#this was probably more relevant a couple pages ago but oh well

[pisoprano]

Ladybug: What did you do to Adrien Agreste?

Catwalker:

[goldenraeofsun]

There is Only Try, Part I

“Love spell,” Rowena proclaims as she glides down the stairs to the Bunker floor like it’s her personal ballroom. Her midnight blue floor-length gown and elaborately curled hair look especially out of place - Dean’s pretty sure his shirt has pizza stains from at least three different pizzas. The shirt is red, so at least two of them don’t count.

Behind her on the stairs, Sam chokes.

Rowena turns around to face him. “And I thought this was going to be a challenge,” she chides. “Really, Samuel?”

“What do you mean, ‘love spell’?” Dean demands with a fleeting glance at Cas, who’s gone red in the face. Dean doesn’t blame him - between the hooker with the daddy problems and the stabby reaper, he’d be leery of anything vaguely love-shaped too.

“We called you because we need to translate the runes on a cursed box,” Sam says slowly. “We think it’s in some sort of cipher, since even Cas can’t get a read on it.”

“Well, did Tweety Pie touch the box?”

“No,” Cas says, offended.

Dean nudges him with his elbow, saying in an undertone, “C’mon, like it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Dean.”

Dean takes in Cas’s unamused face and scowls at Rowena's tinkling laugh. “Okay, Sabrina, what the fuck do you mean by ‘love spell’?”

“I mean the angel’s been cursed with a love spell,” Rowena says with deliberate slowness, like she’s giving a command to a particularly stupid lap dog. “Was it not obvious?”

Dean glances at Cas, horror trickling down his spine. “No.”

“Hmph,” Rowena sniffs. “Men really are oblivious to matters of the heart.” She waves her hand again, eyes glimmering violet. “Like I thought,” she continues, placing both hands on her hips, “A jardin d’amour.”

“A garden of,” Sam pauses, clearly trying not to laugh, “love?”

“A very basic love spell,” Rowena says disdainfully. “The lass didn’t seem to have any imagination.”

“The witch we ganked two weeks ago was a dude,” Dean says. A beat. “A man witch.”

Sam snorts.

“There you go,” Rowena says, lifting her nose into the air. “Most men don’t have that innate knack for the magical arts.” She turns to Sam, giving him the most obvious come-hither look Dean has ever seen. “There are some obvious exceptions, of course.”

Okay, Dean needs Rowena and her heebs with a large dosing of the jeebs out of the Bunker, stat.

“It starts as a tiny seed, a wee obsession,” Rowena explains, “and grows and grows until it consumes you.” She squints, wiggling her fingers, and Dean just barely stops himself from jumping in front of Cas on instinct. “I’d say the spell’s gone about halfway through its course.”

Dean crosses his arms over his chest. He throws another calculating glance at Cas. “He’s not writing love songs or grabbing a boombox, so he’s obviously not cursed.”

Cas, still suspiciously silent, shoves both his hands in his pockets and stares hard at a spot of the floor between his feet.

“Oh, but he is, darlin’,” Rowena exclaims delightedly. “I can see it clear as day. Look!”

Cas sneezes as the magic washes over him for a third time, and now they all can see the purple sparkles - really, Rowena? - hovering in the air around him.

“Okay,” Dean makes a face, “Now I’m confused.”

“Not for the first time, isn’t that right?” Rowena says with faux-sympathy.

Dean glowers. He turns to Cas. “Come on, she’s making this all up. You’d know if you got dosed with Love Potion No. 9.”

“I-” Cas says, his gaze skittering from Dean to Rowena and back again. He looks… caught.

“Wait,” Dean thunders, taking a step forward, “You knew?”

“I,” Cas starts haltingly, “had suspected.”

“And you didn’t think you’d tell us you’d been whammied?”

Cas shrugs. “It doesn’t seem to be affecting me at all. My vessel is functioning normally.”

“Sure, because you’re such an expert on normal-”

Cas’s eyes flash. “It didn’t seem relevant considering everything else-”

“What d’you mean every-?”

“Kelly Kline - Lucifer, again - the British Men of Letters - take your pick,” Castiel retorts heatedly.

“We’ve got that under control-”

“Killing a child is not ‘under control’-”

“It is if the kid’s the literal spawn of Satan-”

“I never thought I’d hear Dean Winchester defending the murder of an inno-”

Dean throws up his hands. “Did you miss my ‘spawn of Satan’ comment?”

“No,” Cas says, his expression as stony as the Bunker’s foundations, “my hearing is excellent.”

Off to the side, Rowena mutters in a carrying stage-whisper, “I can see how a wee curse like this is the least of your problems.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Sam says, running a weary hand down his face.

Dean rounds on them. “What?”

“Do you want me to remove the love spell or not?” Rowena asks, eyebrows raised. “My time is precious, you know. I don’t live to be at the Winchesters’ beck and call.”

“For the last fucking time, it’s not a goddamn spell!” Dean explodes. “Whatever it is, he is not in love. He hasn’t been acting any different.”

Rowena beams. “Well now, if he were already in love, it would have no outward effects. He’d…” Her expression becomes stomach-turningly sly, “...function normally, so to speak.”

Cas’s mouth sets in a firm line. As Dean goggles at him, Cas demands, “Remove the spell, now.”

Dean swallows. Cas can’t be - she can’t be implying - that’s impossible. He’s an angel. They don’t feel things like that.

Do they?

“I’m going to need some ingredients,” Rowena says, looking up to Sam. “Where might they be?”

Sam gestures her forward. “Back in the store room, I’ll show you.”

Rowena pats him lightly on the arm. “What a gentleman,” she simpers as Dean pretends to hurl behind her back.

Dean can’t bring himself to speak until they’re both out of earshot, their footsteps fading off into the distance. He turns to Cas, trying to keep his voice detached and failing miserably. “So, you think it got you after all?”

Cas looks away. “I know it has.”

“Oh.” Dean picks up his empty whiskey glass. He runs a hand down his face, trying to scrub away whatever he’s feeling. It doesn't work. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a drink. Fucking witches.”

“I - I could use one as well,” Cas says to Dean’s surprise.

* * *

“So, uh, who’s the lucky chick?” Dean asks as he makes a beeline for the liquor cart in the library off the war room. He grabs an additional glass for Cas and the bottle of Jack, tips the bottle down his own throat to get them started, and pours them out a few fingers.

Cas takes his drink, jaw clenching. He doesn’t look like a dude head over heels. He looks like his normal sleep-deprived, tax accountant self. He stays silent.

Dean thumps heavily down into a chair. “Have we met her?” he prompts because he’s nothing if not a masochist at heart.

“You could say so, in a sense.” Cas raises his eyes to meet Dean’s, face softening, and Dean’s going to hurl for real this time. Cas continues, “There’s not much in my life I keep from you.”

Dean swallows against the ball of self-loathing and disgust clogging his throat. “Some lady angel, then? Been dreaming about plucking her harp strings?”

Cas scowls into his drink. “No.”

“Not an angel?”

“Not a lady,” Cas says, his voice almost unbearably stiff. “And not an angel, either. A human - a beautifully flawed human.”

Dean has no words to say to that, so he drinks. Cas has probably met thousands of people - nice, normal people who aren’t fucked up in the head from ganking monsters their whole lives - since he’s been on Earth. God knows, he hasn’t been plastered to Dean’s side the entire time. Lately, Dean can’t even come up with a good excuse to get him to stay for more than a day or two at most.

“A guy, then,” Dean says to make sure they’re on the same page - because last time he checked, waves of celestial intent cared less about acing a Gender and Sexuality 101 class and more about whether a meatsuit could withstand a holy oil molotov cocktail.

Cas nods, his eyes narrowing. “Your opinion on homosexual relationships is part of the reason I’ve never brought it up before.”

“Hey, I don’t judge,” Dean says, not entirely truthfully. He holds his hands up in a gesture of innocence. “Homo it up, man. Love is love.”

Cas’s nose wrinkles, but he doesn’t comment on Dean’s hamfisted attempt at proving his acceptance of ‘alternative lifestyles’ as Dad might’ve put it charitably one time. “It’s complicated,” Cas adds, like any part of this fucked-up situation could fit under a goddamn Facebook status.

Dean hitches a grin on his face that probably wouldn’t fool a blind person. “So, apart from that, how come you’ve never come to me for help? I don’t wanna brag, but I’m kind of an expert in hookups. Sam’s kind of hopeless. He can’t get a chick into bed without her dying on him.”

Cas knocks back his glass. “I didn’t want to bother you with my feelings.”

Dean automatically grimaces at the mention of feelings. But, hell, he’s not a teenage girl. He can man up and be there for his best friend.

He has to - Cas hardly asks him for anything anymore.

Sure, Cas didn’t exactly ask Dean for anything this time around, but Dean can read between the lines. Now that he’s copped to what’s going on beneath Cas’s still waters, he can see how deep those feelings run. Especially if what Rowena’s saying is true and a love spell is barely a drop in the bucket.

“And, regardless, your ‘hookup’ skills wouldn’t be relevant, anyway,” Cas says quietly, lowering his hands. “I’m not interested in… coupling.”

Dean wrinkles his nose. “That reaper really screwed you over, didn’t she? Look, just because you got shanked, doesn’t mean all sex winds up with an angel blade-”

“I misspoke,” Cas says over him. “What I mean is, I would rather have no sexual relations at all if I cannot have all of him: mind, body, and soul.”

Trust Cas to spout the most profound cheese Dean has ever heard.

And also, what the fuck? Dean can’t get behind that idea at all. Dean’s always been a take what you can get kind of dude. He had to be, with what he has to work with - a pretty face, a killer's instinct, and an inability to have a normal relationship if his goddamn life depended on it.

Like, if Dean had gotten the slightest whiff that Cas was down with gettin’ down and dirty with Dean as his last hurrah (which of course he didn’t), Dean would never have bothered with that stupid den of inequity. As hilarious as the outcome was, he would have gone for a little something-something for himself before the end of the world.

Of course, Dean wasn’t in love with Cas yet then. Whenever it came to mind, it was just a fun thought experiment, an idle what if for him to think about during a dry spell. Like his fantasies about fucking Ginger from Gilligan’s Island. Or hatesex with Bela Talbot.

But none of that mattered because every step of the way from Castiel, mighty Angel of the Lord, to Cas, their friendly neighborhood angel-man, he never hinted he’d be down for a quick roll in the hay... or something more serious.

Dean remembers very clearly: Anna fell to experience emotions, even the bad ones.

And Dean’s not an idiot - Cas obviously experiences emotions now. Dude’s been through too much not to feel something. But Dean’s never deluded himself that they could ever include all the romantic lovey-dovey, chick-flick moments crap.

Family love, sure. Cas might love all his haloed siblings. Cas has been around for all the Top 10 worst decisions that are the Winchesters’ version of brotherly devotion. Cas even said the big L-word out loud himself, when he was bleeding out in that barn a month ago.

But romantic love? The big kahuna L-O-V-E?

Dean always thought scaling Mount Everest with a plastic beach shovel would be easier than convincing an angel to feel that way about anyone. Cas is a wave of celestial intent; waves of celestial intent don’t do anything as human, as stupid, as fall in love.

But apparently they do.

So maybe that’s why Cas has always been so hard to pin down, so eager to leave Dean all the time. He’s been off pining after this mystery guy.

Awesome.

Cas heaves a weighty sigh and finishes off his own glass of whiskey. Without another word, he half raises from his chair, reaching around the table lamp, to pour them both a second round. “I suppose there is a bit of a relief in finally saying it,” he says in a low voice. “I can’t be with him, but there is a certain amount of happiness in it being known, just being seen.”

Dean wastes no time in downing half his new drink. Throat burning in warning, he forces out, “Why - why can’t you? You’re a freaking angel - thought you could have anyone.” Dean frowns. “He’s not a civilian, is he?”

Talk about a recipe for disaster: Cas plus normal person equals uncomfortable questions and fucked up babysitting gigs.

Cas’s eyes widen. Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head. “Ah, no, not really.”

“So he knows about angels.”

Cas gives a slow nod. “He doesn’t have a very high opinion of them, though,” he says ruefully, staring down into his glass. “They’ve made his life very difficult over the past few years.”

Dean scoffs, “He can join the club.”

Cas flinches.

“Hey, no,” Deans says quickly, “Not you.”

Cas raises head, his eyes unbearably bleak. “Why not me? I was the one who set the Leviathans and angels loose on humanity to wage their wars, among a dozen other transgressions.” He adds morosely, “Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better if a different angel rescued you from Hell after all.”

Dean blinks at Cas, his stomach turning over with dread at the very idea. He tries to picture some nameless angel yanking him out of the Pit or marching into that barn with all the righteousness of Heaven on his heels. Dean can’t do it.

Or worse, not a nameless angel. Uriel, who was ready to kill thousands without a second thought. Zachariah, that dickwad with the mind games. Even Hannah, who Dean reluctantly liked - he still can’t see her sticking by their side, falling, sacrificing everything for them.

Cas is their third wheel, the stabilizer that keeps Team Free Will upright and moving forward. Without him, they’re a tandem bicycle, and nobody wants a repeat of that opening scene from Gabriel’s sitcom from Hell.

“Yeah, but at least you always tried to do the right thing.”

“There is no try, only what I did or did not do,” Cas answers with a strange, defeated expression.

“Okay, but,” Dean starts, rolling his eyes at Cas’s butchered Star Wars reference, “Yoda’s a lot of things, but applicable to the real world without space lasers, he is not. Sometimes the only thing you can do is try, dude.”

God knows, Dean could never have forgiven Cas for any of the shit he pulled if he hadn’t been 100% positive Cas had the best of intentions. Cas did all those things to save the world, and, sometimes, to save Dean personally. Which gives him the girliest, fuzzy feelings and also makes him want to punch a wall.

Cas throws him a pitying look. “Every time I ‘try’ to make things better, I fail.” He shakes his head. “When you were taken, I searched for months to find you. Kelly escaped on my watch, and I couldn't find her. I’m a… dumbass.”

“I thought you preferred ‘trusting,’” Dean jokes, and it only sounds a little forced.

Cas throws him an exasperated look. “Perhaps a few years ago. But now? I’ve made too many mistakes, and people have suffered - you and Sam have suffered - as a result. You don’t need to spare my feelings, Dean. It’s hardly what I deserve.”

Dean frowns, tapping his fingers against his glass as he takes in Cas's defeated air. “Hey, what’s with the pity party?”

“It’s not a ‘pity party’,” Cas counters. “These are basic facts.”

Dean leans forward, bracing his elbows on the table. “You aren’t serious.”

Cas stares back. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Dean rakes his gaze up and down Cas’s face, looking for a break, for a tell - even though he knows he won’t find any. “You saved the world. A couple of times by now.”

“I also personally put it in jeopardy more than once,” Cas mutters. “I trusted Crowley to steal Purgatory. I trusted Metatron to bring peace to Heaven. I trusted Lucifer to take out the Darkness.”

Dean’s heart sinks with every reminder of Cas’s greatest hits. “Come on…”

Cas’s mouth thins, lips pressing together as he raises his glass to his mouth. “You don’t need to stay to keep me company, either,” he says in a low voice. “I’m the one under the spell. If you have anything more pressing, I can wait here for Rowena.”

“Shut up,” Dean says automatically. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Cas exhales a weighty sigh, his shoulders losing some of their tension.

“Hey, what you need - hell, what we both need - is a win,” Dean says reassuringly. “Everything’s been such shit, you need a reminder to keep going.” He gets up from his seat, his legs itching to move. “Why don’t you tell me more about that man of yours?” he asks quickly, his words nearly tripping over themselves to get out before the regret sets in. “Maybe that’s the key to getting your head back in the game.”

Cas doesn’t say anything as Dean moves to peruse a row of books he has no intention of ever reading. Eventually, Cas protests without much conviction, “My head is in the game. I am still useful.”

Dean’s head jerks around so fast it nearly gives him whiplash. “That’s not what I meant.”

“It isn’t?” Cas asks, head tilting in confusion.

Dean makes a face. “I mean, if you’re feeling down, you… shouldn’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

Dean paces to the other end of the bookshelf, unbelievably annoyed at Cas for making him spell it out for him. “Forget it,” Dean says instead. “I still owe you for ganking Billie-”

“But the cosmic consequences-”

“Will suck, but in the meantime you saved our lives. I owe you.” Dean turns so he’s back to fully facing Cas. “So, tell me what this mystery guy is into.”

Cas’s eyes narrow at him. “I’d prefer not to talk about it.”

“Seriously?”

Cas straightens and nods.

“But,” Dean says, words failing as he wars with himself. He could push Cas for more info or keep on living in blissful ignorance. But if he has to choose between his own personal peace of mind or Cas experiencing the one pinnacle of human happiness (or so Dean’s been told in countless chick flicks he’ll take to the grave), it’s no choice at all. He starts again, “If you tell me about him, it’ll make this a lot easier.”

“I don’t want it to be easier,” Cas says, baffled. “I don’t want this to be anything.”

Dean gapes. “Why the hell not?”

Cas taps his empty glass on the table, irritated. “Please, leave it alone.”

“No,” Dean says mulishly. “I wanna help you, man.”

“I don’t want any help.”

“Well, tough shit because you’re getting it anyway. You’re family-”

Cas’s face does a weird spasm.

“-And that’s what you do for family,” Dean continues, a little confused and insulted. They are family; Cas said so, back when he thought he was dying in Ramiel’s barn.

“Drop it.”

“No,” Dean argues, shoving down everything else as his temper rises. “You’re hurtin’, and I can help. Why don’t you trust me? You trusted Crowley, Metatron, fucking Lucifer-”

Too far. Shit.

Cas whirls around, his face a mask of frustration and an emotion Dean has never seen before. “I did, and you know what? They screwed me. And, please forgive me, Dean, but I am tired of being used and used up, over and over.”

Dean blinks, his anger falling away to a raw hurt only Cas can dredge up. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Cas runs a weary hand down his face. He just shakes his head.

“C’mon, Cas, it’s me,” Dean says - pleads, really. “You know me better than anyone else, ’cept Sammy. I won’t do something like that.”

Cas glares. “I do know you, so I know that is exactly what will happen.”

Dean reels back, and he can’t save himself in time before an undoubtedly pained look spreads across his face.

Cas’s hostility cracks, but Dean’s already gotten the message.

So Cas’s one big happy loving family message was only a deathbed thing. That’s… fine. Dean’s done it himself, a time or two. Told Sam to live his life and not go looking for revenge or a way to fix it - all a crock of horse shit, of course. He should’ve figured Cas was more human than angelic with that poison pumping through his veins, making him all weak and sweaty. ’Course he wasn’t above feeling human sentimentality in his death throes.

Face hardening, Dean turns on his heel. “You were right about one thing. I guess I do have more important things to do than staying here with you.”

“Dean,” he hears behind him, but Dean doesn’t look back.

* * *

Dean always hides a spare bottle of booze in the bottom drawer of the desk in his bedroom. It's mostly empty, but, hopefully, by the time Dean's polished it off, Cas’ll be cured, Rowena will be gone, and they all can pretend this never happened - Dean can pretend that Cas stopped keeping secrets because he’s learned they always blow up in his face in the past six years.

Anyway.

First, the booze.

Dean’s barely wrestled the top off with shaking fingers of leftover anger when a knock sounds against his door.

“’S the witch gone yet?” Dean asks without lifting his head.

The door opens. “Dean, it’s me.”

Dean takes a long pull of whiskey.

Cas sighs, audible in the stuffy, tension-filled space between them. He doesn’t approach, instead hovering in the doorway, and isn’t that how it always goes? Always poised for flight, that’s Cas. “Dean,” he repeats, which only makes Dean's blood boil that much hotter.

“What?” he demands. “What do you want now? ’Cause I can’t think of a single thing you need from me, Cas.”

Cas presses his lips together. “You’re making this very difficult.”

“Me?” Dean barks incredulously. “You’re the one hiding things and not letting me help you.”

“You won’t accept this is one area in which you can’t help?” Cas asks quietly.

Dean makes a scoffing noise in the back of his throat.

Cas shakes his head, his gaze focusing on Dean’s face with his patented laser intensity. “You have no idea what you’re asking for.”

“Yeah, I’m just a jackass who can’t get a lady to stick around for more than a few hours. I get it.” He glances up to see Cas’s stricken expression. Frowning, Dean looks away.

Cas steps tentatively into Dean’s room, his face weirdly apprehensive. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

“Sure,” Dean says, tipping the bottle back like it’s water because he needs to be so much drunker to deal with Cas and his love spell bombshells right now.

