#the whole thing was just insane. it was never gonna happen in a million years

[henry7931]

Chase:

Today is a really weird day and I didn’t know how I would feel about coming over to my best friend Bryce’s house especially after the incident.

Bryce and I have been friends for over 12 years now and him and I have always been a couple of scrawny gay nerds. We both love Minecraft legend of Zelda, just about every video game you can think of and one way we really bonded was figuring out that we are both gay.

Now for years, I’ve always known that Bryce had a crush on me. For me it was never that I didn’t like Bryce or I was never interested, but I never wanted to ruin the friendship. But then you have Walker is older brother. Walker is a few years older than us. He’s super handsome, athletic, charming, he could basically date anyone he laid his eyes on.

The truth is Walker was my sexual awakening for years. I’ve stayed at their house and spent the night and it wouldn’t be uncommon to see Walker come out and nothing but basketball shorts hell I don’t even think he would wear underwear sometimes.

I can remember the way seeing him made me blush, and I tried my hardest not to stare at him. I don’t know if Walker could tell that I was checking him out. Or maybe Walker was just used to people checking him out shouldn’t be any surprise that his little brother‘s gay friend had his eyes glued to him.

And somehow he continues to keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter…

So several weeks ago, Bryce and Walker’s family went on vacation to some tropical island. And something very strange happened while touring an old temple. How Bryce explained it to me was that they had a sign up that specifically said, “ please do not touch artifact.”

Bryce can be such a stickler for rules and I can almost see it in my head. It all went down. Bryce told Walker not to touch it. Walker likes to get on Bryce‘s nerves Walker reaches for it and then shit got real quick. Because Walker and Bryce have now switched bodies.

When Bryce was explaining all this to me, I really thought it was bullshit. I mean, who would believe that that sounds like something from a movie and yet even hearing Walker‘s voice, I can tell just by the tone that it’s Bryce.

So today is the first day that I have seen Bryce since he swapped bodies with Walker. And that’s why I feel all kinds of weird.

Now Bryce and I have stayed with each other like 1 million times and it’s really not unusual for us to be basically naked around each other. OK maybe not completely naked but like at least in her underwear.

And I have tried really, really hard to make him feel comfortable and I think I’m doing a really good job but having him standing in front of me in just his brother’s boxers is driving me a bit insane.

I’m sitting on Bryce‘s bed and walks back into his room just to ask me if I wanted anything from downstairs like something to drink or maybe a snack. I can barely get out the words because I can’t stop staring at the chiseled God in front of me.

“ chase you’re staying the night right?,” he asked me.

“ oh yeah, of course I’m staying the night as long as that’s OK.”

“ yeah man of course it’s okay! You know it’s okay man. No one cares you stay the night. You’re like basically family sides. My brother isn’t going to be home tonight. He’s wanted a lot of space since the whole. I’ve got his body thing. And both my parents are out of town so it’s just gonna be us,” he says with a side smirk.

“ well if it’s just us what do you wanna get into tonight?,” I say trying to make conversation.

I’m holding my eye contact directly at his face and I try my hardest not to look anywhere else, but he takes his hand and start scratching his balls and I can almost feel my whole cock twitch.

“ I mean since everybody’s not here tonight, we can always break into my parents liquor cabinet, whoop whoop!”

You know I am probably the most innocent 18 year-old alive, I don’t wanna attend parties nor do I really sneak around my parents but I feel like alcohol sounds like a great idea right now. I mean it I might be able to calm down a bit.

“Hell yeah! That’s sounds fun!,” I say with some enthusiasm.

“Bet! Be right back!”

I hear as heavy feet running down the stairs and all I can do is try to think of something that would totally turn me off like anything taxes, my grandparents, just something…

And yet all I can think about is how hot it would be if I could suck on his toes. I’ve had a thing for feet a while now and it’s taking me a little bit to accept it and a part of that I blame Walker for him because he has some sexy ass feet.

I can remember clearly the smell of his feet after he would finish football practice and he would pull off his shoes. Shit! Fuck! I’m so hard right now. I feel like I’m gonna have to sneak away and beat one out in the bathroom just to clear my head.

And then here comes Bryce with two glasses in his hand and a bottle of wine for the both of us just super eager.

I reposition myself to where I’m laying flat on my stomach so he doesn’t notice.

Bryce hops on to the bed with me and try’s his hardest to navigate a wine opener.

“Geez, I have no clue what I’m doing here…”

I eventually take it and started twisting in. I try to pull it out but struggle.

“Here since you now have all of the muscles.”

He rolls his eyes at me and tugs it out.

“Success!”

“Good team work there he-man,” I say playfully.

Bryce’s pours both of us a glass and at first I thought it tasted awful. But the second glass… now I see why people like it. I feel so warm inside and relaxed.

We both lay back in his bed.

“Is it super weird for you?,” I ask him.

“What?”

“You know… being in your Walkers body.”

“Um… yes. Yes and no I guess. I feel like everything has just moved so quick since the trip. I feel very different in public, like I’m so much more noticed. girls hit on me… so do guys. It’s a lot to take in especially since you and my family are the only ones who know about it.”

“What about Walker’s girlfriend?”

“Oh he broke up with her, thought it would be less weird. Although he had to do it over text because I refused to call or see her in person.”

“Damn! That’s crazy.”

“Yeah but she was like his girlfriend for the month, nothing serious.”

Of course…

“So is this pretty permanent?”

“Yeah I think so, unless you know of any other magic objects than can reverse it haha.”

“No, not off of the top of my head,”I say jokingly.

“Well… that answers your question. This is my body now. This is the new me I guess,” he says looking his muscles over.

I look them over as well and then my eyes draw this briefs… he’s got a hard on…

Bryce catches my eyes and says, “you wanna touch it?”

“What?!?”

“Come on Chase… don’t play games with me. I know you and I know you’ve had the hots for this body. I’ve known for years now.”

I take a deep breath… I feel my nervous all over again.

“It’s okay, I know you like this body. It’s my body now. And I want you to touch my massive dick.”

“But Bryce!”

“Shhh! Chase I’ve had a crush on you for years and I know you would never fool around with me. And now I have the body you’ve been lusting for years now. TOUCH MY MASSIVE DICK PLEASE!”

“Fuck, okay.”

I start touching it from the outside and it does feel huge!

“You know I love you Bryce, you’re the most important person to me. I just never wanted us to loose our friendship. It’s why I never tried anything with you.”

“I know. And listen I know you weren’t trying to go after my brother. I know what he looks like. Everyone does. But now I have the body and the personality so, I’m giving you no choice but to date me. Got it?”

“Ugh fine,” I say rolling my eyes.

“Now can you do me a favor?”

“Sure!”

“Can I see your feet?” he says to me.

Wow! Wasn’t expecting that!

“Wait why?”

“I hope you don’t think this is weird but I have a thing for them.”

“Shut up! So do I!”

“You do?!?”

“Yeah especially…,” I eye down to his feet and wiggles his toes.

“Oh my god! This is about to be a wild night!”

“Wait, can I kiss you?”

“Please!”

Part 2 Coming…

[angeltannis]

Tbh I’ve always been of the opinion that the PVE promised in the 2019 Overwatch 2 announcement was absurd. A story mode for EVERY hero, plus unique skill trees with 40-50 different skills each? It seemed like it was going to be comparable to Borderlands with Vault Hunter builds, except Borderlands has never had a game with over thirty playable Vault Hunters. The most they’ve ever had is six.

It was an insane promise that never had any chance of coming to fruition. I can’t believe they ever made that claim in the first place.

[venuslarkspur]

Teen Hero Shenanigans

Part 4

Lost And Found

Summary: Your Damian’s Twin Sister, after arriving 3 years after your brother, you never excepted to take the Robin mantle, until your brother runs away and you volunteer to take his place. Damian eventually returns and you are discharged from the role, after bottling up your anger you decide to go solo by running away and stealing the Batgirl. But you’re not alone, your sort of boyfriend joins you. The main problem is the boyfriend in question is your brother’s best friend, Jon Kent.

Warning: Wounds, pregnancy, mentions of abandonment, mentions of marriage, angst sort of. Toxic Al Ghul family.

Pairing: Jon Kent x Batsis (romantic), Batfamily x Batsis (platonic).

———————

“Are you feeling better now?” Jon asked, you were sat on your shared windowsill whilst he tended to your wounds. You tried to tend to his wounds too, but to be honest he had taken basically no damage; he was just trying to make you feel better. “All good now.” He said and let you lift your leg down, you looked down at your battered uniform. Seeing the beautiful purple fabric paired with the yellow symbol that you loved so much, it made you miss home. “I got the test, it’s in the bathroom for you.” He uttered, hitting his nails nervously

“Okay I’ll be right back, thanks.” You said and stood up, you kissed his forehead and disappeared into the bathroom. You were both acting, acting like everything was okay. Acting as if you were both mature adults who were ready for this, you weren’t. You were 2 days shy of your 16th birthday and Jon had only just turned 16. You pondered to yourself, that maybe if you had instead acted less like an adult and more like the child you actually are, this wouldn’t be happening. You noticed Jon had bought three tests, probably in case of a false negative. You unwrapped them and eventually did the job.

Finally came the moment of truth, you held the three tests below you, refusing to look. Your arm slung up against the sink next to you as you sat down. Praying to whoever was listening for this all to be foully, you took in a deep breath and breathed out again before lifting up all three tests. All of which read “pregnant.”

————————

You sat frozen as ice, just staring and struggling to comprehend; wondering if this was the price of you and Jon’s love. Or would this be a fatal mistake? A million thoughts came and raced through your mind: Has Damian already told father? What will your siblings do? What will your maternal family think?! Would they make you get rid of it? Could you even care for something so vulnerable when you yourself were so so vulnerable? Will Jon’s parents want nothing to do with you?

Most of the thoughts were preposterous and insane, normally you’d know that. But your hands sweated and your heat thumped all the same. You managed to climb of the toilet and yell “Jon!”

—————————

“Oh gosh-I..I don’t know what to say.” Jon uttered, you both sat on the end of the bed; you held up your positive pregnancy tests. “Maybe that you aren’t gonna abandon me?” You said, coming off a bit harsh; logically you knew Jon wouldn’t do that, but your insecurity got the better of you. “I’m sorry, you’re right.” He bowed his head either in shame or sadness. You couldn’t tell which hurt you more. But what made you tear up was the thought of bringing your kid home, and giving them the childhood you wish you had; They would have so many people who would love them, unlike your childhood that seethed with deceit and rage.

“It’s gonna be fine- I mean, I think it will get easier as we get older.” He looked up to you again, you guessed he finally found the right things to say. “No I’m not gonna leave even if this whole thing is freaking me out a bit.” He said and rubbed the back of his head. “Jon, are we gonna get married?” You asked, looking at him with the gaze he found so soothing. “What?!” He jittered back slightly, not in hesitance but rather shock. His face looked so cute now, but you couldn’t understand what startled him so much. You had always assumed getting married was the safest option if you ever were impregnated, at least that’s what your grandfather said. You had to fight the urge to strike a match when you recalled to yourself the fact that your aunt Nyssa was born out of wedlock. But you resisted the urge.

“We aren’t even old enough to drive let alone get married.” He tells you quietly bowing his head slightly. “Oh..” You mutter under your breath, a bit sad but also grateful. “It’s not that I won’t want to one day, I think it would benefit our kid-gosh! that sounds weird to say…but anyways I want the same as you, I don’t want him or her having to travel between cities constantly.” He tells, moving back to his original spot. Your heart fluttered a bit, thank goodness for Lois Lane teaching Jon some responsibility; You excepted him to leave and get on with his life in all truth. “Sorry, it sounds like all that time in the mountains clouded my brain, I wasn’t thinking.” You reply, playing with your hands.

“Don’t apologise, anyway, it’s your birthday in 2 days. I’m gonna get some supplies for your cake.” He places a kiss on your cheek and stands up, it was his little kisses that you always appreciated so much, you always had to savour every piece of affection he gave you. “You gonna be okay on your own?” He asks, normally you’d say some remark about how you could ‘handle yourself’ but you didn’t today, knowing he was already worried and stressed. “Of course, don’t worry.” You say smiling, he opens the door and throws his coat on; “Just shout, and I’ll be there.” Jon said, closing the door behind him. You let out a sigh of relief and took some time to stare at the night sky in the window next to you, thinking how it didn’t compare to Jon.

—————————

You hear a sudden ‘knock knock’ on the door as you clean around the flat. You tilt your head confused, Jon had only left 5 minutes ago? And he knew the door was open. Something was off. You grabbed a plate from the tiny kitchen, maybe to use it as a weapon? You weren’t sure, your body just went into fight or flight. You slowly opted towards the door, not bothering to use the peep hole.

You open the door, fast, you raise the plate up ready to attack. But your body hesitates at the familiar face. “Dick?” You ask, your voice cracking. You stood there in shock, completely petrified. His face oddly relaxed though, you excepted him to be seething. “I’ve been looking for you.” He said, but instead of sounding harsh his face eases; and he pulls you into a hug. So quick you don’t process it until 5 seconds later, your hands shake but you return his gesture. You stay that way for another 10 seconds, and without warning your facade collapses and tears began to fall from your eyes slowly. You slowly back up and cover your face, Dick ushers you inside and shuts the door. You suddenly choose now to take into account he was in full Nightwing get-up, it felt like your heart was collapsing, all the recurring memories of your family rushed to you, reminding you what you gave up. You fall to your knees with little grace and cry into your hands.

A whirlwind of emotions had taken over, Dick crouches next to you and you blurt something out; “I’m sorry brother.” You babble out, looking at him. He stares in shock, hopefully not a bad shock. “What?” He uttered, shocked at the use of the word ‘brother’, sure you had called Damian and even Jason at one point ‘brother’, but never him. His heart melted and he took you again in his arms, more firmly this time. “I’m so sorry!” You spurt out, an ugly waterfall of tears falling down your face; turning your cheeks sore. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, we’ve all been worried sick.” He whispered in your ear, it was oddly comforting. “Even father?”

“Especially father.” He declared, pulling you to your feet slowly. “Damian said you had something to tell us all?” He asked, but immediately regretted asking; you could tell by his face. “Oh..maybe Christmas would be a better time to let you all know, since I think father might be less mad on that day.” You remarked so casually but looking downward at your beaten costume. “Don’t worry, they will all just be happy you’re safe..” He said, awkwardly, but you could tell he was heart broken inside that you left, he acted relaxed but you knew the truth. You wiped your face with your arm and sniffled, “Can I please go home now?” You said, a sadness and urgency in your voice.

“That’s why I came.” He replied back, a seriousness in his tone. He ushered you out the abandoned flat, taking in its surroundings; probably wondering how you lived like this, but didn’t say anything. “W-wait!” You stuttered, half way down the hall. “What about Jon..? He’s coming with us.” You declared, crossing your arms; trying to look strong despite your tear dampened face and shivering lip. Dick sighs and confesses to you, “In truth, this was planned, we were waiting to get you both alone; Jon’s family should be meeting him now and taking him home.” He said, hiding no secrets. You both walked again, hoping one day you and Jon could still make that cake together. “But father might not want me to see him after everything.” You said, tears threatening to fall again, but Dick places a reassuring hand on your shoulder.

