#fun fact the sword was the very first thing i designed/drew when making this guy up

[wiltkingart]

hands on

#moments before he sticks the tip into your shoulder socket and pries it off #taelle'teth #ocs #trans #trans art #digital #original art #suggestive #nsft #fun fact the sword was the very first thing i designed/drew when making this guy up

[lala-ladybug]

Healing Hands: Chapter 7

Little bit of a filler, but we’ve got some fun shenanigans in store! >:)

Jasonette Sword Art Online AU

Read here on AO3

Chapter 7: Guys bein’ dudes indeed

Tag list: @iloontjeboontje

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Marinette was up early again. She found herself some breakfast, then went to the stables. The Order had made it back late last night, so they didn’t have time to groom the horses. She entered the first stall and started to brush the first horse. The routine motion let her mind drift, and she thought back to the events of the past few weeks.

Marinette, Kagami, and Luka embarked on their daily ritual of collecting the morning paper from town. It was the day after they’d beaten the first boss, which they had reported anonymously. Marinette and Adrien had agreed that taking the credit would only serve to draw unwanted attention towards their group, which could put them and the rest of their friends in danger.

But it apparently had another unforeseen advantage. As Marinette paid for the newspaper that highlighted their victory, she heard comments from other players around her.

“Are you serious? Some party went rogue and beat the first dungeon on their own?”

“Selfish assholes, can’t believe they got all that loot to themselves.”

“Well I think it’s good that we’re making progress!”

“Yeah, if you ignore the fact that they didn’t tell us what it was like at all, so now we haven’t got a clue how to face the next one.”

She shook her head in disbelief and glanced at her companions, who looked similarly concerned. They hadn’t even considered that the other people might not want them to take up the battle alone. Or that last comment, that they were actually hurting the other players by not giving them the chance to fight too.

The three remained quiet until they returned to Chloe’s house, or the manor, as they’d taken to calling it. By then, Adrien and Chloe were awake, and followed without question as Marinette ushered the two to join her, Kagami, and Luka out by the well.

She told them what the people in town had said, Luka and Kagami jumping in with additional comments they’d heard from passersby, and they talked it over. Maybe it was worth fighting with other groups. It would certainly beat the first boss.

They decided to try working with others for the next dungeon, but to lead the battle so that the civilians would stay as safe as possible. There were already groups in town recruiting for it and people exploring the second level, so it couldn’t be too long before they found the next fight. They’d be ready this time, they thought.

Less than two weeks passed before they were ready to take on the second dungeon. The Order had spent the whole time training and leveling up. There was hardly a moment where they weren’t fighting monsters or sparring with each other. They became almost more adept with their new weapons than they were with their ones from the real world. Those days of miraculous encounters seemed a lifetime ago.

The Order made preparations with other groups of players, determining strategy and planning to play to each others’ strengths. All the parties assembled at the dungeon and set up to fight the boss.

All things considered, it could have gone much worse. The support teams kept all the fighters’ HP high, and they had whatever cover they needed whenever they needed it. The battle was significantly shorter with around forty players there. But when the other players got hit....

Marinette could still hear the screams of the civilians as they went down. The blood oozing from their wounds was so very lifelike, and there was no cure to sew them shut. Or bring them back if they fell.

Kagami and Adrien were focused on taking what would have been killing blows if the boss had struck anyone but them. Chloe and Marinette drew fire away from the other players, and Luka used his mace and shield to defend his fellow healers. But Marinette saw the pained look on his face at being separated from the rest. She relived the moment Kagami and Adrien went down while fighting the first boss in frequent nightmares, and she knew Luka did too. The two of them had shared a few too many late-night cups of tea while avoiding sleep.

They won the battle, but there were so many wounded, so many close calls. One look at her Order and she knew they felt as lost as she did. Was it worth it? The thought seemed to echo through each of their movements as they returned to the manor.

“Marinette?” Alya’s call shook her out of her daze. She looked down at her hands and saw that she’d finished brushing the last of the horses. Putting the brush away, she returned to the main space in the downstairs of their home.

Home. She supposed that’s what it was now, but it didn’t feel like it. The design of it was very cozy, there was no doubt about that. But she saw it as little more than a place to eat and sleep. There were far more important things she could be doing, sitting down to relax was out of the question.

“There you are,” Alya grinned from the kitchen. “Feels like I haven’t seen you in days!” She carried a simple charcuterie board into the living/dining area and placed it on the table. Nino, Adrien, Lila, Alix, Nathaniel, and Luka were already sitting in the various couches and chairs gathered around it.

“We were just about to have a snack and play some cards,” Alya said over her shoulder as she used a poker to encourage a small fire in the hearth. “You should join us, girl!”

Marinette’s gut response was to refuse, and she waved her hands and made excuses but Luka and Adrien got up and marched her over to sit next to them. “C’mon Buginette, you need this,” Adrien said quietly in her ear. Luka just gave her a meaningful look.

Over-protective mother hens.

She sighed and gave in. One afternoon of cards couldn’t hurt.

Nathaniel was on her other side. While Alya dealt out the cards, Marinette asked him, “How’s the garden coming along?”

His face lit up with a quiet joy. “It’s going great! I don’t know if the weather is going to change, but the onions are taking nicely!” She listened with a small smile on her face as he went on about the different crops he was planting in the garden. He’d really stepped up to grow the bulk of their food, and seemed to genuinely enjoy spending his days taking care of the plants.

She was glad that he could still talk freely to her, even in the game. They’d always been close and it was nice to see his artistic spirit was unbothered by... everything.

Adrien nudged her to play her turn, and she did so quickly. Across from her, Alix and Nino were laughing at something Lila had said, and Alya sat up proudly with a comment that made them laugh even harder.

On Adrien’s other side, Luka had his hands of cards facedown on his lap while he strummed a lute he’d bought the other day. The pleasant melody lifted her spirits and reminded her of happier times.

This is what she was fighting for, she realized. For Nathaniel to take pride in his art, for her dear friends to laugh, and for Luka to play his music. She blinked away the tears that rose in her eyes. This is what was worth fighting for.

Even if she couldn’t bring herself to sew, to create like she used to love doing. Here she just had to be Marinette the friend or Marinette the fighter. It was almost easier, having less to manage. And yet... she couldn’t feel that same joy for herself that she found so precious to her friends. Not until they were all home again. She couldn’t let herself.

* * *

Jason trudged into the base, pack digging into his shoulder with all the loot he’d recovered. He’d spent the past few days camping and level-grinding, which was apparently the correct term for it. He couldn’t even remember what Dick had said to set him off, but he needed to be on his own for a while. The woods were surprisingly peaceful, and he found the time spent by himself in nature to be refreshing.

“Hey.” Dick sounded pissed. The hell was his problem? Jason wasn’t even back long enough to do anything. Jason turned on his heel and raised his eyebrows. “What?”

Dick thrust a newspaper into his hands in response. He folded his arms, clearly expecting Jason to read it right then and there. Jason sighed loudly and slung his pack off. He turned his attention to the paper in his hand.

“Coalition of over forty players defeats second dungeon,” he read aloud. Shit.

“Just thought you should know,” Dick said in his I told you so voice. “When you went on your little adventure, you missed the next boss fight.”

Oh, now he remembered why he left! Because his “brother” is an asshole. “My little adventure was to get experience and level up,” he glared at Dick. “Which is still doing something more productive than just sitting on my fuckin’ hands.”

Dick’s nostrils flared. Good, he was itching for this conversation. “We are not doing nothing. We need more time to practice with the gameplay. Hell, Gar still tries to shift when we spar!” He threw up his hands in frustration. “We’re nowhere near ready yet, Jay.”

“You know, there’s more to this game than fuckin’ sparring.” Jason retorted.

Dicks brows shot up. “Oh, that’s rich coming from the guy who so desperately wants to get back to our lives that he runs off on his own.”

“I can’t stand being cooped up in this damn house all the time! Just because we’re stuck in this game doesn’t mean we have to stop living,” Jason shook his head. “We’ve already been in here for over a month, who’s to say how much longer it’ll be? We can’t just put our fuckin’ lives on hold the whole time.”

“Training to beat the game isn’t putting our lives on hold,” Dick rolled his eyes. “This place is a death trap in case you forgot. We need to train to get our lives back.”

This idiot just didn’t get it. “Oh sure, and in the meantime we can’t have any happiness or fun. Sounds pretty miserable to me.” He picked up his pack. “You can level up without training at all hours of the fuckin’ day, no matter what a certain black-haired, blue-eyed bastard says.”

Jason stormed out the door, bumping into Garfield on his way back outside. The kid stumbled backwards before pointing finger guns at him. “Nice alliteration!”

He ignored him and kept walking down the path that led into town.

“Hey, hey wait a minute!” Seriously kid? He heard that argument with Dick but still couldn’t take the fuckin’ hint.

Garfield caught up to him and said, “You know, for someone who was supposed to have a relaxing vacation, you sure look tense.”

“Fuckin’ excuse me?” Jason growled.

“Wh-what I mean is you’re probably looking for a way to burn off some steam!”

This was getting old. “Get to the point, kid.”

“On the third level, there’s a quest we can do to make our own guild!” Garfield bounced excitedly, keeping pace next to him. Well, a quest would certainly help get this new brotherly stress out of his system. “We want you to join us, pleeeeaaaase?”

“Hold up, who the hell is us?”

Garfield grinned at him. “Oh you know, just a couple of the guys.”

They’d reached a junction in the path that led to the main road. Waiting beneath the tree beside the signpost were Roy, Jaime, and Bart. The ex-speedster waved excitedly while Roy looked about as pleased to be here as Jason did. They got along swimmingly.

“Hey dudes, everyone cool if Jason joins us?” Garfield reached out to pat his back then hesitated as he thought better of it.

Jaime shrugged while Bart gave an enthusiastic thumbs up. Roy gave him a pitying look, like he’d been dragged into it too.

“Fine.” Jason muttered to no one in particular. “Are we heading out now?”

The other four got their things together. Jaime sent out party invites to everyone to better keep track of each other, which Roy and Jason reluctantly accepted. Garfield pulled up a pamphlet and started leafing through it. Jason spied the title, The Good Adventurer’s Guide to Guilds. Lovely.

“Alright,” Garfield snapped the papers shut and started walking down the path into town. “Let’s go to level three and get this bread!”

Roy narrowed his eyes. “The quest is to retrieve some bread?” He asked incredulously.

“Well, no but yes! But no. Man, we gotta teach you slang,” Bart slung an arm around Roy’s shoulders. The latter pushed him off and Jaime sped up his pace to plant himself as a buffer in between them as they walked.

Dumbasses.

The walk into town was easy, and they used the teleportation kiosk in the town square to get to the third level without a hitch.

The third level had some more interesting terrain than the plains of the first and second levels. Cliffs and quarries dotted the landscape in front of them. The main town itself was built onto a cliff, a gaping valley splayed out before them with minute details.

“Oh wow,” Garfield said. “This reminds me of that one town in France where--”

“Don’t care. Let’s move.” Roy cut him off and stalked down the winding road that would take them down into the valley. Jason smirked and followed suit.

Garfield made a face, then followed them along with the others. He pulled out his pamphlet again, then pointed them in the direction of the quest. Some quarry worker NPC wanted help collecting materials. If they got him everything on his list, he would apparently grant them the rights to start a guild? It made less and less sense as Gar read aloud from the paper.

They trekked on for a few hours, easily hacking apart the common monsters they came across. Between Jason and Roy, the others hardly had time to draw their weapons before the threats were gone.

“What’s better than this?” Garfield put an arm around Jason and Bart’s shoulders. Jaime grinned and put his arms around Bart and Roy. “Guys bein’ dudes!” He finished.

Roy, Bart, and Jason exchanged mystified glances. Roy and Jason had been out of the loop for roughly the same period of time, and Bart had told them before that not much of contemporary pop culture had survived into his future.

Guys bein’ dudes indeed.

Between the five of them, gathering the listed materials and getting them to the worker by sundown was easy. Well, it was easy for most of them.

“You look like a mess, ese!” Jaime exclaimed, seeing a very sticky and scratched-up Garfield. He groaned and replied, “Had to get tree sap. Trees fought back....”

Well, that served the little shrimp right, Jason thought to himself. He and Roy had been collecting gemstones, which could be mined out from the caves littered throughout the floor... or the infinitely more fun way of killing giant gemstone monsters. Take a wild fuckin’ guess which one they chose.

Jason was actually pretty content with the levels he’d gained from the quest. Not to mention getting his excess anger out from talking to Dick. It seemed like whenever he went to the house, there was always some type of disagreement between the two.

Damn. Maybe he should start saving for his own house.

His party currently stood in line at the guild registration office, also located on the third level. The setting sun cast a golden glow over the valley, highlighting the small clusters of houses dotting the countryside.

“Oh crap,” Garfield suddenly said. He danced nervously on his feet. “We did the whole quest, but I forgot the most important thing!”

Roy looked at him sharply. “What’s wrong?”

“We need a name for our guild!” Garfield wailed, clutching his hands to his head.

