.

It was a picture that was much older than the other ones. Not only did the date give it away, but the horrible camera quality as well.

It was a photo that couldn’t be found online. A photograph that was worth more than diamonds and gold.

Four young teenagers, standing in front of beautiful trees and bushes, smiling brightly, were photographed by her grandmother, Carla Yeager.

Nia read the little description below the childhood photo of Eren, Jean, Connie, and Marco: The original Eldian Devils. So long & farewell.

Below that, there was a photo of two young children trying to catch fireflies in a patch of high grass underneath a streetlight, photographed by her other grandmother, whom she had never known.

The little description below that childhood photo read: First loves. So long & farewell.

Nia closed the photo album.

“I think I’m gonna cry, Mom,” Nia started to bury her head in her hands. But then, she suddenly perked up and pushed herself out of her seat. “I gotta go see Dad!”

The young girl speed-walked through the enormous home. At this hour, she was certain where to find him.

Opening the door to the family room, there he was, strumming his guitar.

“Hi angel,” Eren smiled, soft wrinkles by his emerald eyes appeared as he greeted his beloved daughter with her favorite nickname, but upon seeing her eyes glistening with sadness, he immediately put down his guitar. “What’s wrong?”

He motioned the girl over, who quickly ran to him and sat down, wrapping her arms around him.

While he didn’t know why she was so upset, he had years of experience soothing her cries.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here,” he repeated.

Nia was a touch more sensitive and incredibly empathetic compared to the average person, that much was true, and right now, she could only think about all the pain her father experienced. The abuse. Almost dying. Losing friends.

And it hurt terribly, especially because she had only known him as the kind-hearted man who was a phenomenal father.

“I’m glad mom picked you,” Nia mumbled. “Thank you for always watching The Parent Trap with me . . . showing up to all of my shows and stuff . . . reading my papers . . . and just . . . you’re a great dad. I love you.”

“Aw, I love you too.” Eren hugged his girl even tighter. “Of course, sweetheart. Always.”

When you stepped into the room, smiling softly, Eren gave you a confused look that silently asked: What’s going on?

You held up the photo album, and he immediately understood.

Eren then motioned you over. Once you sat beside him, he kissed your forehead and wrapped his arm around you as well, holding on to the two people he cherished more than anyone or anything else in the world.

“I love you, mom. You’re so strong, and pretty amazing, too.” Nia reached out, touching your arm. “I hope I can be like you when I’m your age. Older you. Not younger you. You used to be a mess.”

For a while, the three of you sat there, hugging one another, experiencing nothing but pure love and joy.

—

A few months later, it was Thanksgiving.

The heartwarming event was hosted at your house, as it was every year, and familiar faces were gathered around the enormous dining room table covered with warm plates of food.

This year, Nia approached everyone and asked them more specific questions about their lives, wanting more details about the story she heard.

Aunt Hange was more than happy to answer just about everything after having too much wine.

Everyone was lovingly questioned by the teenager, and she shared what you had told her with their children as well.

After having dinner, Jean and his wife were sitting in the living room, playing cards with Erwin and Hange.

Reiner and his wife, who had flown in from Tennessee, were socializing with Annie, her girlfriend, and Sasha — who brought her husband, Niccolo, and their son.

Nia hung out in the recreation room with Reiner’s three children, who both had hair as blonde as his and were slightly younger than she was.

Mikasa, who had settled down in Washington after seeing the world, wanting to be closer to her friends and family, was telling you and Eren about one Thanksgiving year that she had spent lost in the middle of a forest.

A little while afterward, once dinner, laughter, and board games came to an end, Eren found you outside on the patio, staring at the glowing fireplace.

“Hi, baby. Everyone’s gone,” Eren sat down beside you. “Nia’s asleep, or she’s pretending to be, I’m not sure.”

“She’s probably tired, so I’m guessing she's actually asleep,” you said with a grin. “Today was fun. I miss everyone already.”

“Me too,” Eren smiled softly. “I’m glad everyone’s doing well. I hope it stays that way.”

“It will,” you suddenly yawned.

“Come on,” Eren stood up and reached his hand out, and you took it. “Let’s get ready for bed.”

“Someone’s excited to cuddle, huh?” You teased, expecting him to deny it, but proudly, he grinned wider and said, “Of course I am, so hurry up.”

After having a shower together, you and Eren both cuddled up in bed, falling asleep in each other’s arms.

That night, you dreamt of your past — making cinnamon rolls in a bakery and staring at stars from a rooftop.

It was a dream that you often had, but not out of regret. Not out of pain. But out of reflection of just how much you healed. How much your life had changed.

There were some people you wished you could bring back — Armin and Levi.

Some questions went unanswered — who your stalker was all those years ago, and whether it was a stranger or a lover.

But, even so, after having five husbands, and after every beautiful experience and painful memory, you could finally say that you had found contentment, and your one true love was the happiness you experienced as you grew old with your friends and family by your side.

— ONE MONTH LATER —

Five years.

That’s how long Eren had been trying his hardest to visit Connie in prison.

And a month after having Thanksgiving dinner with his family and friends, Connie allowed him to come.

What a stubborn man Connie was, but Eren’s persistence had won.

Eren couldn’t lie. He was nervous. The last time he laid eyes on the CS Records owner, he was testifying against him in court, both of them as young men. Both of them wishing that the other person would simply fall over and die.

But now, as the man in his forties sat in an uncomfortable chair in a private room, waiting for Connie to arrive on the other side of the thick glass, he couldn’t help but wonder what made Connie finally allow him to visit.

But he wouldn’t have to wonder much longer.

His leg, which shook with anticipation, halted its movement when a door opened and a prisoner was escorted out in chains, two correctional officers standing at his side.

It was him. Connie Springer.

Eren’s brows unintentionally furrowed, his face twitching as he fought the urge to both smile and frown.

It was Connie — the same man that tried to take his life. A murderer. Torturer. And yet, it was Connie, his old childhood friend who had aged just as he did, and despite being behind bars, he looked rather well.

If Connie was as shocked to see Eren after years upon years, Eren couldn’t tell, as the prisoner simply blinked at him as he was escorted to his seat on the other side of the glass, his face expressionless. Intimidating.

And he just stared at Eren.

The former musician was the first one to pick up the phone hanging on the wall to communicate. Connie did so as well a few moments later.

Pressing the phone to his ear, Eren’s emotional, shiny eyes darted away from Connie’s, down at the new tattoo on Connie’s left arm, and back up at him.

“Hey,” Eren spoke first.

Connie didn’t respond.

He just stared at Eren.

“I’m here because I wanted to see how you were doing,” Eren spoke yet again.

Connie’s chains rattled as he shifted in his seat.

He just stared at Eren.

With a frown, Eren questioned, “Why did you let me come visit you if you weren’t going to talk to me?”

“You didn’t give me a choice. I thought you’d give up . . . after five fucking years.”

Finally.

Eren couldn’t help but smile a bit. Hearing his voice again after forgetting what it sounded like was rather startling.

“You only said yes so I’d leave you alone?” Eren asked.

“Yeah.”

“Alright. I’ll take what I can get,” Eren softly sighed. “I never thought that I’d ever want to see you again, but here I am.”

“You really did all this to check on me?” Connie’s question was fired rather abruptly, nearly cutting off Eren’s sentence. “I put a bullet through your chest. I’m the reason you only have eight fingers left. I killed your friends, and I could keep naming shit I’ve done. Why are you here?”

Eren glanced away, adjusting the dark green phone in his hand.

“Time heals all wounds.”

“That something your therapist came up with?”

“Yeah.”

The corner of Connie’s mouth twitched as, this time, he was the one fighting the urge to smile.

“What I’m trying to say is that I can’t forgive you for what you did to Armin and Levi, and it’s not my place to or not to. But I forgive you for what you did to me.” Eren’s eyes glistened with subtle sadness. “I guess I’m just hoping that after all this time . . . after all we’ve been through . . . I can talk to my friend again. Not CS Records owner, Connie Springer, but my friend. I haven’t spoken to him since I was fifteen, and I woke up with two new gray hairs today.”

It was a soft noise, one that was very brief and vanished as soon as it had arrived, but Connie chuckled.

“You’re saying some corny stuff, man.”

Eren’s smile brightened. “That’s what happens when you have a kid. All I do now is think of dad jokes, and try to-”

“You have a kid?”

Eren’s face faltered in utter confusion, but as he stared at Connie’s slightly shocked face, he could tell that the man wasn’t messing around.

Nia’s birth was worldwide news. It was a steady hot topic for an entire year — one would have thought that a new member of the royal family had been born.

But then, Eren realized that for the most part, behind bars, the outside world ceased to exist. Especially in maximum security facilities.

“Yeah,” Eren said. “I have a daughter. She turned fourteen a month ago.”

“Is her mom around? Who’s she?”

“Her mom is Y/N. And, yeah, she’s around. We’ve been married for years.”

“Seriously?” Connie couldn’t hide the shock and surprise. A look of amusement appeared upon his face as he raised his eyebrows. “Well, uh . . . congratulations. How’s Y/N?”

Eren couldn’t help but smile as he thought about you, his beautiful wife. “She’s good. She’s great. Her companies are still going strong, and she’s finally happy.”

“Didn’t wanna come see me?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Connie nodded.

Then, his face fell into a small frown, hazel eyes darting down to the corner of the glass, staring at nothing in particular.

“How’s Jean doing?”

“Jean’s fine. He’s retired from music. He married a pianist.” Eren paused. “Everyone else is doing fine too. Reiner has kids and a wife, and they all have Southern accents — it’s funny to hear. Mikasa finally . . .”

For a while, Connie listened to Eren ramble on about the progressive lives of the people he once knew.

As his old friend spoke, he couldn’t help but wonder how his life would have turned out if he had made different choices.

Sadness pricked at his heart, sending a small ache throughout his body.

If only he wasn’t such an idiot back then.

No. He was worse than an idiot.

He was a monster.

“What about you, Connie? I know you’re locked up, but how are they treating you here? Knowing you, you probably run this place, huh?”

Truth be told, Connie was rather surprised to know Eren cared. It was just as touching as it was shocking.

“Damn right,” Connie said.

And it was true, but not in the way one would imagine.

He intimated who he needed to. Ruined lives when he needed to. But, over the nearly two decades he had been behind bars, he had done it solely to stick up for the defenseless prisoners, both young and old, who didn’t deserve to be treated as he once was when he was locked up the first time.

It wasn’t some change of heart that had occurred over the last several years, either.

From the very first day he entered as a younger man, he was both starting fights and finishing them to protect others.

He couldn’t explain why he did such things. It was no secret that he didn’t mind letting other people get hurt, considering he excelled at harming others, but this was different.

Somehow, it just was.

“Can I ask you something? And be honest with me,” Eren paused, carefully thinking over his words before he dared to utter them. “Do you regret it? Any of it?”

Connie ran his hand down his lower face.

It was a difficult question, and not because he didn’t know the answer, because he did, but rather, he wasn’t sure if the truth was an acceptable response.

Telling the truth meant showing weakness. Losing power.

Letting go of that mentality was rather difficult, especially behind bars where weakness was preyed on.

But he didn’t care about those former beliefs anymore. He was getting too old for such stupidity.

“Telling you I regret it will give you closure, right?”

“Surely you want closure too.”

“I regret everything.” The prisoner looked into his old friend’s eyes as he spoke. “I wish I . . .” He clenched his jaw. He couldn’t speak anymore — but there were, perhaps, no words in the English language that could properly express what he felt in his heart.

“Well, uh, how about this,” The other man sniffled softly as spoke. “You’ll have to be under constant supervision, but, in a few years, how about we work on getting you out of here . . . letting you see the sun again? What do you say?”

Fighting the urge to cry was an incredibly difficult battle. The prisoner nodded, his teary eyes shining with guilt and hope, and the other man nodded along with him.

“Okay, well,” the former musician smiled sadly, “I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Okay.”

The visit ended with goodbyes and promises that they both intended to keep. Your dear husband couldn’t be certain what the future held, but as he did the day he first met you all those years ago, approaching you backstage with great curiosity, he’d trust his gut.

For it had led him to his one true love, and he’d listen to it — always.

Thanks for reading! What did you think? Please let me know by like, reblogging, and/or commenting on the last chapter, or in my inbox!

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restwellsoon · 4 months ago

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Uramichi Omota HCs

Minors and ageless blogs DNI! You will be blocked!

