#(i do think Other characters have daddy issues in the traditional sense. and even in the popular modern sense. but not josuke particularly)

[advestager]

I feel like saying Josuke doesn't have any daddy issues whatsoever isn't entirely fair (I've seen some fic and comics go further into how he and his mom might have been treated due to the circumstances of his birth that were pretty compelling) but people who act like he grew up without any father figure are definitely off base imo. Every single adaptation and extra material have always had a focus on his close relationship with his grandpa for a reason!

see, that's precisely the thing. it is literally impossible to be a grown up human without having internalised some sort of illogical Feeling about oneself or the world – but fandom as a whole tends to just assign arbitrary ones to characters based on stereotypes rather than what they actually are like.

i do think josuke feels some sort of way about his lack of a father growing up, but that's as inevitable as joseph himself (or giorno, or jolyne, or even jonathan) having feelings about his own dad, and yet somehow jorge's absence does not get brought up despite joseph and josuke's fairly similar upbringings. the fact is that most of western fandom tends to view the JJBA characters through a (white, usa-centric) lens that simply does not lend itself to a fair or accurate reading when most of the cast is either POC or from an entirely different cultural background. that's why i'm so resistant to label josuke as having 'daddy issues'; the term means something entirely different to me than it seems to do to most of the fandom, based on all the fic, comics, and discussions i've seen (and had) about the topic. it's not exactly like the organised crime aspect of VA, but it fills me with a similar kind of frustration. i don't think one needs a degree in cultural studies or history or whatnot to enjoy a silly series about people punching each other with slutty soul-ghosts, but it's exhausting to see the same thoughtless, very specifically westernised takes being regurgitated over and over as Absolute Truth until the characters are so flanderised they seem nothing as much as a caricature of their original versions. i love transformative works as much as any other fan creator, but i also happen to like the source material. it is infinitely more interesting to me to think about what kind of relationship josuke might have to his heritage as a mixed-race person, or his identity as the son of a single mother or the obviously cherished and spoilt child of a family such as his own (especially in a place and period like canon's late-90s/early 00's japan), than to hear yet another iteration of 'haha, josuke has daddy issues' where the person saying it has no intention of analysing that premise beyond the puddle-depth obvious.

at barely sixteen years old, even as interested in high-end fashion (and as very much part of a working class family who could definitely use the nest egg) as he is, josuke's immediate reaction to being told his missing father is incredibly rich and wants to take care of him is to say that it's not necessary, and he's fine as he is. sixteen. i worked as a teacher with kids as young as a year old and people as old as mid-seventies; that kind of ease of mind is one-in-a-million and not something you'll find on someone who fits fandom's definition of 'daddy issues'. he's not angry at joseph, he's not grasping for money, he hardly even wants to find out more about the missing part of his origins. his only thought is to wish he wouldn't be the reason other people were hurt, and to protect his mother once there is a risk she might find out and be distressed about it. his entire morality system is (from what i remember of canon) mostly based around the question What Would Grandpa Do?, with some leeway allowed for the temper he clearly got from tomoko and for the fact that he is, again, a big and slightly spoilt sixteen year old.

so yeah. it might not sound fair to say he doesn't have daddy issues, but i don't think the terms fandom's operating under are fair to start with, so i'd rather recuse myself (and my interpretation of the character) from it all til we're playing the same game. the sandbox's wide and wild, and the block and mute buttons are there for a reason, so i'll just stay in my corner writing about higashikatas wielding their feelings like sledgehammers til my mum says it's time to go home.

#tl;dr: everyone's absolutely entitled to their opinion! i just happen to find the most common one the equivalent of soap-flavoured cilantro #i definitely agree with the part about his rship with his grandfather! it's a whole thing in my own writing for them #it's just 'daddy issues' has become shorthand for a combination of takes i quite dislike the past few years #so yeah. i'll just... Not. if y'all don't mind #(i do think Other characters have daddy issues in the traditional sense. and even in the popular modern sense. but not josuke particularly) #anyway i hope this doesn't read as confrontational as i fear it sounds bc that was. so not my intention orz #ty for the ask!!!! i really love discussing character analysis i'm just rly tired rn so i probably sound super Debate Team Mode haha #ps ryohei was 100000% josuke's favourite person in the world growing up and he's still tomoko's special baby gremlin at age 50 pass it on #josuke higashikata #jojo #the funny thing abt my fic is i'm really at ease abt posting my shippy stuff bc it's just like. treating myself to sth nice #and then sharing with everyone as a bonus #but the stuff where i actually talk abt familial and platonic rships for my faves lives in eternal development hell bc i just LOVE it #and never feel like it's perfect enough to share. it's never complete because it's always evolving #which is why i once wrote a novel allegedly about detectives in love but in reality about 100kish of family/friendship character analysis #meaning there was no way this ask could've ever been answered succinctly lol #ask tag #joji.txt #joosk #anonymous

[actual-changeling]

Oh god the way Gomens Fandom infantilizes Muriel and tries to father figure Crowley gives me suuuch a big ick. There's two things really that bug me about it, first the need to turn naive characters into uwu little babies incapable of doing anything for themselves and de-aging them, bc obviously only children are innocent or naive or positive, and it lowkey reeks of abelism...

The other issue I have is Fandom and their constant need to parentify older characters, especially men. I get it, it's the daddy issues website, I'm the same, but not every middle aged man needs to be a father figure and THAT lowkey reeks of the "American dream" of a nuclear family, like in order to REALLY be complete and happy, you have to have a kid... I'm honestly so exhausted of characters who show they like kids even the slightest bit, Fandom has decided their happy ending is getting married and having a kid. Like hc all you want but my aroace ass is tired of people talking about being progressive but then falling back into the same "traditional family" mindset 😩😩😩

The entire "every character needs one significant other and also children" is just amatonormativity: nuclear family edition.

Muriel is the same age as Crowley and Aziraphale, and while yes, Crowley slipping into a bit of a mentor role makes sense and is probably good for them both, Muriel is not a child and Crowley is not their parent.

It's just not that kind of dynamic and it never will be, and I think the fandom's infantilization of Muriel heavily contributes to that.

Crowley is good with children because they remind him of himself as an angel, they're curious and inquisitive, and he'd never deny them answers to their questions. Plus he has experienced so much cruelty that he'd never be mindlessly cruel to someone else, especially not a child.

BUT I don't think he'd ever actually want a child. In a Human AU I could maybe see it, depending on how you write him and his background, but in canon? Never.

I fully get you anon, I'm aro and my opinion on romance is "no thank you" for the most part, although it is fun to explore in fiction. However, so many people have such a normative view of relationships and family it's exhausting to watch most of the time.

#alex answers asks #good omens #good omens season 2 #crowley #muriel #crowley and muriel

[neteyamsilly]

Let me just say that your writing is absolutely immaculate and it should be praised 24/7. You're amazing!!! The way you've managed to write the characters to the point where I'm like "damn this could be canon" and it makes everything so much more easier to picture too.

I honestly feel so sorry for her (the reader) especially when she achieved something so great, in record time, and was at an all time high only for her to be hit by a wave of reality when she realised she was all alone and no one was there to see her do it. It was very realistic, I'm sure many of us have experienced that feeling before, of doing something we finally deem as amazing only to have no one there to celebrate such an achievement and it really had me hurting for her 😭.

Now let's talk about how she did not want her father to see her injury, not because she didn't want to worry him but because she didn't want him to get angry at her which is so telling of how jake has been treating her 😢 honestly her bleeding out in front of him is the cruel punch in the face that Jake 🖕🏻🤠🖕🏻 deserves. The fact that she thought he was mad when he told her to be quiet but really it would've been to just save her energy so she could stay awake and that being the last thing she heard???? yeah im crying from the pain!

I absolutely love her relationship with her mum, it's so heartwarming to think about but also so harsh on Neytiri, not only was her child dying out in her arms but she missed out on a rite of passage the whole family should've been there for. Considering we know Neytiri is very traditional that must hurt really bad to have missed out on such a big ceremony. (AND I JUST READ YOUR RECENT POST HER SPREADING THE BLOOD LIKE THE PAINT IS SO MORBID I LOVE IT)

Now the relationships between the siblings....honestly i have mixed feelings but it's like good mixed feelings ✌🏽😭 neteyam is a sweetheart and it makes so much sense that they understand one another, being the oldest. The way he panicked when he couldn't find his sister 😔 there's so much pressure on him too and it just feels good knowing they have each other. I'm honestly really interested in the relationship between the siblings, especially lo'ak and the reader. Because they are literally the same, other than the fact that lo'ak knows when to go quiet 😶‍🌫️ you'd think they'd bond over that but instead he was just taking the piss out of her and excited for whatever punishment was heading her way. And she did get punished to the point where she's dying. Idk I'm just so interested in the sibling dynamics, I think you did mention a few times that she usually cuts in whenever her siblings are getting scolded at (probably lo'ak lmao) which is so sweet to think about. How she doesn't want her siblings going through what she has to. The difference in treatment especially for her, compared to Kiri and Tuk, I'd be seething 🥊🤡 because that is so shady. Even if she had a small amount of resentment towards them I honestly couldn't fault her because you can't help it when you see that difference.

Honestly I love this family that you've built. And I'm so interested in seeing how/if this conflict will resolve. Please don't let it be resolved within a paragraph 😧 the daddy issues are too strong to be resolved with something simple.

IM AWAITING THE EVENTUAL "I SEE YOU" THATS GONNA HURT IK IT BUT ITS WHAT SHE DESERVES!!!! Imagine him being like "I see you, sweetheart" (cue my immediate sobs)

Also I am so sorry idk how this went on for so long but like whewww sorry if this got boring. Thank you for this amazing fic!!! I can't wait for pt.4!!

- Nini ✌🏽🤡

NINIIIII WELCOME BACK!!! THE LENGTH OF THIS ASK YUHHH 😭😭🥺

So you think the characters are close to canon? you can picture them actually acting this way? I have passed the trial of "my blorbo would never say this [clicks out of page]" ?

thank you..... thank you.............. never a bigger compliment than that.... ah.....

AND I GET BROWNIE POINTS FOR THE IKNIMAYA SCENE BEING REALISTIC? Damn ur spoiling me today!!!! It's such a heart-sinking sensation, really. to be alone in a moment you've looked so forward to all your life, expecting the pride of your family and finally having your moment - but in the end you're on your own, and you've chosen it to be that way because you want to prove yourself & are trying to achieve that high you've always imagined knowing it won't be like that. Idk i have a lot of feelings about that 🤸🏻‍♀️🕳

AND YEAH!!!!! Jake totally told her to be quiet to conserve her energy but he couldn't relay it to her . in his head he's focused on how much she's bleeding and if it's the liver or the spleen and no na'vi biology is different and how long has she been bleeding and it's all a chaos cluster that he cant hang on to any solid thought. its gonna sink in later for him, god. you guys might get bored from the thought process parts but i love writing them 😭

also nini, are you british or anywhere related by any chance? "mum" 🤨🤨

BUT, ABOUT NEYTIRI....... she has me in my feels,, like, this is happening because reader went out for her iknimaya BEING TAUNTED BY JAKE . she bled out BECAUSE SHE DIDNT WANT TO TELL JAKE. She told him to fix this every single time and he didnt, thinking it wasnt urgent and physically protecting his family had to come first, to him, he has to keep them alive first and they can handle whatever come their way together. and now this incident has proven how wrong that mindset was. as her mother, neytiri is beyond wrathful, but as his mate, she is disappointed and miserable. not only has she missed her child's most important moment she wanted to put in her songcord she may lose her for it. she has had enough 😭 and the blood paint is going to be so OOF....

NOW ONTO THE SIBLING DYNAMICS! ABt lo'ak and reader,, like, lo'ak can be a cheeky bitch because they're so close, you know? they havent emotionally bonded as neteyam and reader did because lo'ak would play it off whenever feelings are involved at that stage in life but he likes his sister bc she knowingly wants to take all the fire directed towards him bc she wants to throw hands with her father 😭 he's like ur generic younger brother you fight over your belongings a lot, but he's also like jake, he'll do something in the fic that im looking forward to see you guys react to! 🤠

and dont worry, in this house we like angst, you know i'm not gonna let you guys off easy LMAOOOOOO THAT I SEE YOU SCENE IS GOING TO BE 😙🤏🏻

AND NO, THANK YOU FOR THE ASK, have an amazing day!

#irma mirma ask mask #irmanons: nini

[3d-wifey]

NSFW Alphabet: JD Edition

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

Pillow talk galore. And he's surprisingly cuddly afterward.

B = Body Part (Their favorite body part of theirs and also their partners)

He's pretty proud of his brain. Not to toot his own horn, but he's a pretty clever guy. He's a quick thinker and he managed to plan and execute three murders while making them look like suicides.

He's awfully fond of your hips. How nicely they fit your jeans, how his hands look on them, the noises you make when he squeezes them a little too tightly.

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum, basically)

I can't see him ever remembering to wear a condom and having a kid is not in his cards (yet), so he's definitely pulling out. He likes to finish on your face or your stomach. It's almost like he's marking you. But, if you're fucking in public, he'll cum in your panties and he expects you to walk around in them.