Seriously? Roy scoffed, “Why not just Justice League?”

Jaime rounded on him. “Are you nuts, ese? We can’t go around calling ourselves the Justice League. Secret identities and all that.”

Garfield paced in line, clearly thinking hard. “Hmm, justice. Juuuuustice. Just-ice. Just ice! Hey, we could do something with that!” He exclaimed.

Jason rolled his eyes. “Yeah that’s great,” he said, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “How about On the Rocks.”

Bart put a hand on his chin, looking thoughtful. “Well, we should add a little pizzazz to it, don’t you think?”

“I’ve got it! Rocky Road!” Garfield threw his hands in the air triumphantly. God this kid was excessive.

Jaime and Bart, after the former had explained it to him, voiced their approval. Roy and Jason looked at each other and silently commiserated over their unfortunate situation.

Rocky Road it was.

* * *

“Ugh, that was way harder than it needed to be.” Alya slumped over her battle axe.

Marinette giggled and offered her friend some water. “Well, a ton of other people are starting guilds too! So I guess there are limited resources for a while.”

Nino took the water from Alya after she’d finished with it. He drained it and looked heartbroken until Adrien handed him a new bottle.

The four of them had decided to team up and do the quest to establish a guild. Not everyone in the guild needed to attend the quest to establish one. So when Alya and Nino had approached Marinette and Adrien, asking if the original friend group could be the ones to do it, they couldn’t say no.

“Well, I just wish Marinette had told us about the quest sooner. Then we could have had an easier time!” Lila simpered, sweet as ever. Oh yeah, Lila had invited herself to come along too.

“Weren’t you also a beta tester?” Adrien frowned innocently.

Lila blinked, looking startled. “Oh yes! But you know about my memory issues. I really wish I could remember all these things to help us out,” she sighed dramatically. Typical.

“So!” Marinette decided to move that conversation right along. “We need a name for our guild. Got any ideas?”

Nino rubbed his arm. “Actually dudes, I’ve been thinking of a name for a while.”

“Oh? Let’s hear it!” Adrien smiled and nudged his best friend’s arm.

“Well, I was thinking we could be called Miracle Workers,” Nino began. Marinette traded a look of alarm with Adrien. “You know, because Alya and I used to be miraculous holders? And I thought it’d be kinda nice to honor Chat Noir, Ladybug, and the other heroes. We could use some of their strength right about now.” Oh, that was actually really sweet of him. Marinette offered Adrien a soft smile.

Alya looked at him fondly. Adrien, with a slight nod of approval from Marinette, gave him a side hug and said, “I think that’s a wonderful name.”

Lila tapped her chin. “I don’t know, workers seems a little odd to me. We’re more like leaders or executives.”

“Well, I think Miracle Workers is perfect, babe.” Alya leaned in to peck Nino on the cheek. “Let’s go with that.”

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#jasonette #sword art online au #virtual reality #maribat #maribat fic #batfam #batfam fic #yj #yj fic #young justice #young justice fic #healing hands

[corpsentry]

behind the taylor swift gundam was in fact another, smaller gundam: a brief inquiry into the events of june 2020

so back in june this year june and i got together and we made this motherfucker of a story with this motherfucker of a thread to keep track of it all. but you already know that! and i’ve already got one foot and three elbows in my grave, so i’ll spare you the long-winded stuff. you wanna know how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks? i’ll tell you how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks-

-by linking you guys to copies of my planning documents because i feel like those words speak louder than any words i can offer in the present day. these are long documents. but they are also historical artifacts. very interesting. very weird. very, uh, full of cussing. so anyway, here’s

BIG DADDY: THE ORIGINAL PLANNING DOCUMENT

for those, like me, who have no motivation left in life to do anything and rely on summaries from others to acquire new knowledge, it all started with a single line.

prince of a fallen kingdom atsumu tries to kill hinata but falls in love with him instead

june, april something, 2020

with that in mind i tested the concept out with a few paragraphs of text, which you can find at the bottom of the Big Daddy document in the graveyard segment, accidentally sold my soul to the image of hinata with epaulettes, and then worked backwards, structuring an entire plot around two images:

a) hinata getting the shit beat out of him, with snark b) hinata and atsumu dancing in an empty ballroom under the stars

if you want a betrayal, you have to have something worth losing. if you want to fall in love with someone you don’t know, you have to meet them. if you have to meet them, there has to be a reason for that meeting, and so somewhere in between atsumu became a sword instructor and hinata the prince with daddy issues. june and i used this method of glancing anxiously over your shoulder to see what you’d missed to fill out the blanks in the story, after which i tacked up a bunch of post-its, typed out the plot, consulted june, typed out the plot again, and then broke the characters down into a bunch of questions, like ‘what do they want?’ and ‘what do they have?’ and ‘what are they afraid of?’

with the plot more or less ironed out, i decided it was time to start writing, and then i decided that i was actually too scared to start writing after all, so instead i set a couple of timers using classroomtimers.com (15-20 minutes long) and i sat down and i wrote about the world that hinata and atsumu inhabited.

each warm-up was 300-500 words long, and for the first few days, i’d write one before getting into writing the story proper. later these evolved into simply picking a scene from the story and launching straight into it, which became useful for opening those scenes later when i got to them organically.

then i got lazy! so i stopped. but these shitty little exercises were really useful for me because, unfettered by plot, convention, or any kind of tradition hovering over my shoulder, i was able to fuck around loosely enough to realize what i wanted this story to be. it was a very contrived kind of trial-and-error, an exploration of the characters, the story, but most importantly, the tone.

RESEARCH, PLANNING, AND VICTORIAN BOUGIE FASHION

this is a loose map of the castle and Important Locations within it, which i drew up at the start so i could keep track of where everything was and how i could get my characters from point A to point B. i wanted the story to have Some kind of internal logic, you know, even if that logic amounted to ‘a compass would function normally in this world whereas kageyama tobio would not’.

99% of my planning and organizing within those five weeks took place in this lovely dotted cat journal which my sister gave me for my birthday and i repurposed into a metaphorical Diary of Suffering while working on juno. i used it for everything from keeping track of narrative threads to clothing consistency checks, but the main purpose was this: each day at about 10 pm i’d crack open the cat book to a fresh page, stamp the date and the day of suffering at the top, and then write down a list of things i wanted to write, address, or fix today. then i’d sit at my laptop and write like a madman until about 7 in the morning. with breaks, of course, for sitting in the bathroom and staring at the wall and sitting in the kitchen and staring at the wall, but mostly i was writing. and complaining about writing. you were there, you probably remember that.

anyway, here are some pages from the cat book.

aside from the fact that my handwriting is complete shit, you can see that i made zero effort for any of this to be presentable. it was mainly a way for me to keep track of my thoughts because i have the attention span of an ikea wardrobe and tend to forget things as soon as i think of them. the lack of structure also mirrored the way that i went about writing juno. while i did proceed, for the most part, in chronological order, i had a lot of weird and useless revelations during lunch, which by this point was happening around 2 am, and in the 5 minutes before the exhaustion finally hit and carried me down to hell. i changed A Lot. again, to understand exactly how much the story evolved from day one onwards, please consult the big daddy document.

in the meantime, here’s something else.

once june sent over hinata and atsumu’s character designs i sat down like the fucking fool i am and spent 2 hours poring over a document about victorian and other fashion movements of the past so i could assign a noun, adjective, and verb to each element of their outfits. i don’t know why i did this. i certainly could have not, but i attempted to make sense of their ‘fits from a logistical perspective and that went into the cat book too. everything went into the cat book. the cat book is a relic of the past now, stuffed with artifacts such as the birth of oikawa tooru, and also his demise.

MEDIUM DADDY: EDITING, PROOFREADING, AND CREEPY MURDER CATS

i finished writing on june 26th, 2020, approximately a month after i’d first started planning, somewhere around may 27th or 28th. at that point i had about 90,000 words’ worth of story and no sanity left whatsoever, so i took a day-long break to stare at a wall and listen to taylor swift’s enchanted on loop.

and then i made a new document, which you can look at using the link above, and i laid out everything i had to do. i’d discovered a fuck ton of plot inconsistencies and general errors while writing and lying awake in bed at 9 a.m., sleepless in seattle, and now that i was free of the demon egging me towards the first finish line, it was time to Deal with them. i speed-scrolled through the draft, which was 200+ pages compressed into one google doc, because i like to tempt god’s wrath, and fixed up all the plot issues over the course of a few days. this was the fun part.

the actual, hard editing was the extremely un-fun part. i reread the entire thing, paragraph by paragraph, line by damn line, from start to finish, paying especially close attention to awkward phrasing, incomplete dialogue, and moments which had fallen flat in my haste to get on to the next one. this was really fucking terrible. i spent more time lying facedown on the floor than actually editing anything, but after a long time (about a week), that, too was done.

SMALL DADDY: TITLES, SUMMARIES, AND GOOD FUCKING BYES

i spent a good eighty days thinking about the title, though hilariously enough we ended up with something that was a blend of our names. june + elmo = juno, which is, all things considered, pretty perfect, but the process of picking the title was Hell, and i Did Not Come Up With The Title until about 2 hours before posting. you can take a look at the haphazard clusterfuck of my title-selecting process in small daddy, which is linked above.

so the title was a last-minute choice. so was the summary. and the chapter divisions. and actually all the songs in the playlist for juno. the day we dropped juno onto planet earth like a newborn baby pitched out of the sky, i spent an hour hunched over my laptop, cutting my 213 page google doc into chapters based on nothing more than a Vibe. two days before that, i also attempted to voice-act the entirety of juno, an affair which ended at the 20,000 word mark with a sore throat and the kind of exhaustion one typically wants to sleep in a coffin for 23 years to get rid of. so in all honesty, i did very little editing, which is why there are definitely minor typos and/or mistakes hanging out somewhere on that chunky ao3 webpage. but whatever.

my attitude by july 5th (was it july 5th? or 4th? somewhere around there) was basically whatever. anything so i could get finish this damn thing, chuck it out of the window, and never see another google doc until the next century. i’ve been asked a few times how exactly i wrote at a rate of roughly 2000-3000 words per day for four weeks straight, and my answer has always been this: i died. what died, you ask? my soul. my spirit. my Will To Live. i’m a creature of fixations, and juno was my fixation for june. will i ever be able to do this again? would i recommend this experience to anyone? is god real? the answer to all of the above is probably no. juno was a fever dream, and so is my cat book. and so are all the lattes i had. and so was my 9 am to 4 pm sleep schedule.

but what we made is real. the research, oikawa tooru, the 4 am conversations in which i was like ‘how the fuck do i end this’ and june was like ‘jade proposal’ (the proposal was her idea. all rise for twitter user atsuhinas. she is the mastermind behind all of the Inch Resting moments in this story; i just flapped a korok leaf in her direction and made sure the air circulation was working properly) are real as fuck, and looking back, there’s a lot i’d change, but i’m lazy. and college is starting. and anyway, i did write 93,035 words in just under five weeks, four if you don’t count the week of Editing Hell, so i think that’s pretty cool.

thank you for reading this to the end, and for following us on our journey through the enigmatic taylor swift gundam fic which quite literally consumed my entire twitter account for the five weeks i spent working on it. retrospectively speaking i really was butt-obsessed so i am frankly incredibly impressed with everyone around me for putting up with a Husk of a Man for a month. thank you for doing that. thank you for indulging my vague tweeting, and our butterfly dns, and for reading 93 thousand words of gay fanfiction set in a high fantasy world with epaulettes and galettes. on behalf of june, once again, we are incredibly grateful for all your support.

if you have any questions about specific aspects of the writing process, or anything you’d like to know in general with reference to JUNO, feel free to drop me an ask through my tumblr inbox, or through my curiouscat over here. i’m aware i didn’t cover everything, but there’s frankly too much to put in a tumblr post without passing away somewhere around the 56% mark, so let me know what’s on your mind, and i’ll try to answer that to the best of my abilities. but anyway, before i go, here are some

TAKEAWAYS

one: don’t try to write 93,000 words in five weeks. seriously don’t fucking do it you will end up jittery and sleep-deprived and you will leave all your friends on read for a month. pace yourself. set realistic goals. you wrote 2k this week? that’s fantastic. you wrote 4k in a day? you absolute motherfucker. i hope you’re taking a long fucking break tomorrow. your story will not run away from you, but if you run too fast, you will get tired, and then you will pass away.

two: you don’t have to know everything about your story before you start writing. in fact if you have a single camera shot of two characters holding hands under a rose garden awning, i think that’s fucking wonderful. if you look at big daddy, you’ll realize that my initial plot draft, and all the ones following that, are not perfectly aligned with the final version of juno. i improvised over half of the scenes in this motherfucker, and to be completely honest, some of the improvised scenes were the best. fucking oikawa tooru was improvised out of nowhere. he only got written in way later, around chapter 8 or something, because i realized i needed a plot device and a source of information to keep the playing table from toppling over. i Sat Down one day and was like ‘okay, it’s time to write oikawa into the introduction. because he matters now. he didn’t matter last week but now he does, and soon he’s going to be the fulcrum of the entire story, because it’s like that with oikawa tooru’. it’s okay to change your mind halfway. it’s okay to go back and rewrite entire scenes or segments. it’s okay to highlight 4 pages of fresh, sentimental writing, and hit delete. writing is a fluid process, and you Will make discoveries as you progress through your story alongside your characters. be understanding of that iterative process. be kind to yourself.