General

First and general impressions

Comes off as someone who is lonely, pathetic, or pitiful with a sadness about him

Strangers think he’s handsome but are deterred by his RBF

Suffers from Tony Hawk syndrome™ where people know of his feats as a gymnast and as a kid’s show host yet no one recognizes him (He thinks it’s because of the beanie)

Socializing

Pretty low energy in social situations, therefore you’ll hardly see him in crowded places or partying all night

When he is out and about, he’s definitely the quiet and reserved type

Those close to him are usually shocked and disgusted when he’s in work mode (talkative, charming, and happy) during social gatherings

King of leaving social gatherings without saying anything

Will surprisingly accept most invitations to hang out though

Has the most Netflix and Chill™ vibes except he truly means watching TV and relaxing

Habits

Loves to sleep in on the weekend/ day off and abuses the snooze button and multiple alarms

Chronically early for even the most casual meeting

Picked up smoking and drinking after ending his gymnast career

Preferences

Prefers to wear earthy hues outside of his work uniform

Gymnastic preferences are as follows: rings, floor, pommel horse, vault, and bars

Misc

Actually rich but has no one to spend his money on

Known for being generous with his money

Superstitious, especially when it comes to his daily horoscope

Surprisingly not the type to believe in love horoscopes though

Fully believes in mercury retrograde (after Utano and Furitsuke tell him about it)

Work & Education

Together with Maman

Zero career aspirations, however he does firmly believe in doing a good job in whatever he sets his mind to

Can be a bit of a pushover because even though he tries to decline or say no to more work, he often ends up doing it anyway

Has a good amount of award nominations for his work on Together with Maman

Hates his job but feels even worse when he thinks about inevitably aging out of his career as a taiso no oniisan

Professional gymnast

Volume 2 told us that he was the All-Japan Gymnastics Solo winner, so I do think he probably tried out to be on the Olympic team or was on it at some point during his professional career

(RIP Uramichi, you would have loved being able to take a mental health break to come back better and stronger for your sport. I know in my heart that Simone Biles is your hero.)

Seemed very unapproachable when competing

Ghosted all of his gymnastics connections after leaving the profession

His coach pulled some strings to get him job on Together with Maman

College days

Nippon Sport Science University (Nittaidai) alumnus (confirmed in Vol 1)

Undergrad: Athletic sports major; Grad: Health & sport science

Took a class on childhood sport education, which was surprisingly one of the only classes he remembers taking in college

Family

Future family

Wants kids but needs to find the right partner first

Would feel awkward or uncomfortable around his first child due to trauma related to his father

Developing relationship with his younger sister

Had a strained relationship with his sister when they were children, mostly because of their father trying to live vicariously through Uramichi

Uramichi probably tried to distract their father from criticizing and hurting his sister to the best of his abilities by focusing their father’s attention on him

Thus resulting in resentment and jealousy on his sister’s end

Worried and concerned when she ran away at 16

Relieved and surprised that she reached out to him after running away

Slowly and awkwardly rebuilding their relationship as adults

Uramichi likes to spoil his niece a lot because she reminds him of his sister when they were younger

Strained, if not nearly non-existent, relationship with his father

Doesn’t see or speak to his father after leaving professional gymnastics

Spent the first few years of his retirement full of anger and resentment towards his father

Now it’s all he feels is apathy

His relationship with his father makes Uramichi doubtful and fearful of his abilities to be a father

Return to

The Main Masterlist

Life Lessons Masterlist

AO3

#uramichi omota x reader #uramichi x reader #life lessons with uramichi oniisan #uramichi omota hcs #rest writes

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coraniaid · 1 year ago

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You said a few days ago that you would have liked if season 7 went more in the direction of Help rather than the direction of the First. I know you're not a big fan of the First but I was wondering what you meant by that specifically, and what kind of direction you might have preferred season 7 go in overall?

I don’t have any good reason to think it actually happened, but I always get the impression from watching or thinking about Season 7 that the early plans for the season changed pretty significantly at some point after most of the first few episodes had already been written. (Perhaps when they decided that it would also be the last season? I’ve heard conflicting accounts of when that decision was made.)

If you go back and look at the then-contemporary discussions of the show, the whole season was initially marketed as something of a ‘year zero’: a return to the show’s high school era roots, to something much more upbeat than Season 6, to the original Scooby Gang as the focus of the show.

And just to be clear, I rather like Season 6 – it doesn’t always work, and I think some of the subplots are pretty dreadfully executed, and sometimes I respect the episodes more than I enjoy watching them – but it inarguably has a clear vision for the story it’s trying to tell, one that builds on and recontextualizes what came before it. But for the payoff for that season to land, we needed Season 7 to be different. To be less cynical, more hopeful. It needed to show us that Buffy was right to promise Dawn in Grave that things were going to get better.

And that sort of reset is what we got … for about half a dozen episodes. Then, of course, it goes rather horribly wrong.

I like Help in particular because it is, for me, the closest the show ever gets to delivering on that promise of a return to the high school era. It’s not quite a regression or a soft reboot: Buffy is still an adult with a job, even if she’s suddenly unexpectedly back in high school. Her more mundane responsibilities haven’t suddenly gone away. But now the job she has isn’t something she hates but has to do – it’s something that she actually has a calling for, almost literally, something that harks back to her getting the Class Protector award back in Season 3. In Help Buffy’s inhabiting the same world she did in the first three seasons, she’s still trying to save people, but this time with a new, more experienced perspective.

The episode feels very aware of the show’s history, too. There are nods to Lie To Me (a teenager Buffy knows is going to die because of illness, not anything supernatural Buffy can stop) and Reptile Boy (the cult trying to sacrifice a teenage girl to a demon for material riches) and Beauty and the Beasts (with Buffy herself taking on the role of Mr Platt, worried that Mike is going to turn out to be another Pete), and of course the whole episode is a callback to Prophecy Girl. Because Cassie – probably the show’s last great one-episode character (and yes, the actor comes back later but the person doesn’t) – isn’t just somebody Buffy is trying to save, she is Buffy: a Season 1 Buffy who struggles to make friends and has a supernatural gift she doesn’t like to talk about and knows she’s going to die heartbreakingly young. I don’t think it’s merely chance that Cassie’s big speech to Buffy about her destiny (“You think I want this? You think I don’t care?”) echoes Buffy’s own words to her mother in Becoming either (“You think I choose to be like this?”).

Plus, while the episode ties into the wider story arc – with Spike in the basement and hints that Principal Wood might be up to something and our first appearance of future Potential Amanda – the whole thing still tells a coherent, self-contained story. It stands on its own right; it makes sense on its own terms. it’s not just another installment in the long running saga of General Buffy and the friends she never talks to who later kick her out of the house she owns.

And I think there was a lot more ground there to explore, in the same vein as Help. At least a full season’s worth. There was so much more the show could have tried to do in terms of going back and revisiting some of the classic moments of the first three seasons from a more mature and more grown-up perspective, instead of summarily kicking Buffy out of her new job and then blowing the school up (again). If this season is about the future – about new Slayers being called, one way or another – then what does that mean? How else are Buffy and Willow and Xander engaged in the challenge of trying to pass on what they’ve learned about life on the Hellmouth to a new generation?

At its best, Buffy has always been in conversation with its past, building on ideas that were touched on in one season and asking the audience to think about them again from a different angle. And the beginning of Season 7 sets up the perfect stage to try to do more of that.

I’d have loved to have seen a whole season of Buffy trying to keep her students alive while also preparing them to go out and live in the world. Of Dawn making new friends and finding value in being herself, not just the Slayer’s sister or the mystical Key. Of Buffy and Willow and Xander really getting to know each other again, and having a chance to talk about everything that happened to them last year. A whole season of, in a way, seeing the show from the very beginning, but this time from the perspective of people like Giles or Jenny or Joyce.

But instead we got a lot of boring wank about an impossibly old super-god who can’t actually touch anything (but one who Buffy would definitely let Dawn die to defeat because this godlike being is so much more impressive and scary than Glory, trust us guys, please, we swear) and her army of interchangeable and personality-free super vampires (and of course Caleb, who’s somehow even more mind-numbingly boring than they are). Instead we get a second half of the season in which Andrew Wells has more screen time than Willow or Xander or Anya or Giles or Dawn. Instead we get to wonder whether Giles is the First and try to pretend to care that Spike has been hypnotized. Instead we get Lies My Parents Told Me.

Oh well. At least Faith shows up near the end.

#btvs #asks #thanks!

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ridenwithbiden · 7 days ago

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TO PAY FOR TRUMPS TRILLIONS IN TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH.

"Oz will succeed Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the current administrator of CMS, to lead programs including Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people aged 65 or older, and disabled people, and Medicaid, the state-based health insurance program for lower-income people, which is jointly funded by states and the federal government. The two programs provide health insurance for more than 140 million Americans.

Also in the CMS fold are the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip) and the Health Insurance Marketplace, which was created by the Affordable Care Act under Barack Obama in 2010.

Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans are currently discussing possible cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other government welfare programs to cover the costs of extending the president-elect’s multi-trillion-dollar 2017 tax cut."

Dr Oz, best known for his daytime talkshow, leaned heavily into Trumpism during his failed 2022 run for US Senate. Donald Trump has chosen Mehmet Oz, best known for starring in his eponymous daytime talkshow for more than a decade and leaning heavily into Trumpism during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania Senate seat, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The cardiothoracic surgeon, who faced immense backlash from the medical and scientific communities for pushing misinformation at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, will oversee the agency that operates on a $2.6 trillion dollar annual budget and provides healthcare to more than 100 million people.

“I am honored to be nominated by [Donald Trump] to lead CMS,” Oz posted on X on Tuesday. “I look forward to serving my country to Make America Healthy Again under the leadership of HHS Secretary [Robert F Kennedy Jr].”

In the announcement of Oz’s selection, Trump said that Oz would “make America healthy again” and described him as “an eminent Physician, Heart Surgeon, Inventor, and World-Class Communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades”.

Oz has been on US television screens for nearly 20 years, first appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show in 2004. In that time, he has talked to his audience about losing weight with fad diets and what it takes to have healthy poops and, toward the end of his run, touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential remedy for Covid-19.

Here’s what to know about the New York University professor and surgeon turned television show host, and now Trump appointee.

Mehmet Oz, 64, is a Turkish American Ohio native best known for The Dr Oz Show, which ran from 2009 to 2022. His father was a surgeon in Turkey, and after Oz graduated high school in Delaware, he was admitted into Harvard. He also served in the Turkish military in order to maintain dual citizenship, the Associated Press reports.

Before entering US homes via daytime TV, he had more than 20 years of experience as a cardiothoracic surgeon at Presbyterian-Columbia medical center in New York. He was also a professor at Columbia University’s medical school.

His bona fides at the prestigious institutions earned him quick credibility with viewers, and his popularity garnered him nine Daytime Emmy awards for outstanding informative talkshow and host.

Though his show ended in 2022, Oz maintains a YouTube channel filled with old episodes of his shows where he interviews guests such as Penn Jillette about his weight loss and Robert F Kennedy Jr about his 2014 book about the presence of mercury in vaccines. He also has an Instagram account that boasts more than a million followers, where Oz shares photos of his family and sells products from iHerb, an online health and wellness brand for which he is global adviser.

Oz’s questionable medical advice and time in politics. Throughout his TV tenure, Oz dabbled in the hallmarks of weight loss culture like detoxes, cleanses and diets that promised rapid weight loss. He also faced a grilling by senators in 2014 over claims he made and alleged false advertising on supplements he promoted on his show. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Oz regurgitated misinformation that came from the fringes of the right and medical communities.

These comments continued when he threw his hat into the race to represent Pennsylvania in the US Senate in 2022 against John Fetterman. At the time, the Guardian wrote:

“Oz was dogged by questions about his actual connection to the state during the campaign. Oz lived in New Jersey for decades before he moved to Pennsylvania in October 2020, into a home owned by his wife’s family. He announced his bid to be the state’s US senator just months later.”

Following Fetterman’s stroke, during which he said he “almost died”, the Oz campaign launched unsavory attacks against him, with one Oz aide, Rachel Tripp, claiming Fetterman might not have had a stroke if he “had ever eaten a vegetable in his life”.

Oz ultimately lost to Fetterman, who garnered 51% of the vote compared with Oz’s 46%."

#Medicare #Medicaid #Childrens Health #Disabilty #ACA #Health Insurance #Obamacare #Marketplace

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gizkasparadise · 11 months ago

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What is the worst, most technically inept drama that you secretly love? Tell us of the best badgood drama, the clunkiest dialogue, the most inexplicable casting, the hideously costumed yet most fun dramas, please.

