#every lesbian I know has worn these shorts in their childhood

[thelastspeecher]

I remember you mentioning Emily gets together with Carla McCorkle's daughter. Sorry I forgot her name. What is Carla's daughter like depending on the au she's set in?

I believe I named her Sam.

Sam McCorkle’s “default” job is a florist.  Unless the AU is one where her being a florist wouldn’t make sense because of how the AU is set up (like the MerGucket AU), you can assume that is her job.  She owns her own flower shop, called “Flower Girl”.  That’s how Emily and Sam meet.  Emily goes to this flower shop to buy some flowers for something and chats up the pretty woman working there.  Luckily, she’s a bit better with women than her father, and charms Sam pretty fast.  Or Sam inherited her mother’s fondness for the Pines nose.  Or both.

Sam’s your classic gardener/florist.  Wearing worn, stained jeans and covered in dirt half the time, her hair tied back in a ponytail to keep it out of her face.  She’s surprisingly soft-spoken (at least, surprising compared to the fanon Carla interpretation of “spunky and sassy”), and doesn’t like to get into fights.  I wouldn’t call her a doormat, but she definitely lets things slide that most of my OCs wouldn’t.  She tries to keep the peace.

Given that Emily inherited her parents’ fighting spirits, you’d think she and Sam wouldn’t get along.  But as a couple, they help each other grow.  Emily learns to think before she leaps, and Sam learns to stick up for herself and others, rather than try to pacify someone she doesn’t agree with.

There is one thing that Sam does that is what makes Emily fall completely head over heels for her: she talks to her plants.  Not like, talking to herself while gardening (which Emily has seen her ma do).  No, she names each plant, asks it how it’s doing, compliments it, and reminds it of what she needs it for.  That’s what puts the nail in the coffin for Emily.  It’s so damn cute and endearing.

When Sam and Emily have been dating long enough that Emily will hang out at her flower shop during her spare time, Sam worries that she’ll have to explain how plants work to her.  If only to keep Emily from accidentally putting a sun-loving plant in the shade.  But to her surprise, Emily actually fixes a couple things around the shop, seemingly without thinking about it.  Sam asks, and Emily explains that her grandparents have a farm that her ma and dad worked on, and then her parents started up their own garden when they got their own place.  And she and her siblings were expected to help with the garden, as well as the farm when they visited her grandparents.  So she knows about plants.  She could honestly take them or leave them, but her skills with plants give Sam some heart eyes.

Anyways Sam and Emily are an adorable lesbian couple, one of them round and short and always ready to fight/burn something, and the other average height and thin and covered in dirt and plant bits.  Neither of them are full butch nor full femme, but somewhere in the middle.

Emily and Sam have one biological son (since Emily’s trans) and one adopted son.  Their biological son is named Bassil (like the herb but also like the instrument) Stanley Pines, and their adopted son is Lucas Aspen Pines, about four years younger than Bassil.  Bassil ends up looking a lot like his Grandma Angie somehow (eh genetics are weird and Emily looks a lot like Angie, so I can get away with that), but with Sam’s button nose.  Lucas is a fiery redhead with hair as curly as Shirley Temple’s.  They’re both adorable and spoiled rotten by their grandparents.

Looking through my list of AUs, and honestly, there aren’t many that stick out to me as requiring Sam’s background to change much.  Of those that I think might, here are my thoughts:

MerGucket AU - I said this when I introduced the concept of Emily’s girlfriend Sam, but I’ll say it here again.  Emily becomes a pirate, and her first mate is Sam.  They’re the terror of the high seas.

Various superhero-type AUs - Sam has very, very limited chlorokinesis (the ability to control plants).  The most she can do is make a few flowers bloom or more leaves grow or sprout a couple seeds in fertile soil.  But what she can do is enough to make her flower shop a real hit.  When Emily tells her family about her girlfriend, her chlorokinetic Grampie Gucket and Aunt Violynn are very interested.  Emily doesn’t tell Sam that she is a superhero (well, sort of a cross between hero and villain; a hero with villainous inclinations and who doesn’t care about committing fraud here and there).  Instead, Sam finds out when Emily confesses it while talking in her sleep.

Mystery Moms AUs - Carla McCorkle doesn’t really feature in those AUs as a past lover of fem!Stan, aka Stana (unless @agent-jaselin thinks that Stana and Carla - or masc!Carla - may have dated in the past).  But at the very least, Carla McCorkle is someone that Stana knows.  And Stana feels a bit weird about Emily dating Carla’s daughter.  But other than that, nothing really needs to change, I don’t think.

Big Sis AU - Ooh boy.  Maybe- maybe Sam isn’t Carla’s daughter in that AU?  Because Molly is Carla’s daughter in that AU, and Molly and Emily are half-siblings.  So there’d be weirdness all around if Molly’s younger half-sister was dating her other younger half-sister.  Sam is the daughter of…maybe one of Angie’s childhood friends?  Maybe Sam would be Leighanne’s daughter in that AU?  @agent-jaselin, if you’d like to weigh in, that would be cool.

Phoenix Enchantment AU - I honestly have no frickin’ clue how things change for Sam in that AU.  But things probably are different.

Angiewolf/Werepire Stangie AUs - Gonna shamelessly rip off the amazing fic “Raising Stakes” in which Stan is a vampire, and have Carla be a vampire hunter.  A vampire hunter that raised a daughter who also hunts supernatural critters.  Since I’m a bit of a sap for star-crossed romances, I’ll have Sam be a werewolf hunter.  So she’s a werewolf hunter who eventually gets a werewolf girlfriend and it’s all very dramatic and this ask is getting really long so I won’t ramble more about how I think it could go.

Spy AU - In the Spy AU, Carla works for an enemy organization, so I could see her raising her daughter to also work for that organization and oh hell yeah, another star-crossed romance!  Sam and Emily cross paths while on a mission at the some location, and it involves dancing because of course it does, and Emily and Sam dance and flirt and then Sam slips away and Emily finds out the girl lady she danced with works for the baddies.  They start up a covert romance similar to Stangie’s in the Superhero/villain AU, where they just sorta throw fights against each other.  Eventually, they both stop being spies and settle down and Emily becomes a professional boxer while Sam runs her flower shop and every now and then they have to fight off people from “the old days”.

