#most impressive are the ones who get banned before even saying anything

[casual-atrocities]

and remember kids, trolling queerphobic servers is a team sport

#linked universe #lu #conservative server saga #i got banned pretty fast #but i did actually manage to get in 3-4 messages #even with slow mode #most impressive are the ones who get banned before even saying anything #but also 2 of my friends have been going for quite dome time #even got as far as staging a fake gay awakening between each other #fake only because one of em is actually aroace #fun times #gonna be posting updates in reblogs <3

[ghostboneswrites2]

A Mess || Part 2

New account! @ghostbones was banned! Transferring everything here starting with this series since it was the most popular!

Summary: You make amends with Daryl as you grapple with the insecurities and psychological damage in the aftermath of your husband's affair.

18+ MDNI || WARNINGS: profanity, aggressive Shane

        You only used his tent for one night, the guilt of that alone setting in. You shouldn't have put him on the spot like that, he was only being kind, a rarity from him. He made an effort to stay away from the others, and the one time he went out of his way to be kind it backfired.

        You hadn't spoken to him since that night, nearly three days ago. You also heavily avoided anyone else. You didn't stay in the RV either. Glenn found you a new sleeping bag and Daryl made you a makeshift tent from a tarp, far from the others as you requested, but not so far that it was unsafe. You stayed there most of the time, only leaving to help the other women with laundry or to eat. And, really, you hadn't ate much. You'd fetch your own water and boil it, and you'd only eat when someone brought you something. 

        Lori avoided you like the plague, but you had to give her credit -- she took the judgmental stares from the others quite well. If you were her, not that you ever would have been, you'd have snapped at someone by now.

        You hadn't ate anything all day. It was getting later, the sun slowly sinking, painting the sky in hues of orange and purple. You watched the pink clouds as they rolled over, stomach growling. You just couldn't bring yourself to face anyone after your outburst. It was humiliating to be cheated on, and to announce it like that. Had you really been that undesirable? What was it about her? Her cheekbones, her perfect teeth, her long legs?

        She definitely had more going on in the body department. Even with the recent loss of weight you had all experienced due to lack of food, she still had curves. You, however, were dwindling to say the least. Your recent hunger strike wouldn't help, of course, but it didn't matter now. Who did you have to impress?

        "Still some squirrel." A familiar voice rasped from overhead. You looked up at Daryl. 

        "No thanks." You said. Your voice was small and tired, your eyes sunken in and dressed with dark bags. You were a pitiful sight.

        "Really gonna let them assholes do this to ya?" He asked. "Ya look like shit."

        "Must be nothing new, or my husband wouldn't have fucked someone else." You scoffed. 

        "Don't do that."

        "Do what? I'm not fishing for compliments. If it was so bad his mind had to wander in the middle of the end  of the world.." You shook your head, tightening your jaw as you shivered. You were lacking in iron lately with the absence of any kind of nutrition, so as soon as the sun began to set you felt cold.

        "Didn't say ya were." He shrugged. He glanced around the camp. People were cleaning up their dishes and getting the fire down to a small flame. Shane was staring at the two of you, as he often did when Daryl was anywhere near you. 

        Daryl sighed and sat crisscross in the dirt in front of you. Your empty eyes fell on his, and for a moment, he felt a twinge of actual sympathy. Jesus, you were a mess.

        "Eat." He demanded, handing you an old tin can with some squirrel in it.

        "Not hungry." You denied.

        "Quit bein' a kid and eat." He insisted. You stared at him blankly for a while before you took a little piece of rodent meat and chewed it slowly.

        "Tastes weird." You complained.

        "Yeah, it's tree rat." He said, matter of fact.

        "Gross." You scrunched your nose.

        "Uh-huh. World's gross. Keep eatin'."

        "Why are you doing this?" You sighed.

        "Quit askin' questions and eat."

        You took another piece and began chewing. It wasn't that bad, but it was strange.

        "I'm sorry." You apologized.

        "For what?"

        "The other night. Putting you on the spot." You admitted.

        He just nodded and watched you grab another piece of meat. 

        "People act out when they're hurt." He finally said, somewhat reassuringly, at least for him.

        "It's no excuse. You offered me help and I took advantage of that. I'm sorry." You repeated.

        "Ain't that deep. C'mon, finish up." He urged, nodding his head to the little can that had one last piece of meat in it. You took it and got it over with.

        "Needs salt." You criticized.

        "Next time I come 'cross a salt shaker in the woods I'll grab it." He retorted, taking the can and standing up. 

----

        Everyone was asleep so you took the opportunity to go down to the quarry and wash up. It was nice to wash the sweat and dirt that accumulated on your skin away. It was also just nice to feel like all the stress from the past few days was melting away. If only it was a hot spring instead of a cold quarry.

        You got yourself dressed quickly, fearing any wandering eyes. Sometimes Ed liked to watch the girls take a bath, but you were pretty sure he was asleep. You didn't go straight back to camp, though. You sat by the water, knees curled up to your chest. You were chilly and damp, but it was still peaceful.

        You took the time alone to finally let it out -- the anger and frustration, the hurt, the humiliation, and most of all -- the self doubt. Insecurity had taken over your mind, tugging at every corner. You were never that self conscious before. You never really dealt with rejection, and getting a boyfriend was never much of a hassle. You weren't a supermodel by any means, you were pretty average, but you were still attractive and secure enough in your self image that you didn't struggle too much with it. Even before the outbreak, those nights you suspected Shane got a little too much attention at the bar, you never assumed it would be about you, but more so his lack of self control.

        This with Lori was different, though. There was more to it, something he wanted from you that you simply didn't have. You felt the lump in your throat grow sharper and more painful as tears began to glide down your cheeks, little sniffles breaking away here and there. You wanted to scream, to sob, to throw things and punch people. You couldn't risk drawing any attention to yourself, though. That would surely be a win for the opposing team.

        "The hell ya doin' out here? I made ya a tent, woman." Daryl asked. You jumped a little. You didn't hear him wander up.

        You quickly wiped your cheeks, hoping the moon wasn't bright enough to illuminate the tears.

        "Oh, I was just..." You sighed. "Just crying like an idiot over two other idiots." You mumbled in defeat, looking down at the ground. 

        Daryl looked around awkwardly. He wasn't really the comforting type. The hell was he supposed to do with a crying lady?

        "I could still kill 'em." He shrugged. You couldn't help the laugh that leaked out.

        "Could, but then they'd crucify you." 

        "They don't already?" He retorted. You nodded. He had a point. "Shouldn't be cryin' over them."

        "You don't get it. We're -- We were married. I -- I thought we were happy. We never fought, he never yelled at me or hit me. He --" You had to stop, that painful lump rising in your throat again. You reminisced the thirty seconds Daryl had managed to free you from tears. Your eyes stung. "I just.." You began to cry again.

        He just stood there, debating whether or not he should just walk away. He had bigger things to worry about. Then again, not really. Hunt, sleep, repeat. That was pretty much his routine.

        "I know she'd prettier and has nicer tits but god damn it why was it so easy for him?" You vented between quiet sobs and sniffles. "I mean, I could have never hurt him that way. And I damn sure wouldn't have treated him so bad afterward."

        You buried your face in your knees, hugging yourself tight. Then, you realized who you were blubbering to.

        "God, I'm sorry. You don't have to listen to this. I'm fine." You rambled.

        " 'S okay." He said, sitting down beside you. "Get it out if ya need to."

        You just cried and cried, not baring to look his way and see him probably judging you. A guy like that would surely have better things to do than sit there while you whined about love while the world was falling apart around you. Then, it hit you; "Why are you sitting here listening to this? You're free to go, you don't owe me anything."

        You hated how your voice crackled and shook, so high pitched with the restriction of tears and misery.

        "I know." He shrugged.

        "Then why?"

        "Want me to go?" He asked.

        "I don't know." You admitted, frustrated with the overwhelming diversity of emotions. The truth was that you liked having someone who was willing to be in your presence. Most people just gave you sad looks or stared with curious eyes, no doubt having heard about the other night.

        "Nothin' wrong with a li'l company." He assured you. " 'M Sure it's hard."

        "The hardest part isn't even the betrayal it's... It's what your mind does to you afterward." You explained. He nodded.

        "Like what?"

        "Like.." You shook your head, chuckling dryly at your stupid brain. "It's stupid."

        "Lotta things are stupid. What's on your mind?"

        "It's just.. Why? Why now? I mean, I'm alive, I'm here. I get why Lori needed someone but he had me. Every night I made the sleeping bag up. I always let him use up the pillow so he wouldn't be sore the next day. I woke up when he did so he wouldn't have to feel alone in the mornings. I made sure he had water first thing, always saved a few bites of my food for him because I knew he'd still be hungry. She doesn't do any of that. She doesn't wash his clothes for him, or make sure to sew the holes in his socks. She doesn't--"

        "She ain't you." He summed you up. You nodded. "Sounds like his loss, then."

        "But, was it? I mean, I'm practically a pile of bones, here. And my teeth aren't straight and --"

        "Nah. Can't do that. You'll go crazy pickin' yourself apart like that."

        "But -- I just don't understand." You groaned.

        "Don't need to. Probably wont, ever. People like that don't make no damn sense."

        "I feel so..."

        "Pissed off?"

        "Yeah, but also.. Just sad. And insecure." You mumbled the last part.

        "Insecure 'bout what? Bad taste in men?" He scoffed. You rolled your eyes.

        "About me, asshole."

        "What about you?" He pushed his eyebrows together. He didn't see anything wrong with you.

        "I don't know. That's what's killing me. I don't know what made me not good enough all of a sudden." 

        "Ain't got nothin' to do with you. Some guys just... Don't know a good thing when they got it."

        "Yeah, well, I'm starting to think maybe I'm not that good." You said, pushing yourself up to your feet. "I'm going to bed. Coming?"

        "To your bed?" He joked, standing himself up.

        "Thought you weren't rebound dick." You teased, walking ahead of him. He scanned you up and down from the back. You were thin, sure, but given the circumstances you still looked good. From the back, at least. He never took the time to check you out from the front. He shook his head.

        " 'M not." He agreed. "And I snore, so.."

        "Yeah, you and every other man in this camp. Surprised walkers haven't found us yet with all the noise at night. It's like a damn symphony of hogs."

        "Nah, hogs squeal."

        "Okay, swine expert." You rolled your eyes. You stopped in front of the tent he made for you and looked down at it for a moment. "Thanks for this, by the way."

        "Weren't nothin'." He said.

        "Well it's a place to sleep which means a lot nowadays." You told him.

        "Guess so." He agreed. "Night."

----

        He was back. Rick was back. The others came back from a run into the city. Shane's face was priceless. How were you supposed to contain your amusement? Then you realized Rick came back with them instead of one of the others who had left camp with them that morning. That person was Merle Dixon, and Daryl was pissed, to say the least.

        It shocked everyone when you jumped on Shane. He pulled Daryl into a chokehold for lashing out at the man who handcuffed his brother to a building and left him to die. How could anyone blame him? Sometimes these people made you sick. Merle was an asshole indeed, but he was a human being and he was loved, even if it was only Daryl who loved him. Nobody cared that Daryl was in pain. Why would they? You knew how they say him. You didn't see him that way, though. 

        You were pacing around all day, itching to keep your hands busy. Rick, Daryl, and a few others left to find Merle. It had been hours. You only hoped they'd all come back in one peace. Of course Shane was pissed. He couldn't wrap his head around it; why Rick would risk his own life for a lowlife after he just came back alive. Lori hadn't spoken to Shane. You thought you saw them argue down at the quarry, probably about Shane telling us all he was dead. Of course, how else could he have gotten Lori to come with? 

        At least he got to play house for a while. You wondered how long it would be until he was asking you to come back to his tent. Not a chance. You weren't that weak.

        By nightfall when they still hadn't returned with Merle, you had lost your appetite. You couldn't eat knowing they might not come back, that Daryl might not come back. Plus, you hadn't moved past Shane and Lori's affair, not by a long shot. As soon as you had a moment alone with Rick, you had every intention of blowing shit up. No way either of them were getting out of this without a single scratch or scrape when you were bruised down to your bones.

        You were in your tent when you heard her scream. You rushed out. Andrea was being torn into by a walker in front of the RV. The campers around you sprung into action and as expected, Shane ran to Lori and Carl. You were smart enough to watch your own back, though, and your knife was ready within seconds, stabbing any snarling beast that came near you right through the eye. That was the easiest spot to pierce, you'd learned. 

        One of them wasn't so easy to take down, though. It was taller than you by far, and hitting it directly in the eye just wasn't going to happen when it was snapping its jaw and moving side to side. You still got it. Your blade drove deep into its temple. The issue was pulling it back out. You stepped on its chest, trying to yank the knife out, but it wouldn't budge. Another one had you in its sights, approaching hungrily. You began to panic. You didn't have any friends that would be looking out for you. Nobody would be coming to save you. You pulled harder and harder but still the metal remained lodged deep in the skull.

        Just as the other walker's rotten fingers grabbed the fabric of your shirt, more gunfire rained out and it dropped to the ground with a thud. You looked to where the shots were fired from and it was the group that went to Atlanta. They had made it back just in time and to your surprise, the only one who looked out for you was the man who seemed to be your only friend.

        Daryl jogged over to you and pulled the knife out for you with a grunt.         

        "C'mon." He said, grabbing your arm and pulling you out of the hot zone.

        It didn't take long to clear all the walkers after that. You panted beside Daryl, staring at him gratefully. He was looking around at all the dead bodies when he noticed your gaze. He nodded to you once, as if to acknowledge your silent thanks.

        When your eyes fount Shane, he was just standing there catching his breath while he watched Carl and Lori hugging Rick. Rick thanked him for keeping them safe. Shane's eyes caught you for a moment. You realized then and there, and it seemed that he heard your thoughts, that Daryl was the only one who looked out for you. Not Shane, not anyone else. It was everyone for themselves when things went bad. They covered their own asses and those most important to them, and you clearly were not important to Shane.

        When your eyes grew colder, frigid daggers sent his way, he knew you would want to get back at him. Not with violence or moving on to another man, no. He knew exactly what you were thinking, and he had every intention of ensuring you never had that chance.

Taglist || Masterlist

#daryl twd #twd daryl #daryl dixon fanfic #the walking dead daryl #daryl dixon #twd daryl dixon #daryl dixion x reader

[minicoffee00]

The one that got away - Part 1 Rhysand x Reader x ?

Plot: you are the closest thing Rhysand has to a mate before he is taken away by Amarantha, what happens when you haven’t seen the man you adore and love in 50 years to come back claiming he has found his mate and he wants nothing more to do with you.

Warning: lots and lots of Angst

You’d been in Velaris for 49 years without Rhysand, he wasn’t your mate but you had been together for over 200 years now. You love him irrevocably, he was there for you in a time most others weren’t. You’d saved him and he had saved you. You were apart from the fact that the mate bond had never clicked into place each others equals.

All Rhysand wanted to do for those 49 years was come home to you, to his family and see how his home was holding up without him being there.

As lady of the night court, you now had more responsibilities to attend to. You catered for your people in Velaris non stop and worked yourself to the bone.

Cassian and Azriel had tried to get you to have a break, but you didn't want Rhys to come back to loads of work, you had a plan for yourself Cassian and Azriel to all visit the Hewn City and Illyria as and when the protection on Velaris came down.

When that was, none of you knew.

As the years past, that time finally came, and all of Prythian felt it. Amarantha being slain, the High Lords all having their power restored and the courts gaining that vital strength back.

No more than an few hours later had your and Mor been present to Rhys winnowing back into the middle of the House of Wind. Tears steaming down his face, his gaze fell on Mor first and pulled her into a hug.

“She’s my mate” you heard him sob, and your eyes widened.

While he was under the mountain, he had found his mate.

He continued to cry into Mor, not realising you were there, she looked round at you feeling guilty that you had to listen to this.

“Rhysand?” You asks tentatively, you didn’t really understand anything that was going on right now. He could hate you for all you knew. Have moved on in his 49 years that he wasn’t with you, but did 49 years account for 300…

“Stay away from me Y/N” he grumbles out, a sort of high whine at the end, making tears come to your eyes.

You couldn’t even hug him after all this time, he didn’t want a hug from you. So you left, you walked straight of the balcony of the house of wind taking flight to Illyria, best stay on your duties … it wouldn’t matter if you were no longer a lady of the Night Court. You would still serve your people like you had for the last 500 years or your existence.

You stormed through the camps of Illyria, making sure the reigns were back up, checking on the women and children. Some people were punished (ones who had taken the advantage of being alone for 49 years and had clipped more female wings even though yourself and Rhys had banned it).

You then indulged in the Hwen City visiting Kier after all these years to be impressed at the amount of time he’d spent training his Darkbringers, now a full army ready for Cassian’s command.

“You’ve done well Kier. I’m proud of what you’ve accomplished” you said softly, a smile coming across his face.

“Thank you, Lady Night” he says and doesn’t miss the tears that brim your eyes. You hastily turn and winnow your way back to the house. You were tired after the long day or work, covered it sweat and Illyrian blood… your muscles ached from the walking and fighting. You wanted a good dinner and bed.

As you neared the dining room, you heard multiple voices.

“Even though you’ve found your mate, don’t be rude” Mor says her voice full of anger.

“Feyre is my mate, and I’ve come to feel for her in the time under the mountain” Rhys argues, sniffling a little.

“So your just abandoning 300 years of marriage for what 3 months of getting to know a human?” Cassian outrages.

“She’s High Fae now”

“Your cruel Rhys, Y/N worked herself to the bone to keep this all running” Amren chipped in.

“And you can’t even give her a simple hug when you see her after 49 years. Just tell her to basically fuck off?” Azriel steams.

A short smile comes to your face, happy that your friends are in fact sticking up for you, that they do think that Rhys is in the wrong.

“Good evening” you smile walking in, your appearance was shocking to everyone. They didn’t expect to see you come back so exhausted, the labour seeming visible and physical on your body.

“You can’t eat in here” Rhys says beofre he can even stop himself, he shakes his head trying to backtrack what he said, no’s fucks and I didn’t mean that’ his voice cracks.

“I was just getting food, or am I no longer aloud to indulge in my own home? I’ll be retiring to my room anyway” you say, bluntly not making eyes with anyone else.

"Y/N, please" Cassian starts to stand up, but your hand holds out. The house places food on the table in your place, you swiftly pick it up and take it in your arms leaving the glass of wine behind.

"I-" Rhysand starts, seeing the tears in your eyes as you turn away.

"Please don't hurt me anymore Rhys, my heart wont be able to take it" you whisper and the group see's your step falter as if you are in pain.

You'd gone to your room that night, Cassian and Azriel following. They climbed into bed with you, either side making sure to tuck you in either side of them. You sobbed into Cassian's chest as Azriel hugged you around your middle. Your food was left on the side untouched.

It wasn't until a week that Rhys knew he had to let Feyre go and be happy with Tamlin, which in turn had him coming crawling back to you.

You both spoke, he apologised for his harsh words and behaviours. You hugged him how you'd wanted to the minute you'd seen him and caved into his touch. He held your face looking at you, and in that moment he knew a part of Rhysand would always belong to you, regardless of the lack of a mate bond. But 300 years with a person does that to you.

But... there was also a part of him that would always yearn for Feyre, his mate. The one he was bound too but that invisible warm teather. He'd comforted you that night and that spark that was once there, ignited even if it was a mere match stroke compared to the raging hot inferno it used to be. It was a start.

"She's getting married to him" he'd said to you two months later, he'd been off for about a week. Every night he would wake up, sweating and scared and you'd hold him until the tears stopped kissing up his neck affectionately.

You kept doing the majority of the work, so that your High Lord could continue to rest. You came home with Cassian and Azriel everynight exhausted, but Rhysand never seemed to notice too caught up in his head.

The next week was a week you'd never forget, you'd gone out to help Azriel, Cassain and Rhysand having a night in together drinking, he did that a lot since Under the Mountain.

What you and Azriel was doing was risky, but necessary. One wrong move and you'd been shot by multiple ash arrows, and stabbed in the stomach.

"AZRIEL" you'd screamed as you'd flown back over the wall, he caught you as you fallen to the ground. He flew the pair of you back, until he stopped and hovered.

"Don't come home yet Azriel, I've just brought Feyre to the Night Court" Rhysand asked in his mind, a growl from Azriel that didn't go noticed by your unconscious body.