Cas hovers awkwardly by Dean’s desk, his hands shoved into his coat pockets. “You’re so capable of love.”

“Cas-” Dean starts, but he has no idea where he’s going with this.

Cas keeps talking, thank God. “You don’t acknowledge that side of you very often, but I feel it every time we see each other, every time you’re with your brother. You care, you love, so wholly and completely.” Cas chuckles ruefully. “I didn’t realize it for a few years. I didn’t see how unique it was, how special you are, but you are the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know.”

Dean’s tongue finally unsticks from the roof of his mouth. Face flaming hotter than the inferno where he first met Cas eight years ago, he rasps out, “Cas - what the hell are you saying?”

Cas swallows, dragging his gaze back up to meet Dean’s wide eyes. “The reason I didn’t tell you about the love spell was because it couldn’t make me love you any more than I already do.”

Dean blinks, dumbfounded, at Cas, the words love you bouncing around his skull like a blocked radio signal. Cas said them; Dean heard them with his own two ears; but the meaning behind the words is getting lost in transmission.

As Dean’s brain struggles to make sense of just about everything, Cas nods once. “Well, now you know. I’ll go wait for Rowena’s cure in the kitchen.”

And then he leaves.

Dean slams the whiskey bottle down on his desk, cursing as it nearly topples over in his haste. He sets it right, swearing more as precious seconds pass by. He hurtles down the hall, half-convinced Cas lied to him to get a head start and is really halfway to Timbuktu.

But Dean finds Cas in the library, sitting more or less where he left him before Dean had his little wallowing session in his bedroom.

“Cas!” Dean blurts, skidding to a halt and grabbing onto the edge of the table for support.

Cas looks up, frowning. “I - “ he gives himself a little shake and starts again, “Is Rowena having trouble with the spell?”

“What?” Dean strides forward on shaky legs. “No - I mean, I don’t know. They could be fucking in a supply closet for all I care.”

Cas’s eyebrows shoot towards his hairline. For the first time today, he looks almost afraid. “Then why are you here?” he asks, his gaze darting towards the stairs to the exit. “I’m only going to stay in the Bunker until Rowena can finish. Then I will go.”

“Go?” Dean repeats, a spike of panic shooting up his spine. “You can’t.”

Cas inhales a sharp breath. “You want me to stay?”

“You want to bail?” Dean demands, his voice rising.

Cas pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “You’re upset. This is why I didn’t want to tell you.”

“I’m not fucking upset!”

Cas throws him an unimpressed look. “You clearly are. Your pulse is rising. Your pupils are dilated. I can smell your elevated levels of adrenaline.”

Dean makes a face. “Dude - lines - crossed.”

“Fine,” Cas says, his face set. He gets up. “I can coordinate with Rowena at a later date. She should focus on the cursed box, anyway. It’s clearly a more pressing concern and the reason we called her in the first place.”

“Hey.” Dean takes a step forward. “Wait.”

Cas’s mouth sets in a thin line. “What do you want, Dean? I did as you asked. I told you the spell could only latch onto my feelings for you.”

Dean falters, his words failing him.

Cas’s shoulders slump. “I did warn you, you know,” he murmurs, trying to pass Dean on his way towards the door.

Dean grabs onto Cas’s bicep before he can disappear. “Gimme a moment. What you said - it’s a lot.”

Miracle of miracles, Cas stops.

Dean can practically feel the power thrumming underneath the trench coat sleeve in his grip, but Cas wordlessly lets Dean guide him back to the library table.

“Okay,” Dean starts, his head still mercilessly void of the right thing to say, “So that guy, the one you’re - well, it’s - he’s me?” he asks, stumbling over his words like he hasn’t since that one time Rhonda Hurley opened her underwear drawer.

Cas nods once, his face impossibly solemn.

“Right,” Dean grunts. He rubs at his chin, Cas watching the whole while. “That’s - wow.”

“Quite,” Cas says wryly.

“Hey, don’t be a dick,” Dean shoots back. “I had no idea.”

“That was the point,” Cas sighs. “But now you do.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, feeling like a tongue-tied idiot. If only he could be more like Cas with the grand declarations.

Cas opens his mouth, pausing for a beat before saying, “I was never intending to leave permanently. I will still help you figure out how to deal with Kelly Kline. I will still assist with research, translations, anything you need.” His blue eyes bore into Dean’s face. “I can still be useful.”

Dean’s chest aches. “Didn’t I tell you it wasn’t about that?” he asks gruffly.

Cas’s earnest expression falters. “Of course,” he says, subdued. “Regardless, know that I am always willing to help the Winchesters.”

“Jesus,” Dean mutters, “This isn’t - it’s never been - about you being goddamn useful.” He huffs an exasperated breath, frowning harder as Cas doesn’t immediately get it and launch himself at Dean.

God, that would make this so much easier.

“What you want?” Dean says, glaring daggers at the tabletop between them, “That whole, mind, body, soul crap? You got it.”

Cas blinks. “I’m sorry?”

“You already have it,” Dean says through gritted teeth.

Cas cocks his head like a perplexed chicken, still as clueless as ever.

It’s clearly time to bring out the big guns. If Cas is going to spout pretty speeches that steal Dean’s breath away and leave him weak-kneed but not actually, you know, make a move, Dean will just have to do everything himself.

Fine. That’s how he’s always operated, anyway.

Face determined, he leans over and grasps the lapels of Cas’s trench coat.

Cas leans back a fraction, his eyes widening in alarm or shock. But before he can utter another word, Dean brings their mouths together.

Cas takes a moment to get with the program. There’s a split-second (that lasts several years) when Cas almost seems to push Dean off him, but he kisses back before Dean can yank himself away first. Cas’s mouth is tentative against Dean’s, like he’s waiting for Dean to end it all and yell, “Got ya!”, but he unseals his lips with a light sigh as Dean gently parts them with his tongue.

Dean unclenches one hand from Cas’s lapel. He reaches up to cup Cas’s jaw, the raspy stubble a physical reminder of the goddamn win he’s finally getting. His knees twinge from awkwardly leaning over, but rampaging Leviathans could burst into the kitchen and Dean wouldn’t give any less of a fuck.

He has Cas right where he wants him, and he’s going to fucking savor it for as long as he can.

When Cas pulls away, his face shows nothing but pure confusion. “Why?” he breathes, raising a finger to touch his lips.

Dean, still half-standing, half-leaning over him, frowns. He falls back to his seat with a thump. “Because you weren’t going to do it first?”

Cas blinks. “I didn’t think you wanted anything like that,” he pauses, “with me.”

Like there’s anyone else around who wants to get real up close and personal with the most dumbass angel in the garrison.

“Yeah, well,” Dean says, the faintest inklings of embarrassment creeping in now they’re not kissing anymore and Cas’s first reaction isn’t to look like he got free tickets to Disneyland. “I did. Do.”

“Oh.”

Dean swallows past the lump in his throat.

Cas looks away from Dean for the first time, and Dean dies a little inside. Stiffy, Cas says, “If this is some misguided attempt to show your sympathy for my situation. I don’t appreciate the gesture.”

“Gesture?” Dean echoes, “What the hell are you on, man? I don’t kiss random dudes because I feel bad for them, Christ.”

“Then why?”

Dean grimaces. “You’re really going to make me say it?”

“Yes,” Cas says quickly, his gaze raking up and down Dean’s face. “I have misunderstood your actions in the past, and I have no desire to do it again.”

Dean groans. “Look, I didn’t think angels could have feelings like that.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Or I would’ve… done something about it sooner,” he says, and that’s mostly true. Probably would’ve tried to seduce Cas, failed, and then jumped off a cliff, but Cas doesn’t need to know that.

“Well, normal angels can’t,” Cas says, “but there’s something broken in me.”

“You’re not broken,” Dean swears loudly, his anger flaring. “You’re… better. A new and improved God Squad, far as I can tell.” He narrows his eyes, daring Cas to talk shit about himself one more time.

Cas bites his lip. “You truly mean it.”

Dean tries for a mocking leer, but it comes out more like a dopey, hopeful smile. “You wanna get it engraved? Put up in neon in the Dean cave?” he asks, eyebrows raised as excitement courses through his veins. Cas loves him. Dean can make good on all those what ifs that have been plaguing him for years. “Tattooed on my ass?”

Cas chuckles lightly. “That would be a start.”

Dean lets out a bark of laughter. He can already feel the insecurities looming on the horizon. There’s always a catch: Cas never stays; Cas might want Dean now, but he’ll fly away the moment Dean fucks up because he has no idea what he’s doing.

But none of that matters right now.

He kissed Cas.

And Cas didn’t smite him. Didn't tell him to fuck off. Didn't flutter off to the moon for shits and giggles.

Cas knows him, knows him better than anyone except Sam. And despite all the fucked up shit in Dean's head, Cas is staying anyway, with his eyes wide open like nobody else Dean has ever been with.

Cas smiles in return. “If I had known a love spell would result in this outcome, I would have sought out that witch ages ago.”

And just like that, all Dean’s happy-ending fantasies come to a screeching halt.

Read Part II here!

[misplacedgamer]

Tsuyu Can (Not) Be Trusted: A UA Traitor Theory

So when BnHA 320 dropped a couple days ago, @redblossxmm wrote a very interesting meta post that immediately grabbed my attention. In it, she goes over the chapter cover and the possible symbolism that might be at play. At first when I read it I was like "oh, that's kind of funny, wouldn't it be wild if Tsu was the UA traitor all along". But then I got to talking it over with @rikusoma on Discord and...yeah guys, Tsu might actually be the traitor.

I would just like to say before we get started that all of this is conjecture and based on a lot of admittedly circumstantial evidence. There has not been a lot of heavy handed evidence one way or the other on who the traitor even is (and if we’re being 100% honest, my primary traitor suspect isn’t even a student), but there’s still some fun stuff we can look at that could at least be considered setup against Tsu if that trigger gets pulled.

First off, I want to talk about how weirdly...in focus Tsu has been, especially in the early arcs. So far Horikoshi has only written two bonus chapters for MHA: a 5 page omake included in the character guide that highlights Bakugo's feelings after the 1st semester final exams, and a chapter completely about Tsuyu, her family, and the only friend she had growing up in middle school. Unlike the other bonus chapter though, this one was actually included in Shonen Jump with one of the chapters, and it later reappears in Volume 10.

What’s weird about this is that we ONLY see her family in this little bonus chapter. We actually do get to see a lot of the other families of class 1-A, but we DON’T see Tsu’s family. Horikoshi could have given us Tsu’s backstory and family organically in the story (or in a one page omake, he’s done a few of those, mostly notably in the chapter right before DvK2), but no, she gets a whole short chapter all to herself.

Tsu also gets a whole anime episode to herself (the first filler episode as well) in the vs Stain arc in season 2. What’s weird is that the episode opens with checking in on the other students and seeing how their internships are going, so that momentum could have been continued if they needed to fill time, but instead the entire back half is all Tsu. This should have some payoff later on, or it will have just been wasted narrative space (although since its filler, it could be argued that its empty space being wasted anyway, so it’s not as big a deal).

Now let’s get into some specific things I noticed that we can chalk up to “there are no coincidences”. First, Tsu getting dumped into the water during the USJ attack. Deku attributes this up to the LoV not knowing their power sets, but honestly Tsu is the only one who comes out on top here, compared to the other kids. Deku himself is stuck on a boat, so there’s not a lot of room for him to get going and fight, Bakugo gets blown into the ruins so there’s not a lot of room for him to do things without accidentally blowing himself up, Ojiro is surrounded by fire so he’s also going to have maneuverability issues, Tokoyami’s in the dark so Dark Shadow can’t be used effectively, etc. The low level thugs probably did not know the students' quirks because of how they reacted to Mineta’s goo balls, but if the traitor is a student and told the LoV about the class, then Kurogiri would definitely know. This would be a good opportunity to convince the rest of the class that Tsu was on their side, especially if she was able to be in her element and work as a team player.

Tsu also spends this arc adamantly trying to convince her classmates to call her “Tsu” instead of Asui, a cutesy diminutive of her full first name (like Deku using “Kacchan” for Bakugo, a shortening of Katsuki-chan). It’s interesting that she’s trying to get the boys to call her this too. While it’s fairly common for high school girls to give each other cute names, asking male classmates to also do it is honestly a little bit weird. She also calls everyone “-chan” throughout the story, which is interesting considering she’s once again lumping in the boys and the girls. You could interpret this as her trying to force a connection with the class, trying to be cute to create an air of friendship and intimacy quickly, along with getting them to drop their guard.

Next, let’s look at the Bakugo kidnapping arc. Tsu is not the only person who thinks it's a bad idea to go, but she is the one that most vehemently opposes it, comparing the mission to acting like a villain because you’re working outside of the rules. This is an extremely harsh thing to say, especially to Deku, who just broke both of his arms saving Kota and STILL pushed himself to try and rescue Bakugo and Tokoyami from Mr Compress. Seems to me like she’s very desperate to keep Deku and the rest home, enough to go for the freaking jugular like that. I could also bring up Tsuyu keeping Bakugo away from Deku in chapter 303 (because I’m convinced that if Bakugo had been able to talk to Deku he wouldn’t have run away), but the whole class was on board for that so whatever.

And now let’s get to the big one: Tsu has had two different near misses with the LoV so far. Shigaraki almost grabbed her face during the USJ attack, but it took just long enough that Aizawa was able to save her. Later on, during the Camp Training arc, Toga has her pinned to a freaking tree, but she talks JUST ENOUGH for Ochako to get the drop on her. As a counterpoint, Toga does NOT hesitate at all while trying to go for Ochako’s blood, immediately sticking her and grabbing some before making her retreat. Both times Tsu was put in enough plausible danger to make it seem like she was being threatened, but she wasn’t actually harmed in a significant way.

There are a couple other things we could point to (like how she’s on the cover for chapter 320, along with how weird it is that the chapter just randomly ends on her face, when a more dramatic ending would have probably been when Todoroki encased Deku in the wall of ice), but I think we’ve covered most of everything. To summarize: Tsuyu gets a lot of narrative space given to her despite not really being a relevant character. She is often getting put into danger without actually getting hurt, and Horikoshi has put a lot of effort into making her seem like a gungho team player that will do anything for her friends. Having Tsu be the traitor would make a lot of seemingly unconnected things make a lot more sense, and I think it would be a really good gut punch to have that rug pulled out from under us by her.

Now of course, we have the shakiest part of this theory: what would be Tsu’s motive? Well what little we know about her family is that her parents are often working and therefore she’s responsible for taking care of her younger siblings. It’s possible that she somehow got into some kind of vigilante/mercenary work in the underground in order to support her family. That would go a long way in explaining why she’s always so level headed under pressure (a lot like Bakugo, who also has a lot of experience in fighting, since he used to both bully and get bullied). Alternatively, AFO or the LoV has her family somehow, and she’s being coerced into it. Either way, I definitely think her family would be her motive here.

So in short, Tsuyu is 100% the traitor and clearly this is undeniable. Thank you to Blossxm for making my brain start turning, and thank you Riku for being my springboard the past couple days while I rambled about this ridiculous idea. More meta/theories are incoming, so if you enjoyed my shit post, please stick around and ramble with me about how crazy the last few chapters have been!

[spookyceph]

Pull Test

Summary: Shigaraki and Kurogiri meet with the League of Villain's newest candidate.

Rating: Gen Fic, SFW

Relationships: Shigaraki & Magne

Characters: Shigaraki Tomura, Magne, Kurogiri, Giran, mentioned Dabi, mentioned Toga Himiko

Words: 2,732

Warnings: Implied/Referenced transphobia and deadnaming when Magne's background is mentioned, swearing

The manila folder dropped from the air like a dead bird, hitting the bar top with a slap. Tomura jerked back, stool wobbling beneath him, and grit his teeth as he heard the staccato sounds of his fighter taking damage in his game. Recovering balance, he hit the pause button before glaring at the warp gate that swirled into being across the way.

“Another one already?” he snapped the moment the tall figure of his caretaker stepped out of the darkness.

Kurogiri straightened both his tie and metal gorget. “I was quite impressed myself. Giran is proving to be as professional and efficient as advertised.” He motioned to the folder he’d air dropped in. “Shall we consider this new candidate together, Shigaraki Tomura?”

Tomura wasn’t in the mood to consider shit. He hadn’t been hanging around the bar for going on two hours hoping for work to come along. One of his hands strayed to his pocket. He touched the lump that was the jar of salve he’d taken to carrying at all times. The serpentine ridge of a friendship bracelet (I used red, white, and black string so it would match you, Tomura-kun!) had joined it a week ago. Of course, he’d die before admitting to lurking just to catch a glimpse of Dabi. Or that he’d agreed to let Toga show him her favorite otome games as soon as she came back from her shopping trip. He definitelycouldn’t tell the smug old ink splatter to fuck off and let him get back to his goal of a high score—not without having how wrong he’d been about those same two people rubbed in his face.

That left being a responsible leader as the only option.

Tomura growled and set his game aside. He flicked the folder open. “Fine. What’s this new asshole’s name?” Giving in didn’t require him to be gracious about it.

“Ah. About that. I believe there’s a conflicting issue in her files about that point. Her family name is Hikiishi, however, her given one, or both, may require an update.”

A look at the top of the file filled in the blanks. The picture Giran had included showed the candidate flashing a bold smile at the camera. Shoulder-length auburn hair framed prominent cheekbones. Slightly darker fuzz lined her jaw and chin. Tomura couldn’t tell what color her eyes were behind her sunglasses, but they locked with his through lenses and stock paper alike. Hikiishi Kenji, read the first line of information on the page beneath the photo. A police report, by the looks of it.

“I see. Well, for now let’s just call Hikiishi by her alias until she confirms with us.” Tomura skimmed through the info again. “Magne, right? Related to her quirk, I assume.”

The currents of Kurogiri’s mist slowed and relaxed into looser coils. “Correct.”

Tomura frowned. “What? Did you think I’d have some sort of problem with the name thing?”

“After the misunderstanding with Dabi—”

“Dabi and I talked.”

The yellow eyes glowing within the darkness widened. “Did you now?”

Fuck, he wasn’t turning red, was he? Was he? “We’re adults. We worked shit out, okay? Not everybody has a stick up their ass about being polite all the time.” He scooped up his game, more than ready to retreat into something he could control. “When are we expecting Magne?”

“Giran can bring her by tomorrow evening.”

“Fine. Let’s get the stupid meet and greet crap over with.” When only silence followed, Tomura raised his gaze from the screen to glare at Kurogiri. “What?”

The wisps curling from the smoggy bastard’s head looked suspiciously like smiles. “Nothing, Shigaraki Tomura. Nothing at all.”

-

Taptaptap.

Tomura’s finger rose and fell on the bartop fast enough to give a sewing machine needle a run for its money. The ball of his right foot bounced on the stool’s crossbar in time with it.

Taptaptap.

Giran had promised he’d be there between 9:00 and 10:00. The clock by the door pointed to 9:51.

Taptaptap.

Lots of people would be riding the trains on a Friday night. Or roaming the streets, looking for food and alcohol, karaoke, strangers to stave off loneliness. Heroes would be out in force as a result, watching for any predators stalking the herds of humanity. Tomura didn’t know how to calculate exact probability rates for shit hitting the fan, but he got the sense they were on the higher end under such conditions.

Taptaptap.

Why couldn’t he just run into party members along the way as needed, like in games? Each one would specialize in a skill, forming a well-rounded team. Everyone would follow him to the bitter end because they believed in him and not some ass goblin named Stain. Why they believed in Tomura wouldn’t matter, though money would be a reasonable guess. Idealism didn’t pay much from what he could tell.

Taptap—

“Be calm, Shigaraki Tomura. This meeting will go well.”

He bared teeth at Kurogiri. “There has to be a meeting for it to go a certain way. And I am calm, damn it.”

“So I see.” He finished wiping down the glass he held before setting it on the bar and grabbing another. “My apologies.”

Tomura twisted on the stool to give the smart ass shadow a piece of his overthinking mind.

Knock, knock, knock.

Without missing a beat, Kurogiri stuck his free hand through a small warp gate and turned the handle of the door across the room. He went back to polishing as two figures entered the bar.

For someone who charged such high fees, Giran went out of his way to look cheap and kitschy. Little round tinted lenses pinched to the bridge of his nose. A scrunched scarf like someone’s guts slung around his neck. One front tooth missing in his low-key sleazy smile. The woman following right behind him and surveying her new surroundings made for a more welcome sight. Sunglasses (her and Giran both, for fucks’ sake) hid her eyes just like in her picture, but her lips held a hint of a smile.