three: You Are That Motherfucker. you, me, your dog, your dog’s friend, your dog’s enemy, all of us are that motherfucker. i never thought i’d be able to write anything longer than the great big map, which was a much simpler, linear story in which the other main character did not appear in the current timeline until like the eighth chapter. juno was different. juno was the motherfucker, and i was scared shitless of it, and to cope with that fear joked constantly while writing that it’d never see the light of day.

but it did. it was a rocky process, and i was awake for 48 hours after posting it because of the sheer adrenalin stuck in my skull, but i got through it. and i wouldn’t have been able to do it without june, who stepped in when i flopped over facedown on the floor and dragged me to my feet like the badass friend she is, and without everyone else in my life, who put up with me talking about The Thing that i couldn’t really talk about, but juno’s up there now. forever, or until the internet collapses and civilization goes extinct. and if the nineteen year old clown with the attention span of an ikea armchair and an a level certificate from hell wrote the 93,000 word long thing, so can you. i mean this completely unironically and with every ounce of genuine emotion i can summon from the cracked asshole of my heart.

writing is hard. writing is scary. writing is an investigation of the world around you and therefore, by extension, yourself, and that kind of honesty is freaky. it’s like going skinny-dipping next to the president’s mansion. who’s going to see you? what if they take a photo? what if you lose your spot at university?

but don’t think about that. our world is overrun with stories the way cereal bowls are full of cereal, but it’s those stories that keep us all sane in the disgusting day-to-day muck of reality, so think about your story. what’s haunting you today? what message do you want to leave printed in font size 666 comic sans across the southern hemisphere of the planet? what will you be tomorrow?

a writer. you’re going to be a motherfucking writer.

#my stuff

[chilly-territory]

K Case Files of Blue 2, chapter 4 (part 2 out of 2)

Case Files of Blue 2 by Miyazawa Tatsuki

Chapter 4 (part 2/2) (volume 2, pages 224-246)

†

The one to make contact with her target first was Awashima Seri. When she opened the door to a big hall meant for wedding ceremonies and such, on the other side of the door she found Nakamura Gouki sitting cross-legged in the middle of it, drinking sake from a bottle and making no attempt to be shy about it.

Recognizing her, the giant man said, "Oh, so it's you who came for me, eh? How about a drink?"

He turned and held his bottle up in Awashima's direction. Awashima let out a small sigh.

"I'm on the clock. But even if I weren't, I'd only drink with people I have rapport with." "So with me you don't?" Nakamura Gouki asked after barking out a short laugh. "You," Awashima replied icily, "are somewhat lacking in delicacy." "Hmm," Gouki intoned, stroking his chin. "I personally like you quite a bit though. Like your strong will so atyical for a woman. Your brute strength, too. You shattered that cage all by yourself, without any help, right? For what it's worth, it was made in such a way that even a gorilla wouldn't be able to break it. Which makes you stronger than a gorilla, ain't it ri---" "I suppose I am," Awashima interrupted in a powerful tone, making Gouki bite his tongue. Her expression tightened and she drew her saber. "Against you, I have no slightest intention to pull my punches. I'm sorry to say but there is no room for that. For that reason, if you make a bad move, you might wind up getting severely hurt. Thus, I sincerely urge you to surrender."

Awashima took her signature battle stance with one leg bent in front, the other extended behind her and the tip of her raised sword pointing downward. Gouki narrowed his eyes at her.

"Good gracious. In the end, we both can only settle this by brute force, eh." Still relaxed, he kept sipping his sake. "But before that, mind telling me just one thing?" "What is it?" Awashima kept staring down her opponent, not letting her guard down. "What kind of man is Munakata Reishi? What is he to you?" Gouki's face when he asked that was earnest and serious, and one that Awashima had never seen him make before. "C'mon."

Awashima flushed a little.

Gouki went on. "At first, I only thought of him as nothing more than a man Zen'ichi is weirdly obsessed with. But you know, as this whole story unfolded, I started finding myself taking interest in him, too. Just like with you, I sure want to share a drink and a talk with him. So..." he repeated his question again in the same very serious tone. "What kind of man is Munakata Reishi?"

"..."

Technically speaking, Awashima was under no obligation to answer that. But, being a honest and serious person that she was, she couidn't help giving the question some careful deliberation.

"Let's see," she finally spoke up. "To me, he is my king." "What I want to hear is not a shallow general description like that..." "No," Awashima cut him off flatly. Relaxing her stance, she elaborated, "To me, that person really is my king. And to me, that's everything. This is the only way I can find to describe it." She looked Gouki straight in the eye.

Hearing the weight and gravity in her tone, Gouki refrained from saying anything. Awashima suddenly smiled.

"Captain and I met before he had his awakening as a king. The plane we both happened to be on was hijacked by terrorists, and I helped Captain suppress them. It was like something straight out of movies. But some explosives we didn't know about blew, opening a big hope in the plane's airframe and sending it plummeting down. It was at that moment that he had become a king. All to save the passengers who were on that plane with him. And I witnessed it with my own eyes." Her every word was permeated with strong conviction. "For a long time, Captain searched for an answer to the question of who he was, and in that instance he'd had a realization that becoming a king was his destiny. If that's how it was, then I thought that my destiny must have been to support and help him. So I became his first clansman." "..." "Nakamura Gouki. Now, it's my turn to ask you something. Why do you support Kounomura Zen'ichi?" "Hmm." The giant scratched his bald head. "Sadly, unlike you, I don't have any special reason. It's just..." He flashed his pearly whites. "To me, Zen'ichi is a friend I have rapport with. If I must name one reason, that itself is the reason," Gouki asserted. "...I can't believe you..." Awashima breathed out a sigh. "I had my suspicions, but you really are one strange person, just like Kounomura."

"My oh my, what an honor!" Gouki's shoulders vibrated as he laughed. And then he added, "It's never boring around him." He looked like he was having fun. "...Thanks to that, I even awakened this amusing power."

Getting up slowly, he took the front double biceps pose that bodybuilders do, flexing said muscles. Following the swell of both sets of his well-developed biceps, Gouki's power spiked. In the air between the two tension hung.

"Something's been bothering me for a while. Initially, you were simply Kounmura's friend who became a strain only after Kounomura had started scheming to usurp Captain's throne, isn't that right?" "Ain't you well informed?" Gouki took a side chest pose next, putting his perctorals on display. "That's right. While participating in that grand plan of Zen'ichi's, at some point I had an awakening as a strain. And that fact itself backed up Zen'ichi's theory." "...What theory?" "That the Slate has a uniform response to a person's will. If you want power, you will get power. That is..." Gouki finished his performance with the abdominal and thigh pose. "If you want to become a king, you just might steal that seat and become one if you wish for it strong enough."

For a while, Awashima contemplated his words. Then she let out another long sigh. "You're beyond help." Quietly, she moved to take her battle stance properly again. "That's nothing more than a conceited and self-serving wild delusion. I shall correct it for you." "Oh well," Gouki grinned, "I guess that fits me just fine. Now, c'mon!" he rushed towards her. "Time to talk with our fists!"

Awashima met his dash with a battle cry.

†

About the time the fierce clash between Awashima and Gouki unfolded, Fushimi encountered Marumoto. This run-in, however, didn't escalate into anything as passionate as Awashima and Gouki's.

If anything, it was more of a game of tag where Marumoto, throwing lines like "Why do you resist opening up your heart so much?! Just become my friend! I know you're lonely!", "Eh? You don't have any social network accounts? Then how do you call out to your friends when you have a barbeque party?" and "I'm gonna chillax at a hole-in-the-wall bar with a group of good friends who chase their dreams together, wanna come too?", specially designed to get on Fushimi's nerves as much as possible, tried to run away and hide, while Fushimi did the chasing, clicking his tongue tirelessly.

Marumoto may not have possessed a sliver of fighting prowess in a direct physical confrontation, but he didn't specialize in reading minds for nothing either, excelling in seeing right through Fushimi's thought processes and hiding in his blind spots with exceptional dexterity. Changing hiding places from behind a fire fighting panel to inside a ventilation fan to beneath a sofa, he ran screaming out throwaway lines in the same vein as those mentioned above.

And each time the shutter of his camera clicked, taking yet another photo, it grated on Fushimi's nerves immensely. Fushimi swung his saber, chasing after him.

"Tch!" Tongue-clicking was only a natural response.

Fushimi had a sickening feeling that all he did lately was being dragged into these stupid games of tag. Except, both he and Marumoto knew that it was coming to an end. Through ingenious positioning, the Scepter 4 operative managed to block Marumoto's escape routes and drive him into a dead end. Of course, Marumoto knew what his opponent was trying to do, but through Fushimi's strategic maneuvering that looked random at a glance, he was running out of places to escape.

Marumoto's voice sounded strained with panic. Trying to find a way distract Fushimi, he'd resorted to alluding to Fushimi's family and the clan he was affiliated with previously, but ultimately it proved useless as, despite Fushimi's face turning bitter, his steps never faltered.

'I already was going to punch him once, guess I'll make it 2 or 3 times now,' those were about all Fushimi's thoughts on the matter. That is, for all intents and purposes, he was not rising to Marumoto's bait.

Until one particular statement from Marumoto.

"Why don't you respect your boss more? You should be more of a team player, you know!"

When he heard that screamed out at him, for the first time Fushimi paused in his steps.

"Say," surprisingly enough, Fushimi sounded thoughtful, "why do you follow someone like Kounomura?"

Silence fell.

After a short while, an answer came from a shadowy corner of the hallway.

"Well, because I respect him a lot. Kounomura-san is a great man!" "..." Fushimi sensed something in his tone. Marumoto continued, as if enraptured, "You see, until a little while ago, I was a volunteer at an orphanage that Kounomura-san operates. Kounomura-san is a very busy man, yet he finds time to remember the names of each kid and is always very kind to them. I look up to him and dream to be a person like him some day." "Then you're being tricked," Fushimi cut off bluntly. "Eh?" "Mooooron." Fushimi smirked mockingly. "Do you really believe a guy like him who's only interested in achieving his own dream would give a damn about some kids?" "Wh-what?" Reading his opponent's state of mind like an open book, Fushimi cut to the quick, "You're just being used as a handy tool. As if he'd so much as glance at you if you weren't a strain." "T-Take that back." "I'll say it as many times as it takes. You're being duped by him, dude. Poor schmuck." "Take that back, this instance! Kounomura-san is not that kind of man!"

Suddenly, Marumoto's form emerged from a shadowy nook of the hallway. In his indignation, he left his hiding place without thinking. By the time the realization of what he'd done hit him, plastering the expletive of "Crap!" all over his face, it was already too late.

Kicking off the floor, Fushimi covered the distance between them in one mighty leap and tapped the handle of his saber against the back of Marumoto's neck lightly once. The blow that could be described as gentle and almost soft didn't fail to hit the vital spot with precision.

"D-Damn it!"

Tears in his eyes, Marumoto collapsed on the spot, out cold. Fushimi sneered.

"Is it really that much fun to dream up an idol, put him on a pedestal and worship him blindly?" Then, in a dry mutter, he added, "...That's probably why I disliked you from the start."

With that, Fushimi slouched, taking his leave.

†

Awashima and Gouki clashed violently. These clashes of absurd power and speed repeated again and again. As far as raw power went, Gouki was winning by a small margin, but in speed Awashima held an overwhelming advantage. Both dispensed of tricks and tactics, fighting fair and square and only relying on their skills. Gouki wasn't holding back despite his opponent being a woman, and Awashima, in turn, put all her might into the slashes she unleashed at him.

"Nhaa!"

Lariat that Gouki launched at Awashima along with a throaty shout was blown away.

"Ha!"

After gaining splendid acceleration in midair, a backspin roundhouse kick landed on Gouki's cheek, sending his kicked-in molars in the air. He lost his clothes, Awashima lost her saber, and the battle came down to hand-to-hand combat.

"And theeeere!"

Easily gathering Awashima into his arms, Gouki threw her violently against the floor.

"Ugh!"

Twisting her body like a cat to absorb the force of the impact, she swept her leg, catching Gouki just below the knee.

"Gha!"

He hit the back of his head on the floor.

"And there!"

Still, he reached his thick arms to try and catch her, but Awashima managed to leap from the spot and avoid his hold by a hair's breadth. Then both put some distance between them, watching each other fixedly.

"Fufu." "Haha."

For some reason, they both chuckled.

Their faces were sweaty, they both were breathing hard and bruises and minor hemorrhages blossomed here and there on their bodies as a sort of decorations. Despite that, the two's fighting spirit wasn't dampened in the least. An unspoken understanding that the time to settle this once and for all was upon them was shared between them.