He flew you back, right to Madja. She spent time healing you and Azriel stayed apart from when he went to grab Cassian. Mor found them and had winnowed straight back to inform Rhysand.

"Y/N" you heard Rhysand's voice as you came back around, your wings fluttering slightly.

"Baby" you smile, and you see him gulp a little. You sit up, with the help of Cassian who was behind you.

"You should know, that I've brought Feyre here. I'm sorry Y/N but this is..."

"Please don't" you say, big puppy eyes looking at him. You guys had been good, you'd been helping him with everything.

"I'm sorry, it's something i have to see through. I, you understand right? She's my mate" he reasons, another sob comes from you. Azriel reaches forward, holding you into his chest, glaring at his High Lord.

"I would then like to renounce my title as Lady of the Court and i wish to be pardoned from you court" you say, eyes like thunder.

"Please, no. I need you here"

"You cant have it both ways Rhysand, for years i have acted as no only Lady of this Court but High Lady. I have catered for our people, more than you will ever know. So you cant keep me here running me to skin and bone while you play around with Feyre, hoping that something will arise of this bond. I've give you everything a mate would have, just no snap of a little fucking teather. So yes Rhys, it's either keep me or loose me. You cant have it both ways" you say, his eyes wide and mouth open through your whole ramble. He looked towards his friends Azriel, Cassian, Mor and Amren, all nodding in agreement and glaring at their Lord.

A/N:

I’m so excited to run this through! This concept had me for a while wondering what it would be like if there was someone before Feyre and how Rhys would react to it all. This will run from current times during ACOMAF - all the way through to ACOWAR! Who do you think the other mystery person will be to try take your heart after Rhys is constantly breaking it!

Taglist:

@cat-or-kitten

@sstrohma

@horneybeach1

@its-sam-allgood

@starryhiraeth

@xcastawayherosx

@glitterypirateduck

@azriels-mate123

@mavropouloupanagiota

@chasing-autumns-chill

#high lord rhysand #acotar #acomaf #a court of thorns and roses #acotar fanfiction #a court of mist and fury #acowar #acosf #rhysand x reader #rhysand x feyre

[rumble-aint-a-rumble-without-me]

Hey! Love your work and was wondering if you could do one where the reader is a really good cook/baker!

A/N: Hey there! I'm so glad you like my work :D I really hope you enjoy this one too!

DARRY CURTIS

He swore he couldn’t love you any more than he already did but then you went and started cooking for the boys and Darry found out just how wrong he was

It’s so nice to have someone else who can cook and who Darry can trust alone in the kitchen, he knows you’re not gonna start a fire or something

You’re the one cooking dinner now most of the time, simply because the boys like eating your cooking the best

Darry will cook for you sometimes! Especially if you’ve had a bad week or it’s a big milestone in your relationship, blah blah blah, Darry has a thing for taking care of his partners, and that comes out in the form of food

King of hyping up your cooking, especially your chocolate cakes! You’re the only one that can bake a chocolate cake and get Darry to admit that yours tastes better than his cake does 

Also also also, he asks you to pack him lunches sometimes so that he can take it to work with him and just kind of have a little part of you there with him <3 I highly suggest dropping a little handwritten note into his lunchbox, but y’know, that’s just me talking

SODAPOP CURTIS

Don’t tell Darry, but he likes when you cook or bake for him more than when his brother does, Sodapop thinks it just tastes better

*Insert a joke about how Sodapop likes to claim it’s because you make your stuff with love and Darry doesn’t but we all know that’s nonsense*

I kid you not, Sodapop is a bottomless pit and not a picky eater by any stretch of the imagination, so if you need a taste-tester for some dish you’re trying out, look no further than your pretty boy

Show up to the DX with a packed lunch for the two of you, flirt and giggle before giving it to him, stay with him and eat together in the garage on the hood of some ridiculously Soc car that Steve was supposed to fix later in the day

Nothing says I love you more than sitting on a car and laughing during his lunch break, doing nothing but sitting there and just being together

Plus! Steve will get sort of grumpy and pouty because he wanted to have Sodapop with him for his lunch break but you got there before him and he can’t really be mad because you guys are just too cute but he’ll be funny to watch  

PONYBOY CURTIS

You’re into cooking? Baking? That’s cool, Ponyboy has no problem eating whatever you’re working on and loves to be in the kitchen with him

He’s a menace and likes to sit on the countertops or eat the food before it’s cooked, so maybe it’s not always the best idea to have him there with you, but, y’know, he’s cute so it’s way okay!

The two of you have definitely made a mess of Darry’s kitchen at some point, cookies gone wrong or a mini-flour food fight, so there’s a high chance that you’ve gotten Ponyboy banned from the kitchen

If you bring anything treat-wise for him to school, expect the boys to try and steal some of it, especially Two-Bit, that boy will literally steal anything he can

Hype Man pt. 2, Pony talks about your cooking so much that Darry has probably asked you to just come over and cook dinner one day so that Pony will stop telling him about how you’d cook everything differently

Also, strong opinion that he only knows how to cook very simple meals, scrambled eggs and grilled cheeses and things, and is seriously impressed by when you make things that are like even a fraction of a bit of something better than those

DALLAS WINSTON

If your folks are out and you’re planning on cooking? Please oh please, call up Dally and let him in so he can eat whatever you’re making

He’s not helpful, he eats your food and then doesn’t help with the dishes, I wouldn’t recommend him as a sous chef at all

But! He’s honest and will tell you exactly how he feels about what you’re cooking, which can be a blessing and a curse, just as things usually are with our dear Mr. Winston

If Dally doesn’t like something, he’s gonna bitch about it, but if he likes it, god he’s gonna compliment you and compliment you and compliment you and kiss you so many times as a thank you

No one else is allowed to touch anything you make for him, he threatens to and has bitten and snapped at people who get too close to his plates before, I’m not even lying to you

Also, don’t let him cook because Dally’ll probably end up burning something, solid headcanon that he can barely cook, and he’ll probably end up blaming you for whatever he’s messed up!  

JOHNNY CADE

Hard one, I don’t know exactly how I feel about Johnny with an S/O who’d bake or cook all the time, but I know he’d like it!

You’d probably make an extra lunch for him every so often (every other day or so because you know you love him) and the two of you would eat your lunches together at school

Johnny likes everything you make, he’ll tell you how great everything is and shower you with praise and compliments as he shovels food like he’s some sort of chipmunk

I don’t think he’s picky either? Like, I don’t think he cares very much about picking and choosing when it comes to food, he’d rather just put it in his mouth and go on with his life

But I think Johnny has a favorite thing that you make, I don’t know what exactly, but it’s gonna be something sweet, maybe cookies or brownies

He’s a horrendous cook, okay? Recipe or not, he absolutely sucks and it’s terrible having him in the kitchen with you but he likes to stand with you so I think you should just let him hang out as long as he promises not to touch anything- 

TWO-BIT MATHEWS

You’re helping him babysit his sister? And you’re making dinner? For both of them? And you’re having the time of your life in the kitchen?

Two-Bit thought he was in love with you already, jeez louise, he’s so gone for you and is about to have a meltdown because you’re just standing in his kitchen making dinner for everyone 

He tries to kiss you and almost burns himself on the stove because he’s too busy staring at you he doesn’t realize where he placed his hand and then you’ve got to take a break from cooking to take care of him

Two really does like what you cook though! He’s not picky and he’s open to whatever you want to feed him, I promise! 

Come up to him with a spoonful of mystery and tell him to open his mouth and swallow, Two-Bit will do it immediately, no questions asked whatsoever

He’s a good guy, alright, and he’s got simple thoughts, he just really likes seeing you when you’re cooking, when you’re in your element and I think he’d be a really great pal to have in the grocery store 

STEVE RANDLE

Have I mentioned? That Steve? Is a cheerleader? And likes to hype you up? Because that’s running around and around in my mind

For the love of everything, you better have a chocolate cake recipe memorized because that’s what Steve’s always going to ask you to make, he can’t get enough of your chocolate cakes

You’re gonna have to persuade him to eat anything else, honestly, he’s just so in love with you and the cake, it’s gonna be a challenge 

If you don’t let him in the kitchen with you, Steve’s just gonna whine and pout until you eventually cave and let him in from where he’s been throwing a fit in the doorway

He’s good though, he knows when to keep his hands off, especially when he’s coming from work and covered in grease, he honestly really doesn’t want to help with the cooking anyway

Steve would much rather just watch you and talk, laughing about your days and just be there with you while you cook and bake your little heart out  

TIM SHEPARD

He’s picky with food I have a feeling? Like Tim likes what he likes and that’s what he’s gonna eat, y’know?

Bowl of cereal in the morning, a burger when he goes out to the diner, Tim’s not really into the whole trying-new-things but I have a feeling, if you tried hard enough, you could convince him to try something a little new

Present it to him and smile, bat your eyelashes, say your pretty pleases and beg just a little bit and there’s nothing Tim can do but say yes <3

He’s a good person to cook with! I think he knows what he’s doing enough and likes to cook, so I think it could totally be a bonding thing for you!

The moment you cook dinner for Angela and Curly, Tim knows he’s not gonna let you go anywhere because if you love him to care for his siblings as well, Tim knows you’re definitely a keeper

He likes to come up behind you when you’re cooking and hug you, murmuring into your ear as you throw things together, some compliments and some teasing remarks, but they’re all said with such love it makes things totally cool-

CURLY SHEPARD

This little shit, Curly is head over heels even before you tell him that you like to cook/bake, he’s gonna be long gone when he learns about that

He thinks it’s great, absolutely loves it and absolutely loves you, and wants to hear about everything you’ve ever made

You need a taste tester? Someone to go grocery shopping with you? Someone to talk with while you cook?

Don’t you even worry, baby, Curly is more than happy to spend all day in the kitchen with you while he does no cooking whatsoever, just hangs with you

And, so uh, y’know how cookies and brownies and stuff have that sort of window where you just sort of put them in the oven and wait? Yeah, Curly likes to take advantage of that time period and kiss you senseless

Tell me I’m wrong, you can’t because you know that this boy will take any chance he can get to make out with you, regardless if he runs the risk of burning those cookies to a crisp or not-

#the outsiders #the outsiders headcanons #the outsiders hcs #the outsiders x reader #dillo’s writing #darry curtis #sodapop curtis #ponyboy curtis #dallas wintson #johnny cade #steve randle #two bit mathews #tim shepard #curly shepard #darry curtis x reader #sodapop curtis x reader #ponyboy curtis x reader #dallas winston x reader #johnny cade x reader #steve randle x reader #two bit mathews x reader #tim shepard x reader #curly shepard x reader

[olderthannetfic]

Hope it's okay to ask here, I love your blog and how you give clear, concise answers to questions without assuming bad faith so hopefully it's ok to throw my own "warning tag" question in here, TIA for the answer! So, childhood friends-to-lovers is like one of my favourite romance tropes to write in fanfic. I've done a LOT of ships with that, but I've never actually written anything more uh...spicy, shall we say. Until after the ship were both adults. I was raised Extremely Fundie and wasn't very sex positive for a LONG time as a result but now that I'm older & out of that environment I've grown a lot. So because of religious upbringing I just avoided writing smut before both characters were 18 "to be safe". In a recent new fandom I'm in I have a character who I feel like very much WOULD have explored her sexuality before she turned 18. The partner in this context is her childhood friend so they grew up together and are probably at most like 3 years apart, if that. So my question is, would I tag that as Underage because, even tho they're close together in age (ie. both "minors" in that sense) they ARE Underage or is the Underage tag on AO3 solely for Adult/Minor ships? (not judging writers of Adult/Minor pairings either, I'll add. It's just not my scene and I don't want to give people the wrong impression in the tags, either way around, whenever I inevitably write & post their First Time fic, yk?) -🌸 (hope its okay to tag this so I can maybe find it later? I don't wanna ask this off anon in case I get blasted by That(tm) side of fandom at large who might see my username and then come into my DMs/inbox to scream "P*do!!" at me, but I DO wanna be able to see the answer when it comes up, esp if I am not on tumblr the day that it does haha)

--

Ah. You're still thinking about that tag in a more cultural sense, but that's not what it's for. If you dig through the FAQs and such, the explanation is in there somewhere, but to summarize, it refers to:

On page depictions of sexual activity including at least one character under 18.

(So if they just kiss or you just say she had sex but you don't show intercourse, oral, etc. on the actual page, it doesn't count.)

AO3's underage tag is actually to protect users who live in jurisdictions where <18 sexytimes are banned from art or banned unless there's ~artistic merit~ or whatever. Around the time AO3 was starting up was when Australia was having a big upheaval over such things, so it was on people's minds in the Anglosphere.

Whether the sex is problematique or age gap or whatever doesn't matter. The actual age of consent or laws around sex in the real world location these characters are in, if any, does not matter. Your 17-year-old UK characters fucking still need the warning or CNTW even though that's laughable in context. 18 tends to be the age most used in international law for... like... porn star ages and such, so 18 is what AO3 went with. Never mind that it's not necessarily the age of majority or that age of consent laws can depend on partner age, etc. etc.

Unlike noncon/graphic violence/character death, this warning isn't there primarily because readers find the topic squicky.

It's a legal ass-covering thing.

[zwy01]

Werewolf OCs!!

Yayy more headcanons and stuff. Basically continuing off the post I made a few months ago regarding Maduke’s business with his literal dozens of disposable tools children.

Well, there’s more to it. And it gets worse. By a lot.

Link to previous post for more context (highly recommended for a full understanding of this post’s context):

In my previous post I’ve mentioned how Maduke probably has 50 ish children. To be precise, those are the ones we more or less know of, as in the ones who 1. survived early childhood and 2. somewhat have their names recognized by a decent portion of werewolf society.

This doesn’t include the ones that either died or disappeared before they were really “introduced” to the clan, if at all. In fact, it is possible that no werewolves (except for Maduke himself) even knew of these werewolf children’s existence. Not even their own mothers. I’ll get to that in just a bit.

Long story short.

Long, long ago, Maduke had already been conspiring with certain evil nobles for some time, before Muzaka’s disappearance and his own eventual ascension to the position of Lord of the Werewolves. Just as the nobles needed to gain Maduke’s trust, he also had to gain their trust, as the sentiment had to be mutual before either party was willing to take it to the next level.

So on Maduke’s part, he had to offer something to the nobles to prove his sincerity as well as his full commitment to their mutual cause. It can be reasonably inferred that whatever it was, it was related to them eventually plotting to have the Noblesse and Muzaka take each other out. Anyways, Maduke’s offer couldn’t have been just anything. This was the problem. The nobles already had everything they could possibly want. They were as self-sufficient at it gets from a material standpoint. There wasn’t much for Maduke to give. There was nothing he could think of, as he was also aware that his fellow conspirators probably had all that they needed back in Lukedonia.

Maduke was certain that whatever he decides to offer has to be both irresistible and unheard of. And it has to be solid. No concepts, no empty promises, but something the nobles can physically get their hands on. An object basically. And Maduke couldn’t just do the bare minimum; he had to impress them. And then… he had the most brilliant and evilest of ideas. Maduke recalled one of the nobles mentioning how he enjoys “doing rather harmless research on living beings for the sake of their kind’s advancement” or something along those lines. Perhaps that was a very twisted way of saying “I like doing cruel experiments on my own kind and I will do whatever it takes to fulfill my own selfish goals, and I’ll gladly sacrifice them at anytime”.

Hah. That’s it.

Even if this specific fellow conspirator was very smart and cunning, he still needed to be very careful if he wanted to stay undetected under his noble Lord’s eyes. Too many odd disappearances would raise suspicions, and in the case where a pattern arises, it would harder to pass them off as a mere coincidence. But when you think about it… those disappearances only applied to nobles. They are registered in the system, and every disappearance would be marked and investigated, which makes illegal experimentation much harder, especially if it involves accidental or intentional killing of the subjects. No one said anything about members of other races. Well, experimenting on humans wasn’t completely unheard of at that time, even though the law banned it long ago. Even then, smuggling humans to work on wasn’t worth the time. Humans have their limits. They are fragile, they are short-lived, and overall just make unimpressive test subjects.

Werewolves on the other hand… they would make much more worthwhile test subjects. Even your average werewolf is much more durable than the outliers of the human race. Yup. Maduke figured it out pretty quickly. He could find a way to smuggle werewolves into Lukedonia for the evil nobles to experiment on. No one would suspect a thing. Besides, no noble test subjects being involved means no noble disappearances at all, which would make cruel experiments much more easy to carry out for his fellow conspirators. And secretly bringing werewolves into Lukedonia itself is unprecedented, let alone with the intention of using them as test subjects. Yeah, no one will even think in that direction. Perfect. Even Maduke had himself impressed by his own idea.

Except this is easier said than done. Unlike humans, werewolves can fight back. They are strong, they are feisty, and they can cause a lot of damage. Maduke couldn’t just randomly pick members of his own kind and send them off to their doom like he can do as he pleases with the grapes in his vineyard. He had to maintain his own image in front the general werewolf population. This was no easy task, as he had to maneuver around both Muzaka’s followers and his own followers. Maduke needed to be careful. Kidnapping active clan members was not an option, as he would raise suspicions within the clan, and many of them can actually resist capture. Speaking of which, the nobles probably don’t want ones who can’t fight back. Even if Maduke were to offer his fellow werewolves as part of a negotiation gift, they couldn’t be just any werewolf. The nobles wouldn’t want your average werewolf. To impress them, Maduke figured that he needed to offer ones that are stronger, faster, and tougher. The warriors. Someone who is capable of reaching that rank, would be suitable.

Now what? Warriors could defend themselves and are no easy prey. The only state in which werewolf warriors cannot fight back is when they are still young. Children. Infants. The implication is obvious. If Maduke had no warriors he could offer right away, he’ll just make some. Problem solved.

At this point Maduke had already started to build and solidify his power through his kin, so this wasn’t exactly a new concept to him. It’d be easy, he thought. All he needed to do was to hand pick a few strong ones and send them to the nobles right after they’re born. Heh, excellent idea.

So Maduke contacted his fellow conspirators in Lukedonia about his offer and let them know that this is his way of showing sincerity from his end. The nobles, particularly one of them, were more than willing to accept Maduke’s deal. They seemed to favor the idea. Except they wanted more. Maduke had written three strong werewolf infants aka. “warrior material” in his initial offer. The nobles replied and demanded that as long as there are multiples in one birth, he has to give one to them. If he has twins, he gets to keep one; if he has triplets, he gets to keep two, and so on. And don’t try to secretly keep one for yourself, because we’ll figure it out. Anything worthy of your blood, you must select one and give them to us, they said.

Fuck. Damn those nobles. Greedy and insatiable as ever, aren’t they. If Maduke was cunning, the nobles were just as cunning. They knew the game just as well as he did. As much as Maduke wanted to reject this extra request, he needed help from the nobles’ side. So Maduke reluctantly agreed to this extra condition, and the deal was sealed. That is all.

Maduke would’ve preferred to keep every single one of the strongest of his kin for himself, as they all were his resources, but he had no choice but to make this sacrifice on his part if he were to have the nobles’ support. After all, Maduke had trade something of equal value for what he desired, to keep it fair. Perhaps he even pitied himself, now that he couldn’t get to keep all his “tools” for himself. Woe is me for being robbed of what I am entitled to, he thought. Pretty ironic considering how he was literally robbing his own kin of the lives they could’ve had. But it doesn’t matter, because the only one he cares about is himself. Oh, Maduke, Maduke. Tsktsk.

The next part wasn’t so hard, now that Maduke had figured out the last piece of the puzzle. Stillborn werewolves weren’t an uncommon sight. Sad, but not unfamiliar. Maduke knew how to manipulate his partners using this phenomenon. He would be there while his partners gave birth. When his partners had more than one living child, he would take one away immediately before their own mother was aware of the situation. He would then tell the mother that he took one away because they were born still and didn’t want to “sadden” her any further with the sight of their dead child. Some of them weren’t easy to convince, but in the end, Maduke gets what he wants with his lies.

Of course, Maduke didn’t do this with every single birth with multiple children in it, as it would’ve been way too suspicious anyway. And the nobles were never really interested in the more “average” test subjects, so Maduke only snuck out the ones who were visibly stronger and sturdier, which were signs of children who had the potential of a future warrior. There wasn’t a single time when Maduke hadn’t wished that he could keep all the stronger ones for his own use, but he had to honor his end of the promise to the nobles. His loss. A huge loss, but still worth it in the big picture. Besides, he could just have even more kids. Simple solution for a simple problem.