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self-explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Not inherently sexual, but he's been looking for ways to tie you to him since he met you. He always thought marriage was a shame, too easily broken. So getting you pregnant after high school seems like the perfect plan. Of course, he's not getting your opinion on it beforehand. That's why it's a secret.

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?)

None, considering he was a virgin before you. Surprising since he's so good-looking, but he's not the type to be attracted to people he can barely stand. You're the only person he actually liked being around in, well, ever. So, anything he does sexually is based purely on instinct and what you tell him you like.

F = Favorite Position (This goes without saying)

Any position where he can have a good look at your face. He's pretty partial to you being on top of him though.

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment? Are they humorous? etc.)

Jason's a pretty intense guy with a dry sense of humor, so I can't see him making any jokes during it.

H = Hair (How well-groomed are they? Does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Hates being clean-shaven. Something about being bald down there doesn't sit right with him, and it's way too much work. He doesn't grow a lot of hair in the first place, but he'll trim it down if it bothers you so much. But not without some bitching on his part.

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment? The romantic aspect.)

Jason isn't a romantic person by nature, at least not in the traditional sense. However, he's very attentive in his own way. If it's anything other than a quickie, you'll find he's pretty focused on your pleasure, your reactions. Some might even say obsessed.

J = Jack off (Masturbation Headcanon)

He doesn't really have a reason to when he could just pull you into an empty classroom or something. However, he'll do it if you're nowhere around and he can't, for some reason, sneak over to your place. But considering he's around you almost 24/7, it happens less and less.

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks)

Blood. Not your own, but he likes seeing other people's blood on you. I could totally see him fucking you in front of a dead body if it didn't get incriminating fluids all over the crime scene.

Choking. Going both ways. Not to the point where you might pass out, but he's aiming to leave bruises. He definitely wants you to wrap your hand around his throat until he goes lightheaded.

Hickeys. I know what you're thinking and I want you to stop thinking it because you're wrong. He wants you to mark him up. He's a very pale boy and he bruises easily, so you can apply the slightest pressure and he'll look like a leopard. He likes to show them off and the dull pain that comes when he presses on them shoots straight to his dick.

L = Location (Favorite places to do the do)

Anywhere, anytime. He doesn't much care about getting caught. And it's not like he can't take care of anyone who saw something they shouldn't have.

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going)

You, wholly and completely. He's a teenage boy in love, you could wear a nun outfit and he'd still find it sexy.

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

He's a part of the anti-mommy/daddy kink club. His mommy and daddy issues are both too strong for him to view those words in a sexual light. Just the thought of them is boner repellent.

He's also not doing anything that could seriously wound you, on purpose or by accident. So, knives are out of the picture.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

Likes giving and receiving pretty equally. However, there's something about being in between your legs and knowing that he's the one pulling those sounds and reactions from you.

It's borderline euphoric.

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.)

He doesn't really have a set pace. It usually depends on his mood, which is ever-changing.

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Like I said in the Stamina part, he has a stupid high sex drive, so quickies are his best friends. In your car during lunch, in storage closets in between classes, etc. Name a place and he's doing you there.

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment? Do they take risks? etc.)

He'd do just about anything you asked of him. He's a murderer, there's no bigger risk than that.

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for? How long do they last?)

I'd say 2 rounds (3 max if you're riding him). And how long each round lasts depends on the pace he's going. All in all, definitely nothing to spit at.

T = Toys (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?)

He definitely doesn't own any toys of his own, his hand gets the job done just fine, thank you very much. But I can see him using toys on you if you ask. He's really only doing it to humor you.

U = Unfair (How much they like to tease)

He can't dish it or take it. He thinks he's a totally tease, and he does so good at first, but he always gets too horny to actually go through with the plan. He gives in too easily.

Teasing doesn't work on him either, because as soon as you make the smallest hint that you're in the mood, he's ready to go. Whenever, wherever.

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

He doesn't moan often, more into groaning and grunting. But the man is a talker.

W = Wild Card (A random headcanon for the character)

Something about you acting aggressive or violent really gets him going. Murder's his foreplay, babe.

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

Above-average at about 7-7.5 inches with a slight curve to the left. He's longer than he is thick and he has a cute beauty mark at the base of his shaft. Like I said earlier, he's not clean-shaven but he'll reluctantly trim for you if you want him to.

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?)

He's a healthy, teenage boy. And like most teenage boys, he has an overactive libido. So, he's ready anyplace, anytime.

Z = Zzz (How quickly they fall asleep afterward)

He actually isn't that tired after, assuming you've only gone one round. But if you're both pushing into oversensitivity, he's cuddling up to you and passing out right after.

#jd x reader #jd heathers #heathers #jason dean x reader #jason dean #smut

[thunderheadfred]

❄️Todoroki HC's🔥

Aged-up pro hero Shouto. NSFW under the cut. Minors do not interact.

- - -

General

Might as well be tied with Bakugou for the #1 pro hero spot; they seem to pass the crown back and forth every other year. Everyone knows about their intense frenemies uber-rivalry. Well. Everyone but Shouto.

He's asked to speak at a lot of charity events. If he has time to prepare (and hire a speech writer) he is capable of stirring crowds to standing ovations. But if caught unawares... he gets cornered into hilarious on-the-spot interviews. He's been memed. Mercilessly.

He's an OP character, but unfortunately he rolled -500 in fashion sense. Eventually he wises up and hires a stylist. When he finally cuts his hair a slightly different and even more flattering way, it's a national event. People faint in the street.

Does god-awful sleight-of-hand magic tricks when he meets young fans, even though nobody asked him to. The second-hand embarrassment is palpable. But he keeps doing it. God, why does he keep doing it?

Has hovering arm syndrome in every fan photo.

Super into pop music. Not a fan of any particular group or artist, couldn't tell you the name of a single song. But every time he turns up the volume on the radio it's like... really? THIS? Probably pumps that shit through his hero agency to keep up morale. Has no idea what you mean when you tell him his music taste doesn't match his personality.

Similarly, he enjoys brainless romantic comedies and old silent movies. Doesn't laugh at jokes but loses it over physical comedy. Thinks Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd are the funniest people who ever walked the earth.

He's long and limber. Runs practically a hundred miles every day just to "relax." Doesn't even get sweaty doing it. A filthy yoga addict. He'll probably live to be 200 years old.

He can regulate his body temperature for quirk use but in everyday life he's always half a degree outside the Goldilocks zone. It drives him quietly insane; he has an epic love-hate relationship with his thermostat.

Has a therapy animal pet. Doesn't matter if it's a dog or a cat or a bird or an iguana or a teeny tiny rodent. It's the best-behaved animal in the country and speaks more languages than you. It has its own room and an instagram account with millions of followers.

Lives in a traditional Japanese estate that doubles as a national treasure. Probably has government-appointed snipers at the gate, and he's just like, "don't worry about it." You are afraid to touch anything. Fuck, don't even look at anything, just to be safe.

Has an outstanding personal chef who only gets to cook five things unless (thank fuck!!) company comes over. Impossibly picky eater. He rotates between a few "safe" foods and suspiciously side-eyes everything else. If you cook something unfamiliar for him it will be the most awkward meal of your life, because he'd never tell you he doesn't like it. But oh lord, just look at his face.

This clashes directly with his love of traveling. Frequently uses his hero earnings to visit exotic foreign locales over long weekends... but rarely tries the food.

- - -

Dating

A grey-ace demisexual disaster. You could count the number of people he's been attracted to on one hand. He falls madly in love every time and always gets his heart smashed to pieces when his crush can't magically intuit the meaning of his frigid longing glances and generically courteous romantic gestures.

Which is stupid, because he gets propositioned constantly. He can't walk out the door without being flirted with. People keep slipping him their phone numbers and he always directs them to his agency like a moron. It's a good thing he will never understand how attractive he is because that's the only thing keeping him from total world domination.

Conventional attractiveness does not compute. Shouto doesn't have a type, doesn't care that he's an eleven whilst you are merely mortal. He will fall for your personality above all else.

Probably falls head over heels because your schedules overlap in a completely ordinary way and he witnesses you doing something endearing or brave or most likely: utterly mundane.

Pick a favorite, because you're his favorite coworker, or his favorite barista, or his favorite random bystander in line at the grocery store. You made him smile once; then he spent the next three months daydreaming about your future together before you accidentally stomped on his foot, initiating your first real conversation.

He's big on healthy communication. HUGE. He goes to therapy and it shows. Will talk through literally everything to the point of delirium. Sometimes his dedication to resolving every issue right away can get overwhelming; sometimes you just need some frickin time alone. But it pays off, because the two of you have practically never have a "real fight." There's just no way for bad vibes to fester.

STILL, his family wasn't exactly... erm... verbally or emotionally supportive, shall we say. For that reason, he might not give you all the compliments you deserve, because it simply doesn't occur to him to do so. He assumes you know how he feels. If you're self-conscious or insecure in the relationship, it might take him a while to notice. But when he figures it out (or even better, when you tell him directly) he will make it up to you with enthusiasm.

Will take you on lavish dates. Spoils you rotten without actually intending to. He's clueless about money. If you wanted a sugar daddy, you just hit the fucking jackpot. But if the word valet makes you uncomfortable, perhaps suggest some romantic picnics instead. He can still go all out with the food and five-star location without making you see cartoon dollar signs.

Chronic Insomniac. Stays up too late watching YouTube every night. His viewing history is an incomprehensible blur of k-pop music videos, serial killer icebergs, and super girly crafty ASMR channels. When he's watching a video, he is unreachable. Please call back later and try again.

He's disgustingly cute when he sleeps. Doesn't snore, but drools. Sometimes the drool freezes and leaves frost trails on his face in the morning. Still sleeps with the giant stuffed cat pillow that his mother gave him when he was like, zero. He'll inadvertently suffocate you with it, and you will welcome death with open arms because awwwwww!!!!!

The first time he tells you he loves you will be after your traditional Japanese shinto wedding. You won't hear it again until you start a family. Honestly, it's a good thing he doesn't say it often and is always holding you when it happens. It's a knee-buckler.

- - -

Icy-Hot

I don't even need to say it. Shouto is as old-fashioned as they come. You will never open another door or pull out another chair for yourself as long as you live. He will ask before he holds your hand. He will ask before he kisses you. He will stop and check in if you so much as breathe funny during sex.

If you don't orgasm at exactly the same time while staring into one another's eyes, he'll consider himself a failed lover. God forbid you want him to pound you into the futon... cause you are going to have to present that scenario to him in writing first.

Physical intimacy rarely leads to sex. He loves cuddling, craves physical affection. He'll sprawl all over you and turn into goo while you hold him close. He's an amazing, astounding, phenomenally good kisser. And that's... nice and all... but sometimes you have to grab his face and say, "Shouto, I'm horny," before he's like so that's why you're currently dry-humping me?

Even if he isn't technically a virgin the first time (or the millionth time) you sleep together, you won't know the difference. He's a blushing violet. Every. Fucking. Time. This doesn't mean he's a bad lay, oh no. But there's always ten minutes of confused bumbling before he hits his stride and remembers oh yeah, I DO know how to fuck good.

Absolutely silent during sex. Focused. Intense. Sometimes you have to push him a little to make any kind of noise at all, just so you know you're pleasing him (oh don't worry, you are).

His cock is Just Right. Not to big or too small. Perfectly proportioned and symmetrical. Somehow pretty. Like a fucking factory prototype. It truly is not fair.

Gets handsy and restless at night, even if you both have work the next day. Seems to crave sex at three in the morning. You've given him more than one exhausted handjob.

Gets offended if you don't cum. Will go down on you for hours. Of course he uses his quirk to tease you. He doesn't typically use it during actual intercourse, but he's all about foreplay, and he'll use every tool in his arsenal.

His sex drive is completely fucking unpredictable. Sometimes he's all over you, other times he's an icy slab. His line of work leaves him busy and stressed on a near-constant basis, so you can't entirely blame his personality for this one. Just give him some time and help him take care of his basic needs. He'll come back around soon enough.

#todoroki shouto #todoroki x you #todoroki x reader #todoroki x y/n #gender neutral reader #todoroki headcanons #bnha headcanons #mha headcanons #smut #fred writes #bnha #mha

[thickenmyblood]

hey maca :)) I have sth that I’d love to hear your input on! (wall of text incoming so beware- I’m absolutely not mad if you don’t want to answer lmao). Basically it’s about how you portray women in your works and to what extent you see that portrayal mirrored in the canon books. I have noticed that a lot of writers tend to go a traditional route with for example daughters not being heirs like you also mentioned in an answer for a wtsioa ask on here. Considering the cultures Vere and Akielos are based on that’s obviously very logical and a lot of authors (including you) make it work fantastically! Yet personally I never got the vibe of Vere and Akielos being as patriarchal in canon, mostly because the Information we get is kind of confusing. On one hand damen is a walking manosphere (and. all of Akielos in general as well) without any prominent female figures in his life but on the other hand damen only ever speaks appreciatively of for example the female vaskian warriors. Both countries seem to ban women from the army yet Damen also refers to a warrior queen. The regent is a total misogynist but with the wording Laurent uses it almost seems like that is more the exception and not the general rule of veretian court life. Both countries also have ties to Vask, an exclusive matriarchy and Akielos is said to be similar to Patras which Pacat has stated is also partly a strong matriarchy due to vaskian occupations in the past. I could go on for a lot longer but I guess that damens overall positive attitude towards women and especially stereotypically spoken masculine women is what sticks out the most to me. It just seems kind of misplaced in a world that supposedly is as sexist as the original cultures from our world. Which is why I’d say both countries do have gender roles but are overall a lot more egalitarian than their respective real world og cultures. But that’s only my take and I’d love to hear more on what others think about the portrayal of women in canon and how they chose to portray it in fanfiction. Love you and your new work, hope you’re doing well❤️

HELLO!!! Thank you for asking me interesting stuff :, ) you always have the best questions and my sad little inbox is open to you any time, friend. I divided this into parts, so:

My portrayal of women: I need to work on this a lot lmao. I’m not proud of any female character I have ever written for this fandom, and I’m also not proud to say I struggle horribly when it comes to writing female OCs, especially if the story is not about a female character that is a literal projection of me. Or Bella Swan (yes, Twilight literally shaped my sad little brain and the way I write and consume fiction).

