#there's no leadup to it happening like I thought there would be it just Happens while theyre being happy and it's all over within 30 second

[smokestarrules]

guess what I finished watching

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Empire Wars

brutal YA dystopian fantasy, start of a duology

set in a future climate-ravaged world taken over by a white supremacist empire

a girl raised feral has to survive being hunted along with other foreigners and political enemies on a deadly magical island

and a princess of the Makari-African people newly married into the regime, intent on bringing it down if she can find a way

[mrsbsmooth]

Smut writing 101: What I wish someone had told me when I first started.

So a conversation with @queen-of-boops and @longbobmckenzie sparked this post. Sarah already wrote a list of tips for writing a villa fic which was really helpful and people expanded on it a lot, so we thought it might be helpful to share a few tips for writing smut from some of the writers that do it a lot.

This is a long-ass post, because I've learned a lot over the years. So right at the end, there's a mini how-to guide for how to turn your smut from IKEA instruction manual into an explosion of sexual tension.

In addition, I would love for others to add on to this. This fandom is horrifically talented especially in writing brain-melting smut, and this is just what I could come up with in a few hours. But I'd love to hear from other people and have them add on extra bits!

A few resources before we begin:

The Smut Writer's Dictionary

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Smut Fic [HIGHLY recommend sections ii (Reaction words), iv (sexy alternatives to 'said'), xii (generally acceptable slang terms) and xvi (Some do's and don'ts of smut writing).]

OneLook Thesaurus is much better than other thesauruses at suggesting words for smut (I've found).

Now, on to the advice!

Tip #1 - It's normal to find it difficult and cringe to write. Own it.

Smut can be intimidating. It can feel really cringe and awkward and you might feel like people are judging you for it, and you know what? Sometimes they are. Smut isn't for everyone, and not everyone wants to read it, and that's why ratings and tags exist on Archive of Our Own. But you shouldn't be ashamed of writing it. Smut is fun and awesome and people who do like reading smut often love reading it, and will absolutely eat up whatever you give them. So go nuts. Write what you want to see, write what you want to read. That's advice for everything, but it's especially relevant for writing smut. Because if you feel awkward, it can sometimes show through. Lean into it. Let it happen. If you make yourself blush, you’re doing a fucking awesome job.

Tip #2 - Writer’s block.

I've written hundreds of thousands of words of pure, unadulterated filth, and I still struggle to push into it sometimes. The leadup comes so naturally, the tension builds, they're kissing, they're starting to touch each other, and then-- writer's block. I stare at the page and tap my fingers and go... huh. Same with writing really effectual kisses, or writing orgasms. There's all this pressure to make it the best written orgasm that's ever existed in the English language and it really doesn't need to be. Just put something down. 

If your doc looks like this:She clawed at the wall, knowing she was coming apart at the seams, the pressure building inside her. He didn’t let up. [orgasm bla bla bla]. She took a deep breath. She drew herself off him. She turned around. And she fell to her knees. [blowjob and he's loving it].

Then your doc looks just like mine.

Tip #3 - Pick the right words for everyone’s bits. 

See the resource above for suggestions! People have very different preferences when it comes to what to call a cock or whether or not to use the word ‘cunt’. Adjectives, adverbs– there are so many different opinions. Like personally, I have to physically restrain myself from throwing a fic across the room if it uses the word hole but that is my personal preference, and I am massively in the minority there. But my advice is threefold:

Read widely to find out what you like,

Write what you like,

Know your characters. 

Language will vary by fandom, by character, and by setting, and it’s an opportunity to really solidify their characterisation by carrying this into smut. An arrogant fuckwit who’s bedding his mortal enemy in a fit of hate-sex might use ‘into her slick cunt’, whereas a sweet, wholesome guy who’s desperately in love might say ‘pushed inside her’. But the more you read, and the more you write, the more you’ll find certain words or phrases you’re more comfortable with. 

The more smut you read, the better understanding you’ll have of what you like. The better understanding you have of what you like, the easier it will be to write. 

Tip #4 - POV can help you

Picking the right POV can make your life easier. For example, I once wrote a M/M/M threesome. That fic ended up being my very first ever 'first person POV' fic. Why? Because it turned one set of ‘his hand’ into ‘my hand’. Made it easier to understand the logistics of ‘his hand on his waist’, etc. Maybe it's lazy, maybe it's genius. I thought it was a bit of both. 

Consider whose POV is going to be the most impactful. If you’re not sure, try writing a paragraph from each. You’ll figure it out quite quickly. 

Tip #5 - Dialogue

You don’t have to include dialogue in your smut, but it can really help with pacing things and showing when the ‘end’ is approaching. Anyone who’s ever read any of my smut ever knows I’m a huge fan of cutting people off mid sentence in smut dialogue. 

They start out with “Oh yeah? You think you can make me X?” And the other person goes “Sweetheart, I’m going to make you X so hard you don’t Y for a Z.” 

But then by the end it’s “You feel–” and everyone’s gasping “Oh, fuck–” and sobbing out “I’m so– I’m gonna–” 

To me, this helps to build pacing and tension and show without telling that the end is approaching. But honestly, that’s just me– I enjoy reading people being very vocal in smut, so that’s how I write them. If that’s not your thing, then don’t do it. Simple as that. 

Tip #6 - Don’t skimp on the finale

Orgasms are hard to write. We all know that. There’s all this pressure to write the best most explosive monumental earth-shattering orgasm that’s ever existed in fiction, and honestly, it probably won’t be. But you still need to give it the time it deserves. 

As an avid consumer of smut, there is nothing more frustrating than five pages of buildup, incredible smut, tension rising, rising, rising– and then the orgasm happens in two lines and they’re immediately having a conversation afterwards. This is, no pun intended, the climax of your scene. Give it a paragraph. Hell, give it two paragraphs. Give it four. The climax is something you can write in excruciating detail and it will almost always be better for it. You can decide whether they come at the same time, or whether one comes immediately after the other (personal fav so we get to read two orgasms. Yay! Two cakes!) You can hyper-focus on every single sense. Here are some examples for writing orgasms:

Feel/Touch

The feeling travelling through the character’s body/ zones: up their spine, through their thighs, ‘deep inside them’

Their partner continuing to thrust/move

Their partner’s grip on their body, or maybe a kiss

Fingernails digging into shoulder or raking down a back

Legs squeezing

Smell

Personally I think this works better for the leadup and afterwards, but if you want this in here you absolutely can. Pheremones, cologne, aftershave, perfume, sweat, hair gel– whatever makes them smell like them. 

Sight

Their partner’s face and get detailed! Lips parting, brow scrunched, eyes closed, face in beautiful agony, wax poetic as fuck about their partner's face! What is hotter than making someone come and watching their face while you do it!??!!?

Darkness (blindfolded 👀)

‘White light behind their eyes’ is a cliche for a reason (fucking love this one)

Seeing stars/heaven see above lol

Taste

Harder to put into an orgasm but salty skin, lipgloss/lipstick? Whatever you want really

Sound

Big one. Their partner’s breath or moan as they watch/feel character’s peak

Their own breath/moans (or lack thereof can be just as effective, a ‘sudden silence’ as their breath catches in their throat can work WONDERS)

Bodies slapping together (doesn’t always work but when it does it does)

External sounds, especially rhythmic ones. A train clacking or a club baseline could simulate a heartbeat/shockwaves that you could lean into.

Pick multiple senses and focus on them. This will fill up a good bit of your climax writing. 

But you should also let them come down from it! DON’T SKIMP AFTERCARE (or after-hate??)

Tip #7 - Aftercare!

I missed this so often when I was new to writing smut and I didn’t realise how effective it could be! I always just faded to black immediately afterwards because I didn’t want to deal with the ‘cleanup’. And you don’t have to go into detail, but at the very least, give them a few minutes– a paragraph or so after the sex. The immediate aftermath of the act itself when you can really focus on the relationship. 

If they’re mortal enemies who’ve just fucked and are now horrified? Have them panting into each others’ skin. Their breaths suddenly become sharper and more reserved. They pull back from each other. Someone glares or someone says something snarky or awful. Someone showing aftercare or affection here (or being particularly cruel) reveals a lot about their character.

If they’re deeply in love and it’s comfortable for them to do so, maybe let them just lay there for a second, enjoying the feeling of each others’ bodies and letting breaths fall warmly and smiles tug at cheeks. Soft kisses, laying in silence, affection, etc. 

If they’re best mates who just fucked by accident, have the silence be awkward and have no one breathe at all. It’s tense and awkward and one has to ask the other to go get a towel or something and the other is like ‘oh, yeah, um, right’. 

Don’t skip this! It can be so impactful!

Overall Tip - Beware the ‘IKEA Instruction manual’!

The #1 most common mistake, in my opinion, in writing smut is ‘Insert Tab A into Slot B’. It’s things like, 

He moved his leg A, she touched B. He lifted her arm to C, holding her D’s, before slipping down to cup E. She ran her hands up F, touching his G, feeling his Hs caressing her I as she lifted her J and draped it over his K.

When I read this, I’m not focusing on the smut. I’m doing mental gymnastics trying to keep track of what position they’re in in my head because I’m assuming that it’s important. If you feel yourself doing this, stop. Refocus. Remember whose POV you’re in. This isn’t to say you should never tell the reader what’s happening. Just make sure to break it up a little!

Balance actions with senses. 

Let’s say you start with a basic action. (The example is buildup to smut, not actual smut, but the idea is the same)

“His hand moved from her knee to her thigh.”

-> Instead of writing what they’re doing, write what they can sense.

“His hand moved from her knee to her thigh” becomes “She felt his warm hand slide from her knee to her thigh.”

-> Now, make the phrase active. Instead of ‘she felt’, make it a description.

‘She felt his warm hand slide from her knee to her thigh’ becomes ‘Warmth erupted on her skin as his hand slid from her knee to her thigh’.

-> Give it details, and draw focus to them.

His fingertips skimmed her inner thigh as his hand slipped from her knee and moved higher. The silk of her skirt gave way to the warmth of a coarse, rough palm. Her skin seared beneath it. But every other inch of her shivered with anticipation.

In three steps, you’ve gone from IKEA tab A to slot B to a pretty good section for building tension. 

Examples of writing senses:

What can they feel? - ‘She’d never been so pent up, so wired, so on edge, and every flit of his practiced fingers on her waist had goosebumps shooting up her spine’.

