#I actually like answering the asks publicly so others can learn about it too!

[starryevermore]

the house of snow (2) ✧ coriolanus snow

the house of snow ✧ a royal coryo au | pinterest board | ao3

pairing: king!coriolanus snow x fem!reader

series summary: the king of panem is in search of a bride. and, for reasons you can never understand, coriolanus snow has set his sights on you. it would never be a happy marriage, you’re sure of that. but none of that matters, because when snow decides he wants something, he will do everything in his power to ensure it is his.

chapter summary: though you want nothing less than to marry coriolanus snow, he seems intent on finding you a reason to comply. 

word count: 2,621

series warnings?: 18+ MINORS DNI, royal au, regency au, arranged marriage, rivals to lovers, obsessive!coryo, jealous!coryo, protective!coryo, eventual smut, eventual pregnancy, more tags to be added later

chapter warnings?: no use of y/n, manipulative!coryo, not proofread

Coriolanus Snow’s courtship with you was the talk of the ton. After he was seen promenading with you, it seemed like all anyone could talk about was your impending nuptials. It infuriated you to no end. He hadn’t even proposed and people were already treating you like you were his property! What would people do if you actually married him? When you married him. It was an inevitability at this point. He had been at your family home every day for the past week. No other man dared to speak to you, save for Sejanus. They all knew better than to attempt to take you from Snow. 

Your only solace was when you would go to the modiste with your mother. She was often distracted by the fabrics on display, trying to figure out what you might look best in. It gave you the time to talk to Tigris, albeit in hushed whispers. When Snow had been crowned king, you learned that Tigris had grown estranged from her cousin. She never said much about it publicly, but at least she would listen to you vent about the man ever since he decided he was going to torment you with marriage. 

“I do not understand why he’s doing this,” you said to Tigris as she helping you into a grown. “He has always despised me, I’m sure of it. I do not care what Lord Plinth says. We would be miserable together.”

Tigris hummed. “It would not serve you well to try to understand Coriolanus’s mind. Even when you think you understand him, he will have another motive entirely unknown to you.”

You chewed on your lip. You were grateful your mother was too distracted to notice. She always hated that habit of yours. That is not very ladylike! she would hiss and grab you by the arm, dragging you away from whatever social engagement you were participating in. Nor is acting like a crazed banshee, you would think. Heaven forbid you show any signs of nervousness. 

It did ease your nerves ever so slightly, though, to learn that Tigris was as confounded by Snow’s behavior as you were. While it would have been easier to believe Sejanus, to think that Snow secretly held a flame for you all these years, you had enough personal experience with the man to know that, that was the furthest from the truth. Hell, even Snow’s own words—that he wanted a wife that he could keep in line—did not feel entirely honest. He was up to something. You just weren’t sure what. 

“Will you be joining us for dinner at the palace on Friday?” you asked, trying to pull yourself from the spiral before you could fall too deep into it. 

Tigris looked up, her brows furrowed together. “Coriolanus has not told me about the dinner.”

Your shoulders fell. Oh, you had been hoping she would be there. It would have certainly been a solace for you, to have at least one person in the room who you could talk to and not want to scream. Though, you supposed Snow had done that on purpose. If he was intent on torturing you, this would certainly be the way to go. 

“What a shame.”

“What’s a shame?” your mother asked, her attention finally torn away from the fabrics. 

Tigris answered for you. “We were talking about the dinner with Coriolanus. I was saying that I would not be able to come.”

“Ah. Well, that is a shame. But not to worry, there will be plenty of time to talk once they are married.”

Tigris offered a tight-lipped smile. She spared a glance at you, as if to gauge your reaction to the mention of your impending nuptials. “Of course. I look forward to someone as kind as your daughter being part of the family.”

A satisfied smile curled across your mother’s face. She stood a little taller, shoulders held back, at the idea that one of Snow’s family members also approved the marriage. In her mind, it probably meant that the marriage was sure to happen. Little did she know that Tigris and Snow’s relationship had become strained over the years. If anything, Tigris’s approval might have meant that Snow would suddenly become uninterested in you.

At least, you would hope that. At this point, however, Snow had decided that you were to be bride. There would be little that could stand in his way. A scandal, perhaps, because he cared so much for his personal image. But a scandal could ruin you, and that would leave you right where you started—without a single chance for happiness. 

“Then I hope you would not mind making her wedding gown?” your mother asked. 

“I have already begun working on designs.”

Oh, you hated how your fate was already sealed. 

“The palace is quite beautiful, is it not?” your mother remarked as the butler led you and your parents to the dining room. 

You fought the urge to roll your eyes, though you could not stop yourself from saying, “You act as if you have never been here before.”

If you were at your own home, your mother might have snapped at you for your remark. But here, in the palace, the home of the King, where he could be lurking behind any corner, she held her tongue. “Yes, well, one sees the palace in a new light when learning that it could be their daughter’s future home.”

Your gaze swept over the palace. In truth, the building was exquisite. A testament to how talented the people of Panem are to create a place that housed only the best of the best. Well-crafted furniture, stunning paintings, marble statutes that almost looked like a person had been encased in the rock. But it was the home of Snow, and you hated anything to do with him.

“The decorations are rather tasteless.”

This time, your mother could not hold her tongue. She stopped in her tracks, snatching you by the arm. For a moment, you wondered if you had gone too far. If you had crossed a line. “You will lose the attitude at once—”

“I have to admit, I do agree with her.” 

Does Snow have trap doors all throughout Panem so that he can appear anywhere at a moment’s notice? 

Your mother dropped your arm. She cleared her throat, as if that might dispel the rage hanging in her voice. “Your Majesty—”

“I have not yet had time to update the decor to my tastes. Ruling a country, it turns out, takes up quite a bit of one’s time. Though, I hope that your daughter shall soon help me with making this palace more of a home.” He took a step close to your mother. His pale blue eyes were uncharacteristically dark. His voice dropped low as he continued, “But do not be mistaken. I will not stand for anyone speaking to her like that, even her own mother. Do you understand?”

Your mother could only bare to nod. 

Snow’s gaze slid over to you. His eyes softened. You never seen him look like that before. For a moment, you wondered if Sejanus was right about Snow harboring feelings for you. But then you remember how cold he just was to your mother. Even if she deserved it, a chill ran down your spine as you wondered how cruel he would be towards you. He held out his arm towards you. “Dinner will not be ready for a while. In the mean time, I could show you the library? I remember how you always had your nose in a book at the Academy.”

Between dealing with your mother’s embarrassment and rage or dealing with whatever torment Snow had in store for you, you would rather be with Snow. If only because you weren’t sure what your mother might do when the King’s eyes were not on her. She needed a moment to calm, and perhaps playing nice with Snow might aid in that. You slipped your hand around his bicep. “That would be lovely.”

Snow smiled—a rarity that was becoming more frequent. If he was playing the part of an interested man just so he could spend the rest of your life torturing you, he almost had you fooled. “Wonderful. The library is just down the hall here.”

He began to lead you down the hall, but he did not get far when he stopped. You were forced to stop as well, confused by his actions. What was he doing? Then he turned, his cold eyes focused on your mother. She stood just a few feet behind you and Snow. She cowered under Snow’s gaze. 

“Is everything alright, Your Majesty?” she asked. 

“I do not recall inviting you to the library.”

You looked between your mother and Snow. A battle of prides, it seemed. No sane Mama would allow her eligible daughter to be alone with a man. It would be a scandal if word ever got out. Of course, this was the palace and this was King. Nothing ever left the palace walls that Snow did not want out into the kingdom. Even if this was something that would ruin your reputation otherwise, Snow might not let that happen. Unless, of course, that was his plan all along. To ruin you for anyone else.

“That is hardly appropriate!” your mother protested. 

Snow took a breath. He looked down at you, then back to your mother. “Allow me to make myself clear. While we have not yet gone through all the formalities of a proposal, I fully intend to make your daughter my bride. I have only publicly moved at the pace I have so that no one would think ill of her, and in turn, me. Now, there is no one here that could harm her reputation. So, if I would like to go to the library alone with my future bride, I do not see how the mere wife of a Lord could stop me.”

Your mother looked to you, as if daring you to follow him. To do so would be an insult to her. But to deny Snow might be your demise. Granted, you did not know if he was capable of such things. But a man with this amount of power was capable of anything. When you looked to Snow, he was already looking down at you, as if trying to gauge whether you would start a fight or comply. You looked back to your mother. “It will only be a moment, Mama. Nothing untoward will happen.”

She sucked in a breath, seemingly ready to protest. Yet, when Snow turned his glare back to her, she fell silent. A nod was her only signal that she would not fight him further on the matter. 

With that, Snow began to lead you to the library; this time, alone. You expected the walk to be silent, though that might have only been because you had nothing to say to Snow. However, when you were out of your mother’s earshot, Snow said, “See? Isn’t this much easier when you don’t fight me?”

It would have been smarter for you to hold your tongue. But you were not the sort of woman Snow wanted you to be. “When confronted with two evils, it is easier to choose the lesser.”

Snow raised a brow. “You think I am lesser?”

You looked over your shoulder to your mother. Though she was far away, you could still see the way rage overtook her and felt pity for the butler who was attempting to placate her with a tray of tea and cakes. “I do not know what to expect of you,” you admitted. 

He chuckled, shaking his head. “Nor do I know what to expect of you.”

Turning your gaze back to him, you said, “You should expect one thing of me, Your Majesty. I will not be the meek bride you want me to be. I will never fall in line for the sake of falling in line. I do not wish to marry you. I only will because you have removed every other choice I have.”

Snow stopped in front of a large pair of oak doors. He stared at them for a while, perhaps considering whether he should distract you with the arrival at the library or respond to what you have said. Finally, he asked, “Is it true you wished to marry Sejanus?”

How could he have known that, you wondered. The only people you had ever voiced that to were your parents, and only in an attempt to persuade them to let you consider anyone but Snow as a potential match. The question itched at you, and so you had to ask. 

“It does not matter where I heard it from. What matters is your answer.”

You frowned, trying to sort through your options. You weren’t sure how much Snow was a jealous man or vengeful one. You would hate to see Sejanus harmed because you had said the wrong thing. You took a breath. “I always wanted to marry for love, but my parents made clear that that was not an option. It is no secret that I do not wish to marry you despite my parents urging. I had once expressed that, if they wanted to marry me off to a man of higher social standing, that I would comply with a match with Lord Plinth. I did not, and I do not, love him. But he is an easy man to love. If I was forced to marry anyone, I would protest the least with him.”

