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loveisanimaginarydagger3000 · 3 months ago

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The Soldier Of Death (1)- Mission Complete

Natasha Romanoff X Super Soldier Reader 18+

Summary: Soldat Smerti. The Soldier of Death. You were the perfect weapon: loyal, obedient, and merciless, or so Hydra thought. What happens when these traits are put to the test? Your captivity in the Avenger's tower and the presence of a redhead makes you realise you didn't have to be a monster. The question was though; Did Hydra make you the monster or were you always one?

This fic will contains dark themes. Please read these warnings before starting any of these chapters: graphic descriptions of murder, violence, gore and torture, heavy angst, mental issues.

Please consider these warnings before reading

Word Count: 2.8k

General Masterlist | The Soldier Of Death Masterlist

Mission Complete

Chapter Warnings: Graphic Depictions of murder and violence.

The sound of heavy footsteps reached your ears as you stared straight ahead of you at the stone wall, the boots that crunched against the dirt littering the concrete floors gradually increasing as the men walked down the hallways into the room you were in. They grew closer, and closer, and closer until one of their hands met your shoulder, your body fighting against the instinct to abruptly pull away from the man's touch. He moved around your body, his fingers gripping your chin and forcing your head up to look at him, a cruel smirk plastered on his face.

"Soldat (soldier)," his tone sinister as he addressed you, his teeth on show as he grinned at you maliciously. His gold tooth reflected the light from the dangling, rusting light, the rest of his teeth rotting to match his awful personality. "Are you ready to comply?"

"Da, sare (yes sir)," your tone almost robotic, his smile only widening as he stretched his arm out for another man to pass him a file, tossing the paper into your lap, motioning for you to read it.

"That is Ulysses Klaue," his tone containing a little annoyance while briefing you on the mission. "He was supposed to be helping us with obtaining vibranium but the bastard tried to cross us," you flip through the file, noting that he was going to sell of the vibranium intended for Hydra to some other organisation who weren't even willing to pay as much, offering something else the man must have deemed more valuable in turn. "It's your job to make sure he is made an example of, do you understand?"

"Da, sare," you repeat, knowing he didn't appreciate people who felt they could dare challenge Hydra. There would be consequences of trying to make a fool of your general. "What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to make him suffer," he grits out, anger written across his face as he towers over you. He places his hands on the side of your head, pressing in slightly, your face remaining stoic as he digs his finger into your skin, "I want you to do this," he emphasises by pressing harder against you, "Crush him until he's not even recognisable, break as many bones as you can, do anything you want as long as he suffers."

"Da, sare."

***

The darkness brought a sense of comfort to you as you wandered through the isolated building, your steps inaudible to a normal human as you crept through the abandoned hallways. The lights would occasionally flicker on, indicating the building still had some life in it, while you walked through the twisting and turning corridors, walking until the steady beating of hearts became louder, the chat that was a low murmur now distinct and audible.

"We can have them to you by midnight," spoke a man with a heavy accent, your eyes counting the two men by either side of him, the guns strapped around their large, toned bodies also being noticed.

"How many of them are there?" Klaue asks, sliding a blue-coloured sweet into his mouth, the man who he was currently dealing with clenching his jaw in frustration.

"Twelve girls, eight women," he answers, one of his body guard's heads snapping to the side when you slip into the room, sensing your presence.

"Perfect," Klaue responds, rubbing his hand on the tattoo that covered his neck, offering the others a crooked smile, "It's a deal then."

Before they can even shake hands, coughing and spluttering can be heard, a mortified look replacing the annoyed one on the man's face as he watches your knife lodge itself in his guard's neck. Red splatters against the faded white walls, his large, rough hands grasping desperately at his neck as crimson stains his skin, oozing out of the gaping wound. No one has time to get over the initial shock when another is thrown into the other man's skull, the force of your throw easily allowing the knife to glide through the bone as if it were nothing, killing the man instantly as he slumps to the floor.

"What have you done?" The heavy accent laced with fear as the man scrambles for a gun, words directed at the tattooed man near him. Revealing yourself from the darkness, you grab his head, making light work of him by snapping his neck, letting him drop inelegantly to the floor like a rag doll.

"Well, aren't you a scary thing?" Klaue says in a humorous tone, unaffected by the gory sight, your fingers deftly pulling the blades out of the lifeless bodies, wiping them clean with your gloves before twirling one of them in your hand, the other sliding back into your pocket.

He admires your stealth suit, the black fabric helping you blend in well to the run down building you were currently in. Your eyes were covered by tinted goggles, the emotionless and empty stare not visible to him while the lower part of your face hidden by a metal mask, Hydra desperate to keep your identity a secret.

"Do you know what's scarier?" He asks, your body unresponsive to his question, his hands popping another sweet into his mouth.

You watch as he folds the wrapper in a delicate manner, twisting and turning the crinkling paper before throwing it back into the bowl on the small desk nearby, smiling at you and showing off his now blue coloured tongue, tinted by the sweet.

His unseriousness doesn't bother you, knowing he was trying to act calm and cocky when in reality his heart rate was exceptionally high, the relentless pounding against his ribs audible to your sensitive hearing. Your ears picked up how the beating of his heart would spike unexpectedly when you moved, fear radiating off his nervous form.

"Puffer fish," he answers his own question, your eyes internally rolling as he continues his rambling, stuttering a little when you step closer. "They are deadly creatures," he looks to his side subconsciously in his state of terror when you step even closer, the incessant beating of his heart ringing annoyingly in your head while he gives away the position of the hidden Vibranium by accident.

You block out his further words, deciding to ignore whatever pointless things spilt from his lips and waited until his fight or flight finally kicked in to make things a little more interesting. Soon, his prosthetic arm swung out with force at you, your hand easily catching it and twisting the false limb, tearing it off his body causing him to gasp at your abrupt show of strength.

Lifting your leg, you kick forward once having lined it up with his knee, the precise angle of the movement allowing your boot to shatter the bone easily. He cries out in pain, tumbling to the ground, the concrete not cushioning his fall.

"You don't have to do this," he manages out between sharp breaths, his hand clutching his splintered knee, your body stepping on the dislocated bone to make him scream in pain. The bone crumbles under the pressure of your boot, your foot twisting and grinding it down further, the once solid bones turning into mush as the blood and flesh of his leg are disgustingly blended with it. "I'll do anything Hydra wants," he pleads with you to spare his life, the decision not up to you as you grab the metal pole to your side, easily snapping it off the wall, his eyes widening with fear.

"Is it the vibranium you want?" Using the strength in his arm, he tries to crawl away from your predatory stance, pathetically sliding against the cool stone. "I can get you even more than what you wanted," your head merely tilts at his words as they were meaningless to you.

You didn't care about the vibranium. You didn't care about the cost. You had a mission to do. That's all that mattered.

The sounds of his ragged breaths filled the small room of the warehouse until an ear splitting scream reverberated around the cramped space when you brought down the metal against his other leg. There was a satisfying snap when the pole was violently forced down on his leg again, another broken noise being torn out of the man.

"Please," he begged, spikes of agony flooding through his body as he was left helpless on the floor, his body too weak to try and escape his inevitable fate.