🫥Anonymously yours🫥,

💜Purplehanfu😈💜🍇👾

dear complete stranger (<3),

man i love badgood dramas so much!!! i chose ones that are flatout objectively not good, but i was glued for them all. here's a few that are jumping out

triad princess (taiwan). it ends on a cliffhanger that will never be continued, the relationship building is non-existent, jasper liu basically plays himself yet still acts like he's doing a community service project, but omg it's cute and hit all the right notes for me. fave bonus is that one of the gangster henchmen falls in love with the FL's best friend, a shy boy who works at a mart and makes youtube covers

hold on, my lady (chinese). a bandit is offered a choice when she's caught during a heist: be executed or marry this aloof but beautiful but delicate son of the general. she chooses the latter, and hijinks ensue. made on a budget of pocket lint and just wacky, im going to rewatch this today, actually. fave bonus moment: the FL falls dramatically down and the ML breaks both his arms instantly when he tries to catch her

thumping spike & thumping spike 2 (korean). the two are barely related, but both deal with a competitive men's volleyball team! thumping spike 1 is about a washed up competitive female player going to coach a high school team to glory (just dont...think too critically about the age difference, there) and the second is COLLEGE EDITION with a love quadrangle between two identical twins, one of whom is a cheerleader for the team, the ace volleyball player who's too cool for school, and the WILDCARD volleyball player who gets mad when people call him gorilla. the second one is definitely worse than the first one, but neither are bringing home awards. i still watched them both in one sitting.

my heart twinkle twinkle (korean). this show is actually insane and a parade of toxic that i can never, in good conscience, ever rec to anyone. but gd did i watch the whole fucking thing. look at this fucking poster. this fucking poster looks like it was doused by a fake snow machine.

premise: Noble But Poor family has 3 daughters: the eldest, who is the caretaker; the middle who is Aloof and Ambitious; and the youngest who is A Fucking Menace. they are lead by their single father, who owns a fried chicken store

Rich but Dysfunctional family also has 3 children: the eldest, who is the only son and a fucking piece of work, the middle who is school colleagues with the other family's middle daughter and a hot mess who loves Da Club, and the youngest, who is clingy and gets into a ton of fights with the other family's youngest but is otherwise ok. they run AN EVIL FRIED CHICKEN FRANCHISE that is poisoning people through subpar ingredients!!

there's so much that's so wrong with this, im going to bullet point it from another post i made:

the entire premise is that there’s a fried chicken restaurant rivalry between two families but somehow there’s murder and slush funds and this guy who owns a string of fried chicken franchises named after himself (yeah) has direct access to seoul’s police commissioner at any given moment

one of the main actresses was involved in a scandal a little over halfway through production so they just….vanish her character/entire plotline like it never happened

the main male lead is toxic personified. him and li chengyin from goodbye my princess could co-author a dating strategy/forced-marriage-after-you-kill-your-girlfriend’s-head-of-household book because jesus christ. he literally screams that he hates women and he ends the drama (rightfully!!) in fucking prison

the second female lead disappears/creates a new identity and becomes a chicken chef student of the world. shes later in a love triangle between a single dad chicken shop interior designer and another vanilla guy

that's right, one guy’s job is he’s an architect for chicken restaurant interiors i cant

the main male lead leaves the main female lead’s father to die in a chicken-coop-themed arsony and then cha-cha slides into the son-in-law’s role during the father’s funeral and later MARRIES the female lead

the main male lead tells the female lead’s father’s grave that HE WON AND DAD LOST because the male lead is standing and the father’s in the dirt?!

a friend/almost!love interest of the second female lead dies tragically in a chicken delivery motorcycle chase????

it's the worst drama i've ever seen. i watched all of it.

kakafukaka (japanese)

this one is so gd weird and unappealing it somehow circled back around and became off-puttingly charming to me? so the premise is that there's a 20something year old woman whose life has gone to shit and she ends up in a sharehome with the most sexually dysfunctional bunch of people in the world. one of these is her ex, who tells her that she's the only one he can get a boner with (yeah) and asks her to help him get over his impotence in order to write his novel (yeah). if you read the whole show as kind of an exploration into sex without romance/love, it's as not bad, and there's something weirdly endearing about everyone--i really love the second female lead akari in particular. but it's not a good show, not by a long shot (MDL rating? 6.6), and the ship is dysfunctional at the very best. the ost somehow is great though?

youtube

speaking of trash dramas with great OSTs, love in sadness has some of my favorite songs:

youtube

okay that's enough for now!!!!

#asks!#kdrama #cdrama #jdrama #triad princess #hold on my lady #kakafukaka #my heart twinkle twinkle #thumping spike #long post

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rhyselinn · 1 year ago

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In Defense of Toby Fox’s Halloween Hack

Twitter is all in a tizzy about the Halloween Hack as of late. The apparent reason for this is because the Halloween Hack uses a word commonly used as a homophobic slur, not taking into account that the hack was created in 2008 (when the internet was a different place) and that 2008 was 14+ years ago (and people are known to grow and change over this time). There appears to be some amount of discussion over whether Toby Fox should be “cancelled” for this.

I’ve seen a fair bit of banter from both sides on this, but what I haven’t seen people on the internet talk about is the CONTEXT of the game in which this word is used. And while I don’t spend a lot of time talking about HH due to Toby’s stated embarrassment when people draw attention to it, if the internet’s gonna go dig up old drama for some reason, then by golly, I’m going to go dig up my old love for this game.

So if you want to come take a wild ride through some internet history and literary analysis, then go buckle your seatbelt and click the Readmore.

(content warning: discussion of homophobic slurs)

A quick bit about me: I am an adult on the internet, and I fall into the original Halloween Hack (hereafter abbreviated as HH)’s target demographic: teenagers who existed on Starmen.net, an Earthbound fan website, in 2008. I am also a current admin for Starmen.net, which puts me in a good position to comment on the history and culture of the site as a whole, and how that ties into the reception of HH.

Starmen.net has a long and rich tradition of events called Funfests, in which the site staff run a combination art/writing/music/etc contest for the site members, usually coalescing around a theme such as “Earthbound”, or sometimes “Winter” or “Halloween”. These events offer prizes such as forum avatar/rank privileges, and historically they sometimes even offered physical prizes. The 2008 Halloween funfest had an entire website made for it, which you can view here. Toby Fox submitted HH to this 2008 Halloween Funfest under the internet handle Radiation.

This is the context of HH: a passion project made by a teenager for a fan website full of other teenagers/twenty-somethings. If you go to a high school science fair, you could rightfully lambast every project for being undeserving of a Nobel Prize, but that’s not why we host high school science fairs OR Starmen.net Funfests. These events are an opportunity for teens to show what they are capable of and receive commendation from both their peers and a panel of judges selected specifically for this age demographic and venue.

For perspective, here’s what one of the hosts of the 2008 Funfest had to say about HH:

“Radiation nearly outclassed himself with this effort of skill labour and love. What a lot of fun. Despite getting repeatedly killed in the sewers this was one thoroughly enjoyabe hack. I Think I’ll go and play it again!”

HH won an award in the 2008 funfest-- a #1 in the “Most Effort” category. For some perspective, few people on Starmen.net go to the lengths of creating an entire game for a Funfest (and HH has a playtime of roughly 5-6 hours!). Of those who do, most of the resulting games are consistent with the output you would expect from a teenage userbase, since it’s not fair to expect teenagers to produce professional-quality work. That said, I can say with confidence that HH is a standout in the areas of both effort and quality.

Another thing that needs to be said of HH is that it is not a standalone game made in today’s modern game engines-- it is a hack of a preexisting game. Earthbound's codebase is notoriously complicated, and a lot of the tools that modern Earthbound hackers use to make their jobs easier (eg Coilsnake, Ebmused) didn’t exist in 2008. Toby had to do a lot of manual coding grunt-work to make HH, up to and including manually typing hexadecimal values into his computer in order to compose Megalovania. (Source: Toby wrote a really in-depth post about the process he used to make HH way back when, which I’m referring to here, but it’s unfortunately been deleted since then.)

I can imagine a hypothetical objection at this point: “ok but high effort homophobia is still homophobia”. In this post, I am also going to argue that Toby’s usage of this word can be considered artistic merit when taken in context, but you’ll have to bear with me for a bit while I explain that context. I’ll also talk about some of the cool and neat things this game does along the way because I think they’re worth talking about.

HH is, at its core, a derivative fan work of the video game Earthbound. And while I love Earthbound deeply, I also recognize that it’s a cult classic that not everyone has played. So while I encourage people to play the game I love deeply, I’ll also sum up a few relevant plot beats here so folks can understand the source material HH draws from:

--Ness, a thirteen year-old boy, meets a creature named Buzz Buzz from ten years in the future who tells him that an alien named Giygas has destroyed the world (direct quote: “All is devastation”). As such, Ness and his friends must save the world.

--One of Ness’s friends is a shy boy named Jeff with a penchant for shooting bottle rockets at enemies

--Jeff’s dad is an odd character named Dr. Andonuts. Dr. Andonuts is a reclusive scientist who lives in a snowy region called Winters who sent his son off to boarding school at a very young age. Andonuts’s lab includes no other signs of life, certainly not any indications of a wife/Jeff’s mother. Andonuts ends his conversation with Jeff by saying “Let’s get together in another ten years or so.”

--Towards the end of the game, Dr. Andonuts uses a device he created called a Phase Distorter to send Ness and his friends to the venue for the final battle. This is very clearly telegraphed as a one-way trip, as the kids’ brains are described in text as needing to be transplanted into robots to get there, but the kids go along with it anyway because the world is at stake.

--The kids go on to fight the final boss in a spectacle that words can’t do justice to here. All I’ll say is that after a long-fought battle, in the grace of an unexplained Deus Ex Machina, the souls of the four kids are impossibly returned to their bodies so they can enjoy their happy ending.

These are all canonical events that happen in the base game of Earthbound. Earthbound’s sequel, Mother 3, was released in 2006, two years prior to HH, although the English fan translation wasn’t released until around the time of the 2008 funfest, interestingly enough. Mother 3 does develop Dr. Andonuts’s canonical character somewhat, but I won’t discuss it in further detail here other than to say it mostly re-emphasizes his odd, solitary nature and his overly cavalier attitude towards his science experiments.

It’s also worth noting that in an oddball game like Earthbound, there are a lot of weird and funny idiosyncrasies to theorize on. There are pencil-shaped statues that block your way, which need to be removed with a device called a “pencil eraser.” Ness and his friends fight robots, aliens, and Krakens, but they also fight handbag-wielding ladies and walking mushrooms. Dr. Andonuts’s character oddities, while strange, fit nicely into the evenly distributed mesh of oddities that comprise Earthbound’s world.

Derivative works, particularly fan works, exist in conversation with the source material. They answer questions posed by the source, interpolate details left out of the original, and otherwise build on the world of the original in a collaborative way. This conversation sometimes happens in a one-on-one manner, between fan and original creator, but it also happens in conjunction with the fan community as a whole. When a theory takes traction, it will begin to appear in more and more fan works, growing in popularity and notoriety until it is “accepted” as the most common interpretation of canon’s strange idiosyncrasies. Newer or more fringe theories are less likely to be taken as a “default” interpretation, but they are more likely to be taken as “fresh” or “interesting” until/unless they, too, begin to gain traction.

HH exists in a few conversations: one with the source material, one with the fan community of Starmen.net (and the broader Earthbound community as a whole, although there was much more overlap between the two back in 2008), and one with Starmen.net’s Funfest culture. In order for HH to be well received by the Funfest judges, it would need to be aware of the community sensibilities as well as push the boundaries of the fan conversation with Earthbound as a whole-- a careful balancing act of being both interesting but also recognizable.

So, the fundamental fan question that HH tries to answer is “why is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THAT?”

This is an absolutely fair question, and Toby was certainly not the first to ask it, although his answer in the form of HH is one of the most high profile now.

HH is set in the world of Earthbound a few months after the final boss fight in autumn, but one where Ness and his friends did not magically return after their one-way trip to the final boss. Word has it that Dr. Andonuts has turned evil and must be defeated. On its surface, this is standard fare for a throwaway plot for a Funfest submission, but the magic of HH is that it does not treat this premise as a throwaway plot. It sets out to earnestly discuss why this happened by delving into Andonuts’s psyche.

Coming back to the idea of derivative works existing in conversation with the source material and interpolating unexplained details: Earthbound does not explain why Dr. Andonuts lives in solitude, nor does it give any hint as to the identity of Jeff’s mother. It also gives no indication as to why Andonuts didn’t seem to have bonded well with his son other than the handwavey explanation that Andonuts is just “like that”. HH initially poses the question of “why did Andonuts turn evil”, but leaves the reader to puzzle that out while battling monsters in Earthbound’s RPG engine.

At first, Toby offers a partial explanation: in HH, Dr. Andonuts is portrayed as feeling immense guilt at having sent his son into what he perceived as a death trap. (quote from the game: “The world is dead, and I’ve become senile with guilt and rage.” He also says stuff like “what’s the point in living without them”.) As such, he turned evil and created zombies to storm the world of Winters, causing a surge in refugees and desperate survivors. This is why the main character was sent to kill him.

(image transcription: a picture of a menu with the text “What do you do!?” followed with a single option: “Kill him”)

But in order to see the depth of this explanation, the true answer to the question “why is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THIS”, the player must hit “B” to cancel out of a menu at the correct moment, something Earthbound players tend to learn by habit from closing the equipment menu so many times, but never used as a plot-relevant mechanic in the base game. HH takes this subconscious muscle memory and turns it into a mechanic gating off half the game if you don’t “spare” the enemy, a precursor to the “spare” mechanic that would debut seven years later in Undertale.

When the player does this, they enter Dr. Andonuts’s “Magicant,” a dream-construct representing his inner psyche, with his hopes and dreams and fears all laid bare. The main character is tasked with finding Dr. Andonuts’s lost Courage. In the base game, Ness enters his own Magicant, so this feels familiar to a veteran player, but it also gives Toby the chance to more closely examine Dr. Andonuts’s character than he otherwise might be able to do.