The essence of good manners, Kurogiri bowed to their guests. “Good evening. Welcome to our humble home.”

Tomura, to balance the scales, snorted and folded his arms across his chest. “Took you long enough.”

Giran shrugged and twirled his hand, leaving behind a smoke spiral from the tip of the cigarette between his fingers. “Our train was delayed by some prankster threatening to blow up the tracks.”

“Doesn’t sound like a prank.”

“It wouldn’t have been if the lazy bastard hadn’t been trying to pass off children’s clay as plastic explosive. One of the cops noticed the stuff was bright yellow and they rushed him. They didn’t even call in a hero.” The broker shook his head. “What’s this world coming to? People can’t be bothered to find and pay for real weapons anymore. It offends my pride as a businessman.”

Behind Father, Tomura grimaced. His short-lived venture with Stain had indeed moved people to lash out at society. The problem was most of them were fucking morons. He doubted any decent candidates the League managed to net would make up for all the secondhand embarrassment he’d suffered in the past couple of weeks from watching the news.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the woman said, tapping her chin. “I felt kinda bad for the poor guy. He looked like your average office wage-slave. I thought he was going to break down in tears when they hauled him off.”

“Serves him right for cutting corners. No conviction, no integrity these days I tell you.”

She hid a grin behind her hand. “You’re heartless, Giran.”

The broker snorted smoke from his nostrils like an exasperated dragon. “I’m practical.”

“And yet you still haven’t introduced me.”

Posture straightening, Giran tugged at his weirdly anatomical scarf. “Sorry, got sidetracked. Magne, Shigaraki Tomura and Kurogiri of the League of Villains.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Slipping off his stool, Tomura gave her a short bow. The way Kurogiri swayed slightly, as if he’d swoon from shock, made the display worth it.

“I take it I’ve earned my fee?” chimed in Giran.

Kurogiri’s misty form shuddered as he roused himself. “Of course. We’ll hear from you again soon?”

“I’ve got a few candidates lined up.” The broker sketched them a mock salute before turning and closing the door behind him.

“Please, have a seat.” Tomura motioned to the row of barstools beside him.

“Thank you. Don’t mind if I do.”

While Magne approached, he studied her movements. She strode across the hardwood floor, work boots making minimal noise with each step. Grace as well as power. She knew how to use the muscle under her shirt’s rolled up sleeves rather than relying on pure size. Although, that didn’t hurt either—Tomura put her at over ten centimeters his own height at least, and she definitely outclassed him by weight. He wondered whether she had speed to go along with strength. She slid into the next seat over and rested her chin in her hands.

“Would you care for something to drink, Miss Magne?” Kurogiri asked, jumping at the chance to play host.

“Oh, my. So formal. Sure, I’ll have whatever you recommend.”

Tomura waited until a small glass of something amber-colored had been set in front of them both (ginger ale for him) and she’d taken an approving sip before getting things rolling.

“You have quite a record, Magne.” Though he’d already memorized the relevant bits, he flipped open the folder container her information.

She glanced over, shades slipping down her nose as she scanned the first page of the police report. “Twenty-nine attempted murders, huh? Is that what they’re calling those? I’m surprised you guys bothered having me come in after reading that garbage.”

“Why?”

Like a small bird, Tomura’s stomach dipped and fluttered when Magne looked at him over the edge of her glasses. Not quite in the same way it did when he caught Dabi watching him from across the room, but close enough to classify the sensation as pleasant. Her irises shone like polished agates, made up of rich layers of browns from a starburst of mahogany around her pupils to flecks of burnished copper. Tomura suddenly understood her hiding them behind lenses. Such a beautiful detail would stick in anyone’s memory.

“Somebody who tried and failed to kill that many people would look pretty incompetent, right?” she replied. “Or like they chickened out at the last second. I don’t enjoy killing. I’ll tell you that up front. But…I didn’t hesitate with the three I did put down, let’s just say that.”

Tomura, a multiple murderer himself, examined the square set of her shoulders, the twist of scorn to her mouth towards her accusers, and found no reason to doubt her. He nodded.

“The so-called attempts were from the robberies you pulled off then?”

“Mostly, though I’m sure a few of the bullies I smacked around exaggerated just to prove what big, strong men they are.” She harumphed and took another sip from her drink.

“And the actual murders?”

Her lips puckered, as if she tasted something more bitter than whatever alcohol Kurogiri had given her. “Personal matters.”

“I see.” Tomura turned the page and ran his finger further down the information. “Your quirk has some unique parameters.”

The lines of Magne’s face eased into a smile. “Oh, the gender thing? A theory really. I haven’t had much opportunity to test it seriously. It might be nothing but my own perception…but I guess that doesn’t make it any less real, does it?” She lifted a hand from her glass and reached halfway toward him. “Care for a demonstration?”

Tomura caught himself drawing away from her, his nails latching onto the sides of his neck. Cowering—great way to display his leadership skills. “What’re you going to do?”

“Oh, just tug on your arm a little. Go ahead and put it down by your side for me.”

Resisting the urge to look to Kurogiri for reassurance, he did as asked. For safety’s sake he curled his fingers into a fist.

Magne smiled. “Ready?”

According to the knot in his stomach, no, but he nodded anyway. His arm jerked and leapt up as if it were tied by a string. Tomura gasped, almost slipping off his seat. Magne caught and steadied him.

“Sorry, honey! Got so excited to show off I put a bit too much oomph into it.” She patted his shoulder as if there weren’t dead, gray hands clutching it.

“’S’alright,” he mumbled. And it was—his skin showed no marks, his muscles and joints registered no pain. He readjusted the delicate hand decorating his wrist. Cold, waxy, and pliant. Nothing like Magne.

“So, can you manipulate people’s movements? Turn them into your puppets?”

She hummed and pushed her sunglasses back into their proper place. “Not really. I can move someone with the proper amount of push versus pull, but it’s such delicate work that they could break free pretty easily. Hold out your arm and I’ll show you what I mean.”

Still making a fist, Tomura followed her suggestion. Magne positioned her hands on either side of his forearm, spread about half a meter apart. Concentration dug a V between her brows. A thrum jolted through Tomura’s bones. He startled at the rush of tingles in his elbow and shoulder but kept his balance. Something like a low electrical current pulsed along his arm, raising its pale little hairs. Eyes wide, he watched as the limb drifted from one side to the other, then up, down—anywhere the poles of Magne’s palms guided it. He could even see, feel his skin being tugged and pressed by her quirk. Taking a deep breath, Tomura drew his fist back. He met some resistance, but didn’t have to put up any real struggle.

“Weird.” He shook his buzzing fingers out. “But kinda nice. Tingly. Like an electrical field.”

Magne tilted her head and smirked. “Oh? That’s a new one. Then again, maybe I’d have heard it before if I used my quirk for something besides bashing jerks.”

What would he have done without Father hiding the fact he blushed at the slightest fucking thing? He’d never get used to talking to people at this rate.

“Your skills would be a great asset to the League, Miss Magne,” Kurogiri said, saving Tomura from having to pretend he could be witty. “I presume Giran discussed the expenses we cover? Upon joining, you would also be welcome to claim a room upstairs, should you wish.”

Magne went still. Even her breathing stopped for a moment. “You’d let me stay here?”

Tomura knew right then he’d never live down being wrong about not letting League members move into the hideout. Kurogiri would never be crass enough to say it out loud, of course. He didn’t have to. Tomura sighed, accepting his fate.

“Two members live here already, including another woman. We can introduce you to them both before you decide.”

Gaze aimed at the ceiling, Magne touched fingers to her pursed lips. “I’ve already made up my mind.” She met Tomura’s eyes, a smile lighting up her face. “Sign me up.”

Well. He had no clue whatso-fucking-ever how they’d convinced her, but results were results. Besides, she hadn’t mentioned Stain once. She deserved free room and board for that alone.

“Ah, wonderful. We’re so delighted to have you, Miss Magne.” Kurogiri steepled his fingers. “Please let me know if you require any assistance in moving your belongings. I can warp them to whichever room you choose.”

A soft laugh huffed out of her. “No need, honey. I travel light these days. Would tomorrow evening be too soon?”

Tomura shrugged. “That’s fine. I’ll make sure Toga and Dabi are around so you can meet them.” Even if he had to staple the latter to a chair to make him comply.

“Sounds like a plan.” Magne raised her glass. “To new friends then?”

There was that word again. Offered with the same ease Toga had shown. And Dabi…he’d never said it maybe but his gift had implied…well, something. Tomura touched his pocket. The weight and shapes of the items inside it. With the same hand, he picked up his own glass and clinked it against Magne’s.

“Sure. I’ll drink to that.”

[canary3d-obsessed]

Restless Rewatch: The Untamed Episode 08 second part

(Masterpost) (Other Canary Malarkey )

Warning: Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!

Flower Town, Continued

The boys continue their ramble down main street. When they see an interesting crowd of people, Lan Wangji wants to hang back, actually verbalizing that it’s too crowded for him. He’s made a lot of communication progress since first meeting Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian reassures him, and hits him with a series of irresistibly fuckable coaxing expressions...

...and then grabs and drags him.

However, WWX only drags LWJ nearer to the crowd, not into it, letting go before he and Nie Huaisang step over to the group. Being taken out of his comfort zone is part of why Lan Wangji signed onto this Wei Wuxian ride, and as they grow closer WWX is learning LWJ’s particular parameters so he doesn’t cause a kernel panic total system crash.

Nie Huaisang recites some relevant poetry and Wei Wuxian praises him for being so cultured. I continue to love how sweet these two are with each other.

(more after the cut!)

Flower Boys

Lan Wangji gets rewarded for his bravery with a flower shower, and he blisses out, gazing at the pretty.

Nie Huaisang blisses out, gazing at Lan Wangji

Wei Wuxian valiantly tries to pretend he’s not totally heart eyes for Lan Wangji.

He fails.

Collecting the Yin Iron

Wen Chao is taking his own road trip, collecting Yin Iron and making trouble for our gang. This Yin Iron chunk is at the Flower Lady’s house.

Is...this a good way to store Yin Iron? It seems kinda precarious and, uh, stupid.

Next he goes to hassle the dancing rock lady, who, like OP, is a hystersister, but unlike OP, isn’t delighted about it.  Having her female essence Yin removed some years ago made her hot all the time and now she eats souls if she gets a chance. Mood. Rock Lady needs better vitamins. 

Anyway, Wen Chao is actually pretty effective at this Yin Iron getting thing, until he tries to catch Lan Wangji in a roadrunner trap anyway, and I don’t mind saying his dad should have more faith in him. 

In between Yin Iron stops, Wen Chao takes a moment to menace Wen Ching, blah blah Wen blah blah Yin, oh my god this storyline is the dullest. But we do get to see her beautiful scabbard up close.

Before Wen Chao frees the rock lady from her bonds, she has a magic circle on the ground, like the one Wei Wuxian broke in Episode 1 by stepping on it. Seems secure.  She is also bound in these chains. What are these chains (highlighted with white in the picture) supposed to accomplish, exactly?

Since they leave her front hand totally free, they are definitely not going to stop her from grabbing any of the dumbasses who consistently come and put offerings on the altar directly in front of her, is what I’m saying.

Wen Chao blasts the protection charm on the floor with some fire, and all of the chains fall off, so now Rock Lady is free to get her grouchy on. 

Let’s review the master plan for hiding the Yin Iron, shall we? Of 4 pieces of Yin Iron, Xue Yang hid one up his ass somewhere that’s never revealed. The other three were hidden in 1. a well-warded secret ice cave, 2. A public-access temple 3. A flower.  This is what happens when you don’t have a project manager.

Compatibility Score=Hard Nope

Wen Qing and Jiang Cheng sit down in a tavern for the world’s most antagonistic first date. 

As it turns out, Wen Qing is being helpful. Aggressively helpful. Also, we discover that even when he’s got googly eyes for a girl, future Clan Leader Jiang takes no shit when it comes to confrontations. This is a heartening development, considering his parents’ terrible dynamic. 

After Wen Qing delivers her message she tells her team to chill, and gets ready to sneak up the mountain to cause more trouble for her boss. 

Flower Lady House

The boys continue to be a few steps behind Wen Chao, getting to the flower lady’s house and finding nothing but a feather. 

Whenever we have an overhead shot of roofs I wonder where all the guards went. Possibly I have spent too much of my life playing Assassin’s Creed.

1. Nie Huaisang is very smart and observant 2. Nie Huaisang has super cool braids. There are even tiny side braids snaking up from his ears to his topknot.

Hey babe, how about some eye contact? Okay babe, but make it quick.

Dafan Mountain Town

Meet Granny, who is actually very nice and a good babysitter later in the story, but right now is baked out of her gourd.

Wei Wuxian tucks his sword in between his legs so he can make hand gestures while Nie Huaisang admires his hilt. 

We can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind Because your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance they’re no friends of mine

The gang wanders through the deserted town, which seemed pretty creepy back when I was young and idealistic and hadn’t seen goddamn Yi City yet.

Now it seems quaint and well-maintained. Also the town isn’t really deserted; the inhabitants are in the makeup tent getting their zombie cracks painted on.

Rock Lady Temple

Baked Granny and Vaguely Hostile Temple Tender Guy are like “sure, you kids can sleep in the haunted house, have a nice time with that” and our gang just fucking goes to sleep all at the same time like they’ve never seen a monster movie before. 

Which is hotter: this fire, or this man asleep in this outfit with red laces on his vambraces and his red robe splayed all over the place and his knee up in the air and...ok, really there’s no need to even ask this question.

[too soon, OP, too soon. #FatalJourney]

Nie Huaisang wakes up all scared and startled, and Wei Wuxian subtly indicates his lack of concern.

Rock Lady Fight

Actually, of course, Nie Huaisang’s perceptions are right on the money, and the statue very sloooowly comes to life and attaaaaaaacks them.  Spinning ensues.

Wei Wuxian deploys his bondage talisman, this time in yellowish-white. He probably picked blue before to remind him of Lan Wangji’s headband.

[note: for more spin-fighting be sure to check out my fanvid!]

The actors are really good at all this mime work. The CGI doesn’t always live up to their efforts, but they manage to sell it, most of the time.

Lan Wangji is a great fighter, let’s see what cool moves he will use to get out of this “hand lightly resting on my sword hilt” situation.

Lan Wangji, are you fucking kidding me?

Eventually the fight choreographer comes back from his lunch break and lets Lan Wangji put his arms down. They finish their scuffle with the rock lady, sticking her back on her pedestal. Lan Wangji uses a magic flint-and-steel maneuver...

...and Wei Wuxian deploys some extra-fabulous talismans.

This effectively keeps the rock lady confined for the next several years, so--go go battle buds!

Zombie Attack

Once Rock Lady is taken care of, the undead zombies living puppets attack. 

Battle couple are on the same page throughout all of this, and decide to let go of the windows and doors they are holding closed in favor of putting a talisman on the center door only. Which, in the way of all zombie deterrents, works awesomely for about 2 minutes of screen time and then totally fails. 

Duhn-duhn-duhn! We end on a cliffhanger. What will happen? Will our intrepid gang survive? Is Jiang Cheng going to help, since he’s lurking just off camera? Nope 

Next rewatch is coming soon!

Soundtrack: 1. Safety Dance, Men Without Hats 2. Stand, REM

[felassan]

Gamers For Groceries 2 event

A Twitch stream event from a few days ago. It can currently be re-watched here (it was fun & interesting, so I do recommend to check it out direct). This post contains some notes on things of particular interest & relevant timestamps, in case this is useful to anyone (for example bc of accessibility reasons).

First up is the All About Animating panel, a series of mini-interviews with game devs (animators) asking what they do, how they got there, and advice for anyone interested in getting into the industry. Some or all of the devs that were interviewed are currently working on DA4. They talked a bit about their day-to-day work and a lot about the craft of game dev animation in general. This segment runs from timestamp ~38 mins 40 secs to 1:07:50. Some notes:

[sounded like DA4] Right now the creature team are working on different creatures in a way which involves going through a lot of mocap data

At BioWare they have a pretty big technical animation team, to support their animators, so each tech animator has a different specialty. Tech anim involves animation support, character art support, and rigging the characters so that the animators can pose them

[not sure if re: DA4 work specifically, another project or a general comment on the craft] One of the featured animators’ area of specialty at the moment is faces and hair (building the control structure for face animations). First they had to decide how the face rig and its control structure would work. This involves a lot of performance capture of live actors for things like cinematics and gameplay animation, therefore the rigs for bodies and faces have to be able to accurately capture the full range of expressions and emotions that the actor is portraying. Right now the stage that this dev is working on most is setting up the heads that they’re getting through the pipeline from character art e.g. making adjustments based on feedback from the cinematics team. “Polish - just trying to get realism”

Hair tech has come quite a long way in the last few years [in the industry]

[not sure if re: DA4 work specifically, another project or a general comment on the craft] Hair is very complex to get right. “In the past most games have used card-based hair, which is basically like sheets of polygons with a texture on it that looks like hair, through layers of transparency. But real hair is strand-based, digital strands, so we’re starting to look into that kind of tech - try to get more realistic, more beautiful hair, but there’s always a performance cost to hair. Layers of transparent things are always an expense, they need to balance like, it looks good and moves well, but it doesn’t make your computer or console chug. [...] I guess we’re in the prototype stage but we’ve almost got a set pipeline. It’s always fun to experiment”

In Mass Effect 2 or 3, Miranda’s hair was as expensive as a whole character (!)

[on balancing hair costs/performance, general] It depends on things like character importance and how many characters are on-screen at the time. When you’re in gameplay fighting a bunch of monsters you’re not going to be giving full beautiful hair to all the characters and the monsters, as it will cost too much. (Having a helmet on is a convenient way to get rid of hair.) But if it’s a cinematic scene, with 2 characters talking to each other in a dramatic context, there’s a better budget for nice hair allocated

Some of the hair in Anthem was quite expensive in cinematics. They kept getting bugs from QA saying (for example) that a character’s hair was tripling the performance cost in the scene, so it would go back to character art so they could take away some of the hair cards. “Tough balance, quality versus cost”

“I wish all the characters could have beautiful strand hair”

For p-cap, a lot of the time they don’t want to be too prescriptive in terms of the direction that they’re giving the actors, as the actors know what they’re doing and have a lot of experience, so they give them vague instructions that they then riff off of

[sounded like DA4] They recently did a mocap shoot

[sounded like DA4] There’s a bit more productivity happening now in the pandemic situation; now that the animators are not all going to the capture lab in Vancouver in person for shoots, if it’s not their turn to direct a shot they can instead be working on something else on their computers (multi-tasking). ((Lead DA4 Producer Scylla Costa recently gave a talk at a games festival on the challenges of DA production during the pandemic. In part of this talk he talked about various benefits and drawbacks to the remote-working situation. He also talked about and showed some behind-the-scenes stuff for p-cap and mocap. Notes, images and link here))

[sounded like DA4] Special mocap suits were sent out that they can use with a laptop to go anywhere and shoot motion capture. It’s not as high fidelity as what comes out of the capture lab, but it’s really good for prototyping stuff. Before the pandemic they did some of this (going to a park and shooting some running around)

[sounded like DA4] In one of the shoots they had some actors who were really well-trained in dancing. They were trying to get them to do some combat stuff. This was a bit challenging in the pandemic situation as there’s only so much they can demonstrate/portray as an example to the actors from a distance on camera. “It’s hard to describe what a ‘dodge to attack’ is through the camera to somebody who has no idea what combat looks like in video games”

[not sure if re: DA4 work specifically, another project or a general comment on the craft] The pandemic has really affected performance capture for the face side of things badly, as in order to record, the actor gets dots painted on their face in specific locations by a makeup artist. They can’t do that right now because of social distancing/restrictions, so they haven’t been recording faces at the moment

The more detailed a face, the more joints it has, the more the cost to performance is

---

There was also the Writers’ Block panel, featuring DA writers Mary Kirby, Sheryl Chee and Patrick Weekes, and DA editor Karin Weekes. The timestamps for this segment are ~2:37:50 - 3:26:20. Some notes:

PW has never been weirder than when they were writing Cole on DAI

PW thinks that they accidentally wrote part of “Timber” by Kesha into Solas at one point and they were like “Well, okay, I have to stop listening to Kesha”

For Sheryl, after a while Blackwall’s VA always nailed doing his lines. She loved the quality of his voice and so after a while would always hear his voice while she was writing. This really worked out

^ Mary had this with Merrill. As soon as they cast Eve Myles she listened to several hours of her in Torchwood, and then just wrote to the way that she spoke as much as possible

^ PW had this with GDL as Solas and FPJ as Bull. As soon as they heard FPJ’s delivery, they were like “Oh, okay, I have to write some lines differently, because Bull is smarter than I realized”. With GDL they were like “Okay, he’s going to put poetry into anything I say, in the best way possible”. In early drafts of Solas lines there were parts where they [PW] wondered “Is this too melodramatic? Is this too tragically-angstful?” and then they would hear GDL and be like “Oh! [It’s fine] Game on!”