The sheer desperation in his tone, the anguish evidence in his voice evokes nothing from you. No sympathy, no guilt, no regret, nothing.

Instead, you bring the blood stained pole down onto his last limb, aiming for his shoulder to prevent him from moving his arm at all, a shrill noise painfully ripped out of him. With your enhanced hearing, you could hear when each little part of the bone splintered off from the humerus, stabbing into the tissue that surrounded it.

When his voice begins to slur, mind fogged by the throbbing aches riddled throughout his body, you crouch down next to his immovable figure, your hands reaching for his skull.

Crush him until he's not even recognisable, break as many bones as you can, do anything you want as long as he suffers.

The order echoes in your head, your fingers pressing into his temples, eyes searching his face as his eyes squeeze shut, his jaw clenching through the pain. He's heard the stories of you, knowing what was about to happen as your grip increased, digging painfully into his head.

Due to the tinted glass covering your eyes, he's unaware of the sinister darkness swirling in them, the sadistic look taking over as your thumbs press in harder, feeling the skin and bone straining under the pressure of your hands.

Agonising cries are brutally torn out of him, the bone reaches its breaking point when your fingertips dig in further, harder, deeper. The crack of his skull is deafening in your ear, the bone caving in on itself as the life is drained out of his body, gradually shutting down.

The squelch of his brain being squished under the bone as you forced it down even further indicates to you that he's dead but you don't stop. You can't stop. You grab as much of his mutilated skull as you can, lifting the base of his head before slamming it back down against the concrete. Revolting crunches echo around the room and your mind until you physically can't break anymore of his skull, your body heaving over his disfigured corpse at the strenuous work.

Crimson seeped through your suit, the blood that splattered leaving a streak across your masked face as you moved to stand above your completed mission, ignoring the warm liquid that could be felt against your cold skin. Your eyes were glued to the dismembered body, the command of 'not even recognisable' ringing in your mind as you ensured you fulfilled your order, stepping over the mass of flesh like it was a mere inconvenience to you.

The thought of what you had done didn't have time to settle in your mind, moving on autopilot as you reached the stone wall Klaue looked at. Your fist knocked against the wall, confirming that it was in fact hollow before your fist went through the stone. Your knuckles shattered with the force of your hit, the stone crumbling away as it was nothing compared to your strength. The bones in your hand didn't have chance to heal as you punched the wall again, and again, until the boxes of the valuable metal were soon revealed.

Mission complete.

***

Fury's arms were behind his back as he stood with authority at the end of the table, waiting for Natasha and Clint to enter the room. The redhead and archer soon strolled in together, power radiating off them both as they were let into the confidential meeting room, Clint flopping into a chair with little dignity while Natasha took the more graceful approach of sitting politely. They both looked over to the man who was staring out of the window, his voice taking control of the room.

"This morning, we received intel that Ulysses Klaue was found dead," his tone was blunt as turned around, the scar peeking over his eyepatch. Clint's posture straightened at the sound of the familiar name, the director passing two files to his most trusted agents.

Once the paper file was flipped open, the room's atmosphere grew tense, confusion and shock taking over as they witnessed what had happened to the man. Natasha's fingers deftly flickered through the pages, her mind trying to comprehend what must have been done to cause a human face to look like that. Her green eyes held a concerned glint in them when reading about the perpetrator, a gnawing feeling bubbling inside her when the page contained little information, Clint sharing an unnerved look with her.

"It seemed Hydra wanted to make a statement," Fury continued, everyone at the table now on edge. "All we know is that they must be enhanced, other than that- nothing."

Clint went back to look at the images of the deformed face, looking up to meet Fury's gaze.

"An attack like this surely must have some sort of personal reason behind it?" he questions, Natasha's eyes glued on the mysterious figure a CCTV camera caught on a nearby building, blood smeared across their suit.

"That's what I thought until I saw this," Fury displays an extremely blurry video on the Tv in the room, the cameras within the building somehow still working despite their age.

With an abnormal interest, they watch as the figure effortlessly murdered the three other people in the room before carrying out the inhumane act on Klaue, the violence causing Clint to look away, eyes flickering back down to the file in front of him.

"There was no emotion behind it," Natasha speaks up, puzzled by the degree of violence you chose to use. "If it was personal, there would have been more tension in the body language but they seemed almost... relaxed? It doesn't make sense," Fury nods in agreement with her, pausing the video on the best angle they had on your front.

The agents noted your outfit, the black suit fitted to your body with a Hydra logo patched onto the side, signalling that it was definitely Hydra putting this message across. Their attention then went to your face, or the lack of, as you were completely covered, any sort of tracking software struggling to get enough of your appearance to search for a match.

"Could it be mind control? Brain-washing?" Clint's voice breaking the silence, the tv being turned off as Fury placed his hands on the table, letting out a sigh.

"It appears so," his tone lacking the confidence he normally presents. "If it is, it means we have another Winter Soldier on our hands to deal with."

The mention of Bucky's past makes Natasha tense a little, her experience with his Hydra side not being a pleasant one. Clint's gaze wanders to his best friend, noticing the change in her demeanour but she brushes it off, wanting to focus on the task at hand.

"What do you want us to do?"

"Research," Natasha's brows furrow at Fury's words, Clint's face containing confusion as they look at their director, expecting him to send them on a mission to look for you.

"What?" Clint's tone in disbelief, "You have just warned us about a deadly enhanced individual and you want us to do research?"

"Exactly," he stands tall again, "We don't know enough about them yet to engage. We need more intel before we risk anything, especially considering they are enhanced." It makes sense to them when they think about it but the idea of getting them two to do it stirs curiosity in Natasha.

"Why do you want us two to do it? You have plenty of researchers that would probably do it quicker," she raises her brow a little at the man, him just smirking a little at her.

"Something isn't right about this whole thing, I want people I can trust on the matter," he dismisses and she accepts his answer with caution, taking the file and sliding it under her arm.

"I'll send you what I can find," she says, standing from her chair when Fury dismisses them both from the meeting, her mind unusually intrigued by the whole situation.

Who were you?

#marvel fanfiction #natasha romanoff fanart #natasha romanov #natasha romanoff #natasha x reader #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff fanfiction #dark fanfiction #murder #violence #cw: gore #hydra #super soldier #super soldier reader #angst with a happy ending #slow burn

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gothgleek · 9 months ago

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How Many Licks? (Just Bite It)

Angus Tully x fem!reader

Summary: You work at the University’s mail room sorting packages and trying to keep yourself from boredom. However- not that you would ever admit it out loud- you look forward to Thursday afternoons when Angus Tully stops by.

Based on my post Dominic Sessa looking like he bites people.

Word Count: 1,900+

Notes: She/her pronouns, Afab reader, Christmas mention, biting, cunnilingus, unprotected sex, unsafe sex, semi-public sex, sex at the workplace, overstimulation, quickies, reader being a brat, calling each other ‘slut’, everyone involved is over the age of 18

Notes: Huge thank you to my friend, Mera for helping me come up with what to call Angus because there is no way I’m moaning that name either fictionally or irl. It’s like moaning ‘Ulysses’ or ‘Cornelius.’ Please be nice as this is the first fanfic I’ve ever posted on Tumblr and first ever reader insert I’ve ever written. I tried being as neutral as possible when describing physical features but please let me know if there is anything that takes you out. Specifically I tried saying bite marks instead of bruises because not all skin tones bruise easily but I’m sure I missed some.

