#you had to swap your gender presentation also or people would get weird about it and among other things undervalue your work

[whetstonefires]

when i was a kid i made up a society where they tracked birth sex for reproductive reasons but it didn't particularly determine adult gender, because that was tied to your job--like at some point they got so attached to gender roles that they decided the performance of a role determined the gender. (which historically has been the case quite often, just not to this extent lol.)

it was in the context of a badly written short story where an anthropologist had just straight up failed to grasp that this was how it worked for a humorously long time.

If somebody pitched me traditional gender roles for the first time they would have me in the first half not going to lie.

Oh, in a complex society with a massive amount of required knowledge and responsibilities, two people traditionally partner together so that the knowledge and responsibilities can be divided between them? Awesome!

Wait what do you mean the responsibilities are assigned at birth.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN ONE HALF HAS FEWER CIVIL RIGHTS.

[amazingphanisnotonfire-imagines]

Archie//sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart

Request: Hey agian lol sorry I was also wondering if you could do 2 archie andrew imagines where the reader gets pregnant and tells archie in a cute way, skip to where they find out the gender, then the birth and Archie makes a promise to reader and their baby and proposes to the reader also archie does skin to skin contact 

hey! so, this was fun to write! i hope you like! there’s a lot of baby themed things being posted right now, i must have had an influx of baby requests. also, title is a winnie the pooh quote, so credit to that adorable yellow bear i guess. he really has way with words doesn’t he? 

Andrew’s construction is in popular demand these days, the legacy of Fred Andrews has travelled far and wide through the surrounding towns of Riverdale, and Archie feels like he hasn’t stopped in the last month. He goes to work before you wake up, comes home when it’s dark, eats, showers and sleeps. 

Today is no different, and as he drags his feet up the steps to your apartment, keys jingling in his hands as he goes over what he has left to do on the build he’s currently doing, his eyes get heavier with each step. 

He expects you to be waiting by the door, or pottering about in the kitchen when he walks through the front door, but there’s no one there. The lights are switched off, causing a frown to form on his face. 

The first thing he feels is panic, but then he hears you coming out of the bathroom, a bright smile on your face as you near him and he feels himself relax. 

“Hey babe.” You greet and wrap your arms around his neck. He kisses you slowly and you feel a blush creep up your cheeks. “How has your day been?” You ask and grab his coat from him. 

“It was alright. We’re almost finished the house, hopefully it’ll be done in the next few days, so maybe next weekend we can get away somewhere.” He replies making you grin. “Right now though, I need a shower.” He sighs and untangles himself from you, cringing when he realizes just how bad he needs one.

“Wait!” You grab his hand and he looks at you confused. “I need to give you something first.” You add and pull him into the small dining room. Candles line the room, making him furrow his eyebrows as he looks at you. “Okay, close your eyes.” You tell him and he sends you a look before reluctantly closing his eyes. 

You take a deep breath, feeling your heartbeat in your throat as you pick up the small box hidden on one of the chairs. 

“Hold your hands out.” You instruct and he does, slightly apprehensive of what you’re going to do. 

“If this is a spider I swear to God, Y/n.” He teases making you giggle. 

“It’s not I promise. Just give me your hands.” You say and he shifts uncomfortably, but holds his hands out anyway. “Okay.” You place the box in his hands and he squeezes it. “Open them!” 

His eyes snap open and he looks down at the small white box. He looks between it and you before pulling the lid off. A small bear stares back at him and for a moment he’s confused as to why you’ve given him his childhood Winnie the Pooh bear to him as a present. But then he notices what he’s holding and his eyes widen. 

“Holy shit.” He whispers and picks the white stick up. “Are you?” He squints while reading the small screen. “positive...are you pregnant?” Tears blur his vision but he can just make out you nodding and he grins at you. 

“Don’t worry, I cleaned the test before I put it in the bo-” A squeal leaves your lips as he picks you up and spins you around. Tears roll down his cheeks while he laughs loudly. 

“I love you so fucking much.” He mumbles against your lips. You run your fingers through his hair, and his eyes flutter closed. 

“I love you too.” You reply and pull him in for another kiss. 

---

“Go ahead.” The bell above the door rings, alerting the few people sitting in Pop’s of your arrival. Archie presses a kiss to your head and squeezes your hand before ordering. 

You take a quick glance around, trying to find an empty booth for the two of you to sit and celebrate in, but when your eyes land on a certain blonde and beanie clad couple, your eyes light up and all thoughts of private moment are gone. 

“What are you guys doing back?” You ask, pleasantly surprised and Betty and Jughead stop their conversation. Your smiles mirror each other as they stand up to hug you, and you feel tears spring to your eyes. “Sorry guys.” You wipe at them and Betty looks at you concerned. “It’s the hormones. Although, I am really happy that you’re back.” You send them a watery smile and they look at you sympathetically. 

“Here.” Jughead hands you a napkin and you take it gratefully. 

“Thanks.” You slide into the seat opposite them, resting a gentle hand on the top of your bump. 

“We’re just visiting our parents.” Betty explains. “My mom’s been on the phone every single day for the past two weeks so I thought I’d come down for the weekend so she’ll leave us alone for a bit.” She explains and you roll your eyes. 

“I see she still isn’t quite over the two of you moving.” 

“You’re telling me.” She sips her milkshake while huffing. 

“It’s not like we moved half way across the country. We’re an hour and a half drive.” Jughead adds through a mouthful of food and you pull a face. 

“Jughead, Betty!” Archie grins while placing your drinks down on the table. “What are you doing back.” 

“Alice.” The three of you reply and he shakes his head, a small laugh escaping his lips. 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah.” Betty nods. “Anyway, how are you guys? What have you been up to?” She asks and you and Archie share a look. He places a hand on your bump and you give it a squeeze. 

“We went to the doctors today for a scan.” Archie starts and a soft smile twitches at your lips. 

“Oh you’re twenty weeks now!” Betty squeals making Jughead jump slightly as she leans forward. “Do you know what you’re having?” 

“Nope.” You shake your head and she slumps in her seat. “The doctor wrote it down but we haven’t looked at it yet.” You add and she picks her head up, her eyebrow raises as she glances between you and the bag sat beside you. 

“Nope!” Archie picks it up before she has the chance to grab it and she sits back down with a loud huff.

“Meanie. I think as the auntie and uncle of your baby, we have a right to know what it is.” She crosses her arms and you roll your eyes at her. 

You may have all grown up, moved away and gotten actual lives. But whenever your back together in Riverdale, you all revert back to teenagers winding each other and everyone else up. 

“Hey babe?” Archie interrupts yours and Betty’s small argument and you send her a glare before facing your boyfriend. “Where’s the envelope?” 

“What?!” Your eyes widen and you grab the bag from him. Jughead and Betty lean over the table and watch you empty your bag. “No, no, no.” You mumble and shake the worn leather. 

“It’s fine.” Archie tries to calm you down. “Isn’t it fine guys.” 

“Yes.” Jughead nods. 

“Totally fine.” Betty adds and searches through the pile of things on the table. “It’s got to be here somewhere.” 

“Hey, do any of you guys know why somebody would just have the world ‘girl’ in an envelope?” Reggie drags a chair up to your table and everyone goes silent. “Because, even I know that’s weird.” He continues and drops the paper on the table.

Black curly writing faces the four of you and you all stare down in shock, it takes a few minutes before Archie breaks the silence. A shocked laugh escapes his lips and he looks at you, tears forming in his eyes. 

“We’re having a girl?” He says and you nod. 

“Yeah.” You laugh. “I suppose we are.” He cuts you off with a kiss and Betty and Jughead share a look, clinking their glasses together. 

---

“Y/n. I have loved you since we were 16. I love how smart you are, and how you’re always the funniest person in the room. Your smile is just my favourite thing to look at, it makes me smile just thinking about it. You’ve made me a better man, and now a father, so I would like to make you my wife. Y/n Y/l/n, will you marry m-OW!”

“Are you seriously asking me to marry you while I’m giving birth?” You seethe and squeeze his hand. 

“I thought it was romantic.” He argues and pulls his fingers from your grip. He’s about to continue when you send him a glare that quickly shuts him up, maybe even forever. 

“Birth is not romantic. It is the furthest thing from romantic and when I’ve finished this I swear I’m going to tear your head from your shoulders, shove it in the hole and then see how you like pushing something of that size out of you.” His eyes widen at your threat and he gulps a little. 

The midwives and doctor surrounding you stifle their laughs at your words, all of them excited to tell their co-workers the newest insult to go on their wall of insults that’s been hurled at partners. 

“Sorry.” He mumbles and rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. “You’re doing amazing babe.” He strokes the top of your head and you groan loudly as another contraction hits. 

“That’s it Y/n, keep pushing. Well done.” The midwife talks you through it and you grit your teeth as you push again. 

“Why do you have your boobs out?” You ask through you’re panting and Archie looks down at his bare chest. 

“The midwife said it would help bonding.” He shrugs and you stare at him. 

“With who? The midwife?” 

“No.” He shakes his head. “The baby.” You’re about to argue when another contraction cuts you off and Archie’s bonding is the least of your problems. 

“Fuck!” You curse and Archie grimaces at the noises you’re making. If he could swap places with you, he would in an instant. He hates seeing you in pain, even if you just get a paper cut, so this is killing him, even if he does know after it’ll be worth it. 

With a few more pushes and lot more curses, you finally give birth to a 7lb baby, born at 8:17am with bright brown eyes and head full of blonde hair. 

“Do you think she’ll turn ginger?” You ask through sobs as she’s carefully handed to you. 

“I hope so.” Archie cries. “Although, I don’t really care. I’ll love her no matter what.” He adds and wipes the tears from his eyes. 

“Archie?” You ask and he looks at you, both of your eyes full of love and awe. “I will marry you.” You say, a tired smile twitching at your lips while your head falls onto his shoulder, pressing a soft kiss to it. “Would you like to hold her?” You ask and he nods eagerly. 

“I’m always going to be here for you and you’re mom...I promise.” He starts, and walks over to the window looking over the car park and the rest of Riverdale. “You are the most loved thing in this world and I am already so proud of you. I love you.” Archie whispers, the chatter from the nursers and the curses from you all fade away as he stares down at her. Her wide eyes look back at him, they pierce through him and stare straight at his soul. “Hi, Winifred, welcome to the world.” 

✨tagged ✨

 @moxleybabe

[itsbenedict]

I didn’t post about everything I played this year, so here’s my opinions on the stuff I played that I didn’t make a rec post for:

Raging Loop 

Raging Loop is one of them twisty meta Zero Escape-y branching-path visual novels where an ensemble cast is trapped in a mysterious circumstance where people are dying gruesomely, and you have to find out what’s happening and stop it by looping a bunch. 

I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it, because... it tries to have its cake and eat it too with the supernatural elements. Clearly magic is real and has important impacts on the scenario, but then other parts are trickery you’re supposed to see through, and it’s entirely uninterested in cluing you in to how that trickery was accomplished. Not exactly a fair play mystery, in that regard- you have to kind of just be along for the ride, rather than try to figure it out.

That said, it’s a good ride- pretty strong character writing, and the central conceit of the Werewolf/Mafia-style murder scenario creates really interesting drama. It’s more concerned with making itself feel clever than letting the player feel clever, but it’s still well-paced and gripping and has a pretty decent resolution.

Detective Grimoire

I recommended Tangle Tower, the sequel, pretty strongly- and this one, while obviously a little rougher around the edges with the art and mechanics (the suspicion tracker system is a total dud; I didn’t even realize it existed until I realized I was missing an achievement for using it), it’s still pretty darn good. Really fun character designs and animations, fully-voiced, and a solid whodunit backing it all. Plus- while the two are more or less self-contained, the continuity threads with Tangle Tower raised some really interesting questions.

Contradiction - the all-video murder mystery

This one was pretty fun, largely on the strength of the actors. The main mechanic of interrogating people on evidence and using their own statements against each other was some good stuff, too. Definitely had that Phoenix Wright quality to the deductions, and Jenks is a really fun character. (Had a few points where progression was just linked to standing in a certain previously-abandoned area of the map where a clue was suddenly there for no reason, there- good thing it had a hint system.)

As a mystery, it could use a little work- most of what you end up finding out is sequel bait (for a sequel that never actually came together, unfortunately), and the actual whodunit is just sort of hiding in the cracks of all that. And... cornering the culprit just sort of happens out of nowhere once you’ve got your hands on the right piece of evidence, without much fanfare. You’re following up on leads like usual, you find a little lie in someone’s testimony, and then- oh, shit, they’re just confessing everything! Unlike all the previous times you questioned them and they were super evasive like everyone else! And then the game is over. 

All in all, it’s pretty meaty and entertaining and I’d recommend it, but unfortunately the creators have moved on to other things, so there’s not going to be any follow-up on the stuff it left unresolved.

Ikenfell

Ikenfell is a tightly-designed RPG about kids at a magic school, with Paper Mario-style action command mechanics and a battle system that makes a big deal out of careful positioning and movement, which was really enjoyable. The difficulty’s a little high (I recommend always always always speccing into max damage because killing things before they kill you is worth more than any amount of defense, speed doesn’t work, and healing is cheap), but I found it really satisfying.

There’s... something... off? About... I don’t know how to put it, it’s... doing that “yes, everyone is queer and mentally ill, deal with it” thing, which, sure, okay. But for a lot of them it’s such a background thing, like... half the playable cast is unambiguously nonbinary, but like... I don’t know if it’s trying to make some statement on how there are no rules to being NB and you can 100% perform a particular binary gender presentation but still count, or if they wrote the whole story and then changed the pronouns of some of the characters for Representation Points, or what. Probably the former? I dunno, it just feels weird. Maybe I’m just not woke enough to Get It.

(unrelatedly: why the heck is the official art they use everywhere so... off-model? none of them look like they do in-game- they look like the creator commissioned someone to draw a group shot with one reference image each and didn’t tell them anything about the characters. how much you wanna bet they commissioned a friend and it came out wrong but they were too polite to say “sorry, no, this is wrong, can you do it over?”)

Trails of Cold Steel IV

Hoo boy. It’s... not great, and it’s not great in a pretty predictable way for an even-numbered entry in the Trails series. It happens every time- first there’s a game in a new engine with new characters and a new world to explore, and it’s really nice and does interesting things... and then it ends on a cliffhanger, and then there’s a sequel game in the same engine with the same characters and the same world, reusing as many assets as possible. Also the League Of Generically Evil Anime Supervillains is there causing trouble for reasons they refuse to explain, and the plot is a storm of magicbabble and macguffin-chasing that makes little to no sense. 

Cold Steel IV is that for Cold Steel III, full stop. Welcome back to all the same places you visited last game, except this time there’s some stupid magic apocalypse happening (not that it stops you from taking the time to do random sidequests constantly, of course). The whole “oh, the evil curse mind controls people and that’s why they do stupid bullshit that’s in no one’s interest” plot point is leaned on super hard, and it’s just a big yawn the whole way through.

It’s still really fun, though, because the battle system remains really well-designed. (The same battle system that was just as fun in Cold Steel III, mind you, but it hasn’t gotten old.) And- though they’re struggling to square it with the dumb mind control apocalypse plot, the NPC dialogue continues to make the world feel believable and lived-in. They don’t slack on the parts that make Trails good- it’s just the parts that make Trails bad are making themselves more evident than ever.

did finally get to date Towa though so that’s a win

One Step From Eden

OSFE is... uh. It’s fucking hard is what it is. It’s sort of a deckbuilding roguelike, and there’s this combat that takes place on a grid, and- wait, it’s like Mega Man Battle Network, it’s exactly like Mega Man Battle Network. Man, I forgot about that, but the mechanical influence is extremely obvious. It’s MMBN meets Slay the Spire.

Except it’s super duper hard as hell, because unlike MMBN you can’t pause and swap out chips or anything- everything is just always happening so much, all at once, everywhere, and you have no recourse but to git gud and learn all the enemy patterns and the behavior of your own spells and develop the twitch reflexes necessary to not fucking die from all the shit that’s on the screen always.

(What’s the story? Uhhhh, there was some kind of magic apocalypse, and some anime girls are trying to reach a city for some reason that doesn’t really get explained ever. The game doesn’t really care to build its world at all- it’s all mechanics plus a little token character dialogue that doesn’t say much.)

The point is it’s really frickin’ hard but I am an epic pro gamer and I got ALL THE ACHIEVEMENTS, MOTHERFUCKER. If you’ve played it, I expect you to be really god damn impressed with me, okay???

A Short Hike

This one was really relaxing! It’s a platformer where you explore an Animal Crossing-y island of cartoon animal people, collecting mobility upgrades- but like, mainly it’s about straight chillin’. The flight controls are fun and there’s lots of little secrets to find and it’s just a nice time that doesn’t drag on too long. Not too much to say about this one.

Pokémon Sword

Ehhhhh.

I’m not here for the hot takes about how Dexit is good actually. Development hell happened, they had to make cuts for time, I get it. It’s disappointing and makes the game a little bit worse, but it’s not the end of the world.

Apart from that... perfectly serviceable? The Wild Area could’ve used a little more technical polish (as could most things in the game, really) but was a step in the right direction, giving the player a wider array of early-game team-building options than ever before. No HMs is good. Story and characters were kind of nothing, but that’s par for the course. “At least this time they’re not shoehorning in some kind of stupid evil-team-wants-legendary-pokemon-to-destroy-the-world apocalypse plot”, I thought to myself before they managed to shoehorn one in at the last minute with zero buildup- but, hey, beats wasting half the game on it.

It’s nothing special and it’s missing a lot of polish, but its problems are mainly due to being rushed, and presumably next gen they’ll be able to reuse a lot of the models and animations (maybe even improve the animations so they’re not so boring??? a man can dream) and make something interesting. SwSh seem like they were testing the waters for something else, and not taking too many chances in the meantime. 

(yo why would you sell all these cosmetic items and then turn them all off during gym battles, though) 

Hades

Hades is- oh, who am I kidding? Everyone knows Hades, it’s the game of the year, greatest thing since sliced bread, Supergiant are heroes, yada yada yada. I’ve played almost 300 hours of it and I’ve completed everything except all the Resources Director levels (currently a Sigma Wraith), it’s extremely fun and you don’t need me to tell you that.

Petal Crash

It was that thing the Paranatural creator helped on? It’s, uh. It’s a block-sliding puzzle game thing, sort of in a Puyo Puyo vein. It has fun character designs and some good dialogue, like you’d expect from Zack’s involvement, but it didn’t really leave an impression otherwise (besides how got dang infuriating some of its Turn Trial puzzles can be.) The story is... kinda heartwarming, kinda didactic, kinda childish, not especially deep or interesting. Hard for it to be, when it’s told through little bits of fluffy character dialogue that exist to set up a puzzle battle as quickly as possible. Not super recommended unless you really really like block-sliding puzzles.

Hollow Knight

Man, why’d I sleep on this for so long? It’s a metroidvania platformer with heavy Dark Souls inspiration, in terms of tone and difficulty and death mechanics and environmental storytelling. And it’s... apart from all that, just really good as a game, with tight controls and juicy movement and great animation. Progression is linked as much to mastery as it is to upgrades collected- I found myself in lategame areas facing down things that would’ve killed me ten times over at the start- not because I had the best gear, but because I’d learned the game’s language and understood how to move in ways that wouldn’t get me killed.

(Usually. Sometimes I’d walk into a room and sit on a bench and suddenly there’d be a boss fight and I’d get slaughtered. Ain’t that just the way it goes?)

Anyway, on top of all that it’s just charming as hell, with a really unique and well-realized world full of little bug people. I love how, like, your character is clearly some kind of eldritch abomination, but it’s small and cute and so everyone (besides enemies that attack you on sight because they’re possessed by some kinda evil mold) is like “awww, who’s this little guy? want some help, little guy?”

(except Zote, who is just an ass hole. i love him.)

[noona-clock]

One Condition 🎨🌺🎃

How about going to a Halloween party with TOP and you want to do a couples costume, but the only way he agrees is if it's a gender swap. Something ridiculous, like Morticia and Gomez or Dany Zuko and Sandy. Congrats on the 9k btw!

Thank you, dear @violagoth! I hope you like what I came up with!

Genre: AU/Fluff

Pairing: TOP x You (Female!Reader)

Warnings: None

Words: 1,557

“What do you mean you won’t do it?!” you cried, your brow furrowed in almost extreme distress. “It’s the perfect idea!”

“I just don’t see why we have to do a couple's costume,” Seunghyun sighed as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s so lame.”

“It is not!” you whined. “It’s cute! Especially this one!”