For localization, German words are often quite long so they often have to make sure that everything fits on the GUI

They think scenes like the romance scenes sound prettier in the Italian versions

Behind the curtain in creating the in-world languages: PW: “There are some awesome websites that have every elven word, like ‘Here are the translations and verb tenses and conjugations’ [etc], [...] and usually Mary and I get very sad slightly looking at those pages going like ‘Does that mean that we have to stick to that?’ [...] The rule is, if I’ve looked at the Wiki and the words, and I go ‘Here’s the correct grammatical way to do it’, and if that turns out to be too long or too many disconnected syllables and it just looks bad or sounds bad, then we shorten it to something simpler, because the key is we want to give the flavor of a foreign language, but we don’t have the world-building budget and capacity to make something that is going to be dictionary-real [in a way that] someone could go through and translate all the background things written on the old temple walls”. Part of the reason for this is the consideration for VAs, who already have to act while bearing lots of things in mind, like the cues in the script for each line

Mary: “For building a language, the first things that I started with for qunlat, elven and dwarven, was what words do we need to use the most? Greetings, farewells, words for friend and enemy, basic things that will come up easily in conversation. After that it’s ‘How difficult is this for other writers to use?’ Can they just pick it off the Wiki? Do they need just one word? Do they need to write whole sentences, and how does that work? Qunlat has almost no grammar to it because asking anyone to learn how to use Qunari grammar and conjugate verbs in a pretend language is impossible, and then once you’ve done that a human being has to be able to read it, while not knowing what any of it means”

PW: “One thing that I was really impressed with with Mary in particular doing, Mary was one of the big lore people across the entire DA series; I can look at a word and go like, ‘That has two A’s in a row, that’s definitely a Qunari word. That word is kind of long and maybe has some apostrophes and has a couple of flowy vowel sounds, that’s probably elven’, I think that’s what’s important. You want players to be able to look at a word, players want to feel smart, [like] ‘Oh I don’t know what that means but I totally know that’s a word from the Qunari people!’”. Mary: “Every language has its own set of phonemes, the sounds that they make, and the sort of word structure and spelling so that it gives a flavor to that language. Hopefully that is always chosen to be pronounceable, because again, very important that the words can be said by human beings :D”

Sheryl: “One of the fun things to do is to make up swear words in the fake languages [...] Recently Brianne wanted a word, I don’t know if she managed to find one”

The origin of bosh’tet in ME: it’s just saying “bastard” and slurring it

PW: “I feel like there are times when past writers kind of leave traps for future writers, where past writers will go ‘Okay, I’m going to write this detailed phrase in a codex entry but don’t worry, it doesn’t matter if it can never be said aloud, because it’ll never have to be voiced!’ and then, next game, guess what guys! Look what you have to make someone [a VA] say! And you’re like [facepalm], c’mon!”

Karin: “Now, four games in, we have pages and pages of all these examples, and I wanna say this, well that’s how we said something before, well that’s ridiculous, I don’t wanna say that, but now we’ve said it and it’s out there, so it’s like, how do we, y’know, how do we evolve, and sometimes we just go ‘Screw it! Languages are living languages! We’ll just say it like this now!’”

PW's favorite is the sarcastic Mythal’enaste, “Because it’s the sarcastic Mythal's blessing that basically means you’re getting screwed over somehow. I love it because Mythal nasty! Whoever wrote that clearly never thought that someone would have to say this out loud”

Sheryl wrote Bull’s joke icicles line. She also wrote Isabela’s big boats line - Jennifer took it out but then DG was like “No it has to come back”

They have a pun test, they get a few of them and have to allot them wisely so as not to oversaturate on the puns. “Is this good/bad enough to be one of the times that we pull the trigger? We did have one of those recently, I obviously can’t talk about it, but it was pronounced Okay to go ahead”

The ‘baby-est’ writer is Brianne, who’s been there 8 years

It makes PW sad that the players never get to see the writers’ temp-text [placeholder text when portions are a WIP]. “People have the best temp-text". Mary: “The number of conversations that I’ve temped in like ‘WELL. I hope nothing BAD happens HERE’”

Q. If you could bring in anybody from outside of gamedev, who would you like to work with and do a writer’s session with? PW: “I will say romance novelist Nora Roberts, she is really smart and also she knows how to write inside a genre, and do wonders within it. Her structure is so good. If you pick up one of her books, you know here’s when this is gonna happen, here’s when they’re gonna meet, here’s when this first moment will happen. We’re all experienced and I feel pretty good about that but I really like all of the things she does that way, and also I am a sucker for romance so I would love to bring a romance novelist in and just have them look at our scenes and go ‘Okay here, no, they should pull the tie so that the article of clothing comes open, we need a sense of how warm the skin is here’ - something like that. I’d wanna see what they could do with that”

“Luke writes the best worst lines”

“I’m always impressed with Mary getting away with lines. There are lines that I look at like, wow, you buried that one. [...] The only players who get that line, I feel like they earned it if they went that far into it. [...] And then Varric or Merrill says a ridiculous line in a one-time throwaway”

Karin: “The group dynamic, you’ll see conversations or snippets of a lunch chat or a thing we’ve been joking about and you’ll see it get pulled in, and how all of you [the writers] are able to take a normal kind of thing - as normal as we get as a group anyway - and then turn it into a moment, and use it to further the plot or use it to further a character. It’s just the cleverest thing and it happens in so many different ways. [...] The little snippet of life, then how you crafted it into this very cool thing”

Quartermaster Threnn was written by PW in half a day. “When I was writing Threnn, ‘Okay, this is a good-hearted [person], I was doing a little bit of Steel Magnolias, southern, no-nonsense, but like, blue collar Steel Magnolias’. This is someone accustomed to the ways of the world so she’s going to call a spade a spade. If you come up to her and you’re an elf she doesn’t recognize you and says ‘Buckets are over there’ because she thinks you’re there to clean, [but] ‘Anyone calls you a knife-ear you come to me I’ll take care of it’. It’s problematic but she’s trying - the good-hearted person rooted for the wrong group on every occasion. She was a proud Loghain supporter, she gets really exited if he comes to Skyhold.  That was a fun character for me to write because I had a viewpoint in my mind. I remember someone was like ‘Threnn is really important to me’. And you have to honor that, cause you’re like ‘Cool, it means so much to me that this connected with some part of you’”

---

Also of interest was the Mass Affection panel, in which BioWare devs looked back in over a decade of history to remaster a classic. It featured devs who worked on MELE. The timestamps for this segment are ~3:36:09 - 4:24:37. Some notes:

When the pandemic hit the MELE team were in a relatively awkward spot. They were really entering into what they consider full production and were on-boarding a bunch of teams, as well as training and on-boarding third-party external partner specialized teams worldwide. When the pandemic hit, BioWare and EA were super on top of it. They were tracking it weeks beforehand, getting everyone their computers ready, and getting everything encrypted. When the middle of March 2020 hit they were home rightaway. EA were nothing but supportive throughout the entire thing. They got money every quarter for stuff. It functionally ‘hit’ at 4-6 different times for them as the pandemic occurred in different places throughout the world at different times depending on each country’s response plan (and their external partners were in different countries). “So it was one of those things where it was just like, every day we’d come in like can we still work with this company anymore? Do we need to find someone else? Do we need to pull people in off the other projects at BioWare to fill gaps here and there?”

There was a bug on Virmire at the part when you’re coming into the STG camp. If the Mako had its new boosters on and you came hurtling in really fast, it cut to the cutscene, but the Mako hit a jump and when Ash was like “What do we do now?” the Mako ended up literally flying around in the background sideways and then crashing into the camp

Another bug: when they were re-tuning the guns, the physics force on some of the guns with Hammerhead rounds was so high that when you were fighting some of the Thorian Creepers, you could ragdoll them so hard that you could basically embed them in the roof. They’d be moving so fast that they’d penetrate all the walls with their legs dangling out. It was so easy to do and you could do it to everybody. You could launch a geth halfway across an Uncharted World

Another bug: with Shepard’s casual appearance in ME3, if you didn’t have it set up perfectly correctly it would default to Grunt for some reason. You’d be walking around as Grunt, going on dates as Grunt, and your face would be all scrunched up because it was all mapped to human bones still, so it was just, like, Nightmare Fuel of Grunt

Another bug: in ME2 on Illium when trying to recruit Samara, the Asari enemies just would not stop screaming - regardless of whether they were hit or not, it was endless screaming. Later one of the devs got an audio file of the scream, endless and looped, and now one of the devs has it on their phone and uses it for their morning alarm tone

“Shepard would come up to characters and they’d just be screaming”

---

There was also the Programming Variables panel, talking about what hurdles game programmers face. Some [or all?] of the devs that were part of this panel are currently working on DA4. They talked a bit about their day-to-day work and about the craft of game dev programming in general. The timestamps for this segment are ~ 4:24:46 - 5:06:02.

[source]

[insights/notes from Gamers For Groceries 1]

[☕ found this post or blog interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]

[annonmaly]

Ok, It's Not Red. So What?

"Oh, It's Not Red" continuation

Welcome to the third part of my posts regarding Mochijun-sensei's official VnC artworks. This is just a continuation of the 2nd part (there will be no artworks to be discussed). I will just share some absurd ideas that I came up with after my realization (some may already be out there). If there's any chance that you stumbled to the prior post and decided to continue. I salute you brave warriors that assume I would mention anything that makes any sense. To those who have no time to read a post that only talked about Murr's eye color. Here's a summary: I realized Murr's right eye is not red.

Curious as to how did I come to this conclusion? Check it out here: Oh, It's Not Red (You may not read the first part as it isn't related to this. But if you want to, it's here: Regarding some of VnC Artwork this title is so uncreative)

As usual, a friendly reminder that best in writing is an award I never received. I'm not the person who could analyze, explain, or theorize things clearly. Please bear that in mind while reading. Photos are not mine, of course. Also, spoiler alert to be safe

Now that it's all said and done. Let's go ahead and talk about Murr.

By this time, we already know who is Murr. And I think we all agree that the cat is not just a cute mascot of the series. I bet that he would be a game-changer (yes, I'm putting Murr on a high pedestal). The question is: What do you think of Murr's role in the story?

After spending hours and hours of reading here and there, the common theories I found are:

1. Murr is Sensei (The Shapeless One)

Sensei is an observer. And where is the best place to observe? It's beside your subject of interest. Also, as his title suggests, he is shapeless, so maybe he could shapeshift into anything he wants. This sounds probable but, I do not lean on this much for two reasons.

Personal preference. If this is true, Sensei is weird, not terrifying. I mean, instead of doing scary and shady affairs during his free time, he decided to be a cat just to watch Noé.

Look at the image below closely.

Did you found Murr? No? Take a closer look at Louis. At first, I thought he was just reading, but his book has a weird shape. Where did I see that again? Oh, right.

Not yet satisfied? See this panel from the manga. This is after the first image's scene.

(Grandpa obviously has his favorites)

I think the cat Louis' holding is Murr. Thus, there's a panel where Sensei and Murr are together. That's the second reason I'm skeptical about this theory, folks.

Well, we also don't know. Maybe grandpa killed the cat so he could disguise himself as one.

2. Murr is a spy camera of Grandpa De Sade

It's a simple one. The theory goes like this: Murr's right eye connects to Sensei in whatever way. This panel is what inspires this theory:

(This cat really is suspicious, I bet he is one of the puppet masters of this arc along with Sensei)

This theory is what I'm more inclined to believe. I suppose the cat is working under/with Grandpa for their grand schemes. So, of course, he would report to Sensei the events that took place. Whether he is using his right eye or whatever means it is.

Going to my personal thoughts...

I guess that Murr was a kin of the vampire of the blue moon. He used the power too much, and thus he was rewritten from the inside. Alas, Murr became a cat! Why is he heterochromatic, tho?

Ok, kidding aside, there are two ideas I want to share.

1. Possibly Twins

Mochijun-sensei dropped the bomb in chapter 46. She gave us the idea that the theme of twins would be relevant in the story. Here is the page where Veronica mentioned the thing about twins:

Then three chapters later when Misha forced Noé to drink his blood and reveal his memory. Mochijun-Sensei dropped another bomb.

After seeing this, we speculated that Faustina and Luna are twins. I love that thought. Just imagine how complex the relationship it would be between the two. But if we think about it. What if this is just a misdirection? First, Mochijun-sensei makes us aware that the subject of twins is somewhat important. And while that information is still fresh in our memory, she dropped another bomb and told us that the blue vampire and the queen looked alike. Mochijun-sensei set this up so that we could connect the two easily.

All we know is that: Vampire twins are a symbol of bad luck, and Luna looks like Faustina. This is just me overthinking things, but what's life without competition. So, let's add three more names to the list that could be a set of twins.

Murr and Luna: Because why not? His left eye is blue. Also, Luna's left eye was never shown in the series. It's always hidden by her hair, maybe it's a different color.

Noé and Luna: Let's just say he is older than the series claimed him to be. Noé's memory started on the day that it snowed. I believe that Mochijun-sensei is keeping the timeline vague since it would reveal too much information. I mean, we don't know how long time passed from the day Noé was found by the old couple to the day Sensei brought him to the castle in the forest. Keep in mind that the vampire's growth differs for each person, as well.

Also, is the story the Noé and Sensei told trustworthy?

(How kind are this kidnappers that the kid was not traumatized? Also what's with the injuries. I don't much about slave trading in VnC world. But, if you're going to sell something you don't want it to have visible damage right. Sorry if the comparison sounds offending)

As far as I could tell, Sensei is shady, like really. Noé's memory is also not reliable. After all, someone out there may have the ability to manipulate memories. What if Noé was was born ages ago and was induced to sleep for a long time for whatever reasons?

Going back to Noé and Luna. Mochijun-sensei is giving us subtle hints of his association with Luna. I only saw Luna from one chapter, but I could say they are somewhat similar aside from the hair and skin(?) color (I will make a list later if I still have of time on hand).

(Child Noé and Luna both have similar haistyle, they have the "lid" as Mochijun-sensei called it. Their eyes are different tho')

Go on, read chapter 49, you'll see what I mean. Also, take note that at some panels (especially the ones where Noé is feeling extreme emotions), Noé's left eye was hidden by his hair or something. Who else out there that we don't see her left eye? Yup, the vampire of the blue moon (I have a weird feeling about Noe's left eye that I will share later) To conclude this, I think that Noé was not from this era. He is actually from the past and preserved in whatever way from whatever reason. And maybe he is actually the twin brother of Luna, seeing that they have a resemblance.

For now, I won't say that he's a reincarnation of Luna (I may change my mind later) as the timeline doesn't coincide. Besides, human Vani's reaction when Misha told him that there's a way to revive Luna is intense. Meaning he wants Luna to stay dead. I also believe that human Vani is hiding "something" he knows about Noé. So if Noé's a reincarnated Luna, there's no way human Vani would stay with him.

Murr and Noé

If you saw my previous post. I convinced myself that Murr's right eye's color is violet (the same shade as Noé's). That's why I decided to include them here. I have no definitive reasoning aside from their eye color and how Murr treated Noé in the series.

In the meantime, I'll write the scenario in my head. What if Murr and Noé are twins. Something happened when they were young, and so they were separated. Noé was somewhere we don't know yet, while Murr encountered Vampire Vanitas and Grandpa DeSade. Then the rest is history.

I swear I didn't expect it to be this long, at any rate, this would be to be continued here: Ok, It's Not Red. So What? (continuation)

Note: This is just a random theory, thoughts, assumptions, and/or head-canons. I wrote this to indulge my over-thinking self. Thank you for taking the time to read and understanding if I made any mistakes or post whatever it is you don’t agree on.

[princess-of-the-corner]

Human After All: I'd like to know more about A) Lust realizing that Hohenheim had an actual life in Resembool and B) everyone's reactions to Ed and Al sneaking off to do the human transmutation and the aftermath.

Oh boy here we fuckin go!!!!!

Lust realizing that Hohenheim had a life in Resembool:

Oh boy. Okay so this has some setup.

When Lust first meets Ed and Al, she assumes the situation is a lot different. Basically They're close enough to be mistaken for twins, so she thought it was more "one night stand and disappeared from town but their mom remembered the name and told the kids". Because... Why would he stay?

But then Lust babysits Ed and Al on a trip back to Resembool to visit Winry and her grandma. And like.

Lust gets curious about some things. And she happens to see a photo album out that she can't help but look through.

Of course Granny finds her snooping but just lets her look through it and explains that it's from Winry's parents' wedding. And Lust eventually flips to a page where Hohenheim is in the photo.

Lust pauses on it because it's so strange. First in general, of how Hohenheim looks just like Father but also nothing like him at the same time. Physically identical, but the way they carry themselves is.. Entirely different.

Especially as this picture is kinda goofy. Granny tells her how everyone was hinting to Hohenheim that he should marry Trisha since they were already "basically married". And the newly married Sarah Rockbell had given up pn subtly, and chucked her boquet right at Hohenheim's face with a "sorry I was aiming for Trisha!"(which no one belives because she has incredible aim).

Lust asks more on that. And Granny mentions how Hohenheim and Trisha had been together for a bit amd were already living in the same home. And that pretty much immediatly after that whole "lack of subtly" the pair decided "despite not going through legal paperwork we are married now fuck you' and also bonus pregnancy announcement. Which has Lust relize Ed and Al aren't twins.

But it's weird to her. Because like. Hohenheim had a life here? He was with this woman for a few years and essentially got married (clearly the "don't go through the paperwork" is because he doesn't legally exist). But like. He had a wife and kids. One of the kids seems to have been actually planned. Why would he do that? And why did he leave? No one has answers on that, but Granny says that if he did leave, it was for good reasons. Not whatever the town gossips make up for fun.

Granny is a little sus about Lust's interests in all this because like. I kiiinda mentioned this before on my artblog but he way I draw Lust she actually looks a lot like "if Ed was a girl" and considering how much Ed looks like Hohenheim... They basically look somewhat related. Granny points that out and kinda pulls some Gaslight Girlboss Gatekeep of "nope no relation whatsoever my father just worked with him long ago but it's totally not relevant to anything!"

Anyway!

Later, Lust is wandering around Ed and Al's home because that fucker hasn't burned yet. And she just... Sees more of it.

True. It's been just the boys for years but there's still things like his clothes in the bedroom closet or something casually put on a shelf too high for Trisha to have reached.

The two rooms that really hit are the bedroom and the study.

Tbe bedroom is mostly untouched. But she sees a shelf of little statues. It's strange to her, but she realizes all the statutes are made from Alchemy. About half of them have very obvious marks, a sign of a talented but inexperienced maker. Seeing two distinct styles, she cam guess Ed and Al made those.

The rest are perfect. Intricate and flawless. If they weren't on the shelf with the others, she would've thought they were made by some master clay artist.

Alchemically made trinkets as gifts for someone they love.

The study is another beast altogether. A whole library on Alchemical texts. Some even older than Lust. All marked up with someone's notes in the margins. The same person's notes, as the handwriting doesn't differ. Clearly all these are important. So why leave them?

The real hard hitter is a journal Hohenheim left. Of course Lust reads it. The fact that the journal is written in Xerxian is just another punch to the gut, but thankfully Lust can read it.

It has a lot of things but the main info she reads is an entry from when Ed was just born and Hohenheim is discussing worries over how his whole "Philosophers Stone in Human Form" deal might be effecting Ed in terms of like. Genetics and stuff.

But the main thing Lust focuses on is that Hohenheim mentions discussing those fears with Trisha. That he told her what he was and his whole history and everything.

It's... Confusing to Lust. Why did Hohenheim just settle down here in this small ass rural town with a normal woman? What was it about her that compelled him to stay in one place so long? To settle down after years and have a kid? Having a second kid? And telling her about... Everything?

She finds no answer because, from all accounts, it seems like Trisha was just a normal, small-town girl. She didn't even have an interest in Alchemy! Just gardening. Why her? Why not someone at least... Great and powerful to match what he was? Even if no one could truly compare to what he was.