Royalty AUs - SAM IS A DUCHESS.  I don’t know what she’s a duchess of, or why Carla McCorkle’s daughter is royalty when Carla isn’t (Carla and Stan still dated in royalty AUs).  But she’s a duchess.  And Emily courts her and it’s all v v cute.

Uhhh…I think…that’s about it?  If I’ve missed something or some AU, or you want more elaboration on a part of what I’ve just rambled, send me another ask.

#I put a line in the middle of the ask bc I wanted some sort of separation somewhere bc it was getting LOOOOOONG #Emily Pines #Sam McCorkle #oh shit what would their ship name be #anyways I hope you enjoyed this rambling lmao #ask #vulpixen #(akdsjfnas Sam being a florist and Molly being a botanist probably means in AUs where Molly is Emily's big sister #Molly approves of her younger sister's girlfriend whole-heartedly)

[destroyyourbinder]

rethinking butch while doing my laundry in buckets at 8 PM

You know, I never thought there would be anything on this earth that could make me re-think my commitment to pants over skirts and dresses, a vow I had made to myself over and over again since my childhood days of being crammed into tights and lace, but doing my laundry in a series of five gallon buckets in the bathtub of our dingy apartment was it.

I was thinking yesterday, while staring into our shared closet and remembering when I had a purple closet full of clothes that I had to tug at, clothes that I tried to ignore that they existed even when I was wearing them, that I probably haven't worn a skirt outside of a Halloween costume in almost fifteen years. When I moved out of my parents' house I ditched my last one, a vintage skirt that had always stayed on its hanger, part of a pair with a yellow blazer that I had loved but didn't fit anymore. I felt vindicated, but a bit lost, as if a high school presentation was going to leap out of the void at any time and make me regret my decision. I didn't bring any skirts with me here, to the city; it felt daring and somehow pathetic at the same time, a sign of how stunted my life had been that it seemed like a bold move at all. It was a tiny hop into the deep end of a lesbian kiddie pool. Skirts do lurk around the corner at any old thrift store, but somehow I felt like there was no going back; I had banished them, and they would not return.

My girlfriend and I share most of our clothes, as we're close in size-- she's a bit broader, I'm a bit taller-- and our clothing tastes are pretty similar. She has her favorites, and I have mine, and we don't tend to share pants or shoes due to the particulars of how we wear them out, but the rest are a big indeterminately owned mass of potential dress options. The thing is is that she's supposed to be a "man"; she still lives a life where she doesn't tell people she's detransitioned, generally, and most people take her to be outright male or a trans man. I'm not supposed to be a man; I don't pass except maybe from afar and behind, and I assume I mostly come across as tired and dumpy and gay. I don't really know if people notice that our shirts and shorts and socks swap between and across us. Maybe they're too confused by the other things going on with us to see that one. When we worked together doing early morning stocking we used to fuck with people, we'd switch our jackets and hats every so often and see who we could fool, which was way too many people at way too close a range for a pair of human beings supposed to be at the opposite poles of Gender. Nobody was particularly apologetic about it either when they mistook us, even though that kind of outright misgendering is supposed to be a major faux pas. They usually just laughed in a way that indicated that, well, of course. I laugh in the same way when people tell me that Trans Men are Men, that everyone treats them just like any other male person, that nobody knows they aren't male, that they never experienced sexism and never will, that the gap between them and A Woman is incomprehensibly large. A waiter's never handed me the check at the diner when I was out with a dude, but they do it all the time when I'm with my girlfriend, and then she has to use the men's room after dinner.

I've somehow gotten more "masculine" since I stopped seeing myself as transgender, which I think might surprise people who know nothing about the process of desisting or reidentifying or detransition, but doesn't surprise women who have been through this. I feel a lot less neurotic about wearing men's clothes, about buzzing my hair off, about being hairy elsewhere and not hiding it, about stepping out into the world as an unacceptable female person, uncontained and unbridled, edging in on men's turf. The stakes aren't quite as high, now, honestly, even though they're higher than they have been before. I don't have my family to fall back on if I lose my job due to being an unrepentant dyke, but now that I'm not in her house, I don't worry about my mother discovering my secrets, including that I'm not the daughter she wanted me to be. I'm scared to go out after 7 PM if I can't sufficiently cover up the fact that I'm female, but my entire sense of self worth isn't riding on whether or not someone perceives my ham-handed attempts at not-being-female correctly. I worry about my rent, but I don't worry about where exactly it is men pull up their socks to on their legs, and I don't worry about whether I'm not really worthy of living if I can't do it right, because I don't worry about if I'm not really a man or just a fuck-up of a woman, and I don't worry about whether or not a fuck-up of a woman is the worst thing I could possibly be. Well, I worry about it sometimes, still, because it matters to other people, even if I don't think it matters to me. But I've stopped trying to compensate for my fuck-ups by wearing the right earrings with my undercut, or hiding my breasts under a binder, hidden under a blouse. I can leave the house without having twenty thousand insecurities about the masculinity or femininity of my leg hair growth pattern or the color-contrast of my lips. So I leave the house in shit my nine year old self would probably appreciate: a flannel, a shirt with a cat on it, yellow pants with functioning pockets. I try to take stupid thoughts about whether the pocket style of said pants makes my butt look girly the same way I took my skirts, which is to chuck them out in honor of living a life without gender neuroses.

They always say that gender is culturally contextual, limited to time and place, and while we all pay lip service to that in some way or another when we get mad that our favorite historical figure got parsed as one thing or another, I think we all like to think we would be butch lesbians or trans men or whatever it is we are in another life, that we probably wouldn't have ended up like our great-grandmothers but something like female husbands, passing soldiers and sailors, instead. I spent a lot of time as a kid wondering why the hell girls did this or that, wasn't it harder, it's so stupid; I felt so betrayed when I hit middle school, and everyone was tripping over their purses, pursed lips in candy-sparkle lipgloss, on the way to idolize boys. I wanted to be among boys, I wanted to be a boy, somehow at the same time I thought girls were stupid for admiring them in the other way. I think a lot of us carry this into adulthood; we figure femininity's a bunch of dumb crap we can't be bothered to do, and besides we're unsuited for it, constitutionally incapable of hoisting a tube of fabric above our pooch. We escaped from it because we kept our heads (non) straight or maybe because it wicked off us like pink droplets on a Teflon pan, which we definitely use to make burgers with and not cute hors d’oeuvres. We know what a dress means and how it works, and we know how it makes us feel, and we know we would never wear it, not on a desert island nor to our sister's wedding.