What can they taste? - ‘She could taste the sweat on his skin, the coconut suncream on his shoulders, the salt of the ocean on the hints of stubble at his jawline.’

What can they smell? - ‘Her forehead pressed to his, that smokey, heady cologne engulfing her; curling her closer in time with his arms around her.’

What can they hear? - ‘He watched her every move, breathing quickly, so she looked him directly in the eyes as she undid his belt. Belt. Button. Zip purring as she tugged it down towards her.’

What can they see? - “Then, they opened, and he was treated to the sight of her looking up at him from her knees. Her eyes said fuck me. Her mouth said fuck me. Everything about her. Fuck me. Fuck me.”

I hope this was helpful in some way. I really would love to hear any other tips and tricks that writers would like to add to this. Obviously Mo and Sarah are already tagged, but this is a full and open free-for-all.

Add your thoughts! Add what you've learned! Add what you wish you knew!

I'd love to hear it <3

[aihoshiino]

chapter 154 thoughts

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 11

Aqua Hoshigan Status: (Still) white

man

This is one of those chapters where, technically speaking, I should probably be tearing it to bits (AND I DEFINITELY WILL) - it represents a pretty substantial break in or retcon to the series continuity as it's been presented to us thus far and the actions of certain characters in the lead up to this event don't quite make sense if they've had access to some of the information that's seemingly been in their hands for a while but… would you guys forgive me if I said I didn't really care LOL. As I've said before, I'm the sort of reader who can excuse a lot of raw Plot Bullshit so long as I feel like the hearts of the characters are intact and for all its fumbles, this is a chapter I think is unerringly dedicated to the hearts of its characters. I've made no secret of the fact that Ai is and always has been my main avenue of investment in Oshi no Ko as a series and in this chapter, we uncover the final secret in her heart in particular after having the entire series thus far dedicated to laying it bare to us.

We pick up exactly where we left off last chapter with the reveal that the HKAI breakup was indeed founded on Ai's pregnancy, as a lot of us had predicted.

This, uh, does not quite line up with previous events!

From what we'd previously been told, in terms of placement in the timeline, the death of Airi and her husband happened after the twins were born and sometime in the leadup to the Dome concert, which would put it in the ballpark of Ai's 18th to 20th birthday depending on how long it was in the works for. But based on how this flashback section is structured, it seems to place their deaths before Ai even knew she was pregnant, let alone giving birth. If it was just clashing with 15YL's retelling then I could dismiss that as an element of the movie's fictionalization that we've seen and Kamiki alludes to but this also clashes with where this event was placed temporally by Ichigo, when remembering a real life event. So… What gives!!!!

Like, at the end of the day, the exact placement of Uehara's death only matters inasmuch as it needs to be before Ai gets her new apartment, since the point Ichigo is really making is that Aqua is pinning his hopes on a dead man who was dead before he could have ever contributed to Ai's murder. But placing it that far back in the timeline - before the twins were even born! - just makes Aqua's willful ignorance in relation to it come off as a lot sillier and more difficult to swallow than if it happened closer to Ai's actual date of death.

I'm also a little disappointed that we really quickly breeze past Ai revealing she's pregnant - it's not the point of the scene overall and it would be weird to go really deep into her POV in the middle of a Kamiki flashback but one of my big issues with the Movie Arc was that it ripped past anything and everything to do with Ai's pregnancy, including how she herself felt about being pregnant. Like I said in my 145 review, skipping over the parts of it we've seen makes sense but I think there's still a bunch of really fascinating potential in exploring how Ai felt when she realized she was pregnant - how did she hide it for long enough that she was almost halfway through her pregnancy and getting fucking enormous before her first checkup? How did Ichigo and Miyako react when they first got the news? There's so much juicy character and relationship work you could mine out of that but the story fails to do so. We sort of get a crumb of this in the DVD but her feelings there are all centered on the pregnancy in relation to Hikaru and even then she breezes past it so fast it's clearly not meant to be the focus of any of what she's saying and idk. For a character whose entire hook is her struggles with motherhood, familial love and all the rest of it, that's a little disappointing.

THAT SAID!!! All that makes me sound like I didn't like what went on with Ai this chapter but I actually loved it. It's so painfully in line with everything we've been told and shown about her thus far in the manga and in this chapter, we see all her strengths, weaknesses and human contradictions laid bare in a way I find incredibly rewarding and compelling.

The HKAI breakup especially is just soooooo deliciously cringe inducing. It's an echo of the argument with Nino that 15YL portrays, where Ai's good intentions, avoidant tendencies and absolute absence of tact all snowball and end up ruining one of her most important relationships. Like… I can't believe I'm about to say this about a conversation in which Ai is one of the people talking, but she really is the reasonable one here! She's right to identify that their relationship is not working, that adding babies and marriage to the mix will only make things worse - her intentions, as they always are, are good and she's making her decisions with Kamiki in mind… her delivery is just absolutely dogshit!!! GIRL, PLEASE, YOUR WORDS!!!! USE YOUR WORDS!!!!!

For all my issues with Akasaka's writing lately, I think he portrays these kinds of two sided failures of communication so well, where you can see exactly where both characters are coming from and why they are failing to get their feelings across to each other. From an outsider's POV it's clear as day that Ai views herself and her children as the burden, one she doesn't want to put on Kamiki for the sake of a girl who doesn't even know if she can love him… but is it any wonder why Kamiki took it the way he did and why his guts were so utterly wrenched out as a result?

Kamiki's attempted proposal and Ai's immediate rejection of it are really interesting with the context of 45510 in particular. Extrapolating from her talk of marriage there, she brushed him off so quickly because she simply didn't believe he was serious… and yeah, he's pretty clearly not fully cognizant of the weight of what he's trying to propose, never mind that he's meeting "let's break up" with "LET'S GET MARRIED" lol.

Also interesting to extrapolate from both 45510 and other material surrounding Ai is that, at that point in her life, she simply didn't understand what the point of marriage was. On top of her being Literally Sixteen And A Child right now, Ai is said to have come from a deeply dysfunctional home where her mother engaged in a number of equally dysfunctional relationships, at least one of whom was with a man who was creeping on Ai even as he was working up to marry her mom. It's no wonder she doesn't really take the idea of marriage seriously, but it still hurts so see her reject Kamiki so bluntly - even more bluntly in the Japanese text somehow, simply chirping 無理! (Muri!) in response, i.e, not just "no way" but telling Kamiki to his face it's impossible.

Honestly this whole breakup scene is so darkly hilarious just in terms of how bad Ai is completely beefing it. Congrats babygirl that's the worst anyone's ever done it!!!

And we finally get the "I can't love you" drop after just shy of 25 chapters of buildup…….. And honestly, it feels a little hollow.

I talked about this a little before so forgive me for repeating myself but that line - or rather, Aqua and Ruby's implied misunderstanding of it - from Ai to Hikaru was given a huge amount of weight in the story when it was first introduced. It was implied to be the lynchpin in which everything else about the HKAI romance rested only for the story to go UH WELL ACTUALLY IT'S ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT AI FORGIVES HER KILLER which is like… fine, it just feels very jarring on a reread or when trying to sew together a plot thread like this. It especially feels strange because the emphasis is placed on them not getting it right or at least that Gotanda disagrees with their interpretation, only for the manga to whip back around and not only return this line to its previous heightened importantance but also to largely not line up with what was established about this line and its place in the narrative when it was first introduced. It's just more evidence that Akasaka's plans for the Movie Arc and its resolution changed in some way during serialisation because these inconsistencies are pretty glaring.

Not just that, but like… it's hard to feel impacted by this line when we didn't even see it in the Movie Arc. In general, it's so fucking weird that so much about the main emotional resolutions going on right now revolve around Ruby's performance in the movie when most of the big emotional moments people are reacting to are happening entirely offscreen. This would already be bad even if it wasn't taking place in a manga like OnK with its increasingly frustrating habit of offscreening more and more bits of the story that are extremely important for the characters. Before this chapter I would've said that maybe we'd see some of it after the movie released but given that Kamiki's arc and the revenge play as a whole is pretty clearly wrapping here, what would even be the point of it?

Idk. It's just increasingly obvious (and just as frustrating) to me just how much of the Movie Arc was wasted time and how much of the setup that needed to happen to make what follows really land just… didn't. This chapter's resolution for Ai and Hikaru, both separately and as a couple, is still excellent, but it could have been a lot better if its foundations weren't so meager.

We also finally get concrete proof from the horse's mouth that Kamiki was the one who deliberately leaked Ai's address and……. honestly this is kind of a wet fart too lol. OnK has previously very strongly implied that "Kamiki is Ai's killer" was a red herring or that we should at least be slightly skeptical of Aqua's assertions and conclusions but… nope, he was right all along, I guess?? Alright………………………… I certainly don't believe his insistence that gosh he totes didn't think Ryosuke would go THAT far and I'm still wondering wtf the two of them were doing at the hospital the night the twins were born but like. Honestly at this point, I don't really think it matters and I care much more about emotional resolutions than I do granular plot details - and boy do we get one hell of an emotional resolution.

I haven't shouted her out yet because I was saving it for this section but fuck, man, Mengo's expression work told chapter is killer as usual but this final stretch of pages is just gutwrenching. Ai's gentle, rueful smile on the DVD contrasted with the look of shocked, dawning understanding on Kamiki's….. Jesus Christ.

And at last, we uncover the final secret hidden at the bottom of Ai's heart. The entire manga thus far has been a process of stripping away the viewer's willful ignorance with regards to Ai's humanity but the DVDs had been an oddly ominous mystery box floating around, containing some implied dark secret that would change the entire trajectory of Ai's character as we knew it… but of course, the person who tells us that is Ai herself, a girl who hates herself, thinks of herself as dirty and impure, irresponsible and incapable of love.

So is it really any surprise that her darkest secret, the thing she can only confess with her eyes shining with black stars is simply that she's a fallible human? That she was a lonely young girl, confused and hurt in her own ways and that she hurt someone she dearly cared for and wanted to take it back?