You’ll never know what Maduke’s bottom line is, because it is seemingly nonexistent.

And that concludes the second part of my Maduke hcs.

Now onto the OCs! They are all Maduke’s children.

(Btw Maduke never names any of his children. He is completely indifferent to that matter, just like how he only sees them as his tools. Their mothers do the naming)

(These OCs are not listed in any particular order. Their age order is flexible, even then it is not important to the story)

Finn: Son of Bianca and Lunark’s full-sibling. Turns out Lunark isn’t her mother’s only child... Finn is actually her twin and younger brother. Maduke had to honor his promise and pick one to keep for himself and send the other one to the nobles. Lunark was the one he kept, and Finn was the one he gave up. Maduke could sense that both of Bianca’s children are powerful, and he had a hard time deciding. Ultimately, he kept Lunark simply because she has Bianca’s eyes. Of course he told Bianca that the second child was a stillborn and that he got rid of him for her because he “felt so much sorrow” for their son’s death. Bianca never believed him. She knew Lunark’s twin was born healthy and strong, but she kept quiet for her and her daughter’s sake, as she couldn’t risk their safety. Perhaps Bianca’s departure from werewolf island had something to do with her missing son. She refuses to believe that he is dead, and will search the world for him.

Finn was the name Bianca gave to her “dead” son she never even got to see. The nobles’ name for him is Hadeon. He was very well-hidden as a test subject and still remains isolated in a lab operated by some members of Lagus’ remaining devoted followers. Turns out Raskreia failed to weed out all of them.

Finn is alive in the present day and whether he gets rescued and reunited with his mother and sister, whom he has no knowledge of, is a mystery. No one knows anything about his personality, likes and dislikes, just… nothing. His fate remains unknown.

Pomme: Daughter of Savanna and Kentas’ full-sibling. Technically, his sister-to-be if his mother hadn’t been murdered by his father. This is what Pomme would’ve looked like if she survived along with her mother. Pomme was conceived about a week or two before Savannah discovered Maduke’s true nature, threatened to expose him, and told him that she’d take her son with her. Maduke had to silence Savannah on the spot and he didn’t care if she was pregnant with his second child. Savannah truly loved Maduke with all her heart and sworn loyalty to him up until the very moment she found out about his schemes. A tragedy for Savannah and Pomme, and Kentas who lost both his mother and unborn sister. Pomme would’ve grown up as a strong, all-rounder werewolf warrior just like her older brother, whom she would’ve affectionately called “Kenny”. She would’ve loved to sit on her mother’s apple tree and enjoy fresh apples together with her family, and have butterflies land on the tip of her nose.

Pomme was never born and Savannah remains “missing” in the present day and Kentas still thinks his mother had only disappeared, unaware that she is dead with his unborn younger sibling whom he doesn’t even know had existed.

Copper: Son of an unnamed werewolf woman. Copper was a hard worker. He really tried his best. Despite his efforts, he just wasn’t born as a fighter and he was very lacking in terms of both his abilities in combat and his will to fight. Copper was one of the many “weaker” children in the background whom Maduke assigned spy/informant duties to. Even then, he failed to prove himself to be useful to his father and eventually the latter ordered to have him delivered to the labs. Copper begged and begged Maduke for another chance as he was being dragged away to his doom. Being the relatively weak werewolf he was, he didn’t last for long as a test subject. He cried and screamed for his mother as the werewolf scientists strapped him down and injected him with what would become the dose that kills him. Unbeknownst to him, his mother was too busy trying to redeem herself in front of Maduke with promises of more children, where she pretty much forgot that Copper even existed.

Copper stays dead without any sort of proper burial as his body was burnt in a pile with many other “failed” test subjects. His presence was a weak one and not even many of siblings remember him. Lunark builds a little tombstone for him by the shores.

Olga: Daughter of an unnamed werewolf woman. She is no warrior, just like many of her siblings who ended up as spies and informants because they weren’t good enough to be warriors thus had no right to stand directly next to their father. Olga would’ve been shipped off to the labs just like her half-sibling Copper, but she saved herself. You see, Olga is smart. Money smart. She risked her life by appearing in front of Maduke without him summoning her and asked for a chance to prove herself, and that he’ll definitely find her to be very useful to him. To her surprise, Maduke did not yell at her or have her dragged away. Perhaps he was in a good mood, or he was feeling generous. Doesn’t matter what it was. He simply told her very well, then prove it within the time frame he gives her. And Olga did. Olga was successful. Very successful. Turns out, she is very good at organizing the clan’s budget and saved a lot of time and money for Maduke. She is also very efficient at turning money into more money. To everyone’s surprise, she rose through the ranks very quickly despite not being a warrior and was soon able to secure herself a spot where her status couldn’t be touched by anyone… not even Maduke himself. She was simply too unique and valuable to him, even if he wanted to dispose of her for whatever reasons, which he did not have. He was quite satisfied with her contributions. Her talent ended up saving her from the tragic fate that most of her half-siblings suffered from.

Olga is alive in the present day and continues to manage money for the clan after Muzaka’s return as Lord. She is the one who communicates with her youngest half-sibling and celebrity Oswald Kravei when he sends part of his paycheck back home to support the revival of his clan. The werewolves are able to thrive financially thanks to them.

Erez: Son of an unnamed werewolf woman. He is no warrior. He is also fortunate in an unfortunate way. Just like his half-sister Olga, he had a talent that saved him from being tossed away by his father sooner or later. Erez has a thing for science. Specifically, he knows how to work with werewolf bodies. His intuition and understanding of body modifications meant that his father would assign him to work in the labs as a scientist. At least way better than being a test subject. But how much better? Many of the test subjects that were ruthlessly dumped into his and his team’s labs were his acquaintances. His friends. And… his family. In fact, Erez was the one who injected Copper with the final dose that killed him. Copper was his half-sibling and cousin, and their mothers were sisters. Erez couldn’t have possibly disobeyed his father’s orders, unless he wanted to die too. Maduke, for the “greater good” of the clan, would continue to kill his own clan members through Erez’ hands. Erez is permanently traumatized.

Erez is alive in the present day, and no longer works in the labs. In fact he can’t even go near them at all because it would trigger his trauma. He is very ashamed of himself for surviving while most of his siblings are dead, and thinks of himself as a coward. Currently, he lives alone in a more secluded area in werewolf island and his only activity is tending to a small farm, as some form of atonement/self exile/whatever his way of coping is. He refuses to listen to Lunark, Kentas and his other remaining living siblings when they reassure him that it wasn’t his fault, and rejects all their invitations to come live with the rest of the werewolves in the more populated areas.

Meryam: Daughter of an unnamed werewolf woman. Meryam was a not a warrior. She shared a mother with Rio, and was Rio’s older sister. Meryam worked as a spy for Maduke. She was sharp, diligent, and ruthless. She was also completely loyal to Maduke, and the latter could trust her more than his other children. Meryam carried out all his orders without question. Her inability to reach the warrior status never stopped her from her work. Meryam’s main task was to keep tabs on the nobles whom Maduke worked with. Just because he had a deal with them doesn’t mean that he trusted them completely. Besides, he was only using them as they were using him, and he was going to get rid of them altogether anyway. Maduke needed to monitor them and Meryam was the answer. Well, one of them. But the nobles weren’t dumb. Maduke wasn’t the only one with spies. The nobles knew. They figured it out sooner or later, and ambushed and captured Meryam and brought her back to Lukedonia for questioning and later using her as a test subject because it would’ve been a waste to kill her immediately. Meryam kept her mouth shut even as she was being brutally tortured by the nobles in their lab. Anything for Maduke. She eventually dies as their experiments exceeded her body’s maximum threshold.

Meryam stays dead and Maduke couldn’t say anything to the nobles about her going missing because then it would’ve been him admitting to sending spies to watch his supposed allies. In return, he simply killed their spies. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We aren’t so different from each other, are we?

Rio: Son of an unnamed werewolf woman. Rio was a warrior. He didn’t have much endurance but he was blessed with large amounts of explosive power. He shared a mother with Meryam, and was Meryam’s younger brother. Just like his sister, Rio was fiercely loyal to Maduke. His father’s will was his will. Rio was determined enough to eliminate anyone who stood in his father’s way, even if they were his family. According to ancient tradition, Rio’s status as warrior was a debatable one because he more or less only achieved the rank after he received a bloodstone implant. But again there was no such thing as tradition under Maduke’s reign because of course Maduke’s very existence was the new tradition. Rio had his own party of werewolves and was sent by Maduke to search the lands for other potential intruders during the werewolf arc, but they didn’t run into anyone. Rio died from getting his life sucked out of him from Maduke’s bloodstone implants, as he was one of the less fortunate werewolves who didn’t make a recovery after Maduke was destroyed.

Rio stays dead and the werewolves gave him a proper burial with Maduke’s other victims.

Kiba: Daughter of an unnamed werewolf woman.

Kiba is a warrior. She is the speedy type of werewolf, similar to Kuharu. She’s actually his niece. Unlike most of her half-siblings, Kiba was aware of her father’s cunningness and cruelty since the beginning. While she didn’t have a full understanding of his true nature, she had a pretty good grasp of what this man was capable of. And her guesses were right. You can say she “woke up” much earlier than the rest of her family. For her and her mother’s safety, she pledged fake loyalty to Maduke. Thank goodness werewolves don’t have something called mind reading, so Maduke never found out that her loyalty was only for show. As long as Kiba keeps her acting real, she can fool Maduke and wait for someone to overthrow him eventually. And she succeeded. Muzaka came back, and Maduke is dead.

Kiba is alive in the present day and resides in werewolf island with her mother. Both mother and daughter are adjusting very well to their new lives free of Maduke and his evil deeds. Kiba adores her youngest half-sibling Oswald, and eventually gets into modeling just like him and moves her primary residence to somewhere in the human world close to Oz. As of now, she doesn’t earn as much as Oz since the he is a huge global celebrity, but she wishes to become famous like him one day so she can send a lot of money back home to support her family and clan members just like Oz has been doing.

She is one of Ozzy’s primary caretakers during his youth.

Flea: Son of an unnamed werewolf woman.

Flea is a warrior. He is the very tanky type of fighter with a lot of endurance, and has an abnormally high regeneration ability even amongst his fellow warriors. Just like how Hila dealt with Uzhir, Flea’s mother noped out of parenting him as soon as he was weaned, and left him to Maduke. Of course Maduke didn’t want the hassle of raising him. Or any child of his, for that matter, so he dumped Flea onto his older half-siblings and told them to do the work. Normally Maduke wouldn’t have cared at all, but Flea had the potential of a warrior, so the former made sure to have the latter live up to it. Flea’s only problem was that he got clingy very easily. And he got attached fast. To his half-siblings who were his caretakers, to the random old werewolf lady who gave him a treat… etc. He ended up clinging onto anyone who gave him attention, whether it was good or bad attention. While some of his siblings were okay with taking care of him, most of them were less than happy to be assigned to this mess of a werewolf, so they collectively named him “Flea” because he just kept coming back no matter how mean they were to him. Dammit, you just couldn’t get rid of him. Flea even ended up getting attached to Maduke. None of Maduke’s children were allowed to call him father and would get severely punished if they did. Flea tried to find other ways. He worked under Maduke as a warrior, so he saw him quite often. Flea peeked at Maduke whenever he had the chance, and when he got caught, and he simply smiled at his father before bowing his head back down. Curiously, Maduke never punished Flea for his clingy bevavior. Perhaps he was intrigued by how Flea still managed to adore him no matter how much he treated him like trash and kicked him around like a dog. Flea was just emotionally needy, even if it meant looking for comfort in his tyrant father. Probably wasn’t the healthiest thing. Either way. Maduke was rather amused with this scene and kept Flea around as his unofficial jester and personal bodyguard.

Maduke actually sent Flea to guard his cellar during the werewolf arc because hey, he’s gonna kill all the intruders and win and come for a drink with his jester after the battle. Too bad he lost and now he’s dead. Flea had no idea of what happened at all. Rip.

Flea is alive in the present day and resides in werewolf island with the rest of his family. He manages Maduke’s wine collection, and found someone else to cling onto… Ozzy! He’s also one of Oswald’s primary caretakers. He eventually leaves werewolf island and follows Ozzy around and continues to be his youngest brother’s guardian. Ozzy enjoys the love smothering from his older half-brother and they are close.

Clover: Son of an unnamed werewolf woman. He is not a warrior. In fact, he was born with the same defect that Maduke’s sister Willow had; he has neither fangs nor claws and can’t transform at all. Maduke wanted to get rid of Clover immediately after his birth because it would’ve been a waste to spend resources on someone who wasn’t even slightly worthy of his blood, but Clover’s mother resisted and wanted to protect her son at all costs. Clover’s mother is a powerful warrior and Maduke realized he could turn this situation in his favor and manipulate her. He told her that he will let Clover live on the condition that she births him more children that are worthy of his blood. Clover’s mother agreed, and Maduke let him live. Due to Clover’s defects, Maduke never gave him a job of any sort. He isn’t going to be of much help anyway, and he already does a good job of keeping his mother obedient even if he himself isn’t aware of the deal between his parents. How useful. Clover acted as a caretaker for his younger siblings despite being unable to control them and getting hurt at times due to being much weaker than them. He never understood why his mother just kept having more children, but he never once questioned her, out of respect. His mother only revealed the truth after Maduke’s death and Clover was devastated.

Clover is alive in the present day, though he probably doesn’t have much longer to live due to his defects and he will likely get the same illness Willow had and eventually die sick. His mother will outlive him, but he will do his best to take care of her while he’s still alive. Clover and his mother leave the rest of their family behind and permanently depart werewolf island to spend the rest of their days in peace.

And that’s it for now!

Maybe I’ll do a post of Hila’s journal of werewolf herbs with headcanons of leaves and berries and stuff. Fun stuff.

(p.s. don’t think I’ve said this here before but I am open to questions, chatting, anything really when it comes to HCs, OCs etc. anything is welcome!)

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for future posts!

#noblesse #manhwa #myart #oc #ocs #original character

[mysterycharacterflowers]

Round 3; Sage vs A bouquet of cockscomb, white poppy, white acacia and pink chrysanthemum

First, let's talk about the Sage

Meaning and why it was chosen: it represents 'immortality and wisdom' which is accurate i guess (the immortality more so than the wisdom) Description: • everyone's favourite transbian communist fae • repressing their emotions for their royal image • banned themself from legally practicing magic but still practices magic • lies about their age to impress people

Check their post here

Now, let's talk about the bouquet of cockscomb, white poppy, white acacia and pink chrysanthemum

Meaning and why these flowers was chosen: Cockscomb ("Foppery"; He's very concerned with his appearance. Victorian dandy type beat) White Poppy ("Death and Forgetfulness"; Many of his memories were taken from him shortly before his death) White Acacia ("Friendship"; It's a strange situation, but he'd die (again) for his best friend in the world, who is also his minion) Pink Chrysanthemum ("Cheerfulness in Adversity"; Despite being dead and a partial amnesiac for almost two centuries, nothing gets him down!) Description: This character was alive in Victorian times and a fan of anything aesthetically pleasing, he probably has a much better understanding of flower language than this submitter does! He's the ghost of a prideful magician who's forgotten the words of magic and can't remember how to cast any spells. He wandered the earth as a lonely spirit for decades in the hope of finding a way to access that knowledge again. Through a miraculous (to him) coincidence, he gets to read from a spellbook over the shoulder of a nosy trespasser, and casts a spell that makes her do anything he says! Having a minion comes with all sorts of benefits which include but are not limited to: dramatically monologuing at her, making her explain all this weird new technology that's popped up in the past few decades, and having someone interact with the physical world in his stead to resume his plans for world domination!...he's also forgotten what said plans even were, but he's pretty sure they'll come back to him! Despite his... everything, he's surprisingly very attentive to his minion's needs and loves her to bits, and he eventually learns how to be an actual friend so they can bring out the best in each other! This character is silly, optimistic, a little bit evil but also kind of sweet, and a BIG presence! A presence that most people can't hear. Which might be for the best. (Just don't tell him I said that!)

Check his post here

#round 3 #mysterious character: sage #mysterious character: a bouquet of cockscomb - white poppy - white acacia - prink chrysanthemum

[iri-scrublord]

Chill Season! 2!! Weapon Review!!!

Alright so I'm going to put my faith in the fact that this god-forsaken site is going to put most of my shit under a cut so your dash isn't inundated with my stuff, so here we go. I'll put my overall thoughts in the tags in case you can't be assed to read what's probably going to be a hell of a post.

I'm going to ramble for a bit about accessibility here so if you don't give a shit about that look for the next big heading.

If you know me at all, you know that I'm a weapons guy. I'm disabled, I've got dwarfism, which means I'm way shorter than the average inkling at 3' even. I've got shorter limbs and (importantly) smaller hands/shorter fingers than the average squid does.

Now anyone who knows Squidforce knows that at the best of times they can be kinda fuckin' ableist. Remember the fiasco with Kraken Poisoning seven years ago? Or, hell, to foreshadow my thoughts on the weapons now, the Splattercolor Screen?

I mod weapons. I do them in my garage, Mr. Grizz is my hero and role model. But unlike him, who just takes the safety off of literally anything he gets his hands on, I mod my weapons to be usable by squids with different body types (sometimes I also take the safety off for fun). And before the De-Recall era, where the pro leagues moved to Splatsville (represent), what I do was considered illegal for tournament rules.

And people are going to tell me that we have the Extra Leagues, and sure. I've participated in those. And honestly they're really cool, especially because all things considered I'm one of the lucky ones who has a splat's chance in hell to participate in Turf and Anarchy. Some squids and octos have ailments that make that literally impossible, but still want to compete. I'm not knocking the Extra Leagues here. Hell I make weapons for the damn things.

What I am saying is that I know modding weapons. I know how it works, I know how much of a pain in the fuckin' ass it is to get synergies to work right, and I lose my fucking MIND every time some drooling idiot goes "This weapon needs a Burst Bomb"

BITCH EVERY WEAPON NEEDS A BURST BOMB, YOU THINK EVERY WEAPON'S GOING TO TAKE ONE? SOME KITS ARE GARBAGE FOR A REASON

Anyway, accessibility and modification possibility are things that I rank pretty highly in weapons, and while SF's been cleaning up their act since the De-Recall FOR THE MOST PART, there's still a few stinkers in here I'm going to be docking points from.

Okay that shit's out of the way here we go.

Foil Squeezer (w/ Autobomb and Splattercolor Screen)

Right out the gate I alluded to something that I'm going to need to talk about right away. The special of this thing terrifies me. The hell was Squidforce thinking?? Sure, the structure of the thing's impressive. Throw a sippy cup and you've suddenly got a huge strangely shaped wall of liquid.

What's that liquid do? It gives you goddamn achromatopsia. Who thought this was okay??? Who the hell looked at something like that and said it was fine?? There's already been several complaints I've heard about it around my circles, and I wouldn't be surprised if this thing got banned or reworked in the coming months.

Anyway this is supposed to be about the Foil Squeezer not the Screen so.

The Squeezer is already a pretty solid weapon, two firing modes, hell of a mechanism in the thing to have two separate compartments for the different pressurization levels of the ink inside. Pain in the ass to mod. As far as kits go, we don't know how much it sucks to get the Splashdown or Screen onto them yet (haven't got my hands on a devkit yet) but autobombs are pretty reliable. In terms of synergy? You can throw the bitches through the screen to put pressure, so that's good. Pretty costly for an already ink-hungry weap, but I'll say it's decent, if with a scary scary scary special.

Nouveau's Snipewriter 5B (w/ Splash Wall and Ink Storm)

Remember when Snipewriter first came out and we thought it sucked

hahahaha

This thing's synergistic as all hell. A wall to protect it. A Storm for chip damage which Snipewriter thrives off of. And to top it off a nice red finish. I think they used a different type of wood for it too, which I can appreciate it. Softer.

Fun fact: the origin of the 5H and 5B for the Snipewriters are from the ancient rating system the humans used to use on pencils way back when. 5B uses a much softer graphite for the pencils than the 5H does - art more than writing. I'm not a huge history buff compared to some of my friends but I thought that was neat.

Anyway this weapon's horrifying but I still respect it more than the E-Liter.

