#which goes a long way towards establishing what they're like when they're Not on the last day of their epic quest

[beneathsilverstars]

okay the loop pronoun thing its like its like the splinter in my mind that sticks out just enough to get caught on stuff and irriatate the stuff further in.

because they start off with the royal we before going oh wait thats a personal thing not how other people refer to you. so that with the masking literally everything i am genuinely completely undecided on if the pronouns are like they actually just dont associate any with themselves anymore, their lying and covering it up so siffrin wont suspect anything or if its like they just need some time to be around people again and then itll be like ohhhhhh thats why i like these right.

and from there it goes into we literally have no idea how they act around people. okay they were siffrin but now have been so completely transformed by the looping that they are different enough to qualify as someone else.

they get called shy by the party but is that because they realize talking to them will have permanet consequences? is it because they remind them of who theyve lost? is it because they just havent talked to anyone aside from siffrin?

if they got comfortable around others would they be sassy like they are around siffrin?

loops everything is so wrapped up in the timeloops that its like there is almost nothing that can be said for sure about how they would act outside them at this point its like yeah they were siffrin but theyve forgotten all that and are different at least somewhat from everything.

the looping time really has utterly crushed them and then remolded them into something new and it is shown so so well through what is and isnt there about them and its so irritating they are literally a puzzle begging to be solved and the pieces are all blackened from fire and some are a bit out of shape and its like this used to be a solvable puzzle but at this point who knows!

yesss i do think the they/them was just the quickest default that they at least knew they didn't hate, and they're no longer Siffrin Enough to share siffrin's preference for he/him or they/them, though they may now (or one day) have their own preference for they/them. sometimes i give loop more pronouns later because there's no way they won't change a lot post-loops! (or in aus where they've otherwise had more time to think about it and try things out.) i'm fond of she/they/it loop but i may be biased lol

WE JUST KNOW SO LITTLE ABOUT THEM!!!

we know they were siffrin, a long long time ago.

we know how they act with siffrin, who doesn't yet know who they are, during the timeloops -- which are all three very big and specific criteria.

and then we know how they acted in acts 5 and 6, which are also super unique and unreplicable situations! obviously in act 6 they were just faced with the fact that a happy ending was possible all along but it can now never be theirs, on top of this being the first interaction in which siffrin knew loop's identity and loop knew siffrin knew. and then in act 5, this was their first interaction with the party as loop, which only happened because of desperate circumstances, and started off on the very wrong foot of utter devastation at not being recognized, which meant they abandoned their plans and improvised, all while everyone is super worried about siffrin and then trying to navigate the fucked up house. very weird and overwhelming situations!!

you can draw clues about how loop might act post-canon from all of these things we know, but you can't just straight up extrapolate, yknow? their in-game feelings and motivations just will never again apply in the same way, post-canon. and on top of the new contexts in which they'll be living, their trajectory will surely be strongly affected by their immediate post-canon circumstances, to the point that even putting them back into more-familiar contexts somehow would now provoke new responses. they could go in so many directions!! we just don't know!!!

sometimes people are talking about how loop would act post-canon and they say things so definitively and im like. man i think it depends 😭 we know so little about them and they know so little about themself.

[sameschmidtdiffname]

Hey I love your work so much!!

I was thinking of maybe a Mike Schmidt x reader where the reader is all like “I’m not good enough for you, I don’t deserve you” stuff and then like Mike makes it up to the reader to show them that they are more than enough 🫶

Sure, but it's gonna hurt!

Blue Sunrise

Mike Schmidt x Gender Neutral! Reader

Summery: All is well, yet you aren't. A fact that disturbs and irritates you so, even if it shouldn't.

Tags: No use of Y/N, no use of gendered pronouns for Reader, SFW with brief mentions of smut, pre-established relationship, set during the movie but that's honestly not very relevant, hurt/comfort, Reader and Mike both have PTSD, this isn't projection, bed rotting, depression, self-loathing, night terrors/nightmares, panic attacks, sleep deprivation, mentions of medication, lack of self care, slight self-harm (scratching), breakdown, nosebleed.

Notes: *in sonic snapcube dub voice* heyyyyyyyyyyyy what's upppppppppppppp it's meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (STOP!!)

                     ▪︎◇{¤♧■♧¤}◇▪︎

6:34 A.M.

The dawn is gentle, the sky a soft blue behind the thin, cheap blinds that cover the bedroom window not that far in front of me. If I wanted, I could get up and open the window, revealing the surely beautiful and gorgeous sunrise that waits for me just outside the blinds.

But I don't. And I won't.

Birds sing gently outside, waking up and fliting about here and there. It's my favorite part of the day, quite frankly. When I can, I open the window to allow in the fresh, cool air, moist with the morning dew, unmuffling the bird's songs as I drift off to sleep, my schedule mostly in tune with Mike's for his night shift. Sometimes I manage to stay awake to greet him when he returns home. It's always nice when I do. His smile is lazy, his strides long and slow as he makes his way to the bed, peeling off his work clothes and crawling under the covers with me. Sometimes he'll press himself against me, his lips finding my neck as his hand dives between my thighs, his fingers trained on one goal as he murmurs against my skin how much he's missed me. Sometimes I wake to this.

There's a part of me that wishes he'd do this today just so I wouldn't have to think.

The lock on the front door rattles as someone attempts to insert a key into the hole. It doesn't matter how long he's lived here or how he uses those keys every morning, he still takes a moment to make sure he's using the right one, and on the first try he usually isn't. So it takes him a solid minute to unlock the door and enter the house. If we had dogs, they'd surely drive us insane from his routine. It slightly drives me insane already. But I'm technically not even supposed to be awake, so I never mention it.

When Mike finally enters the house, the first thing I hear after the satisfying break of the doors seal ringing throughout the living room is a deep sigh as Mike's backpack lands in front of the coat rack. He should be quieter about setting it down. I would be. But I think he assumes we should be so deep in sleep it really wouldn't matter, and it honestly doesn't make much noise. Just a slightly dull 'thud' against the thinly carpeted floor.

Next I can hear his car keys land in the bowl they're meant for. Again, he's a bit too loud with it all. At least, while people are sleeping. But it's not really a bother. In a way, I like it. It gives me a routine to memorize, his sounds before he'll trail to our room and come press himself against me.

The rocking recliner creeks softly as he sits in it, lazily undoing the laces on his boots before he tosses them towards the coat rack. And next he'll duck his head into the fridge I'm sure and look for the leftovers I put into a big bowl for him to warm up - which he won't, because he's a psychopath who likes cold food. - and then when my alarm goes off, he'll come to wake me up, rising from the old couch where he's very quietly reading his book while he eats and do whatever he has to do to prevent me from slipping back into sleep. He's very good at that job. Especially when he uses his tongue.

But today there's a break in the routine. Today, his footsteps are padding towards our room, the door quietly opening as he slips in. I can hear him let out a soft sigh as he tugs on his hoodie, pulling it off and then discarding of his jeans, which muffle the clack of his belt buckle as he slips them off. Left in his undershirt and boxers, he crosses the room to open the blinds and the window, letting in the fresh air and leaning against the thin windowstill for a moment. Now, I can see him.

He looks rested, a little more than he should for having just finished a night shift. I keep telling him he's going to get fired, but he always wiggles his way out of that conversation. The bags usually under his eyes aren't too deep this morning, which while problematic is relieving. His skin is pale blue from the dawns light that pours into the room. His dark curls are more thick on the top of his head, clumped together from him not brushing them after his shower. He must've used too much conditioner, because his hair also looks thicker than it usually does. The breeze blows his oversized pale blue shirt against his chest as he leans forward, allowing his eyes to close as he takes in a deep breath. It feels like an overly private moment. Like I've intruded by watching him. I don't see him like this much when he isn't alone. When he's with me or Abby, he's alert. Somewhat on guard. It's like he's watching us to make sure we're okay. He's too used to things falling apart in an instant. But when he's alone, physically or emotionally, the walls crumble away to reveal a man who enjoys peace. Who smiles softly as he bends down low, resting his chin upon his arms, letting the dawn greet him and being the supposed first in the house to greet the dawn. And I feel like a stalker for watching him. A scene that feels as if I've stolen what will now only exist deep in my mind for when I want to remember one of the few times he has truly ever looked at peace with the world. It's a scene out of a painting. As private as a prayer. I should grant him more privacy, but I don't. In a captivated and enchanted way, I can't.

I'd never tell him this, but in this moment he looks like his mother. And not in the sense of him being her son. No, based off of the few photos I've seen of her in more private, intimate instances, like when she was holding a very small Mike on her lap on his second birthday, or when Mike's father had stolen a photo during their honeymoon when she wasn't looking, Mike looks just like her. Quiet, serene, not hiding anything from anyone because there's no need. At this moment it is just him and the gentle, late winter breeze that makes my nose begin to sting. He's beautiful. Just like she was.

The moment comes to an end, and now it is just a moment that exists only within my mind as his eyes open. The blue dawn brings out the green in his eyes that's usually hidden by artificial light that overpowers the amber, turning them mostly black in some instances. That's the color I thought they were until I saw him in proper daylight. His long lashes bat once, twice in an almost sleepy manner as he shifts his focus, now turning his head to look at me. I shut my eyes quickly, my canines biting into my tongue to force myself to keep a straight face. But it's too late. We made eye contact, even if it was only for a second, and now he knows I'm awake.

"Sweetheart?" He whispers softly, his voice low and slightly gravelly in the way it always is. His 's' and 't's just a tad sharp, clear as always when he speaks. I hear the floor groan as he pads towards me.

I don't speak. I'm not supposed to be awake. I should be asleep, he would rather I was asleep. I tried to be asleep.

He stops in front of me, I can hear the floor groan louder as he crouches in front of me. He's trying to decide if I'm awake or not, if maybe he'd been tricked into thinking we made eye contact. But something convinces him he hasn't, and the bed sinks as he places a hand upon the mattress to support his weight while he kisses my temple.

"Hi," he whispers against my skin, placing another kiss just above the curve of my brow. "Good morning." He places another kiss on the space between my brows, his lips now trailing up to the middle of my forehead. "You look so pretty like this."

Like what? My skin shining with oil, my nose dirty, my body heavy from not having moved?

Something makes him pause when his lips find my cheek. He keeps his lips pressed against my skin for a moment before he pulls away, licking his lips as he looks closer at me.

"Hey," he whispers softly, a finger finding my chin. "Open your eyes."

I don't want to. When I do he'll instantly know what I've been doing, and I don't want to handle it. I don't want to deal with it.

His hand slips under my head, between my cheek and my pillow.

"Sweetheart, your pillow's wet," he says in quiet surprise. "Open your eyes, talk to me."

Hesitatingly, I obey. Cracking my eyes open and trying not to reveal how horrid the dryness in them feels after allowing them rest for a few moments after keeping them open for what could have been hours at this point. Mike's face is inches from mine, his brows furrowed in concern as his eyes scan for other obvious signs of distress.

"Hi," I croak in a tired, unused voice as I try to pretend all is well. Mike unfortunately knows better.

"What happened?" He asks concerningly, taking in the tone he does whenever Abby is upset, fretting over me like I'm an injured child as both of his hands cup my face, his lips finding what he's confirmed are thin, itchy and salty tear tracks, placing several, feather-light kisses along them.

"Nothing," I answer honestly, my voice still cracking. "I'm fine."

"Your eyes are red, baby," he says softly, pulling away to look at me again while his body inches closer. "You look like you've been crying for hours."

Ha. I wish. If I had been, maybe I'd feel better about everything. But instead, I've been lying here since Abby went to bed, feeling numb and dead internally as I willed myself to be upset about anything. Work, bills, the color of the walls. I'd succeeded maybe twice, little tears streaming down my face for a minute or two. But then they would stop, and it would feel as though I couldn't cry. Really cry. Like there was some emotional, maybe physical block preventing me from just truly letting all of my emotions out in a possibly hysterical fit. One that would mean I could connect to my humanity. I don't know what's wrong with me. So, instead I just say "I haven't cried."

Mike opens his mouth to call bullshit, but his brow furrows tighter as he thinks. "What's wrong?" He asks again, now lifting my head to allow one arm to slip underneath so I can lay upon it.

"Nothing," I answer again, truly unsure of what to say. "I'm really okay."

And I am. Work is fine, I am fine. Friends are fine. I don't have entitlement to be upset.

"Is it another episode?" Mike asks softly, now pulling his body onto the bed to lie next to me, fully committed to being partner of the year over here. Ugh. Great.

"No," I answer quickly, averting my gaze. Mike's hand cups my cheek, his body cool compared to mine. I'm soaked in sweat from sleeping - read: laying motionless on the bed since 9:30. - in too warm of clothes in too warm of a room under too warm of blankets. I probably stink. Meanwhile the morning air makes Mike feel refreshing. He's perfect. I'm a mess.

"It's okay if it is," Mike says softly. "It's nothing to be ashamed of if-"

"I'm not having an episode," I say firmly, cutting him off as though it will solidify my statement more than his if I finish mine first. "I'm just not."