Your boyfriend simply let his hand fall from his face and shot you a Look.

So, you shot him a Look right back. You knew you could convince him -- persuade him -- break him down. You just needed to be unrelenting and annoying, he would give in.

“Come on,” you sighed, the whine still very much present in your tone. “It’s just one night, and it’s just Halloween. It’s fun! And we’ll look amazing! Everyone will love it, and we can go as whatever you want next year because you know my cousin throws a party every year, and --”

“Okay!” Seunghyun finally relented, and you lifted your hands to clap with delight... but he cut you off before you could. “On one condition.”

“What would that be?” you asked.

“We switch.”

Your brow furrowed immediately, and your head jerked back slightly in surprise and confusion. “...What do you mean?”

“We switch who’s who,” Seunghyun explained as a smirk began to form on his lips.

“Switch who’s -- what? Like... you’re -- and I’m --”

Seunghyun nodded silently.

“What?!”

Your boyfriend crossed his arms over his chest and shrugged nonchalantly. “That’s the only way I’ll do it.”

After you closed your eyes... pressed your lips together... let out a very beleaguered sigh...

You nodded.

“Okay, fine.”

Seunghyun chuckled in the smuggest way a person can chuckle, and you simply shook your head. Only your boyfriend would be able to convince you to do this, that was for sure.

Oh, god. You couldn’t believe you were doing this.

It took you about a week to get your costume together, though not because it was difficult to find anything you needed. That part was quite easy, actually. You just took your time because you hoped Seunghyun would change his mind.

Of course, he did not.

And when the evening of the party arrived... you got dressed. Begrudgingly. Very, very begrudgingly.

You donned your high-waisted trousers, your button-down shirt, your suspenders, your felt, wide-brimmed hat. And just as you grabbed your artist’s palette and paintbrushes, Seunghyun appeared in the doorway of your closet.

Obviously, your immediate reaction was to burst out laughing.

The unibrow, for one, looked absolutely ridiculous and glorious at the same time.

And then there was the flower crown headband, the beaded necklaces, and the shawl around his shoulders.

Okay, so maybe your boyfriend’s idea to gender-swap your Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera couple’s costume wasn’t so bad after all. Seunghyun looked incredibly delightful, and you had to admit that you were much more comfortable in Diego’s outfit than you might have been in Frida’s. Seunghyun was way more confident in himself, and he could pull off a unibrow almost as well as the artist herself.

“Okay, you do look great,” you told him with a giggle as he dramatically flung his shawl over and around his neck like a scarf.

“I know I do,” he replied. “Frida is clearly the showstopper in this relationship, and I couldn’t let you steal the spotlight.”

“You’re right,” you grinned as you stepped up to give him a quick kiss. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“And that’s why I keep you around,” Seunghyun sighed, just barely able to keep a teasing smirk off his lips.

You rolled your eyes playfully before taking off your hat and swatting at him with it. “Come on, let’s go,” you chuckled.

Almost as soon as you stepped into your cousin’s house, it seemed like the entire place knew about your couple’s costume. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the party guests to notice that Seunghyun -- your boyfriend -- was dressed up as Frida Kahlo, an extremely famous female artist.

To be honest, you had been just a tiny bit nervous most people wouldn’t think it as amusing as you did and would shoot you funny looks as you walked by. But, within five minutes of arriving, you knew you’d been silly to worry so much. You knew almost everyone there (besides your cousin’s co-workers), and they also knew Seunghyun. At the very least, they knew what you posted about him on social media, so they weren’t surprised that he wouldn’t bat an eyelash about dressing up as someone of the opposite gender -- and with a unibrow, no less! And they loved it.

For about ten minutes straight, you and Seunghyun posed for pictures. You thanked just about every single guest as they exclaimed over how amazing your costumes were, how unpredictable they were -- one of your cousin’s co-workers even used the word ‘genius,’ which you certainly didn’t deny.

Once the initial hype finally died down, the two of you found your way to the refreshment table to load up on chips and dip before taking pictures with your own phones.

“See?” Seunghyun murmured in your ear as you spooned out some french onion dip onto your plate. “There was nothing to worry about.”

You frowned gently before your gaze darted up to look at him. “I--”

“I know you well enough,” he interrupted.

You had been about to say you hadn’t been worried, even though you had been. And even though you weren’t exactly surprised that Seunghyun could tell. It was just in your nature to keep your anxieties to yourself, no matter how long the two of you had been or would be together.

“Why do you think I wanted to switch who was who?” he added.

Your frown deepened and you opened your mouth to question him, but he continued before you had a chance to.

“I know you only came up with this idea because you thought I would like it,” he shrugged. “Did you really want to wear a unibrow in front of a bunch of people? No, of course, not. But I don’t care. People already think I’m weird, so why not just go with it and let you wear pants and normal eyebrows all night?”

Your brow had furrowed as you’d listened to his confession, and you had to set your plate down on the table so you wouldn’t drop it. Truly, you couldn’t quite believe what you were hearing.

“You... you wanted to switch because you knew I would be too uncomfortable dressing up as her? Not because you hated the idea of a couple’s costume and just wanted to be contrary?” you asked quietly, your brow furrowed deeply.

Seunghyun simply shrugged. He shrugged as if it were no big deal.

And, even if sometimes your insecurities were a big deal to you, you realized now they weren’t to him. He accepted and loved you for exactly who you were. He never tried to change you or make you feel bad for not having the most self-confidence.

...How had you gotten so lucky?

“...Why are you crying?” Seunghyun asked softly, and you quickly reached up to wipe at your eyes.

“Nothing,” you replied with an awkward chuckle. “Nothing, I just -- I love you.”

“Well, you don’t have to cry about it,” your boyfriend grinned. “Diego Rivera would never cry about being in love.”

“He might have!” you countered. “He was an artist. Artists are sensitive!”

Seunghyun simply shook his head, laughing softly to himself before popping a potato chip into his mouth.

Before he could step away from the table, though, you leaned over and placed a kiss on his cheek.

“I love you, Frida,” you told him, the corners of your lips curving into an adoring grin.

Seunghyun turned to look at you, and a smile just as adoring grew on his lips, too. “I love you, too, Diego.”

You were just about to grab his shawl and pull him down for a real kiss when you were interrupted.

“Hey, there you are!” your cousin smiled, suddenly appearing next to you at the refreshment table. “You’ve got to see one of my co-workers. She’s dressed up as Brian May from Queen, and she said her boyfriend is coming soon as Freddie Mercury. It’s amazing.”

...Okay, you weren’t going to lie. That did sound amazing, but you were also just a little bit relieved you weren’t the only girl dressed up as a guy. And part of a couple’s costume, too!

As you slipped your hand into Seunghyun’s to follow your cousin, he placed his mouth next to your ear and murmured, “Next year, how about we do another couple’s costume?”

Your brow knit together immediately. “...Really?” you asked skeptically.

Seunghyun nodded, his grin transforming into a smirk. “Wendy and Peter Pan?”

“Ooh, what about Captain Hook and Smee?” you asked, your eyes lighting up with excitement.

“But it’s not as fun if I don’t get to be a girl!” Seunghyun retorted.

“Oh, my god,” you laughed. “Okay, no couple’s costume then!”

“No, but I like it!” your boyfriend argued, squeezing your hand.. “Come on, let’s do another one!”

Seunghyun was accepting of who you were, and you loved him dearly for that, yes.

But he was still the weirdest person you knew.

[askroahmmythril]

“Robot Master” Typings : Non-Counterpart Navis

Something that was suggested was perhaps giving types to all the Navis that don’t have Robot Master counterparts.  Soooo that’s what we’re doing.  A couple of these of course do have counterparts ELSEWHERE, but since I only did Classic, they’ll get listed here.

Glyde : Normal

He’s just a butler and said to not be suited toward battle, so it’s hard to really say what he’d get beyond Normal if anything.  Basically from what we know, he just uses powerful Battle Chips because Yai buys them with THE POWER OF MONEY.

NumberMan : Normal

He’s simply about calculation and, well, numbers.  Hard to say if he’d have much else, though that angle attack he has makes me think he’d have Tri Attack in his movepool at least.  Probably something like Present or Magnitude that rolls a random number and does damage based on that for his dice.

ColorMan : Water / Fire

I mean, that’s the power he summons, so it feels pretty clear cut there.  He’s all about utilizing Fire Tower and Water Tower.  Well that and flinging the ball at you I suppose.

SharkMan : Water

He’s a fish.  A big fish with sharp pointy teef, but a fish.  Eat your calcium.

Zero : Electric / Poison

Mostly he’s all about his sword attacks, though one has to remember, he uses a beam saber, not a traditional steel or otherwise metal blade.  However beyond that, he’s a virus.  Even once “reset” and made into a Navi, he still has an affinity toward the viruses he originally produced, able to use them for his needs.

GateMan : Steel / Dark

GateMan’s gate serves both as a sturdy shield, and also a gate to a strange realm from which he can summon a dark, shadowy hand.

ThunderMan : Electric / Steel

I’m mostly giving him Steel type due to his overall appearance.  He looks like a being made of metal and conducting electricity that way, via the lightning rod on his head.  The Electric part is obvious.

PlanetMan : Water / Ground

I mean, he’s Earth.  Almost more so than Terra was.  He could potentially have type changing shenanigans though depending on his orbiting planetoids.

BeastMan : Dark / Normal

An intimidating beast that fights with fang and claw, I imagine more than anything he’d just be fast and have a lot of bite and slash type moves.

DesertMan : Ground

I mean, pretty straightforward for this one, he’s just a big guy made of sand.  One could cite Palossand as a reason to give him Ghost typing as well, but I don’t really get ghostly vibes from him.

KingMan : Normal

I don’t really count King and KingMan.EXE as the same character, though I think I’ve seen some debate the topic.  It’s not as clear as, say, Ring.EXE just being a gender swapped Ring Man.  Anyway, KingMan’s just a stompy chess piece more than anything else.  Mostly he relies on his pieces to do the battling for him, or to shield him.

BowlMan : Rock

I’m.... not 100% on this one honestly.  I debated just Normal, but that felt kind of weird for the fact that he’s flinging super heavy bowling balls at you, but then, bowling balls aren’t metallic, so Steel seemed wrong...  The heck are bowling balls actually made of usually, anyway...?

MistMan : Ghost / Poison

MistMan himself isn’t even the target, you have to attack his lamp, so he seems like he has a fairly ghostly form.  His mist clouds also poison Megaman, so this seems fitting.  I debated Fairy typing due to genies being sort of a fairy tale creature of sorts, but Ghost / Poison seems far more fitting.

Serenade : Psychic / Fairy

There’s just something about their appearance that makes this typing seem fitting to me.  The elegant look, the sort of streamers behind their back, Fairy just seems fitting, their powers kind of lending to it as well, but their ability to essentially always see your attacks coming and block them seems very Psychic to me.

VideoMan : Normal / Psychic

VideoMan’s a weird one to classify.  I felt weird making him PURE Psychic, but I felt like that needed to be included since he can essentially manipulate time for himself or his opponent by using his video editing powers.

KendoMan : Fighting

This one seems pretty solid and straightforward.  He’s a trainer for a particular fighting style.

LaserMan : Dark / Electric

LaserMan too is tricky.  Fairy seems to be the one most associated with light-based attacks these days, but LaserMan..... does not seem Fairy-ish.  At all.

CosmoMan : Psychic / Fire

Once more we’re into the whole “space based” thing, but he also enjoys flinging meteors at you, which Battle Network classifies as Heat element attacks.

Colonel : Electric / Fire

Like Zero, he mostly fights with his beam saber.  However, there’s also that Colonel Cannon move he has, plus all the little ally gunners he summons from field objects.

Meddy : Grass / Poison

Meddy’s able to make pills that can either help or hurt.  The Poison comes from the whole “inflicting status ailments” thing her medicine can do.  As for Grass, I more went to thinking of her operator, Jasmine, who makes traditional style medicines.  This makes me think of herbal remedies, so I gave her Grass type.

FootMan : Fighting

Largely I’m using Passimian as the excuse here.  He’s a big burly football player looking to tackle you.

SwallowMan : Normal / Flying

He’s a basic birb man.  Pretty much we have Taillow / Swellow for reference here.  While I guess I understand why, it still bugs me that they changed his name to LarkMan for international releases.  He’s.... clearly not a lark, he’s a swallow.  It’s a type of bird.  Get over it, people.  Stop your giggling in the back row.

CircusMan : Psychic / Dark

He’s a ringmaster, showing his control over the animals he summons to attack you.  Granted he does so with a whip, but..... even Gen 1 Sabrina had a whip for.... reasons..... look, I dunno.  CircusMan is just creepy.  Psychic / Dark just somehow works in my mind.  He gets in your head, and we don’t want to know what’s going on when that tent comes down.  I don’t even fear clowns but.... CircusMan is just freakin’ weird.

JudgeMan : Grass / Electric

JudgeMan’s a weird one, but hear me out.  Electric is straightforward enough, he attacks you with an electric whip.  Must be taking lessons from one of the Phoenix Wright prosecutors...  Beyond that, he’s based largely on books.  Paper though is made from wood pulp, so there is a grass relation there.  We can see that also in Kartana, an origami Pokemon that is Grass / Steel type.  Plus, well, he’s encountered in the Judge Tree system.

ElementMan : Normal (with a caveat)

Let’s face it, this guy’s type is probably “Yes.”  His whole thing is his ability to manipulate and change his element.  The question would be how best to make this work in Pokemon via ability.  He is involved with weather according to the network you fight him in, so maybe something akin to Forecast?

KillerMan : Dark / Ghost

He’s a spoopy demon reaper.  This seems pretty solidly fitting for him I’d say.  He’s another where I understand why they had to change the name, but EraseMan just doesn’t sound as good to me for him as KillerMan.  But yeah, I get it, kids’ game and all.

I THINK I got everyone there.

[heeres-suffering]

Be More Alluring: a Personality Swap AU

[pic description and source will be at the bottom of this post, under the read more]

Start of summary:

“You need to be more alluring.”

"... don’t you mean attractive?”

“I do not. Your attractiveness is adequate, Brooke; if you want to mask your apparently latent queerness, you have to make them want you straight. Isn’t that why your step-father defended you?” 

Brooke Lohst is a loser.

But you know what? That was okay.

She always knew she was a weird one. The intensity of her affection for puppies, picture books, and near-constant daydreaming has lasted well-past a normalcy she can’t seem to grasp; when coupled with her inability to befriend anyone (besides the similarly self-identified loser Michael Mell), it’s not a surprise the rest of her peers have left her behind.

However, there were... ah, worse things in her life to worry about then some mild bullying. She liked her passion well enough, and all of her true insecurities went largely unnoticed, so any insults or weird looks rarely lingered in her mind. It’s not like she was a constant target either, which helped a lot. All in all, she just planned to hunker down, wait out the awkwardness of High School like everyone else, and move on to the rest of her life... 

Except.

When Brooke develops a crush on a girl she’s never talked to, after years of avoiding fairy tale romance and trying not to think about the inevitability of marriage (or how finicky her attraction to boys is in the first place), it feels like her whole world is about to cave in. She’d do anything to make sure her parents, especially daddy, never find out... including buying an edible super computer from the loudest, tiniest guy in school.

End of summary.

Alright!

Hi, hello, it’s Mod Seb, and here’s an AU I’ve been rolling around for a few days! You are free to do with this concept whatever you want, but I wanted to introduce it with a good chunk of the info I’ve already worked out in my head.

So. As the CWs are... too numerous, I’m going to go with a blanket “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” label and encourage you not to read the rest of this if you have any big darkfic triggers that could be upset by mere mention; this isn’t a fic tho, so descriptions of anything awful won’t last long. 

Although, I will mention upfront that Brooke isn’t a binary lesbian. I know the description might read like I’m setting her up to be 100% homosexual; she’s bi with a strong preference for girls, and anyone who presents soft enough in gender or appearance. If it wasn’t for the end-game pairings, her unfamiliarity with smaller details/history of the LGBTQ+ community, and general “gay newb” status, she’d likely ID as a bi lesbian!

(ships and everything else under the Read More)

Okay. That out of the way, there’s quite a number of pairings; I’m pretty sure it’s a super polyamorous and sexual AU, though you’re free to change this list as much as you’d like:

[bolded are end-game ships. italics physically hook up at least once. strike-through means they were in a relationship but break-up in some way before the ending. (H) stands for healthy, while (T) is toxic and/or noncon. underlined characters are pining for the other and may never confess their true feelings]

Brooke/Christine (H), Brooke/Rich (H), Brooke/Jenna (H), Brooke/Michael (H), Brooke/Chloe (T), Brooke/her Daddy (T), Brooke/Squip (H), Brooke/Jeremy (soft T at first bc of mirrored canon-compliant manipulation, H later on), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy (H), Brooke/Squip/Jeremy/Rich (H), Rich/Moses (H), [insert every form of Rich/Mo/Squip/Jeremy here] (H), Jeremy/Chloe (T), Jeremy/Michael (H), Michael/Christine (H), Michael/Christine/Mr. Heere (H; no, seriously), Madeline/Brooke (H)

This is, of course, a role swap AU where Brooke and Jeremy trade places based on my personal lore for their home lives. I always have some pretty fucked ideas as I don’t imagine MB is a great place with great adults, and I pick and choose which parts of canons I use and which I don’t. 

There is no definite ending planned in mind as this isn’t an outline; it’s meta (or an imagine or w/e) for an AU that you’re free to do whatever with. 

So,

The big difference is that Brooke was picked by Michael, while Jeremy was picked by Chloe. Jeremy is trans and hadn’t come out yet; if Chloe had known he was a boy, she wouldn’t have grabbed him. In contrast, Michael’s never gave a shit about potential friends genders.

Jer and B’s personalities... are altered some. Not ALL the way, but kiiinda fusing into their roles, kinda tweaked (I'll get back to that).

The main point of this for me was Brooke/Squip/Jeremy, with B/Jer having a MUCH stronger focus than in canon, and a really bad Chloe acting as one of the major villains.

Michael gets roped into Chloe’s shit, even tho he's still generally a good guy here, bc he's worried about B and thinks she can't properly take care of herself.

While B DOES have a strong crush on Christine, she’s the opposite of the Squip’s “goal”; that’s (obvs) masking, or making passably digestible, her queerness.

Her Mom and step-’Daddy’ have reacted to her friendship w/ ‘openly gay moms, also very flamboyant and GNC’ Michael... poorly.

Michael thinks the solution has to be “act as aggressively yourself as you can, and if they reject you, you know me and the mom’s have a space for you”. This works for him bc he’s permanently hyper-visible, what with all of his own marginalized identities. But, not only has she flied under the radar in comparison to him for years, he doesn’t know everything about her life.

In fact, he doesn’t know most of it. She’s very good at hiding things.

Meanwhile, Jeremy, one of the more popular ‘boy... ish’ (we’ll get to this, too) people in school, is mid-psychosis and self-destruction. He actually has schizo-affective disorder--as is the case with all of my versions of Jeremy--which he needs medication for. Combined that with so many bad influences and trauma, he can no longer fully control himself or his life.

The way he handles this (badly) is to ‘whore around’--which, besides being Chloe’s pet, is kinda why he’s so popular. Nobody respects him, but he’s viewed some form of favorably.

Jeremy is in a relationship with Rich, but he won't let him get as close/protective as Rich wants; Mo and Rich were doing their own man-whoring (but healthy, just droppin’ panties and making dudes and chicks swoon--yeah, Rich is out as bisexual, this is a very ‘the Squips are a good thing’ AU) to gain their standard reputation, but in the course of that, they got together with Jeremy and it became... complicated. Both of them are very "nnn" about how bad his life is for Jer.

The way that their personalities are altered is... okay. To explain this, I have to talk about my characterization of canon-Brooke and Jeremy in relation to this, starting with Brooke:

I imagine B as just a liiittle below the line of "all the way there" for sorta-similar reasons to Jeremy here: trauma, and Chloe (which is why that’s what Jeremy gets in this, it’s just WAY worse when compounded by everything else). She’s also--like me, and like almost every character I write as a result--autistic, in a near-permanent state of “not enough accommodations” and over-stimulation. This leads to a lot of dissociation and a very wandering mind, as well as being perceived as a bimbo or dumb blonde or w/e misogynistic bullshit is projected onto her by the boys she dates (she’s also much more down the middle bi outside this AU).

So, going back to how she is for this AU: she's actually not super nerdy, despite the close connection she and Michael have. Honestly, it’s their general neurodivergent weirdness that bring them together, and so she’s mostly adopted her nerdy interests through him, whether directly a thing he likes, or finding a whimsical variant that fits her tastes.