Enperry Splat Dualies (w/ Curling Bomb and Triple Splashdown)

You're as beautiful as the day I left you.

In all seriousness I've got a soft spot for curling bombs. And like, not as a traversal tool which like yes it's very useful in that. I like killing with it it's fun

For Triple Splashdown...it's public knowledge that its daddy sucked. That it's one of the worst specials in history, rivalled only by the Reef Slider. So how is the Triple version? It's...

good I guess. I mean like, it's hard to shoot the guy down and not die yourself. So like that's cool. With the Enperries they've got okay synergy? I mean it's no Inkjet, but it's fun to roll in and then pop the special if you've got someone pinned up against a wall.

So like...passable! Which is good!

Undercover Sorella Brella (w/ Torpedo and Splattercolor Screen)

Alright, I'm going to address the mormyridae in the room and talk about the basic Undercover Brella kit. It's awful. Of course it's awful. But nobody really talks about why because nobody talks about the actual logistics for kits.

I kind of alluded to this earlier but one of my pet peeves is like when someone goes "bluuuh why don't they just give this burst bomb" "weh weh Inkstrike would be way better" "why don't you give this thing a wall why does it have a mineeeee"

Giving a weapon a kit isn't as simple as 'This weapon would be good with this sub and this special'. A weapon's infrastructure has to support the sub and special. Think of them like puzzle pieces - the more you try and shove the Suction Bomb piece into a Bamboozler, the more you're going to have to mod it to make it fit.

And as we've been over, Squidforce fucking hates modding.

Put more seriously, tournament regs say that for a weapon alt to be legal, the base weapon itself's gotta perform exactly like the vanilla variant. No differences in ink efficiency, accuracy, spread, ink calibre, nothing like that. So the more you mod a weapon to fit a heavy sub like a Suction Bomb, the less likely you'll get it to work exactly like the base weapon.

That being said: the reason the vanilla Undercover's kit sucks is because it's literally just an umbrella. It's not even a heavy duty one it's one you can pick up at the dollar store for 500G. Weighs five pounds at most, and they shoved an ink chamber into the shaft. Ink Mine and Reef Slider are light as hell additions, and frankly out of the ones that we've got tournament standard are the only ones I would bet you could actually be fitted onto the weapon to begin with.

Which makes the Undercover Sorella an engineering miracle. A middling, mediocre engineering miracle.

Custom Blaster (w/ Point Sensor and Triple Splashdown)

Keeping it short and simple, don't have a lot to say about this one. The Point Sensor's a good support weapon for a blaster, but makes it lack a good poking tool to make people move once they're marked, meaning you're more reliant on your team to poke for you by basically saying 'over there!' Not necessarily a bad thing, but makes it hurt for inking power.

Triple Splashdown....I dunno. I don't see anything for it? It's alright as a panic button, I guess, but the Blaster doesn't have the tools to corner someone, which is where the Splashdown excels.

Special ain't great for it, but the sub changes the weapon's role in an interesting way.

Nintendo's S-BLAST '91 (w/ Burst Bomb and Booyah Bomb)

I went off on how amazing the base weapon is on this a while ago, before I forgot to review the Dread Wringer and the Heavy Edit. I'm not reviewing those until/unless they get alt kits. Fuck you.

I went off on how tough Burst Bombs are to get onto kits a while ago, which...I mean if you asked me before this season I would have told you you were INSANE for saying that something as complex as the S-Blast would get a Burst. But here we are. Some-fucking-how Nintendo worked a goddamn miracle.

Is it effective?

...kinda? Kinda.

Booyah's Booyah, not much to say about it. It's decent on basically everything that gets it as far as I'm concerned.

Painbrush Nouveau (w/ Point Sensor and Tenta Missiles)

Painbrush is another weapon I never really got around to reviewing the base of. It's a scary thing. The Dynamo of brushes except it's actually pretty effective because it only takes a week to come out swinging instead of seven happy years of marriage. I can't imagine a time you'd actually be skating with the thing unless you're in a bad spot, and if you're in a bad spot you're dead anyway.

Unlike with the Custom Blaster, I really like the Point Sensor on this thing. Brushes are meant to be annoying little bastards, and constantly marking people with a weapon that has three times as much range as you think it does makes you the biggest little bastard on the map at any given time.

And if it wasn't bastard enough, you have Missiles for extra bastard.

Painbrush Nouveau - a weapon for the bastard in you.

REEF-LUX 450 Deco (w/ Splash Wall and Reef Slider)

*fucking chokes and dies*

Nouveau's Neo Splatana Stamper (w/ Toxic Mist and Crab Tank)

Probably one of the more interesting kits we got. The original Stamper's got the Burst Bomb and Zipcaster. And as everyone knows before the Burst got its infamous capacity nerf, this thing is FEARSOME with the damn things. So when we saw the new kit with Toxic Mist all the Burst Chuds lost their goddamn minds.

What are they going to do, give it Burst Bomb again? Get over yourself.

This version of the weapon's definitely more support based - sensing a theme with a few of the kits this season honestly - but not as much as you might think. Toxic Mist is important soft area denial, but more than that, it makes landing your Vert-Hori combo a LOT easier, because anyone moving through it will be moving slower than your vertical slash, which is saying something because that thing's nearly as bad as the Grizzco Slosher.

This leads the weapon to a much more thoughtful, methodical style compared to its hopped up brother, which I ended up really liking while testing the weapon out. You're not going to be getting quad after quad like Pro Bigboy Chara or something, but with Mist and Crab you're going to be doing your team a service by playing this weapon well.

And that's it. This is the first time I've actually done a real-ass weapon review on tumblr, so...if anyone other than Astral sees this I'll be happy.

Maybe I'll do another one next season? Who knows.

Feel free to shoot me asks or reply in the comments if you've got any questions or dissenting opinions. I love talking shop about weapon shit with anyone who isn't Astral because her opinions fucking suck.

Please someone give me other opinions to go off of I only have hers someone help

#Foil Squeezer: decent with a scary special #Snipewriter 5B: horrifying but I still respect it more than the E-Liter #Enperry Splat Dualies: passable! which is good! #Undercover Sorella Brella: an engineering miracle. A middling mediocre engineering miracle #Custom Blaster: special ain't great for it but the sub changes the weapon's role in an interesting way #S-BLAST '91: Is it effective?...kinda? Kinda. #Painbrush Nouveau: a weapon for the bastard in you #REEF-LUX 450 Deco: *fucking chokes and dies* #Neo Splatana Stamper: you won't be getting quad after quad...[but you'll] be doing your team a service by playing the weapon well.

[debunkingtherightwing]

Michael Knowles Reaches New Lows

At least he's happy to watch this, I'm not. (Photo credit: The Michael Knowles Show at Daily Wire)

Daily Wire Third-Banana Michael Knowles can't stop saying stupid shit.

I suppose when it's your job to say a whole bunch of stupid shit and nobody ever calls you out for anything outside of the really bad stuff, and even then that's really just Media Matters, what you say doesn't really matter.

But man, it feels like every time I watch a new episode of Michael's show he manages to say something worse than the last, and this is impressive because the first time I watched a full episode of the show was the time he defended goddamn blackface!

So, Michael has an....interesting take on the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse entering the public domain and a truly deranged one on Gaza but first we have to slog through his take on Claudine Gay's resignation. So, let's get into it shall we?

00:00, Michael Knowles: "Embattled Harvard president Claudine Gay has finally resigned after a bruising congressional testimony where she defended calls to genocide the jews and amid the discovery of consistent plagiarism amid her consistently small corpus of scholarly publications."

Alright, so I have talked about the "bruising congressional testimony" which was really just Elise Stefanik asking leading questions and getting the EXACT response she wanted but we haven't talked about this phony plagiarism outrage that the right has. We were going to do a Ben Shapiro episode about it originally but then Trump got yanked off the ballot and those plans changed really quickly.

What essentially happened was that Chris Rufo, a conservative "activist", combed through the entirety of Gay's work and found things like improper citations and then threw a stink about plagiarism. Let's be entirely clear here, Gay never claimed someone elses ideas were her own, what the right found were citation errors. Not to say that citation errors are great per-se but these guys need to come the hell down off their high-horse about plagiarism. Many people that the right said Gay plagiarized from stated that it wasn't actual plagiarism, for example David Canon who said quote;

“This isn't even close to an example of academic plagiarism.” (Source: The Guardian)

The truth is that these morons don't give two shits about plagiarism. What they wanted was to discredit a prominent black scholar because she didn't outright ban pro-Palestine demonstrations on campus and it worked. It's total bunk and people like Michael should get their heads out of their asses and stop pretending that this is about plagiarism.

Nobody at the Daily Wire has a right to lecture us about plagiarism either, you guys make a living reading other peoples articles (or in Michael's case, watching CNN) and haven't had an original thought in your lives.

02:10, Michael Knowles: "Former president Gay, for her part, is signing off in exactly the way that you would expect; by playing the race card and blaming her ousting on quote 'the racial animus of bigoted whites'. A fitting way to go for a woman who only got the job by hustling her race in the first place."

Michael does realize that she was a tenured professor before she was president of Harvard right? It's not like she just strolled in off the street and got the job because she was black! She was also a professor at Stanford even before she started at Harvard.

I do think that the rights attack on Gay does involve race. Gay was the first black president of Harvard and you certainly aren't seeing them combing through the academic back catalogue of prominent white academics.

03:11, Michael Knowles: "Probably the most prominent figure, front facing figure, in ousting Claudine Gay is Chris Rufo. Friend of mine, think-tank scholar, author of a terrific new book, and the man who made critical race theory a household term."

While I can't speak towards Chris' book since I haven't read it and probably never will, the CRT thing is a complete grift meant to appeal to racists and Chris himself admitted it. Quote;

"We have successfully frozen their brand — "critical race theory" — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans."

Here's an interesting article talking about Chris' book. His book apparently claims that there is a secret regime change in America, which is clearly completely ridiculous. When pressed on this, Chris stated that he was writing in a "a kind of artful and kind of narrative manner that's not always meant to be taken literally”. In short, taking what Rufo says is a bad idea since he's a self admitted bullshit artist who seems in it to grift.

As for "think-tank scholar", Chris started off at the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute is a right-wing religious think tank with the explicit goal of introducing creationism into elementary and secondary schools and having it taught in place of evolution. They also don't believe in climate change, real galaxy brained stuff.

My point here is that Chris Rufo has a long history of making shit up whenever it suits him and isn't a trustworthy source at all.

3:43, Michael Knowles: "One thing I love about Chris is that he constantly tells you what he's doing. He not only achieves the political operation but he explains how he's doing it while he do"

Yeah, he tells you what he's doing so much that he admitted to making stuff up...twice!

03:57, Michael Knowles: "Claudine Gay did not get ousted over plagiarism. If this were just plagiarism she would still be in her position. She got ousted because she defended the right of students to call for the genocide of the Jews."

No she didn't because the people demonstrating in favor of Palestinian rights aren't 'calling for the genocide of the Jews.' I do wish that Gay pushed back on that framework in her testimony but I get that she was under massive pressure and the fallout probably would have been even larger if she did, which would have led to the same outcome at the end of the day.

Also don't these guys whinge about how there isn't enough free speech on college campuses all the freaking time? By own their rules they should be 100% OK with protests that challenge their ideas as long as they don't have hate-speech in them and even then since most conservatives don't think hate speech is a real thing anyway.

05:24, Michael Knowles: "So it's not about plagiarism, it's about her weakness. She was already extremely weakened by the charges of antisemitism and that is when Chris Rufo and the conservatives pounced."

And why did they pounce with that, hmmm? Could it have something to do with her skin color?

05:42, Michael Knowles: "Now they pounced in a totally just and appropriate way here, this woman's entire academic career is a joke. First of all, she had 11 scholarly publications. A real scholar will have 11 publications by the time they're in grad school."

There are two ways to look at that 11 publications metric and both make Michael sound like a complete lunatic!

1): A real scholar has published 11 scholarly publications before grad school.

This is completely insane since most grad schools require a grand total of zero published works to apply considering that the step before that is undergraduate and very few, if any, undergraduates produce publishable works. If an undergraduate student produced 11 publications that would be legitimately newsworthy. It makes no sense though because there's not enough minutes in the four years you are an undergraduate to learn everything you need to know about your major and then publish 11 papers about it.

2): A real scholar has published 11 scholarly publications while in grad school.

Very few people write more than one published paper in grad school. As a matter of fact, if this thread on Reddit is anything to go by, most don't produce ANY publications. And again, Michael clearly doesn't understand how long research takes because if he did he'd know that 11 publications in the time it takes to complete grad school combined with schoolwork and your personal life is a completely insane request to make of someone.

Now, ignoring that 11 publications and grad school metric, Claudine Gay most likely wasn't brought on as president because she's this amazing genius level scholar because that's not what the president of a university does. They most likely hired her because she's good at fundraising, is a strong leader, and is good at administrative tasks. It's not like it's the presidents job to publish research that makes Harvard respected across the world, that's what professors do. The president of a university handles the administrative stuff.

06:06, Michael Knowles: "She teaches in a fake department called African American Studies which is one of these critical theory derived pseudo academic disciplines to just indoctrinate people in leftism."

First of all, African American Studies at Harvard has been around since the 1960's so it isn't some new thing designed to indoctrinate people into leftism.

Second of all, notice how teaching about the history and culture of black people is automatically "leftist indoctrination". Since Michael Knowles is a racist who believes that depicting Jesus as a Middle Eastern man (which he was) is akin to depicting him "as a gorilla", he views this automatically as a threat to his very being which is pathetic.

Michael says some really boring and meaningless stuff and then there's an ad pivot. Now he comes back to give a completely deranged take on Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse entering the public domain.

09:53, Michael Knowles: "Speaking of left-wing institutions going down, Mickey Mouse has entered the public domain...sort of. What does this mean?"

So, Michael and the rest of the Daily Wire have been on a bizarre crusade against Disney for committing the awful crimes of exercising their right as a corporation to stand up to Ron DeSantis' homophobic Don't Say Gay bill and having the gall to cast more non-white people in their films so it stands to reason that they'd be thrilled with this.

To be clear; Fuck Disney. I hate that company for so many reasons and I'm totally fine with Steamboat Willie Mickey going into public domain, as a matter of fact I think it should have happened the first time before Disney managed to get it pushed back but where Michael goes with this is truly unhinged.

12:26, Michael Knowles: "Mickey Mouse has to become a Nazi. He has to. Because Disney is a very, very evil corporation that wants to trans your kids and fill their heads with all sorts of crazy ideas, and Disney's gotta go." 

....

So let's try to break this down. Since Disney wants to "trans your kids", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, the only logical response is to produce Nazi propaganda. Promoting Nazi ideology is really bad and since Mickey Mouse is a character that is beloved amongst kids, you'd be more than likely promoting it to children.

It wouldn't even take down Disney. Most people would see that and go "boy, who's that asshole who made Mickey Mouse a Nazi? Boy I sure want to punch him!" You know why? Because people who make Nazi propaganda are Nazi's. I guess Michael Knowles is a Nazi now.

13:08, Michael Knowles: "And so, one of the best things that we can do right now is make the Disney characters toxic."

Unless Disney is directly making it, most people won't view at as something that makes the company toxic. Also you can only use Mickey Mouse as seen in Steamboat Willie and that characters design has changed a lot over the years.

Now that I think about it, wouldn't that cross the line over into hate speech and really threaten his funding? Also Michael, why don't you run your brilliant idea by Ben Shapiro? I'm sure your boss, who is a practicing Jew, would be thrilled with your idea to produce antisemitic propaganda.

13:25, Michael Knowles: "And what this means is we need to turn Mickey into a Nazi."

Promoting Naziism is unacceptable under any circumstances.

Yes Michael, even if it's "to own the libs".

13:30, Michael Knowles: "Because Nazi's are bad."

And with that, Michael alienated a good half of his audience.

13:34, Michael Knowles: "We're not going to turn Mickey into a Nazi because the Nazi's are good."

Woah really? Thanks for clarifying.

I feel like Michael is starting to realize how antisemitic this makes him sound and is going through a "shit, did I just say that on the air?!" moment.

13:35, Michael Knowles: "I'm quite anti-Nazi, I assume you are as well."

You're a right-wing media host, while it's not guaranteed that there are people who are pro-Nazi in your audience the probability is way higher than most people.

13:47, Michael Knowles: "And it can be done! In fact, I'm shocked that the mischievous people on places like 4Chan and other internet boards haven't done this already."

"Mischievous" is an interesting way of saying "literal Neo-Nazi's". 4Chan and 8Chan are known hangouts for them. I guess the guys on Stormfront are also "mischievous".

14:14, Michael Knowles: "Back in those days, there was this cartoon frog that a regular cartoonist had made and it was kind of a popular webcomic and then those guys on 4Chan turned that frog into a Nazi."

Again, does Michael not realize that those guys were legitimate ass Nazi's? Why else would you turn some random cartoon into a Nazi symbol?

Michael finally drops this nonsense and moves on to the next topic. Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler's rape and video voyeurism accusations. This was before Christian stepped down due to the allegations so we aren't going to talk about what January 3rd Michael doesn't know. Here's a good article going over what happened:

19:32, Michael Knowles: "I am simply befuddled at the notion that one would have a reasonable expectation of privacy when having a threesome with a bunch of randos, that's totally crazy."

First of all, the woman making the allegations appears to have been a friend of Zeigler and his wife so they aren't a "bunch of randos" like he claims.

Second of all, of course you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy when having sex, unless Michael would like someone taping him and his wife having sex. See, when I frame it like that it's invasive as hell and it's the same thing here. People have a right to privacy during intimate acts even if you don't like the act in question.

19:46, Michael Knowles: "And I guess the deeper part of this to me, what this is all about to me and it seems clear as day, this is all about porn."

Oh my GOD! We get it Michael, you don't like the porn industry, I don't either but not for your dumbass reasons.

In the past couple of Michael Knowles episodes on this blog I have witnessed Michael essentially transform not liking porn into some sort of personality or brand. Maybe it was because that stupid trans brainwashing nonsense finally got him the attention that he wanted but he just hasn't shut up about it. I think he's trying to be the Matt Walsh of porn but shoehorning it into pretty much everything you talk about is cringeworthy.

19:59, Michael Knowles: "I would bet the farm that they're really into porn. In fact, the way I know they're really into porn, or at least the guy is really into porn, he's making a porno."

I mean I guess. I interpreted the act of taking that video more as a sort of screwed up "insurance" thing against his wife and the other woman. Like, an "if I go down you all go down" sort of thing.

Even if this guy is into porn, that's totally irrelevant. What's relevant is that he raped a woman and filmed two without their consent.

Ad pivot.

22:25, Michael Knowles: "Speaking of the media, an equally disturbing story but not nearly as weird. Poland has a new liberal government and the new liberal government is banning the conservative media, they're dissolving the state media."

The new government of Poland isn't "banning Conservative media".

The situation in Poland is this, for 8 years they were under the control of the Law And Justice (PiS) party which was indeed a very conservative leaning organization. The state-run media at the time was notoriously in favor of the PiS party, even being called propaganda by some. Stop thinking NPR and start thinking Russia Today because that is a more effective comparison. When a news agency that's funded by the government criticizes a political leader that's all well and good, BBC and CBC do it all the time, but when it does nothing but slander the opposition party as well as other TV networks that look poorly on one other party, that's propaganda.

I consider the Daily Wire propaganda since they lie in favor of the right all the time but I don't think they should be censored because of freedom of the press. However if the Daily Wire was owned by the GOP (well, in a more direct way anyway) and was the main publicly funded news source in the USA, I'd say that's clearly state-run media and needs to be shut down.

Nobody in Poland is saying that conservative media organizations can't exist, that's just Michael's fearmongering bullshit. What's happening is that they are getting rid of a propaganda network and most likely replacing it with a more impartial and balanced network.

22:59, Michael Knowles: "The libs, that's their favorite thing. PBS, NPR."

Ah yes, PBS and NPR, two known leftist organizations. I love how Michael doesn't even really elaborate on the situation in Poland and just bitches about how the MSM is mean to conservatives, almost as if he realizes that defending a foreign propaganda network is a really bad look.

I wonder if Ben Shapiro watches his underlings videos because this shits embarrassing.

Michael reads a Reuters article about this in a scary voice.