Authors writing female characters in a “traditional” way (for fantasy settings): I can’t speak for other authors but I definitely think, in my case, that using the “it’s a patriarchal society, women have no rights, women can’t be heirs, etc.” blueprint is a matter of being lazy. It’s quick, and easy, and it’s been done before so we all know how it works and a) it’s unlikely that you’ll mess it up (in the plot hole kind of way) and b) it’s obvious that most readers know how the usual system works and so you don’t have to spend paragraphs or even chapters explaining it to them. I am very lazy when it comes to world-building for fics. Why? Because when I’m writing fanfiction I don’t give two shits about the world, I just care about the characters doing Things and having Feelings. The moment you start to question these issues (a society where women can join the army, where they can be heirs, where maybe they can have multiple husbands, etc.) a billion issues arise because it’s not the “usual way” and so you’ll have to deal with “unusual problems”. See: plot holes, info-dumping, etc.

Vere and Akielos in canon: I think the books get very, very confusing at times when it comes to gender roles in that specific world. They also get very confusing about how royalty works, in my opinion. So:

Damen never mentions female influences in his life, not even nannies or wetnurses or anything. He mentions past queens and his mother, but even then… It’s always struck me as “what the actual fuck” that we get no information on Egeria. In TSP, he doesn’t even read as curious to me, especially when I think of that line that goes something like “oh, well, he’d never asked how tall she was”.

Then you have Jokaste, who is highborn and also… perhaps trained in politics? It’s unclear to me if she’s ever been directly involved in meetings or been an active member of the Council or even been allowed to study these issues. Clearly, she’s smart and capable and cunning, but like… how? Did she have private tutors? Is she a self-made woman? Like, what’s up with that? Are women allowed to engage in public politics? Are they allowed to be kyroi?

IMO, Damen complimenting the female warriors in Vask has to do with how appreciative he is of war-related stuff. Like, he thinks people with his own qualities are neat. We see this time and time again in the books—having honor, being brave, respecting one’s family, protecting those who need protecting… He compliments these things when he sees them in others, especially in Laurent. Obviously one of the big changes in Damen as a character is that he goes from being daddy’s boy to being like “well, actually… maybe war isn’t always the answer, and maybe war isn’t always honorable”. The Vaskian warriors prove themselves worthy of praise in a “manly” way, if that makes sense. (In the same way, Laurent proves himself in the Okton, not so much to Damen but to other Akielons). So, in essence, War > Any issues he may have about women doing Stuff.

Don’t judge me for this but I can’t remember the Regent talking about women. Do you have any quotes about that? I feel like Book 1 is super rich when it comes to world-building stuff and yet it’s the book I remember the least. I know he obviously has a preference for boys and not girls, but I don’t recall him having interactions with Vannes or ladies at court? I’M SORRY I’M SO STUPID but I don’t own the book so I can’t exactly word search my way out of this one, and so instead of saying stupid stuff, I’m asking anyone reading this (lol, you and my mom probably) to please tell me what canon says on this issue.

Ties to Vask: Er, yeah, I mean… They’re clearly not at war with Vask and have some sort of economic deal (there are Vaskian pets in Arles? Which makes me wonder if they, like, buy them from Vask? Or if the pets are Vaskian and turn into pets in Vere? Slaves are not like pets so I don’t know?), BUT just because they have deals with this kingdom/are on good terms with the ruler does not mean they necessarily approve? Like, maybe they’re like “yeah, it’s weird they give women so much power, but also I need that silk/leather/WHATEVER, so I’ll shut up about that”.

“Akielos is said to be similar to Patras which Pacat has stated is also partly a strong matriarchy due to Vaskian occupations in the past.” Is this in the books or is this something she said in an interview/post-releasing the trilogy? I know in the books there’s a quote that Akielos and Patras are similar because they both have slaves, but other than that I can’t quite remember anything about Patras? Like, I don’t recall Pacat giving us extensive and thorough world-building on either nation, at all. Once again, I am asking you for more explanations on this because I literally don’t remember.

4. My opinion and a Stupidity Disclaimer: As I’ve said above, there’s a lot of stuff I don’t remember and so I’m not trying to preach to anyone reading this or even saying that I hold the truth about… anything. I’m answering questions as I see fit and asking more questions when I run out of answers.

I believe world-building is not one of Captive Prince’s strong points. I will not elaborate on this because this is already long enough but there is simply, in my opinion, not enough material to reach any solid conclusions when it comes to world-building questions such as the role of women in Vere and Akielos, how compulsory homosexuality affects the development of highborn men and women in Vere, exactly what makes Akielos’ view on women different from Vere’s (if there’s any difference at all), the history of gender roles in this world and how it’s evolved up until canon, how Lamen can solve the heir issue without recurring to, once again, “the usual stuff” (concubines, bastards, marriage to women, etc.). It’s clear from what I’ve read that Pacat has come a long way as a writer and that her new trilogy has a lot more in-depth explanations to world-building questions, but this is not the case with CP, and so I’m afraid my answer to most of this is “I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone can know for sure”.

Lastly, I think I struggle a lot with understanding the role of women in this universe because I simply did not see enough women doing stuff, so I don’t know what’s permitted, what’s unacceptable, what’s illegal, what is straight-up execution worthy, etc. This is not me complaining about the lack of female characters in CP, at all, which I know is contradictory to stuff I’ve said in the past (I answered a couple asks a year ago about how I’d wished we’d gotten Vannes’ POV or Jokaste’s POV in the short stories). I’ve changed my mind, and so I think Pacat is entitled to write whatever she wants, just like I’m entitled to talk shit about KR with any living soul who will listen lmao.

To end this on a spicy note, I think sometimes we consume the wrong media and then complain because it doesn’t have what we wanted. If you’re looking for a trilogy with strong, fleshed-out female characters, Captive Prince is not for you. If you’re looking for a trilogy on female struggles and, I don’t know, defying… the male gaze… Captive Prince is not for you. There are plenty of books out there that focus exclusively on female characters, featuring sapphic relationships, and dealing with gender issues. WHICH IS NOT TO SAY WE SHOULDN’T BE HAVING THESE DISCUSSIONS. This is not about this particular question, but more about a lot of posts I’ve seen floating around… complaining about Pacat’s writing and the themes she didn’t explore.

If anyone has made it this far, thank you for reading, and know this is NOT me telling you what to think. This post is an open question that anyone can engage with, although I hope people will engage with this directly and on this platform, instead of… taking it somewhere else where I sadly can’t engage back! Unlike what happened with our awesome fat Laurent discussion, I will be replying to any questions I get on this (Note: I did not reply to most of those questions because a long time had passed and they were sort of repetitive).

#caramellaurent #captive prince #i'm using the main tag because i think... maybe someone has answers? #also lol melli i see what u did here... u're distracting me from writing for the bang #i see how it is #discourse #is this discourse tho? #it's just me asking stuff #discourse (questioned)

[bakugouisabitch]

do you think malik goes through periods where he's very fun and bubbly, but then like a switch he's very quiet and wants distance?

GOD YES YES THIS is exactly how I imagine him omg it makes so much sense.

First of all, YES 👏 Let 👏 Malik 👏 Be 👏 Bubbly 👏 And 👏 Loud 👏 2k21 because he DESERVES IT. He should always be happy and loud and it shouldn‘t bother Anyone

.

Okay that being said, I hc him to have a lot of trust issues, so, to get to experience his “real self” always takes a lot of time and “opening up”.

He’s not shy or an introvert, he just kind of doesn’t trust anyone except himself (and his siblings - most of all Rishid) and has been through so much shit that he keeps thinking any form of friendly approach from someone is all just a tactic to get to his vulnerable sides. (this funny fanart kind of gets my point across). And that’s exactly why he is like that too. When talking with strangers, he would go as far as being extremely polite and cheesy that you almost can’t recognise him anymore. But he’s doing it all to warm up to people and get to their weaker spots, just in case he’s going to use it against them. (see: his whole fake personality Namu-act that wasn’t even necessary for his plan to enter the Battle City finale...)

To get to Malik’s real self i HC requires a lot of digging and trust - which can take a lot of time. He also seems to be quite conflicted over what he really wants, because after all that time spent analysing and manipulating people just to understand their weak spots he’s left with nothing but a constant state of being alert and ready to use it against them. And when the moment never comes - because as hard as it is to swallow down for him, some people might have genuinely just nice intentions - he realises he wasted another opportunity for making new friends and ends up being full of guilt and regret and probably a big self loathing and once again alone. Then forms the question what do you really want? to make friends or enemies? And he’s not sure he knows the answer anyway. Shit, malik’s whole character design strikes me as being conflicted since he’s a whole mixture of traditional and modern af. He seems to be quite attached to his ancient roots and the nobility of his bloodline but he also seems to want to re-invent himself into that motorcycle-driving kid who said fuck destiny i create my own. But the way he talks and puts valor into his ancient beliefs (+ his father’s earrings) clearly shows he’s far too attached to it to let it go (this leads also to the whole deal of being literally born and raised to Serve and also his whole daddy issues, but that’s another page completely).

Like you said, there are moments where he goes completely quiet and wants distance because i can see him reconsidering every step he took. As confident and self-assured as he might appear, and the end it always seems like his biggest enemy is his own self (or his other self... he might get pretty quiet and dissociates also because he’s probably conversing with his alter in his head. But his alter is also another whole deal completely.)

Just like in Kaiba, I see a constant need to prove himself to be better than anyone in everything: His dressing up as the Pharaoh and saying he has the right for the throne, his modern style and extravagant motorcycle/boat, his emphasis on making the enemies remember his name... 

(see:

it’s all Trauma babey ✨

He seems to just live in a world where conflict prevails over everything. Every moment and every human interaction is regarded with caution and “how to get the upper hand in this” - because that’s All He’s Known His Entire Life. With the Millennium Rod he also got the power to literally read into humans’ minds (in the manga it’s all explained even better). Seeing the desperation and the desire for his wife in Pandora, the homicidal tendencies and dark past of the mime boy he uses... these were all elements he studied and gathered in his collection of “humans just want power over you”, which just increased his trust issues. Also, his tendency to punish his ghouls when they fail clearly reflects a sense of education where you get punished if you don’t succeed and plus being a capricorn this tends to make a perfectionist out of him (and it’s once again something that was ebbed into his brain as a child thanks to his father). So he strikes me as the type who is never satisfied with the end result of something because it could always be Better.

Anyway, trauma and fears aside (and he has a lot of them) he sparks me to be a very loud and extrovert boy and he would probably be shining brighter than anyone if it wasn’t for all the shit he’s been through. He is very intelligent and a fast learner (I hc him to know fluid arabic, japanese and english) and he’s a good observer and very rational. He reacts with his brain first before using his instincts, but he seems to be very driven by his emotions (since they are the reason he does literally everything). He’s ambitious and cunning but with a soft, soft heart like,, I love how the whole deal of Malik in the manga is that he literally Couldn’t bring himself to gain the full power of the Rod and kill Yugi because he’s so soft at heart. No matter how evil and controlloing he tries to be at the end he just Can’t. It was his alter who did it, who took his place in his most vulnerable moment because he literally Couldn’t take it. He would have died.

“His father filled him with pain and sadness... until all he wanted was to die... So in order to survive, in order to keep going, he had to create another self...”

His alter keeps calling this weakness but it basically shows that he’s just good. He’s good at heart and he needs light in his life to survive. (The whole deal of light and shadows that is made in battle city which also includes Rishid is just so beautiful in the manga - i totally rec reading the battle city arc to you to get malik better). He’s soft at heart and this is why I can see him being a loud and bubbly person once he‘s 100% sure there are no bad intentions behind someone. Because he would be so confident and very diva-ish in his attitude of “I deserve the best and the best only”, despite having so many fears he’s battling against daily. Once he loves and trusts someone - and if that someone makes him feel his best - he would cling to them almost desperately this is how I hc him also in my fics and he would be so happy and loud about it, because it’s like FINALLY taking a Break from that “mental state” of alert and control he Has To keep up to Prove to be good. He’s finally his real self.

anyway i could talk abt this boy for hours like i could write an essay over everything regarding him because he’s one of the most complex and rich characters i’ve ever known and *bites fist* I JUST LOVE HIM AND HE DESERVES TO BE HELD SO BAD.

