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doki-doki-imagines · 5 months

Note

Not sure if you take requests but could you write about Shang Tsung (and others) with breeding kink?🙏

feat. Shang Tsung, Bi-Han, Liu Kang, Syzoth (aka the guy I think would be into it)

tw: smut, afab!reader

author note: requests are open! It's been a while since I wrote smut, I hope you'll like these.

Shang Tsung: -He is staining your soul, putting his seed of evil into you. -The thought gives him goosebumps, his right hand keeping your leg up and open wide, while to other play with your nipple and at the same time pushes your back against his front. -The hand that way playing with your chest slides lower, now drawing patterns on your tummy that in a few month will be round and full. -Shang Tsung bites his lower lip, and close tight his eyes, it's a sinful thought that is bringing him too fast to the end. -"Let me cum inside, you want it too right? You always tell me, don't you remember?" He whispers into your ear, voice weavering at each of his thrust in your core. -You seriously don't remember ever telling him that, but you nod, too fucked, too lost in the throes of pleasure to formulate a coherent thought. -"I knew it, you will be an excellent brood mare." He smirks, wide and wicked. -Shang Tsung almost hope he didn't impregnate you this time, the idea so good he wants to try again and again. -Not that he will stop anyway…

Bi-Han: -He is the Grandmaster, you know? He needs heirs! -But Bi-Han isn't doing this to follow orders, his eyes liquid lust while looking at your soft body, phrases way too broken and badly formulated to be of a man following his duty. -"I'll make you full of my cum, I'll fuck you so good-" The sudden grip of your core make Bi-Han stops in his track, lost in the pleasure of your pussy suiting his cock like a glove. -It's not like you are doing any better, legs up his shoulders, hands scratching his biceps the only stable thing to keep you anchored to this moment, mind wandering in the sea of bliss at each of his hard thrusts. -Bi-Han can't stop thinking of your chest, filled to the brim with milk, soft and round begging to be touched, nipples hard desperate for some attention, tummy full of yours and his child. -His mind plays a dirty trick and he cums with just one last thrust, falling on top of you, groaning into your neck, while he fills you with his cum. -"Keep it all in, don't make a single drop fall."

Liu Kang: -He waited his entire life to be in peace and in love. Now it's time to step up the game. -The idea of you carrying his baby, your entire body glowing of happiness make his brain vessels close really fast, blood flowing to his crotch pathetically fast. -That's why now you are on your hands and knees, taking him like a champ, his thrusts hard and fast, the fat of your ass red from the slaps you counted a minute ago, the sound you are both making obscenely lewd. -Liu Kang isn't a gentleman. He is a man with a goal that he needs to accomplish if he doesn't want to become crazy. -Something that you already are, tears running down your face, drool escaping your open mouth, moans escaping freely. -"Please, lemme cum-" You sob "I've been good." You gasp out. -Liu Kang whines after hearing your voice. You always sound so good, and he is too weak to you. -"Take it all, my darling, you can do it. I know it." He prompts you on, close to the end himself. -And you do, not even a sound escapes your mouth, too tired and desperate, total opposite of Liu Kang whom cum into you, an high pitched moan blessing your ears. -You lay down, knees and arms weak after the intense session, trying to stabilise your breath, while your lover stay behind you, pulling out and admiring his work. -Liu Kang notices some cum rolling down your core, so he scoop it up with his index and middle finger to plunge it inside you again, earning him a whine. -"Don't waste any of it, keep it inside. It's holy, you know?"

Syzoth: -He gets a bit insane thinking of you having his kids, honestly. -That's why for the longest time, Syzoth won't say anything and keep this thought for himself, ashamed you may get scared. -But then he finds out you share his kink and his wall drop. But he'll ask to repeat yourself because Syzoth thinks his intrusive thought pulled a bad joke on him. -Syzoth prefers to enjoy his kink when he isn't in "heat", when his mind is a bit more stable and he can control himself a bit more. You tell him he is fine either way, but please respect his decision one step at a time. -Doesn't mean Syzoth won't rock your world anyway; you should know how hot your shy boy is. -Syzoth would bite your neck, tell him if he is being too rough, he may not be in "heat," but the blood isn't pumping only in his brain right now. -Don't tap out! For lizards, it means you are being submissive, and it is like an okay sign to keep going, Syzoth didn't agree on a safe word with you just for fun. -"You are so fucking big-" You turn your head back as best as you can, face still pushed into the mattress, voice almost a little whine "Fill me up, please cum inside!" -Syzoth doesn't have to mind to reply, but he understands enough to act, filling you to the brim, the idea of your full tummy and soft glow the last push he needed.

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thekinkymadscientist · 5 days

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Kind of sad that there is no evidence for sleep learning, or any other substantial effect of audio played while a subject is asleep.

But I have a better idea, one which would work quite well.

All I have to do is dangle a lovely pendant in front of your eyes as you're sleeping, and gently wake you up.

Before you're even fully awake, you'll be focusing on the beautiful crystal, hearing my gently commanding voice telling you to float into trance for me. It's so easy for you to obey even when you're wide awake -- your half-asleep brain won't have a chance to formulate a single coherent thought before you're deeply hypnotized.

And then, sitting on the bed with you in the middle of the night, I can guide you through wonderfully intensive brainwashing. You'll blankly repeat new truths, feel my words seep into your mind, feel any little seeds of resistance or independence swept away so thoroughly you can't even remember they were there.

And once I've moulded your mind to my liking, I'll tell you it was all just a dream, an unimportant dream you can barely remember anyway. And with a tap on the forehead I'll send you back to sleep.

So each morning, there will be new things you believe, or old programming reinforced. New truths that you always believed. You always wanted to be owned and controlled. You always felt this way.

#brainwashing #hypnok1nk #hypno fantasy #conditioning #hypnosis #memory play

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lvndrdaaze · 1 month

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What are your thoughts about NSFW alphabet for Wriothesley? 🥹👉👈

I have so many thoughts about him, but hardly any are coherent (ᴗ_ ᴗ。) I'll do my best though asjakdks

I'm gonna make a post explaining my rules for requests, but just to let everyone know, I'll write NSFW or SFW alphabet headcanons for any Genshin men and some BSD characters, but I'll only accept requests for 3-4 letters at a time bc I get overwhelmed trying to write more than that at a time (,,>﹏<,,) I just chose a few letters for this, let me know if there's any specific ones you want me to write for Wriothesley <3

(gn!reader, NSFW so no minors!)

Wriothesley NSFW Alphabet - J, N, X

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Anytime he gets bored, Wriothesley thinks about jerking off. However, he doesn't often have time to actually go through with it, between receiving regular reports from guards and dealing with difficult prisoners, so he only gets as far as palming himself until his cock is half-hard and just beginning to stir in his pants before he's interrupted. This means that when Wriothesley does get the chance to go all the way, usually late at night when the Fortress is asleep, he's already been teasing himself for so long that it doesn't take long until he's twitching and moaning into his fist, clenched in front of his mouth to muffle the sounds. He prefers to keep this activity away from his desk at the very least, as not only is thay not a very sexy location in his mind, but he also wouldn't want to risk destroying any important documents when he cums. So instead, he half reclines on the sofa in his office, his head tipped back and his chest heaving as he strokes himself quickly with one hand and cups his balls in the other. When he cums, he does so freely, splattering his own stomach with his seed with a noise somewhere between a whine and a groan.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Wriothesley is adamantly against hurting you. Up to a certain point, pain can be fun, but he doesn't ever want to risk crossing that line and causing you severe pain. He'll happily spank your ass and thighs until they're red with blistering heat, and he'll wrap a hand around your throat and squeeze slightly to show his dominance, but he refuses to go any further. He won't fully choke you or slap your face, partly because he doesn't trust himself not to cause you actual injury, and partly because those things aren't sexual to him. They're real and visceral, and he hates the idea of introducing you to them like that.

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

Wriothesley is big, and he knows it. It's around 8 inches, and so thick you can hardly wrap your hand around it comfortably. The skin is a little darker than the rest of him, and the tip is darker still and bulbous. There's no curve to his dick, and his pubic hair is dark and wirey, speckled with grey like his hair.

Feel free to request more NSFW/SFW alphabet headcanons! More info in my pinned post ^-^

#wriothesley x reader #wriothesley x reader smut #wriothesley x reader headcanons #genshin impact x reader #genshin impact x reader smut #genshin impact x reader headcanons

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frannyzooey · 1 year

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Short Days, Long Nights: 2

Joel Miller x f!reader

Rating: none — I’ll change it to E when we get there (slow burn, forced proximity, age gap — no age actually mentioned but rather more implied through lack of life experience, competence kink, hunting)

Summary: Part of a band of travelers, your party is slowly picked off one by one, until there are only two of you left. Finding an abandoned cabin in the woods, you decide to make camp there until you figure out your next move. As the seasons change, the nights get longer and longer…..

A/N: a truly endless amount of thank you’s to @the-ginger-hedge-witch who took SO MUCH TIME to make this actually coherent, and @mourningbirds1 who always asks the best, most inspiring questions. I love you both ❤️ Enjoy!

Chapter One

He shouldn’t be encouraging this.

He shouldn’t.

His head bowed, his steps careful as his eyes scan the forest floor for animal tracks, he had thought the wide open forest and a temporary relief from your close presence would help clear his head, but it doesn’t.

The bright optimism in your eyes flits through his mind, the confidence in how you told him about the various plants you chose to start with and why, the content smile on your face as you went about your tasks this morning. Cleaning out the old pots, filling them with fresh soil, setting up an area in the kitchen near the window to keep them safe.

He should have said something then, but he didn’t.

Should have said no to begin with, but he couldn’t.

The night you had suggested the garden, he watched you leave the room and felt the urge to call you back, but like many urges he has where you’re concerned, he resisted. Hated himself for immediately shutting down your idea, but reasoned that you were too naive for your own good anyway.

It makes him angry, your hope. He wants to stomp it out of you, harden you like he’s been forced to harden, solely because it will give you the best chance at survival in this world.

That’s what he should do, but the second he had found himself unable to say no, he laid bare a dormant part of him that he had been denying for a while: another piece of him that wants you to keep that innocence. Unable to fathom how you’ve kept it this long, he wants to protect it, like those seeds. Keep it tucked away from the ugly world, save both it and you from waste and ruin.

