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elareine · 4 years ago

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JayTim + 42 from the Dialogue Prompts + SPACE AU, pretty please?

I… hope this counts? Technically, it’s not IN space. Though Tim would like to be.

“You’re mad, Tim,” they said. “Stop trying to speak to aliens,” they said. “You’re wasting your life.”

Hah.

Tim has a… set-up.

What’s the point, he figures, in sending waves out to space where they might be heard in a hundred years, when you could just try to contact the aliens already on Earth? After all, if intelligent life is out there and capable of interstellar travel, and if humans haven’t noticed them yet, then said life must be hiding itself.

It stands to reason that these aliens must then be communicating among themselves in a form that’s inaccessible to humans. So Tim sat down and build every stupid crazy thing he could think off—unusual wave frequencies, smell transmitters (bad idea), hormone secretors… anything. There are forty devices stashed in his room, and he’s not crazy.

Because one day, space talks back.

“Koriand’r, what’s the name again for the thing—the strip around our waists that helps people not be naked? And why do I need it?”

Tim whirls around. It’s one of his Hail Mary machine—a radio frequency so fucking impractical, no one would ever use it.

Apart from an alien, apparently. Cause that question cannot have come from a human. Right?

“I’m not Kori-whatstheirname,” Tim says, trying to sound chill. “But it’s called a belt. We need it because our clothing is factory-made and not tailored to fit; and also because it’s not acceptable to be naked anywhere but some beaches in Germany.”

A long pause, then the voice replies: “You’re human.”

“Yes. Please don’t hang up. My name’s Tim Drake. Are you an alien?”

“Uh.” There’s another pause. “I… guess? I’m not from Earth.”

“Oh, awesome!” Tim is out of his seat and leaning forward, he’s that excited. “Wait, you speak English?”

“I have a—a device that can mimic your languages.”

Tim nods. “So like what Google Translate wants to be in another five years.”

“…I suppose.” A pause. “Actually… can you tell me—who or what is a ‘google,’ exactly? I figured out it’s one of your gods, but what do they do, exactly?”

“Oh boy, you just opened a whole new avenue of philosophy. I guess it could count as a god? Not in the religious sense, though.”

“I’m not a boy,” he’s immediately corrected. “I’m a Hzewf.”

“Okay. Okay.” Tim bounces back on his heels. “How about this? I explain Google to you—I’ll even throw in social media, if you want, but please don’t ask about Reddit, nothing can explain Reddit—and you tell me about the Hsev.”

“Hzewf. Okay.”

They talk. When the alien has to leave, Tim’s reluctant to agree—but the next day, the line crackles to life again.

“You’re a good source,” the alien says. “We… can keep talking. If you don’t mind.”

The alien’s name is something like j—more guttural sounding than Tim is used to, and with a long pause after—ay—or rather a pause i/j. Tim looks up various phonetic alphabets and dubs him J-a’i.

The Hzewf have a different variety of gender expression, so the two debate pronouns, and J-a’i decides that ‘he’ will do just fine. He’s addressed as that on a daily basis, anyway, and has never minded. He draws the line at being called a man, though.

What he is, though, is a total anthropology nerd. He wants to know everything about humans—that’s why he’s here, after all. Koriand’r, it turns out, is another alien from another planet he just met by accident. Apparently, she’s settled down and found love, so J-a’i tries not to bother her too much. The belt thing was a total emergency question.

And now, he has Tim.

It’s fun. Tim likes having a secret, a good one, for once. Every night, they talk. No matter how shitty his day is—and most of them are—at the end of it, he can speak with J-a’i and feel like somewhere out there, someone understands.

And then, one day, there’s a knock on the door. Tim briefly entertains fantasies about the men in black before checking the surveillance camera and seeing an alien instead.

Oh well. Alright then.

He opens the door and ushers the visitor in. “J-a’i, I presume?”

The other being looks relieved when he hears his voice. “Tim.”

“The very one.”

Okay. Tim kinda thought J-a’i would be smaller. Tim’s used to short jokes, but having to crane his head back like this feels ridiculous.

“I need to hide,” J-a’i says, looking very serious. Tim would like to return the expression in kind—this is probably a very stressful and dangerous situation for an alien in hiding, and he should give it the proper gravitas—but he’s so happy.

“So you came here?”

“My masking device broke,” J-a’i explains. Ah. That’s why he’s so… uh… colorful. Tim’s really digging the red stripes, though. “I… I had nowhere else to go.”

“Come with me.” Tim leads them to a cupboard, and then opens the secret door leading down. “You never know when you need a bunker.”

“You—“

“Well, do you need to use it or or don’t you?”

“I have finally found a being whose paranoia matches my own,” J-a’i says. He does get into the bunker, though.

“So what now?” Tim asks when they’ve settled down.

J-a’i shrugs. “I’ll probably have to leave.”

“Go to another country?” Tim asks, already mentally mapping out his visa applications.

“Another planet. Home, I think, at least for a while.”

Oh. Right. What do Hzewf visa applications look like? “So we need to get to your ship.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. You left it in Lake Michigan, right? That’s about twelve hours by car. Oh, but,” Tim looks at J-a’i and his very much not human appearance, “should probably only travel in the dark. Luckily, there’s a lot of that in winter. We’ll give your pursuers a few hours, and then I’ll go pack. If the coast is clear, we can leave tomorrow night. What’s the weather like on your planet? Should I bring shorts?”

Instead of an answer, though, he gets a surprised stare. “You’ll come with me?”

“Well, duh.” Tim snorts.

…wait. Uh. Maybe this is too much? J-a’i is self-admittedly desperate to show up here. Just because he didn’t have an alternative, doesn’t mean he wants Tim to invite himself along. None of this stuff is as exciting for him as it is for Tim, and with the bad experience the other creature has recently made with humans—

There’s an expression happening on J-a’i’s face that stops his panic attack in its tracks. Hope. Hope that’s painful because you’re sure that whatever it is you’re being offered will get snatched away from you.

Tim recognizes the emotion for what it is, because he knows it so well.

“Are you sure?” J-a’i asks. “We’d be going to space—“

“J-a’i,” Tim interrupts, “I’ve been waiting to hear these words all my life. Literally. All that’s missing is a kiss and we’d be in the final scene of the Hollywood movie of my dreams.”

“Kissing is that thing you humans do, right? To express affection and/or lust?”

“Yes.” And because Tim’s a fucking sap who has spent too many hours listening to the voice on the other end of a radio: “When we love each other, too.”

J’a-i considers that. “Well. I… wouldn’t be opposed, either. Though I don’t understand how it relates to space travel.”

Tim nudges his shoulder and grins. “Hey, we can work up to that. Tell me some more about your spaceship?”

J’a-i’s whole face lights up when he talks about his ship. Tim’s heard it in his voice before, but it’s pretty awesome to see it in person. Also? He’s sitting next to an alien, talking about spaceships.

Hell yeah. Space, here Tim comes.

(I’m taking prompts until the end of the year.)

#jaytim #elareine writes

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project-pnf-404 · 4 years ago

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Checkpoint and important updates 2!!: Electric boogaloo!!

Heyo guys!! Long time no talk. So, I’ve got some cool update stuff to show you guys. I’ve been doing a lot of blog “housekeeping” since the end of the last event. (don’t worry it hopefully won’t be boring update stuff lmao as it includes some new supplementary content). So, first and foremost, thanks to the inspiration from @koppais-smallest-nerd I’d like to let you guys know that I am now adding screen reader access to all future posts!!! This one included. At the bottom of each post under the, “read more”, image descriptions for all images will be added! Screen reader accessibility will also be added to all previous asks on the blog. However, getting through all of them will take a tiny bit. As, of this update, the first 4 asks have had image descriptions added. As well as all the supplementary content in between where applicable.

I’d also like to show you guys some supplementary content for the blog. Between these dashed lines are in character day 1 log entries written by the rest of the crew.

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I originally wasn’t sure if I wanted to put these extra day 1 logs on the main blog or not. But, I’ve decided that all supplementary content that may be story related will remain on the main blog for the foreseeable future, while BTS content will end up on PNF-404-Plus.

That being said since the end of the 1st event and my time away from the blog a lot has been going on when it comes to the blog.

For one the entire desktop version of the blog has had a large overhaul. A new theme has been added to the main page.

But, not only that but new side pages with supplementary content have been added!! This includes an event list, a bio page for the crew members of the S.S Drake, a Piklopedia page for the new Piklopedia, and a music page to top it all off!!

The Event List will show each new event as they are added! You can click on the current known events to go directly to all posts tagged with that event tag. Speaking of which all Event 01 posts have now had their tags updated with the Event 01 tag making it much easier to navigate.

The new Crew Members page has bios for all the members currently on the mission or known in the story so far! These Bios are pretty in line with cannon with some fanon, and light headcanon added in for good measure. I recommend taking a look as it does have some interesting info in there. Also quick note: all of these bios are written as if it is prior to the beginning of the blog.

Then there’s the Piklopedia!! Here you can read each of their findings as they explore PNF-404! Currently the findings will be on each area they explore (not each creature they find) as they haven’t found any new creatures yet. There is also a map of places they’ve discovered and more!

Lastly, a new music page has been added. On this page, I’ve created event-inspired music playlists. Some of the songs have been mentioned in the past. But, here you can listen to them all in one place and see which songs are for which part of the events. As well there’s a secret songs playlist. This playlist has nothing to do with the blog directly but is filled with music given to me by people I’ve met from this community while I’ve been here!! Currently, there are 5 songs there, however, there will be more added in the future! What makes it secret is that you won’t know who gave me the song XD. (well unless you’re the one who gave me the song lmao) who knows if you’ve ever shared music with me before you may find your song there!! (There is also one song I’m sharing with you guys in there too so have fun figuring that out lmao. )

As well the table of contents has been once again updated with a lot of this new stuff as well as some other new information!! As for mobile users as of now, all of this is on separate Tumblr pages. However, in the near future, I will be uploading much of this stuff , such as the Piklopedia entries and Crew Bio’s, as individual posts! However, in the meantime, if you feel like you can always check out these pages on your phone browser instead if you’re a mobile-exclusive user. (Though some pages don’t look as good on phone)

Welp, I think that’s it as far as updates go!! I should be back with brand new ask posts soon (likely within the next week or so!) so keep a look out!! I’ll see ya guys again soon and thanks for reading!!!

In the first image, Alph’s Day 1 Log entry is shown. His log says, “To think I thought the first day would go well. Then again I didn’t think I would get sucked out of the ship either so maybe I should stop being so surprised. At the very least Louie and I were able to find our way back despite some obstacles and I was able to fix the ship in time. Though if it weren’t for Chunks we would have never found the pikmin we did. That little guy sure saved the day.

However, Then there's what happened to Brittany… To see her in a situation like that... I can’t even bear to think about it. Tomorrow I will be checking over the entirety of the Drake to make sure a crash like that doesn't happen again. I can't help but think that the crash was due to me overlooking something during maintenance... However, The only thing I can do now is to make sure something like this never happens again for all our sake, especially Brittanys’. “ It is then sighed by Alph

In the second Image Charlies Day 1 Log entry can be read it says, “I should have been on top of things. As this crew’s captain, everything that went wrong was under my watch and things should have gone much smoother. That being said I am very glad that all of my crew have made it out alive. Though I am still worried about Brittany. If only I was able to keep her safe…

But, at this point, we all must press forward. We have a task to complete and after seeing how devastated some areas are, we must get to the bottom of what’s wrong with PNF-404. Nothing will get in my way, not with my steely fists that is!!” It is then signed by Charlie

In the third image Louies’ day 1 log entry can be seen it says,

“

Going back to the pikmin planet wasn’t at the top of my list of things I thought I’d be doing anytime soon. Yet somehow I find myself back here and stranded again…. At least I wasn’t fully alone this time…

Alph and I eventually found a pikmin that we later named Chunks. He sure acts differently in comparison to any other Pikmin I’ve seen before. But, even still, if it weren’t for Chunks, we wouldn’t have been able to help Brittany or find any other pikmin for that matter. So, we should thank him for that.” It is then signed by Louie

In the fourth image the updated version of the Project: PNF-404 Tumblr is shown. It now has a bright cyan futuristic aesthetic to it. In the fifth image a picture of the new events page, listing all the past and future events planned so far is shown. It has 1 known event Titled Event 01. The other 3 are titled Event unknown. In the sixth image, the new crew members’ character page is shown. A picture of Olimar is shown along with a description of his traits and a biography. It reads as follows,

CAPTAIN OLIMAR

AGE 38

ALIAS(ES)Olimar

SPECIES Hocotatian

GENDER Male

TITLE(S) Employee of Hocotate Freight, Xenobiologist

AFFILIATION Hocotate Freight, Planet Hocotate Government

Fatherly, well-meaning, and resourceful, for an almost 40 year old Hocotatian he has a lot of bravery and guts. Olimar first and foremost loves his family and cares deeply for others around him. A Hardworking employee of Hocotate Freight and family man, Olimar tends to try and stay level-headed while looking out for others.

Having been one of the first to visit the Pikmin planet Olimar has extensive knowledge of the planet's life. Lucky for him he just so happens to have gone to college for xenobiology. Many of his findings can be found within his many log entries known as the Piklopedia.

But, for as much as Olimar tends to be on top of things, his trips to the pikmin planet have had him face many dangers and life-threatening events. Though these issues are not something he brings up…

In the seventh image, The new Piklopidea page is shown, In one section it displays a map of PNF-404 with 2 marked locations. The first of which is highlighted in blue is named the “Silent Stream” the second, is highlighted in orange, Its title is “Glacial Gardens”. To the right of that is a description introduction for the Piklopedia. It says” To help ensure the progress and success of this mission all crew members must write down their findings in this log. Overview:

CAPTAIN Olimar: Writes In-depth biological analysis of fauna and how the ecosystem affects said fauna.

LOUIE: Writes about Recipes and ingredients that can be found in each area. ALPH: Looks at the area with the eyes of an engineer. He uses this insight to discuss the benefits and flaws of what he’s analyzing. BRITTANY: Uses her botanist skills to look into the flora of the area along with talking about the aesthetics of things and adding in her own general opinions.

CAPTAIN CHARLIE: Writes about combat strategy and how one can use the environment in an area for a tactical advantage.

To the left is a map showing the current locations discovered by the crew. The one highlighted in orange has yet to be explored.

The final image shows the new music page! 6 playlists can be selected on the left each having 5 songs. To the right is an image of the event 01 cover art. With (from left to right), Brittnay, Charlie, Olimar, Louie, and Alph all looking up with a distressed expression on their faces.

END ID

#pikmin #supplementary content #alph #louie #charlie #ooc #Event 01 #not an ask #update #man why are my posts always so long XD #I’m writing most of this in the middle of the night I’m really tired #tomorrow imma look at this and be like what the heck did I write lmao

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leatherjacketsupervillain · 3 years ago

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I've been kind of bouncing this idea around for a while now, and trying to find the time to write it out...

Many see Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol as the definitive take on the series. As such, the most recent iteration of the Doom Patrol as seen in Gerard Way's run(s) have seen a great deal of comparison. While Way's Doom Patrol did many things to emulate Morrison's, the difference in how Doom Patrol has written its outcasts throughout time are radical and worth noting.

When it's at its best, the Doom Patrol has always been about outcasts. Arnold Drake's run with the team's debut in the 1960's featured Cheif who was in a wheelchair, Cliff and Larry who looked straight out of a monster movie and Rita who'd been blacklisted from Hollywood. Sometimes Beastboy, who was bullied at school for his green skin, sometimes the rich, able-bodied Mento who no one else on the team really got along with or wanted him to be there. While the main focus of each book was this weirdo or big monster they'd have to fight, there was always an undercurrent of how they were sensationalized and subsequently dehumanized; "Fabulous freaks", as they're frequently called in the papers. Reporters don't call Larry by his name, because he's not a person to them, he's "Negative Man"; Rita is invited to star in a movie for the first time in a couple years, only to discover she'd been manipulated into a role where the director could showcase her powers as a gimmick, not her talent. They're allowed to save the world and sell papers, but they're not given a place to live among society.

Morrison famously took this theme and upped the ante. In his take for the early 90's, he incorporated many elements that were gaining more attention at the fringes of society; mental illness, homosexuality, gender (explored even further in-depth by Pollack in her run)... Part of what made Morrison's Doom Patrol stand out so much was that while fighting surrealist, parodical and even dadaist threats, the writing left plenty of room to explore what made these characters outcasts; For Cliff, his body dysmorphia (again, expanded on by Pollack) and depression over the fact that though his brain (and possibly his soul) remained, by all other accounts, he was a dead man; Negative Man had been reinvented as Rebis who was genderfluid (even if the language wasn't there yet); the introduction of Jane who had DID (to a supernatural extent) and a history of abuse and trauma; Kate Goodwin who joined the team was both transgender and lesbian (but please, read Pollack's Doom Patrol, its severely underrated, it still has yet to be published in a collection) among others. Though certain aspects of these themes were handled problematically, looking back, this series represented all sort of misfits and outcasts who had had little few representation in science-fiction till then, and even fewer as heroes up to that point. Even today, few series have demonstrated this level of inclusion.

Gerard Way (of My Chemical Romance) picked up the torch and began writing the series in its 2016 revival, carrying the theme of outcasts. So why has this run been the subject of such polarization? As a fairly recent series (ending with Weight of the Worlds as recently as 2020), we, in our current socio-political climate are living the society that shaped this most recent entry; over-politicised divisiveness, racism, economic inequity, and that's just the tip of the iceberg (for as long as we still have icebergs). For that reason, many fans found themselves asking "Why not put that in the book?", or "Why does Casey f*ck her cat in the book?". The fact of the matter is that for all the angst, for all the drama, Doom Patrol has always been about outcasts who have found and love each other, and in turn, learned to love themselves. If you want to say Way's run on Doom Patrol didn't deliver to the fringes of society, look again. He wrote it for the queer community, shippers, fan fiction writers, furries and people with generally frowned upon kinks that you really mostly just see on Deviantart (looking at that issue from Milk Wars where they and the JLA all get hyper-inflated).

So perhaps this run wasn't as poignant or as groundbreaking as you expected it to be, but what Way offered was a safe space. While none of these groups (save for the LGBTQIA+) see the level of oppression many others in the fringe of society experience, or, rather, any, they are not without their own scrutiny. They're often excluded as weirdos who don't really fit in with the world at large. His run was a landing pad where we could watch our charectars go on cartoonish adventures and bizarre sex-romps all the while keeping a focus on the theme of community and self-acceptance. Maybe it wasn't a perfect run, but the idea of a perfect run looks a little bit different to everybody (though I'm a big fan of Keith Giffen's). That said, it was pretty fun and certainly deserves its place cemented in the long (and often convoluted) history of the Doom Patrol.

#basically i wrote a lenghty essay about G Way's Doom Patrol run #its not my first. it wont be my last #erik speaks #doom patrol #dc #dc comics #dc young animal #gerard way

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fatelotusorder · 4 years ago

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Name: Elizabeth Tudor

Others Names : Good Queen Bess , Liz ,Lizabeth ,Beth

Class: Ruler

other Classes He Qualifies For - Berserker(All Tudors Except Ed) , Caster, Saber(All English Ruler Qualify for this class Bess Finds this dumb ), Lancer , Shielder

Alignment: Lawful Good

Voice Actor:Mitsuo Iwata (Sunny from Toriko , Hes Also The Second Voice For Ivanvok in One piece )

https://youtu.be/76jZj7Ymy9Y

Gender: Male Likes: Sweets, Fashion , Beauty in general

Dislikes: Don't call Him Fat or A Drag Queen , Dentists , His Sister and Father

Tags:King ,English , Divine ,Humaniod ,Servant ,Weak to Enuma Elish NaturalEnemy: Mary Tudor , Herny the 8th , Gilgamesh,Ozymandias , Aslaung , Medb

Cards: Buster,Art , Arts ,Arts Quick Active Skills:

Unwavering Charisma (Increases Attack for all Allies and Increases Allies Defense For 3 turn)

Ageless Beauty- Chance to Charm All Enemies for 1 Turn ,and Seal their NP for Three Turns

Glory of the Crown-Increase NP Gain and Apply Damage Cut to all allies for 3 turns

Passive Skills:

Rage of Tudors - Increases allies Attack When Bess is on the Felid Magic Resistance

NP: Tudor Rose- Protection From the Queen - Arts- Bess Gives a Pray out to God

,"when wars and seditions with grievous persecutions have vexed almost all kings and countries round about me, my reign hath been peaceable, and my realm a receptacle to thy afflicted Church. The love of my people hath appeared firm, and the devices of my enemies frustrate"

Before Similar To Neros A Room Appears Around Him as He Walks Towards The Throne , He Smiles as Bess Sits Down on the Throne And Snaps His Fingers and a Light illuminates the Room. Give Invincibility for two hits and a 3 turn Heal Regen for Allies and Lowers Defense for all Enemies .

Biography:

Elizabeth Tudor known By Many Aliases the last Ruler of the Tudor Dynasty in England , who Unlike her predecessors Before Enjoyed a Long Reign of about 44 years. Although Documented as a Woman in the History , The "Queen" was Actually Male, Born with the name Arthur Tudor after his fathers late brother but then Why Didn't Bess take the Throne next Instead of Edward he was the Son Henry always wanted .

Truth is Henry Declared Bess as one of His Daughters as Bess wasn't the son Henry wanted and Henry didn't consider Bess Manly Enough to considered His Next Heir and so Hid the Fact He Had another Son by raising Bess as Girl and Eventually Declared Bess along with His Sister Mary as Illegitimate as Soon as He had Edward .