"If I may be so bold."

With a gesture betraying deep respect, Gouki stepped forward. Awashima came a step closer as well.

"Haaaaa!"

Gouki threw a right straight punch with all his might. Awashima's movements were free of hesitation. Resolved to the possibility of getting hard-punched in the face, she dodged to the side only at the last possible moment. Only, it was a feint.

"Gotcha!"

Gouki grinned and elbowed the crown of Awashima's head now that it was perfectly within his range, hard. The downward jab was like a blow of a giant hammer and packing enough power to be instantly lethal for a normal person.

Except in the end it was Awashima who emerged victorious in the contest of predicting the opponent's moves. The elbow attack was well within her expectations. She had confidence she could weather it and made her calculations based on that. Crossing her arms, she took that bone-shattering killing blow head-on. Unable to absorb the whole force of it, her legs trembled and a grimace of anguish crossed her features.

And yet, despite the pain, that was where her ultimate chance lay.

Gouki's expression changed, reflecting a "Oh, crap!" reaction. Awashima didn't pause. Taking one more step forward that brought her infinitely close to her opponent, she tensed bodily, gathering all her spirit and strength and putting it into a piercing blow to Gouki's solar plexus. If Gouki's attack was like a falling hammer, then Awashima's like a sharp stab of a saber.

"Ugh!"

It managed to pierce even through her opponent's thick abdominals.

"Bah!"

Gouki's eyes rolled back, and his body folded down. Awashima didn't let that momentary opening go to waste. Setting Gouki's head that, until now was too high for her to reach, on her shoulder, "And with this..." she said and lifted the body of her opponent up. His massive giant body.

"Orryaa!"

The throw she executed was so-called Brainbuster from professional wrestling. It was a power technique that you normally wouldn't see outside the ring where you lift your opponent upside down high overhead and then throw them right down.

"Ghaaaaa!"

Landing on the floor on the crown of of his head, Gouki screamed. He tried to get up but it was beyond his ability.

"Fu, fufufufu." His shoulders shook. "You really are strong," he said to Awashima who was breathing hard but stood over him as the winner, looking down at him. "It's such a pity that you're a woman."

Awashima snorted coldly. "You were pretty strong yourself. For a man, that is."

The snapback made Gouki chuckle again.

"Listen," he said when he was done, "I've got a request. You and Munakata Reishi. And me and Zen'ichi. Can we share a drink together some day?" "Well," Awashima replied as she was searching for her saber and then returning it to its place on her hip. "I don't mind giving your request some thought. But asking Captain about his wishes comes first." "I see."

Once he'd heard her reply, Gouki closed his eyes, seemingly content. "Can't wait then... Really."

And with that, he was out cold.

Awashima took a deep breath, wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and turned away from Gouki, intending to head to the hall.

Her dashing profile was a testament to the strength of her resolve.

†

Kounomura Zen'ichi was in the wedding chapel on the top floor. Seated on the altar for taking the oath, he was swinging his legs as he talked to his wife.

"Uh-huh, uh-huh," he was saying into the PDA. "That's right. That's how it is. Yeah, I'm serious. No, I'm telling you," he persuaded in a soft voice, "I can't come back for a while longer. Yes, right. Yes. Yeeees."

Carefree as ever, he hung up the phone. Spinning around, the short man faced the other side.

"You were gracious enough to wait for me to finish, eh, Munakata-kun?" he called, grinning all the while. "You seemed to be busy with a call."

Munakata Reishi who smoothly appeared in the spot of light, too, had a smile on his lips. His frame, clad in a blue uniform complimented with a sword, was set off quite nicely by the special atmosphere of sacrality reigning this particular space. On the other hand, Kounomura Zen'ichi, not blessed with height or dignified stature and looking quite dull in an oversized jacket and tawny slacks, was out of place there.

The two's appearances couldn't have been farther apart: Munakata with his clean-cut features, well-formed and perfectly-proportioned frame and the undeniable air of refinement and elegance, and Kounomura, with a bulky body of a penguin and plain though not without a certain charm features, who couldn't be called attractive by any standard.

Nevertheless, the two men had something about them that made them similar.

In was in their gaze that observed all phenomena of the world with utmost attention, more carefully than anybody else yet for some reason remained distant and detached as if they weren't watching at all, and in their free way of life that transformed sadness far removed from the realm of normal into amusement. But what made them seem alike more than anything else was a calm smile always playing on their lips. That was what the two men so different had in common.

"I have to say it is quite strange. This is my first time meeting you face-to-face, but it does not feel like it," Munakata spoke up unhurriedly. Tilting his head to the side slightly, he continued, "The reason may be the fact that I've gone through massive amounts of information related to you in the course of this affair." "This is my first time meeting you in the flesh, too, I guess?" Kounomura spread out his hands. "But y'know, I made a poster out of one of the photos of you that I'd taken secretly and pinned it up in my room." He closed his eyes. "So if I just shut my eyes like this, I can see your image in all its minute details in my head right away. All your data are etched into my brain, y'see."

Munakata answered with a wry smile. Kounomura opened his eyes.

"I did it because I wanted to become you so bad, Munakata-kun. Because..." he was not shy about his word choices, "Blue King, I thought you were beautiful." "Please tell me just one thing," Munakata asked. "Why did you choose this particular method to dethrone such a king?" "Hm?" "Why did you choose to trick and trap my subordinates instead of going after me directly?" "Hmmm," Kounomura took some time to think this question over. "Why, to tell you the truth, I didn't put much thought into it. It's just when I wondered what it was that made one king, I thought maybe the answer was one's retainers." His face suddenly turned serious. "No matter how much one claims to be king, so long as no one recognizes and acknowledges that claim, one remains but a naked emperor, y'know. So I thought maybe the Dresden Slate would revise your status if you were to be cut off your followers. Then again, it was just one out of currently 12 strategies that I'd come up with, and from now on I'm planning on testing out the other 11. And rest assured, among them there are some that involve cornering you specifically."

Munakata chuckled. "So you're set on trying again, I take it?" "Yup." Kounomura's reply was flat as a child's. "I totally am."

Munakata heaved a sigh, still smiling. Kounomura made a serious face again.

"Munakata-kun, I think you've already realized this without me telling, but..." His voice sounded low. "The Dresden Slate. It's very dangerous." "..." Munakata said nothing to that. Pushing up his glasses with a finger, he changed the subject. "You cannot escape any more, and I trust you are aware of the fact, yes?" "..." This time it was Kounomura who kept his silence. And then he said peevishly, "I've prepared a few means of escape. But the decisive factor that got in my way and prevented me from making use of them is this awful weather." "Your friend," Munakata spoke calmly, "said one interesting thing to me. According to him, apparently, when you get down to it, all coincidences are but inevitable. So wouldn't you say your running out of moves is some sort of fate at work?" "Munakata-kun, you..." "You do realize already, don't you?" The way Munakata said it reeked of eerieness. He was slowly drawing closer.

That was the first time when a shadow of fear slid across Kounomura's face.

All of a sudden, he did an about-face, dashed to hide behind the altar where he took a detonator out of his pocket and pushed the button.

With a thunderous roar, the chapel blew up.

†

When Kounomura made it to the roof, the sky was covered with dark clouds twisting like dragons as far as the eye could see. From time to time, flashes of lightning pierced them.

The torrential downpour, cutting and violent, beat his body mercilessly, and the accompanying gale made him stagger. His face was a sticky mess of sweat and dirt. His hair, thin even under the best circumstances, stuck to his forehead, and his clothes showed tears. Having crawled into the emergency exit made beneath the altar, it took him quite some time to get out.

Kounomura turned to take a look at the rubble that only a few minutes ago was the chapel, and the expression that crossed his face then could be interpreted as despair, fear or maybe even delight.

"...I knew it, Munakata-kun, you're simply..."

There stood no other than Munakata Reishi. Around him the blue globe of a barrier was projected, and despite being in the immediate vicinity of an explosion, not even a hair was out of place on him, to say nothing of injury. Munakata was getting closer, step by step, smiling with grace and refinement all the while.

Kounomura felt fear seizing him. And as Munakata was drawing closer, indivertible in his approach, the reason for this fear dawned on the short man.

For the first time in his life, Kounomura Zen'ichi and his carefully made plans were about to fail. Here, at this very moment.

There were things forever out of his reach, and he was made to realize he could never become someone like the person in front of him no matter how he tried. Between the two men there existed a wall that could never be scaled. In that instance, both Kounomura and Munakata sensed it.

'So this is what destiny is, huh? In the end, I never even stood a chance.'

The moment he thought that, a wave of exhaustion swept over him so bone-deep that he could barely stay upright. His long past its prime body had hit its limit long time ago, and the spirit that kept it going just barely after it had broke that instance.

Kounomura was ready to collapse then and there. But just then...

"That wouldn't do, Kounomura-san."

A quick and strong yet gentle arm suddenly caught him. The wind and rain stopped. Kounomura realized he was drawn inside the barrier projected around Munakata. When he looked up, he found Munakata smiling at him from above.

"He who aspires to be king must never take a knee."

That determination was overwhelming.

Kounomura's first ever failure triggered another strong reaction, and another feeling, new to him, was born on the heels of it. On instinct alone, Kounomura groaned. And then...

"It's okay."

Freeing himself from Munakata's supporting arm, he took a knee before the other man, of his own will this time, and said reverently, "I admit my defeat. You are the true king, Munakata Reishi."

In that instance, he found a new goal for himself, a new someone who he wanted to become.

Munakata, though almost imperceptibly perplexed, kept on smiling, and Kounomura, as he looked at him, couldn't help thinking of him as 'beautiful' once again.

#k case files of blue #k project #project k #k translation

[papersynth]

The Feud breakdown theory

TLDR: Its basically one big Klance-centric episode, this whole theory’s probably a reach but its nice lol. Reposted from my twitter. More under the cut!

Lets start off this thread by pointing out one of the glaring things that immediately hit me once I started watching this episode when it aired: the title sequence. I'm not particularly old but my parents have always loved gameshows and reality television.

They would watch it in the living room and so one of the things that stuck out to me the most was how the logo for Garfle Warfle Snick is visually similar to "The Dating Game" which was a 60's TV show centered around a bachelorette picking out a guy to take out on a date.

Even the dang flowers.....

It was at this moment I thought "well, after being basically deprived of any Klance scenes for 3 seasons, you'd think S7 would bring you some of that and boy oh boy I've been fed so well. I think its strange for them to visually replicate a DATING GAMESHOW logo. We know for a fact that they were going for a family feud esque style, so why didn't they just replicate the Family feud logo instead? The vibe of the entire episode would change because it'll be a glaring reference.

Going back to Kaplan's tweet about how things aren't what they seem, the Feud really, like, obviously lets you know, that things really aren't what they seem. The story shifts in focus and tone and so do the characters.

My theory is that this episode foreshadows events to come that even the paladins never knew were even challenges themselves.

I believe this sort of aids the Klance fight theory (graciously written by Ca HERE) because that altean colony which they believe was a win for them to discover, could possibly be their next challenge (their garfle, becomes a warfle)

We also know that it isn't new for Voltron to use the "it was an altean all along!" as shock value for their enemies but at this point, I think Allura's starting to learn that her race is equally capable of evil.

This adds to the idea that during the 3 year gap, there's a possibility that the altean colony and Haggar/Galra have been working together to develop new technology (Hunk: I've never seen the Galra use weapons like these before) because clearly it isn’t the olkari helping them.

Time for my biggest reach yet, how the fuck is that a chopstick lance. You can recognise a mullet for a hundred feet away but you can't recognise a sword at point blank. Strange considering Keith drew out the sword pretty quickly, so there's no way Lance saw chopsticks.

NOTHING in this image screams chopsticks. I even went and printed out this god forsaken screencap and tilted it to see if it looked like chopsticks from a far angle and nope, still looks like a blade. This one's a reach but, chopsticks are insinuate a "yin-yang" dynamic.

Chopsticks is a strange pick because it doesn't LOOK anything like a chopstick. It would have made more sense to call it a shovel, paper fan, knife, surfboard etc. Go off. Chopsticks have always been used as a pair, one cannot exist without the other, which brings me to voltron's wings. I like the idea of Voltron being similar to Darling in the Franxx because of their mecha designs kinda taking reference from Evangelion. This is a reach definitely, but its cute whatever, eat this up. There's a mythical bird called "Jian" and it only has one wing.

The bird can only exist with another of its kind, where together, they can fly and soar. Wings and duality are symbols that have ALWAYS gone hand in hand, simply because there are two. Chopsticks being Lance's stupid fucking word choice is so damn specific its hurting me.

HERE'S ANOTHER REACH Y'ALL, the reason why chopsticks are thicker and circular at the top but thinner and squared at the bottom is because they represent the heaven and the earth. WHERE'D THEY COME FROM Y'ALL. WHERE DID THE PALADINS GO? UH? BACK TO EARTH YEA?