Obviously, unlike Jeremy, she doesn’t mind being called a loser. She does any insinuation she might be queer. This including anyone who calls her gay or a dyke.

She has too much Cis Male Trauma (unlike canon, where it comes from both cis angles) to really entertain the idea of a Traditionally Male Partner. This means she skews HEAVILY towards hard GNC guys at the very least, and generally finds herself most interested in the idea of enbies and women. she's also not super into butches tho, bc her trauma mixing with her sexuality has latched on to Strong Masc People Are A Threat. 

An expansion on her interests, in canon and otherwise: animals, ASMR/sensual service work (including massages and stuff), spending hours just sorta sitting by herself and letting her imagination wander, fairy tales, and YA-and-under fantasy books.

(Here, she tries to avoid het or f/f romance... except that, this past year or two, she’s started really like m/m stuff--esp after getting REALLY into drag shows, which she could enjoy safely since girls like Chloe have gotten into them too; in canon, she’s a romance fanatic)

Now... this is one of the really darkfic element; she's fucking her step-dad. 

She does this so that he doesn't walk out on her, her mom, and her little sister*. Her mom has a good-enough job as a standard office woman, but he makes enough to pay the rent on their nice townhouse and all the bills she can’t. So, after he expressed interest in Brooke and then casually mentioned he could always just leave if she wasn’t comfortable, she reluctantly entered a relationship with him

(* = her sister is currently know as her brother; he’s like 12 or 13, and started showing signs of trans/queerness which have been Heavily Discouraged. Brooke worries about him a lot)

((I didn’t use she/her pronouns bc I’m not entirely sure he would change them? This is an OC Oli created at the beginning of our interest in BMC, and we haven’t worked on him at all since, so how his characterization will be is up in the air))

Canonically, Brooke's "in love" with her daddy, which is a self-imposed delusion; if she actually addressed it, she’d says she’s well aware that’s not true, but it's so much easier to pretend when you’re cornered like that. Brooke’s life blows.

She’s a lot more honest to herself about hating him here; still, she tries to be as polite and generally-friendly as she can, doing what he says whenever he wants.

OKAY, THAT’S BROOKE. If any of that is badly described or potentially-offensive, it’s just bc I glossed over SO MUCH DETAIL, even in that amount of it!

So. Jeremy.

I don’t have to go over him much and we’re all mostly aware of how I feel about him and also I don’t have the energy to do this again--

(just... read my fics The Devil at your Door or hello yesterday or something... eyyy actually do that, my ao3 username is Sedusa, blah blah blah ANYWAY)

--but basically: He's still very nerdy, like, he’s super into film as well as video games (which is another constant for me), but after being largely ignored in elementary, he's been trailing behind Chloe at her orders since they were in 6th grade. As a result he isn't very open about... any of his interests.

In 7th grade, he came out as trans to everyone. Chloe was furious, but at the same time, intrigued; this was around the time Chloe gets her own... ah shit I gotta go into that too--

--yet another hc of mine is that Chloe gets a Squip on accident around this time at a party (there was one in a “”candy bowl””), and from there, she claws her way up the ladder. I... will not go into that much, but her Squip was crippled by the drugs and alcohol in her system, and therefore largely at her mercy. She’s used his power to manipulate certain things about herself and to sharpen her focus on popularity to the point she’s full-blown Alpha Bitch.

Man, I’ve had to go on so many tangents, I apologize.

Anyway, she drags Jeremy around as a punching bag. She constantly mocks Jeremy's transness, even though she usually calls him by his correct name and pronouns.

This has made the rest of the school follow her lead, hence why I said “boy-ish”; he’s popular, he’s technically ‘well liked’, but nobody really takes him seriously. This is compounded by Chloe’s refusal to let him dress in 'dorky' casual clothes, and, as he’s both too poor to afford designer clothes and also generally hates popular guy fashion, he has to wear the hyper femme clothing Chloe specifically tells him too/

As such, people call him a boy but largely see him as either an idiot, a slut, an attention seeker, or all of the above.

So of course, in Brooke's place, his neurodivergence is more prominent than ever; every day he slips further into this psychosis and self-infantilization haze, as his his mom leaving, his dad severely depressed, Chloe's sexual violence, and other repressed trauma (see: my fic hello yesterday on ao3) all weighing on him. This makes him INCREDIBLY regressed, like, all the time by Junior year.

And then Brooke's Squip (IE: canon Squip) falls in love with Jeremy extremely fucking hard. He pushes her to date him as a way to compromise on her queer desires, since Jeremy is technically a boy, and certainly a few other straight-ish girls have hooked up with him in the past.

WHEW. That is a fucking lot. To wrap this up, lemme go over the interpersonal relationships not already mentioned, and what directions I think it takes.

First off, Madeline has a more prominent role, as I quite like her tbh; she’s a sex worker, she has her own Squip, she’s one of Chloe’s most hated enemies, and she gravitates towards both Brooke and Jeremy. She’s also Actually French, Chloe’s just weird.

(Anyway she prolly sees through Brooke’s straight act and asks her why she’s pretending to be a good little cishet. It rattles Brooke.)

Chloe is scum. This bears repeating. She DEFINITELY rapes Brooke at the Halloween party, and becomes obsessed with her, along with already being obsessed with Jeremy and Jake. 

Jake, by the way, has a lot of regressive behavior and impulsiveness bc he’s been in an abusive relationship off and on with Chloe for years now.

Speaking of Jake, moving on to his best bro: Rich doesn’t set himself on fire. He’s having a good time with his Squip.

But.

He IS set on fire at the Halloween party.

Instead of the Smartphone Hour being about Rich's instability, it's actually about the mystery of Someone Did It To Him But No One Saw Who It Was, They Were Disguised.

The answer relates to the fact that Rich and Brooke are ALSO hooking up, after she’s already with Jeremy, bc he Properly introduces her to him and the three of them hit it off really well.

(She initially wasn’t interested, but while Rich is loud and still kinda abrasive, his Squip doesn’t drive him to act like a bully--and in private, his nerdiness is really obvious and he’s extremely gentle with her and Jeremy. Add to that that he’s bi and trans*, when Brooke connects best w/ queer men over cishet one, and it off-sets his masc-ness enough to make him an Exception.

* = I always imagine him as trans. See: all of Vanceypants fics.)

Sooo... the culprit is actually Brooke's daddy, who sees her with this obvious heartthrob and Cannot let that be.

Chloe convinces Michael that the Squips are Very Very Bad and has him team up with her to force Brooke into drinking Red, with the intention to convince him to kill himself after to get him out of the way, bc she’s really going nuts at this point.

Eventually, he snaps out of it when he and Christine get together (he’s thought he was Full Homo all of his life, but Christine’s prolly genderqueer-ness makes him realize “oh shit, I’m bisexual”) and she starts to question why he’s acting the way he is towards Christine.

He also definitely has a crush on Jeremy and during his time with Chloe he kinda tried to flirt a little but couldn’t really... he’s not up for dating someone as sexually active and a push-over as Jeremy is in this.

However, when he snaps out of Chloe’s manipulation, he and Christine approach Mr. Heere to convince him to straighten up and help Jeremy and also bc they really need an adult to successfully fight Chloe.

This requires a month+ of Christine getting him to see her psychiatrist (the one who prescribes her ADHD meds). Jeremy spends the majority of his time staying with Chloe, and very rarely comes home to gather things or to make sure his dad is eating/still alive, as much as he can remember to in his own haze of mental illness. Anyway, point is, he doesn’t know Christine and Michael are there often... not that, in the course of growing close to Mr. H, they both fall for him hard and it becomes one of my stranger OT3s.

(God, Jeremy goes through a lot of shit in this, tho.)

Pre-Squip, Jenna was kinda-sorta Brooke’s friend--or, well, friendly. However, she’s actually full blown “oh my God she’s wonderful” in love with Brooke.

Brooke isn't aware of that, esp since Jenna tries her not to be around her a lot. She's also trying to hide her own queerness, bc she’s a trans woman and she knows Chloe finding that out would be extremely dangerous.

Eventually, Chloe succeeds in making Brooke take the Red months after canon usually ends, w/o Michael’s help. If you’re curious, Red doesn’t affect her normal Squip bc she’s had him too long and a lot of his receptors and stuff are damaged, so it’s the second one she gets in canon that turns off.

This plan backfires, however, as Brooke’s Squip comes back with a physical body w/ help from Rich and also-bodied-now Moses.

With a body, and shenanigans, Mo and Squip take out Brooke’s daddy too. His life insurance more than makes up for the loss of his income, as it’s a sizable amount. Now that Brooke feels more empowered and strong, she overrides her mother’s neglectfulness and takes control of the household w/ her boyfriends*, comes out as queer, helps her sister transition, and begin to heal from all of this trauma.

(* = Rich and Mo move in, as does Jeremy eventually, after graduation; Jeremy gets a psychiatrist and a therapist and prolly has to go through some intense outpatient care and possibly a stay in the hospital, before finally making major breakthroughs and looking like himself again. The five of them are now happy and in love.)

Chloe, after her arm gets twisted by the Squip’s protective presence so thoroughly, gives up on Jeremy and Brooke to focus on Jake. This too gets abandoned when Rich and Mo help him cut her off, and so she stays in her own popularity bubble, bitter, until graduating and going to a community college in a different state.

All in all, things work out well in the end, but getting there is a long, difficult process. This AU fascinates me immensely and feels like a great way to examine some of my really dark headcanons about MB, as I think it’s a town similar to Derry in Stephen King’s IT--as in, just chronically The Worst Place Ever, with this, like, miasma of low-key despair around it. People adjust and don’t question it, which is why so much of BMC is this flippant dark humor in the face of some highly questionable shit.

I’m so sorry this post is so long (I’ll be uploading it to AU under my usual Sedusa account, as metas like this are more than allowed), but I really adore these characters and the way they can be twisted around, so I had a lot to say!

Thank you for reading <3

-mod Seb

image description: virtual-like stairs pointed forward and bathed in neon yellow and blue to represent Brook and Jeremy, which I’ve modified from the original blue-only design.

source: x (link description: a free Wallpaper Flare image that I found off Google Image’s “filtered by ‘labeled and reuse with modification” feature) 

[umbraastaff]

I’ve just been thinking--it’s about time I make a proper index for my TAZ fics, huh? Also contains: mini-series, ficlets, goof posts, and lyric comics.

(All of the fics are rated G, or T at most for McElroy-appropriate language.)

FICS

I Saw Seven Bounties | Canon Compliant, Enemies to Friends, Complete | Mostly lighthearted, episodic recounting of Kravitz and Barry’s rivalry throughout those first twelve years on Faerun. 24K. -->Extras: Lich Eyes, Fantasy Starbucks, Alt POV for Chapter 1 & Chapter 5, Sorry

They Say Fire Took Phandalin | Small-town supernatural/sorta-haunted-house AU |  Fresh out of grad school, Barry Bluejeans takes a job and a house in the rural nowhere-town of Phandalin. And it’s not like he thought fitting in would be a walk in the park, but the people there all act really weird, and it’s almost like they’re expecting something of him, too. 11K/~20K.

What Can’t Be Done Alone (Detective Squad) | Canon Divergent, Found Family, Fluff | AU where the voidfish works a little better, and Angus never finds the Bureau. Instead, he finds a strange lich in a cave, and he most certainly continues to work this case and not gradually get adopted instead. 18K/~22K. -->Extras: Drangus AU Oneshot

If I Wanted to be Funny I’d Name This Fic “The Time Belt” | Futuristic sci-fi AU feat. time travel | Taako meets the only people in years who recognize the Institute’s name. Known time criminal Barry Bluejeans continues to evade law enforcement. 2K/??.

Overgrowth / Undercurrent | Roleswap AU, Johnchurch, Pining, Twoshot, Happy ending optional | Overgrowth is a oneshot that follows John, the Starblaster’s chief diplomat, through a series of parleys with Merle, the center of the plane-consuming mass of plants that’s been chasing his crew. Undercurrent is a sequel about their post-canon reunion. 4K + 6K. --> Extras: PLAYLIST by @merle-casts-zone-of-truth

Davenport Remembers | Post-canon, Oneshot | Davenport meets with his crew members to try to reconcile his anger with Lucretia, or to decide whether he should. 1.5K.

MINI-SERIES

AU Where Taako is a Lich - Pretty much what it says on the tin here, folks!

Baritz (ask series) - A fusion of Barry and Kravitz, who took over my blog and answered asks for a while. (He originated in the Gallows/S&S lyric comic.)

Good Adventures (Good Omens crossover) - The Antichrist’s wishes summon the wrong boatful of aliens. Thankfully, it seems they’re apocalypse experts. [with plot-ideas help from @avijohann​.]

Omen Zone (Good Omens crossover 2) - Barry is a demon. Kravitz is an angel. Kravitz probably won’t ever admit that they’re friends.

Pokémon: Century Version (Pokémon crossover) - Stolen Century AU where they’re all pokémon trainers. Faerun spin-off: Double Trouble

Till Death, Don’t Let’s Start - Barry fucks up. Kravitz is present.

Very Normal Blog Posts (ask series) - In which Garfield is not at all dangerous, and I am perfectly fine. <alt: chronological link - desktop only>

COMICS & ART

Gallows/Steady and Stronger (Double lyric comic) - Canon-divergent AU where, as the world is ending, Barry gives up to Kravitz. [Image description version]

[Lyric Comics] - Other, shorter lyric comics based on single verses of songs.

Dear Scientist’s Log (series) - Illustrated ship logs from Barry J. Bluejeans.

Movie Madness (Comic) - Barry obsesses over the unforgivable.

Palette Prompts (Arts) - Art from art meme prompts.

Pregananant (goof comic) - You know the one.

REAPER (Comic) - Baritz fuses with Lup.

These Jeans? (Animatic) - Barry advertises jeans.

They’re Both Tessa Thompson (Comic) - Lucretia has a nightmare. Barry reassures her.

War (Goof comic) - prompt: "taakitz with CAT”

What’s bigger than this? - The Red Robe.

FICLETS

Back Soon - Kravitz leaves a note with unfortunate wording.

Bodyswap: Barry & Davenport - During Wonderland.

Casual - AU where the red robe talks like a normal person.

Command - Barry misuses his magic.

Davenport - There’s something unsettling about that butler.

Hangin’ Out - Lup and Magnus.

Harvest - Roleswap AU: Barry is the Hunger.

Healing Necromancy - Merle tries to teach Barry some tricks.

Hope - Barry knows she’s still out there.

How Long? - Taako is frustrated.

In Pieces - The staff.

Liches Forget Too - AU.

Lucretia Forgets - In which there was a mistake with the voidfish ichor.

Lup’s Robe - Gifts from Taako.

Mourning Glories - The flowers in Merle’s beard.

New Years - Celebrations and fears.

Parole - Barry and Kravitz bonding hours.

Phone a Friend - Baritz (the fusion from Gallows/S&S) meets Angus.

Raising the Dead - Barry has to use his crew members’ corpses. [sequel]

Robbie...? - Magnus breaks into the brig immediately after Petals to the Metal.

Second Apocalypse - Based on that one party liveshow. What was the rest of the crew doing, again?

3 Sentence Fics - Pairing + AU prompts.

Smartstone - Lup gets stuck in a Stone of Far Speech, instead.

Stir Crazy - Barry waiting for a new body to grow. Thoughts of Lucretia.

Writing Things Down - In case you forget (again).

You Remember - Taako remembers.

PROMINENT GOOFS

Barry’s Dead - But he’s fine! Calm down!

Character Development - Joke’s on you, DM!

Crystal Kingdom - An absolutely bonkers arc.

Dealer - Merle pun.

Decapitate Me - for making this post

Don’t Care - Taako during the finale. [bonus]

Epilogue - Bracer struggles. [bonus: 1, 2]

Explain the Hunger (Good Omens crossover) - Magnus explains the hunger to Aziraphale and Crowley. They react in varying ways. [with cursed art contributions from @avijohann and @mspainttaz]

Fifteen Dollars - Plus interest. [Bonus]

Fullmetal Kingdom - They’re the same, right?

Gender - And lack of roles.

Gnomes Don’t Exist - They’re all aliens, actually.

Hot Diggity Shit - Been a while.

Icon Confusion - The saga of people thinking my icon is a carrot. [chrono link - desktop only]

Incomprehensible Denim - Jeff Angel’s illegal pants.

In Case it Changes Anything - Taako, Kravitz, and lies.

Irresponsible Teens - Magnus and Lucretia get into trouble.

I Saw Seven Nerds - That’s the post.

Gogurt - Taako’s crimes.

Learning to Drive - i.e. Barry & Davenport Bonding(?) Hours.

Live Shows - The general mood.

Lucretia’s Efforts - A proper meme? On my TAZ blog?

Lup Said No Thanks - That time Magnus was in a tree.

Magnus’ Death - So many close calls.

Nearest Middle-Aged Woman - Clint’s characters’ friends.

Necromancy? - You must be mistaken!

Ned’s Aliases - The Truth.

Pirate Debt - Davenport during that one liveshow.

Punch Squad - SQUAD!

Reaper Cloak - Thoughts.

Relic Names - She probably changed them.

Responsible Necromancy - Good and bad ideas.

Resume - It’s not like they thought it would be relevant.

Schools of Magic - And the Sash was what, again?

Self Care - Respect the dead, please.

Server Shenaniganry (art) - TAAKO THE CAT, NO!

Soulmate AU - Where your soulmate’s greatest enemy is on your wrist. [alt]

Stern’s Truth - You Know.

Taako’s Last Name - Taako’s last name.

Team Composition - The post where everyone wants to argue with me about what qualifies as a wizard.

Third Option - Taako saves the day.

You’re Laughing - End of Suffering Game.

THEORIES/MECHANICS/THOUGHTS

Aloof - Holes Taako refuses to fill.

Barry’s Lucky Possessee - Graphic novel theory hopes & dreams.

Catpiling - Stolen Century thought.

Davenport’s Deaths - Sucks when you always wake up driving.

Death Leaves a Mark - Stolen Century AU concept.

Everyone Else - Some people didn’t get perfect endings.

Fantasy Nonsense - lore about the word “fantasy,” as in “Jesus Fantasy Christ.”

Fragments - Magnus’ memory.

Forgiveness - Old post about the crew’s thoughts on Lucretia’s actions.

Forgot to Erase - Lucretia’s errors.

FULL TIMELINE POST - the Balance timeline.

Gauntlet - (disproven!) Theory about the final relic, from before it was confirmed in the show.

Gnome Nicknames - Thoughts on Cap’nport.

High School AU - Some old headcanons.

Home World Names - The pattern in surnames (or lack thereof) on the IPRE’s homeworld.

Hour - This isn’t a thought so much as an Actual Thing That Magnus Said before the time loops had started, which is absurd.

Idiots in Love - The IPRE’s collective braincell was lost for all of Legato. [2]

Liches, Alone - Being stuck as raw emotion for an awfully long time.

Losing Julia - And subsequent developments.

Love - What was remembered and forgotten.

Love Without Fear - Thoughts on bonds during the Stolen Century.

Memory - Barry actually shouldn’t have remembered anything.

Nickname - Memory of Lup.

Paladin Barry Theory - Converging evidence on Barry’s multiclassing.

Paradox AU - blueprint for 8th, 9th, 10th, etc. Bird AU of your choice(s). (Extra)

Phylactery Mechanics - How liches differ.

Produce Flame - Mechanics of John killing Merle.

Recklessness - THB’s actions recontextualized.

Relic Schools of Magic - They don’t have them!!!

Relicswap AU - Where all the birds get swapped out.

Seven Birds as Gods - Ask-prompt thoughts.

Staring at the Sun - The birds and their light sensitivity.

Story, Song, & Sorcery - Effects on the young population.

Sword Tornado - Magnus Mechanics. [bonus: Time Warlock]

The Good Place AU - A series of crossover thoughts.

Tree Climbing - Davenport shenanigans.

Unique Magic Types - [and combo styles]

What Killed Maureen - hint: it wasn’t Fisher.

[tacitwhisky]

Jon / Sansa Reread - Jon II, AGOT

< Previous Chapter (Arya I) | Next Chapter (Sansa I) >

In which Jon visits Bran, Catelyn is a horrible person, and he gives Arya Needle.

Like Jon I, this chapter is really complicated and a bit of a beast to get through. It's a critical chapter for understanding Jon though; it's his single on page interaction with Catelyn, and the one that solidifies just how traumatic a figure she is in his life. It’s also a tour of all his major Stark relationships outside of Ned: Catelyn, Bran, Robb, and Arya.