Over the course of the rest of the game in Dr. Andonuts’s Magicant, the player continues to control the main character, a bounty hunter named Varik, but the NPCs in the game often mistakenly treat Varik as Andonuts. The dialogue we see from these NPCs reflects memories from Andonuts’s own life. We see a lot more characters try to make connections with Dr. Andonuts (”hey don’t you want to play baseball instead of doing math?”), but these are apparently rebuffed througout Andonuts’s life. One NPC guarding the entrance to the path leading to this lost Courage advises “Be careful. Be yourself.” We see memories of Dr. Andonuts’s presumed wife/Jeff’s mom, who is an OC Toby created for this work to answer the questions posed by canon.

Varik is tasked with fighting three “demons” behind three doors, where each demon is said to be stronger than the next. Since this segment takes place inside Andonuts’s mind, these are unsubtly implied to be Andonuts’s inner demons. The second and third doors represent Andonuts’s relationship with his son and his guilt over getting people killed; the first door is relevant to this post, so I’ll talk about it in more detail.

Inside the first door, Varik sees Andonuts’s memories of something called “Remember Me,” who despite being faced in a battle, is friendly and affectionate and causes no damage apart from being “hard to think about.” This enemy has a stock overworld sprite of a male NPC from the base game.

(image transcript: a smiling purple sprite in an Earthbound-style battle. The text box says “The Remember Me? was a little hard to think about again”)

At the end of this map, we see a cutscene in which it’s implied that Dr. Andonuts felt disconnected from his wife, perceiving her as an incessant insect. She says things like “Lately, you’ve been acting kind of... disinterested in me. Is there something wrong with me?” She asks if Dr. Andonuts has been hiding something from her, which triggers the following battle:

(image description: an Earthbound-esque battle against three enemies, each a sprite depicting a closeup of a man’s muscular body: a bicep, a chest, and a swimsuit-clothed groin area)

All three of these enemies are named NO. The music that plays in the background is deliberately unsettling, and their battle moves consist mostly of “flexing in a masculine way”, “slapping their buddies in a masculine fashion”, and “being hard to think about again”. After three turns, these enemies deliver a series of un-dodgeable moves that kill the player before it’s possible to defeat them, ending the game. The only way to proceed in the game is to select the Flee option in the menu.

To summarize the themes being presented here, Dr. Andonuts is gay and repressed his homosexuality to try to preserve his relationship with his wife due to his lack of courage. From a game design and literary merit standpoint, this NO battle is actually a really poignant way of portraying Andonuts’s mindset and all of the fears that kept him in the closet, portraying men’s bodies as an enemy that he must fight, or in failing to do so, must run from. Remember that Earthbound takes place in 199X-- none of the 1990′s were known for being especially tolerant of gay men, nor was 2008 when Toby made this hack; 2008 was the same year that California passed a bill intended to ban gay marriage. In another since-deleted web page, Toby said that one of his motivations for creating HH was “the lack of non-stereotypical, major homosexual characters in media”. With that in mind, this is a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of the pains of repressing one’s sexuality, especially from a teenager.

Toby also portrays some complexity in Andonuts’s relationship with his son Jeff, making the case that Andonuts helped Jeff in his fight against Giygas as a way of living vicariously through him to feel like less of a monster. From this standpoint, it’s easy to see that Andonuts’s abrasive language might be a defense mechanism for his own self esteem issues, calling others monsters to deflect from the fact he sees HIMSELF as a monster.

(image transcription: a screenshot of the main character fighting Andonuts from the end of the game. The text in the textbox from Andonuts says “you idiots. look at your decaying, frostbitten bodies”)

(and just as a side note, I think the reminiscence of this dialogue to Flowey’s dialogue in Undertale is funny and interesting)

Dr. Andonuts says the following: "If I can't live with myself, why should anybody else? Ergo, nobody will live. Then, everybody will understand all the pain I went through. When everyone understands me... They'll cherish me so." This isn’t the expression of a healthy mind, but it is a portrayal of someone who’s experiencing some serious pain. I’d also argue that it’s a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of a character who is clearly in a crisis.

Another Andonuts quote: “you’re going to kill me, because that’s what a hero does. he has to kill that monster, right? even in this form, i am shaking with fear. i don’t want to die. leave me alone”

The second-to-last fight in the game is against an enemy called Id. In Freudian psychology, the Id is the representation of one’s most base desires, in contrast to the Superego who restrains a person from operating on these desires. The game up until this point does a good job at portraying Dr. Andonuts’s Superego-centric repression strategies, so getting to see his underlying base desires directly is a novel development. The enemy Id consistently reiterates a desire to be left alone and for the main character to not kill it. At the end, it apologizes for not being much of a fight. Only then does Varik fight Dr. Andonuts proper, and without the Id, all that’s left is the Superego-fueled repression, labeled in-game as “hatred”.

Andonuts’s villain monologue starts as such: “I know what this feeling is. It’s hatred for the person who came so far just to destroy an old man. My mind is gone. All that is left is pure hatred.

YOU SEE THIS BURNING, BLOODY UNIVERSE. YOU SEE THIS ULTIMATE, UNLIMITED POWER? Varik. I HAVE FUCKING HAD IT WITH YOUR SHIT. you little fuckers are going to have your bodies ripped in half. i’ll shove your asses so far down your throats that when you crap, you’ll sing fucking beethoven.”

This monologue is the precursor to the infamous line:

(image transcript: a screenshot from the final battle, in which Andonuts says the words “tl;dr: eat shit, faggots”)

As established earlier, this is a line uttered by a gay character who is in a tremendous amount of pain, which would make it an act of slur reclamation. We could argue about whether Toby Fox is in a position to justify this usage, but I refuse to have that conversation because I don’t think real life queer people should have to out themselves in order to justify the art they make. Whether Toby Fox is actually queer or not is, I would argue, immaterial to the story he’s trying to tell here, which is nuanced in a way that a homophobe would be unlikely to write.

We can also have the conversation of whether this word choice is a good decision or not-- and there are, I would argue, a lot of parts of this game that a storyteller with more experience and maturity would have handled better. There are some parts that come across heavy-handed and needlessly edgy, and there are parts that could have been handled with more grace. We can discuss whether “bury our gays” stories were stale by 2008, or whether stories of queer pain had fallen out of vogue for stories of queer joy. But again, this is a work made by a 16-year old, and being needlessly critical of a fangame made by a teenager for a community of predominantly teenagers feels needlessly meanspirited. Just because the game has been unforeseeably thrust into the public light like this doesn’t mean we need to eviscerate it from a 2023 lens. It’s not fair to Toby Fox, neither the original 16-year old creator nor the adult celebrity today.

So I’m not going to do that. What I am going to say is that a queer reading of this work would indicate that this word usage may very well have been a decision made with artistic intent, and a death-of-the-author reading of this work might indicate that this word has artistic merit anyways. If a gay character sees gayness as bad and uses a slur associated with gayness to demean his opponent, that does fundamentally say something about this character, and in this case it reinforces the existing themes that Toby had put in place. I wouldn’t recommend people in 2023 take this approach in storytelling lightly, but I can see and appreciate the spirit in which the game and this word choice appear to have been made.

In the end, Varik does defeat Dr. Andonuts and kill him.

(image transcript: Varik standing above the machine containing Dr. Andonuts’s dead body, not depicted onscreen. The text box reads “You feel a little like this situation could have been avoided.”)

This is one of the last text boxes of the game, and I think it’s a good ending note for this work-- saying that queer lives do NOT need to go this way, that we do not need to bury our gays, that this genuine pain that Dr. Andonuts experienced is not an inevitability.

In conclusion, I do love Halloween Hack for what it is, imperfections and all. It was very clearly a labor of love made by a very earnest and well-meaning teen, and a lot of the things that would later go on to make Undertale so popular are present in their nascent forms here. HH has some genuinely interesting things to say about Earthbound, from both a plot and a character standpoint, and it’s clearly a good-faith attempt at grappling with queer and psychological subject matter. If people on the internet were to engage sincerely with it rather than judging it (and its creator) based on one out-of-context screenshot, I think they might find a diamond-in-the-rough that still manages to be an absolute gem of a fangame.

#earthbound #halloween hack #undertale #toby fox #tw slurs

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butterflyhiptattoo · 5 months ago

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Emerging From the Magazines: Bob Mizer's Athletic Models Guild

When twenty-four-year-old Bob Mizer began marketing photographs of men in posing straps in 1946, he was already on a crusade.

He was tired of police harassment in Pershing Square – a well-known meeting spot for gay men in downtown Los Angeles where he socialized with friends nearly every day during high school. They gossiped about their fellow Pershing Square regulars – the effeminate belles, the butch trade, and some in between. But in 1940 he wrote in his diary of a crackdown: "vice clean up is tightening Lillie is really serious about cleaning up the city," using a slang term common in gay circles for the police.

He also made weekly visits to the nearby Los Angeles Central Library and was tired of reading psychology books on the danger posed by "sexual variants" such as himself and his friends. "Anything you could read anywhere showed how pernicious a thing this was... [how] you would deteriorate into a mass of trembling flesh if you did these things," he later complained.

He was also tired of arguing with his Mormon mother, who vociferously objected to his transgender friend Rodney-later known as Daisy -who was bullied at school for wearing pink girls' slacks and having plucked eyebrows. Delia Mizer called Rodney a "pansy" and labeled his sexual proclivities "against all the laws of nature." Her son responded angrily, using a very different vocabulary, one that drew on notions of legal equality and civil rights: "Most people are just obeying their impulses," he retorted. "Should they be denied the right to fulfill their instincts?"

As a young man, Mizer had already identified the many ways society looked down on "temperamental people" like him and his circle of Pershing Square friends. More important, he was also clearly determined to do something about it to confront the legal, medical, and religious prejudices that so viscerally affected his life.

One Sunday night in March 1940 he was on the telephone listening to Rodney describe his sexual exploits from the night before. Someone else on his party line was also listening in a common occurrence at a time when only the rich had private telephone lines. Using vulgar lan-guage, the eavesdropper expressed his contempt for such people. Mizer had had enough. He channeled his anger into his diary that night: "My aim in life will be to create tolerance among mankind and especially to vindicate the decent, spiritual Urning," using a nineteenth-century term for men attracted to other men. He was beginning to articulate the sense of defiance that had been building up inside him. Soon his rudimentary efforts to create tolerance made it into print. "This week I made my column risqué," he noted of his writing in the Polytechnic High School newspaper. "All of my gay friends are included." Even as an eighteen-year-old high school student, Mizer demonstrated a willingness to defy convention and assert his desires. He had also developed the ability to publicly affirm his gay friends if in a coded way that perhaps only they would understand.

Mizer's ambition was to be an author. He was not just a columnist but an editor of his high school's award-winning newspaper – considered one of the top ten in the country by the Columbia University School of Journalism. He had begun creative writing in grammar school and published several short stories. He was also a voracious reader, checking out popular psychology and sexology books like Out-witting Our Nerves and Sexual Power on his weekly runs to the Los Angeles Public Library. He so identified with Boris Barisol's biography of writer Oscar Wilde, subtitled The Man, the Artist, the Martyr, that he labeled his own 1940 diary "Bob Mizer: The Man, the Thinker, the ?" One of his teachers suggested that his skills at writing, shorthand, and typing would easily land him a steady job as a court reporter. But Mizer wanted to write his own book. He would call it "How You Can Help the Homosexualists" and would target younger gay men whose worldview had not yet formed.

Although he never published such a book, writing would occupy much of his life, as he penned hundreds of feisty editorials denouncing censorship, puritanism, and prejudice for his magazine Physique Pictorial, which he published for over twenty years. Not unlike the book he hoped to write, Physique Pictorial offered help and comfort to tens of thousands of gay men in Cold War America. As the editor of the first large-circulation American magazine targeting gay men, Mizer found a way to help the community he had found at Pershing Square. In the pages of his path-breaking magazine, Mizer honed the skills he first tried out in his high school newspaper-thumbing his nose at the authorities while speaking up for his friends.

In postwar America, a commercial network of gay physique photographers and magazine publishers emerged from the contests and magazines surrounding the physical culture movement. Bob Mizer was neither the first nor the only gay man to capitalize on his community's interest in physique photography. But he became the center of a network that served to connect, inspire, and politicize that subculture. He drew on an older tradition of gay photographers marketing their products through an underground market or in the back pages of mainstream fitness magazines. But with the founding of Physique Pictorial in 1951, he opened this tradition to public scrutiny and a new level of visual and discursive engagement. He was joined by Irv Johnson, the owner of a gym in Chicago, who began publishing Tomorrow's Man in 1952, and by Randolph Benson and John Bullock, a gay couple who met at the University of Virginia, who began publishing Grecian Guild Pictorial in 1955. Together they created a new genre of small magazines that would help serve and unite gay men throughout the country.

The social world Mizer constructed with his gay high school friends at Pershing Square was central to his budding role as a pioneering gay entrepreneur. "The number of faggots cruising around here is legion," remembered the writer Hart Crane. But the number of available sexual partners was only part of the appeal. "Here are little fairies who can quote Rimbaud before they are eighteen," he observed, suggesting how the space also offered an education in gay cultural codes. It was through connections made there that Mizer not only discovered a sense of community and a sense of oppression but also learned about a central feature of gay male culture: photography of the nude male.