Comments, likes, and reblogs are appreciated 💕💕💕

Minors DNI

Your bright red stockings paired well with your wool black dress that hits you mid-thigh. You couldn’t see Angus from this angle, but you could feel his gaze rising up your legs and to the garter belt as you climbed the ladder. You knew he was a boob man but it was too cold for a v-neck dress. You put his package on the top shelf specifically so you could show off your legs when he arrived.

“Thanks, I got them Black Friday shopping.” You tell him, stepping down the ladder, his package on your hip. “Which is what I assume this is?” You shake the box in your hands. It’s not heavy but you can tell it’s packed to the brim.

“Hope so,” You hear him unwrap a lollipop and pop it in his mouth. You cringe as you hear him bite the lollipop.

You step off the ladder and tuck the box under your breasts, pushing them up more. “If you keep biting them, I’m going to start hiding them when you stop by.”

He smiles obnoxiously. “Then you would’ve hid them away by now.”

You roll your eyes, putting the box on the counter. “It’s disgusting.”

“No, it’s actually pretty tasty,” He smirked and took the used lollipop stick out of his mouth. “Wanna guess what flavor it is?” Angus sticks his artificially red tongue out.

“You’re such a slut.” You roll your eyes and shake your head.

---

The piles of new shipments kept the two of you hidden from the public eye as Angus got on his knees, pushing you against the wall. Your stockings had been quickly disposed of, tossed over his shoulder before you could say anything. His mouth was on your left knee, pressing a kiss as he opened your legs. One warm hand rests on your stomach, balancing himself.

He places a sloppy, open mouthed kiss on your inner thigh, above your knee. He licked upwards and bit down, sucking on the flesh between his teeth. He mirrors his actions on your left thigh. You hissed, knowing (and loving) that it would leave marks.

“You smell fucking amazing,” He says against your skin, his big brown eyes looking up at you. Motivated by your scent, Angus’s kisses get sloppier and while his bites are quicker, it is no less painful as he moves upward your legs. You glanced at the entrance to the office, double checking you could freely respond to his actions.

“God, you’re fucking soaked,” Angus said smirking, the cold air making your clit pulse. His thumb lightly moved over your lace covered pussy.

“Did you get jealous of the lollipop? The way I licked,” You jumped as his tongue touched your clit, the lace of your panties adding to the friction. “And bit?” His teeth graze against it.

“God, you’re such a dirty slut,” You tell him, only half teasing.

“And you’re a loud slut,” Angus teases and pushes your dress upwards. “Bite on this.”

You wordlessly accepted and clamp down on the polyester fabric. He slowly pulled down your red panties to show him your beautiful pussy. Since your lower half and most of your torso was visible, Angus greedily took in the sight of your bare stomach and underboob. He kisses your clit and spits on it. He traces his tongue over the sensitive nub and gives you slow, deliberate licks, creating a bigger mess between your thighs.

You let out muffled moans, your fingers tangled in his curly hair and grinding your hips for more friction. Angus once told you he would die a happy man if that meant being between your legs. Today is a good day to test that. You grip his hair, forcing his mouth to wrap around your clit, an action he responds to with a hum of approval. The vibrations make your hips roll and back arch. You can feel him laugh because he knows he has you where he wants you but you cannot care about that now. You hold his head there, pleading whimpers begging for more. Angus removes his hands from your pussy so he could grip your thighs for balance but makes no effort to loosen your grip.

Embarrassingly, it doesn’t take you long to reach your peak. Not when his mouth is making you feel so, so good. Your dress falls down as your mouth opens, a strangled cry echoing in the room, and your nails dig into his scalp as you cum. Angus keeps licking you as if you’re not melting around his mouth. As if your legs are not shaking in his hands from overstimulation. Eventually you cannot take it anymore and you have to push him away. Still, he licks up the mess you’ve created on your thighs before standing to face you with a satisfied smirk.

The intensity of your orgasm leaves you feeling dizzy so his hands stay on your hips as he rises. Though his face is painted with arrogance, Angus gently sits you on the table your boss reserved for processing packages. He lifts your dress over your head and tosses it to the side, impatiently but gently. Your nipples pebble because of the cold air and his lustful gaze.

Eyes never leaving yours, Angus unbuckles his belt and pulls his cock out. He pushed you against the table, kissing you at the same time. You wrap your arms around his neck as you taste his mouth- a combination of your pussy and his strawberry lollipop.

His hand gently pushed your thighs wider as his other hand slipped a finger between your entrance. His thumb gently rubbed your clit in exactly the way you taught him so you couldn’t help the moans that escaped your mouth. He slid another finger in and you gasped out a “Yes!” You rode his fingers, chasing your pleasure. Your moans ricocheting off the walls, not caring how slutty you acted.

But he cared.

Angus pulled away from your breast, not bothering to wipe away the string of spit connecting his lips to your breast. The hand on your thigh paused your movements and his fingers slowed.

“Tell me you’re my slut,” he smirked. You whined in response. “Come on, say it.”

He gently lays you back on the table and takes his shirt off. Angus turned around to see the clock on the wall ticking down the minutes until your boss came back from lunch.

“Tick tock.” He said, emphasizing each word with the tap of his cock on your entrance. “Tick, tock.”

You had no doubt he would elongate this. Last time you pushed your luck, you weren’t caught, but you didn’t you cum either. Angus had the biggest shit eating grin when he came in the following day and you begged him to fuck you.

But you still weren’t going to give him the satisfaction.

And he knew that.

“How does it feel to be a slut?” He murmured against your ear. Angus buried his face in the crook of your neck, biting down and pulling satisfied moans out of your mouth. “To be my slut?”

“I’m not your slut,” You protested between your moans.

He stopped biting your neck to simply nip at it, moving downwards to your breasts. Your trembling fingers grabbed at the curls on the back of his head, encouraging him. Agnus took a nipple into his hot mouth causing your left hand to dig into his shoulder and your right hand to pull his hair. Angus let out a muffled moan of pleasure and sucked on your nipple harder. There was tension building in your stomach but you couldn’t release it until you were around him.

“Say it,” Angus said as he alternated between your breasts. “Say it and I’ll fuck you.”

“Fine! I’m a slut!” You cried. “I’m your slut! Now please! Fuck me!”

Angus chuckled and slid into you. You instinctively wrapped your legs around him, pulling him closer. His eyes fluttered as he felt your heat surround his cock. He stared down at you as he found his rhythm. his fingers finding your clit again. Angus’s fingers moved in the same rhythm as his hips.He moved his hips faster, forcing your back to arch off the desk. Moaning, you clenched around his cock.

Angus kept his pace but his mouth suctioned around your breast as his tongue swirled around your nipple faster. The hand not on your clit reached over to grab your other breast, rolling the nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

“Keep going…” You whined, almost begging. The tension was reaching its peak. “So… close…”

Hearing you cry out, Angus pulled away from your beast and watched you fall apart.