There’s actually a lot more to this chapter than I realized, which is one of the reasons it took me so long to get it out.

Lady Stark was there beside his [Bran’s] bed. She had been there, day and night, for close on a fortnight. Not for a moment had she left Bran’s side. She had her meals brought to her there, and chamber pots as well, and a small hard bed to sleep on, though it was said she had scarcely slept at all. She fed him herself, the honey and water and herb mixture that sustained life. Not once did she leave the room. So Jon had stayed away.

Before we get into Catelyn’s horribleness in this chapter, it’s worth pointing out that this is Catelyn at her absolute lowest emotionally. She also severely sleep deprived and borderline crippled with worry and grief. Unfortunately, much like Sansa last chapter though, we’re not really going to get a sense of just out of her mind Catelyn is until her chapter later: if the order of the chapters had been swapped (ignoring plot considerations for a moment) readers would’ve been more sympathetic to Catelyn as a whole.

Not that her actions this chapter aren’t objectively awful.

Lady Stark looked over. For a moment she did not seem to recognize him. Finally she blinked. “What are you doing here?” she asked in a voice strangely flat and emotionless.

“I came to see Bran,” Jon said. “To say good-bye.”

Her face did not change. Her long auburn hair was dull and tangled. She looked as though she had aged twenty years. “You’ve said it. Now go away.”

Martin has gone on record saying that if he were to write it today he would’ve softened Catelyn a little in this scene or at the very least given it more context. While I get that, nothing Catelyn does or says in this scene (with the understanding that she’s half delirious from lack of sleep) is actually out of character. Jon is an existential threat to her children: not only does he look more Stark than her sons, but he’s also as old if not older than Robb which would make him dangerous if he were ever legitimized.

The thread Jon poses is not an idle one; as she'll mention to Robb later in ASOS the Targaryen Blackfyre bastards led to three generations of brutal civil war and repression. Bastards are, by definition, destabilizing to the westerosi social contract. In a society where everyone has a rigid social role (even their gods are broken into specific societal roles) bastards have none and threaten to crumble the walls between them.

The other threat Jon presents to Jon is to the limited power patriarchal society gives her. As a noble lady, managing her home is one of the few places Catelyn can exert any control over her life, and theoretically has as much of a say in as her lord husband, and Ned deciding Jon will stay with them is a slap in the face to her and a breach of that power. As Catelyn herself thinks in an earlier chapter, the problem isn’t that Ned has a bastard; it’s that he has him live with them and she has no control over it.

Part of him wanted only to flee, but he knew that if he did he might never see Bran again. He took a nervous step into the room. “Please,” he said.

Something cold moved in her eyes. “I told you to leave,” she said. “We don’t want you here.”

There’s a real sense of dread seeping out from Jon when it comes to Catelyn. He’s terrified of her, not so much for material reasons (he doesn’t actually think she’ll throw him out despite how she'll threaten to in a minute), as emotional ones. He’s dreading the emotional backlash he knows is coming, which is a very organic reaction from a child who’s been emotionally neglected or abused in the way he has. This is an old pattern, and he's instinctually flinching from what he knows is the emotional fallout.

Once that would have sent him running. Once that might even have made him cry. Now it only made him angry. He would be a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch soon, and face worse dangers than Catelyn Tully Stark. “He’s my brother,” he said.

“Shall I call the guards?”

“Call them,” Jon said, defiant. “You can’t stop me from seeing him.” He crossed the room, keeping the bed between them, and looked down on Bran where he lay.

Even this early on Jon has started to use his Night’s Watch identity to draw strength from. It makes sense and speaks to why he wanted to join it to begin with: joining it is a clear mark of adulthood, a way of taking his destiny into his own hands, and because of the nobility of the institution, a way of scrubbing off his bastard taint, something Jon has not doubt craved most of his life.

Drawing strength from taking the black is something that will only grow more second nature to Jon as the series goes on. As I wrote in a recent ask, it’s one of the reasons when he’s resurrected I think finding out he was murdered by his brothers will hit him significantly harder than it does in the show. If he's not a man of the Night's Watch, then he's what he is in this scene: small and vulnerable and unloved.

“Bran,” he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t come before. I was afraid.” He could feel the tears rolling down his cheeks. Jon no longer cared. “Don’t die, Bran. Please. We’re all waiting for you to wake up. Me and Robb and the girls, everyone …”

Lady Stark was watching. She had not raised a cry. Jon took that for acceptance. Outside the window, the direwolf howled again. The wolf that Bran had not had time to name.

“I have to go now,” Jon said. “Uncle Benjen is waiting. I’m to go north to the Wall. We have to leave today, before the snows come.” He remembered how excited Bran had been at the prospect of the journey. It was more than he could bear, the thought of leaving him behind like this. Jon brushed away his tears, leaned over, and kissed his brother lightly on the lips.

Not really important, but still kind of funny: the first time I read A Game of Thrones (fifteen years at this point?) I was very young and the kissing thing weirded me out to no end. It wasn’t until years later I would realize platonic mouth kissing is just a thing white people do sometimes (I’m kidding. Mostly).

“I wanted him to stay here with me,” Lady Stark said softly.

Jon watched her, wary. She was not even looking at him. She was talking to him, but for a part of her, it was as though he were not even in the room.

“I prayed for it,” she said dully. “He was my special boy. I went to the sept and prayed seven times to the seven faces of god that Ned would change his mind and leave him here with me. Sometimes prayers are answered.”

Jon did not know what to say. “It wasn’t your fault,” he managed after an awkward silence.

Her eyes found him. They were full of poison. “I need none of your absolution, bastard.”

Even here, even now, Jon is trying to be kind. He's still, in some level, trying to forge some kind of a relationship, no matter how tenuous it is. It’s what makes Catelyn’s reaction all that much more painful. Even outside of this situation, there’s really no common ground the two could ever have found between them, not without Catelyn being a far different person and one living in a less rigidly patriarchal society. Everything Jon does, no matter how well intentioned, will always be galling and patronizing because of who he is and what he represents.

This doesn’t make how Catelyn treats Jon ok though. Whatever her frustrations or anxieties with the position Jon occupies, she is an adult and he is a child, a child who desperately needed a mother figure and to be treated as equal to his siblings. There’s just no getting around it. At some point early in Jon’s upbringing Catelyn needed to put her big girl boots on, do the right thing, and treat him like a person.

He was at the door when she called out to him. “Jon,” she said. He should have kept going, but she had never called him by his name before. He turned to find her looking at his face, as if she were seeing it for the first time.

“Yes?” he said.

“It should have been you,” she told him. Then she turned back to Bran and began to weep, her whole body shaking with the sobs. Jon had never seen her cry before.

It was a long walk down to the yard.

That last line (“it should’ve been you”) is a stab in the gut, but can ultimately, like a lot of Catelyn’s behavior in this chapter, be attributed to being half mad from grief and sleep deprivation: the part about how this is the first time she’s ever called him by his name can’t be, and is just chilling. It’s one of the few concrete details we get about how the two of them interacted. Denying someone their name is dehumanizing (Reek, it rhymes with meek), and speaks to just how much distance Catelyn created between her and Jon.

There isn’t really a reason to think Catelyn called Jon “Snow” or “bastard” or anything particular cruel, but ignoring is a special of cruelty all it’s own, though it probably came easy to Catelyn. In a castle as big and gendered as Winterfell, just like with Sansa, there’s the very real possibility that the two of them simply didn’t cross paths much.

We also don’t really get any reaction from Jon here to what Catelyn says. It’s a little frustrating in terms of trying to understand his character, but it fits Martin’s less is more ethos (for this, anyway, he definitely lacks that ethos when it comes to adding Greyjoy and Dorne plotlines).

Outside, everything was noise and confusion. Wagons were being loaded, men were shouting, horses were being harnessed and saddled and led from the stables. A light snow had begun to fall, and everyone was in an uproar to be off.

Robb was in the middle of it, shouting commands with the best of them. He seemed to have grown of late, as if Bran’s fall and his mother’s collapse had somehow made him stronger. Grey Wind was at his side.

While not a big part of either Sansa or Jon’s storyline, Robb really grows into being a lord in the absence of Ned and Catelyn. Just another example of how all the Stark children are forced to mature quickly, and a bit of a counterpoint to the idea that Ned didn’t prepare them for the adult world. While he certainly didn’t in certain ways in that all of them start their stories at something of a deficit of where they should be in terms of knowledge of the world, he and Catelyn did raise them in a way where they’re able to adapt swiftly to what’s needed.

“Uncle Benjen is looking for you,” he [Robb] told Jon. “He wanted to be gone an hour ago.”

“I know,” Jon said. “Soon.” He looked around at all the noise and confusion. “Leaving is harder than I thought.”

“For me too,” Robb said. He had snow in his hair, melting from the heat of his body. “Did you see him?”

Jon nodded, not trusting himself to speak. “He’s not going to die,” Robb said. “I know it.”

“You Starks are hard to kill,” Jon agreed. His voice was flat and tired. The visit had taken all the strength from him.

Robb knew something was wrong. “My mother …”

“She was … very kind,” Jon told him.

Robb looked relieved. “Good.”

Robb seems to be well aware just how hostile Catelyn might have been to Jon, which implies that he's very aware of the distance and tension between them in normal life. And the fact that Robb is relieved when Jon says nothing happened is also interesting for its implication of just how much strain Catelyn’s hostility towards Jon put on all the starklings. This is an excellent meta that explores this idea more fully. To quote just a bit from it:

“I don’t often see it acknowledged that Catelyn’s abuse of Jon reverberated through the family and hurt her own children, even though it’s quite visible in a few places. Beyond the strain it puts on the Starklings to be perpetually caught between their beloved mother and beloved brother… I don’t see Robb’s anxiety here that his mother might hurt his brother being mentioned, and how that kind of dynamic puts a terrible strain on both children. Catelyn very clearly did not “ignore” or “avoid” Jon, and her actions didn’t just affect Jon, either, they also hurt her own children. Note that I am not saying that Catelyn is a Bad Mother or siding with the goblins of westeros.org who will hate Catelyn for anything she does, but when a parent behaves in inappropriate ways to one child it affects everyone in a family, especially the other children.”

Trying to navigate the hostility between two people you love is hugely stressful, and triply so when one of them is your parent. Fundamentally Robb is caught in a zero sum game where any affection or closeness with Jon is a betrayal of his mother. This is a dynamic I see attributed a lot to Sansa in fic where she’s the one of the starklings in the family who chooses her mother over Jon. It’s a really rich idea to explore, but unfortunately there’s no way of knowing whether it’s true accurate or not: there just isn’t enough evidence one way or another in the actual books. I tend to prefer the headcanon that the two were just different, but it’s certainly no less valid.

What we do is that this zero sum dynamic isn’t what Bran and Arya experienced with Jon. Neither (as far as I can remember) actually ever think about his relationship with Catelyn, though you can still see the damage in how Arya immediately thinks as a child she must be a bastard because she doesn’t fit in. Like we’ve talked about, Catelyn created and perpetuated the subconscious understanding among the Starklings that to be bastard was to be other. To quote from that meta again (it really is excellent):

“We also see the effects of Catelyn’s treatment of Jon in Sansa’s reflection on both Jon and Arya. Catelyn’s attempt to interfere with her children’s relationship with Jon was most successful with Sansa who internalized that Jon was to be held at a distance because he was only their half-brother. Sansa also thinks of how it would have been easier for her to understand Arya’s nature and the difference between them if Arya was a bastard like Jon, which speaks of Sansa’s view of the proper boundaries of a relationship with a bastard sibling and the kind of behavior she was taught to expect from bastards, an expectation that she displays when she casually comments about how Jon was jealous of Joffrey in a very matter-of-fact way. That alignment of Jon and Arya colors Sansa’s perception of Arya just as much as Jon.”

Speaking of Arya, Jon says farewell to Robb, and then goes to say goodbye to Arya who is busy packing in her room.

Arya glanced behind her, saw Jon, and jumped to her feet. She threw her skinny arms tight around his neck. “I was afraid you were gone,” she said, her breath catching in her throat. “They wouldn’t let me out to say good-bye.”

“What did you do now?” Jon was amused.

Though it’s not ever mentioned, Arya is probably the only person Jon has ever gotten any physical affection from. Ned is not the kind of parent to overly shower his children with physical contact, and Jon is even likely to get any from him as both male and a bastard. And Catelyn sure as hell isn’t giving out any hugs to him. It’s interesting he actually isn’t more craving of affection of any kind (like Tyrion is) throughout the series, and speaks I think to how healthy and supportive of relationships he did have with his siblings despite Catelyn.

Her face lit up. “A present?”

“You could call it that. Close the door.”

Wary but excited, Arya checked the hall. “Nymeria, here. Guard.” She left the wolf out there to warn of intruders and closed the door. By then Jon had pulled off the rags he’d wrapped it in. He held it out to her.

Arya’s eyes went wide. Dark eyes, like his. “A sword,” she said in a small, hushed breath.

The scabbard was soft grey leather, supple as sin. Jon drew out the blade slowly, so she could see the deep blue sheen of the steel. “This is no toy,” he told her. “Be careful you don’t cut yourself. The edges are sharp enough to shave with.”

“Girls don’t shave,” Arya said.

“Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa’s legs?”

It’s here we get our first introduction to Needle, one of the top five emotionally charged swords in the series. Throughout all her travels and hardships Needle will be the one thing Sansa holds on to, and as she thinks years later in Braavos before the House of Black and White, Needle is a symbol not just of her old life, but Jon’s unquestioning acceptance of her nonconformity.

That being said, let’s talk for a moment just how weird it is Jon is arming a child with a deadly weapon. As this meta argues, Jon is remarkably comfortable with violence, and his modus operandi in almost any given situation, whether personal or political, is to immediately empower and arm a marginalized group: Arya here, Sam and the other Night’s Watch recruits against Alliser Thorne at Castle Black , and the Wildlings in ADWD.

This modus operandi is interesting to think about when applying it to his relationship to Sansa. Even if they had been in closer proximity as children, I still don’t think Jon would ever have gotten that emotionally close to Sansa. She’s simply in too much of a position of privilege for him to ever really have anything to offer her. Jon is capable of having relationships with people either at his privilege level or higher, Robb and Ygritte come to mind, but on the whole that really is how Jon tends to develop the majority of his relationships: almost as though he can only be friends with people who need him (Sam, Tormund, Alys Karstark, even Stannis to a degree).

To theorize for a moment, this probably stems from his understanding of the world as an uncertain place where his status is always tenuous. And also from a probably unconscious feeling of having no inherent worth of his own: there’s no reason for anyone to like him just for him, so he only feels comfortable when there’s some material reason for them to. It’s a really subtle expression of Catelyn’s withholding of affection and his bastard status as a whole.

This is all really interesting to think about in relation to what his relationship with Sansa will be when they meet again and she no longer holds the position of privilege that she once did. While she almost for sure won’t be as disempowered when they meet in the books as she was in the show, she will need Jon to one extent or the other. It’s also just interesting to think about in terms of Jon’s future emotional growth or how he’d handle it in an intimate relationship.

She giggled at him. “It’s so skinny.”

“So are you,” Jon told her. “I had Mikken make this special. The bravos use swords like this in Pentos and Myr and the other Free Cities. It won’t hack a man’s head off, but it can poke him full of holes if you’re fast enough.”

“I can be fast,” Arya said.

“You’ll have to work at it every day.” He put the sword in her hands, showed her how to hold it, and stepped back. “How does it feel? Do you balance?”

“I think so,” Arya said.

“First lesson,” Jon said. “Stick them with the pointy end.”

Again cute, but to quote from that meta: “[Jon’s] idea of thoughtful gift-giving is to sit around contemplating the best way for a small-sized nine-year-old to kill people and figure out what she needs to do it. “

Arya gave him a whap on the arm with the flat of her blade. The blow stung, but Jon found himself grinning like an idiot. “I know which end to use,” Arya said.

Jon’s grin here is evidence that he really does find fulfillment and happiness with Arya, even here on one of the most emotionally taxing days of his life to this point.

“Who will I practice with?”

“You’ll find someone,” Jon promised her. “King’s Landing is a true city, a thousand times the size of Winterfell. Until you find a partner, watch how they fight in the yard. Run, and ride, make yourself strong. And whatever you do …”

Arya knew what was coming next. They said it together.

“… don’t … tell … Sansa!”

Despite being one of the few times Jon mentions Sansa, I don’t think his evocation of her here is really about what he thinks about her so much as what he knows she means to Arya. We in general don’t really ever (as far as I can remember) get any real insight into what Jon thought about their relationship, or if he even internally took sides. Considering just how close he is with Arya, you’d think he would have more thoughts on the matter, but it’s yet another frustrating example of the black hole of their relationship.

Jon messed up her hair. “I will miss you, little sister.”

Suddenly she looked like she was going to cry. “I wish you were coming with us.”

“Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle. Who knows?” He was feeling better now. He was not going to let himself be sad. “I better go. I’ll spend my first year on the Wall emptying chamber pots if I keep Uncle Ben waiting any longer.”

Arya ran to him for a last hug. “Put down the sword first,” Jon warned her, laughing. She set it aside almost shyly and showered him with kisses.

Again we see the dynamic of Jon finding fulfillment and feeling better in himself for arming and thus empowering someone else. It also brings full circle the tour of Jon’s Stark emotional relationships and how they relate to Catelyn: Catelyn herself who he dreads and has the worst with, Bran who’s comatose but is a positive relationship, Robb who is on the whole a positive relationship but one not unaffected by Catelyn, and then Arya who he’s closest to because they’re both nonconforming.

When he turned back at the door, she was holding it again, trying it for balance. “I almost forgot,” he told her. “All the best swords have names.”

“Like Ice,” she said. She looked at the blade in her hand. “Does this have a name? Oh, tell me.”

“Can’t you guess?” Jon teased. “Your very favorite thing.”

Arya seemed puzzled at first. Then it came to her. She was that quick. They said it together:

“Needle!”

The memory of her laughter warmed him on the long ride north.

Show Comparison

(I know I’m in the minority, but Jon’s face is oh so punchable in the early seasons. Kit is a fair actor, but the impression of Jon we get is less of an intelligent and occasionally sullen bastard, and more just sulky)

The show changes this chapter in a few really significant ways. There’s two scenes that take place in the same timeframe that are addd. One is Jaime mocking Jon for going to the Wall, which is very Jaime and adds to the theme we’ll see in Tyrion II of Jon not quite understanding what he was signing up for, but otherwise doesn’t do much.

The other scene is Cersei coming to visit Catelyn at Bran’s bedside. This is a weird scene for a couple of reasons (not least of which is Cersei losing a child that will then be totally forgotten a few seasons later in Maggy’s prophecy), but for our purposes it changes what Catelyn’s mental state is for the scene with Jon. Instead of being half mad with grief and sleep deprivation, Catelyn really isn’t that distraught. Sad and worried, sure, but not out of her mind.

Before we get there though, Jon goes to say goodbye to Arya. Switching the order of this scene to before the on with Catelyn and Bran actually changes more than you’d think. I can see why they thought it was a good idea: there’s more of a dramatic progression this way, but it robs Jon and Arya’s scene. Instead of a scene where he draws strength from his relationship with Arya, it’s a sadder and more somber scene. It’s also a significantly shorter scene than it is in the book, with less banter, and combined with the cutting of the scene between the two of them in Arya I, it makes their relationship a little perfunctory. Jon also sasses Arya for not having Nymeria react to her command, which runs completely counter to how supportive he is in the books. In general he’s a little more harsh with her.

It’s not a problem, per se, you still get a sense that they’re close, but it’s the first step in a general flattening of Jon’s character. Speaking of which...

A lot of the dialogue in the scene by Bran’s bedside gets cut. A lot. Catelyn literally has two lines, one at the beginning, and one at the end.

Jon: I’ve come to say goodbye to Bran.

Catelyn: You’ve said it.

And then after Jon says his thing to Bran.

Catelyn: I want you to leave.

It’s fair to cut some of Catelyn’s dialogue here. The way she glares at Jon non-verbally communicates some of it, but it fundamentally changes the scene. While I don’t think there’s a need to keep Catelyn as sharp as she was in the original scene, because we don’t have access to Jon’s inner thoughts, cutting all her dialogue means that for all intents and purposes all the things we talked about in this chapter; the toll Jon’s bastard status takes on him, the complexities in his familial relationships, the way Catelyn’s actions affected all the Starks are just… gone. None of it exists on the show.

