#v: mother politician

[fear-is-truth]

ALL PART OF HIS PLAN

kai anderson x f! reader￨nsfw. mdni￨wc: 2.4 k

w a r n i n g s – mdni !! porn with plot. oral sex (m receiving). unprotected p in v. dacryphilia. breeding kink (if you squint). english is not my first language. not proofread as usual

summary — mornings spent with kai weren’t always as mundane as it might seem

a/n – this took forever to complete cos every time i open this draft, i spend a good five minutes laughing at the cursed gif and the writing mood is completely ruined.

requested by: @ellaaaaa44

ೃ࿐ .

You woke up when the birds started chirping outside, just as the soft light of dawn filtered through the bedroom windows. Kai was still asleep next to you, his electric blue hair spilling across the white pillow like a halo. You were facing each other, his arm thrown over your waist. Carefully, you inched from under his arm and sat up, feeling the remnants of sleep clinging to your eyes. In the morning stillness, he almost looked innocent, pure, even. But you knew better— Kai Anderson was anything but pure.

Glancing at the digital clock on the bedside table, its red numbers glowing 06:57. It was Saturday, which meant Kai had a political rally scheduled at 10. As his girlfriend, you were expected to accompany him, not just as a supportive partner, but also to adorn his arm and enhance his appeal to the masses.

But Kai was smart. He had made sure the public knew more about you than just your looks. He had purposely made it known that you were well-educated, and a feminist, no less.

At first, you were skeptical about the whole idea, doubting that the media would find interest in speculating about the personal life of a politician. But, as always, Kai proved you wrong—which irked you to no end. The shallow nature of society never failed to disappoint.

The public adored the two of you, seeing you as an ambitious and attractive power couple, and the media lapped it up like hungry dogs. They also conveniently turned a blind eye to some of the more “controversial” political views of Councilman Anderson, choosing instead to focus on the carefully choreographed public displays of affection meant for the cameras—holding hands, stolen chaste kisses that you pretended to think no one was looking. Tabloid rumors ran rampant about your alleged engagement and the potential of a baby on the way, both of which were far from true, thank the fuck Christ.

That, and a couple of satanic killings that involved clowns, Kai had made significant progress in garnering supporters in a remarkably short period of time.

All part of his plan.

You had to admit, despite the circumstances, you and Kai did make quite a nice couple. There was no denying that the sex was mind-blowing and he had world-class cock that had never failed to make you come undone.

Kai was a pretty considerate lover as well, after you admitted your fear of pregnancy during “pinky power”, surprisingly, he didn’t even get mad or punish you, as expected. He told you that he respected your feelings and prioritized your health above his own preferences. Even though he openly expressed his disdain for wearing condoms, Kai stayed true to his word and wore one every time you asked him to, sparing you the stress.

But Kai had made you a promise that once he secured his position in the Senate, he would put a ring on your finger and you’d be the mother of his “messiah baby”. He made it sound like an honor, and you supposed that, in a twisted, fucked-up way, it was— you’d say yes, because it’s always yes for Kai. Even so, as much as you loved him (was it love? Or something stemming from Stockholm Syndrome, you weren’t entirely sure), the idea of bringing a child into the world still scared you shitless.

But again, you didn’t feel you had a say or a choice in the matter. Kai had rescued you from your lowest points, and for that, you were indebted to him for life.

Enough of that. That was phase two of the plan. Focus on the present.

Big day ahead, don’t fuck this up. All you have to do right now is pretty yourself up and smile, smile, smile for the cameras.

With a sigh, you slipped out of the warmth of the covers, careful not to disturb him. You tiptoed across the carpeted floor and into the en suite, closing the door gently behind you.

Yawning, you began to strip off your sleep clothes—starting with a comfortable T-shirt and booty shorts, followed by your bra and panties—tossing them haphazardly into the laundry basket. Then you stepped into the shower, the sound of rushing water filling your ears as you twisted the knob. You closed your eyes and tilted your face upward, feeling the cool spray hit your skin.

You didn't hear the sound of the bathroom door opening, nor the shuffle of clothes hitting the floor. Suddenly, the sliding glass door slid open, and your eyes snapped open in surprise, a yelp escaping your lips.

Kai stood there, undressed. His hair was a tousled mess. He blinked, his gaze sweeping over your naked form with an unimpressed expression.

He even had the audacity to look a bit offended and disgruntled, as if he wasn't the one barging in on your shower.

“Move over,” he grunted, his voice husky with sleep but his tone left no room for argument. You quickly shuffled to the side, making room for him under the spray.

Kai reached past you and turned the water knob to blast hot water, steam billowing around you as the temperature rose. His hair was slicked back by the water, the vibrant blue adding a splash of colour to the monochrome backdrop of black tiles. Head tilted back, his eyes were closed in blissful rapture as warm droplets of shower spray hit his face.

Your gaze wandered from his features to over his torso, taking in the sight in awe.

Kai looked beautiful. godly, even.

Starting from the clavicle of his neck, glistening rivulets of water meandered down, following the chiseled lines of his biceps and the breadth of his toned chest. Continuing their descent, they danced across his abs, taut and sculpted, rippling waves of raw, masculine strength that seemed to beckon you closer; drawing your eyes inexorably downward until they finally converged at the V-line of his lower abdomen.

Without as much as a glance in your direction, Kai reached for the bottle of 3-in-1 men’s shampoo sitting on the wall shelf.

“Like what you see?”

he poured some shampoo onto his palm. His tone was casual but you could sense the smugness. Heat flooded your cheeks, and it had nothing to do with the steam from the shower. Biting your bottom lip, you nodded bashfully.

“Mhm,” he hummed, fingers raking through his damp, blue locks as he pretended to consider.

“Work for it then. Get on your knees,”

You immediately sank to your knees, wrapping your fingers around the base of his shaft before pressing a kiss on the tip. He raised an eyebrow.

“What was that for?”

“Nothing,”

You smiled sweetly up at him before taking the tip between your lips, collecting the precum and swallowing it with a cheerful hum. Starting with kitten licks, you slowly dragged your tongue up the veiny underside of his cock.

“Fuck…” he hissed through his teeth,

“Attagirl– You’re so good at this…”

The heartfelt praise had a greater effect on you than his usual dirty talk ever could, encouraging you to hollow your cheeks with extra gusto, making sure to give a swirl of your tongue every time you reached the tip.

The groan that came from him seemed to validate his approval. Reaching down, Kai threaded his fingers through your hair into a makeshift ponytail to dictate your motion, bucking his hips into your mouth. Even as your eyes watered, you didn’t pull away as he continued to fuck your mouth. Instead, you peered up at him through your eyelashes and occasionally moaned so that he could know how much you appreciated pleasing him.

It wasn’t long until Kai gave your hair a small tug, and slid out with a small pop. He wasted no time snatching you by the underarms and pulling you to your feet.

His eyes raked over your body as if he was seeing you for the first time. One large, calloused hand trailed from your cheek, down to your neck, then to your arm and waist.

Bending down slightly, his hands continued to trace the smooth skin of your thighs, gently securing behind the bend of your knees. Before you could fully register what was happening, Kai was lifting you up effortlessly from the ground as if you weighed nothing at all. You squealed in surprise as he hoisted you up, your arms instinctively wrapping around his neck for support.

You gazed into his dark eyes to find that the sleep-induced glaze from earlier was now replaced by intense focus and determination. He meant business.

“Stay still, I wanna try something,”

Holding firmly onto your waist, Kai settled you against his hipbones, pausing for a moment to let you wrap your legs eagerly around his waist.

With the shower water cascading above you, it reminded you of the iconic kiss-in-the-rain scene from “The Notebook,” which you had watched together in bed just last week. Well, technically, you were the only one watching; Kai had been either scrolling through his phone or looking irritated the entire time.

Maybe this was just pure coincidence and wishful thinking on your part, or could it possibly be that he was trying to recreate that moment– impossible… right?

The subtle smirk curling his lips and the slight crease of his eyes confirmed your suspicions. So he had listened to your rambles on how hot Ryan Gosling looked. “Kiss me, please,” you begged, and he graciously obliged, claiming your lips in a hungry, open-mouthed kiss. You moaned and tangled your fingers into his hair when you felt his tongue slip past your teeth.

Pressing your back against the tiled wall, he positioned himself at your entrance, so that the tip of his cock was spreading your lips open. Then he pulled back from the kiss, a string of saliva connecting you both.

Maintaining eye contact, he sank his cock into your awaiting warmth. Your eyes widened and a little “ooh-” tumbled out of your mouth at the sensation of him filling and stretching you.

A small voice in the back of your head warned of the potential consequences—a slip, a fall, and the possibility of ending up in the hospital with a concussion or a bruised tailbone. However, any lingering inhibitions melted away in a heartbeat as Kai angled his thrusts in just the right way, hitting just the right spot that made you see stars.

“Whoa, this angle is– fucking amazing…”

Kai muttered between grunts as he continued to slam into you, rocking your entire body with each of his thrusts. It didn’t take long before the tightened coil inside you snapped completely; your pussy giving one final squeeze before you screamed out your release.

“Nuh-uh, princess. I’m not done with you yet,”

He spun you around, forcing you against the shower wall. You yelped in surprise and instinctively flattened your palms to steady yourself. Gripping your hips firmly to keep you in place, Kai sheathed himself inside you in one swift, brutal stroke.

“Ack- Kai!” you squealed as your cheek was pressed against the wall with a wet smack, feeling your breasts flatten against the cool surface. Your fingernails scrabbled against the slippery tiles, desperately searching for purchase as Kai reared back his hips. You let out a loud wail when he thrust back into you, setting a harsh, punishing pace. His pelvis slamming into your ass with such force that the supple flesh rippled with each thrust.

“Ah f-fuck… mghmm—” your vision was blurry with tears as he bottomed out once again, pressing himself so deep that you could feel every ridge and vein, every delicious throb and twitch—his eagerness to pump you full of his come but also to make you suffer just a little bit for his pleasure.

“Hah- you just love it when I fuck you into my perfect little brain-dead slut, don’t you?”

He grunted, his thrusts becoming progressively sloppier but somehow still maintaining the same pace. Whining pathetically, you wiggled your hips, allowing your cunt to swallow his cock deeper. Lewd schlick shlick noises ricocheted off the walls, dulled by the sound of your moans and pattering water.

“Look at me, little lamb,”

You peered over your shoulder, shiny, fat drops of tears decorating your eyelashes. He smiled fondly at you before pressing a tender kiss on your temple.

“You look so pretty when you cry,”

Kai’s hand brushed past your mound, fingers slipping between your thighs and started stroking; deceptively gentle caresses at the sensitive bundle of nerves until your entire body started to tremble. The hot coil in your belly was now impossibly tight.

“Puh-please please please Kai ‘m gonna c-”

“Go ahead,”

You didn’t need to be told twice. Kai groaned, his head falling to rest on your shoulder, his sloppy thrusts coming to a decrescendo.

“Make a mess on my cock. There you go baby- ahh fuck– yeah just like that,”

Kai buried himself deep inside you and you felt the warmth flooding your insides. He thrust lazily into you for a few more times for good measure, and you could feel his cock continuing to throb and spasm as he buried his come as deep as he could.

When the residual spasms finally waned, he pulled out, your combined release seeping out between your thighs and splattering onto the floor. You shivered from the loss of contact. He smirked, nipped playfully at your earlobe.

“What a way to start a morning, hm?”

…

After the hot water had finally run out and you both had cleaned yourselves, you sighed contentedly as you wrapped yourself in a fluffy towel. Despite the soreness between your thighs, you couldn’t help but feel satisfied. This had to be one of the best sex you ever had in your life.

Then, reality came crashing back as you remembered the potential consequences of your reckless actions.

“Kai! You didn’t pull out!” you squeaked, the pitch of your voice raising with panic. You weren’t on birth control either, since Kai was paranoid about side effects.

Kai, still tying his blue hair into a bun in front of the bathroom mirror, turned and looked at you. “The senate election is in the bag. Might as well start trying for a baby now,” he said coolly.

Phase two was already in motion, without you even knowing it.

 fear-is-truth 2024 — all rights reserved. do not modify, repost, translate, or plagiarise my content.

[youraverageaemondsimp]

“My darling.” // CelticSlave!Aemond Targaryen x VestalVirgin!Reader

THIS FIC CONTAINS DARK CONTENT, READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED, DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT.

MDNI.

block the tag #MAE:DARK!CONTENT to avoid seeing dark content from me.

Summary: Fetching water a little later than usual shouldn't really affect much of your life right? You're wrong, and you wouldn't find out until you found a celtic slave in a bad condition named Aemond.

WARNINGS: extreme noncon to dubcon, unprotected p in v sex, blood kink, degradation, breeding kink, violence, blood, murder, slight angst, stockholm syndrome(?), reader basically falls in love with Aemond even though he nonconned her, manipulation. not exactly historically accurate, this is just fiction so do not take it heart, hoping it isn't offensive, + not proofread // requested by @slytherincursebreaker !!

WC: 3.5k

You were an illegitimate daughter of a politician in your country, taken away from your mother to keep the scandal underground, you never had an easy life and your father only did the bare minimum, and to say your step mother and half siblings did not like you at all, they saw you as a pest more than anything, when the pontifex maximus was choosing vestal virgins to serve the goddess vesta, he had eyes for your family, specifically your sister but she did not want to go, and so they sent you instead, seizing the opportunity to get rid of you.

It did not mean you were fully free from their clutches however, as you grew in the monastery you were always slightly discriminated against but the other 5 priestess, having heard the rumours about your bastardised birth. But you still managed to get by, you remember how earlier this morning your half sister came to visit you, telling you that she is to be married soon, she came to rub it in your face because you were sworn to celibacy, and you could not engage in activities like such. She even bought her suitor along, who you swore looked at you with such lust, and you felt very creeped out.

This is why you deliberately didn't go and fetch water from the spring earlier today, he often came to visit the temple and watched you perform your duties to the goddess vesta.

Choosing to fetch water at such a late time shouldn't have any repercussions right? I mean, you did not do it earlier because you had a reason not to, not wanting to entertain the eyes of your half sister's suitor, so you're doing it now.

Wrong.

You didn't realise the threat back then, when you found Aemond being beaten up by a bunch of other men, kindness was something that came to you naturally, seeing him in such a state made your heart wrench, you shooed off the other men, reprimanding them for their behaviour and used your status as a vestal virgin to scare them off before looking down at the man who was covered in mud, and seemed to bleeding.