#sorry ughh #malik #marik #malik ishtar #marik ishtar #ygo #yugioh #yu gi oh #ygo discourse #really should change that tag in just meta lmao #ask #icouldbesus #* #ziggy talks

[mediawhorefics]

<3 dinluke <3

i love the pair so much and i love your writing so much so like <3<3 but yeah <3 do you have any fic rec for them?

yess!!!! honestly, i loved the idea of it even before watching the mandalorian just cause i'd seen a few funny posts and i would die for gay luke and his happiness.... but after having seen the show and actually KNOWING din as a character i'm like.... okay this tracks and would absolutely fuck conceptually as a pairing.

i mean the whole idea of luke 'daddy issues' skywalker + din 'wins all the best sw daddy awards' djarin is simply *chef kiss*. all the tropes alone are so good! you've got the whole mandalorian vs jedi ancient war for a sprinkle of enemies to lovers. you can have some co-parenting on the side since luke is literally din's son's teacher. the pairing SCREAMS slow burn because of the whole never takes off the armour creed thing which means they can't See Each Other Again until Trust Is Established ??? and din djarin is basically the EMBODIMENT of 'touch starved' and i, for one, think luke skywalker is the one who should touch him. idk the gentleness potential of this pairing is off the charts and i love it.

and i think din is such an interesting character in that he's a Warrior in every sense of the word ('i'm a mandalorian, weapons are part of my religion') but he's def. not written as particularly 'aggressive', which is an interesting combo to me. arguably feels very Jedi of him mayhaps? apart from a few moments in the first few episodes, he's quite a gentle/patient character. which, i just love him for it ❤︎. and despite a traumatic past/traumatic loss, he has very healthy attachments? look at his relationship with grogu! he's nothing like anakin: he's absolutely ready to let his kid go when the time comes even though it hurts. he's ready to do what's best for people even though it comes with personal sacrifices. he's quite selfless in his loving/affection? like... grogu clearly wants training and he respects that. and it's not easy to let go, but the does it. which i think is just SUCH a great trait for a potential partner for luke. luke who is tasked with rebuilding the jedi order and thinking about jedi traditions and the question of what to carry on honouring and what to discard? we all know how complex the jedi + attachment issues are and we see so many jedi throughout the sw universe grapple with this concept and i just love the idea of someone like din who just... naturally seems comfortable with the idea of if you love them set them free be in a relationship with a jedi. not that luke necessarily has unhealthy attachments but we've seen him struggle with it before (the disastrous esb rescue being the most blatant example) so i think they'd balance each other out. and din, lets be real, is a rather lonely character satisfying himself with little comforts and company, and i think someone like luke who is rather openly affectionate could be really good for him.

also, din taking his helmet off to show grogu his face before they're separated forever has SO MUCH 'just once let me look on you with my own eyes' from rotj energy and the narrative parallel is so fucking insane, i cannot not ship these two.

literally luke learns about the mando/the watch creed of never taking the helmet off eventually and realises the symbolic implications of din taking it off for grogu and it fully unzips him. 

IDK I JUST REALLY LOVE THE CONCEPT.

ironically, the fic i started writing doesn't really play with most of these concepts since it's a full-on au where deathwatch are a super dangerous/creepy crime syndicate force sensitive but not trained luke owes money to and therefore works for and din is their newest recruit who is secretly working for the new republic forces to dismantle them. it's all secret identity and pining stuff, or hopefully, it will be. if i ever write it. turns out writing star wars fic is hard ? there's SO MUCH re: world building but *shrug*. we'll see.

and yes. yes i do have fic recs. i've only just started reading them and it's quite a rare pair, so i don't have a lot, but here's a few i enjoyed recently:

➡️ the whole way (15k): Din Djarin thinks of the Armorer's words often enough that he has memorized them: "By Creed, until it is of age or reunited with its own kind, you are as its father. This is the Way." And Grogu is with his own kind. Din is no longer as his father. This is the Way.

Din wishes that he was the Jedi. He wishes he could pour himself into the Jedi and live his life with Grogu. He can't stop thinking about the Jedi. | post s2 |

➡️ the word is help (9k): In a flash, Fett has his blaster out and pointed at Luke’s head.

“You’re right,” he says. “Turnabout’s fair play. So maybe I oughta shoot you.”

Din’s voice comes from somewhere behind them. “Try it, Fett.” | slight daddy kink |

➡️ who carried the hill (22k): Din’s about to head up the ramp onto the newly-repaired Razor Crest when a string pulls taut around his heart and yanks him into the sky. | soulmate au | background obikin |

➡️ a quiet life (31k): Luke wouldn't necessarily call himself experienced when it comes to the whole spectrum of flirting / dating / etc. and Leia actually bullies him when he phrases it as such.

But, well, Luke is pretty sure he'd know if he were being courted. Which makes this whole Mandalorian situation that more puzzling... | post s2 |

➡️ and this, your beating heart (31k): After winning the Darksaber from Moff Gideon, Din accepts his role as the new leader of Mandalore and returns to the ancestral home of his people. While he grapples with the responsibilities that come with his new title, he begins to build a friendship with Grogu's new Jedi master -- and begins to question his identity, his Creed, and his place in the galaxy. | post s2 | slow burn | non-linear narrative |

➡️ oh the things we left behind (103k): After he commits every single weapon in the hold to memory, Din finds himself cataloguing more and more things about Skywalker instead, small observations that carve out a space in his mind unbidden.

---

As much as Din likes to tell himself that he’s just been taking a well-deserved break, the truth is that for the six months following their daring rescue he’s been nothing but truly and utterly lost. That is until Luke Skywalker gives him a ship and hires him to help figure out what the hell the Empire needed the Child’s blood for.

As they drift through the empty void of hyperspace, they slowly find unexpected companions in each other and realize their respective paths might not be as set as they once thought. | post s2 | slow burn | pining | dark!luke but he's fighting it | protective!din

➡️ parry, parry, strike (19k): “Oh? What are you, their king?” the Senator says sarcastically, and then freezes at the same time Din does.

“...No,” Din says. He does not sound convincing. | post s2 |

➡️ world's apart (69k): Having safely delivered the Child, Mand'alor Din Djarin inherits the Darksaber, a ruined planet, and the burden of Moff Gideon's fate. That burden brings Din to the New Republic on Coruscant, where he's thrown into a shimmering world of galactic politics even less familiar to him than the planet meant to be his home.

Din isn't the only one on Coruscant with his hands full of a once forgotten order - the Jedi is here too, and as their paths cross, Din will be forced to navigate both what's expected of him, and what he wants. | post s2 |

#dinluke #fic rec #the mandalorian #star wars

[blackberry-gingham]

The love language concept sounds interesting! I’d say George’s love language/the way he shows love is physical touch, Paul’s is receiving gifts, Ringo’s is positive affirmation mixed with quality time, and tbh I’m not to sure for John. maybe acts or service or quality time for him?

Mwahaha, you've fallen into my trap! The truth is I wanted to do this topic more or less for myself, but felt bad bc I still have a few requests left to do. So thank you for sending in a "request" for me so that I can do one out of order real quick >:3

Lol but really tho, thank you for humoring me and these are good! I could honestly see all of these, but for John I'd say acts of service with you, bc the "To Do" stuff just sounds like his character tbh, but maybe also I feel like there's some physical touch too???

Ik I've heard that John kind of actually didn't like being touched, but I mean... If you look at literally any picture of him with Yoko, he's always at least holding her hand, if not just totally draped all over her lol, so I'm assuming for an S/O it's totally different!

But anyway, here's some headcannons real quick and then back to requests. Thanks everyone!

---

George

Honestly? I feel like George would just not be able to keep his hands off you

Like, not necissarily in a sexual way (although that too, if you're in the mood lol), it's just that he loves to let you and everyone else know you're his

He's not all too shy about it either lol

I mean obviously he saves the more lovey dovey stuff for private places, but in public he still has a lot to offer

Everytime he sees you he kisses you either on the cheek, forehead, or mouth and then pulls you in for a hug

Always

Then the rest of the time, as long as he doesn't have to be working, he likes to hold your hand and play with your hair

And if he's feeling a little risqué, he likes to let you sit on his lap and cuddle against him

In private tho...

Oh, he is all over you!!!

You are his sanctuary and safe haven away from the public eye and the daily grind that comes with being a Beatle

I've seen quite a few quotes from geo lamenting the fact that he and the others had literally no private life thanks to their stardom

So yeah, believe me when I say he could live a thousand years and still never feel like he could repay you for giving him the rest and love he needs

He'd be like a long, giant cat. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, if he has an opportunity to snuggle up to you, he takes it

And if he's not exhausted, and if you let him !! he likes to just touch and kiss your body and face

Having that closeness and intimacy is so important to him, he wants to let you know how deeply he loves you

All of you

And of course, the best way you can return his love language back to him is by returning the intimacy he does for you!

When in Rome, after all

Honestly, just by accepting his offers when he initiates a request to hold your hand or hug or cuddle, he already appreciates that!

But if you initiate any of those things, he's definitely feeling the love!!

Although, one thing you like to do a bit different is giving massages

Of course George would certainly give you one if you asked!

But since he's usually tired, either mentally or physically, from always being on the go, you like to do him a favor lol

And he loves it

Seriously, you've never seen a man more blissed out then George gets over something as simple as a back or scalp massage

Assuming he doesn't fall asleep under the spell of your skillful fingers, he repays you with kisses or cuddles after :)

John

Ok idk if I'm like projecting, or reaching, or SOMETHING along those lines, but I feel like of all the boys, John is probably the one most looking for a true partner, as in like his other half

Paul is very close behind with his relationship with Linda, but for John it always came off as a need for him, more then like a want or nice thing to have

So anyway, all this to say that as far as acts of service goes, I think he gets a lot of security out of receiving this!

Like, whenever John's feeling particularly stressed or overwhelmed having you there to approach the issues with an objective mindset is a HUGE relief

Really, like I cannot stress this enough

Phrases like, "What can I do to take some pressure off for you?"

Or, "Well what if we just focus on x for now, and then we can take care of y and z tomorrow?"

All give him such a powerful sense of relief

And of course, the way that you, you know, actually follow up on your word, makes him fall even deeper in love with you then he thought possible

Now on the other hand, is physical touch

While this is a part of his love language cocktail, John likes to express this one a bit more then he likes to receive it

You see, unlike George, John is a little more reserved with his PDA

He will kiss you and hold your hand of course! But unfortunately his anxiety is a thing, so as much as he hates it, he has to reserve his physical affection for more private settings

But when you two are alone, he's like puddy in your hands!

He likes to just hold you a lot

It doesn't matter if you're preoccupied with something else, like a book or the telly, he just wants to have physical contact with you

And if you can do any of those things cuddled up on his lap or against his chest, even better!

But also, John definitely loves to get that energy back

He likes it when you give him cute little kisses and pet his head

I think he'd also like it if you rubbed his temples or the bridge of his nose/third eye lol

Wearing glasses all day can get uncomfortable you know!!

I think if you can establish that trust and physical closeness, that's when you'd also get a return on his acts of service

Really, if you've bonded this deeply with John he'd do literally anything for you

Whatever you need, whatever you want, if he can do it he will and if he can't he'll find a way to do it anyway!

He'd be loyal to a fault and love you forever after

Paul

Please tell me why I could see Paul being your sugar daddy on the low 😭😭

Really, like he just likes to spoil you!

Honestly if someone showed me proof that the real actual, 78 year old, 2021 Paul McCartney uses stacks of hundred dollar bills as tinder for his fireplace, I literally wouldn't even blink

Like even back in the day, he's got that Beatles' money baby !!! and he.... Kinda doesn't care for it, actually

I personally don't think any of the boys come across as like money hungry or something like that, but I could see Paul especially figuring that he might as well use all this dumb money to buy you things you like!

It may feel overwhelming to be on the receiving end of so many random, but expensive gifts tbh

You might even tell him to stop or that he doesn't have to do all that!!

I think he'd be able to understand that overwhelming you with nice things kinda has the opposite effect of what he's intending, but....

He just gets a little carried away sometimes lol

I mean growing up he didn't have all that much, and even now, like obviously nice things are nice, but meh

What he really wants to do is make sure you're enjoying the high life too!

I could see him doing more of writing you songs and music instead so that he can still fulfil his desire to give, should you feel uncomfortable with the fancy gifts

But yeah, if you're uncomfortable he totally would get that and dial back the materialism, but if you don't mind, then he doesn't either!!

Now you might be wondering how you, a delightfully average person, could impress Paul McCartney with a gift giving love language...

I mean, what do you give the man who has everything?

Well I'd tell you this... It's simple!

You could bring him literally anything that you find meaningful and be like "This made me think of you!" or "I just thought you'd like this!" and he'll love it!

He would definitely run up some organized collections of the little things you've given him

He has some dedicated display boxes for all the random, shiny rocks and pebbles you've found

A little filing drawer of all the notes you've ever wrote him

And if you like art or photography, he'd decorate his personal spaces with your work!

