#this story should not go here but i am living my truth so here we go:

[suddenrundown]

famously j2 dont even like each other anymore. dan and phil on the other hand

[acourtofquestions]

🚨 SPOILERS🚨

Kingdom of Ash Chapter 50

Rowan's hands tightened on Aelin's shoulders as the words settled into her, hollow and cold.

"Maeve is a Valg queen?" he breathed.

Aelin said nothing. Couldn't find the words. Her power roiled. She didn't feel it.

Nesryn nodded solemnly. "Yes. The kharankui told us the entire history."

And so Nesryn did as well. Of how Maeve had somehow found a way into this world, fleeing or bored with her husband, Orcus. Erawan's elder brother. Of how Erawan, Orcus, and Mantyx had torn apart worlds to find her, Orcus's missing wife, and only halted here because the Fae had risen to challenge them. Fae led by Maeve, whom the Valg kings did not know or recognize, in the form she had taken.

The life she had crafted for herself. The minds of all the Fae who had existed that she had ripped into, convincing them that there had been three queens, not two. Including the minds of Mab and Mora, the two sister-queens who had ruled Doranelle. Including Brannon himself.

"The spiders claimed," Nesryn went on, "that even Brannon didn't know. Even now, in the Afterworld, he doesn't know. That was how deep Maeve's powers went into his mind, into all their minds. She made herself their true queen."

The words, the truth, pelted Aelin, one after another.

Elide's face was white as death. "But she fears the healers." A nod toward Yrene. "She keeps that owl, you said—an enslaved Fae healer-should the Valg ever discover her." For that was the other piece of it. The other thing Nesryn had revealed, Chaol and Yrene adding in their own accounts. The Valg were parasites. And Yrene could cure their human hosts of them. Had done so for Princess Duva. And might be able to do with so many others enslaved with rings or collars. But what had infested Duva ... A Valg princess.

Aelin leaned back into her chair, her head resting against the solid wall of Rowan's body.

His hands shook against her shoulders. Shook as he seemed to realize what, exactly, had ripped into his mind. Where Maeve's power had come from that allowed her to do so. Why she remained deathless and ageless, and had outlasted any other. Why Maeve's power was darkness.

"It is also why she fears fire," Sartaq said, jerking his chin to Aelin. "Why she fears you so."

And why she'd wanted to break her. To be just like that enslaved healer bound in owl form at her side.

"I thought—I managed to cut her once," Aelin said at last. That quiet, ancient darkness pushed in, dragging her down, down, down-" I saw her blood flow black. Then it changed to red." She blew out a breath, pulling out of the darkness, the silence that wanted to devour her whole. Made herself straighten. Peer at Fenrys.

"You said that her blood tasted ordinary to you when you swore the oath." The white wolf shifted back into his Fae body. His bronze skin was ashen, his dark eyes swimming with dread. "It did."

Rowan growled, "It didn't taste any different to me, either."

"A glamour-like the form she maintains," Gavriel mused.

Nesryn nodded. "From what the spiders said, it seems entirely possible that she would be able to convince you that her blood looked and tasted like Fae blood."

Fenrys made a sound like he was going to be sick. Aelin was inclined to do the same.

And from far away—a memory-that-was-not-a-memory stirred. Of summer nights spent in a forest glen, Maeve instructing her. Telling her a story about a queen who walked between worlds.

Who had not been content in the realm in which she'd been born, and had found a way to leave it, using the lost knowledge of ancient wayfarers. World-walkers.

Maeve had told her. Perhaps a skewed, biased tale, but she'd told her. Why? Why do it at all? Some way to win her-or to make her hesitate, should it ever come to this?

"But Maeve hates the Valg kings," Elide said, and even from the silent, drifting place to which Aelin had gone, she could see the razor-sharp mind churning behind Elide's eyes. "She's hidden for this long. Surely she wouldn't ally with them."

"She ran at the chance to get hold of a Valg collar," Fenrys said darkly. "Seemed convinced that she could control the prince inside it."

Not only through Maeve's power, but because she was a demon queen.

Aelin forced herself to take another breath. Another. Her fingers curled, gripping an invisible weapon.

Lorcan had not uttered a word. Had done nothing but stand there, pale and silent. As if he'd stopped being in his body, too.

"We don't know her plans," Nesryn said.

"The kharankui have not seen her for millennia, and only hear whisperings carried by lesser spiders. But they still worship her, and wait for her return."

Chaol met Aelin's stare, his gaze questioning.

Aelin said quietly, "I was Maeve's prisoner for two months."

Utter silence in the tent. Then she explained—all of it. Why she was not in Terrasen, who now fought there, where Dorian and Manon had gone.

Aelin swallowed as she finished, leaning into Rowan's touch. "Maeve wished me to reveal the location of the two Wyrdkeys. Wanted me to hand them over, but I managed to get them away before she took me. To Doranelle. She wanted to break me to her will. To use me to conquer the world, I thought. But it perhaps now seems she wanted to use me as a shield against the Valg, to guard her always." The words tumbled out, heavy and sharp. "I was her captive until nearly a month ago." She nodded toward her court. "When I got free, they found me again."

Silence fell again, her new companions at a loss. She didn't blame them.

Then Hasar hissed, "We'll make the bitch pay for that, too, won't we?"

Aelin met the princess's dark stare. "Yes, we will."

A Valg queen.

That's who had held his Fireheart. What sort of power had tried to break into her mind.

What power had broken into Rowan's mind.

All their minds, if she could glamour her blood to look and taste ordinary.

He felt the tension rising in Aelin, a raging storm that nearly hummed into his hands as he gripped her shoulders.

Yet her flames made no appearance. They hadn't shown so much as an ember these weeks, despite how hard they'd trained. Occasionally, he'd spy Goldryn's ruby gleaming while she held it, as if fire glowed in the heart of the stone. But nothing more. Not even when they'd tangled in their bed on the ship, when his teeth had found that mark on her neck.

Elide surveyed them all, their silence, and said to their new companions, "Perhaps we should determine a plan of action regarding tomorrow's battle." And give them time, later tonight, to sort through this colossal mess.

Chaol nodded. "We brought a trunk of books with us," he said to Aelin. "From the Torre. They're all full of Wyrdmarks." Aelin didn't so much as blink, but Chaol finished, "If we get through this battle, they're yours to peruse. In case there's anything in them that might help." Against Erawan, against Maeve, against his mate's terrible fate. Aelin just vaguely nodded.

So Rowan forced himself to shove away the shock and disgust and fear, and focus upon the plan ahead. Only Gavriel seemed able to do the same, Fenrys staying where he was, and Lorcan just staring and staring at nothing.

Aelin remained in her chair, simmering.

Roiling.

They planned it quickly and efficiently: they would return with Chaol and Yrene to the keep, to help with the fighting tomorrow. The khaganate royals would push from here, Nesryn and Prince Sartaq leading the ruks, and Princess Hasar commanding the foot soldiers and Darghan cavalry. A brilliantly trained, lethal group. Rowan had already marked the Darghan soldiers, with their fine horses and armor, their spears and crested helmets, while they'd strode for this tent, and breathed a sigh of relief at their skill. Perhaps the last sigh of relief he'd have in this war. Certainly if the khagan's forces hadn't yet decided where they would take this army afterward. He supposed it was fair-so many territories were now in Morath's path-but when this battle was over, he'd make damn sure they marched northward. To Terrasen.

But tomorrow-tomorrow they'd hammer Morath's legion against the keep walls, Chaol and Rowan leading the men from inside, picking off enemy soldiers.

Aelin didn't volunteer to do anything. Didn't indicate that she'd heard them.

And when they'd all deemed the plan sound, along with a contingency plan should it go awry, Nesryn only said, "We'll find you ruks to carry you back to the keep," before Aelin stormed into the frigid night, Rowan barely keeping up with her.

No embers trailed her. Mud did not hiss beneath her boots.

There was no fire at all. Not a spark.

As if Maeve had snuffed out that flame.

Made her fear it.

Hate it.

Aelin cut through the neatly organized tents, past horses and their armored riders, past foot soldiers around campfires, past the ruk riders and their mighty birds, who filled him with such awe he had no words for it. All the way to the eastern edge of the camp and the plains that stretched past, the space wide and hollow after the closeness of the army.

She didn't stop until she reached a stream they'd crossed only hours ago. It was nearly frozen over, but a stomp of her boot had the ice cracking. Breaking free to reveal dark water kissed with silvery starlight.

Then she fell to her knees and drank.

Drank and drank, cupping the water to her mouth. It had to be cold enough to burn, but she kept at it until she braced her hands on her knees and said, "I can't do this."

Rowan sank to a knee, the shield he'd kept around her while she stalked here sealing out the cold wind off the open plain.

"I-I can't—" She took a shuddering breath, and covered her face with her wet hands.

Gently, Rowan gripped her wrists and lowered them. "You do not face this alone."

Anguish and terror filled those beautiful eyes, and his chest tightened to the point of pain as she said, "It was a fool's shot against Erawan. But against him and Maeve? She gathered an army to her. Is likely bringing that army to Terrasen right now. And if Erawan summons his two brothers, if the other kings return—"

"He needs the two other keys to do that. He doesn't have them."

Her fingers curled, digging into her palms hard enough that the tang of her blood filled the air. "I should have gone after the keys. Right away. Not come here. Not done this."

"It is Dorian's task now, not yours. He will not fail at it."

"It is my task, and always has been—"

"We made the choice to come here, and we will stick to that decision," he snarled, not bothering to temper his tone. "If Maeve is indeed bringing her army to Terrasen, then it only confirms that we were right to come here. That we must convince the khagan's forces to go northward after this. It is the only chance we stand of succeeding."

Aelin ran her hands through her hair.

Streams of blood stained the gold. "I cannot win against them. Against a Valg king and queen." Her voice turned to a rasp. "They have already won."

"They have not." And though Rowan hated each word, he growled, "And you survived two months against Maeve with no magic to protect you. Two months of a Valg queen trying to break into your head, Aelin. To break you."

Aelin shook. "She did, though." Rowan waited for it. Aelin whispered, "I wanted to die by the end, before she ever threatened me with the collar. And even now, I feel like someone has ripped me from myself. Like I'm at the bottom of the sea, and who I am, who I was, is far up at the surface, and I will never get back there again."

He didn't know what to say, what to do other than to gently pull her fingers from her palms.

"Did you buy the swagger, the arrogance?" she demanded, voice breaking. "Did the others? Because I've been trying to. I've been trying like hell to convince myself that it's real, reminding myself I only need to pretend to be how I was just long enough."

Long enough to forge the Lock and die.

He said softly, "I know, Aelin." He hadn't bought the winks and smirks for a heartbeat.

Aelin let out a sob that cracked something in him. "I can't feel me-myself anymore. It's like she snuffed it out. Ripped me from it. She, and Cairn, and everything they did to me." She gulped down air, and Rowan wrapped her in his arms and pulled her onto his lap. "I am so tired," she wept. "I am so, so tired, Rowan."

"I know." He stroked her hair. "I know." It was all there really was to say.

Rowan held her until her weeping eased and she lay still, nestled against his chest.

"I don't know what to do," she whispered

"You fight," he said simply. "We fight. Until we can't anymore. We fight."

She sat up, but remained on his lap, staring into his face with a rawness that destroyed him.

Rowan laid a hand on her chest, right over that burning heart. "Fireheart."

A challenge and a summons.

She placed her hand atop his, warm despite the frigid night. As if that fire had not yet gone out entirely. But she only gazed up at the stars.

To the Lord of the North, standing watch.

"We fight," she breathed.

Aelin found Fenrys by a quiet fire, gazing into the crackling flames.

She sat on the log beside him, raw and open and trembling, but … the salt of her tears had washed away some of it. Steadied her. Rowan had steadied her, and still did, as he kept watch from the shadows beyond the fire.

Fenrys lifted his head, his eyes as hollow as she knew hers had been.

"Whenever you need to talk about it," she said, her voice still hoarse, "I'm here."

Fenrys nodded, his mouth a tight line. "Thank you."

The camp was readying for their departure, but Aelin scooted closer, and sat beside him in silence for long minutes.

Two healers, marked only by the white bands around their biceps, hurried past, arms full of bandages. Aelin tensed. Focused on her breathing.

Fenrys marked her line of sight. "They were horrified, you know," he said quietly. "Every time she brought them in to … fix you."

The two healers vanished around a tent.

Aelin flexed her fingers, shaking the lightness from them. "It didn't stop them from doing it."

"They didn't have a choice."

She met his dark stare. Fenrys's mouth tightened. "No one would have left you in those states. No one."

Broken and bloody and burned—

She gripped Goldryn's hilt. Helpless.

"They defied her in their own way," Fenrys went on. "Sometimes, she'd order them to bring you back to consciousness. Often, they claimed they couldn't, that you'd fallen too deeply into oblivion. But I knew—I think Maeve did, too— that they put you there. For as long as possible. To buy you time."

She swallowed. "Did she punish them?"

"I don't know. It was never the same healers." Maeve likely had. Had likely ripped their minds apart for their defiance.

Aelin's grip tightened on the sword at her side.

Helpless. She had been helpless. As so many in this city, in Terrasen, in this continent, were helpless. Goldryn's hilt warmed in her hand.

She wouldn't be that way again. For whatever time she had left.

Gavriel padded up beside Rowan, took one look at the queen and Fenrys, and murmured, "Not the news we needed to hear."

Rowan closed his eyes for a heartbeat. "No, it was not."

Gavriel settled a hand on Rowan's shoulder.

"It changes nothing, in some ways."

"How."

"We served her. She was ... not what Aelin is. What a queen should be. We knew that long before we knew the truth. If Maeve wants to use what she is against us, to ally with Morath, then it changes things. But the past is over. Done with, Rowan. Knowing Maeve is Valg or just a wretched person doesn't change what happened."

"Knowing a Valg queen wants to enslave my mate, and nearly did so, changes a great deal."