It’s the way the show handles a lot of things, and one of the reasons I wasn’t too fond of it back even in season one: really the show is interested only in a surface level reading of the text, and flattens everything, jettisoning a lot of the thematic and character richness Martin fills the books with.

(Oh, also Ned is in the scene now. Do we see how he reacts to Jon and Catelyn’s relationship? Nope, because none of it happens.)

Finally, the scene between Jon and Robb plays out pretty much the same. There’s another added scene after it where Ned tells Jon he may not have the Stark name, but he has his blood and promises to talk about his mother next time they talk. I don’t really have any thoughts about it. It’s nice, but could also have just been cut for time and we wouldn’t really lose anything.

Conclusion

This was a beast of a chapter to get done, much like Jon I. While chronologically the next chapter I should cover is Tyrion II, I’m going to skip it and do Sansa I next (and then Tyrion II). It’ll be the first time we’ll be in Sansa’s pov and get her sense of her relationship with Arya: it also contains the infamous incident between Joffrey and Arya out on the Kingsroad.

Like the last Jon chapter, there’s a lot of really good meta written about the Bran bedroom scene and Jon and Catelyn’s relationship in general. Some I’ve already linked to in this reread series (and this chapter), and some I haven’t, but most of it should be new.

Further Reading

Catelyn’s relationship with Jon drove a wedge through all the Stark children

Jon giving Arya Needle is a sign of how comfortable he is with violence

Catelyn’s animus to Jon stems from her patriarchal disempowerment

Should Ned have fostered Jon elsewhere?

Should Ned have told Jon about his true parentage?

Should Ned have told Catelyn about Jon’s true parentage?

Previous Chapters:

Bran I

Jon I

Arya I

[hope-for-olicity]

Fabulous Olicity Fanfic Friday - April 26th, 2019

Happy Friday! So this is my attempt to both thank awesome fanfic writers for their amazing work and offer my recommendations to anyone who is interested. Here are the fantastic fanfic stories I read this week! They are posted in the order I read them. This and all previous Fabulous Olicity Fanfic posts can be found on my blog.

Tumblr Drabble - Bow by @dreamsofolicity -This takes place somewhere in 5x18, after Oliver disbands the team. It’s pretty angsty but my mind kind of wouldn’t leave me alone about it. https://archiveofourown.org/works/11833266/chapters/26782701

Home To You multi-chapter Complete by @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl - Oliver Queen has never done what his family expected of him. He took a gap year after high school instead of going to college right away. He quit his fraternity sophomore year to join the student newspaper, switching his major from business to journalism. He became a photojournalist for a wire service instead of taking a place at Queen Consolidated. He went missing after six months instead of coming home for his sister’s twenty-first birthday. He survived five years of captivity in a war zone when everyone thought he was dead. He came home. But home didn’t have a place for him in it anymore. His parents were both dead, casualties of their own mistakes and a city they had turned against them. His sister was all grown up, the CEO of Queen Consolidated with a fiancé and a dog and a life of her own. Oliver didn’t belong in his old life, but there was nowhere else for him to go. He was a man without a home, without any way of finding one, until he stopped by the IT department of his sister’s company to get files off an old, battered memory card, and found a woman with curly blonde hair and bright, intelligent eyes chewing on a bright red pen and swearing at a computer screen. https://archiveofourown.org/works/12613188/chapters/28734552

With the Speed of an Arrow multi-chapter WIP by @academyofshipping -Oliver Queen’s elite and silver-spoon life has taken some blows in the past few years, but he is still the carefree billionaire everyone knows of and loves. When his role in the family business is in jeopardy and he is introduced to a motley of new people, his status quo is threatened. With a changed perspective, Oliver realizes his feeling for his best friend and anchor-in-life, Felicity Smoak, may be more than just platonic. OR A modern adaption of Jane Austen’s Emma with a gender swap* and no island. *Knowing that gender is not binary https://archiveofourown.org/works/16559846/chapters/38799857

Overwatch multi-chapter Complete by @it-was-a-red-heeler - A burglary attempt convinces the Mayor of Starling City to hire Smoak Technologies to strengthen his security. But between the sassy AI watching him 24/7 and the personal trainer with his own reasons to kill him, Oliver may wish he’d stuck with his baseball bat for protection. https://archiveofourown.org/works/17500640/chapters/41221793

A Soul Lost at Sea multi-chapter WIP by @tinaday3w - MAGNIFICENT regency romance where Oliver is a pirate who had returned to his previous life. http://archiveofourown.org/works/8181362/chapters/22297091

One Step Ahead multi-chapter WIP by @stephswims - Felicity Acerbi is married to esteemed Italian mob boss. Married after a failed business deal with her father, she is forced into a life decided for her. That is until a new bodyguard is hired. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16959333/chapters/39855036

| ONE | (Oliver the Footballer) multi-chapter WIP @someonesaidcake - Felicity Smoak had a plan; to save enough money to kick her monotonous job and start up the company of her dreams. She made good plans, solid plans, attainable plans. He was never part of her plan. His name was Oliver Queen, the reclusive Brazilian football star with a broken smile and a story to tell. He'd never planned on her either. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15005402/chapters/34779542

Will Fate Allow? multi-chapter WIP by @mindramblingsfics - Seeing her parent's marriage dissolve at a young age made Felicity yearn for a healthy marriage of her own. She thought she'd finally found what she was looking for when Billy Malone showed up offering her what her heart desired. She thought she was happy and had everything she could want, but things began to unravel. Slowly she turned to someone who had become an unparalleled constant in her life...Oliver Queen. Oliver and Felicity are the definition of polar opposites. He is the mob boss that strikes fear in the hearts many, while she is seen as the sweet girl next door, but there is more to both of them underneath the surface. Along the way, they become connected to one another leading to their lives being intertwined forever. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16521596/chapters/38699951

The Voice on the Line multi-chapter WIP by @faegal04 -After his relationship ends, Oliver moves back to Starling to get his life back on track. He's not ready for a physical relationship so his best friend Tommy gives him the number for a local company, Quiver, a local phone sex business. Oliver calls one night and starts speaking with a girl whose voice just does things to him. When he falls for the voice on the line and finds himself calling all the time just to hear her, he knows he has to make a decision. Will they meet? Can each of them get over their pasts? https://archiveofourown.org/works/18511543/chapters/43870330

The Fan multi-chapter WIP by @leuska - For the past couple of months, Felicity Smoak, previous child star known to the world through her alter ego Lisy the Tech Whiz, who ended her career and her growing popularity at the age of thirteen rather abruptly, has sporadically received disturbing notes and gifts in her mail. Police believe the notes to be just little tokens of appreciation by a former fan. Despite having left the spotlight over a decade ago and living in anonymity since, the fan mail keeps coming, increasing in frequency as well as intensity. The last drop is when Felicity receives another letter with a love note. A scary, ominous note. A note written in human blood.FBI director Amanda Waller tasks her best Agent to the case. Oliver Queen, a criminal profiler, is currently working on a special task force formed between SCPD and FBI to catch a man dubbed the Start City Slasher, who has murdered at least three young women in the past nine months. Agent Queen is not thrilled with the prospect of holding a former princess’ hand through her problem with a simple stalker while a serial killer is still at large. However, once meeting her, Oliver finds there is nothing easy or simple about Felicity Smoak as their worlds start to intertwine. https://archiveofourown.org/works/17726573/chapters/41820368

2 + 2 Equals a Family multi-chapter Complete by @mogirl97 - When Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak both reach for the last Lego Batman set on the shelf at the same time one December night while holiday present shopping for their kids, they have no idea that their chance encounter is going to change their lives. https://archiveofourown.org/works/11853030/chapters/26760468

Providence multi-chapter WIP by @so-caffeinated - Will Queen has struggled in silence in the year since he was shot. But when a shadowy crime lord known as Domino targets the only woman Will’s ever truly loved, fate forces him to confront his demons in ways he never could have imagined… Whether he wants to or not. Amelia Prescott has fought to take control of her life since learning two years ago that her personal and professional worlds were manipulated by others. But nothing can prepare her for just how hard she'll have to fight to set her own course, especially when her heart belongs to a damaged man and a crime lord threatens her every professional move... And her life. Destiny brings them together, but as chaos reigns and personal demons haunt Will and Amelia both, it may also threaten to tear them apart. https://archiveofourown.org/works/17919056/chapters/42308753

Paging Dr. Smoak multi-chapter WIP by @laxit21 - When Oliver Queen gets into a car accident, he meets Dr. Felicity Smoak. He had no idea how much a chance meeting would change his life. https://archiveofourown.org/works/17262497/chapters/40595483

Love By Contradiction multi-chapter WIP by @pimsiepim - When Felicity meets Oliver, it’s anything but romantic. Taking her best friend’s spot at a speed-dating event wasn’t exactly how she had pictured spending her Friday night. Meeting said best friend’s soulmate? Even less expected. And even though Felicity never really believed in that silly prediction a fortune teller made ten years ago, the occasion is just too good to pass up. Alena is stuck in a toxic relationship and maybe what she needs to finally get over her ex… is to get underneath someone else. Mission “Get-Alena-And-Oliver-Together” is on the way, and Felicity will stop at nothing to make sure her best friend gets her happily ever after. Nothing. Not even Alena’s lack of interest, or Oliver’s weird tendency to ask Felicity out on fake dates. The plan is perfect, the execution flawless... except for one small detail: it’s not Alena who’s starting to fall for the guy... https://archiveofourown.org/works/18550876/chapters/43969807

Time for a Story multi-chapter WIP by @smkkbert - This fic shows Olicity and their life as a (married) couple with family. Although Olicity (and their kids) are the protagonists, other characters of Arrow and Flash make appearances. YOU NEED THIS STORY IN YOUR LIFE. https://archiveofourown.org/works/3912157/chapters/8757172

seemingly impossible (but not untrue) multi-chapter WIP by @alexiablackbriar13 - Young genius historian Dr Felicity Smoak unknowingly and accidentally calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript within the Oxford Bodleian Libraries - a book that has been lost for centuries. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Felicity wants nothing to do with magic, despite her unruly and powerful abilities. But her discovery of Ashmole 782 sets the world of creatures stirring; with a mystery afoot and new, dangerous magical abilities manifesting for her to navigate, she is approached by the enigmatic vampire biochemist Professor Oliver Queen, who seems to have a deep interest in both the manuscript… and her. Based on A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16224353/chapters/37923743  

Twist of Fate by @wrldtravler for the Olicity Fan Art/Fanfic Appreciation Exchange - A lovely tumble through Arrow season 3 https://olicity-fanwork-exchange.tumblr.com/post/184295774082/twist-of-fate

Always by @icannotbelieveiamhere for the Olicity Fan Art/Fanfic Appreciation Exchange - My “Always” fic takes place right after episode 5.20 “Underneath”. It explores some of the issues Oliver and Felicity discovered while they were trapped under the bunker. Oliver and Felicity reflect on their time together and Oliver has a chance to thank his team and explain why he tried to disband the team after Adrian Chase tortured him. https://olicity-fanwork-exchange.tumblr.com/post/184298507947/always

Perfect Illusion by @jemmaacarters for the Olicity Fan Art/Fanfic Appreciation Exchange - In this version of season two, Felicity give Oliver a but more push back on her “promotion.” https://olicity-fanwork-exchange.tumblr.com/post/184299342269/perfect-illusion

Tumblr Drabbles multi-chapter WIP by @dreamsofolicity - This is a collection of small drabbles I posted on tumblr that come from prompts. http://archiveofourown.org/works/11833266/chapters/26708178

There Was Always Something There multi-chapter Complete by @mindramblingsfics - After having enough of Felicity's behavior, Malcolm sends his daughter to a London boarding school for some much needed structure. Years later, she finally returns home to Starling. She finds that some things are the same while some have changed. As she reacquaints herself with her hometown, one relationship stands out in particular: Oliver Queen. http://archiveofourown.org/works/11060544/chapters/24662730?view_adult=true

Love and Little Cupcakes multi-chapter WIP by @christinabeggs - Felicity loved sweets so much that she paid no attention to her lovelife. Until Thea Queen came into her store wanting fabulous cupcakes for her sixteenth birthday. SO ADORABLE! http://archiveofourown.org/works/12400539/chapters/28216053

Irresistible by @felicityollies - prompt: sleepless - Oliver has a cold, can’t sleep, and is trying to prove to Felicity that he can still be sexy with a snotty nose. https://archiveofourown.org/works/11034534/chapters/26799885

Sawaariya (Beloved) multi-chapter WIP by @crazycrystal10 - CEO Queen? Check. Author Ms.Smoak? Check. Married Olicity? Triple check. Story of Mr.&Mrs. Queen in the 'happily ever after'. AU. https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858814/chapters/26774514

// @emmaamelia95 // @mel-loves-all // @oliverfel4 // @green-arrows-of-karamel // @coal000 // @miriam1779 // @memcjo// @captainolicitysbedroom // @tdgal1 // @spaztronautwriter // @lalawo1// @quiveringbunny // @wrongshipper // @thebookjumper // @vaelisamaza // @myhauntedblacksoul // @lovelycssefan // @laurabelle2930 // @laxit21 //

[sanderssidesfanfiction]

We’ll Carry On - Chapter Sixty One

We’ll Carry On Tag

General Content Warnings: Sympathetic Deceit Sanders, Substance Abuse, Abandonment, Minor Character Death, Transphobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Dissociation, Bullying, Homophobia

December 14th, 2020

Roman turned his head to look at the guy behind him in his math class. It looked like Ryan was wearing nail polish, but he couldn’t be...could he? Was wearing nail polish something Ryan liked to do? Was Ryan secretly in the closet and he hadn’t told anyone he was actually a woman, or nonbinary? Was this his way of coming out?

After class that day, Roman quietly asked Ryan about the nail polish. “Oh, yeah!” Ryan said, glancing at his nails. “I almost forgot I had it on. I went to a punk rock concert last night, and to get into it I painted my nails black. I think it’s pretty cool!”

“Aren’t you worried people will think you’re, you know, a girl?” Roman asked.

“Nah,” Ryan shrugged off. “Guys can wear nail polish too. It’s just a little less common. See you later!”

And as Ryan walked off to his next class, Roman was left stunned and scratching his head.

March 27th, 2021

Roman was mentally and physically exhausted as Dee wrapped up his game that he had been playing, with Roman acting out the part of the evil Dragon Witch. Honestly, Roman loved Dee, but he could be exhausting if Roman wasn’t careful and didn’t watch what he was doing. And he certainly didn’t watch what he was doing today.

Dee thanked Roman for playing, before running off to do whatever he wanted to do next, and Roman flopped face-first into the couch in the basement. He groaned when he heard slightly hesitant footsteps approach not thirty seconds later. That meant it was either Virgil, or... “Roman?” Patton asked.

Roman just groaned in response. He really was not up for this today, not that he had much of a choice. Patton would probably want to play something equally as draining, and Roman had difficulties ever saying no to Patton. He turned his head to look at them. “You good, Pat?” Roman asked.

“I should be asking you that,” Patton retorted. “You’re the one who played with Dee for forty five minutes straight.”

“Yeah,” Roman sighed, sitting up and running a hand through his hair. “That was probably a mistake, but seeing him happy was worth it.”

Patton smiled at him. “You’re a good older brother. A great older brother,” they corrected themselves.

“Do you want something? Or are you just trying to genuinely compliment me instead of buttering me up?” Roman asked with a sigh. “I’m just...really tired right now, Pat. I’m not up for much.”

“Oh,” Patton said. “I was wondering if you’d want to help me with makeup at all. You know that Dad and Ami got me a little makeup bag with some stuff inside it for my birthday, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to help me try some of it. I know how to use lipstick, but I have no idea what the other stuff should do.”

Roman sighed. That sounded like fun, and he didn’t want to say no to Patton, but he was genuinely exhausted. “I don’t know if I’m up for that right now, Pat. Though, if you want, maybe we could do each others’ nails?”

Patton’s whole face lit up. “Do you mean that?” they asked.

“Yeah,” Roman said. “So long as you use the bright red nail polish, I’m great with it.”

“Cool!” Patton exclaimed. That was another gift they got on their birthday—a few small bottles of nail polish. “Can we do it now, or do you want to nap for a little bit?”

“Eh, naps are kinda unhealthy after a certain time, and I’d be waking up at three in the afternoon if I fell asleep now. But I’d be so groggy I’d probably go right back to sleep,” Roman said, standing up and stretching.

Patton cocked their head to the side. “Isn’t it one in the afternoon?”

“Yup,” Roman agreed.

They went upstairs together, and nearly got run over by Vanellope and Dee rushing down the hall. “Dee, slow down!” Roman called.

“Never!” Dee called back. He had been talking bit by bit at home, claiming that so long as no one took any accidental tone as what he meant to say, that he’d feel comfortable using his voice. And he had used it more often when someone asked him for something but they couldn’t see him signing.

Roman shook his head and walked with Patton up another flight of stairs to their room, and Patton immediately went to their dresser, grabbing the red and the yellow bottles of nail polish. “Ooh, feeling cheery, are we?” Roman asked.

“I want to try the yellow out,” Patton said with a shrug. “Besides, it’s nice and bright and Dee might like it.”

Roman shook his head playfully. “One day, Patton, you’re going to paint your nails full rainbow, aren’t you?”

“Probably,” Patton agreed, getting on their bed. “Do you want me to do your hands or your toes?”

“Hands, please,” Roman requested, also sitting on the bed.

They sat in silence for a minute, not really needing to say anything, or having anything they wanted to say. Then, Patton idly said, “I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a crush.”

“Never?” Roman asked. “Not once?”

Patton shook their head. “Nope. I’m not really sure I want one, either. Romance is weird, and like, it’s okay if other people want to do it, but I’ve never found someone who I really want to do romantic stuff with. Is there a word for that?”

“Aromantic,” Roman said, letting Patton wave their hand a little bit over Roman’s fingers. “You could always be aromantic.”

“Huh,” Patton said. “What if I thought that I could maybe date someone, but like, only if I knew them really well? Like, I wouldn’t wanna date anyone I just saw on the street, that seems kinda weird. But I could see myself dating a friend, if they were okay with it.”

“That would be demiromantic, then,” Roman informed Patton.

“Oh!” Patton looked briefly surprised. “Okay. I didn’t know there was a word for that.”

Roman waited for Patton to say something else, but he didn’t. “That’s it?” Roman asked.

“That’s it,” Patton said, glancing up at Roman in their nail painting. “I’m demiromantic, until proven otherwise, I guess. Not a big deal, is it?”

“I mean, no, not if you don’t want to make it one,” Roman said. “I just thought you might...want to make it one.”

“Nah,” Patton said. “I don’t care too much about my gender, why should I care about who I love when I don’t have someone to love at the moment?”

“Fair enough, I guess,” Roman said, frowning. “I’m just...surprised.”

Patton grinned. “What, that the metaphorical heart of the family can’t be the heart when it comes to love?”

“Not what I meant!” Roman exclaimed. “I don’t want to push you into that specific category if you don’t want to be there. And there’s more to love than romance, you of all people should know that.”

“Yeah, I do,” they said with a cheeky grin. “I was just trying to tease.”

Roman narrowed his eyes and said, “As soon as my nails are dry, I will tickle you relentlessly.”

Patton laughed. “Good luck with that!”

“You know I can outrun you,” Roman warned.

“Yeah, but if I tickle you back, you stop your tickling and collapse into a useless heap,” Patton pointed out. “And I know all your weak spots.”

Roman’s jaw dropped. “Is that a challenge, my dear sibling?”

Patton’s grin grew mischievous. “And if it is?” they asked.

“Well, I would say that you’re in for a rude awakening!” Roman laughed.

Patton giggled and shook their head, continuing to paint Roman’s nails. When they had finished the last pinkie, they put the bottle of red nail polish on their nightstand, and offered the yellow one to Roman. “Can you do mine now?” they asked. “While your nails dry?”

“Sure,” Roman agreed, twisting the cap off and beginning to paint Patton’s nails. He was wracking his brain for something to say. “So, what’s it like being nonbinary?”

Patton shrugged. “Why do you ask?” they replied.

“I’m just curious,” Roman said. “Because there’s rejecting societal norms and gender conformity, and then there’s actually living outside the binary. Logan has told me a little about what it’s like swapping places on the binary, but I was wondering what it’s like outside it.”