He tried to fuck you through your orgasm but he couldn’t help but he wasn’t far behind you. Not when pleasure washed over your face. Not when you squeezed him like that. Not when your voice echoed like that in the small room. With a stuttering groan, Angus came inside your pussy while biting your shoulder.

Your legs loosened around his waist as your body relaxed but your pussy still clenched around his twitching cock, taking every drop of him. Angus’s body relaxed and his mouth loosened its grip on your shoulder. But you can feel his teeth scraping against your tender skin. He pressed gentle, open mouth kisses against your neck as he pulled out of you. You whimpered as he did that, already missing him inside you.

Tiredly and lazily, he kissed his way down your body until he got to his knees again. Angus spread your legs again, watching his cum dripping out of you and pooling on the table. You felt his mouth cover your pussy once again. Though tired, you couldn’t help but arch your back a little when you felt his tongue lap at your sensitive pussy, cleaning you. Angus pulled away before you could cum, though you are thankful he did as your body was not ready to accept another orgasm.

He helped you to your feet and kissed you gently on the mouth. You returned the kiss, leaning against him for balance. However, your orgasms still left you a little tired so you had to break the kiss to retain your balance. Not that Angus minded, he still kissed you, this time peppering them on your neck. Your hands loosely held his neck before you noticed the clock.

“Unless you have a turtleneck for me in that package, don’t you dare leave another hickey on my neck,” You told him as your wits came back to you and he laughed against your skin. He kissed your neck and went to his package on the counter.

“As a matter of fact,” He said, tearing it open and digging around, not caring he was still naked. “I do.”

He pulled out a knit black sweater with a thick, folded turtleneck. You accepted it and marveled at how soft it was.

“For me?” Your eyes were wide.

“Yeah, well, you always complain it’s cold down here, ” Angus shrugged nonchalantly but you could see color rising to his cheeks.

“Plus you know,” He brushed your hair off your shoulder. “It’ll hide those bite marks I left behind.”

You look down at your body to see a map of bite marks and bruises identical to his mouth and fingers. You snatched your new sweater from his hands and threw it on.

#angus tully #angus tully x reader #angus tully imagine #angus tully smut #the holdovers #smut #fanfic #reader insert #mine #my fanfic

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writers-potion · 6 months ago

Note

Do you have any tips for deciding whether to use first or third person and present or past tense??

1st vs. 3rd Person | Present vs. Past Tense

1st Person is Best Used When...

The antagonist is abstract/is a psychological barrier that must be overcome

It's easier to weave backstory/info with experience.

Immediacy and toppling high stakes are important for the reader to keep rooting for your MC (like in the case of many fantasy novels)

You have an unreliable narrator.

You struggle to have a consistent tone/perspective. (third person not executed well will easily get confusing)

For literary fiction

3rd Person is Best Used When...

You have multiple MCs, following them more or less equally throughout.

You have freedom to move from wide, establishing views and closed-in views - this is good for conveying the theme.

You find yourself injecting too much of yourself in your writing and wish to prevent this.

You want the reader to view the MC more objectively, sometimes the narrator even offering commentary.

You wish to make use of dramtic irony (the reader knows more than the MC)

Present Tense is Best For...

The majority of novels are written in the past tense, and would be the easier one to execute if you're a first-time writer. However, present tense is certainly not inferior.

It feels like a movie: it allows you to mimic the action and suspense found in film.

It intensifies emotions: it gives the feeling of "we're in this together", the reader experiencing things with the MC side to side.

Works well with Deep POV: Deep POV uses third person narrators like 1st person, sticking with one character's mind for closeness.

Best for short-time-frame stories with constant action.

Works well for unreliable narrators: Since the narrative is so close to the action, it is easy to have a narrator that leaves out details.

However...

Readers can feel "claustrophobic, always pressed up against the immediate" (Philip Pullman quote)

Time shifts can be awkward - you're locked in the present more or less; unless you use flashbacks/dreams (which are disruptive)

It's harder to execute because you need to capture the texture of the present while acknowledging that the past and the future still exist.

It mimics film - you cannot just jump characters, speak directly to the reader or do time skips.

Books written in present tense (and are still good!)

The Hunger Games series

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Ulysses by James Joyce

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque

Fight Club by Chuck Palhniuk

The White Queen by Philippa Gregroy

Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

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ashmouthbooks · 11 months ago

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2023 in books

better late than never, right?

2023 was a relatively slow year for me in bookbinding, but I still made 30+ books. (ask me how much time I spent on my other hobbies and it becomes clear why books were fewer.)

A5 books

the first A5 of the year was an entry for a bookbinding competition (which I didn't win), where the theme was climate change. I had a lot of fun putting it together and it was the first time I made an A5 tête-bêche book - I usually do these A6 or A7 size.

this was also the year I decided to start a collection of menocchio fics, which also led to experiments with printing directly onto bookcloth to get titles on the spine

what's fun about bookbinding is that you can Just Make A Book, but you can also Get Ideas And Run With Them with it. which is how I wound up with this black on black book. destiel necromancy fic, because of course it is

going back to something more colourful...Ulysses. not the James Joyce one, the slowburn 00Q one. named for a Tennyson poem.

final A5 book of the year is my Renegade Exchange book, which I bound for Silent Sun Press - a Crowley-centric genfic with outsider POV, so naturally I went for TV!Gomens colour schemes

A6 and A7 books

I started the year ambitiously - in addition to entering a competition, I started my urchin specials project. thus far I've still only bound these first three books for the project, but I plan to do more. first dustjackets as well!

I continued with the no-glue pamphlets and did three

I joined the Tiny Books Exchange, and as a proof of concept - before I typeset an A7 sized tête-bêche - I did a little tête-bêche of the two Temeraire fics I wrote for yuletide once upon a time

then followed of course the Tiny Book I bound for the exchange - my copy (test & proof of concept, bottom), the giftee copy (green, top right), and the author copy (blue, top left)

I typeset a lot more than I bind - I have plans to bind so and so, so I typeset it, but don't always have the time to bind it right away. so I have folders full of typesets ready to go at a moment's notice. this one was typeset a whole year before I bound it

are these paperbacks or just very slim hardbacks? I call them paperbacks as I used 0.5mm boards and they have no spine, but ymmv

this one definitely is a hardback - with slightly thicker boards, a spine, and two fics in one book. I do love those tête-bêches

at my work we have a lot of deliveries wrapped in this nice recycled brown paper that was just going into the recycling bin, and I thought: why not make books out of it? so I played around with it (and my printer) and came up with a neat aesthetic for paperbacks with breakaway spines (using 0.5mm boards)

will I ever stop with the tête-bêches? no. also this one has endpapers made from SEAWEED. how cool is that?

the last A6 of the year is this little collection of my own stories for a tiny Danish fandom. detectives and trauma, but make it about food? yes. food and cooking themed endpapers and cover papers, and the dustjacket has fake coffee stains on it. perfect

and that is all, folks. I did a lot of different styles and types of binding this year, I had fun with it, I learned a lot, and I'm happy with what I've created.

#2023 in books #fanbinding #bookbinding

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danzaloreley · 2 years ago

Text

Indée Fixe

Pairing: Wednesday Addams x harpy!Reader

Summary: A moment to shut down Xavier’s ass. And a moment to calm down Wednesday.