"But we know what Maeve fears, why she fears it," Gavriel countered, his tawny eyes bright. "Fire, and the healers. If Maeve comes with that army of hers, we are not defenseless." It was true. Rowan could have cursed himself for not thinking of it already. Another question formed, though. "Her army," Rowan said. "It's made up of Fae."

"So was her armada," Gavriel said warily.

Rowan ran a hand through his hair. "Will you be able to live with it-fighting our own people?" Killing them.

"Will you?" Gavriel countered.

Rowan didn't answer.

Gavriel asked after a moment, "Why didn't Aelin offer me the blood oath?"

The male hadn't asked these weeks. And Rowan wasn't sure why Gavriel inquired now, but he gave him the truth. "Because she won't do it until Aedion has taken the oath first. To offer it to you before him ... she wants Aedion to take it first."

"In case he doesn't wish me to be near his kingdom."

"So that Aedion knows she placed his needs before her own."

Gavriel bowed his head. "I would say yes, if she offered."

"I know." Rowan clapped his oldest friend on the back. "She knows, too."

The Lion gazed northward. "Do you think ... we haven't heard any news from Terrasen."

"If it had fallen, if Aedion had fallen, we would know. People here would know."

Gavriel rubbed at his chest. "We've been to war. He's been to war. Fought on battlefields as a child, gods be damned." Rage flickered over Gavriel's face. Not at what Aedion had done, but what he'd been made to do by fate and misfortune. What Gavriel had not been there to prevent. "But I still dread every day that passes and we hear nothing. Dread every messenger we see."

A terror Rowan had never known, different from his fear for his mate, his queen. The fear of a father for his child.

He didn't allow himself to look toward Aelin. To remember his dreams while hunting for her. The family he'd seen. The family they'd make together.

"We must convince the khaganate royals to march northward when this battle is over," Gavriel swore softly.

Rowan nodded. "If we can smash this army tomorrow, and convince the royals that Terrasen is the only course of action, then we could indeed be heading north soon. You might be fighting at Aedion's side by Yulemas."

Gavriel's hands clenched at his sides, tattoos spreading over his knuckles. "If he will allow me that honor."

Rowan would make Aedion allow it. But he only said, "Gather Elide and Lorcan. The ruks are almost ready to depart."

[oddinary4bts]

Chasing Cars | Masterpost (jjk)

☆summary: when your brother goes to study on a semester abroad, your life collides with his best friend Jeon Jungkook, who's coincidentally your roommate. Will you survive the collision, or will you crumble into dust?

☆status: completed

☆pairings: brother's best friend!Jungkook x younger sister!female reader, Hoseok x female reader, Namjoon x OC, Jin x OC, Jimin x OC, Taehyung x OC and others.

☆rating: 18+ (minors DNI, some chapters have mature content)

☆genre: forbidden love?au, college!au, slice of life!au, smut, angst (as usual a lot of it), fluff

☆total word count: 218.5k (lmao my fingers slipped)

☆a/n: I got the idea for this fic just a little over a year ago, following a power outage that lasted for a few days where I live and Jungkook's live where he kept coming back with different outfits (the white dress shirt hit me right in the gut). It took me a long time to write, as I was working on multiple other projects at the same time, but I am so so happy to be ready to share this baby with you guys <3

☆Thank you to @moonleeai and @jessikahathaway for beta-ing this monster <3 (and for all your encouragement and support)

☆And a special thank you to @wintaerbaer and @btsborahaee for encouraging me and supporting me whenever I screamed to you about this fic

☆add yourself to the taglist here!

☆discord server link here!

☆☆☆☆☆

If I lay here If I just lay here Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Chasing Cars, Snow Patrol

☆☆☆☆☆

➳Teaser (Jungkook pov): the day he met you (1.1k)

You fucking touch her, you're dead.

➳Chapter one: when the Incident happens (11.8k)

Jungkook is Tae's best friend.

➳Chapter two: when Jungkook teases you (10.2k)

You know I hate that nickname.

➳Chapter three: when Valentine's Day happens (13.1k)

You know, Taehyung doesn’t have to know everything.

➳Chapter four: when you and Jeon Jungkook clash (9.5k)

I was just going to say that we should keep this between us.

➳Chapter five: when you have to go back to reality (12.1k)

We just pretend nothing happened, no?

➳Chapter six: when Jungkook hosts his friends over (9.6k)

I really want to kiss you right now.

➳Chapter seven: when doubt makes you question everything (15k)

Why do you want to believe the worst of me so bad?

➳Chapter eight: when secrets are unveiled in New York (13.5k)

I want you.

➳Chapter nine: when a party makes Jungkook jealous (11.2k)

You make me insane.

➳Chapter ten: when time slips through your fingers (10.1k)

I don’t want to lose you, peach.

➳Chapter eleven: when Jungkook visits Taehyung in Paris (8.4k)

Can’t wait for you to be back.

➳Chapter twelve: when it breaks (7.3k)

I can’t be with you.

➳Chapter thirteen: when it's too late (8.9k)

I have to talk to him.

➳Chapter fourteen: when the truth comes out (12.2k)

We never told each other how we felt.

➳Chapter fifteen: when you find your way back to Jungkook (7.4k)

You came?

➳Chapter sixteen: when Jungkook takes you out on a date (8.9k)

I think I was waiting for you my whole life.

➳Chapter seventeen: when forever awaits you (9k)

Getting to love you is the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me.

Drabbles in Jungkook's pov (might add more as the story goes on)

➳Chapter 1.5: the first party (1.6k)

Then why are you bringing him home, peach?

➳Chapter 3.5: Valentine's Day (1.1k)

We should have hung out like this before.

➳Chapter 4.5: a walk through campus (852)

You love it, peach.

➳Chapter 5.5: the return to reality (2k)

You wanted to talk?

➳Chapter 6.5: hosting his friends at the apartment (4.4k)

What the fuck is wrong with you?

➳Chapter 7.5: when he realizes (2.5k)

Isn't she Taehyung's sister?

➳Chapter 8.5: the engagement party (6.6k)

Have fun while it lasts.

➳Chapter 9.5: jealous jungkook (3k)

Shouldn’t I prove to you that you’ve got nothing to worry about?

➳Chapter 10.5: the morning before Paris (1.7k)

I promise I'll come back to you and make it work.

➳Chapter 11.5: the kiss (1.2k)

Just this once.

➳Chapter 12.5: after losing you (4.6k)

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

➳Chapter 13.5: returning home (4k)

What am I supposed to do?

➳ Chapter 14.5: losing you again (3k)

I can't believe you've been wearing the necklace

➳Chapter 15.5: a conversation with Taehyung, and his reunion with you (2.6k)

It’s never been like that with her.

☆☆☆☆☆

All rights reserved to @/oddinary4bts, 2024. Do not copy, repost or translate.

[sunny44]

Are you stealing from me again?

Pairing: Lando Norris x girlfriend!reader

Warnings: None

Summary: It was a good idea stealing from him again.

I was in the living room already ready and waiting for my girlfriend to finish getting ready to go to my parents' house for lunch. She came out of my room holding my sweatshirt in her hands, a smile spreading across my lips as she put it on. I couldn't help but roll my eyes.

"Are you stealing from me again?" I said in a playful tone, but there was a hint of truth to it.

She raised an eyebrow, challenging.

"Again?" I took a deep breath, trying not to get carried away by the look of confusion on her face.

"First my heart, now my sweatshirt... What's next? My last name?" A smile lit up her face, and her gaze met mine.

"Y/n Norris. I like how it sounds." I felt a surge of warmth rise in my chest.

"I do too," I admitted, more softly than I intended.

It was strange, but the idea of sharing my last name with her didn't seem as absurd as it should, in fact, the idea of sharing a whole life with her seemed perfect.

"Are you ready?"

"More than ready." She came over to me and gave me a peck on the lips.

"Do you want to move in with me?" I asked quickly, and she was startled by my request.

"What?"

"I asked if you want to move in with me." She looked at me seriously. "I made that joke about my last name and when you said your name with it, I realized I want to spend a lifetime with you."

"Are you serious?"

"Of course I am." I held her face. "We've spent so much time apart because of the races, and when I'm here, you're always with me, so it doesn't make sense for you to pay for a place when you're always here with me."

"But when you're not here, I go back to my apartment."

"I know, but you don't have to, this can be our home if you want to move in with me."

"Are you sure?" I nodded. "I can be messy sometimes, and there might be times when I want or need to be alone and..."

I kissed her, interrupting her, and she kissed me back and smiled in the middle of the kiss.

"I don't care about any of that, I love you, and I want this to be our home." She smiled and gave me a long peck on the lips.

"I love you too, and I would love to move in here."

And there, in that moment, as she wore my sweatshirt and the fact that we had just taken another step in our relationship sunk in, I realized that maybe Y/n Norris wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Bonus scene!

Landonorris instagram stories

“The stealer”

[gothwineaunts]

Wow, hello!

So, I was actually feeling pretty motivated to write this post yesterday. But things have gotten exponentially worse, and I admit the pressure is getting to me. There seem to be a ton of expectations surrounding what I should be saying here, in order to… I guess, absolve myself? As if there’s a checklist people want me to go through to perform the “perfect” creator apology. But, I don’t see the point. I care a lot about this community and I think you deserve something a lot more sincere than some hollow chat-gpt apology. I understand that that’s foolish, on my part. Things are done that way so often because they work. But what you’ll find throughout this post, is that I’m kind of an idiot about some things. I’m stubborn and hard-headed and a little bit pretentious. And so, what I’m planning to do here is to simply tell you the truth about what happened. No cherry picking. All my mistakes, but also the context that goes with them. And at the end, my formal apology. This is a long and winding tale with a lot of characters. I’m going to be sharing some usernames as we go, in the interest of clarity and transparency. You’ll understand why with the context. But please do not seek these people out. Don’t pick fights with them. It will only make everything worse, for all involved.

Cool? Cool. But first I need to address the elephant in the room. This will probably seem like irrelevant drama at first, but this is the nuance and background that I wasn’t adequately able to articulate the night before last. In more ways than one, this is a story told in twos. The first set of twos is you, the readers. Who you are, and what you’re hoping to find out in this post.

1.      The overwhelming majority of you, are earnestly wanting to understand what has happened in the Nevermore Discord. You are concerned that I am not who you hoped I was. You are disappointed, and I understand why. To you, I am so sorry. I want to say that things are not as bad as they seem, but that is not for me to decide. You will need to draw your own conclusions from the words I write. And I understand, whatever you choose to do next.

2.      And there is a small, but incredibly vocal minority of people who are absolutely living for this. They are spreading complete fabrications with no screenshots to speak of. Horrible, horrible accusations. People who are more excited about watching a dumpsterfire than they are about the series that brought them here in the first place. I’m not going to attempt to cater to those people in this post. Because nothing will ever be good enough. Everything that can be taken in bad faith will be taken in bad faith. It would be pointless. But you’ll see them in the comments and reblogs. This is a known group to not only myself, but many others. I will share some of their names in a later section so you know who to watch for. They will make a lot of noise around this post because they’ve been trying to make something like this happen for actual years. And now that I had a genuinely concerning response that good people reasonably want me to explain, they’re lunging at the chance to throw absolutely anything at the wall. It’s parasocial levels of hatred. This is some deep and horrible lore.

The next set of twos is how two things can be true at the same time. And that is exactly what is going on here, in this situation. Let me be really clear, because I don’t want either truth to be lost in my explanation as they are intrinsically linked to one another.

1.      I did a downright terrible job explaining myself in the Discord when people started asking about crimson. I can give you all kinds of contributing factors for this, and I might later. But none of them really matter. It was incredibly careless of me to use “egging them on” and “cried wolf”  to describe what I understood. At the time I was really laser-focused on expressing what happened as simply and quickly as possible because the channel replies were paused and I felt like everyone was just waiting for me to be finished with my message. But after stepping back, I immediately understood how badly I messed up, because of course these idioms are routinely weaponized against survivors of SA and CSA. That is not how I intended to use them. It was an unfortunate case of one thing looking and sounding like another thing. Incredibly ham-fisted and irresponsible on my part. To the survivors who read my words and felt that it echoed their past experiences, I’m heartbroken that I did that to you. That lapse of judgement was a betrayal to both you and me. I don’t know where my head went, and I’m just blown away by my own lack of awareness in that message. So for that I am and will continue to be sorry.

2.      The second thing that can be true is that, while you are all absolutely owed an explanation and an apology, there are also some people amongst you who are using this fuck-up on my part as a springboard to take me down.  These people have been trying to get a call out post to pop off about me for at least a year, and they have been very quick to jump into the reblogs and comments about this very serious topic with complete lies and slander. Just, anything that might stick to the wall. We’ll address this later on as well. But please understand that me discussing the harassment I’ve faced from these groups is not at the expense of me also owning up to my faults and taking the proper accountability.

And the last set of twos is one I’ve alluded to in the first sets, concerning a pair of toxic side-servers that ran adjacent to the main Nevermore Discord. Completely unofficial cliques. And invisible to myself and Flynn and our mod team. We were eventually made aware that both of them were breaking laws and Discord ToS in ways that leaked into our server and affected our members negatively. As such, both groups were mass-banned. And the cliques are the ones running a majority of the discourse you’ve been seeing here, because while they are formally banned from the discord, we have absolutely no say in their participation on Tumblr. Now, keep in mind. Both of these groups were uncovered after crimson was banned the first time. That’s important later.

Clique #1

My understanding of the first group is that it started as a gaming server for people who met one another through the Nevermore Discord. I don’t know when or why it started being used to talk shit about other readers, but I do know that it got really vicious. And it was sort of an open secret for long before I knew anything about it. I found out after that there were a lot of people passively in this server, just observing. It was that much of a spectacle.