After washing my clothes in a bucket, I don't think you should do disservice to your grandmothers like that. I had to sit on one of my other buckets-- there are three in this clothes washing system-- and think for a bit about what the hell I was doing with all this gender and anti-gender shit, what the fuck I was doing with my life at all. Because the thought I had, which surprised me, was that pants are fucking bullshit. They're fucking bullshit when you wash your clothes by hand, which is what generations of women did before me. My value system got turned upside down; I spent my whole life thinking skirts and dresses were frilly nonsense, floofery intended to hold women back from participating in the world, an "easy access" hole to parts I didn't want to exist. And it's not like that isn't true: women's dresses and skirts have been artificially cumbersome throughout history, full of engineered contraptions to enhance women's decorative-sexual living-pornography value, whether literally stuffed with metal cages and yards of fluff or whether tightly drafted to form a second skin. When you can't fucking sit down or lift your legs or bend over it's a problem, when your teeth chatter in the winter on your way to school it's a problem, when you can't be a lawyer or a senator without wearing the appropriate kind of Leg Tube it's a problem. It was a problem when my mom put me in a velvet thing that rested just above my knees, and I wasn't allowed to play or even spread my legs while I was in it, lest I render myself an obscene five year old girl. But the Leg Tube isn't the problem, it's all the other shit, and I had never taken that seriously, never really dug into it, until I had to confront the inconvenience of manually sloshing around my pants for ten minutes.

I had confused symbolism for reality. I thought I was done with that, over that, now that I was out of the trans shit. I was living in some patriarchal dollhouse, and I had thought I busted out, but now I'm in another one, better maybe, but just as artificial, because the grass being greener over here all hinged on having a washing machine. When do I get to leave? I am suddenly afraid I'll spend my life in an infinite nested universe of misogynist fuckery, having existential crises about the fridge or maybe the carpet next.

I guess my girlfriend and I got into what you might call "urban homesteading" by accident. We didn't set out to do this out of convictions or philosophy, it was mostly because we were cheap, and also we're lazy in a certain kind of baffling ADHD way where it's easier to make a curtain with your two damn hands than navigate thirty, fifty pages of advertising-merchandising to find one that will ship to your house for not-sixteen-dollars . Car insurance in this town is absurd, so we just don't have a vehicle. We also don't turn on the heat in the winter, or the air conditioning in the summer. We bake bread, make yogurt, make shampoo, wash out and reuse plastic zipper bags, don't flush the toilet for stretches of time. Clothes get patches upon patches, breadcrumbs go in a jar, there are lots of systems for a lot of things that nobody really thinks about anymore. My dad told me his family used to sleep on the porch of their farmhouse in the summer; I can't do that here, but it comes to mind anyway. He was from that kind of people where you did it yourself or you didn't do it at all, German farm folk born in nineteen-oh-something; my mom was from people that didn't do it at all, her father too drunk to give a shit, her mother feeding her seven kids out of cans. There's a weird mix of shame and pride when you end up doing your laundry in buckets, dual gene lines, dual angel-devils sitting on my shoulders: someone clapping me on the back for my resourcefulness, a job well done, and someone asking me why the hell I stooped to this when there's a washer in the basement, didn't I work hard so you didn't have to live this way.

We saw it on YouTube and thought we could save some money on electricity or water because our landlord isn't going to replace our 30-plus years old washing machine anytime soon. I thought maybe doing it in the buckets would help my busted brain a little, 'cause I could do it every couple days, fifteen minutes at a time, instead of in big piles once a week. I like shit I can touch or otherwise it doesn't feel real, I can't keep track of it, it feels like the sort of work women with tight lips and long nails do and they make their lips tighter when I can’t hack it. There could be a system, tangible, clothes I can see in places where they belong, hands on a plunger pushing soap and water and fabric up and down, you can tell if they got clean yet or not if you open the lid. I don't like dumping them in a machine, an unknown hole of productivity, input-output, assembly line nonsense. I'm not productive anyway, so what do I care?

When you're doing your laundry by hand like this something occurs to you, which is that this is a lot of work, and maybe you don't want to be doing this all the time, so you should be careful with how dirty your clothes get. I realized real quick I wasn't going to be doing this every day, and that it would be wasteful, worse than the water usage of some old-ass washer to try. You start realizing how dumb it is to wear your clothes once and only once before you wash them, as you plunge up and down, up and down. It occurs to you that ten minutes is a pretty long amount of time, even though you're in your late twenties and winter just showed up again and you keep wondering where the hell the time goes anymore. You start resenting how stupid and arbitrary it is that you're supposed to be squeaky clean in public, that stains and wear are unacceptable, that they mean anything at all about anybody except that they live a life and entropy exists. You think that if you have to put this much arm power into washing your clothes, then how much power has to go into a damn washer, and you start thinking about the arms that shovel coal out of the ground, into rail-cars, into boilers. You start getting real mad about how much shit the world puts people through just so clothes can get clean and floors can get clean and skin can get clean and nothing will look like it's ever been touched except by a very conscientious housewife. Your brain starts contriving things while your arms are going, like some wild-haired inventor, like maybe if you had an underlayer of clothing all the time you could just wash that and the outer layer would be allowed to get dirty for a while. Brilliant! And then you feel stupid because well, that's what we always did until you could dump your shit into an electric machine, and then they raised the standards to keep women busy doing something they didn't need to do. It occurs to you that pants are dumb because they're heavy and sopping wet, one big lump of fabric, and you can't wear an underlayer unless it's really cold outside. It occurs to you that pants are not worth it unless you are doing certain kinds of manual labor all the time or you need to protect your legs. You understand why the women in YouTube videos about washing your clothes in buckets are really mad at their husbands and sons, and some generational rage takes hold of your arms as you agitate the clothes in the bucket. Why do men get to be dirty in their stupid pants. Why do women have to clean them. You never want to hear anybody talk about fashion ever again. You never want to hear anybody talk about the gender of clothes again unless they've wrung out denim in anger and they're willing to wring a man's neck the same. Now you get to drain the bucket. Now you get to refill the bucket with clean water and agitate again. Now you get to drain the bucket and press the water out of your clothes with the full bucket. Now you get to hang up your clothes over your tub.