Is it a little convenient that she put all this in the DVD? Yes, absolutely, and I'll be the first to say that the DVDs existing at all are a pretty clear retcon in service of getting info onto Aqua's hands. But it's also perfectly in line with Ai's timid, avoidant methods of reaching out. It parallels both Viewpoint B and 45510 (moreso the latter) where she pours her heart out in words, waiting for others to read and understand her. In 45510 in particular, her leaving the blog post is an extremely clear and strong parallel to the DVD - love letters put into bottles and thrown to the ocean in desperate hope the person they're addressed to might find and understand them.

As Akane says, Ai is torn between secrecy and a desire to have her true self exposed, so she attempts to craft scenarios in which this must happen, even if her avoidance can only allow her to do so with indirect methods. With the blog and moreso the DVDs & their method of delivery, Ai attempts to create situations where the initiation confrontation and disclosure is out of her hands and she has no choice but to tell the truth.

Ai's entire speech here is just heartbreaking. If the start of the chapter didn't make it explicit enough, we see her here put her good intentions into words to better understand how they were misinterpreted.

This adds SUCH a fascinating additional layer to her death that has me gnashing my fucking teeth. One of the things I've talked about a lot in my Ai meta is that Ryosuke is essentially an agent or even an embodiment of the entertainment industry and the way it has exploited her - the misogyny, entitlement, purity culture and abuse that ruled her life went on to end it. With this additional detail, though, Ryosuke becomes an agent not just of the things that plagued Ai of B-Komachi, but Ai as a human, too. All her life, Ai is willfully misunderstood and mischaracterized by the people around her, assigned narratives and roles without her consent and punished for both living up to and failing to live up to them. Ai's death is the end result of a lifelong cascade of failure on the part of every system and individual that has had the opportunity and responsibility to care for her - and, as Aqua throws in his father's face, that includes Hikaru.

Hikaru's supposed understanding of Ai is not one based in empathy or love but projection and possessiveness - understanding in this context is ownership, exclusivity and frankly, arrogance. A claim to a piece of Ai that no one else knows. But as Aqua forces him to realize… Hikaru never understood Ai, even as she did her best to make herself understood. For all his arrogance of understanding Ai and the nature of their relationship, Kamiki is ultimately just the same as every other person who idolized and objectified her then discarded her when the image they'd created in their mind didn't match reality. Ai wasn't his pure and perfect soulbonded saviour - she was a lonely, broken kid like him, still struggling to understand love after a lifetime spent starved of it.

Once, Kamiki begged Ai to save him. And here, the bitter truth is laid out for all of us: the salvation Kamiki had wished for was waiting for him, reaching out with open arms and he not only desecrated it but irrevocably destroyed any path back towards it. In killing Ai, Hikaru Kamiki killed himself.

The imagery of this moment is so fucking gorgeous. The visual of Kamiki and Ai reaching out to each other, in mutual understanding at last but separated by time and death… the "what if" happy Hoshino family… Ai's words being framed as a 'love letter' that transcended time to reach Kamiki and Aqua's eyes blazing with white as tears pour down his face… Jesus fucking Christ Mengo I'm already dead!!!!!

Like I said up top, I make zero secret of the fact that I am primarily invested in Ai above everything else in the manga and the way her importance has been seemingly downplayed since the late 130s mark chapter wise has really bugged me. As such, this chapter was INSANELY cathartic for me. Not only do we get a really beautiful cap to Ai's post death arc (hopefully finally killing those dumbfuck Secretly Evil Ai theories for good) but it's done in a way that once again recenters her love and her wishes as the heart of everything. Even Aqua's revenge play is completely redefined in this context - no longer the childish, selfish and self destructive lashing out we've seen before but as a quest to both honor Ai and to punish the person arrogantly assuming ownership of her heart even as he so catastrophically misunderstands her.

This is a really fantastic end to Aqua's arc too… on paper, that is. I know for a fact that a certain genre of OnK readers are going to bitch and moan that Aqua didn't run his dad over with a 2003 Honda Civic but I really can't imagine Aqua's revenge quest going any other way unless OnK was intended to be a pure tragedy. Over and over, we have seen that Aqua's revenge is at odds with not just his happiness but with Ai's wish for him to live a full life with a bright future. It is self destructive, hurtful to the people around him and antithetical to any of them moving on and reclaiming what their futures. With the emphasis the story places on moving towards a happy future, in selfishly reclaiming your happiness even in the face of systems that seek to crush you and on honouring Ai's wishes and legacy, it would be flatly thematically incoherent for Aqua to choose killing.

The issue is not with this as Aqua's end point but with the path we've taken to get here. As was the issue with Ruby during the Movie Arc, we don't actually see any of the internal work that happened in service of this arc, just the big emotional end points of offscreen development. But it stings especially bad with Aqua when such a huge chunk of the last few arcs locked us out of his head, sharply contrasting the start of the story that lived and breathed his interiority - AND when this is more or less the capstone to his series long struggle to choose love or revenge. It's not that I dislike this as an emotional payoff for Aqua's revenge - this is more or less beat for beat what I'd expected - but that it lacks proper support from the rest of the story. In general, this chapter falls flatter than it should because all this heightened, dramatic emotion rests on arcs and setup that simply have not been shown to the reader, save for Ai.

Speaking of Ai, the info in the DVD here potentially represents a pretty major break in the continuity of Aqua's behaviour based on when we're told he had access to it but I'm willing to bite my tongue and see if that gets filled in, if only because this chapter review is already so fucking long. Let's just say that I Noticed and I sure hope Aka or his editors did too.

And finally… Oh, hey there, Ruby! Aren't you an interesting little snarl to this chapter. Or maybe "snarl" isn't quite right, but her presence here is potentially interesting either way. I'm not quite sure how to read both her expression and her presence - the expression on her face looks VERY displeased and it looks to me like she's outside the room, so is she maybe eavesdropping and not happy with what she hears? Or is she in on Aqua's talk with Kamiki here and just struggling with her emotions with regards to it all? I'm quiety hoping it's the latter, because it would confirm that Ruby DID recognize her dad in 147 and Akasaka wasn't expecting me to believe he was hitting her with the stupid stick quite that hard lol.

In either case, I'm actually excited to see what Ruby takes away from this. In the ways that AQRB has echoed the HKAI dynamic, Ruby has always been in Kamiki's shoes - the one desperate to be saved, clinging to her oshi and relying on him as her sole bastion of light in the world. So what will she think now after being faced with the logical endpoint of this wished-for codependence? When she sees how destructive and self destructive it can potentially be? Just as she saw Ai reflected in herself, will Ruby see her father in her own reflection - and if so, what will she do about it?

Break next week! So we'll be sitting pretty for two weeks to find out. Not that I actually mind this time because with a chapter like this on top of season 2 of the anime coming back today, a week without a break might have actually killed me… please, akamengo, i'm just a little guy!!!!

[lynn-tged-posting]

tged webtoon ep 161 spoilers with thoughts below the cut u know the drill

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THIS IS MY FAVORITE PANEL OF JAVIER EVER. IN THE ENTIRE MANHWA IM LOSING MY MIND HAHAHAHAHAHA

HE JUST LOOKS SO FUCKING UNHINGED I DIDNT EXPECT IT AT ALL HHAHAHAHAHAAAA

anywayy back to the top

honestly maybe i shouldve seen the fact that his own singing would fuck him up coming LMAO

their matching dazed expressions when they both realize PLEASSEE LOL

raphael also calls the start of his singing demonic sounding lmao

and then they start fighting again and JESUS holy shit they're so overpowered this is so cool to watch and also as i was reading i was VERY scared for javier

genuinely i really really love whenever they draw action scenes they look very cool while also not being terribly hard to follow i like that

like oh my god?? he's swinging that hammer around like its nothing its very very terrifying, esp cause its been a while since javier has fought something thats his match yknow, or at least it feels that way

AND THEN. THE LEADUP INTO THE NEXT SCENE IM LOSING MY MIND JAVIER YOU SCHEMER

the feigning being down and then the peek and the slow getting up im giggling so so bad AND THEN

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA JAVIER YOU CLEVER ASSHOLE I LOVE YOU SO FUCKING MUCH

like i knew that line raphael said about how the halo would continue protecting him so long as he's pure and just or whatever would come into play BUT I DIDNT THINK JAVIER WOULD BE THE ONE TO DO IT SO DIRECTLY TOO HAHAHAHAAA he's learned so much from lloyd <3 LOL

i also think its interesting that the halo keeps track of this with like points or smth, not much to say about it i just think its an interesting gear; the ultimate defensive tech but it's based on how "good" you are thats just really interesting to me hehe

ALSO ALSO i think it's really really silly funny that raphael was this very intimidating and menacing figure that was super scary right up until the moment javier played dirty and then the moment that happened that image/vibe immediately crumbled WAHHAHA he's just a silly guy and the halo does the work i like him a lot

i really like these panels of them being evenly matched, raphael is still holding his own even with a penalty like that, their expressions here are really good too its so tense,,,

AND THEN LLOYD BEGGING THEM TO STOPP AAHHH

AGHHGHGHHGHGH AAAHH JAVIER STARING WIDE-EYED AT LLOYD IM CURLING AND SHRIVELED ON THE FLOOR

like okay i know lloyd is scheming or whatever. but my heart wants to believe that some part of this was very real okay . let me cope let me believe this . one cannot act/lie effectively without some of it being real. RIGHT???

AND THEN WHEN THE POPUPS APPEARED I STARTED SHOUTING OH MY GOD I FORGOT ABT THE RP SYSTEM IM SO. LLOYD YOU BRILLIANT MOTHERFUCKER YOUUU

HE CAN JUST SKIP THE PROCESS AND THEN BECOME A SWORDMASTER HE HASNT DONE THAT IN A LONG TIME OHHHH MY GOD

also. everyone else's bonus RP was +10. but only javier's bonus RP was +45. which could mean nothing.

WHAT DO I EVEN SAY ABOUT THAT LIKE. JAVIER WHAT YOU. WHAT. YOUUU im gonna lose it im gonna LOSE IT

top ten photos taken moments before disaster HE LOOKS SO EVIL THE ART HERE IS SO GOOD HAHAHAHA OHH MY GOD

and how he says "YEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS" ohhh lloyd you asshole you i love you so much

THIS PANEL TOO LIKE WOW THE FUCKING EFFECTS THIS IS INSANE HE LOOKS SO FUCKING MENACING THE VIOLENT LINEART HES POWERING UP HIS SINGING OH MY GODDD HAHAHA

when i saw these panels i immediately thought of that one song from princess and the frog god i wish i could like tween or something itd be so cool to see This drawn to That

thats all i LOVED this ep i had so much fun RAPHAEL JAVIER LLOYD FIGHT PART THREE NEXT WEEK HERE WE GO

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

Watched s2e1 again today, and the leadup to Ed shooting Izzy just gets better and better every time I watch it! Knowing how everything's gonna play out, now, it makes it so much easier to track Ed's thought process.