He had silver blonde hair, with only one eye as the other socket seemed empty, you wondered what had happened to him.

“Are you alright?” you ask and you he groans, turning over unto his back, you should leave, you shouldn't help him, but here you are picking him up, leaning his body weight against you and bringing him through one of the secret tunnels in underneath the infrastructure of the building, it was connected directly to another country, was made to use it in order to escape from war or to invade other lands, none of the common folk knew about this, and the people who knew didn't come here often either, as there was no such need for it anymore.

You sit him down in one of the 'rooms' which is just a big spacious squared tunnel, he plops down unto the ground weak and tired, breathing heavily, you quickly went back outside and fetched the water you forgot about and gave some of it for him to drink, you watched as he whimpered, swallowing in pain before he finally looked at you.

“T-thank you.” his voice was so weak, he was barely able to get any words out.

You gave him a gentle smile, and you realised that it was probably late, you had many questions for him but you kept it to yourself for now because you didn't want to bother him anymore, so left back to the temple where you resided.

“Why are you up so late?” you heard the head vestal ask, raising an eyebrow as she took in your appearance, mud covering your prestigious clothing, “I went to fetch the water head priestess, but I fell down on the way back.” you lie looking down, hoping she believes it, and to your surprise, she does believe it, she tells you to go to your quarters after putting the water down, so you do just that.

You visit the badly hurt person from yesterday once again, you knew you were not supposed to have any type of contact with a man, to remain pure as they will taint you, but you really could care less when its about helping others, you found him lying on the ground, likely sleeping, but your footsteps woke him up and he looked at you curiously, you gave him a small smile before giving him the bread you managed to sneak out without anyone noticing, along with water, you gave it to them and sat down, he reluctantly ate it before drinking the water. “Why are you doing this?” he asked you and you shrugged, “Is it so wrong to help a fellow human out?” you question back and he goes quiet, “You i never really got your name, or how you ended up in that situation.” you tilt your head as you watch him purse his lips.

“I am a celtic sex slave.”

You froze, he was a slave.

“My mistress threw me out, and I ended up on the streets without any shelter, and those men just wanted someone to mess with.” he sighs, swallowing the bread. You felt pity for him.

“Till you found me of course, I am extremely indebted to you my lady.” he says and you shake your head no, “I’m no lady, I am a vestal virgin that title is not of my belonging.” You said, and he tilted his head, not understanding what you had meant, he nodded but then his eyes widened “This is such an honour to be in the presence of such a being, sorry you must see me in this state, and… You had to touch me as well.” he apologises and you look down, you shake your head and tell him that it's okay and you did not mind.

You and Aemond had grown closer, he would tell you about his life before he became a sex slave, how he was treated, how you felt extremely bad, how your people treated the Celtics. And so you shared your problems in return as well, he provided you comfort which you lacked all of your life, for the first time you felt wanted, and you could not ignore the feeling that was starting to bloom inside you.

But you pushed it down, you are a celibate, you should not be feeling such things.

Aemond had taken a liking to you, you had a pretty soul as well as a pretty face, the way you looked in your white clothing, and whenever you would fix your scarf over the head afraid that your hair or skin would show made him more curious to see what is underneath the thick robes of clothing even more. He knows damn well that he isn't the first man to ever lust for a vestal virgin, there were many depraved others.

After Aemond recovered, you had showed him around the tunnels and dungeons, various routes that if something happens he can use them to escape, and you also showed the route which led to his country, and he noted it, telling you that he can use this to go back to his own people again and you gave him a small smile.

Though the thought of him leaving makes your heart wrench.

“Aemond, I have to go and attend to my duties now, I will meet you later okay?” you say quickly before leaving.

Though the later never came.

“She was caught sneaking around with a slave apparently, she kept him hidden, surely she committed adultery as well.” you heard the voice of the chief priestess tell the priest.

“That is utmost dishonourable, as a vestal virgin you are sworn to celibacy, how can you do this?!” He yells at you and you flinch, tears streaming down your face.

“I promise! I promise on the flame of vesta that nothing happened between us! I was just helping him out.” you plead on your knees.

“How can I believe you? That you are not ruined? You were helping a sex slave out? you want me to believe that?” he questions and you shake your head.

“Order her death by live burial, she will be buried underground with no food or water.” he commands, tone final.

You watched as one of the virgins who snitched on you, she smiled cruelly and your face turned into a scowl. She was the one who wasn't a virgin, yet you kept her secret knowing what would happen if others found out, but the moment she discovered something about you? She had gone straight to the chief priestess and told her, even fed her lies.

“No! No! Please listen to me! Nothing happened between us! You can check for my virginity if you want! Please.” you cried, at the priest and he simply dismissed you.

You were grabbed by his guards and were being led to your doom, dragged out of the temple forcefully and then the trial was processing when you heard a commotion, accompanied by panicked screams.

“There has been a rebellion! The celtics have rebelled against us!” You hear someone yell, and everyone panics, the guards that were holding you quickly let go before rushing off to fight, you run after them and go to the temple as well, eyes widening in horror as you saw the blood and how few of priestesses were being violated brutally by the rebels, their clothes were being torn by the celtic soldiers and you were spotted by two men who came over to you, grabbing you by your hands and shoving you onto the ground.

“This one's pretty, let me have her cunt first.” you screamed at them to let go and they fought against them, kicking one of them in the shins cause the man to stumble and fall, “This bitch–”

“Stop.”

They both immediately froze up and turned around, and you froze as well, recognizing the voice. “This one is mine, unless you want your heads fucking cut off, fuck off.” he spits harshly at them, and they bow their head before scurrying off and you furrow your eyebrows, Aemond looks at you with a smirk, the empty eye socket from before now held a blue sapphire in its place snuggly.

“This would not have been possible without you, I shall spare you for this.” he begins, pulling you up on your legs by the hair.

“W-why are you doing this?!” you asked in fear and Aemond shrugged before explaining, “For the benefit of my people of course, you Romans have treated us as nothing but barbarians, however I do not blame you for that, you are a kind soul.”

“I threw my life away for this, let myself get touched by filthy hands for this moment, and finally, it was all worth it in the end.” he chuckles cruelly, and you scrunch your face in a scowl, “The emperor—” you begun but you are quickly cut off by him yanking your hair and making you face where a body was laying, head detached from the body, he tuts, “This one?” he pulls out a head and shoves it right up into your face and you push it away, screaming, he lets gos of the head and it falls to the ground rolling away.

“He was nothing but a coward, running off in the secret tunnels, letting his people die, unworthy of ruling over the people, so instead, I became the new emperor.” he clarifies.

“If you are going to kill me, just do it already.” you spit, and he looks surprised at this.

“Doll, if I wanted to kill you, I would have done it long ago, besides I said that I would already spare you, since you were a kind soul, and once again, without you, I would not be here.” he smiles cruelly and you feel your stomach twist.

His grip on your hair leaves before it's attached to your forearm, hand gripping the skin cruelly as he drags you somewhere, and you noticed that it was the head priestess room, the nearest one in the temple. You quickly realised what he wanted to do, so you started struggling, annoyed by this, he picked you up and threw you over his shoulder, before carrying and entering the room inside, securing the curtain shut before he threw you on the bed.

You try to get up and run away but he pushes you on the bed, gets on top of you, and yanks your clothes away, tearing at your robes harshly, revealing your body to him, you quickly hide yourself but he pins your hands to your side and takes in your body, he groans at the sight of your chest heaving up and down, you wriggle underneath him, trying to kick him off but he captures your legs and pushes them apart before planting himself in between them.

“No! Please! No!” you cry out but he shuts you up with one of his hands, the other one quickly undoes his breeches, revealing his hard cock, he gives himself a few pumps and lines it up against your entrance. His tip prods at your entrance, he doesn't wait a second before shoving his cock inside of you, ripping your walls apart, making you scream in pain as you struggled beneath him, he watches as your blood leaks onto his cock, and his smiles at that before he looks at you, watching tears stream down your face as he takes what he wants, he immediately sets his pace at a brutal one, ramming his cock in and out of you.

Each movement was painful for you, your cries and screams muffled by his hand, your body jolting up the bed as he brutally thrusts inside, traumatising your walls, the free hand grips your breasts cruelly before he pinches your nipple harshly, causing you to arch your back, and whine loudly.

Using the least amount of strength you have you push him heavily off, and to your luck it works cause he is caught off guard making him fall next to you, and before you could get up and run, he grabs your waist and pushes you back onto the bed again, getting on top of you and choking your neck with both his hands.

“I was going to spare you, but it seems you do not want that, take it or fucking die.” he spits on your face and you wince, crying out once again as he enters inside you.

Your body betrays you, you know it when it suddenly starts to feel good, his tip hitting a certain spot inside of you, and soon you're moaning as well, unable to process this foreign sensation. “Yeah, that's more like it, my brave girl.” he coos and bends down to kiss your neck and you whimper when he bites down at your sensitive area.

You grab onto his shoulders for support, and he hums in satisfaction, one of his hands travel down to your clit before rubbing fast circles it, and you felt your stomach tighten at that, before something snapped and you were moaning extremely loudly, nails digging into his skin as the pleasure hit you like a huge wave.

You cried out his name, and he hushed you and continued to thrust inside of you, grunting, you felt his thrusts become more sloppy before he halted, pushing himself into you as far as he could go, and moaned as his seed spurted out of him, he slowly rode it out, painting more of your walls white.

“I want to see you pregnant.” his hand rests on the lower part of your abdomen, as he caresses it gently with his thumb, before pulling out and leaning down to pepper kisses on the area, as if a kiss will ensure your pregnancy.

His hands fondle with your boobs, thumbs flicking the nipples as he massages the flesh, “they will be filled with milk..” he says in a daze.

You saw him getting hard again and your eyes widened, before you could get up on your elbows, he pushed you down once again again, holding your legs apart and pushing them up, making the knees bend, touching your chest.

He lines his cock before shoving it brutally inside again, he trapped you in a mating press while he thrusted above, your walls drummed with pain at the overstimulation, you were whimpering.

“Fucking it take it you slut, look at how your expression matches that of a whore.” he degrades you, hips snapping at each words, you felt a sting in your heart at his mean behavior.

“This is what you were made for, to be a fucking whore that men can use, not a vestal virgin, having this much of a perfect cunt and wasting it is unbelievable.” he groans and you feel tears start to fall down at his insults.

He pulled back and groaned at the sight of how there was still blood covered on his cock, your blood which coated him so perfectly, and he felt him nearing his edge, his hand gripped your cheeks before forcing your mouth open and then he spit into it, “Swallow, you whore.” he commands and you obey scared.

“Fuck, you're my whore aren't you? my pretty little whore who will let me fuck my children into.” he moans. “I can't wait to make you mine, my empress who will rule along with me, give me children, my darling- oh fuck—”

You felt the familiar feeling of heat arise in your stomach again, as he hits the same spot again and again, and soon enough, you're once again reaching your peak, arching your back at the intensity, he then finishes inside of you again.

That night was a nightmare, he took you multiple times, he made you take him in your mouth, and he did the same, lapping at your cunt for hours on end as he relished in your taste.

You remember passing out, unable to take anymore as exhaustion weighed upon you.

You woke up groaning, you slept like a baby, that's until you moved a little bit and your body aches like hell itself, and you get up, stretching to relieve the pain, you looked over to your side and spotted Aemond fast asleep, completely bare and then you remembered the events of the night prior.

You saw the sheets which were now covered in your blood, your virgin blood, and you were pure no more. You felt doom settle in your core but you felt relieved in a weird sense of way.

Suddenly there was a commotion outside, you gathered whatever was left of your robes before covering yourself with it, hiding your intimate parts and exiting the room.

You gasped as the scent of blood hit your nostrils, and almost threw up, but then what caught your eye made you surprised, you noticed how the head priestess, and all the people who have wronged you in the middle, tied up as the guards lazily kept them in check.

When they spotted you, they screamed insults at you and you winced, anger coursing through your veins at such an intense rate.

“My empress, look at them, look at the people who wronged you.” you heard Aemond whisper in your ear from behind you, and you got startled, you turned to look at him and you watched as he was almost naked except the sheets which were loosely held together by him on his lower body, hiding his intimate part, the same sheets which were covered in your blood.

“Look at them, see how they are still blaming you? What do you want to do huh? Does it not make you mad?” he asks and you turn your attention back to them again, it frankly does make you mad. “I would never treat you like that, I love you. My queen.”

“What do you want, my little empress?” he asks and you make up your mind.

You collect the water in a small dish and Aemond watches you in confusion, but then you make your way towards the flame of vesta, and pour water over it, putting it out and the head priestess' eyes widen in horror.

“Kill them all.” your voice was more clear than ever.

“Spare the head priestess, and that one, for they shall be buried alive.” you say coldly before you walk back to Aemond, who welcomes you in his arms.

“You heard your queen, do as she commands.” he orders his men before he escorts you away from the scene and into the room once again.

He pushes you on the bed and crawls atop of you, “I wasn't joking when I said I want you pregnant, doll.” he coos and you gulp.

“Impregnate me, my king, I want to carry your heirs.”

And that was enough to make Aemond go insane, before he took you once again.

And soon, you fell pregnant.

Giving birth to a girl, who Aemond adored.

Life seemed to be well and perfect.

Maybe you don't really regret this at all.

———

GENERAL TAGLIST ;

@watercolorskyy @cl-0-vr @chompchompluke @namelesslosers @snowystark @spookyaemond @sweethoneyblossom1 @this-isnt-madness @persephonerinyes @eltherevir @sidni3003 @aleidag1rly @cryingforlife @fan-goddess @hannaeditzs @grungegrrrl @thekinslayersswordhand @aemondsbabygirl

Bold is who I cannot tag, DM to be removed!

[phoward89]

Based on this ask

WARNING ⚠️ Coriolanus Snow is his own warning in and of itself. Cussing, obsession, masterbation (m & f), p in v (alluded to), Dark!Coriolanus, Young Politician!Coriolanus, Secretary!Reader

This one got away from me so it's a bit long. Whoops...

You're at your desk, logging into your computer to start the day whenever the door to the office opens and in walks your boss. Senator Coriolanus Snow. One of the youngest Head Gamemakers and Senators in the history of Panem. He's only 24 years old and he's already so successful.

Crazy, right?