Now, this clique had been pretty rude. Like they’d try to start fights with me in the discord fairly often, both in the Patreon and free spaces. But it wasn’t grounds for dismissal until we found out about the baiting and the alts.  These people had a lot of grievances, but one really united them: they were extremely upset about anyone who would ship Prospero.

Many of you know, that Prospero is an aromantic character, canonically. And you may notice that canonically, he has no apparent love interest. But this group wanted to make sure other readers were not thinking about Prospero in relationships, or creating ship content of him for any reason on the grounds that it would be considered a “proship.” I told them (and I stand on this) that it’s not up to them to police the thoughts of other readers, and that aromantic people have widely varying lifestyles and experiences and do not need to be infantilized that way.

This turned out to be a bad move on my part, because it brought with it an onslaught of alt accounts coming in and "innocently" kicking up what I now refer to as the “prosp-aro” debate every time they had the chance. But because of this and what a common occurrence it was, we started being able to pick out the alts. And we realized that this group of people had been using the same alt accounts with different names to antagonize certain readers they’d decided they hated, and it had gone on for a long time.

I did a lot of investigative work in dms trying to figure out who all was responsible for the harassment, and settled on a list that was vetted by three different people who knew about the clique. And all three of these people insisted that, while Laci was in the group and in a lot of the screencaps saying pretty dubious things, that she was good people. So I believe them, and let Laci stay. This group was banned on April 3, 2024, and contained the following users:

-          lilnatx (nat)

-          suitino (sushi)

-          jj_the_jet_plane (layden)

-          rivsticks (jasper)

-          atheimee (athena)

-          jinxs.com (lanx/jinx)

-          smartestginger (nico)

-          thereallandofbugs (bugs)

-          rosienemui (rosie)

These were the names they were known by on the Discord. I don’t have the Tumblr accounts tied to these identities. But some might be the same. I know a lot of them are here.  It should be noted that jinx was later unbanned due to pressure from Laci that they had been banned in error, after the fact. We allowed them back in after a few days as a favor to Laci since the situation seemed like it was very stressful for her. This would prove to be yet another a mistake since, as you have probably seen in the screenshots from the night before last, jinx rapidly escalated things to another level while I was trying to figure out how to handle crimson’s unbanning and subsequent rebanning an hour later.

Clique #2

Phew. Still with me? Great. The second group we needed to ban was one that actually started long before the first one, but was a lot smaller and comparatively more subtle. This group, to my knowledge, cropped up around the time that ep. 39 of Nevermore was released. (11/10/22) We knew about this group but not who all was involved in it or in what capacity for a very long time. They would consistently post things on Tumblr trying to start a scandal. I recall posts alleging that we were racists, or SA apologists, or that we were sending death threats to a random confessions account.

To be clear, these allegations are completely false. This clique will say anything. Like a recent post one of them put up during this discourse said that hiwi (our mod) is both a r*pe apologist and a childhood friend of mine and that’s the only reason she hasn’t been banned. Hiwi is absolutely nothing of the sort, and I have never met her in person. In fact, she lives on the other side of the continent.

Now, this clique is a little different than the first. The first, to my knowledge, was a group of friends that got toxic and felt morally superior about their opinions and it all kind of got away from them. The vibe was a little catty, I guess. Gossipy. But this clique has more of a stalker vibe. It’s dark.

They’ve had it out specifically for me for as long as I can remember. And some of them (at least one, at all times) would subscribe to our patreon, both to sow dissent in our stream chats and also to leak literally all the content back to the others, including me talking about random shit like what I ate for lunch. Just so they could like. Laugh about it, I guess. I’ll never understand why. [Editing note: because in the final moments of proofreading this post I see one of these people has made some master post about what a terrible person I am? A lot of those screenshots are from Patreon channels and the guy STILL has them laying around. I’m telling you, they stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.] 

The biggest grievance this clique had is that any ship with Montresor is an “SA fetish ship” because to them he is a r*pist because of how he made Ada bark (?) and since Montrada is canon, that means we are supporters of SA, and that Morella and Ada should be together instead. Listen, I’ll level with you, this one baffles me. I don’t even know how to begin to untangle it. But if you see a lot of vitriol about us being SA apologists from these users, it’s because Montresor exists. That’s pretty much it.

You can ask them for screencaps ‘til you’re blue in the face, but unless they build fake ones from the ground up, they’re never going to be able to back up their wild claims. Simply put, they’re provocateurs, and they use the scariest words they can to whip people up into a panic.

We became aware that they were leaking patreon content when one of them was caught publicly referring to things that were being said behind a paywall when we knew they weren’t a patron. It unraveled from there.  People who knew about their antics shared screenshots and information with us, and we finally realized the scope of the clique’s hatred and banned whoever was even left in the Nevermore Discord. But they continue to be active in the community on tumblr. You’ll have seen them around. They were banned on 5/11/2024 and the names involved are as follows (again, a mishmash of discord names, nicknames, and tumblr accounts):

- percy (gremlinguy145 on tumblr)

- queenmorningrose (annabel-lee-nevermore on tumblr)

- spoopycactus630 (spoopy-nevermore-dump on tumblr)

- grif/horrorshow (conscience-grim on tumblr)

- unreqiknizd

- duke aralt (westofthestyx)

- eden (sapphic-mad-scientist on tumblr)

- priemium

Again I’d like to reiterate. The point in sharing these names is not to incite any sort of response against these people. But they are folding themselves into the fray and doing what they can to whip everyone else up into a mob, and all as we’re talking about a discord server that they have been banned from for months now. The above context is also relevant for the next section, which is why you’re all here in the first place.

What the hell happened with Crimson?

I hope it’s not confusing, but now we’re going back to 3/14/2024, before anything I just outlined above had come to light. The cliques were quietly doing their harassment and baiting and raiding and whatever-the-hell behind the scenes, but Flynn and I and the mods were blissfully unaware of how bad it was getting. We get a dm from Laci. The same Laci who was part of Clique #1 and was rescued from being banned with the others by her friends outside the group. Jinx’s friend, who managed to get them unbanned as well. You have probably seen these screencaps already, but I will show them to you again, just in case.

Sufficed to say, we were immediately alarmed by the information Laci shared in her DM with us. Now, I want to be very clear about this because it’s been lost in the game of telephone. What Laci outlines in her dm to me, were the events that occurred between six users (including crimson) in a group chat with minors. Everyone in the evidence was censored (pfp and username), as was the image that crimson showed them. When I asked, Laci agreed to give me one name of one of the minors in the dm. I’ll call them Alice, but that is not their real name. I asked if I could talk to Alice about this, I was told by Laci, no. Alice doesn’t want to talk. I was like, ok I understand, that’s fine. 

I hope it makes sense when I say that it is not feasible for us to moderate the things that happen in peoples’ dms. As you’ve seen above, the mod team doesn’t usually get involved with drama unless whatever is happening is directly affecting the experience people are having in the Nevermore Discord because that is all we can see and the only place we have any real authority.  But this was obviously a special case. We banned crimson very quickly without asking any follow-up questions, because of course we did!? I’ve seen people say I’m harboring or defending crimson or that we’re buddies but we barely spoke, ever. They were a stranger to me then, and they still are now.

But something about the entire situation wasn’t adding up to me. And I want to be clear that none of this is in any way meant to discredit csa survivors, I’m really just trying to put you in my headspace and walk you through my thought process. But I found that the evidence was just, sort of strange. Laci started her dm explaining that she found this information out because she and a group of people were investigating crimson for ‘art tracing’ which felt, to me, like a bizarre non-sequitur and totally irrelevant next to the evidence of them showing nsfw content to minors. Petty, kind of. Like I wanted to ask – why were you doing that in the first place? People trace Flynn’s art all the time. As long as they’re not selling it, it’s not a big deal.

Most of the crops are from a PC but the windows are oddly small, and only contain a couple messages at a time. Some have American formatted time and some have European formatted time. So different users, I assume? The names were blotted out, which I would understand for a public call-out but not for a private report to the mod team. Laci was not in this gc at any point in time, despite being the one to report. 

One of the users was apparently 12, to which I ask – what is a 12-year-old doing on discord at all? If we knew who they were, we would have reported the account. Discord is not a safe place for a child that age, let alone a small group chat. Along with 18-year-old Crimson, there was also a 22- and 17-year-old in the chat, which left us wondering – why hadn’t anything been done?

I had no evidence that anyone ever told crimson they were minors, and I feel if it existed, it would have been in the screencap dump (I find that sometimes a noticeable lack of key evidence is evidence in itself). No one seems to have tried to kick crimson from the group chat or report their account for inappropriate behavior. Then there’s the fact that this is a group chat. Anyone in it can leave at any time. 

Then I came across the messages that started this whole gc, and it only got stranger when I realized Alice started it, called it “Women Lovers” and created it “so we can talk about Nevermore women without having to filter ourselves” after they all reacted to a sultry but sfw drawing of Lenore that crimson had made and posted in our hideout channel. And all that made me wonder why Alice didn’t just kick crimson, if she had admin power?  Do you see what I mean? It’s just all a bit head tilty. I noticed it at the time. But I said nothing. Because it didn’t matter. Crimson, no matter what happened, exposed minors to nsfw content. And that’s on them. And I’ve never in my life defended it. We banned them.

Crimson was beside herself. She came off humiliated and apologetic, and insisted she had no idea and begged to come back to a community she said she loved. But we told her no, there’s no coming back from doing what she did.

Time passes and we uncover Clique #1. And while we figured out who the main players were, I dmed with Laci. And it was Laci herself, who tells me that it was Alice who made most of Clique #1’s alt accounts, and that it was Alice who used those alt accounts to harass people and try to get them to start fights or say something that might get them in trouble. 

And I’ll be honest with you, the mod team still didn’t think much of it, outside of – we need to figure out which accounts were the alts. So we did. We had several confirmed to us.  And those accounts were zeroing in on certain users that the clique didn’t like. At the time we noticed two notable targets in addition to the mod team. I won’t name them, it’s their business if they want to weigh in about all that. But in screencaps, they’ll be labeled Target #1 and Target #2.

More time passes and Clique #2 comes to light. As you can imagine, by now we’re feeling disillusioned, and very tired of trying to moderate shit we cannot see for ourselves. And that’s when crimson comes back to very hesitantly ask if they might be able to appeal their ban. It wasn’t until then that it occurred to us that Laci (on behalf of Alice) was the only one who ever reported anything to us about Crimson. 

And I want to just say that again. Because it’s gotten lost too. Laci was the only person who ever reported Crimson. There was not one single other person who ever sent a modmail or a dm or even a ping to anybody on the mod team. I have since (only yesterday) seen some screencaps that are rather skin crawly, but even those happened in yet another side server. Thinking on this, the mods went back through the known alt accounts Alice had used. And they found that Alice harassed crimson both on her main account and on the same alt accounts that she used to harass the other targets.

By now, Alice is banned for completely unrelated reasons. Not because of what happened with Crimson. I’ve seen that one flying around and I’m sorry it’s just not true. It’s because she was relentlessly harassing and cyberbullying people in the discord we moderate. Laci is still there, but had lost my trust, for being involved with both the drama I’ve mentioned here and more that I don’t care to dip into. It’s ultimately irrelevant. But what am I going to say to Laci? “Hey, did you and Alice, by any chance, coordinate some kind of bizarre trap together to get crimson banned from the discord because you suspected them of tracing their art?” And once again. Because I want to keep this top of mind. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t make what Crimson did alright, and it never will. Sharing nsfw content in front of minors is a disgusting thing to do. And one that we frankly are really irritating about in the moderation of the discord. I’ve heard people say that we over-moderate when it comes to art. 

But all this stuff about a “known pedophile?” If it was known, then we were on the outs. And to even this minute right now, I don’t have any conclusive evidence that Crimson is a pedophile. The evidence I have is that Crimson shared nsfw with a group of people whose ages they did not know. Which is fucking gross. It’s an adult’s responsibility to make sure they’re speaking with other adults before posting things of that nature. 

But at the time, the way I read the situation is that Crimson had only just stopped being a minor and was egregiously negligent in how they were speaking and what they were posting, likely in part due to them not being aware enough of their adult responsibilities.  And hey. I know some of you are chomping at the bit. You can call me naïve for this! This is what I’m referring to when I say that I can be a real idiot. But I feel everyone has been very quick to call Crimson a pedophile. I know this is pedantic to say, but the prerequisite for being a pedophile is “being attracted to minors.” Based on the information I had at my fingertips, I did not think Crimson sought out these minors. Crimson was invited to the gc, they did not ask to join. 

I have seen discussions about all the things crimson did to their victims since we unbanned them but I have not seen screencaps to support that whole ‘marriage proposal’ thing, and again I think it sounds a bit odd coming as a pedophilia accusation from someone only one year younger than crimson.  

But you know what? I don’t know crimson. Maybe we were wrong. But even if we weren’t, I realize in hindsight that it was a stupid decision for the mod team to give them a second chance. We didn’t have anyone to consult about what happened because all the other people in the chat had been obscured from me and I didn’t feel like Laci would give me a straight answer. 

The mods and I felt at the time that crimson, like the other targets of Clique #1, had been singled out and that they deserved another very closely monitored chance in the discord, which they said they still missed dearly. I’m a bleeding heart, alright? A total sap. I know that. But being honest with you, I felt bad. It feels horrible to be singled out and targeted. And I was probably too close to that feeling at the time, seeing as we were on the tail end of finding out the Clique #2 had pursued me so relentlessly for so long. 

So for my part, I’m sorry. I made a rash decision that was influenced by some very personal circumstances. And we should have left it alone. Based on the evidence I've seen, I don’t know if I personally would call crimson a pedophile and certainly I wouldn't call them a known pedophile, but I am regretful that we risked it either way.

When I was trying to explain all of this in the west common room channel two nights back, things had boiled over and were already getting out of hand very quickly. A lot of brand new accounts were joining the discord with one word intros just to start conflicts in the public server with crimson. Alts. Either from banned users or burner accounts. And I got panicky. One of the mods paused the messages in west common room but no one besides me was available to handle the situation at that moment. Reacts about being silenced were pouring in and I felt pressured to quickly take over and try to explain. 