Bess despite His Arrogance, Flamboyancy, and Confidence in himself.Bess Dose question if he truly a Man as He went through Great lengths to Hide the fact that he wasn't a Woman (even pulling an Artoria and giving himself breasts temporarily ) Mainly for political Reasons and so he didn't suffer the Similar short Rules of His Sister. Not for the Reasons that Modern Day people do it so His pronouces are He/ Them.

-—-

Summoned: "Elizabeth Tudor ,Servant Class : Ruler ,Is it Nice to be in the presence of a Queen ,Master"

Bond 1: Its not Everyday Your around a Queen My Master ,Smile ~

Bond 2:Hm ,your an Interesting person to Say the Least

Bond 3: Your orders Master ,I’ll Do anything you ask me to.~"

Bond 4: Hehe ,You Remind Me of Someone Very Special to me in life. Who is this person? Your not ready for that just yet

Bond 5: this special person , Well his Name was Robert Dudley , I had a crush on him for the longest time .

Dialogue 1:"Why Do you Stare At me like that ? ,Master ? Is it Because I'm So Breathtakingly beautiful ... or Is it Something Eles?"

Dialogue 2: "D-dentist, Master ,I D-don't need a Dentist"

Dialogue 3:"Master ,This Scale Has to Be wrong I can't have gained weight ,I Cut back on Sweets"

Dialogue 4: "Some Days I wonder Why I was Summoned as a Ruler I'm Not a Saint or anything ,Just a person Who believed that God was on His Side protecting Him. "

(If you Have Henry the 8th) " Master , Don't Compare me to that Boar in Humans Clothing ,He dosen't Deserve the Comparison "

(if You Have Mary Tudor ) "Mary ,Your Here ...M-master We need to Talk"

(if You Have Francis Drake )

" Don't Go Telling People , How Big My (temporary) Breasts Were! and they Were Not Bigger than Raikou's Cow Udders ! "

(if You Have Ivan the Terrible ) "You Look Just as Ugly and Horrid as that Letter You wrote Me"

(If You Have Ragnar or Judge Vinsmoke )" You Remind me of my Father ,That is a Bad thing "

(if you have Sanji,Before whole Cake ) - Okama! Who are you To Say whether I'm an Okama or not , I'll break You Arms Clean off!

(if you have Sanji,After Whole Cake ) "I seem We were Similar Situations, Your father wanted to mold you Into a Warrior that lacked Empathy and Compassion and Hated your Passion of Cooking for his Ridiculous Standards on What Royalty should and Shouldn't do.. ...Huh ,but I thought You didn't like ugly ass Okamas.~"

(if you Have Ivar the Boneless Before Rwby Event) - "he's the shortest Viking I've Seen and his Legs Flop around like if he was a Ragdoll , He's Kinda Adorable looking He reminds me of a Cat .”

(Ivar After Rwby) " Of Course Come Here ,Ivar , If you Need a Shoulder to Cry come to me , I have been Moved by Your Life Story, You still Remind of a Cat though "

(If You Have Gilgamesh , Ozy or Medb) " Aww ~ You seem Jealous, Is it because of My Breathtaking Beauty attracts Everyone to me like bees to a Flower."

Something you like: I love Sweets and Sugar ,but I'm on diet after looking at the Scale .

Something you dislike: I personally Hate being Called a Drag queen or Okama its Basically telling me I couldn't past for a Woman to save my life , I don't like being Called Fat my Father had to be carried by crane you know.

About the Holy Grail: Grail , If I had I'd wish to be able to Find True Love and Get married During an

Event: An Event , Ah something Different than Our Usal Missions we should take break and relax. Birthday: Happy Birthday , Master ,I shall get the Cafeteria to prepare a Banquet.

——-—

Other stuff

to clarify Bess is More gender non conforming and Really doesn’t caring for looking or acting Traditionally Masculine or Feminine . He’ll wear a Pencil skirt cause it looks nice and if people Mistake him for a women then he really dosent care to him that just means He looks pretty. He’ll drop to his natural sounding voice . Mainly because Elizabeth was Literally praised for his beauty even in his older Years where he was worse for wear in Servant form hes at most in his 30’s .

The reason why Bess hid as Women all his Life is that he was afraid of appearing weak and having a short chaotic rule like his sister as he says” It better to appear as a strong woman than be consider a weak man.“

also He’s 6’3 very tall .

In Fate Lotus order

The some of servants of Chaldea seemed to started a Fan club around Bess . This was started by Nobu and Nobukatsu( Whose actually a saber in this universe) cause Nobukatsu ended up forming a crush on him .

Bess pseudo Harem( cause he dosent know about this )now has

Finn mc Cool

a Chinese moth

Drake in there technically cause they’re Friends

his Advisor who is now a Pretty boy merged with a Snake like Eldritch god due messing with the Occult ( John dee )

he is unapologetically Bi and Unapologetically aware that he’s Thicc

Bess being a Male is based of a Debunked theory of Elizabeth Tudor being replaced by Similar looking male child after dying of illness . He is My Very first servant Oc along with his Sister Mary and Red riding Hood.

#elizabeth tudor #servant #fate grand order #fate series #servant oc #Original servant #Red #kisekae

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fridayfirefly · 5 years ago

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Lost and Found [Part Three]

Masterlist | Ao3

A/N: Sorry for the long wait, but I wanted to make sure this chapter was perfect, and now I’m super proud to show you all

The evening after Damian made his leap of faith and lost the pen was one of the rare nights where his entire 'family' managed to make it to the dinner table. Grayson and Barbara (Damian used her first name only because she threatened to ram him with her wheelchair if he kept calling her 'Gordon') drove in from their shared apartment in Blüdhaven. They were Soulmates, currently dating and soon to be engaged, if the ring box in Grayson's sock drawer (which Damian found when he broke into their apartment last month) meant anything. Todd came in that morning unannounced, claiming to be "in the mood for Alfred's cooking" (Damian suspected that Todd simply doesn't like eating alone, but said nothing). Drake was free for dinner because he didn't have any evening classes at Gotham University. Stephanie Brown arrived the day prior because Drake asked for her assistance on a case he was working on. Of all the heroes who fought crime in Gotham, Damian was least knowledgeable about Stephanie Brown. In all the time Damian had lived with Father, he had only spoken to Brown a few times and had only patrolled with Spoiler once. However, it seemed that Damian would be patrolling with Spoiler a lot more in the coming weeks. Earlier that day, Brown had offered to remain in Gotham and take Grayson's place on patrols. That way, Grayson could stay in Blüdhaven, instead of driving to Gotham on his nights off at the Blüdhaven police force to patrol.

Selena Kyle showed up for dinner as well, though she made no references to their conversation the night before. Father and Alfred were also at the dinner table, but Damian already knew that they would be there. Damian had lived with Father for almost three months, and he had seen the way that the Manor worked. People came and went; it seemed that the only people who stayed the same were Father and Alfred.

Once dinner started, conversations drifted around Damian. He struggled to find the right words to explain that he made contact with his Soulmate. He felt the need to say it, if only for the purpose of stopping Grayson's constant nagging.

“So when’s Connor coming to visit?" asked Barbara.

Damian turned his attention to Drake, interested in any news about Drake's Soulmate. Damian had yet to meet Connor Kent, but he was certainly interested in meeting one of his brother's Soulmates.

"He's coming over a week from Saturday and then staying for a week until the new semester at Metropolis University starts. Connor's bringing Clark, Lois, and Jon along with him. Jon's still on summer vacation, so Clark and Lois plan on leaving him here with Connor for the week so that he isn't home alone all day while they're at work."

"Jon is Damian's age, right?" Barbara asked.

"Yeah, Jon's turning thirteen next month," Drake answered.

Damian wondered what Jonathan Kent would be like. Hopefully not as immature and imbecilic as his classmates at Gotham Academy.

As the conversation hit a lull, Grayson piped up, "Damian, what's new with you? Are you still ignoring all your problems?" Grayson's tone was far too innocent for the taunt veiled underneath the niceties. Damian shot Grayson a glare, which was matched by Grayson's own stubborn look. Logically, Damian knew his teasing was fueled by well-intentioned concern, but Damian still found it annoying.

"Don't call her a problem," Damian growled. No one at the table looked concerned by their interaction, so Damian assumed that Babs and Stephanie had both been informed of what had happened two weeks ago. "The answer is no, anyways. I'm not ignoring her. I lost something for her last night."

All other conversations halted when Damian revealed his secret. "Good for you, Demon Spawn," Todd said, speech muffled by the mouthful of food he was trying to talk around.

"That's great news!" Grayson's face was lit up. "We should celebrate. I haven't had an opportunity to throw a party at the Manor in ages."

Damian sighed. Any attempts to halt Grayson's party planning would surely fail. There was no stopping Grayson’s unnerving desire to celebrate every little thing.

"Babs and I can set it up. We can do it next Saturday, while the Kents are here. After all, it's been months since the last time the Banquet Hall was used."

Father rolled his eyes at Grayson’s antics, the slight upturn of his lips proved that he was in support of Grayson's idea. It had been less than one minute since told his tell his family that he had lost the pen for his Soulmate to find, and he was already regretting it.

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It had taken Damian six hours and eighteen jewelry stores throughout Gotham to find the perfect gift to give to his Soulmate. It was a bracelet, made of silver and designed to look like feathers wrapping around the wrist. But it still wasn't perfect, which was why Damian was knocking on Drake's bedroom door.

Drake opened his door, looking much better rested than he had at dinner two days prior. The dark circles under his eyes had faded, and Damian could see only one coffee cup on his desk, instead of his usual three to seven. "Do you need anything?"

Damian nodded. "There is something I need assistance with. Given that it is within your area of expertise, I came to you for help."

Drake looked shocked at Damian's request, but also interested. "Come on in."

Damian walked into Drake's room and shut the door behind him. "I understand that you are knowledgeable about nanotechnology." Damian set the bracelet down on Drake's desk. "Would you be able to monitor heart rate and blood pressure through this, without the modifications being obvious to its wearer?"

Drake picked the bracelet up and examined its size and weight. "It'll take me a few days, but I think it can be done..." Drake trailed off, grabbing a spare piece of paper off his desk and jotting notes down. "It's for your Soulmate, right?"

"Yes."

"Cool," said Drake, "Is there anything else you want to be added to it?"

Damian paused for a moment, considering his words. "Could you add a tracker? One that activates only if the heart rate and blood pressure monitors detect that she's in potentially life-threatening conditions?"

Drake nodded. "I can definitely do that. If I connect everything to an app on your phone, then those kinds of settings can be done through the app rather than through the bracelet itself. But you know, I won't judge you if you want the tracker to be available to you now."

Damian shook his head. "I don't want to invade her boundaries. I just want to keep her safe and out of harm's way."

"That's genuinely really cool of you, Damian," Drake said. "I think Connor's going to like you."

"Tt. Everybody likes me."

Drake laughed. "Sure, Demon Spawn."

Damian turned away from his brother, leaving the room before Tim could catch the small smile on his face.

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"No more complaining, Dami. I didn't get to throw you a Welcome to the Manor party or a belated Birthday party, so you're going to suck it up and enjoy this one," Grayson instructed. He and Barbara had already bought refreshments, created a playlist titled "Can Damian Even Dance?", and decorated the Banquet Hall. Though in Damian's opinion, a blind cat would have been better at decorating than Grayson. Instead of buying normal party decorations, He and Barbara had gone to thrift stores, buying up used gender reveal party decorations. They then wrote the word Soulmate overtop of 'boy' or 'girl' so that each banner proclaimed "It's a Soulmate."

"I'm not complaining. I just think that your decorations look terrible."

"Don't call them terrible, they're made with love." Grayson could barely keep a straight face while saying it.

Damian rolled his eyes and walked out of the Banquet Hall, heading towards the foyer. He knew that Grayson was the type to go all-out when it came to showing his emotions (i.e. throwing a party to show that he's proud of Damian and supports him) but Damian wasn't really the type to enjoy a party, especially when he's the guest of honor.

"The Kents are here," Tim called out as he opened up the front door.

Damian watched as Tim greeted the Kent family. Damian had already met Clark Kent, though strictly through his superhero identity and was familiar with both Connor and Jon's time spent as Superboy. And Lois Lane-Kent, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of an award-winning novel (which Damian has read), was just as well-known in America as Superman.

“Clark, I know you've already met Damian, but the rest of you should come and meet him. After all, Dick is throwing the party in his honor.”

Damian walked into the foyer to meet Tim’s Soulmate’s family. “Hello,” Damian dipped his head in greeting.

“It’s nice to meet you, Damian,” Lois politely greeted him.

"I've read your book," Damian blurted out. "I found your commentary on the negative ramifications of superheroes on our society to be enlightening."

Lois smiled brightly, "I'm glad you enjoyed it. I've always been interested in how Superheroes influence modern society, and I think it's important for people to understand that Superheroes aren't always a good thing to have. Because Superheroes exist, citizens allow themselves to become complacent, pushing the burden of stopping crime onto Superheroes, instead of trying to prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place. It's definitely a multifaceted phenomenon, and one that our society needs to be aware of."

"It's a very complex issue," Damian agreed. "I hope we can talk about this further at a later date."

Lois nodded. "Definitely." She glanced towards her husband. "Clark and I should go find Bruce and catch up with him." The pair left the foyer, walking in the direction of Father's office. Damian, Tim, Connor, and Jonathan walked in the opposite direction, towards the Banquet Hall.

"So you're Damian," said Connor. "Tim's told me a lot about you."

"Tt. Knowing Drake, it's likely all lies and slander. Drake's jealousy often gets the best of him."

"Jealous of what? The fact that you're so effortlessly annoying?"

"You're obviously envious of my innate ability to do everything better than you."

Connor, Tim's Soulmate, let out a laugh. "Tim didn't tell me that you're funny."

"He's not funny, Connor. He's annoying. Now come on, you have to see the decorations Dick and Babs put up. They're awful."

"How do you mess up party decorations?" Jonathan Kent asked.

Tim made a face. "Dick likes to challenge himself by putting up the worst possible decorations. Last year he and Babs convinced Alfred to have us all make the Christmas tree decorations ourselves. I still don't think I've gotten all the glitter out of my hair."

“At least these decorations are harmless,” Damian cut in. “Imagine what would have happened had Father not vetoed Grayson's Fourth of July cookout earlier this summer.”

Connor laughed. “That definitely wasn’t Dick’s best idea. I doubt that fireworks and the Wayne family mix well.”

When they got to the door to the Banquet Hall, Grayson's music already playing, Tim turned to Damian. "By the way, Damian, I finished the modifications that you asked for. It's in my room on my desk when you want to go get it."

"Sure. Tell Grayson I'll be a few minutes."

Tim and Connor walked into the room, but Jonathan stayed behind. "Is it for your Soulmate - what Tim was fixing for you?"

Damian's eyes narrowed. "Maybe."

Jonathan's face brightened. "Cool. Are you planning on losing it tonight?"

“I take it Tim told you and his Soulmate about my Soulmate," Damian commented, ignoring Jonathan's question.

"Tim didn't tell me, Tim told Connor. He wanted Connor's advice on how to apologize to you, for what he said about your Soulmate. I couldn't help but overhear; superhuman hearing doesn't exactly have an off switch. Besides, I was mostly just interested in the fact that your Soulmate is French. My Soulmate's French too."

Damian didn't know how to respond to that. Jonathan Kent was like a breath of fresh air. He was entirely unconcerned about Damian's wealth and status. He understood the sort of responsibility that being a superhero entailed but didn't get weighed down by it. He had just met Damian but already trusted him enough to reveal information about his Soulmate. Jonathan Kent, who seemed so easy to read at first glance, was secretly a conundrum.

The modifications on the bracelet were almost completely imperceptible to Damian's trained eye. Besides a small change in weight, it appeared unchanged. "I like the feathers," said Jonathan, "Definitely more subtle than anything I could come up with. But what was Tim doing with it?”

“Modifying it,” Damian said curtly. “It now measures heart rate and blood pressure.”

Jonathan nodded, “That’s a smart idea. I might have to ask Tim to make me one."

As they left Tim's room, Jonathan continued to fill the silence. "I don't know how you managed to not lose something for so long. I lose stuff all the time. My Soulmate will probably end up figuring out I'm Superboy because I accidentally misplaced my uniform."

"Your Soulmate doesn't yet know that you're Superboy?"

Jonathan shook his head. "We haven't met in person yet, plus the language barrier makes communication through the Soulbond difficult if we aren't both using translators. My Soulmate only speaks a little bit of English, and I'm even worse at French. But I'm getting better. I take classes now."

"I'm fluent in French," Damian added. "If you ever need something translated, I'm sure I could take the time to help you out." Jonathan Kent was one of the few genuinely good people Damian had met. Damian wanted to get to know him better.

"Thanks, Damian."

As Damian passed his bedroom doorway, he noticed something new sitting on his bed. A black book. He changed course, heading straight towards his new Soulmate object. It was a sketchbook. Damian quickly flipped through the crisp, new pages. His Soulmate must be a designer - the first three pages contained clothing designs. The first page was a dress, pink and white striped with a bow around the waist. The second page was a jacket, olive green with gold-colored buttons. The third page was a plain white t-shirt, simple at first glance, but the detailed notes beside the design indicated that she meant to cover the shoulders and shirt sleeves in a detailed embroidery.

"Wow," said Jonathan. "Did you know that your Soulmate was so talented?"

"No," Damian breathed out, taking in every little detail. He had never been so fascinated by fashion designing. Everything about the sketchbook showed talent, dedication, and skill. He could hardly tear his eyes away from the sketches - they were so detailed, with little notes in the margin indicating everything from what store to go to to buy the fabric, to the exact shade she wanted, to whether or not it needed hand stitched. All three pages were dated August 20th - she had planned out all three pieces of clothing that very day. Damian couldn't quite believe that his Soulmate was so perfect.

But pushing towards the front of his mind was the knowledge that he would have to return the book. It was obviously important to her, something she would never want to lose. Damian pulled his phone out and took three pictures, one of each of the sketches, to make sure he didn't forget a single detail. Then he grabbed a sticky note off of his desk and wrote, "I figured you might want this back - D.W."

Damian could feel Jonathan watching him. "I'm glad you're a good person, Damian."

"Thanks," Damian said dryly, but the compliment still stuck with him. He had never cared about being a good person until he lived with his Father. He didn't think he would be good at it, but maybe he was wrong.

Then, it was just a matter of losing the sketchbook so that she could get it back. Damian, not wanting the book to get damaged in any way, decided to just toss it into one of the open doorways on the way back to the Banquet Hall. It worked to lose the book only because the Banquet Hall was in one of the sections of the Manor that was rarely ever used, except during social gatherings. The twisting hallways and odd door placements were designed to keep snooping Gala guests from getting into the main part of the Manor without physically locking doors. According to Grayson, they also made for very intense games of Hide and Seek, which Damian had yet to play (Grayson had promised him a game, though, and had yet to break a promise).

"So what is your Soulmate like, Jonathan?" Damian asked him once they found their way back into the Banquet Hall.

"You know, you can call me Jon." Jon's facial expression switched to something that could only be described as dreamy. "My Soulmate... he's wonderful. He loves music, it's his biggest passion. He sends me music recommendations all the time, usually weekly playlists, unless he's bored or wants me to listen to something special. His favorite color is green and he has a pet turtle named Oliver. He has three best friends beside me, and he says he can't wait to meet me in person, but we're waiting until we're at least fifteen."

The night passed quickly in Jon's company. It was a new experience for Damian, having someone his own age to talk to. Conversation flowed easily from Soulmates to Superheroes to school. It was the first time Damian genuinely felt like he had made a friend.

Once midnight came around the party ended. Lois and Clark left to drive back to Metropolis, and Grayson and Barbara left for Blüdhaven. Tim took Connor up to his room, and Brown and Todd both left for their own (rarely used) bedrooms. Damian knew that Jon was staying in the guest bedroom three doors down from his own, so he offered to take him there.

The sticky note on his floor was the first thing Damian noticed, once he was finally alone. Written in the same handwriting as the designs from before was the sentence, "Thanks, it's a birthday present from my parents - M.D.C."

Damian knew it was time to give his Soulmate the bracelet. Wrapping it alongside the box of replacement pens he had gotten her, Damian made sure to write in his best handwriting, "Happy Birthday M. From your Soulmate, D.W."

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#lost and found #marinette #damian wayne #marinette x damian #maribat #maridami #daminette #my work

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path-of-my-childhood · 5 years ago

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Taylor Swift Bent the Music Industry to Her Will

By: Lindsay Zoladz for Vulture Date: December 30th 2019

In the 2010s, she became its savviest power player.

n late November 2019, Taylor Swift gave a career-spanning performance at the American Music Awards before accepting the statue for Artist of the Decade. (Swift was perhaps the perfect cross between the award’s two previous recipients, Britney Spears and Garth Brooks.) Clad in a cascading rose-colored cape and holding court among the younger female artists in attendance - 17-year-old Billie Eilish, 22-year-old Camila Cabello, 25-year-old Halsey - Swift had the queenly air of an elder stateswoman. After picking up five additional awards, including Artist of the Year, she became the show’s most decorated artist in history. “This is such a great year in music. The new artists are insane,” she declared in her acceptance speech, with big-sister gravitas. That night, she finally outgrew that “Who, me?” face of perpetual awards-show surprise; she accepted the honors she won like an artist who believed she had worked hard enough to deserve them.