When I stopped seeing myself as transgender I told myself I would consider very carefully the value of anything I did, and I would let practicality and ethics dictate my life rather than sucking up to gender, to men, to the women pandering to them and afraid I wasn't going to. It's taken me some wild places, for real, and I didn't think it would take me to a place where I was questioning wearing pants. But given this, I find myself all the same cringing at wearing a skirt or something else other than those damn pants, other than the thing that men wear and women fought for, willing to violate my newfound guiding forces... and for what? Butch cred? Womanly pride? Can't I just shove it all in the washing machine and stop thinking about this? Do I need to live in the woods to tie something around my waist and get on with my life? If I've learned anything there's really nothing neutral when it comes to gender shit, and no matter how far you get in processing the patriarchy there's always something else at the bottom of a bucket, a broom, a sink strainer. How many years worth of women have had these thoughts while scrubbing something, however they cut their fucking hair? I try to focus more on that these days, rather than what I call myself or what pronoun I use. My grandmother, my mother, all those girls in my class who I thought were big idiots, the women out there bigger and badder and butcher than me, the trans men I envied for living in my dream world, all these female people I defined myself against all these years, we all end up here, staring into a drain, hoping the man won't crush us. When does it end? I want it to end. I'm done spinning my head in circles about the cut of my jeans, whether I wear jeans at all, and I hope you are too.

#writings

[raleigheverhart]

01/BASICS

Full Name: Raleigh Cristina Castillo/Raleigh Everhart Nickname: None Birthday: November 1, 1996 Gender: Cis Female Sexual Orientation: Right now she’s in the territory of “doesn’t like labels” or just “none of your business” but she’s on a journey and the last stop is....lesbian.  Astrological Sign: Scorpio, The Week of Intensity Spoken Languages: English, Spanish Birthplace: Houston, Texas Relationship Status: Single

02/PHYSICAL TRAITS

Hair Color/Style: Dark brown, kept long and usually worn down. A big fan of the side part. She styles her hair almost every day, adding some curl to the ends. When she’s feeling lazy, she’ll go for a messy bun on top of her head. Eye Color: Brown. Face Claim: Chloe Bridges Height: 5′5″ Tattoos: None Piercings: Single holes in both ears Unique Attributes: Her most unique feature is her full lips. She also has a slight scar on the knuckles of her right hand and one over her ribs, both mementos of fights from her teenage years. 

03/PERSONALITY TRAITS/TYPES

Positive Traits: Ambitious, quick-thinking, intuitive, goal-oriented   Negative Traits: Angry, proud, shallow, self-pitying  Hobbies/Interests: Cheer and dance, makeup and fashion, maintaining her instagram follower count, watching movies from “the worst movie on Netflix EVER!” clickbait articles, especially bad horror movies Insecurities: That, deep down, she really is just as angry and as violent as she’s been during the worst times in her life and that, to achieve any kind of happiness or fulfillment in life, she will have to spend the rest of her life hiding it, and fooling people into thinking that it’s not there. That all of the love and affection she’s found in her life since her parents left, mostly from the Everharts, have been based on that lie, and if she were to show her flaws, or if she were to be anything less than perfect, she could lose it all.  Quirks/Eccentricities: Tosses her hair way too much when she wears it down (which is most of the time), wears heels almost all the time outside of practices and games to appear taller, can’t seem to keep herself from picking at her nail polish. She’s taken over a cabinet in the Vixen Den’s kitchen for her tea collection, and owns far, far too many mugs.  MBTI Type: ENTJ, “The Commander” Enneagram Type: Type Three, “The Achiever” Moral Alignment: Neutral Evil Temperament: Choleric

04/FAMILY & HOME

Immediate Family: David Castillo (Father), Diana Atkinson Castillo (Mother); Cecilia Germain Everhart (Guardian)  Harlan Everhart (Guardian) How do they feel about their family?: She tries not to miss her parents. She spent so much time after they left trying to turn all her sadness into betrayal and anger, something more powerful, and that’s what she tries to hold onto: the story she had built for herself in her teenage years, that they were somewhere foreign and beautiful living a wonderful life under assumed names while she was left behind with nothing. She tells herself that she has the Everharts now to give her the life that her parents would have given her, and so she doesn’t need them, or even her memories of them, for anything. The Everharts, even after all these years, still feel too good to be true. Like something she doesn’t deserve, even if only she knows that. Even if she’s doing everything she can to keep them from ever knowing that. She loves the Everharts unreservedly, and in a way that frightens her sometimes. She’s legally an adult, and therefore they have no legal obligation to her, and the love and support they’re giving to her is purely out of the kindness of their own hearts, which means that it could be withdraw at any moment, should they feel that she know longer deserves it. Their declining health means that, sooner than she would like, she may lose them, even if she does nothing to deserve it. She likes to pretend that she doesn’t love them as much as she does, that she wants their money more than she wants their love, but she knows that it isn’t true.  How does their family feel about them?: Deep down, Raleigh does know that it likely wasn’t easy for her parents to choose to leave her behind, that they wouldn’t have done so if they didn’t think they had no other choice. And she knows that the Everharts care for her, every action they’ve taken has showed her that they do, she just can’t be sure if they love her for her or for who they’ve imagined her to be, or how imperfect she can be before she shatters that illusion, fails to fill the role of the daughter they always wanted. Part of her thinks that her fear might be greater than the reality, that the Everharts would tolerate a lot more from her thank she thinks, but she’s also too afraid to test that.  Pets: She has a cat at home with the Everharts that she talked them into adopting the summer before her senior year of high school. She’s cream-colored, very fluffy, and named Missy.  Where do they live?: During the school year she lives in the Vixen Den, over summers and during breaks she lives with the Everharts in Houston. Description of their home: The Everharts live in a historic brick house in Houston’s Boulevard Oaks neighborhood that has been in the Everhart family since it was built in the 1920s.  Description of their bedroom: Her bedroom at the Everharts is very girly, done in pastels and cream. It’s full of trinkets, photographs of Raleigh with the Everharts and with her old squads, throw pillows, plush carpets over polished hardwood floors, and she keeps it scrupulously clean. Her bedroom at the Vixen Den is a little bit less neat, mostly because she has too much stuff—particularly clothes—to confine to one half of the room. Everything is color coordinated, her sheets/comforter and other accessories matched to whatever it is that Stormie has.  