“He cannot give you what I can.”

“Perhaps. But I value my happiness over all else. How could I ever be happy with a man that so openly stated he only wanted a wife that would provide him a child and be otherwise complacent? We are too different. We always have been.”

Instead of acknowledging you said anything, Snow reached out with his free hand and opened the door to the library. He pushed it open, leading you into the expansive room. Though you wanted him to respond to you, you found yourself dropping your hand from his arm, turning slowly to take in the rows and rows and rows of shelves. The entire room took over two floors, books as far as the eye could see. You could spend every day there and still not have read any books. 

You stepped toward one of the shelves, pulling a book at random, thumbing through it. “I have never seen this many books before. Mama always hated that I was well-read,” you confessed. You weren’t sure why you were saying it. Something about Snow just made you want to confess things today, it seemed. “She would have preferred it if I filled my time with hobbies that would have made me more desirable to my future husband. Needlework, piano…She always said that men do not want women who have ideas. I always told her that that was a relic of the past, that the times have changed. She would say that all men are the same, even if they pretend otherwise.”

A hand reached out, pushing the book down. You looked up at Snow. He looked…odd. You couldn’t begin to describe how he looked. Something caught between pained and…admiration? No, that couldn’t be. Snow cared for you as little as you cared for him. He was only doing this for his public image. Nothing more, nothing less. 

And yet, when he said, “The library is all yours if you will be a good wife for me,” for a moment, you considered agreeing. 

#the house of snow: a royal coryo au #coriolanus snow imagine #coriolanus snow x reader #coriolanus snow x fem!reader #coriolanus snow x female reader #coriolanus snow x you #coriolanus snow x y/n #coriolanus snow fanfiction #coriolanus snow fan fiction #coriolanus snow fan fic #coriolanus snow fanfic #coriolanus snow fic #starrywrites #starryevermore

[trungles]

Processing Process, and More Processing

I made this post free and publicly readable on Patreon, but I'm reposting the whole thing right here too because, well, it's a free post, and I don't want to make you click away from your dashboard if you don't need to. But also if you want to support my work, here's the link to the post.

It's a little bit about cartooning, a little bit about drawing, and then it turns into a eulogy for a chicken.

I wrote “process” more than once, and now the word looks funny and is beginning to lose its meaning to me.

This post is about a few things, and it’s a little bit on the sad end of things. Nothing dire! No worries. There’s just a little mention of death, just as a heads up.

Before we get to that, though, I’ve been doing some work and had some thoughts.

I’m often asked about how I draw the noodle hair on my characters, and the answer is typically that I draw each and every line with my hand. But there are considerations of movement and volume that go into it beyond its texturally decorative purposes. I love being able to convey shape and motion with it. It’s less evident, I think, in my illustration work, but I think it’s much more obvious when I do sequential work. In the above image, you can see me working out a sequence of Angelica having a series of thoughts. Her head sort of moves, and her eyes follow. You can see I’d planned out the general shape of the hair and how I’d like it to move.

I wound up moving the drawings a little bit so that the readers eyes will actually follow the character’s eyes as it moves gently rightward on the page. The hair is there to accentuate the movement, like so:

It’s a consideration I employ in all my drawings, but especially when I’m drawing hair and fabric. I don’t use a lot of action lines, so this becomes an important way to give the reader the information that someone is moving through a space. Resistance, gravity, and motion are all things I have to keep in the back of my head when I’m doing these little drawings. I think the planning actually takes more time than the inking, which can happen pretty quickly once I map it all out.

In other news, I’m starting to take my extracurricular artistic development a little more seriously in the silliest way possible.

You wouldn’t know it, but I studied painting college—a medium I switched to after the printmaking professor and head of the Art Department at the time told me I probably shouldn’t be an artist (he gave me a hard candy for my trouble). I recently bought a bunch of little dolls, dressed them up, and am returning to my painting roots. It feels really nice to work in big blobs of color instead of lines. It’s an exercise I came up with in response to a common lament from art students.

One of the more aggravating generational tensions described to me by art school students is when professors describe a student’s portfolio as “too anime” without much explanation. I know what the professor means. They’re trying to get at how referencing your favorite anime or cartoons means that your style becomes a simulacrum, an imperfect copy of a copy, and you never learn to develop your own sense of judgment about where a line or a shape needs to go. And we can tell. It’s a way of working that is perfectly fine for cartooning because cartooning is closer to hand-writing than it is to drawing. I always turn to Charles Schulz’s work for an example. Those figures aren’t literally depicting children—with their little chessboard-pawn proportions and bread-loaf feet—but we read them as endearing children because we’ve come to a consensus between us, the readers, and Charles Schulz, the author, that those shapes mean those things. There are no whiskers or paws in the shape of the word “CAT” but you look at those three letters together, and you know the thing to which it refers. That’s an aspect of cartooning, too. Of course, what elevates it from mere writing is, in part, due to the fact that those little figures do not lose their meaning the more you depict them.

To really draw well, though, you have to do those fundamentals. You have to draw from life. There’s no way around it. It helps you develop a stronger sense of where you like to lay down your lines and shapes, no matter how stylized you like to work. It grows your judgment, and every artist’s best tool is their own well-honed sense of artistic discernment about their own work.

But that doesn’t mean you have to surrender the stuff you like or the things that inspire you to make art! I tell students that if they want to hold fast to their anime style AND hone their fundamentals to develop their eye as an artist, they should buy little figurines and toys of their favorite characters, prop those up against a light source, and draw them as still life objects. Like, yes, do the vases and the figure drawings and all those, I still think those are important. But if this is what you need to keep you interested in drawing from life, having some toys around is a great way to do it! Also, bless those sculptors and toy designers. They’re the best.

I think there’s something to be said about remembering to imagine the physicality of the things we draw, in all its dimensions and in the way it catches the light or casts a shadow. It helps sentimentalize things, too. Makes them feel more real, even emotionally.

Edwina died on Tuesday night, after a few final snuggles, surrounded by her favorite treats. She was about five years old, which is old for a chicken, and she had a very comfortable life. We buried her this morning. She was a good hen, J’s personal favorite.

It really feels like the end of an era. She was the last surviving member of our very first flock. After the other hens died, she really seemed to prefer the company of people over other hens. She is survived by Snooki and Nelly, our two other young birds who get along quite well together, actually.

A baby chick costs between three and five American dollars, typically. An egg-laying hen could be between twenty and fifty bucks, depending on the breed. There are roughly 26 billion chickens living in the world today, about 518 million of them here in the United States. They come pretty cheap. And a part of me was moved to cynicism, entertaining the thought that it might be strange to feel sadly over a little animal that, at most, might be roughly equivalent to the price of a fancy lunch and a coffee.

I watched the 1974 musical version of The Little Prince recently, and I remember it mostly because Bob Fosse was in it and scared the crap out of me as a kid—he played the snake that would take the Little Prince back into the sky when his body gets too heavy to take with him. Gene Wilder plays the Fox whom the Little Prince befriends and tames among a garden of roses. The Fox explains that he is like any other fox in the world, but he is changed—made special and particular to the Little Prince—with time, effort, and patience. So, too, is the Prince’s little flower special to him. Out of all the flowers in the universe, she was the one he watered and protected under a little glass jar. And that’s enough.

I knew my little hen would not live that long. It could be very easy to take a broad view of the life expectancy of a hen and distance myself from it by virtue of its mortality and its commonness. People who raise livestock do it all the time. But I also think it’s wonderful that we should all be capable of loving very small, very brief little things. Edwina is not, to my mind, the rough equivalent of a fancy lunch and a coffee. She was our little hen. For her whole life, she was ours. And I’m so happy she was here.

#cartooning #drawing #patreon #cw death #cw pet death #comics #trungles #artists on tumblr

[queenshelby]

Our Little Secret (Part 13)

Pairing: Dark! Cillian Murphy x Virgin! Reader

Warning: Infidelity, Brief Mention of Stillbirth

Notes: This will not be a love story. It will be dark, twisted and kinky. Cillian is portrayed as totally off cannon.

Two weeks had passed and you had almost moved on with your life which did not involve your family. 

Your mother had kicked you out of her own house following your tryst with Cillian. But as luck would have it, your cousin Lukas had offered you a place to stay after Emma's parents too would not allow you to remain at their family home for more than a week.

You had to find a job quickly to sustain yourself and fortunately, you managed to secure employment at a local bookstore. The hours were flexible, and they paid decently, making your living situation somewhat manageable under these circumstances.

School, however, had to give way to your new lifestyle and you chose to transfer to college in the evening in an attempt to finish your education.

As far as Cillian was concerned, you had not heard from him since that afternoon, leaving you in a state of limbo regarding your relationship status with him.

From the local papers, you since learned that he had finally left Danielle and was now publicly fighting for custody of his son Max who the columns claimed was not his actual son at all.

Yet none of this mattered as you sat there staring blankly into space, haunted by memories and regret. Overwhelmed by guilt and confusion, you tried to block out the past few months - how you became entangled in such a mess with no future, only moments spent locked away from the world. But, it wasn’t easy. It felt as though the entire universe conspired to punish you for daring to experience passion beyond societal norms, yet you continued searching deep inside yourself for answers that wouldn't come easily.

You were pregnant with Cillian's child and an abortion was not currently something you could afford emotionally nor financially, forcing you to confront your reality alone. For the first time in years, the choices you made seemed to echo hollowly in your ears as you attempted to navigate this complex web of deceit, betrayal, and self-discovery.

"Em, I do not know what to do," you admitted honestly, breaking down in tears as she visited you, just like she did every day after you finished work. 

Emma pulled you close, offering comfort as she held you tight.

"We're going to figure this out together," she assured you reassuringly, wiping away your tears. "But I honestly think that you need to tell Cillian," Emma added cautiously. "He has a right to know."

Her advice struck a chord in you, causing you to sit upright and nod thoughtfully.

"I asked him if he could meet, about a week ago, and he never got back to me, Em!" you said, feeling worthless and unwanted.

"He is going through a lot himself and he doesn't know about you carrying his child. Maybe you should try and give him a call again?" Emma interjected, attempting to mediate.

Despite Emma's suggestion, you remained hesitant, unsure whether reaching out to Cillian was the right decision. Nevertheless, you decided to pick up your phone and call him regardless of the consequences.