In my rush, I stupidly didn’t backread more than a quick skim. And I ate shit, y’all. You saw. One thing I want to state outright. I’m talking a lot about my thoughts and my feelings and it’s because I don’t wanna speak for Flynn or for the mods. But I didn’t make this decision alone. In fact, I was dragging my feet and being really lazy about okaying the whole thing. Just because I was busy, not because I was fretting over it or anything. But I had to be pinged and then literally tapped on the shoulder by Flynn, asking me to respond to mod chat when this was being discussed earlier that day. That doesn’t change the fact that I was part of the decision. I agreed to unban crimson. Foolishly. I understand that, now. 

I hope that now it makes some more sense though, how it came to happen. I never meant to hurt anyone. My own past and present feelings got in the way, and I own that. But in the moment, my personal intention was to give crimson a second chance because I felt that they’d been targeted by Clique #1. Not to ignore anyone’s concerns or make them feel unsafe, even if those were the ultimate outcome.  

So, completely underprepared and defensive, I jumped into west common room and I just. Blew it. Totally fucking blew it. I knew it instantly but it’s hard to stay logical when people are telling you you’re vile and evil and they’re sick that they ever thought you were a good person and that they’ll never see you the same way again. My mind went blank and I don’t really remember much of what happened next. But I said what I said, and I should have done better. 

I wish there was a word bigger than sorry. I’m beside myself. I know there was probably a way to make everyone happy. To make everything okay. But I wasn't clever enough to figure it out in the moment, and it eats at me. So it’s like I’m sorry for my poor judgment and my terrible choice of words, but there’s another layer where I’m also sorry for not matching how wonderful this community is with how wonderful (or well, unwonderful) I was two nights ago. I promise I am going to work harder to be better for you all.

Again, to every victim of SA and CSA, my heart is with you, more personally than you might realize. I don’t think I could have handled my explanation in a worse way. And I’m so so sorry.

Moving forward, I am also going to take an enormous step back from moderating and participating in the discord in general. I feel like a lot of this happened because I was still treating it like it belonged to a smaller fandom, like Shiloh’s. But realistically, I don’t have time to both moderate and make the series itself, and I really dragged my feet on being honest with myself about that. And for that too, I apologize. We’re going to get more mods, they’re going to have full control of the moderation, and Flynn and I are going to do what we love more than anything in the world and just make Nevermore.

I understand if you won’t be there for it. This is not a flattering picture I’ve painted for you. And you’d be well within your rights, to decide not to give us another chance. But it's been a pleasure to lurk here in this wildly talented corner of tumblr. And I’ll never forget it. <3 Yours truly, -Kit Trace

[bingsoo-jung]

I said this in the comments of someone else’s post, but I’m going to say this here. Taash identifying as non-binary is good actually, and in fact better than the dev’s making up some new term for them. Let’s get into it.

So for a bit of background, I’m non-binary and Thai. If you don’t know, Thai has specific terms for different gender-sexual identities, they’re quite old, they date back a few hundred years. However, the thing about culturally specific terms is just that, they’re culturally specific. The reason you use them is because you are tied to the culture in such a way that you gender-sexual identity cannot be disassociated from it. Because, to be clear, these terms are never just about your gender or sexual identity. They encompass a role you play within society itself.

For instance, in Thai culture we have tom/tomboys. These are AFAB folks who occupy a masculine societal role and date women. If you’re AMAB you cannot be tom. If you’re transmasc and feminine? You cannot be tom. If you’re transmasc and not attracted to women? You cannot be tom. If you’re transmasc and mostly date men? You cannot be tom. If you’re transmasc but don’t particularly feel like taking care of the girl you date, taking her out, being the ‘man’ in the relationship? You can’t really be tom.

Because the thing about culturally specific genders is that they come with a lot of rules. Being tom isn’t being non-binary. There are cis women who are tom, and there are non-binary people who are toms. You do not get eschew gender roles in these cases. You are quite literally taking one on. You have a role and place in society that has been made for you, and you are expected to carry it out.

Because of this, none of these terms are a one-to-one for other identities, and nor should they be. Being kathoey or hijra is not the same as being a trans woman or non-binary, and visa versa. You can be kathoey and not be trans. You can be trans and not be kathoey. Being aqun-athlok or any other specific term shouldn’t be either. The idea that it is, is more ahistorical and inaccurate than the word non-binary itself. Giving Taash some new, culturally specific term, would inherently tie them to a culture, and one perhaps that they didn’t feel apart of. Especially since Taash’s entire story is about struggling to figure out where they belong. Arguably the biggest issue with their story is that you have to make them decide, and fundamentally tying them to a term would’ve compounded that problem.

The reason I identify as non-binary and not a tom, is because I am not occupying some specific role in Thai culture. Despite living in LA, I rarely interact with other Thai people who aren’t my family. I do not live in a cultural context that would allow me to identify as a tom.

The thing about terms like non-binary, or trans, or agender, is that they’re meant to be acultural terms encapsulating the concept of truth to oneself and ones identity. Whereas culturally specific terms aren’t, they’re about the role you hold in society and where you fit in. It’s about your identity within a status quo. Taash is a character who is eschewing societal roles, and breaking the status quo, giving them those terms just wouldn’t work.

And finally? Using non-binary itself allows the writers to very specifically say where they stand. There is no space given to transphobes. You either accept that DA is queer-friendly or bust. And that’s a very important stance to make in an era where trans and non-binary folks are being actively targeted. There’s no ‘well Taash isn’t actually trans or non-binary they’re [insert term here]!’ Because people would’ve done that, we know they would’ve. This means people can’t do that. They have to just say that they have an issue with the term, and thus we can call them for what they are. Transphobes. Plain and simple.

So yeah, Taash’s identity does have nuance, it has a lot of it. And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trick Weekes, a non-binary person whose wife is First Nations and thus from a group with culturally specific gender identities, knows about the difference between something like two-spirit and trans. And to be honest with you, using something like non-binary has nuance I doubt was actually afforded to Krem, considering they cast a cis woman to play Krem.

So yeah.

[notafunkiller]

we found wonderland

Summary: You have a choice to make: you either set yourself free or continue to play the game.

Pairing: (fake) boyfriend’s brother!Bucky Barnes x female reader

Warnings: 18+, age gap (r is 26, Bucky is 39), teasing, dirty talk, unprotected séx (but she is on the pill), pet names, daddy kínk, language, implied aftercare, no mention of y/n

Word Count: 2.4K

story masterlist

Bucky Barnes masterlist

A/N: I hope you enjoyed this mini-series! Thank you for reading!

Please, do not repost or translate without my permission!

You had decided you should wait for a week before making your relationship public, using that time to try to convince your parents to change their mind while Bucky plays pretend with his. It’s not an ideal situation, but he understands, keeping the truth to himself.

What he can’t keep to himself is his hands. Not that you can… but as soon as he comes home, he’s all over you, not even caring you are in the living room sometimes.

Acting like you’re just friendly is very hard for you. You want to touch and kiss him like crazy. Having sex with him changed the game, and now you try your hardest to find a way out of this deal so you can be in this relationship completely.

You laugh at the way he pouts. “You’re really adorable for an old man.”

“Is it so crazy I want us together?”

You melt, leaning in to kiss his chin. “That’s not crazy, baby, but isn’t that a little fast?”

“We’ve been living together for months now. What’s the difference?”

You wish you could find the right words to explain it. It’s quite scary and exciting, but it feels strange. “We’ve been together for a couple of days. Maybe we don’t…”

“Are you thinking of a break up already?”

You jump immediately. “No! Maybe we don’t have things figured out enough yet. And by we I mean me. I won’t have a job anymore if my parents don’t change their minds. I won’t have a real home. I won’t have anything but you. And I love every moment I spend with you, but I want something of my own, and I definitely don’t want to feel like a burden even if you don’t make me feel like that. My life is a mess.”

“And I want to help. I am not trying to control you or suggest something you don’t want, but we are friends, too, not just a couple. I am here for you. You can stay with me as a friend if not as a boyfriend. I want you safe.”

You say nothing, only staring at him for a while. You don’t even know what to say because the mix of emotions you feel is confusing.

“You know what I want?”

“What?”

“I want to fuck you right now.” You don’t try to hide your neediness as you place your hands on his shorts. “Can I, baby? Can I ride you?”

“Fuck, you’re gonna kill me before I turn forty. Is this your plan? Do you want me gone?” He’s already raising his ass so he can help you take off his shorts quicker.

“I want you with me always. Want you inside me so badly.”

He groans at your tone. “Then go for it, baby, take whatever you want. It’s all yours. I’m all yours.”

You smile eagerly seeing his hard cock, and lift his T-shirt. You cannot stand anything between your bodies right now. You just need to feel him. “God, we should go to the bedroom, but I can’t wait.”

You take off your underwear, unable to wait any longer. As if someone is holding a knife to your throat, and if you don’t get Bucky inside you in the next seconds, you’re gonna die.

“Anyone can walk in,” he says as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. He probably even enjoys it. “Can you imagine their faces?”

You snort, bringing his dick to your entrance without hesitation after spreading your legs further apart. “No, but I can imagine yours when you come.”

“You don’t need to imagine. You’re gonna see it up close if you hurry up.”

Neither of you even realize you’re not using a condom for the first time until it’s too late and you’re already sliding down.

Your grasp on his shoulders is so forceful, you’re sure it will leave a mark, as you moan his name.

“James…” You desperately look at him, wanting to see if he feels the same. “We’re not using anything.”

“I c-can feel that.”

“God damn it, James,” you sound like you’re scolding him, but in reality you are just overwhelmed.

“What did I… fucking hell, I am totally not getting to turn forty. I will die tonight.”

You ask with your eyes closed. “Do you want me to get a condom?”

“No, I want to die.” He groans, already in a different space. “Unless you want to… I am clean and you are, of course, and I can pull out, but like it’s not… I can go grab a condom right now.”

You immediately shake your head, placing your hand on his chest. He’s not gonna do that. He has to make you come.

“You are not going anywhere, you get out of me and I’ll die!”

“So you’re ovulating?” He asks casually, with a playful grin spread across his face.

You chuckle, hitting him in the shoulder. 

“Yes, I am, and you gotta take care of me.”

Bucky groans, grabbing your ass, unable to keep his hands off you. You’re so hot and warm. “You’re really, really wet, princess.”

“Ihm.” You slide down further, almost taking all of his cock. “Look how deep I took you now.” You moan proudly, feeeling so stretched like this. “Look at this, daddy.”

And when he lets his eyes drop to your entrance, he has no idea how he doesn’t com right then. The sight is incredible.

“Baby…”

“I’m your baby, daddy.” You quickly take off your T-shirt at the same time you move your hips. As soon as he’s naked, you grab your breasts, holding them together with a smirk. You know that is going to affect him, and it makes you feel powerful.

“Oh God,” he groans as you bring your breasts closer to his mouth.

“Come on, daddy, go ahead.”

It’s all he needs to hear before he takes your right nipple into his mouth and the left one between his fingers. Riding him like this is a little difficult, but it’s not impossible. You love getting your breasts played with, and he loves doing it.

There is also something really hot and thrilling about the possibility of getting caught. You have no idea why and how, but you’re going to enjoy this as much as you can.

“You feel so good like this, nothing between us. Nothing between your come and me,” you moan, not even thinking about what you say.

“You can’t say that and expect me to be strong.”

That makes you laugh. “I’m on the pill, though, you don’t have to be strong.”

“Fucking hell, you’re gonna drive me crazy.” He starts to thrust his hips back so he can meet you halfway. Riding him feels so, so good. You got him deeper, and the lack of a condom makes you properly feel his thickness.

“You feel so… Fuck, your cock is filling me just the way I need it.” You grab his shoulders so you can move faster. “You’re such a good daddy, let-letting me use you right here, where everyone could see us.”

“You love using daddy’s cock.” He looks so drunk, in so much pleasure. “Such a naughty girl.”

“I’m your naughty girl, James.”

“All mine.” His hands on your hips help you move faster indeed, and you’re already so close you can barely keep your eyes open.

“F-faster.”

Bucky stops thrusting his hips back, and you groan. You need more.

“If you want it faster, keep your eyes on me, pretty girl.”

“I c-can’t-” As much as you want to fight this, your eyes instinctively close again. “Ss-so close.”

He can hear your desperation and without hesitating, he brings his hand into your hair and pulls unexpectedly hard. That’s enough for you to come loud. So loud you can hear yourself as you let the pleasure consume every bit of you.

But Bucky doesn’t stop moving his hips, making your orgasm last longer. He’s saying things, probably dirty things, in your ear, but you can’t understand anything. Your ears are still ringing.

And just like that, Bucky comes too, with his right hand still wrapped around your hair while the left one is digging into the skin of your hip.

“Fuck, I’m coming inside you, baby, can you feel it? Can you feel me filling your pussy, baby?”

“Ihm,” you can barely whisper, too overwhelmed by everything.

“Whose come?”

“Y-yours.”

“Good girl.” He groans as soon as he finishes coming, wrapping his arms around your waist and hugging you. “This feels like heaven.”

“I don’t think I can go back to wearing a condom now. I mean if you want to…”

“Are you sure? We can still use one just to make sure we are safer.”

You peck him. “We can still use it, don’t worry, I get it. Looking out for me and stuff.”

He lets out a deep breath, thankful you understand what he means.

“Of course I am looking out for you, that’s my job.”

“Job? You are my daddy, not my mom or dad.”

“I am your partner and your friend. I will always look out for you.”

A sudden urge to fuck him again takes over your body, but before you can do it, your phone starts ringing.

Bucky gives you the phone without moving, and when you both see it’s his brother, you groan.

“Hi, William.” You try to sound as normal as possible, but your voice is so raspy it’s impossible.

