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today 🥹

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It looks like I haven’t done a fic rec on this yet, so…

If you like a fantasy/medieval-setting AU, this is another one to check out (see also The Beast of the Duke’s Forest by chat_rouge from this multi-fic rec post). Josie’s a refugee, Hope’s a princess, and a series of events spark a connection between them, as the world begins to face upheaval. The author has been updating fairly regularly of late, and things just got wild 😳

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reblog to tell your mutual you’re proud of them and it’ll all work out

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"i'm tired of seeing-" use your filters.

"but there was an icky ship-!" use your filters.

"i don't like that tag-" use your filters.

don't like what you're seeing? use. your. filters.

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writing is hard but coming up with a cunty title and catchy summary will slay even god's strongest soldier

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You should write the most niche, indulgent fiction that appeals to you specifically, because it will be much more artistically authentic and valuable than corporate slop that has been focus tested to death to appeal to the widest audience possible.

Write for yourself and you will always be making authentic art that has an uncompromised vision, and you will gain an audience that appreciates that.

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no you have to contribute to your fandom if you don't want it to die. most fandoms die because people say 'it's so sad watching the fandom die when the hype dies' without doing anything about it. I'm not saying you have to push out 100k word slow-burn fic, I'm not saying you have to make fan art or gif sets or edits or anything. I'm just saying we as a community should contribute to our fandom if we don't want it to die, and by contributing, I'm talking about giving kudos, commenting on your favorite fics, reblogging your favorite art and just talking about your favorite characters. that's enough to keep a fandom alive. that's the most effective way to keep a fandom alive in my humble opinion.

fandoms die because people stop talking about it, fandoms die because people stop engaging with fan content once the hype is gone. what I'm saying is, mainstream media's hype may be gone, but our fandom can stay alive and thriving if us as a community don't let it die.

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As promised, the elevator scene excerpt for Cupid, Draw Back Your Bow. This scene is set the night before the Games begin.

Kate Bishop stepped into the elevator that would take her back to her floor in the Tribute Tower, on what might be the last night of her young life. She regretted doing so the moment she saw who was inside the cab. Yelena Belova. While all the lower-numbered districts’ Tributes looked down the pair from Twelve—“the little boy and the Mayor’s daughter,” they had called her and Peter with derision—Belova seemed to have a special antipathy for her. And now she was alone in an elevator cab with the other Tribute. Kate smiled politely and stood straighter, stretching her 5' 7" frame as much as possible, trying to extend the roughly three-inch difference between them to its maximum. Despite the difference in height, the shorter woman was fiercely intimidating. She was from Two, a Career, trained for this all her life, selected by her district’s training staff to volunteer, the best of the best. (In addition to its exemplary/emblematic stonemasonry, District 2 was known for supplying a significant percentage of The Capitol’s brutal Peacekeepers.) The blonde was a deadly killing machine in a small package. Kate, on the other hand, was the Mayor’s daughter from Twelve, the poorest of the poor among districts. They were, quite literally, the soot of the earth, and Kate’s only useful skill, her passable archery, was counteracted by her innate talent as a klutz. After the doors closed and the elevator began its ascent, Kate immediately found herself slammed against the wall of the cab by the shorter blonde, a vicious, vindictive sneer on her lips. “Clint Barton murdered my sister,” Yelena began in an angry, husky, accented voice, the low volume not quite a whisper but still threatening. Her right hand was on Kate’s shoulder, not far from her neck, holding the raven-haired teen tightly to the wall, while the blonde’s strong legs and hips immobilized her lower half in a similar manner. The Career’s left hand was pressed into Kate’s gut in a way that felt like it was one of those small knives the shorter Tribute was so proficient in throwing. The archer made the mistake of making eye contact with her interlocutor, whose green orbs were roiling with anger. “…And I shall enjoy hunting you down and killing you in the slowest, most painful ways possible. None of this ‘arrow from afar’ nonsense, suka. I will hold your head in my hands and stare into your soft brown eyes as the life goes out of them. And when you are dead, Kate Bishop, I will emblazon my body and my face in your blood, and I will win the Hunger Games. And after that, after Clint Barton and all of Panem have seen what I am capable of, I will hunt down that backstabbing bastard and slaughter him and his family in exactly the same way…slowly, painfully, brutally…with vengeance.” The blonde paused for effect, then uttered one more phrase, her voice softly upbeat and a cruel smile on her lips. “May the odds be ever in your favor, Kate Bishop.” At that moment, the elevator dinged and the door opened. Yelena disappeared like a ghost, leaving Kate once again alone, breathing heavily. She gulped. The door closed in front of the young archer, and the elevator continued its solitary ascent.

