#this started as a silly but it did not end as one

[f1fantasys]

I would like to request a Lando Balmain with 4.

They break up and meet again after some time at an event. They need to be polite with each other, but they cannot do it, and they start to say bad comments to each other until someone escorts them out. Outside they continue discussing, shouting, tears, and getting wet because it´s raining and while they are looking into each other eyes, one of them admitted that they are still in love with the other person.

Absolutely love this request!

Always

Balmain - he breaks up with you, then you meet again after some time, very angsty, some smut #4 - possessiveness

Warnings - filthy smut, minors DNI.

4.7K

As hurt as you were having your heart shatter into a million pieces when he broke up with you, you knew where he was coming from. It made sense.

How he did it? Did not make sense.

Your relationship was flourishing day by day. 3 years of intense love between the two of you.

Until Lando decided he needed to concentrate on his racing, no distractions. He was so close to winning the championship, and he needed to give it his all next year. Both your jobs were too demanding, and you couldn't follow him to every race. Put this all together and things started to shift - just an every growing distance between the two of you.

Missed texts, missed calls, missed dates, silly arguments over stupid things.

It was a few days before the end of the season. Lando sat you down and when you saw the look in his eyes, you knew what was coming. Before he even started talking, you begged him not to do. You loved him with every cell of your body, and to lose him would crumble you.

But he did it. You cried in his arms, praying he would take back his words and tell you he wanted to spend the rest of his life with you.

But he didn't. It was what he did then though, that hitched your breath.

''Come to Abu Dhabi, please. Just be there for me one last time'' ''Don't tell anyone about the breakup'' ''We can pretend to be good with each other for the weekend''

So, he breaks up with you, then asks if you're willing to fake date for a weekend? What an ass.

But I guess you were the bigger ass. Because you agreed.

On camera, Abu Dhabi was the perfect weekend for you both. Lando had won the championship. He hugged you multiple times. He kissed you like his life depended on it. To everyone else, you were THE couple that everyone wished to be.

Only with every hug, every kiss, every touch, your heart broke a little more, knowing that this was the end.

Fast forward six months and here you were.

Still trying to come to terms with not having Lando in your life anymore. After Abu Dhabi, the very next day in fact, you learned that Lando had blocked you on all socials - your number as well.

You spent hours and hours at Carmen's house, sobbing in her arms. Asking her where it all went so wrong. And although there was never really a nasty argument between you and Lando over the breakup, how it ended has left a bitter taste in your mouth.

You've spent the last six months trying to train your mind. You tried to hate him. Maybe that would make it easier. But how do you hate the man who gave you the best three years of your life? The man who told you he loved you multiple times a day? You just couldn't.

You still lived in Monaco, though you made sure to stay home or be out of the country whenever you knew Lando would be home between races. One thing he'd forgotten to do what take you off of his calendar, so you knew of his whereabouts.

Things were about to get awkward though, because you were to attend an event where Lando, and a lot of other drivers and wags (whom had been your shoulders to cry on) would be as well.

Normally you would have of course backed out of going, but it was for a charity that was close to your heart. And just because you'd be in the same room, it didn't mean you'd have to face each other. Right? Fuck, you hoped not.

It was a black tie event, so you went out of your way to buy a beautiful silk black gown that showed off your body beautifully. You'd even forgone underwear to let the dress sit just right.

You thought you'd be a nervous wreck all day but up until now, you were actually proud of yourself for holding your ground and being positive.

The universe had other plans for you though, because the first step you took into the beautiful hall had you bumping into someone.

Before you could even look up to apologize, your body froze in its place.

His voice, filled your ears.

''Fuck, sorry''

Just as you looked up, he was turning his body around to see who he'd bumped into.

Your eyes locked, and the whole world faded away for a split second. It was just you, and your Lando. Or so you thought. He wasn't yours, not anymore.

You allowed yourself to take in him for that second. He still looked so handsome, his piercing green eyes, dimples peaking through his cheeks, his slight stubble, his locks that you swore had a better hair care routine that you. He was just perfect in every sense.

You didn't miss how his eyes shamelessly roamed your body, before he cleared his throat, as if snapping himself out of it.

Lando opened his mouth but nothing came out. Your heart was beating out of your chest, memories flooding your mind. You wanted the ground to swallow you up right now, praying you don't break down in front of him.

Finally, he spoke up. ''Fancy seeing you here'' his tone not one you were used to being on the receiving end of.

''What's that supposed to mean'' you asked softly, not sure you wanted to know the answer.

He chuckled and you instinctively took a step back because this was not the same Lando.

''Just saying, i know you still check my calendar, and you've avoided every single place and event you've known I'll be at for 6 months now'' Always jetting out the country the second i land'' he said, tone harsh.

What the hell? you thought to yourself.

You could feel the tears gathering in your eyes, and thank the lord you saw Carmen spot you and make her way to you quickly. Before you could respond, she gave Lando a dirty look and pulled you away to your seats for the evening.

You didn't think that seeing Lando again would bring such intense feelings back. You tried to calm your breathing and beating heart as Carmen tried to distract you as best she good.

Eventually you settled down a bit and tried to allow yourself to somewhat enjoy the evening, although he was always lingering at the back of your mind. You honestly never would have imagined your relationship with one another to turn sour to the point where Lando would make sarcastic remarks to you, throw daggers at you.

After dinner, as Carmen went to the bathroom, you found yourself at the bar, chatting to random people and enjoying a few drinks when Carlos approached you.

You seen him a handful of times over the months, he was always a close friend and someone you could call at any hour of the night if you needed something. He'd known how broken you were over Lando, so he just came to check in on you and see if you were okay.

''I'm good Carlos, walking on sunshine'' you joked which earned you a jab on your side.

Your eyes caught Lando behind Carlos, he was chatting to a girl, touching her elbows everytime she leaned in to laugh at what he was saying.

You sort of dazed off into watching them interact, until you realized Carlos was still talking and when your brain caught up with what he was asking, you saw Lando's back stiffen up.

''Huh?'' you asked Carlos to repeat his question.

''Not to open up any old wounds, but you and Lando were so happy in Abu Dhabi. What went so wrong after that?'' he asked as your breath hitched in your throat.

Did he really not know? you thought.

''Uh..'' you started, taking a breath. ''You really don't know?''

Carlos gave you a blank face.

''So you're saying that as one of Lando's best friends, you don't know what went down?'' you asked again.

He shook his head and you chuckled, nothing caring if Lando could hear you.

''It was an act, Carlos. All of it. The whole weekend. He broke up with me the week before and asked me to still come to the race, pretend we were still together'' you said, almost whispering the last part, already feeling tears gathering.

Lando turned around at your words and stood next to Carlos, who's face was in shock.

''You could have said no to the race'' Lando snapped.

Both you and Carlos looked at him, his words not making sense.

''Yeah, i could have been an ass and walked out when your broke up with me. But we were together Lando, you ended our 3 years relationship and sincerely asked me, and I quote, 'to be there for YOU at the last race.' I wouldn't shut you down so easily'' you said, voice soft, not believing you were actually having this conversation here of all places.

''You're making like i begged you to be there. Forced you to be there'' he spat back.

''Lando, what are you even saying? You didn't force me to do anything. i wanted to be there for. To see you win the championship'' you said.

''Oh?'' he questioned. ''You wanted to be there for me?''

''Mate,'' Carlos started but was quickly cut off by Lando speaking again.

''If you wanted to be there then where the fuck have you been all these months y/n?'' he said, voice grown louder with each word, angrier with each word.

By now your lips were quivering. He wasn't making sense. And you didn't like this other side of him.

''Lando, calm down'' Carlos interjected.

''No, answer me, y/n'' Lando shouted, turning a few heads in your direction.

Just then the security came, asked you both to step outside or stop the scene.

All the air was knocked out of your lungs as Lando roughly grabbed your wrist and pulled you behind him, walking briskly to the door.

''Lando let go of me'' you tried as you both stepped into the cool Monaco air.

He obliged and turned to face you, eyes boring into yours with a type of anger he'd never shown you.

''What are you doing?'' you asked, the tears breaking free and streaming down your face as you tried to control your sobs.

''Why did everything change? Before...'' he asked.

''What do you mean why did everything change? You fucking changed everything. You wanted me out, so you shut me out day by day, and here you are, asking me why all that happened''

The few drinks you had were giving you confidence to continue.

''And about inside,'' you pointed to the door. ''Why have I been avoiding you? Because you fucking got rid of me, blocked me, everywhere, barely 24 hours after kissing me in front of every camera when you won'' you choked out, voice breaking further with each word spoken.

You were telling your truth, and to see his piercing gaze on you not softening even a little, you weren't sure this was the same person you knew.

A few seconds of silence passed, and with that a few trinkets of rain started to come down, though neither of you made an attempt to move.

After what felt like an eternity, Lando sighed, his eyes softening to the ones you were familiar with, the ones you love(d).

''Why would you care? Even if i blocked you, why would you care seeing me again all these months, after everything i did?'' he asked.

This time you let out a chuckle and a nod. ''Ýeah, why would i care, right?''

Then the tears returned.

''I care because you were my everything, Lando. Everything. I love you like my life depends on it. And then you let me go. And I had to learn to live without you. So yes, i did care, I prayed i wouldn't see you anywhere because I knew one look and all those building blocks would crumble down'' you said, holding onto to the railing to calm your shaking body.

''You..love me?'' he asked.

''Love? Loved? I don't know. Can you stop fiercely loving someone with just a switch from them?'' you asked back, not sure you wanted to know the answer.

''No'' he whispered, causing you to look at him again, seeing his eyes fill with unshed tears.

''What?'' you questioned in disbelief.

''I don't think im capable of not loving you'' he whispered, knocking the air out of your lungs.

''Lando'' you whispered back, in a warning for him or yourself, you weren't sure.

''Fuck'' he muttered, running a hand through his hair and turning around for a second, composing himself before he turned back to you.

You stood there, waiting, not knowing what was coming.

Lando's eyes found yours as he took a step forward and took your hands in his, the both of you trembling, though not surprised at the jolt of electricity through your bodies.

''I've been the biggest dick, but fuck Y/N, I love you. I still love you so much'' he said.

You stayed silent, stunned at his confession, not knowing whether to follow your head or your heart.

The rain starting coming down harder, and this time Lando cupped your cheeks. ''Please, baby,'' he said, leaning down to let his lips ghost over your cheek.

His scent filled your nose and you felt drunk on him already, his breath cooling your cheek had your knees weak.

Finally, you bought your hands up to his face and before you could second guess yourself, you kissed him.

Lando was quick to respond, quickly taking control of the kiss as he wasted no time in sliding his tongue into your mouth and biting down on your bottom lip, making you whimper as his hands roamed your body.

It was messy and desperate, the both of you starved of each other for too long.

You pulled back after a while, needing air as Lando looked at you with the biggest smile, though his eyes told a different story. They were dark, full of lust.

''Come home?'' he asked, innocently, breathlessly, almost shouting over the rain

''Please, Lan'' you said, wanting nothing more than going home with him.

He ran inside to get you coats as you ordered an uber back to his place, your stomach fluttering with anticipation and butterflies, your skin shivering with goosebumps from the cold rain, while you ignored the part of your brain that was telling you to slow down.

Lando came practically running back to you, wrapping your coat around your shoulders as he rubbed your arms up and down to try and warm you up.

He leaned down, eyes level with yours. ''Gonna warm you up yeah?'' he said, teasingly.

You felt your cheeks heat up at his intense gaze, all you did was bite your lip in response to him.

Finally, the uber came, Lando crawling in behind you as his arms snaked around you pulling you impossibly closer, practically on his lap.

His lips found your neck as he left wet kisses, biting down and suckling on your sweet spot causing you to let put a few quite whimpers, clenching your thighs together at the feeling of him growing hard beneath you.

Eventually, Lando's lips made their way up to yours. This time, he granted you access as your slid your tongue into his hot mouth and devoured him, not getting enough of his taste.

Speaking of taste, you couldn't actually wait to taste more of him, you thought your yourself.

Once you'd got back to Lando's, he made sure to leave a generous tip for the uber driver as you both shimmied out the car, and before you knew what was happening, Lando had picked you up and thrown you over his shoulders, getting distracted himself as his hands landed on your ass and gave it a few squeezes.

''Lan!'' you shrieked, spelling him out of it.

He smirked to himself and literally ran to the elevators and through his penthouse doors, roughly pressing you against them, returning his lips to yours for another heated make out session.

''Hmm, too many clothes'' he mumbled between kisses as your hands instinctively started undoing his shirt buttons, running your hands along his tones abs and torso.

By now he'd started pulling your dress up to your things, breaking the kiss to whimper when he realized you weren't wearing any panties.

''Gonna kill me y/n'' he said, trying not to sound desperate but failing miserably.

He let the straps of your dress fall off your shoulder, letting you stand bare in front of him, as he started kissing a trail down your chest as he exposed your breasts inch by inch.

Just as Lando licked his lips and was about to take a nipple into his mouth, he paused, looking up at you.

You breath hitched as his piercing green eyes had softened, a sincere look in them.

''We have so much to talk about, and i won't ever stop apologizing to you. I love you so much y/n, never letting you go'' he said with a low voice, almost like he was afraid you'd pull away.

You cupped his face, letting your thumb run across his cheeks, his lips.

''You're right, we do have a lot to talk about, and Lando i love you too, so much''

''We will, I promise'' he said, before you pushed him down on you again, to which he happily obliged.

You watched and let out a guttural moan as your nipple disappeared into Lando's mouth - being pulled on and sucked on harshly as he rolled your other between his fingers.

Your hands gripped onto his hair as he used his tongue to sooth the pain of the attack he just put on them, before repeating the sequence.

''Lando, please'' you begged, needing to feel more of him.

He pulled back, wiping his chin of his spit as he smirked at you. ''Please what?''

You stayed silent apart from a few pants escaping your mouth.

''What do you want, y/n?'' he asked, voice stern and turning you on even more.

You decided to tell him exactly what you want, catching him off guard.

''Your mouth on my cunt'' he said, smirking down at him.

Lando's hold on your thighs tightened as you heard him mutter a ''fucking hell'' while biting down on his lower lip.

You latched your hands back on to his hair and he spread your legs open wider, wasting no time in running his fingers through your slick folds.

''You're dripping baby, so wet'' he cooed, looking up at you.

''For me, yeah?'' he asked.

''All for you, Lan, please'' you pleaded again, trying to close your legs to rub them together though his strong hands held you in place.

Finally, he leaned forward. Running his tongue through your cunt as he spread your juices all over, making a right mess of your thighs and his face.

''Fuck, Lando, yes. Oh god'' you panted as he quickly founds your clit, sucking and pulling at it roughly wile at the same time sliding two fingers through your hole and starting a stead rhythm of thrusting them in and out.

Your eyes were shut, mouth letting out moans that were pornographic. You were so back.

Lando's tongue felt like heaven on your most sensitive parts, and it wasn't long until you felt the familiar warmth start to build up in your tummy.

''Lan, I'm close'' you managed to say between breaths, as he increased the pace of his fingers and bit down on your clit, and all it took was one look up from him to send you over the edge.

Your body shaking above him as you came all over his face, whimpers flying out of your mouth at the sensitivity.

''Fuck'' you heard him mutter to himself as he licked up all your cum before standing up, dribbling some of it into your mouth before kissing you.

Just that action alone already had heat pooling at your core again.

''Need you'' you whispered, tired, but eager for more.

''Gonna fucking ruin you baby'' he cooed, picking you up once again and carrying you to the bedroom.

As Lando placed you on the bed, you quickly got into your knees, already working on unzipping his trousers and pulling them down his legs.

He gathered your hair into a makeshift ponytail as you finally rid him of his boxers, and this time it was your turn to lick your lips.

You sat there, gawking at his dick. Thick, hard, throbbing, pre cum already running down the sides from his slit.

Lando cleared his throat, smirking down at you. ''Like what you see?'' he asked, pumping himself a few times and spreading the pre cum all over.

You perched your shoulder, over-confidence oozing out you.

''Always'' you replied, before replacing his hands with yours.

You ran you hands up and down his girth a few times, brushing your thumb over his slit causing Lando to buck forward and let out a grunt.

''Hmm. Eager'' you silently mumbled, knowing he could hear you.

But before he could react, you leaned forward and licked his tip a few times, before sucking on it, hard and deep.

'Fuck me, have I missed your dirty little mouth'' he cooed, breathless already, each pull on your hair getting tighter as you finally took more and more of him in your mouth.

You already had tears stinging the corners of your eyes as you deep throated Lando, spit already making a mess of you as he praised your name, over and over again, letting out obscene moans.

Your hands fondled with his balls, pumping whatever you couldn't fit in your mouth, and with each thrust in and out of your mouth, you could feel his throbs getting painfully uncontrollable, as were the moans leaving his mouth.

''Shit, I'm gonna cum y/n, where?'' he asked, though he should have known better.

You didn't slow your movements one bit, instead you increased your pace. and within seconds you could feel Lando emptying his load down the back of your throat, warm and salty, and so thick, as his legs shook, trying to control his breathing.

You took a breath when you pulled back, licking your lips as you looked up at Lando.

A thin sheet of sweat already coating his body, and you couldn't resist licking a path up his torso, all the way to his neck and eventually to his lips.

''Gonna let me fuck you, baby?'' he asked, knowing y=what you answer would be.

Your brain of course short-circuited at his words. ''Uh huh'' was all you managed to say before he wash pushing you to lie down, his body hovering above yours.

You looked down to see Lando slide his hand up and down his shaft, spreading his cum and your spit to lube him up.

He slid his dick through your embarrassingly wet folds, while whispering filthy words into your ear -

''Missed this pretty pussy of yours'' ''Gonna fuck you so hard you're gonna see stars'' ''Gonna claim you as mine, again'' ''Gonna make you my whore, again, yeah?''