And once again, Keith draws this one very quickly so it does show that Lance can make a good guess immediately. I can see why he would say Dog here. SO WHY COULDN'T YOU SEE A BLADE AT FIRST LANCE? EXPLAIN YOURSELF. MOVING ON FROM THE DAMN DRAWING GAME.

I think these two screenshots speak for themselves. Earlier this morning I wrote a theory about how the Klance dynamic is all over the place because Lance has grown as a person in his absence and he's confused as to how he's supposed to behave towards "new keith".

He takes a jab at Keith throughout the start of this whole episode

"Not my fault keith can't draw!"

"I'm not a mind reader!"

So once again, its the usual bickering coming from Lance, but we see that shift later in the episode, I'll get to that later.

The next game with bii boh bi. Funny to me how the game's called "The Garflator" when we've already established that "Garfle" means to "win". The monster isn't the Garflator as they've misleaded, its the tank.

If you don't believe me, here's the subtitles literally calling the monster the "Warflator". Strange isn't it? You miss these things when you watch it the first time. Bob wasn't joking when Warfle and Garfle were interchangeable.

I don't really want to analyse how Bii Boh Bi acts throughout the whole segment mainly because I think that's reaching a little too far, and it was likely comedic the entire time, but I can't help but notice that his tone throughout suggests a "fill in the blanks" situation.

My theory is that this situation foreshadows the possibility that someone will help Lance fill in the blanks, and guess what the answer is in the GARFLator. He might even really be running out of time so again, stick it out till the last episode of S8.

Bonus: Seems like its pretty nice isn't it. Our crops are watered and his skin is cleared. Joking of course, but overall the whole Garflator/Warflator situation keeps getting mixed up together that's why I think this theory's reaching but I digress.

Time for the scene that made all of us Klancers scream into the depths of hell. We all already know that they didn't have to vote for each other if it was meaningless, but after seeing the recent surplus of Lance being hurt by Keith leaving, I've got a solid theory.

Lets look at the scene first, mainly at Hunk and Pidge's faces. We know Hunk is emotionally observant while Pidge behaves logically, so I think when we're speaking logically: Lance picking Keith seems HIGHLY illogical to pidge.

Lance "hates" Keith. Why pick him to survive? THE MATH DOESN'T ADD UP. On the other hand, Hunk's facial expression here seems more....worried? Not confused. There's been substantial evidence that Lance was hurt by Keith leaving, and if he spoke to anyone about it, it'd be hunk.

I think Pidge is surprised to hear these things come out of Lance's mouth and seeing Keith pick him. Remember when they all picked someone to help Lance? The braniest of the team? I think honestly Pidge might be the first to pick up on their possible affections towards each other.

This sort of parallels the earlier scene where Lance was the last one to figure out Pidge was a girl, but maybe that's reaching a little too hard (Curse these short arms!)

Earlier this morning I wrote a thread about how Lance picking Keith to leave here is probably the nail in the coffin that he deeply cares about Keith. Remember, this situation would probably be the third time that Keith has left Lance.

Read the linked thread, I won't reiterate it here but basically Lance grows in Keith's absence, stepping up when he needs to, but its not really what he wants. Losing Keith again might be devastating, but that only heightens why this scene is so affectionate. He makes this choice himself.

He calls Keith the future because he has faith in his skills (he's our leader) and him as a person (plus he's half galra). That Keith HAS a future. This is SIGNIFICANT because the only other person that has said that they have faith in Keith, was Shiro.

Shiro is VALUABLE to Keith, he's the most important person in his life. Having people believe in him has always been difficult and I think where Lance says (although cryptically) that he believes in Keith, is really where their new dynamic takes off.

THAT's why Keith behaves somewhat coldly in S7, because its never gonna be easy for him to suddenly accept a new person in his life. He’s not sure how he should react to another person caring for him. Both of them know their dynamic isn't what it used to be, they can't joke and jab anymore. We're back to square one, but its different this time.

One last thing about this episode (that isn't Klance related) is Luxia's kingdom, just a fun quick thought that maybe the Baku might be back, i mean he never really was defeated, just trapped. ;)

Uhhh that's it! Can't think of anything else haha. Thanks for the wild ride friends, I hope these feed your optimism for today~ Again, they're all just theories but I hope S8 is a good experience for everyone! Have a great day :)

One last thing: I would love it if Klance happens and the theories prove true, and if it doesn't its okay! Sure I'll be disappointed, but its fine if I'm wrong about a fictional TV show lol.

#klance #keith #lance #vld #vld theory #klance theory #i think this was a nice theory #i worked hard on it pals uwu

[bokureii]

Questions for me

Here's some questions that people tend to note me about for some reason. (Notes are more for important stuff, you could just comment instead).

Also I know lots of people on here don't like reading and just wanna see art, you gotta actually read stuff for once :v, the poor writers who write on here needs love. 

  Feel free to take these questions and answer your own, I'd be interested to see! (You can edit some out like the 2 final questions) When did you start drawing, and why? I started drawing back in 2011 when I was 13, around September I think? You'll have to check my old account, DreamyNormy. I had no experience of drawing/art whatsoever before then, so I didn't know how to draw, nor was I interested. I started drawing because I wanted a new hobby, I was bored of getting angry at video games and I had anger issues, so this pretty much helped. Also I was encouraged by an old friend of mine. c:

Do you prefer traditional art or digital art? Answer is pretty obvious but I prefer digital art. I did do traditional art around 2013/2014 but I never posted them online. I can't post them online anymore because they been scrapped, rip. I really liked them, they were background drawings in oil pastel. I didn't know how to do background drawings digitally back then.

What’s your preferred canvas size? Normally I start with 3000x3000, but I reduce the canvas size to the sketch since I draw small.

Do you do sketches first before you start drawing the actual thing? The only thing I sketch is what I'm gonna draw before I line. I don't do any warm-up sketches, though I probably should!

What motivates/inspires you to draw? Music is definitely the most motivating factor for drawing. I'm passionate about music, in fact, I would've been doing digital music making instead of digital art if I wasn't encouraged to do art in 2011. Though, I dunno how far that would've got me to be honest. Other artists inspire me to draw!

How many layers do you typically use? Normally for a basic picture, like the Boku Phantump one I did a few days ago, it'd be around 9 layers, background, colour, colour shade, colour light, contrast, background reflection, eye flare, lineart and lineart colour. However if there's a detailed background involved, then it's like way more, 20 to 100 layers

What do you prefer to draw for comfort? Do you vent art? Simple things! Though, I don't really draw for comfort, I mostly just draw whenever I want to draw (As in whenever I'm bored). I don't like doing vent art, because if I'm depressed or angry, I don't want to draw because I'll just be repeating situations in my head and it distracts from the drawing. I rather just actual vent, I'm a very verbal person when I'm angry. There are emotions put into my art sometimes, but they're not negative :V

Do you prefer drawing your characters or random fandom things? I rarely draw my characters, don't I? So I guess I prefer random fandom things.

Do you use more warm or cold colours? I like a combination of both. Like warm colours for lighting and cold colours for shadowss, I rarely do the other way around

What’s your favourite music when drawing? I have an entire playlist of my favourite music, I don't really have one specific!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcGvp3RjKXjr5_0e0n8ic4HGRgnEmOno4

What inspires you to draw backgrounds? Other artists, they're all brilliant artists. Oh and music.

How often do you draw? Mostly once a week.

Does your drawing suit your style? I guess?

Do you sometimes want to have a different style? Yes, I do. Whenever I'm drawing other people's characters, I lead towards their style than my own and it's fun to do, a new learning experience :v

Do your drawings resemble you? Well, I'm the only person who can draw my own style anyway, haven't see any copycats!

What time of day is suitable for drawing for you? The middle of the day, like afternoon to evening time. The latest I draw is like 10pm to midnight :v

Where is your main source for submitting art? Unfortunately, it's DeviantArt, but I try to post on other websites like twitter and tumblr.

What do you wish your art had more of? I wish my art had more backgrounds. It's difficult to draw backgrounds.

What’s the hardest thing for you to draw? Perspective drawing. Trust me, it's the most hardest thing to do, 'cause you gotta think about the character, what part you should see, what part you shouldn't, and then the background perspective, got to get the size right, can you see this object from here, this object should be covering this up, etc. So many factors to take into consideration, I do it all in my sketching phase.

What is your favourite Pokémon? The one and only treestump ghost, Phantump! However it may change based on what pokemon I get attached to for Pokemon Sword and Shield.

What Pokémon do you like to draw the most? Eeveelutions, I used to be really bad at drawing quadrupeds, that's why I started drawing them so much, wanted to get better at drawing quadrupeds. Unfortunately I drew them too much that I neglected bipeds, sorry marshadows. :c

Could you draw my Pokémon character? This I get asked a lot, especially through notes, even though I'm pretty sure that on my main page, it says in big heading, "Stuff you don't need to note me about" and it says 'requests are closed'. So, please have some decency and actually read before you post stuff? Asking me requests just means you don't actually care about what's on my page and just want a free drawing. Do I have to make the heading even bigger? :I

What’s your favourite Pokémon region? What's your least favourite? Unova! Love everything about it from the Pokémon designs, music, story, characters and the dynamic (Dynamic was so lacking in gen 4, everything moved at the speed of Sinnoh). I hate Sinnoh/Kalos the most.

I want to see more of your drawings! Why don’t you draw more? I have a thing called life, I can't be on deviantArt 24/7 posting art, people have the misconception that we artists just magically make art with a button (I wish though). It takes time. Also it's exam season and also why don't you try draw more. >:v

Where are those visual novels that you were gonna do more of, Boku? For PokemonSaviors? Just be patient, the owner of the group is working really hard on making the next chapter, and I'll be able to do more on that in the future. I might do some visual novels on an old group in the future though. I have ideas. What does ":v" mean? I don't know. It was this habit of mine to type it like every sentence, someone I knew said it a lot, so it sort of rubbed off onto me. Here's my question to you guys though: Do I inspire/motivate you to draw? If not, what does?

#questions #for #me #myart #bokurei

[themarginalthinker]

Whats your favorite fandom you’ve ever been in?

Aaaah, how to answer,,,

I feel like this question is...not necessarily a trick question so to speak, but more like...a question who’s answer has a lot of parts. So I’ll try to keep it short heheh..

So, the first thing is- no fandom. No fandom is my favorite. I like and participate in them all for different reasons. Lets start with the first one I was ever heavily involved enough in to really call myself a ‘part of the fandom’: Danny Phantom 

Now, it’s kinda grown a bit of a cult following as the cartoon itself was canceled in 2007, but it was a very unique experience. Being as small as it was, the Danny Phantom fandom, or, ‘Phandom’ as we liked to call ourselves, was kinda more like an extended family. There was a sense of welcome, for the most part, and let me tell you - aside from a few, I’ve yet to see another fandom so viscerally obsessed with playing and making even more gruesome and unsettling horror tropes then this phandom. Which is fair, as it’s literally a show about how a fourteen year old kid may-or-may-not have literally died to get his superpowers. In any case, this three-season undead wonder of a show was my first fandom calling, and was so for a good four or five years. It was the first time I’d ever written fanfic, and produced art for a fandom, and it was a pretty good first experience with the fun that can come from interacting with people who liked the same things as you. 9.5/10, would join again. 

The next fandom I was involved in was, comparable to the last, a much larger and definitely much more...divided one. Well. Perhaps ‘divided’ isn’t the word I’m looking for, but there were definitely...boundaries. Mostly to do with shipping, but for other aspects as well, which sorta introduced me to the idea of ‘your kink is not my kink’ and ‘don’t like don’t read’ and ‘we are always THIS close from devolving into a steaming shitstorm of ship wars holy shit’. 

This fandom would be the Attack on Titan fandom. 

Now...let me preface this by saying I did not like this fandom when I first encountered it. My first experience with it was when it started invading my other fandoms, as crossovers, references, gifs, whatever. I was sick to death of seeing it before I even actually knew what it was. Then...I kinda...thought the memes used with it was funny. There was some....interesting character designs at least....huh. Ok so wait...giant monsters...swords...a kick-ass theme - ok, what is this. So seeing it pop up on Netflix in the anime section one day, I figured...why not. I was less involved with Danny Phantom at this point, and kinda looking for something else to entertain myself, so, off to the AoT fruity rumpus asshole factory I went. 

And didn’t once look back for four more years. The duration of my highschool fandom scene was utterly dominated by this fandom. I wrote fic, I drew fanart, I formed bonds with other people in the fandom; hell, I almost got into several arguments with people about ships once or twice. To this day, though I can’t honestly call myself really involved anymore, I still read fics from it, and will sometimes peruse some of my ship tags. To this day, Attack on Titan will have been one of the biggest influences in my life in terms of creativity and productivity. I loved it, I still love it, and I hope other people continue loving it in the future. 11/10, would recommend always. 

The third and latest major fandom I’m involved in...well. I think it needs very little introduction. Just one sentence, in fact. 

Let me tell you about Homestuck. 