While still in high school, Mizer went to a party at his friend Sydney Phillip's place, where three gay friends posed in the nude for "artistic studies" that the host photographed. "It was terribly cute to see them rush to hide in the bathroom whenever a knock was heard at the door," Mizer noted of the models' skittishness. Featured in one of the first entries in his 1940 diary, the night clearly made an impression. A few months later Mizer himself posed for another gay photographer and became "enthused about barbell exercising."3

Weightlifting led Mizer to another formative influence: Strength & Health, the preeminent physical culture magazine published by Bob Hoffman in York, Pennsylvania. Mizer began reading the magazine in high school when he started lifting weights – he purchased his barbells through its back pages. He enjoyed the bodybuilding photos and articles but was particularly intrigued by the monthly "S & H Leaguers' Page," a pen-pal service for those who wanted to exchange letters and photographs. Members often described their hobbies and interests, which included not only bodybuilding and physique photographs but often music, ballet, and theater. In April 1945 Mizer placed the following notice, hoping to connect with other leaguers; he included his home address, which would become the legendary home of his physique studio: "Bob Mizer, 1834 West 11th St., Los Angeles, Cal. is interested in photography and creative writing, and promises an immediate answer and exchange of photos to all who write. He uses a York barbell and other training appliances and hopes that we will allot more space to the league notes, as he enjoys reading this department and writing to other leaguers. "

The response was overwhelming – Mizer received over three hundred letters from fellow S & H Leaguers, some of whom remained life-long friends. Other leaguers reported similar responses from their no- tices. One received such a flood of mail-but to the wrong address – that the Post Office requested he issue a correction immediately. Mizer later praised this service for allowing "lonely bodybuilders and others" not only to correspond but also to form "long-lasting and fruitful" friendships. His positive experience with the S & H Leaguers' Page offered a pivotal lesson, demonstrating to Mizer the desire of men who enjoyed physique photography to connect with each other.

After high school graduation he worked as an office clerk and typist for the Texas & Fort Worth Railroad, but in his spare time he also began to help out at various Los Angeles photography studios, learning how to pose models, position lighting, and develop film. In the summer of 1945, during the final days of World War II, Mizer was full of excitement as he made plans over the establishment of what he was already calling "my business." He was honing his craft by apprenticing at Fred- erick Kovert's Hollywood studio. "I am helping him in my spare time in order to decide whether or not to come into the studio to work." Kovert was a former silent movie actor who had become one of the more daring and well-known photographers of nude men. Mizer was one of numerous young men working for Kovert, doing much of the photography that bore his name. Mizer often brought models there, used his darkroom, and even posed himself. He could do none of this at home, since his mother, who ran a rooming house, did not approve of his interest in photographing nearly naked men. Still, he found Kovert to be controlling and difficult to work with.

Soon he bought his own camera and started to frequent Muscle Beach and bodybuilding competitions to find models. Muscle Beach in Santa Monica-not far from the home he shared with his mother near downtown Los Angeles was the center of the postwar interest in bodybuilding and beefcake. It was the perfect place to meet bodybuilders who were anxious to be photographed. "I modeled for Bob Mizer in 1947, '48," Ben Sorensen remembered. "Bob came down to Muscle Beach and just talked to people, you know? He invites us up. Of course everybody's interested, when they're bodybuilding, in getting some free pictures." It was Bob McCune, another bodybuilding champion Mizer photographed, who convinced Mizer to submit his photos to Strength & Health. Editor John Grimek, himself a well-known bodybuilding champion, encouraged Mizer to submit more work. "Yours are as good as others," Grimek told the budding photographer when they met at one of the bodybuilding competitions in Los Angeles.

Mizer called his business the Athletic Model Guild (AMG) and offered his first advertisements in Strength & Health in 1946, where they competed for attention with similar advertisements from other gay photographers, such as Alfonso Hanagan, known as "Lon of New York." Hanagan had first become interested in physique photography when he became enthralled with images of bodybuilder Tony Sansone, who marketed his own photographs. After moving to New York in 1936 to pursue a career in music, he met Sansone and began to socialize with and photograph him and his friends. By the 1940s his physique photographs were being featured on the cover of Strength & Health and bodybuilders began seeking him out, hoping to appear on magazine cover. As payment, the magazine gave him free ad space in the back of the magazine. It was this mutually profitable world of photographers, bodybuilders, and magazine publishers that Mizer would enter, then help to transform.

When Mizer began marketing physique photography to a gay audience, he joined a field with deep roots in gay culture. The taking, sharing, and selling of such images had been central to gay culture for well over a half century by the time Mizer discovered it. Wilhelm von Gloeden began selling photographs of nude young men he posed in classical staging in Taormina, Sicily, in the 1890s. He developed a large following in cosmopolitan circles, especially among cultivated gay men. Some of his more restrained images appeared in European journals that were popular within the Aesthetic movement, while his nudes circulated through an underground market. Oscar Wilde and other gay notables made pilgrimages to his studio.

In addition to such high art, images of nearly nude men circulated in the context of the physical culture movement, starting with images of Eugene Sandow in the 1890s. By the 1920s nude photos were widely marketed in the back of both art and physical culture magazines. Physical culturist John Hernic offered nude photos in the back of Art Magazine in the 1920s and Strength & Health in the 1930s. "These photos will be a source of inspiration to you in your training for a well developed body," Hernic's ad promised, providing a small image of a muscled and oiled young man with a prominent posing strap a pouch hanging off a string that covered only the genitals, the most revealing item of clothing a model could wear.

Collector Robert Mainardi identifies Hernic as a "mail-order pioneer," but his Apollo Art Studios was soon joined by others. To earn a living during the Depression, brothers Fred and William Ritter photographed themselves and their fellow physical culturists who trained at a New York City YMCA. They developed their own photos and sold high-quality images for $1 apiece. Film historian Thomas Waugh labels them "the first gay generation of physique photographers. "10

Nude figure studies were only one of the many items available for sale in the back pages of these magazines. There were advertisements for barbells, food supplements, clothing, figure studies, and more. Indeed, most magazines were simply vehicles to sell products. Bob Hoffman founded the York Barbell Company a year before he founded his magazine Strength & Health and admitted the periodical was really a means to sell equipment. Both Hoffman and his main competitor Joe Weider distributed their fitness magazines at a loss, seeing them as a way to sell more barbells. Some of the first famous bodybuilders were similarly engaged in marketing products. Eugene Sandow – considered the world's most perfect man – performed on the vaudeville circuit, published books on physical culture techniques, and marketed postcards of his own image. As much a brand name as a bodybuilder, Sandow opened a chain of vegetarian restaurants, sanatoriums, and hotels that by the 1920s made him a millionaire. Bodybuilding promoter Bernarr Macfadden also constructed a commercial empire around the sport that included health retreats, restaurants, beauty contests, book sales, lectures, and mail-order fitness courses. Right from the start, bodybuilding was a lucrative business, the centerpiece of a network of consumer items.

A legend has developed that Mizer's first business plan was to serve as a referral service between models and the studios that required their services. According to this legend, the talent agency model failed, but Mizer díscovered, as if by accident, that the photographs were more lucrative than the modeling connections. This unsubstantiated story implies that his idea of marketing photos to gay men was sui generis. It cuts Mizer off from the long tradition of gay men taking, exchanging, and purchasing such photographs, beginning in the late nineteenth century. One of the sources of the legend was Wayne Stanley, a Mizer protégé who inherited Mizer's business and who self-servingly asserted that AMG was "the first photographic studio of the young male physique, ignoring Von Gloeden, Hernic, the Ritter Brothers, Lon of New York, Kovert, and many others. Mizer's diaries suggest that photography was key from the beginning and that he considered himself to be part of a field of physique photographers from at least 1946. While a pioneer in many ways, Mizer did not create the genre.

Although the selling of physique-type photographs was not new, in the post-World War II era such imagery was becoming a much more visible component of American culture. Men had only recently started appearing shirtless in public. While European men had begun going topless on beaches soon after World War I, one-piece men's bathing suits emerged in the United States only in the 1930s. Some called them "Depression suits," suggesting that the shirt disappeared owing to lack of funds. As more and more proud male bathers defied convention by exposing their chests, the media began to talk of a "no shirt movement." Some beach communities such as Atlantic City, New Jersey, pushed back and banned topless male bathing. Responding to the changing beach regulations, clothing manufacturers offered detachable tops for their swimsuits. Representing the shifting cultural sands, their advertisements often featured one shirtless male and another with trunks and a tank top. According to David Chapman, by 1937 the controversy was settled, as most of the nation's beaches allowed men to appear shirtless.

World War II brought images of shirtless sailors and soldiers into American homes and theaters. In covering the war, New York magazines and Hollywood films soon reflected the trend toward displays of the male chest. A cover of Look magazine in 1942 featured a shirtless image of Muscle Beach denizen John Kornoff, the U.S. Army's first physical trainer. Cannon Towel advertisements in Life featured soldiers bathing in the South Pacific wearing nothing but one of its products. Within a year of the war's end, as Mizer started marketing his photo albums, Sidney Skolsky, sitting across town in Swab's drugstore writing his nationally syndicated gossip column, coined "beefcake" to refer to Hollywood's liberal use of Guy Madison's physique. Madison had been discovered by gay Hollywood agent Henry Willson, who also named and popularized gay actors Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson. Skolsky dubbed the bevy of male actors posing in bathing suits a "beefcake brigade," and this new term for displays of young, pulchritudinous male flesh took hold. Willson was a frequent client of physique photographer Lon of New York but was now bringing that same look to Hollywood. So the popularization of "beefcake" imagery and terminology, from their very origins, had a gay inflection.

But if male torsos could increasingly be seen on American beaches and in popular periodicals after World War II, they were still considered taboo in town. Men would continue to be subject to arrest for appearing shirtless on many city streets and in parks into the early 1960s. They were particularly vulnerable to such arrest if they did so in a known gay cruising area, reflecting the tensions in American culture over male nudity and its homoerotic implications. A seventeen year-old Harvey Milk remembered being charged with indecent exposure in the summer of 1947 for baring his chest in a secluded gay cruising area of Central Park, even as men with families did exactly the same on the more public grassy lawns. Being grouped among "the men without their shirts" was one of Milk's first visceral experiences of antigay oppression.

As interest in the male physique increased during the postwar period, Mizer's Physique Pictorial would catch the beginnings of a cultural wave. Yet he would also feel the wrath of law enforcement that tried to shut his business down, even before it was formally on its feet. He and his magazine would be caught up in legal disputes over the sexual meaning of such displays of male flesh. For the next two decades, Mizer would place himself at the center of this battle.

POSTAL INSPECTOR VISIT

On July 23, 1945, Mizer had his first of many encounters with federal law enforcement authorities. After leaving work as usual at the Texas & Fort Worth Railroad and bicycling by the library on Pershing Square to exchange some books, Mizer arrived home to find postal inspectors waiting for him. They searched his room, found "dirty pictures," and took him to their offices for questioning. Mizer somehow escaped arrest, but a few months later Kovert's studio was also raided, resulting in headlines in the Los Angeles Examiner. Intimately involved in the resulting legal drama, Mizer attended court with Kovert, who pleaded guilty to possession of obscene materials, and drafted a letter for Kovert's customers seeking their support. Not even the intimidating tactics of the Post Office and the court system seem to have deterred the twenty-three-year-old Mizer. "Spent evening on [Athletic Model] Guild calls and letters," he wrote in his diary, just two days after being what he described as "probed" by postal inspectors. Rather than serve as a deterrent, Mizer's encounter with federal postal authorities seemed to increase his resolve and suggests how his struggle with the forces of censorship formed a central component of his business. Mizer would face arrest again in 1947 and 1954 in connection with his business, each encounter with the authorities sharpening his sense of outrage.

Mizer began his business in 1946 by producing and distributing mimeographed "albums" to sell his beefcake photographs, copying the standard operating procedure followed by Kovert of Hollywood, Lon of New York, and many other such photographers.17 He would send customers who responded to his advertisements in Strength & Health a one-page sample of photo albums, from which they could select the models and images they wanted to purchase. However, Mizer's early albums went beyond providing the necessary marketing information. Mizer peppered his albums with news and commentary on the physique world-biographies of models, bodybuilding contest results, and warnings about Post Office crackdowns. As with his earlier writings in high school and his later editorials in Physique Pictorial, Mizer constructed a narrative that drew customers and models into the same enlightened circle of upstanding physique enthusiasts and supporters of free speech, while casting public censors and moralists into the darkness.

Starting with Forrester Millard in 1946 -- the first featured model in his premier "Album A" – Mizer constructed a fantasy narrative about his models that encouraged a sense of identification between them and his target audience of middle-class gay men. At the same time, he cleaned up the description of his interactions to avoid any hint of illegality. Although Mizer would print on almost every mailing and magazine he produced that he neither took nor sold nude photographs, he took nudes of Millard and of most every subsequent model. A native of New Mexico, Millard was only sixteen at the time Mizer photographed him, though Mizer fudged his date of birth to make him seventeen.