''Fuck Lando please'' you begged as he smirked at you.

Finally, he let his tip find your hole, and you pushed inside with one hard thrust, the both of you moaning at the feeling of being connected like this after so long.

Lando was bigger than average, and you always needed time to adjust to his size, so he stayed still for a few moments, allowing your body to accept the intrusion.

He looked into your eyes, sincere and full of love, silently asking if you were ok.

You nodded your head, though you were overcome with a mixture of feelings - relief, love, desperation?

As he pulled out again, he leaned lower down, his face hovering just above yours. You could feel his breath fan your face as he pulled out completely before slamming back into you, finally connecting your lips again as he started a quick pace of fucking in and out of you.

Your nails dug deep into his biceps as you wrapped your legs tighter around his waist.

The noises leaving your mouth were lewd, equally as filthy as Lando's grunts.

''Fuck, y/n, how are you so tight right now baby?'' he cooed, moaning at how your walls were clenching around him, painfully so.

You were too fucked out to talk, so you let out a whimper and he chuckled to himself.

''Been a while'' you managed to mumble out, quickly letting another squeal escape your body.

''How long?'' he asked, his movements slowing.

You gave him a look. A look that told him just how long it been.

Then, his movements stopped completely. ''No'' he whispered.

''Yes'' you pressed, trying to move your own body though he held you down.

''What?'' you questioned, cheeks flushed.

''I was the last man to fuck you?''

''I mean, I've done stuff on my own'' you pressed.

''Fuck me'' he murmured before picking up his pace again, leaning back to place your legs on his shoulders.

The new position had Lando hitting even harder into your cunt, brushing against your G-spot over and over again.

And before you could even comprehend what was happening, you were gushing your juices all over his cock, your orgasm having your body shake underneath him while you let out yet more sounds of bliss from your mouth.

You could hear Lando talking to himself as you came. Something about how hot you were.

He pulled out of you and you watched as he let his spit drip down from his mouth down to your pussy, before he manhandled your body to flip over. Now you were on all fours, and with no warning he slammed himself back into you, clearly chasing his own orgasm now as you held onto the headboard for dear life.

''Fuck Lan, baby'' you cooed, already feeling sensitive but not getting enough of him at the same time.

''Harder, please, fuck me harder baby'' you begged, breath hitching when he snaked his hand around your body and settled on your throat, giving it a few light squeezes, while his other hand found your clit and pulled at your clit.

In no time your body was shuddering again. You came hard, and Lando looked down to see your cum leaking out of your body and coating his dick with each thrust.

''Fuck, gonna end me'' you heard him say behind you as you could barely keep your body up.

He pulled out of you again and flipped your body over, pulling you to the edge of the bed before pounded his cock into you again, holding your ankles together and squeezing them tight.

''Missed fucking you so bad baby, gonna let me cum in you?'' he asked. You could feel his movements get clumsier and sloppier with each thrust, and you wanted nothing more than to feel him release inside of you.

''Please Lando, cum in me, fuck'' you said between grunts, already feeling another orgasm about to flutter through your body.

Lando leaned down, taking your nipple into his mouth which sent your straight over the edge, moaning so loudly that the neighbors could probably hear you but you didn't care one bit.

And as soon as Lando felt you coat him again, it was enough to send him spiraling too. Emptying his thick milky load deep inside you cunt, all out shouting your name out between his own grunts.

As Lando slowed his movements, he slumped down onto your body as you instinctively wrapped your arms around him, holding him as close as possible.

Your bodies were a mess of sweat, cum, juices, spit, hot and sticky and both your breaths fanned each other,

Staying silent you played with the curls on Lando's head, drawing lazy patterns on his back as he peppered your neck with soft kisses.

You could feel him softening inside you, but neither of you made a motion to move.

Lando eventually lifted his head, letting his beautiful eyes roam your face and his fingers placed feather light touches on your cheeks.

''I love you so much Y/N, and I'll make sure you know that every single day'' he said, kissing you softly.

''I love you too Lan. Always''

[drivebypainter]

I redesigned my SVSSS OC as the start of my mission to create a design/reference sheet for all of the SVSSS characters!

(prev design)

Here’s her lore:

The lore behind He Mixin’s arrival:

Shang Qinghua, wasn’t one for extreme superstitions. However, he definitely believed he must have broken a hundred mirrors for him to have the luck he currently had. He was stuck doing paperwork and taxes not only for the entire sect, but the entire northern palace too! Not only that but it was only his first few years as a peak lord and already multiple disasters had happened!

So in order to to minimize any future problems, Shang Qinghua began praying to a god of luck and fortune. Sure it was probably useless and a waste of time, but it felt nice to do it. Soon the prayers turned into little out of the way tasks to increase his luck. The it turned into whole rituals before he sent a letter or before he went on a mission. It seemed to be working too! His paper work seemed easier and people began to turn in their work on time!

However one day it went all wrong. You see, Shang Qinghua in his rush to save a stack of paper from falling off his desk, he stuck his chop sticks straight up- in his bowl of rice! (Bad luck!)

After that once unfortunate moment, everything went wrong again. Taxes grew harder, people began to be late with their reports, and peaks began to have disasters every week!

Desperate to get back his luck, Shang Qinghua begged the little statue of the lucky and fortunate god for help. Shang Qinghua was surprised when the sound of the system suddenly sung in his head with a new mission!

[User01 has gained a new mission with a grand reward of a permanent buff on paperwork and other peakly duties! Does User01 want to accept this mission?]

Extremely excited, Shang Qinghua selected the yes button and immediately forgot about the mission, after the system only gave a vague [great see you in 12 years!]

Over the next 4 years, Shang Qinghua’s luck slowly increased again.. but it never got to the point from before, and in fact any increase of luck was barely appreciated due to his now PAINFUL headaches that he was getting all the time.

On the dawn of the 5th year, Shang Qinghua could no longer take it, and begged the system to end the mission. There was no way he could handle it anymore! The pain was too much!

The system remained silent so Shang Qinghua ran to Mu Qingfang for help. After a quick analysis, Mu Qingfang found the problem, there was something growing next to Shang Qinghua’s brain! Mu Qingfang went to remove the mass and suddenly out popped a whole 5 year old child! Shang Qinghua was horrified- but the child’s birth(?) aligned with the mission… so was this his buff for everything on his peak?

Shang Qinghua decided to name the child He Mixin, (which means “to celebrate superstition”), as a call back to all the silly things Shang Qinghua did in the name of luck!

As He Mixin grew up, Shang Qinghua gave up his superstitions and instead just relied on giving small prayers to the lucky god in thanks. After all, despite its craziness, Shang Qinghua now had his own little ‘good luck charm’.

He Mixin personality/details/how she interacts with others:

He Mixin is a very stubborn and hard worker. She works hard to get things done and to make her baba proud. (thought she’d never tell him that).

She has a lot of anger issues, resulting with dealing with “man-child” peak lords and annoying fellow disciples (and even more annoying fellow head disciples).

She is prone to bouts of impulsivity, as shown by her horrible hair that she did on a day where she wanted to be free of the excruciating heat caused by summer in CQMS.

She is sometimes called the Princess of An Ding, because she is the daughter of SQH and out of all the disciples on An Ding she is rather weak. (though off on her peak she is considered the most physically strong out of her fellow head disciples- despite that strength she is very much not a fighter.)((A Ding disciples have to be sturdy and capable in order to do the amount of physical labor they do)).

HMX doesn’t like a lot of people due to the fact her opinions are usually clouded by the fact she has to deal with their bullshit when she does paperwork.

HMX is lesbian yay.

HMX is friends with Feng Licheng (the Zui Xian head disciple) and Gao Hongxia (the Wan Jian head disciple). The three of them hang out regularly.

HMX was forced to go on play dates with FLC the moment he joined ZXP.

HMX has a huge crush on GHX (GHX is beautiful, kind and competent! AWOOGA!)

HMX is frenemies with Ming Fan because the guy is annoyingly bossy! No other reason! (MF and GHX are friends- HMX is insanely jealous every time they hang out)

HMX hates Yang Yixuan to the bone because the brat is Bai Zhan and Bai Zhan sucks (YYX is a pure baby who never did anything wrong.)

HMX’s relationship with SQH is sorta like begrudging father/daughter type deal. HMX wants, but then also doesn’t want, a father, and SQH doesn’t know how to deal with children LOL.

MBJ was shocked the first time he met HMX- “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAD A KID POP OUT OF YOUR HEAD???”

HMX was taught embroidery by SQH and now regularly does little embroidery projects on either her own clothes or on little scraps of paper.

Both Feng Licheng and Gao Hongxia belong to @sillygoofyqueer

[itzy-bitsy-spidey]

The moment they realized they were in love.

Characters: Monkey D. Luffy, Roronora Zoro, Sanji x gn! Reader.

Cw: English is not my first language, this is mostly fluff.

Notes: I thought I had deleted this, but I had simply published it on accident! Hope you all enjoy it and if you see grammar mistakes don't feel bad about telling me!

Luffy

For all his silliness Luffy had always been emotionally smart, he could easily recognize when people were in distress or angry (or at least, most of the time) but it took him quite some time to figure out he had a crush.

When he had first met you it had been a pretty average experience for him, at least as average as meeting the self-proclaimed future king of the pirates could go. By the end of the same day you were already on the Going Merry bonding with those who would quickly become your new family.

Talking with Luffy came easily to you, it was like smooth sailing, but for some reason, over time, Luffy started to feel different during your chats. He started to notice little things that he would usually pass over, like the way your voice got more high pitched when you talked about things you were passionate about and how during that same time you would move your hands around a lot to emphasize what you were saying.

Your hands.

His skin had always been rubbery since he ate the gum gum fruit, but yours looked so smooth and malleable, as if he could just smash his face into you and stay there waiting for your skin to mold around him. And talking about smashing his face into things he was very curious about smashing his face against yours, he had seen Sanji try to do it at the last island they had been at (and failed, the woman had given him a smack with her purse before walking away), and had since thought about it.

But those were all things you would want to do with your friends, right? The moment it really had hit him was one night right before dinner. He was sitting on his usual spot at the front of the ship when he heard his name being called behind him.

He turned around and there was you, standing with a plate on your hand and smiling, oh so warmly, at him. The setting sun made your skin shine in golden light and he thought to himself that if he were to drown and you were a fish in the sea he would follow your glow to the surface. A smile slowly spread itself in his face, all his feelings clicking together inside his brain, and before you could react you felt a pair pf arms wrapped around you and a body slamming against you with immense strength, knocking the plate of food right off your hands.

But for once Luffy couldn't be bothered about the food, you were in his arms.

Zoro

There had been something bothering you for quite a while about the swordsman of the straw hats crew, his indifference.

At first you had thought he was just shy, but the way he would fight with Sanji and scream at everybody all the time had proved you wrong. Then you had thought he hated you for no apparent reason, but once again, if he did indeed hate you he would most likely fight with you the way he did with the cook. So the final diagnosis was the simplest one: he was just indifferent about your presence on the ship.

And that bothered you.

Call it pride or daddy issues, but the feeling that you had to prove to him that you were not just some sort of side character was just too strong. So you did what seemed like the smartest choice, tried to become his friend.

Zoro had been slightly bothered by your advances at first since they included chatting with him (which stopped him from taking his daily nine-hour nap) or getting his attention in the middle of his workout.

The change was almost imperceptible at first. It started with him noticing your presence, everytime he heard your steps approaching him or felt your warm hand on his shoulder using him as a mean of sitting down without falling. Slowly but surely noticing turned into expecting, expecting your afternoon visits and going as far as getting disappointed if you didn't showed up; expecting for you to show up while he was training so that he could show off his skills only to hear you praise him for his strength.

Zoro knew he was falling for you, but despite how much he told himself that having a crush would be useless, and only keep him from achieving his goals, he couldn't help but hope you would be there every day to talk to him even when he never gave you long answers.

The day he realized that there was no turning back you had fallen asleep on his shoulder, he had only noticed after a while when you didn't talk his ear off (he loved hearing you and everything you had to tell him), he tried to sleep, but, when he closed his eyes, all he could focus on was your soft breathing, the way it caressed the skin of his neck, and the heat emanating from your face and seeping onto his body. He should had been training, but maybe staying there a little longer wouldn't hurt.

Especially when he could hear the way both your heart beats started to sync.

Sanji

The moment he fell in love with you? What do you mean? He was always in love with you, even before you two met!

But talking seriously, Sanji is widely known for falling in love easily so it really comes to no surprise that he fell for you when you first joined the crew (especially if you were a woman).

For all his swooning and doting Sanji had alway thought of himself as a composed person, but his whole idea fell apart the moment you entered the kitchen. There had been something about you that he couldn't quite place, something that made him feel as though the entire universe had stopped and that everything that had happened in his life up until that moment had been with the sole intention of him meeting you. Even before you said a word to him, while luffy was still excitedly presenting you to everyone, your eyes had found his and he had felt his soul melt inside of him.

He had walked up to you and held your hands while he fell to his knees, he told you he loved you without remedy and that breathing without your presence felt like inhaling thorns but that he would gladly do it if it meant he would see your face eventually.

You had smiled at him, a smile that could bring the sun itself to shame from how bright it was, and then, then...

Then Nami hit him im the head and told him to leave you alone.

So yeah, Sanji had known he would love you from the moment he met you. But it was the small things, the everyday things, like sitting with him while he washed the dishes, or talking between meals and telling him off for smoking, that cemented the idea that, maybe, the universe had been written only so that you two coul meet.

✶✧✶✧✶✧✶✧

Taglist: @ellelowthere

[merchantarthurn]

I'm definitely still recovering from relying on this to get me through uni and the above isn't kidding, it messes you up and your brain absolutely will start throwing up protective measures after a certain point (I've gotten off rather lightly all things considered - mild-moderate fatigue, increased executive disfunction, more frequent boughts of depression, something adjacent to - though more manageable than - agoraphobia, constant brain fog). But! I know I've struggled to find alternatives and spent a long time despairing because stress was all I was able to Rely On for such a long time, so here's some things.

Most importantly, you have to be forgiving if you "slip up". That includes falling back on Stress as a motivator OR failing to achieve something without it. It WILL happen, it will happen a lot, there is nothing shameful about that. Say it aloud to yourself if you're not feeling it. There's going to be a lot of Emotion to this, let yourself feel it as it comes.

It's a long road to improve that potentially has no end and our brains don't deal well with that. It's good to remind yourself of your long term goal occasionally (again, I find verbally expressing it is useful), but it can help to be a bit more micro-scale - a day, or a week. "How did today go?" "What was I satisfied with this week?" Let yourself reflect, do it at a time that feels right and don't make it Another Chore (I like to talk to myself in bed or whilst doing the dishes).

Planning too far in advance can make it daunting, lean into spontaneity where possible. When you remember something important with a deadline, "oh, I need to do that at some point", ask yourself if you can actually do it Now. If you can't, let what you do "now" be setting a reminder so you can have this thought again later. Boom, you've done something.

Satisfaction can carry you in place of stress, but it likely won't come to you. I know my brain doesn't really... do joy, relaxing, satisfaction? Not without conscious input from myself. You'll probably have to start by still relying on Stress, but take a moment afterwards to congratulate yourself for finishing and tell yourself to feel proud about it (again, verbally if needed). No task is too small for this. Squash the part of you that feels silly about it. The more you train yourself to sit in satisfaction, the more you can use it as a Carrot over the Stick that is stress. "If I get this done now, it will be really satisfying." is a mantra for me at the moment (it doesn't always work, but remember point No1).

Further to this - sometimes if positive emotion isn't a motivator, twisting the negative one to help you out can serve you well. "If I at least try and start on this, I will not let myself feel bad if I don't get much of it done." "Hey, if I do this now then I will have one less thing to do on Friday, and I won't get stressed about the deadline".

Tomorrow's a new day. Dissatisfaction comes easier, and it's okay to feel it. Start challenging yourself when it becomes self-shaming, though. You have the opportunity to be even a little better tomorrow.

Again, nothing is too small or silly to hype yourself up about. I struggle with putting things back where they belong which makes a Big Task of tidying stuff up - so I give myself a pat on the back whenever I want to just throw something on a nearby surface but instead make the effort to put it back where it goes. The little things just add up faster.

There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function

[commandershepardvasfuckit]

M!Minotaur x reader

Will eventually be a full nsfw series (reader being courted by Ahanu and another minotaur who are constantly trying to one up each other for the reader’s attention).

————

You sniffled as you held the little bird. It had only hatched a few weeks ago but fell from the nest and died. You had been checking on the nest almost daily once you had seen an egg in it, excited to see it hatch and grow up.

Maybe it was silly how upset you were over the bird. Back at home you were often teased for being too soft, for crying too easily, for always taking everything so hard, but you could not help it.

It felt wrong just to leave it on the ground, the little thing deserved more dignity than that. You set it back down and started to dig a hole with your bare hands next to the tree, figuring that was the best you could do for it.

You did not hear the footsteps approaching, nearly jumping out of your skin when suddenly there came a voice.

“And what is it that you’re up to out here on your own?” It was Ahanu, a minotaur hunter here in the village.

He looked over your shoulder, surveying your dirty hands, the hole, and the little bird. “Oh, from the nest you’ve been watching.”

You turned to face him and started wailing and he immediately pulled you into a hug while you waited for him to tell you that you were overreacting.

He was soft and warm, and you melted into his embrace, his steady heartbeat was comforting as you pressed your face against him.

You took a deep breath to steady yourself before speaking, “I know it’s silly, circle of life and all that, it’s just a bird.”

“It’s not silly. You were so excited about it, and a loss of life is always sad, no matter how small” he reassured you. “Instead of burying it why don’t we make a pyre?”