I don't pretend to be perfect. I'm not, and I never will be. I know that's okay. I know episodes happen, and that I'll be okay. I've been so much better lately on my new schedule. I'm working, I'm happy.

I have absolutely no good reason to be in the midst of a depression episode. One where the memories won't leave my mind, where I can't sleep, can't think about anything but the past. It plays in my head over and over again, and I can't stop it. Even though I try. I read, I journal, I bathe. But I don't feel real. People don't feel real. Mike is disorienting in the sense that he is the only thing that truly feels real. Where the pale color of the sheets seems hypnotic, his slightly tan skin contrasts to remind me this place really does exist. The furniture and details of the room seem as real as something from a video game, renderings that aren't as realistic as they could be that blend into the wall more as you look. Flat. Nothing. But the freckles on his nose are real. Strikingly real. Overly real. It's as though someone took their time to place each one, carefully deciding their color, their opacity, their placement. I want and love each one, but at this moment they slightly torture me by drawing me into a comforting trap.

"I haven't had an episode in over a month, I'm better," I attempt to say in a firm, solid voice. But I'm too tired, too worn out. My chest burns both from anxiety induced heartburn and how shallow my breathing has been for the past several hours. Mike looks sad, and I hate that. Deeply.

"You have been doing better," he says softly, like a reassuring parent. "I've seen that. And I'm so proud of you."

But I still have this. I'm still like this. I still can't have people wrap their arms around me from behind because I'm instantly taken back to when it would end in me collapsed on the ground, panting, crying, calling out for help that just wouldn't come. I still can't wear shirts with too tight of collars because it always end with me half naked, ripping the shirt off while hyperventilating. That was how I had to tell Mike. For our first Christmas together he bought me this beautiful turtleneck, knowing I liked the style but didn't own many. A dark evergreen color, affordable but a lovely tight-knit material, I adored the thing. But the moment the shirt was over my head, the neck felt like a hand suffocating me, and though I tried to tolerate it fie as long as I could, it only took one casual graze of his hand along my back to send me reeling into a corner, hyperventilating, sobbing, blubbering like a terrified child as I clawed at my neck while he tried to get it off of me.

'I'm so proud of you.' The statement feels like a backhanded reward. It feels as though I'm an idiotic child who just can't learn their ABC's or basic fundamental math. It feels like I'm a small toddler surrounded by adults looking at me full of pity in their eyes while they think 'well, you'll never be normal by any means. But maybe one day if you're lucky, you'll work in a Subway.' But they don't tell me this. They just praise me for existing. 'You woke up today! You put on clothes today! You didn't kill yourself!' It makes me want to scream. Yes, even at him. I want to grab him by his shirt and scream until my voice is shattered 'don't praise me for the bare minimum! I'm not a child!'

But I know he's not. I know he feels the same way when he slips back in progress as well. There was a solid month last year where Mike's insurance refused to pay for his sleep medication due to some paperwork slip and such, something they eventually realized was a complete blip on their end. But that month was hell for Mike, who could barely sleep well even with the medication. His easy smirks were replaced with cracked lips, skin raw from constant biting. His eyes were filled with paranoia from lack of sleep, and worse were the night terrors. Mike didn't even know he was still capable of having them, usually sedated by his meds well enough that if there was a nightmare, he just stayed asleep. At worst he'd wake up in a haze, maybe a very short yelp if anything. But without his meds, it was screaming. Constant screaming. There were nights he would wake after only an hour and he'd start, his voice shrill and reverberating off the walls as he thrashed in the bed. You couldn't console him, touch made him worse. When it happened, you simply had to leave the room and pray he would be okay. The episode could last anywhere from five minutes to an hour, and you would know it was over when all you could hear was broken sobbing, quiet and childlike in nature. Then I would return to the room, and there he'd be. Sometimes wrapped in blankets, sometimes his shirt torn off of himself. Usually sitting either in the dark corner of the room or on the floor of our closet. Red, angry marks would trail along his skin from clawing at himself with his uneven nails, some of them being actual cuts he'd managed in his terror. I'd carefully clean his cuts with cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide while he silently stared ahead, too ashamed to speak or make eye contact with me. And too terrified to sleep again.

Sleep deprivation didn't help, either. One day I saw him with a Redbull stuck in his hand, seemingly never empty despite how much he drank from it. At first I thought it was one, than I realized it was three, then I realized I didn't really know what number he was on. It was surprising how well he could take the new, unusual load of caffeine that tastes sickly sweet without so much as a twitch of an eyebrow. I didn't realize he was trying to starve off sleep until the next morning when his leg was bouncing a mile a minute and he was snapping at every little thing. That day he had a breakdown over dropping an unpeeled onion. And that's when it slipped out.

I didn't judge him. I was terrified for him, but I didn't judge him. And I could tell the same was true for him when I would have my slips, though mine looked different. Mine looked like a lack of self care and rotting in our bed, staring pointlessly ahead until he would lift me off the bed and carefully guide me to a warm bath, where he'd gently wash my skin with a soft rag like I was a newborn while I stared ahead at nothing. At this point we had learned to tell the oncoming signs of each others episodes, and how to starve them off. And if we couldn't, how to help each other through them.

Usually, I don't mind. But today, it hurts. It all hurts.

"Have you eaten?" Mike asks me gently, his thumb gliding over my cheekbone as he wraps me in his embrace, careful of where he places his hands on my person. Like I'm a bomb.

I don't want to be treated like this anymore.

"Yes," I sigh in an irritated voice, like it's the most inconvenient thing he should ask me such a question. But I haven't. I feel empty and yet too full at the same time, and guilt pounds behind my left eye with the ferocity of a headache that I can't just mother myself.

Mike doesn't believe me. He'll pretend he does, but the press of his lips betray him as he takes a deep breath in like he's trying to tell what wire to cut next.

"Would you like to have breakfast with me?" He asks softly, his thumb still stroking just below the raw corner of my eye. It burns. All of it.

'No,' I snap in my head. But I just tighten my jaw and press my own lips together.

"I'm not really hungry, but thank you," I say in a tight voice. Now he's going to pretend that's okay, and he'll go get his breakfast. Then he'll pretend he can't finish it all, joke lightly and say I gave him too big of a portion even though he eats like he's still a growing teenager, and offer me little bites as he "tries" to finish the rest, then eventually trick me into finishing it. He isn't slick, and I'm not a child.

"Hey," he says in a light whisper. "I was thinking maybe we could go out today? All three of us? Or I could call Max, see if she'll watch Abs for a little bit so we can get away?"

Distraction. Cute. I don't need it.

"That could be nice," I admit through half gritted teeth, not meeting his eyes. "Where to?"

"Anywhere," he says too quickly, obviously relieved to have a straw to grasp at. "Your choice."

Guilt twists in my chest like an alien creature settled in my lungs, burning as it begins to slither its way towards my throat to suffocate me on its wrath. He doesn't need to do this. Can't he see how well I'm doing?

"How was work?" He asks me in an attempt to keep me talking. Mike doesn't like silence, not like this. Not really any time. There's always noise throughout the house, whether it's a show on in the background or white noise from his cassette player. He can't stand silence. Especially from people.

"Work was..." Fine? The usual? Non-eventful?

"Good," I decide. Mike presses his lips together again. Stop doing that.

"Yeah?" He asks in a slightly tight voice.

"Yeah," I confirm in a tighter voice.

"You didn't... call out or anything?"

My bottom left back molar feels like it might snap from how tight my jaw is. "Why?" I ask, venom unintentionally creeping in.

"Just asking," he says quickly.

"Why?" I press harder, wanting to know who told on me. Abby hasn't even had the chance to speak with him.

'It's because he knows your patterns,' I think. 'He's trying to gage how serious this is.'

"Maybe we could go out for breakfast? We can wait until Abby wakes up, go get some Waffle Hous-"

"I'm not having an episode," I snap quickly, more harsh than I intended. My tone makes him flinch slightly, his eyes shutting for a moment as he takes another breath in. Now I'm scared he'll pull away.

"We... don't have to talk about this right now," he says softly, opening his eyes again and wrapping his arm around me tighter. "Let's just focus on breakfast."

The guilt pounds in my kidneys, which are sore since I haven't left the bed since I laid down after putting Abby to sleep, but I did have a full water bottle around 3:00 in the morning. It's not Mike's fault I backtracked. He's just trying to be nice. I'm the asshole here.

"I'm sorry," I say in a small voice, dropping my gaze and biting my tongue between my canines again to stop the tears that are now willing to come freely to burn my eyes during such an inappropriate moment.

"It's okay," Mike says softly, placing a kiss on my forehead. "Don't even think about it."

'Don't even think about the fact he's just trying to be a decent person and you can't even say 'thank you,'' a grating voice in my head chides me. 'What, you're too good for a free meal?'

"I'm sorry," I repeat softer, my nails digging into my wrist that I'm holding to keep control over myself. Mike's hand is searching for mine, ready to pry it away to prevent me from doing what I need to to prevent the waterworks.

"Hey." Stop with the 'hey's. "I said it's alright, you're okay."

It's all bad. Everything's bad, and it's not going to get better. I keep thinking I'll get better, I keep thinking I'll be okay. But every two steps forward is one step back and I can't keep doing this redundant bullshit for the rest of my life. Am I going to be 40 at the office Christmas party sneaking off to freak out in the bathroom because something triggered me and I just can't get a grip on things? Am I even going to make it to 40?

Mike is comforting me, cradling my head to his chest and rocking me back and forth. And his shirt is wet. I don't like that his shirt is wet, it should be dry. Why is it fucking wet?

"It's okay," he's whispering in my hair while horrid choking sounds come from somewhere around us. Maybe the other room? "You're alright, it's okay."

I'm aware it's alright, I'm aware it's okay. Why are you wet? Why does my head hurt?

"I can't- sleep," my voice chokes out between guttural sobs, my face pressed into his chest. "It's all nightmares."

Oh. Shit. That's me. The wetness, I did that. My bad.

"I know, it's okay. How long?" Mike asks softly. What, are you gonna call my therapist?

"A week," I moan into his chest. My ribs expand with each recycled breath I steal from against his chest, and I can feel him trying to gently tug me away so I can get one with fresh, cold air instead. I don't let him. My lungs burn more. "They just won't stop."

"It's okay, it's only temporary," he says softly, his hand pushing away some of the blanket to relieve me of the boiling warmth underneath. The cold air is refreshing against my skin, even through my clothes are soaked with stinking sweat.

"No, it's not!" I cry hysterically into his chest. "They don't go away. None of it goes away. I want it to go away!"

He's nodding, rubbing circles on my back as I grip his shirt hard enough it may stretch.

"It'll get better. It did for awhile," he reminds me.

"But I'm back here. I always end up back here. I was doing so good!" I sob, feeling the wetness on his shirt begin to slightly thicken, probably due to snot. I try to sniff it back into my sinuses, but I think that just draws his attention to the new fluid he's covered in.

"That's okay. You'll do even better next time. And if you don't, that's okay too." Don't say what I think you're going to say. Do not. Michael, I'm serious, don't- "I'm still proud of you."

Fuck. Ooooooff!

This is the real release of my emotions. Now I'm gasping, choking, sobbing, making horrible sounds that sound like a European ambulance siren wailing through the streets to announce someone's dying on the way to the hospital. My head throbs with the pain from the heavy crying, and I may give myself a nosebleed from the passion of it all. And Mike, his patience thick and durable, just holds me through it all. Letting me soak his shirt, dirty his skin, grab at him blindly while I wail like a spoiled child, just repeating the phrase over again. 'Proud.' What pride. What honor to be had at such a breakdown. Yes, very understandable.

"I should be better," I sob into his chest. "You deserve better."

"What?" He laughs lightly, and at first it feels mocking, but then he's pulling my head away fron my soaked enclosure and his eyes are so gentle for a moment I know the light laughter is simply from surprise. Then his eyes widen and he's back in parent mode.

"Don't leave me. Don't leave me!" I choke out while gripping his shirt. At first he thinks I'm talking about our relationship, then he realizes I'm not letting him pull away.

"Sweetheart, you're bleeding," he gently explains. "Let me wipe your face. I just need tissues. I'm not even leaving the bed."

But that's too much. Let me bleed, let my head throb, let this headache take the vision away in my eye from how bad it hurts. Let anything happen so long as I can stay in this moment. Don't break the spell. Don't let me go numb again.

"Don't leave me," I cry pathetically, my eyes all scrunched together in the same manner as wailing infants, my grip on his shirt not breaking. Sure enough, there on the wet spot of his shirt is a dark stain of blood that should hopefully come out if we wash it fast enough.

"Let me do that," I'm saying as I try to peel off his shirt now. "Let me wash it."

He's gently guiding my hands away. "Don't worry about it," he says gently, kissing my hands and wrists like they might break even from the delicate graze of his lips. "Let me take care of you."

He does this all the time. He always takes care of me. I should do more. Be more. For him.