26:37, Michael Knowles: "There's a report out that gen z is aging differently from millennials. Millennials look weirdly young. Maybe not me because my diet consists of; espresso, black tea, whisky, and tobacco so maybe I haven't aged quite as gracefully."

"Look at how manly I am with my whisky and tobacco, I'm an alpha male!"

This prompted me to look up how old Michael is since he mentioned that he was a millennial and I was pretty surprised to find out that he's only 33, I kind of assumed that he was 45-50. I guess right wing bullshit ages you.

Anyway, this whole thing about millennials aging more gracefully is just dumb and irrelevant. This mostly exists so that Michael can complain about how he thinks that cosmetic procedures only make people look worse, immediate skip.

29:42, Michael Knowles: "Speaking of toxic substances, there's a lady who is alleging that McDonald's has changed it's wrappers to support the state of Israel."

This is a really really dumb story.

So some woman made a TikTok, most likely for attention because I don't see how someone could seriously believe this, that white and blue wrapping from McDonald's was designed to support Israel. I don't really see this woman being an actual supporter of Palestinian rights as most pro-Palestine people I know, myself included, are boycotting McDonald's. Odds are that this is completely for attention.

In case you are wondering, the blue wrappers are generic and have been used before the war started.

Anyway, Michael is using this as an excuse to make all pro-Palestinian rights advocates look completely insane but that's dumb as well. Some woman on TikTok isn't the voice of every person who supports Palestine.

31:28, Michael Knowles: "Call me naive but I don't think that the McDonald's chicken sandwich wrapper is a subliminal message to convince the goyim to support the state of Israel."

It is a recorded fact on this blog that Michael Knowles believes that both porn and children's cartoons have subliminal messages in them designed to turn kids trans. In short, he has zero right to make fun of anyone for believing in subliminal messages. Yeah, this story is dumb but so is Michael.

31:53, Michael Knowles: "These people need help. These people, the kind of people who stub there toe in the morning and blame the Jews. It's the same kind of people stub their toe in the morning and blame the CIA, or the people who stub their toe in the morning and blame the illuminati, or the people who stub their toe in the morning and blame this that or the other thing."

"Like the people who stub their toe in the morning and blame the lef-oh wait can't say that one, that's me and my audience!"

This is so hypocritical coming from a guy who has based his entire career on complaining about the left and blaming every ill in society on them. Yeah, the people who stub their toe in the morning and blame the illuminati are nuts, but so are the ones who blame the left.

32:26, Michael Knowles: "If you search for simplistic answers to political problems, one you're gonna be wrong and you're gonna think the chicken sandwich is a Jewish conspiracy but two, you're gonna cede the political order."

And that's why you blame literally everything on the left, right?

34:41, Michael Knowles: "If I were an Israeli minister I'd probably be calling for the same thing (displacing Gazan's). I'd be saying 'Look, we can't tolerate Gaza to exist as a political unit anymore. We can't tolerate these people here, it's too much of a security risk and we gotta ethnically cleanse the area.'"

So....let me get this straight. If Michael were an Israeli minister he'd be not just ok with but a literal advocate of committing genocide?! Holy crap that's disgusting. "We gotta ethnically cleanse the area", what an absolute prick. Does Michael not realize how many children there are in that area he'd be "ethnically cleansing"?! Not that ethnically cleansing adults is OK either but how could the children possibly be a security risk?!

Man alive this is a bad episode.

34:58, Michael Knowles: "But, it's just not gonna fly."

Really Michael?! Ethnically cleansing a population isn't gonna fly?! Golly, I wonder why?!

What an absolutely moronic dickhead. I'm done with this segment, what's after the ad pivot?

39:05, Michael Knowles: "She burned down one of the churches for the libs religion (for context: an abortion clinic) which is death and the destruction of all that is nice and flourishing about human life."

Michael Knowles stubs his toe in the morning and blames it on the libs who worship death and the destruction of all that is nice and flourishing about human life.

Notice how that entire segment about how blaming things on an entire group of people is counterproductive is really hypocritical if you listen to literally anything that comes out of Michael's mouth.

Conclusion:

Stupid episode containing some infuriating comments, classic Michael Knowles stuff. Considering that this is my first Daily Wire episode of the new year we can take this as a pretty bad omen for the kind of stuff they'll be up to this year.

#politics #right wing bullshit #journalism #conservative bullshit #fact checking #bad takes #conservatives #disinformation #daily wire #debunking

[childpolh]

A call to arms hemingway

A CALL TO ARMS HEMINGWAY MOVIE

A CALL TO ARMS HEMINGWAY CODE

Even some small exchanges survive, like one between Lt. Henry is wounded, and embarrassed because it happened while he was eating cheese. "If nobody would attack, the war would be over," one soldier muses. Catherine is a still somewhat mixed-up woman who hates the rain "because I see myself dead in it". Catherine and Henry still make love, and she gets pregnant.

A CALL TO ARMS HEMINGWAY CODE

Since this is a film made before the inhibiting Hays Code (Will, not Helen), Borzage and his writers are able to get away with a bit more than they would have just a couple of years later. Yet a minute later, her lines come directly from the book, Catherine noting her daydreams about her old lover turning up at her hospital with a saber cut, then adding: "He didn't have a saber cut, they blew him to bits." For Hollywood, violence was always easier material than sex. In the book, though, Catherine wasn't regretting sending him off to war unmarried, but without their having had sex. In the film, she says "If I had to do it all over again, I'd marry him". Henry first meet, they talk about her former lover, a war casualty.

A CALL TO ARMS HEMINGWAY MOVIE

The differences between book and movie are more in the matter of treatment than storyline. Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou), threaten to tear them apart. But the violence of war, and the interference of friends like Capt. Henry meets nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes) and they quickly fall in love. Henry (Gary Cooper) is an American ambulance corpsman serving with the Italian Army as it fights the Austrians along the Piave, a bloody backwater campaign of World War I. In a story not much different than what you might have read in high school, Lt. Yet a surprising amount of the novel's spirit does survive the transition. Henry and Catherine made into something more befitting Douglas Sirk than the unsentimental Papa. It's more Hollywood than Hemingway: Long blankets of dialogue are condensed, sharp edges softened, and the romance between Lt. And good Marine officers do what they're told to do, to the best of their ability.Frank Borzage's 1932 version of "A Farewell To Arms" has the distinction of being the first film adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway novel. McCoy immediately knew Carlson had known all along that he was the spy. When Carlson was leaving he told him to tell Rickabee, which was McCoy's contact during his mission, he said hello. Carlson and McCoy had a successful mission on Makin Island, and upon their return Carlson signed McCoy's transfer. Banning came though and got McCoy a transfer out as a linguist, but McCoy wanted to stay and be with Carlson on their first mission as Raiders. Banning, knowing McCoy from Shanghai, knew that McCoy was not happy about having to spy on another China Marine and vowed to try to get him out as soon as possible. His findings were that Carlson had most likely heard the scuttlebutt, but did not know that McCoy was the spy. Hoping that he stopped it before Carlson caught wind of it, theCommandant sends Major Banning to find out how much if anything Carlson knows. The Commandant finds out about the plan to discredit Carlson and that his name was used to recruit the key players and quickly and quietly puts and end to it. He and Zimmerman are important parts of the training of the volunteers, getting the weapons and helping making the strategic plans. McCoy is impressed with everything Carlson talks to him about, and thinks he is a good Marine. However, she does move to San Diego with him, where he is stationed during his Raider's training. McCoy refuses to marry Ernie because he does not think that a Marine officer about to be sent over seas should be married. McCoy is dating a woman named Ernest "Ernie" Sage, who he met through mutual friend, Second Lieutenant Pickering. They send McCoy to spy on Carlson and to find proof that their suspicions are correct. General Lesterby and Colonel Wesley are concerned that Carlson is a communist, crazy, or both, and they worry about what that could mean for the Marine Corps. Colonel Carlson is gathering a group of elite fighters, similar to the British Commandos, to be called the Raiders. Second Lieutenant Kenneth McCoy is wounded fighting in Shanghai just before the bombing on Pearl Harbor, ending up with the nickname "Killer McCoy." He is sent back to the States, and is ordered to spy on a Colonel Carlson, who has strong ties to the President's son, James Roosevelt. It follows the career of Second Lieutenant Kenneth McCoy and the people and events that touch his life in the months following the bombing on Pearl Harbor. Call to Arms begins 11 days after the bombing on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941.

#A call to arms hemingway

[luveline]

you know, I'm coming right back [Fred Weasley x Reader]

summary: you're a lonely artist and Fred is your adoring model

word count: 2.4k

tags: reader insert, lonely reader, artist reader, seventh year, kids in love, first kiss, getting together, pining, fluff, friends-to-lovers

It was easy for you, usually, to act fine. To feel fine. Any loneliness that clouded your life was pushed firmly into the depths of your thoughts. You tried to focus on the things that mattered, essays and charms and your art.

You loved to draw. You had sketchbooks filled to the brim with sketches, some half finished, others coloured and lined. You drew everything, though you struggled to bring anything from your memory. Everything you drew had to be done right there, right then, with unsuspecting models. You sketched students eating their dinner, scribbled side profiles when you managed a spare minute in class. But you're most impressive artwork was done in the library, where nothing moved. Everyone was silent. You had pages and pages of bored, tired looking students. When exams approached, you hurriedly copied down the expressions of people on the edge of depression and panic.

You had friends, ish. You knew people. You'd had intense friendships that somehow always ended in awkward drifting aparts. Well, you thought. There must be something wrong with me. They liked me before they didn't, so the fault must've been mine.

You huffed out a sigh, pressing your face deep into the textured page of your sketch book, breathing in the smell of charcoal. You were sketching the illusive Fred Weasley, who you'd never truly drawn before. Maybe you had scraps from your second or third year when you'd still attempted to draw moving objects before getting comfortable and accepting that still life was your forte.

He was maddeningly good lucking when his eyebrows puckered in concentration. He seemed to actually be studying for once, sat at a table with his brother, George, and housemates Angelina Johnson and Alicia Spinnet.

You were sat by yourself, and couldn't help listening to his lilting voice as he bantered with his friends. They were talking about Umbridge (the current victim of the Hogwarts' student body hate train), and quidditch, and their recent ban from quidditch. You'd never played.

"Watch out, dolly fell asleep," said one of the girls.

You bit your lip. You'd been nicknamed dolly by the girls in your dorm because of your porcelain doll you'd had since childhood. Even though this year was your last, you still hadn't felt the need to hide her away. She made you feel much less anxious and alone.

The whole school knew, naturally.

"Don't get any funny ideas," said Angelina,  to the twins.

"Come on Angie, you think so little of us?" said George.

"Yesterday I watched you trick a group of forth years into taking puking pastilles." Angelina said.

"It was hardly a trick. We told them they were multi-faceted," said George.

You could hear your heartbeat if you focused. It was in your ears. It bump, bump, bumped.

Bump bump. You flinched, a hand settled on your shoulder quickly moved.

"Wake up, dolly. Library's closing."

You squinted up into Fred's face, head halo'd by candlelight. Lifting your head from the wooden table, you stretched your neck to the left. It clicked.

"Uh..."

"Hmm?" You prompted him, smoothing your hair behind your ears.

"You have - dirt. On your face. Here-" He said, reaching forward. You closed your eyes as he gently wiped the skin above your eyebrow.

"It's charcoal."

"What?"

"It's not dirt," you said, peaking at him through your eyelashes. "It's charcoal."

He looked mildly surprised. You shifted, hoping to cover your sketch before he caught sight of it.

It didn't matter.

"It's me. My gorgeous dolly, you've created quite the masterpiece right there, haven't you? I look vexingly handsome, of course. Thought if that's a consequence of your skill or my handsomeness is anyones guess."

You were lost for words. "Uh, quite."

"Yes, yes, quite. Say, could I keep it?"

"... You want the drawing?"

"I'd love it, if that's okay."

"I," you quickly dug your thumbnail into the paper, tearing carefully at the centre. The paper came away a little ragged and smudged. "Of course. It's yours."

He handled it with care.

The librarian jingled her little bell again.

"Thank you. So, see you?"

"Yep," you agreed.

He nodded his head and bowed out with his friends. You tried not to feel paranoid at their laughter.

-

You were curled up in a hidden alcove, though it was hardly hidden. Most students knew where to seek privacy in the castle. You just so happened to get there first that evening.

You were trying to sketch Fred again. It felt weird to be missing a page from your book, and weirder still that you couldn't remember his face when he wasn't right in front of you. You tried, but it kept going wrong.

When you finally managed one you liked well enough, you had accidentally ruined it with a heavy hand and the wrong shade of brown.

He looked much too brunette.

You carefully rolled your coloured pencils back up, securing the leather ties tightly so as to keep every pencil confined.

Sighing morosely, you flipped to a new page. Things got so complicated sometimes, it made you agitated. You doodled a little sad face in the corner of your page. When the one thing that you enjoyed in life started to go wrong, it set off your whole mood.

Your birthday was coming up. It had been on your mind a lot lately. You'd spend it alone. That's what you figured. Nobody would know it was your birthday, or if they did, you weren't friends now, so...

You began with an arching circle, bisecting the lines appropriately. Feeling out the familiar lines of your own face came easy, the slight upper tilt of your brows, your hair and your pursed mouth. You always looked sad in the mirror, and it showed, dotted here and there when the only thing to draw was your own face.

The rudimentary outline of a birthday cake took form. The candles were unlit.

In a fit of unhappiness, you scratched out your mouth. It was never smiling.

"What did that piece of paper ever do to you?" said a voice.

You jumped. Fred was peering down at you curiously, wringing his hands. You put your pencil between the soft cover and smashed it flat, closed.

"Hi, dolly."

"Weasley."

"Oh, not even a first name?"

"You neglected mine first," you reasoned, rolling the words. He smiled at your joking tone.

"How rude of me. Hi, Y/N," he corrected himself.

"Hi, Weasley."

He smirked.

"Anymore of me in that blessed vessel?"

"Nah. You never stand still."

"If I pose for it?" He asked. You patted the ground in front of you.

He was a lovely model. He stayed infinitely still, more still than you imagined possible for him. He sat at a 3/4ths angle, chin up but not too far, mouth tilted and eyes open.

His eyes were the one thing he couldn't keep still. You tried not to flame in the cheeks everything you'd catch his gaze on you.

You sketched fast, choosing to hatch rather than render, big swooping lines to give the illusion of a depth that wasn't really there. You would've loved to do a full render, maybe even a colour portrait, but he was beginning to look a little antsy.

You set the book on the floor to face him and pushed it into his eyesight softlt. He turned. He looked nice like that, face bent, hair falling into his eyes.

After a moment, he began scrounging through his robe pockets. He set down a box, a lighter, a pair of gloves.

Finally, he set a galleon onto the floor close to your crossed legs.

"For you," he said, smiling at your inquisitive look. "For the drawing."

"Oh, I can't accept that. And I'd like to keep this one, if it's alright."

Fred thought for a moment. "Alright, you keep it. And the galleon, too, for the one you gave me the other day."

You bit back a smile. "I can't take your money, Fred."

"I can't keep having you draw me for free. It's as valuable a service as anything else. Plus, I'm not sure if you know, but I run a lucrative business these days."

You picked up the coin, rubbing your thumb against the engravings thoughtfully. "It's hardly a service."

"A talent, then. A skill. You're very good."

You're neck almost snapped as you looked into his face, wanting to assess his expression for genuineness. He looked earnest, and kind. You blinked away the gathering heat behind your eyes.

"Thank you."

He waved a hand at you. "Think nothing of it."

"Really-" you cleared your throat, "-you're doing me a favour. I'm not good at drawing things that move."

"I'm sure you're better than you think," he said.

You shook your head, smiling smiling smiling.

"What's in the box?"

"Oh, this old thing?" Fred weighed the box in his hands. It was soft at the corners, like a simple jewelry box that you had in your trunk. He offered it to you. You opened it carefully, the lid sliding free with a shhhhh sound. Inside was an evil looking fruit pastille, a match stick and a dried up flower petal.

It felt like a very private thing to see, suddenly. Such an eclectic collection of items couldn't be random.

"The first puking pastille George and I made. Or rather, the second - the first was forcibly fed to Lee Jordan in our third year. The match stick is from my Uncle's matchbox. I never met him. And the flower was from Ginny, when she was 9." He sounded nervous.

"It's a memory box."

"I- yes. It is. Things are sometimes so miserable now, with Umbridge and you-know-who. Scary, even. I look at them when I feel like it won't ever end."

You took them in for a little while longer and then placed the lid onto the box with nimble fingers. You scratched the lid with a fingernail.

"It's nice. You're right. Things are so awful right now, it's good to have reminders of why we keep going."

"Exaclty. Dolly, can I interest you in a fruit pastille?"

"Not on your life."

"They're perfectly edible!"

"Sure, Fred."

-

The honest conversation you'd shared with Fred was a catalyst between you. He often came to find you, each time whining and nagging you to just sit in the library like most people do.

"What, so your housemates can throw paper balls at me?"

"They thought you were sleeping!"

A likely story, you thought. He sometimes asked you to draw him, posing with the elegance of a natural born model. It was great for you personally, you felt that you were really getting a feel for his face. Eventually, you were able to draw his face from memory, the details of his nose coming to your fingers as easily as a first year spell.

It became about capturing emotion. You could capture his likeness now without a second thought, but his emotions were much more complicated. How would you show his veiled frustration the day Umbridge kicked him off the quidditch team? Through the clenching of his jaw? The shy veins in his forehead? How did you showcase the fear when he'd come back to Hogwarts after Christmas break, through his eyes, downturned and squinting just a little?

Today, it was poorly hidden elation. "How come you're so happy?" You asked, pencil between your teeth. He grinned. You measured his face with your thumb in the air, forming an L.

"Is it a prank?"

"You're thinking too small."

"A new product?"

"Still need to go bigger!"

"Hmmm," you hummed. Measure twice, cut once. Or in your case, sketch once.

"George and I, we're gonna open a shop."

"A section at Zonko's isn't enough for you?" You asked, casually, though you were very very happy for him.

"It's going to be amazing. We're going to run it, just the two of us, and you won't catch me in these scrappy long sleeves anymore. The next time you see me, I'll be in a full suit and tie."

"The next time? Is that not tomorrow?"

Fred closed his mouth, realising his mistake. He had revealed something he hadn't intended to. "We're leaving," he confessed. "We were going to wait for our NEWTs but... Well, we won't need them. This is going to work."

"So. You're leaving today?" You asked, crestfallen.

"Hey," Fred said, rubbing a placating hand over the curve of your shoulder. "Tomorrow. During the DADA OWL. We have a plan."

"This is goodbye?"

"No! No. Not if you don't want it to be. Actually, I've been meaning to ask you something, and maybe now isn't the best time, I had this whole letter planned and I didn't want to distract you from your exams and-"

"What do you want to ask me?"

Fred straightened. "I wanted to ask - will you go out with me? Not, you don't have to be my girlfriend if it's too soon, I'd love to take you for food someplace, I was going to ask you to Hogsmeade, but when the shop officially became ours, the plans changed so fast and I didn't know if you'd still want-" you cut off his rambling.

"I'll be your girlfriend," you said.

"You will?"

"Sure, if you'll be my boyfriend," you murmured.

Fred moved the arm that had been on your shoulder to the nape of your neck. "That's a dealbreaker," he said, leaning in.

He kissed you chastely on the lips first and then pulled back to look into your face. You chased him, a moment of bravery, and opened your mouth to taste him. He was sweet, like sugar. Your sketch pad crinkled beneath you both as he pressed forward. Your chests touched, heaving.

"You're not gonna be my boyfriend?" You asked against his mouth, breathing hard.

"I'm gonna be much more than that, dolly," he said heatedly.

Your mouth was tingling. "Kiss me again?"

You gasped at the force of him, laughing. He laughed too against your lips, and the sound tickled. He gave you a multitude of short and sweet kisses before pulling away again.

He wiped the wetness from your lip with his pinky finger. "Godric, you're cute. Look how flushed you are! You're insane."

Something churned in your stomach. The butterflies had acquired a trampoline. You felt happier than you had in a very long time. "You're not half-bad yourself, Weasley."