Swift cut an imposing adult figure up there, because somewhere along the line she’d become one. The 2010s have coincided almost exactly with Swift’s 20s, with the subtle image changes and maturations across her last five album cycles coming to look like an Animorphs cover of a savvy and talented young woman gradually growing into her power. And so to reflect on the Decade in Taylor Swift is to assess not just her sonic evolutions but her many industry chess moves: She took Spotify to task in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and got Apple to reverse its policy of not paying artists royalties during a three-month free trial of its music-streaming service. She sued a former radio DJ for allegedly groping her during a photo op and demanded just a symbolic victory of $1, as if to say the money wasn’t the point. Critics wondered whether she was leaning too heavily on her co-writers, so she wrote her entire 2010 album, Speak Now, herself, without any collaborators. In 2018, she severed ties with her longtime label, Big Machine Records, and negotiated a new contract with Universal Music Group that gave her ownership of her masters and assurance that she (and any other artist on the label) would be paid out if UMG ever sold its Spotify shares. Yes, she stoked the flames of her celebrity feuds with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, and Katy Perry plenty over the past ten years, but she’s also focused some of her combative energy on tackling systemic problems and fashioning herself into something like the music industry’s most high-profile vigilante. Few artists have made royalty payments and the minutiae of entertainment-law front-page news as often as Swift has.

Within the industry, Swift has always had the reputation of being something of a songwriting savant (in 2007, when “Our Song” was released, then-17-year-old Swift became the youngest person ever to write and perform a No. 1 song on the Billboard Country chart), but she has long desired to be considered an industry power player, too. A 2011 New Yorker profile of Swift circa her blockbuster Speak Now World Tour noted that she initially intended to follow her parents’ footsteps and pursue a career in business, quoting her saying, “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was 8, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be.” In an even earlier interview, she fondly recalled the times in elementary school when she stayed up late with her mother, practicing for school presentations. “I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds - because male artists are allowed to,” she said this year in an unusually candid Rolling Stone interview. “And I’m so sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business.” Of course, she still spent plenty of time sitting at her piano or strumming her guitar, but in that conversation she painted herself as someone who is also “sit[ting] in a conference room several times a week,” coming up with ideas about how best to market her music and her career.

And so over the past decade, Swift’s face has appeared not just on magazine covers and television screens, but on UPS trucks and Amazon packages. Her songs have been featured in Target commercials and NFL spots, to name just two of her many lucrative partnerships. That New Yorker profile also found her to be uncommonly enthused about the fact that her CDs were being sold in Starbucks: “I was so stoked about it, because it’s been one of my goals - I always go into Starbucks, and I wished that they would sell my album.”

“Taylor Swift is something like the Sheryl Sandberg of pop music,” Hazel Cills wrote recently in Jezebel. “She has propelled her career from tiny country artist into pop machine over the past few years with little shame when it comes to corporate collaborators.” Such brazen femme-capitalism will always be a turnoff to some people (“the Sheryl Sandberg of pop music” is even less of a compliment in 2019 than it was when Lean In was first published), but it’s undeniable that it has helped Swift maintain and leverage her status as a commercial juggernaut more consistently than any other pop star over the past ten years.

In the 2010s, with the clockwork certainty of a midterm election, there was a Taylor Swift album every other autumn. (Yes, there was a three-year gap between 1989 and Reputation, but she all but made up for it with the quick timing of August’s Lover.) The kinds of pop superstars considered her peers did not stick to such rigid schedules: Adele released two studio albums this decade, Beyoncé released three, and even Rihanna - who for the first three years of the decade was averaging an album a year - eventually slowed her roll and will have released just four when the 2010s are all said and done. The only A-plus-list musician who saturated the market as steadily as Swift did this decade was Drake.

Still, Drake’s commercial dominance was more of a newfangled phenomenon, capitalizing on the industry’s sudden reliance on streaming and his massive popularity on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Drake might be the artist who rode the streaming wave most successfully this decade, but - with her strategic withholding of her albums from certain platforms until they better compensated artists - Swift was often the one bending it to her will. And she could do that because she didn’t need to rely on it solely: Somehow, against all odds, Taylor Swift still sold records. Like, gazillions of them. When Swift’s 2017 record, Reputation (some critics thought it was a critical misstep, but it certainly wasn’t a commercial one), moved 1.216 million units in its first seven days, Swift became the only artist in history to achieve four different million-selling weeks. And, of course, all four of these weeks came during a decade when traditional album sales were on a precipitous decline. At least for those mere mortals who were not an all-powerful being named Taylor Alison Swift.

“Female empowerment” has been such an ambient, unquestioned virtue of the pop culture of this decade that we have too often failed to take a step back and ask ourselves what sort of power is being advocated for, and if its attainment should always be a cause for celebration. Is “female empowerment” any different from the hollow, materialistic promises of the late ’90s “girl power”? Is “female power” inherently different or more benevolent than its default male counterpart? Maybe this feels like such a distinctly American hang-up because we have not yet experienced that mythic, oft-imagined figure of the First Female President, and have thus not had to contend with the cold reality that, whoever she is, she will, like all of us, be inevitably flawed, imperfect, and at least occasionally disappointing.

As she’s grown into her own brand of 21st-century American pop feminism - sometimes elegantly, sometimes gawkily - Swift seems to have come to a firm conviction that female power is essentially more virtuous than the male variety. This was a side of herself she celebrated in her AMA performance. Swift opened her medley with a few fiery bars of “The Man,” her own personalized daydream of what gender equality would look like: “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can,” she sings, “wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” She wore an oversize white button-down onto which the titles of her old albums were stamped in a correctional-facility font: SPEAK NOW, RED, 1989, REPUTATION. Plenty of the millions of people who scrutinize Swift’s every move interpreted her choice of outfit and song as not-so-subtle jabs at Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta and the manager-to-the-stars Scooter Braun, with whom Swift is still in a messy, uncommonly public battle over the fate of her master recordings. (The only album title missing from her outfit was “LOVER,” which happens to be the only one of which she has full ownership.) She has framed the terms of her battle with Borchetta and Braun in strikingly gendered language: “These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work,” she told Rolling Stone. “And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of Scotch to themselves.” Though she is herself a very rich, very powerful woman, she reads their message to be unquestionably condescending: Be a good little girl and shut up.

It is true that many record contracts are designed to take advantage of young artists, and that young women and people of color are probably perceived by music executives to be the marks most vulnerable to exploitation. But it is also true that Swift signed a legally binding contract, the kind that a businesswoman like herself would have to respect if it were signed by somebody else. Braun, who has been asking to have these negotiations in private rather than on Twitter, claims to have received death threats from her fans.

Even as she’s grown into one of the most dominant pop-culture figures in the world, Swift sometimes still seems to be clinging to her old underdog identity, to the extent that she can fail to grasp the magnitude of her own power or account for the blind spots of her privilege. “Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me,” she sang on Speak Now’s Grammy-winning 2010 single “Mean,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that, compared to 99.99 percent of the population, she already was. The mid-decade backlash to Swift’s thin-white-celebrity-and-model-studded “girl squad” - none of which was more incisive than Lara Marie Schoenhals’s hilarious parody video - took her by surprise. “I never would have imagined that people would have thought, This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it... I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to.”

“Female power” is not automatically faultless, and can of course be tainted by all other sorts of biases and assumptions about class, race, and sexual orientation, to name just a few more common pitfalls. Swift’s face-palm-inducing 2015 misunderstanding with Nicki Minaj revealed this, of course, and plenty of people felt that her sudden embrace of the LGBTQ community in the “You Need to Calm Down” was a clumsy overcorrection for her past silence. Maybe she would have gotten where she was quicker if she were a man. But it would take a more complicated, and perhaps less catchy, song to acknowledge she might not have gotten there at all had she not also enjoyed other privileges.

Art has its own kind of power - sneakier and harder to measure than the economic kind. The reason Taylor Swift has been worth talking about incessantly for an entire decade is that she continues to wield this kind, too. “I don’t think her commercial responsibilities detract from her genuine passion for her craft,” a then-17-year-old Tavi Gevinson wrote in a memorable 2013 essay for The Believer. “Have you ever watched her in interviews when she gets asked about her actual songwriting? She becomes that kid who’s really into the science fair.”

After so much industry drama, much of the lived-in, self-reflective Lover is a simple reminder that Swift was and still is a singular songwriter. Yes, this was the decade of such loud, flashy missteps as “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Welcome to New York,” and “Me!,” but it was also a decade of so many quieter triumphs: the pulsing synesthesia of “Red,” the nervous heart flutter of “Delicate,” the sleek sophistication of “Style,” the concise lyricism of “Mean,” the cathartic fun of “22,” the slow-dance swoon of “Lover.” But like so many of her fans, and even Swift herself, I still find the most enduringly powerful song she’s ever written to be “All Too Well,” the smoldering breakup scrapbook released on her great 2012 album Red. “Wind in my hair, I was there, I remember it all too well,” she sings, an innocent enough lyric that, by the end of the song, comes to glint like a switchblade. In a decade of DGAF, ghosting, and performative chill, remembering it all too well might be Swift’s stealthiest superpower. She felt it deeply, can still access that feeling whenever she needs to, and that means she can size you up in a line as concisely cutting as “so casually cruel in the name of being honest.” Forget Jake Gyllenhaal or John Mayer. That’s the sort of observation that would bring Goliath to his knees.

“It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they do not hear a voice that connotes authority,” the historian Mary Beard writes in her manifesto Women & Power, “or rather they have not learned how to hear authority in it.” At least in the realm of pop music, Swift has spent the better part of her decade chipping away at that double standard, and teaching people how to think about cultural power a little bit differently. She sprinkled artful emblems of teen-girl-speak through her smash hits (“Uhhh he calls me and he’s like, ‘I still love you,’ and I’m like, ‘This is exhausting, we are never getting back together, like, ever”) and did not abandon her effusive love of kittens and butterflies in order to be taken seriously. As an artist and a businesswoman, she made the power of teen girls - and the women who used to be them - that much more perilous to ignore. Because they’ve been there all along, and they remember all too well.

#taylor swift #vulture #article #about taylor #2010s #TAS business #music industry #songwriting #all the eras

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lizzybeth1986 · 6 years ago

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Quick Thoughts on The Royal Heir, Book 1 Chapter 1

• We're back! Hopefully with a better series this time, but I'm not going to keep my hopes too high.

• If my QTs are clogging up your dash, I recommend you block these particular tags: #trh quick thoughts, #trh qts, and optionally #long post.

• Much like my Book 3 QTs, I will be exploring as many playthroughs as I possibly can to see how each LI's route is being written. Last book, this experiment definitely helped me figure out that they were putting more effort into some characters and less into others, and I'd still like to keep an eye out for these things as much as possible.

• I feel this QT might be shorter than my usual (edit: joke's on me - it's not!! 🙈), mostly because the opening chapter itself is...pretty light, and is mostly meant for us to spend time and have fun with our chosen LI. Plus a tiny smidgen of buildup to the premise, which is having a child in Cordonia. But I do have a theory about the overall theme that I'm going to be expanding on towards the end of the chapter.

• Okay that's it for preliminary explanations, it's time for me to start with the chapter! XD

• Ooh. Oooooooh. This loading page now has tidbits about Cordonian society!! Interesting.

• Title: Happily Ever Afterwards

Alternative Title: Be Grateful We're Letting You Have This Much Sex For Free This Week, Because That's The Last Time It's Happening.

• I'm extremely offended they're making me wear that Pepto Bismol outfit again.

•

...thanks so much for reminding me you still don't care about Hana, PB! 🙄 Everyone else remains to be some version of "loyal", but Hana is still considered more for her skills than for her own steadfastness, even though she was the most hardcore-loyal of the four (SHE LEFT HER FREAKING HOME. HER FREAKING FAMILY. FOR YOU. While the other three were certainly loyal and honorable to the MC, they definitely didn't have to completely cut ties with their families to do right by the MC).

• The "fairytale" aesthetics of the frame story were what drew people into TRR in the first place, so it's not too surprising that the LIs and MC give a nod to the flagship series with a "once upon a time". If you're with Liam, it goes straight from "falling in love with the Prince" to what his relationship with her taught him, before the happily ever after. If you're with one of the other three LIs, it specifies that she came there for Liam but fell for someone else. Sounds a lot like Maxwell's book 😄 In Maxwell's playthrough, in fact, there is a reference to it when the MC calls him a "famous author".

•

(Screenshots organized as follows: 1 - Liam, 2 - Drake, 3 - Maxwell, 4 - Hana. Liam's and Hana's are my own. Drake's from @thefirstcourtesan, and Maxwell's from Kaitlyn Walker's YouTube channel).

The other interesting thing to note is that in Liam's playthrough, he leads the narration. While in everyone else's the MC is the one who steers it. One reason I can think of is that the narrative still treats this story as Liam's story as much as it is the MC's (if I'm right about the theme) - which...has honestly always been a sore point with the fanbase in TRR. That would depend on how us and our baby are now further involved with Cordonia in the story. Another factor for why she leads the narration...could be that essentially, the MC took initiative in the other three relationships, while in Liam's case it was he who took a more active role by proposing to her.

• The little story ends with this question from the MC:

Question: But what happens after Happily Ever After?

Answer: Mess. In Cordonia it's always mess.

• Cordonians (specifically the upper classes, since I don't know enough about the common populace to tell, since they're, yknow, practically invisible) are addicted to tea, apples and fucking shit up where they don't even need to.

• ANYWAY. What (literally) happens after 'happily ever after' is a tropical honeymoon on Liam's private island. In the case of the other three, he allows them access to the place and gives the staff instructions on making the stay comfortable for them.

• Now, since Liam owns the island and has probably visited it a could times, he shows more familiarity with it. He tells his wife that on previous trips the island had more rustic accommodations, but the villa they're now staying in was prepared recently. Additionally, the butler welcomes Hana, Maxwell and Drake as newcomers to the island, considering it's their first time. With Liam, there is an air of familiarity - he calls the butler by his name (Javier) and enquires about him and his wife (Mariana) - to show us perhaps how familiar he is with this holiday spot.

• Why the hell does everyone call Liam "Your Highness"? It's been two whole books since he became King, and the proper title for a monarch is "Your Majesty". How is it that Constantine gets to rake the MC over the coals for calling him Your Highness, yet Liam has to hear this from practically everyone. From Javier to freakin' Protocol-Monitor-Madeleine! The disrespect, I tell you!

• Okay so we're having a candlelit dinner by the ocean, and we get our first OOTD. Cute beach dress, has bright flowers and some crochet work on the bodice. I bought it because I couldn't bear to have Esther stay another minute in that Pepto Bismol of a dress.

• LOL @ all the LI responses to "this spot is right where the sharks are!"

• Tuna sashimi and pineapple aioli, huh? I have never had either so idek what that's supposed to taste like (someone on this writing team likes pineapples). I remember having to cut down on tuna during pregnancy, which meant no more Subway sandwiches since the tuna sub was the only one I liked at the time. IIRC most of my family were also cautioning me against pineapples and papaya during my first trimester!

• My gosh this butler doesn't waste much time jumping into assumptions huh?

• Also Javier, why is Cordonia's future so dependent on the well-being of my foetus even if I'm not ruling the country?

• Does Cordonia have sex ed? My money is on no. (esp in the Hana route).

• So there are two parts to the way the premise of wanting to have kids is built up in this sequence. In the first part, the LI impresses upon the MC the need to have children soon after the wedding. The second part addresses the urgency - the "why right now?" factor, and explores the LI's personal emotions towards having children. This bit also feels a bit like a follow-up to the Valtoria balcony scene in Chapter 15.

• The first part is pretty similar for Drake, Hana and Maxwell - all three of whom are now married to a Duchess and are aware that securing the duchy is important. They word it in their own distinctive styles, but the gist is pretty much the same. In Liam's case, since he is the king of the country, he speaks more about Cordonia and its tensions with neighbouring countries.

Take note of this because I'll be returning to this point later. (also who are the writers trying to convince about Cordonia's size. "Small kingdom" my ass).

• I'll be going by the LIs' personal reasons to have a baby now, one by one, along with a summary of their views on children in the Valtoria balcony scene last book (since this scene clearly references that diamond scene if you've bought it last book).

(Screenshots: Liam's and Hana's screenshots are mine, Drake's is from @thefirstcourtesan and Maxwell's is from Kaitlyn Walker's YouTube channel)

- Liam: Liam's love for family and need for children is well-known throughout the series. In Book 1, he's dropped hints about wanting to have a different kind of family dynamic from the one he'd experienced as a child, and in Book 2 there were multiple references to wanting to not be Constantine - both as a King and as a father. In the balcony scene in Book 3, Chapter 15, Liam tells us a number of things - about the value of having more heirs for succession, of him always dreaming of having at least 3 children, about Kenna, Cordonia's most legendary warrior queen which leads to an interesting factoid about how the rules of successions for both the throne and duchies are not gender-specific (he also cites Olivia and Penelope as being in line to inherit their duchies). In this sequence Liam undoubtedly has more to say about the political aspect of having an heir than the personal, but his statement about "someone missing" in their lives is of no surprise when he's been enthusiastic about kids for three books straight.

- Drake: Drake perhaps gets the lengthiest 'personal' bit of all, revolving around his eagerness to be a father and his own family history. This scene has Drake speaking of wanting a child with "your eyes and my hair", but most of all of Savannah and her little family, and wanting the happiness his sister is experiencing now. The writing often manages to tie Drake's thoughts about his future family with his past: in the Valtoria balcony scene, his memories of his father and his desire to bring up his own kids the way Jackson did are dominant in the conversation on children. He speaks at length about the absence of a proper 'home' so far in his life (stating that his room at the palace always felt like "a room in someone else's house") and how high on his priority list the prospect of having children is. The Valtoria scene shows him eager to have kids asap, and this scene builds up the same urgency. You're left in no doubt that he wants those kids now.

• Maxwell: Maxwell's route of this scene soundly pretty sudden, tbh. In his Valtoria scene, Maxwell expressed doubt and nervousness when it came to children, citing the example of Bartie ("I love palling around with little Bartie and everything, but if he bonks his head or something, I can just hand him back to Savannah. When it's your kid, you're the one people hand him to."). While this is referenced in TRH's dialogue when Maxwell jokes about forgetting diapers and baby socks - it's a pretty big jump from the man who didn't exactly feel ready to have children yet, and not enough work was done to justify that shift. This could be somewhat excused in the beginning of Book 3, when the narrative had just begun to treat him like an LI, but they've had an entire damn book and several months after to reflect on how to write him properly. That is...if they actually gave a damn.

- Hana: They don't even have the excuse of "relatively new LI" in Hana's case. Because she is the lone female LI married to a female MC, her scene should have been a lot more extensive and explored her urgency to have children so soon after their wedding, a whole lot more. There are tiny changes, like the one where she hints at the "logistical concerns" that come with two women considering a family, and where she speaks of giving her child the childhood she never had (which, frankly, is an extremely vague statement and could be applicable to more than one character in Cordonia). But there is urgency that, again, isn't properly explained in the scene. Even Hana's Valtoria scene doesn't have much that would explain why she would want a child barely weeks after her wedding. The Valtoria scene does have her outlining her dreams for the duchy (along with a joke about her enacting "Beauty and the Beast") and her happiness at the thought of being a mother (she maintains that out of the things expected of her, motherhood is the one she looked forward to). They could have spent some time thinking up a reason for why Hana would rush this, even before anything has happened, or outlined something personal and not ultra-generic. Both Maxwell and Hana deserved a lot better than this.

• Maxwell speaks about possibly forgetting diapers (PLS NO MAXWELL NO) and baby socks (um okay not as bad but depends on the climate), and one of the MC's dialogue options is to say..."diapers and socks are overrated". Guys your kid won't care how much fun you are when they have a bum rash.

• A-ha! Diamond scene. First-chapter diamond love scenes always come cheap in these series' (12 diamonds) and are usually quite a steal.

• ESTHER HAS NEW LINGERIE OMG I'M SO HAPPY I'D BEEN WAITING FOR THIS MOMENT FOR SO LOOOOONG 😭😭😭😭

• ...and it is also matches Liam's underwear. Maxwell's too 😅

• The scene is nice, there are variations between the ways the LIs work up their appetite before they finally roll in the...well, sand 😅 Maxwell has what they call an "ocean duel", Hana's fulfills her lifelong dream of carrying and spinning around her wife on a secluded beach, Drake chases the MC through the water...and Liam just enjoys being a huuuge tease, okay? 😂

• Oh God, why are they still using the old LoveHacks sexytimes music. That "DHUM-boom-ta-doom-DHUM" beat drives me nuts, and not in a good way. You have better music now, PB! Like the sexytimes tunes from RCD and PM. Use those!

• My gosh this entire group is quite horny for dominant duchesses, aren't they. Every last one of them. Each playthrough has these four gazing at the MC in wonder and telling her some variation of "I think you ordering me around is hot". Olivia could trample over them all with spiked heels and they would thank her!

• As always, when something suspicious happens, my dumbass MC goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and never thinks about it again until shit actually goes down. This woman will never learn, will she.

• Anyway! We now move on to the rest of the honeymoon, summed up in three-four varying scenes per LI:

(Screenshots: Liam's and Hana's screenshots are mine, Drakes is HIMEME's YouTube channel, and Maxwell's is from Kaitlyn Walker's YouTube channel).