“It’s...definitely interesting,” Patton said. “There’s not really one way to show that you’re nonbinary, you know? There’s no one size, or no one presentation, that will make people look at you and go, ‘Oh, they’re clearly nonbinary.’ A lot of people haven’t even heard of the term before. And you can dress vaguely masculine but have androgynous features and people may wonder, ‘Are they a boy or a girl?’ but they never ask if the person is nonbinary. Besides, not all nonbinary people want to present as vaguely masculine.”

“And if you dress at all feminine people assume you’re a trans girl or in drag, is that true?” Roman asked.

“I dunno about drag, because I’m only ten. There aren’t really drag queens my age, you know?” Patton laughed. “But yeah, people have asked me if I’m a boy or a girl, and the mean ones have asked it with a sneer or used the word ‘transgender’ like it’s a slur. It’s...it’s frustrating sometimes, but more often than not it’s just tiring. Why can’t I be allowed to just be myself, and not put a label on it? Sure, nonbinary is a good label, but if there could be no labels at all, it would be nice. I know some people feel better with labels, but I...don’t, usually. It’s nice when there’s a word for something like demiromantic, so I know I’m not alone, but if I have to use the label to explain why I’m not interested in someone, it’s just...yucky, you know?”

“Yeah, you don’t want to be forced into a box, you want to be in that box because you choose to be,” Roman agreed, finishing one of Patton’s hands. “I completely understand that.”

Patton hummed their agreement. “I’m super glad you understand,” they said softly. “Because sometimes it feels like others don’t. They don’t like being pushed into boxes because they’re the wrong boxes. Ami’s genderfluid. Logan’s a guy. I just...don’t like being put in any boxes. All the boxes are wrong.”

Roman nodded. That sounded really difficult, and he wished that Patton didn’t have to deal with that. His little sibling deserved better than those who insisted everyone be placed in a box. “Anything in particular you want to do after our nails have dried?” he asked.

“Nah,” Patton said. “Maybe we could just relax on your bed for a bit, or read downstairs, but I don’t want to do anything super high-energy today.”

“Oh, good, because I don’t want to either,” Roman sighed. “I’m exhausted.”

“I could tell,” Patton said, their grin just a little too big for Roman’s liking. “You never pace yourself when it comes to doing stuff with me, Virgil, or Dee. You’re a big softie when it comes to us.”

“Am not!” Roman protested. “I treat all of the family equally!”

“Then why don’t you do the same to Logan?” Patton challenged.

“Because he can be a jerk and we argue more than we get along,” Roman said.

“When anyone else is around,” Patton said. “Logan has told me that the two of you get along better without supervision. You act like mature adults who can handle problems on their own. But not if anyone else is around. You like putting up a front, but the two of you love each other.”

“Don’t tell anyone!” Roman hissed. “I have a reputation to protect, come on, Pat!”

Patton giggled and shook their head. “Come on, everyone knows that you two love each other, it’s not some government secret or anything.”

“Well, yeah, but it doesn’t need to be pulled into the open for inspection either!” Roman protested. “Seriously, Pat. It’s something that Logan and I share when we have time alone. If everyone knows that we’re civil alone, then someone will say they expect us to be civil all the time, and that will lead to actual arguments, not just arguing over who used the last of the eggs to make breakfast, or who stole who’s sweatshirt.”

“Okay, okay, okay, I won’t tell,” Patton promised. “I don’t see the big deal about having to be civil, though. Virgil and I get along almost all the time, whether other people are around or not.”

“Well, that’s different,” Roman said. “Because you don’t have the reputation of being a ‘Type A’ personality. People expect us to clash. If we don’t, they’ll get suspicious, and if people are scared of us getting along, they might spread rumors that would make us fight for real, and not want to talk anymore.”

“People would do that?” Patton asked, wrinkling their nose.

“Yup,” Roman said, finishing Patton’s second hand of nail polish. He put the bottle on the nightstand and sighed. “People are dumb sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Patton agreed. “Good thing we’re not just ‘people’ to each other, then, right?”

“I guess so,” Roman said with a smile.

[kardemommen]

since were on the topic of gender swaps during mottotage, heres a fun little story:

i graduated about four years ago. we were voting on what themes we should do for our mottotage and pretty much everyone agreed that gender swap was a classic, a must, how could we possibly do mottotage without gender swap?

at the time i was mostly closeted. only very few people in my year knew that im a trans guy. the idea of having to dress masculine for gender swap day when i was already doing that every single day was ??? weird? i would have looked the same as any other day, no dressing up and no actual gender swapping involved, since, you know...... i was already a guy, most people just didnt know that yet. 

dressing super girly to at least get some swapping action would have been just as weird because if youre not out, no matter how masculine you present, to everyone around you you are still a girl. and if youre a girl and you dress feminine for gender swap day people might have wondered if i actually deserved that abitur i was after.

also i didnt really want to come out via mottotage. 

i made a vent post about that and @the-illusion-of-sanity came up with a few alternatives that really cheered me up: 

(sorry, non-german speakers - these all rhyme with geschlechtertausch, the german word for gender swap: 

fair swap - you finally get what you deserve revenge swap - someone else finally gets what they deserve gemächt is an old fashioned word for penis. the next one suggest you crash a drug deal bad swap - why did you think trading a cow for some beans would be a good idea? and finally, laughter swap. it gets pretty intense in that one)

other friends suggested: “*transcend* the geschlechtertausch. embody binary gender roles by being absent” and “show up as a black hole that devours all gender stereotypes” and if it had come to that, i certainly would have considered this option.

anyway what im trying to say is - gender swap as a motto is not great. it relies on stereotypes, puts people who dont identify within the gender binary and those who dont conform to the prescribed behaviors of their assigned gender in a really weird spot. guys in dresses and makeup? hilarious! its also really tired and boring. look at all those other options for much more fun swaps.

in my year, despite the overwhelming support for the theme, we decided to drop the gender swap idea and im really glad we did. instead we had themes that complimented our overall abimotto and in my humble opinion that was more fitting and creative and didnt make me want to stay home for that mottotag. so there.

theres so much speculation about whether or not david is going to turn out to be trans or not. on the one hand i agree that casting a trans actor to play a cis character is neat, because why should we only get to play trans people. thats rather limiting. on the other hand, i can very easily see druck setting this mini storyline up to have it pay off later when david might get to talk about this. 

earlier today i saw a post that talked about how germans, when it comes to dressing up, often dont think about things possibly being offensive. as long as its all in good fun, it doesnt matter if youre hurting someone. druck has a huge young german audience who could really benefit from a little bit of perspective so id love if druck took this opportunity.

[sher-soc-the-famder]

YOOOOO MY FELLOW GAYS it me :p I’m baaaack with another set of conspiracy theories for @altruistic-skittles’ In Our DNA Because I love driving myself insane by thinking in circles XD

That and I’m determined to figure out the Macy Mystery(tm) before it’s revealed, it’s practically a matter of pride at this point XD I mean, I probably won’t but I’m having a blast piecing different hints and details together. Like Game theory, with about the same track record too!

ANYWAYS SPOILERS AND POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW :P

First to recap! From my last theory post

- Patton having emotional power (CONFIRMED!)

- Roman being Subject 89 (CONFIRMED!)

- Patton, Logan, and Macy (Still in the air, probably Jossed XD)

- Virgil’s history with Logan (Still in the air)

- The whole thing being a test (JOSSED)

...which is not to bad actually, huh. ANYWAYS I’m gonna be focusing on the biggest mystery at the moment: Macy so buckle up it’s about to get weird

To start off with we need to narrow down the list of suspects which goes thus:

Roman, Virgil, Logan, Patton, Damion, Ms. Spencer, Emile Picani, Remy, Hobo (yes I’m including the cat, I did say that it was going to get weird), and finally Macy herself!

Pleeeeease let me know if I missed any important characters! I’m not including the parents or Flora because the ages just don’t match up at all, and if I start trying to add them to this equation I really will go mad. 

ROMAN

I’m crossing Logan off this list off of one thing alone: the ships listed for this fic. XD Logince. Need I say more? No? No. Go get your man, Ro

PICANI AND REMY

I mean, they’re in the tags. They’re gonna show up at some point. However, I’m doubting the existence of a third sibling. Neither Patton nor Logan has mentioned the existence of one. Plus I’m inclined to think that Skittles has already introduced us to Macy, and is just making us all suffer at this point

MS. SPENCER

...ok I don’t actually think that Ms. Spencer could be Macy but I really, really wanted to point out that Damion disguises himself as her at least once. How else would a supposed elementary school teacher know that people would be after not only Patton but Roman as well? Why would she time her running into Virgil so suspiciously well that Virgil doesn’t meet Patton at the theater? She’s surprisingly gentle with Roman, whom Damion would know

Hence at least in the theater scene Ms. Spencer = Damion 

aaaaanyways moving on

HOBO

I mean at this point, the cat could be a person and I would not be surprised. Virgil even points this out himself, that the cat could be a mutant and following him around for some reason. The two year timeline is rather suspicious as well. I’m leaning Hobo = Remy at the moment but WHO KNOWS Hobo could be Macy XD (and believe me, the moment that cat makes a return I’m starting a whole new theory board for them)

DAMION

(First off, gdi, Damion adds a whole new layer to the Unreliable Narrator tag, Skittles I’m going to go mad XD)

Damion is not Macy but he’s definitely involved somehow. My current theory? He’s the kid that broke his arm and led to Logan being taken. Chapter 7 opens with a flashback of someone who’s broken their arm, and is met with icy blue eyes. Logan. They leave and then they return to reassure him that everything will be alright.

But

They do it softly, in a way that helps him catch his breath. Which sounds an awful lot like Patton to me. “It’s going to be okay”

So

Damion breaks his arm, Logan sees it and tells Patton, Patton heals Damion’s arm and leads to Logan being taken. Which is why Damion is looking out for them. They helped him out and in return, one got his mind twisted and the other got taken to a facility and experimented on for years.

(Also note the ambiguous pronouns I’m going to bring those back up)

Also Chapter 9, with Damion being disguised as a scientist and helping Roman and his mother escape, leads me to believe that all the files about subject 89 were corrupted and/or deleted by him

PATTON

Ah, the story that Skittles wants us all to believe, the most likely to be true shhhhh I’m in tin hat denial land right now, the red herring, the bright spotlight that Skittles wants us to pay attention to so that she can pull of her magic trick in the shadows

WELL I WILL NOT BE FOOLED

Patton may look just like Logan, Patton may be trans, Patton and Macy may both have hints at having healing powers, Patton’s mothers may have locked him up in order to keep him from being taken as well, Patton may have memory problems that point to Logan messing with his head, but look

...

...

The story of Patton being Macy goes as thus:

Patton/Macy (from here on known as Patcy) heals Damion’s broken arm and gets noticed by Dr. William. After a period of time, Logan notices that people are trying to take their sibling and alters people’s memories into thinking that it was him who healed the broken arm. They alter Patcy’s memories for...some reason, and Logan lets themself get taken to the facility in Patcy’s stead. Patcy’s mothers, lock them up to keep from losing another child. A few years later Pacty realizes their gender, Patton chooses his name, Roman saves him from his mothers and we hit the present day. Makes sense no?

W R O N G XD

There are a few details that stand out that this doesn’t answer: Patton’s bracelet and his habit of messing with it. Why Damion- disguised as Ms. Spencer- kept Patton and Virgil from meeting. Why did Logan need to erase Patton’s memories of him in the first place?

Patton as Macy makes the most sense and yet, when I think about it, it doesn’t feel right. I can’t shake the doubt and conviction that he’s not Macy

Which leaves us with Virgil or Logan

VIRGIL

I doubt Macy is Virgil.

There are a few things that could mean his is Macy: the fact that he’s gender fluid, the normal life he got to lead (s u p p o s e d l y there’s still the question of how he meet Logan, which means he isn’t all normal), Virgil’s family being connected to the facility somehow, the way that the two just click, that strange moment where Patton notes about two of his students looking alike but not being related, and Virgil insistence that Logan gets to live their life

And one other vague hint that Skittles has told me that I’m not sure I’m allowed to share that could swing as support or something to disprove Virgil = Macy I haven’t decided yet

But I don’t think he’s Macy. For a couple of reason. Logan claims that Macy would look like them, and it’s one of the few things that I trust. Virgil has an entire documented family history. Virgil has time based powers when Macy is connected to healing powers in some form. And then well

Moxiety is listed as one of the ships XD With the build up of Logan and Patton’s connection they have to be connected in some way which could make Moxiety a little,,, squicky depending on what that connection is. :p 

Which just leaves:

LOGAN

Yeah, you heard me. I think Logan is Macy. I know it’s probably not right but GDI I’m attached to the idea now that I have to lay my clones theory to rest, at least for now

Do I want it to be a complex conspiracy? Why yes, yes I do, I know it’s not likely but it’s fun to think about and I hope it amuses Skittles. Look I watch Game Theory for fun, I love MatPat but I doubt 90% of his theories are right XD They’re fun anyways. *coughs* I’m rambling back to my thoughts

I already established in my first theory post that I don’t think we can trust Logan completely about their own past. They erased something from it. The question is what? They remember Macy obviously, and taking her place.

And that’s what interests me the most. They took Macy’s place. The fist couple of files we see about them is a search for healing powers. Why? Why would they expect healing? I said family lines before but they clearly don’t show any knowledge of Logan having siblings until they slip up about Macy.

And then there’s the fact they couldn’t erase memories until they were about eleven. Which means that everything they did before that was alteration and not erasures. Whoever Patton was to Logan, they couldn’t have erased things completely, only changed them. And you know what’s interesting about that?

Patton’s comment about Damion

“He was almost like a brother to me”

That on top of Damion trying to keep Royality separate from Analogical, it makes me think that things are going on. Things(tm)

So the Logan as Macy story goes as thus:

There was a pair of twins, both of them female. One heals people with the touch of her hands, and the other can dip into their memories like a pool. One day they meet a boy who’s broken his arm. The one who can heal gets caught healing him.

They’re young, they don’t know what to do. Her sister panics, and refusing to let her sister get taken, swaps both of them. She writes away her existence from her sister’s mind, filling in the gaps with the boy they had helped or just plain emptiness. And then, to make sure that they cannot find her sister, she changes her own mind, putting herself in the place of her sister.

Macy guarantees her sister’s freedom by making sure that they’ll never learn the proper name and information about her. But she keeps the idea of her sister close, to take with her. And leaves her sister a bracelet, maybe not to remember her by, but as a hope that maybe one day they’ll meet again

The only thing I can’t figure out is the whole gender issue, which I figured Damion would help Logan hide but IDk about the rest BUT COME ON The rest of it makes sense!! 

So I stand by Logan is Macy XD

Though it still leaves

MACY

There are two options with this. Macy is simply herself, and Patton is himself, a coincidence that everyone built up. Or Macy doesn’t exist. And was simply someone Logan imagined in order to help him cope. Neither of which are likely at all 

BUT STILL POSSIBILITIES

ANYWAYS thanks for joining me in tin foil hat land again XD I hope y’all are enjoying this fic as much as I am and SKITTLES I’m excite for where you take it no matter where it goes!!

Keep up the good work and have an awesome day! <3

[sinewho]

No.6 major fic rec list

Hello people:D

It seems 2 (two) human beings might be interested in a recommendation fic list. SO HERE IT IS   Things to have in mind:   .It was supposed to be short but I ended up mentioning 97 fics, sorry   .I used 10 categories (highschool, college, modern setting, Kingdom / Fantasy Au / Magic, Miscellaneous Aus, Post-series, canon, reunion, Life Swap and Gender Bend) . Links in bold are fics that are definitely a must. You MUST read them because of how good they are, I tried to highlight 2 or 3 in each category and rating, so you can go to those first   .The rating of the fic is next to the name for easy choosing. Plus some small commentary I added on my favs. .Have in mind that some of this are not finished and a pretty large amount might be abandoned, but read them anyway because they are still great   .There’s a little list at the end with my favorite authors, I would recommend everyone to read ALL of their work, but some of those works might be in other categories. . Feel free to reblog with your own contributions!! I definitely need more awesome fics to read :3

Keep reading for the long-ass list

High School:

Reminiscing on the Past, Looking Forward to the Future (Not Rated)

Shion was digging through a box when he found a small teddy bear and note that Nezumi had given him, many years ago. He reminisces on the past, and decides to finally let Nezumi know how he felt. 

My Gypsy Boyfriend (Not rated) This is MY FAVORITE hs au, go for it, no regrets guaranteed

Shion is drawn to the new kid. Nezumi is both beautiful and intriguing. He's also a gypsy, and a loner that most people avoid...But Shion isn't most people. He’s a persistent airhead who won’t take no for an answer. 

locker notes (Not Rated)

Shion and Nezumi are in their last year of high school with unspoken crushes that only come to light when Nezumi slips a note in Shion's locker. 

shall i compare thee to a high school play? (Not Rated)

Shion is Romeo, and Nezumi is Juliet, and maybe it's just a high school play, but Shion means every single one of his lines to his best friend and only hopes he can keep his true feelings disguised as an act. 

that one where nezumi's an idiot and shion has a cute laugh (G)

“Literally all I wanted was some fucking Doritos.”

Love All, Trust A Few, Do Wrong To None (T)

Shion is the perfect student. He is currently attending a prestigious academy and leads a comfortable, quiet, ordinary life with his mother and best friend in Lost Town. However, a mysterious and dangerous transfer student lurks on the horizon, and little does Shion know his life is about to be turned upside down.

Re: 2 a.m (T)

To: Nezumi

Sub: Sorry in advance

Sent at 1:44 A.M.

Are you awake?

Eyes only for you (T)

This is a world where people are born with two different colored eyes, one is their natural eye color and the other is their soul mate’s natural eye color. When a person makes eye contact with their soul mate, each person's eyes lose their soul mate’s color and become a pair of their own natural color.

Melodic Minor (M)

Rock Band AU set in 1997

School Bells (M)

In an AU Nezumi is a third year who goes to a rich boys school where he aimlessly waits for when he can leave. When he meets a mysterious boy with red eyes named Shion he thinks, maybe, he has something to look forward to everyday.

Meet Me At The Stage Door (M)

Theatre geek Nezumi doesn't think he'll enjoy watching ballet. Boy, is he wrong.

The Rat and Red Eyed Boy (M)

Shion didn't expect for this year to be any different from his others. He had always been the 'weird' kid and got teased for the red mark that traveled along his body. Little did he know his life would change after meeting a certain boy. Nezushi high school AU where Shion's scars are also sensitive to touch.

College / Roomates

drunk and smitten (Not Rated)

Really just a drabble - Shion breaks into Nezumi's apartment in the middle of the night, completely drunk and thinking it's his own home that he's let himself into. 

no more nor less (G)

Nezumi has decided to confess his feelings to Shion after Safu suggests he should. He meets Shion in the library to study Shakespeare, and...?

In Which Shion Is Found To Be Gay (G) soooo cute omg

Exactly what it says on the tin.

I Might Just Love You!  (T)

Nezumi was the first to bear witness to his roommate's dilemma. He knew this was going to be an issue-Not everyone was capable of knowing a beautiful sight once they've seen one, and Shion surely was a beautiful sight, but nonetheless. No one ever said dealing with an infectious disease as a college freshman was going to be easy. Luckily, Nezumi's there every step of the way.

Roommates Before Lovers (T)

Shion needs a place to stay while attending university, and who better to room with than Nezumi, the kid he remembers from that bus ride all those years ago? But things in their apartment don't go as smoothly as expected, because both are hiding secrets about their past from each other, causing things in the present to get...complicated.

The best laid plans (T) ok listen, this fic is great ITS SO GREAT

In which Shion doesn’t know how to meet people, and Nezumi is a Shakespeare snob. Also road trips. 

A college Journey (T)

Nezumi and Shion are randomly assigned to be roommates in their first year of college. Their first meeting goes pretty roughly, but romance soon develops between them. But will it be able to last through the tough times ahead of them?

College Clusterfuck (M) 

Shion's a stoner. Nezumi's a drunk. Inukashi understandably kind hates them both. (High)jinks ensue. College AU.

More than Enough (M)

The lives of Nezumi, Shion, and their friends in college. Or, just another NezuShi College AU with too much fluff.

Corruption (M)

"You're going to be fun...to corrupt." Nezushi AU. Street musician Nezumi, college student Shion.

Who said college life wasn't fun? This is a ongoing series of at lest 14 works -as of today- rating from G to E and my favorite college au, for real, its great. Please read it. PLEASE READ IT ITS AMAZING 10/10

Just one week had passed since the first lectures and already he had two assignments due for the next week so that meant that there was only one place for Shion to go, the library.