Everyone's reactions to Ed and Al sneaking off to do Human Transmutation:

Oh boy. This is a big plot point.

So the boys had quite a plan to trick the adults. Lust has gone on trips out of town for weekends(reporting back to Father), and she's also babysat the boys on a trip to Resembool before. So the boys wait until one of her trips and tell Roy and Riza that she's taking them on a different trip to Resembool. None of the adults know this until Lust comes back without them and has no idea where they were.

They put it together real fast and all three book it to the train station. Several hours of worried pacing of what could've happened.

Roy and Riza are entirely in the dark of what might happen. Lust though... She knows how the Gate works. And what could have happened.

She knows that There's a Price to pay. And while she was planning on encouraging the boys to go through the Gate anyway, she was supposed to be involved with it so she could trade a part of her Philosopher's Stone for their safety. Obviously just so they don't loose a Sacrifice to blood loss or later infection! Not because she cares or anything! But yeah without her, who knows what the Price may be?

They check the boys house first. They see plenty of blood, which is a terrifying sight. But they also see a trail leading out. And that if the boys are still alive, they probably went to the Rockbell place.

Which yeah. Granny's already waiting for them. She wants to yell at them for failing, but it would be hypocritical sinve she didn't notice the first time around.

She tells them the boys are alive but fucked up. Ed lost a couple limbs and Al is... Hard to explain.

Lust is the first to notice the suit of armor in the living room. The way it's arranged like a child, curled up and hiding, barely peeking out from behind the "arms". Light in it's "eyes", like someone's in there watching her.

She remembers the experiments done on the death row inmates. Puttin Souls in suits of armor. She's horrified, but not surprised, when it moves.

That is a whole conversation. Lust has to pretend she doesn't know how that works(while also questioning how the boys managed it). Al tells them what he remembers, which is just everythiny going wrong and then being in the armor and Ed missing some limbs.

We have a long emotional scene when Roy goes to talk to Ed.

Ed is very much not okay at this point and he's trying to be angry but it's just not really there. And he just asks why Roy is still there. He failed to keep them from fucking up why does he still care? Just go back home and leave them so he doesn't have to deal with them anymore.

Well that's just heartbreaking. Roy just talks to him about a lot of things. And the main thing was that this wasn't just "I'm gonna try and stop you but whoops failed that bye bitch" situation. He's not just going to drop the kids because he failed once. He's not even going ti drop them after months of pushing him away and being stubborn about the whole situation. They're a family now damn it.

And Ed kinda feels like that might be worse, because he threw that away ti go fuck up. But Roy tells him it's not "thrown away". They're still going to be here for him. And figure things out.

Later at night, Roy, Riza and Lust all kinda sneaknout individually. Which does lead to some comedy until Granny catches them and calls them idiots. But all of them were thinking of going to the boy's house and looking over their notes.

Roy and Lust are the only ones who can make heads or tails of the notes. Riza can follow some but gets lost and Granny never was an Alchemy person. Roy's looking more for "what went wrong" while Lust is focused more on "what went right". And Lust does find that though they came very close to making a Homunculus, they did do everything pretty right. She accidentally comments on that, which leads to a horrifying theoretical of "what if the boys managed to make a fake Trisha that looked and acted like her but wasn't her?". This also leads to the more disturbing question of "what was it they did manage to make"?

This is a thing that came up in Canon, but here they get answers of the thing that they made wasn't their mom, and you can't bring back the dead. Ed and Al take that news about as well as they did in Canon as well.

The "possible homunculus" thing comes up too with the others wondering if Al really is Al and not just... Something vaguely like him that Ed accidentally created. (Lust knows but can't tell how she knows rip!). Riza to the rescue on this one by asking Al about something Ed shouldn't know about. So that existential crisis is averted!

Of course there's discussion of what to do to help Ed and Al. Which... Does lead to getting back toward Canon of "have Ed become a State Alchemist". It's debated a lot because ya know. Sure it's the best option to help them have the freedom and access to stuff tk find shit but. Ya know. Roy already feels like he failed to protect these kids once already this is not helping.

Anyway! One more fun scene!

Please imagine once Ed gets the automail arm and just does the clap-slap Alchemy. And Roy and Riza are like "yo what the FUCK???"

[reginaofdoctorwho]

weird shit that would probably have something to do with me in a horror movie

no one wanted this but i’m bored and found a bottle so you’re all getting it. yes these are all true. check the tags, if u think i’ve missed something please let me know!

there was a murder (technically, i don’t really count it as a murder) next door when i was four years old on christmas morning

the weird antique glass bottle i found half-buried in the woods in the woods yesterday with living bugs in it that made no attempt to leave it once i uncovered it

there is a local cult in the next town over. this is not the same as the local cult that was in the other town over where my mom grew up

random completed animal skeletons in the woods behind our house, i’m talking prey and predator, both laid out like in a goddamn scientific diagram. for a while there’d be ones in the middle of our yard, always the same type of animal, always just the bones and nothing else, laid out like it was posed. this has been happening for over half a decade and we have no fucking clue how, why, or who is doing it

the screaming from the woods that i’m going to assume is a fox

my sister almost dated a murderer. his niece or something is in my class

there is a house that is now part of a “local ghost tour” that belonged to my great+ grand parents during the civil war where my great+ aunt died allegedly murdered by her husband who is actually blood related to me. family history says she died of childbirth, which given that it was the 1800s... probably is true

there was an actual murderer in our family a few generations back but he married in and killed his wife and her sister. they didn’t find out about it until they read his journals after he died where it apparently told everything he did and they decided. “well, that wouldn’t look good for the family, and they’re already dead anyway” and just kept it hidden??

the fact we have my great great grandmother’s dress from probably 1890s or 1900s. even more so the fact that i fit in it. if this was fantasy horror (vampires, some immortal thing or ghost) i’d be fucking dead or cursed

fairly certain i was possessed by the ghost of a puritan as a kid

my family seems to have a curse with babies and nurses? my great uncle died when he was born because long story short, hospitals were the new hot thing, he was perfectly healthy, then a nurse dropped him and he died instantly. my sister died when she was a toddler and the hospital actively tried to delete her hospital records to cover it up and ended up getting fined by the state for it. the nurses responsible were not arrested or punished in any way.

my family all has fucked up connective tissue, in my brother it was bad enough he had to get a steel bar in his chest so it wouldn’t cave in.

the many times i have almost drowned, sometimes due to intentional actions by humans (my dad, it was my dad)

this in addition to the other fucked up shit he did before the divorce when he still lived here, including but not limited to: killing my mom’s favorite pet goat, hanging its skull in a tree, and leaving the body in the woods. not letting his kids learn how to cook. anytime someone asked him to cook he’d put as much pepper/hot sauce in as he could (even for like, scrambled eggs) and give it to the youngest person, usually a toddler. this was me at times. taking his kids out to the woods and threatening murder. taking his kids out to the woods and threatening burning. purposely locked the basement from the inside so we couldn’t get the gaping hole in the stairs leading to one of three kids rooms fixed. tearing up pictures of the kids whenever my mom did something he didn’t like. i had more here but i tried to cut it down a litttle

people have threatened to murder me before. one time a girl didn’t threaten, and actually acted like she was starting to like me, but her cousin read her diary or something and found out she was planning to commit a lot of murder, and told her parents and she got sent to a psychiatric ward for a couple weeks

my mom lived down the street from a family that got axe-murdered by one of their two sons when she was a kid. the murderer did get out on an insanity plea and is still in the area. also their neighbor’s mom “lost her mind” (how the story was told) when she had to protect their kids while her husband went over to try to protect the non murderer son when he got home from school and ran over screaming about his brother trying to kill him and had killed their parents

also she knew a girl who almost got kidnapped by this really fucked up traveling serial killer that has his own wikipedia page that is,,, lengthy. the girl had [alleged] mafia ties, and the guy ended up dying shot by police despite them being told to bring him in, which sounds kinda suspicious

long story short i’d probably be the sequel where one comes back

apparently i go to the “bad” school, which i found out in a coffee shop when i overheard two girls talking about how one’s dad went there and how horrible and dangerous it is

school fights are weird. either they don’t happen or they come freakishly close to murder. people slam heads into lockers, stomp on bones, drag people by hair along the ground. one time in my brother’s class a 4′9″ girl sent a 6′2″ football player to the hospital. there was video of a fight a couple years ago that’s still around. it was brutal, but also one of the girls fighting was taking one for the team in it and got the other kicked out

we don’t have a ceiling in all of the third floor, and the cafeteria has 2. this is not relevant in any way, but it’s important to me that you know this

also the guys kept ripping the heating vents/radiators/whatever off the walls in their bathrooms and got almost all the bathrooms locked. including the girls’ ones.

also everyone kept punching holes in the walls so on some of them it’s just,,, metal sheeting down the whole hallway

there are so many fucking shootings in the next town over. literally five years ago it was this nice place where kids would go on history tours, i did when my sister worked for that group. now there is pretty much one business that has not been held up at gunpoint, and if u look up to the serial killer bullet point, it is for v similar ties. it’s a pizza place and if u ever stop by u gotta try it

women in my family have weirdly good intuition but every couple generations we get doubtful. my great grandma didn’t want a hospital birth but decided “hey it’s the hot new thing for a reason”, my mom switched churches based on nothing but intuition and it turned out someone was a pedophile there (found out years later), i instantly could tell my friend’s boyfriend was a pos and wasn’t surprised later when he told her he’d murder and dismember me in front of her, and upon meeting him told him he was a fucking coward and couldn’t do it. he broke up with her a month later.

i was really good friends for a while with two guys that burned a building down. yes they were arrested. i was friends before and after the fire. they’re pretty nice, but this girl they used to date (at different times, they were brothers, yes it was fucking weird and uncomfortable for everyone involved except her but that’s it’s own thing) said some fucked up shit and it was the closest i ever got to starting a fight. anyway i’m still friends with both on facebook. one of them shares a lot of king of the hill memes

speaking of that fight, i 100% would’ve tried to kill her in that moment. u know that john mulaney quote like “i didn’t understand how a person could want to kill another person. then i got cheated on, and i was like ‘oh, okay.’”? that was me, but replace “cheated on” with she told me it was good my five year old sister was dead because she was a waste, and told me she hoped i’d die of covid”. it was mainly the sister thing. i couldn’t move because if i did i’d start a fight with the [way] above mentioned shit.

my family has a literal feud with a local farming family. i mean, we keep farm animals (sheep, goats, chickens), these people have that, pigs, and crops too. the feud was because their great uncle (or great grand uncle, i’m a little fuzzy on the details) published an autobiography (despite not being anyone famous/important) and in it talked about when he was friends with my grandfather and how creepy my great grandfather was (this was the one with the dead firstborn son) because he kept newspaper clippings of the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping and murder pinned to a board on the wall of his office/basement. also because he was a child of german immigrants who wanted to fight against nazis in WW2 (how suspicious [sarcasm]). members of their family are in my grade. they charged my sister for almost half an extra pound of goods, too, which just revitalized it.

i live by corn fields. i am surrounded by cornfields. (joke one)

i was friends for a while with this girl whose baby teeth,,, didn’t really fall out completely? she was 17 the last time i saw her in person, she’s probably 19 now and judging by her facebook pictures they’re still Like That. she had a very symmetrical mouth/teeth, which made it weirder. just to clarify, she had some of her baby teeth pushed forward and up, so they kind pointed out a little? and all her adult teeth. she was literally so pretty.

a teacher who is v sexual with his female students came into my english class (he is a science teacher) to demand why i wasn’t signed up for his class. we then both became increasingly passive aggressive and he told the whole class where i live with specific directions and landmarks. the guy sitting next to me had to try to tone things down despite being obviously confused as to why it was even happening (me too buddy). he lives down the road from my sister. when my niece had her birthday party at our house i was outside setting things up and he slowed his car down and honked at me. fuckin creep

[icycream-catqueen]

Kindling (When You’re Burning Low)

Cinder would rather burn herself out than risk a low grade; fortunately, Neo knows how to make her relax.

Rating: T

Tone: Some angst, lots of supportiveness, and a fluffy ending

Word Count: ~5,000

Important Tags: College AU, Established Relationship

I was gonna post this before now but I had problems with writing it and I was nervous about participating in a ship week especially when I only have something written for one prompt, and also my cat was sleeping on me for five whole hours earlier tonight while I was trying to finish up and as everyone knows it is a crime to disturb a snoozing kitty cat. I hope it still counts. ^_^;

Considering it’s pretty long, I only have an excerpt (the first scene I wrote for this fic, actually) on this post; the whole thing is, of course, over on AO3!

On this fine Saturday afternoon, Cinder was taking advantage of the lounge in the dorm suite. The coffee table was half-claimed by various books and notes while Cinder herself was settled at the same end of the couch, her laptop perched on the arm of it and her right side pressed closely against the suede upholstery as she struggled with the perfect phrasing for her essay. Failure was never an option for her, and even the slightest error would lead to it when it came to this class. She was running on pure caffeine by now, from a supposedly unhealthy amount of coffee. This was her third or fourth solid day of being awake. After the first night, she’d moved her setup from her room to the lounge to help her stay more alert. Winter and Emerald had both tried to tell her what was best for her wellbeing, but she’d firmly shut down their arrogance; she knew her own limits, and she needed to get this stupid project done. Neo, thankfully, had been out of town from Thursday morning to last night, and when she’d come back to the suite, she’d trudged straight to her room and shut the door. Cinder had only seen a couple brief glimpses of her since. Just as well, considering Cinder couldn’t intimidate her into letting her be like she could to Emerald and Winter.

At the moment, Emerald and Winter were both out of the building. They’d each probably told her what they were doing, but she hadn’t bothered to remember it. Neo was apparently still asleep, which was a bit odd but not enough so to risk seeing the pitiful kicked-puppy expression that appeared when her sleep was disturbed. Still, if she wasn’t up and about in two hours, it would be worth it to check on her mental and physical health.

Speak of the devil, Cinder heard a door open behind her. She didn't bother to look, though, until she realized the shuffling footsteps were approaching the couch instead of the kitchen, bathroom, or shower. She took a brief glance, then did an immediate double take because Neo looked absolutely miserable. Her hair was unbrushed and her eyes were dull. The oversized black sweatshirt (which Cinder recognized by the fiery orange phoenix on the front as one of her own that had mysteriously vanished a few weeks ago) and the brown and pink plaid pajama pants were probably what she'd worn to bed the night before, and she hadn't even bothered to put on socks. It was worrying to see her in such a state.

"You certainly look worse for wear," Cinder commented. Neo pouted at her as she slowly made her way to the couch and sank to the cushions. Before Cinder could react, Neo flopped down, squirmed to lay her head in her lap, and rolled onto her back. "I'm busy," Cinder told her sternly.

Neo's response was a soft and pitiful keening sound. She fumbled to grab Cinder's left wrist, staring up at her with pleading doe eyes.

"Neo. I'm busy," Cinder repeated. Neo whined and tugged on her wrist, so Cinder rolled her eyes and stopped resisting, curious about what she wanted. She wasn't sure what she was expecting, but she was definitely taken by surprise when Neo gently guided her hand under the hem of her sweatshirt and pressed it against her lower stomach.

What is she trying to accomplish here? Cinder raised an eyebrow at the woman in her lap. Neo let go of her wrist to sign something at her. The odd angle made it hard to translate, so it took a few seconds for Cinder to understand what she was asking for and why.

"I suppose I can take a short break, if you're really in that much pain," she relented. "You're lucky you're cute," she added as she carefully activated her Semblance.

The reaction was instant. Neo sighed with relief at the warmth, eyes full of soft gratitude and affection. Cinder rubbed slow, small circles over her stomach, feeling the smaller woman go languid under her touch. After a few more seconds, Neo's eyes fluttered closed.

"Is this warm enough?" Cinder asked. Neo nodded, a content smile playing across her lips. "Just ten minutes."

Neo opened her eyes and pouted at her.

"There is a reason I've been awake for," Cinder checked the time on her laptop, "about eighty hours now." Neo looked positively outraged.

"You need to sleep," she signed—easily decipherable now that Cinder had gotten a little more time to adjust to her current perspective. Not that the message was very appreciated.

"No, what I need is to finish this ridiculous project so I can move on to my two remaining essays, do all the work for a 'group project' because the rest of my assigned group are immature and unmotivated idiots, and study for my three exams this week," Cinder retorted.

"When are your essays due?"

Cinder elected not to answer, since admitting the due dates were two and three weeks away respectively wouldn't help her against Neo's accusatory glare.

"Your group project?"

Okay, so maybe it hadn't technically been assigned yet and was scheduled to be due in a month and a half, but all the information was in the syllabus. Cinder's class was full of imbeciles, and somehow she always got stuck in a group with some idiot or another who didn't understand what a lesbian was, so she was getting it out of the way to avoid interacting with anyone.

"Are all three of your exams actually this week?"

Two of them, and one of those barely counted more towards the final grade in the class than a small quiz. Her continued silence was answer enough; Neo knew her too well.

"You're going to burn yourself out again." Neo's eyes were unbearably sad, so Cinder looked away.

"I'm fine," she dismissed the concern. A hand grabbed her chin and yanked her head down so her eyes met Neo's again.

"I watched you collapse in the middle of campus last year, and I almost got in trouble for pulling a knife on the paramedics to make them let me stay with you. I got a scared video call from Winter four months ago because you fainted in her fancy rich-person hot tub and nearly drowned," Neo reminded her. “Do I need to go on?”

"I can handle it this time," Cinder insisted, growing agitated. Neo took a calming breath before responding.

"No you can't. You always say it but you never can. You end up in an exhausted daze. You work yourself into a frenzy. You get into fits of rage...which honestly scare me."

"I would never lay a hand on—!" Cinder was cut off when Neo pressed a finger to her lips.

"Not for myself. I'm scared you'll lose control and take it out on yourself again," Neo corrected her. "You haven't in a while, but..." Neo trailed a hand down Cinder's left arm, tracing her scars.

"I just...I need to...I have to keep working. I can't let myself fall behind. I can't..." Cinder faltered. Neo sighed.

"I know," she acknowledged. She knew about the past, knew why Cinder relapsed into these desperate attempts to excel, to stay ahead. "But it's pointless if you destroy yourself trying."

"I've only ended up being sent to the hospital three times since I started college," Cinder argued. Neo was unimpressed.

"Congratulations! And you've managed to barely avoid hospitalization how many times now?"

"I—that isn't relevant!" Cinder hissed. Neo scowled.

"Really? It's not? How many times have you ended up so exhausted that you were bedridden for days? How many times have you gone into a mental decline because you were incapacitated? And how many more times are you going to make me watch you suffer like that?"

"If you want to leave me, just get it over with!" Cinder spat bitterly. Neo's eyes widened, hurt and shocked. Cinder flinched, realizing she'd crossed a very important line. "I didn't mean...I don't know why I said that."

"An abandonment complex, emotional instability, a mess of insecurities you mask with your ego, previous girlfriends who couldn't handle you or only wanted your body...and like I've been saying, you need sleep,” Neo replied, recovering. "Also, my cramps?"

"What?" Cinder realized she'd subconsciously deactivated her Semblance at some point and quickly remedied that. "Oh. Sorry."

"I'm going to make a deal with you," Neo informed her abruptly. Cinder raised an eyebrow, intrigued.

"What kind of deal?"

"The 'ridiculous project' you're trying to finish. Tell me about it, and I'll explain," Neo replied. Cinder clenched her teeth at the mere mention of it.

"It's an assigned experiment, a five to ten-page report on it, and an oral presentation. And the professor hates me. He goes out of his way to make every class, every test, and every assignment hell for me. I have to work harder than anyone so he can't get away with failing me out of spite. If I make even one mistake..." she growled.

"When is it due?"

"The day after tomorrow. It was assigned two weeks ago, but three days ago he realized he 'accidentally' gave me the wrong experiment. In other words, he's making me do a two-week project within five days—after I'd already finished the one he previously assigned me."

"Watts," Neo guessed. Cinder had come back from his class angry enough times that it wasn't even a question.

"Yeah," she confirmed anyway. Neo wrinkled her nose.

"I already hated that guy, and I hated him more and more every time you came back from his class in a bad mood, but this shit he's pulling now is the final straw, so I'm going to get him fired," she declared. Cinder let out an amused huff.

"And how will you do that?" she asked. She didn’t expect an actual answer but Neo didn't even hesitate.