#listened to boyfriend by big time rush while writing hahaha #fred weasley x reader #fred weasley imagine #fred weasley fanfic #fred weasley #fred #fred weasly x reader #sad reader #reader insert #artist reader #fred weasley fluff #sorry for the big blocks of text tumblr has a 250 paragraph limit #why woukd they do that

[spinji]

Quirkless AU where all of the villains are twitch streamers:

Shigaraki has a big following but is infamously hated, including by his own fans.

He gets trolled constantly and donation comments are almost always to mock him.

Because his reactions when he gets riled up (which is not hard) are pure gold.

Fail and rage compilations abound.

He mostly plays RPGs but occasionally gets tricked into playing horror games like DDLC.

He hates getting scared but refuses to stop until he finishes the game just to stick it to whoever recommended it.

Kurogiri will constantly walk into his room to check on him and ask things.

He hates that too.

Not because of Kurogiri inquiring if he wants some piping hot pizza rolls, mind you.

But because his chat will never shut the fuck up whenever Kurogiri peers into frame.

They call him Shadow Man because the shitty lighting in Tomura’s room makes it impossible to make out his features.

He eventually needs to cave and make a Kurogiri emote just so everyone stops donating just to say “are you winning son?” or “get the fuck out of my room I’m playing Minecraft”.

They still do it, even when they promised they wouldn’t if he made the emote.

Kurogiri eventually takes up streaming too, just for fun.

He goes live very rarely but most of Shig’s audience starts following him the moment they find out.

He’s usually very quiet and pretty much only plays tactical games.

Yet he gets more positive reception than Tomura.

He doesn’t have a webcam though, so his face is still a mystery.

Toga is a classic, unhinged e-girl.

Does her makeup before every stream, has a cute as fuck room, and a cat ear headset.

Only plays the most violent shit ever published.

Mortal Kombat, Hatred, the works.

If it’s gotten banned from Twitch for violence/gore she has still tried to play it live.

She has a merch line of pastel animal patterns, but the animals are all bloody, mangled corpses.

People love it anyway so whateves.

Absolutely sold gamer girl bathwater and she is making bank.

Easily the most popular out of the whole league.

Dabi is an overachiever fuckwit.

All of his streams are speedrun records, soulsborne games, or those old flash rage games that were specifically designed to be impossible or unfair.

The difficulty never fucking fazes him, and everything he does is impressive but he’s so calm and smug about it that it’s actually kind of infuriating to see him play so well.

In earlier archives you can occasionally hear Enji yelling at Shoto or Natsu in the background and he just lets out an annoyed sigh.

In his current streams, Hawks will occasionally saunter by the camera in just a tanktop and boxers, looking like a fucking mess.

It always results in a chorus of fried chicken emojis from chat.

Dabi never acknowledges it.

Twice plays just about anything. He gives no shit about what games are well reviewed or brand new.

He will pick up a mediocre licensed game from 2006 and it’s the best.

He just fucks around and has a good time.

Tends to start and end his streams very abruptly, catching one live is hard and very sought after by his fans.

He has a soundboard and spams it constantly.

He and Toga collab for silly co-op games a lot.

It’s the only time you can find Toga playing games that aren’t gory.

Spinner plays almost exclusively driving games.

Claims that these games are how he learned how to drive IRL.

He’s oddly proud of it when he really shouldn't be.

He’s also very passionate when it comes to his opinions on said games.

Gets really pissed if you even insinuate that every Forza game is exactly the same.

So of course he gets shit disturbers in his chat who do exactly that.

He goes on a rant and blocks them immediately.

He and every other league member has played the FNAF games.

Shigaraki is the only one that doesn’t love it.

Spinner specifically gets absorbed in the lore.

Maybe a little too much.

Compress is a V-tuber instead of using a standard webcam setup.

He has the most distinct persona separate from his regular personality.

His reactions to things are always so over the top and odd that you can’t help but enjoy it.

About a year into gaining a following, he started constructing a really convoluted lore around his character.

His fans love it and he’s constantly receiving fanart and watching theory videos about himself in his downtime.

It gives him a good chuckle.

Stain is still a creepy mother fucker.

He’s always rambling about purges and the blood of the weak.

But he’s weirdly really good at rhythm games??

He flips out if he misses a single note.

Most people only watch him out of morbid curiosity.

Any laugh you get from watching him is an uncomfortable one.

Overhaul is the one that seems like the most normal person.

At least among this weird group of loosely acquainted fuckwads.

He doesn’t have particularly strong reactions.

He plays most of the new critically acclaimed games and gives his thoughts on them.

The more interesting thing is his community.

That is absolutely convinced he is a serial killer.

There is a subreddit entirely dedicated to collecting evidence to support this theory.

Random banging noises caught on his mic.

Shadows of people out of frame even though he claims to live alone.

One time he needed to end a stream abruptly and didn’t say why and they went nuts over it.

Chisaki eventually needed to make a public statement to address the rumors.

No one fucking believed him.

Exposed videos are still trickling out to this day.

Gentle is mostly an IRL streamer.

A bad one at that.

But he sometimes shakes things up by playing solitaire on stream.

He has 12 followers.

La Brava is currently minting Gentle NFTs

#mha #bnha #headcanons #quirkless au #league of villains #tomura shiragaki #himiko toga #kurogiri #dabi #dabihawks #twice #spinner #mr. compress #hero killer stain #kai chisaki #overhaul #gentle criminal #la brava #long post #i just really needed to dump my thoughts about this #because the liberation front is legit being led by weebs and gamers and the world must know

[allisonlol]

Chuuya, atsushi, akutagawa, and dazai with a gamer! S/o?

a/n: as a fellow gamer, i love this req !! 🥳

warnings: none!

(Chuuya, Atsushi, Aku, Dazai) with a Gamer S/O

Chuuya

tbh he doesn’t really see the hype behind video games but as long as it makes you happy, he’s happy 😭

in fact he’s rather impressed by your fast reflexes & quick thinking while you’re playing

he’ll never say no if you ask him to play some with you either

beware tho because he WILL rage if you guys lose

(in fact this is the number one reason why he doesn’t like video games - it sets off his temper too easily 💀)

i feel like he’d prefer call of duty or overwatch the most (…😟) and will insist you guys play those together if you offer

if someone’s ever rude to you in voice chat he SNATCHES the mic away from you and cusses the other person out 😭 starts THREATENING them too like chuuya sweetie it wasn’t that deep-

probably gets you banned from multiple servers for this

has also rage-thrown one of your controllers before and it snapped in half (dw he bought you like three new ones to make up for it-)

that’s why it’s better for him to just…watch you play rather than actually join in 😁

Atsushi

he has such a genuine interest in anything that you do, so of course he loves seeing you play your video games :)

loves when you play animal crossing & will always ask to see your progress and whatnot

you end up buying him a switch so the two of you can play together and- it is the most precious thing omg 😭

always visits your island to run around & help you out with various tasks

sends you little gifts in the game too, like fruit or tools you may need. also plants little flower gardens around your island <3

GIVES YOU ALL OF HIS BELLS 😭 like no bby pls keep ur money !!

besides animal crossing, atsushi also likes watching you play mario kart

cheers you on from over your shoulder the whole time

“if only you were this good at driving in real life !!”

he didn’t mean that omg he was just thinking out loud 😦

Akutagawa

oh lord

he’ll pretend to care but honestly finds video games useless

subtly hints that you should spend your time doing something more productive but…you don’t listen 🙄 (i wouldn’t either it’s ok)

after some time he may warm up to it a bit

will pretend to be doing something else while actually watching you play ur games 👀

gradually works his way over to sit next to you…don’t comment on this or he’ll leave immediately

likes when you play horror games the most, like outlast or resident evil (same)

is SUCH a backseat gamer 🙄 gets really nervous watching and orders you around about what you should do next-

literally hovers directly over your shoulder…he’s stressing omg

this results in you dying in the game and the both of you SCREAM at the jumpscare 💀

you offer for him to give it a go but he’ll have no clue on how to use the controller and will just end up shoving it back into ur hands

Dazai

another one who’s super into anything ur interested in

loves watching you play and thinks it’s adorable how concentrated you get

ALWAYS asks if he can play the games with you 😭 you’d be a fool to tell him no because he’s actually super good at them like tf-

a menace honestly. the gaming community fears him

likes to play gta and mortal kombat with you the most

the two of you wreck absolute HAVOC in gta…fr unstoppable together 💀

watch out bc not even you are safe from dazai in games

he’ll turn on you in seconds…jokingly of course

mf just likes to win 🙄 not saying he’ll be able to beat you tho…

he gets so nervous if you play any kind of horror game that it’s almost cute

throws the controller when he gets jumpscared and starts whining about how he wants you to play a different game

an easy way to get him to leave you alone if that’s ever what u wanted 💀

a/n: finally finishing this up at 5am but omg. this req made my day

song i listened to while writing: bite marks by au/ra

Thank you!

#bsd x reader #bungo stray dogs x reader #chuuya x reader #chuuya x you #dazai x reader #dazai x you #nakahara chuuya #bsd atsushi #atsushi x reader #atsushi x you #atsushi headcanons #dazai headcanons #dazai imagines #bsd dazai #chuuya imagines #chuuya headcanons #bsd headcanons

[apocalypticgargoyle]

Hii!! I was wondering if you can write a dream imagine where like you guys are secretly dating and you sometimes post you and dream holding hands but you never tag him so like people know that you are dating someone but no one really knows who and one day you and the guys were talking and you say something like “oh yeah my boyfriend gave me this this and this” and everyone else is all like omg that’s cute but sapnap is over here like “dude dream literally had that here yesterday” but like sapnap doesn’t say anything to you guys he just tells the rest of the guys that he thinks you guys are dating but has zero evidence so the next few weeks they are just trying to catch you guys and one day when they suspect that dream is cheating (when he was actually like asking your mom for your hand in marriage or something) the boys are all like “dude we caught dream talking with someone else I’m so sorry to tell you this” and like you and dream start laughing so hard bc it was your mom and you guys are like “yeah We’ve been dating for like a year now did we not tell you guys?” Or something like “oh yeah did we not make it obvious?” Idk if it made sense 😭😂

I'm ✍️✍️✍️✍️

𝐌𝐎𝐌'𝐒 𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄. ♘ 𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐱 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

warnings: one or two swear words

You leaned back in your chair, listening to the conversation unfolding before you. You turned the volume up slightly as Sapnap began to tease you about your gaming techniques. You giggled as others began to weigh in, joking about this and that. George’s voice came in above the others. “Guys shut up, her boyfriend works for Microsoft and can get you banned,” he mocked, making you snort.

The image of Dream trying to figure out how to boil water flashed into your mind. “Yeah, he’s terrifying,” you chided.

Sapnap was the next to pipe up. “You can tell us you don’t have a boyfriend, you know. No one will care.”

“No yeah, I do. He bought me this shirt,” you defended, lifting the hem of your hoodie to show the group of them, earning a chorus of sarcastic cooing. Sapnap’s eyebrows furrowed slightly as if he’d seen it before.

George smugly grinned at you. “Oh, yeah? Does he go to another school?”

You snickered. “Shut up,” you mumbled, the chat switching to a new subject. Little did you know, Sapnap was texting George and the rest of them about his suspicions that this mysterious boyfriend of yours was actually Dream, knowing full well that he’d seen Dream buy that exact shirt a few weeks prior.

You’d been dating him for nearly a year, choosing to blatantly disregard any questions about who he was and vice versa. Most of your photos on Instagram involving him were vague and gave your audience more confusion than understanding. Comments about searching for your OnlyFans to see if they could recognize his voice began to circulate and your friends even fueled that fire.

You weren’t sure what Dream had told Sapnap all those months of secrecy, but somehow it seemed like the t-shirt was the first hint at your relationship. After he’d addressed his suspicions with the rest of your group, it was like a hunt to find out if it really was Dream or if Sapnap was just a few marbles short of sanity from one too many late nights.

In the midst of this wild goose chase, Dream was focused on getting your mom to warm up to him. She was a difficult woman to impress, but he was just as (if not more) stubborn than she was. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, but he’d rather have her favor him over your past boyfriend and there was one she was determined to prefer over him until the end of time. You often joked about him getting close to you only for him to date your mother, which drove him absolutely sideways.

When she visited, he made dinner for all of you and―after studying for a week prior―discussed various books and authors she loved. It wasn’t until he exhaustedly brought up The Crown that the two of them finally clicked. He’d found her “g-spot,” you’d often tease.

After that, they were practically inseparable and he was the one that took her to lunch and sightseeing when she was in town until you got out of school. It was on one of these visits that Sapnap had spotted the two. She was talking Dream’s ear off about something, touching his arm to articulate her points and mockingly appraising him for opening doors for her without being asked.

At this point, Sapnap and the group were certain the two of you were together, therefore when Dream’s voice picked up on his radar and he saw him schmoozing an older woman, his stomach sank. He watched the two of them for a bit, not seeing much change in the way they communicated, but through the glass of the front of the restaurant, he was shocked that Dream was going behind your back in such a way.

That night the group was rather quiet, only a few mumbles from the others would pitch in as you and Dream basically had a conversation amongst yourselves. “So what’s the news. Why is everyone suddenly so mellow?” You joked, making a few of them chuckle awkwardly.

George cleared his throat. “Uh, we have to tell you something…” he muttered. “Dream’s talking to someone else…”

Your eyebrows perked slightly. “What do you mean?” You queried, Dream sending a silent what into the air.

Sapnap sighed. “I saw him with someone else earlier today. They looked like they were on a date or something…”

Dream laughed into his microphone, wheezing as he went about. “You bitch! I knew you were hooking up with my mom!” You joked, biting back your own giggles. You could hear the physical embodiment of a question mark ricocheting through the chat. “Dream and my mom are absolute besties. I wouldn’t be surprised-”

Dream drew in a sharp breath, his laugh making his voice barely audible as he cut you off. “STOP don’t encourage them!” He bellowed, struggling to breathe through his chuckles.

“What’s Dream doing with your mom?” George asked, tilting his head with a probing expression.

You wet your lips. “Since we’ve started dating, he’s been obsessed with being her favorite,” you jested.

“Since you’ve started dating?” Sapnap repeated to the group as if proving he’d been right the whole time.

Dream sighed, catching his breath. “Yeah, I’m at her place right now,” he spoke. “Hold on, I’ll prove it.” You let out a small chuckle as you heard him set his headphones down, followed by his footsteps thundering up your stairs before he was standing behind you. He briefly pressed his lips against yours in a greeting before leaning toward your microphone and sending a “hello from the otherside” to the group.

He leaned his arm against the back of your chair, you switching on your camera mainly because it was just the group of you. “I thought we were pretty obvious like you guys were just making fun of me because you knew it was him,” you stated.

Sapnap looked over his shoulder slightly as if he were listening for movement in his own home. “Wait, when did you leave?”

Dream scoffed. “I’ve been here all day. I literally woke you up to tell you where I was going.” Sapnap furrowed his brows in disbelief at this.

George was clicking away at his computer. “See, I knew I recognized your hands in the Instagram photos,” he mumbled. “I hate it here.”

You smirked slightly. “That being said, my boyfriend does own your guys’ server so he will ban you if you make fun of me.”

#mcyt x reader #dream x reader #dream fluff #dream imagine #dreamwastaken fluff #dreamwastaken dsmp #dreamwastaken fanfic #dreamwastaken imagine #dreamwastaken x reader

[yuzukult]

acquitted love || sjn & reader

title: acquitted love pairing: johnny suh x reader genre: fluff, angst, co-workers!au, lawyer!au, one-sided enemies to lovers word count: 8.7k warnings: some language/cursing, brief mentions of sex but there's no actual discussions or explicit conversations of the topic, but generally pg-13 prompt: you absolutely hate johnny suh. but when your boss pairs you two up together for one of the highest profile cases, you’re left working close with your enemy but he doesn’t seem to think that way of you. a/n: tada!! i wrote this for the @/ficscafe fic exchange event!! so @urlocalnctstan​ , hope you enjoy this !! i tried to write it according to what you put as your preferences, but honestly T_T it was so hard bc i was just not getting any ideas!! hopefully this is something you’d like :D enjoy !!

“God, isn’t he just… so attractive?”

Along with a click on your tongue, you feign a hit in Hyeri’s direction, whose reflexes have gotten so much faster in the past couple years of knowing you and it shows when she cowers underneath your arm. She gifts you that not-so-apologetic smile, full of mischievousness because she knows no matter how annoying she can be, you’ll still love her nonetheless.

“Why do you keep talking about Johnny? You know he’s banned as a topic of our conversations.”

Hyeri rolls her eyes, crossing her arms over her white frilled blouse. You know that she doesn’t actually inhabit any romantic feelings for Johnny, but she has a problem of thinking without the usage of her brain when she sees a hot guy.

Not that you think Johnny is hot.

No.

“Come on, you can’t tell me you don’t think he’s at least an ounce of smokin’ hot.” She’s unraveled her arms by now, poking your shoulder incessantly to grasp onto your attention as you're tapping on the buttons of the copier machine. “I bet if you asked him out, he’d say yes.”

You briefly glare at Hyeri. “You realize that he and I don’t get along, right? He keeps finding stupid loopholes in the system to win his cases. He thinks with his heart, not his head, and sometimes, with whatever that thing was in his pants.” And, not to mention that he walks out the court with that big grin stretched from cheek to cheek, giving the ‘good news’ to your well-respected boss (who you desperately seek the approval of but that’s a different story for another time). And every single time, she gives him that nod of appreciation, that ‘nod of approval’ if you will, when it should be given to you and not to some asshole who fucks his way to victory.

“But he’s so hot—”

You narrow your eyes at your friend, and with a stern voice, you call out, “Hyeri.”

She shrugs. “Honestly, though, he’s hella smart. He’s got a job here, and works under your boss. It’s Park, Kim & Associates—notice how Park is first, because she’s a fucking genius. She only picks the intelligent ones to work under her. Why do you think I’m still working for Mr. Kim?”

Park Seohyun and Kim Gonghyun—one of the biggest lawyers in the region, decided to join together to build their own law firm from the ground up. They were both highly respected in their field; Kim Gonghyun spent years of his life being mentored by one of the most famous judges, and as for Park Seohyun, she was, simply put, admirable because of the obstacles she has overcome to make her dreams of working in law to be real. Being a woman, young, and beautiful, she’s had her fair share of encounters with people who disregard her potential, that is until she met Gonghyun—who, admittingly is an old man who seems like he’d be traditional, sexist, even, but he proves to also make people realize how wrong they are with their impression of him.

But, as Mr. Kim is getting older, he’s gotten a bit… lazy.

In fact, he’s been slacking so much that he’s gotten a new rep in the office—if he was your direct supervisor, or your supervisor was under him, you were on the side of the office where all the easier, uncomplicated cases were assigned. Which meant that there was a slight possibility that your talents and skills weren’t as sharp and exceptional as you thought they were.

And well, Hyeri works directly underneath Mr. Kim.

Hyeri doesn’t want a heavy workload, despite the fact that there’s a plethora of files on her desk, stacked up one onto another as tall as her PC tower, and they were all open and closed cases—needless to say that she didn’t mind it.

“Okay, but you got offered a position under Seohyun. Do you really think you’re not wasting your potential?”

Hyeri scoffs. “Never. At least, not now. I’m still in my twenties, I’d like to enjoy my youth while I can, for your information.”

You quirk a brow. “And does any of that pertain fucking Johnny? The hot guy, so you claim?”

She immediately has her hand covering your mouth and you scowl. “Shhhhh, he works here!”

You bite the flesh of her hand and Hyeri instantly retracts. “You think I don’t know my archenemy works here? He sits directly across from my office—I get the best view of the guy and I’m not even one of his fangirls.”

“You’re not gonna be one of those girls who claim they’re different because they don’t like him but then end up falling for him anyway… are you?”

Your hand goes up and Hyeri crouches down.

“Stop it.”

“Seriously though! It’s the classic e2l love story,” she has her hands gesturing in front of her like she’s making an imaginary rainbow, “Two lawyers, constantly butting heads, accept each other’s differences and learn to love—“

“The fuck is an ‘e2l’?”

“Enemies to lovers.”

“Are you high? Stop spitting nonsense.” This time, you’re waving the stack of papers that finish printing in front of her face. “Meet me for lunch later. But if you keep talking about my archenemy and I falling in love, you can kiss a free meal goodbye.”

Hyeri gasps.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Maybe. Just maybe, Hyeri might be a tiny smidge right when she says Johnny is handsome. Just a bit though, because she can’t get credit for something like that.