Jealousy is not a word for Wednesday or Y/N. There was an undeniable trust between them that others were a bit envious of. No matter how many flirted neither would bother with said person. Many found it unfair that the goth could so easily reach out and caress the feathers that shone with the ray of sunlight. As if they ever had a right to.

Wednesday subconsciously traced the inside of the wing while they read on one of the benches of the quad. Her back as always straight maintaining her posture as the harpy was fully facing her. Head on the dark girl’s shoulder as a soft rumble of different chitters and purrs emanated from her chest. The hand stopped suddenly and she held it forward with a black feather between her fingers.

“It was already loose, don’t worry.” the harpy said as she saw Wednesday inspecting. A smile growing as she saw the girl hold it to her lips.

“Would you mind if I turned it into my quill, cara mia?”

“Not at all.”

Their quiet time interrupted by one tall boy, Thorpe. He stood infront of them and cleared his throat. “We gotta work on the project.”

Both sent a sneer his way, Wednesday and him had been paired for an assignment it was true. That didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying for them. Xavier had been grinding on Y/N’s gears, finding a way to always show up and interrupt time with her girlfriend.

While spending time with him wasn’t what the girl wanted she was always responsible to make sure to finish her work. They had gone to do their work, but not before you made a display of kissing her full lips. Just to rub it in, it was always fun.

“You definitely spend a lot of time with Y/N.” Wednesday had suffered through the ours of their assignment did he really need to keep conversation after. “It should be expected. Even before she became my lover we spent quite some time together.”

“Didn’t think you would be a sappy kind of person when dating.” His voice had a bit annoyance dripping off. “Not a subject I have to discuss. What I do or don’t is none of anyone’s concern.” Her jaw tightened, he had been throwing little comments here and there since the Rave’N.

“Just saying. You don’t seem to have time for your friends.” he pressed. “On the contrary, my schedule has not been derailed. I still have time to be dragged to Enid’s persistent outings, as well as meetings with Eugene.”

“Even then Y/N joins a lot on those. What—”Wednesday turned with a glare, patience running very low. “She has joined from the moment we met. If you’re trying to say something just get on with it as I am tired of you’re incessant whining.”

“You met her some months ago and for whatever reason you became obsessed with her. You had no time to hang out or even talk. I mean shit even when we went together to the dance you paid attention to her. And then suddenly you’re dating, you trusted her so quick, did you learn nothing from getting with Tyler.”

There was a moment of silence as the raven haired girl contemplated many violent scenarios in her mind. Her gaze fierce as she stepped forward. “From the very beginning I had been quite clear that going to the dance was repayment for last year nothing more. I have plenty of time for my friends, just not to coddle your feelings. Perhaps if you weren’t blinded by your unwarranted jealousy and skewed idea of how I should be you’d actually be more bearable to be near by. She has never demanded my attetion, I’ve given it freely.”

The only thing I will give you is that you are right, in that the boys who pursued me last year were quite a disappointment.”

The loud knock that reverberated on your door scared the hell out of you. Concentrated on meticulously expanding the wing of the ulysses butterfly accidentally tearing from it’s thorax. “Shit.”

Opening the door in came a furious Wednesday Addams. She walked right in without saying a word and just stood there fuming. Closing the door you stayed there. Neither of you moved or said anything. It was best not to push her when she was like this, letting her process her anger.

“Xavier seems to have issues with our relationship.” If you rolled your eyes any harder you might see your own damn brain. “Of course he does. Me telling him to have some dignity didn’t work. Probably cause there’s none left.”

You could tell she wanted to go and wreak havoc. The petty arguments were getting old and fast. Walking towards her you offered your hand out and she took it gently, even if she was feeling far from gentle. You guided her hand to your lips kissing each knuckle and her fingetips. She got closer to you, her body flush to yours. It wasn’t a hug, she didn’t want to feel caged but still wanted to be pressed up against you.

“I have some bugs that I was working on. Do you want to pin or tear the ones that are disposable?” She definitely felt like poking holes in something and she curtly nodded against you.

You sat down on the chair in your work station and guided her to your lap. She immediately started pinning the butterfly through the thorax, pin after pin riddling it. Her shoulders slowly becoming less tense as she abused the poor carcass and your soft lips hovered over her neck and thumbs rubbed small circles on her waist.

“Set a boundary, mi vida. If Xavier pestering you drives you to anger every time, it’s better to not interact with him for a while. Tell him that if he can’t behave maturely that you’ll cut him off. Like a tumor, a benign one people can live with. But if it becomes malignant then it’s time to go.”

Wednesday kept on putting pin after pin while she thought over your words. A reasonable ending to the conflict, sure. Not what she had in mind, she did not feel like being reasonable. “I was thinking of burning his shed. With him in it.”

You laughed and squeezed her. “Yeah, that is gonna put you behind bars. I prefer you here.”

The dark haired girl’s lips quirked. She definitely preferred to be here with you. But she was certain together you could remove any trace of evidence.

She’ll hold off only to try your idea first.

#fanfic #fanfiction #x reader #wednesday series #wednesday adams #wednesday fanfic #wednesday (2022)#wednesday addams #wednesday fic #wednesday netflix #wednesday #wednesday addams x reader #wednesday x reader #xavier thorpe x wednesday addams #xavier thorpe x reader #xavier thorpe

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haute-lifestyle-com · 2 years ago

Link

Once Upon A Rind in Hollywood Movie Night Munchies Recipes Made Simple - #janetwalker #hautelifestylecom #theentertainmentzonecom #charcuterieboard #cheeseboard #recipes #recipeideas #bookreview

https://www.haute-lifestyle.com/168-haute-this-issue/6236-once-upon-a-rind-in-hollywood-book-review-cute-and-cheesy-film-fan-themed-snack-boards.html

#janet walker #haute-lifestyle.com #the-entertainment-zone.com #ulysses press #Once Upon a Rind in Hollywood #book review

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eupheme · 8 months ago

Text

— fold into me

ulysses klaue x f!reader

rated e - 2k

tags: sleepy morning sex, nightmares, pinning down / body restraint, light d/s, fucking the thoughts from reader, teasing, edging, sort-of v. light degradation, PiV, vibrating appendages, oral fixation, implied creampie(s)

a/n: inspired by this post, I read it and had crush me thoughts

Klaue doesn’t want you to worry. In fact - when you’re in his bed, he doesn’t want you thinking at all.

Klaue can hear you worry.

It settles over him, a silent weight as heavy as the gaze that drags over his profile in the soft, early morning.

You shouldn’t be awake. Not yet.

A rare day off, the promises of a day spent together. A nightmare waking you in the early hours instead - leaving you crying out as he’s ripped away by hands that clawed at him. Twining around his legs, threatening to pull him under - into the black depths, while you still reached for him.

They always seem to the come in the days just before he leaves. You can’t help the pit of worry that forms in your stomach - the fingers that rest against his ribs curling into fists, as you resist the urge to reach out and touch.

Craving the reassurance. To confirm that he is still here. That it was just a dream.

You were aware what you were getting into when you first started seeing him. There were secrets of course, but never about what he was. Your world orbited his, never fully joining, but you knew.