"It may include breaking and entering, small and well-placed incidents, a flat tire, some bottles of the expensive alcohol he isn't supposed to have on campus, a sedative, and if we're lucky, a little inadvertent assistance from gravity and Ironwood."

"Just how long have you been planning this?" Cinder was taken aback at the immediate response. Neo considered.

"The time you locked me out of your dorm after his class because you were so furious you wanted to hit something, and you were worried you'd see so much red you might accidentally hit me in blackout rage. You've never told me what happens in his class to make you so angry, or even if it's actually him or just another student—though I was pretty sure it was him—so I planned for both situations."

"I'm impressed," Cinder commented. Neo smirked. “Now what was that ‘deal’ you mentioned?”

"You finish the report for your project, then eat something more substantial than coffee and whatever quick snacks you've been living off of for the past few days. And then we go to my dorm and you get some damn sleep."

"How did you know I'm working on the report right now?" Cinder was taken aback. "And how do you know I haven't been eating?"

"Because I can see it on your computer. And once again, you've done this before, so I know you don't take the time for more than the minimum amount of food to keep hunger from 'distracting' you," Neo pointed out, almost accusingly.

"I haven't even started working on the oral presentation. I'll do all that after I'm completely finished."

"Nope. You can start that part when you're well-rested. If you make me physically drag you to bed while I'm on my period, I'll make damn sure you regret it," Neo threatened with a scowl.

“Fine,” Cinder gave in reluctantly. Neo smiled brightly, and dammit, it was nigh impossible for Cinder to stay bitter in the face of such genuine fondness, joy, and relief. She wondered when she’d gotten so soft—even if only a select few people got to see that soft part of her—and realized she didn’t even mind anymore.

[howlingmoonrise]

Thoughts on Petshop of Horrors: Wandering Ark volumes 1 & 2

(also on dreamwidth)

HOW did I manage to miss the translation of my long-awaited Papa D PSOH series?? I've been stalking it ever since I found the announcement and somehow the fact that @ruthlessnightsscans​ already put out the first two volumes completely went past my head.

Obviously I had to read it right away, sleep be damned.

this is the edited version of my brain thoughts after i managed to get two sleeps and calm down a bit or it would be a lot more incoherent

The art: the initial pages really remind me of the old art! Unfortunately it goes back to the roundness prevalent since the Shin series (which has only become even rounder with time) not long after. That art style is also a lot less dynamic than the original, I find. It's a bit of a problem on scenes that are supposed to have some tension caused by movement. This is nothing new since, like I said, Sensei has been using this art style since a good while ago. I really miss the original art though. It had a major nostalgia punch to it and a lot more feeling as well.

-- First chapter: "I am on a journey with no destination in mind" just say you're on vacation and go off I guess. 

Papa is... weirdly easy-going. I want to say it's because he's not yet mad with grief and his son being taken away and so on, but the glimpses we saw at his time in university definitely didn't paint him this soft. There's no edge to him, on this volume or the next. 

Regarding the story itself, I can't say I loved it but it’s not the worst out of all of them (there are four in total between these two volumes, and a third volume is on the way). I liked Koushun's character, but Seiyou annoyed me, especially when he presumed to know what she wanted (or perhaps he didn't presume, but decided for her what was better anyway) - something like I Shall Revive This Species So Breed In My Name Okay Bye. Note also that while Koushun was willing enough to marry (thinking she was marrying someone else but that's another point entirely), the groom himself came in chains. And then Seiyou... locks them in together? Great. Just great. Very conducive to a loving mood indeed, locking a woman with a potentially dangerous stranger who might cause her harm and telling them both to fuck (note. the. chains. you don’t put chains on someone you think is harmless; they never put any on Koushun even when she attacked Seiyou). I was afraid for her when it cut to another scene here, with the last we saw of her being pushed against a wall and being told by the groom that it seemed that he would have to make a child with her. "Rather than hate each other, I want to break that curse"? Seiyou, sweetie, that is NOT the way to make them not hate you. ((The reveal that Koushou is some sort of creature - very PSOH-y - does not help, since putting two wild animals together without them being used to each other is perhaps even more likely to them killing/harming one another.))

MAJOR little mermaid vibes on Koushun standing over a sleeping Seiyou with a knife. 

There are quite some parallels with the D species on this tale of bloodshed and revenge. The Ds could stand to learn from this, though historically they don't. "Even if you kill the third prince, the Kagetsu people are already gone. They won't return." Papa himself says that 'winning on the last available tile' is a waste of time, which really resonates with his research into reviving lost species and the issues of his own kind. A reference to the health of descendants when no new blood is introduced is also made here, which might or might not point to our D depending on where in time this Papa is from.

--

Second chapter: it's... frankly, super choppy. The story is all over the place. On the author's note, Akino herself says that it's a challenge to put the whole life of that empress in 57 pages, and I have to agree. Either it should have been cut to the REALLY relevant parts and worked on them some more, or be discarded in its entirety. It's too rushed. The whole first part was unnecessary: it could have started with her already working at the palace or being chosen as a concubine, and then made references to her previous life in her thoughts instead of wasting several pages on it when that backstory won't be going anywhere (except for some references to Hakubun whom she sees on that other actor - who dies like, two or three pages later, so that's that on that). I do like Ranji herself as a character: she's clever and quick to pick up on things. Her life is just a series of tragedies one after the other, unfortunately. 

Papa D is some sort of benevolent helper in this chapter for some reason - this pattern repeats somewhat on the next chapters, but on this one there isn't really anything to gain for him at all, other than perhaps his dubious acquaintance with one of the concubines/future empress, which wouldn't really hold much weight since he met her ?once? apart from near her death.

And then, somehow, the initial Papa D in this chapter was actually Sofu?

Sofu???? I'm calling bullshit. As far as we know - going back to Sofu's own series and flashbacks on the original PSOH, even - Sofu never had a hairstyle of that length, and out of our three known Ds (new!D excluded) he's the one least likely to help a human just because. The ark is also said to travel through space and time, so I'm saying that's Papa D and that's it. Fun aside: on this chapter, Papa says he's the "third generation", meaning that on this series he's probably the youngest existing D (and by inference our D does not exist yet).

Also, some issues with in-story continuity here: when the last emperor dies Ranji still looks fairly young and the emperor-to-be is three years old, a couple pages later she looks a lot more aged but the new emperor is still three years old. To be honest, I think the story would have been tied off much better if A-chan had some connection with Hakubun or the eunuch instead of each having their very brief, individual emotional connections to her - which, in turn, doesn't really make them memorable. The "wishes" thing was interesting, really called back to the old PSOH tradition with the mystical pets and bittersweet be-careful-what-you-wish-for endings.

--

Third chapter: I think, overall, this was probably the one I liked the best. Can't really bring myself to call it my favourite though, since none of them even begin to compare to the original PSOH chapters. I cackled at the "jawline is too sharp" dialogues and thoughts: with this art style EVERYONE has the same round jaw as every other character, and it's the furthest thing from "sharp" possible.

With this series it really seems like Sensei is giving more focus to trying to tell historically-accurate stories rather than focusing on the stories themselves, as there is a huge amount of superfluous historical information to be found in these volumes. 

The empress Elizabeth reminds me of Sofu, in truth. She won't "mind" affairs and the like (read: she will hate it but ignore them) as long as it works towards her ends. Her taking away the newly-born child is a huge parallel to Sofu regarding both Papa and D, and D and new!D. Child-snatching FTW! That being said, I actually kind of liked her, ruthless as she was: the whole reason why Sophie made it as far as crown princess was because Elizabeth valued her hard work. You don't get to hold an empire together without having a steel spine and a cunning mind (or people to do the work for you I guess, but here it doesn’t seem to be the case).

I hate that Sophie had to change even her name and religion to fit her new reality, accurate as it is to history. That sort of thing always messes me up (throwback to the Nazi/teddy bear chapter of the original PSOH series, where there was also a name/religion change for the sake of survival). Not a reflection on the author in any way, I just hate that this is something people had to go through. As something I hated that kinda does reflect on the author, though, was the ugly = terrible association with Pyotr and the maid. Sophie/Catherine is initially said to not be beautiful but she's not depicted in the same way those two are at all. 

Papa's benevolence is thankfully offset this chapter by the fact that he does have something to gain here. For some reason Ds doing things merely for the goodness of their hearts kind of rubs me the wrong way unless it's D during or post-Leon. 

Most PSOH victims clients: oh a pretty person! WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S AN ANIMAL Sophie/Catherine: a dog you say? sounds kinda hot ngl

Gotta respect how she just jumps straight into the dog affairs. The take-back of the empire was also nicely executed, and I'm always here for ladies in traditionally male clothing. 

--

Fourth chapter:

This is linked semi-directly to the third chapter by virtue of the amber room Papa D craved. Marks also the second time that Papa takes a human on board of the ark.

D, circa end of original PSOH, a single tear rolling down his cheek as he watches Leon plummet towards the earth: Humans have not earned the right to board this ark. Papa D: I'm gonna go for a joyride and take along this human and this human and this human and this human and--

Papa really gives Doctor Who vibes on the ark matter. Travelling through space and time, occasionally taking human companions? The one for this chapter - who I'm guessing might be a cameo from one of Sensei's other series, since I didn't recognize him and there was no backstory for him on the chapter - even has era-appropriate wardrobe changes (at least assuming it's the same person and not just someone who looks similar scratch that they have eyes of different colours so I guess Papa has been giving rides to delivery men now), the second of which leaving me very ??? as to WHEN he is from. 

That last Look(TM) reminds me a of Leon Orcot, between the long ponytail and the clothes resembling the ones Leon wore on the last chapter of Shin PSOH (in PSOH time, that would have happened approximately 15 years after the end of the original series, meaning that Papa was already long dead then. Unless Leon's style was just stuck in time, which is also very possible). 

It might or might not have endeared him to me for that exact reason. What can I say? I'm a sucker for Leon Orcot, and apparently also for characters that visually remind me of him. ANYWAY.

Why another Nazi-era chapter??? Sensei plz. One was already enough on the original PSOH - it wasn't anywhere near my favourites back then, either - and the fact that this one mostly followed a Nazi colonel didn't help either. Here we witness them tearing down the amber room, "reclaiming" art from all over the world, a father's heartbreaking sacrifice to “save” his daughter’s dog, and Papa D coming to meet the Nazi dude. One would expect the Ds to avoid genocidal racists given the fate of their own species, but apparently the Nazis were relevant enough for not one but TWO Ds to interact with them. Oh well. Either way, I really don't like how Papa appears to not care one way or another - when the D for the original series interacted with people he didn't like, his mask was really fairly obvious (at least for the reader). Perhaps Papa simply has a better mask. Perhaps those nuances were lost to time and round art styles. Perhaps Papa or Sensei just don't give two shits. Guess we'll never know.

EVERYONE seems to comment on the flavour of Papa's tea: it's 4 out of 4 so far for these two volumes, and in this chapter in particular it seems as if it's laced with some kind of truth serum - it seems to be Papa's version of D's (and possibly Sofu's?) incense from the original PSOH. A reference to the original PSOH's Nazi chapter is also made here, with Papa mentioning that Sofu was on friendly terms with Eva Braun: this implicates that in this time they were in closer contact (not surprising since Sofu probably hasn't stolen his still-non-existent kid yet).

The colonel seems to value art over human life - surprise surprise! - so he kills his own comrades to keep the art "safe". A stomach-turning moment comes where they find human golden teeth being kept as treasure, which Papa mentions remelting to turn into golden nuggets. Why, Papa/Sensei, why? It's in poor taste, even if you're testing the colonel the way D did with some of his clients on original PSOH.

At the very least an eerie moment comes next where Papa explains that dead creatures can be revived using DNA. "Even dead people?" Cue Papa's all-seeing stare directly into the reader's eyes (and presumably the colonel's as well) with a backdrop of an inverted black-and-white multitude of graves as he says that future is not very far. Colonel almost shits his pants, with reason when you consider the amount of people the Nazis killed off that would presumably come after them. This almost forgives the teeth comment, and it's probably the first moment in these two volumes when we see some genuine emotion on Papa's face (on this page and the next), creepy and maniac as it might be.

Colonel dude has spent the whole chapter justifying everything under "orders of the fuhrer" so far. Then comes the moment that Papa calls him out by saying that the orders were to burn his sweet dear art so that it wouldn't fall into enemy's hands, and it's here that we see how much of an hypocrite the colonel is when he doesn't want to follow those orders. Suddenly it's "treasures of mankind" (even though he's been stealing them left and right) and the fuhrer is "a fool" (even though he's been using his orders and his "greatness" as justification for everything). 

Suddenly, Papa's companion! Who the heck is that! Shoots him! This is someone whose family was killed by the colonel (directly or under his orders) or so he says; he's gripping a piece of art we don't get to see, which is presumably the reason for those deaths. Now in the future! A guy who looks a bit like that other man who shot the colonel, but who I'm not 100% sure if it is or is not the same person because the round art style makes everyone look alike Someone who is definitely not the same guy because his eye colour is different (and who's dressed in a sporty outfit with a long ponytail, which I've mentioned kinda reminds me of Leon) looks for the amber in the place the art was stored, alongside Papa. He flies on the ark (all these humans on the ark, Sofu would have a conniption!) and reminds me of Leon once more while being shouty and holding on to the main mast for dear life.

The sacrificial father mini-plot also gets resolved with the dog returning (but not the father himself) along with a picture with that family. Which is presumably the picture the other dude who shot the colonel was holding, which begs the question: how is he related to them? He doesn't look like any of them, but he did say the colonel killed his family while (presumably) holding that same picture, so hmmm. Maybe he's the dog, colour-scheme aside? But apart from the father, the rest of the family seems to have survived, so it's kind of a strange thing to say since that sort of wording usually means more than one person. Even if he is the dog (my money is on that option), it's not exactly obvious to a reader who's not looking very closely. Some loose ends there, or at least ends that don't really look like they're tied together at all.

"No matter how long winter is, spring will come." Fairly hopeful final words there, Papa D. These echo similar ones spoken by D at the end of Shin PSOH, after running from Leon once more ("someday, the season for returning will come"): perhaps both these Ds are not as pessimistic as to their future, at least at this point? Poor Papa definitely had a change of heart between his series and the ending of original PSOH, unfortunately.

--

General thoughts: Sensei hasn't quite managed to replicate the feeling of the original PSOH just yet. The storytelling feels a bit shallow and rushed, though the pacing improved from the first volume to the second. There's also very little focus on Papa himself for some reason: he's more of a background character on his own series except for the fourth chapter, which is a very strange narrative choice. In part this might also be because he doesn’t have a permanent companion to discuss/argue with like in previous iterations of the PSOH series. I wonder if the third volume will continue on this trend? I wish it’d delve a bit more into Papa, but either way it’s still nice to get some more PSOH content.

I've heard Vesca will make an appearance next volume, I'm so excited!! Out of Shin PSOH, my favourite chapters were Leon's (surprise surprise!) and the ones with Papa and Vesca on their university days. Papa definitely seemed a lot sharper there, which I miss here - I feel like Sensei has been smoothing out all their edges like with the art style lmao, and in turn it makes them feel a bit lacking since the Ds are not meant to be bland and forgiving and easy-going, at least as per their original portrayal. I've also seen sneak-peaks of Leon and D from author notes of the next volume so I can't wait at the chance to weep at the slightest panel of my son Leon.

A final shoutout to RNS for continuing the PSOH translations! I really can't thank them enough!!

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

May I please request an info dump about an OC of your choice? Ngl I’m super intrigued by the things I see you posting and I’m the nosy gay who wants to know moooooore 😁

Look what you’ve done, you’ve made me ramble 😂😂 were you aware when you sent this that you’d set off a 1,200 word monster of a post??  The only thing I considered but decided to leave out was gathering the links to the stories involving these characters that I have already posted (though if anyone is interested in that, I will absolutely do it, I don’t have a proper master post for these guys 👀)

But oh my god, I’ve never had someone request an info dump before, I don’t even know where to start! Well, I will fully admit it’s not a super developed world that these characters are in, I haven’t determined any specific overarching story that they all fit together in, I basically just made a little family who have made it good in not completely legal means who occasionally get caught up in fights with their antagonist duo who just won’t leave them alone.

(The rest is going under a read more cause it’s a lot haha)

Tyr is my first character, as in like. He was one of the first characters I wrote with when I was like ten, but he has changed a lot since then, his name, his appearance, even his background, basically everything about him except for his ability has changed. Maybe I should have just made Tyr a new character and kept the original one as is, but he just evolved so gradually and even if he’s nothing like he was almost (god, fml) 20 years ago, I still know it’s the same guy, so it doesn’t feel right to try to have both iterations as two separate characters coexisting in the same world. Maybe I’ll recycle bits of his past that aren’t relevant anymore and tack them onto another character, but I haven’t done any of that yet.

As he is now, Tyr is a black man with his long hair done in box braids that fall past his shoulders, 5���6”, and about 28 years old, with a heavy British accent. He’s protective of his friends and isn’t afraid to fight for any of them, no matter how short of time he’s known them, as long as they’ve given him reason to trust them. His ability is the power to manifest and control flames, which he doesn’t do often but is very adept at controlling it. 

Brennan is another character in the group, I came up with him about five or so years ago and he hasn’t gone through nearly as many changes as Tyr, but his name did change a couple years ago and I pinned down a couple other details around that time. Brennan is a pretty big human being at 6’5”, he towers almost a foot taller than Tyr with broad shoulders. In every way he throws a very intimidating silhouette, built like a rock and hard to knock over, but if one were to somehow pick him off the ground they would find him to be strangely lightweight.

And that is do to his ability, two huge black wings that he’s had since he was very young. Though he is a large person, his bones did not develop the same way an average humans would so that his wings can lift him. They are strong enough to carry him, he is a very skilled flyer with them, but they’re not strong enough to carry another person for very long, though he has managed to catch someone to slow their fall and at least get a little further away from danger. (I think I wrote this incident out but not sure if I ever finished it enough to post, but maybe I shall)

Brennan is white but tanned, short light brown hair and light blue eyes, 30, and uses he/him and they/them pronouns, which I do incorporate both of their pronoun options into my writing, it feels natural to me now when I'm writing and I hope it comes across clearly who is being referred to each time. Another important fact about Brennan is that they are non-verbal, they used to speak as a child but due to circumstances in their childhood that they haven’t divulged to the group just yet, they just eventually stopped speaking. Whether or not he is physically capable of saying anything, even he’s not sure, but he and everyone else in the group have grown comfortable enough with ASL that they can all communicate without speaking as well. 

And then there’s Kaipo! Or Kai for short, she is black/Polynesian, 26, 5’8” with thick curly afro hair. She has a bubbly personality and is really good with computers. She is unfortunately not the most detailed character I’ve ever made, I regret that I haven’t written as much with her, but in the fluffy musings I have about this little family, she is the one that drags everyone out of their bad moods and gets them to laugh through jokes and pranks. She is very much a meme master. Tyr and Brennan can both be heard groaning often at her terrible puns.

Trevor is a relatively new addition (I just went to look at the first thing I posted with him, it was two years ago already what the heck! It doesn’t feel like that long ago) Trevor is lean, 6’1”, white skinned with black hair and brown eyes. On his own, he is a normal human being, nothing unique about him to speak of aside from the fact that he will very much die early. I have not disclosed why, but he is terminal and would die within a matter of weeks. The only thing keeping him from an early demise is the mutual partnership he has forged with Algamoth, a lesser demon that Trevor unwittingly freed from captivity while saving himself. 

Trevor is around 28 years old, while Algamoth is not entirely sure how old he would be considered, but he has been on Earth for upwards of 1,200 years. He is able to exist without Trevor, though not in a very tangible way. Without being in a humans body he is not much more than a cloud or puddle that can fit in the palm of a hand. He is able to heal Trevor’s body, which makes their partnership beneficial to both; Algamoth is protected within Trevor’s body and Trevor gets to keep on living.

I started writing a blurb that would tie them in with the rest of the group, but have not finished it, I need to add it to my to-do list and post it haha

And then finally we have Michael. Everyone seemed to love Michael when I posted the first story that featured him, which that story was the result of a prompt from a Discord server I was on a few years ago. At the time I had no intention to mix him in with everyone else, but I think he would fit in pretty well. As you could probably tell from my ramblings last night, I’m not entirely sure which direction I want to take him, but I do have some thoughts on how to get him from where he is to where I want him to be and it does involve whump, but still pondering if I want that whump to reveal an ability he till now was not aware of. I have a vague idea of what he looks like but it’s not set in stone at all yet.