He’s dyed his hair this shade of brunette that sort of reminds you of roasted chestnuts on a cold, winter day, sitting inside of a cooker outside of your childhood home, baking along with some sweet potatoes your mom had gotten from a farmer’s market nearby. Johnny has this focused gaze attached to the screen of his monitor; there’s a dip in the fronts of his brows, lips tightened into a straight line, and constant switching back and forth from the computer while taking notes down in a book that’s laid open in front of him.

You wonder what’s running through his mind, or well, you’re more interested in what files he has sprawled out on top of his desk.

Truthfully, if it hadn’t been obvious enough, you weren’t quite a fan of Johnny Suh and it’s mostly due to his work ethic. He’d been notorious for his reputation of sleeping around—especially with the opposing side—so it’s hard to convince yourself that he didn’t win the case because of his actual capabilities, but it’s because he pulled some strings.

And Johnny doesn’t put much effort into denying it either.

Albeit deep down, you were a teeny bit envious of his confidence. He struts around the courtroom with ease, and when he presents his position, there’s no staggering in his voice—it’s always crisp and clean, weighted with nothing but credence, and never straying from his initial perspective. It’s never a lack of poise, it’s consistently the look he goes for; from the hand gestures and the furrowed brows, to the rhetorical questions in the end of certain statements that has the speculators and jury sitting at the edge of their seat, Johnny had a talent for performing in the courtroom, but that doesn’t mean anything when the way he gets to the success isn’t ethical.

Just at that moment, his eyes lift from the screen and meet yours.

There isn’t any hesitation when you scramble to grab the remote controller, and the shades drop over the windows instantaneously.

“Fuck,” you mutter underneath your breath, tossing the remote onto your desk and shaking your hands after. What if he thought you were admiring him? Maybe he didn’t see. Yeah. It was for a brief second, and with how close your offices were to each other, it would be common to accidentally lock eyes… right?

Interrupting your thoughts, the office phone rings and it nearly startles the living soul out of you. But before you reach for it, your head tilts to the side curiously because the extension number is familiar—it’s Park Seohyun’s, your boss.

What could she be calling for?

You don’t remember fucking something up—but to be fair, half the times, you never really know if you’ve actually fucked up until someone with steaming ears and a crimson face comes storming in. So… did you do something good? Again, you don’t think that’s right either, because other people would’ve made comments about it.

Deciding to swallow your nerves, you pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey!” Seohyun never fails to be bubbly, and you could never mimic her energy. You definitely had to be born with that kind of enthusiasm. “I have a favor. Hop into my office.”

Leaned back in her leather swivel chair, she had her fingers laced with each other while resting over her stomach. Johnny stands beside you (and you do your best to not look directly at him, especially after that weird staring thing), and you both feel like kids being lectured by parents from how still you are. Her office is huge, probably the size of both yours and Johnny’s combined; with ceiling to floor windows, cases of books that line the perimeter, not to mention the humongous ass couch that practically covers the other half of the room, and her desk was so wide, you estimate about four monitors would fit on there with still additional space for work. That wasn’t even the best part—the view of the city looks almost like a generic lockscreen of a Windows computer, and you’re not even sure why she goes home at night when she basically has a penthouse here.

“As you know, I have a favor.”

“Right,” Johnny retorts, mostly as a filler in the awkward silence. “So… what’s the favor?”

She pulls a box from her purse; square, black and made from a leather material with a lock pad stitched into it, something you’ve never seen before, and she slides the passcode in, then it pops the lid open. A key (a… very small one) sits in the velvety cushion, with nothing else occupying the space with it, and it looks comical. She uses this to open the very top drawer of her desk, and as she pulls using the handle, there’s another box inside, but this time, metal instead of leather, but still black.

What the fuck?

It seems Johnny shares the same thoughts, because he sneaks a glance over at you.

“You see,” Seohyun begins, pressing on the digital keys of the box until there’s a beep at the end and the case hisses open. “There’s a lot of security for this. Which means you understand the importance of it.”

Then, she picks up four manila envelopes and lies on the surface of her wooden top desk. “I have a family emergency to attend to this upcoming week. I’m boarding a flight tonight. So I’m leaving the Hwang v. Yoon case to the two of you.”

“Fuck—”

“The what?”

You and Johnny are sputtering out of shock. The Hwang v. Yoon case is the biggest case that the firm is involved in currently, and the only people involved in it have been Seohyun and Gonghyun. It’s been on every social media platform you could think of; from Facebook to Twitter, TikTok to Instagram—there’s even this weird website for emo/grunge teens or strange kids that like writing fanfic called Tumblr, and whatever that is, it’s discussed on there too.

“What about Gonghyun?”

Seohyun scoffs, closing the drawer and dropping the key back into her special box. Where do you even get a box like that? “He can’t handle this alone. So I’m kicking him off until I come back. I thought about letting the two of you work with him, but his ego is so inflated, it’ll get in the way of our chances of winning. It’s easier if it was just me and him, but seeing that things at home aren’t well, I’m going to need you two to step up to the plate.”

The room goes quiet. The only sounds you hear are the muffled noises of a typical bustling office outside the thick walls of Seohyun’s office, and at first, excitement rushes through your blood because Seohyun thought of you taking over a special, high profile case.

Albeit, another realization gets soaked up, and it’s that Johnny also came to mind, and that because it’s such an important case, the two of you would be… working… many… hours… together.

Maybe you should back out of it—but then again, this is such a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Imagine winning this— it wouldn’t be good for just the law firm, it’d be good for you too. Your name, in articles on these big fancy news websites, perhaps even on new channels, talking about how you, this amazing lawyer, won the Hwang v. Yoon case.

But then you’re snapped back into reality when Johnny leans over to take the envelopes from Seohyun.

If your name is on those platforms, so is Johnny’s.

God, this guy just ruins everything, doesn’t he?

“We’ll take care of it, Seohyun. You can trust us,” he says assuringly, a smile tugging on each corner of his lips with that dazzling gaze. “We’ll be at our best.”

Kiss ass.

If you had the option, you wouldn’t be spending your Saturday night here at work, in one of those conference rooms with a long table in the middle, a big projector that displays on the wall, and a random black leather loveseat couch that lines the one corner in case there’s too many occupants.

Especially since the person who’s accompanying you is Johnny Suh.

There’s probably a lot of people who would kill to be in your position (Hyeri being one of them), but you dread it. Not to be that person, but what’s so special about him anyway? What? He’s tall, has some muscles, long luscious hair that he can slick back with that sultry stare—wait, what?

“Alright, moving on…” From what? You guys just started? It’d been clear with Seohyun that the mornings would be dedicated to other cases, but nights would be considered overtime and where you’d zoom in your focus on Ms. Hwang’s justice. “Let’s take a look at the facts here.”

Johnny slips off his blazer, hanging it on the back of one of the chairs as you’re seated in another, leaning back comfortably with an arm resting on the table. He loosens the first few buttons of his dress shirt before folding up the sleeves, and that’s when you notice a little thing in the inner crook of his elbow—is that a fucking sunflower? Is that what he uses to reel girls in? That he’s soft enough to have a pretty little flower etched onto his gentle, silky and supple—

“Okay,” he says, interjecting into your thoughts with a laser pointer in his hand. He taps on the space bar of his laptop that mirrors what’s on his screen, but then, that’s when you realize what’s on the slides.

There’s a collage of pictures, mostly street, casually walking themed ones, but the common factor was that they were of Yoon Changmin, the man you guys were up against. They were all paparazzi-like photos, which begs the question, how did he get pics like this, and why did he get them?

“What’s the point of this?” you ask, voice laced with nothing but suspicion.

“We gotta get into the mind of the enemy.” You wanna get into the mind of your enemy, too.

You gesture to the one image of Changmin with an arm around his girlfriend and a finger up his nose. “Seems like he’s trying to reach inside of his head instead of us. These are just everyday pictures, Johnny. What’s that going to do for us?”

“Well,” he begins, turning to look at the wall of ‘evidence’. “You see—wait, holy shit.”

Freezing in the midst of reaching for your coffee, your head jolts in the direction of your partner. “What? What is it?”

“Holy shit,” he exclaims, “Hoooooooooly shit. Why didn’t I see this before? This changes everything.”

Furrowing your brows, you’ve given up getting your drink and dropped your hands onto the table. “Tell me, what is it?”

“This is a game changer.”

“Johnny,” you call out sternly, and his eyes link with yours before he instantly points to a particular picture with his red laser pointer.

“Look at that.” There’s pride saturated in his words, but when you look at what he’s indicating, your body slouches in disappointment.

Why the hell was he directing your attention onto Changmin’s thighs? Surely, there’s no denying that they were attractive—you recall that his alibi was at the gym that very night of the crime.

“What? He’s guilty for showing off his toothpick legs?” They were lean, you never said they were muscular.

“No,” he retorts, slightly irritated by your response as he rolls his eyes. “Look at his pants.”

“Okay…”

“They’re jean shorts.”

There’s a pregnant pause, but the expression on your face is so loud it can’t be hidden.

Johnny continues, “That’s a fashion crime.” He says it as if it’s an obvious fact known by many. “Not to mention that it’s fucking raw hem. He should be arrested.”

Suddenly, your opinion of him thinking too much with his heart dissipates because it seems like he’s thinking out of his ass instead. Did he win those cases out of pity? How did this guy even pass the bar? How about law school? How the hell did he even get into law school?

“I don’t think—”

“Listen, alright, just hear me out,” he’s got the palms of his hands resting flat on the surface of the table, doing his best to gain your full undivided attention. “Only assholes wear jean shorts. They flaunt that shit around like they own the place, but they’re horrendous pieces of clothing that should not be on a male’s body. I don’t care what you say, what your opinion is, because that is a fact.”

Puffing your cheeks, you feel at a loss. If Johnny is who you had to get this done, it feels like you’re not going to be finding much evidence any time soon.

“Okay, if… if that’s how you want to play it, then show me the evidence—other than those 2012 cut off denim shorts.”

He reaches over to hit his space bar again, then with a wink and a slide change, he leans closer to you and says with that deep, honeyed voice, “Gladly.”

You hate admitting when you’re wrong.

Ironically, you concede and will confess when you actually are, but it doesn’t mean that you enjoy it. For example, when Hyeri claims that the intern Mark had a crush on you, you quickly waved her off, stating something along the lines of, “I’m too intimidating; there’s better chances of him being scared of me than ever finding me attractive.” And then a week later, you owed Hyeri free lunch at that hip ramen place downtown because Mark had approached your desk that very morning with a bouquet of red roses flowers for you, a cheeky grin glued to his face with pools of hearts in his eyes, and ready to ask you on a date because it was the day after his internship had ended. Naturally, it wasn’t fun rejecting that poor college boy.

But, you won’t say you find Johnny interesting or handsome. Or that there’s potential when it came to possibly (just barely the slightest smidge) that you’d ever consider asking Johnny out. He’s your enemy here, you’ve mentioned that a multitude of times, and you stand firm on that very declaration, despite the fact that sometimes when he gets too close, your breath gets caught in your throat and you feel like you can’t get whatever’s lodged in out.

Albeit it’s not the whole “you guys are gonna end up together” comment that Hyeri makes and resulting in you denying it afterwards, it’s that Johnny might… be a decent lawyer.

He’s not the best one you’ve seen; the stupid revelation he had on the first day working on the case about the jean shorts is evidence for it, but it’s the days following that were slowly changing your perspective on him.

When you said, “He thinks too much with his heart more than with his head,” it was 100% correct.

When meeting with potential witnesses, you recognized that Johnny empathizes with people often; when they cry and start panicking from being overwhelmed, he's quick on his feet to put an arm around them, share reassuring words, and have them back to normal in record’s time.

And, well… you? You’re the one making them cry in the first place.

You don’t want to fully take the blame for being the cause of their tears, but people need to hear what’s happening, and the very detail that they can’t even handle this information probably means they’re not worthwhile as a key witness.

Johnny, of course, thinks otherwise.

He believes that these people should have a voice (although you’ve alluded that they might be more useless than helpful), and putting them on the stand with Yoon Changmin there would change the view of the jury to supporting Hwang Naeri.

“Listen, if we get these people to sign the form, we’d get witnesses and it’ll help Naeri,” Johnny claims, frantically moving his arms annoyingly as he talks, trying his best to express the gravity of the situation, “and maybe, maybe, money wouldn’t be how Changmin wins, but how he loses. We can’t have another person with jean shorts walking on the streets of our city like this—they deserve to go to prison.”

You scrunch up your nose. “Why does this always revert back to the jean shorts?”

“It always has to do with jean shorts,” he snaps back matter-of-factly. “Any straight guy wearing jean shorts with that much goddamn confidence has done some wrong in their lives.”

“Right, but I’m pretty sure that the crimes he did are mainly the reason why he’s being prosecuted against.”

“Jean shorts are the windows to the soul.”

“I’m almost 100% sure that eyes are the windows to the soul, but whatever. If you genuinely believe that the women we met today would benefit our case, then… okay. Let’s bring them to the stand.”

On the contrary to you, Johnny doesn’t have a hard time convincing witnesses to testify. You see the way that he works; those kind eyes directed at the participants, the pools of chocolate were sweet, saturated in nothing but tenderness and warmth, then he does that weird thing where he reaches for their hands and cups them before the words that escapes from his lips are enough to swoon them to stand in front of a courtroom.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a method to his so-called madness.

Aggression and bluntness don’t work, it seems, because when you’re the one attempting to convince these people to go against the man that had done them wrong, they’re less willing to do it. Something about ‘moving on,’ and ‘not wanting to relive those memories again,’ but if it was you, you’d want justice. Then again, not everyone is like you, and not everyone thinks like you, and spending this abundance of time with Johnny is slowly getting you to ease into that perspective.

So… the initial impression you had of him may have been wrong.

And maybe, just maybe, you’re developing some feelings for him, just as Hyeri predicted.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

His abrupt personal question is enough to have the coffee spill into your mouth to slide down the ‘wrong throat’ because you’re choking, hand on your chest as you’re tackling to regain your breath again and Johnny only stares in disbelief, blinking blankly. “Are… are you okay?”

You glare at him through a hooded gaze. “Well,” you clear your throat once more. “Now, I am.”

“Cool.” He nods, retracting his hand so he could rub your back soothingly, deciding it’s best to stay away. “Are you going to answer my question?”

Quirking a brow, your head tilts slightly in puzzlement. “Why are you asking this?”

Johnny shrugs. “Isn’t it weird that we’ve hung out with each other for a whole week—stayed here for nights and we both don’t know anything about each other?”

Tapping your fingers against the wooden top table, you sigh. Maybe he’s got a point; after all, “Keep your friends close; keep your enemies closer,” right?

“No, I’m single.”

Johnny’s face suddenly brightens, ears perked, and his body straightens its posture in his seat at this revelation. “Oh, uh, I didn’t know that. You seemed busy in your personal life, so I, uh… was just wondering.” He looked anxious, but you couldn’t pinpoint why. “I, um, I’m single too, by the way, in case you’re wondering.” You weren’t.

The plethora of cardboard and plastic boxes scattered across the table was a representation of the night. It’s been long, exhausting, and messy, mostly because it’s a Friday night, the hearing was on Monday, and the two of you were nowhere near close to having enough to present to the court. In fear of disappointing Seohyun, the two of you agreed to stay over the office for the weekend to cram work for the case. There’s no denying that the atmosphere is weirder on the weekends, especially since, well, no one really comes here on the weekends. Johnny had to use the bathroom earlier and ran into the cleaning lady and she nearly shit her pants because she didn’t think anyone was here, so she had music blasting in her headphones.

Johnny is… interesting. He makes you laugh—or well, want to laugh, but you don’t give him that sense of satisfaction—and he’s smart but in his own weird way. He’s not like the other lawyers you’ve met, or any of the law students you attended University with because he’s more lighthearted and free-spirited than the rest, taking life in strides instead of just overwhelming himself in the abundance of stress that work brings.

He’s entirely the opposite of you.

And maybe you could learn something from the guy, but there’s something in you that brews hatred toward him. Possibility that you resent how easy he makes being a lawyer seem when you’re struggling in your day-to-day life to make things work.

But it’s way too fucking hard when he’s just… like that.

Despite all of that, he’s very generous and kind toward you. On rough days, he delivers your coffee order, the one you always get because he remembers what you asked the intern to get for you the last time, and he’s good at identifying when you’re just having that kind of day. You eventually learn he has a photographic memory (fucking show off), so when he saw that crumpled napkin with scribbles of what you want in that dumb intern’s hand, it wasn’t hard to remember. Which, by the way, is how he’s able to get into the most prestigious school for undergrad, manage to pass the bar so easily, and get into law school effortlessly.

And knowing this information sort of angers you more.

You know this isn’t his fault—he’s been blessed with a trait that people desire, one that you also yearn for, but the lucky ones get handed a lot of things in life. You wonder if he’s the type of guy who wins girls easily after matching with them on dating sites because of this stupid ass ‘photographic memory.’ Does he sleep with them right after? Does it ever get serious?

You shrug your shoulders and shake your head. You shouldn’t even let these strange thoughts haunt you, especially when you don’t even like him.

He’s a spoiled brat who gets everything handed to him on a silver platter.

So you’re left counting the remaining days until the trial so you don’t ever have to work with Johnny Suh this closely again.

Okay, well, it’s evident that bad luck is glued to your side because after you win the Hwang v. Yoon case for your law firm with that asshole, Seohyun is so impressed. So goddamn impressed that she insists that all the high profile cases are to be given to both you and Johnny.

To work as a team.

Together.

Jesus, this is Hell for you.

Surely, the promotion and raise that came along with it was definitely a plus, but it has you wondering if it’s even worth it. He’s been your unspoken enemy since the first day, and although you think you’re pretty forthright about your hatred for this guy, he can’t seem to read social cues.

When you’re pushing the double doors into the conference room the two of you often spend working on cases in, you expect Johnny to be ready for another day. But strangely enough, Johnny doesn’t have his laptop out or any of the notebooks sprawled across the table.

“Um,” you slide the strap of your bag off your shoulder and onto the spare chair. “Did you come late or something?”

He takes in a deep breath like he’s been holding back something. “We need to talk.”

There’s worry inscribed into his features; from the crease in between his brows, to his pursed lips, and eyes soaked in concern, almost like he’s got bad news to share and it has your stomach in knots. Was it that the case was thrown out? It couldn’t be, right? You both worked hard, presented your stance to the point that the jury and the judge were in awe with your findings. Sure, you had to cover Johnny’s mouth right before he was about to go off in a tangent about jean shorts, but overall, it was a good win, a hard one to go back on and pull out the wrongs of it. So what was it?

“I’m quitting our partnership.”

You blink. “What?”

He gestures to the room with his hands as if there’s anything out to reference. “This thing. Our work. The big profile cases. The famous stuff. I told Seohyun that I won’t be doing it anymore and she can revoke the promotion and the raise.”

You’re still not catching on. “… Why?” Was it something you did? Yeah, you weren’t a big fan of Johnny either, but were you so bad that he decided to not go through with the raise because of you?

“Because,” he pushes his blazer back, hands sliding into the front pockets of his navy blue trousers. “There’s a policy put into place. Those who are on the same cases cannot have any personal relations with each other that extend past friendships.”

“We’re not even friends?” With confusion written across your face, your head tilts to the side. “I’m not… I’m not catching on here.”

“I like you.”

Startled, the words you want to say are stolen out of your mouth. You’re left with a mixture of perturbation and bewilderment, uncertain where to go from there because Johnny asked for the removal of both a promotion and additional money that could be so good for his career… and it’s all because he has a crush on you?

“You quit the best thing that could’ve happened to you because you like me?”

“Yeah,” Johnny states calmly, sucking in his cheeks for a brief moment. “Ain’t that romantic?”

You scoff. “No. Absolutely not. You’re insane! Why would you do yourself dirty like that? Use your head, Johnny, you’re constantly thinking with that stupid heart of yours, and hate to break it to you, but it won’t get you anywhere.” Combing your hair with your fingers, you let out a sigh. “Go ask Seohyun for the position back. Say you made a mistake and—”

“I’m not asking her for the position back.”

Johnny doesn’t make any sense to you. “What? Why wouldn’t you do that?

“Because,” he laughs in disbelief, not because he thinks you’re funny. “I’m not going to force myself to work with a girl that I keep falling for. That’s self-inflicting, you realize that, right? You’re amazing, but you can seriously be so dense sometimes.”