He hears the whisper of ferns brushing against each other, sees them moving out of the corner of his eye, and he crouches low, listening. Reaching back, he pulls an arrow from the pack he has on his back and, keeping his eyes on the bush, notches it in his bow.

He waits, still and silent.

He had stayed awake long into that night, thinking about how you were right. Every settlement is a nightmare, FEDRA no better than the free cities, smuggling a dangerous game that would most likely end in death the longer he kept on doing it. It’s not something that had really bothered him before – the thought of dying – but that was when it was just him.

For you, it didn’t sit right.

For you, he can’t let that happen. He won’t.

He had gotten up from the couch to pace, mindlessly scanning the bookshelves as his brain ran through every scenario. Stopping on a gardening book, he had decided that if you wanted to make it work, then he was going to do it right. Keep some of that innocence of yours while also being smart about it.

It’s not that you couldn’t hold your own. He has seen it before, but there is still so much that you don’t know. The sole idea of staying in this cabin betrayed your naivety, highlighting what he had already been fighting with himself throughout this entire trip: teach you, so you’d be ready, or keep you from it, so it wouldn’t be your burden to carry.

If you are going to stay here, that changed things.

He should teach you basic skills: how to hunt, how to set traps, how to properly handle a gun if you need to. You could do it if you had to, but you aren’t great. Inexperienced, at best, and as he waits there in the grass, he makes a mental list in his head of the topics he should cover.

Maybe if he focuses his energy on teaching you those things, he can stop thinking about what it would be like to teach you other things. Not that he knows if you need teaching in those areas, but the idea had taken root weeks ago in his dreams and refused to let go.

Waking up hard and aching every morning, trying to close his eyes and will it away — being ashamed of those thoughts though unable to stop them from happening, he shoved them down deep, just like he shoved you away.

Or tried to, anyway.

Impatient, harsh, taking advantage of how intimidated you are of him, he’s been gruff and dismissive, but you followed him all the same. Sticking to him like a shadow because of the protection he offers and he knows that’s part of the problem. The real reason you bleed into his dreams every night, because you’re constantly around him and on his mind every hour of the day.

A sort of misplaced attraction due to proximity alone, just like your own is due to his protectiveness - that’s all.

He has protected you, and he still does. He will protect you from what’s out there, including himself.

He sees the flash of shine, the animal’s eye catching the sunlight, and his fingers react on instinct, letting the arrow loose.

Finding its target, the plant stops moving.

–

“I was good with my hands, but I was never good at that.” Joel gestures at the pot in front of you, leaning against the wall as he watches. “I always killed ‘em all.”

You laugh, gently tamping down the cool soil with your fingers. “You? Big bad Joel Miller? There’s something you’re bad at?”

You haven’t seen it. Not yet, anyway.

A small smile curls under his mustache. “Hard to believe, I know.”

Late afternoon sunlight streams through the now clean windows, and you shake your head at him, reaching into the bucket next to you. Pulling out another fist full of loose soil, you sprinkle it over the surface of the pot.

“Well, good thing I was always good at it.”

You were. Had once thought it a relaxing, mindless hobby. Houseplants all over your apartment, you had found it fulfilling when something bloomed and blossomed and grew. Loved the delicate sloping vines, the broad leaves that reached for the sun, the endless shades of green.

This new version of the world holds growth as well, but it isn’t the same. It is chaotic and overwhelming, plants and roots and whole trees sprouting from beneath the concrete, overtaking whole structures as it takes back what once belonged to it. You find beauty in it still, but sometimes the growth is disgusting and horrifying – when it’s the unnaturally colorful warning of fungus instead of plants, and when it’s a body buried underneath instead of a building.

Pouring a little water into the soil, you think about the tiny red watering can you had, the reminder of the mundane action that used to bring you so much joy weighing heavy on your chest for a moment as your hands wipe together to brush off the dirt.

He pushes off the wall and steps closer — always stays close, even inside, just in case.

The swirl of his protective presence is a heady one, and you’ve become so used to it that you feel a perceptible absence when he’s not in the cabin. The same orbit pulls you unconsciously into his direction now, tilting your body to the side so he can get a better look.

“This one should bud fairly fast, according to the packet,” you say, trying hard not to noticeably breathe in his warm scent. He doesn’t often get this close, and you hold as still as possible to encourage him to stay. “Then we can move it outside.”

He says nothing, his skepticism apparent through his silence, and you turn your head, looking at him. The wiry patch of gray that gathers at the edge of his jaw calls out for your touch, the light strands threaded among the dark, and you keep your eyes on it for a moment, tearing them away when he looks at you. His eyes focus on yours, a pull of something filling the air between you for a weighted beat, and then he shifts his gaze back to the pot.

“We’ll see.”

You roll your eyes at his ever-present pessimism, opening your mouth to ask him what he had meant about being good with his hands before since he’s never talked about before with you, but he stands, talking first.

“I was thinking this morning,” he starts, leaning against the wall again. “I should teach you how to hunt.” He pauses, his expression shifting into something more resolute. “I’m going to teach you how to hunt.”

You look up at him, wide eyed and questioning, and he meets your eyes again for a moment before looking away, directing his words at the floor.

“You should probably know how to do it, if we’re gonna stay out here. Just in case something happens to me, and I can’t do it.”

Your face goes still at the thought, and he backtracks, “Like if I get sick or something. Can’t get outta bed.”

“Knowing you, old man, you’ll be faking. Anything to stay in bed longer.”

He huffs, amused. “It’s a pretty comfortable one, I have to admit. It’s been nice not sleeping on the ground.”

The beds are better than the ground for comfort, but you liked the ground for safety. Better to have him close should you need him, and you assume he feels the same way, given the way he conveyed his displeasure with the distance wordlessly, insisting the doors stay open at all times.

“We better go before the sun goes down, try to get more than I got this morning.” His eyes flick over to the hallway. To your open door, the privacy of your room just beyond.

“Sure. Just lemme get dressed.”

Standing to carry the pot over to the window sill, you arrange it just so, right next to the other seedlings, and when you turn to head towards your bedroom, you feel his eyes on you until you’re out of his sight.

–

Leaves crunch underfoot as you walk behind him, the slope of his broad shoulders a map that you follow without question. You’ve followed them for months now, those shoulders ones that you��ve seen damp with rain, covered under the taut drum of his flannel, tight and tense in unfamiliar territory and now, relaxed and loose, as he walks over to the now still bush.

“Did you get it?”

He nods in your direction, crouching with a soft grunt. “Yea. I got this one, next one is you.”

“You’ve always done it,” you grumble to yourself, watching the path. Your heart aches for the animal, but you’d never admit that softness to him. You know you have to eat, but to see it happen, to be the one who kills something so innocent - that’s a whole other matter.

You should be used to it by now. But while you have been able to justify killing people as a means to survive, knowing they would do the same to you if given the chance, you still get slightly squeamish about doing it to animals just minding their own business.

“You wanna stay out here, you’re gonna have to learn sooner or later.” He reaches down, grabbing the small, limp rabbit by the ears, and it hangs dead in his grip, not as heavy as he hoped. He stands and turns, leading you deeper into the woods.

Your fingers catch on the feather light branches of ferns, everything a wash of muted color as dusk descends, and it’s peaceful in your mutual silence, the woods around you alive with its own sounds.

“We can wait here,” he says, stopping at the edge of a small clearing. The leaves of the trees rustle in the wind, a rabbit popping out long enough to hide behind some tall grass nearby, and he crouches low, your body automatically following his lead.

“Normally you wanna keep walking. You can scare em’ out of the bushes that way. Rabbits, you let em’ know you’re coming. It’s deer you gotta stay silent for.”

You plant a knee in the moist earth, dampness creeping through your jeans, and he fixes something on his bow. Your eyes rest on the skillful way his fingers move along the bow string, the size of them compared to the delicate wood.

Satisfied, he holds it out to you with an expectant look.

“Show me how you’re gonna hold it.”

Unsure, you hesitate before you take it from him, but he waits patiently all the same. You’ve never held a bow before and when you look down at it for a beat too long, he shifts until he’s right next to your side.

“Like this,” he says quietly.

He positions your body how he wants it, the practiced weight of his hold guiding you into place, and you let him do it, trying to ignore the increasing thrum of your heart. Something stirs deep in your belly, arousal beginning to bud and unfurl, and then his calloused hand is sliding down your forearm, wrapping your fingers around the bow.

“Hold it up, and look with your dominant eye. Like when you shoot.”

You test it out, closing one eye and then the other, the tip of the arrow visually landing directly in the middle of a thicket of tall grass.

“Just like that,” he murmurs, his drawl curling low in your ear and a shiver rolls through you under your jacket, your fingers starting to tremble. He sees it, placing his hand on top of yours with a reassuring squeeze, and you hold your breath.

“They always come out at dusk,” he says softly, the husk of his voice matching the low lit setting. “That and right away in the morning.” He glances at you with a smirk. “Thought you’d prefer this with how you like to sleep in.”

You can’t turn your face to look at him, lest your mouth brush his, and so you breathe out a laugh instead.

“Very funny,” you whisper.

Your leg cramping slightly in your tense position, you shift a little and he places his hand on the small of your back to steady you.

“You wanna look for something shining in the dark. Their eyes, you’ll be able to see them. They reflect whatever light is around, and you’ll see it flash if you’re patient.”

You keep your eyes trained on the spot, a slight rustle to the brush, and focusing there with intensity, you wait, slipping into a sort of trance. His closeness is intoxicating, the solidness of his hold still pressing lightly into you, his voice a gentle, guiding murmur as the woods grow darker around you.

His voice lingers in your mind, catching on every ridge, embedding itself and playing on a never ending loop. He’s spoken more to you today than he ever has, and every word has been a piece of useful information - things you’re trying hard to hold onto, but he’s making it difficult with how overwhelming his presence is. The way he’s guiding you with that soothing, low voice makes you think about what other things he can talk you through in the middle of the quiet night.

You swallow hard, your mouth dry, and he looks from the bush to you, a frown pulling between his brows.

The grass rustles again, and between the blades of ferns, you see it - a sudden flash of something shining.

“There,” he whispers urgently, prompting you to let the arrow loose, but you don’t. Instead you find yourself hovering on the edge, hesitating just long enough for the animal to sense you, and it moves suddenly with a thrash, bounding away.

He lets out a heavy sigh. “What happened? Why didn’t you shoot?”