Modern Au / or more things that are not precisely high school or college

You are My World (Not Rated)

Have you ever loved someone with a fierceness you didn't know about until something happened that made you realise just how much it would affect you should that person be taken away from you? Shion was just about to find out what that felt like. 

Smile (G) (13 y/o cute dorks)

Shion won't smile properly with his braces and Nezumi notices. Middle School AU.

Paperback Lover (G)

Nezumi doesn't visit the local bookstore for the cute white-haired boy that works there. He's only here for the books. No, really.

Dance with me (G)

All it takes is a club and a lot of alcohol, and Shion becomes a regular Casanova.

MotherTruckers (T) nezumi is a mean trucker, how great is that?

Living in Alaska is difficult for recent college graduate Shion, especially considering his degree's emphasis in... plants. But when he stumbles into a job as an ice road trucker and finds himself partnered with a grey-eyed man named Nezumi, Shion decides maybe Alaska isn't too bad after all. Nezushi, Trucker AU

Im in love with my Bodyguard (T)

The year is 1947. Nezumi had just gotten fired and is given a job as a bodyguard.But who does he need to protect? and who is this Shion?

Our Day In Summer (T) Super lovely, full of fluff

Shion is stuck in a monotonous job as a simple company employee, and has no real aims in life. One day, he meets Nezumi, a street musician and aspiring artist, and things in his life begin to change.

Codex (T)  (trans!nezumi)

Shion finds a rat in a bookstore.

Any Helpful (T)  (trans shion and trans nezumi)

Safu is asked for assistance by Shion. She ends up helping Nezumi too.

The Visitor (M)

Shion was just about to leave him. Not for good, but at least to teach him a thing or two. The only problem is, he's sure they can reconnect after the accident damages his lover.  

Empty Fantasies (M)

Eve is the best drag queen in Tokyo. When Shion is dragged to his show for Safu's birthday, he finds himself drawn to the man. When they keep running into each other, they can't shake the feeling that they've met a long time ago.  

A time for everything (M)

Shion will never fall in love again. 

All the Pretty Little Animals (E)

"Shion is dragged by his friends to a strip club. There, he meets Nezumi (bonus for drag!)"

Kingdom / Fantasy Au / Magic

the lost prince (Not Rated)

The royal family was massacred 15 years ago, but the kingdom has always held out hope that the lost prince would return. Meanwhile, Nezumi has been acting strange, and Shion isn't sure why his best friend of 14 years keeps giving him these looks that escalate one night to more than just an expression Shion cannot explain.

three wishes (Not Rated)

Shion finds a genie's lamp, and when he rubs it, he's more preoccupied with falling for the cranky genie that comes out than making his allotted three wishes.

Evening Song (G)

A continuation of the centaur AU for all you perverts out there who wonder how Nezumi and Shion are gonna get together even though Nezumi is a centaur and Shion is an elf. Written in the style of a classic fairy-tale by Andrew Lang.

A Centaur Named Mouse (G)

Nezumi is a centaur. Shion is a wood elf. They are dorks. Kissing happens. It's cute. The end.

Yes, your majesty (T)

There once was a king. There once was a prince. There once was a curse.  Now there once was a mouse. Fairytale 

darkness as it turns into light (T) (harry potter crossover)

Safu always says Nezumi appositely asked the Sorting Hat to put him into Slytherin, to better uphold his bad boy looks and his look-at-me-in-the-wrong-way-and-I-will-take-your-eyes-out attitude. Most of the time, Shion can’t but agree.

The Prince and the Rat (T)

 Shion is a prince in a castle, waiting to be rescued, Nezumi is the handsome knight in shining armor, Safu is a sassy tag along friend (like donkey), and Elyurias is an overprotective wasp mother. (The Shrek AU nobody asked for)

cognitive dissonance (M)

A strange night in the rain at twelve years old was the beginning to a future Shion never could have imagined. A future which involved foreign promiscuity, betrayal, dogs, love, loss, and a whole lot of bravery.

Ghost (M)  (OMG SO BEAUTIFUL AND SAD)

Shion can't remember how he died and Nezumi doesn't want him to. Everything seems fine until a plague is mentioned and Shion becomes determined to find out. Will it bring them closer together or part them even more? ... Song fic, but actually it's more of a poem but yeah, hmm character death?

i begin to understand why god died (M) the angel thing is really cool

I was human when my heart was stolen by him, and I was human when I longed to be by his side. This fact won't change, no matter what name I decide to give to these feelings.  --It was sometime around 1,200 A.D. when he met Shion. 

Be Cruel to be King (E) The best kingdom au, 71k words full of fluff and some fights and great things haha

In the kingdom of Seis, King Rikiga rules cruelly. When he takes a former baker as his wife and makes her queen, her son Shion is named as heir to the throne, with one ultimatum; become a good leader before he turns 18 or be banished to"West District" to live forever in poverty and exile. Sadly Shion has no idea how to be cold hearted like Rikiga, but he meets someone who can help.

Miscellaneous AUs

books and mind reading (Not Rated) From all 27 Danielle’s work in my opinion this is the best, full of angst and fluff. Top 5 best fics ever for sure

Shion can read minds, an ability more overwhelming than he was prepared for when he moved from his small hometown to the city for university. In the city, he meets Nezumi, whose mind is much different than anyone's Shion has read before. Shion breaks his own rule by telling Nezumi he can mind read, intending on never seeing the man again - an intention that, of course, does not quite pan out. 

The Dead Horse Shanty (Not Rated) 

"Oh, poor old man, your horse will die, we'll drop him down to the depths of the sea. We'll send him down with a long, long roll, where the sharks will have his body and the devil have his soul." Nezumi, pirate ship cabin boy, is unprepared for the addition of a hostage onto his to-do list. He is even less prepared for the raging storm that will maroon them on an island together.

their wicked minds (T)

Shion is a Senator in the Intergalactic Imperial Senate, and Nezumi is a bioengineered super soldier assigned to be his bodyguard.

The Forest of Tranquility (M) 

Shion, a young ecologist, is allowed to leave No.6’s protective wall for the very first time in his life. During his research the young man rescues a silver-eyed beauty, unaware that this fateful encounter will hold him captive in the core of the Northern forest. “You shall not leave again!”

Courtship Rituals (M) 

Nezumi is a courtesan in the West Block, Shion is a student from Lost Town who conveniently loses his way and gets caught up in Eve's graces. She offers him possibly the most memorable moment of his life, and he's so close to giving in, but Eve is too much for an innocent Shion to handle. But can a relationship blossom between two that are so different?

Post-series

On the Clock (Not Rated) 

Post-series bakery shenanigans. Warning for general offensiveness on Nezumi's part. 

We Shall Dance Again (G)

A journey forward; a journey back. This was how Nezumi had changed.

Quietly (G)

In which Shion has a surprise for Nezumi and Nezumi plans for the near future.

Communication Breakdown (T)

[Post-series, post-hypothetical future reunion.] Shion has issues maintaining a work/life balance. Nezumi takes issue with these issues.

First Snow's Kiss (T)

After a fight with Shion, Nezumi sets out to make it the Christmas Shion always wanted.

Statistical Outlier (T)

[Post-series] Shion, sex, and statistics. And Nezumi.

Together (T)

Shion isn’t really sure how to act now that Nezumi’s returned. There’s time between them that won’t ever return, but he’s so glad to have him back. Domestic as hell.

Junior is curious (M) Funny and cute and sexy, this one has everything

"Ah, so you've seen them making a baby too?"

Shion's Birthday (M)

Nezumi has planned the perfect evening for Shion's birthday. It will be romantic, thoughtful, sweet, and most importantly, it will end in mind-blowing sex! Of course, even the best laid plans rarely go accordingly.

Good morning, Love (M)

All pretence of sleep was gone from his voice hearing the excuse Shion made to get up this early on a Sunday sounded ridiculous enough to get most of his attention. There was no way that Nezumi and their warm bed was going to be abandoned because of some damn sewer pipes. He was going to make sure of that!

nothing gold (M)

if Nezumi stayed.

Captivate (E)

"He pulled his brows into a frown and twisted in his seat to regard Shion with one slate-colored eye, noting the soothing, benign curve of his pink lips and how it was utterly belied by the stark heat in his eyes." In which Shion Insists and Nezumi is doomed to fail.

Étude (E)

"I'll show you," Nezumi grins. He disentangles his arms so he can cup Shion's head with both hands. "Again."

Still (E)

Nezumi decides to give up a little control.

To The Simple Two (E)

Shion has a proposal. Nezumi has a counter-proposal. Fluff and porn ensue.

Here's Everything I've Always Meant to Say (E)

There's a first time for everything.

In Knots (E)

Shion had never seen Nezumi wear a tie before.

Akame (E)

Stage Fright (E)

Sion lacks appreciation for the finer points of playing dress-up.

About Shion's topping and embarrassed Nezumi (E)

Little humor story from Nezushi daily life. It can be treated like a standalone story or part of my "Not Perfect" universe. It's about idea of Shion getting banned from being on the top by Nezumi.

Reunion

Chances and Choices (T)

After the fall of No. 6, Nezumi left Shion with the promise of coming back. After ten years, fate decided to let their paths cross once again.

Revolution (T)

Six years have passed after Nezumi's departure. Even though the progress of the Restructural Committee is like an untamed wave of changes and improvements, some people are unsatisfied and more than tired Shion thinks he has failed. Will he ever be able to look in these beautiful grey eyes again? Or will his guilt consume him?

Revolution EX: In a starlit night (M) (tecnically postseries but oh well)

It’s a starlit summer night. A busy one at that, since Nezumi and Shion move into the attic of an old ivy-clad red clinker house, which is completely surrounded by nature. What a perfect place to care for their deep, invisible scars the past had carved into their souls… A sequel to Revolution.

When Constellations Collide (M) (this is actually in evey categroy)

Everything felt easier in the dark, Shion thought. Now he was starting to understand why Nezumi preferred it. 5 + 1 times Nezumi and Shion share a bed.

Summer Days (M)

Four years have passed since Nezumi left Shion behind. Both of them are living a solitary live… Will they find their warmth again? - This is a story about hot summer days in the Western District. Reunion. Home, Sweet Home. And of course lemony boy's love!

The Sun in Jericho (M)

Ten years have passed since Nezumi left No. 6 at his back. He's seen much of the world and even found a place to call home, but his thoughts keep returning to a promise he made when he was too young to be making such heavy promises. So he decides, somewhat on a whim, to keep it. It's only to appease his conscience, of course; this decision has nothing to do with his curious inability to get a certain person out of his mind. Nothing at all.

No Man is an Island (M)

It's been 4 years, 22 days, 5 hours, and 21 minutes since the last time he kissed Nezumi.

Redeemed  (M) 

Their Five Stages (M)

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Where the five stages of grief become the five stages of reunion for Shion and Nezumi. Rated M for the last chapter. 

Not Perfect (M) I actually had to edit the post to add this one bc I FORGOT wtf is wrong with me I love this fic im officially the worst, however i dont think there's anyone in the fandom that haven't read it. SORRY DEAR AUTHOR 

 The four years passed after Wall fell. Shion is losing fight with his health and loneliness. Will Nezumi's return help him? It’s been said that life is full of ups and downs.

In Memory Lock'd (E)

I Loved Ophelia (E) I love this one, my favorite reunion so far

Some things are found where you least expect them. Shion and Nezumi are challenged to deal with their feelings for each other and live with the scars from their pasts.

And so we meet again… (T)

Incandescence (M)

Shion is drawn to sharp things.

Canon

affectionate (G)

Shion can’t be entirely certain on whether or not Nezumi is, or has ever been, affectionate, but he can say with confidence that he has a way to check.

Beside You (T)

Shion gets worried when Nezumi catches a cold, much to the other boy's annoyance.

but let's not talk of love or chains (M) This one is so incredible good, im not even kidding

Nezumi promised Shion they would reunite. He never said when, or how long he would stay. Five years later, he’s still figuring that out himself. Nezumi returns before he’s ready and finds that Shion has grown up without him – but for some reason, Shion still welcomes him back. In which Nezumi is forced to reconcile his conflicting fear and love, the pain in his past and the uncertainty of his future, and decide if freedom is worth the price of belonging nowhere at all.

Surrender (M)

Shion & Nezumi have a fight that leads to a very memorable night. Their emotional connection is so beautiful, I thought their physical one should be too. <3

The Most Beautiful Thing That Ever Was (E)

After everything has happened, we are left wondering what Nezumi and Shion's relationship has become. Nezumi has always teased Shion about being naively moronic, but what if Shion ends up teaching Nezumi a thing or two about the matters of the heart? And what about the way in which he presents his lesson?

Life Swap

In the Shadow of No. 6 (T)

No. 6 is no utopia. After twelve years suffocating under the city's constant surveillance, Nezumi is determined to escape. But just when he manages to crawl out from under No. 6's watchful eye, he finds himself the captive of a West Block terrorist group. 

Beyond the Shadow of No. 6 (T)

Continuation of In the Shadow of No. 6; a glimpse in the days of those left behind, 4 years later.

Fateswap (T)

Nezumi grows up in his village... sort of... while Shion is captured and taken to the Correctional Facility at a young age. How will events play out with the roles reversed? And what will happen to the third option? 

Fateswap Beyond (T)

The post-script to the Fateswap universe you've all been waiting for. Contains light smut.

Gender Bend

Inner Beauty (G)

It starts with a question that's innocent enough: "Can I braid your hair?" 

Small Mercies (T)

Rikiga dotes on Shion. Nezumi does not approve.

Behind Closed Doors (T)

Shion has no fashion sense. Nezumi decides it's time to go shopping.

Domesticity (M)

Shion makes hamburgers and fries, she's pretty tired of soup afterall.

Authors (with a lot of amazing works that Im to lazy to list)

Nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare

Enflashings

Triste

Ahiku

Secretagentfan

Elanra

Vox

There are some authors that I’ve read and loved but I cant for the life of me remember their name, I will edit this post if I remember 

I hope my long-ass list is helpful :D

[nothingnicetosaysitnexttome]

90 Day Fiance: Season 7, Episode 4

Ooooh chile. The biggest takeaways for me this episode were thank goodness for Anny/Robert and Anna/Mursel b/c the rest of y’all sleeping on your responsibility to entertain. Let’s start with the worst and get to the best and by best I mean (5 dumpster fires out of 5 dumpster fires)

MIKE and NATALIE

We start with Mike leaving his beloved ranch in RURAL Washington state to the best side character to emerge on this show-Beau. Seriously his 10 seconds on screen was the highlight of this reel. We then flash to Natalie and her two friends in Ukraine (umm...have I been saying it wrong for years by saying-the Ukraine?) who are imitating human women going shopping. No joke, this is some earth girls are easy shit but with a gender swap. When Natalie yelled “vote!” on the dress to her two friends I had to check if they were blinking. We then get some background on Natalie via ‘exposition friend’ who she knows from work. Okay, big request to 90 day, alongside their country can you please put their profession? Everyone always says “job” “work” I NEED to know what these people are paid to do. Thank you, TLC. Natalie used to be married to a man who owned a big business. He could spoil her and give her all she wants. I needed them to call in a shady editor over from the early Rupaul’s Drag Race series to pull up some footage of the ranch. Something tells me Natalie gon be bustin out

We also hear Natalie talk about how Mike had a weight issue and that was important to her because she is such an active person. Judging by the pictures they were showing before I think Mike’s in for some serious body-shaming. He arrives and says “look at my cute little girl” and I almost vommed. Then he described her in the bedroom for a solid 60 seconds going through the entire motions of acting out a tigress and I projectile vomited everywhere. No surface in this house was left untouched. He then says hi to her mom who adores him even though neither of them can speak a word to each other and I suspect it is because the mom knows this man is her daughter’s ticket out of this home and they head off to play tigress meets the... I can’t I can. not.

MICHAEL and JULIANA

Unless I blacked out which -let’s be real is possible-they were in this episode for a solid three minutes. The kids continue to bring on wisdom well beyond their years and Juliana thinks it is a smart idea to style her hair and the daughter’s hair the same. The princess Leigh do only makes her look even younger. The kid’s bi-o-log-i-cal mother shows up and iconically states: “some women may be intimidated by someone so young, so tall, so skinny, so gorgeous, so intelligent, so traveled but I don’t have time for that.” And I said let the preacher say amen! She then says to Juliana there will be no parenting for you which- if I was 20- I’d be like fine with me brah y’all have it. I take “not mothering” to mean I’m never gonna discipline these kids, pay for anything they gotta do, and when they wanna stay up all night cool step-not mom is gonna allow it.

BLAKE and JASMIN

So we are introduced to Blake and Jasmin. It was very hard to focus because this man had straight-up JT NYSYNC bleached to high heavens Ramen hair on top and a Michael B Jordan beard in black on the bottom. But he starts describing going on a dating app after getting divorced at a young age and I’m like this looks promising. They’re about the same age, they’re both attractive, she comes from Finland which people are not fleeing in droves (in fact girl can I get trade citizenship with you- don’t ask why- it rhymes with Rump) and then a couple red flags come in each with a full music stop. The first is that this grown man lives with his parents which seems to be this season’s theme. As soon as he said that I was like hold up- hold the phone. And this is not a Norman Bates situation like Colt-e and Larissa where he is living there because his mom is his everything. This is a-I’m poor as hell and this “music thing” is me “uploading tik toks on the regular thing.” So how is he paying for this visa? The second was that Jasmin’s sister won the green card lottery and lives ten mins from Blake’s house.This got me thinking back to the  dating app they met on like hold up-he said he didn’t realize she didn’t even live in America which means this feisty minx right here probably put up like a 10-mile radius around her sister’s house. Maaaan, don’t hate the playa hate the game. Annnyyywaaay the sister and Blake drive to the airport together and the sister seems like she is not quite present. She mentions being excited to get to know Blake followed by him asking her several questions and her with the lights on, but no one home. I was very curious if Jasmin was going to have the same energy and surprise! She does. When they get back to the hotel room he says they have some alone time what should they do and she responds “shower and sleep” SAVAGE.

TANIA and SYNGIN

Now Tania pulls a move here that is a classic 90-day fiance guaranteed fail. As someone who has been watching the series since day 1 you never spend the first few days in a place waaaay better than the nowherelseville you live in. So after taking him to NY to stay in a hotel they go to CT to her mom’s shed. That’s no shade to CT but you could take me to a shed in the south of France and I’d be like I’m out. She should’ve had them share a room in an elderly home for a few days and been like surprise! private shed! On top of that she told him it was ready and it ain’t. And on top on top of that she is bossing him around to get the work done as fast as possible exactly how she wants it. If I was Syngin, I would’ve gone straight: 

and been like if we living in a shed it’s Syngin’s shed, Syngin’s rules, and Syngin’s way of life. But instead, they have an explosive fight on day 4, which is always great when you have 90 days.

ROBERT and ANNY

Now this couple is taking me on the roller coaster I was promised. This is the enterTAINTment a bitch needs! One minute I’m team Robert, the next minute I’m team Anny (to be fair I am like 85% Team Robert but you get the point). So it starts off with them going off to meet Bryson’s grandparents. The mom is out of the picture but the grandparents are not and Anny is so upset about it. I am like why is she acting so weird about this and saying they need to leave the past in the past.

Then grandma shows up....

and grandma is fooooooooiiiiiiine as all hell. I was like ooohhhh got it Anny, got it. Also, is Bryson’s mom 12? Nana Stephanie proceeds to have a very rational- if not a little invasive -conversation with Anny who is not having her at all. She is at an 11 straight out the gate. And when Stephanie reveals herself to be a porn star (Diamond Foxxx-you’re welcome) Anny is all that’s disgusting she’s uneducated. And that is some bullshit. If Stephanie wants to be a porn star, by all means, do you. Robert then takes Anny to a restaurant when she really should be in bed with some Theraflu. In this hoarse voice, Anny pulls out a bunch of screenshots of Robert’s exes on his fbook. I'm on the fence on this one. For the most part, I think it's fine if you keep up pics from old relationships but I suppose I could see why it might bother someone. Then Robert reveals Bryson is not his only child. Oh no-the man has FIVE children by four different women. That was a full mic-drop moment for me. I was like hey umm DJ run that back. Did you say five? Four baby-mamas? And where are these children?  They have been portraying this man as this savior single father and did not let us know about the other kids until episode FOUR. Well done, TLC. You go for that Emmy.

ANNA and MURSEL

With this couple I simply cannot. I have zero idea what this man’s motivations are. He does not seem into Americans or American culture and he does not seem into Anna. Is he a hostage? Honestly, I do not know. They go on a bee-keeping adventure which for them is foreplay but the man is shading Anna’s bee-keeping abilities!