You nodded against his chest. Humans buried their dead, but minotaurs believed that the spirit was trapped on this plane until the body completely returned to the earth, wrapping and burning their dead before spreading the ashes.

“I can gather some wood” you said.

“Why don’t we do this the right way, yeah? It meant a lot to you so why not give it a full funeral?” Ahanu asked.

“That’s too much just for a bird” you muttered.

“No it’s not, this bird meant a lot to you, it deserves to be laid to rest with care.”

Ahanu helped you to your feet and carefully carried the bird back to the village to the earth speaker. You felt embarrassed as he explained to the earth speaker that you needed funerary cloth for a bird, though the speaker treated it solemnly like any other death and without judgement.

Once outside Ahanu lead you to where the pyres were built at the edge of the village and began digging through the wood pile to find enough small sticks to built it. You watched as he took great care choosing the sticks and binding them together to make the little raised platform for the funeral. Once he was satisfied with it he carefully wrapped the bird in the cloth, tucking in the ends and making sure everything was tidy and just so.

The two of you sat on the ground as he finished preparing everything, finally placing the bird on the pyre.

“Great mother of the earth, welcome this spirit back into your embrace, let its ashes return to the earth and nourish those who still live, and bring comfort to those who will miss it. May this fire cleanse any regrets and light the way.”

At this point you were wailing again as he lit the pyre, equal parts for the bird and over the kindness he was showing for you.

He softly rubbed you back as he sat next to you on the ground, never once trying to rush you, just patiently letting you cry it out.

You leaned against him, eyes stinging from crying and nose running. He leaned his head against the top of yours and hugged you, just being a reassuring presence.

“Whenever you’re ready we can gather the ashes, but there is no hurry” he said.

You nodded against his chest, too stuffy and out of breath to really speak.

He helped you spread the ashes around the tree where the nest was, hugging onto you while you cried again.

“Why don’t you come over for lunch?” he offered.

“Thank you, but I’m not hungry” you said.

“That’s just the sadness talking, and you always like my cooking when I bring you food. Come keep me company while I make lunch, it’ll help keep your mind busy.”

You nodded. He was right on all accounts, it did sound nicer to not be alone right now.

[miaoua3]

(pairing: mingyu x f!reader)

song: kiss me by sixpence none the richer🤍

if the situation you found yourself in wasn’t as serious for mingyu as it is, you would’ve burst out laughing, probably rolled some more on the floor as the tears streamed down your face.

but knowing that your pouty little baby would start crying himself if you did so, you opted for hiding your smile behind the cup of coffee you were drinking at the moment.

mingyu was sitting on the far end of the brown leather couch in your living room, both his legs and arms crossed, his face turned away from you, his pouty face looking out of the balcony door.

cute you think to yourself.

see the reason why your cutie boyfriend was pouting today is because of one thing you said earlier in the morning while you two were cuddling.

you said that in the beginning, before you two even knew each other, your bias was scoups.

mingyu, the ever-believer in things like destiny and soulmates, gasped in shock before he pushed you away so he could stand up, and proceed to ramble to you how this can’t be real and “how could you do this to him?”.

as if the situation wasn’t bad enough, instead of responding to him heartfelt-ly, you did probably the worst thing you could.

you laughed at him.

hence why he is ignoring you now, pouting and doing the little “hmph!” anytime he turns to look at you just to see you not paying attention to him.

deciding that enough was enough, you stand up from the kitchen counter and walk over to him, ever so quietly so he can’t hear you.

the moment you are beside him and see his head turn towards you, his eyebrows so furrowed it could give him permanent scowl, you pounce on him.

straddling his legs, you grab his face in your hands, starting your kiss attack on his squished cheeks.

you do it fast, and you do it uncoordinatedly, making you bump your noses and foreheads together a few times.

slowly, you see a little smile play on the edges of his lips. and the longer you kiss his face, the broader it gets, until he inevitably starts laughing in his high pitched laugh, screaming a little “ahhh stop!” as your kisses stray towards his neck, right where his ticklish place is.

finally, you come back up before you kiss his lips once, twice and thrice, the last kiss letting it be a bit longer.

once you pull away, your smile greets mingyu’s wide and glossy eyes, happiness reflecting in them like the sun would.

as you rub his cheeks with your thumbs, you can’t resist the urge to leave one more kiss on his plush lips.

against them, you say through a smile.

“you silly man, it doesn’t matter who was there before you.

all that matter’s, is that there won’t be anyone after you. because you are my one.

now kiss me.”

[starkeygirls]

i n v i s i b l e s t r i n g

chapter 2

rafe cameron x pogue!reader

summary: still working on writing this well - we'll get there when we get there.

wc: 4.1k

warning: none!

a/n: well, i wrote this whole chapter to hate it, start over and then still not be 100% happy with this one. hope this is at least okay! thank you all so much for taking time to read my silly little re-write! as always, please show your appreciation with reblog/comments/etc (reminder that it's really helpful to those who write ◡̈ )

chapter 1 - chapter 2 - chapter 3

______________________________________________________________

Thoughts swirled in your head as you laid in your bed, seemingly sending flirty texts to none other than Rafe Cameron. The same Rafe Cameron that spilled beer on you without apologizing. Rafe Cameron, who seemed to fight your friends at every opportunity he could - with or without a reason. The Rafe Cameron who ended up being the reason your commission was so good during a dud week. 

What the fuck were you doing? Watching as the three dots type and turn into a message, one that had the corner of your lips pulled up as you read it. Disgusting. 

You two didn’t speak after that. 

Waking up the following morning, you didn’t respond, and he never double texted. Better off that way, you thought. And it was solidified as you thought back to the party last night. 

You paid no mind to the boy who walked along the beach like he owned it. Your eyes didn’t look for his in the crowd, and you couldn’t help the huff that escaped your lips as he cut you in line for a refill on beer. 

Your head was pounding as you regretted nearly every thought you had to agree going to the party. Your sunglasses hadn’t left your face since you entered work, the lights were far too bright, the music was far too loud, and each and every customer was far too annoying. Typically, Saturday was your favorite day to work, but this was brutal. A part of you almost hoping that your boss would pop in and send you home for being out of dress code. 

JJ’s voice rang through the small shop, your name echoing off the walls and piercing your hungover ears. Pulling yourself from the back room, your eyes rolled behind your sunglasses as he came into sight. 

“You’re so fucking lucky there aren’t any customers in here?” You spat, also happy your shift mate was out grabbing lunch. 

“That’s no way to greet someone in this fine establishment.” JJ teased, eyebrow raising as he turned his attention to the clothing hung neatly in place, pulling it from the rack and holding it up to his body. “What’s the verdict? Fashion icon?” 

“The verdict is you would never buy that because it costs more than a day of work and you would stain it two hours.” You conveniently left out that it was a skirt he was mistaking for a tube top, there really wasn’t a thought in his brain. A giggle escaped your lips as you watched his eyes widen as he looked at the price tag, promptly putting it back on the rack and attempting to smooth it out as if he had never touched it. 

“Anyway,” he started nearing closer to you, taking a glance around the small shop. “We were all meeting up at the dock, we were going to chill, drink some beers, swim a little. When do you get off? It’s clearly extremely lively in here, a real bustling shop.. Would be a shame if you closed early.” His shoulders shrugged, smile tugging on his lips as his brows raised. 

“You know I can’t just close early. I don’t have the power to do that.”

“Please, you’re like vice president here and you work every day, you could pull some strings with Big O.” Your lips pulled into a small smile as you shook your head. 

“I’m assistant manager, I have plenty of days off - in fact, my last day off you were too busy hooking up with some tourist to hangout, might I add, and Mrs. Overton would not like you calling her ‘Big O’, or like if I closed early.” Jeez, when did you become such a buzzkill? After your third hour of being hungover, that was for sure. JJ’s bottom lip jutted out, you wouldn’t shut him down without a fight and he wouldn’t leave willingly without seeing a text to your boss with the request. 

– 

Sitting on the side of the boat as John B drove, you assumed when JJ said “we” he hadn’t meant Kiara, Pope and Cleo, but instead, you found yourself with only JJ and John B. 

“I can’t believe I convinced my boss to close early to hangout with you two..” 

“I have such a way with words.” JJ’s cocky tone was enough to make you roll your eyes and send a middle finger in his direction. In reality, YOU had a way with words. The way you respectfully pointed out that sales had been down that day, in fact, they had been down the last few weeks. If you were able to leave, you could showcase what was on the floor in person, and you would be able to show up to your shift tomorrow with a new outlook on the sales for the week. You strategically left out your raging hangover, that was neither here nor there. Mrs. Overton quickly agreed, saying you needed to enjoy one of the last beautiful Saturdays of the summer before Autumn came in. She was too sweet for her own good. 

“Did you notice Topper didn’t even look at me last night? Sarah was with me-”

“She was hanging on you.” You corrected, JJ reaching out to tap knuckles with you as John B cut the engine, dropping anchor in the middle of the marsh.

“Whatever, we were talking the whole night, and Topper didn’t make a single comment, no dirty looks, nothing.”

“Rafe and Kelce didn’t try anything last night, either.” JJ added quickly, peering over the sunglasses that covered his eyes as he cracked open a beer. You shooed it away as he offered it in your direction. 

“Yeah well, Rafe cut me in line for a beer.” Shoulders shrugging, attempting to grasp at any bit of normalcy from the interaction you and Rafe hadn’t even shared.

“Well shit, call Shoupe. How dare he!” John B teased, JJ quickly laughing at the comment. 

“Why did I agree to hangout with you two today?” Tone teasing, but they were lucky your hangover was dwindling as the time went on. 

“Because we’re your best friends.” John B’s voice was a matter of fact, shoulders shrugging. 

“Maybe Sarah had a talk with them. If you’re seeing her, I can’t see why she would let her brother and his friends fight with you guys.” There was a small murmur amongst the three of you, clearly that must’ve been the answer, right? You were just happy JJ had dropped the teasing he had been giving you, and happy he didn’t know about your late night texting - it still felt like a fever dream.

– 

Floorset day.

It was the worst day, right ahead of shipment day. Having to unpack all of the new clothes, unwrap them, put them in size order and backstock was a nightmare. But you would rather do that than completely rearrange the store and dress mannequins. 

You were fighting with a mannequin arm to try and put it back in its socket, you had already been whacked in the head, nearly tackled by a plastic person, and now you were standing with an arm between your legs, trying to shove the other one on. Letting out a huff as you continued to struggle, you heard the ding of the door. Of course someone had to come in right now. It’s always how it happened. Always when you were on the ladder changing a light bulb, or fighting with the mannequins- they couldn’t just wait ten more minutes to buy some overpriced clothes. Pulling the mannequin arm out of the polo shirt, you placed it on the table, turning to look at the door and who had just come in. 

“Hi! Welcome in! I apologize for the-” You stopped, eyes glancing over Rafe who was looking right at you. Pulling your hair that had clung to your lipgloss, you stumbled over your words. “Uh- apologize for the mess. We just got in some new items.” Taking a deep breath, you smiled. “Let me know if I can help you with anything.” 

He was alone, and if it wasn’t for his behavior, you would have written it off, and turned your attention back to the mannequin, back to the ipad with how the floor needed to be set up. And despite your best efforts to pull yourself from the thoughts of Rafe Cameron that consumed and confused your mind, you couldn’t help but watch as he moved around the store. An internal fight broke out inside of you, wanting to just let the kook do whatever it is he came here for. He had already picked up his items- he came in empty handed so he wasn’t returning anything. Hell, you had told him to let you know if there was anything you could help him with, so why were you still watching? 

You hadn’t seen him in a few days, your last interaction, if you could even call it that, was at the party a few days ago. No texts, not that you really expected any- it wasn’t like you had previously texted him on a regular basis. 

“Sorry, didn’t mean to walk in on you manhandling your boyfriend.” He smiled. And you swore your heartbeat picked up. What the hell was going on with you? Distance makes the heart grow fonder or whatever bullshit Shakespear would have said? Your life was not some cheesy romance movie. 

“It’s okay, I prefer when I have an audience. I think it teaches him more of a lesson.” His lips pulled further into a grin, looking down to the floor in an almost attempt to hide his reaction. He paused by the rack of new items you had gotten in the day prior, eyes flickering to you as if silently asking if he was allowed to look through the racks. “Wait, actually there’s something we got in and I thought of you when I opened it.” You pulled the mannequin arm from between your legs, heels clicking as you stepped closer to him. 

“You thought of me?” His brows raised and you felt a heat take over your face. You did what you did best and ignored his question, eyes trailing down the rack as your finger lightly ghosted each piece of clothing until you pulled the sweater out. 

“So this is similar to that shirt you got before, but the fabric is a little thicker for when it gets colder. This color is a good transition color for going into fall, but-” You paused, pulling out another color. “This one is going to let you transition from fall into winter with the deeper tone. Not to mention you can put a button up underneath it to dress it up and also give you another layer. The style is also going to last you a while since it’s a staple piece, and if you like the color enough, it doesn’t matter what colors are in, you know?” You could feel his eyes on you instead of the sweaters you had pulled out, but once your sales side came out, there was no shoving her away. This is what you were good at, it was how you made bigger commission checks. “I noticed you wear more bright colors when you’re out during the day, assuming the country club? And then you wear darker when you’re with friends or at a party. And don’t flatter yourself with me saying I take note of these things, I like clothes. Anyway, you’re obviously not going to wear this sweater out with your friends or anything like that, it’s cashmere and wool- you would be sweating but I don’t know if you’re really going for pink sweater vibes either.” You grabbed his wrist, pulling him towards the second rack. “I think this striped one is so nice. The navy and white stripes but not all the way up? It’s nautical but also just yells fall, paired with some brown pants-” You stopped yourself, almost embarrassed with how much you had rambled. 

You watched as Rafe’s blue eyes scanned the clothing you had tossed his way, along with the newest sweater you had brought his attention to. 

“New shoes I bought have navy on ‘em, right?” His brows furrowed, turning his attention to you. Your face perked up a bit. 

“They do, and if you have the plain white, which everyone on The Eight does,” you paused, pulling at the original sweater you had shown him. “This would go, obviously because they’re white. They go with everything.” 

---

You weren’t entirely sure how it happened, but Rafe was now helping you shove the arm onto the mannequin. He had bought almost all of your recommendations, despite the brown pants you reassured would be a good choice. He had nearly laughed in your face, but said he would be back if needed. He would be back when he realized you were right.

“So you’re the only one here today?” The brunet asked, a popping sound happening from the mannequin before he slowly released the arm, it staying in place on the torso. You nodded, arms up, ready to catch the arm should it fall. 

“Yeah, they trust me to run the store?” You laughed, shaking your head as the concept still baffled you. Lowering your arms, you smoothed out your blouse, running your fingers through your hair as you looked around the store. It wasn’t perfect, but it was getting near the end of the day and the last thing you wanted to do was start another project and stay later than you needed to. “I’m not supposed to be the only one working since I lock up and could obviously take something, but I think my boss knows I need the money and I would be dumb to steal and lose my job.” 

He nodded, taking a seat on the arm of a chair. Looking lost in thought, your own mind began to wander. The hour or so you had just spent with Rafe was actually… nice. Throwing different clothes his way, laughing as he huffed in the fitting room, mumbling a few “absolutely not’s” and rolling his eyes as he came out in a few of the ‘older’ styles, as you called them. He had even convinced you to try on a few outfits, and you couldn’t help but laugh at one of the combos he had chosen. You both laughed until your stomachs hurt.

It was almost domestic in a way, like the two of you had been friends for years. If you were being honest, the past drama, or whatever it had been was nowhere near on your mind. The way your friends teased you, the way Rafe and his friends had caused more trouble than good in your lives - the only thing you felt was happiness. You never expected to find yourself laughing with Rafe Cameron, never expected to have anywhere near a good time with him.

And now you found yourself locking up the shop, Rafe waiting for you outside as you set the alarm code and locking the back door. Your heels clicked along the cement, and with the fresh air hitting you, that’s when what you were doing really hit you. You were going to be seen out in public with a kook. Not just any kook, but Rafe Cameron. He seemed sure of it, had rattled off the two of you going to Duke’s a small restaurant that you had heard had amazing food, not that you could ever convince any of your friends to go. You accepted without much of a second thought. 

But the second thought was hitting now. 

“Did you want to put your things in your car?” Hands fumbling to put your keys in your purse and grip onto your sunglasses. He nodded as you slid your sunglasses on, he followed your motions, take his own off his head and covering his eyes with the shades. Following him to his car, you slid your phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’. While a small bit of worry was coursing through your veins at the thought of getting dinner with Rafe, the last thing you needed was your friends bothering you- or figuring out where you were and making fun of you for actually giving him the time of day.

“You look nice today, you know.” Rafe’s voice was casual as he tossed the large bags into the backseat of his Range Rover. 2022 you assumed, maybe 2020, but there was no way it was any older than four years old. Despite the people you imagined getting in and out of it, it still faintly smelt like new car. You wondered how he kept the smell lingering around for so long. “You looked nice the other day, too. But I don’t know if cashmere is really something you should be wearing in the summer. You’ll sweat.” Oh, so he wanted to tease you now about what you had said to him earlier? Eyes rolling at his comment, you couldn’t help the corner of your lips pulling into a bit of a smile. 

“It’s August, Cameron. It’s basically fall, and it was feather cashmere, anyway.” Your hand waved him off, a light giggle escaping your lips. “But thank you. I’m usually fighting the mannequin in a skirt or dress, but I learned this time.” 

“You mean to tell me that Paul puts up a fight every time?” Of course he remembered you telling him how you had named all the mannequins, because why wouldn’t he? How could he possibly make himself anymore desirable in the moment? He couldn’t- you were sure of it. 