“Hey, gonna be home in a few minutes. Are you okay? Is Bucky home yet?”

“Ihm, he came.” You wink at James. “All good here. See you.”

You don’t wait for him to answer before you’re hanging up.

“You came too.”

You giggle immediately. It’s hard not to be around Bucky; he is goofy at the right time. “We need to clean up, though, he’s close.”

“Alright.”

*

Your parents didn’t want to listen to you at all. You didn’t have the chance to talk at the party since they’re avoiding you at all costs, and you had to go outside not to cry in front of everyone. You don’t just feel alone and treated like shit, you feel humiliated.

You’re lucky Bucky went to pick up William because his car broke down halfway here, so he didn’t actually witness your breakdown. You know he’d have done something about it. Something you should.

At this point, what do you really have?

“Hey, are you well? Why are you outside, it’s freezing?”

Bucky’s voice makes you jump as he’s suddenly by your side, rubbing your arms. William is right behind him.

“Baby, why are you outside?”

You see Bucky rolling his eyes, and you sigh.

“I wanted some fresh air, William.” You turn toward Bucky before taking a step back. You don’t want him to think you reject his touch. You really need his hug, but it’s not about what you need. “We should go inside.”

He nods, and all three of you make your way close to the improvised stage in the main room.

It’s crazy how many people actually came; it almost feels suffocating.

Your parents have been talking for a while, you assume, because people were animated. You wonder what they promised them.

“And since we’re all here now, I have something to announce,” Bucky’s dad takes the microphone all of a sudden, and William sighs. You want to ask him what is going on since he looks nervous, but you don’t have time to. “I want to invite my son, William, on the stage with us.”

And then he calls your name.

You look at both of your parents, trying to understand why you’d be needed there, and Bucky is just as confused as you are. Everyone starts clapping, and you find yourself dragged on the stage before you can protest.

“Tonight marks a very special moment for us both: professionally and personally.” You freeze, looking at Bucky instantly, but he’s also shocked, shaking his head. “A partnership that will last for a long time, hopefully, passed to a real-life partnership that has developed over the last months.”

William smiles proudly when his dad pats him on the back, and you want to throw up right then.

You turn your head to your parents, who display the fakest smiles you’ve ever seen. They don’t care about what you want. About what you need. Either way, you’re alone, and you cannot continue to play their game. You can’t!

And before anyone can stop you, you’re basically running down the stairs, straight toward Bucky. You quickly wrap your hand around his neck and force him to lean in so you can properly kiss him. You sense his surprise, but you don’t stop, using the opportunity to shamelessly kiss him in front of the whole company, including your parents. He’s yours, and everyone should know it.

He cups your face when you break off the kiss to breathe, and you smile.

You finally did it! You’re free.

You don’t need to turn around to know how upset your families must be. Everyone around you is either gasping or whispering around. You know they’ll be talking about this for a solid week at least, but you’re not gonna be there to hear. You won’t explain anything to them, and they can consider you a cheater who fucked the other brother all they want. It is not your mess to fix. You just want to leave.

“Let’s get out of here,” you whisper, taking his hand. All you want is to eat something and suck him off. “I need to pack my stuff.”

“Are you sure?” He asks concerned as you start to walk toward the exit. Neither of you turns when William calls your names.

“I have never been more sure in my entire life.”

He says nothing as you reach his car, lifting the hand he’s been holding closer to his lips so he can brush a tender kiss against the back of it.

You’re going to be okay.

Tags:

@charmedbysarge @identity2212 @vicmc624  @cjand10  @mayusenpai666  @abitofblues @doveromanoff @buckyb-stan @igotmajordaddyissues

[gyeomsweetgyeom]

[9:12 am]

(cw: f!reader, Jaehyun is an asshole, angst with happy ending)

Yesterday had been a bad day. Scratch that- the last 14 hours had been bad. You had gotten home, tired from your day out with friends to find Jaehyun getting ready to leave.

“Oh, sorry I forgot to mention I had plans tonight. I’ll be back later, ok?” He had said casually, kissing your cheek before heading out the door for the night.

That had been right around seven. Then 11 o’clock rolled around and your texts went unanswered. 3 o’clock and your calls were being ignored. It had caused a huge anxious ball of nerves to form in the pit of your stomach which kept you up until now. Every time somebody in the hall would come home, you’d think it was Jaehyun. Someone in one of the other apartments would make a quiet noise and your head would snap toward the door. The caffeine from all the coffee you were drinking was giving you as much anxiety as it was energy. All your texts to mutual friends sent through the night had only been answered a few minutes ago stating they hadn’t been with Jaehyun all night. If he wasn’t with them then who was he with?

You started another pot of coffee when finally the front door opened. A haggard looking Jaehyun dragged his feet to the living room and threw himself onto the couch. “Oh my god! Jaehyun, are you alright?” You asked, rushing over to his side to not-so-subtly look for wounds.

“I’m fine,” came his voice, muffled by one of the throw pillows.

“Where were you? I called and texted you a dozen times. I was so worried.”

“I told you I had plans,” he sighed.

“Having plans now means you can stay out all night without letting your girlfriend know?” You asked while your annoyance for his nonchalance grew and grew.

“I had too much to drink and I had to stay at my friend’s house, ok?” He replied, standing from the couch to head to the bedroom.

“Why are you being so evasive? I texted all your friends and nobody was with you!”

He threw his hands up, turning to face you, “I hung out with a friend from elementary school, I went to her place, we had a few drinks, my phone died, and now I’m here. I’m at home. I’m hungover and I’m tired is that it?”

“But I talked to your friends from elementary school and they said they hadn’t seen you,” you reply quietly.

He groaned loudly, tilting his head back, “I hadn’t talked to her in a while. She sent me a DM and we started catching up and then she invited me to hang out.”

“So you hung out with a girl who you haven’t seen in years after she randomly messaged you?”

“That’s what I said, yeah,” he nodded.

“And you didn’t tell me where you were going, who you were with, and stayed out all night. How do I even know you’re telling me the truth right now?” You ask incredulously.

His eyes widened in surprise, “What are you trying to suggest right now?”

“I’m not suggesting anything Jaehyun. If your series of events sound fishy, then maybe it’s because they are.”

“I didn’t cheat on you,” he states shakily.

You shrug your shoulders nonchalantly, brushing past him to walk to the bedroom. You begin changing out of your pajamas and into an outfit to leave the house, wile he nervously gnaws on his lips. You stay silent and blank faced while you move around the room to get ready.

He finally speaks up while you grab your purse, “Where are you going?”

“Oh, did I forget to mention I had plans? I’ll be back later, ok?” You parrot his words back with a condescendingly sweet smile. His mouth opens but no sound comes out as you walk out the door.

You don’t return until early evening. You feel refreshed and relaxed, a weight off your shoulders, until “I’ve been calling you all day! Why didn’t you answer me?”

“I got busy. Decided I should hang out with one of my elementary friends who keeps swiping up on my stories and just see how he was doing,” you lie, moving to the couch.

“Ha ha, very funny,” Jaehyun deadpans, “You didn’t actually do that did you?”

“Who knows? But whether or not I did, why is it ok for you to act that way but not for me?” You ask, crossing your arms across your chest.

He pinches the bridge of his nose in frustration, you can see the tips of his ears turning red, and some small, tiny, part of you is beginning to feel a little guilty about your actions. He sighs out deeply, “I’m sorry. I mean that. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that and I promise you nothing happened. Even if you didn’t think anything did, I want to reassure you that nothing happened with her.”

“Thank you,” you nod curtly in response, “I spent the whole day shopping by the way.”

“I promise I won’t ever do anything like that again either. Not just because it was totally out of line, but also because I remembered why I stopped talking to her. She was kind of a bully all those years ago and nothing has changed. She wanted to talk about all the drama and problems she had with people when we were 7- it’s been like 20 years!”

You laugh quietly, “why didn’t you answer my calls?”

“That’s the worst part! She had my phone in phone jail because I started texting you back while she started a movie. That’s why I started drinking so much, and she made me sleep on her floor because her couch was quoted not a resting couch. And! She told me she was gonna have a whole reunion party and I was the only idiot that forgot how rude she was as a kid and didn’t block her. So again, I’m sorry and I promise it will never- ever happen again. I will let you chip me like a dog and put me on a lea-”

You held up a hand, “Jaehyun stop talking please, I already got the full story and I’m not doing that. Let’s move on ok?”

He sighed happily, “I’m blocking her too. Her instagram, her number, her facebook, her MySpace, her twitter, her X, her profile on LinkdIn, her threads, her Pinterest-”

You laughed loudly, covering his mouth with your hand, “Stop! I get it!”

“And I’m telling everyone she’s still awful.”

[bullet-prooflove]

The Circuit: Travis Wheatley x Reader

Tagging: Tagging: @kmc1989 @pear-1206 @keyweegirlie @nu1freakshow

You are the only woman that Travis has eyes for. He makes that abundantly clear during his most recent rodeo circuit. He’s a rockstar at these things, pulling in accolades, showcasing his best horses, it’s the reason John Dutton brought him on board. Travis is a money maker and the Duttons want in.

Unfortunately all of this brings the buckle bunnies.

Travis has been around the block with a few of them. He has a reputation, you know that and so does he, he’s been working hard to rid himself of it over the past year but it sticks like mud. He’s hopes news has gotten around that he has a girl but belt bunnies, they’re bold.

“I’m with someone.” He tells Lanelle when she tries to climb into his lap.

She’s a blond firecracker from Georgia with measurements that belong in a Playboy Magazine. The two of them have tussled a few times, she always seeks him out at events like this.

“But she ain’t here Sugar.” She says in that sweet Southern tone of hers as she rearranges her top to highlight her assets. “But I am.”

“Not my thing anymore.” He tells her, his voice tinged with disinterest and she pours her beer right into his lap. He has to say he half expected it. Lanelle doesn’t like not getting what she wants, in the past he appreciated that feistiness, now…

It’s gotten old.

She spends the rest of the night, writhing on the knee of some young gun coming up on the Bronco circuit and Travis could not give less of a fuck.

He slips away early, disappearing from the bar and heading towards his trailer. He usually goes to the break of dawn at these things before climbing back on his horse and winning his next bout but the truth is he’s getting tired.

The doctor tells him he has a good few years left in him if he takes care of himself, cuts down on the booze. Too much partying is starting to catch up with him, his liver isn’t functioning the way it should do.

You’re the only one he’s told about that, you and his Mama. His doctor says if he doesn’t slow down, he’ll be looking for a new liver in the next five years. Before you that wouldn’t have deterred him. He lived hard, he played hard, he would have died on that hill. But then you’d come into his life, a vision in a white cowboy hat and worn out plaid and he  realised he wanted to stick around as long as possible.

He’s never through of himself as an alcoholic, he’s always been a good time guy but the damage adds up and now he’s careful about what he drinks, what he eats because he know he doesn’t have a hope on the transplant list. Even if he did have the surgery it would put him out of action for over six months and he can’t imagine going that long without riding.

He's sitting on the edge of his bed when he calls you. He’s been missing you more and more lately, your smile, your laugh, the press of your soft body against his as you lie tangled up together. You’ve been together almost two years now and it’s getting harder to leave.

“I saw you on TV.” You say when you pick up the phone. “You looked good.”

“Yea.” He says pinching his brow to ward off the headache that’s starting to gnaw at his temples. “We made some real money today.”

“You sound tired.” You say softly and it still amazes him how attuned you are to him even over this distance.

“I’m missing you a little.” He admits as he lies back on the mattress, his gaze coming to rest on the ceiling. “Actually, I’m missing you a lot.”

Love Travis? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[martialartslover7]

Headcanon time: Am I the only one who feels like, Jiraiya should have left this little compensation gift for Tsunade, before heading off to fight Pain? Dying in the process, while still leaving a remainder of his legacy behind? Making up for lost time, and allowing the two to heal together, after years of fearful denial and trauma?

I get that the Naruto series is practically infamous for how poorly the female characters were handled, but honestly, this one time, where one woman in the series would end up pregnant, where I would wholeheartedly SUPPORT it, would be Tsunade. Think about it, after the war, after fighting Madara, she practically returned to the same solitude lifestyle she had, before encountering Naruto. She didn't change for the better, in fact, she regressed completely. She returned to living without any purpose, going back to gambling and getting senselessly drunk, practically every day.

Look, I get it, by the time Kakashi becomes Hokage, she might have just retired and wanted to be left alone, but is this really all there is to it? Just regressing back to negative habits, because, screw you? I dunno, man, this is that one time where, if she DID end up having a child to take care of, it might have elevated her character, instead of "putting her down", because it would mean: She has a purpose for living. And it would mean, her love for Jiraiya wasn't a "curse", like how it was with her previous lover, Dan. Jiraiya's love for her, saved her life, in the end. He turned out to be that one guy, that, even post-mortum, still managed to have a positive influence on her. And the child is a daily reminder, of how closely intertwined the two were, in spite of the trauma. That just sounds so beautiful, and far more conclusive to Tsunade as a character, than what happened in the actual story. Plus, she and Kurenai could have become besties and connect over the difficulties with pregnancy.

And yeah, I hear you calling: BuT tSuNaDe Is ToO oLd To GeT pReGgErS! Listen, the Strength of a Hundred Seal kept her entire appearance and body about twenty years younger, if that also applies to her organs and her uterus, that isn't a dead topic. Plus, we all know how much of a horny perv Jiraiya is, he couldn't have just left it at just one time, and then never again. Especially since, this is Tsunade we are talking about here, the one woman, he had always held so dear. And I can only imagine, the moment the dam breaks between the two, it would get... SPICY.

It wouldn't even come close to all these sex worker ladies that Jiraiya had probably slept with, while thinking about Tsunade, since he would always go for those, who KIND OF resemble her. But I will bet, in spite of his attitude, I doubt he would have even minded to see Tsunade all wrinkly and old. His love for her was genuine and deep-rooted, I doubt he would have had any problems with her getting "saggy". She would have been THE golden exception, to most of his "rules" on what he finds attractive, because to him, everything about her, is attractive, not just the looks.