- Liam: Focused and dedicated. And insatiable as hell. Sex on a bed (SHOCKING!), sex after his wife points out what could be an apple constellation during stargazing (the MC effectively killed Liam's boner for Cordonia, I see), sex after having chocolate strawberries at a sunlit pond, sex again on a bed (Why is he getting four? 🤔). While the staff is still around somewhere on the island. This is a man with a mission.

- Maxwell: Fun and playful - kind of a "let's live wild and do daredevilry while we can!" vibe. In one Maxwell and the MC cliff dive into the ocean, debating over the wisdom of such risky adventuring when they may possibly be having a baby. In another, the MC watches, concerned, as Maxwell eats a raw squid appetizer. There is a nice callback to Maxwell's House sigil - the kraken - when he tells her that a squid would never hurt a fellow squid. The third shows them playing Strip Monopoly in the comfort of their bedroom.

- Hana: Adorable, caring and looking through every detail. Hana's three scenes involve her showing the MC the sights around the sunlit pond (which Hana and the MC lovingly call the "Hana Lee Honeymoon Itinerary"), watching the sunset under blankets, and this little scene of them choosing sperm donors for their baby:

It's a nice addition, but it still doesn't explain why they couldn't have waited a few more months. Nothing has happened yet in the timeline of the story, the women are (they believe) finally safe and happy, and while Javier seems to believe that babies born to a couple that consists of two women pop out of nowhere, I'm hoping the denizens of their duchy will have at least a little more common sense (this is Cordonia, so "hope" is the operative word).

- Drake: Langorous, relaxed and contented. Stargazing on the beach (I wonder whether this was a nod to the meteor shower scene in Book 1), whiskey on a patio/balcony/whatever in the afternoon, and eating roasted pork by the fire. Plenty of sex but also lots of outdoors, which means lots of the stuff Drake enjoys doing.

• Aaaaaand it's time for sexy scene 2! The couple are now relaxing in bed on the last day of their honeymoon, and the LI proposes a momento in the form of a sensual photoshoot (which comes with artwork of the LI in their underwear, posing for the MC) The male LIs pose with their hands at the back of their heads, smirking at the camera, while Hana strikes a coy pose, leaning against her hand. It's a quick, fun scene that's supposed to squeeze as much alone-time out of the couple as possible, because from here on the focus may shift to other things. Basically this chapter is meant to be one giant (but largely safe for readers) smutfest. I like the artwork - it's different and I guess meant to be a little more realistic than the usual full-page art in the books (like the engagement and wedding photos with your LIs last book), which is why I think it takes a little getting used to. I know it took me some time!

• Maxwell got an underwear upgrade too!

• We've now come to the end of our honeymoon, our bags packed and ready for our return to Cordonia. The chapter ends with us seeing a "familiar face", who could either be Liam (if you married someone else, and he doesn't show any expression) or an unspecified person (if you married Liam, and he looks ultra happy). Now that could either be related to some paparazzi-related stuff, if the flash of light was paparazzi-related, or it could be a fake-out and he's actually brought along the rest of the gang to surprise you. Idk and I don't want to speculate too much on this, mostly because something more interesting caught my eye.

• So that's it for my thoughts on the scenes themselves! On to the "general thoughts" section.

• General Thoughts and Potential Theories:

- As a first chapter for a new series that is still tied to an older one, it worked. It mirrors the light feel and sensibility of TRR's very first chapter, in that both chapters build an illusion of a fairytale-like place, with hints of the darkness within emerging the next chapter onwards (in this series though - since we're already familiar with Cordonia - the darkness is lightly hinted at this chapter itself). In a lot of ways I think we're going to see a lot of parallels between TRR and this new series.

- Unfortunately, one of those similarities also includes the imbalance in the writing for the LIs. Specifically with Maxwell and Hana. It's the most glaring in the dinner scene, which builds for us the premise on which this entire book stands (the topic of pregnancy). There are ways you could have them make the jump from nervous about having kids to excited, if you tried - there are elements in their storyline that could have helped us understand their urgency.

- I played Liam's route first, and was happy overall with it but I still have my misgivings. The good in terms of Liam's story is that he gets importance because the story is also about him and his country, where we are staying. He gives us some very important details in his route, and personally I like that his role as Guide To The Intricacies And Nuances of Cordonian Society still exists...but you can't deny that there were things in his storyline which should have been addressed and never were. I hope those are addressed this book. If they do the same this time around, it will only be to their detriment.

- Also, I find it highly ironic that Drake is the one to mention Savannah and Bartie when it was MAXWELL who was more involved in helping her with the child. Sure, he was - as he confessed in that Valtoria scene - more the "fun uncle" type, but he was still pretty heavily involved. Still keeping track of what Savannah needed and what Bartie would want. In his own final Book 3 scene, Maxwell is shown having an amazing rapport with little Bartie, playing peekaboo with his nose. I can barely count scenes involving Drake and Bartie with the fingers of one hand. Why couldn't Maxwell reference that last moment in Book 3, drawing up some inspirational moment from it? Like spending more and more time with Bartie changed the way he felt about kids? Or maybe that Savannah or Bertrand said something regarding the joy children bring to him. Anything that gives us some idea of when this shift happened.

Maxwell may have been new last book. It may have been a struggle to know what to do with him last book. But that isn't the case right now. By now they should have settled in their writing of him and figured out ways to make his story make sense? To give him more depth rather than simply reducing the man to the court jester? Maxwell's story was supposed to be about him growing, the scene in Valtoria was supposed to be about wanting to be a good father for his future children but fearing he might fail...yet the writers have the same man say the exact opposite. Maxwell's family history was thrown away for no good reason last book, and was replaced by Savannah drama. There was more space given to Savannah's love story with Bertrand (which didn't NEED the entire book to gain fruition) and Drake (optionally) enjoying humiliating Bertrand. That time, energy and effort could have gone in building up Maxwell, getting an insight into what happened to the Beaumonts that they became so poor...but no. The only Beaumont that mattered seems to be Savannah (and we know exactly why). And going by the fact that they're going to force an entire wedding storyline involving Bertrand and Savannah down our throats, that still seems to be the case.

- Hana's is even more worrying considering that it was poles apart from the rest of the playthroughs and therefore SHOULD have had more thought. Yes Hana loves the idea of being a mother. Yes Hana loves children and has a nurturing nature. But the urgency is still the same as the others' in her playthrough, and it made absolutely no sense. There was a clear dissonance between their current situation and the rush these two were in.

Hana's deserved at least some more time in her dinner scene. Maybe one where she could speak about growing up an only child, with no companions and not even toys. She could explain the loneliness involved in having a small family with parents who gave her more duties than affection, and then speak about giving her kid a better childhood. There isn't even any discussion about which of them should be the person carrying (we know it will be the MC, but why it has to be her in their case is anyone's guess).

What the team have done here is give Hana the bare minimum, after an entire two books of giving her even less than that. I know I'll probably be judged for thinking negatively rather than being cautiously optimistic, but the fact is that the moment this team feels they can get away with tossing scraps or less than that, they can and will do it. It's not stopped them before: not from botching up Hana's storyline, not from giving Hana fans a reception full of goof-ups and shoddy writing, not from pairing her with her bully. Perhaps last year I would have been happy and grateful to see Hana and the MC calling each other "my wife". This time...I refuse to settle for just mere scraps. If you can give thought and care to Liam and Drake's storylines, you'd better be able to do the same for Hana and Maxwell, otherwise what's the point of reviving this book? What's the point of using Hana specifically in two of your ads as bait for your lesbian/bi/wlw fans?? Might as well let the entire series rot in the trash where it belongs in that case.

- I've heard theories about our child becoming heir to the throne, thanks to a possible future arc that may make Liam unable to have children. I personally hate this possible plot line for two reasons:

1. As it is the MC gets more importance than she deserves, whether or not she actually puts in the work. She becomes a front-runner during the social season even if she fails. She becomes a Duchess even if she lacks even the most basic skills, while Hana who has done way more than she ever had for the country gets nothing, not even a needle-point's worth of land. She becomes Champion of the Realm even if she is literal garbage throughout that book, when that title could have easily gone to Olivia or Hana instead if she didn't earn enough to get it. And now to have her kid be made an heir to the throne? For no good reason? Get outta here.

2. Forcing Liam into yet another storyline that is tragic and painful (and I'm pretty sure the writers will find yet another excuse to write a thesis on Drake Walker in the time they could be using to let Liam actually break down, or vent. If they couldn't be bothered to explore the man's feelings when his own father died, do you really think they will bother with him in this??) on top of whatever else he's had to experience so far? At this point I can do with less of that. I'm honestly sick of storylines that put Liam in very uncomfortable, painful situations with very little space for him to air out his grief. Give the man a fucking break. Let him have some breathing space to rule his goddamned kingdom, get him a fantastic therapist and get him better friends while he's at it. Pushing him into yet another messed-up situation when you've barely even scratched the surface with what his experiences have done to him, is really just drama for the sake of drama, nothing else.

- Nonetheless, since this is about a pregnancy and a future heir, I believe there will be plenty talk about succession, and about the importance given to fertility and children in Cordonian society. But as with the social season in Book 1, the engagement tour in Book 2, and the wedding + Unity Tour in Book 3, I believe the pregnancy itself is a frame story. The kind of story that justifies the glitz, the glitter, and the glamorous events...that can serve as a temporary gloss to cover the conflicts within. All while the inner stories reveals those conflicts, layer by layer (again, if it's done right. Book 3 is a good example of a great premise ruined by bad writing. I sincerely hope this book does not go in that direction).

- Remember those screenshots I put up in that dinner scene from Liam's route? About Cordonia's tensions with its neighbouring countries, and how the country may be viewed as vulnerable? I think that's where the actual theme of the story lies.

Books 1 and 2 mostly revolved around the illusion of Cordonia - the fairytale kingdom - before the MC herself is confronted with the tensions brewing within. Book 3 was about strengthening Cordonia through resolution of internal conflict. It was about learning about the intricacies of the country, its most powerful duchies, their histories and identities, Cordonia's messy, complicated history - to tackle the problems that lay within.

I feel like Book 4 would be taking a natural progression from resolving internal conflict to finally standing united as a nation against outside forces. Constantine - in his conversation with the MC in Shanghai - hints not only at groups within Cordonia that wanted to destroy the monarchy, but also foreign powers ("suffice to say there are those who envy Cordonia's prosperity...". Not the royal family's - but "Cordonia's").

Keeping a united front and showcasing strength through pride in the country - ergo 'patriotism', or perhaps 'national integration' since Cordonia is home to many different cultures and geographical locations (I originally wrote 'nationalism here, but now realize there may be negative connotations attached to that word in today's times: thanks @musicallisto!) is often viewed as an asset against alien forces. The MC is now a part of the monarchy/nobility, and will be irrevocably tied to the country's future - so it makes sense that she will now dig into the deepest and most intimate parts of Cordonia's history, and go several steps further in helping to unite the nation.

- Why do I theorize 'patriotism' or 'national integration' as being a theme? There are several reasons for this:

The Unresolved Storylines: We still have a ways to go in understanding Cordonian history. We don't know which other forces were involved in previous assassinations, and we don't have a clue what happened to Liam's mother. All we do know is that other people and groups that we have probably not even seen yet, may have been involved. Francesco (who also knew Liam's mother) and Xinghai, the only foreign delegates/visitors that we got to network with in Book 2, have minimal roles so far but SEEM to have had some influence when they were introduced earlier. Francesco particularly could have some sort of role to play, given what we were told about him in Book 2. Now would be a good time to explore why he needed contacts with these people (other than the fact that Xinghai is Hana's dad). It's possible that nothing will happen and we may not even see these two, or exchange any important information, but I'd still hope that there is some importance to their appearances in Book 2.

The Connections We Made In The Engagement Tour: Meeting Francesco in Capri was related to getting access to EU markets for Cordonian products. The engagement tour itself revolved around grabbing international attention towards Cordonian problems - one of which was the tsunami that hit Portavira, which we learn more about in Book 3. There is a possibility that these threads may be picked up in the future.

Both the above points hint at possible threats, or allies. At this point we can't exactly determine who is friend and who is foe, but it is clear that neighbouring countries - and indeed countries we have associated with in the past - will play a pretty big role in the way we view Cordonia, and in the way we direct the narrative of this country.

The Artwork: I love this part of my theory because it is the most based on actual evidence rather than guesswork. The idea of a nation depends as much on items of familiarity and symbols, as it does on history. It's why countries have national animals, anthems, fruits. Why art depicting national and local legends can often be considered almost sacred. The book has barely even begun yet, and already it is FILLED with all kinds of things symbolic to Cordonia.

Let's first take a peek at the cover art:

Now let's ignore Liam's and Drake's (busted) faces in this cover and focus on what the three are holding.

The MC holds a rattle in her hand, and the jewel within the rattle looks similar to a ruby, which has been associated more than once with apples in the story (Cordonia's most valued variety of apple is the Cordonian Ruby, Liam's wedding gift to the MC is a ruby in the shape of an apple. The same rattle shows up in the second cover [on the left] as well. It's a stretch, I know, but I've got better evidence. Stick with me).

Liam holds a onesie with a crown design on the front - and we know that "for crown and country" is a popular phrase, especially for toasts, in Cordonia. Drake holds out a toy lion: the lion is the national animal, and holds a place of pride in the national Coat-of-Arms. The throne on which the MC herself sits, is blue and gold - both considered national colours. That's at least 4 symbols related to Cordonia vying for our attention on the same cover!

I mean, even Book 3 had just two major symbols - the apple (related to Cordonia) and the phoenix gown (related to Valtoria) - featuring on its cover.

The biggest proof to me, however, is not the cover, but the loading page. To be more precise - what is written above that loading page. A number of Choices books (BB, for instance) write little factoids about the world they are building above the loading bar, which players can read while they're waiting for the chapter to load. This wasn't a common practice with TRR, but they've definitely started it now! Some of the commentary is usual stuff - about gaining advantages through outfits, welcoming you back to Cordonia, etc...but THIS TIME there are tidbits of information given to us as well. And 80% of those involve apples!

Here are a few I managed to catch. One fact on the importance of apples in Cordonian culture, two specifically on the Cordonian Ruby itself including a rare recipe, and two old proverbs (this isn't the only time we've heard apple-related proverbs in the books - in Book 3 for instance, Bertrand refers to their trip to Fydelia as 'slicing two apples with one knife'). Proverbs in general often give us an idea of what people within a region hold up as important, as so connected to their life experiences that they can use those familiar objects as motifs for things that they see in daily life (eg. proverbs in my home state, Kerala, often refer to things/animals we find locally: jasmines, coconuts, jackfruit, dogs, elephants).

The fact that the apple features so often and with such emphasis in the loading page itself - and we have already seen what this simple fruit means to Cordonia - indicates to me that this national symbol - and the idea of the nation itself - will be of great importance. Not only will we be exploring foreign relations, IMO, but we'll also be learning how to build a national narrative that will benefit and strengthen Cordonia.

What's also interesting is that the apple symbolizes fertility to the Cordonian people as well - the apple cutting ceremony during a wedding (as explained by Regina to Leo's fiancée in RoE) is "a symbol of the fruit the tree will bear - you being the tree, of course", and there are chances that the fruit may feature often within the context of pregnancy/having children as well.

• That's all for now, guys. I hope to write more and theorize more as the chapters progress! Until then, I hope you enjoy this one, and I'd love to hear what you have to say.

• I did the Hana screenshots for this chapter, since the first chapter allows me to play repeatedly within losing keys, but I won't be able to do so from Chapter 2 onwards. If there are any Hana fans out there who keep screenshots of scenes in their route and are interested in sharing, I'd love to hear from you and will definitely credit you for the screenshots I put up!

• If you'd like to be tagged in future QTs, please let me know! Tagging @nikkisha16 for now since she asked xD

• Until Saturday, folks!

#long post #trh quick thoughts #the royal heir #trh qts #king liam #liam x mc #hana lee #hana x mc #maxwell beaumont #maxwell x mc #drake walker #drake x mc

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ts1989fanatic · 5 years ago

Text

Taylor Swift Bent the Music Industry to Her Will

In the 2010s, she became its savviest power player.

In late November 2019, Taylor Swift gave a career-spanning performance at the American Music Awards before accepting the statue for Artist of the Decade. (Swift was perhaps the perfect cross between the award’s two previous recipients, Britney Spears and Garth Brooks.) Clad in a cascading rose-colored cape and holding court among the younger female artists in attendance — 17-year-old Billie Eilish, 22-year-old Camila Cabello, 25-year-old Halsey — Swift had the queenly air of an elder stateswoman. After picking up five additional awards, including Artist of the Year, she became the show’s most decorated artist in history. “This is such a great year in music. The new artists are insane,” she declared in her acceptance speech, with big-sister gravitas. That night, she finally outgrew that “Who, me?” face of perpetual awards-show surprise; she accepted the honors she won like an artist who believed she had worked hard enough to deserve them.

Within the industry, Swift has always had the reputation of being something of a songwriting savant (in 2007, when “Our Song” was released, then-17-year-old Swift became the youngest person ever to write and perform a No. 1 song on the Billboard Country chart), but she has long desired to be considered an industry power player, too. A 2011 New Yorker profile of Swift circa her blockbuster Speak Now World Tour noted that she initially intended to follow her parents’ footsteps and pursue a career in business, quoting her saying, “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was 8, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be.” In an even earlier interview, she fondly recalled the times in elementary school when she stayed up late with her mother, practicing for school presentations. “I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds — because male artists are allowed to,” she said this year in an unusually candid Rolling Stone interview. “And I’m so sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business.” Of course, she still spent plenty of time sitting at her piano or strumming her guitar, but in that conversation she painted herself as someone who is also “sit[ting] in a conference room several times a week,” coming up with ideas about how best to market her music and her career.

And so over the past decade, Swift’s face has appeared not just on magazine covers and television screens, but on UPS trucks and Amazon packages. Her songs have been featured in Target commercials and NFL spots, to name just two of her many lucrative partnerships. That New Yorker profile also found her to be uncommonly enthused about the fact that her CDs were being sold in Starbucks: “I was so stoked about it, because it’s been one of my goals — I always go into Starbucks, and I wished that they would sell my album.”

In the 2010s, with the clockwork certainty of a midterm election, there was a Taylor Swift album every other autumn. (Yes, there was a three-year gap between 1989 and Reputation, but she all but made up for it with the quick timing of August’s Lover.) The kinds of pop superstars considered her peers did not stick to such rigid schedules: Adele released two studio albums this decade, Beyoncé released three, and even Rihanna — who for the first three years of the decade was averaging an album a year — eventually slowed her roll and will have released just four when the 2010s are all said and done. The only A-plus-list musician who saturated the market as steadily as Swift did this decade was Drake.

Still, Drake’s commercial dominance was more of a newfangled phenomenon, capitalizing on the industry’s sudden reliance on streaming and his massive popularity on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Drake might be the artist who rode the streaming wave most successfully this decade, but — with her strategic withholding of her albums from certain platforms until they better compensated artists — Swift was often the one bending it to her will. And she could do that because she didn’t need to rely on it solely: Somehow, against all odds, Taylor Swift still sold records. Like, gazillions of them. When Swift’s 2017 record, Reputation (some critics thought it was a critical misstep, but it certainly wasn’t a commercial one), moved 1.216 million units in its first seven days, Swift became the only artist in history to achieve four different million-selling weeks. And, of course, all four of these weeks came during a decade when traditional album sales were on a precipitous decline. At least for those mere mortals who were not an all-powerful being named Taylor Alison Swift.

As she’s grown into her own brand of 21st-century American pop feminism — sometimes elegantly, sometimes gawkily — Swift seems to have come to a firm conviction that female power is essentially more virtuous than the male variety. This was a side of herself she celebrated in her AMA performance. Swift opened her medley with a few fiery bars of “The Man,” her own personalized daydream of what gender equality would look like: “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can,” she sings, “wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” She wore an oversize white button-down onto which the titles of her old albums were stamped in a correctional-facility font: SPEAK NOW, RED, 1989, REPUTATION. Plenty of the millions of people who scrutinize Swift’s every move interpreted her choice of outfit and song as not-so-subtle jabs at Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta and the manager-to-the-stars Scooter Braun, with whom Swift is still in a messy, uncommonly public battle over the fate of her master recordings. (The only album title missing from her outfit was “LOVER,” which happens to be the only one of which she has full ownership.) She has framed the terms of her battle with Borchetta and Braun in strikingly gendered language: “These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work,” she told Rolling Stone. “And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of Scotch to themselves.” Though she is herself a very rich, very powerful woman, she reads their message to be unquestionably condescending: Be a good little girl and shut up.

Even as she’s grown into one of the most dominant pop-culture figures in the world, Swift sometimes still seems to be clinging to her old underdog identity, to the extent that she can fail to grasp the magnitude of her own power or account for the blind spots of her privilege. “Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me,” she sang on Speak Now’s Grammy-winning 2010 single “Mean,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that, compared to 99.99 percent of the population, she already was. The mid-decade backlash to Swift’s thin-white-celebrity-and-model-studded “girl squad” — none of which was more incisive than Lara Marie Schoenhals’s hilarious parody video — took her by surprise. “I never would have imagined that people would have thought, This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it … I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to.”

Art has its own kind of power — sneakier and harder to measure than the economic kind. The reason Taylor Swift has been worth talking about incessantly for an entire decade is that she continues to wield this kind, too. “I don’t think her commercial responsibilities detract from her genuine passion for her craft,” a then-17-year-old Tavi Gevinson wrote in a memorable 2013 essay for The Believer. “Have you ever watched her in interviews when she gets asked about her actual songwriting? She becomes that kid who’s really into the science fair.”