Publicly, Mizer lauded Millard as the ideal model who had control of every muscle due to hours posing before a circle of mirrors. Privately, Mizer complained that Millard was narcissistic to the point of being "completely entranced with his own physical beauty." Vanity had led Millard to quit school and be supported by his mother and a girlfriend. "In the album bulletins I try to be truthful – but naturally I must show jurisprudence in what truth I tell," Mizer wrote a correspondent at the time. "I would doom a model's popularity if I announced he was married with two kids.... Most of my models over 23 are married or are permanently shacking up with their common-law wives."

So the biography Mizer constructed for Millard centered on discipline, Horatio Alger upward mobility, and a hint of homosexual camaraderie. "Laughed at because he was skinny, Forrester rapidly developed a magnificently defined body which became the envy of his former tormentors," Mizer wrote. Mizer replaced mention of his real-life girlfriend with "training companion" John Miller, who had won top honors at a recent AAU contest. They posed for Mizer's first duos, a homoerotic format that set Mizer and other gay physique photographers apart from their mainstream colleagues. Dark-featured Millard and blonde Miller looked like the perfect gay couple. They hoped to open a gym together, Mizer told his clients suggestively. The image of Millard and Miller on a settee with overlapping arms, hands touching, appeared in Strength & Health and became a signature AMG photo. Millard was later called "almost the touchtone for AMG's fame".

To counter the perception of both gay men and bodybuilders as degenerates, Mizer's biographical notes gave his models middle-class respectability, highlighting not only their physical attributes but also their alleged intellectual and professional ambitions. Not only was model Johnny Murphy tops in the "muscle game," but his business courses at Woodbury College were preparing him to become a business executive. "In anything he does, he will not content himself with being just average, he must be the best," Mizer gushed.

From the feedback he received to his many customer questionnaires, Mizer had a keen sense of what his audience liked and the "psychological effect" of his photos. As he told a colleague, "A picture is rarely unpopular if the model looks directly into the lens (and hence seems to be looking at the person observing the picture) as naturally they feel identification with him." Not only in his lighting and posing but also in his editorial content, Mizer made sure that his largely middle-class audience could identify with the models he was offering them, assuring them that they were "from upper-level homes." While seeking to bond models and customers in a circle of mutual camaraderie and respectability – what he called "the few... who demand freedom of expression" – Mizer also used his albums to make a detailed and careful analysis of censorship efforts by people he derided as "philistines," "moralists," and "unaesthetic law enforcement officers. " Mizer had gotten nowhere in his attempts to reason with censorship authorities. He and his fellow Los Angeles area physique photographers petitioned the Post Office to allow the use of the mail for nude photography. Postal authorities responded that they were forced to forbid such mail by local civic organizations and church groups that feared such products would fall into the hands of children. Mizer offered a clever countersuggestion: photographers could send nude photographs care of the local postmaster in every city, where they could then be claimed by the recipient with proper proof of age. His proposal went unheeded.

Mizer had been in business less than a year when he was first arrested, but it was not for sending nudes through the mail. Mindful of postal inspectors, he had sold nudes only to walk-in customers at his studio near downtown Los Angeles-what amounted to just 10 percent of his business. But when one of those customers, thirty six-year-old Mexican-born Texan Pasquel Barron, became embroiled in a Post Office obscenity investigation, he admitted to obtaining nudes from Mizer, and the Post Office quickly forwarded the information to the local district attorney. Mizer was arrested in 1947 for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, James Maynor, one of his first models, a seventeen-year-old. The district attorney uncovered a network of teenage bodybuilders centered on Muscle Beach, many of whom had been brought to Mizer's studio by William Petty, a physical education instructor employed by the city of Santa Monica to organize athletic activities and performances. Petty and another photographer were also arrested.

Unable to afford an attorney, Mizer was convinced by a public defender to plead guilty to the misdemeanor charge he admitted to photographing Maynor in the nude. But in his plea to avoid prison and receive probation, Mizer insisted that he operated a legitimate business. He stipulated that he had consulted with attorneys and obtained signed release statements from his models or their parents. To distinguish his from previous such enterprises that operated underground, Mizer granted the court access to his meticulous records concerning both customers and models. He freely admitted to being a homosexual and to "attend[ing] several meetings of other types of such individuals in Lafayette Park" a possible reference to gay social or fraternal organizations. Friends and neighbors testified to his good conduct and character – they described him as a photographer and artist who never smoked, drank, or got entangled in the law. The district attorney countered that Mizer's business was "pandering only to the tastes of lustful homosexuals." Several of his models, including John Miller, featured in AMG's early advertisements, confessed to engaging in oral sex with Mizer.

In denying his request, the probation officer emphasized that Mizer showed no remorse for his activities and was an admitted homosexual. He labeled his business of photographing teenage boys in the nude "a vicious and deliberate crime." Mizer was sentenced to six months at a work farm in Saugus, California. As with his interrogation by postal inspectors in 1945, the time he spent in Saugus seemed to steel his will. He felt abused by a legal system that was persecuting him for his lack of shame in being gay and operating a business that catered to his fellow homosexuals. He would later caution his readers to remain silent if arrested and never admit to any guilt, lest they find themselves "rail-roaded to prison" like he felt he was. As he wrote to his mother from Saugus, "I feel more strength now than ever before, but this strength, this driving energy, shall be carefully bridled and directed with wisdom.... ambition is everything." Mizer's tone and focus on the forces of censorship turned darker after his 1947 arrest. By 1950 he reported on a "witch hunt" at Muscle Beach, where one Sunday all the photographers were arrested and further photography forbidden. "Los Angeles and California is in a stage of sex hysteria," he warned, with the state legislature passing sex laws "which only stop short of outlawing the double bed." He chastised "those too stupid and prurient-minded" to understand and appreciate the need for nude art. "These same philistines are mischievously at work to undermine other basic rights of the individual," he wrote. He recommended that readers join the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or the American Sunbathing and Health Association, a nudist organization. "The only successful way to fight these frustrated reactionaries is through national organization." Fighting the forces of censorship through collective action was clearly on Mizer's mind.

Mizer closely followed and reported on the legal struggles of other physique photographers, even though raising such issues threaten to scare away more timid customers. Whenever possible, he noted what he saw as rays of hope, such as a "progressive Federal Judge" in Chicago who ruled in 1947 that photographs of nude males by Al Urban were not obscene. He noted that most magazines and photographers "in the field" had almost always beaten their prosecutions, but "only at damaging expense." These small victories failed to establish a clear national legal precedent, nor did they silence the local churches, parent teacher organizations, and other "moralist groups" behind censorship efforts. Mizer quickly identified the pattern of obscenity prosecution that would continue for the next twenty years: censors won at the local or lower-level courts but then lost on appeal. Physique photographers would have to work together to establish a large war chest to fight the censors and establish a national precedent.

PHYSIQUE PICTORIAL

So when Mizer began publishing Physique Pictorial in 1951, he envisioned it as a collective effort – a catalog of merchandise from a variety of gay photographers and other vendors facing exclusion from mainstream fitness magazines. The first few issues were "advertising booklets," offered to subscribers for free – a "gift" underwritten by participating businesses. Like the mainstream fitness magazines, Mizer figured that photograph sales would more than pay for the magazine, as barbell sales financed mainstream fitness magazines. He wanted to bring gay physique photographers into closer alliance and thereby more effectively fight the forces of censorship. First called Physique Photo News, it would take advertisements from the back of Strength & Health and give them a new, safer, and more prominent home of their own.

Under pressure from postal authorities, mainstream fitness magazines were beginning to refuse ads for undraped nudes. Warning that "queers" had "obtained a particularly vicious hold on our bodybuilding game," Iron Man instituted a policy refusing ads with models wearing anything less than swim trunks and threatened even stricter rules in the future. Strength & Health had faced censorship efforts over a cover image that had been taken in the nude and later retouched with a posing strap. The managing editor of Strength & Health warned Mizer that his advertisement photos were becoming "less athletic and more risqué" and threatened to bar him from the magazine. While Mizer pledged to cooperate, he saw the writing on the wall. "We are anxious to get our own magazine strong enough that in a few years time we can thumb our noses at the physique magazines," he wrote to a trusted adviser.

The first issue represented the combined effort of six physique photography studios, but most of the others soon opted out. "Bruce [Bellas] was so frightened that he decided not to be represented in the next issue," Mizer recalled. To avoid postal inspectors, Bellas preferred to travel from city to city selling his images in person to select clients. Russ Warner also demurred, having already been summoned to Washington for an arduous hearing before postal inspectors over his nude photos with inked-in pouches. "The only people who would want photos of men were gay people," the postal inspectors confided to him, and their threat to "get every one of them" left him skittish. Even Mizer feared repercussions since "it will look dangerously like an organization which might effectively resist the postal distaste for physique work." Postal authorities may not have viewed it as a threat, but such organizational power was clearly at the forefront of Mizer's thinking.

Mizer's efforts at consolidation drew inspiration from the most prominent scholar and writer on the subject of sex in America. Like other early activists for gay rights, Mizer had read Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and considered it pivotal for his understanding of homosexuality as a naturally and frequently occurring variation of human activity. "Dr. Kinsey's first book was the most important one in my whole life," Mizer wrote to a colleague, "and for it I owe him a debt I could probably never repay. "

As an avid collector of materials to document American sexual culture, Kinsey became a regular Mizer customer, and the two quickly established an active correspondence that lasted nearly until Kinsey's death in 1956. On his many visits to Los Angeles, Kinsey met with Mizer and conducted sexual histories of his fellow physique photographers and models. Mizer even forwarded his frequent customer questionnaires to Kinsey for tabulation, thereby offering him indirect access to his customer base. In return, Kinsey offered strategic advice about how best to combat postal authorities.

Because of his own struggles with postal and customs authorities over shipments of erotic materials to his institute at Indiana University, Kinsey had developed relationships with prestigious law firms specializing in the First Amendment. It was he who suggested that physique publishers could win at the appellate level if they could find a way to sustain and finance their legal cases. "I have suggested before that all of you photographers should band together and employ the very best attorney that you can in the L.A. area to advise you and to handle individual cases," Kinsey wrote to Mizer in 1951, just as Mizer was establishing Physique Pictorial. Kinsey suggested that photographers of female nudes had tried to do this but never succeeded at forming a united group. While Mizer never formally organized his fellow physique photographers, he and his magazine served as a de facto central bureau of information, connecting customers, photographers, and publishers.

Tapping into an underserved gay market, Mizer's business flourished. As Mizer later remembered, "there was not such a thing at the time as a magazine that showed a variety of young, youthful models – not supermen – which is what most people wanted." Through his customer questionnaires, Mizer knew what his clients wanted: less information on weightlifting and exercise and more models. One twenty- two-year-old customer from Winchester, Massachusetts, remarked how Mizer's models were becoming "more youthful, slimmer and more suggestively posed" and encouraged him to be upfront about it – not to "hide all this under the general category of art photography," a common claim of photographers offering undraped nudes. As he wrote to Mizer, "It appears to me that by the constant polls you all seem to be taking so that you may satisfy your customers, you are catering more and more to the homosexual trade." Models, too, knew what Mizer was up to. "I think Bob was, um, interested more in the gay magazines than the bodybuilding ones," remembered model Ben Sorensen. "I'm straight, but that didn't bother me at all. Everybody at the gym knew what they were doing with the photos."

Within a year of establishing AMG, Mizer reported a gross monthly income of $700-annualized, this amounted to nearly three times the average family income of 1947. Mizer had hired his brother as a full-time employee and had nearly $2,000 in savings. His mailing list already contained customers from "practically every country in the world," according to the district attorney who prosecuted his case. "It grew like Topsy – a little bit each time," Mizer remembered.33 He soon began offering a "Nickle Plan," similar to a monthly book club, where customers would regularly receive photographs from each new AMG album. Wishing to respond to the particular desires of his customers, he allowed them to specify what types of models and photographs they preferred not to receive: "models over or under ages, races, slender or very heavy weights, poses with girls, models in clothing or part clothing such as Levis, models in trunks, portraits." Mizer was already engaging in specialization, acknowledging the particular sexual desires, fetishes, and prejudices of his customers.

Although Physique Pictorial could increasingly be found on select newsstands, Mizer's initial sense of it as a catalog of merchandise for subscribers endured. He recalled that although magazine wholesaler Lou Elson began to distribute it in New York after a year or two on the market, newsstand sales did not substantially increase total circulation. "Its circulation was horrible. It was very hard to get. Most newsstands didn't carry it," remembered Chuck Renslow, then a fellow physique photographer in Chicago. Mizer himself called his newsstand circulation "quiet select." Continually struggling to find a newsstand distribution network, he mostly sold Physique Pictorial by subscription. But he was proud of his independence – unwilling to bow and scrape to distributors or advertisers. In addition to working with a few wholesalers, Mizer sent copies himself to select newsstands. "Tell your dealer about this and give him our address," he suggested to readers, trying to get them actively involved in increasing circulation. When Physique Pictorial did manage to appear on newsstands, it sold out almost immediately.

In 1963 AMG tried to diversify and modernize by offering a large format, color magazine called Young Adonis to supplement the black-and-white Physique Pictorial. It was a sell-out wherever it was sold, but again Mizer had trouble getting it on newsstands. The distributor wrote Mizer a two-page letter describing the magazine's "sins." Although Mizer promised future issues would feature new offerings, including a fashion section handled by model Mark Nixon, it was the only issue Mizer offered.