The stories and the whispered weight of his name. The deals and the fights and the danger. A twist of tattoos that dip beneath his clothes. The fresh and faded scars, and an arm made from metal.

That he was a bad man.

But never to you.

Your eyes drag over the angle of his nose. Past a strong jaw, the stubble darkening his cheekbones, to be scraped clean when he rises. To the thick fan of dark eyelashes against his cheeks.

And then a sharp glint of blue, as one eye cracks open.

“Should be sleeping,” He rumbles - the thunder before a storm.

Your reply is on the tip of your tongue before he is striking - quick, in spite of the breadth of his chest and shoulders. All you manage is a little squeak before he’s rolling you beneath him.

His weight presses into you - chest, hips, thighs. Pinning you to the bed as you squirm, an arm shoving under the curve of your spine. The other tucking under the pillow, as his cheek scrubs against yours.

“Klaue,” You protest, “I was just-”

“Don’t want you thinking,” His voice is low and rasping with sleep.

You huff, still shifting. But the weight - you have to admit it is nice. Crushing you into the mattress, a silent command to slow down and stop, for just a moment.

And so, you go still.

Taking in the moment. Seeing if sleep will tug at you again. Your hands slipping from beneath to slide up on either side of his ribs. Fingers folding together on his back in an embrace, the slow cadence of his breath warm against your ear.

It is soothing, but you’re too wound up. A skittering beneath your skin. Eyes fixed on the ceiling above - afraid that if they close, if you do sleep, you might dream again.

Your fingers eventually start to trace against skin, and he sighs at your touch. Nails dragging down his spine, the tips working into stiff muscles.

Only to freeze when you press too-hard into something tender - a hidden, half-healed wound - hearing the sharp intake of air through teeth.

The worry slips right back in.

He clucks his tongue at you. Don’t, you’re sure he’s saying. There’s a drag of his face against yours, bristle over soft skin, before it dips lower.

Warm lips press against the pulse point of your throat, the cant of his hips downward. It is now that you feel him - the thick curve pressed into the hinge of your bare thigh - that you squirm for another reason.

It’s difficult, with your legs pinned together, trapped between his parted ones. The hand between his shoulder slipping down and beneath sheets - flattening in the dip of his spine. The weight of his hard cock increasing, where it digs into bare skin, leaving a wet smear behind.

“Klaue.” You sigh his name this time, trying to lift your body against his. Hips to hip, the curves of your skin matching his. Gripping on now, instead of trying to slip free.

You crave him, and he rewards you. Splitting your thighs, his own working between them. Twining his ankles with yours, so much like the grasping hands from your dreams.

Theres another troubled flicker in your mind, before his legs are shifting. Slowly spreading them wide, taking yours along with them.

Opening you up, baring where you’re sticky and slick from the night before. From now - the press of his mouth and his words and his weight, as the need blooms in your belly again.

Your nose brushes his temple, in your search for him. Fingers twisting into thick, greying curls, trying to draw his face to yours.

A low hum of amusement, before he meets you. It’s hungry, your hands moving to wrap around his shoulder. Whining into his mouth when his hips lift and roll, his cock slipping down to press snugly against your cunt.

You swear you can feel every inch and ridge of him, as you clench in anticipation. Eyes closed as you concentrate on the sparks that arc up your spine with each needy buck of your hips.

How each time makes the velvet skin more slick, until he’s glistening with you. Nudging against your clit, teasing at your opening.

“This what you want?” Klaue’s lips brush yours. His voice still slow and smooth, content to wait. Letting you rut against him, as your teeth nip at his jaw.

You moan your assent, breathless. The weight of him presses against your ribs, leaving you dizzy. Another low laugh as he reaches between you, a fist wrapping around the base. Holding himself steady, the flushed head just nudging at where you need him.

“Come on, then.” He rasps.

And then, he goes still.

Leaving you wanting. Squirming again, as your eyes flip up to his. Seeing the darkened amusement, the careful way Klaue watches you. Fully awake now, but still keeping you pinned so carefully.

A living sculpture carved from flesh and muscle. Undeterred by the promise of your warm cunt, by the needy press of your lips against his skin and the thick weight of anticipation.

He wants you to do it.

You realize that, as he waits. It’s hard to move, with the spread pull of your thighs, pinned as you are. Hands bracing on his shoulders - trying to push yourself down, to impale yourself on him.

It makes you take him slow. Nails digging into his skin as he nudges a little deeper with each rock of your hips.

Leaving it impossible to think of anything else but him, as he splits you open. As you ache to be filled, already clenching down around him, trying to draw him deeper.

His breathing is harsh through his nose. Warm against your skin, the brush of his knuckles across your belly and breasts and tight peaks of your nipples on their way back up. Elbows and forearms planting in the mattress on either side of you, just barely adjusting his weight.

Each thrust of your hips is shallow. He’s not fully seated in you, only what you’ve managed to work inside so far.

It teases at what you want. What you need. Your initial spike pleasure quickly plateauing with the minutes that pass - the grind of your hips not nearly enough.

Leaving you teetering on the edge - your desperation dripping down his cock, sticky on your inner thighs.

“Please,” You try to whine, your face pressed into his neck. Mouthing at the brand, teeth scraping where shoulder meets neck.

The word become disconnected between your thoughts and your lips. Half gasped and half sighed, lost in the muted buzz of the city awakening outside.

“Are you still worrying?” He asks, his pulse fluttering against your lips. Betraying him, revealing that he’s not nearly as unaffected as he’s been pretending.

Hitching his hips forward, sinking deeper. Again your answer is more sound than words, drawn from deep in your chest.

“Oh,” He sighs, with that grin. Pulling back to let his nose brush against yours, seeing how gone you are, “You’re not thinking about anything at all, are you?”

Your thighs flex, brow pinching as he suddenly hilts himself. A gasp ripping from you at the way he fills you, your pussy making room for his thick girth. The heavy weight of his sack resting against the curve of your ass, coarse hairs already sticky.

“Oh, fuck. Good girl.” Klaue’s teeth clench, feeling how you wrap so perfectly around him. How you arch against his chest, panting as you adjust.

His voice dropping lower, with a smooth roll of his hips, “You listened so well, so I’ll give you what you need.”

And he does, the shallow thrusts you’ve managed turning into the rutting of his hips. Skin slapping against skin as the curves of his cock drag along your inner walls.

Pushing himself higher on his arms until you’re chanting his name, the fat head stroking against the soft, spongey spot that brings in the night again, making you see stars.

Your groan is guttural, eyes slipping shut again. No longer tethered to the bed, now somewhere far beyond - solely focused on the snap of his hips, the burn of pleasure with each plunge of his cock. Muscles already stringing tight, toes curling in blissful anticipation.

Missing his sharp smile in the early light, all white and shining gold. How he moves then, bracing himself again on a tattooed arm as the other slips downward.

The tips of his fingers whir - just barely activating the mechanisms inside. Pressing them cruelly against your clit, pinching the tight bud between two of them.

It’s too much - steady pulse of the vibration, the sharp punch of his cock. All-encompassing, until your mind is truly blank. The mindless grinding of your hips against his, chasing his fingers, the high that you can almost reach. Each breath shorter, everything winding tighter and tighter, and then -

With a ragged cry, you feel yourself shatter in his arms.