“It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they do not hear a voice that connotes authority,” the historian Mary Beard writes in her manifesto Women & Power, “or rather they have not learned how to hear authority in it.” At least in the realm of pop music, Swift has spent the better part of her decade chipping away at that double standard, and teaching people how to think about cultural power a little bit differently. She sprinkled artful emblems of teen-girl-speak through her smash hits (“Uhhh he calls me and he’s like, ‘I still love you,’ and I’m like, ‘This is exhausting, we are never getting back together, like, ever”) and did not abandon her effusive love of kittens and butterflies in order to be taken seriously. As an artist and a businesswoman, she made the power of teen girls — and the women who used to be them — that much more perilous to ignore. Because they’ve been there all along, and they remember all too well.

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starswallowingsea · 5 years ago

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Growing Up Trans and AlloAro

Or whatever the hell this essay turned out to be. Under the cut because this got long (like 1340 words long).

---

When I was younger, I never quite fit with the word “girl,” but I thought it was just because I didn’t like playing with dolls like other girls my age. I spent my first two years of school playing spies on the playground and sticking my tongue to frozen poles (and yes, it is painful but I somehow managed to not get in trouble for it).

I would sit in our office--soon to be my baby brother’s room--and build towers out of his foam blocks and make stories for people that lived in cities I built on SimCity on our old desktop. Even with my girl friends, I would get confused about why they were talking about liking boys and getting crushes.

I remember sitting in my friend’s basement during a freezing winter in North Dakota and she was shocked when I told her I had never seen Drake and Josh before and then grabbing her Magic 8ball and asking it if she would fall in love with Drake.

I moved to Wisconsin a year later and had a hard time making friends. I thought we would just move again so I only talked with a handful of people in our already small school district. We would play dolls and teacher and I would get bored most days, wanting to play with the boys and make up stories.

It was around the time that he left that I knew I was different from the other kids. They were starting to date each other as early as 3rd grade. We would tease our friends about who they were dating but I never understood why they dated in the first place. For the first few years, I would deflect questions about crushes by saying I still liked someone from my old school, but that only worked for so long.

In 8th grade I started questioning my sexuality for the first time. I wasn’t really sure who I liked, because I didn’t really like anyone at that point. There was one kid I thought was attractive and always used him as my scapegoat when asked about crushes so nobody would know. I did like him, but it felt different than I knew my cishet peers thought about their crushes, just based on the way they talked about them. I thought I was asexual, because the internet in 2014 didn’t like to talk about aromanticism, much less than it does now anyway.

So I joined tumblr in like, 2015, the summer between 8th grade and freshman year of high school and posted about asexuality, being nonbinary, toontown rewritten, all the stuff that 14-15yos are into. For a while I identified as heteroromantic asexual, and then nonbinary asexual quoiromantic, and then aromantic asexual and nonbinary? Or maybe I was really cis?

And it went like that, back and forth between a few labels. I never felt like I could tell anybody, because I went to a small school and heard all the comments people made about the LGBTQ community and what my parents said about trans people and the messages preached at church.

When I was about 16, I realized I wasn’t ace at all. I thought maybe I was a nonbinary aro lesbian, or maybe bisexual. Tumblr in 2016/17 was very against having attraction to men at all in the circles I found myself in and I pushed those feelings down so I wouldn’t make people uncomfortable. I forced myself to be attracted to women when I really wasn’t at all. Every other post about bisexuality was talking about how beautiful women were and how disgusting men were. I never felt comfortable talking about my attraction to men in public, or even in private. I felt even more uncomfortable talking about maybe being bisexual and aromantic. At this point, alloaros were practically unheard of and there weren’t a ton of trans aces, so finding someone to talk to about my identity was hard, to say the least. I just simply was alloaro, but that word didn’t exist yet and I couldn’t find anyone else who was aromantic and not asexual.

That’s how I lived for another 2 years, as a nonbinary aro lesbian (or maybe bisexual). This was around the same time as I got involved in truscum/tucute discourse. I’ve always been minimally dysphoric about my body and got attacked for it by truscum and it would take me another 2 years to realize that I was actually a trans man. Because I started associating trans men with truscum and I didn’t want to be like them because they were always the nastiest people I had ever come across (I’ve obviously since outgrown this view point and am comfortable identifying as a man now).

Another two years later and I’m outside a Thiesen’s with my parents picking up stuff for my graduation party that was happening later. My feet hit the pavement and I get a thought that said “maybe I’m a guy.” I stopped for a second and kept walking in, thinking about that, trying out he/him pronouns with myself and decided before we checked out that I was a trans guy.

It took a while to get used to thinking about myself that way and I still use they/them pronouns. A few days after solidifying my gender identity, I realized I was aro and bisexual (or maybe gay). Labeling my sexuality came much easier, realizing I was a man. I’m still aromantic and that’s one thing that’s been pretty constant in my life. I never really got crushes in the typical way and I still don’t, even though you all see me reblogging yearning posts. I think that’s a byproduct of wanting to touch people in non-romantic and non-sexual ways in our society where touches have a lot of baggage with them.

I came out as bisexual and aromantic to my roommates in September. It came up in casual conversation and I felt comfortable enough to tell them, since they were all from the city and city-folk tend to be more accepting of queer identities (not to rag on rural folk, since I am one, but rural Wisconsin is not the place you want to grow up trans and queer). One of them came out as straight in October on coming out day and I forced myself back into the closet on coming out as trans. We had a falling out with her earlier this semester and she moved out.

Literally the night she moved out, I came out to the other two roommates as trans and they took it very well! They call me by my preferred name when we’re around people I’m out to and they even bought me a trans flag that we have hanging in the common room of our dorm (and at least one person has told me they say “trans rights!” whenever they pass by as soon as they found out it was mine). I’m still working on being socially out at college and need to call gender inclusive housing at some point, but I keep putting that off.

And recently I’ve decided I’m trans, aro, and queer. I still use the word bisexual, but really thinking about what genders I’m attracted to is super complicated and the word bisexual doesn’t convey that to most people. And queer just fits better some days.

I don’t really have a tl;dr for this, but if I had to pick something from this to hammer home, it would be that it’s okay to change labels and question your identity. It’s okay to change labels frequently or once every few years if you feel like they’ve changed! It’s never too late to figure out who you are and there will always be people who will accept you for who you are.

Also tumblr is the worst place to try and figure out your identity, but sometimes its all people have and I want my blog to be a safe space for people questioning their identities.

#transgender #alloaro #aromantic #aromantic experience #growing up trans #growing up aro #long post #shay speaks #shay writes #okay2rb #honestly idk how much sense this makes but i felt like i needed to get this out there #there's so much shit that gets thrown around this site and i know what it feels like to not see yourself in any of the content on here #ig that's what im trying to say?#also i wasn't particularly close to anyone in hs can you tell?#i had like 3 friends lol #but do with this what you will #it isn't meant to be an academic essay or anything. just getting my experiences out there #looking back on 8th grade me is like 'YOURE TRANS AND ARO AND QUEER AAAAAAGHHHH'#but alas i can not scream at my past self in real time

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pug-bitch · 5 years ago

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That’s not why I’m staying (1)

Life of the party

Book: The Royal Romance, Book 2

Pairing: Drake Walker x Amara Suarez

Rating: some foul language, some extremely suggestive, and a steamy scene right at the beginning. This is absolutely NOT appropriate for people under 18. This also alludes to disturbing content about consent. No assault scene, but allusions are present.

Word count: about 5,000

Notes: Welcome to my version of Book 2! This picks up pretty much where we left off, the day after the Decision Ball, starting with Amara’s POV. This contains some plot, but mostly lots of fluff. I guess I needed it, after the drama-packed end of Book 1… But don’t worry, drama will come back eventually ;)

*****

Amara smiles softly as she sees Drake’s eyes open ever so slightly. She’s been up a while, and barely got any sleep, but she doesn’t care. Her heart is full, and her mind is determined. She warms her hands on the cup of coffee she snuck up from downstairs, and takes a sip.

‘Babe?’ Drake calls for her as he opens his eyes with difficulty.

‘I’m here,’ she says, walking back towards the bed to embrace him.

‘Hmm,’ he murmurs, leaning into her kiss. ‘You smell like coffee.’

She chuckles. ‘Want some?’

‘Please.’

Amara snuggles up to Drake as he sips from her cup. There, she thinks, that’s what she wants. This level of intimacy, forever. Drake puts down the cup and, now with two free hands, pulls her in for a warm hug.

‘I’m so glad we’re here,’ he whispers.

She smiles. So is she, at the end of the day. What was she thinking? Last night, they ended up celebrating so loudly that they woke Hana up, and she joined the five of them downstairs for lots of hugging and some champagne. When was the last time Amara had felt this much warmth in a room? Besides from her dad and Nancy, and of course Mia, over the past two years… not much.

She kisses Drake more deeply, and asks, ‘So… now that we just have to wait for the engagement tour to start, what are we gonna do with our time?’

Drake laughs. ‘Wow, I don’t know… a whole five days just to ourselves? Pff, problems problems…’

He kisses her neck, and Amara leans into the moment, taking in every second. She needs to remember this. The good. For when it becomes tough again, inevitably. She needs to soak it all in.

Drake hoists himself up until he’s on top of her, and she sees the familiar glimmer in his eyes. The want, the tenderness, the sheer adoration… all of it, all together. Everything he feels for her, everything she feels for him in return.

Amara’s breath catches. Does she deserve all this? This wonderful man, always there for her, even when he knows all of her flaws, all of her mistakes? Maybe not all yet, the voice in her head says. Maybe he will still have a few surprises.

She shakes it off. Stop being so insecure, she thinks. Don’t create problems where there are none, not now.

‘You ok?’ Drake asks, in between kisses.

She nods. Of course she’s ok. She’s with him, right here, right now, and that’s all that matters. She needs to silence that bitch voice in her head, pestering her with self-doubt that she really, really doesn’t need.

‘I’m great,’ she smiles, before kissing him some more.

He smiles back. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he whispers. ‘I love you, Amara.’

His lips go down, and down, and trace a loving path from her neck to her breasts, then to her stomach… ‘I love you too,’ she whispers.

His lips are between her legs now, making her shiver like he knows how to do so well. Her back arches, and he kisses her core passionately, like there’s no tomorrow. She moans quietly, until she can’t keep it in anymore and needs a pillow to muffle her scream. ‘Fuck,’ she laughs breathlessly. ‘Drake, that was so good…’

He smiles broadly. ‘At your service, Suarez.’

She chuckles and guides him back on top of her. He lets out a low groan, almost a purr, as she wraps her legs around him and presses herself onto his length. In less than a few seconds, he’s already teasing her entrance with the tip of his cock, and she can’t wait to have him all to herself again.

*****

‘Wow,’ Drake says as he lies back down. ‘You really know how to start the day, Suarez.’

Amara laughs. Drake wonders if he’s ever heard anything more entrancing than her laugh. ‘Shower and coffee?’ She asks.

He nods. ‘Please. I can already hear the commotion downstairs, Max is definitely up to no good.’

Amara cups her ear and listens carefully. ‘Um… Drake?’ She grabs his arm and bursts into laughter. ‘Is that a goat?’

Drake clearly makes out a bleating sound. He can’t contain his laughter either. ‘Sure sounds like it. Alright, let’s get in the shower so we can investigate this, Detective.’

*****

Amara isn’t surprised to see a baby goat in the living room, but she can’t help but squeal anyway. ‘Oh my God Maxxie, what did you do?’ She screams as she joins Hana in petting the small, delighted animal.

Maxwell pours coffee for Amara and Drake, shrugging. ‘I went to the Farmer’s Market this morning in Ramsford, I wanted to show Michael, and get some produce. My favorite vendor, Gustavo, was there, and he was selling baby goats. I thought this little guy would be a good companion for my peacocks and our two sheep.’

Amara’s eyes widen, the little goat’s head in her arms. ‘Hold up. You have sheep?’

Maxwell giggles. ‘Yeah! Have I never told you? I have five sheep, in the back of the property, they live with the peacocks, and our property manager, Silvio, takes care of them full time! Have I never told you, Little Blossom?’

Amara laughs, ‘No, you certainly have not. Can we please see them today? What are their names?’

Maxwell gloats in anticipation. ‘Well, there’s five of them, right? So, I named them Bobby, Jonathan, Antoni, Karamo, and Tan. Some of them are girls but you know, gender’s a construct.’

Hana and Amara share a look, and both burst out laughing. ‘That’s the most hilarious thing I’ve ever heard,’ Hana says, wiping a tear.

Maxwell beams. ‘Right? So, what are we gonna name this little guy?’

Drake, coffee mug in hand, squats to pet the goat, and Amara can’t help but notice the wide grin on his face as he plants a little kiss on the goat’s forehead. ‘It has to be an awesome name, as handsome as this little fella, you know. We can’t name him something boring, this guy deserves the best name.’

Amara gasps. ‘I know! I have the perfect, handsomest name ever.’

Hana smiles. ‘What is it, babe?’

Amara looks the goat in the eye and solemnly declares. ‘Bradley Cooper. His name has to be Bradley Cooper.’

Drake almost chokes on his coffee and Michael laughs wholeheartedly. ‘I see the obsession is still going on,’ he says.

Amara shrugs. ‘Not an obsession. Just the recognition of the best actor of his generation, y’know.’

Drake raises an eyebrow. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I like the guy, but… we’re talking about the man who starred in The Hangover, babe. Think about that. Think about how terribly this movie has aged. Think about Ken Jeong emerging from the trunk. Think about Bradley Cooper’s line when they’re waiting for Ed Helms outside of his apartment.’

Amara thinks for a second, and shrugs. ‘It’s not like Bradley wrote the movie, Drake.’

Drake throws his hands up. ‘I give up. Max?’

Maxwell grins widely. ‘It’s perfect. Welcome to the world, Bradley Cooper-Beaumont. We love you.’

*****

‘So? What did you think of the Fab Five?’ Maxwell asks anxiously.

‘They’re soooo sweet and so cuddly,’ Amara exclaims.

Hana nods. ‘I love how they just run towards you as soon as you get there, and how they instantly adopted Bradley Cooper!’

Drake chuckles. ‘Will I get used to that goat’s name, ever?’

Michael pats his back. ‘Let time work its magic, Drake. It shall pass.’

They both laugh. Amara smiles at the sight of her friends and family getting along, and without even realizing it, reaches for her phone in her pocket. Still no texts. Well, some from her dad, with whom she’s been texting since he woke up, but none from anyone else. Her heart sinks a bit. She contemplates writing another, but she promptly gives up. She doesn’t want to stalk her, either.

Drake swoops in from behind her and grabs her hand. ‘Whatcha doing?’ He asks, all the while knowing exactly what she’s doing.

Amara shrugs and squeezes his hand tight. ‘Nothing. Checking my phone.’

Drake brings her hand to his lips and kisses it. ‘She’ll come around. She’s stubborn as fuck, but if there’s one person who can do no wrong in her eyes, it’s you, Suarez.’

She smiles faintly. ‘I don’t know about that.’

*****

Olivia turns her phone over, one more time, and when she sees nothing on the screen, turns it face down again. She takes another sip of coffee and a bite of her eggs, angrily.

‘Still mad?’ Rashad asks as he plants a kiss on the top of her head.

Olivia shrugs. ‘I’m not mad. It’s just funny how the bitch thinks my advice is shit when I deliver it, and then two hours later, she decides to do what I told her to do.’

Rashad raises an eyebrow. ‘So...you’re mad that she took your advice? I don’t follow.’

Liv rolls her eyes. ‘You’re pretending not to follow. It’s annoying.’

He chuckles. ‘Well, you’re right, I’m following. I just don’t understand your logic.’

She snorts. ‘No one does.’

Rashad thinks for a second and takes her hand. She doesn’t flinch. ‘Liv, I think you’re mad at her out of principle. But think about it. She went through something shitty last night, and had a gut reaction. Can you blame her?’

She shrugs again. ‘Yes.’

Rashad chuckles. ‘Alright. I guess you can.’ He starts pulling his hand away, but Olivia holds on to it, without meeting his eye.

She sighs. ‘For the record,’ she says, looking down at her cup of black coffee, ‘I didn’t come here because I needed you. I’ve wanted this for a while, now we’ve finally boned, end of story.’

Rashad’s smile falters. ‘End of story?’ He asks worriedly.

Olivia bites her lip. That’s not what she meant. At all. Fuck, how is she going to spin that one without seeming too eager? ‘You know what I mean,’ she says. ‘I mean that I don’t want to talk about that whole Suarez shit. I know what you’re thinking, that I came to you because I was sad or whatever.’

Rashad shrugs, a shadow still over his eyes. ‘Honestly, Liv, I’m glad you came to me, and I just hope you don’t regret us having sex for the first time in these circumstances.’

She snorts. Why does he have to be such a good guy? She needed comfort last night, that’s true. Not that she would admit it, but she did. She felt betrayed by Suarez, who she considered to be...ugh, not worth putting words onto it. She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m fine. And, if you must know, it was fucking hot. No regrets here.’

He smiles a little and digs into his eggs.

She did fucking love it. They did need to break the tension. No regrets.

Still, it feels a bit...anticlimactic. Is it how it feels to have sex with someone you actually like? Sure, she had sex with Liam many, many times over the years, and ugh, boy, did she have feelings there. But he was unavailable. It was noncommittal.

Here and now, as they share breakfast, and she’s wearing no makeup, while Rashad looks as comfortable as ever in his sweatpants, Liv can’t help but feel… too safe?

Maybe she’ll tell Suarez about it, sometime, when she stops hating her guts.

Who doesn’t listen to Olivia Motherfucking Nevrakis?

*****

Liam hasn’t slept. At all. He watches the sun rise on his country, as he sits on his balcony in his boxers and dress shirt from last night, his head full of regret. He replays the events from after Leo left last night, in his head, and cringes at the memory.

Madeleine getting impatient and knocking on the door of his study. Their small talk. His discomfort. Her advances.

His attempts to create a diversion by offering her a drink. Her insistence at having a nightcap in his suite.

The knot in his throat as he caved.

His inability to say no any further.

It would have been suspicious if he had said no, right? She would have known he was up to something. She needs to feel comfortable and safe if they want to successfully investigate her and break the engagement. Right?

He swallows his saliva, and takes a hesitant peek in his bedroom, through the French windows. She’s still sleeping, soundly, sprawled in his bed.

He had believed her. Like an idiot, he was convinced that she was the only one who still cared about him. Until the ball, until his stupid eyes were open by the picture of Amara’s assault.

He closes his eyes tight. It’s not a big deal, right? Everyone forces themselves to do things they don’t want to do, sometimes.

Even that. Even something that you’re supposed to completely want.

Right?

*****

Drake stands in front of the stove, and flips the pan expertly. He can get used to this: cooking for his friends, with his girl keeping him company. Amara is sitting on the counter next to him, and playing with the ingredients as they chat about life.

‘This is gonna be so good,’ she says. ‘Have you made this before?’

Drake chuckles. ‘Sausage and peppers? Of course. It was a staple of the Walker household.’

She smiles. Is there anything more heartwarming than her smile? He thinks not. ‘Did you cook for your family, always?’ she asks.

He shrugs. ‘I did, sometimes. Dad was always in charge of grilling and he taught me how to take care of meat and fish. I love cooking fish above everything else. It’s delicate, precise, and so satisfying when you get it right. Mom was more into baking, and making hearty dishes like mac and cheese. Efficient stuff when you’ve got two kids that you need to feed quickly.’ He laughs. ‘And boy, did we need to be fed. Sav and I were always big eaters.’

Amara smiles a bit wider. ‘That’s really sweet. So were we. I remember Mom making chilaquiles, and Sergio and I were so impatient to eat them that we would literally wait in front of her. She’d roll her eyes and be like ‘Chiquitos, you’re not gonna make me cook any faster.’ When she baked, it was the same. I’d just stare at the oven hoping it would bake faster.’

Drake steps away from the stove to plant a sweet kiss on her lips. He loves when she shares memories like that. They both need it. ‘Did your mom cook mostly Mexican specialties?’ he asks.

‘I’d say half and half. She liked hearty American food like your mom, too! And my dad, well he grew up in Pennsylvania with Puerto Rican parents, so his comfort food is a mix of both.’

Drake smiles. ‘Sounds delicious. You’ll have to tell me about your favorites and I’ll find recipes.’

She gasps excitedly. ‘I could even send you my mom’s. Sergio and my Dad numerized her cookbook years ago, because when she passed away, they both picked up the slack in the kitchen and wanted to remember her this way.’

Drake’s heart pangs. ‘That’s such a sweet initiative. I’d love to see some of her recipes. I’ll try to cook Marisol-style!’ he says excitedly.

Amara’s smile that ensues could melt Drake’s cold heart, if it wasn’t completely melted already, all because of her. She says in a breathy voice, ‘I’d love nothing more, babe.’

‘Hey guys, need any help?’ Michael asks as he walks in. ‘I guess I mean...Drake, need any help, as Amara just stares at you without helping at all?’

Amara giggles and throws a dish rag at him. ‘I’m here for moral support!’

Drake chuckles. ‘I’m all good, but you can look in the fridge if anything appeals to you. Max bought a bunch of food this morning, in between buying farm animals, y’know.’