It pained you, if you were being honest. The way he effortlessly made you laugh, and the way you were able to tease each other, firing back at one another. It reminded you of your nights with the pogues, though the sexual comments were yet to be found. He was actually respectful, which surprised you. Was it because he was alone? Why was he alone? Were you just some last resort when all of his friends were busy? You couldn’t think of that right now, no matter the reason, you had already spent time with him, you had already had a good time. You had already agreed to dinner. 

–

Dinner had taken longer than you had expected- but it wasn’t in a bad way. You had actually learned a lot about Rafe, which was something you never thought you would say. That he’s a lefty golfer, which was a bit weird since he was a righty. You learned that despite living in Kildare his entire life, he didn’t have his boating license, and he was allergic to strawberries. You learned he was in the process of helping his dad with his company, but he couldn’t quite get all the trust he had hoped for.

Your cheeks hurt from how long you had been smiling. When was the last time you had smiled that much? You couldn’t exactly pinpoint it, not that it really mattered. 

He smacked away your card as you attempted to tell the waitress to split the bill, a huff escaping your lips as you glared towards him. “I could have paid, you know. At least half.” 

“Could have, but aren’t going to.” He said simply, flashing you a toothy grin. 

“Well, I’ll leave the tip then.” 

“Or, you could let me handle it.” 

A huff escaped your lips, sliding the card back into your wallet, arms crossed against your chest. His lips pulled into a grin as he watched you admit defeat, your motions mimicking that of a child who didn’t get their way. 

“Contrary to popular belief, we can actually pay for our own meals.” Your words were sour as they left your lips, feeling a sense of pity radiate off of him. His brows had furrowed. “If this was some charity case it can stop here.” 

“Woah, woah.” Rafe’s hands found themselves up, confused at this sudden attack after a meal spent with laughter and aching cheeks from smiles. “I seemed to have missed where I insulted you? I think you left the station and took a hard left because where did I insinuate that you couldn’t pay?” 

“When you decided to not even let me tip.”

“I did that as a kind gesture.” He added quickly. “Do you always attack people after they pay for your meal?” 

“Only when they don’t let me tip.” 

“Then I look forward to more arguments in the future.” 

His words shocked you, your hands getting clammy at the thought of seeing him again, of sharing a dinner table with him again. A part of you believed this was just a nice gesture after spending some time together, surely he had just gotten hungry and decided to invite you along as opposed to eating alone. 

Perhaps you were wrong. 

“Thank you.” You finally mumbled, eyes meeting his. Suddenly your rings were the most interesting thing on the planet, toying with them on your fingers as you felt embarrassment creep up at your outburst, though also feeling a flush creep on your cheeks. Thankfully, the restaurant was dimly lit and you were certain Rafe wasn’t able to see the effect of his words. More arguments in the future, please.

The walk to your car was once again filled with laughter and teasing, something that you hadn’t been sure would be possible with someone like Rafe, someone who had always been so different from you and your friends. Someone who didn’t seem to understand the world you came from - not that you could understand his world any easier. As much of a facade as you put up in your fancy clothes, you were still from The Cut. You still had to work, and work hard at that, for everything that came your way. 

But there was something easy about being with Rafe - not that you would admit that to him or your friends. Ever. 

“Well, thanks for the clothing recommendations, still honored you thought about me as you pulled them out of the boxes.” You pushed his shoulder slightly at his words, a small ‘oh please’ mumbled under your breath at his words. “And I’m grateful the server took the knives away before I refused to let you pay.” 

Reaching for your keys, you rolled your eyes at his remembrance of your outburst, you proclamation that yet again, there was a clear line in the sand from where you both stood on the island. That line in the sand becoming more apparent, yet again, as you unlocked your car which was strikingly different from Rafe’s flashy one. He didn’t mention it, but thoughts were once again flying rampant around your mind at just how different the two of you were. 

“No, no. Thank you. I wouldn’t have been able to get that arm on without you, and I’ve dying to eat at Dukes. Really, thank you.” Your words were sincere, and Rafe was almost caught off guard by your lack of jokes. He kept it cool, as he had the whole time you spoke to him, in fact, as he had every time you spoke to him the last few days. A part of you wondered if that was just who he was, or if he was better at hiding his emotions than he lead on - at least with your friends. 

As the two of you approached your car, you half waited for him to lean against the door, for the two of you to keep speaking for another hour. And a part of you almost wanted it. 

“See you around?” He offered, an easy exit. 

“See you around.” You confirmed, reality creeping in as you watched him nod, tapping the top of your car. Rafe offered you a simple ‘get home safe’ before turning on his heels and heading in the direction of his car. 

Climbing into your car, you sat there for a moment, the whole day swirling around your head. You drove home with the radio on low, still trying to understand how you had really ended up at dinner with Rafe in the first case. 

Not a date. You kept repeating to yourself, because while you had known of Rafe Cameron all your life, the Rafe Cameron that had sat across from you at dinner was brand new. Pulling into your driveway and making your way to your room, you finally pulled your phone from your bag, taking it off Do Not Disturb. Your phone flooded with messages from your friends, but none from him.

----------------------------------------------------------

taglist: @p0gue420@khaisdrz@marrleyss@sadgirlxangel@alorsxsturn @hoelesslyt @mattyskies @percysley @eolsens @saintsir4n @honeybee270

[secondhandhandyhaversack]

I think this relates to general media literacy in a big way, although the example in the original post is a more positive, lighthearted version, I think the principles are the same.

I think the Harry Potter debacle has made us all a little too susceptible to this. When Joan starting tweeting about all her heinous opinions, we all started scouring the books to see if there was something amiss we had missed; As it turns out there was. But now we do it with everything all the time. We are constantly on the look-out as if the content of the books matters far less than the beliefs of the person that wrote them, which, in my very humble opinion, is a very lazy way to do media literacy. No need to actually think critically about the media, just need to know if the author sucked or not.

Ursula K LeGuin hated it when people did this. She thought it was extremely invasive to believe that you could glean the inner thoughts of a writer from their writings. Sometimes a writer writes what they write because they're trying to highlight a specific type of problem, sometimes they write someone into their book because the beliefs they have fit someone that might have those beliefs in the real world. Does that mean the author really believes those things? Not necessarily, and it is the weirdest form of hubris and parasocial bullshittery to believe that you can glean whether they do or not without any proof other than the story.

I'm going to use use myself reading LeGuin's EarthSea novels as an example here:

While reading the novels, I was intensely upset by the way women were treated. They were often sidelined in favor of characters who were men, and in the first book, there was hardly any women at all. This was confusing to me because I knew, from reading her own essays, that LeGuin was a feminist and progressive to the core. So why did her books make it seem like she hated women so much. If I ended with the first book, I probably would have been upset forever, and confused forever, but I kept reading.

By the end of the sixth book, the whole picture comes into view. She doesn't hate women at all, and you can tell! She was just slowly through the books highlighting how women often had so much bullshit to deal with that of course men ended up running the college at Roake, and of course they were assholes about it, and once a man was in charge, and specifically once an asshole man was in charge, of course they stopped admitting women even though it was a woman who had founded it. Ursula K LeGuin didn't hate women at all, but she wasn't telling a story about how women can do anything. She was writing a story about how being a woman is hard and how men make women's lives harder. And, how the world goes out of balance when men are the only ones in charge.

It took six books for me to get it, and even then, the only way I was able to really "get" it was because LeGuin had written countless essays on politics and feminism from which I could actually read her opinions and beliefs as she presented them. It was only through the framework laid down by the author herself that I could understand her views from the books. For me to accuse LeGuin of hating women, after reading only one book, or even all of her books, would have been silly, and quite simply, wrong.

Without a framework from the author themselves, you're just shaking a stick in the night. You can't possibly know. So you must engage with the media in a conscious and critical way. In cases where the author is on a tirade, witch hunt, or crusade, then please avoid supporting them in ways that will empower them. Otherwise, if the media can stand on it's own legs, let it stand, if not, let it fall.

Saw this on Twitter and I obligatory need to share it

[strawberry-halla]

now im probably the many few people who actually agreed with the way bioware handled varric’s death and here’s why:

varric has been one of the most prominent dragon age characters since dragon age 2’s release. he’s basically the mascot (well, i think solas has stolen this role now but i digress), the character everybody loves! varric has been there since almost the beginning, over 10 years of our favorite dwarf.

this is the thing that hangs people up on his death in veilguard. why did they do it? why did it happen? what was bioware thinking? well i’m not expert but i think i have a pretty good idea.

varric has always been the friend who supports you no matter what, the one to pull you away from the heavy decisions the player makes to make you laugh or try to see the bright side. he made the player feel good and your character feel good, no matter who you’re playing as.

we saw this lovable dwarf go through so much tragedy in every media possible. he was dealt a bad hand at every corner but the good parts were the friends he made along the way. even if they did something bad in the end (anders and solas), varric still sees the person they were underneath everything.

so yes i think his choice to talk to solas, only to end up dying, was how it was going to end for him. varric cares so much about his friends and eventually, one of them was going to fuck that up. he got lucky so many times, escaping death at every turn. if varric would have went home to kirkwall as viscount for the rest of his days, i don’t think that would be a good end for him.

it’s a pretty thought to have, but it’s just NOT varric. he wanted to help the inquisition and he wanted to help save/stop solas because he knew him. they were friends. good ones. so of course it makes sense varric is the one to go after him.

now i think it would have been worse if varric was dead from the start of veilguard (well, he is but we don’t know that yet) because it definitely doesn’t ease the player into the reality of it. so making him a figment of solas’s blood magic on rook was a very clever way to ease them and us into accepting his death. i cannot think of a better way if i tried.

varric’s relationship with rook was so important. he was basically a mentor, a father figure for some. his role in veilguard is not a waste. rook as a character needed their mentor to ease them into this leadership. i think it would have been incredibly jarring to just have rook suddenly know how to lead the veilguard without having someone to talk to about their struggles. solas would have worked fine, but his role as the antagonist for most of the game would have made a really unrealistic connection.

and yes. i know varric’s memory is being manipulated by solas’s hand, but solas himself says that varric would never say anything to rook that they already didn’t know from him. varric’s guidance was still at play here, not solas. he just kept up the illusion varric was still alive to make sure rook would succeed. it’s incredibly shitty of him to goad this at rook, but he was never entirely wrong that rook had varric to help them. they did have varric, even when he wasn’t there. varric’s lessons and memory alone were enough.

and when rook and the player finally come to this realization in the regret prison, it just hits you all at once. i cried for about two hours once the scene ended. i had to pause my game, get up, and walk away. it was like losing a best friend. and i know how silly it sounds to mourn the loss of a video game character, but varric was more than that to many. to me. i just needed a bit to recover from the realization.

varric made a choice. one that got him killed. but he knew that it was the right one to make. solas regrets what he did to varric. he even says if he could, he wouldn’t have done it. it was an accident. a horrible accident that doesn’t justify what solas did. there is no glory in needless death. but this isn’t about solas.

varric in all his goodness as a person FORGAVE solas for this. he knew solas was still good. deep, deep down. that solas ‘wants to be the hero’ and would tear himself apart to make things better. i don’t know about you but it’s incredibly insane that someone forgives their murderer. especially varric! who said in inquisition: ‘nobody forgives someone for killing you!’ like it came full circle.

varric’s death was necessary for us and for solas’s story. i know it sounds incredibly silly to us that one character’s redemption is another’s downfall, but isn’t that how things work sometimes? you don’t have to like it or agree with it, but that’s just one thing i find so fascinating about dragon age’s characters and how they interact with one another throughout the series.

there’s an incredible post by @/corseque that explains the parallels between varric and solas that really ties this all together. please go read it if you haven’t!

i’m so so glad we had so many good memories of varric and his legacy will forever live on in-universe and amongst fans. now’s the time to make new ones with our new favorites, shall we? and we can still honor varric’s memory by writing stories, of course.

[nemisuki]

Metal Love

Robot AU | She was the first successful experiment, created by the government to protect UA students from potential harm. And he was the troublemaker, who needed to be monitored more than others. 

᧔o᧓ || katsuki bakugo x f!reader, no manga spoilers, no nsfw, pure fluff, very dense reader, protective + jealous bkg, aged up to third years, bakusquad mentions, silly moments, bkg has feelings, open ending, 3k word count

“For a robot, she’s pretty cute huh?” 

That's practically the topic of all whispered chatter as Class 3A enters the cafeteria. It made his scowl deepen with disgust. 

The constant focus was always about a “student” among the third years. 

An advanced technology sent in by the Japanese government. 

More specifically, the first successful model. 

Apparently she was scientifically created using human DNA, hence her appearance is nothing unusual. Especially in today's age, where the connection of society and mutant-type quirks, heteromorphs, are so common. 

Though she did have mechanical features regarding her prosthetic arms, built perfectly for combat and defense. 

A perfect soldier - Model #8307. 

Despite being the ideal android, there is one thing she lacked : human emotion

Thus the government sent her to UA High School on a sole mission.

To protect Class 3A til graduation. 

Hoping she’ll develop an understanding on what it means to be human along the way. To have feelings.  

It's notorious all around Japan.

Since those specific students entered UA, trouble seems to follow them everywhere.   

So after many precautions and examinations, the government sent the model over for a test run. Finding it beneficial for everyone.

Given a scenario where some villains were to attack the school, as coded into her programming, she would alert the authorities and defend until help arrived.

If done well, more of these creations would be produced to enhance the safety of all schools and buildings. Pushing Japan to be the first country with a solid line of defense that requires less human labor and lives to be lost in battle.

It’s been a few months since she first arrived at UA. 

And it’s been a huge success so far.

Through daily interaction, Y/N started to gain more knowledge on emotions, though she’s still a bit lacking in some areas. 

Their classmates scatter around the lunch tables like any other day, eating food as they joke around.

“Hey where's Y/N?” Kirishima asks out loud to the Bakusquad, noticing her usual spot next to the blonde is empty. When no one answers he looks to his friend, “Bakubro where is she?” 

“Hah, how am I supposed to know? I ain’t her damn guardian” Bakugo scoffs with his signature scowl on his face. 

“Oh c’mon! We all know you have a soft spot for her. Plus she’s practically always glued to your hip!” Kaminari chimes in with a smug grin. 

“Shut your trap dunce face!” 

“Woahhh calm down man, I mean it is true she follows you around the most” Sero says in a muffled voice, continuing to stuff his face with sushi. 

“Tch, cause of her damn programming” Bakugo reminds them as he scans the cafeteria for any sign of her.

“Oh yeah, she follows him around because he causes the most trouble. But I don’t think that’s the only reason. She seems to like you!” 

The blondes eyes finally spot her near the lunchline, food tray in hand, a blank expression on her face. 

Some guys from another class are surrounding her with curious gazes as they exchange words.

The distance is far too great for his ears to overhear what they’re asking her. 

His stare is completely focused on the people standing closest to the girl. 

“She seems more human now, she even started smiling recently!” Kirishimas mumbles with a mouth full of food. 

Bakugo wasn’t paying attention to whatever these idiots were saying. His thoughts shift, thinking about why those extras are acting so friendly with you. 

He can’t blame them honestly. 

A half human-robot would spark his interest as well. 

But it's the way they are eyeing her, causing his fingers to fidget with the chopsticks in his hand, a foreign feeling taking over his whole body. 

“Yeah but mainly with Bakugo!” Kaminari snickers and looks at the blonde, expecting a reaction but is met with nothing. 

Everyone at the table grows silent and their gazes land on the Blonde who's seemingly lost in thought. His brows are furrowed and his jaw is clenched, fingers now gripping the edge of the table to release his tension. 

“Bakubro? You okay man?” 

“Kaminari look what you did!” 

“Ah my bad! Sorry dude-”

As he was observing the extras, the sight of them beginning to touch her, made him move.

In a matter of seconds, Bakugo abruptly jumps up from his seat and starts walking away without another word. The bakusquad goes into full panic mode, assuming the worst.

“Where is he going?!” 

“Wait hold on.. look!” Kirishima points in the direction Bakugo is going. All of them twist their heads to watch as the blonde marches up towards a crowd, “Oh it’s Y/N!” 

Bakugo couldn’t believe the nerve of these assholes. Touching her as if she was an object. 

It only frustrated him more that they’re taking advantage of her clueless nature. She was just standing there, responding to whatever they were saying, as they continued patting her head. 

He makes it to the group in no time, shoving people away with ease, “Move it extras.” 

The guys are quick to back away from him, giving the man a clear path. Shrinking from the presence of the strong third year. Who is notorious for his anger and strength. 

“C’mon idiot, what are you doing?” 

He reaches her side, giving a stern look while crossing his arms.

She looks up at him as he does, her once blank expression shifting ever so slightly to soften. Some rare human emotions on display for him, “I was getting lunch.”

He has to avert his gaze for a moment. Attempting to avoid a facial reaction to develop in response to her innocent image, “yeah I know that stupid. I’m asking why you’re wasting your time talking to these extras.”

“They were curious regarding my robotic arms-” 

“Psh damn first years, of course they are. Everyone always is” he mumbles, pure annoyance seeping through his words. 

He takes her lunch tray in his left hand and starts walking back to their table. Glaring along the way at the guys that are roaming around, who are now rushing back to their individual tables from fear.

She follows in his steps without hesitation or asking any questions. As they make it back and sit, Kaminari whistles teasingly, “went to go rescue your girl huh-” 

“Shut it moron!” Bakugos glare intensifies if that's even possible, making Kaminari shut up immediately. Sero and Kirishima simply snicker at the sudden tension between the two. 

“Am I your girl?” She asks while looking at Bakugo with a plain expression. 

It was silent for a moment when she asked that.

Then laughter filled the void of silence, cackles heard all around the table, never finding a dull moment with Y/Ns denseness. 