Ed and Izzy's relationship in this first ep is, to put it mildly, deeply fucked up. Izzy tells Ed he "has love" for him, and Ed's like "ew bro wtf," which is incredible on its own, and combined with how Ed reminds Izzy that he can "find someone else" to do Izzy's job if Izzy won't do it, Izzy realizes he's not nearly as valuable to Ed as he clearly thought he was and starts Really Going Through It.

By the time Izzy goes to ask Ed if he wants to "talk it through," Izzy's begun to realize that he's fucked up. Ed has not seen Izzy crying; he doesn't know that. He has no reason to belive that Izzy would ever approach him from a place of genuine concern and ask if he was okay. Ed was busy staring longingly at the Stede cake topper when Izzy walked in and hurriedly hid it; that combined with what surely would have seemed like a very pointed to reference to Stede's "talk it through as a crew" mantra no doubt made it seem like at least one of two things were happening: either Izzy had realized Ed was slipping up and wasn't performing Blackbeard correctly, and/or Izzy was mocking Ed again.

My guess is Ed was thinking both options were probably true. I think this is when we see the first big shift towards actively suicidal behavior from Ed, when he goes out on deck and starts pointing a gun under his own chin.

Now. I've thought what Izzy could have said here so things would turn out better for him. If he'd apologized to Ed then? If he'd owned up to how much he hurt Ed at the end of s1?

But the thing is, Izzy doesn't even blame Stede. He still blames Ed, and Ed's feelings specifically. He says the vibe on the ship is fucked because of Ed's "feelings for Stede Bonnet," and that's when Ed shoots him.

Ed nods, barely even waits for Izzy to get Stede's name out, and I think that's because it wasn't Stede's name that did it, I think it was blaming Ed's feelings.

Ed's got a lot of things going on in his head during these scenes. He thinks Izzy has realized he's not doing a good enough job of being Blackbeard and pretending he's not still heartbroken, he thinks Izzy might be mocking him about it, and given Izzy's threats at the end of s1, he's probably thinking that it's not safe to keep Izzy around anymore even before they step out on deck. But I think it's Izzy blaming Ed's feelings that pushes him over the edge.

[fairyhaos]

How To Fucking Write: a guide by fairyhaos

[masterlist]

this post details:

SLOW BURNS

hi gays and gals! "how to fucking write" is back, with yet more advice and tips for everyone ^^ please feel free to send me an ask if there's something you want me to talk about or if you want to be added to the taglist! and as always, please reblog if you find this helpful :)

# - HOW TO SLOW BURN.

.. bullet point one : word count .

putting this here because i have one thing to say about this.

word count doesn't matter.

you don't have to have over 50k words or some shit in order to write a really, really good slow burn. similarly, you can't just the quality of a slow burn—or a story in general—by its word count.

yes, maybe stories with higher word counts tend to be better slow burns, but that's not because of the word count. it's because of what they do with the words.

so if you've finished writing your story and you're happy with it and it doesn't feel rushed, doesn't feel too slow, and it doesn't mess up the relationship development, that's it. don't try to add words just because it's not "long enough".

word count doesn't matter.

(that being said though, there have to be enough words for it to actually be a slow burn, but. that's a given.)

.. bullet point two : plan .

now i know that there are people who don't like planning, or their writing style means that they feel more comfortable with just winging it and throwing words at the paper.

however, for a really good, well-paced slow burn, it's really really important for you to create a plan.

it doesn't have to include everything! it doesn't need to be an exhaustive breakdown of all the scenes you're going to put into the story, but you need to know vaguely what's going to happen, and how you want your characters to act.

because slow burn is a leadup to a relationship, right? it's about relationship building. their relationship is a castle, and you need to know what your castle is gonna look like before you start haphazardly slapping bricks on top of each other.

plan the milestones you want their relationship to reach. think about what scenes you want to use that will signpost the gradual change in their relationship (more on signposts down below).

think about how you want the slow burn to reach its climax, and also when.

what will that climax be? will it be the realisation of feelings? will it be the confession? maybe a rejection of confession?

all of that can be figured out when you plan. having the climax in mind and having the ending in mind are things i will always advocate for when it comes to writing.

especially with slow burns. because it's all about that heart-wrenching climax, isn't it? when someone blurts out their emotions, and there are tears and shaky whispers and it makes you want to scream because feels.

planning helps with coherency, too. helps everything flow more naturally and make the slow burn overall feel more well thought-out and more impactful.

plus, i dunno about you guys but planning out how shit's gonna go down and cackling over how you're going to make your readers cry with every single almost confession scene and every single mutual pining part is just the most incredible thing in the world.

.. bullet point three : signposts

i mentioned this above, but having signpost scenes that you and your readers can use to identify milestones in the characters' relationship is very, very important.

for example, a very simple set of milestones would be:

the scene wherein X falls for Y

a scene wherein X almost spills their feelings to Y

the situation wherein Y suddenly realises their own feelings for X

a scene where they feel like they're about to lose each other

something that makes someone confess

it's horribly simple, and very vague, but these are the basic milestones that most slow burns will use to influence their characters' relationships.

but nevertheless, do you see how each of these scenes are important?

how all of them help the relationship progress? build up the slow burn, until it finally reaches its peak?

of course, the story would probably include more than just these scenes. if it's a good story, then of course it will.

but these are the most important, and recognising what your important scenes are, and making sure that you know how many you're putting in and in what way they influence the plot is very key to writing slow burns.

.. bullet point four : motive

this is perhaps not a very necessary bullet point, but if you wanna go all-in with your slow burn and make it knock-out spectacular, then i suggest that you think on this bullet point for a while.

why aren't your characters together right now?

---is the question you should be asking yourself to make it a really stellar slow burn.

why can't your characters confess? why can't they realise their feelings? what is stopping them from simply going from being friends to realising they're in love and then confessing?

your characters need a motive.

often, that motive is really simple. there's a whole bunch that are commonly used but, if you do it well, then it'll be as hard-hitting as if it's something no one could have ever predicted.

are they not together because they...

...used to be enemies? have been friends for too long? don't know whether they're really in love or if it's just a fluke?

maybe they don't believe in love. maybe they're loving someone who they think will never love them back. maybe they don't even realise they're in love.

the beauty of it all is that you get to choose. you get to pick your own dilemmas for your characters, and write about their messy path to realisation, through their slow burn, while untangling all their emotions throughout their journey.

slow burn is about feelings, after all. make those feelings complex. truly think in your character's thoughts, just for a moment, and think about how it would feel to be in that situation. think about how they'd react. what they'd do.

and also what's holding them back.

motives make everything even more deliciously painful. you can truly sympathise with the characters' relationship progression then, and can really get readers invested as they try to see how the characters overcome their struggles.

besides. don't we all love when X shouldn't love Y but they're going to love them anyway?

... and that's it ! if anyone has anything else they want advice on (how to structure, how to write dialogue, how to plan etc) then just shoot me an ask, because i'd love to help however i can :)

tagging (comment/send ask to be added!): @mesanthropi @stqrrgirle @weird-bookworm @eternalgyu @blue-jisungs @yumilovesloona @the-nightfox-nest @lvlystars @anemoiant

[rubra-wav]

Vox's death - personal headcanons/rambles

A/N I've been sitting on this for a while HDHDH

A lot of this is building on prior headcanons of mine and shots in the dark based on vibes so yeah - I could be completely wrong in season 2 and thus I will eat my hat if that's the case /lh

Just wanted to throw my thoughts out there on this 🙏

CW: SFW, murder, mentions of suicide/mental breakdown, references to staticmoth, angst

In my personal opinion Vox didn't die from a TV falling on his head: he died from poisoning.

The first thing that differs from a lotta stuff I keep seeing is that I don't think the red lines that come from Vox's mouth are actually Val's saliva from kissing him.

In some scenes, it probably is (like in the poison music vid) but when he's very obviously done with Val's bs during the off periods in their relationship that they go through? Nah.

It just wouldn't make sense that it's always from Val. Especially when we have examples like the beginning of episode 8. It just starts seeping from his mouth as he's saying the "I can't wait to watch you get fucked" line.

They show up whenever he's more unstable (like in Stayed Gone) and/or when he's having a sadistic power high (ep 8 ) and is particularly out of his mind.

I think it's symbolic of actually being blood from being poisoned in an instance when he was like that in his life.

Actually getting into it: The leadup to his death

Regardless of how it happened exactly, imo in the end every single one of his relationships while he was alive broke down in the height of his popularity.

He became more and more insufferable to keep around: constantly egotistical and looking down on everyone the more famous and powerful he grew, and became utterly obsessed with maintaining his power. (Also what he's doing in hell - fixated at all times on appearing a certain way and staying at the top)

His mental state declined terribly as he grew paranoid that he would lose his control and have to start from where he was (which wasn't good to say the least), and all of his friends and family left due to how he treated them which only added to his instability due to having no support system.

Not that it would have changed much because yeesh.

The second someone would try to reality check him (if they did) during this time, it only would have made him even more unstable.

He most likely believed that stepping on everyone to maintain his power was more important than anything, and meeting someone who disagreed, he would have just discarded them without a second thought, all the while internalising it deep down to be brought back up whenever he finally crashed.

His actual death

I have two main headcanons of how the poisoning may have gone:

1. The first main one is that he was murdered.

He treated his staff so badly during his gradually worsening mental decline that one (or maybe more) got so fed up by his poor treatment of them that his morning coffee was poisoned, and while on air he started spitting up blood and then died (hence why his head is a TV).

This one makes particular sense to me because the red lines show up when he's being a sadistic asshole - as he would have been leading up to his murder.

2. The second: he poisoned himself on purpose as suicide.

His mental state declined so much, so stuck in his delusions of grandeur that when he was either reality checked and it actually took hold of him or his content started performing badly in comparison to someone else's he experienced the inevitable crash after having a high in that way and had a full on breakdown (or both tbh).