After a series of rings, someone else picked up on the other end – a stranger.

“Hello, can I speak to Cillian please?” you asked politely, trying hard to maintain composure amidst growing anxiety.

"Who am I speaking to?" replied the unfamiliar voice, curiosity evident in her tone.

”This is Y/N and I really need to speak with him,” you introduced yourself, taking a deep breath in preparation for what might follow. “Is Cillian available, please?” you begged and, just after you did, there was silence on the line for several seconds before the woman spoke up again.

"So, you are the homewrecker?" she snarled bitterly, anger radiating from her voice.

You flinched upon hearing those harsh words directed at you. You didn't expect the person answering Cillian's phone to actually know who you were, but then again, you did not know about the woman on the other line either.

"Listen, my brother isn't available. Don't call again. Please don't bother him anymore," came the venomous reply. Taken aback by the hostility, you couldn't understand why she reacted so aggressively when you hadn't even spoken poorly of Cillian. After a momentary pause, you found your voice.

"Actually, it's important we talk, whether you like it or not," you stated resolutely, ignoring the sharp edge in her voice. There was another brief silence followed by a mocking laughter that broke the air.

"Listen sweetheart, Cillian is going through legal proceedings against his wife, Danielle, because of you. He should not be speaking to you and if you call this phone again, I will provide you with a cease-and-desist letter on my brother's behalf. Any further contact will be considered as harassment, " she threatened ominously making you realise that the woman on the other end of the line was not only Cillian's sister, but also his solicitor, handling his custody case. 

You recalled having met her at the funeral a few weeks ago. Her name was Alison and she worked at one of the largest law firms in Dublin. 

As the conversation progressed, it became apparent that she despised you with an intensity that took you off guard. To make matters worse, she insisted you ceased communication with Cillian altogether. This was problematic considering she served as both Cillian's attorney and sister, putting her in a unique and potentially influential position.

You struggled to comprehend the full extent of your predicament until now. How were you supposed to inform Cillian about the child growing inside you without incurring the wrath of his sister?

It appeared impossible. Nonetheless, you had to reach out somehow, eventually, and hope for understanding from both sides despite their conflicted history.

As days turned into weeks, you grew increasingly anxious and restless, worrying constantly about how you were going to break the news to Cillian as the dire three-month mark drew nearer and you had yet another appointment with a local social worker to discuss your situation.

She offered you both, a community funded loan to carry out the procedure you needed or the option of putting you in touch with an adoption agency so that, further down the track, you could give up your child if you desired to do so.

Although it may seem cruel, it seemed practical and logical in light of your situation and, in the end, even Emma agreed with you on that front. The idea that you could choose whether or not to become a parent appealed to your desire for control over your destiny. However, this was easier said than done. Having a baby meant drastically altering your course forever, but you also knew that, not having the baby, might cause you regret. 

The choice loomed large, casting its shadow over your daily existence. You frequently found yourself pondering the gravity of your options while walking along the quiet streets surrounding your temporary residence late at night. You often stopped in your tracks, contemplating your fate as a result of your irresponsible actions.

Life seemed determined to play itself out according to the chaos you created. Every passing day brought you closer to facing the inevitable truth and this truth was now something you had to confront by yourself. Without the man who caused all this by your site. 

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#cillian murphy #cillian murphy smut #cillian murphy x reader #cillian murphy imagine #cillian murphy x you #cillian murphy x y/n #cillian fanfic #cillianmurphy #cillian x fem!reader #cillian murphy fic #cillian murphy fanfic #cillian murphy fanfiction

[hopelesslyromanticgay]

An Americano Please PT. 6

Words: 1400

Y/N's POV:

Not gonna lie, I'm kind of nervous to meet Jenna's friends. What if I fuck up? What if I'm accidentally a little rude? Or what if they all around don't like me?

God I sound like a teenager meeting their partner's parents for the first time.

I really enjoy spending time with Jenna, though, and I don't want her friends not liking me to mess that up. 

My phone pings with a text from Nessa.

                           Nessa😝

Girl, pull your shit together and get your

ass into that pizza shop. No I'm not stalking 

you, I just know you well enough by now.

                                                                            OK fine.

I timidly step into the store, the warm scent of baking pizza wafting around me.

"Y/N, over here!" I can hear Jenna exclaim, waving me over to her table. She's sitting with a few other people.

"These are my castmates, Emma, Joy, Georgie, and Hunter. Castmates, this is Y/N," Jenna excitedly introduces us.

"Hi, nice to meet you guys," I smile, waving stupidly.

"Nice to meet you too," Joy says kindly, "Jenna's told us to much about you."

I can see Jenna hide her face from me a little.

"Oh really, what's she said?" I ask innocently.

"Just how pretty, funny and kind-" Emma starts.

"Hey, have you guys seen that new baking show with the engineers?" Jenna interrupts. Darn it, I really wanted to know where Emma was going with that.

"No, none of us have the time to do that," Georgie laughs, "I'm surprised you do, honestly."

"No I watched it before we got here," she says quickly.

"So," Hunter starts, immediately way better at changing the subject, "What are some cool sites around Romania I should check out. I have a lot more free time on my hands with this show because I don't have to learn new hobbies, so I wanna get to know the area."

"Oh, well Jenna can tell you I'm an amazing tour guide," I start, "You have got to go to Bran castle, after all, it's said to be the home of Dracula. In reality, it was just a castle that Vlad Dracul once went to, but Bran Castle is the place Bram Stoker based Dracula's castle off of. So that makes it pretty cool."

"That's so cool, I'll have to take Naomi with me," he grins, "thanks for the recommendation."

"Oh yeah, perfect for her because you know, who she plays," Emma winks, "Sorry, we can't share a lot of details with cast outsiders," she says sadly.

"We'd love to share more, but we're under legal agreements," Joy adds.

"I totally get it," I say, feeling the slightest bit left out, but otherwise enjoying myself.

"Hey, so what's the deal with queer acceptance around here?" Hunter asks quietly, "because I want to propose to my boyfriend when he comes to visit in a few months but I don't know how publicly I can do that."

"Oh my god you're gonna propose?!" everyone at the table shrieks, all congratulating him individually.

"I'd like to, but I just need to know from a local," he says, looking to me.

"So, people do have the right to discriminate against you for being queer, and you certainly can't do the actual wedding here, but most people in Busteni aren't that homophobic. And I'm a queer person, so I'd say I'm a pretty good source," I tell him, "I'd say the worst outcome is if it's in front of tourists, because you never know what they'll do."

"Thank you so much," he tells me, "you're awesome."

"Glad I can help," I say happily. So at least one of her friends likes me.

"So, Y/N, how long have you lived in Romania?" Joy asks.

"About three years now," I answer truthfully.

"Wow, so you came at sixteen?" 

"Yeah," I say, eager to change the subject, "so how are you guys liking Romania so far?"

"People can definitely tell we're not from here," Emma giggles, "I mean, not speaking Romanian is a dead giveaway."

"Yeah, we're pretty good at being able to tell just from the language you speak," I laugh, "I only get away with it because I grew up speaking it."

"Woah, so you grew up bilingual?" Emma questions.

"Yeah, my mom grew up in Romania and my dad went to college here, so they both would speak it with me when I was a kid," I explain.

"Oh that's cool."

The rest of the night goes pretty similarly, all of us getting to know one another. I learn that Jenna used to autopsy little animals like the true Wednesday she is, which I found hilarious. I learned that Emma had to go to a werewolf bootcamp to get better at stunts. They were all such interesting people.

 By the end of the night I think they actually might not hate me! Success.

"Hey, Y/N, can I walk you home?" Jenna asks.

"Sure," I smile. The rest of the group exchange looks, and file out of the pizza shop.

"I think my friends like you," she tells me as we get up from out seats.

"You do?" I say, surprised.

"Yeah, they wouldn't have talked to you as much as they did if they didn't."

"Well in any case, I'm glad they're okay with me," I laugh.

"Yeah, me too," she smiles brightly, wrapping an arm around my waist and leaning her head on the side of my arm as we walk down the street. It's fully dark out, and the only thing lighting the street up are the old gas powered street lamps. Oh my god I hope she can't see my blush. She's so adorable.

"I was so worried they were gonna hate me," I confess after a few minutes of silence.

"Why would they do that?" she asks, "you're a lovely person." Hearing her say that melts my heart. She thinks I'm a lovely person!

"I'm glad you think that, but I don't think everyone shares that opinion."

"Well they're stupid, but in any case, thank you for coming to dinner with me tonight. My friends really wanted to meet you."

"Yeah, I bet it's because you told them how pretty funny and kind I was," I tease her. I can just barely see the blush on her face under the soft glow of the street lamps.

"I can't believe she told you I said that," she shakes her head.

"Oh so you did say it," I inquire.

"I'd be lying if I said I didn't," she confesses. Wow, I can't believe she really thinks all that about me.

"Well what else did you tell them?"

"You know, the usual stuff."

"Such as?"

"W-well you know, the things you tell your friends when you like someone," she starts, "like what we say to each other, or the jokes we have. Or what we do when we hang out. You know, that stuff." Oh my god, she likes me. Like, likes me likes me,

"So you like me?" I raise an eyebrow.

"Of course I like you!" she all but shouts, "your sense of humor is amazing, you're beautiful, you don't judge me for anything I say or do, and you always want to hear what I have to say." Well what do I even say to that? Saying I like you too feels cheesy and like something a child would say.

We've come to a stop now, right outside my apartment. We're only inches apart, her beautiful brown eyes glistening in the light.

"Please say something, Y/N," she says quietly.

"Can I kiss you?" I ask softly. She exhales in relief before nodding intently.

I cup her cheek, bringing our lips together. It feels like fireworks are going off with my stomach. She wraps her arms around my waist. I never realized kissing someone could feel this right. I can taste the tropical chapstick on her soft lips, and smell her subtle perfume. 

What feels like both an eternity or also less than a second later, we pull away, both smiling.

"So I'll see ya for coffee tomorrow?" she asks.

"You can count on it," I smile. She pulls me into an embrace, burying her head in my shoulder. We stay like that peacefully for a minute, swaying in the wind.

"I have an early start tomorrow, so I should get home now," she tells me.

"Aww okay. I understand. Well, good night gorgeous," I quickly lean down to kiss her again. Her smile widens.

"Good night, Y/N/N," she blows me a kiss before walking off.

Wow. What a night.