You look at him, the words pulling you from your head. Your eyes are hooded with want, your mouth slightly parted and his own gaze narrows in something akin to recognition, but it disappears from his face before you’re sure. He stands, getting some distance between the both of you.

“Nevermind. It’s fine.” He won’t look at you, instead letting his gaze rest somewhere out in the field, and your head clears as the thick tension you felt earlier dissipates into thin air, vanishing into the twilight.

“I think you’ve had enough for today. We can uh – we can pick up tomorrow. It’s getting dark anyway.” He stands there for a moment, weight shifting from one leg to the other while he taps the edge of his thumb against his thigh, and then he’s gone, leaving you sitting there alone.

–

Choosing to dress the rabbit he shot earlier alone down by the water, you prepare everything else inside. You watch him make the pit, his thighs taut in their crouch as he prepares it to burn hot and low, and when he’s done cooking, you eat together in relative silence.

He hasn’t said anything about your lesson or about picking it up tomorrow, but the way he won’t meet your eyes has embarrassment and shame coursing through you. Becoming a burden to him is something that you can’t afford and taking his avoidance of the topic as disappointment, you are stewing on apologizing when he clears his throat, sitting forward with his forearms resting on his knees.

“I’m gonna set some traps tomorrow. I think you should help me, so you know where they are.” He brings his eyes up to yours for the first time since he’s come inside. “And so I can show you how to set them.”

Relief washes through you, and you nod, agreeing “I’m sorry, by the way. About earlier.” He frowns in confusion, and you clarify. “With the rabbit. Sorry I didn’t shoot. I’ll – I’ll try harder next time. Focus, like you asked.”

You had been focusing, just on the wrong thing, and his frown gives way to a look of understanding.

“Don’t worry about it. Your first time holding a bow, wasn’t it? Wasn’t expecting you to actually make a kill or anything. Just wanted to get you used to it.”

Second chances are something you aren’t often afforded, but here it’s different. Here, you can take your time and learn without the pressure of death as a consequence for your mistake, and it’s like he knows it too, with how understanding he’s being.

He stands, preparing to do his usual checks for the night while you gather the dishes and place them in the sink for washing tomorrow. He grabs his rifle from the counter, leaving the cabin to walk the perimeter and then comes back in with a stomp of his boots on the rug to check every lock, scanning the forest through the window before he tells you he’s going to turn in for the night.

“Goodnight,” you say, settling in to read on the couch.

Delighted to find a bookshelf in nearly every room, you had spent the last couple of days going through the titles, selecting the ones you wanted to start with and reorganizing the shelf in your room to store them.

Assembling your own personal library, Joel’s face had been amused as he watched you, and you had thought maybe he would say something to discourage it. At the very least make a teasing comment, but he had held back.

Victory was yours later when you spied a worn western on his bedside table, the paperback lying open, face down.

You read for about an hour, your eyes eventually burning with tiredness in the low, flickering light of your lantern, and deciding to also turn in, you glance at that western when you pass by his bedroom.

Stopping in the shadowed doorway, you look at him for a moment.

His broad back facing you, his shoulders are a steady, slow rise and fall. He shifts, rolling onto his stomach and the t-shirt he’s wearing strains tight across his torso as he bunches his pillow, adjusting it under his head. You see a sliver of his back in the darkness, a slice of it beneath the hem of his shirt, and the dip of his spine leads downwards, disappearing into the waistband of his sweatpants.

Crawling into your own bed with your door open, you lie in the darkness and concentrate on the sensation of warm, firm velvet skimming under the pads of your fingers, his back still on your mind.

Crawling into your own bed with your door open, you lie in the darkness and concentrate on the sensation of warm, firm velvet skimming under the pads of your fingers, his back still in your mind.

Stopping in the shadowed doorway, you look at him for a moment.

Satisfied that he seems to be okay, you crawl into your own bed and with your door open and lying in the darkness, you drift off to the sensation of firm, warm velvet skating under the pads of your fingers, his back still in your mind.

#joel miller/reader #joel miller x f!reader #joel miller x you #joel miller x reader #joel miller #joel miller/you #joel miller tlou #tlou fanfiction #pedro pascal #pedro pascal characters

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akunya · 2 years

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i return. i love love meixul, anyway i need mr. rias to fuck me NOW

i dont know what it is about rias he is just portrayed so .... i dont know he is justvery hot

also i think mysta getting NTRd by his alter is funny

🌃

implying that mysta wouldn’t enjoy it, LOL. you always have the best ideas.

i wrote mysta and rias to be brothers here, just for logics sake. feel free to imagine them as just friends (or not).

tw: NTR, cuckholding, dirty talk, dubcon. incest(?), mindbreak, humiliation, etc.

small drabble under the cut.

mystas a bit hesitant bringing up the idea to you. who wouldn’t think it was a bit odd - your boyfriend sheepishly asking if he could watch you get fucked by another man. you were a bit confused at first, not understanding how you could enjoy having sex with someone other than your partner. when you agreed, you initially told yourself you would even pretend to feel good. you doubted you’d get any pleasure from it.

oh, how you were very wrong.

rias was a lot more confident than mysta. from the way he touches you, to the dirty little things he’d mutter in your ear — rias was hot and he knew it. he was more than happy to show his little brother how to properly fuck his boyfriend. by the time rias had made you cum thrice in a row, you were a drooling mess, crying and begging like a cheap whore.

it didn’t help that mysta stared at you the entire time. he was instructed to sit on a chair a bit far away from the bed, however, close enough that he could see every drop of sweat on your skin. the blossoming marks of red on your ass whenever rias smacked it, the tears rolling down your cheeks as you got fucked — mysta was turned on by it all.

“go on, tell him how much you love my cock.” rias laughed, yanking your hair so hard he pulled you upwards, only to move his grip onto your neck. he hasn’t even cum once, his piercings dragging against your hole deliciously. “i-i love your cock, rias! please, don’t stop!” you whined like a bitch in heat.

maybe a few rounds ago you would cringe and deny saying anything close to that. now, however, your mind couldn’t string together a single coherent thought other than being filled with rias thick seed.

mysta gulped at that, palming himself through his pants. the more cock drunk you looked, the more turned on he got. he never saw you this desperate before. he felt humiliated. he felt good.

rias groaned, his heavy balls slapping against your little hole as he turned you over, locking you in a mating press. “i don’t want to stop now, y/n. not when your boyfriend is enjoying it so much. be a good little bitch and take it.”

all you could do was nod, eyes flickering to mysta. he was already jerking his cock, watching your every move. it was clear he didn’t want it to end anytime soon. you were the main event, after all!

#my askbox..#male reader #mlm blog #male reader blog #nijisanji x reader #nijisanji en x reader #my fics..#luxiem x reader #🌃 anon #mysta rias x y/n #mysta rias x m!reader #mysta rias x you #mysta rias x male reader #mysta rias x male!reader #luxiem x y/n #luxiem x m!reader #luxiem x male reader

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bots-and-cons · 1 year

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scenario request for tfp!soundwave and a human!s/o!

s/o is trying to get soundwave to take a break from his busy work by trying to figure out if he has any hobbies they can do instead

(and if he doesn't, then s/o tries to introduce some human pastimes to him!)

I do like this idea, but Idk if I wrote it very well, because I'm not really putting much effort into this unfortunately. Tbh, I have no interest in writing atm. It's not just for this request or for this blog, I just don't feel like writing anything, I have no inspiration or motivation. I really wanted to get this out though. I was initially planning to do a scenario for this, but I couldn’t put it together coherently, so HCs it is, sorry

•Soundwave doesn’t have anything he’d count as a hobby, nor does he really have time for things like that

•Because I don’t think digital identity theft really counts, even if he does it for fun

•When you one day ask him if he has any hobbies, he thinks about it for a moment before just shaking his helm and turning his attention back to his work

•You decide he needs a hobby so you start asking him what kind of hobbies he might be interested in

•You know he likes music so maybe something to do with that?

•You show him a few apps he could use to make music, but it turns out he’s more into listening to it than making it himself

•Then you think about something that might be a bit out there for him, but you still think it’s a good idea anyway

•You suggest gardening to him, he doesn’t really have a good idea of what that includes, but he agrees that he can try it

•It’s just something to do with plants, right? That couldn’t be too difficult, right?

•You go to pick up some soil, tools, pots, seeds and flowers you can plant in a couple of bigger pots

•You drag it all to the Nemesis with Knockout’s help, since you had him take you to get them

•You take all the stuff to Soundwave’s habsuite and go get him to see what you brought

•You show Soundwave how to repot some of the flowers and urge him to try it too

•Soundwave just figures that if it makes you happy, he’ll do it, he didn’t expect to actually really like it

•You plant some tomato seeds and a lot of different flowers

•Soundwave finds the whole process relaxing and pretty nice

•His habsuite happens to be one of the only ones with a window, since it’s on the side of the Nemesis

•So he can keep the plants in front of the window so they can get sunlight

•He keeps a keen optic on the plants, and he takes very good care of them

•In a few months you get to eat some fresh tomatoes and he has a ton of plants everywhere

•He also got those sunlamp things for the plants that aren’t in the natural light all the time

•Who knows how he got them, probably has something to do with his little collection of stolen credit card numbers from his other “hobby” if you can even call it that

•Soundwave is really invested in watching the plants grow and blossom, and he finds taking care of them to be calming

#transformers #tfp #transformers prime #decepticons #soundwave #tfp headcanons #reader insert #transformers x reader #tfp x reader

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cedricsnotdead · 4 months

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here’s a post about writing tips from an excessively prolific fanfic writer

a question i’ve been asked is how do i manage to write so much in so little time, as for many people even putting down 500 words of a story can take a very long time

i don’t know if i’m the right person for giving writing tips but here are my answers to this (long post, sorry)

first there are two points that i should make clear:

1) i would not overestimate my productivity - if the plot is complex, i’m not that fast either. it took me a long time to put together ink and blood parts 1-3 which have a more complicated story. the other things i wrote were very simple in the plot or, like with the prequel, they followed the canon very closely so the plot was already done

2) even though it feels strange to say it, my real life job is professional writing. i don’t write fiction for my job, clearly, but even if it’s a different type of writing, the routine is always the same: elaborate a chunk of information, put it together in a way and order that makes sense, and sit there and write pages and pages under time pressure. this means that i’m used to produce coherent written pieces and to do it fast.