Him taking a stance of 'I'd rather die now while eyes are still on me then when they're all gone again and my existence is unknown once again'.

I think it's far likelier the former, though considering everything.

I am probably reading too damn much into all this but like... the brainrot is all-consuming.

I want to write a fic about his death at some point but like.. I don't think anyone would gaf enough to read it for one, and I also have a bunch of stuff I'm already working on that my brain is buffering about/lh

I'm thinking about how bad he's probably gonna be done in season 2 and slightly dying inside. I HOPE I'm proved wrong so desperately bc I love him too damn much.

Either way I do NOT think there is enough time to properly explore his chara even if Viv wanted to dip into the interesting asf things under the surface. 🗿

My masterlist

[fairytail-whathesays]

okay but I NEED to know your orga/laxus relationship headcanons, nsfw, etc. (if it's okay with you ofc) because this is the best ship that nobody talks about

Oh babe we need more like you in Fairy Tail fandom

So I talked about godslaying magic here, in this post about Zancrow, and wrote it as having a lot to do with how psychotic and violent Zancrow is. I also happen to believe proto-dragonization has a lot to do with exacerbating the effects of Laxus' burgeoning mental breakdown that had its tipping point in the Fantasia arc. I also wrote that those negative effects feed into themselves the more the godslaying magic is used.

This poses problems for both of them, especially Orga, who doesn't have purely elemental lightning magic to fall back onto like Laxus, and is highly incentivized to use his magic frequently by the hype that sustains Sabertooth.

I think they'll have enough ease getting along just due to chemistry in their personalities, but needing help doesn't hurt, nor does:

These two probably bonded very very quickly. Not only were they all but flirting in the leadup to their GMG fight, but they both have a love of music that is very noticeable, like their punk aesthetics, and are very lowkey otherwise. Can Orga sing? Debatable. Will he be a hell of a lot of fun at karaoke? Yes.

I think their first fling happens relatively early into their friendship. Honestly a bit of a speed record for friends-to-friends-with-benefits. It was a natural course for them--they are the ultimate masc4masc fuckboi hookup.

And maybe it's through that fling that they discover something pretty useful; Dragonslaying magic and "godslaying" magic (corrupted/cursed dragonslaying magic) have an inherent opposing quality, almost like a positive and negative charge.

And by fighting each other and kissing each other, and just being around each other, they can temper their internal magic's discharge-like backlash that causes brain degeneration. Doctor approved!

No really they probably went to Porlyusica and she told them to keep hanging out.

This would also handily explain why corrupted brain degeneration isn't affecting Chelia either, since she hangs out with Wendy so much.

It's a slow thing, but that friends-with-benefits angle slowly deepens for them, especially with Orga, who originally thought of Laxus as just a very powerful mage in a powerful guild. Laxus may be something of a thug, but he's also well-read, introspective, and respects history, and it makes Orga want to improve himself.

Their fights get brutal. Not even arguments, because they rarely have them, but their sparring matches pursued just for fun. They are both very competitive, and unused to being challenged on an even footing. Orga actually being able to hurt Laxus makes up any difference in their power easily.

Laxus ends up with significant extents of lightning scars. Yeah yeah, Laxus with lightning scars, we've all seen those posts--but consider that a) Orga feels horrified when he sees them later and b) Laxus has to shout them down because he actually thinks they look sick as fuck and he loves them. They're dark, too, black like Orga's lightning before they fade to normal a few days later, so it's like getting more tattoos.

I like to think that Orga has a deeply-hidden romantic side. He's probably into cooking, has an instagram where he posts the supermodel equivalent of foodinsta, looking oh so delicious. He likes to write lyrics, too. Laxus gets into that stuff--he could sit for hours and watch Orga pore over a set of verses he wrote himself (and maybe even help) or watch him dither trying to make a three-hour meal for two people (and help because he feels guilty).

Orga's nickname in Sabertooth is "big bro" by the young'uns, or "uncle" when they feel like disrespecting him. When he officially becomes a thing with Laxus, this also extends to him, and much like they do with Cobra, Sting and Rogue slap Laxus with the big bro label.

When you spend that much time around another person, both because they heal you physically and because they heal you socially, you start to learn them. Every little intimate detail. For Laxus and Orga, that means not only learning each other's scent, but learning each other's "scent" (how they appear when being picked up via electroreception) and even how the other's lightning tends to sound when far away.

The instas go wiiiiiiild babey. The thirsty gays were already congregating around the two but when they start appearing in each other's stories??? Absolute hoe madness in the comments. The twinks are dying. Someone send help. Modeling contracts are flooding in. Constant requests to start an OF together.

Laxus is openly bisexual and Orga is openly gay, but neither one of them has ever been huge or loud about it. But they do go to their first Pride together, and it's a great experience for both of them. Orga in particular feels like he's being rewired in the best way being there.

You'll just have to send a separate ask for the ns/fw part bc it's long enough to be its own post and I also got

filthy with it

[utilitycaster]

I'm so kdhdkdjdkd jazzed about the fjorester proposal !!!! But something that popped up pretty immediately that baffled me was these like... cope posts i guess? Of how "beau and jester should cheat leaving their partners for eachother and how dw guys marriage is just going to spice up the inevitable affair" and it's not even treated as a joke and Im just confused? Like i got into cr2 by the time it was over with so idk what it was like waiting for releases, but why after all this time do people hold on as much as they do? Do they like the story or not?

So I will be totally honest: I am not above checking the blogs of those I know hold terrible opinions, for a number of reasons both reasonable (keeping an eye out for potential harassment; inspiration for meta; my genuine enjoyment of analyzing fandom trends) and less so (schadenfreude and sending DMs that say Can You Believe This Idiot) but I actually have not seen this! To be clear, I would not be surprised it was out there - heaven knows this was a refrain during late Campaign 2 and in the leadup to the two-shot - but I thought that most people finally gave up in late 2022 after the two-shot made it clear the existing relationships are still very much in place. Granted I, as always, rarely go on Twitter.

Anyway. I think some of it is just that people whose enjoyment of works hinges on their ships becoming canon, rather than that being one of many facets to their fandom, also tend to not know when to give up just generally (you can look around this website and still find people hopping mad and/or pining for resolution regarding shows that ended before Campaign 2 even started). I think most of them did finally give up and leave, which is probably healthier for both them and the fandom, but there will probably be a dwindling number of holdouts who will gasp out on their deathbed fifty years hence "Beau and Jester should have been together" to a politely confused hospice nurse.

To actually answer your question, no, they do not like the story. I know I've been very hard on people who seem to only be able to enjoy fiction through a lens of either shipping or intense projection of the self onto existing characters, but in my defense, I'm right. This is a whole separate post, which to be honest I've kind of already made several times, but the usual complaint about the Campaign 2 noncanon ships (echoed in the complaints about Campaign 3 primarily by those who do like the canon ships thereof) was that they would have happened and been flawless and perfect but for that Pesky Plot, ie, the story. Unless the entire point of a story is a romance (eg: the genre that is cleverly titled "Romance") romance is always optional.

I also think, to be honest, Campaign 2 attracted people who were patient. This is a good thing! I think that, for example, people who are not entirely feeling Campaign 2 13 episodes in are valid, because I was similarly enjoying myself but not entirely won over by the plot yet, and it was only a combination of that patience and the burgeoning character dynamics that kept me going (plus the fact that watching week to week is a lower commitment than a binge). Granted I think if you fully give up at that point you are weak and will not survive the winter and should probably go watch Michael Bay movies or Bluey, but that's a separate point. Anyway. Some people are patient beyond a point where it is rewarding or even neutral and pass into a realm of showing up to the Story That Has Fjorester and Beauyasha In It muttering "I hope this doesn't have any fucking Fjorester and Beauyasha". I don't know how to help them, nor do I particularly want to, but I do know that not going on Twitter has been super helpful.

One final note: again, haven't seen the thing you mention in your ask yet in relation to this one-shot and not for lack of poking around Tumblr at least; but I have seen people who were deeply bitter about Campaign 2 but are still around for Campaign 3, though not a ton, and this was also frankly true of people who loved Campaign 1 and have not really cared since but still stick around. There's a weird zombie problem in the fandom; you get people who are very invested in being a fan of Critical Role and can't seem to leave, but haven't actually been happy for literal years, either because they were ultimately only fans of Vox Machina, or the Mighty Nein, or a specific ship within that. It is actually something I try to be cognizant of because I was very cautious about becoming that during the stretch when I was more frustrated by Campaign 3 than I am now. I think, ultimately, it's a conflation of one's fandom with one's external identity and I don't know how that happens or how to fix it but that might also be a factor: people who really don't like the show and haven't for years and are grasping at a thing they think would fix that and make them happy again, and refuse to admit it might be time to move on because that would mean they need to change their conception of themselves.

[jerzwriter]

Enchanted

This absolutely stunning creation was made by the lovely and talented @/artbyainna on Instagram. I have been so anxious to share it with you - but waited for @tobias-carrick-appreciation-week. I'm so glad it's here!

In my HC, I built on the canon version of their meeting in A Deli...ghtful Meeting. But I've always wondered about the leadup. The moments when life is about to turn upside down in the most delightful way, but we don't see it coming. The only thing Tobias was willing to commit to was remaining a bachelor. Beautiful, even brilliant women were common in his life, but never captivated him for long. But after a brief meeting with this woman, he could not get her out of his mind. These are the moments before Tobias Carrick's life was turned upside down... and he never saw it coming. This story is told from his POV.

Book: Open Heart Book 2 Pairing: Tobias Carrick x F!MC (Casey - eventual) Featuring: Aurora Emery Rating: Teen Words: 1,600 A/N: The original title was not Enchanted, but as I was writing this, my daughter was playing the Taylor Swift song of the same name, and it fit so perfectly that I went with it. Participating in @aprilchallenge - Love is in the Air.

"Come on, jackass!" The steam was practically pouring out of Tobias's ears as his hand lay on the horn, refusing to lift it until the moron blocking the intersection moved out of the way. The moron finally did… just in time for the light to turn red.

His jaw clenched as he closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, reminding himself it wasn't worth becoming this upset over. When his eyes opened, the light turned green, and only two thoughts remained. One: his best friend Kerry was really getting to him with her bullshit relaxation tips, and two, he couldn't be mad at her because they seemed to work.