A/N: I know Y/N is supposed to be mostly customizable, but I swear the thing with the parents WILL make sense later! love u guys, hope you enjoyed the chapter:)

Random Notes: 

- I'm not making up that the lipstick jenna used on the set of Wednesday was in fact made from tropical fruit. 

- Eidolon is actually a real pizza place in Busteni.

- I spent HOURS on the tour chapter learning about places in Busteni. Finding the places on SnapMap, reading their reviews, and cross referencing the information. I also spent a while learning about Romanian geography. Romanians, I'm so sorry if I'm not doing your country the justice it deserves.

- A lot of the laws around queer people in Romania are less than progressive, but being queer in itself is legal.

#jenna ortega #jenna ortega x reader #cute #i love jenna ortega #reader insert #jenna ortega x fem!reader #tara carpenter #vada cavell #wednesday addams #jenna ortega x you #an americano please #coffee shop romance #first kiss #fanfiction #jenna ortega fanfic #jenna ortega scream #jenna marie ortega #wednesday addams x reader #emma myers #hunter doohan #joy sunday

[blinkpen]

nother lil life update!

appointment with housing admin lady got rescheduled to tuesday, but that's not too big a deal since that is the soonest day they could officially open up that apartment for me anyway, so if the answer was going to be yes, rescheduling when i get the yes to said day, doesn't delay the move-in, except by like, maybe, one more additional day of just. going back to get/move my stuff? so i am Unbothered and maintain the same level of cautious optimism leaned optimism as before

and again my stress level is way lower now knowing there is likely a light at the end of the tunnel (hell that a tunnel even EXISTS now) and mom is, at least for now, sobered by the intervention of other adults for whom going

"ummmmm but the very existence of trans identity is a personal attack against me and my beliefs bc i believe their existence is blasphemous they stole the rainbow from christians and desecrated the noah's arc story that's why i'm so mean to [not my fucking pronoun] whenever anything remotely close to the topic of gender comes up, asking nicely to so mach as -gag noises- humor they/them is a deliberate attack on me first, and forcing the queer agenda on me, so i get to attack back with full venom unloaded and vote in favor of making queer peoples' lives more difficult if not impossible, so like, i'm the victim actually? [not my fucking pronoun] needs to stop being so entitled and unholy and learn to deal with Different Opinions and stop Undermining me"

will not fucking fly and she can't make inflict Power Word: Guilt Trip to make them crumple away the way she does to me to instantly win and make the argument stop so she is now not pushing buttons and keeping her toxicity to herself methinks bc "ah fuck, an actually benevolent authority figure nobody in town would question is looking at how much my grown but wingclipped and disabled child's mental and now physical health has deteriorated to life-threateningly poor levels and looking in my direction while Knowing details i cannot possibly spin in my favor to outside observers; the only people who'd swoop in to take my side would only make me look worse by association, though i'll probably still refuse to think about The Implications of that, so i will Be Mask On now about it if nothing else"

like she got a stark fucking reminder i think of the fact she is a mean person who publicly boasts about being mean because she thinks its funny and also equates being smart with being cynical and therefore if you're aggressively cynical you're automatically smarter than whoever you are talking to or about, and is the kind of person who literally owns a "leftist tears" coffee mug, while claiming herself a Good christian just because she didn't kick me out for being queer like the Bad christians do, but like, she can still give me shit for being queer as much as she likes and if i stand up for myself i'm an ungrateful little bitch, those are her Vibes,

and being that way, makes it hard to defend yourself as totally innocent of any wrongdoing and victim-blame someone most people in town know, by contrast, as "the borderline mute Always a Hoodie n Headphones kid who spends a lot of time just wandering around town for the heck of it and seems a bit touched in the head/lost in their own little world, but is unfailingly friendly if you do try to talk to them for whatever reason, and will sincerely ask if they could be of any assistance to anyone who enters their cone of vision who seems to be in a pickle" once they start developing what seems like a wasting illness and an aura of hopelessness they didn't have before and finally show up at the hospital looking like they're about to drop dead from what is clearly several months of physiological stress and self-neglect and they don't even have their meds handy because you locked their disabled ass out in retaliation for leaving for one single night because you wouldn't stop screaming at them about how their gender thing is blasphemous and [checks notes] eavesdropping in on them while they shower to make sure not even their anguished crying and muttering to themself even in there isn't saying anything you don't like??? what the f-

even the crusty old farmer i know who i guess probably would go "not sure i like that but whatever" about transness otherwise enters "now what makes you think that makes [not my pronoun but i forgive bc its not done Maliciously] less of a person, what makes you think that's okay" mode over that

lol, said the frog, as a human hand scoops it out of the water just in time, and places it on a nice log where it may recover from the sting, while pointing to the sinking scorpion suggesting they go to therapy instead of stinging everyone around them and going "but i'm a scorpion so that means i am not responsible for my actions and nobody is allowed to expect better of me" lmao,

okay that went from a life update to me venting a bit? but. i eared that i think, it helps keep my grounded, hoenstly.

anyway we gotta send my doc a fruit basket or somn

#cw for discussions of transphobia and all that

[edenfenixblogs]

outside of the general principles of credibility and fact-checking (or including those if you want) and looking for commitment to peace and shared prosperity like you mentioned in your pinned, do you have any other advice on gauging the reliability of sources regarding israel/palestine? or any particular sources you recommend as reliable or warn against as unreliable? there's so much misinfo and disinfo out there that i often end up getting overwhelmed and sharing nothing specific - and i know that's not exactly helpful, i'm just not sure where to start.

This is SUCH a good and important question!!! Thank you so much for asking it. I’ve been waiting until after work today to answer, so I can give it the attention it deserves.

This is an incredibly complex topic. It is completely ok to tackle only one item of this at a time. It is ok to spend more time listening than speaking. It is ok to only do basic fact checking until these things become second nature. It seems like a lot. But it actually becomes quite simple when you realize that, as a member of a non-affected group, your only job is to steer the conversation toward truth and peace.

That means most of what you are doing is rejecting sources and individuals engaging in bad faith discourse by simply not engaging with them. Your next most common task will be to publicly fact check bad faith discourse or incorrect information that has spread too far.

It is tempting to become outraged when you become familiar with bad faith discourse and data and see it spread widely. However, remember that this is incredibly complex and even the most experienced people get things wrong on this subject all the time. If you notice an error in what appears to be someone trying to bring attention to a cause they care deeply about, approach with kindness first. Always.

Try a reblog or a personal message with a link to the problematic post and say something like,

Hey. I care a lot about [issue] too. And I am trying really hard to make sure everything being spread right now is verifiable and accurate so nobody gets upset about things that aren’t true. Did you know that [thing you said+link to the post where you said it] was actually proven false by [reliable source+link to that source]? I’m really glad that didn’t happen. Of course, terrible things are still happening [to Palestinians/Israelis/Jews/Muslims/Arabs] on/in [college campuses/diaspora/Palestine/Israel/etc] there all the time. But at least nobody has to suffer through [incorrect info]. By the way, I’ve found a lovely organization run by actual Palestinians/Israelis/Arabs/Muslims/Jews working together to find peace for all. Check it out, I think it has promise! [link to reliable cause/organization]

Here is a wonderful site for MENA-based organizations geared toward fostering a shared peaceful future in a variety of ways.

Give the poster a chance to self correct. You will be wrong in the future. Model the way you would like to be informed of an error.

I briefly touched on the basics of identifying any source as reliable here. I won’t reiterate because this may be a long post and I wanna save space. But it contains the basics of what I learned in college.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that no source is objective. No source is without bias. And there is no way to make any source objective or without bias.

News is written by people. And all people have viewpoints. Giving all voices in a conflict equal importance is not inherently unbiased, because that risks giving support to more harmful ideas and equating harmful ideas, ideologies, and organizations with reasonable ones. Likewise, asserting that one viewpoint is correct and being unwavering in this belief no matter what is obviously no way to cultivate a balanced and well informed viewpoint.

Your job is to use critical thinking skills to examine the level of bias in a piece of media as well as how responsibly the source handles that bias. Your job is also to do your best to be aware of bias as well as what bias is relevant to the subject matter being reported. A source that is left leaning, but never shares fake information and is always verifiable is preferable to a source that is moderate but consistently shares half truths or faulty information.

Sometimes, information from a less than ideal source can be shared, but if you are sharing that source, you must explicitly state that source’s flaws and why you chose to share that information anyway. And if you are unable to find a better source, you should state that you are sharing information that may be incomplete or inaccurate and you are happy to update the post you are sharing if and when more information or confirmation from a more reliable source emerges. There are very limited situations where this is appropriate. Usually I would suggest not sharing information from such sources at all unless it can be backed up by better information.

One example of such a case is information about antisemitic hate crimes from the ADL. The ADL has a very problematic history and one should be aware of it when they share statistical data from the organization. However, that doesn’t make their information inherently unusable. It makes their information inherently suspect, though. In order for anything shared from the ADL to be worth sharing, you should be able to evaluate the data collection method and the sources of the data. And if there is any information in the data you are sharing that is not appropriate, you should explicitly draw attention to it, not try to hide it.

Case Study: Global Antisemitic Incidents in the Wake of Hamas’ War on Israel

This list contains very useful data on incidents of antisemitic violence against Jews in diaspora since 10/7/2023. I trust this data because: it links to each individual news source it references, often with pictures of the attacker/attack/incident and time stamps. It’s data is open to questioning and its sources are available to check individually. This is in line with the ADL’s mission statement of tracking antisemitism. Documenting antisemitism is not an inherently biased practice nor do I have any reason to believe that they lie about the antisemitic incidents they document. As that is not one of the things that critics accuse the ADL of, I do not see a reason to question its record on antisemitic incident reporting. I have never heard a critic make a substantiated claim against their formally collected data as falsified. I am willing to be proven wrong on this, but I will interrogate a source claiming this as thoroughly as I interrogate the ADL as a source itself. I am skeptical of this source because: the title of the article uses extremely biased language that makes the war seem one sided. The advantage of this source is: it is one of the few sources existing that collects data on antisemitic violence and hate incidents of Jews in diaspora. A sign of good faith from the organization: they dedicate a page to addressing criticisms of their organization, which means they feel confident that criticisms of them will stand up to scrutiny. It is not sufficient to use this page to absolve them of any of the listed criticisms, but it should help you find articles that critique the ADL as well as relevant information that supports their defense. Thus, you must come to your own conclusion on whether or not that information is trustworthy on the matter you are commenting on. A sign of possible bad faith from the organization: their page devoted to confronting myths and inaccuracies about their organization’s history does not address accusations about supporting South African Apartheid or failing to call the Armenian Genocide a genocide. An acknowledgment of my own limitations: I am not an expert in South African Apartheid in any way nor am I an expert on the Armenia genocide. Any other relevant information: Any reputable news sources verify information before reporting. If a news source that is verifiably responsible in its reporting cites information from the ADL, I will assume they have made adequate inquiries to verify that information as accurate enough to report. For example, if AP reported information and cited the ADL statistics, I would assume that the ADL made sure the data fit its high standard for reportage.