Of course he'd appreciate traditional gifts too tho

Like a watch or bass strings or a new tie ect ect

But the thing for you to not get caught up on is the price!

That doesn't matter to him :)

He likes your gifts bc they came from you!

Ringo

Ok, positive affirmation is definitely a big thing for Ringo

He gets roasted a lot by the boys and even the media, and all in good fun I suppose, but after a while enough is enough you know?

Not to mention, he just feels a bit... Lesser then?? Compared to the others and their musical talent

So the poor guy really needs a break!

Literally, even just little one word sentences of encouragement mean sooo much to him

"I'm so proud of you Ritchie!"

"That sounded wonderful!"

"You've done a great job today at the studio, good work!"

Stuff like that makes him melt

Of course he also appreciates the more conventional things like "I love you" and when you call him handsome!

And as for the spending quality time, that comes easily!

Ringo looooves to take you out on dates!

Now yes, there's your typical movie date, dinner, dancing, all that

But his favorite things to do is go on little adventures!

He takes you to the park, the beach, out to explore thrift and consignment stores, and anywhere else you want to check out!

However, not everyone wants to run around outside 24/7

So in the house, he likes doing things that you two can do together!

Painting is a big one, seeing as it's his other hobby, but it could honestly be anything, like puzzles, board games, or just watching TV!

I'm trying to think of how he'd return the words words of affirmation side of his love language, but I think it would be a little harder for him to do then expressing quality time tbh

You just make him so darn shy!

What with all your good looks and kindness, he just feels a little overwhelmed

Have you ever seen a work of art, or architecture, or even a landscape so breathtaking that you don't really know where to start when describing it to someone?

Yeah, it's like that

He definitely wants to try tho!

I think he'd stick to simple things like complimenting your outfits and praising your work or personal projects you show him!

He's worried that that comes across as just common decency tho, so he says "I love you" a lot and tries to make up for his bad way with words with quality time

#the beatles #ringo starr x reader #john lennon x reader #george harrison x reader #paul mccartney x reader #beatles x reader #beatles imagines #love langauges

[where-all-the-time-went]

no one can stop me; here’s a robin scherbatsky theory that’s not “the robin theory”

if you follow the himym tag here, you’ve seen it in every language: 

“𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓻𝓸𝓫𝓲𝓷 𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓸𝓻𝔂: aesthetic post about how women are complicated” that i never finish reading because i’m lazy

then again, i doubt enough people follow the himym tag to know what i’m talking about. well, it lead you here if you do, so i wanted to talk about robin a bit differently. there’s stuff about her character arc that always drew me in, even if it may very well have been unintentional. (spoilers ig)

Robin is often looked at as your typical will-they-won’t-they female love interest: a woman who is focused on her career often to an unhealthy extent. However, I thought there was something to speak to about how her childhood affected this aspect of her personality.

Robin’s father raised her to be a boy. In her household, femininity was a death sentence. Hell, she spent her 14h birthday fighting off wolves. There’s nothing wrong with nontraditional gender expression, but the common understanding of the advocacy on the subject is that everyone always have a choice. Robin was never granted that choice, because toxic masculinity made her father uncomfortable with raising a girl. 

Which brings me back to my opener: career-orientedness is a traditionally masculine trait. For Robin, who was never given a choice towards how she chose to express herself, it may very well have seemed the natural route. Robin does not want to focus on the traditionally “girly” romance the same way Ted and Marshall do, yet Ted and Marshall simultaneously have huge career aspirations. They are able to balance these goals because they, particularly Marshall, are comfortable enough with both of their traditionally masculine and feminine sides. Ted is a hopeless romantic and also a devoted architect, while Marshall is passionate and outspoken about the environment while putting Lily above all else.

Fortunately, as the show progresses, Robin’s priorities begin to shift. Sure, she still focuses on her career as a news anchor, and continues to push Ted away in part because of it, but her attitude changes. Some may think this is symbolized in season five by her relationship with Don: when she’s offered a job in Chicago, he ends up taking it, because she puts her relationship first. However, this decision is a low point for Robin, and ends in heart break. Here, instead of communicating with Don in order to balance her relationship and her career, she immediately chooses her relationship. Rather than learn the lesson from her poorly timed relationship with Ted, Robin flips to the other extreme, and loses Don. This turns out fine for her because Don’s own decision suggests and inconsiderate nature, but does not imply that she has truly learned her lesson.

On the other hand, in season nine, after Robin’s marriage to Barney, the two decide to travel together for her work. Robin allows herself to fall in love with Barney, and although the two do not “settle down” in the traditional sense, it is definitely not the masculine-like “casual” relationship she and Barney would have looked for in seasons one and two. Unfortunately, their relationship falls apart for this very reason, but it ends in a somewhat-amicable divorce. This was a decision I agreed with, mainly because it seemed to me like Robin’s internal conflict around her gender roles clashed with Barney’s own.

 @jmagnabo92​ (who I hope doesn’t mind me mentioning them) made what I consider a fantastic point about Robin’s timeline after breaking up with Barney. While she pursues her career, she avoids Ted until the time is exactly right. Robin has made the rational decision to focus on one thing she loves--her career--to protect the other: Ted. Thus, her character arc is completed when her and Ted’s implied relationship comes full circle. Robin has managed to find extreme career success, and later, romantic success. She does not have to be traditionally feminine, and act as a mother, but she also does not have to play to the extreme, and can be in a relationship with a man she loves. 

I do not know whether any of this was intentional, but I think Robin, as a character, is a perfect lesson about how forcing oneself to conform to one gender role or another hurts oneself and those around them. Robin hurt herself by denying herself romance, she hurt Barney by never being able to settle down, and got hurt by Don when she misunderstood her own priorities. Of course, she never had a responsibility to be the perfect woman for Ted or Barney, but she stuck around and continued to be friends with both despite her failed relationships. Her maturity in this sense is directly correlated with her maturity in her understanding of her gender. 

tl;dr robin’s dad SUUUUCKS but we all kno barney likes girls w daddy issues. its ok now tho shes all better

#will probably edit this a lot later #i always say that and then i never do #himym #himym theory #how i met your mother #how i met your mother theory #robin scherbatsky #ted mosby #barney stinson #marhsall eriksen #lily aldrin

[corpsentry]

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

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

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

BIG DADDY: THE ORIGINAL PLANNING DOCUMENT

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

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

june, april something, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

RESEARCH, PLANNING, AND VICTORIAN BOUGIE FASHION

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

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

anyway, here are some pages from the cat book.

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

in the meantime, here’s something else.

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

MEDIUM DADDY: EDITING, PROOFREADING, AND CREEPY MURDER CATS

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

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

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

SMALL DADDY: TITLES, SUMMARIES, AND GOOD FUCKING BYES

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

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

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

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

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

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

TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#my stuff

[longinglook]

I’m going to be gone for most of the day so I thought that the best way to use up my last 10 minutes before leaving would be to write a multi paragraph post on what I think about Fighter’s behavior so here we go

(under a read more because this could get very very long)

so. fighter. our confused messy boy we are just starting to understand

i’ve read a lot of tweets/posts/comments of people that don’t understand his behavior or think that his storyline doesn’t make sense which has always left me a bit perplexed because to me everything he does seems justified and coherent to where his mind is at the moment so i’ll try to explain

but first, something about me kfmslkcls 

i identify as lesbian but i have struggled with compulsive heterosexuality all my life, i’ve spent years identifying as bi because the scary part for me was not admitting that i liked girls but admitting that i did not like boys past the occasional crushes on fictional boys and let me tell you: a lot of what fighter does/the way he thinks reminds me so much of how i was and here’s a list of things:

1) he seems a lot more at ease with same sex friends, the only times we see him with hwa you can tell that he’s forcing himself to act a certain way, he knows he’s supposed to do boyfriend things like taking her on dates and kissing but he is not comfortable with it, he tries and fails at it. of course part of the reason is because of his father but not only does he seem uniterested in her, there’s always a sense of uneasiness when he’s with her, like he’s scared of actually having to kiss her. he’s fine with the relationship as long as it’s just texting and hanging out (like a friendship would be) but he seems not to want it to become phisical. since he’s a very confused boy he’s probably blaming all of this on his father forcing him into the relationship, instead of knowing right away that he’s not interested in her

2) thinking whatever he has with tutor is just friendship and teasing: i feel like this is such a common experience for most lgbt+ folks, thinking you just have a deep friendship with someone of the same sex, only to later realize it was actually a crush and you had no idea. ex. liking the casual cuddling and touches and looking for more, paying close attention to all the displays of affection, wanting to always be close and being a little jealous of everyone else that they interact with. I feel like a lot of people go through this thinking it’s just a friendship, especially if it’s with someone of the same sex because they are not even considering the option of it being a crush. that’s why fighter keeps saying that they’re only friends and he’s behaving like a close friend would, he just doesn’t let himself consider the option because it would be way too scary and that leads us to point #3

3) being too scared to say what he wants: he does this A LOT. instead of asking for something, which would mean saying it out loud and admitting it, he just acts. words can be so scary (again making this about me, i have id’d as lesbian for over 2 years now and ive come out to a lot of friends but ive never said the word lesbian out loud because it’s just terrifying to me), and fighter seems to only use them after he has acted to justify whatever dumb shit he has done with an excuse. saying something like “i kissed you because i wanted to” would mean admitting he wants to kiss another man (meaning he’s not straight) and that man is fighter (meaning he has feelings for him). it’s much easier for him to go with the flow  and do first, explain later. and by explaining i mean lying, even to himself because deep down he knows, of couse he knows what’s going on but acknowledging it would have serious implications on his life.

also the way he reacts to tutor asking him if he likes boys is a big indicator of what's going on with him, it's his way of answering, not his way of avoiding the question. he can't say it out loud so he shows it but then he's scared of the consequences and no homos it. and the choice of replaying the question scene while they're making out shows us that fight is tormented by it, he's scared of other people asking him that as well, now that tutor has noticed it more people could as well and that's why he pulls away. 

4) on a similar note, teasing until tutor does something/not wanting to be the one to start it: this is pure fighter behavior, hoping tutor will be the one to start it so he doesn’t have to. i called this gay chicken last week, it’s fighter making everything into a challenge so he can blame it on tutor and say that he was just reacting. we can see how desperate he is for tutor’s attention, how happy he is when he has it and how frustrated he is when he doesn’t. he’s like a child who wants people to pay attention to him but doesn’t know how to ask for it, so they start annoying people. fight knows very well that he could just say hey tutor i’m here, please talk to me but how could he give a realistic reason for it other than because i have a massive crush on you meaning i’m not straight. he knows tutor doesn’t back down from a challenge and he riles him up because he has learned what that will lead them to. it’s like he knows there’s an easier way to get to that, but it’s scary so he just keeps going with his soundproof tesing tacting which so far has worked every time. also in general reacting is a lot easier than acting, again a personal example: if someone asks me if i like girls I’ll say yes right away, but if i have to start the conversation i won’t. (one thing i do a lot is to be like “hey i have something to tell you about myself but you have to guess it”)

5) backtracking/giving mixed signals: again he’s terrified, he knows what he wants but he knows what /wanting it/ implies. sometimes he follows his heart, but then his brain comes back to tell him that, hey, you’re kissing another dude and you’re enjoying it and of course he freaks out and leaves. i would be way more annoyed with him if the show had been portraying tutor as pining and in love, meaning that fighter has been giving him false-ish hopes, but after ep.6 we see that tutor himself still hasn’t admitted to himself that he likes fighter (in bold because i feel like this part is very important and often overlooked) so they are both confused about their feelings. 

i don’t think they are actually confused, they know but they are scared which in my opinion is very realistic of how someone behaves when they thought they were straight and they are not. It’s not about being dumb or being slow, it’s about realizing that once you take that step and acknowledge you’re not straight your life changes. idk how many of you are actually not straight (i assume most just because tumblr) but like…… coming out is so stressful being straight is just so much easier you dont have to do shit i wish that were me

6) his father: i feel like we only grazed the surface of fighter’s daddy issues, but he seems to be a very controlling and inflexible man, meaning that he probably wouldn’t be thrilled at the idea of his son dating another man. we don’t know about fight’s past, and maybe he has already had crushes on men and had to repress them. fighter seems to be used to a pretty luxurious lifestyle, he can’t just fuck off and go against his father because he would lose his support.

so it’s not just admitting things to himself, which can be insanely hard on its own especially if you were brought up in a traditional family, it’s also having to deal with the reactions from everyone around you