But another point to consider, just imagine, IMAGINE, the look on Naruto's face, the moment he learns that part of his father figure will continue to live on, inside Tsunade. That all his sacrifices were never in vain, and he finally got over himself to tell her the truth, resulting in the birth of their child, the one to carry on both of their legacies. Naruto would have cherished this baby, just imagine him tearfully cradling it in his arms, swearing to protect it, the same way his mom swore to him, when he was still a newborn. Oh god, my heart...

...it would also be a nice callback to how Kushina held Naruto, right after birth.

Plus, it would have given Naruto, much like when Shikamaru revealed to him, how Kurenai bore the child of her and Asuma before he died, a much bigger motivation to fight Madara, Obito, and later, Sasuke. The stakes would have become way higher then, if that were the case, since, this isn't anyone's child, it's Jiraiya's and Tsunade's child. Two people, who have played major roles in Naruto's life, being his foster parents, if you will. And he would have fought way harder to defend the past, the present and the future, while facing Sasuke. I mean, sure, it's doubtful if Sasuke would have ever had the guts to truly go through with this, since he couldn't even bring himself to kill either Naruto or Sakura, no matter how hard he tried, so, if he couldn't do that, then everything would be out of the question. But you get the point.

And for NaruHina and SasuSaku fans: Yup. Both Naruto and Sakura would have probably had to take care of Tsunade's baby, since they were the closest to her, and it could have been an ideal training method for either of them, to grasp all about the stressful nature of raising a child, while still working as shinobi and in their respective fields of work. It would have mentally prepared either of them, for when Hinata and Sasuke finally decide to tie the knot with them, and build their own families. And to add another layer of pure sweetness: Kakashi and Anko would have gotten announced as the child's godparents, should something happen to Tsunade. Nuff' said.

I am sorry, despite Kakashi and Anko not looking like it, I think, both of them would be AWESOME godparents, or hell, even uncle and aunt. Both saw the worst of what life had to offer. Raising a child would be... child's play, by contrast. Just imagine Anko adorably doting on the baby in her crazy, unhinged, but very endearing way.

There you go, another headcanon of mine, spilled. What do you guys think? Lemme know. Peace.

[icantdothistodaybruh]

oh, are you familiar with the BoM side story? where arthur dreams of different characters in different fairy tales? i’ve become so! obsessed! with the snow queen versions of sebaciel. ciels outfit is so pretty on him!! but i love a ciel that left everything behind to stay with sebastian.. and sebastian, he’s been so lonely for so long that when he gets a pretty boy he can’t let him go. when someone tries to save him they not only get a “no” but get forcefully snow-blasted right out the door. they understand each other because no one sees the beauty in desolation like they do… so of course they stay isolated in a castle together.

there’s the panel where sebastian’s wrapping his coat around ciels whole body… sebastian acting so smugly to ciels rescuers… the line where ciel says he belongs to the devil… i could live here forever… please consider this cold angle of sebaciel

I AM! AND IT'S ONE OF MY FAVE EXTRAS OUT THERE!!

The implication that the whole dream was of Sebastian's doing (which he is very capable of judging by GWA) brings out such an interesting twist to it - we can see a glimpse of Sebastian's actual opinion on other characters! But I'm of course going to talk a little about Ciel solely for today hehe

I might be wrong since I only have ru and eng translation at hand, but the way Ciel talks about his heart being frozen and eye belonging to the devil makes me think of these acts as essentially same thing, especially given that he "adapted beautifully to the world of Ice" by Sebastian's words. I mean that his heart being frozen doesn't equal to death or inability to feel, but rather just that, adaptation and belonging.

Now I know it sounded far-fetched, but the reason It caught my attention in the first place was the mentioning of the heart at all. It's a dream made by Sebastian, the 'emotionless' and 'unfeeling' demon, with clear analogy to the contract built on power, revenge, and hunger for one's soul, or at least that is how it always was portrayed before. So why would his made up dream-Ciel suddenly bring a heart into equation?

You should've seen my face when I got to the chapter were Elizabeth escapes to rCiel. Call me delulu but it suddenly made so much sense when Sebastian started talking how "human hearts are mysterious, complex things" and "no matter if you are demon or god it is truly and utterly impossible to shackle another's heart." Before that I wouldn't even think he'd have any opinion on the matters of the heart, let alone it be a stated fact to him that he can't have it in a way he can own souls or bodies.

And so that man, in his made up dream, with a made up Ciel, made that Ciel say that not only his soul (eye) belongs to the devil, but heart too. Knowing for a fact it can't belong to him in reality. I'm speechless.

Also when I got your ask yesterday I thought I should make a fanart or a redraw of that scene, and once again, you should've seen my face when I found the page:

and if you don't know why I was so surprised I'll gladly explain with two more pics:

My head exploded.

Three pieces. Representing their change of masks and roles. Yet each is the same in it's core. And one of them is character's fantasy while other two his reality. I'm so done with this show.

...could it be that Arthur's dream made by Sebastian is yet another lie becoming truth?...

[monayen]

I love your stories! Perfect for feeding my bedtime delusions ♥️

Can I request something for ratman 3? Him & reader waiting out a threat in a too small hiding spot so they’re pressed against each other. The danger and close proximity make 3 noticeably excited…

Cramped | Ratman 3

➷ Paring - Ratman 3 x GN!Reader [Randal's Friends / Ranfren]

➷ CWs - dry humping, biting, very light description of violence, WHIMPERING

a/n - first ratman with a fic, isn't he special :-] ? sad state of affairs as i recently broke my phone (which i always write on) so i am now confined to my laptop. ignore any mistakes or formatting issues, i kept getting distracted trying to make a ranfren twitter. (i needed a phone number to do it D-:)

“Quiet, okay?” you whisper to the trembling ratman beside you, his forehead damp with fear as you guide him through narrow passageways.

Cramped spaces were second nature to you. Crawling between walls, squeezing through vents—it was how you’d survived since your formation. Open spaces were death traps, especially for vermin trying to get by in the confusing Ivory house.

Ratman 3 nods, his beady eyes darting nervously behind his round glasses as you move together, your bodies pushing through the tight crawl space.

“We need to bring something back this time,” you whisper, voice low and urgent. “I’m so sick of eating drywall.”

Behind you, his shaky voice follows. “I-I think it’s… fine, actually.” He mumbles, barely convincing even himself. You both know the truth. The shared bags of chips, warm beer, and crumbs of crackers disappear far too quickly in the nest. Rationing isn’t exactly an option for a group who can’t count.

Disputes over who should venture out into the Ivory’s pantry have become routine—bickering and rounds of makeshift card games determining the unlucky rat. This time, you and 3 drew the short straws. Though, you’re pretty sure Michael Jr. cheated.

The path weaves through chewn holes in the drywall and vents and pipes you two squeeze through. It'd be borderline claustrophobic for any other person, and it's even worse with how the blonde ratman clings behind you like a meat shield.

You glance back at your companion, his eyes wide and darting, every sound seeming to send a shiver through his scrawny frame. He's following behind, almost pushing against you in the narrow space.

“Keep it together,” you mutter, more to yourself than him. Ratman 3 gulps and shakes his head, “Let's just go back. I think I have a granola bar stashed away somewhere–”

You’re about to reply when heavy footsteps echo from the other side of the wall, cutting off whatever quip was on your tongue.

Ratman 3 freezes, chest heaving, his body trembling as he grabs your arm. You shoot him a warning look, silently pleading for silence. The footsteps are joined by multiple voices.

It’s the brothers that live here. The older one seems to be scolding the younger one, though you can't seem to piece together the context behind his words. You listen carefully as a deeper, gruffer voice says something short. Though it's enough that you both instantly recognize easily who it is, making your blood run cold. 

3 immediately panics, his flight instincts kicking in as he silently urges you two to leave. Your heart beats in your ears, but still you motion for him to stay put. 

The walls feel like they’re closing in, the tight space you're accustomed to suddenly pressing down with suffocating intensity. Claustrophobia creeps in, tightening your chest as the weight of the situation sinks deeper—you’re trapped. Any noise, any creaking movement, and you're sure they’ll hear.

Ratman 3 shifts nervously, pressing his body tightly against your figure as he tries to make himself as small as possible in the cramped space. 

“The catman will leave soon,” you whisper as softly as possible in an attempt to soothe him. But even in the dark between the walls, you can see the sweat beading on his forehead, his chest rising and falling in rapid, panicked breaths.

You feel him shift again behind you, and you almost turn back to whisper for him to quit moving before you two get killed. That's when you notice a poking on your behind, and how shaky 3’s breathing really is against your neck.

“Are you fucking hard right now?” You say too softly, still concerned about being caught to let your baffled thoughts run out your mouth. 

Your words hang in the air as Ratman 3 freezes behind you, his body trembling even more than before. 

"I-I'm sorry!" he whispers, his voice cracking with panic. "I can't help it! It's just... being this close to you, in this tight space... It's..." He trails off, and you can almost sense the mix of embarrassment and excitement radiating off him.

Ratman 3's body tenses as he tries to suppress his arousal, but it's becoming more and more difficult for him to stay still. The confined space, the adrenaline rush from the potential danger, and the proximity all makes your heart beat faster and his dick harder. Both of you need to urgently relax, or you’ll be torn out the walls and have your guts spilled all over the floor.

Ratman 3's breath hitches as he grips your hips, his panting becoming more frantic. You can feel the contagious feverish sensation of his arousal pressing onto you, the friction of his pants rubbing against your own sending sparks of pleasure through your body.

"Ah," he gasps, his voice barely above a whisper. "I can't... I need..." His words trail off into a low moan as he holds up, the tight space tenfolding every sensation.

Pure heat radiates from his body, his breathing growing even more labored as he struggles to maintain any sort of composure. The poking sensation touching your ass is becoming more and more insistent, and you can sense the desperation for any type of relief on his flushed face.

Your own desire is growing, your body responding to the closeness and the danger of the situation. You lean forward, bracing yourself against the wall as you feel Ratman 3's hands sliding under your shirt, his fingers resting the curve of your waist and hips.

"We can't," you breathe, "They'll hear us."

But Ratman 3 seems beyond reason, his body mindlessly continuing to shift. He leans closer, his breath hot on your ear as he whispers, “Please,” his voice a desperate plea. “I’ll be good.”

His small movements grow more frantic, his pelvis grinding slightly for any sense of relief. The tight space amplifies every sensation, his arousal pressing insistently against you. His breath comes in ragged gasps, and you can hear the neediness in his voice as he whispers, "I can't stop, please don't stop me."

“Shh,” you whisper, your voice trembling with tension. You're acutely aware of the muffled sounds from beyond the drywall, and how even the slightest noise could expose you both. Despite the risk, you brace the wall, offering him more leverage, your heart racing as excitement pools in your empty stomach.

He takes up the welcoming position immediately, biting back a groan as his hips begin to roll off of yours. The rub of fabric makes 3 shudder, his head tipping back and almost hitting the wall behind him. His hand slides down to cup your ass, squeezing roughly as he pulls your hips against him. The pressure of his erection is too much to ignore, and you can feel your own arousal dampening between your legs.

You gasp softly as Ratman 3 speeds up against you, the friction getting rougher and rougher as pleasure waves through your body. He moves excitedly, taking in the softness of you cramped in front of him. He bucks his hips shamelessly, desperate and unrhythmic.

“Fuck," you exhale, your voice trembling slightly. You glance back just enough to catch the fog on his glasses, his beady eyes pinched as he nibbles on his lip to bite back too loud of moans. The smallest of whimpers still escape his mouth, his body tensing over and over again as he holds onto you. You press your cheek against the cool wall, trying to muffle the sounds of your own excitement as Ratman 3 continues to rut against you.

Ratman 3's breathing grows heavier, his movements becoming impossibly more erratic as he quickly chases his orgasm. You can feel the warmth of his body pressing against your back, his chest heaving with each ragged breath.

"I'm gonna... I'm gonna come," he whimpers, his hips thrusting urgently against yours. You're about to shush him, but a touch on your chest surprises you. His clammy hand moves from your hip to under your shirt, groping and squeezing frantically. He leans forward, giving a final rut of his hips against your ass before his teeth sink into your shoulder to suppress any loud moan that was going to spill out of him.

You almost gasp too loudly, but you catch yourself and clench your jaw to choke back the sound. Ratman 3 lets out a strangled whimper against your shoulder, his body tensing as he buries his face into your skin. He quickly comes into his pants, fully pressed onto your ass as his cock twitches and pulses, riding out his orgasm. You purse slightly, feeling the warmth of his release soaking through and staining your clothes.

Ratman 3 slumps against you, his body shaking with the aftershocks of his climax. You can feel his heart racing, matching the pounding of your own as you both struggle to catch your breath.

The silence that follows is deafening, broken only by the sound of your ragged breathing and the smallest creak of the walls around you. You hold your breath, coming back to the reality of how dangerous of a spot you are right now. 

You listen for any sign of the family, anxiety tugging at your gut as you wait for any sign that both your presences have been discovered. But the voices have moved on, their footsteps fading into the distance as they go down the hall.

You let out a shaky sigh of relief, turning around to face Ratman 3 with the little space you have. Ratman 3 lifts his head, his eyes meeting yours in the darkness. There's a mix of embarrassment and satisfaction in his gaze, and you can't help but smirk at the sight.

He shifts slightly, wincing at the sticky mess in his pants. His eyes dart down to the stain on the fabric, and his face flushes an even deeper shade of crimson.

“I, um... I guess I made a bit of a mess,” he mumbles, avoiding your gaze in embarrassment. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin your clothes.”

You shrug, trying to downplay the rush of adrenaline in your chest. “Don’t worry; at least we weren’t caught.”