Your older brother was in the same graduating class as him at the Academy. Rein was a slacker that wasn't in the top 24 while Coryo- uh Coriolanus- was the top student, won the Plinth prize, and even did a short stint as a Peacekeeper to serve the greater good of the country (like his father General Crassus Snow did before him) before attending the University as a double major in Political Science and Military Strategies. Oh and while attending the University he interned under Dr. Gaul, became an Assistant Gamemaker, and even became the Head Gamemaker himself when Dr. Gaul died in a tragic lab accident involving her mutts.

And he did all of that by age 20.

Age 20!

After graduating from the Academy, Rein was shoved into the Peacekeepers by your father, retired Colonel Javanis Halvir. Your brother was sent to 8 and he complained in all of his letters about it. Once he was eligible to take the Officer's Aptitude Exam, your father had ordered him to sign up. So, Rein took the test and became an officer. He got assigned to PK Base D-12.

And that's what your older brother accomplished by 20. Oh and he also knocked up a local barmaid from the Hobb, causing your father to have a stroke. Your mother found it very comical.

And then both of your parents told you that you needed to redeem the family name, blah blah blah, and pushed you to be the top student in the Academy. So, of course you ended up in the top 24. And you mentored a tribute, a 17 year old boy from 7, that won. He was very proficient with an ax. You didn't have to do too much mentoring, he basically just hacked everybody to bits…

But you still won the Plinth Prize anyways. And during the ceremony for the prize, instead of Strabo Plinth handing you over the Plinth Prize it was his heir instead.

Head Gamemaker Coriolanus Snow.

After handing you the prize he had asked you to have a glass of posca with him, causing your mother to glare angrily at the interaction. Your father on the other hand was ecstatic that Coryo-uh Coriolanus- wanted to talk to you. He served under General Snow in 12; thought that Coriolanus was a man cut from the same cloth as his father.

Anyways, once you and Coriolanus Snow got to talking he admitted that he was going into politics and would need a personal secretary; an assistant per say to help him with his day to day tasks such as scheduling meetings, etc. and much to your surprise, he offered you the job.

That was a couple of years ago.

So, yes, that's how you got your job. And you really liked your job. It wasn't that hard to do plus it made you feel important that such an accomplished and powerful man trusted you to manage his life.

If you only knew that Coriolanus, who's been insisting that you call him Coryo for roughly a year now, has been lusting after you since he saw you in a cute dress that hugged your body just right when he presented you the Plinth Prize 2 years ago. Also, your boss is a dark soul. A cold man. But he does have a soft spot for you.

And only for you.

Which is why he greets you with a wide, manic smile that makes the corners of his baby blues crinkle. “Good morning, Y/N.” The platinum blonde senator says while crossing the room, heading to your desk.

“Good morning, Senator Snow.” You politely smile, pulling up the excel document in order to print out the day's schedule for your boss. And talk about your boss, he's holding a bouquet of white roses in one hand and a tray of coffee along with a pastry bag in the other as he stops at your desk.

Coriolanus sets everything down, only to grab the vase on the corner of your desk and bring it over to the trash. All the while saying, “I brought you some fresh roses, courtesy of Grandma’am’s rooftop garden, to replace the wilted ones on your desk.”

The blonde politician did that every Monday for you. He brought fresh flowers for your office vase. A vase he gifted you for your one year work anniversary last year.

Dumping the contents of the vase out in the trash can, Coriolanus gestured to the coffees and brown paper bag on your desk, only to explain, “The barista at the coffee shop got my order wrong, so I had to do a second order, but since I already paid for the wrong order I figured I'd give it to you.”

“Oh, thank you, Coriolanus, Sir.” You simply smiled, grateful for the free coffee. You were going to put a pot on in the break room as soon as you printed out Snow's schedule, but getting an unexpected cup of coffee’s always nice.

Perhaps you'll pay it forward and treat him to coffee tomorrow. The gods know that you have his coffee order memorized.

It's black, just like his soul, with a couple of sugar packets. Not Splenda, not Sweet ‘n’ Low, not Truvia, but real sugar made from sugar cane grown down in 11. Oh and he always has a chocolate filled croissant too.

You also know his afternoon tea order by heart along with his dinner orders from a handful of takeout places he prefers. Hell, you even know his liquor order for after hours meetings. But it's your duty to know those things since, after all, you're his personal secretary.

Literally his right hand woman.

“Darling, how many times have I told you to, please, call me Coryo.” Your boss shook his head at you while bringing the empty vase to the nearby bathroom to fill up with water.

It must've been at least a hundred times by now, maybe more. But it felt weird to you calling your boss such a personal sounding nickname. You're both professional adults, if you call him by his name it should be Coriolanus. If not then you'll just refer to him as his title, since he's your boss.

“You know I can't call you Coryo, Coriolanus. It's not proper; you're my boss.” You remind the senator, who's dressed to the nines today in a perfectly tailored three piece black suit- complete with a white dress shirt and striped tie, as he walks out of the bathroom and back into your foyer office with the filled up vase in hand.

A vase that looked dwarfed by his large grip. “We've known each other for a couple of years now, darling. I'd like to think of us as being on friendly terms, wouldn't you?” Coriolanus asked, placing the vase down on your desk and arranging the flowers in them for you.

You clicked the print button on your computer, only to swivel your chair around to reach the ink jet printer behind you. “Yes, we're friendly, but you're still my boss.”

“And as your boss I'm now ordering you to call me Coryo.” He told you, pulling out the coffee that was yours, due to error, and setting it on your desk while you watched the printer spit out the paper with his daily schedule on it.

“Fine, I'll call you Coryo.” You gave in, grabbing the paper and swiveling back around to face your him.

“I got two croissants since I had to get my order remade, so it looks like you'll be getting one this morning, darling.” Coryo told you, opening up the paper bag and pulling out a pastry. He grabbed a napkin that was stuffed into the drink carrier and put it on your desk, next to your coffee, before depositing your croissant on it.

“Thank you.” You simply smile. Handing him over his schedule, you announce, “Here's your schedule for today.”

The platinum blonde gives you a closed lip smile and nods before stretching his hand out for the paper. “You've got a dinner meeting tonight at 7 o’clock sharp with a political sponsor.” You reminded him, your fingertips brushing, while he grabs the outstretched paper from you.

Briefly glancing over the paper in his hand, he asked, “Would you like to go with me?”

“What?”

“Dinner at 7 o’clock sharp. Would you like to go with me?”

Shaking your head, you politely decline his offer. “Oh no, I'm sorry, Coryo, Sir, but I can't go.”

“Why not? Got a boyfriend or something occupying your time?” The senator sharply asks, his baritone heavy with a tingle of jealousy.

Coriolanus prayed to every God he never believed in that you're single. If not, well he's going to go whack some unlucky bastard to free you up to be his girl. He's decided that he's tired of pinning over you; stalking you.

Coryo's ready to take things to the next level. He's ready to fucking corrupt you; make you his forever. He's going to be announcing his bid for the presidential runoff, the first step in becoming one of two candidates to face off for the presidency, and it's time for him to get into a relationship.

A public relationship.

And you're perfect for that. Coriolanus knows, without a doubt, that you'll make a perfect First Lady. That your beauty and slight innocence will be the perfect contrast to his cold, stoic, but regal stature. That you're a perfect fit for him.

Plus he's getting tired of paying for whores. Whores that he has to keep disposing of so that they can't blackmail him about his sexual appetite. Coriolanus prides himself of being from one of the founding families of Panem, from the Old Guard. He even runs on the Old Guard ticket; he can't have some disgruntled whore tarnishing his reputation.

It'd be much cheaper and easier to just get you into bed; fuck you in all the ways that he likes.

But he also has a soft spot for you. Coryo likes you. Okay, that's a lie. He's obsessed with you in such a dark, sick way that if he sees a man smile at you or get too close to you then he's killing that man. Yea, Senator Snow’s in love with you, or at least in his head he's in love with you.

It's more like an obsession.

“No.” You shook your head. “I don't have a boyfriend.” Well, you had an on-again, off-again thing going on with your neighbor across the hall from you, but since it's currently off Coryo doesn't need to know about that.

Coriolanus swore that he heard the heavens singing hymns upon hearing that you're single. Yes, now’s the perfect time for him to make you his.

“Then I'll have my driver pick you up for dinner tonight. Wear something nice.”

Once again, you decline him invitation. “You're my boss, I'm sorry, but I can't go with you tonight.”

Usually Coriolanus appreciates your professionalism and dedication to your job, but right now he loathes it. Why can't you just accept that he's taking you to his dinner meeting tonight. That he's showing you off on his arm for the entire Capitol to see.

Leaning against your desk, he gives you a piercing look with his icy eyes and tells you, “It's a very important business dinner with a political sponsor, Y/N, and you're my assistant.” A calculating look crosses the politician's face as he adds in, “It's actually, you might say, very vital that you attend dinner with me tonight.”

Well…

When he puts it that way.

“Okay, I'll go to dinner with you tonight.” You relent, causing a smug grin to appear on Coryo's face.

“Good.” Coryo grins, making his face light up like sunshine, as he grabs his coffee and pastry bag. “Since dinner's at 7, I'll have my driver pick you up at 6:45. That'll leave a 15 minute window to get to the restaurant.” The platinum blonde told you the plan before pivoting on his heel and striding over to his office. Pausing at his door, with his large hand hovering over the knob, he looked over his shoulder and told you, “Wear either a red or black dress, but preferably red.”, before opening up the door and disappearing inside of his office.

Oh, how did you get into this mess?

Coriolanus sat at his mahogany desk, going over documents for various bills that he could either sponsor or just straight up deny. Honestly, most of the shit that got dumped on his desk he denied. If it didn't pertain to the Capitol and the Capitolites then he just shoved the document in his shredder and made a note to vote no, well in the Senate it was ‘nah’, on it.

And Senator Snow was notorious for voting nah on everything.

As he sat in his office going over mindless matters, he couldn't help but wonder about what you'd look like all dolled up for dinner tonight. He knew that you had a few nice cocktail dresses to pick from, but the mystery of whether you'd listen to him and wear something black or preferably red versus another color altogether made his head spin a mile a minute. He hopes that you're a good little secretary and listen to him about the dress.

But what he really can't help fantasizing about is what you'll be wearing underneath your dress. He can't help picturing you in a bra and panty set that hugs your body in the right ways. The senator's daydreaming about delicate lace molded against your most private parts, that are hidden away only for your lover to see.

And just thinking about becoming your lover, stripping you out of not just your dress, but your soft, delicate lingerie has his pants growing tighter. So tight, in fact, that it was downright uncomfortable.

Letting out a barely audible groan, the platinum blonde stood up from his desk and went over to his door. For just a moment, he leaned his forehead against it and debated on whether or not to call you into his office; have you on your knees underneath his desk for him. But then he decided against it; locked his door instead and went over to his desk chair to take care of himself.

You're not some district whore, you deserve to be properly wined and dined first before he has you on your knees for him- choking on his cock with tears and mascara messily running down your cheeks.

Oh, just the thought of you with your pretty mouth around his large cock had said cock twitching in his pants.

Quickly, Coriolanus makes his way over to the small sofa that's in the corner of his office. He makes quick work of undoing his belt, only to tug his pants and boxer briefs down just enough for his cock to spring free before sitting on the sofa. Spitting in his hand, he leans back into the sofa and wraps his large hand around his cock.

He feels his dick throbbing angrily in his cold hand while sliding his thumb over his tip’s leaky slit. The platinum blonde bites back a moan, and closes his eyes- pretending that it's your hand wrapped around his shaft and your thumb teasing his cockhead. Fuck, how he craves your touch. Using his thumb to spread precum over his tip and down the length of his dick, he started to move his fist up and down in measured glides.

Coriolanus knows he should just rub one out as quick as possible since he's at work, but the fact that you- the object of all his fantasies- is right outside won't let him. Being in such close proximity to you feeds his fantasies and he has to have a proper handjob session.

Coriolanus has to indulge in the make believe notion that you're the one pumping his cock up and down, twisting your wrist slightly every now and then. That it's you playing with his cum heavy balls, making his toes curl in his socks and black floor shines, as the fist around his cock starts to slightly pick up pace.

Gods, he's getting lost in his fantasy of you pleasuring him with your hands, hell even your mouth- that he's sure will be aching from his cock unhinging your jaw when you suck him off- that the loud ringing of his office phone startles him.

“Goddamnit! Can't I fuck my fist in peace?” Coriolanus grumbled.

He's angry that his fantasy was broken; that he has to fist his cock faster than he wanted to.

The phone continued to ring off the hook as he furiously moved his hand up and down his dick. He bit his lip and bucked his hips, spurting his cum into his left hand. The one that he was using on his balls before the damn phone started ringing like crazy.

Letting out an aggravated sigh, he grabbed a few tissues from the box on the side table next to him and wiped off his hand. Standing up to right his boxer briefs and pants, he heard your heels echo down the hall. Great, just great, now you're on your way to his office because the phone’s ringing off the hook.

Quickly, Coriolanus tosses the tissues into the wastebin. Rushing to his desk, he grabs the phone, only to slam it down. Hard.

Hey, he made the excessive ringing stop. Whoever called should just stick to the after 3 rings, hang up and try again later rule. Coriolanus has more important things to do than listen to a phone ring endlessly.

More important things: like jacking off to daydreams and fantasies about his secretary.

His secretary that's knocking on his door and asking him if he's alright.

“I'm fine, my darling.” Coriolanus called out to you while crossing his office. He unlocked his door and opened it, only to give you a manipulative smile while feeding you the bullshit lie of, “I just zoned out reading a grant proposal and didn't realize the phone was ringing.”

“Are you sure you're alright?” You asked, only to follow it up with the offer of, “I can always read some of those grant proposals and take notes on them for you, if you want. That way you won't get so bored to death reading them that you miss important phone calls.”

“You'd do that, for me?” Coriolanus asked, feeling a bit touched by your offer. Oh, how he thinks you're an absolute sweetheart.

A perfect angel sent to him from the Lord above. And he's your golden angel too.

Lucifer, that is.

“Of course, Coryo. It's my job to help you with paperwork.”

And before another word could be shared between you two, his phone started ringing. Again.

“Oh, I'll leave you to your call. Just put whatever you want me to read for you on my desk later.”

“I will, darling.” Coriolanus smiles at you, watching you walk away before closing his door.