“I’m not happy about this, that’s for sure, but I can’t stop you loving him, which is why I can only help you.” He smiled at you and you returned his smile. “Also..they all insisted on coming.” He announced, and you turned your head to look at him. “Seriously? ALL of them?” You asked, and you actually feel happy, just like old times; “Well, myself, Barb, Jason, Cass, Tim, Duke and Steph.” He listed, and your heart twisted upon not hearing Damian’s name. Was he still mad? “Oh and Kate has came round as well, Bruce knows how much you like her.” He mentioned, it was true. You did like your Aunt Kate and how comforted she made you feel.

“I���m happy.” You told him, he peered at you and kept his smile. “You’re getting better at expressing emotion.” He said “I’m proud of you.” He patted your head and you continued down the grimy stairs. “Well I did have a good teacher.” You announced and he looked at you hopefully but you had to disappoint him. “I was talking about Jon, but sure you work too.” You giggled and he playfully eyed you. “Seriously?”

“Very, I hope I can see him again before Christmas.”

————————

THANK YOU ALL FOR WAITING PATIENTLY <3

My exams are now over 💗🎉

Taglist: @waterwyne @venusmorning @planetlotus @sugarrush-blush @skepvids @dreaming-of-the-reality @otterluver05 @godoreo22 @earth-to-name @krys0210 @0924ours @type-ink @mallowryblog @allycat4458 @chenlelover @qardasngan

IF YOU ASKED TO BE TAGGED AND WEREN’T, PLEASE CHECK UR SETTINGS 💗 (I promise you weren’t ignored)

[husbandhoshi]

TO GROW LOVE (AND EAT IT TO THE CORE)

pairing: mingyu x gn!reader wc: 8.1k summary: your whole life, you've only wanted one thing. then you meet mingyu. suddenly you want too much, and you wish the summer never ended. notes: farmer!au, established relationship, angst/hurt/a little comfort

this is a birthday fic for my one and only cat @wuahae ! yes this is about half a year late but what can i say. all good things come with time. thank you for being so kind, funny, and thoughtful (and patient)! not a day goes by where i’m not thankful for our friendship :)

and a million thanks to hana @wqnwoos and jackie @97-liners for helping me with edits. literally you guys are insane writers and i will never stop looking up to you.

i. strawberries (the summer we were young)

When a strawberry is ripe, the seeds push out from the heart of the fruit, as if it's bursting from the inside out.

This is one of the few and only things you've learned by living in Seogwipo, where strawberry season comes like a supernova. The May sun, full and heavy, peels into summer, and the roadside farms open their doors, trying to catch stray vacationers from Jeju City on the other side of the island.

That being said, there are approximately two things to do here. One of them is farm. The other is pretend like you have a life, which is your childhood friend Yizhuo's favorite thing to do when she's back from university on summer break.

Today, this involved convincing her ritzy, too-good Seoul friends that they're missing out on this side of Jeju. (Missing out on what? You're not sure. Perhaps the chipped paint of the mural walls, or the endless flat-topped stretches of seagrass. Yizhuo isn't fooling anyone, but you've always liked stretching your legs out in the bed of her pick-up, even on the long drive to nowhere.)

Unsurprisingly, her friends quickly came to the same conclusion. Just one look at your local strawberry patch, with none of the glamour of the bloated tourist traps in the city, and they decided they'd rather spend the afternoon at the beach.

It was then, between the fragaria blooms, when you met Mingyu. He asked for your name, and the rest was history. Yizhuo and co. scattered like the grasping hands of an overripe dandelion and you learned that he was, one, the newly-graduated son of a pair of local farmers, and two, very, very attractive. Almost too much so, especially for a place like this.

Now he holds up a berry, a bright red murder between his fingers, and tells you to try it.

"You must be delusional if you think i'm taking food from a stranger," you laugh, perched on the fence bordering the field. It sprawls before you, melon stripes on the sunbaked ground.

"No, my name is Mingyu," he replies. "No idea who delusional is." His smile, all bright lip and snaggletooth, tears into the scarlet belly of a newly picked strawberry.

"We all know what happened to Persephone."

"Well, if the underworld was a strawberry patch, I wouldn't mind being stuck there for all of eternity."

"What're you picking all these for, anyway?" you ask, watching Mingyu struggle with his too-big straw hat between the vines. His woven basket bleeds over with little berries.

"Jam. I make it on the very first day of every summer."

"Why?"

"You ask a lot of questions for someone who trespassed on my farm. You're cute, but I won't let you off easy."

He laughs at how you balk, clearly red-handed. You're not sure how to tell him you don't think you were supposed to be here either. You don't do things like sit in the back of trucks, trespass, or talk to pretty farmer boys who take a fancy to you, but it's the summer before you graduate and you're not even sure how long you'll have to continue making bad decisions.

"Are you gonna take my first-born now?" you joke instead. The daylight runs down the rim of Mingyu's hat, trickles down his brow, and you wish you could pour the image of him into a jar and keep it forever.

"No, but I will invite you in for some fresh jam on toast. I baked a loaf this morning." and when you say nothing, he continues. "The strawberries are only good once a year. It's the best you'll ever have. Promise."

It's a whine and a half, and somehow you convince yourself this will be the last bad decision you'll make. You've been here long enough to know that good things don't come twice in Seogwipo, and he is unlikely to be an exception.

Yizhuo blows up your phone, you tie the gingham apron around Mingyu's tiny waist, and the basket turns to blood in the saucepan.

Mingyu is right. Love comes to you in that kitchen, high and red like the sun, and the jam never tastes as good as it does that summer.

ii. watermelon (hollowed out, like a magic trick)

"A good watermelon sounds like a heartbeat."

You watch Mingyu heave the fruit, small and striped, out of his grocery bag. It joins the array of egg sandwiches and banana milks you picked up from the store together earlier. (There should have been chocolate Pepero too, but you split the box on the walk).

You're on a picnic, sprawled out on the outcropping overlooking the water. The path up is basically right behind your house, but you had never cared to visit. It had always been the local makeout spot, a schlocky teen crawl for those with nothing better to do, and yet, with Mingyu stretched out beside you, it seems newer. More exciting.

You're still just friends, or at least that's what you told Yizhuo. But ever since you sat on Mingyu's kitchen counter and ate from his jam-covered spatula, you don't think you've gone a week without seeing him. It's been almost two months, which seems so long and yet not long enough—he makes it easy to be greedy.

"See?" He thumps the watermelon with the heel of his palm. "Try it."

You already went through this entire charade at the grocery store, right in front of all the local aunties, but you indulge him. There's little point to triple checking if it's still ripe, but you think he just likes hitting it.

"It sounds good," you say. "But how are we even gonna eat it? We don't have a knife."

"Watch this." Mingyu procures a coin from his pocket. "You didn't learn this in elementary school? I feel like everyone was doing it."

"Here?" you ask, incredulous.

"Yeah, here. I grew up here too, you know."

He holds the edge of the coin to the skin and slams his palm into it once more, so that it lodges itself into the rind, and begins dragging it around the fruit. You start to wonder if he bought the watermelon just to show you a party trick—not that you mind, though. The strain of his biceps peeks through his rolled up white tee, and you remember why he was able to stop you with just one look back when you first met.

"No way." The watermelon is so ripe, it bleeds around the incision. "I feel like I know everyone here. And I definitely would have remembered you."

"I was probably, like, two grades above you," he replies. "And my parents shipped me off to live with my cousins after elementary school. They said I should get out of Seogwipo and experience the real world."

"Good call. There's nothing here." You watch Mingyu spin the melon over to cut through the other side. The coin catches the sunlight, and it looks like gold. "I wish I left for university. The one here is so small."

"Really?" He pauses to show you his handiwork. The two melon halves roll over on their backs, their cut edge cruel and jagged. "Cool, huh?"

"Impressive," you say. "Honestly. I really didn't think that would work."

"I didn't either when I first saw someone do it. But I’ll try anything once," he replies, ripping open the packaging of the plastic spoon from the bag. "I can't believe you don't like it here."

"You do?"

"Yeah. A lot." He shoves the spoon in his mouth, and you watch the watermelon juice pool around his lips. "I missed home. The trees and the tall grass and the ocean. All the fruits. Everything. I learned to ride a bike, right down there by the water."

"Hm." He passes you the spoon. You don't want to hog it, so you carve out a piece bigger than you need. "Are you gonna work at the farm?"

"Maybe. Haven't decided yet," he says. "I think I want to be here, though. Maybe do something with food, but I want to be home."

"That's funny, because I think I’ve always wanted to live a different life. Or at least one somewhere else."

"You want to go to law school, right?"

"Yeah." Mingyu is right. The watermelon is all sugar, and you would almost feel guilty for eating it if it wasn't technically good for you. "I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer. It's something about the people watching, I think."

"That’s really cool," Mingyu says, mouth full but no less sincere. It's then that you notice your shoulders are almost touching, and your heart crawls back up to your mouth. "You know what you want. I admire that."

He makes it sound like a compliment, but you're sure it's a curse.

You think of your parents. There's a permanent wrinkle ironed into their foreheads, the paper crease of expectations and high standards. It's not that they didn't care, but their kind of care was a humbled sort, made heavy by a hard life. It didn't help that your big sister Seohyun went straight from Yonsei to work a big tech job in San Francisco and never once looked back.

But you can't blame any of them—wanting has always been a hereditary failing. Sometimes Yizhuo will catch you frowning at nothing, and then you remember that life isn't a performance and every day ends at the same time no matter how hard you work. But you don't know how to tell her that the only thing you can do sometimes is want, because otherwise you wouldn't really have much at all.

It seems like the exact opposite of how Mingyu lives—everything about him seems to pass like the seasons. Maybe that's why you can't seem to get enough of each other.

"Thank you. Really." You dig the spoon into your half of the melon. There isn't much left. "You're way too nice to me."

"It’s not hard to be," he laughs. "Maybe you're just too hard on yourself."

You're losing track of the distance between the two of you. You can almost feel the heat playing off his skin.

"Maybe."

It's then, under the veil of summer, where you meet Mingyu's gaze and, finally, things seem close to simple.

All you know are his eyes, heavy with sun, and then the slow, slow move of his lips against yours. He tastes like August, long and sweet, and for once you know what it's like to not only want, but to have, and to have again.

The ocean sings on the horizon, and the watermelon bellies weep.

iii. adzuki beans (or, the blood of a headless taiyaki)

Mingyu eats taiyaki headfirst because he says it hurts less.

"That makes no sense," you tell him, your pinkies linked. You never really liked holding hands, but yours fits so perfectly in Mingyu's and there's some girlish, childlike shine to it when you watch his finger search for yours after just a moment separated.

"What do you mean."

He breaks your gaze to eye a red bean taiyaki, like an unwilling predator sizing up their prey. It's the lamest, most embarrassing iteration of National Geographic you've ever seen, and yet you cannot find any fiber within yourself not deeply in love with the lion.

Fall is a forgiving place for your relationship to settle. You're now a senior at university and he's started his gap year. Gap implies he's in the middle of something, but in true Mingyu fashion, he leaves it up to fate, or chance, or something not nearly as kind (whim).

"Taiyaki isn't alive. And why would you want to pretend it is? Eating gummy bears would become an extinction event."

"It kind of is." He holds out the tail end of the taiyaki, the pastry almost explicitly flayed open, in front of you to eat. "Why does the Haribo bear have a face? Why do the gummy bears live in a gummy forest?"

"Great, so now I can’t even enjoy gummy bears without feeling like a serial killer?"

You dig your pointer into his shoulders, broad from all the time he spends on the farm. To think that his hands, big and weathered, were made to pick berries (and now wrap around your pinky finger) is bruising, if not ridiculously funny.

"It's a crime of passion. Gummy passion. Prosecute that."

He kisses your cheek and your heart almost squeezes into two.

The terrible thing about being with Mingyu is how seemingly endless his affection is. Now he's feeding you in public and buying the two of you matching socks (cat and dog, to be exact), although you'll admit it's a little charming, even if the neighbors do gossip.

He's sweet, too sweet, and his kisses stick to the back of your throat.

But you can't be fooled. There's an unsaid violence to the way Mingyu loves. (The meticulous spiral of the peel he carves when you ask for him to cut you an apple. The grind, decisive and cruel, of a knife against a cutting board. A pair of canines against your neck, your jaw.)

Even now, he bites the head off another unwitting taiyaki before stuffing it back in the bag.

"We're still splitsing, right?" he says, with perhaps 1% of his mouth available for speaking and the other 99% murder machine.

Splits, he always says before you share food. You never had the heart to tell him that it's in the same family as mines or sharesies or takebacks—silly childhood relics, ones that no one uses anymore because they don't mean anything.

This time, you don't hear him because you're thinking about the law school fair you went to before Mingyu picked you up. The future is so close, it scares you. A year from now, what ground would you be standing on? Would it smell like this—the peat, the thread-spool fields, the balm of the ocean? Would you still have Mingyu's finger wrapped round yours?

"Have you decided if you're staying at the farm?" you ask.

"Not really." He uses the back of his hand to wipe off his chin. "If my sister decides to take over, I’m actually kinda thinking of going to pastry school instead of getting a masters."

Mingyu had been toying with the idea for some time after you had talked about it on the outlook. It started off as a joke (September; a galette), then a what if (October; green tea mochi), and now it sits at a kinda.

"Kinda?"

The word gathers speed in the pachinko machine of your mind. You never liked being a kinda person. For Mingyu, it seems like a luxury of a word, but for you, it's really just another thing to hide behind. Kinda talented, kinda ambitious, kinda just there. You're always one foot in, one foot out of something better.

"Yeah, kinda. Why?"

"I dunno. What if we both end up leaving?"

"Maybe. You still want to, right?"

You would be lying if you said you didn't—it's what you always wanted. Seogwipo has been a sun-rot, too-small crutch for you, but you would also be lying if you said you weren't terrified that you'd eventually come back, limping like some doomed Icarus, unable to truly make it in the real world.

Then you think of the pockmarked farmland beside your home, lacy with the fall harvest. Even now, you can trace the endless blue of the coastline all the way there, cut through all the maybes and just let the sound of the ocean fold you into sleep like you were a child again. You wonder if Seohyun, all the way on the other side of the world, ever misses it.

"I’m not sure," you say, because, as much as you don't like it, it's the only answer you have.

"It's ok. You'll figure it out. You always do." He squeezes your cheeks together between his thumb and index, laughing at how they pillow out underneath his fingers. "Screw pastry school. I could come with you. Who else would keep you fed?"

Mingyu's complete and unfounded belief in you makes you feel something close to betrayal. How could he say any of that? With what proof? Only someone like Mingyu would be able to hold the wrinkled fruit of your unremarkable life between his palms and see something better than that. Maybe it's because he grew up on a farm. Either that, or he already cares for you too much, too painfully.

Secrets are easy to keep when they look like yours. At least here, in the pit of your stomach, you can keep count, take attendance of them, all your tittering, small anxieties. Some days it feels like your ribs are pressing out, but it's better than cutting everything loose to spill out over what little you do have control over.

You can handle a little pressure. You have to.

What concerns you is the hand Mingyu's got across your chest. With one look, he just might gut you. A twist of the heart-knife, and all those carefully wound insides carved out in an instant—maybe he'd pity you, but worse than that, he'd likely be disappointed.

For you, expectation has always stood taller than shame, and the idea that he sees something past you makes you want to run away.

"I could be a house husband," he says as easily as ever. "You'll be off saving the world, arguing with whoever, and I'll be there to run you a bath afterwards."

"Let's not get too ahead of ourselves," you reply, binding up the strange, hollow feeling in your stomach with a laugh.

There's a scared little girl hiding inside you, and whether Mingyu sees her or not hurts the same. A spade is a spade. You can only pretend so long.