05/THIS OR THAT

Introvert or Extrovert? Extrovert Optimist or Pessimist? Pessimist Leader or Follower? Leader  Confident or Self-Conscious? Confident, with hidden insecurities Cautious or Careless? She does her best to be cautious, but her temper often pushes her towards being impulsive and careless Passionate or Apathetic? Passionate Book Smarts or Street Smarts? She has a fair deal of both Compliments or Insults? Compliments when she’s trying to get her way, insults when she doesn’t

06/FAVORITES

Favorite Color: To wear, black. As decoration, lavender.  Favorite Clothing Style/Outfit: Raleigh likes clothes, and she owns a lot of them. She doesn’t have a set style, and switches between what’s fashionable. She likes short dresses, high-waisted jeans and crop tops, and owns more pairs of expensive leggings than any one girl should. She also has more modest apparel, shirts with higher necklines and dresses and skirts with longer hems that still find their way into her regular rotation, because the Everharts bought them for her. Almost all the shoes she owns have a heel on them, and even her sneakers usually have a little bit of a platform. She loves red lipstick, and is hardly ever seen without winged eyeliner.  Favorite Bands/Songs/Type of Music: Her playlists are mostly all Top 40, but she has a soft spot for pop-country, and the more Americana and folk that the Everharts listen to.   Favorite Movies: She has a weakness for early-2000s romantic comedies like Whatever It Takes and 10 Things I Hate About You. Center Stage will forever be a classic. And she only likes bad horror movies.  Favorite Books: From her childhood, anything by Tamora Piece. As an adult, she has a strange affinity for tragic autobiographies or semi-autobiographies that are probably/definitely fake, like James Frey and JT LeRoy.  Favorite Foods/Drinks: She loves any kind of seafood, but especially shrimp. She will regularly extol the virtues of Texas barbecue over Carolina style, and bemoan the lack of good Mexican food in South Carolina compared to Houston. She drinks coffee in the morning but tea at any other time of day, and she’s a snob when it comes to alcohol.  Favorite Sports/Sports Teams: She likes football and baseball, and goes to Houston Astros and Houston Texans games when she’s home.  Favorite Time of Day: Night owl Favorite Weather/Season: Autumn Favorite Animal: Cat

#catch me doing my own task months late!!!! #tfctask #MISC.

[thenichibro]

Summer 2017 Anime First Impressions

Well here we are again, four weeks into the season before I finally get around to catching up on the twenty shows I’m keeping track of. Not like anyone reads these anyway. Regarding this season, we can say one thing: at least it isn’t last season. Thus far there’s been nothing super stand out, with a lot of middle-of-the-road shows and a few ones slightly better. Much preferable to the shit show 16 weeks ago. As usual, here’s what I’m watching, with MAL links and original shows marked:

Tsurezure Children (MAL) Starting off, we have a webcomic turned serialized manga turned anime, and for good reason. Tsurezure is a 4-koma romcom focusing on way too many couples in bite-sized happy romance stories. Defined by reaction faces, exclamation points, and yet a surprising amount of exposition, it's a quirky comedy I glad I started reading. One of the main downsides of Tsurezure is that although it has overarching themes, minute-to-minute enjoyment is very much based on the current couple. Personally, I love the Class Prez/Deliquent, Chiaki/Kana, and anything with the Love Master. The problem, then, is that once you find the few you really like, it's kind of a shame you only get so much time with them. A simple art style that matches the manga belies an infectious humor that Toshiya has mastered. This is one short show I wish was longer. Watch this.

Aho Girl (MAL) Continuing the notable increase in half-length shows, we have this half-witted one. Aho Girl, lit. "Clueless Girl," follows Yoshiko, an idiot, and her friends(?), mostly childhood friend Akuru, trying to deal with her idiocy. A suitably odd OP, both in sound and visuals (or relative lack thereof), leads into Yoshiko's introduction through getting a 0 on all her tests. I guess that confirms the title, now doesn't it? Tsukkomis, wild attitude swings, and bananas are the name of this show's game. One thing I love right off the bat is just how blatantly annoyed Akuru gets with Yoshiko's antics. It's not hard to see the "he's supporting her because he does feel something," but that being shelved in favor of faces of disgust is just funny on a very essential level. This show knows exactly what it is, a dumb comedy about a girl being dumb. And yet it's dumb fun all the same.

Isekai Shoukudou (MAL) A somewhat restrained take on the well-worn isekai genre, Shoukudou involves Nekoya, a resataurant that serves fantasy creatures once each week, connecting to "the other world" through the restaurant's front door. Right off the bat, the upbeat OP is coupled with some fantastic visuals. I missed having a food porn show last season, but Shoukudou brings it back in force. Further, throughout each episode the background music keeps pace with events and is a very nice touch to the cool tones of this show. Indeed, this show absolutely exudes cool. The smooth tunes while the last few customers (albeit they being beastmen, wizards, and the like) finishing their orders, Aletta and the Master cleaning tables into the night, it's just so nice. Aletta is the new hire, a demon girl homeless in "the other world" who finds the door to Nekoya by happenstance and promptly gets a job and a new outlook on life. She's real cute. Shoukudou has plenty of the "customer narrates the intricacies of how good the food is" every time a new customer comes in, but it's great all the same. If this show is a slow introduction of new characters to Nekoya for the rest of the run time, I will be more than satisfied. AOTS contender right here. Satisfied with an isekai? What is this season coming to?