"You deserve better," I choke out, feeling like I may suffocate from the tears. Mike's brows furrow in concern, and he grips my chin very carefully as he makes me meet his eyes.

"Hey, no. Get that out of your head, it's all okay," he tells me softly, staring at me like if he can't verbally convince me, his hard stare will do the trick. "I don't want to hear you talk like that."

"I should be better," I repeat, my crying lessening slightly as I try to hold eye contact.

"You're getting better," he reminds me. "This is the happiest I've seen you since we met. You'll get back to that. Hell, you could feel the same way tonight. It's okay. Take a day off. We all need one, even normal people," he says softly, stroking my hair as he kisses my forehead. "Can you just let me take care of you in the meantime?"

No. Go away, let me rot.

"We can still go out for breakfast," he offers gently. "I can still call Max, or we can all stay in. I'll set up a nest in the living room so you can watch TV. Works you like that?"

Stop. Stop being nice to me, stop trying to make me feel better. It all just feels awful. I don't want this guilt, someone takes it away.

Mike must sense my overwhelmed emotions, because he places another kiss on my forehead before asking if he can clean my face again, and this time I say yes. He pulls away, which is still upsetting but less so. I don't make a deal out of it this time at least. He opens a drawer, searching for wipes and pulling them out before turning back to me.

"Do you want to sit up?" He asks gently. I bite my tongue to prevent another mocking thought directed towards me and nod. Bones crack as I do, my kidneys hurt worse. But at least I finally moved.

Tears still streak down my face as Mike wipes away the snot and blood, his large hand gently cupping my face as he does. There's a soft smile on his face, though I'm not particularly sure why. And when he's done, he runs his thumb along my bottom lip before placing his own lips on top of mine. They're chapped, one spot raw from excessive biting. But there's still some leftover chapstick on them, and it tastes like grapefruit.

I tug on his shirt, one hand sneaking under it to feel his cool skin underneath. He gently takes my wrist once more, then pulls away. A silent rejection. He knows that I'm just looking for a distraction from my emotions, and in a moment he'll offer a much healthier one. He does discard the shirt, leaving his chest bare, but only so that he doesn't smear my fluids back onto me as he pulls me in for another embrace.

"We'll be okay," he promises. "Everything will be okay."

"What if it's not?" I ask in a quiet, strained voice.

"Then it'll be okay later. You can take time to not be okay," he says.

There's a short silence before either of us speak. And when I hear his voice hitch in the way it does when he's about to say something, Abby's alarm rings crystal clear in her room. Then the sound of a truck rattles by on the road in front of the house. Birds continue to sing. And my pours feel so clogged I'm sure my skin will be lashing out for days.

But it'll all be okay.

                             ¤▪︎{♧}▪︎¤

"Can we have some fluff to reco-" no. Suffer.

Taglist:

@cassiecasluciluce @gh0u1ishly @joshhutchersons-slut @schmidtsbimbo @sugarevans @wompwompwomp57 @jhutchissupercool @laurrrelise. Thank you for your support pookies!!! <3

               •▪︎Masterlist▪︎•

[snakes-and-fluff]

Milgram drought be hitting hard... Anyway I was thinking what an anime of each prisoner's personal story might look like (assuming all isolated from each other and Milgram as a facility does not exist) ((also assume each 12 episodes long)) also assuming they're psychological dramas because. Milgram

Haruka: The main appeal is the artstyle, drawn like animated child's drawings for most of the time but a few scenes an episode is instead depicted in starkly realistic illustrations (not animated). It's told from the perspective of Haruka who keeps insisting he has a good life even as all the facts point otherwise, finally culminating in the murder late in the show, at which point the artstyle changes to be a strange mix of the previous two

Yuno: What first presents itself as a peppy slice-of-slice soon devolves into a painfully raw story of a teen girl. The winner of many awards but not that popular with most people who claim to find it too dry and boring

Fuuta: The murder happens towards the end of episode two but it isn't revealed to the audience exactly what happens until much later. Fuuta's behaviour clearly changes after that point and he keeps getting harassed by people who were previously friendly with him, but the actual flashback reveal is only in ep 8. The show leans very heavily into the "is he a bad person?" question and the fandom is known for starting debates about it in the comments of completely unrelated posts

Muu: It was a dark setup from the start but not many people expected a murder in episode 7. The anime switches POV between Muu and Rei until Rei dies, then it switches between Muu and a student counsellor (who doesn't know about the murder and is just trying to solve the bullying but the tension comes from the fact that the audience and Muu keep being worried about her potentially learning about the murder)

Shidou: The most niche of the bunch, some people weren't a fan of how medically accurate it was while others rejoiced in that fact. The whole thing is a flashback as it's established that Shidou has left the medical industry in the first episode but it is slowly revealed why and the circumstances behind his family's deaths as it goes on

Mahiru: Yuno's might have been a bit misleading at first but everyone who saw the promo material knew what was going down. Mahiru's managed to keep the dark twists under wraps, genuinely being sold as a cute love story though there were hints from the start. It's unclear when exactly the death happened because as it goes on it starts timeskipping and flashbacking without warning and it's clear that Mahiru isn't quite sure herself of what is actually happening

Kazui: Hinako is dead before the series even starts and it is actually told from the perspective of someone who works with Kazui slowly uncovering what happened out of morbid curiousity. Kazui is the very definition of unreliable narrator and nobody knows what to make of whatever information comes directly from him. Some fans don't like the way the show never seemed to decide on a single answer as to what happened while others praise it for it

Amane: The fandom is small but loud (though it is always recommended as "this one will tear your heart out"); the tale of a child embroiled in an awful home life, using a unique visual style of poppy colours and thick outlines to sharply contrast the horrible things being portrayed. The murder happens at the end of the last episode, giving the closest thing to a "happy ending" they could achieve for Amane, though it is left ambiguous what would happen to her next

Mikoto: Told in a non-chronological style, the reveal of the murder is towards the end (around episode 10) leaving the rest of the time as wrapup as Mikoto finally comes to accept the truth of the situation. There are still arguments in the fandom years after it ended if the murder was metaphorical or not

Kotoko: She's presented as a really cool vigilante at first but then it slowly unravels as she reveals more of her violent side and that her kill count is a LOT higher than previously thought. Her personality is divisive among fans but everyone can agree that the opening is a banger

DISCLAIMER: I just realised that some of these can be read as me throwing shade on the fans of a particular character; I promise 100% that isn't the case this was just a fun thought experiment!

[runawaymun]

Hey! Any advice on writing multi chaptered fics or just longer stories?

I feel like I'm okay for like snippets but have no idea how to write the middle of a story or move a character or story from point a to point b.

And asking you because you're writing is phenomenal and I'd love some advice.

(But if no brain space for advice I totally get that too and feel free to hide this ask or something)

(Anyway great updates on boundless and the one shot Brimbrond)

Sorry for taking so long to respond to this! I just wanted to take some good time to gather my thoughts because oh man oh boy I am a bit of a nerd about plot structure, even if I pants it a lot of the time -- because middles and structure absolutely plagued me when I was a beginner and so I spent a long, long time studying it and breaking it down.

I'm going to start with some very, very basic advice and then get into some more specific stuff. So let's talk first about how to structure a long-form plot first.

DISCLAIMER: this is how I personally structure plots. More often than not I veer off my own track. And this is a very western way of structuring a plot. It's well worth looking into how storytellers from around the world structure their work because it can vary wildly (Miyazaki is a great example of this). Take this with a grain of salt. It's a guideline which I find helpful. This is going to get very, very long. Bear with me:

When I'm first thinking about how to create a plot around a story I want to tell, this is the process I walk myself through, and it tends to work about 75% of the time for the stories I like to tell (I'm not much of a thriller or mystery writer and those tend to have different kinds of structure). Main recipe is as follows:

Status quo - establish the setting and the character. Do this by the middle-to-end of chapter one, preferably. You can get away with drawing it out a bit in sci-fi or fantasy works that require more worldbuilding, but try not to.

Inciting incident - I won't tell you to start in media res, as that varies from writer to writer and story to story. Generally you want to have this somewhere in chapters 1-3. Say we're talking about LOTR - I'd say the inciting incident is when Bilbo goes invisible at his birthday party and leaves for retirement. Everything sort of snowballs from there (Gandalf confirming this is The One Ring, the Ring being passed to Frodo, the adventure beginning, etc. etc). This is where your character can lose something, or be confronted with a huge problem, or gain some new information. This is the point where your story really picks up.

Point of no return - your character has been presented with a problem or is put in a situation and now they have to decide what to do about it. Sometimes characters choose to run away, or choose inaction. It's up to you and your character as to what they do next.

The annoying part - the most helpful way I've ever found to think about middles is in terms of a series of decisions and consequences. Your character must decide what to do (or try to get what they want), and this will then come with consequences to those decisions. I ignore a lot of writing advice because writers seem to be very cagey about how they compose middles and plots for some reason, but the one piece I heard that helped me was: "What does my character want, and what stops them from getting it?" -- and this can be anything, right? Frodo wants (has to) take the Ring to Mordor. Luke wants to learn to be a Jedi like his father. Inspector Poirot needs to catch the murderer. Odysseus wants to return home. Each of these characters are going to make a series of decisions toward their goal, and they may be working from incomplete information, or bad paradigms, or racing against the clock, or against impossible odds. They're going to make mistakes. Over and over and over again. The middle is a series of decisions, consequences for those decisions, and obstacles (more on that later).

Point of no return 2, electric boogaloo (i.e. the actual midpoint to the story) - the part right before the climax -- the climax IS NOT the midpoint of your story, nor is it the end. This is your midpoint where Everything Fucking Sucks. Your character's back is against the wall. They have to change, or fail.

Paradigm shift: your character learns something new, or develops in some crucial way that leads to:

The climax/confrontation: 3/4 - 7/8th of the way through your plot. Frodo decides to keep the ring. Luke uses the force to blow up the death star. Anakin's fear and the manipulation from Palpatine overtakes him and he turns to the dark side. Inspector Poirot gets his last crucial piece of information and gathers everybody together for the Big Reveal. Odysseus gets home and chases the suitors out of his house. Etc. Etc. This is that Big Point in the story we all think as the most important or crucial point (but it's not. That's the key here. THE most important point is the whole middle of how we got here).

Consequences and paradigm shift 2 electric boogaloo: varies from story to story, but this is the fallout of the last decision or confrontation. Your character may reflect on what they've learned. The killer goes to jail. Frodo returns to the Shire and it's saved, but not for him. The journey your character has been on has irreparably altered them, or the world around them -- for better or for worse.

Resolution: the place where you land the story ;) what is the final impression you want your readers to have of your character, or this world?

Alright so that's all kind of nebulous. Let me give you a slightly more specific form of this plot structure that I use pretty often, because I almost exclusively write character and relationship-driven stories since that's what interests me most:

So most of this looks much the same (the inciting incident is some kind of meetcute. The characters then have to decide if they want to have some kind of relationship -- I like to name this part the callback). Then we have a whole weird squishy section of building interest and tension, before once again we have The Big Fight (darkest before the dawn or what have you), before one or both characters have some kind of paradigm shift, they confess their feelings (or resolve the fight or whatever), and the security of the relationship is established -- happy go lucky times, everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

So the middle here is of course still squishy and nebulous, but the focus here is still on "What decisions are the characters making? What are the consequences of those decisions? What are they learning, and how do they respond to it?" Maybe the tension is in one character being more reticent, while the other is more open. Maybe the tension is a sexual tension (will they, won't they?). Maybe a character is working off of incomplete information, or a misunderstanding, and that needs to be cleared up before the relationship (or even their own personal growth) can progress (both Elrian and Thalionel in Stars and Boundless Sky follow this pattern). The middle is a push-pull between your character's desires and outside forces that are stopping them from getting what they want, or achieving what they want to achieve.

So okay, that's all well and good. That's basic plot structure. Let me get into my thought process about middles specifically:

Begin with your ending in mind. I do not mean that you need to have like the whole resolution to your story fleshed out. If you're that kind of writer, great! But if you're more of a pantser like me, then that can be a big ask. Instead, ask yourself: what do I want my character to have learned by the end of the story? How do I want them to have changed, or grown? Do I want it to be for better, or for worse? Is there a specific plot goal you have in mind? (saving the world, or catching the murderer, solving the mystery, exorcizing the ghost, the couple getting together at the end, the found family finally gelling with each other, or whatever).

Once you have that thought in mind, now start to think about what your character might need to get from their starting point to their ending point. If it's a murder mystery, this is your information gathering section. You can lead your character to wrong or right conclusions. Have them make mistakes. Etc. etc. If it's a romance, this is where you create a string of scenes where the characters have opportunities to interact and learn more about each other (works for platonic slowburns, too). If this is a traditional hero's journey, this is where you plop in your actual journey.