His attitude improved as he drove off, but the morning traffic didn’t. A woman in a non-descript sedan waved at him as he sat in traffic, her eyes imploring him to wait so she could get out of her tight parking spot. He may have behaved differently a few moments ago, but a small smile tugged at his lips as he waved her on. 

Then he had an idea. A parking spot on the streets of Boston? Unheard of. And that spot just happened to be located a few doors down from his favorite deli? That wasn't a coincidence. No, this was divine intervention telling him to reward himself with a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich from Boston Pocket. Without another thought, he parallel-parked his Santorini black Jaguar into the freshly vacated spot with ease.

It was a cool morning for late August, and he promised himself he'd go for a jog after breakfast. After all, God may have felt Tobias deserved that sandwich, but He wasn’t ensuring his toned abs. Nope, that rested squarely on him.

Bells jingled, and a delightful aroma wafted over Tobias as he opened the door. He inhaled deeply to take it all in. Yep, this would be well worth an extended jog.

"Whose next?" A young man barked from behind the counter. 

Tobias raised a hand. "Bacon, egg, and cheese on a Kaiser roll. Salt and pepper."

"Want ketchup?"

"Do I look like a heathen to you?" Tobias leered, and the young man's grin made it clear that he shared his sentiments.

"Coming right up!"

With nothing to do but wait, he rested his elbow against the counter to take in the sights. Tobias Carrick had an unrivaled ability to look like he belonged anywhere, and this was no exception. So as he blended into the background, he quietly watched everyone who didn't. 

The older woman dripping in diamonds and expensive designer clothes, a little dog resting comfortably in a Louis Vuitton carrier. He couldn't imagine what she was doing here. Of course, she probably knew this dive had the best breakfast in Boston, money be damned. Two high school kids uncrumpled the bills in their hands to find they did have enough to add homefries to their order. Then there was the cute little brunette with her shapely legs well-displayed in a tiny black linen skirt and matching high heels. Her eyes were waiting to meet his as they trailed slowly over her body, and he took the smirk on her cherry-stained lips as an invitation that he was eager to accept. He was about to take a step in her direction when a melodic laugh from the booth behind him created a distraction.

"It sure would!" The beguiling beauty beamed, mindlessly tucking an errant strand of her long, golden locks behind her ear. All at once, Tobis felt compelled to learn what “it” was and what it was going to do?  

With the brunette who had held his attention moments before forgotten, he couldn't peel his eyes off this new vision. He stared, spellbound, as she animatedly waved her hands and joyfully conversed with her companion. Tobias Carrick observed for a living, and he had assessed her in mere moments. He was confident that no one could make a ratty, old Henley and a likely decades-old pair of jeans look that good so effortlessly, and that smile could not be faked. There was something so genuine about her, and he couldn’t look away.

He let out a little chuckle when he noticed her morning beverage of choice: a chocolate milkshake with the whipped cream already scooped off. He wasn't sure if it was revolting or adorable. If attributed to anyone else, the prior may have been the victor, but in this case, the latter undeniably won. His breath hitched when she leaned over and wrapped her lips around the straw. Never in his life was he more jealous of an inanimate object.

That solidified it. He had to work his way into their conversation. He was not leaving without her number, but how? He continued to watch her serendipitously, a pleasant smirk on his lips when he heard a loud crash.

The doctor in him took over, and he rushed toward the man collapsed on the floor, but, to his shock, the object of his affection had beat him to it.

"I’m getting his pulse!” The beauty yelled.

Was she a doctor?

“Sir!” Her companion hollered and pointed directly at him. “I need you to call 911!”

“I’m dialing now.”

He watched carefully, ready to jump in if needed, but he was a physician long enough to know that too many cooks spoil the soup, and the two women had things under control. Well, at least one of them did.

“Thank God you stopped me, Aurora!”

 Thank God, indeed. He thought, then his eyes widened… Aurora? Could that be?

The paramedics barreled through the front door and made a beeline to the patient on the floor. 

“Dr. Emery, what have we got?”

A smug smile came to his lips. It was her.

With the situation well under control, Tobias pulled out his phone and began texting rapidly.

… still want to snag Harper Emery?

… has she been receptive to you?

…. I’ve got an idea…

He looked up from his phone, dismayed to find Harper Emery’s niece and her stunning companion were gone.

“Shit!” he muttered, reminding himself they couldn’t have gone far.

“They were the doctors that just helped that man, right?”

The waiter stood before the abandoned table, holding a tray of food as the server behind the counter nodded.

“At least it wasn’t an eat-and-ditch,” the young man shrugged. “They didn’t eat and only ditched to save a guy's life.”

“Hey,” Tobias jumped in. “Do me a favor. Pack their food up… right away!”

“Were you with them?” the waiter asked.

Tobias pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to the waiter. “Too many questions!” He spat. “Wrap the food and give it to me… quick… oh, and keep the change!”

“I’m on it!” The waiter grinned, handing Tobias a brown paper bag in a flash.

The bells that had greeted him upon entering now heralded his exit as he rushed outside. The two women were half a block away, well within catching distance.

“Doctors! Wait!” he yelled. “You forgot your breakfast!”

He had a definitive purpose now, and he knew what needed to be done. Still, it took all his strength to forget about wooing the young Dr. Emery to Kenmore. Every primal instinct within him was screaming to forget everything except getting this angel’s phone number. But when he stood before them, he handed the bag to Aurora.

“Oh, thanks!” The young Emery smiled. “Can I pay you for this?”

“Don’t mention it,” he said with his signature grin. If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was charm. “I’m more than happy to treat a couple of heroes to breakfast.”

“Oh, we’re not heroes,” Emery replied. He may have been focusing on her, but his peripheral vision was finely tuned in to her friend, and was she ever checking him out.

“You were really something back there,” he continued.

He was impressed with his ability to focus. After all, luring Harper Emery to Kenmore would be a huge feather in his cap, and getting her niece there first could be just the ticket. This would really impress the top brass, and he had reason to want to do that. There was only one Aurora Emery. Pretty women, were a dime a dozen, right? If this one slipped through his fingers, there’d be another… eye on the prize. Then, she had to go and speak.

“She’s one of the best doctors at Edenbrook,” the beauty chimed in.

“I don’t doubt it,” he said with a broadened smile. God, she sounded like an angel. Focus! “It takes a very cool head under pressure to catch a detail like a cyanosis.”

Somehow, he managed to keep the conversation on point, wrapping it up by placing his business card into Aurora’s hands.

“Let me know if you’re ever looking for a change of pace.”

Less than a second after completing his task, the little head regained control of the big one. His eyes slowly raked over the tall beauty at Aurora’s side. He could feel the heat emanating between them, and he knew she felt it, too, when he saw the delicate blush on her cheeks. OK, she was interested. And when their eyes met, he was careful to not look away. He wanted to ask for her name. Her number. Could he buy her a coffee? Any chance she’d ditch her friend and grab breakfast with him? But he thought better of it and offered an enticing smile instead. He had to play this right, but this was not over.

After exchanging goodbyes, he turned and jogged back to the deli. But when he reached the door, he couldn’t help but look back once more. And was he ever happy that he did. He smiled with delight when he saw her staring right back at him. With his ego fully restored, he gave her a little wink before returning inside.

No. This was not over, and this is not where their story ended. If Tobias knew anything, he knew that he would see to that.

Permatags: @a-crepusculo @animesuck3r @annoyingmillenialnewbie @crazy-loca-blog @differenttyphoonwerewolf @doriopenheart @fayeswiftie @genevievemd @gryffindordaughterofathena @inlocusmads @jamespotterthefirst @jennieausten @kingliam2019 @liaromancewriter @lucy-268 @onikalover @openheartforeverinmyheart @potionsprefect @quixoticdreamer16 @rookiemartin @secretaryunpaid @socalwriterbee @sophxwithers @tessa-liam @trappedinfanfiction @jerzwriter-reblogs-asks @choicesficwriterscreations @openheartfanfics @openheartfanart

OH Tags: @alwaysmychoices @annfg8 @binny1985 @coffeeheartaddict2 @mysticalgalaxysstuff @ofmischiefandmedicine @peonierose @youlookappropriate

Tobias Only: @icecoffee90 @kyra75

[thesnailtail]

;; who wants to open the chamber of secrets (<- let me infodump about another proseka au)? /silly

yesss feed us with au crumbs

;; i have so many aus that it's not even crumbs anymore, it's just a cookie but horribly amalgamated from so many different types of cookie crumbs.

;; ANYWAY MANAGER MINORI AU BE UPON YE

;; was this au created because of my coder minori brainrot? yeah it was.

;; so the major difference in this is that minori sees haruka later than in canon. so she still finds her hope eventually, but it's less and she's so much more pathetic (/aff). so she gets involved in idol forums and hey! coder minori. but she's also super interested in the production side of shows. she still wants to be an idol but her bad luck might get in the way so why not focus on the things where it's all just numbers and computer data?

;; when the mmj main story happens it's relatively the same. only difference is that minori and shizuku already know each other because shiho sent shizuku to minori at one point when she broke her phone and minori just became the go-to anti-shizuku for tech. minori is a bit more pessimistic in this but she still manages to bring hope by simply encouraging others to do their best.

;; major differences happen when they start live streaming! minori refuses to go on stream because "someone needs to manage the camera!" she is lying. she is fully aware that they don't need someone to do that. airi is the only one who actually does anything about it. major downsides of this change: minori's cameo in shizuku's "im just me!" card would not exist.

;; so airi decides to force minori on camera at some point in this au's equivalent to hopeful show, minori panics and gets told to go back off camera by chat. later on during the collab with nanamin, she basically has a mini interview and does the dance thing with her leading to the falling on her face. yikes. when she meets yuina, she promises to make it the best show she can from behind the scenes. and it works! at some point in this minori realises that she still wants to be able to go on stage but ignores the thought. more more jump! have already formed and they don't need someone trying to catch up. (prepare for a lot of that train of thought.) her focus card would change from doing the show on stage to showing her standing behind the cameras looking at them with stars in her eyes.