Storming over to his phone, he sees that the video option light is blinking. Sitting down, he answered the phone and pressed the button to turn on his video call screen. As soon as the face of the half-assed idiot that was one of the Junior Gamemakers appeared on the screen he immediately felt a migraine coming on.

“Senator Snow, are you neglecting Head Gamemaker duties in favor of politics? You never answered my call.” The redhead man with a bad combover had the audacity to tell his boss via the phone screen.

Poor soul must not value his life…

“There’s 3 fucking months before the games, that I'm designing, so there's no damn reason for you to call me and let the phone ring off the hook. Are you incompetent? If you had the common sense that God gave a mule the. You'd know I was busy with other matters and couldn't answer your ridiculous call.” Coriolanus seethed in a long winded rant. His veins were protruding from his pale neck; a red vein was angrily popping in his forehead too. But it was his eyes that held so much hate in their icy orbs.

The man on the phone screen, despite being a few years older then Senator Snow, was a complete incompetent idiot in Coriolanus' opinion. Age certainly didn't make him any wiser.

“I'm a very busy man; next time you pester me I'll have you thrown into a tank full of rabid mutts.” Coriolanus promised the Junior Gamemaker before hanging up, hard, on him.

Coriolanus pinches the bridge of his nose and slumps into his overstuffed leather office chair. Letting out a heavy sigh, he rubs his temples and tries to calm down by daydreaming about dinner with you tonight.

Your day went on as it usually does. You took calls and made appointments for Senator Snow. You also read and typed up some cliff notes for a few bills that Coryo left for you before he took off for lunch. He didn't say where he was going and you didn't ask.

When he came back from a power lunch, you knew he went somewhere for drinks cause you could smell a hint of whiskey radiating from his pores, he greeted you with a simple thin lipped smile and placed a container of food on your desk. He didn't tell you to take your lunch break, but the way he wordlessly moved his baby blues between you and the doggie bag he just dumped on your desk was more than enough to give you a hint that he wanted you to eat. So, you simply thanked him, before handing him some notes and taking the food he got you to the break room.

After lunch, the remainder of your day was mundane. Or at least it was until Coryo emerged from his office and strutted over to your desk. You didn't pay him any mind, figuring that he prolly just wanted the other bills back along with the notes you just finished up on them. So, when he perches himself on the corner of your desk, all the while suggesting, “Darling, why don't you leave early. You can pamper yourself with, say, a rosewater bubble bath before tonight's dinner. Yea?”, you're taken aback.

You're in total shock.

Your nose scrunched up, reminding Coriolanus of a little bunny rabbit, as you asked incredulously, “Excuse me, Senator Snow? You're sending me home early?” Softly, you trailed off, “To take a bubble bath…”, while tilting up a baffled arched eyebrow.

“A rosewater bubble bath.” The regal platinum man corrected with a long finger high up in the air. Leaning slightly, so that he towers over you as you sit behind your desk (and gets a nice little peek down your v-neck blouse at your modest cleavage), he tells you, “You're such a dedicated employee; I think you deserve to go home early and pamper yourself before I drag you out to a dinner with my potential political sponsor.”

And what he wasn't telling you was that Mr. Feathersworth was bringing his mistress along. Oh yea… So, technically, it's a couples dinner.

Really? He wants you to relax and pamper yourself before a dinner full of political talk? Wow. You weren't expecting that from your boss.

“My bath and beauty products are actually rose-vanilla scented, Coryo, not rosewater.” You told him, before you could even think better of it.

A smirk appears on Coryo's face and desire briefly flashed in his cerulean eyes. The imposing man favored roses; in fact it was his signature, so that fact that you used rose-vanilla scented bath and beauty products had his cold, black heart beating with warmth, life, and daresay love for you.

“Darling, you deserve to pamper yourself in that rose-vanilla bubble bath. We'll be in for quite a long evening; you don't want to be tense beforehand, now so you?”

Well…

When he puts it that way.

Sighing slightly, you gave in with, “Fine, I'll leave early and pamper myself with a bubble bath.”

“Rose-vanilla bubble bath.” Coriolanus corrected with a ghost of a smile tracing his lush lips. Patting your cheek, he tells you, “Go ahead and go, darling. I'll be fine here for a few more hours.”, before pushing himself off of your desk.

“Thank you. I'll see you later for that political dinner.” You genuinely smiled, grabbing your bag out from under your desk and shouldering it before standing up.

“Remember, my driver will be by at 6:45 sharp.”

“Oh, that's right. You need-” You began, intending to give Senator Snow your address, only to be cut off by a raised hand. “I have your address in my employee files, Y/N.” His baritone hung thickly in the air like honey stuck on a honeycomb; slowly dripping down, as he ordered, “Go home and pamper yourself; get all dolled up in something red, my darling rose.”

As you sat neck deep in your tub, surrounded by bubbles, thoughts of your boss floated around your head. You never really thought much about him, or at least you didn't til now. Yes, you always thought that he was easy on the eyes- platinum hair (you always secretly wondered if the carpet matches the drapes), striking crystal blue eyes, a prominent nose, sharp jawline, tall and lanky build. But you never truly fixated your attention on his looks, or at least until now that is.

You can't explain it, but the interaction you had with him before leaving the office had your blood racing. You're flustered with dirty thoughts. Things that you've never truly let yourself imagine about Senator Coriolanus Snow.

But now…

Well, now you find yourself closing your eyes and thinking about your boss while relaxing in your bath; trailing hand over your breasts while your other hand’s rubbing your clit; dipping two fingers in and out of your pussy.

It's best to get this out of your system now, before you're stuck going to dinner with him tonight.

“Coriolanus, I was expecting your driver to pick me up.” You gasp, hand tightly gripping the doorknob of your open door, as you're shocked by the sight of the tall platinum blonde standing in front of you- dressed impeccably in a deep crimson suit with a single red rose in his hand.

“Bentley drove me here.” Coriolanus informed you. “Now, what sort of gentleman would I be if I didn't walk up to your door to get you our dinner date?” He smirks, offering you the rose.

Your eyes widen at his words. “Dinner date…but I thought this was a professional dinner with a potential political backer, Senator Snow.” You tell him as you shakily take the offered rose from his large, outstretched hand.

“Yes, well, my darling, Mr. Feathersworth informed me that he's bringing along his mistress to Mizuna’s so I don't see why we can't mix some business with pleasure as well.”

Before you could utter a word, the door right across the hall and behind Coriolanus opened; out walked your on-off neighbor ex. Bastard was dressed like he's going out somewhere (or going out with someone). His sea-green eyes look over at you and lock Coriolanus back a bit curiously: portraying that he can't believe you're all dolled up and going out with someone so regal looking.

Deciding that you didn't like the look on your ex’s face, you put your hand on Coriolanus' label and press a quick kiss to his lips before telling him, “Let me put up this rose, Coryo, and then you can take me on our date.”

Coryo grabbed your face in one of his hands and kissed you again, this time his lips searing and hungry, before running his hand over your cheekbone and darkly smirking, “You can just take it along with us, darling. I'm taking you home with me tonight; it'd be such a shame for you to leave your rose alone on a side table all night.”

“You're taking me home with you?” You asked, finding this information entirely new to you.

At least your bronze haired ex wasn't standing behind Coryo; gawking at you anymore.

Pulling you out of your apartment and locking your doorknob, only to slam the door shut, he bluntly tells you, “I’d be a fool not to, Y/N, and, frankly, I'm anything, but a fool.” Coryo smoothly tell you while leading you down the hallway; towards the elevator bank.

And of course when you reach the elevator your ex is just stepping into it. Great, now you're going to be riding in an elevator with your on-off neighbor ex and your boss/sudden new fling.

Oh boy…

“After you, darling.” Coryo sweetly tells you, guiding you into the metal box while following right behind you.

You feel your ex’s eyes on you, burning a hole into the side of your face, as Coriolanus hits the buttons to both close the door and go to the lobby.

“Should've known you'd be cozy with Senator Snow, considering you're his personal secretary.” Flew out of your ex’s mouth as soon as he saw Coryo's large hand come to rest on the small of your back.

“Odysseus…” You chastise, nearly hissing at him.

Coriolanus snapped his head around so fast, it was as if it was going to spin off exorcist style, and narrowed his eyes at the bronze haired man next to you. “I can have you turned into an Avox for slander against Miss Y/N, so I’d mind that useless tongue of yours if I were you.”

“Coryo, calm down. My neighbor-”

“Ex” Odysseus supplied at the same time you uttered the word neighbor, causing Coriolanus’ face to turn into hardened stone.

“She doesn't belong to you anymore, Odysseus. My darling seems to have gotten tired of settling for beans and has upgraded to the filet mignon.” The senator told your ex in a smooth, but eerily cold tone. “You ought to consider yourself lucky that I won't be calling for your tongue, but I'm sure I'm we can agree to you not bothering my sweet girl anymore, can't we, Mister-”

“Odair. Name's Odysseus Odair, Senator Snow.” Your ex shot out, his voice fake and sugary, as he played with fire.

Snow melts, but fish fry. And unfortunately for Odysseus Odair he'd learn that the hard way after Senator Coriolanus Snow gets him exhiled to District 4 for the crimes of slander. Coriolanus' cold ass gives Poseidon Odair, Odysseus’ father, an ultimatum- either sign over his assets, investments, and company over to him and go into exhiled on 4 with his son or his son would be turned into an Avox for slander against you, the senator's personal secretary and girlfriend.

Coriolanus Snow was a cold ass to everyone except for you. Something that you'd come to discover in time. But right now it's not important.

No, right now what's important is keeping the senator from tearing your ex apart limb by limb.

Sensing that Coryo was starting to unravel (something that you've never seen and, frankly, didn't want to) you rubbed his shoulder while telling him, “Coryo, please, just let it go. You don't want to be in a bad mood before dinner with your political backer, do you?”

Coriolanus’ jaw twitched for a moment before he gave you a slight smile, “Of course, darling.”

Odysseus found Senator Snow's demanear changing into sweet and loving for you at the drop of a hat very alarming. Honestly, he thought it was downright scary that Snow went from menacing one minute to practically cooing at you the next.

As soon as the elevator came to a stop and the doors dinged open, your ex practically ran out of them. It made Coryo chuckle.

You and Coryo walked out of the elevator together, only to cross the lobby and head out of the building towards his car. His driver, Bentley, was standing by the black luxury sedan that was parked in front of the curb. Upon seeing you with the senator, he quickly opened the back door. You thanked him and let Coryo help you into the backseat.

“Oh, darling, I'm so sorry for not telling you earlier, but you look truly beautiful in your red dress.” Coryo told you, once he was settled in the back seat next to you.

“Thank you, Coryo. You look handsome yourself.” You replied with a smile as the driver took his place behind the wheel and pull the car away from your building.

“And tonight we'll make quite the debate as a stunning political couple.” The platinum blonde confidently told you as you rode to the high end restaurant the meeting with major political endorser Mr. Feathersworth, and his mistress, was taking place at.

Tonight is only the first of many spent at Coryo's side. It's safe to say that you're Senator Snow's darling sectary; that he has a soft spot for you. After all, he charmed you into becoming his girlfriend with the guise of attending a political dinner with him for work related purposes.

But you'd accept that dinner invitation again and again no matter what universe you're in because that dinner ended with Coryo fucking you in the backseat of his car. The poor driver nearly drove the car off a bridge and into the opposite lane of traffic he was so startled by what his boss and you were doing. Yes, the two of you still were clothed (for the most part) but Bentley knew that if he looked into the rearview mirror and saw something he wasn't supposed to then Snow would have his eyeballs pickled in a jar (literally!). And after fucking in the backseat of his car, a life was created with Coryo and you never left his side.

Tags: @kuroosbby001 @purriteen @poppyflower-22 @meetmeatyourworst @whipwhoops @bxtchopolis @readingthingsonhere @savagenctzen @ryswritingrecord @erikasurfer @tulips2715 @universal-s1ut @thesmutconnoisseur @squidscottjeans @sudek4l @wearemadeofstardust0 @mashiromochi @gracieroxzy @belcalis9503 @shari-berri @aoi-targaryen @whiteoakoak @spear-bearing-bi-witch @gisellesprettylies @loverandqueenofdragons @qoopeeya @mfnqueen1 @permanentlyexhaustedpigeon88 @v-love @swiftieblyth @joyfulyouthlover @harvey-malfoy @tian-monique @chxrrybomb22 @marvel-hiddles-stark @xjinnix @devils-blackrose @zombicupcake3 @jacesvelaryons @tempt-ress

[blyth-me]

make up: coriolanus snow

Summary: Coriolanus pushes it too far in an argument and after days of receiving the cold shoulder, he's tired of being ignored.

Warnings: SMUT 18+, arranged marriage, mentions of Sejanus, cursing, unhealthy ways of dealing with arguments, mentions of alcohol, dom!coryo, possessiveness, biting, penetrative sex (p in v), unprotected sex, young politician!coryo, praise

SMUT 18+ MDNI! IF I CANNOT SEE YOUR AGE, DO NOT INTERACT. ALL MINORS AND AGELESS BLOGS WILL BE BLOCKED.

Word Count: 2.1k

A/N: This is the first thing I've written in years so please be gentle. This is unedited, sorry for any typos. based on this post.

"Never leave a fight unresolved."

It's a saying your parents drilled into you as a child. They would rarely argue in front of you, but when they did, they made sure to apologize in front of you, too. They were the perfect examples of love, forgiveness, and compromise. As a child, you followed suit, always apologizing and forgiving quickly. When you didn't want to be quick to forgive, you would replay the saying in your mind over and over until you believed it. Thankfully, you didn't get into too many arguments or conflicts and the words of your mother and father were rarely necessary. Unfortunately, not everyone grew up with your parents.

"It's the secret to a happy marriage." Your mother insisted as she adjusted your veil before you met your father to escort you down the aisle. A happy marriage, you thought, not an arranged one. Your father had risen to significant political success and popularity when you were a child and he intended on maintaining his legacy. When you turned twenty-two, he explained as though it was no big deal that you, his "precious girl" would marry Coriolanus Snow. Your face crinkled in disgust at the news, you remember it clearly, but you forgave your father. You told yourself if you forgave your father and practiced tolerance with your assigned husband, you could be happy one day.

This, however, was not the case.