Not to repeat this ad nauseum, but your middle is all about getting your character to your end goal, but in the most difficult way possible lmao. Let them make mistakes. Let them make bad decisions -- and then follow through with the consequences of those bad decisions. Give them bad information. This is where understanding your character's fundamental flaws becomes extremely important. Your entire plot, imo, stems from your character's fundamental flaws -- because ultimately that is what is going to slow them down the most from reaching their goal. Sure, you may have the big bad evil guy (bbeg), but we're not worried about him. That's an external factor and that's easy to drop in when you need a quick problem to place in front of your protagonist -- but that problem needs to be in service to your character or your worldbuilding. Teach them something. Give them an opportunity for growth. Aragorn needs to lead at Helm's Deep so he can inhabit his leadership role. The mountain pass of Caradhras needs to force the Fellowship through the mines so that Gandalf falls fighting the Balrog and comes back leveled up and ready to fight, and other characters in the fellowship have a chance to grow into their roles without relying on Gandalf for leadership. Your middle is all about crafting little opportunities for character growth, always while moving toward your end goal -- whatever that may be.

The paradigm shifts are crucial, and they can shift for better or for worse. It's up to you and your characters and the story you want to tell as to which it'll be.

If you're bored, your reader is bored. Only write what excites you, skip all the rest, and make it make sense at the end -- I'm so serious. Yes you need to add in breaks for pacing (like the whole Rivendell section in LOTR), but in those breaks still make sure that you're either expanding your worldbuilding, or giving your characters and opportunity for growth.

If you want to tell a really long (novel length) type of story, sideplots and alternate POVs are your best friend. They are structured exactly the same as a regular plot, they're just simpler or smaller and generally work in service to the main plot. Maybe there are side characters or side relationships you'd like to develop. Maybe there's a smaller mystery or a part of your worldbuilding you'd like to explore. Action plots can be side plots to romantic or platonic slowburn plots, just as much as it can be the other way around. And this is not something you need to structure out the gate. Just be curious and playful. Find points in your story that interest you, and explore them a bit. You'll find that they expand the story.

Biggest and best tip I can give you, when all is said and done, is to decide what kind of story you want to tell and then examine how other people are doing it. If you want to write a superhero story, pick out your favorites and look at how they're structured. If you want to write a mystery, same thing. If you're writing a romance or a drama, again -- same thing. Look at the pieces of fiction that you like, figure out what you like about it, and then apply it to your own work.

That's all the general advice off the top of my head. IDK how helpful this was lol. If you want more tips on middles I can try to look at it a bit more in depth, but to be quite honest middles are really what defines a genre. Romances have different middles to thrillers. Thrillers have different middles to mysteries. Mysteries have different middles to dystopian sci-fis. Etc. Etc. So take the general advice with a grain of salt and look more specifically at the genre of story that you're looking to tell.

Thanks for coming to my tedtalk <3

[mohntilyet]

not to mention the entire antaam fleet like 😭 that was the PERFECT moment to show off what the lords could do!!! The antaam fucked over rivain, theyve been a thorn in the whole nations side for a long time now, they would not pass up a chance for payback via full scale naval warfare so that the veilguard can do what they need to!! Sure dreadnoughts are dangerous but at this point they probably have tricks up their sleeve, thats one of the few things they have!

also wouldn't it be personal because does solas not try to blow up kont-aar because he's trying to 5d chess tevinter and the qunari into destroying each other. like. i know technically this would not be incredible widespread news because the attack was stopped, but i don't think the wonderful citizens of kont-aar would have missed the tsunami that nearly hit them and the shockwave that actually hit them. rumors go around. and i assume irian/vadis tell varric. who i think would tell isabela. who would tell the group she leads. who would care because ofc, they LIVE IN RIVAIN, and now know that solas and his followers thinks they can trade rivaini lives* to further his plans.

*while i also think there's probably a divide between kont-aar and the rest of the nation, it's one that the rivaini love to jump across and back over. an interesting comparison to be made here with most of rivain having similar sentiments towards dairsmuid and the chantry. like this is the country specifically mentioned to have a lot of citizens who follow the qun/are non-andrastian + it being MUCH more multicultural and accepting than other nations. any attack on rivain, even if it's a qunari settlement, would fan a lot of flames that solas cannot put out so the idea of trying to him taking multiple steps back because he didn't realise how intensely the qun/rivaini/lords would react is very fun for me. it would have been soo interesting for rivain to be a hub for efforts against solas because of how it's not influenced by andrastianism, how he (or his agents) specifically fucked them over, and (maddeningly for solas) also part of this resistance has spirits who willingly guide them against him. this could have even been a plot device where the door goes both ways and solas finds out rook's plans because he manages to eavesdrop through a seer or something.

and on the spirits. all the stuff where the mourn watch regularly communicates with spirits could have been done with rivain as well, and with different takes on being 'friendly' with spirits. iirc there's a spirit in the hall of valor which is so interesting but it's literally just there for flavour text. THERE'S A SPIRIT IN THE HALL OF VALOR THAT DOES NOTHING BESIDES LIKE. SAY HI. ??? bioware i would have liked to see more spirits and seers and the matriarchal pantheists you have talked about please. and also the idea of the peaceful qunari settlement being pushed to protect the country they are part of and what that means for them as qunari vs. rivaini. taash's storyline could have contributed to this . so A LOT less about choosing a side, more about how kont-aar has developed, changed, how rivain has influenced it and what it means to be qunari. not the qunari agents and fighters that we have seen, but their 'civillian' way of life in kont-aar.

complete waste not seeing any of established lore reflected in the lords of fortune or rivain because i stupidly actually thought we were going to see some kind of settlement and be introduced to a very different cultural norms.. in my beautiful mind i like to think taash is a little taken aback by how badly mages/elves/etc are treated. like they understood it was different outside of rivain (they would have been young when the dairsmuid circle annulment happened right? so they don't 'remember' it themself, they likely heard others talking about it when they're old enough to understand) but until they actually saw what was happening first hand, they had a weird dissonance about it. but what we got was a deserted beach, ties to another faction (wardens are fine!! they are great !!!! the fourth blight is interesting!!!! yet they are not the faction with a lack of info about them!!!!!) and also the hall of valor that exists as flavor text with nothing meaningful behind it besides a pub used in a few cutscenes and a minigame.

[hadescabin]

How do you feel about the new elder request book? I'm not going to spoil anything if you haven't read it and whatever is happening with tigerheart.

There's a lot I could say about the book itself, but as for the Tigerheartstar segments, I've seen and heard it alright, and it's BAD. Makes me feel a little better that I've been procrastinating on finishing the Tigerheart essay because this just gives me more material. Spoilers for the Elders Quest under the cut! CW for parental abuse, emotional neglect, manipulation, and a brief mention of grooming

Okay I'm going to break this down into segments that I took note of. Tigerheartstar right off the bat is introduced as being grumpy and aggressive towards SkyClan and even Tawnypelt. This isn't a big issue for me, I just wish they elaborated more on Tigerheartstar's grudge towards his mother. IMO it would be interesting to see it be a manifestation of all the events that took place under Rowanclaw. I point this out because it provides context to what everyone has been talking about lately. Of course, I'm talking about Birchfeather wanting to leave ShadowClan to join SkyClan for Ridgeglow. The way Tigerheartstar and Dovewing reacted was just terrible, hypocritical, and completely unsupportive (Tigerheart more so than Dovewing but I'll get to that in a minute). To give them some credit, Birchfeather was the only surviving kit in their second litter, and Rowankit's death was traumatizing/stressful in nature. So, I can understand why they were upset, and why, despite the fact that they too were cross Clan lovers, they're not happy to see Birchfeather leave. Much less to SkyClan which Tigerheartstar has established as to not having good relations with at the moment. This much is emphasized in the text. Despite what a lot of people have been saying, the hypocrisy isn't that bad from a writing standpoint, and actually had interesting character potential for both Dove and Tiger. Characters are allowed to have flaws. (Though I will admit that seeing someone like Tigerheart talk about clan loyalty is very, very funny, considering that it goes against his OOTS personality of finding clan borders stupid). It's the way that Tigerheart went about it that was completely unacceptable for me. If it wasn't for Tawnypelt straight up dragging her own son and his wife out of their den, they would've never said goodbye to their son during such a vulnerable moment in his life. This is terrible, especially when you consider that Birchfeather held back on saying anything for so long based on his father's potential reaction alone. He knew his father was going to throw a tantrum, yet he told them anyways.

This is crazy to me your child should never be afraid of coming to you period, much less fearing your reaction

The fact that he needed Tawnypelt to be in the room with him when he told his parents speaks volumes. Can you imagine, having all that hope built up only for your worst fears to come crashing down on you? This is terrible for both Tawnypelt who didn't expect that he'd move and encouraged him to speak out in the first place, and Birchfeather who tried to place his trust in his parents.

also note that when they do finally come out of their den, they still refuse to offer him any sort of emotional support in retaliation for him making his own decisions. this is manipulative behavior. Even worse, later on in the book when Tawnypelt is heading to SkyClan and offers to relay a message from Tigerheartstar and Dovewing to Birchfeather, Tigerheartstar straight up interrupts and speaks over Dovewing, before she could say anything.

You guys already know my opinion on TigerDove so I'll spare you the essay, all I'm going to say is that it doesn't really help my opinion that Tigerhearstar doesn't see his wife as her own person. This is just one of many patterns of behavior where he makes Dovewing's choices for her or pressures her into doing what he wants. It's for this reason that while Dovewing did initially not give her son the support he deserved, it shows that unlike Tigerheartstar she is trying to make amends to this and reach out before rudely being interrupted. Outside of him simply ignoring the very obvious twoleg threat and shutting down any discussion of it, Tigerheart's treatment of others worsens.

for context here, Tawnypelt helped Birchfeather pass his challenge by chasing a rabbit over the SkyClan border, Yarrowleaf caught her and reported this to Tigerheart.

Here he admits that he's purposefully ignoring his son until he comes back to ShadowClan either due to him changing his mind or failing the trial. This is emotionally abusive behavior or at the very least maltreatment, he is trying to manipulate his son into doing what he wants by dangling his parents' communication over his head. Furthermore he's punishing Tawnypelt for not only providing Birchfeather with the love and support he deserves over his decision, but also helping him pass the trial. Being a strict and hostile leader is one thing, explicitly manipulating your CHILD and punishing your mother for not participating in it is another. His dislike towards SkyClan and grief over losing Rowankit and Birchfeather doesn't excuse this behavior whatsoever. I did try to be understanding because grief is irrational and ugly, but this has gone beyond that and straight into abusive territory. To summarize my views, despite what a lot of people are saying, Tigerheartstar being manipulative towards his loved ones isn't out of character for him. In fact, I'd argue that the guy who needed to manipulate and groom a teenager into dating him would go as far as to carry the same treatment out to his children. My only real issue is like what someone on here (I forgot who) pointed out that this wouldn't be the type of manipulation tactic Tigerheart would induce. This type of manipulation where you give your loved ones the cold shoulder until they relent isn't really him, and does feel out of character. If anything, given Tigerheartstar's past behavior with Dovewing in OOTS, I would've expected him to try and guilt trip Birchfeather into rejoining. This book just feels very weird in general and it's strange that they're making Tigerheartstar an antagonistic leader, not because I think it's a bad thing (we need more antagonistic leaders tbh, a lot of them are plain bread) but because they spent arcs trying to build him up as being separate from his grandfather. With that being said, I do hope they don't wrap this all up with Birchfeather relenting to go back to ShadowClan or them pretending like it never happened and moving on (or the secret third evil option, tigerheartstar going down the berryheart sacrifice route). If they do reconcile there needs to be a lot of behavioral changes with Tigerheartstar and the way he treats his wife and kids. Unfortunately, knowing the Warriors series the former is most likely to happen.

[manicpixiefelix]

*crashes my imaginary car into your inbox*

OLLIE WHO WAS ADOPTED BY READER'S FAMILY!!!!!

I know this is a major shift in established dynamics but hear me out!!!

What if Oliver's tales about his home life were actually true, worse even so he ended up an orphan? He gets adopted by Reader's parents for the optics mainly because it makes them look good and they figure it'll provide their heir with a companion.

So they become this peculiar little duo, both very observant of the world and people around them. Ollie is a stranger to this world of the ultra rich and endures etiquette classes.

Oliver Quick becomes Oliver L/N, the boy uplifted from squalor by the heroic family *eye roll*

Reader is fiercely protective of their brother and will ruin anyone that insinuates he's not ~really~ family

I know we've never really discussed the ancestral home of Reader but I imagine it is every bit as grand and impressive as Saltburn. Ollie's favorite room is definitely the massive library.

BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS A LOT OF COURSE I LOVE HOW YOUR MIND WORKS!!!!

Of course your parents love the optics of it all.

You're six when they adopt Oliver, and he's five; this mousy little thing who doesn't smile often and barely speaks and can't look you in the eyes. He shys away from your overbearing, performative parents, but you seem to be able to see how overwhelmed he's getting. There's no words in your first interaction, only gestures, taking and keeping Oliver's focus as best you can to ground him in the moment; you teach him a simple game, and he returns the favour. Not a word between you two. By the end of the visit, you realise the adults have gone quiet; your parents and Oliver's case worker are just watching you both, marvelling. As you're looking away, Oliver himself finally steps towards you, taking your hand carefully and half hiding himself from them behind you, as if already deciding to trust you. You and Oliver had begun the day as strangers, and ended as siblings.