Everyone was laughing except him. 

“W-What?! No you idiot! Dunce face was just being sarcastic” Bakugo grumbles as his gaze lands on her face. A hint of shyness creeping up on his voice. 

“Oh” she simply replies and goes back to eating her meal.

“Stupid robot” he mutters, now annoyed towards her minimal reaction. He starts eating his meal with large spoonfuls, tuning out whatever the idiots we’re talking about as they ate.

Reminiscing about all the small moments since she got here.

(∩˃o˂∩) flashbackᶻ 𝗓 𐰁

a/n : the following are all flashbacks at random moments throughout the year in order :) 

“Bakugo Katsuki, Explosion Quirk, Blonde Hair-”

His piercing red eyes drift to the side of his desk, staring the new face down as she practically does a character analysis on him. A scowl immediately took over his once calm expression, “Hah? Back off little robot!”

“I am Model #8307. My name is not little robot” she says with a neutral look, taking in new information regarding his voice and vocabulary choices. 

“Tch, you telling me those scientists or whatever, didn’t even give you a damn name?” 

“I am Model #8307”

“You have some shitty creators then, what type of assholes call you by your creation number” he scoffs clearly not fond of that decision. 

“Aw bakubro! Are you perhaps feeling bad in her defense?” Kirishima chimes in with a toothy grin.

“Psh as if! I'm just pointing out the obvious. What the hell am I supposed to call her? Her damn serial number?” he says, rolling his eyes with disdain. 

“Hm, maybe we can give her a name! Oh I bet I have some ideas in my notes-” Deku mumbles under his breath, already flipping pages for ideas. 

Bakugo groans and looks at him with a glare, “you’re mumbling again nerd!” 

Despite his complaints, the entire class started shouting out potential names for the new classmate. As they all gather around to chat away, the robot seems to stick close to Bakugo, and he seems to notice.

“Got something to say?” he crosses his arms, giving her a calculating once over. 

“My programming states I must keep an eye on you the most” she says now stepping closer to him. 

“I don’t need a damn babysitter” his jaw begins to clench at her words. Annoyance taking over as she scoots closer. 

Some laughter is heard across the classroom and Deku smiles, “Kacchan looks like you’ll be spending the most time with her, so how about you name her!” 

“This is fucking dumb.”

“Aw c'mon bakubro! She needs a name, and you seem to be her favorite!” Kirishima grins in his direction. 

He stays silent as he processes both the idiots' words seemingly in thought. His red eyes study the robot and all of a sudden he sighs, “Y/N”

“What a manly name! Where did you think of that Bakugo?” Kirishima tilts his head with curiosity. 

“Oh I remember! That name was from a children's picture book when we were younger, right Kacchan? The main character was a robot in that as well, it makes sense-” 

“Mumbling” Bakugo reminds him with a frown and a warning look. 

“Oops sorry kacchan!” Deku quickly covers his mouth and awkwardly smiles. 

“Alrighty then! You hear that? Your name is Y/N from now on” Kirishima says to her while patting the robot's head.

“Are you my new master then?” Y/N asks Bakugo out of nowhere, given he’s the one who named her.

“Kinky-” Kaminari snorts out loud and begins running away as Bakugo lunges at him. 

“Dunce face shut the hell up! And fuck no, you damn robot!”

–⋆ ˚｡⋆୨ ʚɞ ୧⋆ ˚｡⋆–

His red eyes roam through the scantron for any mistakes he could’ve made on the exam. 

Once fully satisfied with his answers, he places his pencil down. Moving the booklet towards the corner of his desk. 

He is about to rest his head down til he hears a voice beside him, “you got one wrong.”

Bakugo almost jumps at the low whisper, his head snapping at his side to find Y/N analyzing his scantron. 

Since she was in charge of protecting the class, she didn’t have to partake in exams or classwork. Her knowledge as an android practically made her a perfect scholar. 

“The hell are you doing?!” he whispers back and looks at the front of the classroom. Taking a sigh of relief to see Erasure Head distracted in his sleeping bag. 

“I am here to help you” she states while pointing at question 13 and repeating her words, insisting to recheck his answer.

“You can’t just waltz around to help! This is a test!” 

“But my mission is to help the students of Class 3A-”

“Ugh, it's like I'm talking to damn icy-hot, now scram before Mr.Aizawa thinks I'm cheating!” He waves her off with a scowl.

Bakugo could only facepalm when Kaminari secretly calls Y/N over. Taking the opportunity to cheat as she gives him the answers so casually. 

“What an idiot” he grimaces, looking away to stare at his own exam.

His eyes stay lingering onto the booklet, flipping through the pages to look at question 13. After a moment, he mumbles curses under his breath and looks back to see if Y/N is around. 

Who's practically giving Kaminari all the answers per request.

The grumpy blonde quickly looks back at his own paper, grabbing the erasure, and changing his answer. Once completed he rests his head on the desk and huffs, “dumb robot as if I needed help….”

–⋆ ˚｡⋆୨ ʚɞ ୧⋆ ˚｡⋆–

Bakugo freezes in complete disbelief. Did she just-

“Oi! What the hell are you doing?!” he yells out, trying to pry her hands away but no use. As if he could best her metal arms in strength at the moment. 

“Todoroki says this is effective to make people more comfortable around you” she states, keeping her arms wrapped around his waist from behind. Clearly an attempt to give him a back hug. 

“He’s the last person you should be getting help from! Now get off me!” 

Everyone that's around the common room collectively laughs at the odd sight. No one could remember a time when anyone had dared to hug Bakugo like that. 

“Keep him still Y/N!” “Everyone attack!” “Y/N is so manly!” “Get him!” 

“Don't even think about it you idiots!” Bakugo screams out with annoyance and hidden embarrassment. Soon enough, everyone starts joining in on the group hug. He groans and puts his frustration somewhere else, tugging on poor Dekus hair, “all of you are dead when I get free!” 

“Agh- kacchan!!”

–⋆ ˚｡⋆୨ ʚɞ ୧⋆ ˚｡⋆–

No umbrella.

His eyebrow twitches with frustration at the sight of rain. Oh how much he hates rain. 

“We can share my umbrella” Y/N says, approaching out of nowhere.

His eyes meet hers with a grumpy look, “You always show up at the weirdest moments you know that?” 

“I am here to-”

“Here to help. Yeah yeah I know, just hurry it up would ya?”

She takes a step outside and opens her umbrella, holding it up so she can reach his height. He sighs and takes it from her, holding it as they walk together.

It's a calm silence as they head to the dorms.

Y/N's gaze roams around campus, noticing many pairs clinging to one another under their umbrellas. 

So with the new information, she wraps her arm around his bicep.

He tenses at the sudden contact and looks at her direction, “tch what now?” 

Usually he would shove her away but with the rain, he held back. Plus he finds himself growing accustomed to her shenanigans. 

“I am holding your bicep.” 

“You- I know that! But why?” 

“Everyone seems to be doing so.”

His eyebrows furrow and he looks around, spotting nothing but cheesy couples being clingy under their umbrellas.

“Because they are couples you dork, and we aren’t so let go.” 

“Does this mean we are a couple?” she says, squeezing his bicep for clarity. 

His heart beat increases and he coughs, now looking away with pink ears, “What?! No! It doesn't work like that!”

“Then how do you become one?”

“Agh- ask someone else, stupid!” 

Bakugo shoves the umbrella back in her hand and makes a run for it instead. Rushing back to the dorms in the rain, pink ears and all. What is this feeling?  

(∩˃o˂∩) back to presentᶻ 𝗓 𐰁

He is soon brought back to reality when he hears an unfamiliar voice. His head looked to the side to see some guy talking to Y/N, who seemed to approach as he was distracted, “so what do you say we go on a date hm?”

Bakugos eyes slightly widened at the bold words, his mouth opened to cuss the guy out but she was faster to respond. 

“I decline your offer.”

The extra frowns and tilts his head, “you got a boyfriend or something?”

“Yes I do,” she replies with a polite nod. 

Everyone at the table looks shocked by her response, not expecting such a reply from her. The extra leaves a few moments later, seeming to understand at least. 

“Wow Y/N.. didn’t know you had the guts to lie to someone” Kirishima gives her a proud thumbs up.

“Lie? But I didn’t lie” she says, continuing to calmly eat her lunch.

The guys gasp at her words, not able to believe it. Bakugo freezes in his spot looking at her in disbelief. His heart thumps in his chest as shock fills his body.

“You actually have a boyfriend?! Who?!” Kaminari yells out, curiosity taking over.

“Bakugo of course” she mutters, sipping away at her juice box.

The guys all stare in shock and their eyes dart back and forth between the two. Bakugo almost chokes on air at her response. The fuck? 

Laughter is heard around the table, all used to Y/N's dense nature, it seems she still has some learning to do. 

“Did I say something funny?” she looks around as they all wheeze at her words. She looks back at Bakugo and tilts her head. 

He can still hear his heart thumping wildly in his chest. He sighs loudly and shakes his head, “Ignore the idiots and continue eating.”

Y/N nods at his words and goes back to continuing her meal, as does he.

The trio immediately stopped laughing and looked stunned for a moment. Bakugo didn’t react to her words nor corrected her this time. 

Could he…

Almost as if he could read their minds, the blonde sends a glare their way, making them all go back to eating. 

This time, correcting her didn’t even cross his mind. He can see out of the corner of his eyes, the way she scoots closer to him.

But he doesn't say anything this time. 

He knows she's staring at the couple at the other table, observing their actions and taking in the information. She is always so observant.

Out of curiosity, his eyes wander across to the couple, noticing the guy sharing his food with the girl.

Bakugo can already feel Y/N's eyes on him. It almost makes him want to laugh. 

Silently, he takes a sushi roll off his plate and places it on her tray. Copying the other guy's actions. It’s stupid as hell, but she seems to like it. 

With that action alone, he can see a small rare smile forming on her face as she eats.

Teach her emotions huh. Fine. He can do that. 

As the lunch period went on, he didn’t eat much.

The reason? Sharing his food with her.

But he oddly didn’t feel hungry this time, feeling full off that rare smile she had on her face.

✦ ⎯⎯ㅤִㅤ୭ ୨♡୧ ৎㅤִ     ⎯⎯ ✦

A/N ||| Attention all Bakugo stans : Our favorite boy has won first place in 'Worlds Best Hero' global popularity poll (yippieee) but our journey isn't done yet! Vote for Bakugo in the plus ultra stage using this - link ૮꒰ྀི > . < ꒱ྀིა The winner of this poll will get a new illustration and using that, it will be made into a bronze statue to be displayed at the MHA exhibition in 2025! It's only a 24 hour poll so vote now using the link above! You do not need a account for this so get to voting, plus ultra!

[kiragecko]

On the whole, I agree with this. And the way people are trying to censor books because they think they’re inherently harmful is quite scary. And, I’ve recognized, come to terms with, AND healed from trauma through stories that would definitely be censored by these types of people.

On the other hand, I believe that having years of nightmares about something IS a sign it traumatized you, and several books have had that effect on me. Usually because I didn’t understand what the book was hinting at, and didn’t realize the effect it was having until I started getting depressed, or having panic attacks. A few times, because the book decided it would be fun to have a ‘shocking twist’ involving something gross and gratuitous.

Those books did NOT give me agency in the face of events. And it harmed me to read them.

-

Bridge to Terebithia gutted me. It was shocking, and made me cry, and haunted me for years. But it was also appropriate to where and who I was when I read it. It didn’t traumatize me.

Judy Blume’s books acted like certain experiences were universal to being a girl, and contributed to my sense that there was something wrong and alien about me. But it was the world that actually traumatized me - the books just reinforced what was already there.

The fanfic I read about the Winter Soldier not thinking he was a human? Which was absolutely filled with memories of awful things happening? I actually found that one very healing! I still remember some of the things characters said while they were teaching him how to reclaim his humanity, and use them as self talk during my darkest periods!

But the book I read about a young idealistic king trying to end the cycle of murder and corruption his family and country were stuck in? That decided to throw a twist at me where all his friends were conspiring against him? And ended with him blinded, broken, and struggling to still be positive as the world got worse around him? That one made me feel sick and dissociative for days. I felt betrayed and paranoid. It would have been fine for someone else, but it was a very bad fit for me.

The book where I first encountered sex, which was written from a preteen who ALSO didn’t understand sex’s perspective? That described penetrative sex as a snake coming out of the dude and biting a lady? Trying to figure out what was going on made me confused and freaked out. When I finally DID figure it out, I carried the main character’s fear of sex for years. It messed me up.

The fanfic where Professor X is running a cult and mentally influences Kitty Pryde to get bulimia so he can more easily manipulate her? It drip-fed me information in a way that I didn’t realize I wanted to stay far away until I was stuck in Kitty’s mindset and desperately trying to disconnect.

I think that these stories should be allowed to exist. I think that it’s fine for people to get value from them. I do NOT think they are inherently harmful!

But that doesn’t mean they didn’t cause harm.

-

People can get PTSD from witnessing a car accident. From THINKING that a friend is dead, even if they’re actually fine. The event doesn’t have to happen to them, or be real.

Books can traumatize people. Anything can traumatize a person. Heck, most neurodivergent people end up with mild PTSD just from doing normal things in a world that tells us that noises and lights aren’t physically painful! (Like, actual, diagnosable, PTSD!)

Traumatizing isn’t the same as evil. Traumatizing things are allowed to exist. But even if it feels silly to other people, we can be hurt by imaginary things.

I'm wondering if, as a society who cares about vulnerable people, we could stop saying "traumatize" when we truly mean "upset"?

I am sick of hearing sad books or movies "traumatize" their readers. I simply do not believe that happens. A traumatic experience might be adjacent to books (I have vivid memories of books I was reading around certain experiences and even how the contents of those books affected my processing of the experiences). But it's not caused by the book. And, y'know. The weather is Christofascist Censorship Attempts outside.

Meanwhile from the other side I continue to be surprised at just how badly people fail to understand trauma and traumatic experiences in general. Watering down the term isn't helping. Find other hyperbole to express that The Bridge to Terebithia gutted you, chewed on your heartstrings, and made you cry your first pair of contact lenses right out of your preteen eyes.

[coffeegnomee]

Ooooo you wanna tell me about PrinceZam and Lifesteal lore soo bad 👀👀 (I just started s6 and I'm super interested in it lolol)

Just started season 6. oh me oh my. welcome. I wrote a summary a while ago for s3-5, here it is below.

updated to add the eclipse arc too since i glossed over it last time. and added s6 up to october. 8.5k words.

I didn't hold back on any plot twist/spoilers but like, knowing what happened is very very different from watching it unfold so all videos and vods are well worth watching. but this can give a waypoint as many videos are published months (or years) after the events.

s3 zam made an empire to keep spawn from being grieffed, everyone opposed it because he called it the PrinceZam Empire, they killed him, and he agreed to be executed and banned by Red. He came back for the finale in which vitalasy wanted to revive everyone but then banned himself (or got banned i forget) and keeping everyone unbanned became Zam's job(TM) and he resolved to never give up. After 5 (or so) bases in one week that Spoke leaked every time bc he was secretly still teamed with clownpierce, spoke did a dramatic dialogue with Zam on a hill, "why are you trying to save a world people are actively trying to leave". There was a big war which ended in Zam having another dialogue with Spoke where Zam attacked spoke with a stone ax until spoke continually killed him until he was banned. Spoke got him to give up, spoke won. It was awesome. You can watch Zam's vid on it "i was banned for saving this smp" or the finale streams, both are great recap of s3. (both the spoke dialogues happened in the same vod, it's a really easy watch)

s3 was the best season for yt vids imo, i particularly love clown and branzy's videos on the funhouse, casino, cleansing, and finale vids and if you just watch that you get everything. Everyone had good videos if you start searching channels.

s4 ends with the wormhole, a game breaking glitch that Spoke Vi and Ash found (also Subz was there) and used to completely destroy the server. Before all that the server runs as normal, starting slow with the youtube arc where everyone is making their silly random youtube videos. Zam initially wants to go solo but the joins Team Awesome which is commonly just him Mapicc and Ro but also Spoke and Terrain (iirc). There are many fun shenanigans. a spawn prison, the medusa arc. Around the mid season Team Awesome finds a dupe glitch. They dupe endless gear, god apples, and hearts and get into fights where Mapicc and Zam fight together constantly. this is The Dupe War. There are videos on it, but no streams. It ends with them withering the entirety of spawn, completely annihilating it (there's more to the arc but that is important)

During dupe war Zam and Mapicc thought Spoke was betraying them by orchestrating it with Parrot, turns out it was just Spoke who was orchestrating Everything because part of the wormhole glitch required Spoke to socially engineer Parrot into clicking a sign that would give Ash creative mode. When Ash got creative he loaded his hotbar and the Wormhole Barrel(TM) was brought into the game.

That same day Ash started showing the server the exploits (changing the course of the season DRAMATICALLY). Everything that was going on between the dupe war and this moment got put on pause.

What is everything? Well after the Dupe war Mapicc and Ro were planning on keeping duped items in a stash so they would never have to worry about items. Zam realized he Hated That(TM) bc exploits are unfair. So he left the team dramatically, fought them on the nether roof, and perished fantastically. He then retreated to his sanctuary where he built a castle.

Mapicc finds him at that castle the next day and filled with rage at zam betraying him begins The Castle Arc, fantastic arc, well worth watching as vods on Zam's channel. it's the vod after "the end of team awesome" which is also a great vod. Mapicc torments Zam nearly daily while Zam was also repairing spawn with Subz. Subz, as the finale of his spawn cleanup fights Mapicc and Ro who have become the bbegs of the week, he gets exiled. Zam grows a backbone and ALSO fights them, also looses, and then proceeds to die to Ro 13 more times. This is the Stone Sword Incident.