Michael laughs. ‘Yeah, full disclosure, I was with him, and I could have stopped him but...the goat was too cute.’ He reaches for a bunch of radishes and a head of lettuce in the fridge. ‘And to be perfectly honest, it felt good to be out and about in a very normal setting. No sash people, no viscounts and dukes and whatever, but just a farmers market.’

Drake smiles. ‘I feel ya. Well, in this case, we should all go out tonight, somewhere in Ramsford. Suarez, what do you say?’

Amara joins her hands together. ‘Yes! It would be awesome! Plus, Michael’s only here for a few more days, we need to make them count.’

Michael makes an excited face as he washes the lettuce. ‘Seriously? That would be great. A normal place with normal food?’

Drake looks at Amara with a victorious look on his face. ‘My man,’ he says softly, pointing at Michael. ‘Yes, a normal place and all. Ramsford is good for that. We’ll see what Max recommends, I have a few favorite places but he knows more.’

Michael smiles widely. ‘He is the life of the party.’

Amara chuckles. ‘Oh, you’ve noticed?’

*****

Drake’s lunch is a success, as always. Amara enjoys every bite, as well as conversation with her friends. Even Bertrand is in good spirits, and got over the whole goat debacle quickly. He doesn’t like when Maxwell spends money, but ever since they stopped paying off Albert the blackmailer, they are a bit more comfortable.

Hana nods excitedly at Maxwell’s suggestions for bars and restaurants. ‘That sounds so great!’ she exclaims. ‘We’re all going, right?’ she asks, looking at Bertrand.

He chuckles. ‘It’s really sweet of you to include me, Hana, but I think with all this um… drama, as you youths say it, I need to get some rest tonight.’

Amara rolls her eyes. ‘Us youths? Bertrand, you’re barely older than Michael. Calm down.’

Bertrand smiles. ‘I suppose so. But Amara, with everything we’ve been through, I just want to be in my robe and relax.’

Amara nods. ‘I don’t blame you. Your robe looks very comfortable and, most importantly, has a lot of tassels.’

Bertrand blushes. ‘Um, yes, indeed it does.’

Maxwell bites his lips to stop laughter from coming out. ‘Alright, let’s leave Grandpa Tassel alone tonight then, but Bertrand, we’re not taking no for an answer tomorrow, we’re doing something. We need to enjoy Michael’s company while he’s here.’

Bertrand nods solemnly. ‘Yes, you’re right. We need to honor our guest.’

Michael smiles facetiously and makes quick eye contact with Maxwell. ‘Thank you, Bertrand. Your hospitality means a lot.’

Amara can’t help but notice the brief looks of complicity between Maxwell and Michael. She hadn’t seen Michael be so social in years. Even before Sergio passed, Michael was always the studious one, the serious one, while Sergio was...well, also the life of the party. Hmm, she thinks. Could this be something?

‘Amara,’ Maxwell insists, ‘did you hear me?’

She shakes it off. ‘Oh, sorry, I was in my thoughts. What is it?’

Maxwell looks at Drake, and at Amara again. ‘I was asking, do you want me to invite Liv tonight, or not? She would definitely like the vibe at Zeno’s, but I don’t want to include her if you guys are still...tense.’

Amara’s smile falters. ‘No no, invite her. If I’m the one texting, she won’t answer. We need to put an end to the bullshit.’

Maxwell nods. ‘I’ll ask if Rashad wants to come, too.’

‘Oh, the sexy smoldering guy from the ball?’ Michael inquires. ‘He and Olivia seemed very close.’

Amara smiles. ‘Yes, and yes. They’re kinda dating. See? You’d make a good detective, too.’

*****

Maxwell reflects intently as he focuses his eyes on his closet. ‘No, not this,’ he murmurs.

Michael sits on his bed, feeling awkward about having to, once again, borrow clothes. ‘Max, seriously, I can wear what I have.’

Maxwell turns around and smiles at him. ‘You can, you’d look good in anything, really. But I want to give you options!’

Michael smiles. ‘Thank you. I really need a clothing intervention. I do dress like a lawyer,’ he says, looking down at his outfit made up of beige chinos and a plaid shirt. ‘If we’re going to a hip place--’

‘We’re not,’ Maxwell interrupts. ‘Whatever you’re comfortable with will be great. But I have some clothes that would look better on you than they do on me. Let me find them…’ He digs deeper in his closet. ‘Ah!’ he says victoriously. ‘Here it is. The shirt.’

He presents an emerald green shirt to Michael, who almost recoils in fear. ‘Jeez, Maxwell, it’s very green. I know I wear these colors sometimes, but… isn’t it a bit much?’

Maxwell smiles as he holds the shirt against Michael’s face. ‘No. It brings out your eyes. You can wear it with your chinos, or jeans. You have jeans, right?’

Michael nods. ‘Yes.’

‘What cut?’

Michael raises an eyebrow. ‘I’m not sure what this means.’

Maxwell smiles. ‘It’s ok. I have jeans that you will like.’

*****

Hana and Amara are sitting outside in the sun, a margarita in hand and Amara’s nail polish collection sprawled out on the table for them to choose from. Amara looks out to the pool, where Drake is swimming laps. She doesn’t even realize that she’s staring at his body as he gets out every now and then to take a sip of his water.

Hana smile mischievously. ‘Amara, honey, do you need binoculars?’

Amara shakes her head. ‘Oh shit, Hana, I’m sorry. I promise I’m not a perv. He’s just so…’

Hana laughs. ‘Oh, I know. I’m gay, not blind.’

Amara chuckles. ‘Alright, back to business. What are you wearing tonight?’

Hana nods seriously. ‘I’m gonna go with my coral sundress, with my light brown wedges.’

‘Great choice. You wanna go for a light nail, or a metallic?’

Hana thinks intensely and finally says, ‘I think I’ll go with your gold polish. Is that ok?’

‘Of course, great call. I’m gonna wear my ripped jeans and a yellow top, so I’ll go with the light gray. Good?’

Hana smiles. ‘Perfect. Amara, I’m so glad you stayed. I don’t know what I would have done without you here.’

Amara takes her hand. ‘Same. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve found my people, why did I want to leave?’

Hana smiles broadly. ‘Right? I feel the same way. I know my parents are leaving me tons of messages, but I’m not ready to listen to them. I want to enjoy my time with you guys, and go on the engagement tour.’

‘Plus, the tour ends in London, and you know what that means,’ Amara says in a sexy voice while wiggling her eyebrows.

Hana blushes. ‘I do know what it means, since you’re not being very subtle.’ She smiles and twists the nail polish open. ‘We’ll see what happens. For right now, I’m happy to be here.’

‘Agreed.’

She continues, ‘On another note, did you catch all the little looks between Maxwell and Michael? They’re totally inseparable,’ Hana whispers.

‘I was just thinking that. It’s nice to see Michael be close with someone. Who knows where it might lead, but it’s just nice to see, you know,’ she says, avoiding eye contact.

Hana paints her nails intently. ‘I can imagine. Michael seems to relax a bit, and tonight will help too.’

‘What are you guys plotting about?’ Drake asks as he walks out of the pool and towards the nail painting station.

Amara chuckles, ‘Nothing babe. I’ll fill you in later.’

‘Don’t come out yet, Drake, here we come!’ Maxwell exclaims, running towards the group on his bathing suit. Michael follows slowly, shyly covering his body with a towel.

Amara sits up and asks eagerly, ‘Maxxie, did Liv get back to you?’

Maxwell, still running, cries out, ‘Not yet, Little Blossom. But I gave her all the info and she’ll know where to find us!’

Amara looks down at her nails, silent. Drake sighs and puts his hand on her back comfortingly. ‘She’ll come around, baby. I promise.’

*****

‘Looking good, man,’ Drake says as he catches Michael looking at his reflection in the hallway.

Michael jumps up, startled. ‘Oh! Thanks, Drake. Is it too much, though?’

Drake shrugs. ‘I don’t think so. Green looks good on you.’ He walks to the drink cart and pours two glasses of whiskey. ‘Here you go,’ he says as he holds one out to Michael.

‘Thank you.’ He smells it. ‘This is good stuff.’

Drake smiles. ‘It really is, huh? Max doesn’t skimp out.’

Michael smiles and sips. Drake takes out his phone and looks at the text he just sent out.

I know she hurt your feelings, but she came around and apologized. Don’t let your fucking pride take you away from a friend. We’re both new at this opening up shit, I get it, it sucks to be vulnerable, but it’s also fucking satisfying to be surrounded by people who care. Don’t fuck up.

He wonders whether he cursed too much, but oh well. It’s sent.

And read, without a response.

He sighs and looks up. ‘Sorry, Mike. Hey, what do you wanna do tomorrow? I can take you on a tour of Ramsford in my Jeep if you want me to show you around.’

Michael’s face lights up. ‘I’d love that. I want to call Callie tomorrow when she’s awake, but otherwise I’m all free.’

Drake smiles. ‘Good.’ He glances at his watch. ‘I guess we’re the fastest ones to get ready around here. When I left Amara, she was agonizing over which earrings to pick.’

Michael chuckles. ‘Max picked my outfit, so I have absolutely no merit in being quick.’

As if on cue, Maxwell appears on top of the stairs, Hana and Amara on each side. ‘Gentlemen, may I present you the two most beautiful women in the world!’

The girls chuckle and roll their eyes, they all yell out to Bertrand to wish him a good night, and they get on their way.

*****

Amara fidgets in the car, her hand in Drake’s. She is sitting in the middle, between Drake and Michael.

‘You ok, babe?’ Drake asks. ‘Nervous?’ he points to her shaky leg.

Amara promptly stops. ‘Sorry. I’m fine. I’m excited to have fun, I promise.’

Maxwell glances at Drake in the rearview mirror, a worried look on his face. Amara notices it right away. She knows it means Max didn’t hear back from Liv. She hates that she feels so nervous about it, and she especially hates that Drake and Max are, once again, worried about her. She sits up and takes a deep breath. She needs to grow a pair of ovaries and stop being this fragile little bitch who is always in danger of having an anxiety attack.

She needs to enjoy life, dammit. It will be hard enough to sneak around and investigate while on the tour, the least she can do is enjoy her five days of freedom, and make the most of Michael’s presence.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Maxwell parks in downtown Ramsford. ‘Alright guys, I’m designated driver tonight, you bitches go crazy, I’m there for you!’

Amara smiles broadly. ‘Max, I can bet you that we’ll end up taking Ubers back. No way you’re not getting lit.’

Maxwell laughs. ‘You may be right. This is a 24-hour parking lot, detective. Either way, we’re good. Let’s go!’

They get out of the car, and Amara walks with Drake, her hand still in his. Zeno’s is a cool bar, not too hip but definitely nice, with an outdoors section full of greenery. As they walk in, Amara finds herself relaxing. This is definitely normal, with young couples all around, and too many people for them to get noticed. Maxwell picked the perfect spot.

‘First round on me,’ Drake announces ‘Everybody tell me what you want!’

Hana requests a margarita, and everyone follows suit, except Michael who wants a lager.

Drake smiles. ‘Babe, help me carry?’

They make their way to the bar, their bodies close to each other. Amara holds Drake’s belt loop so they don’t get separated by the crowd. This place is really happening.

They plant themselves in front of the bar, and Drake orders for everyone, and opens a tab. Amara nuzzles in Drake’s arms, taking advantage of the crowd pushing them together. She buries her head in his chest.

Drake chuckles. ‘You’re not afraid of being seen?’

Amara smiles, ‘Not really. Too crowded. Plus, it’s not my fault if people are forcing us to get close.’

‘Good excuse,’ he whispers in her ear as he squeezes her shoulder.

‘You look hot tonight,’ she murmurs. ‘I love you in black.’

‘And I love you, period,’ he says softly.

‘You guys are sickening.’

Amara whips around instantly. ‘You came!’ she exclaims.

Liv rolls her eyes and adjusts her top. ‘Of course I came. Walker threatened me via text.’

‘I did not,’ he protests. ‘I tried to convince you, that’s all.’

Liv snorts and orders two double vodkas. She pauses and says, ‘It’s not all for me. Rashad’s here with me.’

Amara smiles. ‘I’m glad.’ She hesitates, then throws her arms around Olivia and pulls her into a hug.

‘What the hell are you doing, Suarez?’ Liv asks disgustedly.

‘Hugging you. Lean into it,’ she replies.

Liv rolls her eyes again and slowly hugs Amara back. ‘Fine. That’s your one hug. You used it up.’ She pauses. ‘And never fucking blindside me again like you did yesterday. You made me be your friend, now you have to act like one.’

Amara lets go of her and grabs a couple of glasses from the bar. ‘Agreed. I fucked up, I’m really sorry. Now, can we please get drunk together and show my brother how shit gets done in Cordonia?’

*****

Taglist:

@drakeandcamilleofvaltoria @andy-loves-corgis @jovialyouthmusic @mariahschoices @drakesensworld @thequeenofcronuts @notoriouscs @drakewalkerisreal @nikkis1983 @simsvetements @alesana45 @iplaydrake @emceesynonymroll @lily1999love @drakewalkerwhipped @drakewalkerrosenberg @drakxwalker @drakeswalkers @drakelover78 @silviasutton1989 @dcbbw @texaskitten30 @furiousherringoperatortoad @hollygirl1269 @sirbeepsalot @ladyangel70 @thisperfectmemory @of-course-i-went-to-hartfeld @i-bloody-love-drake-walker @mrsmairstanley @addictedtodrakefanfic @msjpuddleduck

Thank you for your encouragements, everyone! Let me know if you want to be added to the taglist :)

#that's not why i'm going #that's not why I'm staying #drake x amara #drake walker x amara suarez #drake walker #amara suarez #dramara #drake x mc #drake walker trr #drake walker x mc #trr drake #the royal romance #the royal romance fanfic

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dustedmagazine · 5 years ago

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Dusted’s Decade Picks

Heron Oblivion, still the closest thing to a Dusted consensus pick

Just as, in spring, the young's fancy turns to thoughts of love, at the end of the decade the thoughts of critics and fans naturally tend towards reflection. Sure, time is an arbitrary human division of reality, but it seems to be working out okay for us so far. We're too humble a bunch to offer some sort of itemized list of The Best Of or anything like that, though; a decade is hard enough to wrap your head around when it's just your life, let alone all the music produced during said time. Instead these decade picks are our jumping off points to consider our decades, whether in personal terms, or aesthetic ones, or any other. The records we reflect on here are, to be sure, some of our picks for the best of the 2010s (for more, check back this afternoon), but think of what follows less as anything exhaustive and more as our hand-picked tour to what stuck with us over the course of these ten years, and why.

Brian Eno — The Ship (Warp, 2016)

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You don’t need to dig deep to see that our rapidly evolving and hyper-consciously inclusive discourse is taking on the fluidity of its surroundings. In 2016, a year of what I’ll gently call transformation, Brian Eno had his finger on multiple pulses; The Ship resulted. It’s anchored in steady modality, and its melody, once introduced, doesn’t change, but everything else ebbs and flows with the Protean certainty of uncertainty. While the album moves from the watery ambiguities of the title track, through the emotional and textural extremes of “Fickle Sun” toward the gorgeously orchestrated version of “I’m Set Free,” implying some kind of final redemption, the moment-to-moment motion remains wonderfully non-binary. Images of war and of the instants producing its ravaging effects mirror and counterbalance the calmly and increasingly gender-fluid voice as it concludes the titular piece by depicting “wave after wave after wave.” Is it all Salman Rushdie’s numbers marching again? The lyrics embody the movement from “undescribed” through “undefined” and “unrefined’” connoting a journey toward aging, but size, place, chronology and the music encompassing them remain in constant flux, often nearly but never quite recognizable. Genre and sample float in and out of view with the elusive but devastating certainty of tides as the ship travels toward silence, toward that ultimate ambiguity that follows all disillusion, filling the time between cycles. The disconnect between stasis and motion is as disconcerting as these pieces’ relationship to the songform Eno inherited and exploded. The album encapsulates the modernist subtlety and Romantic grace propelling his art and the state of a civilization in the faintly but still glowing borderlands between change and decay.

Marc Medwin

Cate Le Bon — Cyrk (Control Group, 2012)

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There's no artist whose work I anticipated more this decade than Cate Le Bon, and no artist who frustrated me more with each release, only to keep reeling me in for the long run. Le Bon's innate talent is for soothing yet oblique folk, soberly psychedelic, which she originally delivered in the Welsh language, and continued into English with rustic reserve.

Except something about her pastoralism seems to bore her, and the four-chord arpeggios are shot through with scorches of noise, or sent haywire with post-punk brittleness. In its present state, her music is built around chattering xylophones and croaking saxophone, even as the lyrics draw deeper into memory and introspection, with ever more haunting payoffs. It's as if Nick Drake shoved his way into the leadership of Pere Ubu. She's taken breaks from music to work on pottery and furniture-making, and retreats to locales like a British cottage and Texas art colony to plumb for new inspirations. She's clearly energized by collaboration and relocation, but there’s a force to her persona that, despite her introverted presence, dominates a session. Rare for our age, she's an artist who gets to follow her muse full time, bouncing between record labels and seeing her name spelled out in the medium typefaces on festival bills.

Cyrk, from 2012, is the record where I fell in, and it captures her at something close to joyous, a half smile. Landing between her earliest folk and later surrealism, it is open to comparison with the Velvet Underground. But not the VU that is archetypical to indie rock – Cyrk is more an echo of the solo work that followed. There’s the sharp compositional order and Welsh lilt of John Cale. Like Lou Reed, she makes a grand electric guitar hook out of the words “you’re making it worse.” The homebound twee of Mo Tucker and forbidding atmosphere of Nico are present in equal parts. Those comparisons are reductive, but they demonstrate how Cyrk feels instantly familiar if you’ve garnered certain listening habits. Songs surround you with woolly keyboard and guitar hooks, and one can forget a song ends with an awkward trumpet coda even after dozens of listens. The awkwardness is what keeps the album fresh.

She lulls, then dowses with cold water. So Cyrk isn't an entirely easy record, even if it is frequently a pretty one. The most epic song here, reaching high with those woolly hums and twang, is "Fold the Cloth.” It bobs along, coiling tight as she reaches into the strange register of female falsetto. Le Bon cranks out a fuzz solo – she's great at extending her sung melodies across instruments. Then the climax chants out, "fold the cloth or cut the cloth.” What is so important about this mundane action? Her mystery lyrics never feel haphazard, like LSD posey. They are out of step with pop grandiose. Maybe when her back is turned, there's a full smile.

Who are "Julia" and "Greta,” two mid-album sketches that avoid verse-chorus structure? Julia is represented by a limp waltz, Greta by pulses on keyboards. Shortly after the release, Le Bon followed up with the EP Cyrk II made up of tracks left off the album. To a piece, they’re easier numbers than "Julia" and "Greta.” The cryptic and the scribble are essential to how Cyrk flows, which is to say it flows haltingly.

This approach dampens her acclaim and her potential audience, but that's how she fashions decades-old tropes into fresh art. She’s also quite the band leader. Drummers have a different thud when they play on her stage. Musicians' fills disappear. She brings in a horn solo as often as she lays down a guitar lead. The closer tracks, "Plowing Out Pts 1 & 2," aren't inherently linked numbers. By the second part, the group has worked up to a carnival swirl, frothing like "Sister Ray" yet as sweet as a children's TV show theme. Does that sound sinister? The effect is more like heartbreak fuelling abandon, her forlorn presence informing everyone's playing.

Fuse this album with the excellent Cyrk II tracks, and you can image a deluxe double LP 10th anniversary reissue in a few years. Ha ha no. I expect nothing so garish will happen. It sure wouldn't suit the artist. In a decade where "fan service" became an everyday concept, Le Bon is immune. She's a songwriter who seems like she might walk away from at all without notice, if that’s where her craftsmanship leads. The odd and oddly comfortable chair that is Cyrk doesn't suit any particular decor, but my room would feel bare without it.

Ben Donnelly

Converge — All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph)

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Here’s the scenario: Heavily tatted guy has some dogs. He really loves his dogs. Heavily tatted guy goes on tour with his band. While he’s on the road, one of his dogs dies. Heavily tatted guy gets really sad. He writes a song about it.

That should be the set-up for an insufferably maudlin emo record. But instead what you get is Converge’s “All We Love We Leave Behind” and the searing LP that shares the title. The songs dive headlong into the emotional intensities of loss and reflect on the cost of artistic ambition. The enormously talented line-up that recorded All We Love We Leave Behind in 2012 had been playing together for just over a decade, and vocalist Jacob Bannon and guitarist Kurt Ballou had been collaborating for more than twenty years. It shows. The record pummels and roars with remarkable precision, and its songs maniacally twist, and somehow they soar.

Any number of genre tags have been stuck on (or innovated by) Converge’s music: mathcore, metalcore, post-hardcore. It’s fun to split sonic hairs. But All We Love… is most notable for its exhilarating fury and naked heart, musical qualities that no subgenre can entirely claim. Few bands can couple such carefully crafted artifice with such raw intensity. And few records of the decade can match the compositional wit and palpable passion of All We Love…, which never lets itself slip into shallow romanticism. It hurts. And it ruthlessly rocks.