Your parents love to tell anyone who will listen about how when you first met Oliver you 'practically fixed yourself to his side and haven't moved since'. You look like the perfect family in photos, and the press is quick to forget how little research your parents did on the last charity they very publicly supported, and it's less than ideal history. Oliver learns to smile on command the way you feel like you've always known, but at least they don't make the two of you seperate in these moments.

Oliver says your house is like a fairy tale. At first he sticks close by you, overwhelmed by it all, but as the days turn to weeks and then months, you start to lose him as he goes exploring amongst the estate's many rooms and corridors. No-one knows the old house better then you, but Oliver is a close second; Nan says Mother used to scurry around just like you did, used to know every trick the old house had, but that was a lifetime ago.

Mother's study locks from the inside and Father works long hours in the city, so it's up to you to help Oliver settle in with the nannys and the tutors and the rest of the staff. Your parents like to buck tradition, so they're not precious enough to hire anyone to teach Oliver the etiquette that usually comes with wealth and a house like this, so long as he was polite and respectful and sweet faced in public, they couldn't care less which fork he used for salad. Honestly adults at events found his lack of grace and understanding of their unspoken rules charming in its sincerity. You, however, know that their condescending adoration grates on your brother's nerves as they talk to him like he was some kind of pet.

On the weekends Nan comes over, and it's clear that Oliver likes her the best of all the adults in your lives. Like you she doesn't pressure him to talk, always taking his silence in stride, but also taking the time and putting in the effort to understand him when he does try and communicate, however that may be.

In public - not that you're in public a lot - you and Oliver tend to cling to each other. As you grow older, even as you stop physically holding on to each other, you barely seem to stray from each other's shadow. Of the two of you, Oliver still is the far more reserved one, happy to let you do the talking most of the time, often only sharing his thoughts as quiet asides to you alone.

Considering your parents had no choice but to publicly acknowledge you in this universe, you and Oliver very much grow up in the public eye. The strange, observant duo who seemed to have the uncanny ability to wrap rooms full of adults, the upper echelons of society, around their little fingers, grow into beautiful and bitchy socialites.

Considering you're both getting privately tutored instead of going to a proper school, most of your time is spent travelling and attending events. Following the various Fashion Weeks around the world is a yearly tradition since you were teens, you go to concerts and film festivals and galas, always together, always inseperable. Or at least, inseperable when being seen by people who might matter. Oliver's confidence grows, he's far more open and even talkative in public than when he was a kid, but there's comfort in your established dynamic too. It returns most often at formal events, with Oliver half a step behind you, murmuring his commentary and amusing aside to you throughout the night.

A few of the independent tabloids your family didn't own print unsavoury rumours about your closeness, but those get pulled from news stands within the day, and a few threats of defamation lawsuits make them think twice before printing those kinds of articles again.

Everyone in the Western world knows who you both are, or has at least heard of you. But thankfully it's been years since anyone had tried to tie Oliver back to the Poor Orphan Boy he was when he'd first been adopted. By the time you both get to Oxford, he's been your brother for so long that it's like the world has thankfully forgotten that it's not by blood.

[dandylovesturtles]

@theplacewhereidumpmyinterests I can't talk about most of them because they're part of an AU verse I want to keep secret until I have the first fic that's part of it written, and idk when that will be (by summer?? HOPEFULLY??), but I guess I can talk about the other one because idk if/when I will write a fic for him (I'd like to but like I am only human)

"more AUs Dandy?" LISTEN all I do is sit around and think about "what if"s, okay?

ok so this started as me being like, hm, we see Lou Jitsu with a rotating door of women, so many he doesn't seem to remember all their names, so it's not totally out there to think he might have gotten one of them pregnant, right?

and thus Marcus (middle name Kyle) was born! literally!

so the story for this is, Lou Jitsu had a fling with a woman in the early 90s, pre-Big Mama. they were both in agreement that the whole thing was casual and it didn't last very long, but oopsie-daisy about six weeks after their last night together she finds out she's pregnant.

she debates what to do for a bit, because, as established, Lou Jitsu is kinda a fuckboi and she doesn't really want a relationship with him. But once she decides she's definitely keeping the baby she feels like she can't just not tell him, right? so she tries!

...unfortunately he's dating Big Mama by that point and she interferes to make sure that Lou Jitsu never meets with the woman and never finds out, because she knows this would get in the way of her plans.

she takes never hearing back from LJ as a sign he just isn't interested in the kid and resolves to single-motherhood. which she is the best at, btw.

she's still considering trying to introduce Marcus to his dad at some point, but unfortunately her kid isn't even 5 before Lou Jitsu suddenly goes missing, with his teary fiancée telling a sob story to the cops. assuming, same as everyone else, that he's dead, she lets the whole thing go, though she does tell Marcus who his dad is once he's old enough to understand everything.

Marcus goes through periods of being obsessed with Lou Jitsu, watching all his movies and consuming every piece of media about him that he can find, and periods where he can't stand to even hear the name. it's up and down. from his perspective, LJ abandoned him and his mom, but he's also dead, so it's not like he can have closure on this ever, right? so it's just a thing he has to deal with on his own.

but he's fine! he's alright. he gets through high school, then college, then accepted into vet school just fine.

then... his mom gets sick and dies.

yeah, that's a hard blow.

but he's alright! he has a few buddies from college he still sees now and then, and he's started his zoo vet residency at the Bronx Zoo (with a particularly special interest in reptiles), so lots of new people to meet that way! he's doing great! he's not lonely at all!

(a few months ago, he was suddenly woken up by a surge of something, like dozens of voices were crying out to him for help, tugging him toward something, saying his family needs him...

yeah, no idea what that was about. he doesn't have any family anymore.)

then the sky opens up and aliens come out.

Marcus is at work, because of course aliens would attack at the beginning of his shift. he spends the day ushering survivors into safe zones within the zoo, using his medical knowledge to handle first aid, and just trying to stay sane as the whole world turns upside down.

and then just as suddenly as it all started... it stops.

in the aftermath, everyone around him is just trying to get home, desperately calling their loved ones and praying for the best. Marcus starts trying to figure out how he's going to get home, because the trains definitely aren't running, and as he looks as his phone for a spark of inspiration, he realizes... no one has tried to call him. his coworkers' phones have been going off all day, whenever they can get signal, as loved ones try to reach them, but... he doesn't have anyone trying to reach him. and as he sits there he realizes he doesn't know who he should be calling, either.

so. that's pretty depressing.

and as he's sitting there, thinking about his life and what led him here, in a now empty vet clinic outside the bronx zoo... he hears a noise. and then, voices.

ah great. looters.

at first, Marcus tries to call 911 - but obviously the call center is swamped. so he decides to take care of the problem himself, going to see who's there and get rid of them...

wait, who is he kidding? he's definitely not paid enough to confront potentially armed looters! he's going to get out of here.

but just as he starts to leave, he hears the voices again - coming from one of the surgery rooms this time. and they're talking about IVs... scalpels... anesthesia...

suddenly he realizes that these aren't looters - they're here to try and treat somebody.

and like hell is he going to let some idiot kill someone trying to do DIY surgery.

so he turns back around and bursts into the room... on two humans, a rat that counts as giant even for New York, and four very big, very injured turtles.

one of whom immediately points a gun in his face. to be fair, that's what he thought would happen.

"Donnie!" yells the biggest one, and, oh, they can talk. huh.

"Relax, it's just a tranquilizer!"

"Donatello!" that's the rat. there's a sound like a whip cracking and the one with the gun makes a startled noise and drops it.

now the rat is in front of him. he's looking up at Marcus imploringly. "Do you work here?" he asks.

"Y-yeah. I'm a vet."

the rat bows very politely. "my sons are seriously hurt, and I don't have the supplies to help them at home. I understand it is a lot to ask, but... we must use your supplies. please, if you could just look the other way."

Marcus looks around at the turtles, especially the one on the table, the one worst off. he looks mangled. he won't live long if he isn't properly treated.

a rat, two humans who look like teenagers, and the turtles. who the rat called "sons". now that he's noticing, they're all pretty short, other than the big one. are they also teenagers?

"...Are any of you doctors?" he asks. the littlest one starts to raise a hand, but the girl grabs it and forces it back down.

everyone else has left by now. he's the only doctor here.

alright. guess he's doing this.

"...okay, everyone make some room. let me get sterilized, and I'll see what we're working with here."

and that's how the son Lou Jitsu didn't know he had becomes primary care doctor to his teenage mutant ninja half-brothers. ^^

(and then a bunch of other stuff happens)

[stabbyfoxandrew]

I’m so glad you’re doing this again! You’ve been in my thoughts. Can I please request mer roadtrip?

- @aftgphoenix

WIP Wednesday (1/8) | Mer Roadtrip AU (Part 99)

The movie is terrible.

That's what Andrew gets for allowing Neil to pick. But at least it's cool inside the theater and Neil even bought them snacks after Andrew threatened to dive over the counter and start biting the employees. So now they're halfway through a terrible film and Neil hasn't spoken since they came in. He's just sitting there, looking like he's about to fall asleep. His duffel is in his lap, clutched to his chest. Andrew had opted to leave his in the car, which pissed Neil off.

-

An hour later, the movie is finally over. Neil tells Andrew to stay put, that they can keep waiting here as long as no one notices them. And Andrew gives him a look.

"I am not sitting through that again. Come on, Neil." He says, pulling the slighter man to his feet. Neil grumbles the entire way, but lets Andrew pull him to the exit. Across the street there's an arcade and Andrew leads them towards it. He bums five bucks from Neil to exchange for tokens and shows off his skee ball skills. Then convinces Neil to play a round of air hockey with him. And that is when Neil perks up.

Turns out, Neil is insanely competitive. Since Andrew is too, the game lasts for almost an hour and there's a crowd of small children watching them. The score is 9-9 and the game only ends once someone hits 10. Andrew isn't going to let Neil win.

He slams the puck towards Neil's goal and it's sent back to him double quick. Luckily, Andrew's reflexes are incredible. He blocks it with such gusto that it goes flying off the table and clocks a woman in the head. She wails and Andrew looks at Neil's wide blue eyes before almost choking on a laugh.

They are asked to leave the establishment after that, but Andrew insists they get a chance to trade their tickets in before they leave. They end up with a rubber ball and a plastic ring shaped like a spider. Andrew passes that off to Neil and turns on his heel to exit.

"Sorry." Neil says sheepishly behind him, likely to the woman Andrew concussed. But Andrew pays him no mind. It's not his fault the idiot was standing in the way of his puck. Neil quickens his pace to match up to Andrew and looks at him. "You're insane."

"I never claimed not to be." Andrew shrugs, bouncing his ball on the ground. He catches it and tosses it in the air again. "What next?"

"Anywhere else you want to get kicked out of?"

"No, no. The thrill is gone." Andrew flips open his phone to check the time and it's past six now. "I could eat though."

Neil mutters something under his breath as he gets into the car. It sounds suspiciously like a complaint.

"Care to repeat that?"

"I said it would've been cheaper to get a room for the afternoon." Neil grumbles.

"Make note of that for next time. I saw a steakhouse that way," Andrew says, pointing out the windshield.

"Is that your way of requesting steak?"

"Yes."

Neil rolls his eyes. "Fine, but we're getting fast food for the rest of the trip."

"We'll see."

[grayintogreen]

what about dissecting ashley's monologue to indulge a reader instead 👀

I do think that, like, examples work best for people who maybe really like the vibes that post is putting out, but want to see it in action, so it does work as a teaching moment.

I do also what to preface this by saying that not every monologue needs to hit all or any of these criteria. It is, specifically, about being unsettling, but I think if you hit the first big monologue with a lot of these, it will make EVERYTHING the villain says way more unsettling just because you know what they're capable of. Ashley gets a lot of jokes (from me, mainly from me) for being a wordy little shit, but he only has a handful of true monologues and ALL OF THEM occur when he has the people he's monologuing at at his mercy. I think the biggest crime a villain can commit is monologuing before they've secured a victory. (This is why Ludinus irks me where Lucien never did- Lucien's monologues ALWAYS occurred when he had the upper hand and right before he pulled a full Ozymandias, whereas Ludinus tends to monologue seconds before he gets utterly humiliated. Like yeah, he got away and technically "won" but he talked too soon. That said, Ludinus's monologues do fit a lot of these criteria, so like… They're good monologues. He's just doing it way too soon, but, like, I get it. Poor Matt would never get to use those speeches if he didn't.)

Also Ashley is Lucien's narrative foil and based on Brennan Lee Mulligan so of course he knows when and where to deliver his speeches.