Other characters that have appeared in my writing are Malichi (Tyr’s boyfriend), Allison (the main antagonist), and Remy (Allison’s right hand). Another character that exists but has only appeared on page once is Promise, who is Kai’s girlfriend. That single story-ish thing with Promise only got one note lmao but tbf it wasn’t a full story, just a song inspired AU.

As of yet I don’t think I have any characters who are definitely straight, they’re all pretty queer in some way. Tyr and Brennan are both ace and panromantic, Kaipo is bisexual, Malichi and Promise are both gay, Algamoth is pansexual. I have not discovered yet what Michael and Trevor’s sexual or romantic orientations are nor pinned down what Allison and Remy are since they in general aren’t super fleshed out, though I have leaned towards them being girlfriends as well, but I’m not 100% convinced on that yet. 

AAHHH Wow, ok I didn’t expect for this to get so long, but I hope this was of interest! Typing this out and regathering info of these characters reminded me of a few WiPs that have never seen the light of day that I would like to finish some day, so hopefully this has given me the spark to do that.

[witchcraftingboop]

Further Insight on Briar's Recent Discourse & Prim's Apparent Grooming of Younger, Newer Witches

It was suggested to me that instead of making one long post (which I was genuinely sorry for creating in the moment as well), that I should offer the second half in a separate one so that it is easier to share and harder to simply ignore as a wall of text.

Here is the link to the first half of the current JBird and Briar discourse floating around. I highly encourage everyone involved in the Witchblr community to review both posts and not just this final addition. 

Regarding Prim stirring the pot, I actually do have proof of that on my page somewhere if you wouldn't mind my sending it to you? The person I reblogged it from, Mahi, also received death threats from Prim when they were only 16 and Prim was 20 (I can't ask him to share that though because Prim has since used her following to drive him off of Tumblr and he's still fairly [and justifiably] sensitive about it.)

Regarding Briar's statements more specifically though, I can see where the confusion is coming from. After the "in France" part, she's just defining a relevant term (hence the use of "irrelevant details) and then giving an explanation of how she came to be so knowledgeable about that term/concept. I wouldn't say she's calling Prim's activism an "irrelevant detail," but pointing out how Prim uses it as a shield against backlash whenever another blog (not just tradcrafters) calls out her platform. I don't expect you to fully understand or see what I mean when I say that, of course. Because you are still new, and these are habits I've observed of hers from nearly a year of following their interactions. I would, however, like to point out that Briar doesn't say anything racist about Prim and does not once bring up her race. In fact, I think if you read her entire post and not just point 3 as Prim has it cropped out in all of her mentions of it, you would see more fully the depth and amount of frustration Briar is trying to express. Similarly, Briar never threatened to dox Prim. She has, in fact, repeatedly tried to point out that Prim should be protecting her online information and be more aware of how to stop others from finding out about her private life/situation. These statements, however, have since been warped by Prim and her followers to come off as a threat on her life. Briar's statements above aren't a threat of doxxing. She's never once posted Prim's personal information or told others to find it or use it in any way. She has, however, searched for Taglocks on Prim, something witches especially are known to look for. In that search she found more than she was even looking for, despite trying to tell Prim repeatedly to stop being so open online with the information she posts about herself. Doxxing though is not racist. It is something used by them, sure, but it is not inherently racist.

Additionally, Prim has raised money, sure, but I still have not seen any actual receipts as to her *actually* donating it to any public or private organizations. This, for me, is highly suspect. In reality, we still have no idea where that money is. Whereas with Briar, she took no money in for a couple days on her readings and instead merely asked that those requesting a reading first submit proof of donation to an organization linked in the post. She raised substantial money for the BLM movement, but no one seems to want to bring that up in all of their "she's a racist" discourse. Also, the observation that someone is misleading or gaslighting their following is not racist. Just because she said Prim was recently using her BLM reblogs & promotions to do it *this time* still does not make it racist. Questionable wording is just something the reader disagrees with, in my opinion, and should be addressed as such.

I'm not going to lie, I do feel a little frustrated at this point. I was really hoping to come to you and see that you had concrete proof to offer that Briar is a racist. I do understand that you have your own reasons for feeding into the assumptions and twisted outlooks already taken on Briar's words, but I don't have enough energy in me to fully swallow my tongue on this one. I really do hope that you at least consider what I've said here. I'm not sure what I can say at this point because all of the information I've read from you thus far has been purely conjecture or assumptions or just "not feeling right" about the wordings on a single post. A racist, from my perspective, is not something I would ever feel comfortable calling someone off of this lack of evidence.

I understand it is hard to separate preconceived notions from your mind when reading through the words of others, but I really do miss when you were more open to the words of others. If I could ask one thing of you, it'd be to please try to read Briar's post again but from the perspective of seeing it how it was meant to be: a witch who has been on the butt end of Prim's harassment for going on three years now. She is tired of the wild accusations and constantly having to defend herself, and even when she supplied her proof a couple years ago, no one wanted to hear her. She has, largely, given up on being heard, and now screams into what feels like a void when attacked.

Proof of Prim stirring the pot that I offered: An example of Prim actively seeking out the community and trying to stir the pot with an already dealt with situation that had passed over a year ago.

A direct source that I offered as further proof of what has occurred already: This is one from the account mentioned before who was directly involved with the previous discord server where the Trio incident took place a couple years back.

[A Reply.] I think, to be fair, I saw your comments on her previous posts through your main, and with how much aggression you packed into those messages, I don't necessarily blame her for deciding not to engage with your private messages. As I've said, she's very used to people attacking her like that, and in her mind, unfortunately, you've probably been added to the list of aggressive people ready to fling the blame at her rather than look at the situation as a whole. I do apologize for the way her post may have made you feel, but I think it's also important to remember the potentially aggressive things you left on her page (I'm not saying you meant to come off that way, but even I couldn't help but read that way). Also, regarding the ask, it's no small secret that the occultists of the tradcraft group are skilled and well-versed in hexes and curses. When reading her posts about how she may respond to further antagonism on Prim's part, I see a fully realized occultist wielding their most well kept and trained weapon: baneful magic. I'm sure Prim herself also understands that the "threat on her life" she's saying she's so afraid of, isn't a physical threat, but a metaphysical one. She has repeatedly and continually tried to drag these people through the mud, and now that they're refusing to just sit back and be canceled, she's afraid. She knows how strong their magic is, and they aren't shy about it 🤷‍♀️

[A Reply.] No, I completely understand where you're coming from. I, personally, have seen your willingness to talk things through, despite how aggressive you can come off at times in the things you say, so I think that's why I was genuinely so surprised to see your comments on some of her posts. But I do think her response and refusal to further directly engage with you is warranted and her right. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell who is genuinely open to talking and who is just trying to bait and add to the problem. And with how aggressive your comments were, 8 honestly think she most likely was responding from a place of "oh look another young Prim follower here to bait and berate me." I don't think she looks down on you for your age, but her views are likely a reflection of the fact that a lot of 18yos follow Prim and have openly harassed her without even asking for her input on the matter.

At this point, I would like to talk about the second half of the title of this particular post. Grooming. This is a very serious allegation against Prim that I have not spoken on previously because I had no proof that it was happening. With this person's permission, I would like to share how exactly they wound up fighting Prim's battles for her.

I will note: I am highly disgusted by what follows.

[A Reply.] Oh no! You cannot fault yourself for this! Prim is a known manipulator, and the fact that she was able to make you somehow think this is part of your being "gullible and naive" is just testament to the fact that she's gotten wayyy too good at what she does. This is in no way your fault or because of some fault within you. Practiced manipulators are cunning and dangerous even to the best of us. It was unfortunate that she chose you, but her twisting you around is in no way a bad reflection on you as a person!

I've chosen to include my reply to this person rather than our continued discussion because of how personal and involved our conversation turned. I've included it to show, as well, that grooming others to fight your battles is (though this should go without saying) NEVER OKAY. Prim has shown her true colors, in my opinion, and while I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt time and time again, I simply cannot permit myself to ignore the harm and damage she's inflicted on not only the tradcraft community, but also this innocent group of friends. A group who that has hitherto dedicated their time to sussing out predators, terfs, nazis, and racists. A group that should never have had to deal with being gaslit and manipulated by a well-known and respected blogger on this platform.

I cannot reiterate enough how sorry and deeply shocked I am at the information this person has brought to my attention. I am still stunned by Prim's activities and unable to fathom how many other potential individuals are out there being groomed to support and fight for her cause. I am sorry to the Witchblr community as a whole. I feel as if I have sat by and watched as Witchblr has been manipulated and am therefore complacent in the damage and needless hurt that has been allowed to spread throughout our community. I am just so very, very sorry.

I will be taking a couple days off of Tumblr because of this, as I feel as if I need space and time to think, but my inbox is always open and I am always available to speak with others on my return.

[silverlightqueen]

Mischief Managed: Restricted Section

Across the United Kingdom, millions of children attend school every day, studying Maths, English and Science, but deep in the Scottish Highlands, a lucky thousand schoolkids get to study Potions, Charms and Defence Against the Dark Arts. Whilst the rest of us learn names like Shakespeare, Avogadro and Fibonacci, they learn names like Goshawk, Bagshot and Scamander. Whilst we learn how to do algebra, how to analyse poems and how photosynthesis works, they learn how correctly use a Conjuring Spell, how to brew a Draught of Living Death and how to fly a Nimbus 2000. And naturally, school children will always find a way to misbehave, to get up to no good, to make mischief, but when you add spells, potions and magic into the mix? Let’s just say… they get up to more than just mischief. Welcome to Hogwarts.

hogwarts!au, Park Jimin x reader - comedy, mild sexual content

Rating: PG17 (discussion of sex, sexual innuendo, brief mentions of violence and torture, mild profanity)

Word Count: 2.4k+

a/n: check the masterlist before you read!! here is the second instalment of my new hogwarts drabble series called Mischief Managed! (I know it’s really quick, but I’m motivated atm so I’m just posting as I finish them lmao). thank you to the loml @silverlightprincess​ for proof-reading and editing for me, you’re the best! I really hope y’all enjoy this, lmk what you think, I thrive off praise lmao x

silverlightqueen masterlist

Accio (Summoning Charm)

Type: Charm

Pronunciation: Various, including: AK-ee-oh or AK-see-oh , AK-see-oh , AS-see-oh (US), and AT-chee-oh (Anglo-Catholic pronunciation)

Description: Summons an object towards the caster. It is able to summon objects in direct line of sight of the caster, as well as things out of view, by calling the object aloud after the incantation (unless the spell is casted nonverbally). This spell needs thought behind it, and the object must be clear in the casters mind before trying to summon it. The caster doesn't necessarily need to know the location of the target if they say the name of the object to be summoned, such as when Hermione Granger summoned some books from Dumbledore's office simply by saying "Accio Horcrux books!" while in Gryffindor Tower

Etymology: The Latin word accio means "I call" or "I summon"

Notes: The Summoning Charm is unable to directly summon exceptionally large targets such as buildings, or living creatures (except for Flobberworms which aren't considered to be worth summoning). It is, however, possible to move a creature by summoning things they are wearing or holding. It is also possible to bewitch items to become unaffected from this charm, as is the case with most bought goods

Lumos (Wand-Lighting Charm)

Type: Charm

Pronunciation: LOO-mos

Description: Illuminates the tip of the caster's wand, allowing the caster to see in the dark

Etymology: Latin lumen, "light"

Notes: opposite incantation, Nox, puts the light out

‘Good evening, Madam Pince,’ I say as sweetly as possible with a big smile, and the Hogwarts librarian looks at me over her glasses, her eyes flitting to Jimin stood behind me. ‘Miss y/l/n, Mr Park. How can I help you both?’ she asks slowly, nasally drawl nearly going through me, but I widen my smile even more at the vulture-like woman, looking past the hooked-nose and the shrivelled skin. ‘We’re doing a project for Professor Moody, on the Unforgiveable Curses, and he said that the books we need are in the Restricted Section,’ I smile, injecting as much sickly sweetness into my voice as possible, and I’m even graced with a smile as Madam Pince holds a hand out. ‘Note?’

Jimin drops the note from Professor Moody into her palm, and she inspects it thoroughly, holding it up to the light, before looking back to the two of us. ‘Nobody else has come asking about Unforgiveable Curse books in the Restricted Section,’ she says, almost suspicious, and I’m worried she’s going to refuse us entry – all we’ll be able to write of our essay is the title if we can’t go in and research. ‘We were all given different topics,’ Jimin replies pleasantly with his award-winning smile, and she gives one curt nod. ‘You have an hour and a half, not a moment longer,’ she says, waving her wand at the rope which cordons off the Restricted Section, the rope disappearing, and Jimin and I exchange a victorious glance. ‘Thank you, Madam Pince,’ we chorus, and she nods, waving us away with a ‘hurry along. And don’t touch the chained-up books! You’ll regret it if you do!’

We quickly head into the Restricted Section, the rope reappearing behind us, and I stop in my tracks, having to take a few moments to let my eyes readjust to the darkness. ‘Would it kill them to invest in a couple more lamps?’ Jimin mutters, putting his hand around my wrist and pulling me along behind him. The Restricted Section isn’t that big, only a few shelves on either side of us, but the darkness and the shadows make me feel like hundreds of scary things could be hiding in here, ready to pounce.

‘Lumos,’ Jimin whispers, a sudden burst of light appearing from the tip of his wand, and I feel a little better after he does so, grabbing my wand and doing the same. ‘Where do we start?’ Jimin asks, letting go of my hand, and I suddenly feel vulnerable, quickly reaching for him again, and he turns to me with an amused raise of his eyebrow. ‘Are you scared, y/n? Not very Slytherin of you,’ Jimin teases, and I roll my eyes, keeping a firm grip on his hand. ‘Shut it.’ ‘Well, I can’t hold your hand the entire time. We’ve got to actually look through the books,’ he says, and I sigh, reluctantly letting go and ignoring his laughter as I turn to look at the closest shelf.

I hold up my wand, the light from the tip streaming out onto the spines of the books, illuminating the titles. None of them seem relevant to the Unforgiveable Curses – they’re about potions or evil wizards or dark magic that’s been banned by the Ministry. But then, any of them could mention the Unforgiveable Curses, and I realise just how vague this project topic is. ‘Found anything?’ I hear Jimin’s disembodied voice echo from the other side of the shelves. ‘Nope, not yet,’ I call back, and he lets out a sigh, both of us resuming our searching in silence.

‘Here, I found one,’ Jimin says, and I can’t get to him quick enough, feeling uneasy being around all these… evil books, and in the dark, no less. The tip of his wand is resting against a book titled, ‘Magick Moste Evile’ and I use my wand to pull it off the shelf, reluctant to touch it. ‘You flip through it, see if you can find anything, and I’ll look for some more,’ Jimin says, already beginning to walk away, and I have too much pride to ask him to stay, so I just nod, looking down at the book. I use my wand to flip through the pages, and each Curse has a page dedicated to it, a little breakdown of each curse, how you perform them successfully, and their effects.

After skimming through those three pages, I’m curious as to what other spells could be in the book, and so I ignore the voice in my head telling me not to do it, and continuing flicking through the pages. Some of the spells and magic are interesting, like ‘Protego Diabolica’ (which creates a ring of fire around the caster – their allies can pass through unharmed but their enemies will be incinerated the second they come into contact with it), and ‘Fiendfyre’ (which they do teach us about, but not until we’re in sixth or seventh year because of how dangerous it is), but most of the spells make me shiver, like ‘Transmogrification Torture’ (which tortures the victim to death) and ‘Serpensortia’ (which produces a snake from the wand of the caster that attacks the victim).

‘y/n?’ I hear Jimin call, and I quickly flick back to the pages on the Unforgiveable Curses, feeling cold all over. ‘Yeah?’ I reply, and he sticks his head around the corner of the shelf beside me, making me jump. ‘You think they only have books on, like… dark magic and evil shit in here?’ he asks, a mischievous grin on his face, and I narrow my eyes at him suspiciously. ‘Well, what else would they have?’ ‘Sex books?’ he smirks, eyes sparkling with mischief, and my mouth drops open.

‘I- what? Sex books?’ I echo, eyes wide, and his grin grows even more with amusement at my reaction. ‘Yep. Like… the wizards’ Kama Sutra,’ he nods, and I choke on air, ignoring his stupid laughter. ‘Who told you about the Kama Sutra? That’s a muggle thing,’ I demand, and he looks like he’s stumbled across gold, a hand running through his jet black locks and his eyes sparkling when he says, ‘how does our innocent little y/nie know what the Kama Sutra is?’ I feel a little embarrassed, but I shake it off, rolling my eyes as I reply, ‘I grew up around stupid muggle boys, Jimin, of course I know what the Kama Sutra is. How do you know?’ ‘The others told me, Tae and Hobi about it.’ ‘Which others?’ ‘Jin, Yoongi, Namjoon and Jungkook,’ he lists off, and I gasp, offended, pushing down my confusion about why they were talking about sex in one of my very few absences.

‘When did you guys hang out without me?’ I demand, and he laughs. ‘When you were having your girls’ night with your little girlfriends a few weeks ago,’ he says mockingly, and I push down the temptation to hex him. The boys are always laughing at my friendship with some of the other Slytherin girls (Jennie, Nayeon, Solar, Jeongyeon, Irene and Tzuyu), saying that I’m too much of a bitch to have girl friends, but every now and then, you just need a girls’ night (and I have to have a break from the Gryffindors in our friendship group sometimes – they’re a bit much).

‘Well, no, I don’t think they have a wizards’ Kama Sutra in here. It probably doesn’t even exist,’ I murmur, reaching into my robes and pulling out my mobile phone to take pictures of the relevant pages in the book in front of me. We don’t get service here, because of the magic and because of how far out in the countryside we are (sometimes I’m lucky and get one bar down in Hogsmeade – it’s pretty rare though), but it’s good for taking pictures of books in the library so that I don’t have to take notes on parchment and then copy those notes into an essay. ‘I beg to differ. There had to have been someone who’s used magic to have freaky sex, and they have to have published it somewhere,’ Jimin says offhandedly, and I pull a face at him, not wanting to imagine the kind of things that would be published in a wizards’ book of sex positions.

‘Why are you, like, interested in finding it? It’s not like you need it,’ I tease, and he lets out a mocking laugh, rolling his eyes. ‘I’ll have you know that Jennie asked me to go down to Hogsmeade with her next weekend,’ he says proudly, and I look at him in surprise, ignoring the tense feeling that tightens my chest. ‘She did? She didn’t… tell me anything,’ I say, voice soft with shock, and he raises an eyebrow. ‘I’m surprised. You girls tell each other everything, right?’ he says, and I nod. ‘Well, we’re supposed to anyway. But whatever, it’s fine. She’s allowed to have her secrets,’ I say neutrally, using my wand to lift ‘Magick Moste Evile’ back onto the shelf.

‘Just because she’s asked you to Hogsmeade with her, it doesn’t mean you need the wizards’ Kama Sutra,’ I say, and he raises an eyebrow with a smirk. ‘We’ll see,’ he replies, and I shoot him a dirty look. ‘Men are so trash. I wish I was lesbian sometimes,’ I say mildly, continuing to search through the books, and Jimin closes his eyes, pressing his fingers to his temples. ‘Hold on, don’t say anything, let me just. Oh, yeah, that’s imprinted on my brain now,’ he says, and I let out a disgusted noise, reaching out to swat at him, and he dodges my hand with a mischievous grin. ‘Pervert.’ ‘I was joking.’ ‘I’m not sure I believe you.’ ‘Yeah, don’t.’

I roll my eyes, turning away from him and searching for more books, aware that our time is running out, and I want to find enough information to write a good essay – I don’t really want to get on the wrong side of Professor Moody. ‘This is getting boring,’ Jimin says, and I recognise his tone. It’s when he has an idea, and he’s waiting for me to agree that it’s boring, so that he can enact his idea, so I side-eye him. ‘What’s your idea?’ I ask, and he laughs, before holding up his wand. ‘Accio Unforgiveable Curse books,’ he says, and before he’s even finished speaking, I know it’s a bad idea.

The second the words leave his mouth, several loud thuds sound, and I drop to the floor, ducking from the several books that are (inevitably) about to fly towards us. A couple dozen books in total zoom through the air towards Jimin, and he shields himself, wrapping his arms around himself and tucking his head down as they make contact with his body, one of them hitting top of his head and another the area between his legs. I hold a hand over my mouth to stop the laughter from bursting out, especially when he looks at me, pouting.