Now...if you’ve been anywhere on the internet, chances are you’ve at the very least HEARD the Name ‘Homestuck’ and for good reason. While I (very nearly, a that) avoided being sucked into Homestuck proper during it’s heyday - around 2012-13 - it DID stick in my mind for a while. The reason? It. IS. EVERYWHERE. THERE ARE LITERALLY SONG LYRICS STATING ‘YOU CAN’T FIGHT THE HOMESTUCK’ AND THEY AREN’T HYPERBOLE, GUYS. That in itself should explain this fandom pretty well, if nothing else. 

When I was young an naive, I’d asked a friend who was something of a closeted Homestuckian veteran about whether or not I should read it, as all I knew about it was that it was a webcomic and that it was supposedly a really long, weird, batshit one. They told me to run. Run away, and don’t look back. I didn’t listen, and here we are with me ass-first in the middle of act 6 - the longest act - of Homestuck and completely gone on it. There’s a video describing another poor soul’s decent into madness with this comic, with the lines ‘it’s like if Satan had written a webcomic’ and again, not hyperbole... 

I can confidently state that Homestuck is the most varied and wide-spread out of any of the fandom/canon experiences I’ve had so far. Despite it being literally just one storyline, one comic, one(?) metaverse, it still manages to feel like a whole industry of itself, similar to the feeling of the Marvel or DC extended universes. Makes sense, as the comic proper has literally over 8,000 pages claiming and holding a title as one of the longest pieces of english literature written to date. Let me make this as perfectly clear to you as I can - One you’re in, you don’t get out. There are people in this fandom who’ve been in it since the damn thing fucking started in 2009, and haven’t waned in their fandom activity, producing fic, music, art, games, zines, whatever else have you. 

Homestuck is...kinda impossible to describe, really. I think that the author him self honestly said it best when summarizing: “It’s about some kids who play a game.” And honestly? That’s good enough for me. 

Homestuck: 413/10. Good fandom. Best read. 

Well. I think I’ve said plenty. Sorry about the length anon...  ._.”

[itsclydebitches]

Title: Down by the Lake 

Summary: Bakery!AU following Sugar-Coated Everything. Ozpin and Qrow head out on their first date

Fandom: RWBY

Words: 1,956

Warnings: None

Pairings: Ozpin/Qrow

Where to Read it: AO3 or below the cut. 

A/N: It’s 1:00am! So obviously it’s time to post ozqrow shenanigans :D

Ozpin really wasn't an expert on these things. However, even he thought if your date cracked up when they first saw you, that probably wasn't a good sign.

He looked down at his clothes, half-wondering (and hoping) that there was some stain of jam or flour that he could play off, maybe run back inside for a quick change. He was a baker after all. Hardly unusual... but no such luck. Qrow continued to laugh uproariously and Ozpin, as far as he could tell, was immaculate.

Definitely not a good start.

Ozpin looked back up, eyes slightly narrowed. "I'm not sure whether I should be offended or not."

"Oh no, shit, don't go getting offended—" Qrow waved a frantic hand, looking legitimately distressed. He was still chuckling though. "Sorry, Oz. I don't mean to be an asshole about it, but..." Qrow bit down hard on his lip. "A suit? A green suit? I told you we were keeping things casual."

Again Ozpin looked down at his outfit. Ah. He could see now how that might be confusing. In truth though this was casual for him, in a manner of speaking. While it was true that a baker's life didn't lend itself to fine clothes—Ozpin generally stuck to slacks and light, long-sleeved shirts protected by his apron—when given the chance he much preferred to look his best. After all, next to his speech what else did you have to judge a man on but his clothes? Even in college he'd dressed up rather than down, something James gave him nothing but grief for. It was hardly his fault if the athlete couldn't dress himself...

Ozpin smiled. "This is a rather comfortable suit, I assure you. You'll notice that I've forgone the tie."

"Uh huh. It's green."

"I like green."

"I like green," Qrow mimicked, finally closing the distance between them. He hesitated a moment, seemingly unsure, before leaning up to give Ozpin a quick kiss on the cheek. It was such a gentle moment from the normally boisterous man and Ozpin closed his eyes, savoring it. When Qrow pulled back there was a faint cheery color to his cheeks.

"You look good," he said, dispelling that concern. Ozpin was about to tell Qrow the same—dressed in torn jeans and a black t-shirt, an array of jewelry decorating his hands and neck—but before he could Qrow's hand bumped his, pulling back for only a moment before linking together. Ozpin's mind short-circuited and all that got through was that he was far too old for butterflies in his stomach. 

How wonderful.

Qrow began leading them down the street. He was slow about it. Casual. "Where are you taking me?" Ozpin asked. "I recall you were disgustingly close-mouthed over the phone."

Qrow shook his head, grinning. "I told you not to dress up. We're going to feed the ducks, Oz."

"The...?" Ozpin blinked, processing that.

"Yep. Motherfucking ducks. You'll see. They're the punk-rockers of the bird world."

... alright then.

***

Ozpin was ashamed to admit how long it took him to realize that a man named 'Qrow' might well develop a slight fixation on birds. Then again, perhaps he wasn't giving Qrow enough credit. He'd never attempted to hide the tight budget he was working with, especially when there were four mouths for him to feed. Once, while browsing Ozpin's portfolio, Qrow had told him about working as a props designer, specializing in weaponry. It was fascinating but not very lucrative career, especially when he didn't have connections with any of the larger film studios. Tai, meanwhile, apparently excelled as a stay-at-home dad—and Ozpin could easily see raising Ruby and Yang as a full-time job. Qrow had spoken frankly that if he picked the first date (as Ozpin insisted he should) it wouldn't be anything fancy. Perhaps a trip to the park was the most he could afford.

If so, it was an excellent choice.

"Beautiful," Ozpin murmured. Their small town really did have a nice park, large enough and wild enough that it felt like something natural. Their slow walk had led them to the entrance right at dusk and a thin purple sheen shone among the clouds. Ozpin brushed hair out of his face and tilted his head to the sky.

"Sure is," Qrow said and something about his tone made Ozpin think he wasn't talking about the sunset. He ducked his head back down in embarrassment.

"You promised me ducks," Ozpin reminded him, imbuing enough seriousness into the words that Qrow chuckled. The previous mood was broken, but this one was just as comfortable. Qrow nodded and started down the path towards the lake.

"Ever been down here?" he asked.

Ozpin shook his head. "I'm ashamed to say I have not."

"Well all you gotta know is that the little family I’ve acquired is greedy as hell." Qrow shook a baggie he's drawn out of his pocket. "Doesn't matter how late it gets, if there's someone with food nearby then they'll stick around. Claymore will bite your freaking fingers off if you let him, so watch out. Spatha's a little shy. I normally try to create a pile to distract them and then toss the rest her way. Talwar, meanwhile, is just a straight up asshole—"

"Wait." Ozpin drew them to a stop. He ran through his very limited knowledge and... "Did you honestly name a family of ducks after swords?"

Qrow grinned. "'Course I did. Oh, except one. You'll see..."

Ozpin wasn't sure he did see, but dear lord, that was half the fun. Somehow learning of Qrow's odd habit felt more intimate than anything Ozpin had experienced with previous partners and as they reached the lake he found himself swinging their linked hands, feeling like a schoolboy. Heaven help him if Glynda ever saw him like this.

Ah. Hmm. Yes. That must never, ever happen.

"Here we are! Hey there, guys. Mind if Oz and I join you for a while?"

They'd been swarmed as soon as they came into view. The ducks, like squirrels and pigeons, had no fear of humans after generations spent in this place. Ozpin was mindful of their little webbed feet as he and Qrow found a nearby bench, sitting thigh-to-thigh and shoulders brushing. Ozpin was so hyper-focused on the touch that it took him a second to realize Qrow was offering him the bag.

"Just bread," he said, popping a piece into his mouth. Qrow nearly choked as the closest duck (Claymore?) gave what read as an incredibly angry quack.

"Jeez, buddy. Wait a damn second."

Ozpin took the offered handful. He hesitated though, just resting it in his lap. He certainly didn't want to come off as, well, a sanctimonious know-it-all (to quote one of James’ favorite sayings), but...

"You realize this is terrible for them?" Ozpin said, immediately regretting the words.

Qrow cocked his head. "Huh?"

"The bread, it's... I'm so sorry. I realize now how rude this is, but it's essentially a junk food for them, almost no nutritional value. And of course if they fill up on it they won't be eating from their normal habitats and---not that you should have known that. Of course. I just... sorry. I'm sorry, Qrow."

He glanced between Ozpin and the impatient ducks, looking a little thrown. "Well shit. Wait. One crisis at a time. What exactly are you apologizing for?"

Ozpin didn't need a mirror to know that his cheeks had heated. He only sent up a quick thanks that the sun had finally sunk. "I've been told that I… how did Glynda put it? Yes, 'suck the fun out of everything.'"

"You...?" Qrow was staring one moment and then he started snickering, hanging his head—where the ducks started taking the opportunity to peck at his clothes and hair. With a splutter Qrow shooed them off him and sat back up, poking Ozpin in the shoulder.

"Oh man, that is rich considering that I'm definitely having fun. Shit, Oz, we'll just bring something else next time. What do ducks like then?"

Next time. Ozpin swallowed. "Bird seed it always good. Fruits. Chopped lettuce."

"Bird seed it is then," and with a grin Qrow took Ozpin's wrist and helped him throw out the first handful. "They can eat shit for one more night. I ate like 12 cakes just to get you here, you really think a little trivia is going to turn me off?"

Ozpin considered. "Perhaps not."

"Damn straight."

With a lazy silence between them Ozpin settled, tossing out the bread one piece at a time, making sure they lasted as long as possible. Certainly it had nothing to do with the fact that each time he did his arm brushed along the length of Qrow's.

"So," Ozpin said. "Where is this mysterious bird without a sword name?"

"He heard you talking about him." Qrow pointed to a duck that had arrived at the edge of their group. He stood out like a beacon due to his white feathers, as well as the large tuft on his head that looked similar to a Mohawk. "That one is 'Oz.'"

Ozpin froze. The glare he leveled at Qrow had him snickering again. "I am the namesake?"

"I told you, Oz, punk-rockers of the bird world. They gotta have a leader. I've been looking for the right name since we moved here."

"Qrow. There is nothing 'punk-rock' about me."

"Now you say that, but that's exactly what proves you are."

"No sense," Ozpin muttered, but he was secretly pleased. It was a feeling he recognized from other, rare moments. There was just something magical about this time of night. It allowed for possibility... and courage.

He might not have been the first to ask for a date, but Ozpin was the first to offer a real kiss. He took a moment to trace Qrow's shadow with his thumb—making sure he wanted this—before leaning in and discovering just how good humor and contentment tasted on the tongue. Qrow was a little rougher, pulling Ozpin until he had one leg hooked around Qrow's calf, the rest of him nearly up in his lap. Ozpin pushed back into the kiss and Qrow slid his hands through the opening of Ozpin's shirt. Yes, he was thrilled he hadn't worn a tie.

When they came to rest forehead-to-forehead, Ozpin was shaking. It was excitement, arousal, thrill... and just a tiny bit of fear. Because this… this was real.  

"We have an audience," Ozpin murmured, eyes shifting to the disgruntled ducks. He watched Qrow let his eyes slide shut as he smiled.

"Pervy bastards."

Perhaps, but they weren't the only ones.

***

No matter how magical a night, daybreak always arrived. Ozpin was back in his shop long before the sun came up, preparing his wares and opening his door at 8:00am, jue like he had for many, many years.

When Qrow came in late that afternoon—dangling a small bag of birdseed behind Port's back—Ozpin had the absolute pleasure of knowing that their simple time spent together had meant as much to Qrow as it had to him. That was wonderful.

Though not quite as wonderful as Qrow's expression when he saw the new cupcakes available. Each was accompanied by tiny, rice-crispy figurines covered in fondant that sat atop the frosting. In short, each flavor had a corresponding duck.

"There's only one outlier," Ozpin said, completely straight-faced as he showed off the display. "These over here—black forest with a whipped cream topping—are 'crows.'"

Port was no fool. He looked between the two men, noting Qrow's twitchy expression, and slammed a meaty palm down on the counter.

"Fantastic! I'll take five."

#RWBY #Ozqrow #Ozpin #Qrow #rwbyfic

[lostsummerdayz]

Castle Point Anime Convention Wrap-Up!

Castle Point Anime Convention is in the books! It surely indeed was one for the books as well, coming from someone who has not attended Castle Point in literal years. Try...2012 to be exact. Seven years passes by so flipping fast. To think, the last time I was at this convention was back when I was a mere nineteen year old! Regardless, time flies and as we get older and we evolve, so too must our conventions that we attend. If conventions do not improve of evolve, then they will never last for the long term. Rather dire things to say for an opening to a wrap-up post, but it’s how I personally feel on the matter. It’s a challenge for grassroots conventions to pull it off, but for those who do, the payoffs are grand. In Castle Point’s case, they have pulled it off. They have evolved greatly from the small yet modest “college con” that I recall attending way back when.

KDA Akali by projectxayah and KDA Evelynn by melanubis

As such, to end this foreword, I’ll be making some comparisons to the last time I attended CPAC back in 2012, to now, throughout this article. It’s going to be quite a lengthy read, so strap in everyone!