Left on 2 hearts he does a stream with Clown and Branzy which gets him banned by Mapicc because he had paid Clown one heart to be his protection. So Mapicc thought he still had two. they revive zam and he is left on 3 hearts (or was it 1? I forget. mapicc might've taken two of them back after revival) he turns to his only ally on the server, the only person who came and defended him from mapicc during the castle arc: ItzSubz_.

Subz invited him to his team, the Eclipse Federation. What transpires after here is the most beloved arc in all of lifesteal history, from a fandom perspective. I wrote a whole writeup on why it works so well from a story telling perspective that's one of my first posts on my blog. you can use the #gnome rambles tag to find it easier.

What started as a team, protection, safety from Mapicc, two allies who would come on to fight Mapicc and anyone else whom he got to fight on his side (though subz was more active than vi) turned into a nightmare.

After Ash leaked the wormhole items vi and subz quickly dmed him to meet at the base. Vi (iirc) told him to stop stream and delete the vod, which zam did. Unbeknownst to him, subz accidentally hit go live instead of start recording and for the less than 10 minutes he was live, he and vi implicated themselves as the originators of the wormhole glitch. The secret was out.

By the time they made it to the base to meet with zam they decided to tell zam everything, letting him know that they wanted it to have been a good surprise, something exciting that they could all do together. Vi promised that there was a plan for the items, an arc that he wanted to make happen that he had been planning since the very start of the season. I forget exactly how much they told him, but it was not everything.

Faced with Vi's season long plan, and still not knowing What the plan was, only that it was good, zam agreed to go along with it, trusting subz and vi that they knew what they were doing.

Zam, beyond all reason, had found himself on the very team that was behind the new exploit after just having left Team Awesome over exploits.

He asked if chat could know the plan, and vi and subz both agreed they wanted to keep it secret but that zam could ask off stream. Zam being Zam, could never hide something that huge from chat, didn't want to hide something that huge from chat. So he decided to not know, placing all his trust that Vi would tell him what he needed to know and that everything would be okay.

The doom lifted, for a brief time everything was okay again. But soon enough Vi was ready to start phase 1: a bedrock prison at spawn for the tyrants of the server. Zam didn't like that their team would have the power to imprison people, and he didnt like it was bedrock. He tried to communicate that, and vi and subz both assured him they would only put people in that the server as a whole agreed needed to go in. That helped zam for a short time. i dont remember all the meetings super well, but there were many. one time vi told zam they had "amplified" the glitch. another he said they had a bedrock farm in the end. vi was desperate to keep zam on the team because he loved zam and enjoyed his presence and didnt want the team to fall apart. zam at one point committed fully to the plan and killed himself in a hole to show his commitment (vi also jumped down and also died). the next day they made the prison and the day after zam regretted building out of bedrock. he hated exploits. nothing could shake him from the deep-set hatred that this was unfair for the server. he didnt want to ruin vi's plan, but he didn't know if he could continue supporting it.

around and around he went. changing his thoughts based on what vi said, changing based on subz, changing based on chat, changing based on vi. Feeling trapped, seeing no hope in being understood he roamed the server in despair. filled with the weight that the exploits would get worse in phases 2-5 he shouldered the burden without being able to tell anyone.

Beyond anything else he felt completely indebted to subz and loved subz more than anyone. subz had fought for him and protected him from mapicc, he had taken him in and given him hearts and gear to get back on his feet, he was always there ready to log on and help zam fight or save him when jumped.

Around this time there were many conversations with bacon and planet. They had seen some of the exploits, spoke was leaking them slowly since the prison was built, spawning a warden and endermite that could one tap players, using potions that gave you all the effects in the game. pvp was a thing of the past.

Bacon and Planet were investigating, trying to figure out who was pulling the strings and where the plot might go. Pretty quickly they figured out zam knew a lot, but zam wouldn't tell.

When Vi made the prison, they interviewed him, and planet got so upset that all this plot looked to be was a prison that could be used, not even would be used that he immediately started talking to bacon about getting zam to leave eclipse. he had previously been a proponent of zam sticking it out because being in the thick of content is always good on this server even if you don't love the methods. Zam was ready to leave the team but he was wracked with guilt and the fear of being alone again just like he was after betraying team awesome. they invited him to their team if he left, but he was still hesitant. he cared about subz too much to leave.

A few days later zam one again invited Branzy on, knowing that the next day he would have to make a decision about being on eclipse. There was a meeting scheduled about the next phase tomorrow. Spoke turned branzy into a dolphin with a potion and after the shenanigans, zam asked branzy for advice about what he should do. it's one of my favorite stream moments from s4, branzy approaches the lore with great seriousness and helps zam work through his thoughts to figure out what he wants to do. zam doesn't quite make a decision but has many talking points for the meeting, equipped with new metaphors to explain how he's feeling and how he needs vi to promise change, not just do little things that don't mean anything in the big picture.

At the end of the conversation planet joins call and starts asking zam innocent questions. he finds out about the book that vi once showed zam that had the whole wormhole plan, zam says it's in one of the bases, but not which, and he ends stream soon after. But once stream ends he gets curious to reread what vi wrote so he journeys to the base. Upon arrival though he realizes planet and bacon are both in the area. He sees them through the wall and walks into a room he has never seen before filled with barrels. planet and bacon drag him into a call and show him that the room is filled with every exploit and more, things they hadn't seen yet.

Seeing the extent of where the wormhole would go, and supported (or influenced depending on how you look at it) by planet and bacon, zam finally commits to leaving eclipse. he can't be part of this. this is too much. these exploits are far far worse than anything team awesome did.

So the next day he makes his traitor's requiem. He confronts vi, bacon planet and jaron come through the end portal invis and they kill vi, marking zam's departure from the team. Vi is furious zam didn't come to them, that he would betray so callously and kill him so instantly. Subz resignedly accepts that zam never was going to be able to be a part of the team, he was too against exploits.

Wracked with the pain of betrayal and loosing the person he loved deeply even though he had lied to him, Vi started to embrace the wormhole powers. Through a different glitch he was able to fly in survival, and with the one tap potions he tormented planet in the prison, killing him over and over and giving the heart back. but he insisted that he was not going to use the powers to become evil.

over the next days vi would roam the server using exploits, a ghost on the wind debating what to do with his infinite power. bacon and planet and zam got him in a call to talk about how vi was being a villain and they wanted him to give up the exploits. vi refused to see what they were saying.

but then spoke, lead by parrot and mapicc and ro, took a power play and tried chunk banning vi to end the evil on the server. parrot leaked the plan to vi and vi got out, but once again vi was facing the ridicule of the server for something that he wasn't even wanting to be.

So vi gave up the exploits. summoned the whole server to himself and burned all the items in his echest. but the server didnt believe him for a second. they were convinced he had more exploits hidden in the world. they were convinced he was the villain and were angry he wasn't just doing things with it.

but vi was done. spoke (iirc) killed him and after leaving call vi found himself atop the prison, gazing down at the server he loved, the server that hated him. it was over. he threw himself from its height over and over until he was banned.

after the ban, zam was left listless. he had betrayed eclipse because he feared they would be evil, but vi just banned himself off, sealing into the story that he would not be the villain. he couldn't talk to subz, he was too ashamed. so he became a farmer and lived inside subz's floating islands at spawn.

but one day while he was on subz revived vitalasy. zam wasn't invited but he busied himself at his farm, hoping his old teammates might want to talk to him. But something far far worse was about to happen. a ban message rang through chat. subz was killed by vitalasy. subz left the game.

his world shattered. The one person he cared about was gone. gone and he couldn't even talk to him. couldn't tell him how much he regretted betraying them. he needed to revive subz. right. now. he got vi into a call, a bottle of sunshine, sure it was just a mistake, sure subz was not really gone.

But vi was crying. he didn't explain it all to zam, but subz had brought him back on the server to tour him around their bases. filled with grief vi dragged his feet from location to location. eventually subz brought him to his newest base, and in the corner he could see a room filled with signs spelling out depression. lost, alone, a failed team that he had brought together, now split apart. vi immediately realized what subz was about to do. subz brought him to the end and revealed his masterpiece base, and then told vi to kill him. he wasn't capable of reuniting the team while he was alive, maybe in death vi and zam could reconcile. He was determined to have vi kill him. vi refused for an hour until he finally got subz to promise to return when he needed him most. And he banned him.

vi had zam meet him in the end and faced with that innocent smiling idiot's face, vi had almost no words. subz had left him a book telling him his final wish was for them to reconcile and vi begrudgingly decided to let zam in. he showed zam the end base. zam apologized instantly, wanting nothing more than for everything to be all right. but his focus was completely on reviving subz, almost ignoring vi in his desperation to get subz back. two lost birds.

vi explained that subz wanted to be gone and even if they revived him he wouldn't come back. they agree to be teammed again, and i think it's this zam vod or the next time he talks to vi, but within 30 minutes he's regretting saying yes to everything and wondering if it was the wrong thing to reconcile and get back together with vi. so. still good old princezam.

but it was done. they were reconciled. as the wormhole approached zam reconciled with everyone he had wronged.

but he forgot about pangi. in the wake of vi banning himself zam no longer wanted to do a "trap the gods" idea with pangi since the exploits were over. time and again this season zam had preferred his own plan over pangi's and often fought against him even though the two were friends. even though pangi was always there to help zam with his plans. frustrated at being snubbed, pangi took zam through the course they had made together, ending with the void trap they were going to use to lock the exploiters under the bedrock.

zam jumped in willingly, having taken off all his gear so as to not loose it in the void, but pangi had repaired the bedrock with the bedrock they had stolen from ash. pangi gave a great villain speech and trapped zam in bedrock. zam accepted his fate. so full of regret for all his action this season, this was nothing compared to what he felt he deserved.

And zam broke. he entered his mind and confronted all his past selves. his eclipse self tells him he cant just give up and abandon vi again, not after everything. zam thinks he has hurt vi too much to ever be forgiven. his team awesome (i think) self tells him he should just give up and destroy the server instead of wallowing in self pity.

he kills himself with a water bucket (ooc pangi had dropped it to him so he could get out) and decides to talk to both vi and spoke to figure out what side of the wormhole he would be on. vi isn't available. so he speaks to spoke first.

he meets spoke on a hill just like in s3, and asks to join him in ending the server. spoke reveals that he has not just all the exploits, but op. he gives zam creative mode, shows him custom items he coded, transports a whole chunk of the overworld to the end, gets in a console battle with parrot's admin account and wins. spoke is in complete control of the server.

mapicc was already on spoke's side and so once again devotions are together, fighting side by side just like on team awesome.

zam talks to vi next and iirc doesn't tell him he's already joined spoke, he's aware he has a team secret to keep and either way vi says he doesn't have plans for the finale. i actually dont remember when vi finds out zam is on the wormhole side.

over the next week spoke does prep events for the wormhole, involving inactive server members, mapicc and zam corrupt the world (grass to netherack, wood to basalt) with boots spoke coded for them. devotions wonder if spoke will betray them, they dont like that they're just minions and not equals, spoke isnt giving them actual power, just toys and tricks. they promise to end the server together no matter what happens.

the night before the end zam wonders if he's making the wrong decision again, the chatters fan the flames and he works himself up into second guessing everything. spoke might betray him. planet has found out he's on spokes side and hates him. he's messing everything up again. he was so against exploits and now he put himself on the exploit team.

suddenly he realizes chat is the problem. he's trying to make everyone happy, even chat, and he needs to just decide to do what he thinks he should do. and he decides that he wants to end the server as fast as possible so that subz can return in s4. because it's always been about subz.

the day of the wormhole arrives and about 100 other mcyts join the server to kill parrot, planet, bacon, and jaron. earlier spoke had said if they can survive the wormhole he will give up the exploits and they can save the server before ending it. over the next 48 hours they play a protect the president event.

vi revives subz the first day and suddenly zam is faced with the object of his desires back on this server. they have a final terribly tragic conversation where subz is disappointed in zam for joining spoke, zam cant defend himself because he agrees with subz, vi joins and chews zam out for betraying and tells him if he didn't want to play he should have just logged off. vi and subz are on parrot's side and killing people with leftover exploits vi still had. they leave, and zam even more dejected than ever.

planet decides to live the whole event at 3 hearts despite parrot having gathered 100 over the season. right at the end spoke asks both sides for items to ban and eventually hearts get banned, so planet is stuck at 3. in the final moments he almost gets banned but minute (as a guest) has planet kill him to get a heart again (minute's video on the wormhole was actually really good btw), but mapicc catches up to planet and bans him in the last 10 seconds of the event.

spoke, because the players fought so hard, brings everyone to the control room telling them they can choose to save the server or end it. while the server discusses mapicc and zam message each other and decide to jump in both options at once so that the server has to end. there's a final conversation on the grass where vi says this was the ending he wanted.

the long and complicated season is over.

s5 starts slow, Zam is very much done with being the main character and not much happens for about like 5 months. zam takes a full 3 month break from streaming, but when he returns in january he joins Mapicc and Bacon and they invite Jumper and Pentar to make the Abyss. they start breaking bedrock at spawn and getting players to fall into the void. its a fun and long and shenanigan filled arc that takes a deep turn as themes of players leaving the server start setting in. This season rek left before it started and parrot, poafa, mid, subz, and vi all leave mid way through. lifesteal feels like it's crumbling.

After days of fighting, planet gets zam into a call and asks him why the abyss is doing all of this. zam mentions mulitple things but lands on player activity. planet walks to the void hole and says "if the goal is player activity then, in a way i guess you lost" and then jumps into the void. the ban sound pierces the air announcing planet having been on one heart that whole time.

The abyss is mortified. They did like their idea of player activity but planet was right, just killing memebers made them give up. so they concoct a new plan, a week long scavenger hunt for the rest of the server to complete: if they finish the Abyss will stop voiding all of spawn, if they dont spawn will be destroyed. Minute heads up the opposition in the Foundation.

for multiple 9-12 hour streams zam labors at building the freakinator to destroy 5 layers of bedrock. mapicc joins him most often, usually just sitting in call to keep him company but being there nonetheless. Jumper and Pentar start helping more once the scavenger hunt really starts while bacon joins call to work on the clues. many fun hours of banter and laughter fill the air.

jumper pentar and mapicc take valorant breaks much to zams embitterment. jumper accidentally gets pentar to fall into the void with multiple skulkers of pistons, enraging zam. zam and jumper both are filled with excitement at the future making all of spawn into parkour civilization.

the whole arc zam has to face the concept that he cares more about this project than anyone else on the team, even though the abyss wasn't originally his idea. he has to fight constantly to battle the bitter voices that tell him they don't care about him and are bad teammates. only mapicc stays in the positive light. everyone else drains resources and falls into the void with the pistons he spent hours crafting.

As the scavenger hunt continues (oh day one of the scavenger hunt wemmbu demands 50 hearts or he will orbital strike spawn. foundation and abyss join together to unite the server in stopping him. spoke leaks the orbital coords he got bc he is owner to ash and the foundation take the win at being the one to destroy the canon and spawn trap wemmbu to 2 hearts. though the shot still went off and a large portion of spawn got destroyed despite the server trying to waterlog everything)

the foundation runs through clues faster than the abyss thought they would, so bacon adds some extra steps at the end. minute gets frustrated and decides to log on before the final session starts to try and finish the hunt. zam is planning on breaking the first bedrock to void at 3pm and minute wants to beat him to it.

despite everything, in a mad rush right at the end, the foundation gets the final clue at 2:55pm. they are to give the abyss one task of their choosing. they are in control. they decide the abyss members should die to the void once and never break bedrock again. The players jumped into the void.

But what nobody saw coming, or none dared imagine even when there were signs, was Jumper was secretly on the Foundation's side and leaked the scavenger hunt answers whenever the Foundation got stuck.

All the work, all those pistons, stopped in an instant. The betrayal was one of the most insane things to happen on lifesteal ever. three months of deep cover. actively helping the team. dreaming of parkour civilization together. multiple trust tests and steadfast dedication promised. all lies.

Mapicc immediately tries to kill her, Zam helps but both give up as Minute defends Jumper and both fight them back. There is no resolution to the betrayal. (Clown's video of this arc covers the whole Foundation side and is great)

Mapicc vows to destroy her life, Bacon agrees, Zam is down with it. Leaving Pentar to have the difficult choice: stay on the team and destroy the only member he knew before joining the server, or leave. He leaves. Later he joins Jumper and Minute as a team

Mapicc and Zam try fighting Minute and Jumper over and over but fail again and again.

The Presidency Arc begins, the server elects one person to get legal exploits basically: changing three things about the server. 4C and Reddoons together win, disappointing Mapicc and Zam greatly as red and 4c were extremely inactive and only wanted CaptainSparklez on for one event, removed the heart recipe, and had a third thing so forgettable i dont remember it and it didnt happen.

Basically they stalled out the already stalled progression of the server. Nobody was doing any big arcs since the abyss weeks before, the last arc was soundly destroyed by betrayal and no revenge was possible bc Minute and Jumper were just slightly better pvpers than Mapicc and Zam.

With the captainsparklez event on the horizon, Zam being lower on hearts, and having just died to Minute and Jumper in a fight where he semi-illegally restocked, was called into the principle's office with Ash (owner of s5 with spoke). Ash told him off, and then was reminded that he didn't remove heart crafting recipe, so he did that and told Zam to just kill 4C and Mid if he wanted more hearts.

Once again Ash is changing the trajectory of the server. Zam goes into a moral quandary bc he's kind of evil this season but is he THAT evil to kill two non-pvpers? While they're building? In the middle of the debate Ash logs on again and /msg him why they're still alive. So Zam kills 4c. He feels awful and spirals and goes to his and Pangi's base to think, but upon seeing their bed, realizes he could just farm Pangi off the server. Or just take half his hearts. The idea is so horrible, the depths of darkness so great, that he just starts laughing. and laughing. and laughing. (vod: "an agent of chaos is born")

So begins Zam's Joker arc, incredibly relevant to s6. Throughout the Abyss, Minute had been calling himself batman, and thus became the fixation of the Joker arc.