Conclusion: I find the ADL to be a trustworthy enough source of data about antisemitic attacks and incidents on Jews in diaspora, but only in cases where their sources and/or methodology are made public and/or another more regulated or otherwise more reliable source of statistical information partners with them. Because I lack expertise on South African Apartheid on the Armenian Genocide, I will not share information from the ADL about Palestinian apartheid, segregation, oppression, or genocide (until or unless I become more well-versed in these topics or am able to devote substantial energy into fact checking each claim in what I share. If I ever choose to do this, I will share every source I used to verify the information so that others may check my work and inform me if I’m wrong. At this time, I do not foresee a situation where I would refer to the ADL for matters about Palestinian concerns). The ADL in general and the linked source in particular seems to be an overall worthwhile source to cite on matters of antisemitism. The ADL does not meet my standards of a reliable source on Palestinian suffering. Check each link/source on an ADL source you want to share and form an informed conclusion on its reliability before sharing.

Also, be aware that primary sources with biased information are extremely valuable but never objective on their own. A tweet from the IDF or a statement from a released Palestinian prisoner may both be true! But sharing them as if they are definitely true without fact checking the information through the most trustworthy sources available is irresponsible. Do not share any social media information as fact. You are free to share social media information and publicly explore its implications in a responsible manner, but it is not responsible to discuss them as facts.

Case study: When something in Gaza or Israel is bombed, be sure that you know who the key players and commentators are.

When the IDF releases a statement blaming Hamas for bombing their own citizens, know that the IDF has a vested interest in not being perceived as an aggressor. When the Ministry of Health in Gaza accuses the Israeli military of being responsible for the attack, be aware that the Ministry of Health in Gaza is run by Hamas and is not a third party neutral source. Do not post anything about an event like this until the information is fully vetted by a neutral third party source (or as neutral as you are likely to find on such a hot button issue).

The best way you can help during an emerging story is to urge others to wait for full details, call out people irresponsibly casting blame before the facts are in (especially politicians), and repeatedly verify every source of information as they are named so that you know if they are trustworthy. Do not trust politicians who espouse inflammatory and prematurely accusatory information and do not make a public retraction and apology when they are found to be wrong.

That said, it is always appropriate to express sorrow for loss of life. You do not need to accuse a killer in order to do this.

There are also sites geared toward helping you identify the source itself fairly. Note: sites like these will help you evaluate the publication or news entity (eg New York Times, Al Jazeera, Haaretz, etc.). They won’t help you evaluate an individual journalist or article.

Some sites to help you verify credibility:

Media Bias Fact Check: Allows you to verify sources based on the news source’s political bias in terms of a left-right spectrum as well as by their reliability on matters of science, their use of questionable sources, and use of satire. Also, you can check how reliably factual the source’s reporting is. You can also sort by country, media type, general credibility, and how well trafficked the source is. They also publicly offer insight into their methodology of coming to these conclusions.

The Associated Press (AP) fact checks individual claims. Other news organizations fact checking claims include Reuters, The Washington Post and AFP. While AP is a gold standard and generally reliable, be aware that news organizations are also subject to bias. The advantage is that news organizations have investigative reporters on staff to investigate claims. The disadvantage is the bias inherent to the publication itself.

Other third party cites checking facts in news reports and in politics include:

FactCheck.org

Politifact

Snopes

Lakehead University offers an entire site devoted to developing media literacy as well as many ways to search fact checking sites. So does Kansas State University, and UMass Amherst. Many universities offer sites like this. I urge you to look into them.

Once you find a news or data source you trust, do a quick google search on the journalist’s name and a relevant phrase to the aspect of the conflict being reported on. For example The Newspaper Tribune Times Chronicle may be trustworthy. Veteran reporter, Ima Journalist may have written an article about Israel Bombing Gaza. So, before sharing it, just Google: “Ima journalist” + Israel Palestine Jews antisemitism Islamophobia. Make sure you don’t see something like “Ima Journalist photographed screaming ‘Hitler was actually a super good guy!’ anywhere in her history. When satisfied, feel free to share the story.

Other points to keep in mind:

Be aware of crappy tactics on both sides of the i/p conflict.

The IDF is often accused of excessive violence and planting evidence on Palestinians. This often leads to Palestinians being unfairly accused of terrorist intent and criminal violence.

Hamas uses civilians as human shields — both by using individual humans as shields and also launching bombs from civilian buildings (like hospitals, preschools, and libraries), building militaristic infrastructure in or beneath those same civilian buildings, and instigating conflict with IDF soldiers positioned near residential and civilian locations. This allows Hamas to escape criticism by framing the IDF as mindlessly bloodthirsty and eager to kill Palestinian civilians.

And finally, make sure accusations and talking points never conform to antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The universal aspects of antisemitic conspiracy theories (detailed more fully in the source linked above and also in another post I made) are:

Accusing Jews of replacing another group or population

Accusing Jews of pretending to be something they are not

Accusing Jews of dominating or attempting to dominate a prominent or essential aspect of a society or the world at large.

Accusing Jewish people of genocide and bloodlust in pursuit of personal gain

Accusing Jews of undue privilege or if appropriating something belonging to others.

Dehumanizing Jews by grouping them under a collective name or identity.

I hope this helps! Feel free to share it!

#antisemitism #islamophobia #media literacy #infodemiology #long post #resources #fact checking #Israel #Palestine #critical thinking #how to help #responsible advocacy #jewish muslim solidarity #israel Palestine solidarity #israeli Palestinian solidarity #be kind

[bunnymajo]

Time to fill out that OC questionnaire but for Thistle this time!

He'll be in the @sonic-oc-showdown so be sure to give him a vote!

Name: Thistle the Tenrec

Species: Highland Streaked Tenrec

Home: Central City

✨How did you come up with the OC’s name?

Since he’s inspired by Amy I wanted to pick another prickly flower name. Thistle flowers can have a lot of negative connotations in flower language just as much as positive ones (aggressiveness, unwanted intrusion). If roses are known for being noble and lovely, thistles are more wild but pesky, they’re also hard to let go if you end up stuck by one. The image of thistle flower suited him the more I thought about it.

🌼  - How old are they? (Or approximate age range)

Same age as Surge.

🌺- Do they have any love interest(s)?

Currently Surge and only Surge. He’s had previous partners but they usually don’t last very long. Current record is 1 month.

(The only tragic thing about Thistle is that he's not trying to be the worst boyfriend ever. He really wants to do good but he's too self-centered and stupid to realize that he's the problem)

🍕  - What is their favorite food?

Key Lime Pie, he likes anything tart but sweet.

💼  - What do they do for a living?

Works part time at a flower shop in central city, he’s actually quite popular with customers. 

🎹  - Do they have any hobbies?

Flower arrangement and astrology charting. Loves reading romance novels and watching old classic movies even if he gets the meaning of them completely wrong. He’s good at baking and also spends a lot of time online on social media. He’s a jack of all trades and always ready to learn something new to get closer with people in his life. He’s here for you. What more could you want from a guy :)

🎯  -What do they do best?

Anything that’s considered traditionally feminine Thistle excels at. Baking, shopping, event planning, crushing your enemies. But even with all of that he’s incredibly good at finding information. Does his new crush have a favorite band? Well Thistle just doxxed every band member and knows the rest of their schedule for the next 3 months.

🥊  -What do they love to do? What do they hate to do?

Thistle likes doing anything that will get him lots of compliments and attention, especially if it’s something he already finds fun. He’s the type to get really wrapped up in tedious side project so probably mapping out his and Surge’s life together via astrology 

Hates doing something that doesn’t serve him in some way, like doing volunteer work for strangers. He also isn’t much of an adventuring type unless it’s to chase Surge down, he’d rather not though, he’d rather keep her tied down close to him and they can live a cozy domestic life.

Running around beating up robots getting sweaty and gross and for what? just to protect the masses? Awful, blech, Sonic can have that. 

❤️  - What is one of your OC’s best memories?

One time he and Surge accidentally shared a soda, therefore doing the incredibly scandalous “indirect kiss”. She vaporized the soda can to destroy the evidence and then punched him in the gut when he told her. He passed out for about two days.

✂️   - What is one of your OC’s worst memories?

His first relationship was an online one where the other person ended up blocking him and then publicly warned other people about his creepy behavior.

Thistle made one of those “am I the asshole?” posts about their relationship and everyone in the forum went “yeah, you were totally the asshole.”

Thistle deleted all his accounts and started over. He learned nothing. “It’s the forum that was wrong, they were all just jealous.”

🧊  - Is their current design the first one?

There’s a few initial sketches I did to get the overall idea going and there’s a few minor tweaks but he’s basically the same design as when I started.

🍀  - What originally inspired the OC?

It was a bumblekast question asking about what a glitch Amy would be like and I liked the answer so much I wanted to develop it into a real character. 

I really like aggressively-in-love characters like this in media actually, something about them being not shy at all about the person they’re in love with leads to a lot of funny or interesting situations, also since Surge is my favorite sonic character at the moment it’s fun thinking about how she would react to someone like this too. It’s a win-win situation for me lol.

🌂  - What genre do they belong in?

The villain in a shoujo romance manga

💚  - What is your OC’s gender identity and sexuality?

Identifies as male, Pan, he/him/they pronouns

🙌  - How many siblings does your OC have?

Zero. Probably for the best because he’s terrible with children.

🍎  - What is the OC’s relationship w/their parents like?

He’s an absolute mama’s boy when she’s around. (It should be noted that Thistle doesn’t really have a tragic backstory or bad childhood. He really is just like that for some reason.)

🧠  - What do you like most about the OC?

Thistle can be a lot of things I like about male characters (a goober in love, not afraid to appear “feminine”, a polite good boy, twisted priorities) and also be the worst person I’ve ever wanted to write thoughts for. He’s a very fun punching bag.