“I’m dense? You just told one of the best law firms in the city that you don’t want to work on the important cases anymore because you have a stupid crush on your partner!”

“If we were on a team with more people, maybe it’d be different. But it’s just us two. You think I won’t fall any harder? That’s not easy. Every time I see you working, I swear I could be hopelessly in love with you one day.”

Your heart stops for a second.

This is Johnny Suh you were talking about here. One of the claimed best lawyers in your office, one of the most intelligent people that Hyeri has ever met, and Seohyun evidently backs this up because she’s given him so much recognition for his work. He’s the guy who worked with you to win the Hwang v. Yoon case, he’s the one who brought up the stupid jean shorts that seemed so far-fetched at the time, but they were a crucial detail everyone missed—it so happened that when Changmin bought those dumb shorts, there was evidence of at least one of his crimes in that store from the security cameras.

Any cis-gendered male who wears jean shorts can’t be trusted, according to Johnny.

And candidly speaking? You couldn’t even deny that. Your past two ex-boyfriends both wore jean shorts and the one cheated on you and the other one was caught money laundering.

“Listen,” he begins, interrupting your foggy thoughts. “I’m not asking you to tell me you like me back. I’m telling you because you should know, and that I can’t go on any further without letting you know. I’ll, uh, be in my office. Seohyun said she’d find a replacement for me.”

Hyeri is his replacement.

She’s great company and does a good job of helping you with whatever you need, but that was just it. Hyeri followed you, she never led with you, just as Johnny does. Agreeing with everything you say, mindlessly trailing behind everything you do—Hyeri was smart, but she couldn’t figure out how to think for herself when it came to these bigger cases because she’s never been given such a responsibility. But you couldn’t even blame her because it’s what she was told to do under Gonghyun.

“You said that you think Maeri snatched the bracelet?”

“No, I said if you watched the security video that the jewelry store submitted, it clearly shows that Maeri snatched the bracelet. Not that I ‘think.’ The proof is right there, Hyeri.”

She nods, resuming back to her work on the computer. Truthfully, Hyeri felt more like an assistant than a co-worker, someone to bounce ideas off of and to see from a different perspective. And as much as you hated Johnny, he had decent points. He had ways of making you put yourself into the shoes of people you never thought you were; although the guy was obnoxious, at least he actually was… good at his job.

Deciding you can’t take it anymore when Hyeri asks for the tenth time that hour about your beliefs rather than her own, you abruptly stand from your seat.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” you reply shortly. “I’ll be back.”

It was just a spontaneous thought. It’s after hours, and although there are some people who stay behind to get some work done, you had your doubts that Johnny would still be here. He seems to have a better grip on that work/life balance thing people talked about (unlike yourself), but it didn’t hurt to check his office, right?

It’s a good thing you went with it. Because right across from yours, there’s Johnny.

There’s one single lamp that shines over the tabletop of his desk, and the other sources of light in his office are from his computer screen and the ones from the city skyline from behind him. It has him seemingly angelic like this, so serene, calm, and collected, only focused on what’s laid out in front of him. The sun has gone down, people have gone home, but Johnny remains, hardworking as always, despite your previous observations that he’s a lazy, unprofessional guy who gets everything handed down to him.

With a knock on his glass door, he flinches, head raising up and eyes meeting yours.

Were his eyes always this sparkly?

Opening the door, Johnny drops the pen in his hand and crosses his arms before leaning back in his seat. “What’s up?”

“You’re here late,” you state the obvious, and Johnny only nods in return, without a rebuttal in sight. “You aren’t normally here late. At least, before the Hwang v. Yoon case.”

“Yeah, you’re right. But Seohyun dropped something on my desk this morning. Wanted to work on it. What brings you here?”

Inhaling in a deep breath of courage, your hands bundle up into a fist by your side. “Please come back.”

Johnny raises a brow. “What?”

“Come back,” you reiterate, this time, it’s less tense and releases with ease. Caving in isn’t usually this effortless to you, but something about Johnny makes you feel… comfortable enough.“Come back and work with me again. Yes, I’m not supportive of how you do things—”

“Then let’s go out on a date.”

You freeze. Legs rooted into the floors of Johnny’s office, you’re left immobile and diffident on how to react next. It wasn’t what you were expecting, although you weren’t quite sure what you were hoping to anticipate, but it most definitely was not this.

“I—”

“I said my terms,” he retorts, shutting the book in front of him before shuffling up from his seat. He’s leaving, you realize, and Johnny’s ready to head home for the night and you’re not sure if you could handle an entire weekend with Hyeri here. “And, I meant what I said. One date, and if it really doesn’t work out, I’ll stay on the case.”

Chewing on your bottom lip anxiously, the next words that come out are out of character for you. “And… what if it does?”

A soft smile tugs from each corner of his mouth. “Then we’ll figure it out from there. Promise.”

This is… awkward. It shouldn’t be, but yet somehow, it remains awkward.

You’ve spent weeks with Johnny before, and those moments were in a room, in the middle of the night, and alone. Hours and hours were dedicated to work, yes, but it was just the two of you and nobody else.

So why is it so weird being in a five Michelin star restaurant with him?

Maybe it’s the atmosphere. The dim lights, the white clothed tables in lieu of the scratched up wooden one back at the law firm, and instead of leather seats, there’s a neutral beige chaise cushion for the dining chair, slightly less comfortable because it doesn’t recline like the one in your office. Instead of an array of photos and evidence disseminated in front of you, there’s a laminated menu with a multitude of options of what to have for dinner.

Johnny gets the steak with mashed potatoes and string beans, and you order something similar but seared salmon for the main protein. The waitress offers wine, babbling on about the age of the red, where the vineyard is located, and the dryness to sweetness—to be honest, you could care less; you’d rather have gin and sprite with a squirt of lime. A couple glasses of that and you can almost guarantee that the night would end with a deep slumber.

Oddly enough, Johnny seems nervous. Ever since he pulled up in his midnight black Audi in front of your apartment complex, he’s been acting strange. He keeps wiping his sweaty palms off the material of his trousers, occasionally swiping off the droplets that fall on the side of his face.

“Are you… okay?” you suddenly ask, adjusting your dress in your seat. Deciding to go with a black silk dress with a slit up the leg and your hair let down, it’s not a look you often sport but since you’re going on a date (one you haven’t been on in quite some time), you figured it would be nice to at least play the part.

“I’m, uh, honestly, I’ve never really asked a girl out before.”

You quirk a brow curiously. “What? You’re telling me you never asked a girl out before?”

He lets out a bashful laugh with a faint nod, making an attempt to swallow his nerves after. “Honestly, I’ve always been asked out and not the other way around. Not to sound like that guy, but I never really had to put effort into trying for girls. They kind of just…”

“—Throw themselves at you?”

He beams. “Yeah! Like that. I don’t really know how to react half the time, but it makes the whole dating scene a little bit easier.” Geez, he called you dense, but he’s over here acting clueless.

Either way, it feels like whatever opinion you had about Johnny remained true. He never had to try when it came to the dating scene, and you could only imagine what that means for work and the relationships he has with the women in your career field.

“Mm, does that usually happen with work too?”

Befuddled, Johnny leans back in his chair. “What do you mean by that?”

With a shrug of your shoulders, you’re poking the meat of your salmon that falls off easily. After the first initial bite, the fish practically melts on impact when it touches the tip of your tongue, smooth like butter and bursting with flavor that couldn’t be described by any common person because it wouldn’t do the salmon justice. Johnny seemed to put a lot into this date, and you’re left pondering what the point of this was. Did he actually like you, or was he trying to get into your head? “Just seems like you get a lot of special treatment.”

“Are you jealous?”

“In what way?” you snap back.

“Are you jealous of me because I’m getting this so-called special treatment that you think I’ve always had, or were you jealous of the girls that seemingly got my attention?”

You’re left without anything to say.

It was a good observation he made because truthfully, you never saw it like that.

In actuality, you often saw Johnny as your rival. He climbed the ladder in the field with ease, and it wasn’t hard to quickly blame his success on the fact that he was a guy in a male dominated industry, but the fact that there’s a possible interpretation for your hatred may be from these feelings you might’ve been harboring for him this entire time… that can’t be it… right?

“I mean, look at where you are now,” you begin, trying to defend yourself. It can’t be true that the reason you’ve been bitter about Johnny was because of the girls that got his attention, and one of them not being you. “You got a high position from—”

“—From hard work,” Johnny interjects with his brows furrowed. “I didn’t get to where I was because I slept around, if that’s what you’re insinuating. I knew you sort of always hated me, but I’ve always admired you. I like your work ethic, I like your style, even though we’re both on opposite spectrums, I like the way you think and I wanted to know what it was like being partners with you. Getting to be on that case with you showed me more than just who you were as a lawyer, but who you were as a person. I like you, but I’m trying to put my finger on why you hate me so much.”

“So you noticed.” Sucking in your cheeks, your eyes trail elsewhere—from the fork that lays beside your plate, to the glass filled halfway with wine, to the little candle that sits in between the two of you that flickers the way he has your heart when he expresses once more how he feels about you.

“Yeah, of course I noticed. If you like someone, it’s kind to miss details like that about them. So… you really hated me because you thought I slept my way to the top, huh?”

“I mean…” shoulders dropping in exasperation, you run your fingers through your disheveled hair. “All those rumors—”

“Again, they’re just rumors. I worked hard to get here, you know. And I’m kind of offended that you thought of me that way.”

You scoff. “They’re rumors, Johnny, it’s kind of hard to ignore all the office gossip when that’s all you hear. Plus, it wasn’t hard to believe either, with the whole flirtatious act whenever you encounter anyone who’s breathing and has a vagina.”

“I wasn’t flirting.”

“You need a book for dummies that elaborates on what’s flirting or not, because Johnny Suh, whatever it is you do with your body language in front of that chick who sits by the front door.”

“You mean Siwoo? The pregnant one who’s married to her highschool sweetheart? Also, how do you not know our receptionist’s name?”

You throw your arms into the air. “How am I supposed to know her name?”

He tilts his head to the side, genuinely baffled. “Do you… not talk to anyone outside of Hyeri?”

Your silence answers his question.

“I… honestly, I don’t know if I should be offended or if I should be honored. You think I didn’t earn anything that I have now, you think that everything I have was handed to me. On one hand, it’s flattering that you think my looks and my bedroom skills could do that but at the same time… I’m offended because you think I’m incapable.”

“I never said you were incapable—”

“But you implied it.”

Hands falling onto your lap, it’s your turn to gulp. His words come shooting at you, but you’re without a shield to protect yourself, and with the new experience of working with Johnny, there comes the realization at times that Johnny is a hard worker. There are some things that he says and does that aren’t like the people you’ve encountered, and being put on new cases with Hyeri only proved it. He’s thoughtful in the sense that whenever you’d bring up your stance on something, he challenges you with what the defense might counter.

Johnny makes you want to be better. Not just against him, but to brush off the dust on your skills and enter into the battlefield of a courtroom to showcase them.

“Well, if you’re staying silent, I just want to say that I tried,” the crinkle in between your brows makes another appearance because Johnny is great at leaving you stunned and confused. “I really like you. I love how your head works, and I wanna be with someone like that but I also can’t be with someone who doesn’t respect me.”

Why is it that when you’re in that conference room with him, you’re not afraid and never running out of things to say, but now you’re empty handed?

“I’ll pay for dinner. Grab you an Uber. I honestly thought I could overlook those things, and maybe your perspective for me has changed, but I could see it on your face. It’s the same.”

After that date with Johnny, his life turns back to normal.

Yours? Not so much.

Candidly speaking, part of you missed working with Johnny. You were wrong about him, so wrong, and even when you wanted to apologize at the dinner for what you thought of him, the pride in you was like a vicious plague that blackened your insides, preventing you from ever saying those words.

Oftentimes, you’d still be able to sneak a glimpse of him in his office with that same look on his face—full of concentration and nothing else in his mind other than the task at hand.

The cases you have with Hyeri entail a head like Johnny’s. Someone who could question you, to protest against your stance when there could be flaws in it. It feels like deja vu each time you think about it, each time you open a new case file and Hyeri sits there, perched in that seat beside yours, eyes sparkling with what you have in mind next, instead of what she has going on in hers.

Although you’ve tried convincing yourself that maybe, just maybe, what you feel for Johnny is purely professional but when you see him standing by the water cooler with a couple of your coworkers, eyes mimicking the moon crescents in the skies, replicating the ways his lips curl in elation—it was beginning hard to believe that it was all platonic feelings.

So maybe you should be bold for once. Pull off that exterior that displays you as someone who isn’t just independent and assiduous, but someone who’s stubborn and aggressive in getting what they want—and not in a good way.

This time, you’ll show it in a good way.

Or at least, you’ll try.

Johnny is a routine kind-of-guy—he grabs an iced americano every morning at the coffee shop downstairs at the edge of the street, he does his daily 11:00AM drop-by at the water cooler to refill his Hydroflask (which was his prized possession, by the way), and parked in the same exact spot in the parking garage of your building, despite there being an abundance of places he could choose.

That’s why you decide to stand by his car after work that day. Bouncing on the balls of your feet, hands shaking because it’s your turn to feel anxious. That blazer that once fit so comfortably in the morning suddenly feels tight and hot in the afternoon, and the weather hasn’t even changed. Your bag slung over your shoulder weighs ten times heavier than an hour ago, and you can’t stop your jaw from tightening.

Before your thoughts could spiral off all the possibilities of what the outcome may be when you tell Johnny how you feel, he’s already standing there, feet away from you with that dip in the fronts of his brows that you want to smoothen out the crinkles of with the pad of your thumb.

“Hi,” you greet, faint and peculiarly different from your other approaches. “Um, I just… was waiting for you.”

“Hey,” Johnny says back, the first few buttons of his shirt already unraveled, his blazer hung over his forearm and the sleeves are rolled up. “I see that. What’s up with you?”

“Um,” your leg was jittery, hard to control so you spat everything you had to say out as fast as you could before he could see right through you. “I just wanted to apologize. For everything. You’re admirable, kind, and I wish I inhabited those same characteristics you have. I think professionally, you’ve got great ideas, one that could be implemented into mine and what we did together for that case was just… yeah. We could do something big if we put our heads together.”

Johnny nods in agreement. The relationship between you two work-wise was obvious, he knew that much. “And what about… outside of that?”

“I like you,” you choked, barely getting the words out. “More than just coworkers, um, I guess, more than friends but I’m not really sure since you walked out on our first date,” inhaling in a deep breath of courage, you continue on, “and I don’t know how you feel now after I’m standing before you like this, asking for another chance and that I’m sorry.”

He stares at you blankly, and it leaves you unsure whether or not he accepts your apology. “You know why we ended that date early.”

“Well,” you start again, “can we… start over and try again? I promise I won’t tempt you to end the date early this time.”

And with that, there’s the signature smile that Johnny sports that swoons girls, makes their knees weak, and heart clench but this time… it’s just for you.

“I’d really like that.”

#ficscafe #nct fanfic #johnny x reader #johnny fanfic #johnny suh #johnny nct #nct 127 #nct 127 fanfic #suh johnny #gyukultfics #idk what else to tag #hopefully this does well :|

[writingwithcolor]

Tragedy Exploitation and Characters of Colour

hi! i've browsed your blog for a while now and it's been really helpful to me, so first off, thank you. i was wondering about something tho, i recently saw your response to a person explaining their story idea that revolved around two lovers, where one was cursed to kill the other and the other was always resurrected only for it to repeat, and i believe the characters were POC. in your response you seemed quite upset that such a plot was happening to POC characters specifically and it confused me because it sort of read as if you were mad that a bad thing was happening to a POC character in a story, which i genuinely didn't understand (i really don't want to sound rude, i'm being sincere), because it came off as advocating for only good and happy and nice things to be reserved for POC characters and if an author dared write something bad or traumatic happening to a POC character it's immediately 'poor narrative', and i personally don't agree with that take, because i feel like that reduces a POC character to just being POC instead of a person, which I feel like hurts POC rep in fiction, because being upset someone wrote something bad happening to a POC character makes it all about just that character being POC instead of just a regular person something bad has happened to in the story that just happens to be a person of color at the same time. my god this has gotten long, i got very interested in hearing more about this because i personally didn't quite understand and it sounded wrong to me, your original response. if you do reply to this, thank you, i hope i didn't sound rude, i do genuinely want to learn, because even tho i typed all this out i still feel like i'm wrong about this & missed the point somewhere

Disclaimer: please do not pile onto the ask about a Black woman murdered by her lover, as the asker has realized the issues with the ask. We are presently addressing the attitude of “why can’t bad things happen to PoC?” in this comment, with the name retracted, because it’s an attitude that crops up every once and awhile.

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You have missed our extensive backlog of posts about double standards re: PoC and white characters, wherein we describe, at length, how we are uncomfortable that PoC characters get extra bad stuff that’s treated as “organic” because our history is full of suffering, when white characters often don’t get that same thing.

like White Authors and Topics to Avoid/Tread Carefully

and Writing About PoC Trials and Tribulations

We ask that people question why they decide to automatically make someone suffering a violent constant-death-loop be a person of colour, especially multiply marginalized (Black, woman, LGBTQ+). Because there are already too many stories of characters of colour (especially multiply marginalized) suffering needlessly and oftentimes worse than the white characters for the sake of a plot.

You completely misread the heart of the reply, which was “why are you forcing Black women to suffer the worst fate imaginable (murder) in one of the most emotionally heartbreaking way imaginable (at the hands of your lover) multiple times in order to “earn her happy ending”? this is tragedy exploitation and is making a mockery of trauma”

PoC already have enough stories about us traumatized by circumstance. And while we can suffer, narratively, part of systemic racism is only telling stories of PoC when we are suffering as the sole marker of the plot. Especially when characters of colour are suffering disproportionately to lighter skinned characters.

You also missed the part where Marika said that even if it were white characters, they would be uncomfortable because constantly pulling out murder as a curse is lazy writing.

All we ask is: why did the asker decide that a woman of colour must suffer to the point of repeated murder before she can be happy? Why does she have to forgive the person who did it to her? Because that is a logic born of passive racism that tells people: women of colour, especially darker skinned/Black women, can “handle anything”. And that is a lie.

~Mod Lesya

Echoing Lesya, I’m puzzled as to how you came to the conclusion that “If an author dared to write something bad or traumatic happening to a POC character, it’s immediately a poor narrative” when I explicitly said I thought this was cheap theatrics and tragedy exploitation even if both characters were white, particularly as the ask had given me no conception of the author’s motivation in using the curse as a dramatic device. In Japanese, we jokingly use the word 中二病 (Chuunibyo) or “8th grade disease” to describe edgelord phases for teens. This is a 中二病 plot device. It’s perfectly fine for niche angst addicts on ao3, but not something I would be able to take seriously in a more substantive work aimed at a larger audience. I think it is also telling that even the original asker has commented that they independent of our answer concluded this was a poor plot choice.

Finally, with respect to your question of the usage of negative tropes like the ones mentioned in this ask (Misogynoir and Bury Your Gays), I am concerned that you do not understand the motive for this blog. Our purpose is to provide instruction to those who wish to use diversity in their writing in an inclusive manner in ways that resonate with marginalized populations. We are not proposing a ban on tropes. They are tools, but like all tools, they have appropriate forms of use. Do you honestly think that many BIPOC individuals would be happy to read a story with this kind of tragedy exploitation? And how would you, as an author, factor in their impressions when writing your own works?

No one can stop a writer from pursuing the narratives they wish to pursue, but the opinions a writer is primarily concerned with says a lot about who a writer believes their work is for. Let us say I were to write a story with a gratuitous depiction of sexual assault purely for the shock value, despite never having experienced sexual assault myself? How might survivors of sexual assault regard both me and my work? Now imagine BIPOC individuals whose main experience with representation in media is seeing characters look like them die from the kinds of violence that are common for them to experience, and it should become clear that an author who adopts these approaches, at a bare minimum, is being exceptionally tactless. A writer who finds no issue with tragedy exploitation involving BIPOC characters is likely not a writer who cares about what the BIPOC members of their audience think, or, even worse, does not even factor BIPOC perspectives into their writing.

- Marika

#can I write about x #tragedy exploitation #misogynoir #creator responsibility #double standards #plot #characters #characters of color #racism