I KEEP THINKING ABOUT NEW THINGS TO ADD TO THIS POST SORRY anyway i think fighter has already shown multiple times that he does care for tor, it's just in a very shy and lowkey way because he's scared of giving himself away but he does indeed worry about tor (ex. he notices tor is stressed about his test, he tries to help outat his part time job). it also seems that in times of urgency he's more explicit about ex. offering to pay off his debt when tor was being threatened or saying he's his boyfriend when the gross cafe dude was hitting on him

also can we talk about how heartbreaking and soft fighter can be when he lets down his guard and shows his emotional side ex. telling tor nobody has ever taken care of him like that or the way he looks every time tutor pulls away first... this poor boy is touch starved and he craves affection but he can't ask for it yet. he's going to be a real gem once he can be honest with his feelings

for future episodes i think that tutor and fighter are well on their way to realizing their feelings for each other and there's going to be some development soon, but i dont expect fighter to come out to anyone else in the next few episodes because there's a lot of work to be done still. i just hope they dont pull the /i dont like boys i just like you/ trope because i WILL drop this show. so. fast. please don't ruin this character please let him accept his attraction to men fully

in conclusion. i dont blame fighter for anything he has done so far, he’s scared shitless but knows what’s going on, i trust he will soon be brave enough to start being honest with himself and with tutor

man this did NOT  take 10 minutes to write and i dont have time to proofread

#fightertutor #zee pruk #why r u #why r u the series #why r u? #why ru the series #why ru #fighter #text #meta

[cityandking]

multiples of 5 for two ocs you're really vibing with atm

it’s gonna be the Boys // angst questions 

5. Would they ever turn on someone they just met in order to save themselves? 

DAI — no! he would in fact be staunchly opposed to that. though he might makes a few snide comments about it, if he were having a very very very bad day week month

ENIKO — absolutely 100%. get fucked rando

10. What were the character’s parents like? What was the affect the parents had on the character? 

DAI — only ever knew his dad, but they are very very close. his dad was a soldier (a ranking officer? I think?) who was injured in the rebellion/war that created the current governing body and as a result dai is very loyal to the order (it’s why he became a cleric). but really dai has only ever had his father, and until he got to know the party that’s who he was closest to. he just wants to do right by him and make him proud (and get home to him again)

ENIKO — where do I start. ok so birth parents: never knew his biological dad but his biological (human) mom was in Some Trouble with her (human) husband when she gave birth to a half-elf (rip) and she was consequently pretty distant. lots of missed signals. human father (dad #2) absolutely hated his existence and taught him a whole lot about hate and bitterness until eniko turned about? six? seven? and started being Useful around the farm, at which point they sort of started awkward, weirdly bonding (there was a sort of... acknowledgement there. not love, definitely, and not even liking, but. something that could have grown. he died, of course). and then sir, dad #3, the icing on top of the fucked-up parental figure cake. built eniko in the image sir imagined for him and never once let him forget how lucky he was to be unmade like this, how much worse it could have been otherwise. anyway the upshot is, SO many daddy issues

15. What is their biggest fear? What in general scares them? How do they act when they’re scared? 

DAI — is afraid he’s going to let people down. that he’s going to be insufficient for whatever situation he walks into and fail and people are going to get hurt because of it and he won’t be able to fix it (he is. figuring out that sometimes you don’t have to Fix things. it’s enough to just help a little. we save what we can. it’s easier to preach it than to believe it). he buckles down and tries harder when he’s scared. courage, dear heart

ENIKO — is afraid of sir. that’s it, full stop. good thing he’s dead! (ha). he’s just a paranoid little bastard. gets twice as prickly, which is pretty impressive given how prickly he is already

20. What was something they struggled with greatly and how did they overcome it? 

DAI — bro, Everything. he seems to be slowly finding the light tho (with the power of Love and Friendship)

ENIKO — struggled (and struggles) with a concrete sense of self. or, not a sense of self exactly—he knows what he believes himself to be, a tool and a weapon and something for someone else to use—but control over his own life, the possibility that he gets to define his own wants/wishes/selfhood. he’s still figuring it out 

25. Do they find that they care what others think of them? Or do they not really mind how others view them? 

DAI — truly doesn’t care. he wants to be seen as someone who does Right(TM), but he’s not so much occupied with which people/organizations decide what’s right. as long as he knows who he is and he has faith in himself he can be satisfied. it’s when he loses himself that things fall apart

ENIKO — cares to a degree. not about any moral judgement or anything, but he’s very particular about how he presents himself: someone assured, powerful, who can move through the world with the specific sort of ease that comes from being in control. everything he does is in pursuit of that facade

30. What makes them feel safe or secure? What makes them feel insecure or unsafe?

DAI — feels safe/secure without the bounds of like, tradition/rules/A Way Of Doing Things. standards to fall back on when he feels uncertain/out-of-control. likes to have order; dislikes being thrust into situations where he can’t orient himself. though having someone at his back in those instances is a great relief

ENIKO — feels safe with a knife in his hand, a wall at his back and an easy exit in sight. absolutely hates being trapped, literally or metaphorically. don’t back him into a corner; he bites

#thewildmother #anyway guess what I just found in my drafts! #yikes rip etc #apparently it's cleaning day here at cityandking #memery #eniko #daichi #polar opposite boys lmao

[not-safeforsanders]

Sugar Daddy

Warnings: Age gap (19-37), nsfw as always, I guess sort of prostitution but not in the traditional sense. 

Ship: Logicality

Plot: It seemed like a simple arrangement, fuck the dude, get paid. Really simple. Right up until Patton realized that his sugar daddy is actually kind of...sweet

((Am I projecting onto characters again? U bet ur ass I am))

Patton sighs as he looks down at his outfit. “You look wonderful, as always, Pat,” His flatmate, Roman grins at him “That ass though,” Patton giggles a little as he stares in the mirror. White, ripped skinny jeans with a pastel blue shirt tucked into them, little cacti decorated the shirt and overall gave him a look of sweet and innocent. 

Which heavily contradicts with the arrangement he’s made. 

He slides his circular glasses up his freckled nose and runs a hand through his unruly curls in hope of sorting them out somehow. “Are you sure I look okay?” He sighs, sliding his feet into his rather battered boots and tying the rainbow print laces into double bows. Roman nods enthusiastically in response, being the personal hype man that he always is for his friends. 

“Absolutely stunning, he’s not going to be able to keep his hands off of you,” Which might also be a problem. See, Patton is no stranger to sex, it’s having sex with strangers that is the predominant issue. He knows very little about this man as a person, what if he’s not trustworthy? What if this is all just a really bad idea. Isn’t this essentially prostitution?

He thinks about this as he slides his headphones over his head and begins his journey to the place they’d agreed to meet up. It’s just dinner, really, for tonight, just to feel a little more comfortable with each other. And for Patton, a free meal is a wonderous thing especially when he sees how bare his cupboards are. 

The college student stands outside of the restaurant, hands in his pockets as he sways nervously on the spot, he glances down at his phone every now and then just to refresh his memory of what the other man looks like. A car pulls up outside, if this guy could not get any more stereotypical he has his own driver. 

Patton really does hate billionaires most days of the week, but this one is feeding him so he can’t really complain right now. 

Then, there he is. Tall, slender but not skinny, with a sharp jawline and tan skin, black hair perfectly coiffed except for one strand that didn’t seem to want to behave today, as it fell into his blue eyes. “Hi there Patton,” He extends a hand which Patton shakes with a dazed expression, tugging his headphones off of his ears. “Glad to see you got here safely, shall we” He gestures towards the restaurant with a small smile.

If he didn’t know better, Patton might say he almost looked a little shy. But men like that don’t get to come into so much money by being shy. Right? 

The inside of the restaurant is huge, with dim lighting and candles on the tables, the menus finely printed in white and gold. If Roman ever became rich, he’d love this place. As they’re seated, Logan holds out a menu for Patton before talking “So I suppose I just wanted to know about you, get to know you, perhaps it would make the whole ordeal feel less strange for both of us if...”

“We don’t feel like strangers?” Patton smiles a little “Yeah I get that feeling,” His eyes widen at the prices on these meals, a soft ‘what?’ leaving his lips. “Why...Why here? Aren’t these prices a little...excessive?” He’d really just wanted something to eat, he hadn’t expected a meal of nearly $200. 

“Admittedly, not my general place of eating, it is excessive, but I wanted to make a good impression, and I’m told the best way to do that is too...” He trails off a little, looking for the right words. 

“Buy them?” Logan’s cheeks flush, looking a little mortified at first until he sees Patton’s grin “You don’t need to throw your money at me for everything, especially food that I probably won’t even enjoy,” He rests the menu on the table for a moment “And if you really want to make a good impression, mister, you could start by not throwing money around like it’s nothing, the costs of these meals are the cost of my rent for a month,” He chuckled “But I suppose I’ll enjoy being spoiled just for tonight,” 

“I apologize, I hadn’t quite considered you may be offended by frivolous displays,” Patton hesitates, noting the sincerity in the other’s voice, and that the blush to his cheeks hadn’t quite faded making this detail noticeable even in the low light. He’s kind of cute. For someone in their late thirties anyway. 

They order food and wine and talk. Logan discusses his work, which was formerly as a CEO of his father’s company and he detested every second of it, he now works as a professor. “I finished my doctorate when I was 25,” He explains “But my father wanted me to work for him, and it paid very well so I stayed, and I saved up a lot of my money because I knew there would be a time where it didn’t come so freely, but then my father died and I got practically all of his money, and my brother took over the company so it all worked out in the end,”

“I take it you and your father didn’t get along well?” 

“He was, for lack of better phrasing, the world’s biggest asshole,”

“Language!” Logan laughs a little, and Patton can’t help but smile a little. “So now you work in a University? What do you teach?”

“Physics,” Patton nods, he knows nothing about physics, or science, or really anything that requires any degree of mathematics. “And what about you? You mentioned you are a student?”

“Part-time, it’s all I can afford,” He chuckles, but it has a sad tone to it. “I work two jobs just to make rent, sometimes I have to cover some of my roommates because his boss keeps fucking him around, and it’s not exactly easy to get a job these days,” He notices Logan’s expression and corrects the misunderstanding that may have occurred “He always pays me back! It just leaves us both a little strapped for cash when it happens, which basically means food is...nonexistent,” Logan’s eyebrows furrowed, as if he couldn’t quite comprehend that people live like that.

“What do you want to be?” He finally asks. 

“Oh, I want to work with children, primary school children mostly because teenagers are scary,” 

“Admirable, much harder job than mine, I spend too much time around young children and fear I may spontaneously combust,” He fidgets around with his phone for a moment “And what’s your roommate's name?”

“Roman, Prince,” Logan nods slowly, not looking up from his phone for a moment. 

“And what University do you study at?”

“Beacon College...is this 20 questions?” Patton watches him with a look of confusion on his face but is then distracted as the food is put down in front of them. He thanks the waiter with a smile as he starts to eat. Logan switches off his phone and places it down on the table, ignoring it’s existence again. 

“Apologies, work texts,” Patton nods, understanding as he practically shovels the food into his mouth. “I appreciate that you may be hungry, but if you continue to eat at that pace you will make yourself feel sick,” The student slows down a little, swallowing his food before uttering with a smile.

“You sound like my mom,” He teases lightly, as Logan rolls his eyes and starts on his own food. The two eat in varying degrees of quiet, occasionally chipping in odd comments and tidbits of conversation. At the end of the meal, Logan tips the waiter and gives him a smile. “Put it in your pocket and don’t tell your boss,” Patton advises, the waiter laughs and gives Patton a small wink as he takes the plates back to the kitchen. 

“This was nice,” Logan said gently “I almost forgot we even had a predetermined arrangement halfway through that meal, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to talk to a person in a normal manner, it’s very...calming and grounding to spend time with someone who doesn’t mind being honest with me,”

“Honesty is the best policy, most of the time,” Patton replies, digging his hands into his pockets “So...do I go back to yours or...?”

“Perhaps not tonight, our meal lasted longer than anticipated and I have a 9 AM lecture to teach tomorrow,” Patton nods and looks down at his feet awkwardly. “If you don’t mind me asking, however, do you mind...if you’re interested...?” He stumbles over his words, a man so eloquent yet so easily foiled by matters of the heart as he gestures loosely towards Patton. 

The student smiles, watching the man trip over his words before he finally pities him just a little too much, and leans up to kiss him gently. He tastes like wine and coffee and whatever was in that meal he ordered, yet he also tastes soft...and of something that Patton had never tasted before. 

As quickly as it started it was over, and Logan ducks his head to hide the flushed cheeks as Patton fights back a smile. “See you later,” 

“Yeah,” Logan replies dazedly, blinking as he watches Patton walk away “See you later,”

--

For the next two days, Patton can’t stop thinking about Logan. He gets a text just as he’s finishing work on the first day asking if he’d like to come over for dinner tomorrow evening. When he says yes, Logan asks for his address and says he’ll send someone to pick him up. 

Now Patton’s not, generally, dumb. That’s what he tells himself as he hands over his address to a near stranger, an action that has him, and Roman, questioning his sanity. He gets through his own front door to be greeted by his roommate, who looks like he’s just seen a ghost, he’s holding an envelope in each shaking hand. “I think your sugar daddy paid off our university bills,” He whispers, holding out an unopened letter with Patton’s name on it. “Because I didn’t pay them off,”

Patton reads his own letter, a hand coming up over his half-open mouth. “Holy...smokes,” He whispers “He didn’t? He did, holy...oh my God,” His face breaks out into a smile. 

“Jesus you must have some sort of magic ass to get that done,” Patton flushes red at the comment and shoves Roman playfully. 

“We haven’t actually fucked yet, but I guess I should probably go get changed for that,” Roman squeaks as he ushers the other man to his room. 