✏️  - How often do you draw/write about the OC?

Probably too much haha, I don’t usually write a lot of actual terrible people so he’s a refreshingly fun rom-com villain.

💎  - Do you ever see yourself killing off the OC?

It’s funnier if he stays alive imo. If Surge ever changes her ways in canon or something drastic happens to her he might lose interest in her and move on to his next victim, that’s about as close as I’d ever get to “killing him”. It would have to be a very drastic personality change though.

💀  - Does your OC have any phobias?

Whatever the fear of being unloved is. 

To him, being loved by someone is the ultimate goal. “I can love so easily, why is it so hard for someone to stay in love with me? I must not be loving hard enough, I need to love someone who craves love just as much as I do. Yes, then it would be the ultimate romance”  - is basically the rationalization here.

🍩  -Who is your OC’s arch-nemesis or rival?

I mean probably Amy, not just for Surge’s sake, Amy will fight anyone she finds being a selfish creep in the name of love.

In Thistle's mind anyone who even smiles in Surge's direction is a rival. She's spoken for, who do they think they are??

🎓  - How long have you had the OC?

A little over a year!

🍥  - What age were you when you created the OC?

33

#hey hey it's that time again #thistle the tenrec #my ocs #sonic ocs

[jadeacereigen]

i also always felt like the fandom depicting reigen's childhood as abusive and neglectful never really quite fit. i know that most of it is probably just projection, and it's something i really understand because i've done it before with other characters.

i feel like there's a difference between giving a character trauma that makes sense when taking their canon self into account and giving a character trauma for other unrelated reasons, like comfort or even for fun, to be able to explore the scenarios that would come with it. both are very valid. let the people do what they want, y'know?

but something i feel like people tend to gloss over sometimes is that parents can fuck up when raising you and still not be outright shitty evil people. they can judge you on your career choices and still love you. your friends can make an off the cuff comment that ends up sticking with you in a bad way without realizing, people can suck at showing they care about you while still caring about you, they can be imperfect just as much as you are. it's their first time on this earth too. and it doesn't excuse the times they may have hurt you or made you feel bad about yourself, but it's up to you if you wanna keep them in your life. everyone can change, but that's also up to them.

it gives reigen an added charm [or should i say humanity?], to know that he is a flawed person and that it stems from the things that happened when he was younger, and the people that were in his life, and to know that things don't need to be catastrophic for them to affect and/or change you, whether good or bad. it's a good thing to remember i think. to know that there's so many greys between the white and black. that he has layers. his experiences are very valid.

anywho. sorry for the long ramble i just had to get this out there hehe.

ask game time!!!! 25, 9 and 22

Oh my god no don't apologize you're so right. I agree 100% so I'm gonna answer with my own long ramble.

(Discussions of child abuse below, though nothing that's not present in MP100 canon.)

Yes, it almost feels like people want to dismiss all flawed parenting and strained relationships between parent and child as abuse. There's certainly something very wrong with Reigen and his parents' relationship but I'm gonna be honest, I don't understand how people can find redemption in Toichiro who literally beat up his own son but then at the same time demonize Reigen's parents for the crime of disapproving his life as a CONMAN.

Yes, Reigen actually helps his clients and refuses to take money for things he cannot fix, but he's an incredibly special case and his parents are like most people who have no clue that the supernatural is even real. I personally think IRL psychics are full of shit and prey on the naive and emotionally vulnerable. If I had a kid who quit their normal job and spent all their savings to become a psychic I would not be happy with them! I would hope I wouldn't be as cold and that they wouldn't live in fear of my messages to them but I would definitely be encouraging them to stop that shit and get a "real job". To think that his parents should support his choices in life when he's pretending to be a psychic with no additional context is wild to me. (Also, I can't find the translation anymore but Reigen says in the fanbook that his mom thinks he's being tricked into doing his current job.) Again, they could go about this in a much better way but this disapproval does not inherently point to abuse.

(Sorry this rant got very long so everything else is below the cut.)

I think the biggest thing that points to Reigen's parents not being as awful as they are in fan content is that even after Reigen gets publicly exposed for being a con artist, his mom does tell him to learn his lesson from this but she also takes the time to prepare him an apology, tells him that he should come home (instead of telling him he's not welcome home/disowning him) and emphasizes that she's on his side. Maybe you could consider that the bare minimum of a decent parent but this to me just doesn't feel like she's the hateful abusive mother so often depicted. She could be warmer about it but she's obviously super concerned and wants Reigen to know she cares about him regardless of his actions.

(As for his dad, all we know is that he and Reigen don't talk to each other at all and that he thinks Reigen is unemployed. This relationship is definitely worse than Reigen and his mom's but there's little to go off of in terms of if his dad is a terrible parent or not. His mom seems to think he's worried about Reigen and that would definitely not surprise me.)

In terms of how Reigen feels about his parents, in the fanbook he acknowledges that there have been misunderstandings from both sides and that he'd like to talk things out with them and visit them more often. That's such a real thing lots of people can relate to and I'd love to see that get explored! I want to see Reigen patch things up with his parents! Maybe I'll write out my stupid fic idea for it idk.

I also don't want to stereotype but I am from an East Asian family myself and grew up surrounded by others so I feel like it's safe for me to say that Reigen's parents really remind me of your typical older generation of Asian parents. (Reigen was born in 1984 so his parents would definitely be of the boomer ilk, potentially even the Silent Generation if they had him on the older side.) Reigen also says in the fanbook that his parents are very serious people. Oftentimes with that older generation they just don't really show their care the way you'd normally see it. There may never be any "I love yous" but they'll cut you a plate of fruit without you asking or remember the show you liked 10 years ago and assume you're still into it...

Of course, parental norms in a culture don't justify hurtful parenting. (I mean just watch Everything Everywhere All At Once if you want to see the pain of having a disapproving Asian parent despite knowing they love you and just want what they think is best for you.) His mom fussing over his job and his lack of a girlfriend may be a super "Asian parent" thing, but it definitely hurts Reigen's feelings and she should cut that out. So yeah, Reigen's parents could do a lot better in terms of making Reigen feel supported and loved regardless if they approve of his life choices or not, but Reigen wants to patch things up with them for a reason and I'm hopeful that they can all reach a better understanding with each other.

One thing I also wish the anime showed was that Reigen's mom talks to him on the phone after Separation Arc! We see that in this omake:

Reigen definitely didn't tell his parents his phone number or his home address if his mom had to resort to emailing his business address just to talk to him. But I like to think that after Separation Arc he started letting his mom into his life a bit more...

God this was such a long rant, I'm sorry. One final thing before I get to your questions is that if we really need abusive parents to hate, Teru's non-present parents are ripe for the picking... Just saying.

(ask game)

I'm assuming you mean Reigen for all of these btw

25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now?

Gosh I initially thought he was just a silly goofy character who could be annoying and pathetic at times, but I enjoyed his presence on-screen. Then he got deeper in the Season 1 finale and showed just how much he truly cared about Mob... That part definitely got me shook. He only got better and better from there and now he's one of my favorite characters in the story.

9. Could you be roommates with this character?

Jesus christ uh I definitely don't think he'd be a bad roommate and we'd probably get along just fine but I also think I'd annoy the shit out of him. I'm not the best at keeping my space neat and clean. Also the thought of meeting Reigen in person is actually terrifying... Reigen should never exist outside the world of fiction because his pure chaos would be too much for reality.

22. If you're a fic reader, what's something you like in fics when it comes to ths character? Something you don't like?

Hmm I answered what I don't like last time, but I do like fics that explore his relationship with Mob or Serizawa. I also like seeing him confront more of his personal issues and grow as a person even if he gets a little hurt in the process-

#jade speaks #ask #reigen arataka #hoo boy

[youngroyals-hc]

Wille gets a call from the royal court at stupid o'clock in the morning, which he promptly ignores, but the 5th time they call back he groans and realises they're not going to go away. He begrudgingly answers the call, slipping on tracksuit pants and a hoodie and blowing a kiss to Simon who watches his boyfriend go regretfully.

A few hours later and he still hasn't returned; Simon is sitting at breakfast making small talk with the Forest Ridge boys but continually glancing up at the door whenever anyone walked in, hoping it would be him. 10 minutes before breakfast closes he decides that the prince won't be coming, so he gets up and makes him a sandwich and heads to class.

Wille arrives at class 20 minutes late looking cranky and tired. He slips into his seat next to his boyfriend and drops his head to Simon's shoulder for the briefest moment before getting his books out and staring blank-eyed at the teacher. Simon reaches out and puts his hand on Wille's thigh, rubbing lightly with his thumb to comfort his boyfriend. Wille's grimace turns into a tiny smile as he traces the lengths of Simon's fingers with his own under the desk.

A few minutes later the teacher instructs them to get into small discussion groups and find somewhere to work. Wille turns and looks at Felice and Fredrika, gesturing with his head as he stands up, holding Simon's hand for just a moment and giving it a gentle tug. The four of them head towards the library and sit down at the desks. Simon takes the opportunity to reach into his bag and place the sandwich on the table in front of Wille, quickly kissing his cheek and smoothing back his (rapidly growing) hair behind his ear. Wille looks for a second like he is about to cry, before quietly whispering "Tack, Simme" and gently unwrapping the green paper.

As the four friends sit and discuss the structure of the Riksdag, Wille nibbles on his food, and his mood slowly starts to rise. He still sits quietly for the most part (years of being told not to share his political opinions is not an easy habit to break), but he nods along to what Simon says and gives him encouraging smiles, especially when Fredrika says something misguided and Simon tries to hold in his annoyance as he explains his point of view.

The class ends and the boys gather up their belongings and walk down the corridors of Hillerska.

"So what did they want this time?" Simon says gently.

"They're still trying to convince me to do Military service like Erik did. I just can't Simon, I can't imagine spending 12 months learning how to hurt other people, even if it is just for show. Why can't they just let me take alternative service and let me actually do something good instead?" Wille's voice rises in panic as he speaks, and Simon pulls him aside and into a nook in the hallway.

"Wille, they can't make you do anything. If you object publicly, what could they do about it?"

"Make my life more hell than it already is" Wille replies miserably.

"Maybe... Or maybe, you could put a spin on this. Think about it. Showing alternative service as a valid option to those who view it just as an excuse. We could do some really public acts during it, invite the press. Surely the court will see that as a positive impact on your image?" Simon says, taking his boyfriend's hand with his while circling his other over Wille's shoulder and chest to calm him.