Jonathan Shaw

EMA — The Future’s Void (City Slang, 2014)

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When trying to narrow down to whatever my own most important records of the decade are, I tried to keep it to one per artist (as I do with individual years, although it’s a lot easier there). Out of everyone, though, EMA came by far the closest to having two records on that list, and this could have been 2017’s Exile in the Outer Ring, which along with The Future’s Void comes terrifyingly close to unpacking an awful lot of what’s going wrong, and has been going wrong, with the world we live in for a while now. The Future’s Void focuses more on the technological end of our particular dystopia, shuddering both emotionally and sonically through the dead end of the Cold War all the way to us refreshing our preferred social media site when somebody dies. EMA is right there with us, too; this isn’t judgment, it’s just reporting from the front line. And it must be said, very few things from this decade ripped like “Cthulu” rips.

Ian Mathers

The Field — Looping State of Mind (Kompakt, 2011)

Looping State of Mind by The Field

On Looping State of Mind, Swedish producer Axel Willner builds his music with seamlessly jointed loops of synths, beats, guitars and voice to create warm cushions of sound that envelop the ears, nod the head and move the body. Willner is a master of texture and atmosphere, in lesser hands this may have produced mere comfort food but there is spice in the details that elevates this record as he accretes iotas of elements, withholding release to heighten anticipation. Although this is essentially deep house built on almost exclusively motorik 4/4 beats, Willner also plays with ambient, post-punk and shoegaze dynamics. From the slow piano dub of “Then It’s White,” which wouldn’t be out of place on a Labradford or Pan American album, to the ecstatic shuffling lope of “Arpeggiated Love” and “Is This Power” with its hint of a truncated Gang of Four-like bass riff, Looping State of Mind is a deeply satisfying smorgasbord of delicacies and a highlight of The Field’s four album output during the 2010s.

Andrew Forell

Gang Gang Dance — “Glass Jar” (4AD, 2011)

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Instead of telling you my favorite album of the decade — I made my case for it the first year we moved to Tumblr, help yourself — it feels more fitting to tell you a story from my friend Will about my favorite piece of music from the last 10 years, a song that arrived just before the rise of streaming, which flattened “the album experience” to oppressive uniformity and rendered it an increasingly joyless, rudderless routine of force-fed jams and AI/VC-directed mixes catering to a listener that exists in username only. The first four seconds of “Glass Jar” told you everything you needed to know about what lie ahead, but here’s the kind of thing that could happen before everything was all the time:

I took eight hours of coursework in five weeks in order to get caught up on classes and be in a friend's wedding at the end of June. Finishing a week earlier than the usual summer session meant I had to give my end-of-class presentations and turn in my end-of-class papers in a single day, which in turn meant that I was well into the 60-70 hour range without sleep by the time I got to the airport for an early-morning flight. (Partly my fault for insisting that I needed to stay up and make a “wedding night” mix for the couple — real virgin bride included — and even more my fault for insisting that it be a single, perfectly crossfaded track). I was fuelled only by lingering adrenaline fumes and whatever herbal gunpowder shit I had been mixing with my coffee — piracetam, rhodiola, bacopa or DMAE depending on the combination we had at the time. At any rate, eyes burning, skull heavy, joints stiff with dry rot, I still had my wits enough to refuse the backscatter machine at the TSA checkpoint; instead of the usual begrudging pat-down, I got pulled into a separate room. Anyway, it was a weird psychic setback at that particular time, but nothing came of it. Having arrived at my gate, I popped on the iPod with a brand new set of studio headphones and finally got around to listening to the Gang Gang Dance I had downloaded months before. "Glass Jar," at that moment, was the most religious experience I’d had in four years. I was literally weeping with joy.

Point being: It is worth it to stay up for a few days just to listen to ‘Glass Jar’ the way it was meant to be heard.

Patrick Masterson

Heron Oblivion — Heron Oblivion (Sub Pop, 2016)

Heron Oblivion by Heron Oblivion

Heron Oblivion’s self-titled first album fused unholy guitar racket with a limpid serenity. It was loud and cathartic but also pure beauty, floating drummer Meg Baird’s unearthly vocals over a sound that was as turbulent and majestic as nature itself, now roiled in storm, now glistening with dewy clarity. The band convened four storied guitarists—Baird from Espers, Ethan Miller and Noel Harmonson from Comets on Fire and Charlie Sauffley—then relegated two of them to other instruments (Baird on drums and Miller on bass). The sound drew on the full flared wail and scree of Hendrix and Acid Mothers Temple, the misty romance of Pentangle and Fairport Convention. It was a record out of time and could have happened in any year from about 1963 onward, or it could have not happened at all. We were so glad it did at Dusted; Heron Oblivion’s eponymous was closer to a consensus pick than any record before or since, and if you want to define a decade, how about the careening riffs of “Oriar” breaking for Baird’s dream-like chants?

Jennifer Kelly

The Jacka — What Happened to the World (The Artist, 2014)

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Probably the most prophetic rap album of the 2010s. The Jacka was the king of Bay rap since he started MOB movement. He was always generous with his time, and clique albums were pouring out of The Jacka and his disciples every few months. Even some of his own albums resembled at times collective efforts. This generosity made some of the albums unfocused and disjointed, yet what it really shows is that even in the times when dreams of collective living were abandoned The Jacka still had hopes for Utopia and collective struggles. It was about the riches, but he saw the riches in people first and foremost.

This final album before he was gunned down in the early 2014 is full of predictions about what’s going to happen to him. Maybe this explains why it’s focused as never before and even Jacka’s leaned-out voice has doomed overtones. This music is the only possible answer to the question the album’s title poses: everything is wrong with the world where artists are murdered over music.

Ray Garraty

John Maus — We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (Upset The Rhythm, 2011)

We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves by John Maus

Minnesota polymath John Maus’ quest for the perfect pop song found its apotheosis on his third album We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves in 2011. On the surface an homage to 1980s synth pop, Maus’ album reveals its depth with repeated listens. Over expertly constructed layers of vintage keyboards, Maus’ oft-stentorian baritone alternately intones and croons deceptively simple couplets that blur the line between sincerity and provocation. Lurking beneath the smooth surface Maus uses Baroque musical tropes that give the record a liturgical atmosphere that reinforces the Gregorian repetition of his lyrics. The tension between the radical ironic banality of the words and the deeply serious nature of the music and voice makes We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves an oddly compelling collection that interrogates the very notion of taste and serves an apt soundtrack to the post-truth age.

Andrew Forell

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society — Mandatory Reality (Eremite, 2019)

Mandatory Reality by Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society

Any one of the albums that Joshua Abrams has made under the Natural Information Society banner could have made this list. While each has a particular character, they share common essences of sound and spirit. Abrams made his bones playing bass with Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Mike Reed, Fred Anderson, Chad Taylor, and many others, but in the Society his main instrument is the guimbri, a three-stringed bass lute from Morocco. He uses it to braid melody, groove, and tone into complex strands of sound that feel like they might never end. Mandatory Reality is the album where he delivers on the promise of that sound. Its centerpiece is “Finite,” a forty-minute long performance by an eight-person, all-acoustic version of Natural Information Society. It has become the main and often sole piece that the Society plays. Put the needle down and at first it sounds like you are hearing some ensemble that Don Cherry might have convened negotiating a lost Steve Reich composition. But as the music winds patiently onwards, strings, drums, horns, and harmonium rise in turn to the surface. These aren’t solos in the jazz sense so much as individual invitations for the audience to ease deeper into the sonic entirety. The music doesn’t end when the record does, but keeps manifesting with each performance. Mandatory Reality is a nodal point in an endless stream of sound that courses through the collective unconscious, periodically surfacing in order to engage new listeners and take them to the source.

Bill Meyer

Mansions — Doom Loop (Clifton Motel, 2013)

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I knew nothing about Mansions when I first heard about this record; I can’t even remember how I heard about this record. But I liked the name of the album and the album art, so I listened to it. Sometimes the most important records in your decade have as much to do with you as with them. I’d been frantically looking for a job for nearly two years at that point, the severance and my access Ontario’s Employment Insurance program (basically, you pay in every paycheck, and then have ~8 months of support if you’re unemployed) had both ran out. I was living with a friend in Toronto sponsoring my American wife into the country (fun fact: they don’t care if you have an income when you do that), feeling the walls close in a little each day, sure I was going to wind up one of those kids who had to move back to the small town I’d left and a parent’s house. There were multiple days I’d send out 10+ applications and then walk around my neighbourhood blasting “Climbers” and “Out for Blood” through my earbuds, cueing up “La Dentista” again and dreaming of revenge… on what? Capitalism? There was no more proximate target in view. That’s not to say that Doom Loop is necessarily about being poor or about the shit hand my generation (I fit, just barely) got in the job market, or anything like that; but for me it is about the almost literal doom loop of that worst six months, and I still can’t listen to “The Economist” without my blood pressure spiking a little.

Ian Mathers

Protomartyr — Under Colour of Official Right (Hardly Art, 2014)

Under Color of Official Right by Protomartyr

By my count, Protomartyr made not one but four great albums in the 2010s, racking up a string of rhythmically unstoppable, intellectually challenging discs with absolute commitment and intent. I caught whiff of the band in 2012, while helping out with editing the old Dusted. Jon Treneff’s review of All Passion No Technique told a story of exhilarant discovery; I read it and immediately wanted in. The conversion event, though, came two years later, with the stupendous Under Color of Official Right, all Wire-y rampage and Fall-spittled-bile, a rattletrap construction of every sort of punk rock held together by the preening contempt of black-suited Joe Casey. Doug Mosurock reviewed it for us, concluding, “Poppier than expected, but still covered in burrs, and adeptly analyzing the pain and suffering of their city and this year’s edition of the society that judges it, Protomartyr has raised the bar high enough for any bands to follow, so high that most won’t even know it’s there.” Except here’s the thing: Protomartyr jumped that bar two more times this decade, and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t do it again. The industry turned on the kind of bands with four working class dudes who can play a while ago, but this is the band of the 2010s anyway.

Jennifer Kelly

Tau Ceti IV — Satan, You’re the God of This Age, but Your Reign Is Ending (Cold Vomit, 2018)

Satan, You're The God of This Age But Your Reign is Ending by Tau Ceti IV

This decade was full of takes on American primitive guitar. Some were pretty good, a few were great, many were forgettable, and then there was this overlooked gem from Jordan Darby of Uranium Orchard. Satan, You’re the God of This Age, but Your Reign Is Ending is an antidote to bland genre exercises. Like John Fahey, Darby has a distinct voice and style, as well as a sense of humor. Also like Fahey, his playing incorporates diverse influences in subtle but pronounced ways. American primitive itself isn’t a staid template. Though there are also plenty of beautiful, dare I say pastoral moments, which still stand out for being genuinely evocative.

Darby’s background in aggressive electric guitar music partly explains his approach. (Not sure if he’s the only ex-hardcore guy to go in this direction, but there can’t be many.) His playing is heavier than one might expect, but it feels natural, not like he’s just playing metal riffs on an acoustic guitar. But heaviness isn’t the only difference. Like his other projects, Satan is wonderfully off-kilter. This album’s strangeness isn’t reducible to component parts, but here are two representative examples: “The Wind Cries Mary” gradually encroaches on the last track, and throughout, the microphone picks up more string noise than most would consider tasteful. It all works, or at least it’s never boring.

Ethan Milititisky

Z-Ro — The Crown (Rap-a-Lot, 2014)

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When singing in rap was outsourced to pop singers and Auto Tune, Z-Ro remained true to his self, singing even more than he ever did. He did his hooks and his verses himself, and no singing could harm his image as a hustler moonlighting as a rapper. He can’t be copied exactly because of his gift, to combine singing soft and rapping hard. It’s a sort of common wisdom that he recorded his best material in the previous decade, yet quite apart from hundreds of artists that continued to capitalize on their fame he re-invented himself all the past decade, making songs that didn’t sound like each other out of the same raw material. The Crown is a tough pick because since his post-prison output he made solid discs one after each other.

Ray Garraty

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thewritingstar · 5 years ago

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I would ask you 1-100 but that's a huge request and doubt you'll do it, UNLESS🤔🙃

UNLESS....

1. Name- Deanna or as everyone knows me, Star

2. Nationality- American

3. Age- 19

4. Birthday- April 5th

5. Zodiac sign (or your primal zodiac sign)- Aries

6. Gender- Female

7. Sexuality- Bi/Pan (im fine with either)

8. Your looks (add a picture or describe yourself)- Dark brown hair, greenish eyes and body of a 12 year old boy

9. What do you/did you study?- Animation

10. What’s your current job like?/What job would you like to have?- I work in an ice cream shop just as a job but i wanna be an animator or writer for shows

11. Your birth order- Youngest of 2

12. How many siblings do you have?- One

13. Do you have good relations with your family?- for the most part

14. How many friends do you have?- I would say I have about 8 close friends and then just a ton of other friends

15. Your relationship status- single but accepting applications

16. What do you look for in a SO?- usually a pulse and good hair

17. Do you have a crush?- kinda but also no

18. When did you have your first kiss?- haven't yet :(

19. Do you prefer serious and meaningful relationships or casual dating/one night stands?- prob meaningful

20. What are your deal breakers?- smoking and drugs and how they treat others

21. How was your day?- well i just woke up so i guess good.

22. Favourite food & drink- Raspberry iced tea/Vanilla Lattes and Chowmein or burgers

23. What position do you sleep in?- either on my side or stomach. Im usually curled up in a ball so prime cuddle position...just saying

24. What was your last dream about?- I think it was about cake..

25. Your fears- bugs and the overwhelming thought of me being a failure

26. Your dreams- being someone where others can be inspired by

27. Your goals- to live a life with no regrets (i know typical right?) but also have a successful career.

28. Any pets?- 2 doggos

29. What are your hobbies?- drawing, painting, writing, video games, reading

30. Any cool places in your area?- kinda but you gotta drive to them so not really

31. What was your last awkward situation?- me stuttering over my words at work

32. What is your last regret?- idk

33. Language/s you can speak- English and barely any French

34. Do you believe in astrological stuff? (Zodiac, tarot, etc.)- hell yeah

35. Have any quirks?- i can make a guinea pig noise and can stand on my head for a while.

36. Your pet peeves- having my neck being touched and mouth breathing

37. Ideal vacation- Any disney park

38. Any scars?- only mentally

39. What does your last text message say? “Shes being a big girl and taking 5 classes.”

40. Last 5 things from your search history- im to lazy to check but prob youtube or fics

41. What’s your [device] background?- Phone background is a painting from a museum and my computer is a bunch of Nintendo items

42. What do you daydream about?- being a voice actor or a pirate

43. Describe your dream home- one that looks like a castle

44. What’s your religion/Your thought about religion- I was raised Catholic but i really dont practice it anymore. I think it its a beautiful thing and alot of good comes from it, however i dont like it when it is used to harm others or defend evil people

45. Your personality type- So i took a test based on the 16 different ones and I am an Advocate type which apparetnly is very rare and less than one percent of the pop are it. https://www.16personalities.com/ heres the link if you wanna take it!

46. The most dangerous thing you’ve done- I used to suck on batteries as a child

47. Are you happy with your current life?- for the most part

48. Some things you’ve tried in your life- Snorkeling in Hawaii (which i almost died), Crystal Cave tour and donuts which i hate

49. What does your wardrobe consist of?- hoodies and graphic tees

50. Favourite colour to wear?- black

51. How would you describe your style?- comfortable and sometimes i look good

52. Are you happy with your current looks?- ye

53. If you could change/add something to your appearance - impossible or not - what would it be?- I want blue hair one day

54. Any tattoos or piercings?- have my ears and now my nose pierced but i do want tattoos in the future

55. Do you get complimented often?- usually for my hair and i find it happens often

56. Favourite aesthetic?- Gothic and pastel

57. A popular trend that you dislike- crop tops

58. Songs you’re currently obsessed with?- “Good Night Moon” by Go Radio

59. Song you normally wouldn’t admit you like.- My Little Pony and Sofia the First songs slap

60. Favourite genre?- pop punk or pop

61. Favourite artist/band/genre? -Panic!, Taylor Swift

62. Hated popular songs/artists?- I wouldn’t say hate but im not really a fan of Billie Ellish, maybe i need to sit down and really listen but its just not my jam. I think shes a cool person and i love watching her on tv and what she stands for. By i hate Drake and Chris Brown for sure.

63. Put your music on shuffle and list first 5- Head above Water, Happy when im sad, Love bug, Casual affair, I believe. So Avril Lavigne, Jonas Brothers and Panic!

64. Can you sing or play any instruments?- Im not the worst singer but im also not fantastic and i can’t play

65. Do you like karaoke?- sometimes

66. Own any albums?- like cds then yes

67. Do you listen to radio? What stations?- not anymore

68. Favourite movie/series?- Any disney or pixar

69. Favourite genre of movies/books/etc- YA like adventure books

70. Your fictional crush/es- oh here we go. Juvia and Gray (Fairytail), Catwoman, Danny Phantom, Captain Hook and Regina Mills and Henry (Ouat), Steve (stranger things), Riddler (gotham) and Molly Hooper (Sherlock) and prob more.

71. Which fictional character is you?- prob a mixture of Momo and Deku from My Hero and Honey from Ouran

72. Are you a shipper? List your otps, if so. Am I a shipper? ha. aight Gruvia, Nalu, Gajevy, Jerza, Kiribaku, Kacchacko, Todomomo, tododeku, LadyNoir and the love square, Captain Swan, Outlaw Queen, The powerpuff girls and the rowdyruff boys (respected partners) and like five thousand others

73. Favourite greek god?- Hades and Persephone

74. A legend from where you live that you like- literally nothing from where i live

75. Do you like art? What’s your favourite work or artist?- love art and i cant just pick one

76. Can you share your other social media?- i mean you can follow me on twitter at StarsnShortcake but all thats there is my shitty tweets and interactions with my friends and Voice actors lol

77. Favourite youtubers?- Mikes Mic, Macdoesit, Twamiz, Larri, Dan Howell, Amazing Phil, Jenna Marbles, Shane Dawson, Steph Inc, Garret Watts, and like a ton more

78. Favourite platform?- Tumblr or twitter

79. How much time do you spend on the internet?- too much

80. What video games have you played? Which one’s your favourite?- I love anything Nintendo

81. Your favourite books (manga also counts)- Kingdom Keepers, Suicide Notes and the Selection Series to name a few

82. Do you play board/card games?- Yes

83. Have you ever been to a night marathon in cinema?- nope

84. Favourite holiday- thanksgiving for the food

85. Are you into dramas?- ye

86. Would you use death note, if you had one?- haha ye

87. What changes would you make in the world, no matter how impossible, if you had the power to?- no racism, sexism, homophobia and legal marriage everywhere. Also that no one goes hungry and everyone has a nice place to live.

88. Could you survive a zombie apocalypse?- probably

89. If you had to be turned into a paranormal being, what would it be?- a hot demon

90. What would you want to happen to you after your death?- I turn into a goddess

91. If you had to change your name, what would be your pick?- ooo Celeste is a cool name

92. Who would you switch your life with for a week?- hmmm Tara Strong

93. Pick an emoji to be your tattoo- either the stars or the black heart or the fireworks

94. Write 3 things about yourself - only one of them must be true- Ive never eaten a chicken nugget, I can do the splits and I have cat

95. Cold or hot?- hot

96. Be a hero or be a villain?- oooooo um im a sucker for villains

97. Sing everything you want to say or rhyme?- Rhyme

98. Shapeshifting or controlling time?- Shape shifting, i could be a plant

99. Be immortal or be immune to everything aside from natural death?- bold of you to assume i would wanna live forever

100. ….. or …..?- :0

HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS ANON CAUSE IT TOOK FOREVER.

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suffering-and-happy-about-it · 6 years ago

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Imagine Samuel being a father

A/N: So, in my opinion... Samuel Drake as a father would a killer. I think that he would be somewhere between Ryan Reynolds (find his parenthood tweets, oh lord) and Josh Wolf (such a good stand up comedian).

He would love his children endlessly, he isn't his own father, after all, but he'll maybe terrorize them a bit. Like in a funny way.

Also, I might start a series of one-shots, because I have a ton of ideas for this one.

Warnings: Samuel being a kickass father. There's some weed mentioned in here, but it is meant to be fun.

You and Samuel were together for some time.

Let me say, you were that badass Californian couple - partying, drinking your ass off, smoking weed and doing a lot of fucking things.

Like, you were practically animals. Party animals.

And of course, you were on your pills. We don't want any accidents here, right?

But, if ya know and are aware of - antibiotics and hormonal pills kinda don't do a single shit when mixed.

You should let him know that when you were finishing your antibiotics after a looong illness.

But you somehow magically forgot when he started to nuzzle you on the sofa. You know the drill really well. But why not, you were horny as hell, you missed his weenie and his body. Boy, it shouldn't be a sin to make love with your boyfriend, right?

Ya know how this goes, don't you? You don't? But I do and let me tell you.

Nuzzling > nude dudes > just the tip > oops, I cum in you.

It wasn't a sin to make love with your boyfriend. But you didn't count on that you actually get pregnant.

Yet there you were, holding that goddamn stick in front of his hazel brown eyes.

"Alright, young man." - You went. - "You wanna tell me something about dat? Because I'm pregnant and I don't certainly didn't impregnated on my own." - You asked, looking at him with that you know what you have done. But he just slapped you in the face with his answer.

"Maybe it's God's will?" - Samuel asked and you didn't know if you were about to cry or laugh actually. There was a fucking baby on the way and you two weren't that couple who would get rid of it. Maybe it hadn't the most perfect timing, yet you two have done it, so it was your responsibility now.

"Are you joking me?"

"Babe, I have one question and I am scared of the answer." - He whispered and you waved your fingers as sing for him to go on. - "I've heard some... Rumors? Like... Will your vanana be the same when he or she gets out of your body? I kinda like your tight little girl."