The Meadowlands Expo venue was simple to arrive with no issues on our end. A simple fifteen-minute-at-best-half-hour-at-worse-due-to-traffic bus ride from Port Authority was all that was needed to arrive. The bus stop even lets you off directly in front of the convention center itself! Here is where I can immediately talk about how helpful the staff was towards myself and the rest of the podcast. When we needed help as far as knowing where to go and con assistance in general, everyone was able to help, but, there weren’t any crowding that I noticed as well. Lines were handled well, and the Dealer’s Room/Artist Alley, places where there’s known to be a packed pandemonium, was handled well. Mainly this was due in part to there being a designated entrance and a designated exit. Take notes future cons!

As the time drew nearer for the gates to be open, the hall slowly but surely filled itself with various cosplayers, attendees wearing gaming and anime inspired apparel, and soon enough the events began.

One of the first events was a maid performance, made to kick off the opening of the anime convention. It certainly had set the tone for the convention for sure, where one could hear it in ambiance even if they weren’t there to physically attend.

After the opening ceremonies concluded, I was left to explore the event as it were. One of the first stops I take in any convention is within the game room, so to speak. Majority of the games featured, due in part from the Snow Phoenix team, in the game room below are games in which I have played at least once, play on a regular at the local arcade, or games in which I never had played before (Or ever will play outside of cons)

Regardless of which category the games fell under, it’s always fun to go back to these games from time to time. Free play is just a bonus in all honesty. My personal favorite of the games featured here had to have been Sound Voltex, always a fine game in my book. The second being Crossbeats, a touch based rhythm game which, sadly, development ceased as of last year. It’s still a great game to go back to from time to time.

Another portion of the game room were console setups. These had a slew of fighting games ranging from the Street Fighter Collection to Mortal Kombat 11, Soul Calibur 6 to Tekken 7, and of course an entire section of CRT televisions dedicated to Melee. Tournaments were held throughout the weekend, which, unfortunately I didn’t make it as far as I would have liked. However, those who I had met were friendly enough to me.

Back on the topic of rhythm games, I had attended a rhythm game panel that was being presented later on that afternoon. The convention was split into two venues. The main venue, at the Meadowlands Expo, had the main events while the Holiday Inn had the extra panels. This was where the Rhythm Game panel was held.

Held by RhythmCore Gaming, the rhythm game panel spoke about the history of rhythm games, mainly focusing on Bemani games, as well as touching upon mobile rhythm games briefly as well. For those reading who aren’t aware of what a “Bemani” is, essentially it’s the rhythm game division of Konami. Familiar titles include Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania IIDX, Sound Voltex, Pop’n Music, and so much more.

All in all, as far as presentation, it was a well run panel. From a technical standpoint, the Castle Point staff made sure all equipment that were in use were running well, as far as projectors for example. Crowd control was also handled quite well, to avoid overflow. From the panelist’s standpoint, I feel they had gotten the gist of what each game is and how they play. Being slightly critical, I feel some of those who were assigned to talk about a specific game went more in depth with their game than others, but I know more than anyone the challenge of running a rhythm game panel.

See, way back in 2013, I, too, ran a rhythm game panel at a convention that has long since been discontinued. A good friend of mine and I both ran the panel, yet, with technical difficulties due to the inability of the staff to assist us, as well as not informing the panel ahead of us that we were running late due to the technical difficulties, the experience gave me more of a headache than I’d like to admit.

An awesome ass couple cosplay that, sadly, did not have any social media :( I still dug it!

However, this is where I can once again praise the Castle Point staff for being on top of making sure the panel ran smoothly. I can also give respect to the RhythmCore Gaming group for tackling on a subject to appeal to a crowd that may look at an arcade rhythm game in fear and confusion. I suppose I admit I attended this panel to see how others would tackle such a topic. I give the panel a “Certified Nay’s Thumb Up.”

For the rest of the convention, I had made sure to try to get my fill in of taking pictures of as many cosplayers as I found whom caught my eye, all of whom you’ll see throughout this post. One in particular who caught my eye was a Kasumi cosplayer.

Kasumi from Persona 5 Royale by ZodiacKind

See, again, for the reader who may not know this about me. I am a huge Persona fan. When I had heard news that Persona 5 Royale was a thing and I had saw the trailer earlier that same week, I was hoping that the cosplay community would work fast.

The cosplay community would not disappoint me.

This cosplayer deserves special mention just for having this at the ready so quickly, so, for that I appreciate this so much!

Another cosplayer who I felt deserved an honorable mention was a woman who was a very good Sub-Zero, but also earlier that weekend she was Kratos. I had the chance to interview her as Sub-Zero in which the video can be found below.

Sub-Zero by Amarys Berry

I mentioned in my previous post about Winter Brawl that vendors are the underappreciated glue that holds a regional/major together. There will be a post separate from this one where I interview one of the vendors from Artist Alley, but the same sentiment is stated here. There are so many vendors in the Artist Alley with their own story and own purpose for doing what they love.

I, in fact, covered an Artist Alley vendor at the Con itself! However, I feel a paragraph alone won’t be enough to give them justice, so please be sure to read the companion article here where I discuss meeting with Bunnies & Cream! You don’t want to miss it, for sure!

In any case, the same could be said for cosplayers. Cosplayers are not so much the glue, but the exoskeleton that makes the entire convention worth it. Each cosplayer has their own story in terms of what got them into it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what made them cosplay certain characters.

Unfortunately, things can tend to go awry when you least expect it. The blade on your sword prop may hang loose, an annoying thread may linger on one’s dress, a shirt may be ripping from the seams. All of these nightmares are easily avoided by those on standby who are dedicated to make any mess a fixable one!

This was quite possibly one of the few points of interest that I saw at the convention. An “all in one” emergency repair station not unlike one you would see at a convention. I couldn’t help myself. I had to learn more. Thankfully these guys were friendly enough to answer my questions I’ve had. Big thanks!

With all of the maintenance that goes into making the perfect, subjectively of course, cosplay, no matter if it’s been a decade or ten days, every cosplayer is equally important to the well-being of any convention.

Even moreso when cosplayers engage in violent carnage within the squared circle and go for a swinging neck cutter as a finishing move.

In what was perhaps the highlight of the convention, the Cosplay Pro Wrestling event was a fitting end to an action packed weekend. Although I had caught it while in the middle of the event, what surprised me the most was how there was an actual story arc.

From what I was able to gather, the main story arc revolved around the face, or hero, Big Boss, feuding with Team Rocket, who formed an allegiance with Princess Peach. The main event was scheduled for Big Boss vs Princess Peach for the title.

Throughout the set, one of the matches I did see in its fullest was Winter Soldier versus, and I quote, “Jeff Harley Quinn.”

As you could expect from the name alone, this Harley Quinn shared a lot of Jeff Hardy’s likeliness as far as his mannerisms and his moveset. What one may not have expected, was Winter Soldier, who bore resemblance and a moveset similar to Roman Reigns.

Spears, Twists of Fates, Leg Drops, and Swanton Bombs were present here as one would expect to see from fans of both wrestlers, yet they also brought about some of Quinn’s cunning which was what gave her the overall victory.

Harley Quinn by Catie V

Eventually, after a match of Link vs Liu Kang, the main event transpired. Paing homage to heel stables of the Attitude Era, trickery was used while Team Rocket was able to give enough damage to Big Boss to have Princess Peach secure the pin.

However, when all hope seemed lost... Mario and Luigi, decked out in “Bullet Bill Club” shirts, went out and chased Team Rocket as well as Princess Peach out of the ring. What followed after was a tag team match, with more story building now that the Bullet Bill Club entered the scene.

There was so much more that could be said as to what transpired in this two hour finale to an otherwise action packed weekend, including one of the guys from Attack on Titan fighting Isabelle from Animal Crossing, but it was one of those events where you had to be there to experience it.

That’s the one thing I can say about the convention. For a two-day con, there was always something to experience. If you wanted to meet one of your favorite voice actresses like I had, you could do so.

If you wanted to take in the sights and experience panels and learn new things about otaku culture and the like, you could do so as well. There’s literally no right or wrong way to attend the convention and the only thing that I can recommend is to do everything you possibly can. Unfortunately some conventions don’t have that, but, with this year’s Castle Point I can definitely say that the community as well as the staff had pulled out all the stops to make it memorable.

With that said in conclusion, for this being my first anime convention of the year, it was a fantastic way to start. Thank you once again to the Castle Point staff for giving myself and my fellow members of the Geeks podcast for giving us the opportunity. I’ll definitely try to attend next year for sure.

As always, may the Lost Summer never end! Tune to us soon for the next post!

#cpac2019 #Castle Point Anime Convention

[republicstandard]

The Standard Conversation - Ivan Throne & The Dark World

Ash Sharp Editor

I am pleased to tell you that no, I am not writing Young Adult fiction. Ivan Throne is a very real person, and, according to him, The Dark World is a real place- and we all live in it.

He is the bestselling author of THE NINE LAWS. Speaker, business manager and seasoned veteran of the financial industry, he's also a deaf ninja. literally, he can't hear anything but can make you eat your own legs with one hand.

Badass.  He has been gracious enough to answer some questions for us in this, the second installment of The Standard Conversation. We talked about the meaning of manhood, Islam, cataclysmic war and tiny Ben Shapiro. Read on for an illuminating glimpse into the Dark World.

RS: Ivan, tell me about the Dark World. I'm sitting here on my balcony overlooking some nice views, and life is pretty sweet for me. What's so dark about the world?

It ends, doesn’t it? And so will you.

You’re a finite consciousness, in a finite creation, and both of those things are integrally designed to sputter out and cease. Lots of people think I mean “dark” as in “bad” or “horrible” or “cruel”. The world certainly can be those things, and often is.

But the real lesson there - in the fact of not only your own death but that of the universe itself – is this:

Brother, this is not a dress rehearsal. There are no do-overs. And the inexorable slide of things is towards entropic heat death. The other critical aspect of this creation, this existence, is that the universe does not care.

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That is a terribly hard thing for most people to understand, let alone accept. The universe doesn’t care whether you’re having a good day, a bad day, a great life, or a short and brutal one. The universe does not perceive you; it doesn’t hear you scream.

It just keeps on spinning and dying.

Once your mind, and more importantly your heart, grasp and accept this truth – then action is freed up and the man abandons pity towards himself and transits through life unblinded.

That is where the immense work of Men is truly done.

Image: VixSwift Photography

RS: You're quite active in this growing scene of positive masculinity with guys like Hunter Drew of The Family Alpha and others. Why do you think there has been this growth in 'positive alpha-male' philosophy?

The accelerating return of masculinity to the West is a severe and fearsome process. It is severe for many reasons. It is severe because it is unapologetic, and as a movement, it rejects any infection of weakness or groveling supplication. We are men. We are not castrati. We did not ask for permission to build Greece and Rome or the empires of the West.

Nor do we ask for permission to restore men to their inherent, rightful place in the pantheon of human power. It’s our nature, and all pendulums swing. Men like Hunter, myself and many others are pushing hard and driving deeper momentum into that swing, making sure it takes deep and abiding root in our own generation and the next.

There are powerful signs of success, deeper than we had imagined. Generation Z is avowedly militaristic, utterly contemptuous of weak and feminized society, and openly seeks the strong hand of a Generation X that knows the time has come to teach the methods and truths that we have incubated for forty years as the West slid into degeneracy.

This return of authentic masculinity is also a lagging and leading indicator.

It is a lagging indicator of a foundational shift, rejection of cultural suicide, and decision by men to simply stop caring what those who want to destroy them may think or speak of them. This is profoundly important.

If hostile Islamists overtly declare they will kill me, take my women, and indoctrinate my children to hate me – what do I care for their insults when their very spears of war are aimed at the heart of my nation?

If hostile Marxists with a history of dumping scores of millions of naked, emaciated and gunshot bodies into pools of black blood and spattered fat at the bottom of killing pits, want to call me toxic – what do I care for their words, when their actions are where my arms and brothers must contend?

Thus the process is fearsome:

The return of authentic, powerful, unapologetic masculinity is a leading indicator of war.

Be very glad that Donald Trump is at the helm of the American nation as the age grows quickly hot.

RS: Ha! You're right on the money there. I can only imagine how monumentally screwed we would be with Clinton in power. I read from your site that you "don't care" about the Jewish Question -rightly so in my view.  This being the case, why does Ben Shapiro call you a White Supremacist?

Ben’s a darling muppet, isn’t he? The short takes and his inability to reach the truth on the top shelf are quite fun. Two things actually came to light immediately afterward. The first was the sheer number of people he calls a “white supremacist”, many of them bizarrely so. I had no idea. It seems to be a de rigueur fallback position of his, which I discovered with some amusement. I’m not a listener or reader of his, so I hadn’t been paying attention to what he thinks or doesn’t think of people.