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Good News, Bad News, Bishova News

👋 Greetings and salutations, friends!

After almost a month, 12.5K+ words, and the continued machinations of @the0fi and @persevereforahappyending (I picture them like those little devil/angel characters, each sitting on a shoulder and whispering schemes in my ear—which is the devil and which is the angel is yet to be determined; maybe they’re both devils? 🤣), I have given in and declared Cupid, Draw Back Your Bow aka my Bishova Hunger Games AU idea an official WIP.

Before you start cheering/applauding…

I am notoriously bad with writing long fics (only 8 of my 40+ completed fics are 10K words or more).

I am notoriously bad at getting stuck and/or burned out, moving on, and not coming back to a fic in any sort of reasonable timeframe (see: that WIP link above).

I can’t multitask or switch/rotate between fics with any usefulness.

Because of 1, 2, and 3, I mostly write-until-complete and publish only once finished.

I struggle with things that are fight scenes and fight-scene-adjacent.

I am not a fast writer.

I still haven’t seen Hawkeye.

I’ve only seen the Hunger Games trilogy movies, not read the books, and it’s been some time at that.

On the other hand, I have a pretty solid idea of the entire arc of the first movie/book (thanks, Suzanne Collins) with a bunch of specific scenes identified and even some critical ones sketched out. I have a fairly complete MCU cast list for the three THG stories and TBOSAS 😳 (thanks, @persevereforahappyending), so it’s going to be less getting stuck on the plot and more getting burned out writing.

But several of you liked the “prologue” 🙏, and I kept having ideas for scenes I wanted to write, and here we at 12.5K+ words, so…let’s keep going until I crash into a ditch, no?

(Also, I promised myself 3 weeks ago that once I finished the elevator scene and its accompanying Kate-Clint conversation, I’d publish the elevator scene here as an excerpt, because I loved that scene. 3 weeks and nearly 10K words later, the accompanying scene is done 😳 so I’ll pop the excerpt in the next post…)

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Are rabbit, deer, squirrel, or wild turkey halal? (The answer generally seems to be yes, if slaughtered as prescribed—although the schools of jurisprudence are apparently divided on squirrel.)

Black widow spider bites

Photos of Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan/Ms Marvel

Chanterelles

Skin tones

How does silk handle sweat?

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more of the bishova rugby au

plus some incredible ficlets from @simplykorra , @thecousinsdangereux and @strangelythirsty <3

Ficlet 1, by simplykorra:

"Kate?! What was that??" Clint's mad, like...sure, Kate shouldn't be suprised. She had a wide open run in front of her and just completely fucking dropped the ball and turned it over. But in her defense she did NOT know that the other team was allowed to cheat. Because that's absolutely what that was, cheating. Who the fuck flips their hair like that mid match? Who wipes the sweat off their forehead with the bottom of their shirt, showing off their insane abs in the middle of a match when it is quite obivous that someone on the other team is pathetically gay and crushing. That's the worst part, she has an insane crush and she really shouldn't. Because Yelena Belova is the enemy, or so has been said in every practice leading up to this game. She's the best player on that team, one of the best they'll face all year, and Kate had this big, annoying speech about how she could handle her. Then one peek of abs and Kate's losing her shit, dropping the ball and now getting yelled at by her coach - who is still yelling, right. She needs to pay attention. "Sorry!" She grins, because smiling always gets her out of stuff. "Butterfingers or whatever, you know? It's hot out here today. Sweat and...stuff...you know how it goes." Clint eyes her, then looks over her shoulder to something on the other side of the pitch. When Kate looks back, Yelena is looking right at her, with the most annoying smirk on her face. Then, like she KNOWS Clint is also looking, Yelena winks at her. "Oh my god." Clint says and Kate turns in a hurry to see him rolling his eyes. "Seriously? That's why you dropped the ball? Natasha's cranky little sister?" Kate takes a deep breath, a thousand excuses coming and going through her head. She could pluck any one of them and it would probably be enough to put an end to this conversation. But she knows that she has to go back out there again and will probably look into Yelena's eyes again and will DEFINITELY do something else stupid when that happens. "I don't know what you want me to say, coach. She's really hot." "Yeah, and we're really losing. Do you think she's gonna want to buy you a drink if you go out there and keep fumbling the ball like your hands are made of butter?" Kate shrugs, "I mean, dopey and gay has kinda worked for me so far, you saw the wink." "Okay, look, it's my fault for starting this conversation but I'm not the one to talk to about your crush." "Whoa, who said anything about a-" His raised eyebrows puts an end to her sentence. "I'll just...close my eyes whenever she's in my field of view." "Or you could get your shit together and just play the game." The whistle blows as the timeout comes to an end and Kate looks back just in time to see Yelena trotting out onto the field, not once taking her eyes off of Kate. When she looks back to Clint, she grimaces. "I'll close my eyes." It doesn't work. They lose the game. But Kate manages to get that drink afterwards. One more win for dopey and gay.

Ficlet 2, by thecousinsdangereux:

Kate had done a really admirable job of keeping her focus.

This is, at least, what she keeps telling herself at the half. Or maybe, probably, more like reminding herself, with the explicit objective of convincing herself not to look over towards the opposing team's bench. Because looking over towards the opposing team during warm-ups is what had gotten her in this mess in the first place, if said mess could be called a mess because really! she'd done a super admirable job of keeping her focus in the face of the absolutely fucking smoke show on the other team. The one with the thighs and the hair and the skills and general overall attractiveness that Kate had definitely not been distracted by at all.

(During the game, specifically. Never mind warm ups. Or now.)

"It's like you can hear her thoughts," Greer says, ostensibly to Franny, but mostly to fuck with Kate.

''Don't look at number two, don't look at number two, don't look at number two.'"

“'No matter how many times we sensually locked eyes in the middle of a competitive match.’"

"Number two is not showing the same restraint," Franny comments, dropping the mocking internal commentary quickly. "She is looking right over here and — yeah, okay, damn —  she's lifting her shirt to wipe the sweat off her face. Jesus."

Kate twists her neck with enough speed that something pops and fine, she's not doing a great job with that whole focus thing and who cares? Hot blonde has abs and Kate is gay and there were more important things than rugby and winning and pride and... other stuff that Kate would definitely be able to list if number two hadn't — at that exact moment — decided to look up and (without dropping her shirt! which! fuck!) smile, too crooked to be anything but smug.

"Yeah, okay, we're going to lose," Greer declares. "Pack it in, folks! Kate is too gay to function! Might as well call the game now!"

She definitely says it loud enough to be heard across the field. Kate sneaks a peek and, yeah, number two definitely hears it.

"You're the worst friend I've ever had."

Except maybe not, because the blonde doesn't exactly look put out by any of it. She's (mercifully) dropped her shirt, and this time when she holds Kate's stare, she lifts a hand to wave, with just the tips of her fingers. It's short-lived, because the team's coach (a redhead who — it has to be said — also has a lot going for her) yanks the girl back over to the bench by the back of her shirt and begins to lay into her in a language that sounds Slavic. The blonde rolls her eyes, but is (apparently) not especially deterred, because she looks back over at Kate with an expression that's full of dry humor.

('Do you see what I put up with for you?' Kate imagines her saying, in that accent that she'd definitely noticed on the field and had definitely found attractive and would definitely like to hear in other contexts. Such as for example — )

"Holy shit, Kate. You're drooling."

"I'm not drooling." She's not, but does wipe at her mouth as she pulls her stare away, back towards her own bench.