You look at the taiyaki floating in their wax paper bag, blinded and wrought open by the same grin that now peels you down, and you're not hungry anymore.

iv. winter pears (rotten, outside your parents' house)

Mingyu's family loves Christmas.

You think it's because of the pear trees they have in the front yard. They stand bravely before the house, all emerald ash and wisdom in the December freeze. Run your palms over the knobs and it's like you can see into a sleepy visage of simpler days past. (Below its heart, carved: 1982, the year the farm was bought. Along the tangle of the roots: gyu waz here, in an unsure, childish scrawl.)  

Winter comes to the countryside crawling on its hands and knees. On days it doesn't snow, there's a mist, boggy and clingy. You've come to realize the cold is more of a threat than a promise, and so the pear trees still bear fruit; the silvery branches hang heavy, faithful.

The first day of December, Mingyu's parents had tasked the two of you with decorating the farmhouse, a duty you took very seriously. You wrapped Mingyu up in string lights and watched him blink in and out like your own personal firefly.

It wasn't until you watched the rafters, the barn doors, the joyous vault of the ceiling all glow, like a spectacular firework, that you finally started to understand why Mingyu was so into the holidays.

It was in the yellow blush of the string lights that you had your first pear from the tree, which Mingyu insisted was a holiday tradition. We make poached pears, he said, mid-bite. You simmer the pear in syrup until it gets so soft, you can cut into it with a fork. Just like butter.

That same night, he kissed you, mouth hot and trembling and tasting of honey, and pressed you against the bark so hard, you could feel the grit of its veins against your skin.

You think December became your favorite month, and pears your favorite fruit.

So much so, that for the entire month, you try to put away your worries about law school applications to celebrate with Mingyu and his family.

You learn his mom makes the best hot chocolate (a cinnamon stick and a dogged devotion to the whisk), and that Mingyu has no clue on God's green earth how to ice skate. (He careens right into your chest the first time. You spend the next hour with him attached to you like a backpack—he manages to find the most impractical ways to do anything, which you somehow admire the most). On Sundays, Yizhuo ditches her Seoul friends and instead accompanies you to the mall two towns over, where she watches you compare different ties and watches and collagen creams as you decide on gifts for his family. (Lilac is so last year, she'd say, stirring the straw of a watered-down milk tea.)

It's not until the weekend before Christmas when you realize just how serious things have gotten. Your feet understand the meander of the dirt path to the farmhouse, your bones the scent of the yellow-skinned apple, the faded wildflowers. Your palms crave the plush of the rug they have in front of the fireplace. Hell, you can't even eat soondubu without thinking of the kind Mingyu's dad makes, with extra anchovies and green onion.

You don't think about what this means. There are ten days left in December and love poured from a full cup never seems to run out.

"Please let me carry some of those," Mingyu wheedles. "Oh my god. I'm like the worst boyfriend in the world."

"No, you are not." you make your way up to his doorstep, taking care to one-two step over the stray roots of one of the pear trees. It's second nature to you by now. "The moment I hand you a box, you are gonna start trying to figure out what it is."

He harumphs and plucks the big one off the top anyway, the one he knows you can't reach. "I didn't even know you were getting us gifts. You didn't have to."

"It's the least I could do. Who shows up to a holiday dinner emptyhanded?" You stop at the front door. "And stop shaking it," you laugh, using the tip of your boot to nudge his shin.

"Okay. Okay," he says, saccharine, adoring, before grabbing the doorknob. "Ready? Are you nervous? You shouldn't be nervous, right? It's not fancy or anything, if you were worried about that."

And that's the thing that wedges itself between your ribs. Mingyu and his whole family are like this. They love and worry and love again; it presses deep into you, fills you, and overflows.

So here you are, standing in your nicest dress and balancing a stack of gifts you hope will amount to something, never enough but something, to repay the people who you feel have loved you more than you deserve. It's all you really have. You do your best, and yet you know when that door opens, it'll all be washed away in a high-tide flurry of hugs and laughter and the familiar press of Bobpul's wet nose against your leg. They're just those kinds of people—they would be just as happy if you didn't bring anything at all, and somehow that makes you feel even more guilty.

"No, no," you wave him off. "I’m fine. Excited."

When Mingyu opens the door, everything goes just as you expected. His sister takes your coat, your gifts are whisked away to the tree (Aji has already figured out which one is his), and his parents descend upon you in a choking swell of warmth and charity.

We baked some fresh bread for your parents (—Thank you so much, but you really shouldn't have.). You look so beautiful in that color (—No, no, you flatter me too much.). Mingyu better be taking good care of you (—He is. He really, really is.).

The kitchen is gauzy with cinnamon, anise. They must be making their famous poached pears, which Mingyu remarks on, just like clockwork.

Dinner passes the same way. It bubbles over with affection, and you feel swallowed by an impossible yearning. This—a full table and a hand to hold underneath it—did you deserve this? And could you keep it?

For an instant, you picture yourself, years later, at this same seat. Mingyu would be fussing over the rice cakes, his apron still gingham because it reminds him of the day you two met. His parents, grayer but no less happy, bickering over the shade of tinsel on the tree. And the dogs, coiled at your feet like they are now. The vision laps at your bones like you're a raft in a storm.

You're pulled back into the moment when Mingyu squeezes your hand, grounding and insistent. "Mom asked how school was going. I told her I think you're basically the smartest person I know, and I’m pretty sure you're getting into whatever law school you want."

Mingyu's parents laugh, and they cut through their pears.

"Oh, sorry," you say. "Um."

Clink. Knife meets flesh, meets porcelain. Your cheeks are hot. You wanted to talk about anything other than yourself tonight. Clink.

"The top programs are a reach, but it'd be nice." clink. "I just want to get in somewhere."

"They’re all so far away," Mingyu's mom remarks. "So grown up. Any school will be lucky to have you. You'll get into all of them."

Clink.

"Or maybe you can stay here." You watch the prongs of Mingyu's father's fork disappear into the pear. "Keep us old folk company."

"No, no, I think Mingyu should take notes and get off his lazy ass," his sister says, teasing. "Going back to the city will be good for him."

"So you can, what, burn down the kitchen again?" Mingyu grumbles, and the whole table seems to boil over with laughter.

"We’re kidding," his mom tells you. "No matter where you go, I’m sure you'll do great. We can even throw you a party at the end of the year. For graduating."

Clink. Clink.

There's a horrible uneasiness writhing around in your stomach. It's pear and syrup and clove and a blackness, an anxious, selfish one that sucks up all the generosity of the evening and turns it into shame.

Mingyu's mom is talking about throwing you a graduation party, something you didn't even think to do for yourself, and here you are, thinking about the shaking moment you open your rejection letters and the lonely path you'll draw on your way back home.

It's ok. They missed out, Mingyu would say, pouring you a consolation drink, and then it would be over. You'd go home and sit on your bed and the trifold piece of paper would go round and round your head like it was in a washing machine.

Your heart, an inventory of tasks and goals and tally marks. Things you've taken and things you've owed. It's a soft, boneless excuse. Be grateful. Give them that, at least.

Clink.

Dessert ends before you can tell his family not to get their hopes up. Mingyu's mom sends you off with your loaf of bread and a kiss on the cheek, and the moment is gone.

"Gyu," you call out on the steps in front of the house.

There are words at the seam of your lips. You want to tell him you're sorry for worrying so much. For making the whole dinner about you and then very possibly having nothing to show for it when it matters. For the heaviness in your chest. Your cowardice. But none of it comes out.

Instead you watch Mingyu pull at the leaves of a pear tree, watching the frost-filigree they get at the end of the season. He looks over his shoulder and smiles at you, as if he's on the hazy cover of a magazine. His eyes bend so wonderfully at the corners when he looks at you, and it breaks your heart.

"You had fun, right?" he asks. "My parents like you a lot, you know. I think they really do."

But that's the problem, you want to say. You all do, and I have no idea why.

Some of the pears are beginning to rot now. You watch one drop off the vine, and it caves to the pavement like it was made of nothing at all.

v. wild barley (grows like weeds)

In March, you play house.

Your parents leave on a two week trip to see relatives, and Mingyu takes it upon himself to make sure you survive.

It's a kind, blinding charade.

(7 am, breakfast. You usually don't even eat breakfast, but you wake up to doenjang and a smile, one that presses itself to yours until you're wearing it on the long walk to school.)

(4 pm, the stretch between lunch and dinner. You're muddling through another useless club meeting when Mingyu sends you a picture of him in your mom's apron, making kimchi. Kiss the chef, he texts you. You promise to, over and over and over.)

It's good until it isn't.

That isn't to say that it's Mingyu's fault. In fact, it's never really Mingyu's fault, and that's the worst thing about your relationship. Sometimes you wish he was worse just so there was someone else to blame.

(1 am, a fridge-cold glass of water and a hand on the column of your spine. Can't sleep? He asks. Just had a weird dream, you say.

It's a lie. You're a liar.

You miss your parents and the first wave of acceptance letters comes out in two days. You're not like him. Sleep has never been a cure for the exhaustion you're feeling, and you have no way of telling him that however warm the bed is won't fix that.)

It's on a Thursday afternoon when you open your mailbox and see the tiny, thin envelope that you've been expecting for the past week. You don't need to open it to know what it says, and yet you do it anyway.

The sun is white, a ghost in the spring sky. The ocean bleeds into the overcast, the curly barley stands tall around your feet, and you let the worst letter you've gotten in your life fall upon your shoulders, word by terrible word.

Then you close it, pinching the seam shut, and draw up your brave face. Nothing left to do but be brave. You're convinced you've used up all the sadness in your relationship—spend in pennies and the well still runs dry. Mingyu will cup your cheek and call you darling, pouring into your emptying basin, holey and broken.

You see him now through the kitchen window, Venus in his clamshell of a kitchen. Galbijjim day, he had said this morning. Now, he waves at you, glittery with recognition.

Your throat feels like crumpled paper.

Mingyu smiles at you, hazy through the glass. Your cheeks hurt and your mouth is paper mache, but you smile back anyway.

///

The letters come one after another.

You know what the envelopes hold and yet you keep opening them. The little folder you keep stashed in your bottom drawer gets fatter every passing day because you can't help but revisit your misery, almost as if you need to remind yourself it exists.

Mingyu is none the wiser. Today he decides he'll put off pastry school for one more year. "It doesn't feel like the right time," he says, rolling a log of burdock kimbap up. "You know what I mean?"

No, you don't. You never really do.

You do know, however, that it would feel really fucking bad that, come the end of the year, to have nothing. All your friends would be going somewhere—even Yizhuo opened her acceptance to an MFA program in Shanghai yesterday—and you would be here, still, feet firmly planted in the muddy Jeju dirt like they always had been.

"Hey, don't look so disappointed." he jokes. "Don't tell me you're already trying to get rid of me."

You're not, you really aren't. But part of you wonders if it's just a race to the bottom. If you got rid of him before he decided he wanted to get rid of you, maybe it would hurt a lot less. One less letter for the folder.

"Never. But imagine if you picked up a French accent at pastry school. Then I’d consider it. Maybe."

You watch his knife rock back and forth on the cutting board as he cuts the kimbap.

"Some for you. And more for me," he says, in what you can only describe as someone attempting to speak French when they've never heard it before. "Unless you want more, mon cherie."

He brings the plates to the table, his grin nothing short of dizzying.

"I’m irresistible, huh? Still wanna leave me now?"

"You're gonna have to try a little harder than that, I think."

The words roll off your tongue, easily, traitorously.

You watch the kimbap disappear off of Mingyu's plate.

Going, going, gone.

///

Seogwipo is always dark at night, only kept alive by the glow of the moonlit sea.

You can't sleep. Again. And so you sit out on the steps in front of your house, letting the twilight wrap around you like a blanket.

You got your last letter back earlier today. You held your breath and tore it open like you would a birthday card with money in it.

Waitlisted.

It was surely better than a rejection, but some naive, child-eyed part of you thought that if you had just closed your eyes and hoped hard enough, things would work out the way you had planned. Tragically, it wasn't enough this time. You wanted and wanted and you thought maybe that would mean you'd come close to deserving it.

Your parents called today. After managing to sideline the issue of basically the rest of your entire life, they had finally cut through your sad little charade. No good news yet, huh?

No, but—

It was always like that with you. No, but it's not as bad as you think. No, but give me a chance. No, but I’m trying. I've been trying.

You wish things didn't come out of you so complicated. That you could be like Seohyun, who could go through school with her eyes closed and still graduate at the top of her class. Instead, you parade around your little failures, trying to convince people it all could mean something only if they squinted. See? It isn't so bad.

You think you're past the point of crying about it. Your stomach hurts, you're cold, and most of all, you just want to go back to bed. Plus, although Mingyu sleeps like a log, you think he's developed a sixth sense for whenever you get up too early.

Time to be brave, you've been telling yourself, although you don't know who you're pretending for anymore.

So you nudge the front door open—it's so old, it wails if you come at it with any more force—and, to your surprise, see the light above the kitchen sink turned on.

It's not very bright, but it's enough to make out Mingyu's broad silhouette, back turned to you as he makes a cup of tea. He's humming one of his made-up songs.

"Mingyu?"

"There you are," he says, turning around. "Just came out to check on you. And make you some tea."

The kettle whizzes. Your gut twists.

You still haven't said anything to Mingyu. To manage your own disappointment was one thing—you don't think you could handle another person's. And yet when he stands there, Pororo mug between his huge hands, you feel as if you are holding a knife, big and guilty and bloody.

"I-I'm fine, Gyu. Honest." you watch his expression flicker, unreadable in the persimmon lamplight. "Sorry you had to come out. It's chilly out here."

"You know, you can tell me what's going on. I won't judge."

No, no, no. This is the last conversation you wanted to have, with the last person you wanted to have it with.

You feel feverish. You think your hands are shaking.

"Mingyu, I swear—"

"Whatever it is, we can fix it. I know we can."

That almost makes you want to laugh if you didn't want to cry so bad. Of fucking course he would say that. Mingyu, who treats life like it's the watermelon trick he showed you on the outlook, wants to put a bandaid on this whole thing, as if that could come close to fixing it.

He'd tell you to curl up on the couch with a bad movie while he orders takeout. Kiss you on the top of the head. It's ok, baby. Just another bad day for the person who has the worst luck in the world. Another lump of problems for him to try and make better. If he isn't sick of you now, he sure would be soon enough.

"It’s okay," you say, steeling your voice. "It really isn't a big deal. Let's just go back to sleep."

You try to walk away, but the hardness in Mingyu's eyes roots you down to the tile.

"Stop doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Pushing me away," he swallows. "Like you always do. I know something's going on."

"I’m not, i just—"

"You just what? You can't help it?"

"No, I—"

"Because you like to know that you can? That you can say whatever and then watch me come back?" A fragmented, heavy silence thrums between you. He's looking at you like he's daring you to say something, anything. His gaze is black. "What am I good for if you can't tell me anything?"

There's that familiar, stinging pressure behind your eyes. You think you're crying, but you're not sure. Maybe you've been crying this whole time.

"Fine," you bite. Your blood feels like hot metal. "You really wanna know? I didn't get into law school. There. Happy now?"

Mingyu looks stung.

"W-why didn't you tell me?"

Because I thought you would stop loving me. I thought you would have finally had enough.

"Because it's not all about you, Mingyu."

The words, selfish and damning, burn your tongue. Mingyu is right. This is what you always do. You fuck up and then make everyone else hurt for it.