Coriolanus met you for the first time a week after your father broke the news about your husband-to-be. He came to your father's summer house and was polite, a little blunt, and reserved. He seemed cold, but not necessarily towards you. There was something... inexplicable and sad about him. You decided that all the rumors you heard about his time in the districts were true as you listened to him speak about Mr. and Mrs. Plinth. He seemed to have remorse? No, suspicious guilt, as he spoke about his late friend Sejanus. Somehow, the death of his "dearest friend" turned carefully into a discussion of his heroism and kindness to the Plinth's after the death of their beloved son. His expert manipulation made your skin crawl as you watched him win your parents over that dinner. You had to forgive him for that to make your arrangement tolerable. After all, this marriage was to further his career as a young politician and cement your father's.

For the first months of your marriage, you took all of Coriolanus' distance with a grain of salt. "He's seen things out there," your mother reminded you, "be understanding." You did your best to uphold your wifely duties to a man you didn't love (or really even know) yet and he did his best to uphold his. The two of you operated more like a well-oiled machine than a newlywed couple. The capitol balls and events felt more like a chore since most of the time he discussed politics with his colleagues and you were grouped off with the other wives to gossip. At night, you often tried to get him to open up to you as you had to him, but he wouldn't. You forgave your husband. The cycle went on and every night you crawled into what felt like a strangers bed.

Coriolanus, you quickly discovered, didn't apologize. He didn't apologize for manipulating your parents. He didn't apologize for his short answers to your common and normal questions. He didn't apologize for the lack of intimacy in your marriage or the lack of friendship between the two of you. He didn't apologize for keeping you waiting at dinner when he'd promise to be there on time. He didn't apologize for keeping himself at a distance. Your only option was to forgive him, but not tonight.

You couldn't remember how the argument started, but you did know how it ended. You freed yourself from his death grip on your wrist and told him to "go to hell", promptly wandering off to your room. You locked the door and climbed into the bed (which felt emptier than you thought it would), ignoring his incessant knocks and demands. Coriolanus fell asleep outside your door that night.

You didn't know much about your husband, but you did know that he loved power. He was a powerful man already in politics despite graduating the University only two years ago. He loved having power over conversations, which you observed at capitol events and when he met your parents formally. He loved having power over his life and therefore, loved having power over you. You were usually very forgiving, but not this time. So, you decided quietly before you slept, Coriolanus would have all chances at power revoked until you dragged an apology out of him.

For Coriolanus, the next days were torture. He was forced to sleep in the guest room of the penthouse you shared since you hid the bedroom key and moved all of his necessities to his new space. Nobody kicked him out of anywhere, let alone his own wife in their house. He tried to be extra sweet with you when you left the master bedroom to make breakfast, only to be met with curt responses if any. When that didn't work, he tried to slip notes under your door only to find them crumpled in the waste bin by his desk the next day. By the third day, Coriolanus was confused and angry. How could you be so immature? He tried to sit with you at dinner, but when you calmly stood up to eat in the silence of the bedroom, his face turned red with rage.

"You're acting like a child." He snapped. You stayed silent and kept walking.

"I am your husband! Don't walk away from me when I'm speaking to you." He shouted after you, scooting his chair out to follow you down the hallway. If kindness hadn't worked, maybe intimidation would have to do.

"I regret the day I agreed to marry you if this is how you'll treat me." He spoke pointedly.

You froze in your tracks, unable to pinpoint exactly why that statement affected you so much. You took a deep breath and continued moving until: "I wish your father would have mentioned you be a bitch behind closed doors, too."

Without a second thought, you spun around and threw your wine at him, tears pricking at your eyes. You watched as Coriolanus breathed heavily and examined his stark white dress shirt. You almost opened your mouth to speak, but bit your tongue and wiped your tears. You forced your half-eaten plate at his now maroon shirt and slammed the bedroom door without another word.

Hours went by as you curled up in bed, weeping at the words of the man was supposed to love you. This was not how you envisioned getting married. It was supposed to be your choice, not your father's. It was supposed to be a union, not a business deal. You weren't supposed to welcome home a cold man every night and sleep on opposite ends of the bed. Despite all the hurt Coriolanus put you through, you still wanted to be happy with him. He was attractive, but insensitive. He knew how to speak to people, but couldn't open up. Sometimes, he even looked at you like he could love you, but never showed you a crumb of affection beyond being polite. You could not forgive him.

A knock came at your door close to midnight. Against your better judgement, you opened up. On the other side was a disheveled Coriolanus, looking relieved that you answered before quickly regaining his composure.

"Good evening." He greeted. "You don't have to talk, I just..." He took a deep breath as you eyed him. "You should know that I regret our argument the other night."

You waited expectantly for the words "I'm sorry" to leave his lips, but you simply stared at each other.

"This arrangement has been strange for me." He began again as you scoffed. "I haven't been good to you, I see that now."

You pushed the door open a little further and stepped out from behind it, wearing your sleep clothes already as Coriolanus drank in your appearance. Suddenly, in a gesture you weren't expecting he dropped to his knees.

"Can you forgive me?" It came out as a whisper as you stared in disbelief. "Please."

The sound was satisfying to your ears as you looked down at him. He seemed exhausted and distraught, his white t-shirt snug around his shoulders as he looked up at you. You almost feel like drawing this out, making him formally apologize, but you're reminded of your parent's words: "Never leave a fight unresolved". For the first time in days, you spoke.

"Okay." You whispered.

Coriolanus' head shot up and his eyes met yours. In another gesture you weren't expecting, he stood up and cautiously wrapped his arms around you to pull you into a hug. Hugs weren't foreign between the two of you. Coriolanus would often sling his arms around you at public events and would hold you close if you were dancing at a dinner, but touches like this in private were extremely rare. You gingerly wrapped your arms around him in return as you inhaled deeply. His peace offering had been accepted.

"I want to start treating you like my wife." He turned his head into your neck and mumbled against it. "Affection like this should be normal." You shivered at his words and the feeling of his lips against your neck. You nodded and whispered a shy "yes" as he held you closer.

"You should never go to bed untouched. Especially looking like this." The words went straight to your core as he stood straight to look into your eyes. "Would you like that?" Your lips parted in surprise at his sudden change in demeanor.

"Hm?" He hums, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. "Let me show you." He leaned down and captured your lips in an experimental kiss. You couldn't bring yourself to push him away, the smell and feel of him becoming too much. He was everywhere. Coriolanus reconnected your lips feverishly and walked you backwards into your shared room.

"Coryo..." You whimpered as he nibbled your bottom lip.

"Be quiet." He ordered. "You didn't want to speak to me for days, you can be quiet while I fuck you."

You were ashamed at how wet you were becoming. It wasn't your first time having sex, but it was your first time having sex with Coriolanus. He laid you back on the bed and began to kiss and mark your neck.

"My wife," He breathed. "Don't disrespect me like that ever again."

"I didn't-" You were cut off by a quick slap against your thigh.

"Not a sound." He growled against your shoulder, biting down onto the skin as you tried to keep quiet.

In no time, your pajamas were off and so were his. Somewhere in between the messy, passionate kisses, Coriolanus slipped inside you with no warning. You gasped against his lips and whimpered quietly as he bottomed out.

"So fucking tight." He gasped into the skin of your neck.

Coriolanus began moving slowly inside of you, giving you time to adjust before picking up the pace. His icy blue eyes met yours as he kissed you deeply, feeling the way your walls sucked him in.

"Look at my wife. You're taking me so well, aren't you?" He asked mockingly.

You nodded quietly, fighting back the moans threatening to spill past your lips.

"Good girl."

The praise caused you to flutter around him as he kissed and nibbled your neck.

"You're all mine, do you understand?" Coriolanus slowed his thrusts and buried himself deeper inside of you.

"I-I understand." You responded breathily, making your husband smile wickedly.

"That's right baby. You're not going to ignore me anymore are you?"

You felt dizzy as his thrusts began to speed up again, unable to form words. He let your silence go becoming lost in pleasure himself. As Coriolanus continued fucking you passionately, he reached down between you to rub you clit.

"I'm close, Coryo." You moaned, holding his shoulders tightly.

Your words seemed to have the desired effect as his thrusts got sloppier as he buried his head into your shoulder. He nipped and kissed at the skin, making sure to praise you along the way. He told you how good you were, how tight you felt (just for him), and how pretty you sounded moaning his name like that. As you felt yourself cumming around him, you also felt yourself forgiving him.

Coriolanus pulled you close as you both basked in the afterglow. You decided, as you drew patterns on his chest, that this arrangement wasn't so bad if it meant nights like these. You decided, as he kissed your temple and played with your hair, that maybe a life with him was exactly what you needed. Just as you fell asleep in the arms of someone who finally felt like your husband, you decided you would always forgive him especially when it meant making up like this.

[modernelites-if]

Modern Elites is a 18+ raunchy slice-of-life IF that follows you, a young royal, navigating the world of the obscenely rich and immensely famous while trying to keep your elite, royal family together in the midst of drama and tabloids.

Setting: modern times, fictional tiny country of Selusa, New York, Paris and more.

Genre: slice-of-life, drama, romance

Celebrity. Pop Culture Icon. Heir.

Royal.

As the heir to the Selusan throne, you're known by many names. Growing under the spotlight hasn't been easy, especially since it seems the vultures all want a piece of your elusive family. Country clubs, yachts, parties, private jets, elite schools, you've had it all.

But is there something missing?

Customize your heir from appearance to gender identity to personality. Dictate what kind of person they are: rebellious, dutiful. Do they care about the royal line or are parties more on their mind? Will you keep a squeaky clean rep or ruin the family name?

Customize Salusa and cater the country to your taste.

Dictate what kind of leader you want to be, and how others percieve you.

Experience the life of the hidden .01% and the drama of the ultra wealthy.

Engage in fiery, dramatic romances that could either uplift or ruin you and your family.

and more to come.

THE ADVISOR

Imogen/Ian Lancaster [f/m]- your family's advisor and publicist. I has cleaned up every mess, every leak, every scandal and at this point, there are no secrets between your family and them. Coming from a well-off family themselves, they know exactly how this world works...and they navigate it with a steel will and a cold, detached demeanor. I has you handled like an adult with a child, trying (and probably failing) to keep you in line. Anything you do will go through them, so it's better to think twice.

THE BETROTHED

Everett/Eva St. Clare [m/f] - the eldest of one of the most influential businessmen on your side of the world, black sheep, and a source of gossip in polite society, there have been talks of a betrothal between you two since the partnership started. Because of that, you two are forced into a fake romance for the cameras. E is an arrogant and brash casanova, sex-obsessed, and is proudly noncommital with string of rumors that follow them like their own entourage. Unfortunately for you, E's exploits can damage the carefully constructed facade you two have built. Of course, E doesn't give a damn.

THE REBEL

Vince/Vivian De Grasso [m/f] - (secretly) fresh out of jail and newly reformed (not) V's politician of a mother has asked in a favor from your family: to reform them and stifle their rebellious ways by adding them to your security detail. Your father having a soft spot for the kid, brings them in as one of your guards. Hopefully V keeps in line...or not.

THE COMMONER

Cordelia/Corden Bowen [f/m]- an employee at the country club you frequent, someone less polite would call them a 'nobody.' C has a bit of an attitude, but that's expected from someone who is used to getting berated by rich people all day. There's not much else to say about them...or maybe there is?

THE JOURNALIST

Romi Marshall [m/f]- a famed journalist with contempt for royalty and elitism. Their newsletters frequently slam you and your family's every move, and they don't like you one bit. You can confidently say they're your biggest hater.

THE ROYAL BEST FRIEND

Oliver/Olivia Ames-Astor [m/f]- a fellow prince/princess from another country and your best friend, who is still hung up on their ex. Forced to betroth someone else, O has so many problems you can hardly sort through them. Still, they're kind and as polite as you'd expect from a person who has had etiquette lessons drilled into them since childhood. They're also your best friend, so there's that.

[jonsnowunemploymentera]

This part in Jon III AGoT when he’s realizing that he means to swear his life to a celibate institution at only the age of 14, before he could explore all the options the world has to offer him.

“I don’t care,” Jon said. “I don’t care about them and I don’t care about you or Thorne or Benjen Stark or any of it. I hate it here. It’s too… it’s cold.” “Yes. Cold and hard and mean, that’s the Wall, and the men who walk it. Not like the stories your wet nurse told you. Well, piss on the stories and piss on your wet nurse. This is the way it is, and you’re here for life, same as the rest of us.” “Life,” Jon repeated bitterly. The armorer could talk about life. He’d had one. He’d only taken the black after he’d lost an arm at the siege of Storm’s End. Before that he’d smithed for Stannis Baratheon, the king’s brother. He’d seen the Seven Kingdoms from one end to the other; he’d feasted and wenched and fought in a hundred battles. They said it was Donal Noye who’d forged King Robert’s warhammer, the one that crushed the life from Rhaegar Targaryen on the Trident. He’d done all the things that Jon would never do, and then when he was old, well past thirty, he’d taken a glancing blow from an axe and the wound had festered until the whole arm had to come off. Only then, crippled, had Donal Noye come to the Wall, when his life was all but over.

This part in Jon V, only two chapters later, when he’s finally about to become a man of the Watch but he can’t get too excited because he’s realizing that there’s a great big world down there, yet he’s all the way up here at the Wall - a cold, unwelcoming home; a prison with no escape unless he wishes to die.

He had no destination in mind. He wanted only to ride. He followed the creek for a time, listening to the icy trickle of water over rock, then cut across the fields to the kingsroad. It stretched out before him, narrow and stony and pocked with weeds, a road of no particular promise, yet the sight of it filled Jon Snow with a vast longing. Winterfell was down that road, and beyond it Riverrun and King’s Landing and the Eyrie and so many other places; Casterly Rock, the Isle of Faces, the red mountains of Dorne, the hundred islands of Braavos in the sea, the smoking ruins of old Valyria. All the places that Jon would never see. The world was down that road… and he was here. Once he swore his vow, the Wall would be his home until he was old as Maester Aemon. “I have not sworn yet,” he muttered. He was no outlaw, bound to take the black or pay the penalty for his crimes. He had come here freely, and he might leave freely… until he said the words. He need only ride on, and he could leave it all behind. By the time the moon was full again, he would be back in Winterfell with his brothers. Your half brothers, a voice inside reminded him. And Lady Stark, who will not welcome you. There was no place for him in Winterfell, no place in King’s Landing either. Even his own mother had not had a place for him. The thought of her made him sad. He wondered who she had been, what she had looked like, why his father had left her. Because she was a whore or an adulteress, fool. Something dark and dishonorable, or else why was Lord Eddard too ashamed to speak of her? Jon Snow turned away from the kingsroad to look behind him. The fires of Castle Black were hidden behind a hill, but the Wall was there, pale beneath the moon, vast and cold, running from horizon to horizon. He wheeled his horse around and started for home.