Ratman 3 nods, quickly wiping his brow and smoothing down his rumpled shirt. He takes a deep breath, as if steeling himself, then stammers, “S-So… you wanna… uh, share that granola bar?”

[daisukitoo]

I am 15% of the way through Harrow the Ninth. There are no plot spoilers below.

"Second person, past tense" is a really weird choice for a novel's narration, and I will be disappointed if this does not pay off mightily.

Most pieces I see in second person POV are short stories. The goal is to establish intimacy and immediacy, and they are most commonly in the present tense. The notion is that the action is happening to you, right now, and you are finding out about it as you the reader go through the story. Occasionally you see such a story in the future tense, suggesting someone is prophesying to you.

Second person, past tense is someone telling you your own history. This is kind of weird. One assumes a Memento story with an amnesia premise, or similarly Merlin living backwards in time. The second person here raises the question of who is telling you the story. The past tense raise the question of why you need someone to tell you your own story.

That our protagonist is explicitly and demonstrably insane gives us a lot of "why," although the particular "why" depends on the "who." The most obvious "who" is that Harrow is telling herself her own story. We have already seen Harrow telling herself her own story within this story, so adding another layer of recursion seems obvious and later adding multiple seems fun.

But here we reach a fork that we cannot resolve this early in the book. Is Harrow in a moment of lucidity telling herself what she should already know? Is Harrow in a moment of insanity hallucinating a new history? Is Harrow just lying to herself because the ending of Gideon the Ninth was too painful?

Harrow the Ninth is sometimes described as gaslighting the reader about Gideon the Ninth. Someone is not telling the truth about something here. One character seems to have noticed, but it is hard to be sure when our narrator is unreliable and may be hallucinating and/or lying.

Gideon was a somewhat unreliable narrator not in the sense that she lied (except perhaps about her emotions, except perhaps mostly to herself) but in that she was not paying attention, like the meme post in circulation about a movie showing the start of World War I from the perspective of a pet pigeon. You can probably identify all the important plot points of Gideon the Ninth by how boring Gideon finds them.

Harrow is more classically unreliable. She has a skewed perspective, and within that perspective she hallucinates, and on top of those hallucinations she will deceive herself and others. This early in the book, we already have many examples of Harrow seeing things that aren't there. She tends to realize within a page or two that she is hallucinating. The big news at some point should be that those little hallucinations were within the context of a larger hallucination and/or lie.

And now I need to go finish the book so I can check my Tumblr notifications without worrying about spoilers in the notes.

[where-theres-smoak-2]

For me the whole question of who is the rightful heir to the throne and the whole reason why I am team black all the way is very simple. Rhaenyra is the rightful heir to the throne because Viserys, who was the King at the time, named her his heir and he got all the lords to swear fealty to her when he did. The King's word is law, it really is that simple.

It's the same with the whole Jace, Lucerys and Joffrey debate, I don't consider them bastards and therefore excluded from inheriting lands and titles because Viserys, the King at the time declared them, publicly and on several occasions as legitimate and the rightful heirs. We know from the og show that a king has the power to make a bastard legitimate so if Viserys is standing up in front of witnesses and saying these boys are legitimate then they are legitimate end off.

Also whilst on the subject I have seen claims in the past that Rhaenyra is trying to trick poor Corlys and Rhaenys into believing that those boys are Laenor's and that makes her an evil bitch of a whore apparently. But here's the thing, those boys are Laenor's, like he claimed them as his own, both he and Rhaenyra referred to them as their boys. We know that Rhaenyra and Laenor tried and failed to conceive a child and so they looked to other methods of producing an heir. Look I don't really like using modern day constructs etc when talking about medieval set stories but I can't think of a better way of explaining what I mean, but the way I see it is like if a couple want a child but can't conceive so they get a donor, using this donor they are able to have a child. You wouldn't then go around and say that the father wasn't really that child's father because they weren't genetically related. So what we essentially have is a couple using a donor situation but set in a medieval fantasy society which complicates matters. Unlike in a modern setting where the couple could be open and honest about using a donor, Rhaenyra and Laenor could not but it still doesn't change the fact that the three boys were planned by Laenor and Rhaenyra and were seen as their children. This isn't a Cersei/Robert situation where Cersei was trying to pass Jaime's kid's off as Robert's without Robert's knowledge. Everyone involved knew what was going on and agreed to it. Laenor knew that genetically they were Harwin's, Harwin understood that legally and in all other ways those boys were Laenor's and not his. Yes Harwin was involved in their lives, yes Harwin clearly loved those boys, yes those boys were lucky enough to have two men in their lives who loved them and cared and protected them in a fatherly way, but that doesn't change the fact that they were still Laenor's sons. Rhaenyra chose Harwin to have children with because he was someone she trusted and cared for and who she knew cared for her, considering in their society if Laenor's sexuality was discovered or it was discovered they had used Harwin as a 'donor' to have their children, it could have really bad consequences of course she would want to chose someone she was sure would keep her secret.

I guess my overall point here is that its not as simple as Rhaenyra lied to Corlys, Rhaenys and her own boys about who their real father was, because their real father was Laenor. This situation came about because both Rhaenyra and Laenor were under pressure to produce heirs, so they found a way, together, of producing those heirs, so really when Rhaenyra tells her boys that Laenor is their father its the truth, he is in every way that matters. When she tells Corlys and Rhaenys these are your grandchildren, again its the truth. Because at the end of the day if Laenor himself knew and agreed with how those boys came to be and considered them his own, then its no one else's business how Laenor and Rhaenyra had those children, they are still their children.

Anyway I've rambled on enough and its 2am where I live and I should really be getting some sleep. But yeah, as far as I am concerned Rhaenyra is the rightful heir and her three eldest boys are the true sons of Laenor and are legitimate and the rightful heirs of the throne and driftmark, I will not budge on that. Alicent, the greens and everyone else just needs to mind their own damn business when it comes to those boys.

[catboxcoffin]

On Furniture

(Apologies for discursive definition-talk..)

I believe the label of ‘furniture’ itself, like anything that isn’t given a complete answer, to host a catbox of meanings, so I’ll list some thoughts and categorize them by factual/thematic v.s. (meta-)fictional. I am separating these categories based on the word’s two ‘origins’: [1.] the ‘in-universe’ coinage; and [2.] the first usage within the episodic structure.

Regarding/defining categories:

Factual/Thematic:

The canon, chronological storyline [1.] underneath the story’s presentation tends to connect more to the Factual—I use this term to refer to the material events upon which everything else is built (‘Prime’) because Umineko likes to play with the word ‘Truth.’ Extra-gameboard events are as close to ‘factual’ as we can hope for, as they should occur outside of the Catbox. I willfully ignore the gestures pointing otherwise, as that would completely ruin the entire game’s truth-search, but I will concede differing ‘perspectives’ as a means of obscuring, and stories told by catbox pieces to be dubious. Literal and Thematic are not oppositional here; all metaphor/hyperbole/concepts in this category are rational extensions of the in-universe ‘reality’ because they remain as such—by this I mean that they are not visualized as chairs or rabbits, but instead concepts as intuitive as love and evil that exist among the world's inhabitants. Although these themes are delicately woven into the meta-fiction, they are born from ‘reality,’ not personified from a third source or a tool within the game.

2. (Meta-)Fictional:

The story’s presentation [2.] aligns more with the subjective, fantastical elements within the story. Considering the nature of an ‘endless witch’ and voyager witches in general, the Meta-World falls into this category as well (Also... take my usage of 'Meta' lightly—I am referring to fiction-within-fiction and the common term for the worlds, not asserting that Umineko is an effective work of MetaFiction). The gameboards in their entirety cannot logically exist without Meta interference, because their planes often (arbitrarily) merge. To simplify the discussion I’m treating the layers somewhat like this: —> (Note: it would take me ages to map out a consistent meta layer system for Umineko, so bear with the simplicity)

Prime - Umineko’s ‘real’ universe. The fragment of authored message bottles and (pardon my presumption) Ange/Eva’s survival. + What can reasonably be gleaned chronologically from the following layer (2) along with flashbacks.

Gameboards and the pieces within them. Were written with an intended purpose & elements of reality. In order of importance: 1, 2 > 3, 4 > Chiru

The Meta-World 1. Where Battler and Beatrice fight & the presentation/narration of the board. Seems to seep into every other layer somehow. Hypothetically contains Yasutrice as-author

The Meta-World 2. Whatever the hell was going on with Featherine and Ange reading about MW1. Arguably any extra-catbox people (voyager&endless witches of the future) contribute to this layer.

My Factual-thematic category focuses nearly entirely on layer 1, with extrapolation from persistent themes/discussions in 2. My (Meta-)fictional category encompasses layers 2 & 3. 4 can be relevant but I largely dislike using it for theories. In other words, category 2 is everything that is non-factual, meaning mostly presentation and interpretation.

I. Factual / Thematic

The in-universe coinage of ‘furniture’ is only disclosed in Reqiuem. I find this to be an interesting choice considering the inverted ‘answer sheet’ theme of EP7; Ryukishi is handing us a short, retrospectively logical explanation, but its brevity leaves much to be interpreted.

"This body that isn't even capable of love...!! / What's...what's the point in living like that?! / This isn't a Human's life...!! / It's like being furniture!! / That's right, I'm...furniture...!!"

The term is suddenly flipped on its head. Prior, furniture was presented as unable to love because it was furniture (implied to be status-based, seemingly just an effect of inferiority). However, it’s the other way around: one is furniture because it cannot love. The condition of the body precedes & defines worth. Unlike the dramatized, bodiless nature of Beato’s fantasies, this solution is grotesque and earthly. Being physically alienated from the universe of two makes one sub-human. Yasu-Shannon-Kannon’s—I’ll use ’YSK’—mutilated organs make ‘them’ (collective, not gender-neutral) unable to form a sexual union with any of their respective partners. Shannon cannot fulfill the marital duty of motherhood or even sex with George, Kanon is literally impotent, both physically and emotionally/volitionally in his pursuit of Jessica, and Yasu is so alienated from the feminine ideal that she cannot allow herself to ‘exist’ without performing through the former two (&Beatrice). None of them are sexually ‘complete.’

Continuing the material interpretation, its application to Genji is obvious: He loyally serves Kinzo as a friend and confidant, possesses a flamboyant, flirtatious fictional counterpart, and remains unmarried with a certain sterility towards women... He is gay. Blatant subtext aside this answer also ties up some of my personal qualms with his characterization. His senseless, sociopathic dedication to the head and his successor, complete unwillingness to intervene regarding Kuwatrice, and legitimate desirelessness can at least partially be humanized by lolgayforkinzo… If anything, a possible envy of Beatrice(s) could have solidified their doom. This unrequited love makes Genji too ‘sexually incomplete.’ While not literally mutilated, there is metaphorical castration in being a sexual minority. Kinzo would never love him, and I doubt Genji even respected himself enough to wish for it. He is the other half-universe that complements YSK, and possibly the only one who could begin to understand them. Their dramatically fatalistic tendencies can be narratively justified by their banishment from (yet proximity to) the world of love. There is no purpose in ‘living’ without the single element of life.

On a simpler note, we can also reverse-engineer the label simply based on those excluded. On my first read, ‘furniture’ initially, obviously seemed to be a hyperbolic representation of servitude. Being barricaded from the rest of society by class would certainly render one ‘sub-human.’ This, however, is self-eliminating by exempting Gohda and Kumasawa from the label. My immediate conclusion then was that the basis was not physical status, but psychological servitude. KumaGoh always felt far more human to me, which I chalked up to abysmally poor writing of ShKaGenji—a belief I still hold to an extent, but have found ways to cope with. Kumasawa and Gohda are distinctly rebellious, obviously thinking little of their status as servants. They are petty, greedy individuals who fit in well with the Ushiromiyas despite their class differences. Kumasawa is a pathological slacker, and Gohda is a skirt of responsibilities, but this doesn’t make them 'bad' in any sense. They have a passion for and qualms with their employment because it is their job, not their identity. The same cannot be said for SKG, who literally embody their vocation. I could never take their little spats with Beatrice seriously because of how bizarrely complacent they were in the face of reality; to this day I get irritated with searching for satisfactory answers in EP2. Thus, ‘furniture’ can be taken to mean a lack of humanity constituted by a lack of will & individuation.

In a similar (& more personally satisfying) vein, ‘Furniture’ can represent a debt and unbreakable tie to Kinzo. ShKanon and Genji are closer than anyone to being his property, yet they obtain strange respect from him, bearing the One-winged eagle as both a brand and honor—prized possessions. The magical perspective refers to them as his ‘creations,’ which works literally with Yasu/Lion as his paternal creation and Genji-as-servant as a circumstantial creation. Genji owes Kinzo as his savior, his remaining existence eternally devoted to paying back the favor of being spared from death in the seizing of Taiwan. Serving for so long, and so absolutely, definitely degraded his sense of humanity and began to merge his identity with his master’s.

(GEN): ”......We must continue to return the favor we received from the Master...until our final moments."

YSK, on the other hand, are tied to Kinzo by blood. Even in their ignorance and physical distance, and much to their personal detriment, they cannot escape him. They merge with projections of Beatrice without even meeting him, they come to work in the mansion without knowledge of their ancestry, and they become treasured servants seemingly by coincidence. Both ShKanon and Genji have a sense of being Kinzo's above all else, to the point of being distrusted as servants by the rest of the family, an unfortunate state since neither has families of their own. I think of this as a semi-intended and enforced alienation by Kinzo, furthering their already lonely situations for the sake of dependence and loyalty (I do not find this entirely loveless, though…). This loneliness could explain the affective resignation felt by furniture, and their inability to ‘love.’ YSK’s case is cemented in youth due to special treatment both inciting bullying and cultivating a strange relationship between them and Kinzo—Kanon’s mention of shooting with Kinzo and participating in pranks tugs on a heartstring I can’t explain. I am particularly fond of this interpretation…

II. (Meta-)Fictional

There is a stupid amount of facets to furniture in the 'fictional' portion of the story, to the point where it’s difficult to speculate on a cohesive definition. 50 new characters now fall under the label, and they must be encompassed as well. Is the term simply an extension of its connotation in reality, or is it morphed by meta-context like many of the other themes? My vote? Entirely Meta.