"I'm sorry," Mingyu says. His voice doesn't sound like his. Instead, the words seem to hang in the air, trembling and holding their breath, waiting for an apology you can't give yet. "I shouldn't have—"

"It's ok." You swallow hard, and it hurts. "Let's just go back to bed."

It's getting colder and colder. You think there's a little hole in your sock, right above the cat's whiskers.

Mingyu doesn't reach for you as he passes to get to the hallway. Maybe he doesn't know how to anymore.

The Pororo cup is left abandoned on the counter. You walk over and read the label on the tea bag—barley, because you have class tomorrow morning.

You pick it up, let the ceramic buzz between your hands with whatever warmth it has left, and hold it to your lips.

It's cold now, but all you can think to do is drink it. Erase all the evidence that tonight ever happened, and maybe it'll be nothing more than a bad dream in the morning.

There's honey at the bottom of the cup. It sears the back of your throat, but you drink until there's nothing left.

vi. the peach blossoms (without fail, bloom every August. I miss you.)

You broke up the next day.

Even now, you remember what happened. You had woken up early that morning to make your own breakfast because you couldn't allow Mingyu to give you any more of himself. Your hands could only hold, shatter, so much.

"Mingyu, I think we should...." You looked at the zigzags of jam on your toast, angry and uneven. "I think we should stop seeing each other. For now," you had added, as if that made anything better at all.

Somehow that seemed more merciful at the time. Really, you think it just showed your cowardice. If you were going to break his heart, you might as well have gone all the way the first time.

Maybe it was a good thing that Mingyu saw right through you. He always did.

"So that's it, huh? You're just gonna give up on us?"

"No, I just...need some time."

"How long?" he asked. "Be honest with me. Because you know I’ll wait."

"I don't know." You couldn't meet his gaze. His eyes reached and reached over that kitchen table and you denied him even that.

"Don't you always know?" he asked, pitifully, desperately. "Don't you want this to work?"

And you did. In fact, you don't think you had ever wanted anything more, and it was that that scared you. You had already lost law school—you couldn't let the only other thing in your life let you go. So you pulled the trigger first.

"We should just end things. I'm sorry. I can't give you what you need."

He packed his bag within the hour, and you think everything, from then on, froze inside you. You didn't move from your seat until your parents came home from the airport later that day and asked why there were two plates of toast still on the table.

You think you knew, someplace, inevitably, this would happen. You, who only knew hunger, had reached deep inside Mingyu and rooted out a love you didn't think you were worthy of having. And yet you still ate from the vine, bite after guilty bite, until you couldn't take any more. The only time he asked you for anything at all, you couldn't give it to him—such was the irony of your relationship.

Maybe you were doomed the moment the first strawberry hit your tongue, just like you had said, all that time ago.

About a month later, you got another letter in the mail. Chungnam National University Law School, it read. This one was fat, in one of those brown envelopes lined with bubble wrap. Somehow, miraculously, that position on the waitlist had turned into an acceptance. You held the package to your chest and cried, loud and with abandon, as if taking a deep breath after almost drowning.

Ironically, the first person you wanted to tell was Mingyu. But the good news you needed to save your relationship came too little, too late. Perhaps that meant it had no legs to stand on in the first place, but that didn't stop you from missing it. Instead, you told Yizhuo, and she drove you to Jeju City and treated you to dinner. "You should just call him," she had said. "Hey, don't look at me like that. He'd probably pick up on the first ring."

The city is swathed in August's crimson summer—peach season. The narrow streets are lined with peach trees, the fruits glowing like fat drops of sunlight. All you do these days is plan for your eventual move to Daejeon and the start of a life that seems newer and shinier than your own. But surrounded by the cicada song, the velvet treeline, the rain-soaked asphalt, somehow you think you're going to miss Seogwipo more than you think.

(Fickle, fickle heart. You always needed things to be taken away to really be able to appreciate them. Somehow, all that wanting had boiled down to something more satisfying, more filling.)

You wonder how Mingyu is. Now that you think about it, he seems just as much a part of Seogwipo as the farm he lives on. It was only last summer when you had first met him in the field, set on fire by the strawberry harvest. You think about him now, peddling around that ridiculous wicker basket to make jam. Maybe talking to another pretty girl, someone as naive, cruel as you had been.

Not long ago, you considered calling him to apologize, but that'd just be another thing to be selfish about. A little time and some warm weather, and I’m calling to finally wash my hands of you. That's what it would sound like, no matter what you said. Still, it didn't stop you from thinking of him, every flower, every season.

"You know, I always wanted to grow peach trees. But I think we've always been a pear kind of family."

Mingyu. If a voice could cut through air, it'd be his.

You whip around, half-believing you're hearing things. Certainly that would be easier, but you're learning that there are some things you can't run from.

And like a picture, Mingyu stands tall, golden, framed by the peach blossoms. Not a thing about him has changed. Not even the way he looks at you.

"Mingyu," you breathe. Unfortunately, none of the times you replayed your last conversation with him help you come up with something to say, because in none of them did you anticipate him coming back. "W-what are you doing here?"

"I live here, silly."

"No way," you reply, scrambling. "Crazy, because I live here too."

You both laugh nervously, a silly, bubbly thing, but you feel like you're going to throw up. It's only now that you realize you're kind of on the walk to his place. Seogwipo has never had places to hide.

"I...um." You try and disentangle the guilt from the nostalgia from the scent of the peaches and the warmth on his face. They all look the same. You missed him. "I got into law school. In Daejeon."

"I heard," he says. "Not surprised at all. I always knew you would."

"Thank you. I mean it." The cicadas buzz around you, as if they know they have an important silence to fill. "You're staying in town, right?"

"Actually, I decided to apply to culinary school. It finally felt right, you know? I'm leaving at the end of the summer, but it's just in Jeju City. I couldn't leave the island."

"Thank goodness. I don't know if you could tell, but I kind of always hoped you would. I don't think I’ve ever eaten better food." Your voice wobbles, but it gets there. "You'll do amazing."

Then time stretches and forces you to recognize, reckon with, the moment you're in. You wonder if he feels the same way you do—bruised, overripe. If there's still a space in his heart for you.

Deep breath. Life only gives you so many chances.

"Mingyu, I’m sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't make us work. You deserved better." Saying it feels like peeling the skin of your heart back. There's still a palpable distance between the two of you—you think that had always been there—but it feels more comfortable in a way it never did before.

"Don’t apologize," he says, easily, as he always does. Everything seems to flow off him like water, and you think that's the part of him you loved the most because it was the one thing you couldn't touch. "We loved each other. I think that much was true."

A jasmine breeze curls through the trees, sending the blossoms fluttering around you like ink in water. The very first time you met Mingyu, you thought the image of him, haloed with the sunset, was the one you wanted to keep forever. And yet, somehow, you don't think you'll ever forget the way he looks right now.

"Will you ever come back to Seogwipo?" you ask.

"I was gonna ask you the same thing—you were always the one who wanted to get out of here." He grins, ear to ear. "Of course I'm coming back. There's nowhere I'd rather be."

"Yeah. I think I know what you mean."

The sea, the clay dirt, Mingyu. Even yourself, clumsy and care-worn. You think, somewhere along the line, you forgot how to love. But you're learning—one step at a time.

"Friends," you say. "Let's be friends. If you'll let me."

"Thought you would never ask. Gladly. Always." The space between you seizes, like it's holding in a breath. Maybe one day, you'll think of closing it once more, but you like where you stand now. You can admire him better from a distance, without your fingerprints all over him. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, something he does before he gets ready to leave. But before he does—"I'll see you soon, okay? You better come back. Promise me."

For the first time, you see the honesty in his eyes and you really, truly believe him.

"Promise."

The Seogwipo sun is high and red in the sky when you wave Mingyu goodbye. It feels like you're coming to an end of a long summer, but you're not afraid. You watch the wind dance through the peach blossoms, their branches never searching, never wanting, and you finally feel as if you've arrived home.

[girliism]

rockstar!patrick zweig who thinks being in a rock band is the best thing to ever happen to him. the endless access to fame, money, girls, and boys. he was more than happy that he joined when his childhood friend brought it up one day while they were chilling in one of the many rooms at casa zweig.

“dude i think we should start a band.” art donaldson his closes and probably only person worthy of “the best friend” title blurts out randomly. “what?” patrick huffed. “we’re sixteen and have never played an instrument, you’re crazy.” the conversation ended after that as they went back to watching their movie. but still they found themselves later that night in their respective homes watching youtube video after youtube video on how to play different instruments.

that was seven years ago, and thanks to arts sudden interest (and hard work from all three of them) the challengers were everywhere, sooo why were they playing some venue in tiny college town. “oh, don’t act so upset pat, this whole week you’ll be surrounded by drunk easy college students, your favorite.” tashi patted her hands on his shoulders trying to reassure him. patrick groaned “with a number one song on billboard hot 100 all i’m saying is we should be selling out stadiums”

art laughed shaking his head. “haven’t you ever heard of humble beginnings?” at this patrick mocked him in a higher pitched voice with a roll of his eyes.

“hey guys, you’re on in five” some stage manager popped into their dressing room to say. standing up the three of them get miced up and start doing vocal warm ups to get ready.

“ok, huddle up.” tashi said gathering the two boys up in a small circle. “whether it’s performing in front three mice or 3 million people we give it our all ok.” nodding they all take a couple deep breaths putting their heads together before walking out to the stage.

the crowd was insane to say the least, singing along to all the songs louder than the band themselves. it almost hurt them to have to leave the stage. almost.. because what’s better than a concert? the wild after party full of fans eager to please their favorite band member that comes after.

“ughhh, why does she do this?” art groaned from the kitchen as he watched tashi shove her tongue down some random guys throat. “i think i’m gonna be sick.” art downed whatever was in his cup in one gulp before pouring another.

“when will man up and just ask her to be exclusive, tell her you’re more than just a warm body to use for when she’s feeling bored.” patrick mumble into his cup looking around not really caring for art’s pinning at the moment. “tashi doesn’t do exclusive you know this.”

whatever art was saying sounds completely muffled to his ears as he spots you. sitting there looking bored out of your mind as if you’d rather be anywhere else. he’s got to talk to you he’s got to know you. it’s like you’re pulling him in without even trying like some kind of siren that drags sailors to their death with ease.

“yeah art that sounds great.” he says absentmindedly as he goes to walk over to you leaving his friend alone, though not for long.

he plops down next to you. do all girls smell this good? he thinks before saying. “you here alone?”

eek ok that’s all for now!! part one part three

[jeff-from-marketing]

Hey it's been a hot minute, I'm gonna go off about Helldivers 2 for a bit, because the whole thing fascinates me.

Funnily enough it's not even the actual game itself that truly fascinates me, as great as it is. I do genuinely think that, while not perfect, it's a very solid game that knows what kind of experience it wants to deliver, and does a fantastic job delivering on it. The Starship Troopers-esque satire is hilarious, and I love how much the gameplay reinforces that satire through things like reinforcements canonically being a whole new Helldiver sent into the meat grinder, and that the mission still counts as a celebrated victory even if you never make it back alive. I could even talk about how the objectively clunky system for calling in orbital support is actually a positive for the game, but only this game and the type of experience it's selling.

But none of that is what fascinates me about this game so much. Because y'see, I played the first Helldivers game, and it was also a great bit of fun! It's actually why I was interested in the second one to begin with. But I also know that the first Helldivers was not a very wide reaching game, none of Arrowhead's games have been. They've not done poorly by any means, they're still in business and have been for over a decade now. But they've always been fairly niche affairs. Until now. To really sell the picture, I wanna rattle off player counts for their previous games:

Magicka in 2011, Arrowhead's first big game and published by Paradox, had an all-time max player count of 11,727 players according to SteamDB. I don't believe it was on any other storefronts, but I could be mistaken. A quick wikipedia visit tells me that the game sold roughly a million units over a year which, again, not bad! Especially for a game that is admittedly fairly unusual, but is a lot of fun!

The Showdown Effect in 2013, which I only just found out about right now after double checking my numbers, had a all time high of just 3,284 according to SteamDB, and is now delisted from Steam. Though apparently there's a remake from another company happening? There's a lot less info on this one in general.

Gauntlet in 2014, this one I do know a bit more about since I also played this one. A remake of the original 1985 game, and was a good bit of fun as well! This one is trickier to get an accurate player count reading, because it did have a PS4 release and those are harder to find numbers for. Regardless, it was also on Steam, so therefore I can use those numbers at least, which gives me a max consecutive player count of 12,730. I don't know how much PS4 factored into this.

And now we get to the real interesting one: Helldivers 1. Again, this is tricky because not only was it on console, but it was actually on console before it was ever on PC, which heavily skews numbers. SteamDB has the peak at just 6,744, but this doesn't sit right with me. I've seen estimates of 50k people around the place, some say 35k, but never a solid source. It's also very difficult to search atm because of how much Helldivers 2 is blowing up. Speaking of...

So Helldivers 1 is their most popular game, and I'll be generous and say that the 50k count is the accurate one. So surely Helldivers 2 can't be that much more- oh I'm not even going to pretend, you already know what's going on here. The game has reached ~450k concurrent players just on Steam alone! And the game also exists on PS5, and if I recall correctly: there's official statements saying that the player counts are roughly equal with each other. That means a peak of ~900,000 individual players. To illustrate how bonkers batshit insane that is, motherfucking Fortnite has a current consecutive player count of roughly one million.

Let me reiterate: a game that came out of basically nowhere with little marketing, from a small studio with only about 100 employees, is rivaling the juggernaut that is fucking Fortnite. That is insane.

As someone who has played all of Arrowhead's previous games besides The Showdown Effect, this is bonkers. There's a reason the sentiment was "there's no way to have predicted this" when the servers were at their worst, because look at the previous data! How is anyone supposed to predict a sequel to a niche game (from a company very few people have heard about) to get a ~1800% increase in max player count? Their initial server capacity was 250k, which would've been very optimistic if you were just going by Helldivers 1 numbers. But then that wasn't enough. And then 360k wasn't enough. And then 450k wasn't enough. We're now at 700k server capacity and just finally getting things under control. This game just exploded in a way no one could have reasonably predicted. And I have no idea why this is the case either.

I'm not saying it's not deserved; it absolutely is! Like I said, game is great, and there's not even any shitty business practices I can bitch at this time! It's just so sudden and out of nowhere that it baffles me. Such a small percentage of these players would've even heard of the first game, let alone played it. It didn't have a massive marketing campaign, this is pretty much all spread through word of mouth, which is insane in its own right. It's not even like the game is entering an untapped market, it shares its existence with games like Deep Rock Galactic, Vermintide, Darktide, the actual Starship Troopers game, probably some others I'm forgetting. And yet, despite all of this, it breached containment something fierce. I don't have a big conclusion to make from all this, I'd love to be able to say "oh people are just getting tired of Triple A- oh I'm sorry, Quadruple A gaming and this is a breath of fresh air" and it is that, as was Baldur's Gate 3, but I'm not naive enough to think that's the main reason. Not when so many other great games continue to go undiscovered, and so many people still end up buying whatever the next big Triple A thing is. It's a great game to play with friends, and there's a lot going for it and a lot of charm, but such is also the case for the other games I already listed in this paragraph and they don't see the same popularity.

Whether it's just dumb fucking luck, or a really oddly specific set of circumstances at play that I can't see, I'm just dumbfounded and flabbergasted. But I'm not exactly gonna complain. It's fun getting sent into the meat grinder to spread Managed Democracy, and I'm glad the game is doing as well as it is, though I do hope that the devs get to have a bit of rest once the dust finally settles a little bit.