that said, i think my writing tips are the lamest ones i can give and you’ll hate me for this:

practice.

the fact that i’m fast at producing stuff is because as a consequence of my job i have been writing and doing this process of transforming information from my head to a page for years.

and even with that professional background, the quality of ink and blood 1 is not the same as that of ink and blood 3.

as you keep writing you can see how you dramatically improve from one piece to the next one, so just do it. you have an idea? write it down, even if it’s not for publishing it. i have a lot of old scraps of scenes i wrote down, some eventually made it into the published stories, some will stay there in the shadows of my files forever.

let that little seed grow on the page.

i think one point that blocks many people is that they feel like they don’t have a full plot with characters and worldbuilding in mind when they start writing.

but this is normal, it’s not like you wake up one morning and you have a full plot in your head that appeared overnight. for me, most of the things i wrote generated from one little seed, one little random scene that appeared once in my head while doing a random task and that had likely nothing to do with the big picture of the plot.

an example? ink and blood, a series of now like 9 fanfics and countless chapters, was generated by a random scene in chapter 4 of part 3 that i published last week.

if you have a random scene in your head, write it down. maybe it will stay a random scene and you’ll have practiced some writing, or maybe you will find yourself thinking how the characters ended up there and why, and what’s the background, what will they do next. and then one idea will pull another one and you may find yourself writing many chapters of a long project.

find a beta reader.

find someone who is willing to read your drafts.

agree on the boundaries of what “beta reading” means for you (spellcheck/language mistakes? just general impression of the story? more criticism on finding plot holes?). make clear from the beginning how much you are willing to give up of your original idea.

setting those boundaries is very important - years ago i had experiences with beta readers without agreeing on these things and i found myself hearing very harsh and frankly unnecessary feedback that just made me give up instead of trying to improve the piece. the original idea of ink and blood that i had many years ago was trashed down as painful to read and completely dismantled by the first two people who came in contact with it.

but finding someone who is even just there to talk about your story will help you improve and motivate you as well, if you set the boundaries right. and if you’re motivated, you’ll be faster as well.

read.

read as much as you can of the genre you want to write. this will help you both developing the language skills (especially if you don’t write in your first language) and developing a bit of critical thinking when it comes to character development, worldbuilding and plot, and on what you as a reader of that genre would like/not like to see on the page.

it’s not easy to have the headspace for reading someone else’s writing when you are in the zone of your own story, so you may have to do some hard stop breaks between one piece and the next one such that you can read something that is not yours. it can also help you recharge your brain a bit and unconsciously get new inspiration for your next piece.

so yeah i think that’s it. but if you have questions or remarks on these things feel free to use the ask button, asks are always open ✨

#w.i.t.c.h. fanfiction #fanfiction writing #ao3 #ao3 writer #writing tips #writeblr #ao3 fanfic #resources

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olistar255 · 10 months

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What do you think Leaflings are capable of? they seem to be fine if left underwater, would that be a gameplay thing, or could some perhaps have bits of Blue Pikmin in them? would that imply other hybrids are possible? wings? the White Sage was there for Ages apparently? wonder if they have an extended lifespan? also some have 4 eyes?

Thank you for the questions!! i always appreciate some Pikmin discussion

So… leaflings are a weird case in the Pikmin ecology. As far as i know, they are the only case where what the Onion absorbs directly influences what comes out (which was even already the case in Pikmin 1). We already know Onions' offsprings get influenced by environment and, through evolution, by the DNA of what it absorbs, but leaflings are unique in that Onions doesn't really decompose/recompose the creature, but rather simply attaches Pikmin attributes to the host, rejuvenating them and usually bringing them back from the brink of death.. which is very important.

I believe what sets the leafling apart is that all the people leafified weren't corpses yet, but either in deep sleep, comatose or about to die. Because the Onion may be too weak to decompose still-living creatures (hence why the Pikmin need to kill them first), it skips that phase but still implants the Pikmin seed/Hermikmin in them before spitting them out. I would even assume this was the same process that birthed Ice Pikmin, Rock Pikmin, and Bulbmins.

Now what does this mean for what leaflings are and are capable of? Well, the logical conclusion is that the leafified person gains Pikmin abilities along with the physical attributes; as seen ingame, the most important one being the ability to breathe PNF-404's air, and like you pointed out also being able to go underwater with no helmet (for the sake of discussion i'll just assume it's a real trait and not just the devs not caring about putting dandori challenges underwater :p)

The idea of leaflings receiving different attributes depending on which Onion transforms them is awesome (and would make for a ton of awesome OC concepts) but i do think those abilities would be limited because the Pikminification is limited. In my opinion, realistically the ability to breathe underwater would just be limited to the blue Hermikmin somewhat adapting the lungs of the host to underwater breathing (more on that later) while the leaves allow air breathing through their stomata. In a similar vein, i assume red leafification would allow for limited resistance to fire because the leaves would somewhat protect the skin, etc.

Not getting the full extent of the Pikmin abilities come with the perk of keeping most of your cognitive abilities (even if you do become dandori-obsessed) and the possibility of reversing the process with glow sap-based medicine.

Now i want to bring up the relationship between leaflings and time. We only have 2 samples of specimen who have been leafified for a while by the time we find them, Olimar and the Sage leaf, so the following more or less will be on the conjectural side.

First the most obvious part is how these two are much more coherent than recent leaflings; and while we don't have a ton of dialogue for the Sage leaf, we see how he's aware of concepts like pupils, leaving, the outside world, etc., while Olimar suppresses anything unrelated to dandori until we defeat him, so i think it's fair to assume a proportional correlation between time passing and the Pikminification brainrot ceasing.

Secondly - and this is harder to prove given the small sample size -, the older leaflings look closer to normal people than the recent ones, who all have the same body type with freaky eyes.

My theory is that because the Onion's attempt at turning a person fully into a Pikmin fails, those Pikminification effects (simple mindedness, modified organs like the eyes or the lungs) simply wither away with time, with only the beneficial effects sticking with the host: the leaves covering their body.

This is pretty much all i can think about when looking at the leaflings. In short they're a hybrid between a person and a Pikmin, down to how they think. I do wonder, though... Are they truly the result of the Onion failing to do its task completely, or is there some conscious decision behind them? Can the Onion choose to refuse to digest a creature, maybe even because they care about their wellbeing? or are the leaflings a result of strategic evolution? After all, their obsession with dandori is very beneficial for the Pikmin; what's the first rule of dandori any leafling will remind you of when you start a challenge? "Gather and make as many Pikmin as possible..."

#pikmin 4 #pikmin 4 spoilers #leafling #theory crafting

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artoriarts · 4 months

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borked coloring but Adam & Eve prime. While I’m of the mind that p-3 probably should probably be Lucifer (though it would fit the tragedy if he wasn’t even strong enough to be a prime. Simply a man concerned of his lord’s work damned with the rest. but I’m getting ahead of myself) or another Greek figure to keep up the theme, that don’t stop me from thinking. Cracked lore under cut

Don’t have any specific specifics but my general idea is that, unlike Minos and Sisyphus who remain in the world via willpower, the lovers here do so out of a combination of latent power as the first humans and sheer denial and the simple urge to live. Due to God’s shame robbing them of an explanation, neither of them even *know* why they’re in hell, whatever sin put them there in the first place. They barely even know what hell is. All they know is each other and the eternal torment that their minds reject. This, understandably, left the two bitter and paranoid and angry and, above all, horrified of everything around them, and cultivated their first response to anything being incredible violence, which eventually got them locked up by heaven in their flesh penitentiary or whatever prison synonym we go for. When v1 finally comes along and frees them, they’re barely coherent enough to even give their speech, and they have not a shred of the valiance their fellow primes have shown - they harbor no grudge against the angels, their only wish to be free, but upon registering v1’s presence, the only response they can muster is fear, and consequently try to fight it. Upon their inevitable defeat, the two, again, free of malice, and now drained even of self-defensive anger, can only embrace and cry together one last time.

During their fight itself, I'm imagining that the two are completely animalistic - they move nearly as fast and erratically as v1 itself, dependent a lot more on direct movement than the teleports Minos and Sisyphus work with, their state of "rest" when out of stamina being skating around and peppering v1 with thorns of eden much akin to v2's combat. Their main combos, their "Thy End is Now!"s and "You Can't Escape!"s have the main caveat that most parry opportunities from Adam are immediately either preceded or proceeded by an unparriable from Eve, and fucking up one will usually confirm the other. Other assorted ideas are:

Vine whip that, while also used by them in their movement to redirect their momentum, can be used like a Hideous harpoon. The way they use this most commonly is to spear v1 and then string it up and suspend it in the air, forcing it to either rely almost entirely on dash i-frames to dodge or quickly kb'ing the whip and slamming back to the ground. Also thinking that their power allows them to instate their presence on the world around them, allowing eden to partially take over the penitentiary, making bramble a hazard that they can just, y'know, grab and fling v1 into.

Previously mentioned thorns of eden are hitscan pellets that they can either fire rapidly, like the gutterman's chaingun, or in short, 2-shot bursts akin to v2's revolver. Also like v2, they can shoot coins with the thorns - And speaking of coins, they also have a sort of coin derivative in seeds of eden, which they can throw out in arrays, which will hang in the air for a moment before homing onto v1. They will do nothing but follow until v1 or A&E shoot it, at which point they will explode, ricocheting around all present seeds, ending the chain with the seed closest to the target (v1 if A&E shoot it, vice versa).

The two have three phases, two health bars - The first health bar is a standard prime fight, with their stamina growing and moveset getting a bit more deadly after hitting half heath, gaining the briars seen wrapping around them in the photo as their "crowning" similar to sisyphus gaining his beard and minos his aura, but the second health bar is much more dramatic, with them struggling to right themselves after the damage v1 has inflicted, with eve, in the struggle, managing to pull her half-formed body out from adam's, standing on her own for the first time since becoming a combined prime on a knotted tangle of veins and translucent guts, the two's spirit reinvigorated by the distress of their separation and the physical agony of being mutually disemboweled, then fighting together as two separate targets. Eve takes half the damage Adam does, but is less aggressive, taking most of the ranged role from him and meleeing only when joining in his melee combos, and, due to half her current body mass being vascular system, is also constantly bleeding fresh blood, essentially having a permanent mini-screwdriver in her.

okay that's all i got for now thanks for reading my illness <3

#my art #art #ultrakill #ultrakill art #oc #ultrakill oc #adam & eve prime #prime soul

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251-dmr · 1 month

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The 2-AziraCrow Theory

Maybe I should be calling this my head canon, and not even give it theory status.