"I couldn't ask you to do that Simon, I know how much you hate the press." Wille says sadly, but less dejectedly than before.

"You're not asking me, I'm offering älskling. Plus, it gets me out of the conversation too; I'm certain they were warming up to that."

Wille huffs out a breath and leans in closer to Simon.

"Will you ask them, mi amor? Next time they call, be super positive and tell them all the things you will do and why it's a good idea. I'm sure you can win them round."

"What would I do without you, my Simon?" Wille says, finally circling his arms around his boyfriend's waist and hugging him tightly.

"Well, for a start, not eat breakfast I suppose" Simon teases back, and it earns a laugh from Wille.

"Come on Wille, military service can wait but I don't think Mr Englund can" Simon says, breaking away and leading Wille back into the hall as the other boy groans and starts spewing complaints about their teacher instead.

#young royals #yr s3 #wilmon #prince wilhelm #simon eriksson #yr #wilhelm x simon #wille young royals #felice young royals #fredrika young royals #i mean i thought this was going to be a short one #and then the words just kept coming lol

[tatatatatara]

The special investigators when they were in CCG academy

Kuroiwa: the silent guy. Seems hard to understand at first but actually very reliable. People respect him for not even flinch at injuries and always carry people to the infirmary

Shinohara: the funny guy who always makes dirty jokes. Once sneaked adult magazine and alcohol in the class, it did not end well. The teachers think he's a troublemaker but the students love him. When he was not running around making troubles he would explain the lessons to anyone who came to him because he is patient and good at explanation and

Mougan: Sometimes refuse to go inside some places because "there's a malevolent spirit here". People begged him to do psychic stuffs like contacting someone who died and called him a liar when he refused. A true party goer, if there was a party you would see Mougan there. The lecturers asked him many times to not scream while firing weapons

Aura: the popular girl. She hold the record of "getting the most confession in one day" and "getting the most confession from both genders". She was so pretty some people suggested her to be in S2 squad or become a lecturer so there's less chance to be injured. She never speaks to them again. She has a friendly rivalry with Mado Kasuka and people loved seeing them compete against each other. When not competing they would rant about how CCG treats women, with Kiyoko swore that she would never get married and Kasuka said she would only marry someone in this line of work and fully respects her will.

Ui: "what's this rich pretty boy doing here?" "He will get killed the first day on battlefield" "I heard his family donated a large sum of money for CCG" Ui's academic life is full of rumors and doubt, which made him really upset at first. Until he learned that he could do better than most of those people lol. Got mistaked for a girl easily, refused to change his iconic bowl cut

Houji: the secret troublemaker. Unlike Shinohara who did everything publicly to gain attention from his fellow classmates, Houji took pride in messing things up without anyone notice because no one thought it was his handy work. He stayed in the dormitory of the academy and never returned home during holidays. People like him, he didn't have any friend.

Marude: he was in a biker gang and he was super proud of it. Confused about why he prefers looking at boys to girls. Talked a lot during lessons but he can answer every question perfectly. He was very good at shooting but not as much for heavy weapons due to his physical, which made him kinda jealous/mad at the buff, strong guys

Arima: Marude tried to make him go to the academy for one day. He was late and missed the first two periods and didn't know what to do so he just stand outside the class until people led him in. People surrounded him during lunchtime to ask if the rumors about him were true and caused a scene in the cafeteria. He was too good for the practical lessons but too far behind for the theory lessons (like "why should we calculate the RC regeneration rate? We just need to kill them fast"). He dropped out after 2 days.

#tokyo ghoul #houji kousuke #shinohara tokyo ghoul #mougan tanakamaru #kuroiwa iwao #aura kiyoko #arima kishou

[blorbocedes]

ok, so i got into f1 through dts in the past few years, and then stumbled across the brocedes rabbit hole recently. before that i didn't really know/like nico at all, because everyone made out like he was awful and obsessed with lewis. but i've just been watching the 2016 season, and not only is nico actually really nice (especially when he keeps being booed by crowds for literally no reason) but i have to say that i was shocked by how unreliable both mercedes cars were in that season. like, people make it out as though lewis' car was breaking down all the time and nico's was perfect, but in almost every race where lewis had car issues, so did nico. even watching the sky sports coverage (where they do talk almost non-stop about lewis and are definitely biased towards him), the number of times that they interview niki or toto going 'oh it was a perfect race for nico but car issues for lewis' and toto or niki say that actually both cars had issues is insane. also, people keep saying that nico would deliberately speak foreign languages in the cooldown room to exclude lewis (which im obviously not discounting), but in almost all of the cooldown rooms that they've shown for this season, it's just really awkward and quiet as they don't talk to each other, or anyone at all really. i feel like nico has just been done so dirty by everyone

come here anon let me kiss you with tongue

i went through this exact journey of discovery too where I was like yeahhhh everyone hates this guy! boo 🍅🍅🍅 so I went looking deeper into why (so I can be an #informed hater) and then I was like HUH.... he's not the manipulative evil obsessed with lewis can't get over their past relationship dude he's portrayed in fanon or exacerbated by sky news. in fact he was well liked by the grid!!! he invited others on Air Rosberg so they could all go travel together. and don't get me started on The Narratives of it all. my man was getting booed at Silverstone or for beating lewis, and he was saying thank you to the fans... the tifosi booed him for winning Monza and he turned that around and made them sing with him!!! (and then kravitz called it embarrassing 😶)

the British sky coverage bias is SO real, and not do get me started on the crashes which are all framed as "Nico got envious and rammed into Lewis" and not the amount of times Lewis didn't leave enough space, or he was the one who caused it....... but I digress. the W-06s were kind of like the 2022 Ferraris where they were insanely fast but notoriously unreliable. fucking hell when Nico won the championship -- EVERYONE including his own team of Toto and Niki were talking about whether Lewis lost due to DNFs, and it took sebastian vettel to be like. hey. can we talk about Nico's deserved win tho?

lewis was asked if he thought the better man won and he said he didn't agree with that, and then when he retired was like "oh I'm not surprised, it's the first time he's won anything in 20 years." 🥴🥴🥴

every time someone learns more about nico over what's regurgitated about him they're always Huh... he's just some well meaning cringe dude... and not an evil mastermind 🤥 I do not discount that they've both hurt each other in ways we're not aware of, but everything that's publicly available means that's not our stance to take (hate a guy on Behalf of lewis cause he won't say his name)

now I don't blame fans -- how would you know about something that happened like 7 years ago now? and Lewis is very skilled at the narratives around him, he had a team that despite letting both drivers race was clearly behind him; and everything since DTS, fanon has been reinforcing the same narrative.

ultimately, nico won 2016 and lewis won the narrative.

sorry this answer got so long!!! i have mental problems!!! happy to recruit you in our large number of 6 nicologists if you now swing that way. 💕

#nico rosberg #the villainizing nico thesis (condensed) #i wish he was as evil as fandom makes him out to be. instead he's just a guy very enthusiastic about electric cars #cringe (affectionate) #blorbocedes ask #nicology

[least-carpet]

hello!! 👀 (for the au ask game)?

Hello!! This is so extremely belated, I'm very sorry.

One AU I will never write is one I've outlined loosely in its entirety (so maybe I should just post the outline?) and it's the AU where Jin Ling is a cis girl. This is one of my earliest attempts to answer the question "what would actually make Jiang Cheng happy?" and it involved the conclusion of "Jin Ling living in Lotus Pier and inheriting without the sect being absorbed into the Jin." And I felt like I could make it happen for girl!Jin Ling!

Because the Jin Sect especially sucks, Jin Ling being a girl removes her from the line of succession. She's still given to Jiang Cheng to care for, and like canon Jin Ling, she splits time between both sects with the understanding that she still technically belongs to the Jin, despite them being unwilling to make her sect heir. After Jin Guangshan dies, Jin Guangyao and Jiang Cheng come to an unofficial agreement that she will marry a Jiang disciple of suitably high cultivation and rank and inherit the sect that way.

Jin Rusong, the only available male heir who's not Mo Xuanyu, is watched like a hawk and doesn't get murdered. (I am agnostic re: whether Jin Guangyao had him killed or not. Either way, needing a direct heir and there being more of a reason to expect Rusong to be at risk are both elements that could change the outcome there.) He's a very sweet kid, and much, much smarter than he looks, but he is spoiled to pieces, including by Jin Ling. That's her cute baby cousin! Of course he can have everything he wants!

Qin Su, having her son to protect, does not commit suicide despite finding out about the incest (although she ain't doing too good). The incest is also not revealed publicly. Unfortunately, an Evil Jin Elder—Jin Chan's grandfather—finds out about it somehow.

When Jin Ling returns to the Jin Sect to protect Jin Rusong and investigate Jin Guangyao's secret room, she gains access to—among other things—a treasure trove of blackmail material about the Jin elders.

The Evil Jin Elder, not wanting to be blackmailed or publicly dragged up on charges, blackmails Qin Su into using Jin Ling to fulfill an old written offer of marriage from the Lan sect. This solves a number of different problems for him: no more secret sect investigation, weakens Jin Rusong's faction, reaffirms now-shaky relationship with the Lan. So many birds with one stone! Qin Su is not about this but is also very, very desperate to remain in her position in order to protect Jin Rusong.

Jin Ling wakes up, bound hand and foot, in a carriage to the Lan sect, without her bow, Suihua, or Fairy. (Despite being all tied up, she still resists strenuously with her teeth. "Why does she even need that dog," says one of Evil Jin Elder's henchmen bitterly, as they haul her from carriage to palanquin.) Once there, she learns that the offer specifies a member of the inner family, but not who; and that a certain faction of elders is proposing that she be married to Lan Xichen, i.e. her uncle's secret boyfriend who killed him.

Jin Ling has never gone along quietly with anything she didn't like in her entire life. Her escape involves Lan Qiren, Lan Jingyi, Wei Wuxian, and Li'l Apple on a boat.