The presidency had also passed to Minute who had run saying he would do pvp style events but then just added the aether, changed the kit, and added the Blaze and Caves achievement race (BAC). And he was already talking about ending the server in peace.

This upset Mapicc Bacon and Zam, who had become The Players by this time. After consulting with Spoke (bc he always ends the server), they came up with a plan to break up all the teams. Mapicc started reaching out to Clown and Leo to see if they would betray the PMC, their team with Minute. And they came up with the plan to try and steal the presidency from Minute after his term was up (3 weeks, 3 changes) and use it to make the server hardcore, thinking they would finally be able to kill Minute and Jumper.

Zam full on went onto his Joker arc, blowing up builds, having people choose to blow up builds, fight each other, and a host of other Joker inspired moral dilemmas. minute told zam that the reason he wanted to join lifesteal was because he looked up to him for his s3 heroism. (vod: "murder chicken machine") Jumper also had a great yap session with zam at this time ("your president doesn't care about you")

Zam's main tactic was taking all his armor off in front of minute and jumper, taunting them to kill him and break their peaceful ending. If they wanted him to stop destroying the server they could just kill him.

But they refused. over and over.

Then the Blaze and Caves event happened, Minute's final presidency event. whoever got the most achievements from the 900 or so new ones would get a heart cap of 30. Zam being Zam loves small tasks and went on a week of 12 hour streams to get them all, stopping all Joker activities.

In this week Mapicc made fun of Minute for not just killing Zam and over the course of the conversation Minute agreed to bet the presidency bc Mapicc implied that they were just opposing Minute bc Minute stole the presidency from Mapicc bc the vote was rigged after the CaptainSparlez event. If Mapicc could get the majority of the server to vote him out, he would step down.

Wemmbu approached Mapicc and I forget who suggested it first but what came out of it was Wemmbu would pay everyone who voted for him $500, Mapicc wanted Wemmbu to get the presidency bc he thought more people would vote for Wemmbu over him, and then proceeded to convince everyone on the server to vote against minute within like a 2 hour span. (you can watch the entire thing go down live on Zam's vod. it was incredible)

Minute was completely cooked. The presidency was ripped out from under him, Clown and Leo voted against him, everything was rigged from the start while he still believed the server would vote for what was right, not what was interesting, and definitely not for irl money.

Minute's vod "meet the yappers" is a vod of all time.

That Saturday the BAC achievement race was finished and Zam got 30 hearts, Pentar came in second and got 25.

The server got turned to hardcore, and the Players accidentally killed Bacon with an arrow cannon like 5 minutes into it that they were planning on using on the whole server.

With the presidency gone, Pentar, Minute (Brandon), Ash, and Jumper became officially PB(And)J and gave up being the nice guys. They were still self-proclaimed the good guys and they still wanted peace, they just had to kill a few people and then there would be peace on lifesteal.

So they, all four of them, jumped Zam and killed him in a couple minutes flat when zam had threatened to blow up the vitalasy hole, Vi's last place on the server before leaving. It was the classic Joker threat, but he went to actually do it bc Ash was being extra obnoxious in the call. And then got instantly murdered. and Zam was banned.

Then like a week later (iirc?) Jumper asked Mapicc on to talk, she told him she regretted betraying the Abyss, that pb&j wanted to kill people and she just wanted the server to end in peace, and that she wanted Mapicc to kill and ban her so she could end her season on her terms.

It was a trap. Minute shot Mapicc with an arrow cannon. Killing him instantly.

They then got Wemmbu on and used their presidency power that was left over to cancel out his presidency power of immortality (it was just as confusing as that sounds) and killed him instantly.

Wemmbu didn't like that(TM) so he changed the tnt damage to 100 and dropped a nuke on them instantly killing Jumper Ash and Pentar. But that was unfair(TM) (and he lagged the server illegally to do it) so it was undone.

As a result Zam borrowed Pangi's account and Mapic borrowed Spoke's and they were back on to oppose this peaceful ending. Clown and Ro also locked in and were super active in the finale.

Wemmbu's next presidency thing (this was before they killed him. whatever. time moved weirdly in the finale) was the blessings and curses, Zam was pretty much emotionally done with the server, so in a final act of GayJoker flare, blessed Minute with fire res (which was useless bc Minute had 64 notch apples).

Mapicc and Clown were Not Happy with this, Mapicc took it as a betrayal, which upset Zam a lot because his whole thing this season was not betraying his team bc that's all he did s4. So he locked in for the finale. Pangi's account accidentally got banned, so he borrowed Spepticle's account.

Minute and co were not logging on a lot, even though they had a whole meeting about them playing at least a couple of hours a day so The Players could actually try and ban them and it would be a real finale event. Mapicc pulled out Salty Mode and once again got Minute to cave and Jumper and Pentar logged on and they did a 4v3. Clown out general'ed Minute and Minute got banned and Pentar got banned. Speptical logged onto his account to kick Zam off mid fight which was a delightfully great bit of possession control.

Jumper had to survive two days and got Squiddo and Ash to help, the three of them tried chunk banning Clown and Ro and Mapicc (zam got banned by clown so they couldnt use Spep's account to get Mintue back on). Mapicc died bc Squiddo made a mod to tap into Wemmbu's mod from his presidency and she nuked him and he died from an elytra glitch.

Eventually the next day Jumper and co chunk banned everyone, but clown and Ro walked out of it bc you can join and move a bit before you get kicked. Jumper elected to stay canonically in the ban and give up, even though they let the ban despawn by accident and she could log on. She conceded the event.

Everyone went to Branzy's carnival which had been happening in parallel to all of this the past couple months. They celebrate his final moments on lifesteal, and bid adieu to one of lifesteal's most beloved members. He won't be joining season 6.

And then we have s6.

Zam starts the season deciding to never kill a player again. he will just build peacefully at spawn, swearing off violence in the wake of his violence in the joker arc and s5 in general.

within 12 days he is killed by pentar on bacon's suggestion, killed by mapicc 3 times in a row, killed by bacon and planet's trap which they pulled to stop leo from killing him, along with a host of other small moments that almost make zam break.

on the 12th day he tries building a shulker farm for hours and hours. pangi bothers him throughout the whole process and he shoots him with his bow to get him to go away over and over. in a bout of frustration over the farm not working he builds a closet to lock the spirit of the joker in. he tells bacon about the closet and how he has terrible nightmares and the demon in his closet tells him to kill people. eventually he gives up on the farm but later that night he logs on to mess with bacon more. bacon and planet manage to piss him off within a couple of minutes and he again starts using his bow to shoot at them in petty frustration.

but planet takes off all his armor and takes an arrow to the head, popping like a grape. zam got his first kill.

that night he stalks spepticle and is menacing in the distance. he tells spep he wont remember this when he wakes up but spep will.

the next day he's in agony over what he has done. pangi comforts him and tells him its not his fault. zam builds a tree and writes his first oath, swearing to never crit or bow at players ever again.

satisfied that he's learning to control his bloodlust he decides to try and get to 20 hearts from building because mapicc asks him to build him a castle. the next day flame asks him to build him a volcano for 3 hearts which makes him raise the price on mapicc's castle also up to 3 hearts (after two conversations)

at the same time squiddo, 4c, and cube run the peace trials to decide who they will give the mace to. eventually they choose clown because he put his all into it.

as time continues more and more people choose to follow zam in pacifism. woogie swears off violence after mane blows up their base and red kills kab. kab swears off violence after going in a box for a week to process red killing her. pangi swears off violence so people feel comfortable coming to his recording events. zam hates that people are copying him. it was never about making lifesteal peaceful, it was about his own bloodlust.

one day flame comes to spawn during session asking for a 10v1 fight. everyone thinks there has to be a trap, but he denies it. mapicc starts getting people involved for the fight and they get about 5-6 people because zam woogie and pangi all refuse bc pacifism and terrain never pvps and has no gear.

right at the end zam decides to let go of his oath for a day to participate in the fight so flame can do his idea. he wont kill flame but he will crit him. but flame decides there's not enough players and he hears that rek and others will just run if they get low and flame wants to kill them all, not end in running. so he cancels the fight to plan it another day.

everyone disperses and logs off but a bit later wemmbu calls zam back to spawn so he can watch them blow it up. flame is destroying builds to piss off the players so they will want to fight him. zam is horrified and gives himself up as a fight so flame will stop. flame and wemmbu kill him and keep blowing it up because it was never the point. they want a 10v1 not a princezam alone.

flame burns down zam's tree and as the fire consumes the tree zam can only helplessly look on while flame and wemmbu mock him in vc.

Zam almost breaks. But pangi logs on right after and he suddenly realizes he can rebuild spawn over and over from a schematic and nothing is bad at all. Skipping away he starts gaia's hand, a group of players who will help him rebuild spawn and fight flame. He's afraid of getting so involved and so close to fighting because it might make him slip up and break, but if flame burning his tree couldn't make him change he didn't think anything could.

pangi takes it upon himself to talk to flame, giving him lite therapy to get him to see that people take time to build and building is enjoyable by building a house with him. flame begrudgingly builds the house thinking it's dumb the whole time. but pangi gets him to agree to not blow up spawn anymore and pagni will organize flame's fight for him. but minutes later wemmbu logs on and starts blowing up mapicc's castle. pangi is helpless to stop him because of his pacifism and he's pissed that flame can't control his teammates. he leaves telling flame to stop wemmbu or the fight is off. minutes later again flame calls him back to the house they built and wemmbu has blown it up. flame is completely dejected and feels like he cant stop wemmbu and also that it isn't his problem to fix. pangi gives him one final chance, but he's at the end of his rope. but they leave agreeing to get flame the fight.

zam gets into mccr and leaves the server for this week to practice, during his absence the fight happens, but right as the 10 people stand together in a pre-fight pep talk mapicc and spoke tnt minecart the whole circle, killing everyone. the players are pissed and refuse to fight again. mapicc says its because wemmbu blew up his castle, and that flame needs to kill wemmbu and he can have his fight. mapicc and wemmbu end up fighting and bc mapicc was on his phone hotspot he starts to loose so he runs from the fight. in retaliation the server griefs his castle, enemies and friends together.

after the cart incident zam logs on to get updated, pangi and mapicc both hate how flame is bullying the server into getting his fight and they promise to stop flame.

in the ashes of his tree, zam no longer has an oath, so he writes a new one that focuses on refusing to kill and refusing to use violence to solve his problems. he's emboldened by his idea to rebuild spawn over and over whenever flame destroys it, convinced he will outlast him.

flame logs on and zam gets him to admit he can't control wemmbu and also cant betray wemmbu bc wemmbu has something over him that will ruin him. zam this time promises to get flame his fight if he can convince wemmbu to stop blowing up spawn. he logs off to win mccr the following weekend, and the day he returns flame has decided to do his fight during session and uses 1000 dogs to aid him.

also while he was gone kab killed planet twice, almost banning him but then gave back the hearts.

zam is left listless, there is nobody to fight. he builds a field of daisies to frolic in. he doesn't know what he will do. where his journey will take him. but for now he's content. he has completely become the pacifist.

days later mapicc calls him to his castle and reveals that he's been stalking him for months and trying to get him to break and start killing. it has obviously been unsuccessful. at one point about a month before he had taken off his armor and started attacking zam and zam still refused to hit him, only doing it accidentally before running away and getting out. mapicc offers him hearts if he kills him and zam easily refuses. they end the arc teammates rather than enemies.

with nothing going on in the server, bacon decides that while mapicc prefers having zam as a friend, he prefers having zam as an enemy and so he choses to join wemmbu to help guide him to do more interesting arcs. wemmbu takes him in and same day kab leaks spep's location and wemmbu kills spep with bacon in tow and the team starts to form.

that same day bacon starts training kab to learn to escape fights, during it kab sets her bed in front of him. a little later mane logs on and kills kab bc they have a feud going on since the start of the season, and then finds that bed and kills her again. kab immediately thinks bacon betrayed her and sends hannah after him to kill him, he dies in one hit because he's on 4 hearts and then dies again trying to get his stuff back and is overall rather pissed at kab and hannah because he didn't leak the bed. they get wemmbu on and update him and bacon refuses to team if kab doesn't give the heart back. it ends unresolved but a couple days later kab gives bacon the hearts and the california girls becomes a team (name will come later).

zam thinks bacon is being fishy so he investigates him but wemmbu leaks pretty quickly that they're a team. but then wemmbu gets hannah to kill poafa at spawn twice and zam can do nothing but watch and give poafa two of his own hearts. he's left with nothing to do and no ideas of how to fight wemmbu without fighting.

mapicc drops his stalking video and then dies to wemmbu in a 1v1 and zam logs on in time to see him die. bc of both things he's sent into a reflection turmoil over who he is on this server. mapicc has got him feeling like the team awesome days and it scares him. who do the players on the server view him as? he realizes independence was nice, but it's also isolating and he's all alone. he resolves to find teammates. but even so he doesn't have options he likes at all.

then one day bacon revives planet, and wemmbu kills planet twice and all the members of the server are too afraid of wemmbu to attack him and protect planet. zam is crushed but still doesn't know what to do. he gives planet hearts from his own hotbar, but he's running low and he vowed to not kill and he doesn't want to slip and go down a route that will make him evil again.

then while musing over ideas he flies to spawn and sees derap and mid, touching down he intends to chat, but derap kills mid, banning her instantly. horrified zam asks him why but derap just says it's because there were no repercussions to his actions. that word sticks in zam's brain and he realizes wemmbu has never had to face any sort of repercussions for his actions.

bacon and mapicc log on and zam shares his realization and him and mapicc decide to use zam as bait to get wemmbu into a fight where mapicc and spoke can kill wemmbu with zam as support (not using strength). they get the fight, flame joins in, but mapicc and spoke both die and zam gets out. zam, in post fight talking with chat admits that he's felt more happy while fighting than he has most of the season. he starts to very seriously consider changing his oath to allow fighting, but he doesn't want to do it by his own choice so he asks poafa and kab on.

the poafa conversation is very dear to me, zam admits that the whole reason he did pacifism was because of the "chicken murder machine" conversation with minute s5 where minute said he was inspired by zam s3. Zam has been wanting to reconnect with who he was in season 3 so he swore off fighting and vowed to protect the server at all costs. poafa gently helps him see he's not fighting on fair ground and it wouldn't be bad to fight. that he is capable of looking at the reasons he's fighting and choosing to not go too far.

he talks to kab, and feels good enough to choose a new title, pacifism never fit, but first derap comes back asking what the heck happened because he saw the mapicc and spoke death messages and zam and mapiccs banter with flame after the fight so he knows zam fought. zam admits what he said earlier changed everything and that he is going to fight from now on.

after derap leaves he writes a third oath, this one labeling him a protector of spawn, and collects a sword "galaxia, the protector sword" plus a bunch of strength pots from a barrel right by leo's void hole that he has stashed a couple of days ago as he thought over this arc change. (this is the vod PRIDE)

that brings it to 10/15/24

since then there's been small things that may or may not be relevant as the season continues to unfold. zam is still in his protector arc. mane has taken up the mantle of destroying spawn. a couple weekends ago there was a massive battle for spawn trying to kill mane once so he would stop. it all failed. minute became a legend for trying to 1v1 mane and lost but maybe won the ideological battle. mapicc's team built an orbital cannon to use against mane and involved zam. devotions have had incredible lore. kab is doing something with zam that who knows how will end. derap is doing lore with zam.

we are firmly in the mid season where all early things matter and we're establishing all the relationships that will matter for the end of season lore. and this mane spawn destruction may very well be the mid season economic miracle like the cleansing, dupe war, and abyss were in previous seasons. We'll see if anyone does anything bigger after him. Seasons usually end around may/june so there's still plenty of time to go unless they decide to go rogue.

[mymegrokosmos]

"josh, I can't keep doing this."

you sighed, rubbing a hand over your face as you glanced across the small table at your best friend. he offered you a sad smile, reaching over to take your hand.

"it's like he just doesn't care anymore and I'm so tired of being the only one fighting for this relationship."

joshua slid your cup closer and leaned back in his seat. "then don't."

you blinked, sipping the coffee and curling your fingers around the warm mug. "what do you mean?"

"I mean," he shrugged. "stop fighting. if he isn't willing to put in the effort then you'll know it's over and if he is... then maybe there's something there left to save and you two just need to sit down and talk about it again."

you considered his words. "I don't know. I think... that maybe we moved to fast and he just isn't ready to love me."

your best friend took your hand again. "like I said, stop pulling all the weight in the relationship and find out for yourself. if that's true, then he's missing out, but at least you'll know for sure instead of always wondering."

you squeezed his hand. "maybe you're right."

"I usually am."

his silly grin had you smiling and you knew that at the end of the day, however this went, you'd be okay. you nodded.

"I'll give it a try."

...

it didn’t even take him a week notice the difference in you. dinner was still waiting for him when he came home late but it was packed into the fridge in a container, cold, and you were already in bed.

you were still there but you weren't really present. you responded when he spoke to you and you listened when he had something to say but you weren't engaged. you kissed him goodbye every morning but your heart wasn't in it.

you used to reach for him, whine at him to stay an extra five minutes, plead for one more kiss before he left. now he was lucky if you even mumbled goodbye or left him a lukewarm cup of coffee when you woke up first and made a fresh pot while you were showering.

"angel?"

"yes?"

he frowned at the lack of nickname when you blinked up from your book to look at him.