Yes Jon could leave the Watch, but he has no place! Because where would he go, bastard that he is?

That’s why the most underrated endgame theory is ‘Traveling Diplomat Jon’. Yes he’s a talented politician and he would do very well as a ruling lord, but there’s so much he’s yet to discover because he struggled to see where his illegitimate status could take him. But even in his bastardy, Jon is connected to so many important locations all around Westeros. Forget Winterfell. He could visit Harrenhall where his parents met. He could go look for rubies in the Trident and see where his father died. He could visit the Vale, the place that raised his adoptive father and the man he’s named after. He could take a trip to Starfall and visit his milkbrother, then visit the Tower of Joy’s ruins. He could got to Dragonstone and Summerhall, his father’s birthplace and home. If he wishes, he can cross the Narrow Sea and visit his friend (and personal banker) Tycho Nestoris in Braavos. And if his suicidal tendencies get stronger, why not visit the smoky ruins of Valyria where sleeping dragons were once brought to life, just like himself?

Jon has spent five books earning his ‘Lord Snow’ title. And though it’s an oxymoron everyone, from baseborn bastards to mighty kings, calls him that and not all of them do it as a sign of mockery. He’s put in a lot of work towards coming to terms with his bastardy. So it’s finally time for him to take that in consideration and realize that there’s a great big world out there that’s ready to welcome him, bastard as he is.

[lamemaster]

The Monster Who Ate Words

Request: Hello (*^^*) Can i please request an Arranged Marriage AU story for Maedhors x Vanyar Reader? Let's say reader is a bit intimidated by Maedhors ( who has not shown much interest in her ). And Maedhors doesn't want to scare her so he keeps his distance.

Pairing: Maedhros x Reader

Genre: Arranged marriage au

Summary: Nelyafinwe was good. Good enough in your books. Good looking from the times you had met in childhood, a great politician if rumors from Tirion were to be believed, and tall enough to expect respectably tall elflings in the future. 

AN: Thanks for requesting! I hope you like this :3 I really enjoyed writing this. Unedited for now don't kill me pls I have 3 little fish to feed.

“He hasn’t bothered to show face even once!” You scowl adjusting the errant pendant. “So why should I be the one to write to him?” You turn to your father, who by now has folded into himself like a petulant sunflower at sunset. 

“He is a prince!” Your mother roars undeterred. “He probably does more than just writing children’s fables in his free time, daughter mine.” To this your father protests silently to your mother. Only to flail helplessly.

Such has been the case for your parents. Your father- the distressed damsel and your mother- a fire-breathing drake. 

And you were nothing if not her rage personified. Which was wildly out of place in most Vanya settings. Some astray friends of yours had even jested in passing about you taking after your father-in-law, Crown Prince Feanaro more than his eldest. 

An arranged marriage to Nelyafinwe hadn’t been the most unexpected. Born to Ingwe’s brother, you expected such. Given that you rarely held the passion and patience for sweet nothings for a romance of your choosing.

Nelyafinwe was good. Good enough in your books. Good looking from the times you had met in childhood, a great politician if rumors from Tirion were to be believed, and tall enough to expect respectably tall elflings in the future. 

Additionally, much to your ire and your friend group’s joy, if a certain Telerin minstrel was to be believed then, the son of Feanaro possessed worthy assets. A fact that you swore did not bother you to anyone who dared to bring up the topic. 

Your betrothal to him had been set up 2 loar ago. An agreement was established through embellished scrolls and a piece of jewel exchanged by each side. That jewel now the emerald that had been forged into the pendant that hung from your neck for the past 2 loar. 

Binding you to the Feanorian with the dignity less than that of a stabled mare. 

Love, you did not expect. But such coldness had hurt. Absence of even a single acknowledgement had hurt. This your mother knew well. Better than your soft-hearted father could ever understand. For even rocks nestled in the depths of Earth crack under the pressure of an unyielding hammer. 

“My letter or the absence of it will make little difference.” You whisper and what follows is your mother’s uncanny silence. 

You have written to him. For two loar, you have written. Every week at the beginning of your betrothal, letters about Vanyamar, about your favored writings, or scents and silks that you would like for your wedding. 

Those soon dwindled to monthly updates with perfunctory greetings and everyday happenings. Sometimes about stories that you wrote for the children in court. Or about elflings born to your siblings. 

No matter what you wrote, Nelyafinwe never once did reply. As if your letters by some sorcery never slipped past the borders of Vanyamar. 

The last one had been short. A last-ditch effort on your end. A simple request. To meet at the Feast of Trees. That is all you had wanted of your betrothed. And he had failed. 

Out of all of Finwe’s line, Nelyafinwe had been the one to not show his face. A fact that you bitterly swallowed with a forced smile and cheerfully chatted with your future in-laws.

At least Nerdanel and Feanaro seemed to possess basic decency of character to bear the Vanya thrust their way.

Nelyafinwe despised it. The lingering scent of a promise that his betrothal held. Unfailingly binding compromise. 

A business matter to be ended over correspondence. He hadn’t given it much thought. His resentment did not allow it. 

The piece of amethyst that arrived with the letter had been handed off to Curvo and his father, who within a week produced a hairpin that ended up somewhere in the mess of Nelyafinwe’s room or the drawers of his study on most days. Gathering dust away from his gaze. Next to the letters. 

He had desired a choice. Unlike the horde of brothers and cousins that fate had thrusted into his life, Nelyafinwe had desired love.

But that too had been stripped away from his hands when his grandfather in a matter of a single day roped his father, who on most days detested Vanyar to arrange a wedding with one for his eldest son. 

It started as a silent protest that soon became a habit. The letters from Vanyamar were thrusted into the farthest drawer where the light of the trees barely ever lingered. 

Why could you not understand his signs? Was it not clear that he did not desire such a connection? He did not want your words or get to know you. He did not want it because depriving himself was the only way of showing his father what this had done to him. 

For once, he did not wish to be agreeable, gentle Nelyo everyone had made him into. This was his rebellion.

Some part of him had protested such cruelty towards you. What fault was it yours that elders desired a marriage of convenience? How fair was it for you to be the scapegoat of his ire? But those voices remained quiet.

So it came as a surprise when one day, your words found him despite all he tried to run away from them. 

Crouching next to Ambarussar, who sat surrounded by the hurricane of their mess of toys and all the possible possessions, Nelyafinwe saw tiny books. Handwritten illustrated books that the twins read aloud as Kano snored next to them, sprawled on a chaise. 

“What are you reading?” Maitimo sat next to them, only for the twins to ignore their usual protocol of climbing all over him. Amras sighed, barely glancing up at his elder brother “The Monster Who Ate Words.” He replied, his eyes glued to the book.

The pages of the book, inked it a clean hand, next to the drawing of a long red serpent with blazing eyes caught Maedhros’s interest. “Sister-in-law wrote these,” Amrod looked up at Nelyo, thrusting the book in his hands. “She designed the serpent after you!” The twins giggled now sharing a book as Maitimo flipped through the pages.

A childish tale indeed. The story went- on a long lonely island lived a raging serpent with red mane and glimmering silver eyes. The serpent terrorized the island with his loud roars and ability to devour words. This left the world empty and elflings bereft of any tales or lullabies. 

The ridiculous tale further developed into a group of outcast elflings gathering the words hidden in their textbooks to fight the serpent that detested sums and numbers. 

Nelyafinwe scoffed finishing the book. He was perfectly capable of summing, and no, he did not hate numbers or mathematical calculations. 

It took a moment for him to spot the empty room. Ambarussar had fled to Eru knows where and Kano had left the room unnoticed by Nelyafinwe. Rays of Laurelin had dimmed casting a mellow light in the room. 

Suddenly Maitimo wanted to go far away from the cluttered room. He wished to get on his mare and wander until his mind calmed down. Until his heart rate evened out. He despised this restlessness. 

For his heart could not remember the last time he had held your letter. The last time he had the chance to thrust it into the drawer. He could not remember. 

He had failed to notice it. This settled like dread in his gut. That something had changed. Somehow, from a stranger he had become the monster in your stories. 

Nelyafinwe does not run away. He knows he cannot do that, no matter how much his heart craves for freedom from such obligations. He is the eldest-born Feanorian. Named after the high king of Noldor. 

So seated in the silent dark of his study he opens the drawer full of the same writing as his brother's books.

Picking up the Amethyst hairpin heavy in his palm, he pulls his hair back and uses his betrothal gift after 2 loar. It holds his hair with the comfort he is familiar with. His father’s work never fail their purpose. But this one in specific is achingly familiar as it settles into his hair. 

With a distant curiosity, he wonders what gem of his claim rests on your being. He cannot remember the conversations 2 loar ago. He had merely agreed to the first suggestion by Indis and his mother. 

One by one he reads through your letters. Words leave him heavy with guilt. His throat- scratchy with the fullness of his heart and eyes. 

He is one wretched betrothed. Worthy of all the villainy in your books.

He reads from the first letters of ill concealed excitement of introductions. Of likes and dislikes, ideas of works in progress, to rare fleeting letters about weather and courtly affairs. 

In a matter of hours, he goes through the process of getting to know you and losing you. But he does not stop reading. He does not deserve the respite of that ignorance. 

And so he picks up the quill and begins his labor. For days he sits in his study replying to the letters. His likes, dislikes, hobbies, courtly affairs, and a short review of The Monster Who Ate Words. 

To quell the heartache of his own making. This in the least was of his own choice.

[mitigatedchaos]

You Won't "Beat Trump at His Own Game"

Post for July 8, 2024 5,500 words, 25 mins

[ @morlock-holmes ]

Like, can you guys imagine Donald Trump ever admitting that he lost a debate? Let alone imagine his party *withdrawing him as nominee* because of it? And we're going to beat him at his own game by, uh, doing literally the exact opposite of his game?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

Your plan is to beat Trump by being better at being Trump than Trump is? Damn, son. You got a Texas oil baron lined up or something?

-★-

I watched the first hour of the debate. At one point the moderator asked Trump about abortion. As the Republican candidate, this is a tricky question for him, since evangelical voters would like abortion banned in most cases (and thus presumably every state). Trump then argued that he was leaving it up to the states, and the states would decide. He says that he agrees that the abortion pill should be legal, and agrees with the court ruling in favor of it, and that he supports the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. Further, he's against third trimester and 'post-birth abortion.'

While banning most first trimester abortion only has 38% support, banning most third trimester abortion has 80% supermajority support. The views of the median voter are in tension: they don't want to force women to have babies they don't want, but they also don't want to kill babies.

Biden stumbles in his delivery of his canned line in response, which appeared to be based on the idea that strict limits on abortion access would de facto nullify the exceptions.

Democrats have repeatedly lied about abortion. Republicans have repeatedly lied about abortion. The whole argument about 'after-birth' abortions appears to be based on political fencing with bills, which Democrats also do. (Something like the classic, "Oh, sure, it's illegal, but will you make it super double illegal? Oh, you won't? That means you support it, then.")

(I should note, at the time, I wrote, "I don't think Americans should trust a single word either of these guys is saying.")

But later, Biden trips over Roe v. Wade and the three trimesters to the point that it's unclear just what the hell he means.

The main CNN video doesn't support comments, but there's a clip that does. The top comment?

we're fucked as a nation

In my opinion, these comments overall agree with my post...

Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.

It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.

-★-

With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."

There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.

People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.

Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.

I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.

All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.

So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.

So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)

Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."

It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.

So to me, this feels safe.

I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.

I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)

This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.

-★-

Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)

Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.

So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)

But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.

To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:

Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position. We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police." "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."

In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.

From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)

This was a triple failure.

First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.

Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.

Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.

Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.

Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.

I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.

In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.

-★-

There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.

But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.

To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.

I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.

Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.

Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.

So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.

The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?

First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)

Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)

Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.

So was Trump right? Was he wrong?

Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.

What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.

Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.

Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.

(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)

-★-

Anyhow, that was all background.

How did Democrats get into this mess?

Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.

The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.

After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.

Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.

Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.

They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.

This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.

One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.

A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.

The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.

So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)

-★-

Why did this happen?

First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.

There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)

Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).

Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."

The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.

Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.

Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.

However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)

It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.

We lack means to convert funding into results.

(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)

Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.

They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.

Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)

When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."

The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.

And for the debate itself...

Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭

Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.

-★-

A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:

Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.

I had been writing a draft response to this.

Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)

Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.

During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).

In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.

Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)

There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.

However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.

One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.

For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.

While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.

Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.

If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.

In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.

-★-

As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:

"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."

Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.

Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:

Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.

He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.

Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.

A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.

There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.

Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.

For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.

For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.

Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"

To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"

From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.

But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.

The actual job is President of the United States.

If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.

That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.

-★-

Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.

How do you deal with this?

That's "simple": split the issues.

A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.

Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.

For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.

For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.

The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.

Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.

-★-

If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.

You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.

-

[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.

[2] It's more complicated than this.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Book Report: Royal Audience

Welcome to another semi-recurring feature, where I read the royal books so you don’t have to.

A new royal book has recently been published. This one I found at my library in the “new books”/“this just in” section.

It’s about the Special Relationship between the US and the UK, focusing mainly on The Queen’s relationship with the POTUS.

There’s a lot of history and international politics discussed, but I found it an easy, enjoyable read. I do wish the photographs had been in color instead of black and white so it’d be easier to see the details, which are often discussed in the text. One thing that quickly became clear while reading is that of the men whom are considered The Queen’s favorites, the only thing they all have in common is that they gave attention to and supported the whole family at-large, like hosting Charles or Anne, being friendly with Margaret, giving opportunities for Philip to visit solo, etc. The POTUSes that just gave attention to The Queen and Philip weren’t as successful as nurturing the Special Relationship.

So without further ado, anecdotes about The Queen’s Presidents:

Hoover: The Queen never formally met him “in office,” but she sat next to him at dinner once in the ‘50s.

Wilson: The Queen never met him but he did visit George V at Windsor Castle (the first POTUS invited to Windsor) and that visit set the tone for many of the POTUSes’ visits to The Queen.