But I’ll press on nevertheless. This theory had a seed planted when I saw this quote mentioned at the end of one of Sendarya’s videos in which she mentioned the Theologica Germanica concept of the soul having two halves.

The soul has two eyes When one makes an effort Without the other It shan't get very far, When they help each other They accomplish much. [William of St-Thierry]

Some time later, I began to see the pattern, a theme, that seemed to emphasize the concept of twos.

After noticing these, I started looking for other repeating, seemingly frequent ideas.

These ideas just keep crashing and bouncing and ricocheting around in my head. They just won’t coalesce into anything coherent. My apologies for the chaos and disorganization.

Theme – Two, Half, Split There are references everywhere, in dialog and visually, to “2”s, “halves”, and “splits”. Far too many to list, but examples include putting the lesser demons on half rations; being shown a demon’s split-tongue three different times, Azi & Crowley performing half a miracle each; Shax asking Crowley about the two yellow(!) lights on the boiler; the twin passions of Bildad; Crowley leads the humans out of the bookshop 2x2; even Uriel makes two complete revolutions pacing around Michael in the scene before Sq and Muriel arrive in E1. Honestly, the list is extensive. I suppose, however, that it could be referring to two of any number of things.

Theme – Inside/Outside Again, we have dialog and visuals that emphasize the idea of things being inside or outside, but especially inside. Azi to Crowley in the smitten scene “Why don’t you wait inside? You like to wait inside?” Nina’s “A lot of people in this head…”; And we have so many scenes of someone looking inside or out a window. I have quite a list in another document on my computer.

Theme – Spies This one starts right off with the spy sitting down at the wrong bench, next to Crowley. Shax recruits Crowley to try and find out what’s going on in the Up. Beez recruits Crowley to help find Gabriel, etc. Then there’s Jane Austen, master spy. The three zombies spying on them to get Furfur’s proof and we could even say that those go back to S1E3, 1941, “…half-witted Nazi spies running about London…” And, I also really, really don’t trust Michael. Could they be a spy for hell in heaven? But I don’t have any real evidence for that. Just a distrust of Michael.

Theme – “Bit”s Another word used throughout the season, and maybe even in S1. Well, we definitely have the final S1 scene with Azi saying to Crowley “…if you weren’t, at heart, just a little bit, a good person.” Searching the S2 transcript comes up with ~25-ish uses of the word. Is that a lot? Or normal? I have nothing to compare to it, nor base it on. So although Azi is not Crowley’s “bit on the side”, I thought, maybe Crowley is sometimes Azi’s “bit on the inside”.

Theme – Point Another well-used word throughout the script, appearing ~24 times. This is trickier, though, because “point” can have a number of reasons – the reason or conclusion, indicating direction, or the sharp point, of, say, a pin? I suspect that all are somehow applicable in this season.

But just looking at the last one, it could be a call-back to S1 and how many angels, or demons, can dance on the head of a pin. Where we learn that Crowley can make himself small enough to speed through a telephone wire.

I always vaguely thought Crowley’s line to Mrs Sandwich about whether or not she had her hatpin was a bit of an odd, maybe throw-away line and Mrs Sandwich responds so quickly and charmingly that the line gets passed over. But again, is it a reminder of what angels and demons are capable of? Or does this line mean something else I’m just not aware of?

Theme – Small Crowley Not as fully developed, and maybe not as obvious, but in E1 on the bench, for example, after the spy leaves, we see “normal-sized” Crowley immediately followed by seeing a “small” Crowley in Shax’s compact mirror (and he’s looking out of the mirror, see above) when she arrives. In the resurrection minisode, we see another “small” Crowley, when he’s off his head on laudanum.

Theme – “Invisible” Crowley As far as I’ve gotten to date, there are two definite scenes where I think Crowley is actually inside Azi’s head (or whatever) and not physically there.

First, when they leave GMCoGMD with the Eccles cakes in E1. As soon as they are outside the shop, Azi barely looks at Crowley, and Maggie doesn’t seem to see him, that brief conversation is only between Azi and Maggie. Crowley only “talks” to Azi once they’ve started walking again.

Second, and the bigger one, is in E5 when Azi heads out to solicit the shopkeepers to go to the meeting. Crowley asks “Can I watch?” and just follows Azi around and again, Azi barely looks at him; the shopkeepers appear to act as if they are only talking to one person, and Crowley is completely quiet around them, just hanging around in the background.

I also noticed that in these cases Crowley is on Azi’s right, the opposite of where we usually see him. (Oh, an exception is Mrs Cheng, where he’s on Azi’s left again, and he acknowledges Mrs Cheng when they leave, implying to me that Mrs Cheng can see him.) There could be more instances where we see this behavior, but I haven’t studied every episode yet to look for it.

Theme – S2 posters Just looking at these two for now. Azi and Crowley with one pair of wings, one white one black, behind them. I’ve seen the line “…and they aren’t talking…” I’m not quite convinced yet that they aren't talking. I think it could mean they aren’t talking face-to-face, physically. And I optimistically see their positioning as that they’ve still got each other’s back. Maybe I’m in denial, but I just don’t see the “break-up” as extensive as many seem to.

The other poster is this one of Azi and Crowley, each with the other in their heads/thoughts. Crowley is “seeing” Azi from a memory, from 1941. But Azi is seeing a current Crowley, draped across the bookshop chair. Also, I noted that the [double!] rings that surround them are linked.

My way-out-there idea, then, is that Azi and Crowley have “carved out” space for a duplicate but also somehow real, bookshop (a high-fidelity copy?) within Azi, within his mind, his brain, his soul, I don’t know. And he can enter and leave it as needed. It could also be a copy of Azi’s memories or something.

But it’s also someplace Crowley can visit, a place he can go in and out of (like the telephone lines in S1) as needed. I wonder, then, does Crowley in the end “split” himself, so that a “bit” of himself can go up to heaven with Azi? Referring back to Jane Austen, brandy smuggler – is Azi smuggling Crowley into heaven? All season, Azi usually has his hands closed, perhaps to imply he’s carrying and/or hiding something.

With this theory, it gets complicated, though, figuring out which “reality” we’re looking at. The external original(?) world? Azi’s copy in his head? Or a memory? Or none of the above and this is all nonsense.

Multiple sets of memories, possibly getting mixed together, could help account for the inconsistencies in flashbacks, the apparent “continuity errors” in various scenes, the changing POV.

We’ve seen the physical appearance swap. We’ve seen Azi’s physical possession of Madame Tracy in which they could both control the body. What I am considering is neither of those.

This is just a start. I’ll keep working on it unless someone already has some convincing evidence that clearly refutes the idea.

#good omens s2 #gos2 #go meta #good omens meta

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sunflowervolvimp3 · 1 year

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When bb and vampy are laying in bed facing each other, and both just holding one another, they were talking about their day but bb is so so sleepy she’s using all her energy to keep her eyes open and she’s just looking at vampy and running her thumb up and down his cheek slowly. Trying so hard to stay awake cus she wants to spend more time with him since she was at work all day but eventually her eyes are just to heavy for her and she closes them 😔 and vampy is just bursting at the seams like he fucking can’t she’s his BABY and he just pulls her even closer and puts her face in his neck cus he knows she likes to sleep like that 😭 kissing her head one million times 😞

Harry can tell Y/N is about to fall asleep.

She's been resisting the pull of rest for the last forty-five minutes, fighting valiantly against the drag of her eyelids as she's relayed her day to him. Her speech has been drifting in and out of coherence for the last fifteen minutes, her words falling off the edge of her tongue like a rock off a cliff— quickly plunging further and further down, until out of sight completely. And yet, just when Harry thinks that she's finally dropped into a chasm of sleep, her even breaths stutter, and she begins her story anew, her topics drifting like her speech.

"And there was this other customer today," Y/N stifles a yawn against Harry's shoulder as she moves her thumb slowly and evenly over the stubble on his cheek. "Who threw a fit because we were out of cream for their coffee. They said—" another yawn interrupts her speech. "—that milk didn't..."

Her voice trails off again, just as it did two minutes ago. Harry suppresses a smile, rubbing her back in time with her breaths. "The milk didn't what?"

"Hm?" Y/N's eyes flutter open again, although not quite to the same degree that they were before they fell shut. "It didn't taste the same. And I reminded them that...it's milk, not cream, so of course it...doesn't..."

Despite the warmth spreading through Harry's immortally frozen chest as he watches his lover battle her exhaustion, he hates to see her deny herself of her needs. He can't help but think that she wouldn't be so resistant to things like sleep if he could participate in the human habit with her. If he were to fall asleep first, Y/N would have no trouble curling into his side and closing her eyes without argument.

It's crossed Harry's mind once or twice to fake it. He's an excellent actor— he's had to be, to survive two centuries pretending to be mortal. He's sure he'd have no trouble closing his eyes, evening out the breaths he doesn't actually need, and lying still enough to convince Y/N that he's lost in a sea of sleep. But the idea plants a seed of discontent in his chest. He lies to his love so much, and so often. He can't bring himself to weave another deception at her expense.

"Angel," Harry keeps his voice low, barely a whisper echoing around his bedroom. "You're exhausted. Go to sleep."

As expected, this statement of truth is met with stubbornness. "Not tired."

Y/N can feel vibrations roll through Harry's chest as he fights back laughter. "You can barely finish your sentences, love. You can tell me more about your shitty customers in the morning, over breakfast. But for now, you need some rest."

"Don't wanna," Y/N tugs herself closer to Harry by his shoulders, inhaling the tobacco and vanilla scent of his cologne as she does so. "Barely saw you today, H. Wanna keep—" Another stifled yawn. "Talking."

"You know you undermine your arguments when you can't even open your eyes to make them, right?"

Y/N blinks her eyes open, unaware that she had let them fall close again. "They're open, asshole. Maybe it's yours that aren't open."

She feels one of Harry's dimples appear under her thumb as she strokes his cheek, and knows that he's laughing at her. If she had more energy, she'd push him away. But it's late, and despite running cold, being pressed tightly against his body is still the most comfortable place to rest. The only thing missing is—

Harry gently guides her head to rest in the crook of his neck, and the sigh of content that falls from Y/N's lips seizes his undead heart like a vice.