The other was his timing. Vox Day had just released another philosophy bestseller, “SJWs Always Double Down” in which our darling Ben was eviscerated in rather blunt terms. I wrote the foreword to the book, and I was told by some industry insiders that Ben thought it would be safer to tangentially target someone, anyone, other than Vox Day.

Well, we all make errors, and Ben is no exception. No doubt we’ll meet someday and chat intensely about it.

RS: You know, I think if Ben could approach the talk in good faith without trying to pull rhetorical tricks that would be a fascinating debate.

In THE NINE LAWS you talk about utilizing our innate psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism to achieve goals. These are not considered by most to be desirable traits- though the book also contains lines such as;

"Do not fail to believe in possibilities. Do not fail to believe in yourself. It is how odds are ferociously defied. Even preposterous dreams can be made real, my brother. I am the living proof."

By any measure, this is a message of positive self-determination. What inspired this usage of the 'Dark Triad' to produce positive effects in men?

Men must play the cards they are dealt with. That means seeing clearly, understanding correctly, and acting decisively.

Thought, word, and deed are the foundations of the human being. Thought becomes vision. Words become plans. Deeds become competent. The dark triad of personality takes those a great step further, focuses those inherent human processes into sharper relief.

Vision becomes narcissism, faith, and belief in a future that you will personally shape into existence. Plans become Machiavellianism, the ability to shade and tumble and turn the world until it coalesces into actuality. Competence becomes psychopathy, where the ego dissolves and a man deploys raw, unfiltered, and unblinking execution of power in the world.

Where these things collide at a single point, you have what I call the detonation of fate: the human being bringing every capacity and venue to bear into the moment of realization, the determination of what will be.

This is a conscious and deliberate application of natural human traits, taken a radical step further, and each trait put into service of the others. It’s far more common than people realize.

Most simply never do it consciously and deliberately.

Any project manager worth his pay understands Machiavellianism. To realize enterprise vision with competent execution he must entangle and entwine men and resources, time and effort. He cannot hire and fire; he has total accountability but no authority. Thus, subtle alliances and relationships are how his success or failures pivot along the way.

Any world champion understands narcissism. He must focus his entire mind, heart, and body into the single-minded pursuit of a glittering and glorious vision with a ferocity that few can comprehend, let alone emulate. Not one champion ever lived who did not believe in himself, and I tell you that the vision of the champion seems deluded and extreme to the common man.

Any military leader grasps the necessity of psychopathy in determining objectives, issuing orders, and the planning of destruction and death. He coldly and pitilessly achieves political results on the battlefield. He will throw men like “clumps of earth” and accept the loss and suffering of the troops as an inherent part of that icy delivery of fate.

Like any power, capacity or tool, the dark triad traits can be turned in malevolent direction. A sword cares not who it cuts, after all. And men are fallen animals. Disordered, dysregulated traits are what happens when men do not adhere to discipline.

It is a dark world. Possession of extreme capacity has nothing whatsoever to do with moral elevation or spiritual advancement. That is not how the dark world works. As human beings, we have choices to make in the service of our sacred purpose, and those choices – why we envision the future, how we plan it, and where we execute on it – shapes what men later call history.

Weakness is not moral. Abdication of power is not spiritual advancement. To use pity as a strategy is obscene for the human being, who is formed in the image of God and bears the sacrosanct responsibility of serving as a vehicle for the will of Heaven.

The truth of the dark world is this: no one is coming to save you. You are personally responsible for your survival, and that of your culture and civilization.

Do not grovel and whine, seeking mercy from a universe that does not hear.

Stand as a man, build to the best of your capacity, and defend it and your loved ones with all the ferocity you possess.

Image: VixSwift Photography

RS: The Western world is under grave threat from migration- more people are on the move today than at any time in history. Pew Research indicates that Europe could be as much as 20% Muslim by the middle of the Century, with nations like France, Sweden and my own United Kingdom with far higher populations. This is, without doubt, an undesirable outcome for Europeans. Is there hope for the West?

There is hope for the West if it accepts the reality of war.

There is hope for the West if the men who inherited it, return to their true and inherent nature as warriors and priests.

There is hope for the West if leaders stand forth with the vision, plans, and competence that are so bitterly demanded.

But there are no guarantees.

Fate tumbles and turns in the dark world, and there is no question that the times are dangerous, full of shocks and fear.

Sweden is a degenerate, obsequious pit of unforgivable cuckery and the descent of that nation into insane, multicultural suicide will require serious blood and killing to return it to the fold of the West.

France may yet detach itself from that same trajectory, although again much blood will be required. The spirit of France has not yet been thrown down and murdered, but France will need other nations to lead it.

The United Kingdom is not finished. The long, stable rule of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth will soon pass away, and the tumult and resulting chaos of subsequent sovereigns will eventually settle. It will fall upon her loyal subjects to ensure that the Crown is preserved, for it is through the Crown that the spirit and ferocity of the United Kingdom has its best chance for survival and restoration during the existential wars that come.

RS: Do you have any specific ideas on how that scenario could be achieved? If existential war is inevitable, how does the West win it?

From the ground up, through the hearts of men of the West who see clearly, understand fully, and take direct action for the preservation of their lives, their families, their communities and countries, and culture.

The dark world does not do pity, but it does reward the bold and the decisive, for that is also the way of this dying creation.

The roaring return of authentic masculinity is not merely an indicator or pendulum but also a prerequisite for victory in an existential clash of civilizations.

I intend for us to win it, and I call brother the men who rise and march with me.

Be a bloody Man and fight for what is yours!

Live with sacred purpose and utter savage ferocity!

Anything less and your culture is going to die, and all your lineage with it.

RS:No time to mess around with video games then. While you don't appear to be a particularly political guy (beyond the support for Donald Trump) people seem quite keen to call you a Nazi or Alt-Right or whatever. I also know you like taunting leftists online- is that just for fun? Doesn't that make you a 'status-quo warrior'?

I’ve been called every epithet across the entire political spectrum. Marxists call me a Nazi, want me banned and my readers imprisoned. Nazis call me a race-traitor, want me beaten and gassed. It’s really quite delightful. And it is useful to see how antifragility works, which is part and parcel of dealing with haters and trolls both online and in real life.

RS: Antifragility?

Think about where your vulnerabilities are, and turn them into pits of overthrow for your adversary. Consider what your strengths are, and how your vulnerable brothers can benefit from their application.

There is very little difference between a general sustaining the morale of his army through declarations of spirit before the arrayed ranks of his troops, and a social media influencer proving antifragility for his followers against the emotional, writhing attacks of idiotic adversaries. It is simply a new age and a new medium, but the message is the same:

“We will have victory, and you will not. And we’re coming for you.”

Anything less than that is a disservice to the army, and a failure by the general to lead spiritual command in war.

RS: Who is your hero?

My late father, who by his example showed me how to think, how to live, and what mattered. It is in homage and fealty to him, and to the legacy of the culture, I am descended from, that I do the work I do.

RS: You have a piece of art/t-shirt on your website that depicts ISIS terrorists in front of the Eiffel Tower skewered on stakes in true Vlad the Impaler style. The tagline is Impalement Stops Invasion. Obviously, you don't care about people taking offense at your ideas- but what inspired this? Do you really think this should or could be done?

The Impalement Stops Invasion shirts grew out of some discussions I had with people about Islamic terror, and moreover how terror works. Terror is designed to freeze you, to cause fixation of the mind and heart, and prevent decisive action.

Islam has nearly redefined terror in the modern age, and they are absolutely hell-bent on it. People do not grasp that beheading videos are merely the tip of the iceberg. The dead in the Bataclan in Paris were disemboweled, castrated, their eyes gouged out. They were forced to crawl screaming over their own entrails before being finally butchered. Young girls at the school siege of Beslan in Russia were viciously gang-raped and sodomized to death with rifle barrels, and similarly, Islam has cruel intentions for the other nations of the West. Floor plans of America middle schools were found in Iraq, and the reasoning was quite simple: the girls are big enough to rape, and the boys are too small to fight back.

What stops terror?

I will tell you what stops terror, here in the dark world:

Ferocity.

It is not a question of whether ruthless and public impalement of jihadists could be done. Of course, it can; there is no insurmountable logistical or mechanical reality that prevents the physical hoisting of Islamic invaders on fatal stakes at the national borders of Europe.

Nor do I declare whether it should be done. That is a question for politicians, for State officials, and ultimately for the men who protect the women and children of the West. And it is, at the last resort, the decision of those men whether their politicians and State officials have failed in their duty to preserve, protect, and defend them.

The design does speak and communicate an absolutely uncontestable truth: if it were done, the jihadist invasion would stop.

Would you dare cross a border, where those who came before you were a grim and incontestable warning against your entry?

Would you dare to rape and behead a Western schoolgirl, if you knew a wooden stake would be driven into your anus and out your screaming mouth before your agonized carcass was hoisted to the sky?

Do Western cartoonists dare to draw Mohammed?

Jihadists dare to explode and butcher and rape and machine-gun and roar down our streets with trucks in bloody massacres.

I will simply say that all pendulums swing, and where Governments fail to protect Men… Men form new Governments.

It’s a dark world. It was dark before I got here, brother. It will be dark long after I am gone. A sword cares not who it cuts, and terror is a dreadful sword in any hand.

The shirt’s a great and impressive design by a very talented artist. And hope and pity aren’t strategies.

Vlad would say I’m right.

RS: I think he probably would. OK, tough question time. What does it mean to be a man?

That’s really the critical question the West faces, isn’t it?

What does it mean to be a Man?

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What does it mean to be a Man when failure means the death of a thousand years of heritage? What does it mean to be a Man who fights against the degenerate slaughter of his very identity?

The answer is the same one it always has been: the grave and linear process of manhood, war, and salvation.

Manhood is derived from the foundational layer of conscience, from the voice of God that works through the heart and informs the mind, and thence forms the decisions by which deeds are birthed. Manhood is conscience married to discipline, to the strength and habits of achievement and building and creating in this dark world those things that survive and outlast us.

Family, honor, country, culture, civilization. Great works of art, of construction, of ideas, of civilization itself and of the prerogative to detonate fate according to sacred purpose!

Men are designed for war. The very shape of Men is formed to serve our male burden of performance. That performance, that sacrifice, that ongoing painful and agonizing struggle, is an integral part and parcel of being a man.

It is difficult, and challenging, and often bitterly and continuously unappreciated.

Where is there rest from this?

The answer lies in the respite of performance, in the total and unrelenting savage ferocity that accompanies adherence to sacred purpose.

When you have given your work everything you have, with nothing held back, and you have burned your ships on the shore and thrown away the scabbard of your sword and walked into battle with nothing held back…

…life and death are both release in the aftermath.

Therein is the rest, albeit momentary, of the male burden of performance.

Then it begins again, and men return to the work that is their nature.

Sacred purpose, in the life of the individual man, is where all the infinite strength of honor and dignity and power arise.

How does one identify one’s sacred purpose, and lay bare the road of the Way that brings both immortal glory and the peace of life and death? What is the process by which one identifies and adheres to the discipline of the divine conscience?

That is, precisely, what I and my partner teach in the Immersion Forge.

Image: VixSwift Photography

Sacred purpose, savage ferocity, and adherence to the divine path of fulfilled conscience.

The first Immersion Forge in January at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was sold out. The response has been incredible; testimony from the men who attended has been remarkable and explosively strong.

We spent a year creating the curriculum, refining it, testing it, and shaping the structure of delivery.

The results were phenomenal.

The next Immersion Forge is in New York in the Park View Suite of Trump International Hotel and Tower on February 24th.

There are eight seats left, but they go quickly.

We have tapped into what Men need in this dreadful age, and we build a brotherhood of sacred purpose and momentum.

There is a Way that can be learned, and the process of connecting divine conscience, sacred purpose, and total savage ferocity is driven by the esoteric teachings of the ninja and the dread combat experience of my partner Mr. Swift, a ruthless mercenary who has seen and done the unimaginable.

Men teach men, and men learn from men.

That, too, is the Way. And the Way of men is cruelly demanded more now than ever.

Men do not leave their brothers behind, and that is why Mr. Swift and I deliver the Immersion Forge.

Civilizations collide, brother. And collision comes fast.

We mean to win, and with everything we have.

Join us, and march with us as brothers.

RS: Thanks, Ivan!

There you have it folks. Intense ideas spoken plainly. I highly recommend that you follow Ivan Throne on Twitter because he is both hilarious and thought provoking- partcularly when he's trolling weak internet communists into oblivion. If you like the way Ivan's mind works you should buy The Nine Laws: Survival, Momentum, and Triumph and read it. It's a permanent fixture on my work table.

Ivan's philosophy is clearly written and explained, and he gives his ideas room to breathe. You need to put the work into his book not through wrapping your head around overly complex post-modernist sentence structure but in quiet reflection upon yourself. That's the greatness in his writing- it is a collaborative experience with the reader that encourages the discovery of your own anwers while providing the calm hand of a great teacher in guidance.

Coming this Autumn 2018 he releases The Three Gates: Manhood, War, and Salvation through Castalia House, and is the second in his triptych of philosophy books.

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