Koi to Uso (MAL) Marraige is arranged genetically for happiness at 16, and other love is forbidden. As if there was a premise that lent itself more to a high school romance-drama. I have to say, I am in absolute disbelief that Koi to Uso isn't penned/drawn by the same creator as Scum's Wish. The artstyle and really the whole tone, albeit Koi to Uso being a bit more restrained, I immediately thought it was the same author. Wild. Anyway, we're dropped into a modern Romeo and Juliet, Nejima and Takasaki confess, to each other, just as the government - the external circumstances - are pulling them apart. It's not a new path forward, but I think the latter half of the first episode conveyed the emotions pretty well. The beautiful artstyle helps, and with shaking hands, red cheeks, and streaming tears the ending scene got me into it, despite the expected outcome. ...Is what I was thinking as Nejima fucking fell on top of Ririna (his assigned wife) in the second episode. Why. Why do that? Why have that 6 seconds into the show? At least the girls are cute - Takasaki in a hoodie, shorts and thighhighs was just incredible, but Ririna with her curious eyes and attitude beyond her height, hoo boy - guess I'm rooting for the underdog now. Time to suffer. With Ririna's schemes, Koi to Uso is perfecting anxiety - having something so treasured so close, being trapped by things out of your control, being trapped by things inside yourself - so much anxiety. This show can't go anywhere except emotional turmoil, but if it's already getting emotional responses out of me, I'm going to stay interested. Especially after episode three's ending.

Netsuzou TRap (MAL) Yet another shorter-than-normal show, we have NTR. Yes, that NTR. The "fuck over the caring guy and get off on cheating behind his back" kind of NTR. Just now with lesbians. Even moreso, I dislike Hotaru's archetype so much it just makes me feel bad for Yuma. If you're into that, watch this. If you're not, don't. I don't know why I did. There are better fetishes.

Clione no Akari (MAL) The fourth and last of the short shows, Clione no Akari begins with Takashi and Kyoko trying to help Minori, who is getting bullied. Its muted art style matches this tired premise. I know it's only nine minutes, but the first episode still felt like it dragged on for some reason. Moreover, both Takashi and Kyoko reflect on their weakness and that they want to stand up to the class for Minori, but then in the second episode all of that possible growth just gets passed over. They call out to her after she almost gets splashed by a car, and then Takashi says "After that, Kyoko and I grew so focus on how we could solve Minori's current situation, it was as if it were happening to us." So after they complain about their weak personalities, instead of forcing them to change, they simply get a way to help Minori while not directly standing up to the class. It seems like if it affected them that much you'd see a bit more exposition rather than nothing to "And then, we became super close to her" over the span of fifteen minutes. It might seem like I'm asking for a lot from a 9-minute show, but that's exactly the point - if a show aims to be an engaging drama about making friends and standing up for one another, it needs to have more substance packed into its short timespan, and Clione no Akari does not.

Hajimete no Gal (MAL) And the award for "highest percentage of animation budget used exclusively for cameltoe" goes to... First, make sure you eschew the HorribleSubs release on this one, because the censoring is bad. Not Terra Formars bad, not Shinmai Maou no Testament bad, but it's not great. Now then, this is a very simple decision: you watch for the fanservice, or you don't watch at all. I'm serious when I say the animation goes to Yukana, and to a lesser extent the other girls, because the male characters (even the MC) and everything else looks downright bad. The fanservice, however, is pretty damn nice. Junichi's delusions lead into some steamy scenes that are top tier gyaru action. Other than that, the OP/ED are generic, the other girls are lackluster, and the "comedy" is unfunny. Just skip through the dialogue until you get Yukana being cute, and this'll be somewhat enjoyable.

Gamers! (MAL) A nothing main character spoken to by the cutest girl in school because she's interested in video games and especially his passion for them, despite never talking prior. Wew. Karen, said cutest girl, is attempting to bring back the school's gaming club, where real gamers play games with their gaming friends. These are serious gamers, so serious about their gaming that they forget everything else except the game, like the true gamers they are. Episode one has fantastic lines like "I've been looking for new members who are undeniably true gamers" and "Why did you guys become gamers?," like it's something you have to awaken to. And yet even in spite of this, the glorification of gaming is still going hand-in-hand with the conceptualization of "gamers" as outside normal people. Karen hasn't told anyone about her gaming passion even though she's so popular (and it's foreshadowed she'll lost her widespread respect), and Amano gets the description "Games are his friends." Every character is just entranced with Amano's gaming spirit that they can't help but want to game with him. And just like a good MC, Amano is humble and pessimistic about his own gaming passion, but stands up for the game club and the gamers that make it up. This show feels like an E3 PR rep's ideal anime. The game references themselves aren't half bad, but that's certainly not saving this waste of my time. Guess I'm just not a true gamer.

Made in Abyss (MAL) I was originally off-put by the character designs, but I am glad I finally decided to watch it. A city sits on a massive hole - The Abyss - full of ancient ruins - and our main characters are delvers into the giant void. Importantly, Made in Abyss lets us know right off the bat that it will not be all idyllic landscapes - a close call with a dangerous monster now foreshadows so much better than suddenly changing the show's tone halfway through. Background music and art style both benefit this show greatly - the music rising and falling with he action while the art easily conveys the current state of the landscape - overgrown yet hiding secrets. Riko is a energetic girl at an orphanage guild, known for swiping Relics she finds and generally causing trouble. In the tussle with the monster, she is saved by a robot boy, Reg and promptly takes him back to experiment. Just the first episode sets up tone, characters, and the mystery of the Abyss with precision. The choice of children as main characters is an interesting one, but I almost didn't think twice because the rest of the people in Made in Abyss didn't think anything of it, either. Starting with a premise that has such a clear objective, like the Abyss' bottom, also relatively anchors the show against wild plot swings, which gives me more confidence in the story going forward. All these things combined are making for quite an enjoyable experience, and I can't wait to see where it goes.