BUT TO THE POINT. The monologue in dreamers is EXTREMELY important, because it's Ashley's proper introduction (barring the scene at the end of OUADYA where he is merely set up as Jayne's partner. Lord Allard's son, and an annoyance to her, which makes him seem like some cheap additional muscle). This monologue is basically Ashley's Establishing Character Moment after he's wasted the Tombtakers, who had previously wasted the Mighty Nein with a surprise attack and then additionally wasted several Assembly wizards, proving he's a scarier threat.

But let's break it down! I'm gonna go through the full scene alongside all ten examples in the post so this will get long and… extremely indulgent, so remember I WAS ASKED. #autism

A fifth person stumbled out and then stumbled backwards- a skinny, though well-muscled, man in light plate with a dark bowl-cut and piercing blue eyes. His eyes widened underneath his fringe of straight bangs and he dragged his teeth down his bottom lip.

“Oh… Oh boy. That is… Yikes. You, uh, really tore into my friends there.” He pushed further in instead of running, which seemed unbearably stupid and just a bit irritating. It might have been fun if he tried to flee. “So that happened.” Tyffial’s nostrils flared and she advanced. One more easy kill then? One more easy kill then. He blinked at her as she took graceful strides towards him like a predatory beast, but didn’t move. It was as if she didn’t have a necrotic blade in her hand and blood splattered across her tanned skin. It was as if he believed if he didn't move, she could not see him. “Ohhh. Oh you’re gonna kill me now. Fantastic. Just one thing I gotta say first.” His entire bearing changed before Tyffial could abort her action, leaving Zoran and Otis shouting futilely behind her. His eyes darkened and a blade came into his hands- a dark dagger- and before she could properly register how ineffective it would be against a rapier, the man moved and slipped underneath her defenses and slammed the dagger, hilt-deep into her stomach and twisted. ”Thank you.”

Here we have Ashley's intro into the scene which already sets him up as unsettling- he stumbles in, sees the carnage, acts like a bumbling idiot, all to see what Tyffial will do and the moment she attacks him, he goes in for the kill, thanking her for giving him a reason to attack here. This is where the contradictions come in! We learn immediately that for all that Ashley is a brutal servant of the Chained Oblivion, he has a code. He won't attack unless he's attacked first.

Tyffial gurgled and slipped to the floor on top of her pile of corpses. The man standing before her flipped the dagger and threw it at Zoran- landing just to the left of his heart in a critical blow that dropped him to his knees. The dagger yanked back into his hands and he lunged at Otis, drawing a streaming red line from ear to ear across their throat like a smile, leaving them choking and bleeding out on the stones.

No, no, no… Tyffial gripped her stomach with one hand and started to crawl towards Otis. She had potions in her bag. She could bring them back up. She could fix this.

I can’t be alone again.

Zoran recovered and lunged, flaming maul aiming to make short work of this stranger, but he sidestepped into the shadows and reappeared elsewhere. Zoran tried to aim again, but the maul passed through nothing but an illusion. He had time to bark a confused huh before the man reappeared and stabbed him in the back with the same brutal efficiency he had shown on everyone else.

“See. Here’s the thing. I don’t like to fight people who don’t attack first. It’s a code of honor thing. I’m a paladin.” He yanked the blade free and left Zoran to fall back to his knees and stay down this time. “I’m a really, really nasty paladin, but there’s still a code I follow. Evil has standards sometimes, right?” He gave his dagger another flip and threw it right into Tyffial’s hand, piercing through bone and preventing her from crawling any closer to Otis. She bit back a scream.

“That’s gonna leave a mark by the by.” He recalled the dagger into his hand and moved to Tyffial, crouching in front of her and blocking her view of Otis.

Furthering the contradictions- Ashley is extremely affable, even as he's actively attacking. This is also where body language comes into play. Ashley plays with his food in combat due to the illusory nature of his paladin/weapon abilities. He does spend a lot of this conversation crouching, turning a dangerous conversation into a more conversational one by virtue of making it a chat.

Knowing not what else to do, she spat in his face and snapped through pained tears, “What do you want?���

The man dragged a hand down his face and flicked the bloody spittle off his fingers. “Okaaay. Way to start a negotiation. Noted. Hi. I’m Ashley. Nice to meet you.” He grabbed her by the hair and threw her back against the bodies and, all the while, his casual tone never changed, which made it all the more haunting. “And since we’re friends now… I have to tell you that I lied before. Those guys weren’t my friends. I pretended to be a helpless rich boy who needed a guide and threw money at them until they decided to let me play too. Guess which part of that I lied about.” He smiled wickedly and held the bloody dagger up to her face- this close she could see it was a jagged, ugly thing with an endless maze pattern carved into it. It made her dizzy to stare at it.

This is a mild example of subverting expectations- Ashley doesn't get angry that Tyffial spits at him. (In an ideal world (and will likely be fixed in future edits of the series) I would not have off-loaded the effect of the scene by pointing out that Tyffial finds his contradictions haunting. So, like, this is a learning experience for me too. Don't lampshade that. Let your audience find it haunting without the POV character telling them that it is.) Anyway, Ashley's reaction- tossing her aside into the bodies- is just a show of his strength. He doesn't backhand her like a typical arrogant male villain would do for the disrespect. He simply brushes it off and then continues his speech by pushing Tyffial's face in the mess she made of the people he had with him and what a huge depth between their power and his is.

Every breath was agony. Tyffial frantically checked on Otis and Zoran- still alive, but barely. She needed to get to them.

Ashley looked over his shoulder to follow her gaze and dragged a hand down his clean-shaven chin. “Right. You asked me a question. What do I want… Hm. What… do I want?”

He screwed up his face, considering. “World peace? Good will towards all persons? The total annihilation of literally everything in this fucking world?”

He laughed, as cold and brutal as his tone of voice wasn’t. “Weirdly the, uh, that one doesn’t contradict the first two things, but you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? You get it. You get that ever since the Calamity, things have been barreling towards the exact same scenario, ‘cept there’s no gods this time to punish the folly of man, is there? They locked all those doors up really tight after the last guy yanked the deadbolt out. So it just continues and continues on and on and on. Someone’s gotta put the kibosh in it. ‘Cause we can’t do this again. The next time mortals aim so fucking high there’s not gonna be a hand to slap us down and eventually we’ll push too far and it’s gonna be worse than if the gods had just put us in cosmic time-out with an apocalypse in our backyard.”

He stopped just shy of building to an angry rant, breathed in, and then spoke softly again. “I don’t want that. I won’t be alive then, but if I was, I’d definitely hate to see what happens when hubris runs unchecked.”

Here we have Ashley messing with syntax! He gets distracted, he rambles, he alternates between deep eloquence and slang. He speaks casually, but formally, due to a combination of his noble background and general disregard for how he's perceived. I think on top of comparing him to Brennan, who his entire syntax is based on, he has the vibe of a Christoph Waltz character who plays some REALLY iconic villains by simply using natural charm, casual syntax, and extremely sharp lines delivered in the middle of otherwise innocuous rambles. It's also kind of a Tarantino staple and I've made ZERO secret how much of my writing is inspired by him. He's also based on Harry Lime from The Third Man, which is where a lot of his belief system comes on, who ALSO delivers monologues in this specific way.

Ashley mentioning that world peace and general good will being the same as annihilation ALSO subverts audience expectations, because it's NOT sarcastic. This is the crux of what he believes, which brings us into the next bit.

He leaned closer to her, almost nose to nose. “See, deep down, we both want the same things. We don’t want this world to exist anymore. You just want a better one and I want nothing because there’s no such thing as better.”

The anger returned and this time he let it run unchecked. “Better is a lie that mommies and daddies tell their children so they grow up to keep rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. Better is a subjective term that nobody will ever agree to. The only thing that is better than what you have right now is nothing.” He spread his hands, eyes closing in a sudden serenity that came on the heels of the anger and somehow merged with it. “Absolute. Perfect. Nothingness. No pain. No suffering. No sense of self. And isn’t that exactly what you want- No, don’t answer. That was rhetorical.”

Jayne believes in destruction for destruction's sake. Ashley believes it serves a purpose and here he uses this to throw Tyffial's beliefs against her and mirror her, pointing out that Lucien's plan to bring everything a equilibrium is pointless because better is subjective and generally a lie because one person's better is another person's eternal damnation. Without actually saying it in direct words, he's effectively deriding Lucien's plan that Tyffial still believes strongly in is just another lie and that what she really wants is for her pain to stop.

This is also where we get quiet confidence mixed with loud assertion, which is Brennan Lee Mulligan's STAPLE CROP in monologues. Ashley gets loud when he's genuinely angry, so this marks the first time we see what makes him angry. We know at this point and it's one of the few things we know that he hates his father, who famously was part of a cult that wanted to cause destruction and suffering in the name of betrayer gods and their ilk not because of belief in their tenets, but because they were rich assholes who wanted an excuse built in for why they chose to be cruel assholes. This spits in the face of Ashley's belief system which is that destruction MUST occur for new growth. This is also what sets apart from Jayne, who believes in destruction for destruction’s sake.

(As a sidebar, a lot of Ashley’s design went into me really putting the work in to figure out what would make a lawful follower of a chaotic deity. Believing in the natural cycle of death and rebirth felt like a good way to honor paladin creeds even with Ashley being a Treachery Paladin that are just modified Blackguards, but are still required to take Oaths, unlike Oathbreakers.)

He placed his palms together. “And I promise I’m getting to the point. The point… The point is that I need everything to go a certain way and you are very, very much not hip to my vibe right now. So I’m gonna need you to step off, go back to your little hovel in whatever shithole you crawled out of, and not try to murder these people anymore. Mmkay? ‘Cause if you don’t, then the halfling’s gonna bleed out.” He pointed behind him at Otis, glassy-eyed and taking shallow breaths as their slit throat leaked blood onto the stones. “And then I’m gonna start peeling the skin off the goliath and when I’m done with that, I’m gonna break both your legs and leave you here with the bodies just to see what you end up doing. Trust me, I have theories and it’s a hell of a thing to watch when you’re bored between acts of devotion for the uncaring toothy void I call a god.”

Once again, we see Ashley playing with syntax. This is also where we get our first glimpse of Ashley’s certain threats. We know Ashley is good on his word- he’s already caused the Tombtakers considerable harm without them ever getting a hit on him. And while he has certainly explained the WHY he wants to do what he does, he has left everything ambiguous, including his god. Maybe a good history check would narrow it down, given he did flash his dagger, which is specifically the Blade of Broken Mirrors, the arm of Tharizdun’s chosen, but ultimately he’s vagueing it up. He said a lot of shit, but all he really said was “I want the world to burn and I want you to let this go.” We don’t know Ashley’s plan, only that it involves the Somnovem and requires the Nein to survive. So he hasn’t paused everything to reveal his evil plan. He’s just made it plain that the Tpmbtakers are interfering and given them a clear option. He could kill them and he probably should, but he has his reasons for letting them live to tell the tale should Tyffial choose “correctly.”

Ashley grabbed her by the collar to pull her up, putting pressure on her wounded stomach. His tone was unnervingly even now. “I’ve got big plans and I’m a rich male human, so I’m really used to things going my way. You don’t wanna see me when things aren’t. This is me being polite, honestly. And you wanna know why I’m being polite? Because I know you’re not gonna let your friend bleed out. I know you’re gonna do everything I ask. And how do I know that? Because deep down, you want the darkness too. It doesn’t matter who brings it so long as it swallows you whole.”

He released her and she fell back again with a half-choked cry of pain. She folded her arms over her wet and tacky leathers like she might hold more of her own blood inside her that way.

“So what’s it gonna be? Tick tock.”

Tyffial didn’t waste any time. “Otis. Fuck you. Fuck you.” “Are you telling Otis that or are you talking to me?” He waved his hand around his ear. “Not really clear.”

“Save Otis,” she gasped, desperately, and hated herself all the more for it.

“Oh that’s a good choice. Lovely work.” He clapped his hands together, stood, marched over to Otis and laid his hands upon the wound he’d left. The skin knit together leaving a pale scar like a smile across their neck. Ashley took one look at his work, threw a smile over his shoulder at Tyffial and vanished.

And scene! For Ashley, anyway. Here we see him using personal knowledge against Tyffial- he knows enough to know that she’s broken, desperate to keep hold of the friends she has, and won’t choose a horrific, slow death in favor of her pride. He doesn’t pull the “you should join me” card because he knows she’d never do it, but he plays on her exhaustion by saying that to get what she wants, all she has to do is step aside for a moment. It’s cruel, callous, and does everything it’s supposed to- set Ashley up as a villain and show how absolutely fucked up Tyffial is by everything that is happening, providing a bait and switch that shows she and the Tombtakers WON’T be villains in the next story and that Ashley is absolutely too strong for the Nein to deal with and that they’re in over their heads even with their human enemies.

And that’s the monologue break-down! Hopefully it helps some people with writing villains and if it doesn’t… well, here’s my thought process for one of my favorite scenes in all of LitMoR.