Your vision goes white and hazy as the edges, his name broken as you sob it. A different kind of wave crashes over you, the ripples flowing down your limbs, from your molten core.

His words muted, but you collect what you can. Growled endearments that slip between bared teeth.

“That’s it, sweetheart.”

“Look at you, so fucking good for me.”

It’s bliss, this frozen moment in time.

You’re boneless, when he finally slips his legs free, hitching your thighs around his hips. Pleasure-drunk on the ambrosia that glitters in your veins, his hand lifting from between your thighs to pinch at your chin.

His thumb smearing across your bottom lip, eyes darkening as you part them automatically. Tongue dipping out to taste yourself, a sweet tang against his skin.

“There you go.” Klaue coos, seeing the dazed look as your lips close around and suck.

His own end not far off, with the warm grip of your cunt and mouth - the broken echo of his name ringing in his ears.

Knowing for certain that he has you thoroughly distracted. Starting a slow pace as he grins, an idea forming. Your eyes fluttering - threatening to roll shut again when his hand slips free, your lips parting with a sigh.

His hips pulling back - easing his cock out just enough to circle his thumb and finger around the base.

The vibrations start again as he drives himself deep, traveling down his shaft. Pulsing inside you, nudging against that spot again, as your eyes snap open with a sharp cry.

If he can hold off just a little bit longer - he thinks - he’s certain to coax out another.

Because when it comes to you, he’s nothing if not thorough.

This time, when he relaxes - his weight settling over you, a warm and welcome blanket - you find that your mind has gone blissfully silent.

Content to fold yourself into him. Arms wrapping around, head tilting to rest against his. Mimicking without thought the easy rise and all of his breaths, your quickened pulse slowly following.

He murmurs something soft and low, though you’re already gone.

Off to a sleep that, for both of you, comes easy.

He vibrated the glass, and it vibrated my - *gunshot*

#ulysses klaue x reader #Ulysses klaue x you #Ulysses Klaue x f!reader #Ulysses klaue smut #ulysses klaue

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watchilove · 6 months ago

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Ulysse Nardin DIVER [NET OPS] and DIVER [X SKELETON OPS]

View On WordPress

#DIVER [NET OPS]#DIVER [X SKELETON OPS]#news #Press release #Ulysse Nardin #Ulysse Nardin Diver #Ulysse Nardin DIVER [NET OPS]#Ulysse Nardin DIVER [X SKELETON OPS]

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mariacallous · 1 month ago

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A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

These days, everybody talks about spaces: the “gastronomic space,” the “podcast space,” even, on N.F.L. podcasts, the “analytic space.” Derived from some combination of sociology and interior design, the word has elbowed aside terms like “field” or “conversation,” perhaps because it’s even more expansive. The “space” of a national election is, for that reason, never self-evident; we’ve always searched for clues.

And so William Dean Howells began his 1860 campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by mocking the search for a Revolutionary pedigree for Presidential candidates and situating Lincoln in the antislavery West, in contrast to the resigned and too-knowing East. North vs. South may have defined the frame of the approaching war, but Howells was prescient in identifying East vs. West as another critical electoral space. This opposition would prove crucial—first, to the war, with the triumph of the Westerner Ulysses S. Grant over the well-bred Eastern generals, and then to the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party, drawing on free-silver populism and an appeal to the values of the resource-extracting, expansionist West above those of the industrialized, centralized East.

A century later, the press thought that the big issues in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were Quemoy and Matsu (two tiny Taiwan Strait islands, claimed by both China and Taiwan), the downed U-2, the missile gap, and other much debated Cold War obsessions. But Norman Mailer, in what may be the best thing he ever wrote, saw the space as marked by the rise of movie-star politics—the image-based contests that, from J.F.K. to Ronald Reagan, would dominate American life. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire, Mailer revealed that a campaign that looked at first glance like the usual black-and-white wire-service photography of the first half of the twentieth century was really the beginning of our Day-Glo-colored Pop-art turn.

And our own electoral space? We hear about the overlooked vs. the élite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young—about the dispossessed vs. the beneficiaries of global neoliberalism. Upon closer examination, however, these binaries blur. Support for populist nativism doesn’t track neatly with economic disadvantage. Some of Donald Trump’s keenest supporters have boats as well as cars and are typically the wealthier citizens of poorer rural areas. His stock among billionaires remains high, and his surprising support among Gen Z males is something his campaign exploits with visits to podcasts that no non-Zoomer has ever heard of.

But polarized nations don’t actually polarize around fixed poles. Civil confrontations invariably cross classes and castes, bringing together people from radically different social cohorts while separating seemingly natural allies. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, like the French one of the eighteenth, did not array worn-out aristocrats against an ascendant bourgeoisie or fierce-eyed sansculottes. There were, one might say, good people on both sides. Or, rather, there were individual aristocrats, merchants, and laborers choosing different sides in these prerevolutionary moments. No civil war takes place between classes; coalitions of many kinds square off against one another.

In part, that’s because there’s no straightforward way of defining our “interests.” It’s in the interest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to have big tax cuts; in the longer term, it’s also in their interest to have honest rule-of-law government that isn’t in thrall to guilds or patrons—to be able to float new ideas without paying baksheesh to politicians or having to worry about falling out of sixth-floor windows. “Interests” fail as an explanatory principle.

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.

As much as television was the essential medium of a dozen bygone Presidential campaigns (not to mention the medium that made Trump a star), the podcast has become the essential medium of this one. For people under forty, the form—typically long-winded and shapeless—is as tangibly present as Walter Cronkite’s tightly scripted half-hour news show was fifty years ago, though the D.I.Y. nature of most podcasts, and the premium on host-read advertisements, makes for abrupt tonal changes as startling as those of the highway billboards.

On the enormously popular, liberal-minded “Pod Save America,” for instance, the hosts make no secret of their belief that the election is a test, as severe as any since the Civil War, of whether a government so conceived can long endure. Then they switch cheerfully to reading ads for Tommy John underwear (“with the supportive pouch”), for herbal hangover remedies, and for an app that promises to cancel all your excess streaming subscriptions, a peculiarly niche obsession (“I accidentally paid for Showtime twice!” “That’s bad!”). George Conway, the former Republican (and White House husband) turned leading anti-Trumper, states bleakly on his podcast for the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion site, that Trump’s whole purpose is to avoid imprisonment, a motivation that would disgrace the leader of any Third World country. Then he immediately leaps into offering—like an old-fashioned a.m.-radio host pushing Chock Full o’Nuts—testimonials for HexClad cookware, with charming self-deprecation about his own kitchen skills. How serious can the crisis be if cookware and boxers cohabit so cozily with the apocalypse?

And then there’s the galvanic space of social media. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, we were told, by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Daniel Boorstin, that television had reduced us to numbed observers of events no longer within our control. We had become spectators instead of citizens. In contrast, the arena of social media is that of action and engagement—and not merely engagement but enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets. The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry. The algorithms dictate regular mortar rounds of text messages that seem to come not from an eager politician but from an infuriated lover, in the manner of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”: “Are you ignoring us?” “We’ve reached out to you PERSONALLY!” “This is the sixth time we’ve asked you!” At one level, we know they’re entirely impersonal, while, at another, we know that politicians wouldn’t do this unless it worked, and it works because, at still another level, we are incapable of knowing what we know; it doesn’t feel entirely impersonal. You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.