;; more more xmas is basically just what happens in canon. slight changes in that minori and saito are in charge of managing the staff and minori doesn't have a meet and greet line at the end. but someone still comes up to her to say they admire her. even if she isn't on stage dancing, all her efforts are still seen. her focus card would be like canon except minori is sitting on stage casually and has a fan approach her.

;; dear me from the past. oh boy. here we go! to quote how i described this in a discord server: "so in canon it's really hopeful and cements that minori really is an idol and that she's grown a lot right.. so nuh uh." yeah it's not fun for anyone involved. :D

;; this is when the timing of events gets messed with! so the canon event is following the leadup and the solo show itself. the au follows the show itself and everything after. because this is when minori's feelings that she ignored all come back to haunt her. im gonna let this little bit i wrote speak for itself

;; yeah. this is not only when her discarded emotions come back but also the consequences of having slightly less hope. she is. not having fun. she feels like her job is redundant now, given they can hire people who would be better at lights and sound than her. so this all builds up until someone (probably airi) confronts her about it. at which point she finally lets it all out. then acts like nothing happened. but the rest of mmj won't let that happen and all start trying to help her "catch up" as she puts it. focus card would change from her on stage to the conversation with miku backstage.

;; step by step would probably be the same. focusing on her choices regarding whether or not she would move class to assist mmj. with an added sense of "you should make up for not doing anything before." and "i took care of all the finances shut up"

;; then with the scars carved, i haven't read a translation yet but i just know so far i have made a single joke about it and it was because i saw the card and said "oh poor thing. she finally learned the horrors of property tax."

;; then her fes would get to be messed about with as well. it's about her endless hope and how achieving her dream only made her even more hopeful. but if it takes place at the same time in this au (post step by step, pre scars carved) it would probably be a duller version of her canon fragment. she's beginning to be open about her dreams again, and try to chase them.

;; BUT YEAH!!! manager minori au. :D

[nayvwriter]

I forgot if I sent smth or not so: .... Ross, specifically?

Ross! I love him.

(major nexomon extinction spoilers)

So. Ross. Someone who worked on this game hates him. He is consistently the butt of jokes, gets the Idiot Ball constantly, and don't even get me started on Abyssals. I knew they meant Ross when they said 'bravery and/or stupidity' but really? And did they have to do it like that?

He thinks with his heart instead of his head. He's been told about how great the Guild is, and now he and his friends are tamers! This is gonna be awesome!

...It's not awesome. They're fighting the Guild. Ross would like to not be here. But Vados sounds really dangerous, and like Nora said it's probably just Amelie that's the problem, right? Amelie's the bad guy. He and the others can beat Amelie and then they'll be heroes!

(He still doesn't quite get why Vados killing Tyrants is a bad thing, but Nora and Coco and the protagonist seem to understand, so he'll just go with it.)

Then they get thrown in prison. Ross is reconsidering his life choices. Then they truly see Vados's power and... nope. Nope, he's out of here. He's terrified, even if he tries not to show it.

He's met again during Petram's revival, but I don't remember much about what happens there.

And then… the tower. His friend, lying on the ground. And Amelie telling Ross said friend is a Tyrant.

His friend's a Tyrant. Tyrants are evil. His friend's not evil. This doesn't make sense. All those thoughts swirling in Ross's head.

Amelie telling Ross to step aside, so she can kill his friend.

…No.

Ross doesn't really know what's going on, but he knows what the right thing to do here is. He wasn't sure until it came down to it, but when he has to make a decision, he makes one. Ross tries to punch Amelie in the face.

I read Ross as someone who has trouble figuring out his own feelings on something until he actually has to make a decision about it, with consequences. Like this. And when he does make a decision, he does something about it.

He didn't use his Nexomon – possibly because his gut reaction went punch, but possibly because he knows he doesn't stand a chance against Amelie with Nexomon. She's (probably) a Grandmaster, after all.

(The game's really inconsistent on whether Amelie's a Grandmaster or not. I can get at least one example for yes and for no. I go with yes, especially given the strength of the team she fights you with.)

He must be really scared, going against a Grandmaster to protect a Tyrant. But bravery isn't the absence of fear. It's facing that fear. And in that aspect, Ross is probably the bravest character in Nexomon.

That is why I like him. It all comes down to that moment – the leadup to it made it matter more, but his bravery atop the tower is why I like him so much.

Thank you for the ask!

[nobedofroses]

December 31st

pairing: Marcus Moreno x reader

warnings: fluff and leadup to smut

words: 533

a/n: last one! I had such a good time with this, thank you again Steph for putting these prompts together and thanks everyone for reading!! just a cute sleepy new year's day thing with Marcus, picture prompt from @toomanystoriessolittletime's winter writing challenge ❄️

more Marcus, Full List

🌨️🌨️🌨️

Marcus followed you, stumbling, into the living room. You groaned simultaneously as you saw the absolute mess awaiting you. 

“How did— how did this happen? I thought we only had four girls here last night,” Marcus said incredulously. 

“We did. Missy, Sarah, Alice, and Rachel. 1, 2, 3, 4, that’s four,” you said, counting it out on your fingers. 

“Then why does it look like a tornado blew through here??” 

“I don’t know, baby, but can you talk a little quieter?” you asked, patting his arm to calm him down. 

“I mean, I don’t really care if I wake them up to be honest,” Marcus said. 

You winced, “No, it’s for me. I guess I haven’t drank that much in a while,” you admitted sheepishly, hands coming to your head to massage your temples. 

Marcus turned toward you and his hands took the place of yours, giving you a little massage that made you moan out loud, “Guess that half a bottle of champagne really did you in, huh?” 

You didn’t even bother to respond, just let his fantastic hands continue to work out the headache you had. A minute later, the sharp pain was gone and you knew the rest wouldn’t go away without some kind of painkiller or time. You opened your eyes and tilted your face towards him so he’d know you wanted a kiss. He moved his hands to hold your jaw and leaned in, pressing his lips softly against yours. 

When he pulled away, you offered, “I’ll go make the coffee if you start picking up.”

“That would be a good deal if we in any way made this mess,” Marcus told you, gesturing to the trash and clothes and pillow on the floor. “But we didn’t, so I say we tag team breakfast and coffee and once the girls have woken up to the smell of my pancakes and your bacon, we’ll trap them.” 

“Trap them?” you asked with a little laugh. 

“They’ll think they’re eating a delicious breakfast because we’re such nice hosts and parents, but really it’s so they have the energy to clean up this giant mess,” he explained with a goofy grin. 

You couldn’t help but laugh, “I feel like I’m supposed to say you’re an evil genius or something.” 

“That’s because I am,” he said with a “duh” look on his face. 

“Oh okay. Well, does my evil genius have time to kiss his wife more or does he need to start on his evil plan right away?” 

Marcus’ eyes got wide and then his hands stole down to your waist to tug you closer, “We have plenty of time. The girls are wiped out. They probably won’t want to eat until lunch, even.” 

“That’s a lot of time. More than we need for kissing, I think. Do you have any plans for me?” you asked innocently. 

“Yeah, yes. They’re, um, in the bedroom,” Marcus improvised, trying to make sure he was doing what you wanted. 

“Oh well then I’d better go take a look,” you said, walking away back towards the bedroom with Marcus hot on your heels. You thought that maybe there could be another cure to your headache there.

🌨️🌨️🌨️

[divinekangaroo]

furthering the tommy-sexuality dialogue with @deadendtracks and this post and this post:

“Did you see Grace and Tommy's first sex scene in s1 and their reunion sex scene in s2 as overly performative?” / “When I was thinking about this I kept coming back to the first two sex scenes we have with Grace, though -- where imo we do see him leaning into surrender, intimately and sexually. I don't know if it's a total loss of control, but he's certainly not avoiding it in my view. I think the whole reason he fell for Grace is that he *did* feel that surrender of intimacy with her, that vulnerability. And it's in distinct contrast to every other sex scene we get from him after that.”

That’s a good point – I’ll need to rewatch to double check, they were filmed differently to other sex scenes, too, even May's softer sex scene. (the camera was so focused on May it was clear it was about her...) (And there’s something in my head telling me there’s some very distorted/unpleasant film-technique callbacks to the S1 scene in what happens with Diana that I should probably chase to see if they really existed too.)

With the little that I do remember, S1 I had a sense he was performing as if for himself (unable to remember intimacy) until instinct took over and the performative sense disappeared. Given he lost Greta just prior to the war (his sole intimate relationship if we assume his brothers’ joking means he wasn’t really one with lots of girls) then had a one-off with Zelda then (judging by Duke’s age) immediately went off to war, he probably didn’t have a lot of experience being intimately connected with women? Lots of prostitutes and fleeting actions through and post war and not much else. So that first scene feels like he’s kind of unpacking/realising/*feeling* again through the action.

S2, my memory of the conversation and the leadup leaves me with a sense of something far more performative than S1 – but again, more for himself than for Grace. Almost a sense of proving something to himself (or Campbell, who knows). There’s too much bite in the leadup, that the sex itself felt like a necessary ‘tick box’ in some list he had going from the moment she returned. I think, there was no intimation Grace would stay with him, no baby, no ongoing intimacy to expect and to allow himself to fully let loose in the understanding his vulnerability would be compensated by an ongoing relationship, I’m just left with that sense that S2 sex was…proving something. It had much more of an edge than S1, S1 I’m left with much softer and intimate impressions.

---

“What do you make of that first sex scene with Lizzie in 2.01? I have thoughts of my own but I'm curious about how it fits into your understanding of Tommy & sex, beyond the need to avoid intimacy and the physical release. Because it's quite a strange scene if you look at the way he seems to be completely dissociated, he doesn't seem to even really be there.”

I have had multiple goes at unpacking this for myself over time especially given he then has the typewriter scene with Lizzie, and none satisfy me XD so take even this with a great dusting of salt. Any insight I would be very interested in reading!

Important for me: the joint context of Polly having just reminded Tommy to get over Grace, and him having to walk out immediately after the sex with Lizzie to assassinate that man.

That first S2 assassination seemed such a major moral trauma point for him: I think it’s often overlooked because…it’s just killing some rando dude right? But what it actually meant for him was huge when you look at his rage/terror around the entrapment. In S1, he’s partially brought all that shit on himself by holding the guns, and he acknowledges that and moves through it, but this S2 assassination – it’s repeated, his whole Chosen One loop, why me? He asks more than once, Why me – he really, really hurts, he is really really angry. The ability to get away from being used to kill, but then being locked back into it against his will.