FROM GUILD TO NETWORK

Mizer's choice of the term "guild" to refer to his business started a trend among physique photography studios. Don Whitman founded the Western Photography Guild in Colorado in 1947 and soon had advertisements next to AMG's in the back of Strength & Health. In Metairie, Louisiana, a group of physique photographers and artists launched the Southern Guild. And in Portsmouth, Virginia, George U. Lyon and Charles E. Smith started Underwood Photographic Guild. The word "guild" could refer to any association of people with a common goal but historically referred to a group of craftsmen or merchants who exerted some control over their trade. As an avid reader, Mizer was probably well aware that medieval guilds were famous for regulating entry into a profession and often exerted considerable power in city government. His choice of words suggests his aspirations to unite, protect, and empower those involved in the physique field. It was the same term Harry Hay would use as he began organizing the Mattachine Society as a gay political group across town a few years later.

In keeping with the spirit of a guild, Mizer cooperated with and promoted the work of other photographers. He would share or sell mailing lists to competitors and alert readers when new physique magazines were launched or studios opened. "Physique Pictorial is not a closed enterprise and any legitimate studio can be represented in it," he promised. By 1954 he regularly included a directory of photographers, artists, and models selling merchandise, a custom followed by many later physique magazines. He was happy to note when individual models offered their own photos directly to readers. When he had a disagreement with a physique artist, he let readers know that the artist's work could now be found in a competing magazine.

As the number of physique studios catering to gay men proliferated, Mizer's magazine functioned like a Better Business Bureau. Mizer barred advertisements from studios who were known to be unreliable, gave bad service, or sold illegal material (although he included photos with "inked" pouches, indicating the original photograph was in the nude.) He threatened to publicly denounce photographers who were territorial and unwelcoming to new talent in their area, and he was quick to publicly reprimand photographers who did not reciprocate his courtesies. Mizer also warned readers of offers from the "get-rich- quick boys" promising special pictures available only to a few "intimate friends." Given the Post Office's vigilance, he knew that studios selling nudes would not last long. "Every mailing list is peppered with postal inspectors and their collaborators," he cautioned. After sending in an exorbitant fee, the customer might receive nothing. He encouraged readers to confess their stories of being victimized by such schemes.40 Envisioning a constantly widening network of producers and consumers, Mizer sought to place himself at its fulcrum. Soon he was offering a host of consumer items – artwork, slides, viewers, and "garments for athletes" including jeans, T-shirts, bathing suits, and the ubiquitous posing straps. Physique Pictorial functioned as a nexus for finding, producing, selling, and admiring male photos. Other studios described AMG as a one-stop shopping experience: "one of the largest photo guilds in the country and supplies about everything a photo collector or bodybuilder wants: movies, garments, thousands of all sizes of photos, color slides, and many other works of art."

The network grew increasingly international as Mizer featured photographs by Arax of Paris and models wearing trunks from Vince of London. He soon had agents in Belgium, France, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Japan. By 1962 Mizer sponsored European tours for physique enthusiasts, "to photograph local athletes, and to visit famous clubs of special interest."

Mizer encouraged not only other physique photographers but a new and growing group of physique artists in his magazine. AMG became a generative center that showcased the work of talented young painters and sketch artists who then developed their own followings that often eclipsed Mizer's own popularity. In 1957 he introduced an unknown artist who "depicts the healthy robust youth of the forests of Finland," who would later reach international renown as "Tom of Finland." But it was an artist from Virginia, George Quaintance, who created what Mizer called a "vogue" that was widely imitated.

Quaintance had begun taking photographs and drawing sketches of male nudes under the tutelage of Lon of New York. He had worked drawing bodybuilding champions for the cover of Joe Weider's Your Physique, but it was when he started painting for Bob Mizer's new magazine that his career took off. Set either at a dude ranch in Arizona, where he lived, or at a bath in ancient Greece, Quaintance's paintings created the kind of playful environment of easy male camaraderie that Mizer sought to foster through his magazine. And like Mizer, Quaintance considered his homoerotic artwork to be "a crusade for the rights of the feelings" of his customers. "I too feel that I crusade in my attempt to supply, or satisfy, a deep emotional hunger in the inner lives of my customers," he explained to a homophile leader. Soon his mailing list of ten thousand active buyers around the world surpassed that of Mizer. He offered not only physique paintings but prints, photographs, and sculptures, expanding his business to a four-man operation. "It grew too fast.... I'm trying to adjust myself to all the confusion," he wrote at the time. Those who met him as he toured the country selling his artwork describe a flamboyant artist who loved wearing western gear, turquoise jewelry, and showing off his young Mexican American lover and frequent model, Eduardo.

What distinguished Quaintance's artwork was not just the invitation to view nearly naked men but the excitement of seeing them looking at each other, as Michael Bronski has argued. One of Quaintance's first cover images for Physique Pictorial demonstrates how groundbreaking those gazes were. "Morning in the Desert" featured four ranch hands around an outdoor bath dressing and preparing for work. One naked bather is standing, his genitals covered only by soapsuds. Another naked man lies below him in a tub of water, looking directly up at the other's body. But for the cover of the magazine, to pass postal censors, Quaintance shifted the man's head to the left, so his gaze no longer fell longingly on his fellow naked male bather. Like his better-known successor, Tom of Finland, Quaintance constructed a "network of looks" that included and invited those of the viewer, furthering the sense of homoerotic identification.

Mizer's growing network of photographers, artists, and other physique-related businesses used a language of friendship and camaraderie that further encouraged a sense of community. Seattle physique artist William MacLean set up a studio and invited new and emerging physique artists to market their work through him. This offer featured a photograph of the very handsome artist hanging images in his exhibit space, noting suggestively that he was "a very eligible bachelor" and therefore "his studio is a gathering place for the young social set and many a party is hosted there." London model Clive Jones sold his images directly and promised to handle orders personally. "Clive would like to hear from his many friends in America" and promised to send a catalog of images of himself and his "buddies" in London.

Mizer offered slides of physique models intended to be projected on a wall or screen for group viewing. One of MacLean's more reproduced drawings showed a group of men admiring AMG slides and imitating the poses of the models. When Mizer began making physique film shorts, he called for readers to submit script ideas, giving members yet another way to participate. He offered suggestions on where to buy a good, inexpensive projector and soon began renting the films at a quarter of the price of purchasing one. In words and images, he encouraged readers to share the experience of watching physique films. "Imagine what a hit these films would be at your next party or gathering of friends who are physical culture enthusiasts!" Indeed, much of the allure of participating in this network, whether as a producer or as a consumer, was the sense of community it offered.

Mizer's own rhetoric helped to solidify that sense of community. Boasting that his magazine lacked "mass appeal," he explicitly signaled his targeting of a minority population, what he called "the limited aesthetic group" who appreciated the male body. Mizer was borrowing a gay discourse developed in the late nineteenth century, a period he knew well from his reading of Boris Brasol's biography of Oscar Wilde. As art historian Christopher Reed argues, "The Wilde trials seemed to reveal homosexuality as the secret behind the enigmatic passions of the Aesthetes, tainting the entire movement, all of its products, and even the idea of aesthetic sensitivity."

Indeed, the modern identities of "the homosexual" and "the artist" – both considered manifestations of innate predispositions – developed nearly simultaneously in the nineteenth century, as both creating art and committing sodomy moved from activities to ways of being. "Artistic" quickly became euphemistic slang for "queer." Painter Paul Cadmus remembered how the association had transferred to the American scene by the 1930s. "The word homosexual was never used," he remembered. "They just said, 'He's an artist." American psychiatrists, too, described men suspected of homosexuality as "aesthetic in temperament." Thus when Mizer adopted this language, praising Quaintance for his "neo-aestheticism" and imagining his audience as "the limited aesthetic group," he was signaling to and helping to construct a distinct gay identity among his readers.

"THE TV SHOW THAT MADE AMERICA GASP!"

Physique Pictorial's increasing circulation came with its own risks. Its presence on Los Angeles newsstands soon caught the attention of Paul Coates, a conservative columnist for the afternoon tabloid the Los Ange- les Mirror, known for exposing what he considered to be the seamier side of life in Southern California – prostitutes, repo men, drug addicts, and shoplifters. In 1954 Coates used his local television program Confidential File on KTTV to alert his audience to the "unpleasant fact" of homosexuality in Los Angeles. It was the first prime-time television program to broach the topic and helped propel Coates's show into national syndication. Coates featured footage of a Mattachine Society meeting with well-dressed men and women drinking coffee and eating cookies. He also gave his audience a glimpse inside a gay bar. But he ended the show by holding up a copy of Physique Pictorial as a shocking example on city newsstands of the publications catering to homosexuals. According to one tabloid, it was "the TV show that made America gasp!" Working closely with the local Parent Teacher Association (PTA), Coates couched his programming as a crusade to warn families of the dangers homosexuals posed to children. He followed up with three newspaper columns devoted exclusively to the presence of gay maga-zines on the city's newsstands. Although concerned about the homophile magazine ONE, which billed itself as "The Homosexual Magazine," he noted that its editors at least made an effort to avoid the lurid. Physique Pictorial, however, was "thinly veiled pornography" that appealed to sex criminals and sadists. Coates claimed that this "Esquire for men who wish they weren't" featured images of men in chains being beaten and stabbed – a sensational reading of Mizer's photographs with swords and chains as props. He highlighted the case of one of Mizer's teenage models from Muscle Beach-an active church member engaged to be married, he noted-who complained of unwanted homosexual solicitations after his photo appeared in Physique Pictorial. There were dozens of such dangerous photographers, Coates warned. "It's big business in our town."

Leveraging his connections to the powerful Chandler media family, Coates orchestrated an all-out assault on Mizer's business. After Coates's columns appeared, a phalanx of local government officials descended on Mizer's business. Police began to intimidate newsstands where his magazine appeared. City regulators inspected his home, and health officials tested his pet monkeys for diseases. The former model featured in Coates's column sued Mizer for invasion of privacy.

Most ominously, the story brought a plainclothes Los Angeles Police Department vice officer to his door asking to buy nudes. Mizer demurred, offering him only his usual catalogs of men in posing straps. Undeterred, Detective Philip Barnes asked who of the many other photographers featured in his magazine might offer nudes. Mizer again demurred, but Barnes had already visited the studio of Lyle Frisby, a young, up-and-coming Mizer protégé whose images Mizer often included in his magazine. More accommodating, Frisby sold him "inked" nude photos, where the posing straps could be easily rubbed off.

Coates proudly covered the sting operation in a subsequent column. To again sensationalize the threat posed to children, he noted ominously that Frisby's Los Angeles studio was located just 250 yards from an elementary school. Both Frisby and Mizer were promptly arrested for possessing and distributing lewd photographs – a violation of the Los Angeles municipal code allowing Coates's newspaper series to end on a note of civic triumph.

Frisby was easily convicted and spent time in prison. The prosecution of Mizer, however, was more complicated, since the focus of the charge was "aiding and abetting" the sale of lewd pictures. Detective Barnes testified that Mizer told him he could obtain nudes from any of his advertisers, but he failed to note this in his initial report. Mizer denied the claim, testifying that he told detective Barnes that nudes were illegal and unavailable in Los Angeles and that he personally advised all photographers not to deal in nudes. Either way, there was little evidence to link Mizer directly with Frisby's nude photos. Seeing the weakness of the "aiding and abetting" argument, the prosecutor argued that Mizer's own photos were obscene because they displayed both "scenes of brutality and torture" and "the uncovered rump." Mizer's lawyer, Herbert Selwyn from the ACLU, argued that Mizer's posing-strap images were no more lewd than those in classical statuary or in movies such as Garden of Eden, a film set in a nudist colony then screening in area theaters. He called it "the first uncovered rump case" in memory.

But as in almost all trials of physique photographers, the real issue was less the explicitness of the photos than the sexual orientation of their audience. Displaying his real concern, the judge told Selwyn, "These are nothing but pin-up pictures for homosexuals." To feed the judge's suspicions, the prosecutor displayed a copy of Confidential mag- azine at trial with the blaring headline "America on Guard! Homosexuals, Inc." Trying to further associate Mizer with the homosexual cause, he concluded his cross-examination by asking, "Do you also publish the magazine known as ONE?" The judge sustained Selwyn's objection but enjoyed a "hearty chuckle." He found Mizer guilty and sentenced him to ninety days in prison.

Mizer appealed his conviction, telling Kinsey he was willing to put a substantial dent in his bank account and solicit help from nudist and other groups. He convinced a British magazine to publicize the case. "It is odd that when I am one of the few physique photographers who does not deal in nudes that I should be picked out as the one who must fight for their legality," he complained to Kinsey, who thought he was singled out because of the size of his business. Mizer was the aggressive entrepreneur who took the physique business from the back pages of fitness magazines to the cover of his own magazine, openly challenging postal inspectors. Predictably, Mizer's conviction was overturned on appeal. "You have done very well to stand up for your legal rights," Kinsey congratulated him. But Mizer, concerned about the effect such news might have on the field of physique photography, did not gloat. "I am keeping news of our victory quiet because I think some of the photographers in our field need a bit of a deterrent to keep them in line."