‘What was that?’ we hear Madam Pince’s shrill voice echo, and my amusement is replaced by panic. Luckily, I’m a quick thinker, and I call back, ‘nothing to worry about, Madam Pince! Jimin just tripped on his robes, but he’s fine!’ Jimin shoots me a dirty look and I smile back angelically as Madam Pince replies, ‘if you say so. Remember, you only have 47 minutes and 24 seconds!’ Jimin scowls in the direction of her voice, and I have to stifle more laughter. ‘That hurt,’ he mutters miserably, rubbing at his head, and I roll my eyes as I pick myself up off the floor, dusting off my robes. ‘Will you kiss me better, y/n?’ he says cutely, pouting his plump lips and giving me big puppy dog eyes, and I scowl back at him. ‘You’re such a baby. This is what you get for talking about sex books,’ I say, and he rolls his eyes, before gasping with realisation.

‘Should I try the summoning spell to see if there are any sex books?’ he asks, and I scowl at him. ‘I swear to God,’ I say, pointing a threatening finger at him, ‘if you keep banging on about these non-existent sex books, I will not put your name on the essay, and you can face Moody, and tell him that you spent all your time looking for the wizards’ Kama Sutra instead of books on Unforgiveable Curses.’ ‘Excuse me!’ he exclaims, feigning hurt and clutching onto his chest, ‘if it weren’t for me, you’d still be searching all the shelves for Unforgiveable Curse books! And anyway, you’re the one who brought the sex books up again!’

‘Did somebody say sex books?’ we hear Madam Pince shriek, both of us looking at each in shock and panic. ‘No, Madam Pince, we said hex books!’ I call back, Jimin giving me a thumbs up, impressed with my quick thinking. ‘I should think so too,’ she mutters primly, both of us holding hands over our mouths to stifle our laughter.

[killian-whump]

Hi! I recently read a post about this person not feeling the CS energy anymore. I don't either. I mean, I'm a big MSR fan and to this day I have a pic of them as my cell wallpaper and I ocasionally watch MSR videos on YouTube and I still get that tingly feeling every time. I was a HUGE CS fan but the feeling is fading away. Maybe the ship isn't aging well or maybe it's the fandom itself? I thought I was the only one experiencing this but I see I'm not. What do you think? Still love Colin tho. :(

Honestly, I think it’s just a natural phenomenon... and an inevitable one, too.

A lot of it comes down to firsts. The blush of first love. The first read of a great book. The first kiss. The first day of school. The first “I love you”. Firsts come once in a lifetime, and they are thrilling and exciting because they’ve never happened before. Oh, sure, millions upon millions of people have kissed in the world, but never before has this person kissed this person. And yes, you’ve read hundreds of stories in your life, but you’ve never read this one so you don’t know how it's going to turn out.

Incidentally, this is the problem a lot of books/shows have when it comes to canon ships. People get so excited for the firsts, and they want them to happen and beg for them to come... but once those firsts are done, the audience loses interest in the subsequent events. The first kiss might get a million more people to tune in... but the second kiss will render hardly a blip.

And so it is with ships in general. When you first “meet” them, they’re so exciting and thrilling, you’re just completely consumed by them. It’s like that wildly romantic and all-consuming period that starts off every real life relationship. And in this stage, it’s easy to overlook problems. It’s easy to ignore the faults and focus on the positive. But eventually... that period fades. It’s natural, of course, and inevitable. And when it happens, well, that’s when most relationships either fall apart... or develop into something deeper and richer.

But here’s the thing: A successful real life relationship doesn’t end. It continues, changes, evolves, and stays relevant for the rest of one’s life. Fictional ships, on the other hand... they DO end. The book runs out of pages. The show gets cancelled. The credits roll. It’s over. Sure, you can imagine how it would change and evolve and maintain its relevance after that point... but no matter how deeply you invest yourself in those imaginings, they’ll never be real. Ultimately, you’re left with recycled firsts (here’s their first kiss again... this time in space!) and complete fabrications (their third child was adopted from Agrabah...).

And eventually... Well, even those become old. You’ve already read about their first kiss in space, and in ancient Rome, and in high school, and in college, and in a coffee shop, and in a castle... and it’s not that you don’t like the couple, or that you no longer think they’re perfect for each other... It’s just that they’re not exciting anymore. And, unlike real life relationships that lose their excitement, they don’t evolve into something deeper, because they’re over.

They stagnate.

Again, this is completely natural... and inevitable. There are those who would claim it isn’t, but that’s probably just because they haven’t experienced it enough times for themselves yet. Eventually, they will... and then they’ll understand. But in the meantime, denying the inevitability and sheer naturalness of the phenomenon does more harm than good. People who try to FIGHT it, who force themselves to maintain the same level of investment once the stagnation begins... they’re only going to one day realize the only thing they’ve achieved is to turn a stagnating interest into a resented interest. What once gave them inordinate pleasure now leaves them feeling completely unfulfilled - and bitter about the time and energy they expended on trying to maintain an interest that was coming to its own natural decline.

So how do you prevent that? You let the thing stagnate. You accept that its lost its luster and no longer excites you. It’s not that it’s a bad thing or there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that you don’t feel like reading about it or writing about it or blogging about it or talking about it or whatever... and that’s okay. You have to give yourself permission to set it aside for however long you want or need to. And then, if/when you DO come back to it... it will be with fondness and warmth - not resentment and obligation.

So no, Nonny. It’s not the ship itself, or the fandom, or even you. It’s just natural. Once ended - Captain Swan ended - years ago. It will never die, and there will always be fans and shippers (new and old), but it IS over. There’s no more firsts. No more excitement. It will never be as great as it once was. People will grow tired of it and drift away. They’ll scatter off to other shows and other ships, like dandelion seeds in the wind. It’s inevitable. Part of life.

C’est la vie <3

[bladekindeyewear]

Bloggin’ bout HS^2 Commentary from start to Mid-Jan-2020

Sigh.  Time to pay the piper.  Someone’s gotta extract whatever plot-important and plothole mentions get mentioned in this commentary, even though reading behind-the-scenes stuff about Homestuck makes me even more nervous than reading frontend stuff ever could so I don’t really want to.  FYI, that’s what you’re going to get out of my posts on these -- anything regarding plot stuff and plotholes, things we would’ve misinterpreted or missed otherwise, not any of the other paid content such as sketches or full quotes from them about things.

TWENTY FUCKING DOLLARS A MONTH!???!??  Is Andrew even seeing any of this cash?  --no, not much of it I guess, he would want to make sure the WP folks get paid enough after the--

Yeah I’m not gonna even think about that.

Fuck it.  I’m ponying up.

Alright, first commentary post on the Patreon, commentary and bonus sketches for Ghostflusters... whoa, this is long and extensive.  Is it going panel by panel??

I guess I’ll give you a small quote just for a taste of how this starts...

Page 33:  Not sure what any of this shit means. It’s pretty deep though. We were going for an echo of the beginning of the epilogue when John is dreaming in anime. Except here it’s Jake, and nobody is dreaming, at least not yet. Also an anime dream wouldn’t be a nightmare for Jake, since Jake likes anime. Or he used to. Now anime probably just reminds him of Dirk.

Good thing we’re never gonna hear from that guy ever again.

...because this commentary is sort of stylized.  They’re kind of riffing on what they’re doing, and I get that -- when you have to write commentary you’re asking people to PAY for you can easily feel like you have to be entertaining.  But they are describing the rationale for the shot choices they made and such.  They’re also going for a sort of Andrew-recap sort of attitude, and I don’t blame them for that choice, either.

[Candy] Jade is...well, you’ll see.

GOD DAMNIT.  Don’t remind me that Dave vanished on her forever while they were doing pro-revolutionary work and she’s probably going to be in a bit of a state!  Stupid knowing author future allusions...

Then again, that’s exactly why I’m here blogging about the commentary for you guys -- for me to relay Authorial Intent on Stuff That Happened That Seemed Plotholey and Hints About What’s Going To Be Relevant.

I just, uh... didn’t expect there to be that MUCH of it.  And that casual phrasing for that Candy Jade Is Going To Be Seen And Or Relevant hint is... kinda indicating to me that there’s gonna be a LOT more of that here than I wanted.  :|

Continuing... there’s talk of why they started with Jake here, being unused to writing for middle-aged characters in Homestuck terms, et cetera, but again, I’m only here to relay anything with plot impact or SERIOUS perspective on how we should / the authors are viewing this.  The rest stays behind the paywall for whichever of you all think it’s worth $20, I don’t really have a choice.  At least now I know why there was no one to tell me what details were actually BEHIND the paywall.  Seriously, that’s steep.

Speaking of how stylized the commentary is here, I can get why some might read it and view the authors as slightly callous -- I’m giving them PLENTY of benefit of the doubt, though.  Andrew was FAR from callous and he hurt us worse out of love of artistic intent with the Epilogues than the HS^2 folks could EVER hurt us.  Real Dirk-like, actually.  Dirk is practically half of a self-insert, as we well know.  No wonder Andrew thought the right thing to do was to take his hands off the story, what with Dirk’s villainous action being putting his own hands ON the story.

We like to make fun of Jake English as much as the next guy, but he probably is actually pretty good at “doing things” if the need arises. 

Mhmm; there are some jibes at how screwed up Jake has made his life, but I don’t believe these authors actually disrespect Jake at all.  He was dealt a bad hand by the story leading up to this point (quite INTENTIONALLY by Dirk’s narrative control in the Epilogues, too) and HS^2 and its bonuses so far have been exploring the heap of merits and potential he’s still got in him.

It’s kind of sweet how he wants to clean out his ecto-son’s house, even if most of that is to prevent the slow creep of mounting existential dread and narrative relevance. 

Huh.  So they think Jake can sort of feel that narrative relevance is seeping in around him, to him?  That’s not out of the question at all.

Continuing... they’re going on a bit about the same sort of things I mentioned about their choices in detail or detail-less-ness when depicting people in this new format, considering ages and the paired text descriptions and such.  That’s the sort of thing you’d traditionally want to pony up for commentary for, so rest assured that all that IS in their commentary posts if you want to do that.  I’m kind of extracting the plot stuff out of the paywall just on principle.

A lot of making this comic--and every other comic ever--is trying to convey as much information with as little space as possible.

Quite so.

From this conversation we find out a couple things. 1) that Brain Ghost Dirk knows about Ultimate Dirk, and he thinks he’s a dickhead. 2) Brain Ghost Dirk knows who Jeff Bezos is, and Jake doesn’t. This could be a sign of a couple things, all of which are probably stupid. 

This is ALSO what I came here for:  Legitimate “don’t worry about it” handwaves about stuff that shouldn’t matter to us.  I never ascribed the slightest bit of relevance or inference to BGDirk making a Jeff Bezos reference, and I’m glad I was completely justified in ignoring it.  So far I agree with this probably-plural-but-acting-like-a-singular author’s train of thought.

Come to think of it, it’s maybe strange that in this Cool Future Earth where all of our characters are rich as hell, none of them have bothered to have any sort of corrective eye surgery. Jane, Jake, John, and Jade all still wear glasses. I guess they do have “signature looks” to maintain in regards to their brand. 

I had to include this, I was legitimately curious.  Understood it was probably an artistic decision to stay on-brand a fair bit -- and losing glasses even temporarily has a lot of thematic significance whenever it happens in Homestuck Proper -- but it’s nice to have some confirmation that this was the understandable rationale behind the choice.

Here we find out what Dirk thinks about Jake’s behavior of the last few years. In other words, we find out what Jake thinks about Jake’s behavior over the last few years. [...]

[Brain Ghost] Dirk is manipulating Jake here, but he isn’t actually saying anything demonstrably untrue. 

Again, most of this was obvious at the time, but it’s nice to have authorial confirmation on what was being brought across as per the strange divide between Brain Ghost Dirk’s independent will and his mostly-part-of-Jake status.

Seriously though, shoutout to the conceit that god tiers can just fly endlessly, with no visible effort. It’s a really excellent form of narrative shortcut that fits perfectly into the bonkers vibe of earth c as a whole. Oh there goes one of the Creators, just flying over the Wal-Mart like an asshole. 

You know... who IS doing the commentary here?  One of the authors, all of them?  One of the artists??  This really is a COLLABORATIVE effort between the authors and artists involved here, I think, and it shows in their clear surprise and appreciation for each others’ work that only settles into a full understanding instead of just knowing what one intended off the bat.

It calls into question exactly how much of the Condesce’s mind control was actually mind control at all, and how much was just a lowering of inhibitions. 

Right, right.

We see Jane greeting Jake here with open arms, which makes you wonder exactly what is going on here. If you’ll remember from Candy, Jane has already served Jake divorce papers. A mystery in need of solving, for sure. 

HERE we go!  This is the potential plothole we were concerned about that got me alerted that the commentary had something to add in the first place.  John mentioned toward the trail-end of the Candy epilogues that divorce papers had shown up for Jake.  (And we also saw an HS^2 update ago or so that Jane hadn’t actually KNOWN Tavros was “awol” at all until he was literally a part of this whole clowncorpse logistics business.)  So in light of what this post continues to say:

It could be that Jane has put aside the nasty business of their divorce in order to have a strong chest to cry on. Can’t really say I blame her. Jake English has many flaws but he does seem like a good person to drape yourself across and really let loose on. And without Gamzee there, Jane needs another punching bag. 

...it all finally fits as pretty logically consistent, although the author is being deliberately coy in a way that leaves it open for more to be revealed later about exactly how this is happening.  Good!  No obvious plotholes in HS^2 (yet).  That’s an honest relief.  The more often they have something in mind where I’d previously worried they’d screwed up, the more often I can give them credit and speculate properly on those gaps in story-logic expecting something there, like we so often got to with Andrew before the retconsplit made even THAT kinda fucky.

If you’ve ever had a friend or family member go evil, you’ll know that one of the hardest parts is there’s always still elements of them that you like.

I can definitely say that from nearly personal experience.

Also, at this point in the story there is no lingering doubt that Jake and Dirk have had a sexual relationship. There’s a familiarity there that wasn’t around when they were teens. 

I assumed so, but I guess I never thought ABOUT how I assumed so.  Huh.

Do any of the creators have a moral leg to stand on if all they’re doing is curling up into a ball and hoping the world gets better without them? Actually, does anyone have a moral leg to stand on if they do that? 

Almost Riddley, there.

These posts are certainly interesting!  Steeply priced for what they are, but interesting.  Moving on to the second of four so far... this one’s about Catnapped Part 1.

Taking over Earth C's business world certainly would have required rubbing shoulders with the already-powerful on the planet.

--yep, which I never doubted even when brought up in the Epilogues is a large part of her supply-side government views.

Ah, looks like the bonus commentary is a good deal shorter!  But that bonus section was a good deal shorter than the story section covered earlier too, so.

On to the next one, for Clown Logistics.

Page 58: If you love Vriskas, i hope you enjoy more Vriska content. If you hate Vriskas, well. Here is another one that is kind of different. Feel free to contemplate nature vs nurture and how best to apply this dichotomy toward emoting about the vriskas of your choice how you see fit.

I’m starting to really enjoy this author commentary.

Tavros being named Tavros sure was a decision. Go back and reread the commentary for panel 58 but stop before the nature/nurture thing, since they are not clones, or even the same species. They just have the same name, which, in this universe, means you at least type kind of the same.

Hmhmm.

Page 65:  Sometimes you try and come up with something to say about a page, and you cannot, and so you wait 8 hours, and go see Knives Out, and then you have 2 white russians, and then you still can’t come up with anything to say, but oh well! Commentary needs writing. Tavros is experiencing an emotion here.

Now THAT’s a mood.  I gotta go see Knives Out sometime soon.

...Alright, I can see why some people think MAAAAYBE this author might be being a little disrespectful to the audience, but if they’re going based on THIS, I don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  This comment could have come from Andrew’s fingertips any day of the week!!!  I honestly wouldn’t WANT replacement authors who couldn’ comment like this in there for a page in paid commentary, especially in a lighter section of the story that doesn't need too much said about it.

And I paid $20 for this shit.

...Continuing, I’m loving all this commentary on Harry Anderson.  Representative excerpt:

Again, direct your eyes toward the boy. What a fucking asshole. 

...these commentaries are honestly improving my mood!  I didn’t expect that, really.

Ah, I didn’t even notice that the flying cars appear to be self-driving.  I think maybe the back of my mind MIGHT have noticed but only a bit.

Referring to the corpse-carry crew:

Page 82: Pokedex entry for Magneton in Pokemon Sun: When three Magnemite link together, their brains also become one. They do not become three times more intelligent.

Ain’t THAT a mood.

(...I just had an internal “Wait, am I using that right, it being a “mood”?  Isn’t that the hip new term, how do I have any right to latch onto that however much I feel it?  Ohhh gosh I’m so fucking old” moment.)

It’s clear from the commentator’s complaints that the crew never viewed this commentary ALONE as worth upping the pledge to $20, but that’s... not quite a bad thing?  I think it’d have been more disrespectful to think that they COULD make the commentary worth that.  I doubt there’s a single person on their team who feels quite right about the business model (besides the artists they have plenty of context to know how deserving they are of a living goddamn wage), but it’s what they have to live with and go with, here.  I feel weird for honestly understanding ‘em, and more than slightly pitying for how many people will look at all this and read “these assholes don’t care about us”.  I really can’t think that’s anywhere CLOSE to true from this without more context.  (And I really DON’T want more context, don’t send me any.  I’ve got to read HS^2 and I’m enjoying reading it so far so let me keep enjoying it please.  Background drama details make me nauseous, DON’T give me any if there is any (which I wouldn’t know about in the first place beyond an opinionated friend or two dropping hints in a bad mood).)

Did you know there are people who I’ve seen honestly believing “Undertale is pretty good but the creator is an arrogant asshole”?????

Because they saw his tweet about the game score passing Kojima’s MGSV on metacritic briefly and misinterpreted his wide-eyed disbelief, disbelief honed to nervous laughter to maintain sanity by Toby’s insecurity about his unprofessional work and work product???  They thought he was SERIOUS without any of the context of the usual insincere little dog persona they should’ve read into the game of his they played??

Awh man.  That just ticks me off.

Anyway where were we.

Page 91: This is a flashback so I didn’t write this one, which means I thankfully don’t have to say anything about it. 

Wait.  What?

Are they trading off writers between chapters, or...?  Hm.

Whatever they’re doing, it fits together pretty darn well SO far.

Alright, that finishes that off, time for the last commentary post on the second bonus update.

I don't know if you noticed, but everything is terrible right now. And I don't mean just in Homestuck's dumb fake earth. I mean in our dumb real earth.

Now that’s a mood.

I've been playing a lot of Death Stranding recently. Basically any media that you're making in 2019 has to either address what's going on around us or come off sanitized, sterilized, with its head in the sand. Kojima offers a simple power fantasy: Through Norman Reedus's sweaty, urine-filled labor, the things that divide us can be banished. America can be unified again.

Now THAT is a god damned MOOD.

The author(?) goes in about why this is happening, why Jane is being confronted this way, why she IS this way, et cetera.

Privilege, safety, and inherited wealth do funny things to the brain. People justify to themselves why they have what they have. If you have enough for long enough, you start to convince yourself you deserve it.

That’s one of the biggest goddamn reasons for the inequality and political landscape we have today IRL, yeah.

She saw a new world and chose, simply, to replicate the power structures of the 21st-century America she was raised in. Boardrooms, power pantsuits, formality and professionalism.

Jane's favorite comic, a noir-detective drama steeped in the pop-cultural trappings of pulp Americana, reflects this mindset.

So, our catgirl Seer of Light takes us through the looking glass, and we get to see an old friend.

Hm!

Nothing really to say, I just had to share this fitting context the author is giving.  How things fit together even better than they seemed to, and this was all far from random.

I feel warmly ensconced in the womb of nostalgia, gently cradled on Norman Reedus's chest.

Pffffffff

Yep, more of what we already surmised and appreciated, how Swifer and Cliper were giving us some much needed perspective... the commentary post even has little traditional-Homestuck sprites for ‘em.

And... that’s it for the commentary so far!  Again, I enjoyed all that more than I expected.  $20 doesn’t sting for me as much as it does for others in general, but it stung a lot less after I was through reading all that honestly somewhat-entertaining stuff confirming a lot of the insights I’d thought the plot was having.

I’ll probably wait to check for further commentary posts until like... after bonus updates come out, in the future, and then just blog about whatever I’m not caught up on.  Sound fair?  I’m going to blog as often as a real or bonus upd8 comes out, but I’m not going to pop in more often than that for my own sanity’s sake.  Have a good MLK weekend, y’all.  :)