“I have to dress you for this occasion,” Patton sighs, but there’s no arguing with Roman once he has his mind set on something. They’re both the same height and weight and it’s not uncommon for Roman to steal some of Patton’s jeans every now and then, but in general, the younger has a much more frivolous taste in clothing. Which is how Patton finds himself wearing a pleated white skirt that falls just above his knees, with knee-high socks and dark blue shirt. “You’re definitely getting laid tonight,” Roman chuckles as he sits cross-legged on the bed applying glitter to Patton’s eyelids. He pauses for a moment “Is this...do you want to do this?” He finally asks, looking worried. 

“I do,” Patton replies softly “I wasn’t sure at first, but he’s actually...really sweet and, if all else fails, really cute,” Roman nods, satisfied with this response “And he has lovely eyes,” The elder can hear his friend laughing just a little at his lovestruck expression, but Patton can’t quite react as the younger resume applying makeup. 

The car picks him up at the time agreed upon and Patton gives Roman a quick kiss on the cheek, with the promise that he’ll call if he needs him. The ride to Logan's house wasn’t all too long, and the house itself was not quite as lavish as Patton has been expecting, no it was a moderately sized house that most upper-class people would have, with a quaint and pretty garden. 

Patton stands at the door feeling so small against the big house, reaching up to knock before stepping back a little. Logan opens the door, wearing skinny jeans and a smart blue shirt tucked into them. A tea towel resides on his shoulder, indicating he’d just been using it which is solidified by a wonderful smell. “You have your own driver but you cook for yourself?” Patton relaxes and smiles as he teases the elder man just slightly.

“I can’t be completely helpless in the world,” He holds open the door “May I take your jacket?” Patton smiles and slides the denim jacket off his arms, handing it to Logan as he hangs it up on the coat stand. “Generally I ask for people to take their shoes off at the door, I have some house shoes, cleaning these carpets can be a nightmare,” Patton nods, they have the same rules in their flat too, only because their vacuum is trash and neither of them has a lot of time for cleaning. He toes off his shoes and slides his feet into slippers that are four sizes too big, but he doesn’t miss the slightly endeared look Logan gives him. 

“So what’s for dinner?”

“Lasagne if that’s okay? I realized I possibly should’ve asked if you have any dietary requirements,”

“Oh no, not at all, it smells lovely,” He follows the other into the kitchen and sits down at the dinner table “So did you...was it you who...paid off our student debts? And our tuition? That’s a lot of money I don’t know how to thank you...”

“I’m not in the habit of lying, so I will admit I did, but I don’t want nor need a thank you, I have the money to spare I wouldn’t make a decision financially that I couldn’t handle,” Logan rests a plate down in front of Patton “Furthermore, please don’t feel obligated to me, I simply couldn’t handle the idea of you struggling like that, you don’t...deserve it, nobody does, and for now it’s all I can do,” He sits down opposite Patton with his own plate “Also the food is hot, please don’t burn yourself,”

Patton can’t quite understand his kindness. They had a set of rules in place, an arrangement. Patton hadn’t even given him his end of the bargain and Logan wasn’t remotely pushing for it, he was simply being...nice? Letting Patton go at his own pace? It’s rather sad that Patton really does not, cannot, fathom why someone would do such a thing. 

But there again, if it were him in Logan’s shoes he’d probably do the same. They eat in a comfortable silence as Patton digests his first and only meal of the day. He feels out of place in this big home, he feels so small against the tall walls and like he doesn’t belong, doesn’t fit. As he finally rests down his knife and fork, he looks nervously over at Logan. “So I guess you would like me to...I mean our arrangement was...”

“I only want you to do what you want to do, your company has been more than pleasant enough,” It finally settles into Patton that sex hadn’t been what Logan wanted at all. For some reason, it had been easier to say that than admit the truth. 

He’s lonely. 

All the money in the world can’t buy you a real friend, can’t buy you someone to listen to your awful parents except maybe a therapist, it can’t buy you someone who looks past who you’re supposed to be into who you are. Patton’s lips quirk a little “Well I’m lonely too,” He replies “And I’m bored, and I’m not...opposed,” Logan rests down his knife and fork and wipes his mouth off on the napkin “But I suppose you don’t get this often...what do you want?”

It takes the elder a moment before he nods “Mostly to watch a movie and see what happens,” Patton nods. 

“Netflix and maybe chill it is then,” Logan looks like he doesn’t understand the reference, Patton is somehow completely not surprised. 

They curl up on Logan’s bed as he opens Netflix, Patton’s head rests on the elder’s collarbone, his arm around his stomach. Once a film had been chosen, Logan’s arm rests comfortably around the smaller’s shoulders. “You look...nice,” He says softly, compliments not always coming easy to him but he felt the overwhelming urge to make sure the other knows he is pretty. “I like the skirt,”

“I bet you’d like what’s underneath it too,” Logan’s jaw tenses and his breath hitches a little as Patton leans up to kiss him softly. “Say no if you want to stop,” He mutters against his lips. It had been a while since he’d had the time to simply...well, fuck; Roman seemed to have someone every other night but he also has ten times the amount of energy of a normal human being. Which usually meant Patton had to listen through the very thin walls. 

He’s lonely and he’s horny, in essence. “So much for just seeing where it goes, huh?” Logan mutters as Patton’s thighs trap his body underneath him, his ass resting against the other’s crotch suggestively. 

“I’m seeing where it goes,” He kisses him again, his hands keeping himself up as he grinds his ass down against Logan, eliciting a rather surprised gasp as the elder man’s eyes closed. Patton somehow looks even prettier, his glasses sliding down his nose, his skirt tenting slightly as it rested higher up his thighs. 

Logan’s hands rest firmly on Patton’s hips as he rolls his own up against Patton's ass, feeling his own cock harden underneath the younger. Logan’s hand slides up Patton’s skirt, squeezing him through the material of his very tight, very thin underwear; the brunette gasps out and rocks his hips into Logan’s touch with a whimper of need, nails digging into his partner’s arms. “Fuck me, please, Patton breathes quietly against Logan’s neck, his breath turning sporadic. 

The elder man doesn’t need to be told twice as he easily flips them over, lying Patton down into the bed; he takes a brief moment to admire how wonderful he looks with his cheeks flushed, legs spread, soft curls splayed out against the pillows. Logan wastes no time sliding his partner’s underwear down, discarding the item before sucking the tip of Patton’s cock between his lips, tongue brushing against the slit. 

Patton gasps and whimpers and makes all sorts of wonderful noises as he tries not to simply fuck Logan’s throat. “Please Lo...” He finally manages, embarrassingly needy after spending so long alone. The blue-eyed man pushes through his drawers, looking for the bottle of lube and a condom 

Once he’s found both of these things he slides his belt through the loops and discards it. Pouring some lube onto one hand, he teases Patton’s hole a little, whilst listening to the soft pants and whimpers coming from the brown-eyed man’s lips. As he starts to stretch the other open, forearm tensing as he works his fingers in and out of Patton, with his other arm he squeezes himself through his boxers. His dick flexes under his touch and a quiet moan escapes him, biting down on his lip as he watches the way Patton rocks his hips into Logan’s touch “I’m ready,” He whispers. 

The professor nods as he kicks off his trousers and underwear, sliding a condom over his hard length and lubing himself up. His arm rests to the side of Patton as he uses his free hand to guide himself into the other. Patton welcomes the pleasurable burn with a quiet series of moans, easily accommodating his partner. “Fuck that feels good,” the younger whispers once Logan’s cock is fully inside of him. 

“Good, it would be somewhat counterproductive if it didn’t,” A light teasing tone accompanies the seriousness of his statement. He does want Patton to enjoy this too. It’s been a while for him too, and the warm tightness around his dick is slowly eating away at his resolve, he takes it slow anyway so he doesn’t cause Patton any unwanted pain. 

He rests himself between Patton’s legs, his chest pressing against Patton’s, as their lips meet again in a warm and heated kiss, Logan moves slowly at first until he can taste and hear the quiet demands for him to go faster. As he thrusts into the other, feeling his skin prick with heat and muscles burn in his arms and thighs and abdomen. Patton responds by grinding his hips up, whimpering every time the angle was just right; he makes a lot of noise, but quietly, soft whimpers and gasps in quick succession of each other. 

Logan has been told he’s too methodical to make noise during sex. He concentrates so much on making his partner feel good that sometimes he genuinely forgets he’s supposed to also be feeling good, and he does...it’s just sort of like background noise right now. 

He leans down to suck and bite at Patton’s neck, his hand finding the younger’s twitching cock and squeezing. He teases a little, listening to the curses aimed at him with an amused lilt to them before he strokes Patton properly and in time to the rapidly increasing thrusts. “Fuck, Lo...I’m close,” 

“Language,” Logan teases a little before he presses deep inside the other, Patton bites down on the other’s ear lobe in response, taking note of the throaty and surprised moan it elicits. Patton bites down on his bottom lip, his throat bared as he arches lightly, his nails digging into Logan’s shoulders as he moans and gasps, eyes screwing shut. 

Logan thinks he looks absolutely stunning as he comes, watches him stammer out words in an order that makes no sense, although he does catch a “thank you,” in there. He stills his thrusts as Patton hisses lightly from the overstimulation, pulling out and rolling the condom off of his cock. Once the younger moves again, he pushes Logan back onto the bed, looking a little shaky but with a wide smile on his lips. “There are some flavored condoms in there if you need them,” Logan supplies helpfully. 

He didn’t think he’d ever see someone get excited over flavored condoms. He can’t help but smile as Patton holds up the different flavors. “I have got to try all of these,” He mutters, before grabbing the strawberry one and opening the packet, rolling it down Logan’s dick. The elder relaxes back into the pillows at the touch, watching as Patton’s head sinks between his thighs. His hands grip the sheets at the warmth and wet, trying his best to keep his hips pinned firmly to the bed as Patton finishes him off, head bobbing up and down his cock. 

It doesn’t take much longer for Logan to finish, gasping out Patton’s name like a prayer as he shifts his hips just a little into the other man’s mouth. As he reaches his climax, Patton looks up at him through long lashes and that image is really all he needs to be pushed straight over the edge. 

He lies back, running a hand through his sweat-slicked hair as he smiles up at Patton, the younger crawling up his body to press a kiss to his lips before the two set about chucking the condoms in the bin and getting a shower. 

Logan doesn’t quite think he’s ever liked someone as much as he likes Patton. Although the sex has done wonderful things for his Dopamine levels, he doesn’t think it’s the sex that makes him feel this way; no it’s more to do with the fact that Patton is currently dancing around the bathroom wearing nothing but his underwear whilst singing along to music that logan has never heard before but has decided he loves. And there’s his smile. And his eyes. And how his hair seems even curlier after sex. 

Logan just...really likes Patton. 

--

Ko-Fi ((Please if any of u can donate I would be very much thankful, u can also commission work off of me))

#not safe for sanders

[textualdeviance]

On another little note: I still keep seeing generic proclamations (usually by non-geek media sources) that "fans" hate TROS and the ST in general and...

Look, almost everyone has some issues with it. Star Wars as a whole is heavily flawed in a lot of ways, and none of the movies are exempt from that. People have been arguing and shit-talking about it since 1977. They will continue to argue and shit-talk about it for another 40+ years (assuming we haven't fried the planet and made the human race extinct by then.)

But most of the fan rage this time is coming from two groups--R*ylos and obnoxious fanbros--who have one thing in common: A belief that Kyle Fucking Ron was supposed to be one of the ST's main heroes and get a happy ending. They thought he was supposed to pull a reverse Anakin, get The Girl and become the new Jedi King or some shit. Everything they think is wrong or doesn't make sense about the films all comes from seeing them through that framing.

The complaints about the ending, for instance, all talk about how sad/weird it is that Rey’s supposedly alone. Well, if you think she was supposed to fall in love with Kyle, rather than having her own separate character arc and being her own person, yeah, that might seem odd. And also, if you completely ignored the blatant and literally stated "found family" theme which ran through all three films, and which culminated in the shot right before that scene, yeah, you might assume she'd run off with Poe's little orange child, never intending to return (or have anyone else waiting back on the Falcon for her.)

One of the few complaints that does make sense is how bizarre and out of place that kiss was. It's pretty obvious that's a piece of Disney-required fan service, rather than fitting with the rest of the story. The rest of the scene? Eh. Fair enough. But that kiss was cringe city. The whole Force dyad thing in this story was never supposed to be romantic any more than Vader/Luke was. It was literally about the eternal dark vs. light battle. Unless you were hoping for a tragic ending, dark had to die so light could live on. That was always how it was going to be, and that's not exactly fertile ground for romance.

TBH, I can kind of get why some people would have expected him to have an easy clean-slate redemption instead of requiring a bigger sacrifice to get it: That's what a certain flavor of Christianity sells. You can do anything up to and including murder, and if you just say you're sorry and wave hi to Jesus on your deathbed, yay, you get to go to heaven. What a deal! If you come from a cultural tradition that expects that sort of facile salvation, it seems reasonable to expect that would happen for a guy who merrily tortured and murdered his way through his entire adult life because he had a giant ego and daddy issues. (And, no, you don't get to handwave that with "Palpatine made him do it." Rey had a shitty childhood and was a fucking Palpatine herself and still managed not to murder anyone. And don't get me started on Finn.)