Mizer and Barnes squared off again a year later, this time in a televised congressional hearing. Mizer and Frisby became fodder for Senator Estes Kefauver's traveling hearings on the alleged problem of juvenile delinquency in America, part of his bid to enhance his presidential aspirations. Kefauver got Benjamin Karpman, the chief psychotherapist at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., to testify that exposure to pornography at an early age could turn someone gay. Barnes described how he had confiscated pornographic materials from major national distributors Edward Mishkin and Irving Klaw. Some of the material was on display in posters lining the walls of the hearing room.

"Have you had any occasion to investigate cases wherein the use of male models might be used?" Kefauver asked, a delicate way to invoke homosexual erotica. Barnes outlined the case of Frisby and Mizer, pointing out that Mizer happened to be in the audience. Exaggerating the success of his efforts, he claimed he had confiscated $10,000 worth of materials from Frisby, that both men had been convicted of obscenity, and that Mizer's sentence had been overturned only because of a technicality. He highlighted the danger they posed to the public by noting the proximity of the school and the youth of the models.

Kefauver commended Barnes's efforts and noted what a difficult job he had, given how the courts and the legislatures continually failed to provide the tools he needed. Barnes impressed on the committee the need for a national agency to coordinate the efforts of local law enforcement to stamp out pornography. At the conclusion of the hearing, Senator Kefauver offered anyone who had been named the opportunity to correct inaccuracies. Detective Barnes looked squarely at Mizer, egging him on. Mizer contemplated speaking up but, aware of the presence of journalists and television cameras, decided instead to offer a written statement, his preferred form of communication.

In the pages of Physique Pictorial, Mizer denounced the hearings as "the grossest obscenity of public trust" he had ever witnessed. He accused Barnes of perjuring himself in his claims about Mizer's case. Within a year, however, Mizer enjoyed some schadenfreude when he revealed that Barnes was sent to prison for molesting his stepdaughter. He was also delighted to tell readers that Kefauver's chief counsel, James Bobo, was forced to resign after admitting to hosting private screenings of stag films for a Memphis fraternity. It all reinforced Mizer's conviction that the legal system was corrupt and that those who were most obsessed with fighting prurience were hypocrites.

Like many self-appointed guardians of American morality, Coates viewed both the Mattachine Society and the Athletic Model Guild as threats. But the reactions of the two organizations differed markedly. In 1953 Coates gave the Mattachine Society its first negative press coverage by suggesting that it had ties to communism. Coates's accusation caused a crisis in the organization, which led to the resignation of the original founders, many of whom had been members of the Communist Party USA. The organization was restructured and membership fell off. Historian John D'Emilio called it a "retreat to respectability," a turn away from political activism toward internal self-help tactics.

Coates's assault on Mizer was even more aggressive – involving the Los Angeles Police Department, a powerful U.S. senator, and backstage efforts to influence his obscenity trial – yet Mizer changed his operating procedures only slightly. He decided to tone down the "brutality" aspect of his images, eliminating props such as whips or chains. But on the issue of the "uncovered rump," Mizer stood his ground. "Bob has defied them," Kinsey noted of Mizer's refusal to succumb to a Post Office ultimatum barring nudes seen from behind. He also continued his feisty editorials, despite Kinsey's suggestion that he tone them down. "Certain principles I will not back down on," Mizer defiantly told Kinsey.

Each of Mizer's encounters with law enforcement politicized him, and he, in turn, sought to politicize his readers. To supplement his personal experience, he read widely in popular and scholarly texts on censorship and sought to convey that knowledge to his readers. He noted that those who were opposed to physique magazines were organized into groups such as the National Organization for Decent Literature and had the ear of local and national politicians. He pointed out how local newspapers pressured newsstands and magazine distributors to discontinue all physique magazines. He urged readers to organize. When one reader suggested ignoring the censors, Mizer compared him to the Jews in Germany who "ignored the menace of Hitler."

Putting the issue in the context of human rights, Mizer called for a collective and activist opposition. "The censor is a bully and will back down if we all stand up to him." It was a theme he returned to frequently, asserting that putting one's head in the sand would not make the problem go away. He repeatedly implored customers to join the ACLU. "It's Your America," he reminded readers, and politicians and police were "your servants." He implored readers to write their representatives and local newspapers to defend freedom of expression. Otherwise, he warned, a state-controlled media will emerge that would be the envy of Hitler. According to his alarmist rhetoric, the ACLU was the only thing standing between the status quo and totalitarianism.

Mizer's editorials on censorship even seeped into model descriptions. He described Sonny Star, a lean model lounging by the pool, as being from Fargo, North Dakota, where a federal censorship trial was taking place. He railed against police corruption and governmental injustice so often that readers tired of his many editorials – one counted eight in a thirty-two-page issue and complained of all this "doomsday talk." Many just wanted information on where to purchase forbidden materials.

IRON MAN BETRAYAL

As Physique Pictorial and other physique magazines that emphasized the "aesthetic approach" flourished, they increasingly came into conflict with what Mizer called " 'hard-core' muscle magazines" or "old-school muscle books" that had fallen on hard times. He knew that their harsh critique of new magazines like his had alienated "the great bulk" of their readership. But he still encouraged readers to support these magazines and their veteran writers. "We cannot afford to lose them from the field," he generously noted.60 Mizer had gotten his start through the support of these editors and was not prone to burn bridges.

Mizer had an especially close relationship with Iron Man, founded by weightlifter Peary Rader in Nebraska in 1933. Mizer had contributed enough photographs to be listed as one of Iron Man's "staff photographers" in 1949. Some of Mizer's first catalog advertisements appeared in its back pages, and Rader had even printed the first issue of Physique Pictorial. But under pressure from the Post Office, Rader refused to print subsequent issues. Fearing the loss of his second-class mailing privileges, he then stopped running physique photography advertisements. And in 1956 he published a scathing editorial denouncing the "homosexual element" that had infiltrated bodybuilding and ruined its reputation. He called for a comprehensive "crusade" to clean up the sport, including a ban on nude or G-string photographs, fewer body-building contests, and more manly poses. He attributed the immorality that had seeped into bodybuilding to increasing "commercialism," emphasizing that his concerns were not only moral but also financial. Mizer felt sorry for Iron Man. "I doubt if many copies would be sold to those solely interested in the weightlifting results."

This attack from his former supporter and printer caused Mizer to pen his first editorial on "Homosexuality and Bodybuilding." Claiming to have less familiarity with the subject than the editors of Iron Man and others who seemed so preoccupied with it, Mizer first resorted to a version of the schoolyard taunt, "It takes one to know one." He did so by quoting one of the most famous closeted homosexuals in 1950s America. A London reporter had recently asked Liberace in the midst of a legal struggle with a tabloid that had outed him "Is your sex life normal?" Fully composed, Liberace hastily replied, "Yes, is yours?"

In many ways, Liberace and Mizer were in parallel situations. Both offered the public fairly open representations of gay life, but without the label. But because of their popularity, they had caught the attention of the media and were being tarred with the sin of homosexuality. But Mizer went beyond Liberace's taunt to frame the question in terms of civil rights. "We wonder if really good people show prejudice against any minority group," he wrote, comparing such prejudice to that against a particular religion, race, or political party. This effectively made Peary Rader the one guilty of immorality and repositioned the debate on homosexuality within the realm of minority rights. Most important, he referred readers to the homophile groups Mattachine Society and ONE for more factual information.

Mizer's mailbox must have been full after this unusually frank editorial. He noted that readers clamored for him to reprint letters, demonstrating their desire to connect to each other, to see who else was out there reading Physique Pictorial. Mizer printed only four responses. One called Mizer "naïve" for not realizing that all bodybuilders are in some way homosexual, since they are so obsessed with the male body. Another expressed the opposite view, that such "he-men" could not possibly be sissies. But the most unusual letter came from the mother of four male bodybuilders-three of them married with children, the youngest openly gay. She described his difficult coming-out process, psychiatric consultations, and much anguish. But she then painted the picture of a happy, healthy gay domesticity. "John lives with another young man who shares his interests, both are highly successful in films, are 'accepted' everywhere." She thanked Mizer for his sympathetic attitude.

Mizer could not print any letters from openly gay readers for fear of confirming the concerns of censors. But he gave readers clues that he received many such letters. He noted that many had written in anonymously to "unburden [their] frustrations" and "project [their] own motives to us." Although such personal, confessional letters could not be shared, Mizer assured readers that he would send them to a "psychological research group for study," a probable reference to the Kinsey Institute. While Mizer had to be cautious about the content of his magazine to appease censors, his readers were often more explicit. Mizer considered many of the letters he received to be so salacious or incriminating that he did not want to keep them in his home in the event of a "purge" by authorities.

Art historians have documented the lasting impact that Bob Mizer's physique photography had on Western visual culture, influencing the work of such artists as Francis Bacon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andy Warhol. British painter David Hockney famously said, "I came to Los Angeles for two reasons: The first was a photo by Julius Shulman of Case Study House #21, and the other was AMG's Physique Pictorial." Dozens of high-end coffee table books attest to the lasting appeal of the artistic vision of Bob Mizer and his fellow gay physique photographers. But Mizer's business model was as generative as his photography. His business acted as a key catalyst for a gay consumer culture network, encouraging and popularizing many other gay mail-order businesses.

Although often portrayed as something of a bumbling loner, Mizer was at the center of an increasingly sophisticated gay network and came to be a leader of an effort to unite and defend the rights of gay men. It was a dream shared with early gay activist Manuel boy Frank, who, through his involvement in an early underground gay pen-pal club, had seen the potential power in gay men's interest in physique photography. Mizer, too, had an early sense of the depth of a gay market, through his work with Kovert's studio and his classified advertising in Strength & Health. He also had a great sense of the dangers involved. Each time Mizer had come under attack, he had come back more determined and open about his intentions. Neither the Post Office, nor the local vice police, nor vigilante journalists, nor mainstream muscle magazines deterred him. Over the course of his career he tried various tactics: reasoning with authorities, cautioning his fellow photographers, fanning the flames of outrage, and encouraging collective action. He had been on a crusade since high school to stand up and make the world a better place for his fellow homosexualists, and Physique Pictorial was his vehicle.

Mizer saw Alfred Kinsey as a hero and collaborator in this crusade because he saw Kinsey's scientific work as a vehicle for increasing tolerance. "One of the greatest values of your present work will be to allow at least the ones who read it to realize they are not uniquely perverse because of either their overt or desired behavior," he wrote to Kinsey. "Many a man will be able to hold his head a little higher and square back his shoulders and know he is not disgustingly 'abnormal' merely because he is gifted with more healthy, vital sex powers than his sanctimonious moral condemner." But what Mizer wrote so admiringly of Kinsey also applied to his own life's work. Mizer took inspiration from his academic friend and advisor, offering the same message of healthy normality in a more visually accessible format, reaching a much wider audience. He provided images to substantiate Kinsey's scientific treatise.

Like his mentor, Mizer was something of a workaholic, shooting still or moving film nearly every day of his life. But his ambitions were not monetary. Although by the end of his life he had expanded his home-studio property in Los Angeles to include several adjoining homes and a pool, it was never lavish. It became a sort of dormitory or homeless shelter for wayward models. Friends remember him in later years wearing glasses held together with tape and string. After his death in 1992, friends found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stuffed in film cans-proceeds never invested, or given much thought. Mizer's ambitions had not changed from the time he was in high school. He took pride in knowing his readers considered the arrival of his magazine like "a visit from an old friend." And since that old friend "always brings new friends with him," he hoped it offered his readers the sense that they were part of a large, welcoming community similar to the one he had discovered in Pershing Square. As he told his readers, he hoped all who read his magazine carefully – who "take the trouble to study" it – would take away a message of "hope and inspiration."

Hope was the message that Noel Gillespie found in Physique Pictorial when he discovered it as a teenager. He remembered it as "a gay-oriented oasis" in a Cold War desert of prudery and macho conformity. He considered Mizer less a salesman than "an old friend and confidante" because of all his "chatty remarks" among the model images. Gillespie praised Mizer's editorials on the "anti-nudity, anti-gay, anti-free speech attitudes" of the period. He recalls how he eagerly antici- pated each new issue for both Mizer's "latest fresh-faced discoveries and his candid and for the period, courageous commentaries." Beyond this special bond with Mizer, he also felt linked to his fellow subscribers through their occasional letters to the editor, which he thought made Physique Pictorial "more a friendly resource than a mere sales catalogue."

Hope was exactly the message that a young David Hurles understood when he encountered Physique Pictorial on newsstands in Cincinnati in 1957. "I came face to face with the awesome and wonderful knowledge of a place somewhere different from any place I yet knew," Hurles later wrote. He remembered following Mizer's exploits closely, noticing when he put in a swimming pool in 1956. "His pictures, magazines and films turned us on. But more than that, they gave us hope," Hurles eulogized at the time of Mizer's death in 1992. Hurles later became a Mizer protégé and went on to produce his own magazine. "Bob revealed the evidence which made us certain that what we desired and needed did, in fact, exist."

-- from David K. Johnson's Buying Gay.

#bob mizer #long post

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