She is trying to use this whole experience to set off a night with some bubbly and Boyz II men playing and he is not getting it. at. all. because neither of them understands a word the other one says. She’s all-”does my bee-keeping make you horny baby?” and he's like “bees, yes.” They’re then on their way to what I think is her bridal shower and she is telling him to talk to her friends but she literally has to hand motion “talk.” He arrives and understands nothing and no one commenting on how in Turkey only men have bachelor parties. Oh my non-alcohol drinking friend you have yet to see a bachelorette party. All her friends are confused because these two can barely communicate like even on the most basic of levels. In terms of relationships via google translator, I would put them BELOW Paul and Karine and that's a low ass standard.

So that is this week’s episode of 90 day fiancee! RIP to Angela and Michael and Sasha and Emily because they were not shown for a single second. We keep you in our prayers.

[frasier-crane-style]

Mo’ Superman TAS, Mo’ Problems

SSeason 2

1-2: Blasts From The Past

Ugh... that’s the best title they could come up with for their season premiere?

One of the quirks of the DC Universe, in all its frequently crappy forms, is that in addition to there being seven Zods, there are about twenty evil Kryptonian characters that amount to being the Zod, Non, and Ursa from the Donner movies. This holds true as late as Supergirl, where Non, of all people, showed up as a Not!Zod. Here, Zod is Jax-Ur and Ursa/Faora is Mala (just to make things even more convoluted, this is the name of a male Kryptonian in the comics).

This arc has the novel twist that instead of a Phantom Zone criminal being released by misfortune, Superman realizes that Mala’s sentence is up and paroles her. Things quickly go amiss when she realizes he’s in love with Lois instead of her--given that Clark and Lois aren’t officially in a relationship, is it not a bit creepy that he chooses to obsess over her from afar instead of pursuing a relationship with an interested woman like Lana or, yeah, Mala? Maybe he heard about the gender-swapping thing and just isn’t into that. Mala releases her old CO, Jax-Ur, and they go at it.

3: The Promethean

Superman fights a kaiju.

4: Speed Demons

Wally West! Yes, it’s not Michael Rosenbaum, but still! And him being something of an obnoxious jerk here, but more of a sweetheart by the time of JL is actually in keeping with his comic book character arc. Man, it’s crazy how just... not obsessed with the Silver Age DC was at the time. The Flash and Green Lantern show up and they’re just Wally West and Kyle Rayner, that’s it. Kyle even gets the first human GL origin story instead of being a legacy hero. I don’t think DC would ever let one of their properties get away with that these days. And wasn’t ‘the Flash’ in Smallville actually Bart Allen? Jesus.

5: Livewire

Livewire was supposed to be the breakout character of Superman, the same way Harley Quinn was for Batman, but I think that actually turned out being Mercy Graves. Livewire just... she’s okay. The shock jock thing had to have been instantly dated and it’s hard to buy there being a rabid fanbase for an anti-Superman radio personality right smack dab in the middle of Metropolis. Plus, Lori Petty just isn’t as strong a performer as Arleen Sorkin. Her Livewire is just too one-note and even grating in comparison to Harley’s rich and well-rounded personality. What did Supergirl end up reinventing her as? Some kind of mean anti-feminist because women who make fun of other women are evil unless they’re Cat Grant? Ehhh. 

6: Identity Crisis

Bizarro shows up as a flawed clone of Superman, named by a somewhat OOC Mercy Grant. Also, your childhood is ruined as you realize that Bizarro was as smart and heroic as Superman for a good while, before suffering the equivalent of severe brain damage. Superman, stop, you’re beating up a disabled man!

7: Target

Lois Lane gets a stalker. Seriously, stalkers, of all the people you could stalk, Superman’s beau? The baddie in question is Edward Lytener, who naturally becomes the evil light-themed Luminus. By his second appearance, he was reduced to the Mysterio chic of creating ‘hard light’ holograms of pirate ships and Old West bars to fight Superman in, so no wonder this guy never made it to the comics.

8: Mxyzpixilated

Great episode. Mxy shows up to essentially be the Coyote to Superman’s Roadrunner, with Superman getting to be cold as shit in sending Mxy back within a minute basically every time they match wits. Good to see Big Blue getting his Sherlock on.

9: Action Figures

Metallo again. He has amnesia. It doesn’t last. Was Metallo the most common supervillain Superman faced, besides the technicality of Lex Luthor? He comes across like the Shocker to Superman’s 90s Spidey. 

10: Double Dose

Livewire again, and she teams up with Parasite. I wonder if they were trying to recreate the Joker/Harley relationship on some level. Basically, Parasite wants to fuck/rape Livewire, but she won’t let him unless he kills Superman. Cracked Presents: Top Five Times Your Childhood Was Raped And You Didn’t Even Know It.

11: Solar Power

That Luminus again. When will he ever learn? He doesn’t even care about Lois anymore, he just wants revenge against Superman, which kills any interest his character might’ve had.

12: Brave New Metropolis

Yes, even TAS did the ‘Lois dead = evil Superman’ story. Here, Superman teams up with Luthor despite knowing he was a scoundrel from literally day one, but at least Lex was lying to him about just how bad their dictatorship was, so Supes didn’t break that bad.

13: Monkey Fun

You ever think that if Superman were real, he’d be like “guys, can we quit obsessing over that time I fought a giant monkey? I have lots of other villains that I fight!” Now I demand that Titano appear on Supergirl. I want to see the writers try to turn him into a metaphor for the perils of online dating or something. Shut up and take my money!

14: Ghost In The Machine

Sort of a character episode for Mercy. Here, she was an orphan plucked from the streets rather than the Amazon she was implied to be in the comics, which is a seriously weird canon wrinkle that I think might’ve been entirely thrown down the memory hole. And that Brainiac is back, forcing Lex to build him a new body. 

[oneweekoneband]

ALL THE WAY ACROSS TOWN: Contributor’s Roundtable

The very first decision I made about this week (before, in fact, Hendrik had even given me the go ahead) was that if I was going to do it, I wasn’t going to do it alone. Part of that was self-preservation: Green Day are a massive band, with a three-decade-long career and insurmountable amounts of energy. It’s a lot for one person to tackle. Even between the five of us, we’ve barely managed to scratch the surface.

But more than that, there was this nagging feeling that’s only grown more powerful over the course of this week, that it would really just be a shame if only one person wrote about Green Day. They belong to everyone. They’re there for the people who need them, when they need them, for whatever they need them for. Yes, they mean the world to me. The thing is, they probably mean the world to you, too.

So I put out the call on Twitter and my blog (restricting it somewhat to my circle of acquaintances by doing so, unfortunately, but this did make me more comfortable with asking in the full knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to pay any contributors for their work), and I got lucky: most of the people I was secretly hoping would offer to write about Green Day did just that. And, oh man, did they write. I can’t express how proud I am to have been able to give those pieces a platform, and to have myself and my writing associated with them and their writers. I was so impressed with the generosity and honesty of everyone’s writing that I wanted to hear more, and so I suggested the idea of a roundtable, where we could all come together to talk about our mutual topic: Green Day. This is the result.

All of us, this week, have touched on notions of belonging and acceptance in our pieces. There’s been an undertone, throughout, of the notion of Green Day as a safe space of some sort - whether it be for kids to start to figure themselves or the whole punk rock business out, or in the crowd at gigs, or as not-male or not-straight music fans. Do any of you have any more (or more specific) thoughts about this? Is this a feature of Green Day’s music, or the band themselves, or something else entirely? (Despite my piece on punk, I know it’s not as simple as that, as I’ve been in more than one punk space and met more than a few punks who made me feel unsafe - there’s a difference between ideal and reality, always.) What is it that makes a band feel “safe”?

KJ:  I think I thought of Green Day as a supportive space for all sorts of people who were different, and therefore avoided owning up to liking them because I didn't want to be thought of as different? Thankfully, I've gotten over that.

Jessie:  For me, it’s a combination of factors. Some of it has to do with the punk thing. Green Day weren’t the first punk band I heard--that honor goes to another East Bay band, Operation Ivy--but sometimes I call Green Day my first punk band because it was around the time I first heard them that I started thinking of punk as an identity. I have definitely felt unsafe in punk spaces/around certain punks, and I guess Green Day sort of represented some utopian ideal of punk as this super welcoming club for nerds, freaks, and outcasts. I’m not sure why that is--maybe because of the scene they came out of, or maybe, because I said in my piece on “She,” it felt like they understood what it was like to be freaks and outcasts. Which leads into the second reason they felt safe to me, and that was entirely about their music. I was being bullied pretty much constantly during the time when I first heard them, and it just felt like they understood that. Like they’d been there. I mean, Dookie had a song (“Having A Blast”) about getting revenge on the people who bullied you. (More on that song later.) The third reason they felt safe to me is a very personal one, and it may sound weird, but--they felt safe to me because I didn’t have a crush on any of the band members. From the age of 12 to around 17 (or maybe even older, but that would lead into some topics that are beyond the scope of this roundtable), I usually ended up getting a crush on at least one member of every band I liked. I mean sexual fantasy-type crushes. And I was sort of terrified of my burgeoning sexuality (for many reasons). But with Green Day, I thought of them more like cool older brothers than people I wanted to get with, and that made them feel safer to me than a lot of other bands.

Jacqui: Jessie, I’ve never even thought about it the way you put at the end there, but now that you have I completely agree. I’ve also never had a crush on any of them, and it does make a difference. There’s something a lot safer about wanting to swap guacamole recipes with Mike, for instance, than ever having been properly attracted to him would have been. 

Alice:  It was much the same for me, though I think Green Day was my first punk band (or, possibly, The Offspring). But Green Day also was sort of a gateway drug, in terms of pop punk, and I think that in so many ways the pop punk scene of the early-to-mid-2000s was my safe space. It’s like we’ve said, that punk in reality isn’t always the safe space it is supposed to be - and of course, it is different for everyone and we are ignorant, of certain things, when we’re young. But when I was growing up, in Alabama, there weren’t many spaces for me. The pop-punk boom/resurgence of the 2000s was a saving grace, I think. Those bands - Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, etc. - and the people I met through them, mostly online, became a huge part of the ways in which I reckoned with myself and my identity. Between “Well, maybe I’m the faggot America / I’m not a part of the redneck agenda” and Bert McCracken (of The Used) wearing a shirt that said “Gay is OK”, I felt included and comforted by these group of weird punk misfit dudes.

This is perhaps a corollary to the above: as far as I know, everyone who’s written for this week is, in some way or another, not-straight. One of my favourite things ever written about Green Day, Cristy Road’s coming out memoir Spit and Passion, is also, obviously, written by a not-straight woman. I know that when I think of Green Day, I think of a band that is Not A Straight Band, in smaller ways and larger ones (I’m thinking of Billie Joe, of course, and of certain lyrics, and safe spaces, again, and of the secret-community like collection of “Coming Clean” tattoos I’ve seen over the years). What do you think?

Jessie:  I don’t know why so many not-straight people are into Green Day, but it certainly does seem to be true. I didn’t know that Billie Joe identified as bi until way after I got into the band, but when I found out I was like “Hell yeah! Yet another reason to love them!” Dookie came out the year I realized I was bi (though it would be another four years or so before I actual felt wholly comfortable with that label), and though there were no explicitly queer songs on it, it goes back to what I mentioned above--so many Green Day songs seem to speak to that sense of being an outcast, being lonely, being bullied, and one of the things that made me an outcast and that I was bullied about was my sexual orientation and gender expression. Another theory as to why so many not-straight folks love Green Day: they are not an uber-macho band. Billie Joe has often been seen wearing makeup, nail polish, even dresses; I’ve seen Tre in eyeliner, too, and he’s just sort of goofy-looking (I mean that as a compliment!). Mike is probably the most ‘masculine’-looking of the band members, but even he is not some meathead. There are just so many rock and punk bands that are so so into the whole machismo, look-at-me-I’m-a-man thing, and Green Day are not one of them and it’s great.

Cat: So, haha, funny story, Billie Joe is sort of the reason I admitted to myself that I liked girls. I mean, God knows every single person in my life knew I wasn’t straight, I was bullied for it relentlessly from the ages of eight to eighteen, but I was really terrified of this idea of “not being normal”. Small town, small school, white picket fences and 2.5 kids - I had this really clear idea that there was a Right way to live your life, which was “how everyone else was living it”, and that there was a Wrong way. And then I read that Advocate interview - which I was so happy to find again in your post about Coming Clean, Alice! - and Billie Joe says there, I think everybody is born bisexual, I think everybody fantasizes about the same sex. Which I disagree with as a point of view these days - but at the time, it was exactly what I needed to hear, to understand that my thoughts and feelings about girls weren’t just a random fluke that I needed to suppress. And then later I was able to move into a more mature standpoint, i.e., “oh, it doesn’t actually matter if this is normal or not, it’s okay anyway”, and also, “oh, I’m actually way more into girls than guys.” But I really, really needed that Advocate interview to get me to that place.

Alice: Thanks, Cat! Yeah, as I mentioned in my piece, I didn’t read The Advocate interview until much, much later. But I read it - when I was seventeen - exactly when I needed to read it. I don’t think that I ever connected Green Day, and the ways in which their music always meant so much to me,  to my being gay until that moment. It was a moment of satisfaction, reassurance, almost. Like oh this is maybe why they always felt like home to me.

KJ:  I have a very vivid memory of frantically late-night Wikipedia-ing a “list of bisexual celebrities” and feeling utterly relieved when I saw Billie Joe’s name. Like, if this guy who I looked up to could be bi, so maybe could I? Not for the first or fifteenth time, I thought about starting a band.

[ continued under the cut ]

We’ve also talked a lot about what Green Day meant to us, about our memories of the band and their songs, simply by virtue of this week being a retrospective of their career. Have your feelings changed, in the present? Do they mean/are they the same band to you now as they used to be?

Jessie: Green Day have drifted in and out of my life. They’ve grown as I have and sometimes I’ve needed them and other times I haven’t. It’s like they’re old friends who I sometimes go years without speaking to, but when we run into each other we pick up where we left off. Some of their albums have come out exactly when I needed to hear them, others have grown on me, others I’ll probably never be that into. But they’ll always mean a lot to me because of the things we went through together (to stretch that “old friends” metaphor), and I adore Revolution Radio--I think it’s their best album since American Idiot.

Cat: I mean, part of it’s just going to be the usual punk problem, i.e., American Idiot was the most important album of my entire life, it defined everything in my life, it was my constant soundtrack and the only thing that explained the world, and then Obama was elected president.

And then Trump was elected president! And suddenly it’s - not the most important album in the world, the Bush era was very specific and unique and I need slightly different content from my punk for 2017, but it means more to me than it did in 2010. It’s like cicadas, it comes out of the earth to scream every 16 years.

KJ:  Funny enough, I was up at my parents’ house the week before this OWOB started and my mother still uses the one mix tape I made her in high school as her alarm clock cd. So, while I'm thinking about Green Day and Having Some Real Feelings, out of nowhere comes the strains of “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” my mom's only acceptable Green Day song (all others deemed too noisy). So in a way, Green Day is less a rebellious sound and more a coming home, to me, now.

Is there anything else you wish you’d had the space to say about Green Day? Another song you wanted to cover, maybe, or a story or observation or thought that wouldn’t fit in any of your pieces?

Jessie: There is so, so, so much more I could say. A lot of thoughts and ideas came up over the course of this week. One thing I thought of that I eventually want to explore further is about “Having A Blast.” That song came out before Columbine, and I wonder if it sounds different to people who heard it for the first time after that. I wonder if that song could even be written now. In 1994, it sounded like a harmless way to vent about being bullied, a way to get our your anger without actually hurting anyone. Now that people have actually taken those feelings beyond the realm of fantasy, that song sounds a lot darker. 

Alice: Only that we really, really should have planned for a second roundtable, just to discuss Green Day’s cover of Eye of the Tiger.  

More seriously, I am a bit sad I wasn’t able to write a piece about the musical (sorry Jacqui!) - I had the chance to see it when it opened and it remains, to this day, the only Broadway show I’ve ever bought full price orchestra tickets for. It wasn’t perfect, but sitting in a Broadway theatre between people my age who had obviously been with the band since the beginning and women in their 60s and 70s who still wore gowns to the theatre - and seeing that they were both equally happy to be there - that was a really special moment for me.

KJ:  Oh man, eye of the Tiger! Ditto their “I Fought the Law” cover. Basically, I guess we should have luxuriated in covers.  

Jacqui: I know that I, personally, avoided covers this week because there was already so much to say about their original work. But if I had gone in that direction, it would have been “Working Class Hero”. One of the major ways I had of connecting with my dad was through music - a good 75% of the stuff I know about rock history, still, came from him - and this song and really the whole benefit album it was released on was an actual, tangible bridge between us (I have this incredibly fond memory of waiting for me just inside the door when I came home from school one day, bursting with the need to tell me that “Justin Timberlake is really talented, actually”). I’d also want to talk about the difficulties and complications of things like benefit albums, probably, and about Green Day’s activism in general.

Finally, is there anything you want to say to each other (or me) - responses to posts, questions you want to ask, etc?

Cat: I get the feeling I’m a lot younger than a lot of you - was born in ‘95, Bush’s election is my first real political memory, and you guys talk about American Idiot and the Iraq War and the ‘00s as things you experienced as people who were coming of age, not young kids. Do you all think that makes a difference? Do you need to be a certain age to appreciate Dookie in a certain way, for example? Also, jeez, y’all have been incredible, I’m so honored to be part of a week with such amazing and thoughtful writers for such an amazing and thoughtful band.

Jessie: Hmm, I don’t know if it’s an age thing. I will say that I’m probably the oldest one here--I was born in 1981!--but I know people who are 10-12 years younger than I am who heard Dookie as adolescents and loved it just as much as I did. So maybe it depends more on who you are/what your life was like when you heard it than on your actual age. 

I don't really have any questions for any of you, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being part of this as well. All of you are amazing writers and I’ve loved reading your different perspectives on Green Day. Also, I’m working on a long essay-thing about Dookie (I’ve been mapping it out for about a month already!), and I may want to interview some of you for it, if that sounds like something you’d be interested in.

Alice: I certainly don’t think you need to have been a certain age to appreciate Dookie - like I’ve said, my mother loves early Green Day and she turned 65 this year. But I do think perhaps you’re right about American Idiot, not that it doesn’t hold meaning for people who were too young to remember 9/11 or people who were well into adulthood. But, I was born in 1990 and so my “coming of age” period was literally when Bush got elected. I very much remember watching the towers fall. And, as someone who had the questionable delight of meeting him personally, I certainly remember George Bush. There aren’t words for how important that album was, in that moment in time. Waking up when you’re eleven years old and realizing that world had suddenly and completely changed, and for reasons you don’t really understand - well. Music helped with that, it helped a lot. So, again, not that it didn’t or couldn’t mean the same to someone a bit younger than me (it obviously did!) but for someone who came of age in Obama’s America? I don’t think it’s possible to really get the very specific - and bleak, angry, defiant - zeitgeist American Idiot captured.  

I don’t have any questions either, but like Jessie I wanted to thank you all so much for this! I love doing One Week One Band and I loved it even more doing with it with y’all! And thank you Jacqui for facilitating this. It’s been an absolute blast.  

KJ: Just want to thank Jacqui for the opportunity to write about and come to terms with my Green Day fandom. (I don't think my therapist was...intending? To discuss a pop punk band for 30min this week?) Also re: age, it really doesn't matter, as there are many accessible avenues to Green Day. (Thatsaidamericanidiotisclearlythebestfightme.)Thanks again!

Jacqui: Jessie, I would be absolutely delighted if you decided to interview me, and am going to take a second right now to beg you to let me know when that essay goes live regardless, because I will definitely want to read it. I’ve left your mention of it in, here, so that people will know to keep an eye out for it!

I agree that age doesn’t matter when it comes to getting into Green Day, or even understanding them - there’s a difference between remembering a specific point in time and understanding or finding your own meaning in what came out of it, and I think that’s true of all art. Whatever you love, whatever sparks a feeling of recognition in you, that’s yours and no one can take that feeling away from you. That said, I do think there’s a difference in types of understanding when it comes to huge, world-shaping events like watching the towers fall (or, more positively: the development of the internet and its ability to facilitate both music sharing and community building.) Basically, I agree with Alice. No one is surprised.

Thank you so much again, everyone. It really has been a delight, and a privilege. I’ll be making a round up post that re-introduces you all and collects your contributions to end the week.