FDR: Another POTUS that The Queen never met, but her parents did. George VI and the Queen Mother were the first reigning monarchs to visit the US in 1939 and it was a smashing success. While the Americans have always had an affinity for the BRF, it was this tour (in which FDR and Eleanor served the royals their first hot dogs) that cemented how much Americans supported, or would show up for, the royals if/when they came to visit:

As the Washington Post once wrote, “She’s not our queen but before we’re through with her, she’ll probably think she is” and as Obama once quipped to Charles: “it’s fair to say that the American people are quite fond of the royal family…they like them much better than they like their own politicians.”

Truman was POTUS when Elizabeth and Philip had their first official tour of the US in October 1951 as Duchess and Duke of Edinburgh. The trip, conducted as part of a visit to Canada, was delayed due to King George’s lung surgery and resulted in Elizabeth and Philip taking the BRF’s first international flight. Apparently everyone was so nervous about the flight that the Royal Navy deployed battleships every 700 nautical miles across the Atlantic just in case. By taking the flight, the royals were only a week behind schedule and they sailed home with 97 pieces of luggage.

Eisenhower: the Eisenhower were considered family friends by the royals. He remains the only POTUS to be invited to Balmoral and Elizabeth sent him her personal recipe for drop scones which - yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus - is published in the book, for all you home bakers. The Queen made her first state visit to the US under Eisenhower coinciding with the 350th anniversary of the Jamestown Colony (a trip Her Majesty would repeat 50 years later for the 400th anniversary and made me late to school but that’s another story for later). This state visit is what finally knocked Sputnik off the American front pages.

Kennedy: If you watched the Kennedy episodes of The Crown’s Season 2, you can skip this chapter. Kennedy once met a young Princess Elizabeth though, when his father was the US ambassador.

Johnson: The Queen never met Johnson in person. LBJ didn’t like traveling and preferred to focus on domestic affairs and Vietnam. But Princess Margaret did meet LBJ while on a visit to the US, which is also chronicled on The Crown, which the author takes great pains to mention is fiction because Margaret and LBJ never actually did kiss 🙄. LBJ and The Queen were friendly in letters though.

Nixon: hosted The Queen’s very first Thanksgiving dinner when he visited London in November 1958 (while Eisenhower’s VP) to open the American Memorial Chapel at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Queen’s acceptance of the invitation to Thanksgiving dinner caused such a consternation because Nixon hadn’t lacked a tuxedo that all the men in the American delegation who had traveled with him and worked at the embassy were measured to find someone from whom Nixon could borrow a tuxedo. Nixon’s visit to Buckingham Palace in February 1969 was the first time that color film was used at the palace.

Ford: hosted The Queen and Philip during the US’s bicentennial celebrations. It is considered to be one of The Queen’s most successful visits/tours. The tour was in July 1976 and if you know East Coast summer weather, you have an idea already what the weather was like. First there were rough seas that made even Philip seasick (they flew from London to Bermuda, then sailed on Britannia from Bermuda to Philly). Then there was humid muggy heat in Philly that The Queen was fanning herself often. And then in DC, it was even swampier with daytime temps of 100F in the shade. The bicentennial visit later became the theme of The Queen’s 1976 Christmas message - reconciliation.

Carter: Carter was the POTUS most considered to be The Queen’s peer since they were closest in age, and that’s about the only thing they had in common. He horribly offended The Queen Mother by kissing her at the G7, hosted Princess Anne on her first solo trip to the US (wherein she shocked the press by being more like Philip in her temperament than The Queen), and personally lobbied Westminster Abbey to include his favorite poet - Dylan Thomas - in Poets Corner. His wife, Rosalyn, is the only FLOTUS The Queen didn’t meet.

Reagan: After Eisenhower, probably the POTUS The Queen was closest to, over their shared love of horses. Their relationship reminds me of the classic “introvert adopted by extroverts” trope (albeit in its own unique way). The Reagans’ first trip to the UK was chaotic in its planning with offenses left and right that made Margaret Thatcher reel. Charles and Nancy had a wonderful relationship and were close for the rest of her life.

Bush 41: Bush (another peer who of similar demographics to The Queen; they were just a few years apart in age, he served in WW2 with a career that reminded her of Philip’s, each had four surviving children, their eldest sons were relatively the same age) was favorite POTUS #3 after Eisenhower and Reagan. The relationship started off rocky, but it was Pickles - a puppy from the Bushes’ dog given to a friend whom The Queen had visited - that smoothed everything over and the two couples got along well. The Queen’s official visit under Bush 41 began with the infamous ‘talking hat’ speech and saw her take in her first baseball game. It was proposed that Philip should throw the first pitch out but The Queen nixed it, though she did join Bush for a little walkabout on the field before the game started. (Boo. I would’ve rather liked to see Philip throw the first pitch. I bet he’d have thrown a strike without any practice.)

Clinton: Clinton prioritized the relationship with Blair more than with The Queen, which ended up salvaging the Special Relationship after Blair’s predecessor (John Major) practically blew it up by getting involved in the 1992 POTUS election when he/his government campaigned for Bush. But Clinton came around to The Queen in the end. Clinton is notably the first president who was younger than The Queen and I suspect his presidency marked a change in how The Queen approached the special relationship.

And also, there’s a very good chance that this chapter illustrates Meghan’s obsession with Hillary Clinton - Diana and Hillary had a good enough friendship, even if only a working relationship, that Diana co-chaired a White House breakfast with Hillary. The book also points out that much of Diana’s post-BRF work in the US took place in the Clinton administration, so now I’m wondering if perhaps Meghan sees the Clintons as a partial extension of Diana’s network and that’s why she tries so hard with Hillary. (And also there’s the obvious that Hillary knew/met Diana so maybe Meghan has been trying to court Hillary to be part of the “Meghan is just like Diana” fan club.)

Bush 43: had the first official full state visit of The Queen’s reign, which was also only the second state visit by a US President (Wilson in 1918). There were significant security concerns due to the War on Terror and this is also when the Daily Mail’s reporter was a footman for 2 months; the reporter broke his own cover to report on the state visit. The Queen had her final state visit to the US in May 2007 as part of the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Jamestown. (Her visit was the unofficial kickoff to the official celebrations, which began the week after.)

I didn’t know this, but The Queen personally donated a significant sum to the 9/11 memorial funds. Also The Queen enjoys Mexican food. A lady after my own heart!

Obama: Obama’s relationship with Britain began cool, owing to family tragedy closely connected with British colonialism in Kenya. He and the PM at the time, Brown, didn’t seem to get on, but The Queen stepped in and it’s thought her gentleness with the Obamas is what softened Obama’s consideration of the British. I do believe that Obama was the first head of state to see The Queen as more a grandmotherly figure and that helped boost The Queen’s global reputation (Bush 43 and Clinton saw her as motherly, and everyone through Bush 41 saw her as a contemporary/peer).

In the epilogue, the author writes that he believes Obama was favorite POTUS #4. I think the Obamas had a special friendship with The Queen, but sometimes I feel like it was more of mentorship, with The Queen showing them a generous kindness they weren’t expecting that led to both of them learning from her what it means to be diplomatic without losing sense of themselves.

Trump: His working visit in 2018 and the state visit in 2019 both were preceded by chaos and politics. A lot of people looked to The Queen’s symbolism in her outfits for how she felt about him. Trump held The Queen in high esteem, which she seemed to reciprocate diplomatically, but he had waffling views on Britain itself and that seemed to affect how the Special Relationship was managed (ie one day they were allies, the next day, Trump was assailing the mayor of London on Twitter).

Biden: No one quite knew what to do with him. He had proud Irish heritage so everyone thought he wouldn’t regard Britain well, but at the same time, Biden was outspoken against Brexit and Boris Johnson, which aligned with mainstream feelings of the day, so they weren’t sure how the wind was going to blow. But the Special Relationship prevailed, with Biden in a unique position that saw him speaking more about the generosity and the humanity of The Queen given what was happening to her - first the COVID protocols, then Oprah interview, then Philip’s passing, then her own illness.

(Biden is in the “Queen as motherly” club with Clinton and Bush 43.)

[diioonysus]

my favorite historical facts

mayans believed that having crossed-eyes meant you were favored by the sun god kinich ahau, who was cross-eyed as well. in hopes that children would be, they would have objects dangled between their eyes to permanently cross their eyes.

ancient rome had a 4-story shopping mall with 150 shops and offices which was made in 113 AD

ancient egyptians invented toothpaste, they made it with rock salt, pepper, mint, and dried iris flowers

until recently (20th century) bones and mummies were used in traditional medicine, as some believed they could cure ailements by ingesting related body parts.

left-handed people were considered unlucky in ancient rome

lots of medieval barbers were also dentists and surgeons, which is why barbershops use red and white stripes because the stripes represent bandages used during bloodletting.

in medieval germany, married couples could legally settle their disputes by fighting a martial duel.

married women were not allowed to watch the ancient olympics, under penatly of death, but the vestal virigins in ancient rome were allowed to in some circumstances because their sacred building was knocked down to make a stadium

ancient greeks invented the first alarm clock in a system where pebbles would be dropped onto a gong and this would then make a loud sound

if a pirate ship approached flying a red flag with a hourglass on it then the defenders knew they were in some shit as red meant "give no quarter" and the hourglass meant essentially your time on earth was about to run out

shakespeare originated the "yo momma" joke, as in his one play titus androcius, a character says "thou has undone our mother," to which another character says "villain, i have done thy mother."

before abraham lincoln became a politician, he was a champion wrestler with more than 300 bouts under his belt, and only lost one match in his career. he was inducted into the national wrestling hall of fame in 1992

the gauls when trying to sack rome, caedicius had to get approval from the senate on the besieged capitoline. a messenger snuck through the gallic camp and scaled the unguarded cliff side of the hill to deliver the message. It was quickly decided to restore camillus to his command and to give him dictatorial powers and then the messenger snuck his way out again. the senone scouts discovered the messenger’s footprints and figured out that there was a way to scale the cliffs. they choose a night with a full moon and sent their bravest warriors up the cliff. none of the romans noticed, but the geese did. they started honking loudly and woke up the sleeping romans, the romans than pushed the gauls off the hill, and due to this fight the gauls suffered food shortages and diseases, so geese saved the day.

a pig was executed in 1386 after attacking a kid who would die from their wounds. the pig was arrested, kept in prison, and then sent to the court where it stood trial for murder, eventually being found guilty and then executed by hanging.

forks used to be considered blasphemous. when forks arrived in 11th century italy, it alarmed religious leaders because eating with artifical hands offended god.

the bluetooth design and name was named after the viking king harald bluetooth, based on an analogy that the technology would unite devices the way harald bluetooth united the tribes of denmark into a single kingdom. his intials in runes is the design of the logo

throwing an apple at somebody in ancient greece was considered flirting because the apple was sacred to aphrodite, so throwing it was declaring ones love

king george v of england was euthanized as his staff wanted his death to make the morning papers rather than the evenings ones, so they put him to death early without his consent

robert liston, a surgeon preformed an operation with a 300% mortality rate; he killed the patient and two other people

[hotvintagepoll]

Suchitra Sen's impending loss is tearing my heart out. How can Bengali cinema's greatest female icon lose out in round 2 itself? I won't let her go down without a fight!

Suchitra Sen entered films as a married woman and a mother which was highly unusual for not just Bengali cinema, but for the whole of Indian cinema as well. In an age when actresses tried their best to hide the fact that they were married and had children, Suchitra Sen was not afraid to swim against the tide.

Hailing from erstwhile East Bengal (present day Bangladesh) she left with her family for present day West Bengal in India following Partition in 1947 and she had to adapt to the dialect and pronunciations used in Bengali films made in India.

Many talk about Suchitra Sen's quiet dignity on screen, but summing it up so briefly does her injustice. She played melodramatic without resorting to melodramatic acting. Her screen presence was so heartbreakingly real and didn't have the theatrical nature that was associated with Indian cinema of that era.

Starting from the 1950s, Bengali rom coms were all Suchitra Sen and Uttam Kumar. They had incredible chemistry on screen. But Suchitra Sen was determined to prove that she was not just Uttma Kumar's other half on screen but a capable and frankly good actress in her own right. So, in the 1960s she went on to do many women centric films opposite other lead actors (such as Bikash Roy and Soumitra Chatterjee), thus giving us some gems of Bengali cinema like Uttar Falguni (1963) and Saat Pake Bandha (1963), the latter won her the best actress award at the Moscow International Film Festival making her one of the first Indian actresses to win an International award.

In Uttar Falguni (1963), she plays a woman who flees an abusive marriage and becomes a courtesan to support her daughter. In Saat Pake Bandha (1963), she plays a young woman whose marriage disintegrates due to her mother's interference. In both these films, Sen doesn't need words, her loss, her pain, her anger are all etched on her face in different moments but never does it fall to melodramatic theatrics.

In Devdas (1955), Bimal Roy's classic production of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's celebrated novel, she plays the role of Paro and is in my opinion the best of the many Paro's I've seen on screen in adaptations ranging from 1936 to 2002 and beyond.

In Aandhi (1975), she played a politician estranged from her husband dealing with a clash of love and career.

Suchitra Sen was a classic Bengali beauty and an icon, not just of Bengal but of India as a whole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSV2xoFQCJ8&list=PLA_A9T_Uj7IxMGFk5Pif7gjJR46v8FRPZ&index=5

Suchitra Sen vs Cyd Charisse

The linked video:

[silvermoon424]

I'm glad I'm not the only 1 that felt that way. There's also a Stars ep from the 90s ver with this issue. Mina joins a idol competition and 1 of the starlights is all "what abt ur mission?" Mina WINS and puts the letter away and I was so sad for her. Her dream was SO close but she couldn't achieve it because she had to be a guardian.

UGH, I KNOW. And remember that episode in the S season where she had to give up playing on her school's volleyball team, which she loved? That's not even touching the end of the Sailor V manga, where Adonis/Kaitou Ace predicts that Minako will always, always choose duty over love and thus her love life will always be cursed. Like give my queen something, for fuck's sake!!

@bismuthwisdom said this in the tags of my initial post and I totally agree: the "tragic duty-bound Senshi" thing already happened in the Silver Millennium. Wasn't being able to live normal, happy lives the entire point of Queen Serenity sending her court to be reincarnated? Why are they once again being forced to choose between their duty and their dreams/passions/relationships?

It just rubs me the wrong way. I feel like it would have been much more impactful to have the Senshi reject the dichotomy of "Sailor Senshi OR individual with dreams and passions of their own" and embrace both.