[lavenderobject58]

#2: What Was I Just Thinking? by Kuwabara Tamotsu

[Content warning: violence, blood]

toxic yuri am i right ahaha If you've heard of Kuwabara Tamotsu, its likely from his manga Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell!, an ongoing series popular among some of my edgiest lesbian friends. It's a great manga, and I'll probably end up writing about that manga at some point or another, but that's not what this post is about. Instead, I'm writing about Kuwabara's 2020 oneshot What Was I Just Thinking?, a manga that covers similar themes of love, sex, and violence, but with a different perspective and tone. In it, Makabe, the protagonist, struggles with her violent intrusive thoughts directed towards her friend Hoshizaki. After the latter reveals that she's actually a masochist, the two go back to her apartment and get sadomasochistic. It's a little cute, actually, even if the way it goes down is pretty fucked up on Makabe's part.

Kuwabara Tamotsu seems to really love taking these stressed-out, high-strung characters and giving them super unhealthy - usually violent - release valves. Obviously, there's a little more complexity to this specific situation than just that but it's essentially the core of Makabe's arc. The way we see her thought processes play out over the course of the manga paints this really fascinating picture of a woman who's so terrified of her own desires that when she finally lets them out she has no idea where - or even how - to stop. Classic yuri stuff, really. There are a few different ways you can interpret the dynamics at play outside of that, though. One of the things that for me really adds a layer of nuance to the relationship for me is how intentional Hoshizaki is about drawing certain reactions out of Makabe. There is obviously a huge difference between fucking with someone just to see what they're like when they're upset - which is just obnoxious friend behavior - and smacking the shit out of someone out of nowhere - which is assault - but the underlying motivations of both characters share some similarities, Hoshizaki is just a tad more subtle about it. And then there's that moment near the end, where Hoshizaki starts playing with Makabe's bruised hand in order to see what she looks like when she's in pain. There's a disparity in how much respect for boundaries each character has, and that's an important part of their dynamic, but I really like the way Hoshizaki isn't just a receptacle for Makabe's weird hangups. One might even say she "matches her freak".

There's also the fact that Makabe is a wimp. I think this is an important part of her character - she seems to have a bit of a complex about it, as we can see when she gets all defensive about having played ping pong in school, compared to the more athletic Hoshizaki. The fact that Hoshizaki seems more concerned about her hair being messed up than the bruising all over her face while Makabe's hands hurt so bad she can't even hold a cigarette is still kind of cute, and it makes her desires and motivations feel a lot more real.

Another fact of the matter is that these two women really are in love with each other. There are enough longing glances and flushed cheeks throughout the manga that we can be sure of that, and it's really not, like, normal friend stuff to want to hurt your bestie in order to understand her better. One really would hope that these two don't go on to build a relationship based off what they've established here, but come on. Look at them.

So what I find really interesting about this manga is that it's definitely toxic yuri, but it's presented in such a complex and sympathetic way that it almost makes you want to forget that fact? Like, obviously there's this big overarching layer of straight-up violence on the surface. And once you get to the core of the story it's about two characters nurturing a really unhealthy dynamic that's not going to take them anywhere good. But in between those two levels, there's this real sense of passion and romance and emotion that undercuts what would otherwise just be a total downer of a manga and turns it into something that's actually really cute, even while it maintains this sense of tension and fear and desperation that keeps you from getting too comfortable. It's also just really hot. If that all sounds good to you, you should read this comic (which I'll link below). You should also read Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell!, but more on that eventually. Probably. I'm still kind of figuring out what I want this blog to be, so no promises on anything, but you'll probably be seeing more of me throughout the week. Hope you all have a lovely Tuesday :)

[willknightauthor]

Wraith: The Best Game That Never Was

It occurred to me that even among RPG nerds Wraith is more obscure, and that makes me sad. Like people know it existed, but even at the time it was an also-ran. Among insiders at White Wolf it was a darling, but it never took off, so they stopped its line half way through. Even in high school I had to buy the books used online.

Wraith is one of the most original and compelling approaches to the afterlife I've seen in any medium, but especially in an RPG. In many games ghosts feature as NPCs, but rarely do you get to play as them, and even more rarely in an interesting way that centers the subjective experience of being dead.

The first thing that grabbed me was the art, all faded gray-scale, scratchy, often grotesque and surreal. The cover is striking: stark gray bound in chains. All far bleaker and genuinely scarier than anything else put out by White Wolf. Turns out the art matched the vibe of the setting very well, because the ultimate conceit of Wraith is that if the living knew what the afterlife is really like, we'd all be even more terrified to die.

Wraiths are a violation of the laws of nature. Biological life is already an improbable struggle against entropy, but the continued existence of consciousness after death? An absolute affront to the universe. Reality wants you gone, but you can't be killed. That contradiction manifests as Oblivion: non-existence as a visible, active force; the Freudian death drive become physics. And it goes all the way down into your very thoughts.

The afterlife is a world of ideals, not materials. Your well-integrated mind shatters into pieces when you die, and your "physical" form is a manifestation of it. Your Jungian shadow-self, once an unconscious and abstract thing, becomes a real, tangible person living inside you. All your vices, your self-loathing, your misanthropy, your death drive, become a voice in your ear: your best friend and worst enemy, helping and tricking you, constantly trying to gain control.

But you can't be killed. You're already dead. Instead of death, you just decay, further and further towards becoming your shadow. Eventually all that's left is a nightmare of who you used to be, existing only to torment others and drag them down together into nothingness. The world is full of these monsters, the things that go bump in the night and terrify both the living and the dead.

But that's literally the tip of the iceberg. The thin layer of shadow reality is nothing compared to the much larger expanse of the Tempest: a cosmic plane of dream and nightmare, right on the edge of Oblivion. The deep underworld is Lovecraftian Mad Max: an infinite shifting desert of eternal night filled with screaming storms, incomprehensible monsters, and forbidden knowledge. Pockmarking it are islands of stability upon which societies are built--dysfunctional city-states desperately attempting to project power into a world constantly trying to swallow them.

However, if no-one can die, then every awful political trend and tyrant remains forever. And they all have a huge head start on you establishing political power. Their society is a veneer of modern industrial capitalism, layered on top of mercantile guilds, layered on top of feudal lords, layered on top of a Roman imperial bureaucracy, all built on the back of one ancient wraith: the ferryman Charon.

But the Emperor has been missing for a long time, and the bureaucracy is so massive and old that it's rotting in on itself. Who knows how many are secretly succumbing to their own shadows? Their attempts to rule the rest of the underworld are always tenuous, like the last days of Roman Britain. It's a world eternally mid-apocalypse.

The problem with a world of thought and feeling is: how do you make things? What do you make them with? Sometimes the ghosts of physical objects make their way through, and they're mined like whale fall. Undoubtedly the Twin Towers were a huge boon to the dead, probably the site of an entire city.

But it's not enough. Wraiths are still people. They want clothing, and furniture, and buildings, and machines, and tools, and money. Where does all that come from? The only thing left that wraiths can touch: other people. Wraith society is built on a form of slavery more exploitative and horrifying than anything that's ever existed among the living. Slaves are valued not for their labor primarily, but for their use as raw materials.

The vulnerable newly dead are captured, dragged back to the capital, and molded in workshops and factories into goods for the upper classes. They claim it wipes out consciousness, and thus the finished product isn't suffering. If anything it's a mercy! To release them from the torment of the afterlife! And prevent them from becoming monsters! But when it's quiet, if you listen closely, some report you can hear it all whispering.

The bleak alienness of this afterlife to any human religion breaks the minds of many when they first realize they're dead. Some go into denial. Some reject their old religion. Some invent new religious explanations. And some try to twist their old beliefs into a shape that conforms.

The underworld is full of cults. Cults promising escape from the underworld. Cults claiming they know where heaven and hell are. (At best just projections of the collective beliefs of the living into the underworld.) Cults who claim they're building heaven and hell themselves. (These sorts of "afterlife lands" sometimes become tourist attractions.) But Oblivion is Oblivion. If you could describe its structure logically you would be contradicting its very essence. There is only decay.

Most people don't go to the shadowlands when they die. Where do they go? No-one knows. What happens when you're swallowed by Oblivion? No-one knows. Is there a God? No-one knows.

Just like when you were alive, you don't know what comes next, or why you're here. It's not real death, it's something in between. But maybe real death is just nothingness. Better not to risk it, then... even if that means clinging to the sands of Hell under the yoke of an eternal slave-aristocracy.

Maybe if you can figure out why you're here, you'll find a way out.

[m--rtyr]

tw, cannibalism, self-mutilation, drugs/drug-induced hallucinations/violence, mutually-toxic relationship (Zanus), and all associated themes.

i was gonna do a whole drawing whilst i talk about YJ-au (in long, an au for Lr which is based off of the basic premis of yellow jackets: What if a bunch of teenagers got Lord of the Flies'd and ate eachother) Zanus but

alas

my laptop is being slow, so nevermind.

I'll just talk about it in a basic text post, which is boring and uninspired (when i do it, i love when y'all do it).

QUICK DISCLAIMER: i do not romanticise/glorify any of this behaviour. they're incredibly toxic, and relationships like this are BAD. but i'll write it anyways, because Media Literacy may be dead, but my desire to explore dark themes is immortal.

Zanus were friends, though not romantic, prior to the crash that landed them in the mountains. Distant, maybe, but Zane always had a holier-than-thou attitude towards anyone, so his distance from Janus was typical, less personal. After the crash, due to the amount of characters involved, they all sected off into little groups.

The Jury was a school council type thing, and though they weren't Zane's first choice for survival buddies (his first choice being the group of assholes who ate shrooms, had a bad trip, and ate eachother), he stuck with them bc they were better than his third and fourth choices.

Due to general life stuff, he began actually having to interact with the rest of the Jury, and he found that Janus was very quick to agree with him, and so hung out with Janus the most. and, of course, Janus was like obsessed with him, but Zane wasn't really interested in them like that.

and then Zane get's his eyeball obliterated by Garroth by accident, and as an act of solidarity, Janus takes a knife to their own eye (the opposite eye, of course, so they have one full set of eyes between them). And Zane goes 'ohhhh fuck i want them so bad' and now they're dating, and they're toxic, and they suck <3

and get worse from there.

i have more to say about Zane, but i think setting the baseline that his idea of peak game is self-mutilation in honour of himself is probably the best way to establish who Zane is in this au.

[artbyblastweave]

Currently on episode 3 (2?) of MAWS. A few notes: One interesting thing about S:TAS is that you got an excellent sense of what the post-Superman status-quo was displacing. The first episode after the pilot involved Bruno Manheim, a conventional mob boss, running afoul of the Toyman, one of the first of the new crop of supercriminals, in a way that reminds me of The Long Halloween. Whenever Bruno Manheim shows up for the rest of the series, it's in the context of his struggle to remain relevant until he's killed while trying to be a cats paw for Darkseid. In the S:TAS pilot, Lex Luthor's big plan was an under-the-table attempt to evade an arms embargo and sell the combat robots to a post-soviet state; a very ripped-from-the-headlines plot for the 1990s, interrupted only by the abrupt injection of an out-of-context problem in the form of a Superhero. The show had a lot of nods like that, to the way in which Superman and company were beginning to upend a world that was, in terms of its economy and geopolitics, at least a little like our own. Justice League took it further- demonstrating that Superman has a positive impact on nuclear disarmament policy, but then further demonstrating the government's antsiness about the overall shift in the balance of power towards the Justice League, with their secret killsat and so on. However. The series was aware of how the world was changing, but didn't advance a precise mechanism for why all the disparate weirdness happened to kick off all at once, in time for Superman to encounter and fight it. Because that was pure Doylism- Now that Superman exists, wacky stuff needs to start happening so he can have something to fight each week. MAWS patches this from a watsonian perspective- there's a common (Kryptonian) origin of most of the supervillians Superman is going up against. However, there's a level on which this has made (all two episodes) feel siloed away from the world at large, in a way that the first two (four?) episodes of S:TAS didn't. Intergang goes from an established Mafia-style crime syndicate desperately using alien tech to remain competitive in a post-Superman world, to three comically-incompetent crooks who could barely knock over a convenience store. The robots go from a human technology built for war profiteering reasons to (implicitly) salvaged Braniac-tech. The arms-dealing plot is still present but it's a bit less clear on the face of it who's bankrolling this and who was supposed to be buying it. Cadmus is the strongest tie that this show has to the sense of realpolitik or the balance of power or whatever it is you want to call it, which was threaded through the older shows at a pretty deep level.

There's a level on which I'm being extremely unfair, because I'm comparing 60 mins of worldbuilding to a continuity that ran 15 years and probably close to a hundred hours- this could plausibly go anywhere. Indeed. One aesthetic criticism I had of the show, which I'm walking back before having even made a post about it, is that with the kryptonian tech meta-origin, I thought they were getting dangerously close to doing the MCU thing of villains who show up in costumes-that-are-barely-costumes, street-clothes or military-wear augmented by a few gadgets, with some aesthetic signifiers referring to the more costume-like costumes they had in the comics. Then I did a quick scan of S:TAS and noticed that very few villains in that are actually wearing costume-costumes- instead, it's altered physiologies, experimental bodysuits that look like skintight spandex in the abstracted artstyle of S:TAS, or clothing that's just the style in the alien society that they're from. Villains who are clearly wearing considered costumes are much more prominent in Justice League- set years after S:TAS, when the precedent for costumed villainy has had time to solidify. This last paragraph was what this post was originally going to be about, incidentally.