[co-mixed]

CIVIL WAR

In a couple years Civil War turns 20. It's an event that almost everyone knows at this point, it's been adapted for the MCU, and it's one of the most iconic Earth-616 events.

A tale of exchanging freedoms for safety, hugely inspired by the aftermath of 9/11. That was almost 20 years ago, yet we keep circling back to the issue of government control. Is it a friend or a foe and if a law is wrong, how do we go about changing it?

When the time came to go through the CW issues of the Fantastic Four, I decided to go back and review the whole event.

And if you're about to move on, because you haven't read it yet (there are gonna be spoilers), or just bookmarking it for another time, I’ll leave you with my final thought right away: it's a very different experience for a teenager and an adult. For someone who is still sampling the real world and someone who's nearly fed up with it.

The idea to register superheroes wasn't new for Earth-616. In a different version, this bill’s been around since Byrne’s FF (unfortunately, I can’t pinpoint the issue but I referenced it in one of the previous FF reviews). What I do distinctly remember is the hearing, the team went to, and how passionately they tried to stall it. 

Even then though, they knew it would come back to bite their backsides. 

The bill reemerges after M-Day and blooms after the tragedy in Stamford when New Warriors trigger a team of villains while shooting their reality show (talk about your ‘00s essence). Supervillain Nitro uses his ultimate and disintegrates 600 townies, a bunch of heroes, and his own crew. 

The public outcry is insane. There is high demand for masked heads on spikes, full transparency, and maybe some ritual sacrifice (just enough to butter everyone up). The sales of red paint and placards skyrocket, and everyone (knowingly or not) quickly picks their side of the argument. 

Remember just a few years ago Genosha happened? Millions of mutants were brutally killed, and all it provoked was more hate toward them. What do they call it now, the good old days?

What's the plan? 

The grand idea is cooked up by the great minds of Tony Stark and Reed Richards (eww). They go as far as to introduce 100 ideas of how to make sure Stamford never happens again. 

The gist of it all is to register all superhumans, send them to training, then license them and release back into the world. Better yet, pack them in teams and send to each one of the 50 states. It’s superhuman police meets mutant registration and unites in a beautiful concept of a police state. 

There are a few concerns with the plan, right off the bat.

Yes, the first one is data safety. Reed and Tony are smart for sure but for each of them, there is an equally inventive hero or a villain. There are no unbreakable/unhackable data storages. There probably never will be, so all the personal information heroes share will eventually be up for grabs. They guarantee that everything will be locked and hidden away in a digital Fort Knox, meaning they are promising something impossible. They’re setting y’all up.

They did cover their asses here though. What’s the best way to prevent villains from doing villainy things? Rehabilitate them, of course. 

Though it does sound impressive on paper, it's in fact more of a suicide squad scenario. The villains don’t go through any sort of therapy and no one is offering them help. They are controlled and forced to do Stark’s and S.H.I.E.L.D’s bidding.

Some 20 years later Daredevil will ponder a more reasonable prison reform while chilling in his cell. But that wasn’t a common conversation in 2006. Back then we were way more into punishing everyone. 

Stark doesn't hesitate to abuse his newfound power when, through his nanobots, he controls Green Goblin and makes him shoot an Atlantean official. 

All part of the grand design. 

And oh, of course, there is 42, the superhuman prison in the Negative Zone. The pride and joy of Reed Richards – a place where he and Tony eagerly send their former friends to take a time out and think long and hard about what they did. See, neither one of them goes for conversation, they jump head-first into policing.  

Kids with superpowers have to go to military school now. That’s the kids who don’t end up as lab rats for an insane doctor. There is always one of those around and they’re somehow always in cahoots with the officials. 

But chances are you, young superhero wannabe, are gonna go through military training (obviously the best kinda training if you want to help people, amiright?) 

Jumping ahead, we get a nasty preview of one such facility. And guess who's in charge of the program? If the name Gyrich is familiar to you, need I say more? 

It ends in tragedy too. Right away.

But enough criticizing. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. 

Instead, let's imagine that everything works out. There are superhuman peacekeepers all across the US. And there are military schools where kids are screamed at by some YesSirThankYouSir. 

Does that make Earth-616 any safer? 

What happens when Sentry flies off the handle and destroys half of New York? Would it help that you know his civil name? 

How about when Daredevil builds his Shadowland and chills there with a bunch of ninjas? Would you sleep better knowing his home address?

The short answer is no.

Then why do they do it? 

My theory is there’s a reason one side includes Reed, Hank, and Tony. They are virtually the same archetype. All extremely privileged people, rich, famous, adored. They are also scientists – they operate in numbers and technologies, in fixing things. They think they know, which allows them to remain on cordial terms with empathy. 

Looking into the future and using logic to solve the world’s greatest mysteries is the way all three of them choose. 

Ok that might really just be Reed but what can I do, I hate the guy. 

Either way, Reed and Stark both did some math and some thinking and figured that if you can't beat them you might as well lead them. That's why they both jumped at the chance to make the world better (Reed event dragged his family along for the ride). 

It feels like halfway through the war though, the whole for Tony turned into an obsession with winning. Winning by all means necessary and realizing that the ends absolutely justified the means. 

As it always happens, heroes on Stark’s side let themselves go way too far. If unmasking Spider-Man felt uncomfortable (we’ll get to Spidey), then building 42 with extremely harsh conditions just to scare everyone into registering was a full-on dictator move. Building a Robo-Thor (Ragnorak) to balance the power scales was simply outrageous. I told you, Reed, Pym, and Stark have serious issues with empathy. 

Then, they created their first victim – Goliath. We could go into a long conversation about the issue of using a Black character as collateral, but we all know what’s what. 

I remember from years ago the image of him lying in a giant grave. And only now it hit me that maybe it had to be him, to emphasize the metaphor of a giant loss. Because even his grave looks like a mass grave and the way he's laid to rest is similar. And this couldn't play out the same way with Stamford victims, because none of that was personal to the heroes.

You’d think one death of their own would stop them or at least force them to pause. But no, just a few people left the cause after that, among them Sue who unfortunately eventually reunites with Reed. 

She did make a hole in his ceiling though. Good job. 

But hey, Reed’s done the math. Can't go wrong with that.

I kept trying to put myself in Tony’s place to understand where he was coming from. And here’s what I figured. 

There was a voice of “conscience” whispering in Stark’s ear – Miriam Sharpe (a parent of one of the Stamford victims. I couldn't not include the worst 'argument' in history that aged worse than anyone could imagine). There was Happy on life support after having been attacked by a supervillain. And decades upon decades of trying to keep it together as a hero and a person. It was easy to dismiss all that after time had erased most of the details from my memory, but that’s exactly what re-reads are for. He truly believed that something should be done so that even heroes could have it a little easier. 

As a self-appointed leader of the superhuman community, Tony felt responsible for all of them and it was necessary for him to fix everything. This is where his ego plays a huge part because he took it personally and let it cloud his judgment. That’s a human thing but that’s also the thing he allows himself but not other heroes. 

You know what? I'm gonna do something wild here. I’m gonna compare the two heads of the police state and make Reed look good. 

He’s not doing it for power or his ego, he actually doesn’t let emotions play a part. We see that clearly when he continues to work with Stark after Sue leaves him. He puts his pain aside and does what he believes is correct (not right, correct). He's also doing it for the future and his kids and while that can be perceived as emotion, he also backs it by his math. 

Meanwhile, Tony sees himself as the savior, takes control of all the capes, and you can actually see him basking in glory when he reports his victory to Miriam. 

Who's fault was Stamford? 

Let's roll back a little, to Stamford and the incident.

A huge part of the conversation revolves around who is responsible for the accident. We have the New Warriors, who poked the bear, and we have Nitro, who was the bear. The people though, they unanimously choose the only surviving New Warrior (Speedball) to be the scapegoat. Nitro is dealt with in private by Wolverine and Atlanteans (he offed Namora), who seem to be the only ones interested in bringing him to justice.

Throughout the Front Line series, Robbie Baldwin (same ole’ Speedball) is trying to come to terms with his being the most hated person in America. His parents turn their back on him, the government is offering him a registration (to which he opposes), and the people hate him and wanna see him hanged. Of course, Robbie does feel responsible, he is too. But Nitro is not a mine he stepped on. He’s a person, who did the actual killing. 

Not at all surprising, that no one sides with Speedball. Not even his lawyer Jen, who’s trying to help for sure, but doesn’t seem to be hearing him. In fact, she’s more of a liaison between him and the authorities and the one vividly on the latter side.  

Robbie succumbs to his guilt. Everyone sees him as a monster and a murderer, so he accepts it.  

Here's the controversial part – I felt sympathy for him both times. He was reckless and untrained, which is the argument Tony Stark and others put on their flag and ran with. That is the idea – to train and register the heroes. 

But for that to happen, Robbie had to be the scapegoat. And the superhero community might have been able to eventually forgive him but everyone else? No way. 

In the process, he gets shot by one of the Stamford parents (they really aren't making themselves look good there) , and by the end, he accepts the deal under one condition – that the shooter gets released as well.  Robbie walks free but where would he go? He ends up becoming Penance (Not Monet-Penance). 

Which is probably not a great idea anyway, since he's beyond messed up at that point. 

This is a tragic bit of the story. 

It seems like nearly everyone hates Speedball, even more than they would Nitro. I mean, Nitro has a strong argument covering his radioactive butt — he’s a villain, what did you expect? A New Warrior is a hero, so he’s held to an impossible standard. 

What can I say, those in power really did find someone to blame just so those in power could maintain their faces and a clean image. One person is always a very acceptable sacrifice for them.

Are you in or are you out?

I promised you we’d get back to Peter Parker. He is absolutely one of the main characters here. Fair to assume this story was essential for him at the time as well (yes, we’re not peeking ahead because we all know his identity can’t stay public forever).

Obviously, in my teens, I was wise and could see right through the trap Tony Stark was setting for Peter. Tying him to the cause by forcing him to be the first hero to unmask, promising him and his family protection, sharing only bits and pieces of truth? He’s practically spelling it out for Pete: “I own your webbed ass!”

Yeah. Times change. It’s so easy to steer an idealist. And that’s who Peter is, that’s who most heroes are. He still believes in the whole responsibility concept, and by saying “This is the responsible thing to do”, you can get him to do nearly anything. Top it with his admiration and infatuation with Stark, and you have a foolproof Spider-catcher. 

Imagine your ideals being dangled before your eyes like that and tell me you won’t follow. 

Here’s the deal. Whenever I ask people (be it regarding the movie or the comics) whether they would’ve registered or not, they almost invariably say no. Most of us are that convinced that our ideals are concrete, that there is no scenario that could shake us up and force us to the other side of the barricades. 

Allow me to call BS.

So many of us really still view this as a fantasy arc: even if has something to do with reality, nothing like that can ever happen. 

But fantasy simply takes reality and pushes it to extremes. Remove the capes, take away the superpowers, and take a closer look. It’s an ongoing leitmotif throughout history. Hell, it even happened in the same universe before (hello, Mutant Registration)!

So while the idea 20 years ago was to choose between safety for the majority and giving up just a portion of your freedom, in reality, most people always choose the latter. 

Because when you are asked to do so, it’s never really a command, it’s a suggestion. And it’s always coated with a reasonable explanation that benefits you. These things are never a one-day operation. They are carefully prepared for us by propaganda and advertising which even work on several levels. If the simple explanation doesn’t work on you, the complex one might. Either way, you’ll be on board.

You get to choose between easy and difficult. And you only know what you will decide when you come face to face with the problem.

That’s why my answer then was “I’d never register” and my answer now is “I have no idea”.

The right side

It’s easier to choose freedom when Cap takes a firm stand for you. He can do no wrong in the eyes of other heroes (I mean, even Punisher refuses to hit him, that kinda cred has to stand for something). But siding with the squeaky-clean Cap is a pretty picture. We don’t get those in life.

Just like Tony, he feels responsible for every hero. I think, for one it’s a vanity thing, and for another, it’s the leader gene.

It never felt to me like Cap was fighting out of sheer stubbornness or even because he believed he was right (like Tony did). He fought because he believed this was the best course of action for the superpowered community. Heroes and villains alike. The old dying to protect your freedom to be wrong narrative.

He is a 616 icon, he has nothing to gain in all this… 

…Which may be why he lost. He’d put up a great fight, but he never offered an alternative course of action. 

If the registration bill had never passed, what was the other option, where was the guarantee that Stamford wouldn’t happen again? Essentially, this is why he gave himself up and stopped the fight. This is WHEN he did so. He saw the battle in New York as a step away from a mass disaster. So he took off his mask and accepted handcuffs. 

Now did he betray everyone who followed him? 

Yes and no. 

Yes, because without him all they had was a ragtag team of heroes. Without Cap’s credibility or his resolve, they were completely lost. 

And No, because if they couldn’t stand up and continue the fight, they may have been fighting not for something but alongside someone. 

Cap giving up is not an example of an underwhelming resolution. It’s just what you do when the ends stop justifying the means. When the body count grows and you see no way out. 

He chooses to stop getting people killed — something I don’t believe Tony would’ve done. 

I remember being so impressed with Cap’s resolve when I was a teen. What I see now is a grand gesture that ultimately changes nothing. Then again, that’s what heroes do, right? 

At the end of the day, they stand before you and invite you to make a choice. He wasn’t doing it for the other heroes, he was doing it for everyone else. Showing that a single person can be responsible and that’s what they should be trusting in. The fact that they managed to destroy a whole block in New York didn’t exactly give Cap’s side any sympathy points. 

I also get why Stature and Nighthawk defected from the cause — they chose personal safety and comfort over constant risk. 

I get why Ben Grimm left for France. Maybe just now but I get it. Not wanting to fight and to even pick a side. He may look like a coward through idealistic glasses (even though he does come back eventually). And he may be naively ignoring the fact that whenever he goes, the registration law might follow. 

But he goes anyway and it’s hard to say he’s wrong. Sometimes you just want to escape because you know it’s gonna get ugly. 

What was the point? 

The resolution of this war doesn’t give you an answer who was right and who was wrong. That’s the point — there is no point. Never is. The main book went out of its way to draw similarities between Civil War and many famous battles throughout history. You are slightly pushed toward sympathizing with Cap’s side and I bet it hits you hard too when that side loses and later he gets shot.

After all is said and done, in a one-shot called Confession Tony Stark admits to Cap’s dead body that the war wasn’t worth it. An answer to something Cap asked him before when he first was arrested. Kinda hypocritical of Tony to not realize that after Goliath's death.

It’s not the end of the story but it’s the end of the war, and I think between the name of the comic arc, the events, and the final words, you can piece together a pretty good conclusion. 

Cherry on top

I’m leaving the arc I found to be most memorable years ago for last. 

It’s Front Line and specifically the arc of Sally Floyd and Ben Urich. They are both journalists, and they are hunting down the same story. The sides might be different, but the sources, the issue, the story — the story is the same. 

By the end, they’re sitting on this goldmine of an article. Something they have the responsibility to share as professionals who claim to value integrity. But they bury it, because their personal experience during this war gets in the way. 

This part of the book really surprised me as a kid. I loved the fact that we took the time off to see how the real people are dealing with a superhero conflict. And we know that Ben isn’t exactly impartial, he has a long history with every New York hero ever and works for everyone’s favorite Daily Mail substitute — Daily Bugle (where JJJ is on cloud 9 because the damn capes finally get to answer for their misdeeds). 