As I did earlier, I will begin with the first usage—this time, the coinage within the episodic structure [2.]. Doing this, I found something interesting:

The first use of furniture is Self-Referential and used as a reason to not do something: Kanon not giving a real interactive greeting, or accepting sweets; Shannon not fighting off Battler’s assault. It actually takes a while for the term to be used by non-furniture, making it appear entirely self-imposed. The word is persistently used despite the discomfort and intervention by others. It’s not self-deprecation or knowledge of one’s place; it’s a rule—a rule seemingly ingrained into the fabric of their existence. This is what I assert in this section—it is.

Shannon, Kanon, and Genji to a lesser extent, are wholly pieces owned by Yasu as their author. Not in the sense that Piece-Maria or Piece-Eva are pieces—I mean literal fiction. SKG are Yasu’s characters. Their differentiation from ‘humans’ all hinges on what can be ascribed to their fictionality.

They have an unchangeable position in the world because they are born with a singular practical purpose: to facilitate the gameboards’ culprit. (The strife that appears down the line is due to the conflicting purpose of creation) They cannot obey promises, only orders. Furniture does nothing but rot with the passage of time (…due to the triumph of new truths, I presume). Furniture is a reliable ‘tool,’ aptly fitting for characters who exist to fit neatly into the logic of murders, allowed meta-sentience but not autonomy. Writing about Humans is inefficient; you must cater to their flaws and desires, bound by what they Would or Wouldn’t do. What they are shown to be like is what they are like; the room for duplicity is small in stories corroborated by the Truth of the outside world. To surpass this—to create the perfect culprit without constraints, morals, or ties to reality—one only must ensure they are embodied. Embodied, they must be, by someone who could feasibly be them, due to an intentional lack of information. The benefit of the ambiguous identity is the excusability of multiple identities and secret motives. Yasu, with the least history, is the default, practical culprit for such a scheme. It would be entirely possible for Yasu to have no motive against the family at all, and through a simple desire to write the most effective story possible, just happened to write herself as the villain (though I obviously do not believe this, based on… well… everything).

Genji is not quite ‘fictional’ in the way that I’m claiming ShKanon are, but his nature makes him the perfect culprit-tool. Little can be known regarding prime-Genji aside from his undying loyalty to Kinzo and his successor (and how this makes him starkly morally bereft). Without family or distinct loyalties aside from the aforementioned, he too becomes a motive-mystery, and can be written to feasibly facilitate and assist almost any act if dictated by the ‘Master.’ The role of Master is pretty significant regarding Genji’s utility, considering that if the boards are chronologically honest (which they must be), Kinzo is dead and Yasu is ‘the Master.’ This aggressively recontextualizes most of Genji’s references to being furniture:

(GEN): ".......I believe everything has proceeded as the Master has hoped and arranged for. ...To distrust that would exceed my role as furniture in service to the Master.”

(KAN): "...............I wonder if this means the Master's ceremony has already begun." / (GEN): "...Probably. However, that has nothing to do with furniture like us.”

Obviously, we could read this as commentary on Yasu literally carrying out the murders, but the passivity and strange sentience regarding the ceremony leads me to believe this comes from a character aware of his narrative function. He was Yasu’s original ‘piece’ in reality, remaining her greatest asset in fiction as well. His loyalty was not just feasible, but real. Like ShKanon, he functions as a limitless Queen. Unlike SK, though, he does little to ever interfere or reject his status. Although, there is that scene of him knifing the butterfly…

Before I discuss the other(s)’ fictionality, I have to preface: I will not suspend my disbelief—I do not think ShKanon was a ‘thing’ in prime. I don’t doubt the mental manifestation of Kanon as an ideal, and am even open to a Kanon ‘alter,’ but I cannot accept that YasuShannon regularly dressed up as him or that anyone knew of a Kanon (besides maybe Genji, and even that’s tenuous). I honestly don’t mind the impracticality of performing Kanon, more so the meaninglessness. Within a gameboard ruleset where absurdities being ‘technically possible’ warrants its writing as truth, why would Kanon be real? Wouldn’t that be stripping Yasu of her hilarious authorial tricks? His existence as “extra person without extra body” is the perfect tool for a game, but totally worthless in reality. It’s not unreasonable that he ‘existed’ at Jessica’s school festival as a favor, but I wouldn’t push further than that. Besides, he was 90% covered and still considered strikingly young and androgynous, which only confirms the difficulty of genderswapping in reality. Plus, most of the ‘confirmation’ of PrimeKanon exists among swaths of half-truths (i.e. Requiem stating that a whole separate kid is being summoned out of thin air and Yasu is doing magic). Don’t take this as discrediting his significance, though; Beatrice also isn’t ‘real,’ and she’s more interesting for it.

As for Shannon, she is also largely fake. Yes, the servant named ‘Shannon’ exists in Prime. That is Yasu (or, well, what was left after the Clair-trice fragmentation [Ironically enough, I do actually take this absurd plot point at face value. Because it’s interesting]). However, I truly believe that Gameboard Shannon (GS) is a fictional entity born to serve (exempting murders) the desire for conformity and traditional femininity as much as Kanon was born from loneliness and repression. Again, these facets and desires absolutely existed in reality, I just don’t see them as being sustainable, performed identities. The fact that Battler’s memories of his first love aren’t remotely jogged by GS, and the fact that such memories would make the culprit obvious, insists upon the idea that GS is an intentional construction for the sake of the story. Battler isn’t an idiot, his androgynous intellectual gf just morphed into a moeblob tradwife over 6 years…

I feel like there’s a sticking conception that either: 1. Shannon is literally mentally Beatrice le evil culprit mastermind and is just inhabiting a servant body; or 2. Shannon is completely disconnected and the evil witch is hidden in her head as a separate consciousness and possesses her and seriously fights her alternate personas. I find these neither compelling nor reasonable. As for the first, I really do not feel like labeling a character’s entire real-world existence as a facade, no matter how boring they may be. Besides, it would be quite difficult to earnestly repress your true self enough to love not one, but two other people on the side. As for the second, a split personality is meaningless and nigh impossible when within the board’s logic you can literally kill, resurrect, and swap identities at will. They’re all fiction. That’s it. They’re all Yasu’s characters. Granted, they each contain large, separate amounts of herself, but none are uniquely her. As Zepar and Furfur said, “Their soul is less than a single person.” Existent, in a sense, but not fully ensouled.

It should go without saying that I reject Prime!JessiKanon or and ShaGeorge (for the most part). I think their inclusion in the story is a mechanic to solidify just how disconnected Yasu’s desires and ‘selves’ are, and to provide ample commentary on Love. It’s entirely likely that Yasu fantasized a romantic pursuit of George to distract herself from Battler, but I have a hard time reconciling her character with that sort of activity unless, again, Shannon was a literal split identity. Besides, the love square serves to soften the absolute disingenuousness of ShKanon for being what they are—tools.

However, Shannon does have an undeniable centrality, a ‘Heart’ that the others are not afforded, including Beatrice. My answer for this is that she is the only one truly Embodied outside of the board, pushing her into a strange half-furniture, half-human category. Kinzo is said to have made her by hand without a demon and to have given her a heart. This alludes to her being a child born from flesh, not contrived by circumstance. As always, Kinzo is paralleled by Yasu, who has a similar (meta-)relationship to Shannon.

Gameboard-Shannon does not ‘exist,’ but she surely contains the most real rudiments of Prime-’Shannon.’ Though less than human, she is Named and privileged with a body the others could never have. Her higher existence can also be explained by her being the simplest to potentially ‘exist’ (no gender-bend, no blonde witch). The conflict between her narrative role as Yasu’s piece and the narrative constraints of her ties to reality affords her a special rebelliousness, manifesting as a stronger Heart. Shannon’s bindings to Prime are a hindrance from an authorial perspective, narrowing culpability, but a privilege to the piece herself, who may circumvent fate with her ‘humanity.’ This is why she always precedes Kanon, and why she wins the love duel (Yes, I think the duel was identity>love). I also believe that Yasu envied the conceptual GS (The Beatrice/Shannon clash is enough to evidence this) and that Shannon’s internal strife is a consequence of Yasu’s teetering consideration of embodying her completely—hence the “heart that can know love.” By abandoning her Self and personifying this ideal, she could pursue a love beyond Battler, but it would be a charade. Thus the ‘Shannon’ character was trapped in a dream she wasn’t allowed, with a new purpose outgrowing the old, fighting her own authorship.

“…Burning with infatuation and worried by love, being tempted constantly and eternally with a way out was truly a cruel trial.”

This could easily be read as Yasu’s conception of Shannon—her last way “out.” However, her piece is not allowed to transgress its role, or the catbox games would shatter.

Though I have agonized over it, I don’t think my thoughts here ignore the heart. To understand the nature of furniture, one must deconstruct each character and what makes them human. Metaphors & representation are crucial to Umineko and, by extension, Yasu. The motive compelling one to author iterative ‘selves’ containing neuroses invisible in reality yet contained in one body for the sake of their nature being solved is far more bittersweet than reverse-engineering a split personality because it’s the only way to make the Logick Work. Applying the sentiment of Eva-trice and the black witch, internal conflict may be made comfortable through literal bifurcation, but the mind in reality is painfully united. The possession of multitudes can justify the inability to understand or accept yourself; to love yourself. Many but one.

I consider the Golden Land’s ‘liberation’ of furniture into love & bodies of their own to be the opposite of what it seems—instead of external fabrication, the identities unite cohesively within the single mind, thus allowing them ‘each’ a body and the capacity to love.

TLDR; Furniture in the meta-perspective is the role of a character & narrative tool. Furniture in ‘reality’ is a physical, psychological, and relational condition.

[formosusiniquis]

Am I the Asshole?

Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington; Robin Buckley/Original Female Character(s); Steve Harrington/Original Character(s); Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson WC: 6052 | Rated: T | Tags: Modern AU, Reddit AU, Some AITA typical terrible people, QPR Steve & Robin, NB Steve, NB Robin AKA the Stobin AITA fic

r/AmITheAssshole u/HufflepuffHero94 9yrs ago AITA for being concerned about my girlfriends living situation?

Context: My (20F) girlfriend (18F) is amazing. She's a polyglot linguistics major, speaks three languages fluently and she's completely self-taught, a genius basically. We go to the same college (Midwestern Liberal Arts college) where we met in the marching band. Now R, my girlfriend, is from a small town. Like the kind of small town that they make jokes about in sitcoms, she isn't really online (so I'm not worried about her seeing this) because she claims they didn't even have the internet until she was in high school. She isn’t really “out” because of this. It’s like she lives in this semi-closeted space like some kind of TV queerbait character. It's not really a problem, I mean she’ll tell people we’re dating if they ask and all of our marching band friends know but when I ask about it she says it’s because it wasn’t really safe in her hometown growing up. But it’s 2014 not 1980…

Even though R is a freshman she’s in special accommodations. Instead of living in the dorms like the school usually requires she’s got a small, studio apartment just off of campus. A perk considering how awful living in the dorms is. R is a pretty private person and super studious. Most of our dates have been in the library or a study date at the coffee place on campus. She’s not big on PDA, she says she’s trying to get better at it but she’s still only sort of out and I’m her first real girlfriend. I was psyched when she asked me if I wanted to go with her to her apartment to study, said her best friend had a never fail study method that she was eager to try (and when she told me what it was I was pretty eager too).

R can’t drive, so when I pull into the parking lot of her complex she notices something and says her roommate hasn’t left for work yet. I’m a little confused because like I said she lives in a studio apartment, but she just brushes it off and says something about asshole parents and this being what they could afford when some money fell through. She’s sent me snaps from her place, so I know it’s pretty cozy so I tell her it’s fine. Obviously I’m concerned about what the set up is going to be like when we get up there but she insists that dingus (her words) will only be there for another couple minutes before they have to leave for work and that Stevie (again her words) is her best friend in the world. They moved here together from the same small town or something.

To give R credit, she’s definitely done the best she can with the space. When I walked it it definitely felt as homey as it does in her pictures. The door opened up into the kitchen and living room and she’s got those spaces divided off from the beds with one of those Chinese paper divider thingies. Anyway to make a long story short it turns out her roommate and best friend Stevie is actually a whole dude (19). He comes out, gives her a look and asks her if “us girls are planning a sleepover” and if he should make himself scarce for the evening. R says she doesn’t give him shit when his “special friends” come over and after that I kinda stopped listening. I slipped off into the apartment looking for the bathroom and that’s when I saw how their “bedroom” was set up. Twin beds INCHES apart, they might as well be sharing the same one.

Here’s where I might be the asshole. When her “friend” finally cleared out I told her the truth. I didn’t know how comfortable I was hanging out in her place where she lives with a guy. I do live in the dorms but I’ve got a single right now. I asked her to move in with me so she wouldn’t have to be in this situation. I guess it maybe sounded like I was dissing her friend, which I was but I didn’t mean for it to sound like that. I just think it’s weird that she won’t come out to anyone and is also living with some guy! I told her I wasn’t interested in being an experiment and if things were serious then she would want to move in with me.

That’s when she kicked me out and called me an asshole. But really I don’t think I’m being a dick for being concerned that she might just be jerking me along while she plays lesbian so she can tell her boyfriend about it at home. Even if nothing is going on I'm just worried that living in this kind of environment isn't safe for her. I mean this guy is probably just pretending to be her friend to get in her pants, I think the fact that they're from the same small town means she can't see that. I really think she would be better off if she moved into the dorms with me aita?

u/otpsnotbrotps NTA

u/foreplayisntreal NTA guys and girls can't be friends. If she even is a lez and a katy perry wannabe then roomie is just biding his time til she's ready to be converted

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