Ballroom e Youkoso (MAL) Tatara is our typical despondent teen protag, who through a chance encounter is roped into trying ballroom dancing, and in it sees an opportunity to find himself. I picked this up solely on its premise, because I've never seen an anime about ballroom dancing before. It just seems so far from the typical slate that it caught my eye. This show's unique animation style, credit to Production I.G., has its ups and downs. For the most part, the show looks clean, the lines look great, and the motion is good. On the other hand, the actual dance scenes seem to lose a bit, in favor of dramatic freeze frames or showing the top halves of people rather than their legs moving or other intricate motion. I'm certainly not going to yell at the animators, for a show in which Tatara is won over by simply watching a ballroom dancing DVD, to get the viewers interested the motion, the visceral movements of the dance need to be shown, and more often than not they aren't. Oh, and the necks. Why is everyone's neck so long? Apart from Tatara, behind Sengoku's bombast lies a calculated, seriously powerful personality that is the perfect motivator for Tatara. And I don't know about you guys, but Shizuku is cuter in her practice/casual clothes than in a ballroom dress. Just my taste. Anyway, alongside the stalls in animation, I can't honestly say I like Tatara's VA. To me it just gives off the trying-too-hard-to-be-a-teen vibe too much for me to not notice it every time he speaks. While still enjoyable, these two faults are noticeable the entire time you watch the show. However, if you are interested in the premise, and don't mind animation quirks, then by all means, Welcome to the Ballroom.

[ORIG] Princess Principal (MAL) Alt history, 20th century steampunk London, and spies but also superpowers and made-up minerals, this is Princess Principal. Smooth jazz while a loli-ninja wearing a mushroom hat cuts up 20th century cars? Sure, why not? Cavorite, the aforementioned made-up mineral, allows for temporary control of gravity, allowing the girls to make their first daring escape with a VIP. Also, the girls are spying between the Commonwealth, or the West, and the Empire, or the East. Also the Princess herself is a spy. It's certainly a lot to take in immediately, but this show seems to revel in the craziness - echoing the fast-paced, spontaneous action of the spies themselves. Our main girl Ange lies to get through life, and is soft spoken and terse. The others in her immediate crew range from the authoritative onee-san to the cheerful loli. I personally feel like they could have made a perfectly enjoyable spy thriller with just alternate history and no supernatural element Take Joker Game from a few seasons ago - that even went so far as to be historically accurate in its place names and such, and aside from some same-facing was a wonderfully engaging show. While I do feel the personalities more in these femme fatales, I just don't see the "thriller" part as holding up as much. It's really not bad - I just feel my main gripe here is the overpresence of themes that don't need to be there. Still worth a watch if you don't mind it.

Centaur no Nayami (MAL) Having watched both MonMusu and Demi-chan and consequently becoming an Expert™ on monster girl shows, Centaur no Nayami is most certainly more of the former. I'll say at the very least that guys in school also being monsters is a welcome change, rather than including a harem. Hime, the titular centaur, acts just like her name. Nozomi is our sharp-tongued, tomboyish tsundere, while Kyouko (my favorite) is a terse, blonde tsukkomi. We get a surprising amount of world-building right out of the gate - the world is as it is thanks to a different evolution path, and to avoid the discrimination of the past, "equality" is aggressively and strictly enforced. The seemingly dark background behind the otherwise peppy slice-of-life is definitely off-putting, and seems immediately at odds with the tone. If while walking around town the girls maybe glimpsed an abuse or something similar, the aggressive equality mantra might seem like an understandable government reaction. Seeing nothing of the sort while hearing Kyoko not want to ride Hime because that's discrimination and she might get sent to a "correction facility" is more than a bit unsettling. Production-wise, the show looks and sounds great. Quirky music for quirky circumstances, and the motion of all the characters' different bodies is conveyed convincingly. The A/B Parts splitting the episode is something I haven't seen in quite a while, but I think it lends itself well to the SoL part of the show. Overall, this is a surprisingly endearing slice of life with a higher-than-normal amount of kissing, and I just wish they'd lay off the dramatic background. Worth a watch if you're into monster girls or slice of life more generally.

[ORIG] Action Heroine Cheer Fruits (MAL) Last but not least, we have Action Heroine - Heroines (as in those live-acted hero shows) are now super-popular, and the show follows one town that is way behind the curve on popular heroines. Immediately, I like the art. It seems like not too much more than "generic anime-style," but Diomedia has a way of doing soft lines and expressive faces that just looks great. Now I don't pretend to like hero/heroine-type premises, but even I can see this show's got remarkable heart. Spurred by her sister wanting to see Kamidaio, the current most famous heroine, Mikan, an earnest, caring sister teams up with Akagi, an energetic Kamidaio-super fan to put on a small-scale show, and the rest is history. Their first performance is carried singlehandedly by the effort the two girls put into making Mikan's sister's dream come true. Action Heroine gives off the feel of an idol show (he says, having not seen LoveLive nor Idolm@ster), with a diverse cast of girls all trying to be the best for their fans. While I don't think this show is exactly going to enjoy LoveLive levels of success, as I've said - you can see the heart it has. Some individual moments were also very strange - like a flashback where one girl loses a tennis match because a bug flew in her face, and another girl talks to her imagined anthropomorphizations of model trains. If you're into the nostalgia of hero/heroine shows, this plays right into that. Otherwise, it's a show you can pretty easily avoid.

#tsurezure children #aho girl #isekai shokudou #koi to uso #netsuzou trap #clione no akari #hajimete no gal #gamers! #made in abyss #ballroom e youkoso #princess principal #centaur no nayami #action heroine cheer fruits #summer 2017 anime #my anime reviews

[melodyfromanotherworld]

List of AUs

Because I have AUs of AUs. Sorted by likelihood of you lot ever seeing them.

Stuff I’ve Written For

Rookie Team 3 AU

AKA: “Let’s Start from the Beginning”

Basically Kourubi, Ryou, and Mai are the same age as the rest of the Konoha 12. Instead of having her consciousness swap places, Kourubi is simply a reincarnation.