Sally and Ben find out exactly how Stark orchestrated the fallout from Stamford and how at every turn, he steered the narrative in his own chosen direction. 

They bury it. And I don’t know how to feel about that now. It’s a selfish and selfless choice. This could’ve made them legends but this also would’ve destroyed any control the heroes had over their fates. 

What’s it good for

I used to think this was a book about right and wrong, and I used to think the sides were very obvious. But I was idealistic. While I still believe that this was no way to go, and othering anyone is an awful idea, I get to look at this as a selection of personal stories now. And I can easily see myself (or anyone really) in every one of the roles.   

So maybe it’s more about the choices you end up making (I mean, it does continuously ask you whose side are you on). Or maybe, in another decade I will read it again and see an entirely different tale. 

P.S. I tried to make it simple this time by using the Marvel Unlimited reading guide, but you should know that it’s slightly out of order and incomplete. 

[joelletwo]

(sets a timer) the exorcist postcanon lore i can remember off the top of my head

well the precanon is they were teenmarried in an impulsive haha jk unless 'lets run away from our restrictive homes' moment they immediately chickened out of post-signing the license. and then immediately the various inciting incident cracks in their teenage tenuously extended-grace-bc-theyre-lonely-w/o-peers ability to cooperate that happen as they become adults (seiji dad death-now new heir of the clan-eye attack, and whatever shuuichi's doing to get away that makes him go insane and become a celebrity in three years) makes them more or less lose contact and ignore the elephant in the room until canon. though seiji (and nanase) do poke fun about it sometimes and any time natoris like fucking hell i cannot let the paparazzi find out im legally married itll be a whole Thing can you please sign the divorce papers hes like hahaha what a funny joke shuuichi-san /_^ [mails them back folded into origami]

[various natsume-fueled char development we've disturbingly stayed kind of sort of on track for in recent arcs] -> matoba reconsiders his whole life and the fact that as an adult hes in total control of it and he kind of completely hates it. he wants a less black and white relationship w youkai he's forlornly looking thru the window at natsume and all his sick ass youkai friends. he gives up his eye to eye-eater to settle the matoba debt and (at least temporarily) quits his job and leaves the community and lives a life as just some weird-ass guy whos suddenly free to have hobbies (just picking up and trying whatever) and go to therapy and physically recover.

[per my fics] nanase uses this to get her favorite matoba child back into the picture and help them reconcile as seiji passes the clan back to [matoba sister. i have not reconsidered with shinobu i cant handle it kjsf] and they uncover some of the misunderstandings that drove them apart as kids

[also per my fics. NOW DEBUNKED I GUESS] when natori hears that matoba quit his job he seethes in anger bc FUCK he was gonna do that!!!!! now he cant!!!! but its an opening for them to reconnect and similarly patch up some misunderstandings or figure out where, now changed by time, they fit together differently and less conflictingly than before. natori has also been gently prodded by natsume into therapy and lots of outdoor hobbies where he can Find Inner Peace

i really still adore the idea of. matoba gets settled in his lonesome. um he adopts a youkai-seeing kid thats varyingly important i love her to pieces i cant get into that. read my fics look at our art. but matoba's got his own thing going on hes broadening his horizons in his new life. natori's happy to dip in and out but hes got ten million lives hes busy hes all over the place. they get back together but like. only strictly Share A Life in the typical sense like. in passing. irregularly. always keep in contact but theyre not like. moving in together. for a long time at least.

natori does lose his leg in a freak accident at random one day and he DOES keep the lizard afterwards. really important to me. he grows to love this guy. disabi/_^y 4 disabi🦎y

broad strokes. funny specifics:

matoba gets into doll restoration and has lots of pickling jars w body parts all over his place. natori spends lots of time in the woods lookin' at bugs as he gets fond of the gecko and learns more about geckos and then learns more about little guys in general. hes perfectly positioned to like. anthropology out the symbiotic relationships he discovers between insects and youkai. he writes an pseudonymous guidebook about this thats nichely successful and taken as whimsical fantasy

meanwhile sasada has never given up the goat on trying to prove youkai exist even tho her whole friend group wont admit it. i forget the details but she gets into the book and gets really into bugs to see if she can reverse-engineer the youkai side of the relationship without being able to see it. at some point meets natori thru natsume in just-some-guy capacity and finds out they both like bugs and they bond over that without her knowing hes the author. comedy of errors time ^_^

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

We’ve Got A File On You: Evanescence’s Amy Lee

I’m curious about the “Bring Me To Life” demo on this new anniversary edition of Fallen. Is this the exact version that you played for the label before they pushed for the rap part?

AMY LEE: Actually, no.

What’s the timeline on it? Where does it come from?

LEE: We did, like, at least nine demos of “Bring Me To Life.” Because they had decided this was the song that’s gonna be the first single, and we’re gonna put a whole bunch of focus on this breaking-in point. So, they just kept being like, “How about do the whole thing again, but add this?” And they were paying us. It was back in the day when people got artist development, which was actually really cool. So we kind of had to do what they said. [laughs] “OK! Whatever it takes!” We just did that demo a million times, and that one, as far as I can tell, is the last one or one of the last ones before the rap happened. They were already giving us notes at that point, but it didn’t go there. The Daredevil thing hadn’t come up, and we hadn’t had that whole new wave of, “OK, now let’s talk about this whole new idea.” So I felt like that was a good representation of us getting it all the way to another version that you’re not already pretty much hearing on the album.

You’ve been open about your fight with the label about adding a male co-vocalist, and how the guest spot that ended up on that song was the compromise. Is this version that we’re hearing now, this demo, kind of how you still think of the song in your head?

LEE: You know, actually, after all this time, playing the song a million times live, they’re never done growing. Especially when it’s a song like that. We’re always gonna play “Bring Me To Life” at a show. We want it to get better and better. We want it to be interesting. And also, you realize you have moments when the crowd does something. Make space for that. Let’s make extra space. We have a whole new part of it that’s a little bit longer, where we get everybody with their hands in the air. So when I think of the song, actually, I hear it the live way, because that’s the way I’ve heard it the most in my life. And the rap is in there, just, I do the rap, which is pretty fun. It’s not really a rap. It’s such a weird way to call it. Anyway.

A ton of people feel a very strong connection to Fallen. It’s also a snapshot of who you were at 21. Is that kind of strange, to have people feel so intimately connected to this very young version of you?

LEE: Yeah. You know, that was hard for a minute, because it was always really a stress of mine in the beginning to bring them along to the next thing. Because I love making music, and my personal quest as an artist is always about sharing more and more and more, and showing the whole picture of my heart and things that I’ve experienced, and drawing from real life. And there’s just so many colors to a human being, and to the things we experience. It would be impossible at any age to sum up your whole self in one song, or even in one album.

So that was actually my biggest reservation about the idea of having a guest vocalist on the first song, was that if this is our only chance – because that happens all the time, this is the thing that people are gonna hear and it’s all they ever hear of us, which is totally possible – I want our first thing to be the best possible representation. That’s why there’s so much pressure on a first entrance single. It’s like, I have to show you who I am as completely as possible, for a million reasons. One of them being, if you like it, you get the rest of the album and you’re not disappointed. Or if you hate it, it’s like, “Wait, that’s not fair! That’s not it! Please listen, I have more to say!” A lot of that fear was quelled very quickly, because “Going Under” did great, and of course “My Immortal” did great, and we have brought so many fans along. At this point, 20 years later, it’s insane. I am so grateful.

So yeah, that bothered me at first, and I’ve gone through a couple of little moments like that. But I don’t feel like that anymore. We have millions of amazing fans who love our latest album. And I feel really proud of everything that’s out there. And in context, I love Fallen. It’s not that I love it less…actually, I do! I love it less out of context. In context of the whole picture of us, and all of our growth, after all this time, I love it. But if that was our only thing that we had done, it would really bug me. So maybe that’s the reason I can’t stop coming back.

The Early Days Of Evanescence (1994-2000)

You started the band as a teenager. What was the music scene in Arkansas like in the mid-’90s? Did people know what to make of you guys?

LEE: It was different. We were different, even for that. I always saw that as a positive. The time period is part of that. [We were] super influenced by grunge and alternative. Heavier stuff, too. But what was the music scene like in Arkansas? It was what you would expect. Country was big. Hip-hop, pop, whatever was on the radio. Whatever you’re being fed by the top 40. So there’s that world, and then there was this total counterculture death metal scene. So, we obviously didn’t fit into either of those groups. But the death metal scene was a little bit closer. Those were the concerts I went to, in tiny, sweaty, back-of-the-pizza-restaurant clubs and stuff. I definitely learned to have an appreciation for this really heavy, rhythm-driven music, and cool riffs, and double bass pedals.

That’s not where I came from. That’s not my origins in music. I was really into classical. Dramatic classical, and then Soundgarden and Björk and cool, interesting alternative music. So when we did our thing, what was different about us was, first, that we weren’t a live band. It was just me and Ben [Moody]. Kids making music, in my parents’ garage and his parents’ garage and basement. Any basement or garage, or studio we could borrow after hours at my dad’s radio station, or anything like that. And we were recording artists. We were just finding what we could and making sounds. It was more like an electronic duo, and then pulling in band elements was always like, “Who will do a show with us?” And we’d gather up a drummer, and a bass player, and another guitar player, and promise them pizza and play a show. And we got signed [by the BMG-distributed Wind-Up Records] pretty quickly. We’d only played a few shows. It was like, “OK, we’ve got to put a band together, and make this real.” So we really grew up and became a band in front of the world.

It’s a very old-school, major label A&R story, I feel like. You get discovered, you get plucked, and you get brought out to LA. That kind of thing doesn’t really happen anymore in the way it did then. What was that moment like for the band, to kind of be thrown from playing the pizza place, to now, you’re in show business?

LEE: It was tumultuous. It was fighting. It was so much push and pull. It was gratitude, as well, but I felt from a pretty early point that I was constantly having to fight everyone around me to not sell out all of our vision.

So, we got signed, and it was awesome because we didn’t have to do a showcase. Everyone else wanted us to play a live show, and it was like, we’re not really like that. We still have to put this together. And this one label from New York was obsessed with it, and they’d had big success before, and we were like, “OK, we’re doing this.” Just a really rash decision at 19. And then instead of it being like what it sounds like when you say it, which is they flew us to LA, they put us in a cool place, and it’s cool and we’re making this album now. That is what we expected. We thought the album was done. But I have to be grateful now, because what we thought the album was is nowhere near as good as what Fallen ended up being, because they made us do crap that we didn’t want to do and write more music.

We had the freedom of not having to have jobs that would suck all of our energy. We could make our job impressing the label with something great. So, we just worked on writing new songs and demoing songs for a year and a half. And there were rocky moments in there, where we had to fight for our rights, and go home, and there were insults flying around everywhere when we didn’t do everything that they wanted. But all those fights were completely worth it, too. It was just the right combination of saying we’re gonna write more and do more, and also fighting back on the things that would’ve absolutely bastardized this whole thing and made us something that wouldn’t have existed this long.

Joining Korn For “Freak On A Leash” On MTV Unplugged (2006)

How well did you know Korn before they asked you to do that?

LEE: Oh, quite well. I loved Korn. Korn was one of the heavy bands that I loved, and I was so excited as a fan when they wanted to do something with me. We toured, I think, right after that. I think that was one of the last MTV Unpluggeds they did.

I think you’re right. I miss it!

LEE: I do too! It was beautiful. I made up my part the day before, I came in, we ran through it one time, and that’s it. I loved doing it, and then we went on tour together after that, which was cool. And then we did it again 15 years later.

Yeah, you stayed close.

LEE: Yeah. And then we finally did that song live! Because we never did it back in 2007 or whatever, when we first toured together. And this time, I was like, “Are you gonna have me up on that song, or what? Come on!”

The Cure were also a part of that show. Did you get to hang out with Robert Smith?

LEE: Yeah, we were all on the couch together, hanging out backstage. It was pretty amazing.

Singing “Sally’s Song” For Nightmare Revisited (2008)

I saw the Nightmare live show in LA a couple of years ago, and Billie Eilish sang that part.

LEE: Oh, amazing!

It’s cool how that song is kind of becoming a standard for alt-leaning pop singers.

LEE: Yeah! It’s funny you say the word “standard,” because there’s so few [new] Christmas standards. These songs that we’re always going to listen to, they’re all from the exact same era. And I do it too. But The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of those really rare things, where there are holiday songs on that – countercultural, of course – that are gonna live forever.

Yeah, and that belong to a younger generation. Was Nightmare big for you growing up?

LEE: Yes. It came out when I was 11 or 12, which was perfect. I mean, it was perfect. I think Edward Scissorhands was right before that, and I was obsessed with that. That’s one of my favorite scores. And then [Nightmare] came out, and I was really blown away, because I have a big love for stop-motion animation. My first record that I ever bought with my own money was the California Raisins. [laughs]

Wow!

LEE: I have always really loved what we used to call Claymation, but stop-motion animation stuff. And seeing my favorite director [Tim Burton] and my favorite score composer [Danny Elfman] do something that was that, I was a fan for life. Immediately obsessed with it.

How did you end up getting to do “Sally’s Song” for that record? Did you know Danny at that point?

LEE: No, but he was really nice to me. He invited me over to his house. It was a really surreal, cool experience. But [Disney] just asked me. I also did a random song that I don’t know a lot of people know from The Muppets [“Halfway Down The Stairs”] on their Muppets tribute album, but I think that was after that, because they were like, “Hey, that went well, let’s do another one.” But they asked me. I got the call, and I said, “Hell yeah! Please, can I do ‘Sally’s Song?'”

Nightmare – thanks in large part to Hot Topic, I think – is synonymous with a certain strain of alternative fashion. And for a while there, I think Evanescence was as well. I was in high school in the mid 2000s and there was definitely a lot of “the Amy Lee look” in the hallways. Did you ever see yourself as a style icon? Was that something you cared about?

LEE: I really have always been into fashion design. As a kid, it was hard for me to choose a definite career path, because I loved music. I felt like music was my passion, and I had to do music. But I also had a lot of passion about visual art and fashion design. And I have journals full of all of it. And making things, I’ve always made most of the art in our homes. I buy art, too, but I get an idea, and I’m like, “I want that on my wall. Here’s what needs to be here.”

I am so lucky, because what I’ve been able to do is combine all of those things into this job. I get to make my music, which is the center and the focus and the king. That’s the point, but then all around that, from production design ideas to album art ideas. I usually sketch them out before we do an album cover. I have a sketch of every one, where I had an idea, and I was like, “This is what we need to make. This is the title, this is the vibe, these are the colors.” And then with clothes, too, I’ve been making my stage wardrobe forever. Not all by myself, but I design it and I have somebody with a lot more patience than me do the math and help me take it all the way.

Her Children’s Album, Dream Too Much (2016)

Dream Too Much came out in 2016. Your son was born in 2014. I imagine there’s a correlation there.