[pinkprimrose05]

Can you do the whole favorite thing about them, least favorite thing about them, favorite line, brOTP, OTP, nOTP, etc. for Yuya?

Warning: Long post, contains slight spoilers.

I am so very sorry for long this stayed in the box- but thanks a lot for the ask!

Favorite thing about them: Why must you make me choose. I can't. I can't do that. There's genuinely too many things to choose from.

...fine, I can do honorable mentions. One thing that piqued my interest in the tomato son all those years ago was how layered his persona can be... if you squint. Or if you're like me and relate to him on a spiritual level. You see, at the surface of his character, Yuuya's your average protag boy: fun-loving, good-natured and full of innocent hopes and dreams-

Except, that's not all there is to it. Not even at the very start of the story. We see from the get-go how he struggles with the weight of past events and his own doubts and insecurities -which only gets more and more prominent as the show goes on- all while holding onto his smiles in defiance against adversity, and trying to help others do the same as well. Personally, I still think that this is a deceptively simple yet very powerful message.

Least favorite thing about them: Ah, that's a question I can't quite answer. You see, there isn't anything specific I dislike about him, as much as there's stuff I dislike that happen to him- as in, to his character. Like the last stretch of the Xyz and Fusion arcs. Those parts did irreversible damage Yuuya's portrayal- so much so that even I, known for being more forgiving of the story's flaws than most, was shaking my head in denial through the first, second, and third watch. Lord help me when I reach them in the fourth.

Favorite line: Quoting myself from the Yuugo version of this post: would it be cheating the question if I said there's too many to count? Because it's still true. I know for a fact that I'll mention a line here and then find another one I prefer not a day later- that's how it is with the faves, I suppose. For the sake of not leaving this empty, though, here's one quote that stuck with me longer than most:

"The dueling I've had up until now isn't something I made alone. Because everyone was there, I was able to make it this far!"

brOTP: Yuugo!

...Saw that coming? Yes? No? Look, Yuuya's the protagonist so he naturally has a lot of interesting friendships, some established, some made over the course of the show... and a few entirely hypothetical, like this one. What can I say? I just think they'd go great together. Picture this: two idiots with half a braincell between them, who meet each other proper and instantly click. And get on like a house on fire from there. Seriously, they're so different yet similar in so many ways, and I think that'd lend itself to a great mutual underdtanding between the two- almost as if they have some kind of telepathetic link (hmmm). Putting them in one room for extended periods of time will either result in the most fun sort of chaos or in talks so deep they both end up bawling their eyes out in each other's arms.

They're friends. Besties. Brothers even.

OTP: Look, I'm a bonafide vanilla when it comes to romantic ships. Fruitshipping is my first and main OTP in all media of interest, and the threatre kiddos get a badge of honor for being one of a scant few pairs that got me extremely close to crying on more than 1 occasion. That's more than can be said for... *checks notes* ...99.8% of the characters I know!

nOTP: Hmm... there's none that come to mind, honestly. I don't mind seeing Yuuya paired with anyone, as long as the ship is not inherently inappropriate and/or isn't portrayed in any weird ways.

Random headcanon: Thanks to certain happenings towards the end of the plot, Yuuya ends up developing the unconscious habit of hoarding things precious to him. He'll go to sleep curled up in the middle of a nest of blankets and pillows, surrounded by all his favorite plushies, random trinkets and gifts from friends, and of course, his pendulum and card partners (thank god in-universe cards are stupidly sturdy). The first time Youko chances upon him in this state, deep in the peaceful bliss of slumber, she stealthily snaps a photo and- huh? No, you didn't hear a thing. "Cuteness overload can be heard from over a mile away?" Pfft, nonsense.

Unpopular opinion: No idea how unpopular this may be, but... I don't get the claims that Yuuya's not a good duelist?

Several people point out that he relies on Action cards to stall out a duel until he can turn it around, and conclude that as such, he's less skillful than most of his opponents. That take confuses me more than anything; after all, isn't it in the nature of the Action duel rule that one must make use of the card scattered around them? They're not just there for show, nor are they solely used for their effects. And besides, it's clear that Yuuya's particular brand of entertainment dueling places heavy emphasis on the dynamic aspect, which is why he's always running around the field and trying to make a spectacle out of every move. That doesn't diminish his skill in any way I can see- he's just more inclined to using resources outside those in his deck, thanks in part to needing more combo pieces than survivability cards by virtue of using Pendulums.

Song I associate with them: Assuming any song qualifies, I'd say it's Future Fighter; because it's literally Yuuya's (and Reiji's) very own personal song. It highlights core aspects of their personalities through the lyrics- and what do you know, our boy has a very nice singing voice too! It was one among many highlights from the back half of ARC-V S1 to me.

Favorite picture of them: Look, I just want to see him happy. I think he deserves to display genuine joy more often. And the more sparkles the episode budget allows, the better! So with that in mind, here's a few of my favorite pics of the boyo.

....oh, you thought I could pick only one?

Bonus:

[valeriefauxnom]

And now that DnD alignment chart I mentioned...(Or: How the Heck Do Your Kids Have So Many Alignments, Aurelius?)

Explanations beneath the cut:

(as always long post ahead, but I tried to find little moments that I think overall display their alignment tendencies to break up the text!)

First of all, I'd like to establish how I personally interpret the Ye Olde DnD alignment chart in all the many arguments it's inspired over the years. 'Good' is the tendency to act selflessly or for noble pursuits through the means that do not or minimally harm others, 'Evil' indicates more of a self-centered pursuit of interests as well as a willingness to do acts that would make good-aligned characters balk in the process.

'Lawful' is a strong adherence to a code, be it in the actual law, religion, or a personal creed, whereas 'Chaotic' carries a sense of utter disregard for tradition and doing things how they are supposed to be done, usually accompanied by rebellion against a code in turn.

Neutral on the good-evil spectrum, well...here's kinda where the 'doing good things for bad reasons or doing bad things for good reasons' complexities arise. These characters are tempered in their tendencies to act in certain ways. They might do a good deed and then do something more morally complicated, shall we say, the next day. Mind you, this only goes so far. You can't be casually murdering babies and claim to have a 'neutral' alignment even if you just saved a whole orphanage yesterday, for example.

Neutral on the lawful-chaotic spectrum are people who usually are just going about their lives. They're not fiercely devoted to a set of rules, but aren't exactly jumping to throw order into the fire either. This doesn't mean they're entirely disinterested in following laws, but they're probably a bit more willing to bend tradition/laws for their purposes.

Okay, with that out of the way, here's some explanations+alternative alignments, since there's always an argument to be made...

Aurelius: Pretty cleanly stereotypical LG. He has a strong focus on fulfilling his duties as king as well as fostering good in the world. But he does have one unique attribute to me, for such a clean LG: he isn't so caught up in 'duty' that he tries to force everyone else into it, as seen with Emile when he tried to reassure him that he needn't assume responsibility beyond his capacity. He's more of the belief each should aspire to and fulfill what duty they can manage without forcing one's self into a position they are unable to handle, which is very admirable in my opinion.

Leonidas: starts in Lawful Evil, shifts to Lawful Neutral. Leonidas is Lawful, through and through, based on his strong adherence to his personal creeds, even if that creed is more of a chaotic viewpoint. If I could somehow declare him Lawfully-Chaotically-Evil, I would, but ultimately when chips are down he wants order, which is why he's more than willing to quell riots. His order is just one that inspires chaos among others.

He also flat-out changes his modus operandi when Euden beats him, because he actually sticks to his creed of 'might makes right' and thus, Euden's methods are right. While Leonidas is not necessarily incorrect in his hatred of the church in general, given what all they're up to, casually hunting down regular adherents and his wanton disregard for life puts him more in Evil territory. He shifts to Neutral more in the sense of how he's behaving even if his ultimate goal hasn't changed: he's just working towards it differently.

Phares: when possessed, honestly you could argue all three of the 'evils-'. The Progenitor himself is likely Lawful Evil, maaaybe Neutral Evil, but you could argue his overall behavior when possessed is pretty chaotic, since he loves springing in at inopportune times like his freeing of Beren, ambushing siblings as a 'test', and the way he seems to take joy in the chaos he's leaving. All in all, though, I'd say he's not particularly acting for pure chaos nor out of adherence to a creed because of the Progenitor's corruption.

Unpossessed, though, he's more in neutral good to lawful good territory. Phares does show some tendencies to believe they have duty as the royal family, but overall to me he comes across more as trying to do the good thing for the sake of it and isn't so caught up in duty as to stick to it if it's truly causing problems, like how he implores the Halidom scientists to study anything, no matter how heretical, to try and find a solution to save the world.

Chelle: I could see an argument for Chaotic Neutral depending on how morally absolutist you are when interpreting her summer story wherein she's essentially long-term manipulating to set up an actual child as one of her spies in the future by putting her in debt via rescuing her from the streets, which is kinda icky.

Otherwise, she's a pretty solid chaotic good. I mean, we're talking about a woman who prefers other games to Alberian chess because Alberian chess has too many rules in it and brings back deeply forbidden technology because she thinks it's needed. She loves doing things in an unconventional way to win before fights even start, and is a good representation that 'chaotic' alignments aren't just doing stuff at random as some misguided people seem to think. Granted, she does seem to have similar thoughts that there is a duty inherent to nobility, but the way she goes about expressing that? Pretty chaotic, all things considered.

Valyx: if you'd asked people around chapter 6, people would probably say he's Lawful Neutral since he was coming across as a 'law above all else even if the law is doing some messed up things' type, but with everything we know, he's solidly good. His story reveals he did initially try to stand up to his Father, not realizing he was possessed, and when he did figure that out, Morsayati was immediately threatening his siblings with possession and throwing the realm into chaos to get Valyx in line, which he accepted to try and keep the army set free to pillage per Morsayati under control as much as possible.

Beren: he just wants to see all the worlds burn and make them suffer as he has. Perfect microcosm of chaotic evil right there. (also I put this here because I don't know, Beren saying 'okie-dokie' is just funny to me)

Emile: Oh boy. Emile largely acts with complete disregard of others in favor of his own self-interest. He also shuns the concepts of duty as royalty after the long war with trying to measure up to his sibling growing up, overall appearing apathetic to the concept of responsibility in positions of power. He's strongly motivated to make others, in particular Euden, suffer physically and mentally, as well as his attempted enslavement of Mercury when he lies to pact since he views pacting as slavery on part of the dragon. He has huge disregard of life as seen by his random attack of a random village just because he obtained power.

To me, he fits pretty snug into CE for most of the game. After Audric's lessons and similar events, though, I'll give him CN since he seems like he's trying to overall behave better, ie 'not evilly', but it's a loooong slope to even that. At best I could imagine him in the fictional 'accidentally good' alignment, wherein he's not actually good but occasionally happens to do good things in the course of doing something else, like his encouragement of democracy of Dyrenell just because he's lazy.

Euden: he might have strong drives to protect others and be a good prince/leader, but with his overall distaste of actually being a leader and his tendency to relax all the rules and regulations regarding interacting with royalty comes across as 'neutral' to me. He respects laws, but won't let rules about etiquette or going through appropriate channels stop him from busting down doors to get to black market dealers, etc. But he also doesn't entirely approve of completely ignoring the law like Bell- er, Lapis in her Robin-Hood esque thievery or other vigilantism. Easy enough to slap the G alignment from there for NG!

Zethia: Being a head of a church, she's pretty clearly LG. She's strongly devoted to the Ilian faith, and does her best to adhere to the ideals the faith champions. She seems more overall concerned doing things because of her duty as Auspex and royalty both. Like Beren, not much to say here since not a whole lot is up in the air.

Possessed, well, along with Aurelius, the Other definitely seems to bat for chaos even if he proclaims indifference or even pretends to do things the 'lawful' way to continue his façade pretending to be Aurelius.

Nedrick: Nedrick is hard to quantify himself exactly, but I'm afraid his methods by assembling Agito shuck him pretty quick to Chaotic Evil. Even with how every would-be Agito, -excluding Valyx, -donned the beast masks willingly, his willingness to let them run rampant in all their atrocities makes him complicit since he enabled/empowered them to do it in the first place. I'd also hear an argument for himself more on Neutral Evil, but no matter how you slice it, Nedrick is not good aligned.

While I would argue he's not as personally evil as Emile tends to be, more of an extremist 'anything to get what I want done' with disregard if it harms people instead of Emile's goal often being to harm people, his methods and willingness to harm/kill so many still aren't good. He also is rebelling against the order of the world as it stands, which makes me tend towards chaotic even apart of the Agito.

So uh...yeah. The Alberian Royal family spans quite the range of alignments, in my opinion. What do you guys think, though? I'm curious as to how the royal fam comes across to you!