"My eyes are open. Which you would be able to tell if you could do the same."

Y/N hums in acknowledgement of his response, but doesn't form a counter argument. Instead, she lets her hand fall from her lover's cheek to his chest, too tired to note the unnatural stillness where his heart should beat.

"That's a good girl." Harry's lips press to the top of her head as her breathing evens out for the final time that night, and she finally drifts off the edge of consciousness. "Sleep. I'll be here when you wake up."

Despite not being awake to hear this promise, Y/N knows that it's true.

#ysijwa blurb #THIS IS MY FIRST TIME WRITING FOR THEM SINCE 2020 CAN YOU BELIEVE #feels weird feels rusty but we prevail #harry blurb #hs blurb #harry styles x reader #ysijwa

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skaruresonic · 24 days

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It's funny how you don't like Surge or Kit at all yet you've done far more with their characters and concepts in off to the side tumblr posts than anything in the official comic.

Thanks! ^^

I think the wide variety of AUs people write for them proves there are many number of coherent directions for Surge and Kit, which just makes the wasted potential all the more annoying. The book's inability - or maybe refusal - to focus and really pick a throughline is how we wound up with a bloated mess of an arc that, paradoxically, wound up saying nothing. We know no more about these two as when they started a year or two ago. Truly the writing of all time.

I like to tackle it from the angle of "Surge and Kit feel unwanted due to a series of tragedies and lash out because of it." But someone else could approach the same material from the angle of "Surge and Kit were criminals" - maybe make commentary on the exploitation of criminals and how even they deserve basic rights - and still be completely valid.

Because the book refuses to pick a lane and stick to it, however, we're left playing multiple choice with their themes and character arcs. The proportion of time spent on their characters to how little substance they actually have is kind of amazing. You'd almost have to be deliberately dicking around in order to avoid saying anything about these characters like the book did.

For instance, we know Surge hates Sonic with a burning passion, but why? Why does she hate Sonic other than the fact that Starline told her so 232 times? I don't think the book ever bothers to drill into the bedrock of such questions, really explore what they mean, other than how these tragedies serve Sonic's character (and to a lesser extent, Starline's and Eggman's).

To me, it makes the most sense to link Surge and Kit to the Tinker dilemma and make them victims of Starline's schemes. That way, Belle's arc isn't completely irrelevant, and Starline's actions feel more far-reaching in terms of impact.

Starline took the seed of an idea and exaggerated it via hypnosis. Surge has valid reason to resent Sonic for his failure to keep his promise to check up on Tinker. Maybe it wasn't quite hate. Not originally. But when senseless tragedy strikes, naturally, the psyche seeks to blame someone in order to maintain an illusion of control. Surge therefore continuously feels panicky, powerless, and out-of-control - Sonic being a big trigger.

I also envision Surge as being less abusive to Kit and more like a disgruntled protective older sister. Her old nickname for him was "Skippy," which mutated into "Drippy."

Conversely, Kit is the voice of temperance and reason keeping her grounded, paralleling Tails' straight man role to Sonic's antics.

Although Surge sadistically wanted to prolong Starline's hypnosis session as his mental state deteriorated, it was Kit who wanted to pull the plug, feeling it too cruel even to Starline. However, he framed it as "Starline fell asleep because he's insomniac" and "We should leave while he's out cold."

Kit playing with a doll he cobbled together out of scrap metal is not only reminiscent of Belle, but Tinker's presence. Tinker, too, was taken from them, in no small part due to Sonic's failure. Rubbing salt in the wound is the fact that the only person to give them any sort of permanent home treats them like objects.

Weapons don't play. Surge knows that. Yet maybe Starline doesn't have to. She fries the camera and feigns ignorance when he grills her on it later.

I like to think Surge has a lot of pent-up pain with nowhere to go except destructive ends. Perhaps, if there's no nearby water source, she demands Kit use her tears and sweat to conduct electricity: it would go some length to imply that she's internalized her own dehumanization.

As Starline notes, the duo's will to survive ironically hinders the healing effects of the metal virus. It's like their bodies and minds are fighting to retain their original identities.

Of course, I forgot to touch on how Belle, Surge, and Kit's reunion would go. Maybe that, too, could have added a layer of dramatic irony and poignancy as each party struggles to recall the other, with more and more of the truth peeking through with subsequent meetings, until there's a big revelation.

There's so much you could do with Surge and Kit to make their story thematically coherent. It almost boggles the mind that the book opened up so many avenues for character and yet took none of them. It expects us to sympathize for them as though we know the full context without having laid down the proper groundwork.

#asks #long post

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bardic-inspo · 4 months

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1, 14, and 50 for the fic writer asks!!!

Thank you lovely!! 💜

[Fic Writer Asks]

1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)

Right now, Midnight Chimes is my only BG3 fic (hoping to change that very soon!) But honestly, its not a bad intro to my writing. It's an Astarion x Cursed Tav fic where the actual slow burn is between my Tav (Naomi) and the unfolding reveal of her curse/circumstances. Tav gets her own subplot, and the focus is on her/Astarion's subplots and less on the main BG3 plot (although that's sure there, too). It deals with a lot of themes I like exploring in my other work (grief, recovery, survival) with a more foreboding/haunted vibe that I've always wanted to toy with but haven't really in the past. Here's the summary/link:

[AO3 LINK]

For Fallout fic, I would say No Rest for the Wicked. It's technically set post-game, but doesn't really spoil the game itself. Featuring pining for old friends that aren't (yet) lovers, the seeds of a future OT3 (Deacon x MacCready x F! SoSu), domesticity, and the ache of just deep set emotional wounds that aren't healed yet. Angsty but hopeful, which is par for the course in most of my Fallout writing. Summary below.

[AO3 LINK]

Deacon gets it, he thinks. MacCready and Natasha are in love with each other. A kind of crazy, end-of-the-world, burn down bridges sort of in love with each other. And they’d be fine enough on their own without him. Right? “So, let me get this straight,” Deacon asks him. “You’re begging me to sleep with your girlfriend?”

14. Are there any tropes you would only read if written by a trusted friend or writer?

I would read absolutely anything by @electricshoebox. Riss does not miss and I would follow her into the abyss (heh, rhymes). Her writing is cozy to me like a nice warm blanket even when it's like. Angsty and heartwrenching. I just wanna wrap up in it and when I do, all is good.

Honestly, there's not much I wouldn't try at least once, even if it's only out of morbid curiosity. I might never go back to it again, but hey, now I know.

50. Answer any question of your choice, or talk about anything you want to talk about!

Oh no, I have no idea what to talk about here! Haha. Um.

How about the fic that got me through the pandemic: @electricshoebox's beautiful Enemies to Lovers Slow Burn (featuring Deacon and MacCready from Fallout 4): A Line in the Sand. I don't have adequate words for how amazing this fic is, so I'm just going to drop the AO3 summary/link below, but you'll probably see me absolutely wailing (not always coherently) in Riss' comments if you take a gander down there. I'll never be normal about it ever.

[READ ON AO3]

#ask games #midnight chimes #reclamations #fic recs #a line in the sand #fallout 4 #bg3

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holden-norgorov · 11 months

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An Apologia to BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013)

I've just finished rewatching for the umpteenth time the spectacular work of art that is The Before Trilogy, and since I've discovered it I have always refrained myself from writing about it because of my inability to put into words the beauty and the depth behind the meaning that these three films have progressively acquired for me.

But this time I'm going to try to say something for the sake of those who believe the screenplay to have failed in portraying Jesse and Celine’s personalities and gone out of character in this third installment – which I feel particularly compelled to defend as it's, in my opinion, not only the best entry in the trilogy, but also one of the best movies ever made, significantly thanks to the way the couple's characterization brilliantly builds up on two-decades of long cinematic work and collaborative effort and climaxes with an egregious payoff. I hope that reading about how I interpret the way Before Midnight blends in perfect harmony with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset may at least partially redeem the film for those of you who were left dissatisfied or disappointed by the decrease in naive idealism and dream-like romance.

WARNING: Detailed spoilers of all three movies under the cut.

Even though I think it’s quite easy at first to find a bit jarring the evident, apparently sudden change in Jesse and Celine's dynamic – reacting with a kind of discomfort that is clearly something the screenplay wants to induce in the audience, which is not accostumed to revisit Jesse and Celine after they have spent almost a decade together and studying each other inside out – I also think it quickly becomes clear that what Before Midnight aims to do, with regards to characterization, is to take all the most irritating and unpleasant shades Jesse and Celine had always had within themselves, whose seeds were planted and indeed palpable, albeit romanticized, in Sunrise (despite both characters trying their best to keep them hidden beneath a deeply self-conscious need to foster the spark of their newfound connection and perform the attraction/seduction role-play) and aptly watered in Sunset, and throw them full-force to the viewers’ face, challenging their ability to still feel invested in the couple by appealing to the idea that even our favorite, most beloved people in the world can intimately be ugly, paradoxical, occasionally toxic as well as endearing at the same time, because that’s a hard truth about human nature and “this is real life, it’s not perfect but it’s real”.

To demonstrate that their characterization is actually coherent with everything that came before, I challenge you to think about Jesse and Celine in these terms: Sunrise makes it clear that they are both smart college graduates, fundamentally contemplative and opinionated intellectuals (or at least, proto-intellectuals) who share a hardwired desire to shape the world around them with their thoughts and ideas and an idealist outlook on the universe, time and the human condition. The trilogy explores, among other things, the way they react to the realization that the universe, time and the human condition can’t conform to their idealistic vision, but that they themselves have to find out how to conform to the universe, time and the human condition. What deeply sets Jesse and Celine apart, then, is the direction they decide to channel the resentment and deep-seated unfulfilling dread steaming from this bitter realization towards.