So yeah. There were no fights, no yelling or tears. The only two things Samuel was concerned about was the health of the baby and how actually make your vanana tight again after that.

He's an idiot. Don't mind him. At least he was looking forward to being a father. He looked like the type who runs away directly after telling him - but he was fucking pumped for your child.

That didn't mean he would be a good father. Not at all. You could tell, you could fucking tell, that he'll be that prankster, pretty tough dad with some terrible fucking jokes and you were sure that when your child will be an adult, they'll have some freaking funny memories to share.

Let me say one thing - he read as many books about labor and pregnancy as he read on the topic of vanana. He has his priorities straight. And you couldn't tell otherwise.

But no one else could believe.

"I'm with a baby." - You told Elena and Nathan who has their daughter just a few months ago. She was gorgeous after her mother and you were all scared that she'll catch Nathan's attributes.

Nathan started to laugh hysterically, but you guys were looking at him with a frown. Elena slapped his back and her stare was like can you calm the fuck down, man?

"I meant that they were joking."

Nobody could believe that Samuel Drake is about to be a father.

But when your belly got bigger and bigger, they figured out you might not be joking at all.

Samuel loved when he could speak with your belly, whispering to it when the evening came and you two lazily lied on the sofa, watching some dumb movies with Bruce Willis.

"Hi there, little one." - He carefully descended between your legs, nuzzling your belly with his lips and nose. You unconsciously messed his hair with your hand.

"Had a crazy day, I tell ya, buddy. My head is blowing up with one thought at the moment." - Samuel sighed dramatically.

"What thought, daddy?" - You messed with him with a quiet laugh. You were all in about calling him daddy in the family way and in a naughty way as well.

"I was thinking about marrying mommy, little fellow."

It wasn't history's greatest proposal, but it was something, right? It was romantic in its own way and it made you really happy.

And when the baby moved under his palms for the first time ever, it made him legit cry like a little boy.

At the moment he officially started the age of Sam, the sensitive and loving father™ (even tho it was insanely lovely, it didn't stop you from making fun of him).

He acted around you as if he was walking around some porcelain which he could break easily. He made sure you don't drink, you don't even get close to some weed, he was cooking you the healthiest recipes and even bought you some pregnancy clothes.

You wanted to know the gender, of course, but Samuel was strictly against it. So you knew it would be a boy from the start, right?

But his curiosity almost killed him. He asked you many times during different events.

Once you made dishes? He asked. You were cooking? He crept being you and almost killed you because of freaking out. You were washing clothes? Dear, that man just magically stood next to the washing machine.

But in the end, you finally told him.

And he cried again - he was about to have a baby boyo. His own son. Someone to pass the legacy on.

That made him the happiest man under the sun.

When that day came and Thomas finally saw the light of the world, Samuel was under serious pressure, shaking and crying a big time, white as a fucking wall - and you were screaming that you'll kill him if he ever tried to have another child with you.

And yes, your firstborn son was named after a pirate - Thomas Tew.

It was a long and let's be honest, painful a fucking lot in the end, labor but there was a small little bean in your arms, both of you were crying like little fucking girls and you almost immediately fell asleep after breastfeeding the baby and having all of those pregnancy things out of your body.

"You can breastfeed me as well." - Samuel whispered wickedly, thinking about sexual stuff again, and you were so disgusted by it after baby just fucking crawled from your vanana that you smacked his cheek hard. He was mesmerized, shocked and partially amused.

"If you ever put your lips close to my boobs or your penis somewhere near my vagina, you better be sure that I'll cut your weenie off, you motherfucker." - You sighed painfully with your eyes closed. He chuckled.

"From today on I'll be a motherfucker, I solemnly swear." - Samuel said in a loving tone.

He called Nathan as soon as he left you when you fell asleep. Both of them cried and they decided to have a shot for the welfare of his son - which meant that Nathan vomited in the park at three am and Samuel tried to kick hydrant because that hydrant insulted him.

They were fucking high, having the biggest hungover of their lives, waking up on the beach and neither of them knew how the fuck they got there.

You came home after a few days with a baby in a safety cradle and you couldn't believe your eyes. Those little things which made baby safe about sharp edges and some fuses.

The funniest was when Samuel forgot how to open the one on your toilet. And he needed to pee desperately.

He always thought that babies are more fun than just crying, eating and pooping - why would everyone want them then?

He kinda didn't understand Nathans feelings about Cassie. It doesn't mean that he doesn't love his little baby boy, alright? He was just that kind of a man who thought that babies crawl out of the woman and they immediately do everything. He needed to learn that it takes some time before they walk and talk.

So when he was holding Thomas in his armchair, he whispered him his pirate stories and fact and that little one didn't understand a single word, but it calmed him down.

So be sure that Samuel was PUMPED when the boyo started to crawl around and saying those sweet nonsenses. Samuel also almost threw a huge celebration when Thomas said mama for the first time or when he did his first step.

“He's a genius! Have you heard the pronunciation? Our little boy is exactly like his dad - fast, charming and extremely good with ladies. Have you seen him with Cassie?”

“Samuel, I think that you're freaking out and overthinking it a lot.”

He was basically pumped every everything Thomas did.

And when his boy started to draw? Jesus, Samuel was ready to call him Picasso. In his eyes, he was extremely talented (and you didn't ruin it by saying him that Thomas is completely normal, little boy).

You were pretty lit parents, to be honest.

When you had a long day at work and Samuel was too sick from Thomas making him angry (like when he fucked up your beautiful white wall with Nutella and fucking ketchup), you just waited until your son fell asleep.

“Are you ready for it?”

“You bet your ass, Samuel. I just need to turn off my brain.”

And you two smoked some tree (weed, who doesn't know). You were high as a kite. You didn't smoke weed much, just sometimes and it wasn't even a lot of it. Just to make you feel ok, restart your brain.

But one day you came to the bedroom and Samuel was pale and looking into your closet.

“What is up, baby? You look scared.” - You said and stood next to him, looking into that closet next to him. - “Babe?”

“You were... You know, eating our happy brownies what you've baked for today's evening?” - Samuel asked and you shook your head and his eyes and expression went to “What?” to “Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Thomas ate your weed baked in brownies. There was not a lot of it, thank god, so he was mostly okay. He was totally fine the next day - but the evening, man, that was a wild one. You both didn't leave his side all night, watching him and you didn't even fall asleep. Nothing happened, thanks to god.

Even tho, years later you burst out of laugh when Samuel was talking about his baby boy getting high on accident.

Yet, from that day on, you started to hide your edibles and weed more carefully.

From that day on, Samuel sometimes didn't leave his side all day - he woke him up, prepared breakfast, took him to kindergarten, took him out, went out with him and so on - sometimes he even fell asleep during telling him a proper pirate story.

Especially when you somehow got pregnant, again. What should I say? This man just has good genes and really good sperms.

Nobody knew how it happened again.

But Thomas was just about to have a sibling when he was four years old.

So Samuel took the role of father for 24/7 when you got really pregnant. It was nice and Samuel was a lot calmer this time.

He was a self-proclaimed pregnancy expert since Thomas was born and he was pretty sure your vanana can be tight once again after labor because you were successful the first time.

Especially he loved to take Thomas out to the park.

He was sure that his son will be like him. When he was five years old, he was pretty good with the girls his age and because he took after your beautiful face and he took after Samuels' eyes, he was good even with women. Thomas was an adorable boy.

But that's what made Samuel worried - if he would be like Samuel as a teenager, you will through some tough shit.

But hey - for that moment, he was only five and he had a little sister named Anne after a pirate woman Anne Bonny. Sam did his puppy eyes for that one and he promised you endless nights of eating out if you name her Anne.

And Thomas was like “Why the fuck should dad eat mommy?”. He was pretty scared at that moment.

When Anne was actually born, you had already learned from the mistakes you have done with Thomas.

Your life went on - you got a house, Sam was still in the business with Sully and yet Sam wasn't exactly the youngest, he had a hella energy for his children and job. And he got a hella money from that. Sully knew really well what he was doing. Tom started to go to elementary school and it wasn't a much of time before Annie went to kindergarten.

You stopped smoking tree at home; Elena and Nate were looking after Tom and Annie and you just got off to the woods or you want on to some mountain cottage. But you have still done that only when life was too hard on you and you needed to relax really badly.

Sometimes you took Cassie to your house, planning the evenings of their life to them.

Samuel and Nathan even started a competition who will do it better - but let's say that Samuel wasn't as much pussy as Nathan. That prison made him crazy a bit.

But oh man, then it started.

Thomas was twelve years old and he was a high-school boy. So watch out. Obviously, you are old as fuck and you don't know shit about his cruel, tough life.

He stopped telling you everything, but you know it was only a natural thing that you had to accept. Annie was seven at the time and she was Samuels little sunshine and princess and you were her best friends.

But Tom had a strong relationship with Sully and Nathan and Sam. And the older he was, the stronger it was.

He wasn't that little boy anymore. He slowly started to be a man. And you couldn't be prouder.

He had his moods, yeah, but he helped you at the home, he cared about his grades, he even hadn't that much of a mess in his room and he was really well brought up. And he loved you more than anything else in the world - you were his mommy.

But just as Sam, Nate, Sully, and Tom had their club, you, Elena, Cassie and little Annie got you a one.

But oh my fucking Lord, you loved the stories what Sam was telling you when you got to bed. He didn't tell you Tom's problems in from of him, but you two were still his parents and you know how the drill goes: what does your dad know, your mom knows too.

"Dad?" - Tom came to Samuel one evening and he was looking like a piece of shit. Samuel frowned immediately and put his newspaper on the table. He was still worried about Tom even tho he was really smart, pretty non-problem thirteen-year-old boy. He knew how to take care of himself.

"What's up, kid?" - Samuel smiled and massaged his son's shoulder with his palm, trying to calm him down.

"I, uh, oh damn I don't know how the hell I should start." - Tom said quietly and if you were there, you would look at your son and mouth language, but there was only the two of them, so it was cool. - "Okay, okay, okay, I have a problem. It's a huge problem. I think that there's something wrong about me." - Tom whispered.

"Why would you think that? Look at you, you're a handsome young lad, just as I was back in my days." - Sam chuckled and gulped a sip of beer.

"I just gonna tell it, okay?" - Thomas took his face into his palms and started to mumble. - "So my classmate Lindsay had a really nice, tight shirt on today and I saw her boobs in a coincidence and something happened in my pants, you know, with my weenie. And then it happened again when I was a math class and I don't know what to do, because it never happened before and I'm so scared." - He finished and Sam just smiled and patted his shoulder.

"There's nothing wrong with that. Your body just tells you that you're ready to have a woman. But try something when you're underage and I'll kill you, understood?" - Samuel told him with a proud smile. - "And I don't know if this happens, but if you get hard for a man, I don't tell you it has to happen, it's just as good. I don't care whom you bang when you'll be an adult, understood? But you are still young for doing that, so try anything and I'll tell your mother."

He was so proud at that moment. His boy became an official man in his eyes. He wasn't little anymore. But still fairly young.

And you also worked as the biggest threat to Tom, so he was almost shitted because of fear at the moment. You were worse than a hurricane when he did something really bad, like throwing up on your mom's dog or when he broke a toilet at his school.

And you giggled when Sam told you that your son is a man.

He talked with Sam about everything as he grew up - he had told him about his first making out with a girl, about his first boob-touching session which he was really excited about (Tom hummed songs all evening, which wasn't a thing he would normally do) and he even asked for advice when he was about to touch his girlfriend's, her name was Carmen and she was a lovely girl, vanana for the first time ever. They had a big group meeting with uncle Nathan and pa Sully about that - it was huge for Tom and they just quietly remembered how it was for them.

But let me say - Samuel and Nathan aged like a fucking good wine. They maybe weren't the youngest around, but hell, they still did something to the women around and they had plenty of experience.

And it was three times more for Sully. Even he got married to a woman named Florence (@missdictatorme I had to) and when he was twenty years younger, he knew how to do her good.

"Alright, old man." - Eighteen-year-old Tom sat next to his father and grinned at him in the Drake-typical way with his corner-turning upwards and his eyebrows risen a little. - "Might I ask you for some tips and tricks? I think I really love her and I need to be gentle with her so she would enjoy as well."

"I might be an old man," - Sam grinned and looked at his younger brother. - "But I think your mom doesn't think so at times. Am I right, boys?" - He looked at Sully and Nathan, and every one of them laughed a bit. Sully was a really old man; each one of them was considered old, and he was now sitting on a wheelchair. He could walk, but those years of treasure hunting hadn't done any good to his poor knees.

"Ew, Jesus. That's gross. I don't wanna think about that at all."

But they got him some useful tips. Like: don't try to find her vanana on her stomach or when you stick a finger inside, make sure it's wet and don't your hand just, you know, stuck out there. Move it.

They had a great bond. Otherwise, he and Samuel would never talk about it this openly.

You two as parents got a lot of fun with your son, especially when he was nineteen and he was ready to try some new stuff. You knew he will get drunk - but when he vomited all over your terrace and when you heard him speak and say I love you for a million times while you recorded him, you had the fucking time of your whole life. Don't worry, you made it clean up after himself.

Samuel recorded all of his son's bullshit - how he spoke when he had eaten those weed-brownies when you were camping in the wood while he was eight and somehow he got his shit on his earlobe when he totally burned your Christmas sweets... Baby, there is a lot of your son's mistakes you had a proof for.

But the biggest fun actually came when he wanted to try weed. You and Sam acted a bit mad, but you knew it had to come at one point.

So, in the end, you told him "Okay, you're eighteen, so you're in law, but we'll do it together so when something happens, we are with you". And of course, he went like "Wtf no".

But you have all of that shit recorded, and when you have your bad day, you just play the speech of your stoned son. It's embarrassing and he wanted you to delete it immediately - so you knew you'll play it at his wedding.

But when it came to Annie, his baby princess and a flawless small girl being in the same age his son were when he started his sexual life, oh dear lord.

A boy looked into her direction? Sam was there, looking at him like "touch her and I would fucking break your hands, hands and penis, punk".

But you knew it is going to happen someday, so you went all in about hormonal pills, condoms, other sources of protection, you told her a hundred times that she shouldn't do it because every girl has done it but because she loves somebody... And she was like "mom, you've told me a million times and I'm not an idiot."

But you know - Tom, now a twenty-two-year-old adult, and his fiancée moved into a flat together, so you took care of Annie even more intensely.

Annie accepted your opinions if they were useful and not too idiot-sounding like. But you know girls her age - she was sure that Samuel is a huge dick who just wants to make her life harder.

And he almost fainted when she came home with a boyfriend. His name was David.

In your opinion, he was a nice boy, he was really nice to you and your daughter and polite to Samuel as well. They got through everything together - first kiss, boob-touching, making out, even first sex.

Annie even married him five years after that evening. And they moved out as well.

At the end of the day, besides for your son getting high as a kite when he was just five years old, your daughter accidentally drinking aid alcohol, losing your children in the mall a few times, a heck of bruises and a load of embarrassing, childhood stories... You were good parents.

And your son and your daughter knew that they were very lucky to have you because you taught them how to love and enjoy life and every time they need you for anything...

You were there for them.

#samuel drake #samuel drake headcanons #uncharted #daddy sammy #he would be great #i love this #had a ton of fun #hope you’ll enjoy it as well #have a nice day

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unchartedterritoria · 6 years ago

Text

Hashtags - A Sam Drake One-Shot

So, in a discussion not too long ago, a question was pondered:

What if Sam Drake went through and read his own hashtags?

I couldn’t NOT do at least a little something with this! Just a simple one-shot meant to be amusing to my fellow Sam Drakers.

Also, if anyone reading this wants to submit any interesting or funny tags they’ve given our boy, I’d be up to revising it if I got enough to make the one-shot a little longer!

@missdictatorme , @bechobbi , @samdrakeftw , @fhujami , @jodiereedus22 , @shambhalala , @dragonjedihobbit , @jaheesvorson

Word Count: 1068

Sam sat in front of Nathans' computer, his mouth agape.

“Nathan!” Sam yelled for his brother.

“What is it?”

“You gotta see this!”

"If it's Asian cartoon porn, I've seen it. Not interested." Nate called back from the kitchen, his head inside the fridge as he scanned its contents for a snack. Finding nothing, he settled on another beer, making sure to grab one for Sam as well.

“Would you just get over here?”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm coming,” Nate's voice trailing off into a mumble as he padded down the hall towards his brother. “What?” He asked as he leaned into the small bedroom of the bungalow house that served as his office.

“Have you seen this?” Sam asked, pointing towards the glowing computer screen in front of him. Nate peered over his brother's shoulder, his eyes squinting. The blog-like layout of the vibrant web page in front of him looked vaguely familiar.

“Where are you?”

“It's this thing called Tumblr-”

“Oh jeez,” Nate groaned as he shook his head.

He knew all about Tumblr, and though he still wasn't sure how, Tumblr knew all about him. Tumblr was a dangerous place for Nate. One night, while Elena was gone for work, he found himself scrolling through hundreds of images of himself in front of Shambala, grasping onto the golden statue of El Dorado as it was whisked away in the air. Stills from all of his glorious adventures. The next night, he discovered the incredible, and some inconceivable, stories that people had written about him. Something they called 'Fan Fiction.' Tumblr was a labyrinth at the bottom of a rabbit hole. He spent days wandering through the pictures and the stories and the pairings. Hashtag after hashtag with his name, reliving his glory days and trying to understand again why he gave it all up. This train of thought was all helped along while steadily making his way through two bottles of Johnny Walker Blue.

After one week and one horrid hangover, Nathan swore off Tumblr, vowing never to go down that rabbit hole again. And here was Sam, swan-diving into it.

Thank God Nathan and Samuel Drake were very different people.

“So, I searched my name, and it gave me everything that had my name and that pound symbol attached to it.”

“It's called a hashtag on here,” Nate interjected.

“Yeah, yeah, people write stories about us and post our pictures and then, they use the little hashtag things to comment,” needlessly explained to his brother. Nate nodded, remembering his time down the rabbit hole.

“Nathan...the women fucking love me!”

“Oh boy.”

"I'm serious here! I mean, c'mon look at this, look at this! 'Sam Drake is my daddy,'" He nods and gives a sexy chuckle, "You know I am...bechobbi."

“Looks like your daddy to a lot of women on here,” Nate says over Sam's shoulder, who is still scrolling through the many posts about him.

“Missdictatorme, Dictator me? She calls me her husband. So does this ironspiderx. AND this fhujiami chick,” The good humor in his voice turned serious, “Nathan, it's finally happened.”

“What's that?”

“I have my own harem,” Sam marvels, causing Nate to give a little snort.

“I think that samdrakeftw has it more accurate,” Nate says, pointing to a spot on the screen. Sam squints to read it against the glaring light.

"'Such a dork.' Yeah, yeah, say what you want. I got women writing stories about me." Sam boasts.

"And half of it is about you and Rafe from the looks of it," Nate observes.

“Me and Rafe?! Together?!”

"Oh yeah. There is a whole group that thinks something happened between the two of you when he got you out of prison. Come to think of it, what did happen when he got you out of prison?" Nate questioned.

"Work. Lots and lots of work," Sam muttered quickly into his beer bottle as he took a healthy swing; A rose blush crept across him, turning the birds on his neck a dull crimson.

He continued to scan through the many blogs and posts dedicated to him.

“These women are very interested in what I look like with my clothes off,” He mutters, passing a post of a shirtless Sam Drake photo manipulation.

“Uh, Sam. I don't think it's all women.”

“That's cause some women haven't met me yet,” Sam boasted with a smirk.

“No, you pompous meatball, I mean I don't think it's all women," Nate emphasized.

Sam furrowed his brow, his brain processing what was being said, the tumblers clicking into place after just a moment.

“Oh. Oh! Well,” Sam pondered the thought for a moment, “Well, I'm flattered. Nice to see I'm appreciated by both genders. Don't think you can say the same, can ya little brother? Grab me another one, would ya? Since you're up and all,” He said as he poked Nathan in the ribs with the mouth of his empty bottle. Nate took the bottle with a deliberate silence, biting the inside of his cheeks.

He knew about the other fanfictions that existed. The ones that paired him together with his own brother, the ones that had been cleverly labeled as Drakecest. Nate decided that Sam didn't need to know about those.

“Seriously Nathan!” Sam called out.

“Serious what?”

Nate wandered back into the small office to find his brother, still in front of his computer, but suddenly shirtless, examining his taut stomach. Sam's hand ran over his torso while his black t-shirt lay in a small heap next to the bureau that served as a desk.

"Jesus put your shirt back on, no one wants to see that," Nate said with a groan of disgust.

“Um, I beg to differ,” Sam retorted, pointing at the screen, “I mean, I don't blame them, I am pretty impressive,” He bragged as he gestured towards his lean chest, the tanned skin covered in a layer of velvety chestnut brown hair, “Those made up pictures come close, just not as good as the real deal though,” He sighed.

“Yeah, well, your tattoo is stupid,” Nathan muttered, taking a sip of his beer.

"Ah! Nate! Nate! Look at this one! 'Lady boner.' I love that!" Sam howled, pulling his shirt back on.

“That is pretty good,” Nate chuckled.

"Oh, here we go, Unchartedterritoria. 'Perfection in Pixels.' I like that."

"Hey, Nathan?"

“What?”

“Uh, what is a pixel anyway?”

#sam drake #Samuel Drake #sam drake fanfiction #My writing

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