If the cultural advantages of liberalism have given it a more pointed politics in places where politics lacks worldly consequences, its real-world politics can seem curiously blunted. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden before her, is an utterly normal workaday politician of the kind we used to find in any functioning democracy—bending right, bending left, placating here and postponing confrontation there, glaring here and, yes, laughing there. Demographics aside, there is nothing exceptional about Harris, which is her virtue. Yet we live in exceptional times, and liberal proceduralists and institutionalists are so committed to procedures and institutions—to laws and their reasonable interpretation, to norms and their continuation—that they can be slow to grasp that the world around them has changed.

One can only imagine the fulminations that would have ensued in 2020 had the anti-democratic injustice of the Electoral College—which effectively amplifies the political power of rural areas at the expense of the country’s richest and most productive areas—tilted in the other direction. Indeed, before the 2000 election, when it appeared as if it might, Karl Rove and the George W. Bush campaign had a plan in place to challenge the results with a “grassroots” movement designed to short-circuit the Electoral College and make the popular-vote winner prevail. No Democrat even suggests such a thing now.

It’s almost as painful to see the impunity with which Supreme Court Justices have torched their institution’s legitimacy. One Justice has the upside-down flag of the insurrectionists flying on his property; another, married to a professional election denialist, enjoys undeclared largesse from a plutocrat. There is, apparently, little to be done, nor even any familiar language of protest to draw on. Prepared by experience to believe in institutions, mainstream liberals believe in their belief even as the institutions are degraded in front of their eyes.

In one respect, the space of politics in 2024 is transoceanic. The forms of Trumpism are mirrored in other countries. In the U.K., a similar wave engendered the catastrophe of Brexit; in France, it has brought an equally extreme right-wing party to the brink, though not to the seat, of power; in Italy, it elevated Matteo Salvini to national prominence and made Giorgia Meloni Prime Minister. In Sweden, an extreme-right group is claiming voters in numbers no one would ever have thought possible, while Canadian conservatives have taken a sharp turn toward the far right.

What all these currents have in common is an obsessive fear of immigration. Fear of the other still seems to be the primary mover of collective emotion. Even when it is utterly self-destructive—as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic.

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not.

Though Trump can be situated in a transoceanic space of populism, he isn’t a mere symptom of global trends: he is a singularly dangerous character, and the product of a specific cultural milieu. To be sure, much of New York has always been hostile to him, and eager to disown him; in a 1984 profile of him in GQ, Graydon Carter made the point that Trump was the only New Yorker who ever referred to Sixth Avenue as the “Avenue of the Americas.” Yet we’re part of Trump’s identity, as was made clear by his recent rally on Long Island—pointless as a matter of swing-state campaigning, but central to his self-definition. His belligerence could come directly from the two New York tabloid heroes of his formative years in the city: John Gotti, the gangster who led the Gambino crime family, and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. When Trump came of age, Gotti was all over the front page of the tabloids, as “the Teflon Don,” and Steinbrenner was all over the back sports pages, as “the Boss.”

Steinbrenner was legendary for his middle-of-the-night phone calls, for his temper and combativeness. Like Trump, who theatricalized the activity, he had a reputation for ruthlessly firing people. (Gotti had his own way of doing that.) Steinbrenner was famous for having no loyalty to anyone. He mocked the very players he had acquired and created an atmosphere of absolute chaos. It used to be said that Steinbrenner reduced the once proud Yankees baseball culture to that of professional wrestling, and that arena is another Trumpian space. Pro wrestling is all about having contests that aren’t really contested—that are known to be “rigged,” to use a Trumpian word—and yet evoke genuine emotion in their audience.

At the same time, Trump has mastered the gangster’s technique of accusing others of crimes he has committed. The agents listening to the Gotti wiretap were mystified when he claimed innocence of the just-committed murder of Big Paul Castellano, conjecturing, in apparent seclusion with his soldiers, about who else might have done it: “Whoever killed this cocksucker, probably the cops killed this Paul.” Denying having someone whacked even in the presence of those who were with you when you whacked him was a capo’s signature move.

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. Self-defined as a showman, he can say anything and simultaneously drain it of content, just as Gotti, knowing that he had killed Castellano, thought it credible to deny it—not within his conscience, which did not exist, but within an imaginary courtroom. Trump evidently learned that, in the realm of national politics, you could push the boundaries of publicity and tabloid invective far further than they had ever been pushed.

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Just as Trump’s support cuts across the usual divisions, so, too, does a divide among his opponents—between the maximizers, who think that Trump is a unique threat to liberal democracy, and the minimizers, who think that he is merely the kind of clown a democracy is bound to throw up from time to time. The minimizers (who can be found among both Marxist Jacobin contributors and Never Trump National Review conservatives) will say that Trump has crossed the wires of culture and politics in a way that opportunistically responds to the previous paralysis, but that this merely places him in an American tradition. Democracy depends on the idea that the socially unacceptable might become acceptable. Andrew Jackson campaigned on similar themes with a similar manner—and was every bit as ignorant and every bit as unaware as Trump. (And his campaigns of slaughter against Indigenous people really were genocidal.) Trump’s politics may be ugly, foolish, and vain, but ours is often an ugly, undereducated, and vain country. Democracy is meant to be a mirror; it shows what it shows.

Indeed, America’s recent history has shown that politics is a trailing indicator of cultural change, and that one generation’s most vulgar entertainment becomes the next generation’s accepted style of political argument. David S. Reynolds, in his biography of Lincoln, reflects on how the new urban love of weird spectacle in the mid-nineteenth century was something Lincoln welcomed. P. T. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: the tiny General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. Lincoln saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of sensation; he even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife—as much a violation of the decorum of the Founding Fathers as Trump’s investment in Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. Lincoln understood the Barnum side of American life, just as Trump understands its W.W.E. side.

And so, the minimizers say, taking Trump seriously as a threat to democracy in America is like taking Roman Reigns seriously as a threat to fair play in sports. Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

In any case, the panic is hardly unique to Trump. Reagan, too, was vilified and feared in his day, seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the culture of the image, an automaton projecting his controllers’ authoritarian impulses. Nixon was the subject of a savage satire by Philip Roth that ended with him running against the Devil for the Presidency of Hell. The minimizers tell us that liberals overreact in real time, write revisionist history when it’s over, and never see the difference between their stories.

The maximizers regard the minimizers’ case as wishful thinking buoyed up by surreptitious resentments, a refusal to concede anything to those we hate even if it means accepting someone we despise. Maximizers who call Trump a fascist are dismissed by the minimizers as either engaging in name-calling or forcing a facile parallel. Yet the parallel isn’t meant to be historically absolute; it is meant to be, as it were, oncologically acute. A freckle is not the same as a melanoma; nor is a Stage I melanoma the same as the Stage IV kind. But a skilled reader of lesions can sense which is which and predict the potential course if untreated. Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

And so the maximalist case is made up not of alarmist fantasies, then, but of dulled diagnostic fact, duly registered. Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue. Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high. ♦

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