Jesse directs it towards himself, which turns him into a depressed writer who is never going to be satisfied no matter what happens into his life. In Sunset, the movie starts with Jesse talking about how everything is autobiographical and proceeding to announce the concept of his next book, which happens to feature a totally depressed guy whose dream is riding motorcycles trough South America, being a lover and adventurer who finds happiness “in the doing, not getting what he wants”, but who is instead “sitting at a marble table, eating lobsters with a beautiful wife and everything that he needs”. Later on, at the Parisian café, Jesse rants about being unable to be “in the moment”, about not enjoying any minute of his best-selling book tour and about how Buddhists may have a point when they talk about freeing themselves from desire – which Celine aptly identifies as a symptom of depression. And while Sunset seems to want to make you think that Jesse’s depression may stem from his unsatisfying family life, even hinting at the idea that Celine may be the cure to his condition, Midnight slaps you hard in the face and awakens you to the reality that even though Jesse did get what he wanted, he’s still more depressed than ever – in fact, it clarifies that Jesse’s depression is existential. Celine herself outwardly calls him out on it after he relates an anecdote about the twins fighting over a trampoline, when he refers to pettiness, jealousy and selfishness as “the natural human state”. He seems to quickly scrape her comment off in the moment as one of her exaggerations, but later on admits to his accuracy when he tells her, in the last scene of the movie, that he has struggled all his life connecting and being present with those he loves the most. Which brings us back to Sunrise and his confession about being an unwanted, neglected child who eventually kind of adjusted and took pride in viewing the world as “this place where I wasn’t meant to be”, or to the acknowledgement that he is sick of experiencing his life from his own point of view (“see, I’ve heard all these stories, so of course I’m sick of myself”). I truly believe, during the car ride at the beginning of Midnight, that Jesse is thinking about the same words of his father’s that he was confessing to Celine in Sunrise, when he says, talking about his own absence from his son’s life, “This is the one thing I promised myself I was never going to do, and now I look up and I’m doing it”. I really think it often goes underappreciated how tragic Jesse’s character actually is. The point of his character is that his own childhood abandonment trauma colored his conception and experience of the world, and about how that adds up to his intellectual inability to find peace and contentment in the moment, and about how both aspects flow into apparently inescapable patterns of self-repeated misery. He’s not just depressed: he’s doomed to depression. And the truth the movie points to is that, ultimately, Celine can’t change this foundational aspect of Jesse’s nature. She has, to an extent, to learn to live with it and accept it.

On the other hand, the same intellectual resentment and unfulfilling dread that Jesse directs within himself, Celine aggressively projects to the outside world. If Jesse is fundamentally depressed, Celine is fundamentally angry. Sunrise does a masterful job at carefully planting the seeds that testify how Celine is, at her core, defined by her anger, while simultaneously never allowing for that anger to truly come to the surface and take the audience out of the otherworldly romantic idealism of their night in Vienna. She talks about the unfairness of being unable to complain to nice and supporting parents; she says that everything pisses her off and proceeds to list several examples; she thinks it’s a healthy process to rebel against everything in her life right after admitting that she has been raised happily, loved and wealthy and doesn’t even know “who or what the enemy is”; quite revealingly, she tells an anecdote about a professional shrink experiencing her anger to the effect that, after a single session with her, she had to call the police in fear that Celine might actually carry out the story about killing her ex-boyfriend that she had written as a consequence of her morbid obsession with him. And maybe most importantly, the palm reader makes explicit to the audience what ends up being the central theme of Celine’s character in the trilogy: “you need to resign yourself to the awkwardness of life; only if you find peace within yourself, you’ll find true connection with others”. Sunset dares to shed quite a bit of the romantic aura that Celine was wrapped in during Sunrise where, despite all of this, she still managed to resemble a Botticelli angel, and lets her anger manifest more vividly in several moments. “The world is a mess right now!” she shouts right before a bitter political rant. She’s also deeply resentful towards Jesse who, despite her statement in Sunrise about not wanting to be “a great story” or a male fantasy, has basically decided to spectacularize their night together and sell Celine’s most intimate side to the masses. This is why Celine proceeds to lie about not remembering them having sex – she feels like Jesse has stripped her of agency and control over herself and officialized to the world a one-sided interpretation of their encounter – so she wants to reclaim ownership and hurt him at the same time (“knowing his weak points, what would hurt him, seduce him” she told him in Sunrise while talking about her habit of studying her boyfriends in order to grasp how to manipulate them). The existence of this fictionalized version of herself out in the world that she didn’t consent to, along with the death of her romantic outlook on life that prompts her notorious rant in the taxi, only makes it easier for her to allow her deep-seated anger to bubble up and start defining her. Which brings us to Midnight, where that anger is so consuming that it ends up being directed also at herself (she resents herself for failing to live up to her own expectations of both motherhood and feminism, and for letting herself be consumed by anger). She engages in a lot of borderline toxic behaviors – parental alienation (she sabotages Jesse’s ability to talk to Hank twice), false accusation and public shame (she mischaracterizes their conversation in the car at the dinner table and exposes Jesse’s private fantasy) and generic hurtful insults. Her problem with Jesse’s monopoly on how the world perceives her is as alive as ever, and she makes it a matter of relative status in the relationship. And last but not least, she also resents the world – and men – for women’s unjust impossibility to avoid having to make compromises that motherhood (or largely, the female condition) imposes on them, leading them to sacrifice leisure time or renounce to opportunities that our modern, fully technological world increasingly abounds with. In the same scene, in the hotel room, where Celine calls Jesse out for being depressed, he accuses her of seeing anger as a positive means to deal with life, and despite her refusal to concede the point in the moment, she ultimately admits to it in the last scene of the movie (“I’m an angry person and I hurt my kids, my work and everyone that I love”).

In a nutshell, we could sum up their characters as follows:

JESSE: idealized, intellectual approach to the world --> finds out about world’s imperfection --> blames himself --> existential depression.

CELINE: idealized, intellectual approach to the world --> finds out about world’s imperfection --> blames the world --> existential anger.

Particularly interesting, in this regard, is the role each of them plays in establishing the kind of path the other ends up taking. Jesse ultimately allows his depression to take over him as a consequence of Celine's decision to miss their agreed-upon second encounter six months after Sunrise, whereas Celine ultimately allows her anger to take over her as a consequence of Jesse's decision to circumvent her previously expressed wish and publish a book about the night they spent together in Vienna. In a way, they both sealed each other's existential fate in their quest for the connection they had once shared.

So, once you peel away all the layers in their characterization and identify the root core of their motivation, choices and actions, I don’t really think it’s possible to argue that they are out of character in Before Midnight. In fact, it feels like a perfect follow-up to its predecessors, designed to force the characters to confront the origin of their unhappiness and realize that they are not meant to be each other’s salvation. Just as Celine is going to have to accept Jesse’s depression as something he’s never going to be able to fully part with, Jesse is going to have to learn to deal with Celine’s unhealthy relationship with her own anger (“I’m not asking you to change, it’s called accepting you for being you”). This is where Ariadni’s words come to mind as the testament of the film – “this is what fucks us up, right? The idea of a soulmate coming to save us from taking care of ourselves”. The point of the movie is that Jesse can’t save Celine from herself, and Celine can’t save Jesse from himself – that real love, which is to say real life, is not about that.

Another quite common form of criticism that I don't get is the annoyance at the movie being willing to occasionally be critical of feminism, or explore perspectives outside of the feminist lens – particularly with Jesse's character, whose detachment from and derision of Celine's overstated feminist apologia apparently strikes to many people as a betrayal to his characterization in the previous installments. But first of all, I don’t think there's any evidence that Jesse was ever portrayed as a feminist in the previous movies – and even if he had been, how can a change in one’s own ideology or outlook on life through an eighteen-years-long experience result in an “out of character” portrayal? People change. Ideologically and politically, I’m almost a completely different person than I was three years ago. Does that make me out of character? I don't think so. But that said, many seem to move from the assumption that Sunrise and Sunset were feminist movies in the first place, which I also disagree with. In Sunrise itself, when the topic of gender comes up for the first time between the two, Jesse points out the paradoxical nature of some common female behaviors and raises a biologically-rooted counterpoint to Celine’s obviously University-derived socially constructivist outlook. Nothing about that screams “feminist” to me.

On a sidenote, though, I find incredibly illuminating Jesse’s response to Celine’s rant about female sacrifice in the hotel room scene. He sharply brings up her privileged upbringing (she actually spent her whole childhood “travelling around the world while her father built buildings” and was raised “with all the freedoms he had fought for”, as she herself said to him in Sunrise), which starkly contrasts both with his own childhood of neglect and psychological abuse and therefore with her feminist axiomatic ideas of male privilege and female oppression, and then he mentions a specific historical male-only obligation (the military draft) to swiftly rebuff her claims. She calls him an asshole, but has no real counterargument to throw back at him other than some mockery. This writing choice was actually so clever that I had to pause the movie a moment and think back about Jesse’s character. Then it occurred to me: Jesse’s been divorced and likely lost custody of his son after a strenuous legal battle with his ex-wife that both he and Celine refer to multiple times during the film. He had to spend years travelling back and forth trying to escape the dreadful destiny of turning into his own father and dealing with a progressively litigious ex-wife who apparently exploited Celine’s pregnancy and the notoriously skewed U.S. legal system to make Jesse’s attempt at remaining present in his son’s life extremely difficult – all of this while still managing to maintain some kind of sympathy from the viewers, who know she’s been wronged and cheated on by her ex-husband. The screenplay of this movie is excellent to the point of being able to condense into a single line a character’s entire lived experience and approach to things. That amazing line from Jesse about the “trenches of the Sorbonne” not only reminds the audience that he’s not a feminist; it also reveals that he’s quite versed in (and therefore accostumed to) anti-feminist talking points. Which is incredibly accurate and realistic for an American man who has found himself having to deal with custody issues – as Celine rightly points out, “I guess judges assume that women have the mother instinct”.

The fact that Jesse’s lived experience makes him critical of feminism doesn’t mean that Celine’s own lived experience is invalid, though – nor does it mean that the movie itself is anti-feminist. And there lies the brilliance of the film. Celine’s deeply-held feminist views are still entertained and tested in their validity. She is allowed to be a feminist through and through and voice her ideas, often with incredibly powerful weight and resonance – in fact, two of Celine’s best and most poignant lines in the whole movie are "The world is fucked by unemotional, rational men deciding shit" and “You know what I love about men? They still believe in magic”. Most of the film's detractors just seem upset that those ideas are not presented by the movie as golden nuggets of truth that shouldn’t be subjected to scrutiny or falsification, or treated by the screenplay as axioms that should automatically be taken for granted by everyone. I also think having Jesse laugh at Celine exposing her worries about rape to be, once again, incredibly realistic – it highlights how there will always be some level of incomprehension between the sexes, and how men will never be fully able to put themselves in women’s shoes when it comes to truly understand and empathize with that kind of fear and vulnerability. It basically testifies men’s impossibility to live the female experience.