LEE: Mm-hm, definitely! Making music isn’t always serious. You just sing your way through the day sometimes, and I realized that extra after having a baby, because you just end up filling the space with happy sounds. My husband and I both do it. You’re just singing through the activity, and then it’s like, “That’s kind of funny.” The song “Dream Too Much,” I was goofing around on the guitar, and Jack as, like, a two-year-old was saying those first couple of lines while he was playing. “There’s a monkey in the band!“ He was talking about Curious George, I think. And then, “The muffins are sleeping!“ I was like, “The muffins are sleeping? Awesome, we’re putting that in there.” [laughs]

It was fun to just have an opportunity to let things be goofy and fun, and when you have that subject there, you know exactly how to entertain them. There’s a person to focus on. It’s like, “I’m going to make this the thing that you love.” Including the stop-motion animation, and the instruments that are click-y. He used to love this Nesquik commercial with a STOMP vibe. Everything was pencils on glasses and chicka-chicka-choo-kah stuff. My producer and co-writer friend, Will Hunt – not Will Hunt the drummer [of Evanescence], very confusing – we did that album together, and he’s this super, like, science-y, fun, experimental music guy. We became friends over our love of Björk. He’s like, “Oh, this is great. I have all these weird tubular sticks and junk we can make sounds out of.” And it was just this really fun experience where I got to work with my whole family.

It sounds so naturalistic, or something. It doesn’t sound like the discipline of songwriting. You almost make it sound like you were just goofing around.

LEE: We were having so much fun! That’s what it always should be. I think that’s where good music comes from, is that you’re enjoying what you’re doing and that translates. But there are different paths and ways. It felt like we didn’t have to think so hard and make it complicated for an adult audience. It’s funny, because you make choices that are just natural, and you realize that maybe that’s not such a bad idea in general. There was definitely learning through that experience.

Metalocalypse: Army Of The Doomstar (2023)

I recognized your voice right away, even though you have like two lines.

LEE: I keep meaning to capture the clip and put it on social media somewhere! I want them to hear my voice screaming.

I was looking at your IMDb, and I was somewhat surprised that you haven’t done much voice acting or acting. Was that ever something you were interested in pursuing?

LEE: Always. I’m always asking for the right opportunities to do that stuff. I haven’t always had the best representation, and I think that maybe held me back in the past, when I would have really liked it. I just didn’t have the access that you’d think that I would. But I’m not in that situation now, so I’m always looking for something fun like that, whether it’s voice acting or making music of any kind for a film. It’s interesting the way the film industry and TV industry work. It’s so depressing how often things go so far and then get canned. There are so many things that get half-made and then dumped, and I’ve written music for a lot of those. [laughs] It’s not my fault! Or maybe it is. Maybe I should stay away.

Well, it’s odd, because movies have been woven into the Evanescence story. You mentioned the Daredevil thing, which ended up being so huge for you guys. Did you feel like you were interacting with Hollywood at that time, or did that feel like it was in a separate sphere?

LEE: There were moments. Hollywood doesn’t feel that separate from the music industry in LA. It’s all one big thing to me, in my mind. So going to those awards shows – or, we played the screening party for Daredevil, and all the actors and everybody were there – I definitely felt like we were intermingled in that world in a way that was very surreal. It’s weird. It’s like, “Whoa. Why are we here?”

That’s a great era, the early 2000s, for action movies randomly having a metal song over the end credits.

LEE: Right? [laughs] You’re welcome.

“Goofy Sings Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life” (2014)

I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t ask you about the Goofy version of “Bring Me To Life.” I’m told that you’ve heard it.

LEE: I’ve heard it. I’ve heard a lot of things over the years.

When you heard it, what was your reaction to it?

LEE: Not to insult the artist…

Bring it.

LEE: Honestly, I was like “What the fuck is this? This is stupid.” It’s funny. I don’t have a huge response. So many people sent me that. Even more people sent me this recent, the music note thing. There’s this toy that’s a music note, and it’s floating and singing the song. It’s not singing, it’s like [imitates warbling noise]. It’s so bad. My favorite one of those, I will tell you because it haunts me to this day. Somebody worked at Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza, and you know the animatronic characters of the band?

Yeah.

LEE: So, after hours, when nobody was there, I don’t know if they work this way or if this person programmed the show. I don’t know if they’re sensitive to sound, so they move their mouths and move around, or if the person programmed it, but they made a light show, and it was dark, and they’re playing the instruments, and they did like three of our songs. In the right state of mind, that’ll give you nightmares. It was horrifying and awesome. And I salute you, sir or ma’am, whoever you are. [laughs]

You’ve got music that’s kind of been absorbed into the broader pop cultural consciousness, and I guess that’s why these things happen. There’s also the Ariana Grande thing on Fallon, where she’s doing a vocal impression of you. Is that kind of stuff surreal? How do you even process that?

LEE: It’s not surreal anymore. When we were starting out, it was. But at this point, living with it for this long, the music kind of just takes on its own life, and you start to see it as separate from yourself. It’s hard to explain. It started out very surreal and strange, and impostor syndrome is very real, but I feel like at this point, I’m where I’m meant to be. It’s amazing and I’m proud. I am ready to accept my fate as goth superstar Amy Lee of the fuckin’ dark-ass band Evanescence.

[blackandwhitecircus]

Rant i just sent to my friend:

I am so fucking insane about Riza FullmetalAlchemist like we been knew I am not normal about that woman but also I am watching the show with my dad rn and we are past the first hurtful Flashback episode, nearing the second and then the one my tattoo is from and I am !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! about Riza Hawkeye I am going to kill myself over riza hawkeye I am so insane over her like ?!?!?!

Like she's this kid this tiny kid and her father is an accomplished alchemist and he takes on an apprentice who's a few years older than her and kind of cute also they're both from messed up home situations

And then he leaves and her father gets sick but he finishes his research finally and it is so dangerous and it can kill millions so he TATTOOS IT ON HER BACK and he gives the power to pass it on to this SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL who is all alone in the world

And then the boy comes back and he has just joined the military and he is so idealistic about it he genuinely believes he's doing good and SHE IS SEVENTEEN AND ALL ALONE IN THE WORLD so she GIVES HIM HER FATHER'S RESEARCH and then he gets ordered to do a Genocide and he does it. Roy Mustang burns god knows how many people to death with the power SHE GAVE HIM. And even worse she believed him and now she's a sniper and a killer too and he will never forgive himself for this he will never forget that his idealism is what destroyed her too

So she asks him to destroy her tattoo to literally burn it off her back and he does and she promises to follow him to Hell and back if it means he will make the world a better place and he will make a system that will hold the two of them accountable and he makes her promise to shoot him should he ever deviate from that

AND THAT ALL HAPPENS TEN YEARS BEFORE THE SHOW EVEN STARTS

FOR TEN YEARS SHE LIVES IN THE CONVICTION THAT IF ROY DIES SHE WILL KILL HERSELF AND NEVER LET HER BODY BE FOUND BECAUSE HER

FATHER

BRANDED HER WITH ALCHEMICAL RESEARCH THAT HAS ALREADY KILLED GOD KNOWS HOW MANY PEOPLE

AND THAT'S NOT EVEN GETTING INTO THE THEMES OF FATHERHOOD THAT GO THROUGH THE ENTIRE SHOW OR THE

TWO OTHER CHILDHOOD

CHILDHOOD FRIENDS RELATIONSHIP THEIRS IS MIRRORD WITH OR THE ONE EPISODE WHERE SHE

LOADS SIX BULLETS INTO A REVOLVER

AND ONLY SHOOTS FIVE

CAUSE SHE THINKS ROY IS DEAD

40 EPISODES BEFORE HER SUICIDALITY EVER BECOMES RELEVANT AGAIN

riza hawkeye.

[3 hours later]

Ok I fell asleep but I am not done with this actually cause Roy?!?! has this whole philosophy of "If i protect the people I love and they protectect the people they love we will have a nice and compassionate society" and it is very clear to EVERYONE that at the top of the list for "people roy Mustang loves and wants to protect" is riza to the point where she gets taken hostage/almost killed over it TWICE but she herself does not see her life worthy of protection because of the things ROY DID

So when he almost dies she almost dies cause she's so distressed and he's mad at her about it and and that point the soft first time viewers think "oh she really likes her commanding officer" while I am already actively loosing it cause I know the next thing she was gonna do was either use her final bullet on herself or sacrifice herself to make sure alphonsus survives. You know. The little blonde kid who lost everything to his and his older brothers idealism and wish to bring their dead parent back. Complete coincidence in how the main characters all parallel each other.

Anyway like 40 episodes later roy is now actively loosing and she goes nuh uh and PUTS A GUN TO HIS HEAD cause he has abandoned his compassionate ideals in that moment and he goes "the fuck u gonna do after shooting me" and she goes "kill myself, cause the flame alchemy" and he IS SO SHOOK BY THAT that he immediately goes

"I can't afford to loose you."

?!?!?!?!

And calms down and realizes that he has hurt her AGAIN which is like the thing he has felt immense guilt about (next to the genocide) for ten years and they have the tenderest liddle moment during which in the manga

HE TAKES HIS GLOVES OFF TO TOUCH HER HAND

and then like 10 minutes later the villains are like "hey Mustang u like this woman right" and almost kill her and that's when my tattoo happens which I cannot stress enough is like a split second and the closest they ever get to wach other like

ALL THIS

Just happens strewn over 64 episodes while the elric brothers do their heroes quest thing. First time viewers are not even equipped to get the weight of any of it and in all that time they NEVER EVEN CALL EACH OTHER BY THEIR NAMES

[butmakeitgayblog]

What’s your opinion about the people making fun of the ones missing in the titanic submarine? I get it they’re billionaires, they did nothing to help anyone ever. But still they’re people and they’re gonna suffer an awful death if not already. And there’s a 19 year old there. I can’t find myself laughing at a lot of post making a joke out of it.

Well to preface this, I've always thought they were dead to begin with. Either because of a system failure or because they just plain got themselves lost. I think this whole "search and rescue" thing was a completely futile mission to begin with because it's not even trying to find a needle in a haystack, it's trying to find a needle 12,500ft below sea level in the dark. The whole oxygen countdown was nothing but hysteria inducing bullshit created by the media to sensationalize this shit. They're dead. They've been dead. Probably before Tuesday when this all was released to the public, even tho they went missing on Saturday. But even if it was from oxygen deprivation, the whole 'X amount of remaining hours' countdown thing was never real because that's not accounting for each person's oxygen use or increased breathing due to circumstances, etc. It was all media sensationalizing bullshit.

That being said.

I think the answer to as why so many people are finding humor at the prospect of this terrifying ordeal is a lot more of a nuanced answer than just oh they're callous and don't care about people's suffering. The truth is that this isn't something unlucky and devastating that just happened out of nowhere to unsuspecting people. These guys knew the dangers. They signed very detailed consent forms explaining the risks to all this. However, like what usually happens with the obscenely wealthy, they thought they were untouchable. Disasters don't happen to them. Right? The supreme level of privilege it takes to overlook how lucky in life you've had it (while the mass majority suffer at your indifference) and instead deliberately chasing down thrill seeking highs that put your life in danger because you actually have no idea what it means to be terrified for your life is mind boggling.

The fucking hubris that requires.

I mean these men, every last one of them, the 19 year old included, knew what they were getting into. They climbed into a tube with shitty communications, no homing devices, no flotation devices, no escape hatches, all to go down and look at a mass graveyard through a shitty tv screen for no other reason than to be able to say that they did it. And oho, can't forget, because it was a more ~convenient~ form of being able to achieve such a thrill.

That's literally the selling pitch from the CEO himself that every last one of them read.

The entitlement it takes to read this and all the other warnings about lack of safety contingencies WHICH WERE MADE CLEAR TO THEM and think, "yeah no that's for me😀" is insane because it truly shows that fundamentally these people think they're untouchable. They lack any survival skills because they've never had to cultivate any because they've lived their lives in total luxury and safety.

And they've done it while the rest of the world suffers as a direct result of their selfishness.

They each paid a quarter of a million dollars to do this. The things they could've done with that money instead and still be alive right now. I'd love to say they could've sponsored a refugee or used it to feed swathes of starving people in each of their home countries, but let's be real, they never would've done that. Because they didn't do that while they were alive. You're right, they helped no one. They hoarded their wealth and lived in opulence while the rest of the world suffered at their fingertips.

And now people should feel bad for finding humor in all this? I'm not saying it's ok to laugh at the death and suffering of anyone, but I can see quite plainly why people are reacting to this with humor. I can see that a lot of the humor comes from a place of anger and inequity and being fucking tired of living in a world where people who have more money than sense can do things like this for a thrill and a chance to flaunt their wealth, while the majority of the world is just struggling to stay alive.

I don't think those two mentalities have to be mutually exclusive. I think you can feel objectively bad and empathetic to what was probably a pretty miserable death, and also find the absurdity of the whole situation grimly humorous. I think those two things can and do exist, and I don't think it necessarily makes someone a bad OR good person for feeling one more than the other considering everything else at play.

And that's not even getting into the fact that we're having this conversation at all when refugees are dying all the time trying to escape the suffering of their countries and no one says shit about it. But when it comes to some wealthy men fucking up on a power trip? Well then everyone's suddenly got an opinion 🙄

[ultimatebottom69]

what is your opinion about the HS universe spreading like this?, we had Heaven's Secret requiem and now Astrea Broken Heart, now I'm waiting for Alice to say that even we are part of this universe.

Thank you for making me smile, hugs to you.

I don't know who you are but I am pretty sure you made me smile at least once without knowing !

So about HS. Turns out I was exxagerating and actually only 3 universes are related to HS. If you exclude HS2 and count it as a continuity and HS requiem as an interlude before HS3 . Technically speaking only Chasing You and Astrea's broken hearts are part of HS.

But we could count HS requiem as it's own spin off which we should.

So 3 universes. I'd say. It's not that big of a deal.

But. I want them to add HS to more universes only for the absoute chaos the fandom is everytime it happens. I never laughed 6 posts in a row but damn here I was. Watching people go insane about a book that I didn't mind the existence of.

Like I think many people are taking too seriously, I mean Alice worldbuilding was kind of ass, like there are lots and lots of openings.

Like for example we got a random ass snake that represents evil that is birthed every year ? Like the Temptress snake that's what's the name was. And we never saw the beast again. We got sirens. Ok. Why they in THAT river specifically ? Are they the only sirens ?? Nobody knows. They could even come in the size of a glass of water for all we know.

How many rocks type is there ? The answer was "There are as many types of rocks as there is immortals." I am sorry you meaning we got Millions or at least a 1000 different type of rocks in this universe ?? All with different powers ?? This is the fuckiest deus ex machina I ever seen.

Like the whole HS universe if you really try to inspect it is a giant plot device that you could say almsot anything and it could happen.

I mean we got immortals who just have to BELIEVE they can lift a building. And boom. They fucking can.

The true Heaven's secret was to believe.

I am serious this is the whole two books. A kid in a playground making up the rules as they go.

Alice litterally pulled up in the studio. Got up on a table. Turn on that powerpoint. Show a pigeon on the screen. Add 2 eyes. Make it white. And said "This is the familiar of Eragon, the guy who has been in charge for a thousand years of the Angel council. How he got it ? He went into the green haired emo billie eilish wanna be's Island. And the creature liked him. Here is a cool name. Any objections ?"

And there were none.

Eragon the the guy who is supposed to be the wisdom incarnated. Has a fucking pigeon as a familiar.

So RC announcing Astrea's broken heart is in HS universe...Well you can tell this is not the craziest thing I read about HS or in HS. Like I saw Mikael with wings and I went "Oh boy. They not gonna miss. They gonna pull the HS on us." And they did.

but as someone said, the true error was announcing it on Facebook instead of I dunno.

Make Fencio pull up and say a random mysoginist thing and promptly getting killed again. I think everyone would have been less mad.

The only true downside to being the same universe as HS ? Well very very soon the author gonna pull a plot card out of the cards against humanities deck and it will help the main cast. For no reason. Nobody knew that thing existed BEFORE that moment or we had just very vague allusions to it.