Pairings: SasuKouNaru, KibaRyou, MaiSaku

Mage/Familiar AU

AKA: “Baby, There’s Magic in You”

Set in a fantasy version of the Elemental Nations, humanity is split into three categories: normal humans with no magical potential, mages who have large stores of mana that they can manipulate, and familiars, shapeshifters who have access to natural magical energy (or ‘chakra’) which allow them to change between an animal form and a human form. Each familiar has a ‘tell’ that gives away their animal form as well as a singular magical talent powered by their chakra. Mages bond with familiars in order to perform magic.

Pairings: Same as MFAW canon

Black Cat AU

AKA: “A Black Cat Followed Me Home”

In which Ryou’s sassy mouth pisses off the Hokage and ends up getting him custody over Sasuke instead of Kourubi. Kourubi’s attention is pretty much solely focused on Naruto, leading her to officially adopt him as her younger brother, tell off Jiraiya at every opportunity, and leave with the two of them when they go off on their training mission. Mai, feeling left out of the whole ‘protege’ thing, ends up taking Sakura under her wing. The end result: healer/weapons expert Sasuke, brawler Sakura, and swordsman/seal expert Naruto.

Pairings: No idea, but nothing like MFAW canon

Stuff I Might Write Eventually, Even if Just for my Own Amusement

Arranged Marriage Omegaverse AU

Kourubi’s folks aren’t as much on the up and up as originally thought, and arranged for her to marry the Uchiha spare before she was even born. And then they don’t bother to tell her until she brings Sasuke home after the Third Exam prelims. Ryou is also stuck in an arranged marriage to Neji, though he’s not sure if it still stands after he ran away. He’s thinking probably.

Pairings: Alpha!SasuOmega!Kou, Alpha!NejiOmega!Ryou

Coffee shop/College AU

In which team 3 works at a little coffee shop on the corner of campus that’s frequented by too many hot people and they complain about it. Featuring Running “club” Kourubi and friends, and “Runners appreciation club” Ryou and Mai, who honestly just want Kourubi to keep hydrated while they watch butts move in tight shorts. Kakashi and Iruka are their faculty sponsors but they’re not entirely sure how they got there.

Pairings: Basically just Team 3 lusting after everyone

Kingdoms Omegaverse Harems AU

AKA: an au that’s way too common with me and my friend’s characters (hi erik)

In which Kourubi, Ryou, and Mai are each rulers of their own kingdoms with long, long traditions of royal harems and the shenanigans that comes with that.

Pairings: Omega!KouHarem, Omega!RyouHarem, Alpha!MaiHarem, Beta!GaiOmega!Nobu, Beta!LeeOmega!Yu

Emo Punk!Team 3 Modern AU

AKA: This is what happens when you hear ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ for the first time in like two years, and then your friend encourages you (hi again, erik)

Team 3 are college freshmen. Kourubi is the ‘music saved me’ emo who wears band shirts almost exclusively, and when she’s not, she’s wearing anime graphic tees. She double majors in Music Theory and something like History or International Studies. Mai is the classic leather jacket punk who lives in her leather jacket and combat boots except when she’s living in her jacket covered in patches about beating up cat-callers and being a lesbian (plus an aspec solidarity patch for Kou’s sake). She’s a Women’s/Gender and Sexuality Studies major and probably rides a motorcycle. Ryou sits somewhere between pop-punk and scene emo and pretty much only shops at Hot Topic. He’s a nursing major who drinks his coffee black with a monster energy drink dumped into it during finals week.

Kakashi is the grad student who somehow always ends up as the TA of any and all lit classes they take. No one knows if he actually goes to class and he won’t answer any questions about what his field of study actually is. A purveyor of ‘poor college student chic’ he goes places for the free shirts and leaves immediately after getting one. He’s worn the same jeans all week.

Iruka is a Early Childhood Education Major who’s so straight-laced and sweet that it gives people cavities. Sweaters are a staple of his wardrobe. Also cardigans. He carries around coloring books and crayons during dead week and passes them out to people who look like they’re about to cry. He, Kakashi, and Genma are the triangular core of normalcy around which the weirdness revolves. But everyone has a few marbles loose, so this doesn’t end up meaning much.

Genma is the Farmer’s Market Hot (TM) single dad who is strangely charmed by Ryou’s half dead, Caffeine high flirting at the Sunday Farmer’s Market that Ryou dragged them too because it had coffee as black as his soul and Kourubi wanted to test if the Farmer’s Market Hot theory was true. Turns out it was. But she wasn’t the one who ended up with a man. Genma ended up with Umeko after her pediatrician intervened and told her Crazy Vegan mother that no, babies cannot survive on almond milk. He may or may not basically end up as Ryou’s sugar daddy.

Noboru is their hipster, grad student RA who introduced them to the farmer’s market in the first place. Gai is his jock boyfriend who seems to spend more time at the gym than in class. Hangs out with Genma at the farmer’s market and is horrified at Ryou’s flirting and Genma’s acceptance of it.

Hinata is the pastel/soft loli who Kourubi ends up RA-ing with the rest of the Konoha twelve her sophomore year. She and Mai end up being the ultimate lesbian power couple on campus.

Stuff I’ll Probably Never Write but are Fun to Think About Anyway

Silver Millennium AU

AKA: this is all @purple-possibilities fault

Set during the Silver Millennium of Sailor Moon lore, Sakumo is the younger brother of Queen Serenity, making Kakashi and Usagi/Serenity II cousins. Basically this is just an excuse for Moon Prince Kakashi. All the major clans of Konoha send their heirs to the moon along with the Sailor Senshi/Princesses because peace is brought through understanding or some bullshit. The Uchiha clan are from Mars, the Hyuuga from Pluto, the Karasuno from Jupiter’s moons, Uzumaki/Namikaze and Inuzuka from Earth, the Nara from Saturn, the Yamanaka from Venus, the Aburame from Mercury, and the Akimichi from Uranus. Kaguya Ootsutsuki is the matriarch of the Dark Moon Family, and is basically one of those bitchy, gossipy noble women that has far too much influence for her own good.

Pairings: Doesn’t fucking matter. I’ve got me Moon Prince Kakashi

#melody from another ship #mfaw AU #this will likely expand because my mind likes to run away from me #If ya'll can't tell I like omegaverse stuff #I'm not sorry