Ficlet 3, by strangelythirsty:

Kate thanks the gods, and more specifically, the athletic commission, who okay’d each teams’ uniforms. Previously it was because the new board leader agreed for her team to change out the old fashioned cotton for the good moisture wicking material. Which is its own thing. But this?

She hasn't seen as good an argument against the old cotton shirts as this one.

“The ball!” A distant voice says, but that's not important right now. What is is the expanse of abs she's seeing — which is currently beading with sweat, and okay she's heard the arguments, abs are for vanity more than function, yada yada yada. But who can argue with these results?

“The ball!” The voice says, now closer than it was.

She blinks because the shirt (which was hiked up to be used as a towel) has dropped back down. Oh right, the game. She picks up the ball at the last possible minute, the rival team had come close to grabbing it where it fell from her hands only a second ago. No need for her coach to be looking like he was going to have a stroke, that was a little dramatic.

It doesn't matter because she grabs the ball anyway, side steps the tackle, and takes off back down the field.

By the time the first half is over, they're still down two points, a simple goal would put them over the edge.

Later, she'll blame the coach for making the call for the play, and maybe, a little bit could have been the way she's completely distracted with Captain Belova tackling her.

The pass was clean, the team nearly in place for her to throw the ball, but she sees the streak of short blonde hair and white and red getting closer. Instead of looking for the next best teammate to throw the ball to for the score, she looks at Captain Belova, expression intensely focused, full lips pulled back exposing beautiful teeth in a snarl (beautiful teeth? She’ll later think, get it together, Bishop). But right now? Belova’s shoulder meets her midsection in a perfect tackle, the air leaving her lungs and the ball flings from her grasp as she goes — right into the rival team’s number two, who runs it down the line in a game clenching score.

The rest of the teams take off down the field to follow the action, but Yelena sits up, legs straddling hers. “Distracted, Kate?”

“Oh fuck off, Yelena. You didn't tell me you were working on your abs.” Kate laughs, poking her stomach through her shirt, feeling the warm skin and wet shirt.

She's going to get her back for that, somehow.

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bishova rugby au on the brain

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Black Widow is arguably one of the darkest and most interesting Marvel movies with one of the most terrifying villains because people like Dreykov are real and the themes of family, human trafficking and hope from Natasha and her family is so powerful

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[Image ID: A split-screen image. The left side is labeled “What's on an introvert's mind:” and is an enormous wall of text, full height, full width, in a small font. The right side is labeled “What they say:” and is a black void with the only content “nvm I'm okay” in a green bubble. /end ID]

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Feminine patronymic of Alexei

Men’s and Women’s long jump world records

(Apparently I never posted this last night? It was sitting there waiting for me in the post editor today 😂)

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A new and different version of the Maya Machado detective/PI idea (more of a SIOF spinoff in this case), arising from college visit day in SIOF:

Maya calling Hope up when she’s in a warehouse surrounded by vampires while following a story, sneaking around crates and shelves, whispering into her phone, leaving Hope a voicemail to please hurry because there's some sort of vampire kidnapping ring going on…

Random idealet* from another comment I left on Such Is Our Fate (part of TheDarkestHour13’s and my long-running discussion about SOIF’s Maya’s future career as a private investigator):

A Maya-focused fic, 1950s/noir setting where someone’s in need of help and calls Machado Investigations, and then when they arrive at the office, they’re shocked when the dame who answered the telephone introduces herself as Maya Machado, private dick.

Alternate version, where the fog clears/etc and the private dick takes off hat and trenchcoat to reveal perfect curls and a killer dress of Maya Machado, at your service.

* baby ideas that don’t even have a premise or anything, just the tiniest kernel of a seed

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New AU idea, courtesy @poppyseedxx’s You Got A New Match 😍😍 (you are reading it, aren’t you?):

Lizzie’s a black boots, black pants, black leather jacket-wearing enforcer for a motorcycle gang…but she does her best to keep that part of her life away from her sweet and law-abiding twin.

But somehow Josie meets Lizzie’s fellow biker gang member Hope, and sparks fly—much to Lizzie’s displeasure 😏