Moreover, the same detractors that lament their disappointment at the “lack of feminism” in the movie also seem to take umbrage at Celine being portrayed as profoundly human in her complexities, which strikes me as quite the paradox. Women can be as toxic and problematic as men, albeit often in different ways. It’s Celine’s own imperfection that truly makes her a great female character. The argument underneath this criticism seems to be that a female character who engages in problematic behaviors drawing from the ugliest side of human nature does a disservice to feminism – which I guess you might think, if your feminist belief assumes that only men can really be toxic and problematic with the other sex purely out of selfish reasons. It’s quite clear to me that a socially constructivist perspective on life and the world is informing these people's judgment on the movie and the characters, whose raw realism and unfiltered humanity they seem to find ideologically inconvenient.

I have to say I’m also baffled by some people's characterization of the argument scene in the hotel room as “boring”, or an example of “classic middle-aged couple problems" film. It’s anything but, in my opinion. I find it some of the best cinema I have ever seen, with directorial choices, a screenplay and acting performances so high-ranking and engrossing that I was left mouth wide open, with so many shades and aspects that I’d never seen any other “marriage movie” seriously bring up, let alone face. I could never give justice to the excellence of that scene with words. Similarly, I’m stunned by the recurring claim that the dialogue in this movie feels forced and pretentious, given the fact that this is uncontestably the less philosophical, more grounded script of the three. Even though I also don’t agree with those who claim that Jesse and Celine were ever pretentious, I can see how Sunrise could definitely give that impression at specific moments – though the actors’ chemistry and talent were always able to hide any artificiality as much as possible. But Sunset and Midnight particularly flow with such a spontaneous and natural rhythm, as well as flawless acting expertise, that it almost seems a criminal act to press pause during the film. This specific claim seems particularly paradoxical given the fact that the same people who complain about this simultaneously express dissatisfaction with the absence of the kind of idealistic, philosophical talk that the characters had with each other when they met for the first time – which could have easily sounded pretentious if it had been delivered by lower-skilled actors. As if, by the way, the lack of that kind of magic between the two wasn’t completely intentional and exactly the point Midnight is making, particularly when it comes to what Celine laments as her own forced sacrifice of existential discussions in favor of seemingly unending, practical maternal tasks. This is a movie where Jesse says that he misses hearing Celine think, and Celine replies that her thoughts now smell like shit. Not only is the Leopardi-esque “Death of the Illusions” one of the main themes of the film, it’s also an inevitability in the relationship between two formerly idealistic intellectuals who now have to deal with their own existential dread while at the same time raising a family together and being deprived of the luxury they used to have of closing the world outside of their time-constrained connection.

About the ending scene of the movie, I admit that it had to grow on me. On my first watch I didn’t really know what to think about it, mainly because I was still recovering from the brutality of their fight in the hotel room. But the more I rewatched the movie, the more it made sense, and now I find it not only extremely fitting but also kind of brilliant. The couple’s destiny is also once again left up to interpretation and not at all cemented in a definite trajectory like I've often seen being implied. At the same time, the trilogy comes full circle by having Jesse impersonate the time-travelling role-play that won Celine over during Sunrise, and consequently by evoking in the audience a comparison between the state of Jesse and Celine’s relationship now to that of the German couple who, likewise apparently in their 40s, had prompted Celine’s decision to change seat in the train and sit opposite Jesse, reinforcing that very idea of “awkwardness of life” that the palm reader advised Celine to resign herself to in order to find true happiness. As such, the ending solidifies the idea that genuine relationships take work to function, and that true happiness has to be found in carrying that work out ("in doing, not getting what you want"). Jesse realizes this and demonstrates that he’s willing to do the work to rekindle a kind of spark and magic that can exist outside of the transformative influence of time. Celine also eventually acknowledges this, and closes the film showing her own willingness to put in her own share of the work. "It’s not perfect, but it’s real."

Overall, this movie is a masterpiece, a milestone in romance and independent cinema and, as far as I'm concerned, the bar that any film intimately interested in the exploration of the human experience and the creation of solid characterization has to outdo.

This trilogy is History, and as such I will forever treasure it and pass it on. Thank you Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for such a gift. Ad maiora.

#richard linklater #ethan hawke #julie delpy #before trilogy #before sunrise #before sunset #before midnight #jesse wallace #celine #jesse x celine #review #analysis #meta #mine

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ashcoveredtraveler · 6 months

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Personalizing The Pale King and White Lady

So this will go into how others characterize these two characters, along with my characterization of these characters in both my AU and my fic as they are pretty similar. Part of this post does have criticism to both PK and WL but they aren't complete monsters.

Also TW: I will obviously talk about child death along with miscarriages and parental and child issues. In my story, it is kinda important as it's related to WL's drive and her and PK's relationship with all of their children, vessels and Hornet.

Let's start off with The Pale King

The way that people characterize the PK is either "bad man that killed his kids" or "dad man who really wanted his kids but had no choice but to sacrifice his kid." In my personal opinion I think that it is a mix of both.

The short of it is that I think that PK wanted kids(because of WL influence which we will get into later), but decided that the life of the many bugs are more important than the few...children were going to sacrifice. This would have been easier if it weren't for the many dead children that they had.

I have a headcannon that they tried to have kids but due to issues that they were trying to have a hybrid child(both of root and wyrm) the children didn't survive for long. I even made a fic about it so if you want to read a slightly angst fic, here you go.

While WL really wanted to have kids, PK went along with it cause his wife wanted kids. Though he did not not want to have kids, he felt like kids would give off the image of a caring King and Queen. With that being said, I do think that if they successfully had kids that survived he would have gotten attached in some way, but not in a way that would be healthy for the kid at all.

Now let's talk about the White Lady.

I feel like the White Lady gets a slap on the wrist for the things she has done. While yes, she might have been coherence into sacrificing her children, she made that decision and somehow still thought it was a good idea to try it again after the fact.

When the knight comes to her in game she says that they should take the hollow knights spot, as if trying the same exact thing twice would cause something different to happen.

Now time for the headcannony stuff about if WL were to have kids.

For sure, I think that the White Lady wanted kids, but I think she wanted kids cause

1. She "desire(s) to spread seeds upon the land" and 2. She wanted to have kids to love her.

The second option isn't based on anything in game, it's just how I think the WL is. I imagine she has a very idolized image of how a family should be. A mother and father with obedient kids she can model to her liking. I think she would want a prim and proper child who is perfect. (With that description of WL, it may sound like she is homophobic. And that is kinda right. She prefers bugs taking partners that could procreate with. However that ideology will have to be challenged as when PV gets a date.)

Now let's go into PK and WL relationships with Hornet, and how I think it went as I think it's approximately how they would have treated their own kids. I think the relationship is rough with the monarchs and Hornet. PK simply had Hornet as an agreement, so I imagine he would care for her the way that WL would "care" for her children. Something that was moldable and to his liking. As I said, he only wants children cause of the WL, and he would shape his views into her view. Besides, Hornet was Royalty, she should act like one. This made Herrah limit Hornets time with PK as the way he would raise her with the WL was not healthy.

Now let's get into how these personalities work in my AU.

So the Pure Vessel gets revealed and both the PK and WL are horrified as they genuinely thought they were hollow. I am unsure how they get revealed, but they do.

While they are horrified at the revelations, they also have thoughts that horrified the great knights.

During her musings, the WL speaks to herself out loud. She says that she is slightly disappointed that she now has a spawn that is completely grown that she can't raise them from when they were a child. She only spoke a little bit about how they wanted a new child before Dryya spoke against her queen and how she should be grateful that a child of hers is alive.

PK didn't change anything about how he treated the vessel besides that they weren't going to be sealed. When finding out that they were impure, he tried to give them an option of choice but they didn't comply as they were unsure how to do that. He then simply ignored them and worked on another way to fight or seal the infection.

The Five Great Knights are truly the reason why there is some semblance of a family unit. The knights dealt with bugs that came from abusive situations, so they know how to kinda deal with the situation. They started off with trying to gently pry the stoic armor to reveal a scared child that is afraid to disappoint their parents and is ashamed of their twin they left behind.

After that The Great Knights explained to the King and Queen that if they don't clean their act, then it would be better for them to live elsewhere once they are stable enough. The King and Queen obligated and started taking their advice and started interacting with their child better.

Something that was hard for them to do is trying to choose and force things for them. An instant of them doing this is when the vessel was thinking of choosing a name on their own accord. The queen heard about this from one of the knights as they were talking about name options with them, and the queen saw this as her opportunity to 'help them'/insert her desires and image into them. She essentially overwhelmed them and tried to pick a name for them. The Knights found out about this and immediately criticized the queen for doing so.

The vessel eventually picked out the name Howl.

Eventually they become somewhat a family unit, but WL and PK aren't fully satisfied.

That is until Pk found more vessels living with other families.

First it started out at a trip to Deepnest when a vessel rammed into him when playing around with Hornet. He immediately wanted to take the vessels off of Herrah's hand but she declined. They were her children and she had basically raised them. Here is the backstory for the Deepnest Vessels.

The next vessel he had encountered was when visiting Greenpath to request for the Nailmasters training for some of the guards. There he found Broken Vessel training with the Nailmasters. Of course he tries to do the same thing but the Nailmasters don't want to lose the kid. Here is a post about them.

After interrogating the Nailmasters, they find out a vessel is living in the wilds with an esteemed hunter. Unlike the other two groups the hunter pretty much tells the king to f off and leave the child alone as he already kicked them out of the nest when they weren't ready. Here is a post about them.

As I said in my original post about this AU, PK had a good enough relationship with Howl and they told them about their twin. I haven't quite done a story for Little Ghost yet but I have an approximation of how they will be revealed.

So with the reveal of these vessels make WL and PK both happy and infuriated. They have somewhat of an ego and feel like they are entitled to have their kids even though they abandoned them in the first place. WL especially doesn't think that the lifestyle that their kids are being raised in is proper for a royal child.

Though throughout this AU they will learn to accept their kids despite the family they live in.

#hollow knight #hollow knight au #hollow knight headcanons #split family au #hollow knight pale king #hollow knight world building #hollow knight white lady #hollow knight pure vessel #hollow knight vessel

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