"did I do something?"

you set your book down, folding the corner of the page and sitting up. "what do you mean?what's going on?"

he ran a hand through his hair. "I don't know, you tell me. first you start treating me like a stranger and now you don't even use pet names for me. what happened to hannie? baby? to love and darling and saying hello when I come home?"

you sighed. "jeonghan."

he shook his head. "no, see, there you go again. it's like you're falling out of love right in front of me."

you met his eyes. "now you know how I've felt for the last six months." you got up, picking up your half empty mug of tea and carrying to the kitchen.

his footsteps followed. "wait, you can’t just say that and then walk away from me. what do you mean?"

you set your mug in the sink and leaned back against the counter. "it feels like you checked out of our relationship a long time ago. I know work is important, but it's felt like the only priority of yours for a while now. you come home late every day, you forget plans, you blow me off for your friends, you don't answer calls or texts even to say you can’t talk you'll get back to me later."

you shrugged, looking up to meet his eyes.

"it's felt like you had better things to do and other places to be for months. you barely even notice I'm here unless you want something and it's kind of exhausting being the only one holding any of this together."

you bit your lip. it felt harsh but it needed to be said. jeonghan's eyes were sad as he stepped closer, shuffling his way over to you slowly like you'd run or slip away if he moved faster.

you leaned into his touch as he cupped your cheeks in his hands, thumbs brushing over your skin and forehead resting on yours. you sighed softly, melting and wrapping your arms around his waist as your eyes fluttered shut.

"why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I tried. you were always busy or too tired. you kept saying we'd talk about it later and we never did. eventually I got sick of being brushed off so I just stopped bringing it up."

one hand slid down to rub your back, holding you closer against his chest. "I'm sorry angel. I didn't realize it was getting that bad."

you nuzzled your cheek against his shoulder. "I just wanted to know if you were over this so I could figure out if I should move on or if there was still an us in the picture."

he pulled back at that. "there's still an us. there's still this us." he lifted your chin, eyes locked to yours as he spoke. "we're still together, and we're staying together. I'm going to fix this."

you smiled softly as his thumb brushed over your bottom lip. "that's all I wanted, hannie. I just need you to try. to feel like you still want this, want me."

he leaned in to brush his lips over yours, the barest hint of a kiss, breath ghosting over your skin. "I still want this. I'll always want this angel. want you."

you took his face in your hands. "that's all I needed to know. josh was right."

he blinked. "josh? about what? you talked to shua about us?"

you nodded, hands sliding down to rest against the sides of his neck. "I needed someone who would listen."

the hand on your waist tightened and he pressed closer. "that person should have been me."

"yeah," you kissed his nose, leaning up a little to reach. "but it wasn't."

"well, then that's where we should start."

you looked up at your boyfriend, head still leaning on his shoulder. "mm, that would probably help."

he kissed your forehead. "I don't mind that you talked to shua. you should have a support system, but maybe we can both work on being better at communicating? don't let me brush you off if it's important, and I'll try to make more time to sit down and talk with you about things."

you nodded, holding out a hand. "deal."

he linked your pinkies, lacing your fingers after the promise and kissing your fingers. "we're okay?"

you kissed his neck softly. "we still need to sit down and hash some things out, but yeah. we're going to be. if you'd still like that."

"I would." he held you for a minute, just pressing little kisses to your face as you played with the ends of his hair. "after we wrap this comeback, I'm taking some time off, and we'll go on a little trip."

"just the two of us?"

"just the two of us."

"I love you hannie."

he squeezed you tightly in reply. "I love you too, angel. forever, okay?"

[marypsue]

I was asked for recommendations because of this post, and here are a handful:

The Wicker Man (1973): The quintessential folk horror viewing experience, this movie is exactly as good as everybody always says it is. The soundtrack alone is worth the watch. Has a Wonderland-esque quality, where the main character is thrust into a world where everything he thinks he knows is turned topsy-turvy, and everybody around him seems to be determined to irritate and confuse him into an early grave. If you haven't been spoiled for the ending yet, try not to be before you give it a watch.

House / Hausu (1977): This movie was made in Japan, so most people call it Hausu, but the title card styles it as 'House' in English and has a voiceover that says "House!" at the same time. This is a surrealistic, almost cartoony psychedelic trip of a movie, where characters are named after the archetypes they fall into and special effects are added with hand-drawn animation onto film. Starting out like a parody of slice-of-life high school dramas and quickly getting weird with it, it could be silly and campy, and in some places it is, but I also found it creepy and psychologically unsettling in a way that sneaks up on you and gets right under your skin.

Halloween (1978): John Carpenter's original is a classic for a reason. Unlike many entries in the inescapable trend for masked killers cutting up co-eds that it inspired, this one is a moody, atmospheric, tense suspense thriller broken up by sharp, sudden explosions of violence. This is one of my all-time favourite horror movies and one that I go back to over and over.

Suspiria (1977): This movie is a candy-coloured confection of spun-sugar broken glass, cotton-candy razor wire, and raspberry-syrup blood. The aggressive use of the Goblins' creepily enchanting theme song nearly made me turn this one off in the first few minutes, but I stuck with it and I'm so glad I did. This is one you want to watch if you're looking for a Grimm fairy tale updated into the modern day (in 1977), built around a series of baroque and dramatically stagey murders.

The Haunting of Julia / Full Circle (1977): 1977 was, apparently, a good year for horror. The Haunting of Julia, or Full Circle, depending on the country of release, is a psychological ghost story with an absolutely gorgeous set and soundtrack. Is Julia really being haunted by a ghost, or just her own guilt? By the end of the movie, you may still not know for sure. This one is truly a horror movie for those of us who grew up on the 90s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden movies. (Just bear in mind that the abdominal thrust manoeuvre for helping choking victims, popularised by Dr. Henry Heimlich, wasn't common public knowledge until after an info campaign in the early 80s.)

Let's Scare Jessica To Death (1971): This is such a surreal nightmare of a movie that in the end, you may end up questioning whether any of the violence actually happened, or whether its perpetrator was really who it seemed to be. Don't go into this one for the plot (it doesn't make a whole lot of sense), go into it for the imagery and the slow ominous rising dread (and the possibility of ancient immortal vampires).

I've also got Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) on my list to watch.

There's something about seventies horror that reminds me of live theatre, actually. The sets and costumes are often cheap, and when it comes to period pieces, more 'inspired by' than accurate; the makeup is big and visible; even when the effects are really good, the blood is usually unnaturally red. The acting tends toward the broad and stagey.

And yet, it's also clear that realism is not the goal. Rather, the movie works to draw you in to a unified fiction, to get you to share in its nightmare. The best seventies horror I've seen has a dreamlike, Vaseline-lensed quality, a sense that it doesn't matter whether or not everything that happens in the movie is likely or even possible in real life. We've stepped outside of real life into a self-contained bubble with its own logic and its own sense, a dark fairy tale where the corpses of young girls might transmute into hares or eternally hungry floating heads, or the night of All Hallows might summon a stalking, unkillable masked evil from the past, or a ballet studio might be entirely controlled by witches. Even the lowest-budget, most exploitative Hammer flicks don't escape the touch of that dreaminess, that velvety, enfolding unreality. The movie suggests a world, and we, if we are wise, gladly succumb to the power of that suggestion.

[redgoldsparks]

November Reading and Reviews by Maia Kobabe

I post my reviews throughout the month on Storygraph and Goodreads, and do roundups here and on patreon. Reviews below the cut.

Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics by Olufemi O. Taiwo read by Jamie Lincoln Smith 

This is a short read (3 hours in audio) and surprised me with its easily understood analogies and approachable language. The beginning idea is that of "elite capture"- the problem, experienced in many countries which receive foreign aid, of money or other resources meant for the general public being siphoned off or outright stolen by the class of elite citizens who are tasked with managing and distributing that aid. Táíwò then explains how this problem is seen in other social and political areas, including identity politics, specifically in whose voices get heard (and whose voices even get into the room to be heard in the first place). Táíwò is Nigerian-American, and included many examples from outside of the US, as well as referencing Black feminist movements from within the US. I was glad I read this and will definitely be taking some of the ideas from it away with me when I think about other things. I will also be keeping an eye out for other works by this author.

The Cat from Our World and the Forgotten Witch vol 1 by Hiro Kashiwaba 

In this isekai manga, a cat from Earth is summoned into a fantasy world by an older witch with a tragic backstory. The witch is annoyed that the "guardian beast" she summoned seems very lazy and doesn't follow orders, while the cat is confused about its new surrounding and dislikes the food it's being offered. Through book one, pieces of their respective histories are revealed, and they begin to trust each other. The art is very cute and the story is very silly; I'm not sure how deep the cat and witch's relationship can really become if they are never able to verbally communicate. (Also, I found it a little unbelievable that the cat did not try to eat the witch since she is the size of a mouse in comparison, but I realize I need to suspend my disbelief). I will probably continue on with the series to see what happens next.

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K Le Guin 

I chipped away at this short story collection, slowly, over about 4 months. It definitely didn't grab me as strongly as the previous Le Guin story collection I read years ago (Five Ways to Forgiveness). But what I liked about this one is that each story contains a short preface by the author, and they are arranged in chronological publication order, and span about 10 years of Le Guin's writing career (from 1963-1972). So the volume serves somewhat as a retrospective. The stories that stood out to me here include "Semley's Necklace", "April in Paris", "Winter's King" (set in the same world as The Left Hand of Darkness), "Nine Lives", and "The Stars Below". I'm always interested in what shorter ideas novelists play around with, and I also plan to work my way through Le Guin's entire body of work eventually so I'm glad to have read this one.

Please Be My Star by Victoria Grace Elliot 

Erika has been called creepy in the past for her tendency of liking things Too Much, for getting crushes on people she doesn't even know, for building alters to her obsessions. She starts at a new high school for her senior year without much hope of making friends. Quickly, she falls for a tall, handsome boy, Christian, who is also in the drama club. In an attempt to get closer to him, Erika writes a whole one-act play with the hope he will star in it. What she didn't account for was how much time you end up spending with someone during rehearsals, and what it might be like to get to know your crush for real. I really enjoyed this pop culture-infused teen rom-com, the little kpop easter eggs, the clear aesthetic references of mid-90s and early-2000s manga. Silly and sweet and poignant! Can't wait to see what this author does next.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, read by Katie Leung and George Weightman 

In the near future, Britain appropriates a tool that allows them to create doors through time. For unclear reasons, they decide to bring multiple people forward from their historical eras to see if it is possible for them to live in and acclimate to a time outside of their own. The project chooses people very shortly before the time in which they would have met their deaths in their original timeline, in hopes that removing those due to die will not mess up the flow of history. The main character of this story is an unnamed ministry worker, a mixed-race linguist, promoted to the role of "bridge" for one of the historical expats; she moves into a small government-owned flat with Graham Gore, a man yanked from 1847 and an early grave as part of the doomed Terror expedition. Her job is to answer all of his questions, fill him on current attitudes and social norms, and to observe him very closely and report everything back to her handler. Gore is an intriguingly self-contained man with a dry sense of humor; after an initial period of extreme shock, he develops a keen sense of curiosity about the world in which he now has his second chance at life. Our main character develops, maybe inevitably, intense feelings for her object of study. I loved the writing style of this book; full of clever metaphors and delightful little turns of phrase ("he looked confused, as if handed and egg and told to hatch it"; "it was a dull toothache of a day"). The humor of the story really worked for me- there is something just inherently ridiculous in having to explain cell phones, modern dating, and germ theory to a man from the Victorian era. There is an undercurrent of danger, suspicion, and tragedy underpinning the slice-of-life bulk of the plot, which kept me hooked. Unfortunately, I did think the thriller/action sequence in the final quarter was the weakest section of the book, but I still really enjoyed it overall and I will definitely be keeping an eye out for what this author publishes next.

Artificial: A Love Story by Amy Kurzweil 

This long, thoughtful, meditative comic unfolds the story of a family driven by creativity and invention, traits which have both saved and consumed their lives. The author's grandfather, Fredic, was a Jewish musician and conductor living in Vienna before WWII; his talent provided the connection he needed to flee to the US on the eve of war. He married and had two children before dying young. His son, Ray, became an inventor whose early experiments in machine learning and machine generated art and music, as well as various robotics, proceeded much of the invention we see today. In middle-age, Ray became obsessed with the idea of typing up all of his father's letters and journals and turning them into an AI chat-bot which he and his daughter could communicate with. Whether you find this meaningful or monstrous will depend a lot on your own personal relationship with AI. Honestly, I struggled to understand why someone would feel they could know a deceased loved one better by chatting with them through an algorithm (owned by an outside tech company, mediated by human and machine decisions) than by simply... reading the journals and letters. Ray's desire to create a digital simulacrum of his father, dead for fifty years, felt motivated by unprocessed childhood grief and folly. My understanding is that the majority of this book was written before our current Chat-GTP dominated era, so there is no discussion of how the majority of AI programs available today are built on stolen creative work and are already straining our energy grids and water resources. (Google recently proposed building seven new nuclear reactors, simply to power its AI). Please know that the comic does delve into more than this one topic; there are thoughts on the meaning of life, of health, death, immortality (through art or AI); on inherited family neurosis and memory. I think many people will find much to enjoy in this book. I simply found myself in such strong philosophical disagreement with so many of the ideas expressed by Ray that it was hard for me to focus on some of the other threads of the narrative. I would still recommend checking out the book if the themes seem interesting to you!

Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown

I realized, about a third of the way into this book, that I picked it up wanting a book primarily about activism, and instead was reading a book primarily about pleasure. I think the book I wanted maybe was one that would have been titled "Sustainable Activism" or maybe "Joyful Activism". After I re-framed my expectations, there was a lot of value in this collection. I liked how it was composed of many different short sections by a very diverse array of authors. I liked how many of the authors seemed to know each other, to have worked at overlapping organizations, to be friends. It gave me the sense of a whole network of people working to make the world a more equitable and pleasurable place. I enjoyed the interview with the owner of a sex toy shop; with an indigenous activist and comedian who protested at Standing Rock, and with two sisters on the theme of burlesque as liberation. Many of the sections that focused on pussy power/sex acts spoke to me less; as an aromantic, asexual person, sex is just not one of the main avenues of pleasure in my life. My suggestion is to treat this book like a buffet, reading the chapters speak to you and skipping the ones that don't.

Love On The Other Side by Nagabe 

I picked this up after enjoying Nagabe's other short comic collection, The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms. This one leans closer into horror themes, including several stories in which children are at risk of being dismembered and eaten by monstrous beings who control their physical space. The majority of the stories are of a relationship between a child and a nonhuman creature, whether that is a just a large animal (a lion, a massive crow), a half-human/half-animal, or a creature composed mostly of claws, teeth, and darkness. It's honestly too unsettling for my personal preference but the stories are striking.

Transgender History by Susan Stryker, read by Emily Cauldwell (2018 revised edition)

This book is accessible and fairly short, but provides a rich overview of the history of trans people in public in the United States from the 1850s until the first Trump administration. Stryker outlines the increasing awareness of trans people and trans issues; the rise and fall of many different organizations and publications over the past century; the building of and challenges to medical resources and healthcare access. Two overarching threads are the relationship of trans activists to the wider gay, bi, and lesbian liberation movements, and the views of trans people within feminist thought. There were many familiar people and places here (Marsha P Johnson, Silvia Rivera, Compton's Cafeteria, the GLBT Historical Center, Lou Sullivan, Brandon Teena) and also many who were new to me (Vanguard, Reed Erickson, Dr Harry Benjamin, the NTCU, Beth Elliot). Definitely recommend it as a great starting place on trans history- look for the revised 2018 edition, which also has a nice audiobook.

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 1 by Sumiko Arai translated by Ajani Oloye 

Aya is a pretty, popular high school girl whose only unusual trait is her taste in retro western rock and indie music. Her love of this music leads her into a CD shop where she develops a bit of crush on the cute dark haired boy who works behind the counter. Little does she know that this "boy" is one and the same as the girl she sits next too in school! Mitsuki has always marched to the beat of her own drum; she's loved rock, dressed mostly in all black boys clothes, and struggled to find anyone who shares her interests her whole life. I LOVED the art in this comic, and I'm already so hooked on the sweet, nuanced friendship (or more?) between these little alternative teens.

[discoscoob]

sliding our favourite silly fbi agent johnny utah into your ask box rn

- ghcstpyre

I had a lot of fun with this one 😂

Bisexual king! He was so into Bohdi and Bohdi knew it too. “You want me so bad it’s like acid in your mouth.” There’s no heterosexual explanation for that line followed by Johnny Utah screaming “fuck it!” as he launches himself out of an airplane after him sans parachute. (Side note: I love romcoms that end in an airport chase where the main character races to the airport in a desperate rush hoping to catch them before they get on the plane so they can declare their love. Why is that literally that in this movie?)

Hear me out! Keanu in The Replacements is Johnny Utah after he quit the FBI. Just this shot of him all wet in his T Shirt screams Johnny Utah in the opening credits of Point Break to me. He quit the FBI, bought himself a boat and then even got to go back to his routes and play some football? They’re the same! This is what happened to Johnny after the movie. Gif from Pinterest.

He spent a year travelling the globe hunting down Bohdi, it broke down his relationship with Tyler and consumed him. He kind of lost his identity, throwing away his FBI badge was kind of the best thing he ever did. He didn’t go straight back to America, he did some more travelling and developed his own identity. He really did enjoy being around water though, so that’s why when he eventually returned to America he decided to buy himself a boat and live on it.

He would’ve probably settled into a coaching job, maybe at a high school where you work in the English department or the art department.

To scratch the detective itch, he might occasionally delve into unsolved cases in his free time. He obviously doesn’t have access to the files or anything but maybe you get involved too, the pair of you becoming amateur detectives or start running a P.I. business.