Like that's the only downside. The upside ? The comedy is about to get crispy.

[raveneira]

Remember when people where hyping up code to be this unstoppable guy to turn up to be ultimate fraud

Yeah, I had high hopes for Code, so much potential and his introduction was a MASSIVE hype for his character

Like look at this

This is how we get officially introduced to him, and both Kawaki and Amado emphasize what a huge threat he is and how hes different from the rest.

Code is literally Sakura on steroids, this is literally the Sakura vs Sasori fight setting up massive hype for where her character was gonna go from there and just doing jack shit with that potential, then waiting till the FINAL arc of the series near the very end to make her awaken her biggest achievement, only to immediately be overshadowed by Naruto gaining a even greater healing achievement.

Code is that level of wasted potential but a million times worse because hes supposed to be a main villain, Sakura had an excuse as a healer to stand back, Code is a main VILLAIN and is one of the main THREATS to the main cast and we're introduced to him literally murdering ppl with ease.

So Code doesnt get to just 'step back' because thats not what he was setup to be, he was setup to inherit Isshiki and the Otsutsuki will and become a GOD who would carry out their will [the whole divine tree spiel]

I want you to REALLY pay attention to what Isshiki said here because this is a huge reason why Code had massive expectations on him.

That is an INSANE amount of expectations placed on this character, Codes gonna somehow create a divine tree? eat the fruit and become a new Otsutsuki? eventually become a god? just how strong is he with his limiters off if Kawaki and Amado are already scared of him with them on? the expectations were endless

But then...the worst possible thing happened for not just Codes character and relevance as a main villain, but also the manga as a whole.

This bitches introduction right after Codes....Code didnt get more than a few pages killing ppl and being hyped but by Amado and Kawaki before he was immediately overshadowed by Ada, we didnt know that would be the case at the time, but this one page is single handedly the moment Codes entire character was doomed for failure.

Instead of the unstoppable menace avenging his god Isshiki and carrying out the Otsutsuki will for him as his final wish like we were promised, instead we got this goofy ass team rocket trio and Code is quickly replaced once hes outlived his use to the eye poison siblings.

Little did we know how right Bug was about him being all bark, because in the timeskip he's beaten effortlessly even by Boruto who he, according to the power scaling set by Ikemoto with these statements, should be stronger than an imperfect vessel Jigen, who literally beat full power Naruto and Sasuke 2v1, so either Boruto is more powerful than Jigen, Naruto, and Sasuke combined, or unlimited Code is just a got danm joke that was never a real threat to begin with.

As Bug said, Code was all bark, he took down some fodder, got hyped up just to live up to NONE of it and not only got replaced by Ada and Daemon, but by his own danm army he built for 3 years straight, all of which happened due to HIS carelessness.

His rivalry with Kawaki was also a huge point of intrigue, ppl wanted to know more about their relationship in Kara, how their current conflict with eachother would play out [Code avenging his god, Kawaki protecting Naruto] and there was just a whole lot of intrigue and potential that could've been played with there but again, absolutely nothing was done with it, its just a one sided beef that Kawaki could care less about, except he did care about it because he was havin PTSD flashbacks about him in the lab and went to confront Code personally to appease him by sacrificing himself since he knows how much he hates him

but again just another interesting dynamic just forgotten by this incompetent writer that seems to forget one of the main things that made Naruto so good and memorable [the villains and character dynamics]

Code is an even bigger example than Sakura of wasted potential, a guy who had literally EVERYTHING to be one hell of a main villain, an absolute menace our main cast would really have to struggle with, he could've potentially became Madara levels of unstoppable and Ikemoto just threw all that shit out the window, ironic because Kishimoto wanted to kill off Code but Ikemoto spared him just to do jack shit with him, he reduced him to a comedy villain on a similar level to Drakken from Kim Possible.

Thats the one death I was glad Ikemoto didnt follow through on, because Code had so much potential that I would've hated to see wasted, but if Kishimoto read the drafts of what Ikemoto had planned for him, maybe Kishimoto was tryna spare him the embarrassment and the waste of time his character would end up being as we see now.

[sapphire-weapon]

I just wanted to say that as a person in their early 20s who only just got into resident evil after re8, it was so fun finding your blog and scrolling through all the little blurbs you’ve got. fandom elders always have the best resources and lore and make spaces a million times better, so thank u for mentioning all the little game details and fandom notes that would’ve been forgotten or missed otherwise to newcomers!!

on another note, i wanted to ask if you had any amusing/chaotic tidbits relating to the re fandom in its earlier days, whether it be speculations of scenes or character directions or interactions that people were so sure were going to happen in later re games that absolutely did not happen, fics that were really influential, insane fanwar stories, memes that used to be rlly prolific and now don’t really come up, etc. it’s something i love to discover about fandoms because it rlly is a “you had to be there,” type of information that people don’t document the way they would with canon developments that you can easily find on wikipages

Anon... I'm gonna fucking cry. 😭 This is exactly what I wanted this blog to become once I realized I was falling back into RE hell. Anything that I can do to make this canon more accessible to new people, I want to do it. I think I've said this before, but I literally cannot imagine what it must be like getting into this series this late in the game, because RE is terrifyingly huge and abstract and very old by video game standards.

As for the second part of your ask... Man, I have so many stories. I won't tell all of them, because if I try to, it'll be weeks before I can post this LMAO so let me just break this up into sections and I'll tell whatever the first stories that pop into my head are.

FAN THEORIES

So, historically, RE fandom was never big on fan theories. Fan theories and meta were something that Silent Hill people did, not so much RE people.

BUT there is one that refuses to die, and I have seen people scream about it as recently as Revelations 2.

People are convinced that Steve Burnside is going to come back. This drum has been getting banged ever since the original Code Veronica released in 2000, and even though it has literally never been hinted at at any point in the 23 years since then that Capcom even remembers that that was a possible thing that was set up, the fandom is still waiting for it to happen.

And it's all because Wesker stole his body and fucked off with it and was a complete asshole about it when he did it. That's it, that's the whole reason.

But then that also ties into the fact that there are still people who are convinced that Wesker didn't actually die in RE5 and that he's gonna come back any day now, guys, really -- and that's just a whole level of death denial I've never seen before. Dude got hit with two rocket launchers in the middle of an active volcano. YOU LITERALLY DO NOT GET MORE DEAD THAN THAT.

INFLUENTIAL FICS

Surprisingly, none. RE didn't have an "I Know What's Beneath the Snow Fields" or a "Walk This World." There were influential authors, though. I won't name them because I have no idea where they are now or if they're still around, but. I will say that there was one very influential fic writer in Cleon fandom who utilized literally so many headcanons in her fics that her characters were utterly unrecognizable. Some of the headcanons blatantly contradicted canon, even. But her writing style and her prose were so, so, so fucking good that it didn't matter. For a while, Cleon fandom almost became like a cult around her fics -- and, as someone who only dabbled in Cleon because my friends shipped it, but I had no personal stake in the ship myself -- it was really, really weird to watch this go down.

INSANE FAN WAR STORIES

I was going to go off on a huge thing about the Aeon vs Cleon wars, but seeing as how they're still fucking happening for some god forsaken dumbass reason, I decided not to.

So, we'll forget that. And while this isn't a war story, exactly, I do need to give a special shoutout to the Wesker wives of old.

If you are at all familiar with the stories of old school Final Fantasy VII fandom of girls who convinced themselves that they married Sephiroth on the astral plane -- guess what. RE fandom had those girls, too, and we called them Wesker wives.

There was one really prominent one on LiveJournal back in the day who used to get art commissioned of her and Wesker together, and she would post pictures of herself "in uniform" for him, and like. Would legitimately write as though she was actually married to the fictional character Albert Wesker. She'd answer questions from people and shit.

And she was really, really pretty, so everyone was just kind of stunned by this, because this girl very clearly took care of herself and worked out and knew how to do her hair and makeup -- she always looked really good -- and it was just like... how did someone like you fall so far off the reality wagon?

And then it slowly started to come out that she maybe had some nazi ideology behind her and kept referring to Wesker has her Aryan king or someshit, and that was about the point where my Jewish ass backed away from that whole trainwreck and stopped paying attention to it, so I don't actually know how this story ends.

MEMES

So, uh. If you've been on the fandom side of the internet long enough, you'll at least have heard of the "it's over 9000" meme, even if you're not into Dragon Ball or ever seen an episode of it in your life.

Well, the same guy who started that meme also left his mark on RE fandom, too. The whole "Jill sandwich" thing was always a meme in its own right, but "Hope this is not Chris's blood" was added onto it thanks to this video. So, "Hope this is not Chris's blood" was a big, big meme in the late aughts that I really don't see around anymore. It was used as a sort of... shitpost response to a shitpost, if that makes sense? Like, your friend sends you some obviously stupid bullcrap or a dumb meme and you just respond back "hope this is not chris's blood."

This cap from Code Veronica was a huge meme for a long time, too, and I DO NOT FUCKING KNOW WHY

And then.

There was this masterpiece. Do not watch this with other people in the room unless your willingness to let others bear witness to your own cringe is very high. It's also NSFW. And, actually, this video might be the single oldest meme in RE fandom history. The YT link I provided here is not the original source of it. It was some stupid fan edit that was making its rounds on Kazaa, and I'm not joking. I want to say this edit is no younger than OG RE2 (so 1998).

And I would negligent in my duties as a fandom historian if I did not introduce you to the glory that is Resident Evil 4 Days of Our Lives. I STILL QUOTE THIS SHIT, TO THIS DAY.

Like, this is me on plurk referencing this stupid fucking shit as I'm liveplurking my very first playthrough of RE4R:

There was a part of me that was honestly kind of upset when the two cops at the beginning of RE4make didn't actually say to Leon, "I hear no one listens to you. Is that true, Captain Cubscout?" because that is unironically the single greatest line of dialogue that was ever written to be said by any character to Leon Kennedy, and it was written by some fuckin college kids back in the mid aughts.

And that's all I can think of for right now.

Thank u for indulging my old person desire to ramble on about "BACK IN MY DAY........." I appreciate u.

ETA: ok like i know i said i was only gonna mention shit that i could think of at the time that i responded to the ask but there is one more meme that i would be remiss to not mention

[junosswans]

It's a really big thing for me and for the first time in so many years I'm feeling that everything is finally going to turn upwards. It feels so unreal.

I'm literally sobbing rn like... Although it's an exaggeration, but most of the time I really feel like my entire life up to this point has been cursed. And it made a lot of sense to me-- because bad things always lead to another bad thing and another, like irresponsible parents always lead to financial hardships and then abuse and neglect happens and you're supposed to take on the role of a parent to provide, which fucks up your studies which leads to more hardships and abuse and it's just a whole unending circle, except that a circle's line stays balanced, but your life can keep on going downhill in which all the previous shitty stuff are still happening but new shits stick onto you, like you're a dryer ball that collects hair and lint (at least I imagine them to work like that, I've never owned a dryer)

And I don't know when's the last time I've had a dream come true; I've worked so hard on everything, got all the credentials and experiences I needed and way more than that, but nothing, just nothing ever seemed to go the way I wanted it to. But finally a good thing has happened and it's gonna get me out of this shithole, far away from my abusers and my past, away from the totalitarian nonsense and all the other insane shits that goes down in this city everyday.

I honestly don't know how to feel because genuine joy is something that I haven't felt in so long that I probably have forgotten how to feel so. Right now, I'm just crying my eyes out and feeling the grief and relief of things finally being over.

I know it won't be easy over there, and there will be another million hardships waiting for me, but it's my choice this time and I'd rather suffer in my own terms. I hope I can finally find my peace.

[mushiewrites]

can I just be sappy for a moment about 2022? It was so shitty for a multitude of reasons but you guys made it better ):

firstly everyone that interacts with my posts, i love u and appreciate u so much ): if i didn’t have people interacting, i wouldn’t really have a reason to want to keep writing.

but there are some very cool and lovely people I want to fawn over and just say a few things about 🫠

thank u to:

@an-inkling-of for hyping up my writing and always encouraging me to be mean (hehehe 😈)

@elliot-tword for being one of the first people i remember being so kind and supportive when i first started out writing

@fluffy-fics for making LITERAL BEAUTIFUL ART FROM MY FICS / DRABBLES???????? still so honored tbh 🥺💕

@sleepy--anon + @azuregiggles + @starshinenova for providing the best hc’s i’ve ever seen and allowing me to run wild with them 👀

@amitlee for being my enemy, one of my favorite people to bully/be bullied by, and also one of the best people i’ve gotten to meet on this hell site 🔥

I have a million more people I could thank, so if you weren’t mentioned, just know I love u and appreciate you. I want to tag you all 🥺

I hope every has an incredible 2023, it’s gonna be great I can feel it ✨

(okay i’m putting the longer ones under here…..this is going to be SAPPY sappy - this is your warning)

@cayjno - my baby jworm ): i don’t even know what to write for you. i went from freaking out in the best way over your fics to getting to be so close with you and i am still confused as to how????? i have no idea why but i was so nervy to speak with you bc u were just so COOL to me and i was scawwed. i remember the night we had our first real conversation, i was just so hype that you were as cool as i thought, probably even more so. you are one of the most kindest and sweetest humans i’ve ever met. i am so so thankful to know you and get to be in your life. you make me feel so safe, you never ever throw judgement on me and i am so grateful for that. i don’t ever feel scared telling you things because i know you’re not going to look at me differently for it. you also don’t let me brain run with bad things - you normally tell me straight up how something is if i seem to be going a different direction than what actually is happening in situations where that might normally happen. you are just such a lovely support person. we are so comfortable with each other and i love doing stupid things with you. you are so extremely talented in so many ways (i will never have another wallpaper that isn’t a juno drawing ever again btw). u are absolutely adorable and i adore you and your art and your writing and just skdndjdndjsj i love you ): i can’t wait until we invent teleporting so i can hug you for a million years ): i love u so much mouse 💕

@covenofwives - I literally stayed hyperfixated on The Blame Game for m o n t h s. you are SO UNBELIEVABLY COOL. the first few times we spoke i was so hype because you were so kind! we’ve gotten to be such nice little fwens and i love that for us ): we have our own little bobbi duo! i love when we exchange art and wips, it makes me feel so nice that you allow me to see your creations before they’re finished. you are so insanely talented as well, i’m still so hype that you drew Big Challenges on the beach just enjoying his day. you and your feathers are the cutest things EVER, i can’t wait to keep our cute lil friendship growing! i love and appreciate u and ur kindness always 🥺💕

and last but definitely not least

@awkwardtickleetoo - my lil baby puppy knight. the other half of puppyduo. mr bones. i could list everything we’ve ever called each other here but it would need to be a whole new post tbh. i adore you. you already know this. i remember being nervy to speak to you too, but god am i glad we started bc here we are now, months later and clingy as heck. we are the cutest little besties and i wouldn’t trade our weird little freaky conversations for anything. thank you for always bouncing ideas around with me or reading things if i need to know if things sound okay. i love that we don’t gatekeep, and i love that we bully each other about the embarrassing things we share. i love that we’ve resorted to using mostly pet-names for each other, and i love the ones you give me (all of them are good but you know my favorites 🥺) i love that we don’t EVER judge each other and i don’t ever second guess it when i tell you things that fluster me. you’re always so kind (and mean) in the best way and you are just such a lovely person. you, just like everyone else on this list are so extremely talented. you know i binge your fics and fawn over the shit you say all the time. i am very clearly cal stan #1. i actually could keep going but this would end up being very long and repetitive, but it’s all true. love you, idiot. 💕