So there’s this joint ‘get over Grace, Tommy, right now’ (because you will never have grace, either the person or the concept) = just fuck some other woman where it doesn’t mean anything, and ‘I’m being used [like a prostitute, for other people’s wants] and can’t get out of it because of who I am’ = he…calls in a prostitute and uses her, because….???? He’s projecting??? He’s angry? He doesn’t know how else to try to move through that or rationalise that being used?

I have such a sense he’s almost *forcing* himself to do it. Again, like proving something to himself. From Lizzie’s words (and how warm the two of them are in the typewriter scene) I have to assume they’ve had a relatively amicable paid sexual relationship, and Tommy’s definitely acting different in that particular scene. So if it’s a sharply different encounter to the usual and given the context: it’s almost as if he’s forcing himself to do it to remind himself that this is what we/I do, just fuck, there’s money, get it done.

Almost an image of himself in that bent-over position taking it and taking the money and taking what it gives him, but having to *take it* first. Kill the man, take the trade, move on. Be fucked, take the cash, move on. It’s not really about pleasure or release before a risky venture that might kill him. It’s not even about Lizzie at all, or a comment on his prior (or upcoming) connection with Lizzie. A reminder to himself about being used, the way certain disadvantaged people are always used no matter what they actually want, the way he feels about being used that way. And a very strong reminder at the end when Lizzie outreaches for connection that you take the money and treat the exchange as a transaction.

While Lizzie has her personal reasons/infatuation/desire for connection for that scene to be sad, at that point in time I don’t even think he’s thinking about her at front of mind at all. He has no room for her reactions/feelings at the front of his mind, which is totally full of his own anger/hurt/disassociation from the upcoming unpleasant task at that point. I do think his back of mind churns over her hurt/sadness, though, or he wouldn’t act the way he does to her in the typewriter scene. Did he feel regret, belatedly? Epsom as well, he gets regretful about using Lizzie, but only belatedly?

He seems to oscillate between using Lizzie like a tool/thing in S2, and perhaps the fact she was a prostitute means she’s coded in his head initially as that ‘sexual tool’, who can be used that way without concern. Then, these sorts of mental or emotional kicks he experiences that she is not, she is a person, and his attempts to reconnect and make up for it after.

Given Lizzie is the only one of Tommy’s lovers who is, by class and status, ‘less than’ Tommy, I think that ‘sexual tool’ coding and hierarchical coding is very strong in him. His focus on the symbols and manners of status and rank (and eventually money as his only agency when even his acquired rank doesn't deliver what he thought it would) suggest this quite entrenched hierarchical thinking as well. Something in his head which says those of lesser rank/status are used by those above, similar to how he is used.

So he uses Lizzie, not cruelly or unfairly in that desk scene given she is a prostitute then: she’s his only lover that he doesn’t have to perform with. He can have terrible sex, he doesn’t have to think about her pleasure, he doesn’t have to perform or satisfy her or try to influence her.

The typewriter scene, her status by S3, then S4, he consciously tries to lift her up and out of his default, ‘first thoughts’ coding and treatment of her as that sexual tool in fondness and liking/affection and recognition of her. But I also think it suggests much about his approach to sex/sexuality and how it intersects with class that this thinking of her as sexual tool does appear to be his first thoughts, it’s his second thoughts/later thinking that consciously go back on that first take.

Tangentially: I also think a lot of his behaviours with Lizzie are actually about what’s going on in himself, not about his feelings for her. She becomes a kind of substitute/blurry mirror where his actions and behaviours around her are him projecting what’s happening inside him. At the same time SK also writes Lizzie as an actual character with her own motivations for engaging with Tommy, and there’s that imbalance in what Tommy uses her for versus what she wants him for.

The physical and emotional mirroring they increasingly do over time, Lizzie actually mirroring him if not in sync, adds to this thinking. This Lizzie as a Tommy-distorted-mirror warps and shifts over time, but I think S2 in particular she’s almost this “sexual-tool / extension-of-himself” to be that mirror of him being used as a “killing-tool” where he has no choice, and he actively uses her that way in the sex scene and at Epsom.

This is one of those unformed/not properly unpacked niggles that stood out to me on rewatch, because of carrying the preconception of what happened in S5 with Mosley asking for Lizzie as a thing/a Tommy substitute – well, he actually did do that to Lizzie at Epsom, because he couldn’t do it himself. And this is quite different to his use of Grace where the intimacy/recognition is that he can’t do it because he doesn’t know what Grace actually is (except he knows she’s not a working class girl he can use); with Lizzie during the S1/S2, maybe even S3, he can use her this way, he doesn’t have the same hesitation he has with Grace.

---

“some of these might be considered trauma responses but my preference is to think he is/was always going to be this way *somewhat*#because he is this way.the particular traumas he went through were able to be framed in ways that allowed him to continue…for a while Also curious about this -- what do you think are the characteristics he has that were "always going to be this way"

The key ones:

- That he struggles with actually connecting deeply with people, reading sexual cues/flirtation, because he actually connects too deeply – he holds back to avoid embarrassment if he’s misread something. Some of this leads to an inclination to prefer sex that is openly a transaction (prostitutes) because it relieves any dialogue around intimacy or connection. He can treat sex as a physical need without having to think about the other.

- Deep connection is unrelated to sex, and that he’ll always look for deep connection with someone over the sex. If both, ok wonderful, but if the sex makes the connection complicated he’ll ditch the sex and find that elsewhere. (I really think of Alfie in this space.)

- Connection comes before physical/sexual attraction. People are physically neutral to him until he feels something for them first. For example, he couldn’t be seduced by a hot woman into a vulnerability in the way, say, Arthur or John probably could? I think of both Grace and Tatiana here. With Tatiana and no or limited connection, he pretty much flips her attempted seduction on its head and notwithstanding the essentially of them having ‘sex for the cause’, his sexual participation instead forges that double (is it triple by this point?) cross with her instead for their mutual benefit, rather than her sexual seduction exposing vulnerabilities in him for her people to exploit. With Grace, the connection comes well before the sex and it’s connection which exposes him/makes him vulnerable, not the sex.

[sukifoof]

My goodness this is such a captivating AU, my mind is racing with different possibilities. Flowey follows us all throughout the game, I'm not sure if Asriel would be able to do the same without attracting attention? His friendship with Papyrus might not come to pass. How would his reactions to our different actions in the Ruins change? Would he defend Toriel if we tried to kill her? What about Asgore. Would he even know his son woke up in the most recent reset or would he assume that he finally died? And how would Asriel's/Flowey's involvement in the Asgore boss fight change? Would he still kill him, and still take the Human SOULs? Or the True Pacifist ending, since he's still a Monster in this AU he wouldn't be able to take the SOULs of other Monsters to equate that 7th Human SOUL, completely changing how shattering the Barrier could work. Perhaps he would discover over the course of the fight or in the leadup to it that he still has Chara's SOUL, and then coming to accept that have to let go of it at the end to destroy the Barrier (and also free himself, more metaphorically)?

Or the entire Genocide Route, Asriel's involvement in it would be different from Flowey's, simply due to them having different forms. He would obviously have a greater capacity to fight back, would he be the final boss after sans? Or replacing the sans fight altogether?

Or even the simple question of what happens to him in the various Neutral endings?

This is an AU with such great potential for anything and everything to change, it deserves to be developed into a full thing

(Although the question of how Asgore's and Toriel's aging was affected during Asriel's coma would also have to be addressed, since Undertale as it is takes place at least 100 years after Chara's death)

HI I MEANT TO ANSWER THIS EARLIER but this week has been so busy </3 my General Thoughts on it is that it pretty much just stays the same and asriel is just an elusive guy.... like.. u know how the amalgamates are gooey?? he just kinda learns how to slip out of sight after who knows how many resets. so if it were to come down to papyrus or toriel or whoever else everything would pretty much have the same dialogue and scenes, except for Specifically Toriel who would probably be. really worried about asriel all the time. especially if u tried to kill her. she would probably be like "Oh God My Son Has Already Lost So Much Oh My Baby Boy" and then asriel would show up at the end of the ruins like "ok Wow u didnt even Try to spare her! u kind of remind me of myself ahaha" and then he follows u like flowey does via amalgamate goo. i think sans would probably be mildly worried about this Goat Friend papyrus talks about but overall i think he would be like "oh sick my brother has a pal. even if hes imaginary"

BUT as for the true lab i think some things would be different. asriel was kept there for a VERY long time and since he was on the verge of death he didnt take much Soul Power from his parents so they barely aged, just like him. toriel and asgore figured there wasnt much hope and everything goes pretty much the same way as it does in canon. but asriel wakes up alone in the lab and FREAKS OUT cuz hes like "oh my god how long have i been out where am i is chara dead what happened to their soul whats going ON" and when he sees asgore and feels numb he immediately thinks that there MUST be something wrong with his soul. that maybe he died and hes living off of charas soul and theyre gone because of him or that charas soul is gone and that Did something to him. he doesnt know but hes pretty much convinced that theres just something Wrong with him now. and thats when he realizes he can reset and he goes about all his resets and whatnot

i think what really happened is that after he went into a coma, charas soul stayed but they pretty much disappeared kinda similar to how chara "wakes up" when frisk falls, but asriel cant tell. i think he wouldnt find out about his soul until he kills asgore and absorbs the six souls and turns into an abomination and the six of them revolt... like he Knows charas soul is There Now but hes convinced that its frisk hes sensing, so he still ends up believing frisk is chara especially after frisk goes through the true lab. i think the true pacifist end would be different in like.. a way that he just uses his Various God Powers to isolate him and frisk like in the photoshop flowey fight. he breaks the barrier after accepting that chara is gone and he Literally has to let them go to break the barrier and hes just a Regular Monster now who is mildly fucked up and dripping cuz of the dt. at least those are my rough thoughts

im sure theres a lot of holes cuz im still trying to think of how i wanna go about it...... i might just have charas soul be gone if i think about it more but either way i wanna try to keep that idea of him having to let chara go to move on from his trauma... most of his issues with his parents would probably be a post game thing where he still avoids asgore but lives with toriel and frisk cuz of his time in the ruins with her. i hope my rambling makes sense i think about asriel so very much