But that kind of religion isn't in this story. Yeah, it's created and exists within the real-world Western Christian cultural paradigm to an extent, but this story is not an Evangelical allegory. On the contrary: It's closer to Buddhist than anything else. Remember: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hatred. Hatred leads to suffering." Kyle was always going to have to give his life to earn his place in the Jedi afterlife.

For those of us who don't automatically regurgitate the cultural propaganda that all large-scale stories are supposed to have white-dude protagonists, the ST was pretty darn good. Definitely problematic and aggravating here and there (Rose deserved better, and fuck the obvious No Homo shit), but overall, it was fun, and even brilliant at times. Speaking as someone who used to wish we could have a whole huge movie trilogy just about Eowyn, getting one with another female protagonist discovering her power was really gratifying. I would have loved to see bigger (and better) arcs for her boyfriends, but that would take another two trilogies to tell properly.

I'm tired of the sexist, racist contingent of fans being framed as the "real" ones whose opinions should be given priority soapbox space. They're just loud, not numerous. This trilogy has made scads of money; clearly the people who hate it are few and far between, even if they do make pests of themselves. I'm not ashamed to say I love these movies and I love these characters just as much as I love a lot of other flawed things in my life, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but I don't think the opinions of assholes should be given as much newshole space as they have been. Being extra obnoxious shouldn't earn extra attention.

[culturechroniclesblog-blog]

Neon Genesis Evangelion & Making Arthouse Work

There is a lot of arthouse media out there. Anime certainly has its fair share, and who hasn't watched a Lynch or Jodowrosky film solely to lord your cultural sophistication over your inferiors? Most of them share a common thread of being “art for art’s sake”: impressive on an aesthetic or thematic level while a little lacking in character and narrative, which leaves its wider appeal, ah, limited at best.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a show that cannot escape its ending. The show’s final stretch is totalizing in the popular discourse - everyone knows it "goes off the rails" in its latter half. Evangelion becomes an arthouse show, throwing reality to the curb in exchange for an assault of abstract and introspective setpieces. At age fourteen when you inevitably first see it, your mind is blown by it all, which is fair if it’s your first taste of the genre. However, coming back to it over a decade later like I did, having seen way more avant-style media than is probably healthy, I expected to enjoy the show but also see it just-another-entry into the genre.

Instead it held up masterfully. Evangelion is replete with flaws if you look at its whole picture, but in the execution of its arthouse appeal I saw it soaring past its competition in so many ways. In hindsight it had to - why else would an entire generation of fans trumpet it as one of the most successful shows of all time despite all those rails it went off? Evangelion, through undoubtedly sheer luck and insanity, stumbled on a way to make arthouse work for audiences beyond its niche, and I think that is the key to what makes the show as a whole function so well.

A World Without Uncertainty

As previously mentioned, most avant animation & film privileges aesthetics first in its visuals. The goal is to evoke a mood or feeling, and whether or not it really connects to the narrative is pretty secondary. I am certainly not bashing that - the way this challenges the viewer creates a unique experience. But even I will admit that sometimes it makes it, well, a bit hard to care about what’s happening on the screen.

Evangelion dodges this problem pretty much completely by making so many of its visual elements extremely direct. Honestly if you look at the majority of the more out-there sections of the show sequence by sequence, they would barely qualify as out of the ordinary! To choose one, take one of my favourite moments from Episode 26:

This sequence is not a mind-boggling piece of animation, at all. The concept of an outer frame that contains fast-moving images that reflect the nature of that frame is not new - ever seen this before?

--- It even has a red background, the hacks! ---

Not exactly the peak of avant-garde cinema here. Evangelion adds to the directness because this sequence is playing to illustrate that, literally, Shinji's identity is composed of the people in his life, and his desires are shaped by how they see him. It’s one of the core themes of the show - other people's conceptions of you are, in a way, just as much "you" as your own conception of you. What better way to illustrate that concept visually than having those people flashing through the frame of your body? While still an abstract animation sequence, it is not at all "art for the sake of art". It’s tied directly to the narrative, with a clear meaning - there is even dialogue partially explaining it.

This clarity exists for most of the more out-there sequences in Evangelion. The show's real "challenge" to the audience comes in how it strings sequences like these together, often at a breakneck pace. While in isolation they are only borderline abstract, when thrown together you are pounded down by the mix of themes and aesthetics. Look at Asuka's breakdown in Episode 22:

The scene has a cool visual design with the color contrast, to heighten the faceless crowd vibe - which it should, because Asuka is constantly fighting to not drown in a sea of anonymity, to stand out from the crowd and be the best pilot, to rely on no one but herself - and yet she constantly fears she is doomed to fail. This pretty-clear sequence, though, jumps quickly into this:

Then goes into this:

--- Eat your seizure-warning heart out, Pokemon ---

And in 20 seconds the show has thrown a half dozen thematic ideas at you via abstract representation. The viewer is absolutely overwhelmed on their first viewing from this, it becomes an aesthetic and you get that unique “arthouse experience”. But almost none of it is art for art's sake - you are watching a plot, a narrative, it almost all has dialogue explaining it. If you slowed it down you could get almost all of these scenes on the first watch, and on a rewatch you will probably pick it up fully. It’s this merging of abstraction and concreteness that elevates Evangelion above most other arthouse animation I've seen; you are constantly challenged, but never so much as to surrender and give up.

(Note: When I say that these scenes are “direct: or “clear”, I don’t mean that they have only one meaning, or that everyone will agree on the meaning. Their meaning is based on many other scenes, each with their own ambiguities and layers, and those differences will multiply out over the course of the show to result in varied interpretations. That process is different, however, from scenes having only aesthetic content, with no or little inherent narrative grounding.)

Realizing the Obvious Over and Over

Okay, the art itself walks the clarity/abstraction line, but even if it is connected to the narrative, why do this? Why would an audience want something that was a "typical" show to move in this direction? A lot of viewers have commented on the severity of the "shift" in the later episodes of Evangelion (generally starting around episode 16), a disconnect the fandom has not failed to capitalize on:

This split has its own meta-narrative, based on the production history of the show. Anno's growing mental illness - always present from the beginning - and huge production woes involving having to scrap already-complete episodes, caused a "breaking point" around this time where he threw caution to the wind and let capital-D Depression take the wheel. While there is some truth to this in the meta-sense, I have never liked the idea that the show itself has such a split. I instead see the more arthouse final stretch as more-or-less a natural outgrowth of the narrative, not a meta-split. In particular, the arthouse second "half" only functions as a reflection of and continuation of the more traditional first half, and without that first half it would fall on its face.

To show why that is the case, I want to explain a type of narrative arc that really hits my personal aesthetic in long form media that I am calling now and forever more the "Multifaceted Character Arc". Essentially, these are when characters have a core arc, and over the course of events they resolve this arc - but the show or book or what-have-you is only halfway done. They could just have a second, different arc, but instead the resolution of their previous arc proceeds to be undermined, picked apart, and exposed as a partial lie, and the character realizes they haven't resolved anything yet; and so the same arc continues, but from a different angle.

Evangelion embodies this trope on turn-it-up-to-eleven steroids. Episode 16 might be the "split" point in the meta-sense, but I always looked at Episode 12 as the narrative split-point, where the first half "ends". Episode 12 wraps up with Shinji, Misato, Asuka, and Rei having a ramen dinner together after beating an Angel, and so many of their previous arcs are "resolved". Shinji has opened up, comfortable with his surrogate family and no longer pushing them away, Asuka is letting her guard down and actually thought about Misato when choosing where to eat, something early-Asuka wouldn’t be caught dead doing, Rei is socializing, and so on. Shinji even admits why he wants to pilot the Eva (praise from his father), which has been one of his "arc" question up until this point, and he seems to have finally figured things out.

--- This might actually be the last happy expression Shinji has till the finale ---

Of course, the directing will have none of that, because this is a false peace. Misato, who is wise to the wider narrative, knows exactly on how shaky a ground this is all built on, and gives Shinji the side-eye to prove it.

--- The “we call those daddy issues, Shinji” face ---

Episode 13 is a Ritsuko side-story, and episode 14 is a recap episode....look, I never said Evangelion was perfect, okay? But once episode 15 rolls around all of this narrative build-up starts being completely undone: Shinji and Asuka's stable-ish friendship gains some very-unstable romantic overtones, Misato has a full-on emotional breakdown, and we are off to the races in episode 16 as Shinji's newfound confidence and masculine need to wave his dick around for Asuka's benefit results in one-way ticket to psycho-analysis mind-screw station:

I could go into how these themes develop from here, but that isn’t the focus of this essay. My point with all this build is instead to focus on two core narrative elements: justification, and engagement. All of the out-there elements and pyscho-analytic themes of the second half of Evangelion are present in the first half, and were presented in a typical way - character interactions, dialogue, plot events, and so on. Remember that scene I mentioned before from Asuka's breakdown, of her being swamped by ghostly forms, and how it referred to Asuka’s desire stand alone from the crowd through her skills as a pilot? I know what it meant thematically, cause here is Asuka, implying to you, in dialogue, what that scene is going to mean 8 episodes earlier (“it” is “pilot the Eva”):

And this isn’t even the first scene this theme has come up in, I could pull up a number of screenshots if I needed to of her either implying or directly stating this desire, its conflicts, and having resolutions around them.

The avant latter half of Evangelion can throw half a dozen themes at you in sequences of abstract animation because you have already spent half a season thinking about these issues in normal terms. It’s the multifaceted character arc - they have been continually struggling with these issues and exploring different solutions to them, solutions that seem to fail. On this backdrop, to repeat these themes again using traditional narrative tools would be, well, boring. Evangelion isn’t an essay, it’s a visual medium; the show has set the stage with the regular visual tricks of the trade for exploring these arcs, but in the latter half of the show  it pushes what that visual medium can do. With that grounding, unlike in so much avant work, you can fully follow along with it. Essentially, Evangelion made you do your homework before the test.

The Ones You Love Mean More Than Anything

This groundwork is true on an intellectual/comprehension level, but it is also true on an emotional level; not only do you understand better these abstract elements, you also care about them, because they are not just referring back to factual elements but human moments. To take an example, Shinji and Asuka have several fight scenes that occur in abstract-head-space, and in one of them Asuka (wanna guess who my favourite character is?) is ripping into Shinji for how he fails to reach out to her, to make her feel wanted, and she mentions this:

The image here is one of many flashing across the screen at the time, but it’s a flashback to the aftermath of their kiss in episode 15. The “hold” here isn’t metaphorical; it’s a direct reference to how he didn’t hold her during the kiss. If you didn’t think it was clear, look back at the actual episode 15 footage - how the kiss scene focuses entirely on Shinji's hand in all its not-holding-Asuka glory. Like, really:

--- This shot is held for over 15 seconds, with only Shinji’s hand moving. Also a penguin walks by, don’t ask. ---

This is a really impactful call-back, part of the multi-faceted arc, as Asuka continually tries to figure out her feelings for Shinji and fails. Except, the scene being referenced here is not shot as a dramatic relationship moment, it’s a comedy scene. Its honestly hilarious, one of the worst first kisses ever on screen, to the point where Shinji almost suffocates to death because he is such a wuss and Asuka is such a tsundere. And at the end of the show they take this moment and transform it into part of Asuka and Shinji's relationship implosion. 

Which means that you care about it! Because you are going to care about two kids’ fumbling attempts at romance far more than an essay on isolation and connection, for all the reasons those narratives traditionally work. Real people never have endless strings of introspection - introspection is something you do on a life that you have otherwise been living, with moments of seriousness and moments of hilarity and dumbness. Evangelion can show that, because it isn’t drama 24/7. Its first 15 episodes have comedy, action, slice-of-life, the works.

I think this is the element that really makes Evangelion stand out - that it can push what is happening onscreen to the limits of abstraction, and you are not only going to understand it, but also remember the human beings it is all happening to. It not only put in the time to make these characters fully-fleshed out, but connects back its new later elements to the moments that made them so fleshed out. It justifies going as far as it does through its arcs, and engages you emotionally as it escalates, while so many attempts at arthouse media either fail or don’t bother with either of those key elements. Evangelion is a show that starts as a highly traditional narrative, ends as an arthouse film, and by binding it all together so tightly makes you think it couldn’t have gone any other way. Which, it turns out, is a pretty good way to make the arthouse elements actually work.

....

Oh yeah, so Neon Genesis Evangelion: 10/10. Like the score? We are supposed to do that, right? That’s my score.

-Tim

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Final Notes: I have a bunch of other thoughts on Evangelion, and so while I imagine a lot of the shows we watch are going to get one cohesive essay, I will almost definitely have some follow-up posts - this post is just the main one that connects so many of my biggest takeaways together. I definitely want to write a few on the plot issues and their (non)relevance, the ways Shinji’s arc is perceived by fandom, and some other topics, but I do want to put up a few essays on other anime so we don’t have a massive Evangelion dump starting out the project. Hopefully I will get some inspiration on more topics from all the great ~discourse~ going on around Evangelion right now, and we will see what gets written.

#evangelion #neon genesis evangelion #art house #avantgarde