Also, I'm probably reading too much into it, but it reminds me of how women are so often told "you have to choose between having a family or having a career! You can't have both!" as if working mothers haven't been juggling those roles for centuries. Not to mention fathers are never given that dichotomy; it's just assumed that they can easily be both fathers and businessmen/politicians/etc.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:

Yesterday, nearly 200 Democrats and Republicans wrote amicus briefs asking the Supreme Court to rule in favor of transgender rights in the upcoming L.W. v. Skrmetti case, which challenges Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. It is the first such case that the Supreme Court is hearing. “While the government has a role in keeping kids safe, that role is limited, and it does not justify the State second-guessing the judgments of parents acting in good faith who are best positioned to know what their children need,” the Republican signatories wrote in their brief. “States have no business overruling the decisions of fit parents who make an informed medical choice for their children that is supported by their doctors, by the medical profession more generally, by the children themselves, and by their conscience.”

The Republican brief was signed by numerous former and current Republican politicians and notable officials like Kentucky state Rep. Kim Banta; former U.S. Reps. Barbara Comstock (R-VA), Denver Riggleman (R-VA), and Deborah Price (R-OH); former Republican National Committee National Press Secretary Kirsten Kukowski; Republican campaign manager Colin Reed; and the late Sen. John McCain’s chief of staff and advisor Mark Salter. It was also notably signed by former Rep. Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the mother of Advocates for Trans Equality executive director Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen.

[...] 164 Democratic legislators signed their brief. The group was made up of 11 U.S. senators and 153 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and their brief stressed the discriminatory nature of Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban. “The current rash of bills targeting transgender people is merely the latest round of discrimination faced by transgender individuals. Lower courts have cataloged the “widespread private opprobrium and governmental discrimination” faced by transgender individuals,” they wrote in their brief. “But amici believe enough is enough. Tennessee has no ‘proper legislative end but to make [transgender adolescents] unequal to everyone else. This [Tennessee] cannot do.’—so the Court should reverse.” The politicians seen in this brief include Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), among others. They also argue that animosity towards trans people played a large role in passing Tennessee’s bill. They note that Tennessee is a “hotbed” for such animosity, having nearly twice as many anti-LGBTQ+ laws as any other state. They refer to hateful rhetoric from Tennessee politicians. The core argument in this brief is that there is a medical consensus that gender-affirming care is safe, medically necessary, and backed by numerous reputable organizations across the United States and the world. They argue Tennessee is discriminating against transgender individuals by blocking them from accessing safe and effective health care. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign both supported the brief.

Nearly 200 Democrats and Republicans filed amicus briefs in support of gender-affirming care in the United States v. Skrmetti (L.W. v. Skrmetti) case, with 164 of those being Democrats.

These are just two of the pro-trans amicus briefs filed in Skrmetti.

See Also:

Erin In The Morning: Families Split Apart: Families Fleeing Anti-Trans Laws File Amicus In Supreme Court Case

[scotianostra]

On October 16th 1516, Alexander Home, 3rd Lord Home and his brother William were executed in Edinburgh.

It's fair to say that those men who held the title Duke of Albany, have been involved in some of the most troublesome intrigue in our long history, the first one, a ruthless politician, was brother of King Robert III and was widely regarded as having caused the murder of his nephew, the Duke of Rothesay, this in turn forced the King to send the future James I to France in 1406, but was captured by pirates and "sold" to the English and held for 18 years, his ambitious uncle ruled as King in all but name until his death in 1420, when the next his son Murdoch, took over as Duke and regent, James I was eventually released in 1425 and Murdoch inevitably lost his head after being found guilty of treason.

Jump forward about 90 years and just after James IV died at Flodden, John Stewart, the latest Duke of Albany took over as Regent to James V was another of the boy Kings, I mentioned in my post earlier about James II.

Lord Home led his horsemen were part of the Scottish force that fought at Flodden, and was one of the few successful charges of that day, his men defeated the right wing of the English army, it's a pity other tactics went horribly wrong. As the battle progressed and the Scots were being slaughtered Lord Home fled the field, he did however stay on in Northumbria and attempted, unsuccessfully to to recapture the taken Scottish artillery some days later.

This story seems to be more about two men who disliked each other than anything else.

Although accepting Albany as Regent things started to go sour when the two had a meeting at Dumbarton Castle, where legend has it, Albany joked about Lord Home's small stature, quoting 'minuit praesentia famam' meaning 'the appearance doesn't live up to report.' Their relationship deteriorated and it seems Home tried to garner influence in England, possibly hoping to seek refuge there, sensing things were not going to end well with the new Regent.

In September 1515 Albany forcibly took Hume Castle, and ordered Home to meet him later that year at the Collegiate Church at Dunglass, where he was arrested and imprisoned at Edinburgh Castle. The keeper of the castle at the time was the Earl of Arran and Home's Brother in Law. Home persuaded Arran to escape with him and take up arms against Albany, they joined another rebel, the Earl of Angus in the Borders.

Moving North they attacked Glasgow capturing ammunition and throwing it down a well, they then headed east and to Dunbar, attacking the castle there and heading south again captured the Chief Herald, the Lord Lyon King of Arms at Coldstream holding him ransom for his mother who was a prisoner of one of Albany's lieutenants.

After offering a pardon, Albany invited Home and his brother William to Holyroodhouse, where he promptly arrested the pair, imprisoning then on the fortified island of Inchgarvie on The Firth of Forth.

Initially they were accused of the trumped charges of the murder of James IV at Flodden, then of failing to prevent English re-fortification at Norham Castle after the battle.

Finally he and William were charged with rebellion against Albany and beheaded, and their heads displayed on the gable of Edinburgh Tolbooth.

In the mid 1520's Albany was overthrown from the Scottish regency, and lived mainly in France until his death in 1536.

The pic is model of the Old Tolbooth exhibited in Edinburgh's Huntly House Museum. The execution platform can be seen projecting from the building. The second pic is a painting by Scottish artist Henry G. Duguid of the Tolbooth and St Giles.

[mariacallous]

US environmental law is a relatively young discipline. The Environmental Protection Agency is a little more than 50 years old, and the Clean Air and Clean Water acts—legislation we today see as bedrocks of public health and environmental safeguards—were passed in 1963 and 1973, respectively. When the case that would become Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council was filed in the early 1980s, the EPA was just beginning to pump out rules that would have major economic consequences for business and industry.

In its decision last week overturning Chevron deference—a crucial legal precedent that gives federal agencies the ability to interpret laws that are otherwise vague or ambiguous—the Supreme Court has taken the future of an incalculable number of regulations on public health, clean water, and clean air out of the hands of scientists for organizations like the EPA and passed it along to nonexpert judges who will hear challenges to these regulations in court.

“Anybody who doesn’t like a federal-agency regulation can now bring it before a court,” said Jillian Blanchard, a director at Lawyers for Good Government. “It’s scary.”

Overturning Chevron is just a cog in the larger plan to dismantle the administrative state and environmental law as we know it—and the ultraconservative forces and fossil fuel defenders, like the Koch brothers, behind it are only getting started.

Ironically, the Chevron decision was initially seen as a win for polluting industries. The Clean Air Act mandates that new stationary sources of pollution go through an agency review, but it fails to define what exactly a source is. In the early 1980s, Reagan’s EPA—headed by Anne Gorsuch, the mother of current Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch—expanded the definition of source to mean an entire factory or complex. This significantly cut down on red tape for polluting industries, which previously had to go through government approval processes to add individual smokestacks to larger facilities. The National Resources Defense Council sued the EPA and won; Chevron interfered and took the case to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled 8–0 to reverse the lower court’s decision and handed a victory to the oil giant—and the EPA.

The doctrine established by the case was also seen as a good tool for corporate life. Industries rely on consistent federal guidelines to build their business models. Taking the specifics of regulations out of the courts and putting them into the hands of agencies provided stability for companies that needed to plan ahead.

“As the deference doctrine became known law, everybody just came to rely on it,” Blanchard said. “They may not like an agency’s decision on something, but they were able to rely on the fact, like, OK, at least we can trust the process.”

Subsequent administrations passed much stronger environmental regulations using the Chevron doctrine as a basis. The EPA, especially under Democratic presidents, increasingly came to be seen as an onerous, antibusiness body by industrial interests and ultraconservative figureheads alike. Even Antonin Scalia, who for most of his career was a champion of Chevron, showed signs of tiring of the doctrine in his later years.

In 1989 climate scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm about climate change in front of Congress. In the years that immediately followed, climate science was accepted by both Democratic and Republican politicians, and George H. W. Bush expressed support for climate change policies. The fossil fuel industry panicked and began organizing to combat what it saw as an oncoming wave of regulation. In the decades since, the industry and its allies have invested in politicians, scientists, and cultural figures to publicly sow doubt about climate science, transforming what should have been a straightforward policy problem into a cultural and political war that is still playing out today. Charles and David Koch, who had built up a massive chemical, industrial, and fossil fuel empire, were some of the most important funders of this campaign, almost single-handedly ensuring that climate action stalled for decades in the US. (It’s no accident that it took until 2022 for the country to pass any sort of climate change legislation.)

Those interested in casting doubt on science and clearing out the administrative bedrocks of environmental law had a valuable ally in Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society and one of the most influential figures in stacking the Supreme Court with ultraconservative judges. Although much of Leo’s massive funding to remake the courts comes from dark money, the Kochs have played a public and private role in supporting his efforts. In 2016 Leo coordinated a $10 million donation from the Kochs to George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, for which Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh have all served as faculty; Thomas’ long-standing appearances at Koch donor events was also facilitated by Leo, as ProPublica reported last year.

“This whole thing has been funded by the Koch brothers,” Blanchard said.

The Koch-funded, Leo-facilitated assault on the administrative state hasn’t been isolated to Chevron. On Monday, the court ruled along familiar 6–3 party lines in Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, in a decision that creates new opportunities for companies to attack federal regulations years after they’re put in place.

“After today, even the most well-settled agency regulations can be placed on the chopping block,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent. “Any established government regulation about any issue—say, workplace safety, toxic waste, or consumer protection—can now be attacked by any new regulated entity within six years of the entity’s formation.”

A day before the Loper Bright decision last week, the court ruled, again 6–3, in a decision against the Securities and Exchange Commission that could potentially force federal agencies to hold jury trials as a regular part of enforcement. Last year, the EPA issued more than 950 compliance orders, fining a wide variety of companies, industrial plants, and other entities for not being in line with federal standards. Pat Parenteau, an emeritus professor at Vermont Law School who served as regional counsel in the EPA’s New England office, said that administrative orders are the agency’s “bread and butter.”

“If you have to go to the DOJ to file a lawsuit [for the 900-plus administrative orders], the enforcement program is going to collapse,” he said.

The elimination of Chevron and other guardrails for administrative law doesn’t mean that all environmental rules will disappear tomorrow. The Supreme Court hasn��t used Chevron in a decision in years. Last year, in Sackett v. EPA, the majority justices sidestepped the doctrine altogether in their decision, which effectively wiped out federal protections for as many as half the nation’s wetlands—a preview of the type of decisions that can now be made without Chevron in play.

Lower courts have still consistently relied on Chevron and made decisions using the doctrine that, one analysis found, overwhelmingly favored federal agencies. Now, facing incapacitated enforcement mechanisms and a wide-open field to challenge federal regulations, with a host of conservative judges across the country ready to hear lawsuits, deep-pocketed polluters have little in the way of taking swings at the remaining laws holding them back.

There are a dizzying amount of opportunities ahead of them—and untold effects on the American public when environmental protections are dismantled. Agencies could begin to act more cautiously for fear of lawsuits, a trend that, as Blanchard’s organization points out, could have devastating effects during a crisis like the current avian flu epidemic, when entities like the Department of Agriculture and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention need to work together. The Supreme Court has already agreed to hear a case next year reconsidering denied approvals for a crude oil railway, and its decision could do away with how the government calculates potential fossil fuel emissions associated with infrastructure projects.

“We have by no means seen the end of the assault on the administrative state—which is environmental law,” said Parenteau. “Environmental law is the administrative state.”

Parenteau said that although the Clean Air and Clean Water acts are likely to be the first targets of proponents of Chevron’s demise, conservative towns and cities could eventually decide to take new federal regulations intended to protect the public from “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, to court. “The costs of monitoring and testing for those PFAS chemicals in the parts per trillion is going to be exorbitant,” he said. “My guess is there’s going to be a real pushback as these rules start to take effect.”

For Leo’s part, he has already signaled where he intends to turn next. In recent months, his network has launched public and private campaigns to persuade the Supreme Court to take up a case involving the city and county of Honolulu’s suit against a handful of fossil fuel companies, one of dozens of such climate suits being launched across the country. If the conservative court decides to hear the case, it’s likely to deal a blow to one of the newest strategies to hold Big Oil accountable—and one of the last remaining lines of defense for a nation that’s rapidly losing its ability to make polluters pay to clean up their messes.

[lets-talk-gundam]

An Introduction to Mobile Suit Gundam Sidestory - Another One Year War

Using a fork of the Operation V RPG system developed for the Feddie Scum actual play podcast, I've been running a Gundam TTRPG for the past couple months and we're coming up on the end of the first story arc! Here, I'll be sharing and documenting the events of the game.

All posts relating to this game will be tagged as #another one year war!

More below!

The premise.

It is the year 0079 of the Universal Century. A half-century has passed since Earth began moving its burgeoning population into gigantic orbiting space colonies. A new home for mankind, where people are born and raised. And die. 3 months ago, the cluster of colonies furthest from the Earth, called Side 3, proclaimed itself the Principality of Zeon and launched a war of independence against the Earth Federation. As Zeon’s ground invasion continues, one group of Federation soldiers will find themselves in a position to change history. This is the story of Bee-Line, a team that will come to be known by many names, and for many deeds. Good, and ill.

I'll be posting some character profiles of my players' characters and important NPCs over the next couple days!

Player Character profile 1/6:

Namana Rayadin, the classic Gundam child soldier™ Nationality: Spacenoid, Side 2 Rank: Civillian (For now)

Born and raised in poverty on Island Iffish, Namana used his talents as a tinkerer to support his mother and sister, as his father had left to fight for the Zabi cause.

After an unfortunate run-in with the Federation's Office of Internal Affairs, and leaving his sister with a small fortune he had stolen from a corrupt politician, he was sent to Seattle to live with extended family.

At the outbreak of the war, Namana experienced a prophetic vision of the Colony Drop, but was unable to act on it in time. He volunteered with Federation forces shortly thereafter, gaining a reputation as a skilled mechanic.