Story 1 is the story of how Jin Ling becomes the (still unmarried) heir to the Jiang sect, and it's pre-lingyi. Story 2 involves her eventual marriage, since, as Jiang Sect heir, Jin Ling needs to find a husband. She proposes (like the great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan) that any potential husband has to beat her in a contest that she chooses. Then she has to frantically brainstorm a contest of martial prowess that Lan Jingyi can beat her at. (Wrestling. It's wrestling. This is 100% because Lan Jingyi sucks at so many things and not an excuse for her to get wrestled to the ground by the goofy Lan boy with the very nice arms, Jin Rusong, how dare you insinuate things of that nature—)

#lowkey incorporating some CQL canon here because I need Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian to be separate for plot purposes #and for Wei Wuxian to wander by on his donkey at an opportune moment #jin ling #jiang cheng #jin rusong #qin su #lan jingyi #lingyi #mdzs + #au ask game #ask game #asks #least-carpet thoughts

[flowwochair]

Sorry if you have received this question before (and no need to answer publicly or even at all if you don't feel like it; that's my usual disclaimer 😊).

So I know you're a big Bessières-Murat shipper, that's why I hope you may be able to help me out. I've read several times (in English publications, as far as I can remember) that Murat and Bessières indeed were close friends. Have you come across anything that supports this assumption? Because I've been looking and so far I've come up with nothing except Bessières being a witness ("cousin") at Murat's wedding. Which is far from unusual for Bessie. The list of correspondence in the French Archives only seems to have official military documents they exchanged - but no less than 22 letters "of predominantly private nature" (sic!) Bessières received from Eugène de Beauharnais. And considering Murat and Eugène were not exactly best friends...

If you have more examples of private relations between Murat and Bessières, I would love to learn about them!

Thank you in advance! 💝

AAAAA I SAW THIS ASK THIS MORNING BUT FORGOT TO ANSWER I AM SO SORRY!!! I know that Murat and Bessières met when they were in school (College of Saint-Michel at Cahors) then went on to serve in the same guard (Constitutional Guard). It would seem to me that Murat initiated the friendship, although I have seen someone people say that it was Bessières so on that I am uncertain, but Murat seems to have been the one usually dragging Bessières around with him. One of the biggest factors contributing to this sort of historical blurriness regarding their relationship is the fact Bessières had a whole LOT of his personal letters burnt by his own command shortly before he died, likely including a lot of his correspondence with Murat. Regarding his friendship with Eugène, given Murat's nature and attitude, I feel like if that truly made him uncomfortable/paranoid he would have dropped Bessières immediately and/or taken a passive-aggressive or straight up hostile attitude with him which he does not seem to have taken from what I know; this could either mean that maybe he didn't view this friendship as a threat or he cared too much about Bessières to drop him (which is the cute option that I prefer bgdhjhdfjdf). I know a couple of rumour-style stories of Murat begging Bessières to drop out with him, or Murat convincing Bessières to sneak out with him at night when they were in school but these are just stories from somewhat unreliable sources regardless of how much I'd love to believe them TwT. I mainly ship them because I love their dynamic, especially stemming back from when they met where Bessières was the perfect golden boy and Murat was the unpredictable chaotic little fuzzball. I also love their relationship stemming back so far to the point they made such a genuine connection, when they met again in Italy Murat seemed to still hold the same affection for Bessières. I also have never read about Bessières resenting Murat on any personal level, even after his betrayal, if anything Bessières seemed to become even more miserable after Napoleon essentially blacklisted Murat, but this might be my biased reading of it since there were a lot of other factors making Bessières miserable at that time (600k of debt, post-Russian campaign, lots of comrade deaths, etc.). I hope some of this info helped, some of it is listed in their wikis actually! I have a messy scrambled time with my sources so if I find deeper ones I'll lyk TwT. TLDR; i am the crazy bessimu person i love bessimu so much bcuz theyre adorable childhood friends who seemed to never stop caring about each other.

#napoleonic era #napoleons marshals #joachim murat #jean baptiste bessières #bessimu #rhodo answers

[amerricanartwork]

9. and 20. please.

Also love the new lil scugsona. Very fitting for you.

@scavworld's Rain World Questionnaire

Thanks for the ask! Just a quick note, that little character was actually meant to be a scug-ified version of my regular avatar, which I should probably make a ref for soon. I've always just liked the idea that it can "transform" into a different creature to match whatever fandom I'm dealing with, so I thought I'd portray it as a slugcat in this case!

Anyway though, onto the actual questions...

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

9. What are your opinions on Five Pebbles (character)?

Ohhh, now that's a very interesting matter! I really like characters like him because they're so fascinating to me! For now I will disregard the fantastical element of him being a massive supercomputer, because even though in-and-of-itself I think that's such a unique concept even in fiction, especially after I realized that Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon really are the core of not just the "story" of Rain World but even the in-game environment itself, I imagine I'll have another chance to touch up on this so I'll save my longer thoughts on that for later.

That being said, I'll start by saying I love thinking about characters from a psychological perspective, trying to figure out why they are the way they are, why they do what they do, what they really want vs. what they think they want, how they really perceive themselves vs. how they present themselves publicly, etc. Characters like Five Pebbles are always an especially interesting choice for this kind of pondering, because, as flawed as they may be, so much of the situation around them also contributed to their downfall that I refuse to let everyone else off the hook too. And since I also don't believe anyone is inherently a "bad" person, it's really fun to ponder just how these characters go from being alright people to doing such terrible things and meeting such tragic ends.

To put it shortly, Five Pebbles (and other characters like him) is in my interpretation a great example of karma in the more real-life meaning, and the "you attract more of what you think about the most" idea. Five Pebbles always seemed to feel trapped by and at arms with his surroundings, from the great opposition to his very existence from the True Anointed Citadel, to him literally being physically stuck to Looks to the Moon, to the fear of opposition he must have had as a Sliverist, to him being stuck dealing with the rot, and finally with his collapse, left as a tiny fraction of himself buried in the cold, lifeless remains of his superstructure, with truly no way out on his own. Because he was so focused on escaping the perceived confines around him, all he did, albeit unknowingly, was end up finding more nets to get trapped in.

And again, while I think everyone around him did contribute to his awful end in some way, stories like these are still pretty sad to me because, in the end, I think these characters themselves need to learn to change their thinking, yet all the harshness they face can so easily lead them to create a vicious cycle. Five Pebbles isn't the first character I've enjoyed strongly whose story seemed to play out this way, and as sad as it is, it's also very intriguing.

And besides, it opens up plenty of potential for redemption arc AU stories—!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

20. What is something you think the game could improve on?

The short answer: incentive.

The long answer: Let me start off by saying Rain World, to me, is fascinating largely as more of an art project than a normal video game. It's amazing how a relatively simple concept of a small animal in an urban environment they can't understand morphed into something so vast and extensive, combining nature with technology, science with religion, sci-fi with fantasy, and dunking it all in a super unique aesthetic that fuses urban street style with fancy ancient artwork, it's amazing!

BUT so much of this is lost to players because the game does, in my opinion, a pretty bad job of conveying it all. It's very confusing , especially to new players, and the only means of discovering the greater context of the story, besides just hearing it from other players/fans, is if not downright frustrating at least very tedious. And that's just getting the story itself. I think most people who have played this game haven't even made it that far, because the gameplay alone is so difficult the first time playing that if you aren't captivated by the mystery factor of the environment (or like me and also stubbornly dedicated to getting the bragging rights of having beat such a difficult game), you're too busy just trying to not die every other cycle to bother really exploring and ferrying the pearls to Moon, much less making sense of what you uncover.

I think the blank stare of the slugcats looking up at Five Pebbles perfectly encapsulates what I'm getting at here. You've got this absolutely fascinating story about a mechanical god who flew too close to the sun in a desperate attempt to escape the confines of his life, meanwhile the little slugcat is just all "...'kay", because what does this little animal care about the crazy religious hubris of some long-gone existence-hating people and their sad crumbling calculator robots when all it wants its is to just find more food and not get eaten again?

For a bit of devil's advocate, I will say that I think the difficulty of just playing the game and then figuring out its story, first of all is pretty "realistic" from the perspective of simulating a real-life ecosystem and having an animal discover complex lore in a way that they'd be physically capable of, but secondly has led the Rain World fandom to be really tight-knit compared to other fandoms I've seen. It seems like everyone I've come across is at least in the process of playing through all the campaigns, if not having already completed them and established some level of their own interpretation of the story, because they are all genuinely interested in the game, its characters, world, story, and themes enough to persevere through all the struggles of gameplay and lore confusion to enjoy it. However, it's also the same thing that makes this fandom rather small, which is also fine by me; I think there's lots of value in quality niche content!

With all that said though, I can't deny that I think this game isn't very good at getting players geuninely interested in all it has to offer. For evidence, consider how few players have even met Five Pebbles, who is perhaps the most important character in the entire game story-wise (Steam achievements has the "The Journey" Achievement at 12.0% of players as of posting this). Even from my experiences, I didn't even know what "Sliverist" actually meant until a couple weeks ago, and I've been playing this game and involved in the fandom for months at this point!

So yeah. To sumarize, in my opinion, Rain World is a fascinating and very inspiring art project, but most of what it has to offer is lost to most players because it's terrible at giving you a reason to care about it all. Thus, the main thing I think it could improve upon is giving players a reason to care about its worldbuilding and story enough to continue playing.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Well, that was long, but pretty fun! I hope these answers suffice! Keep the questions coming!

#rain world #asks: scavworld's rain world questionnaire #iterator #five pebbles #rw fp #quetzalli's thoughts #quetzalli answers #inbox

[anonymouspuzzler]

I MIGHT BE A BIT LATE BUT I MUST ALSO HAVE ANSWERS /nf

For the ask game!! Questions 1, 5, 21, 35 (for da entire Trio™) !! And Question A for you :3c

combining these for ease of answerin'! thank you All for Question's... (some of these i answered before but I went and dug up the answers to combine/add/etc! readmore for length also)

1. What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

Very Very Little for all of them. Davey fares the best, but only barely, and only because if you have him sit still with nothing to do he'll just fully doze off. Minnie's the next best, though she gets fidgety and annoyed very quickly, and meanwhile Buck I think will Actually have a breakdown and/or panic attack if you leave him sitting still with nothing to do for any significant amount of time.

2. How easy is it for your character to laugh?

Minnie and Buck are both extremely guarded with their emotions (laughter included) and, publicly, are more prone to their Practiced Performative Villain Laughs than anything actually genuine. Of the two Minnie is much tougher to crack when it comes to genuinely laughing; Buck at least will loosen up for Davey Specifically (who can get him to crack up fairly consistently).

5. How easy is it to earn their mistrust?

Extremely, extremely easy for all three, though it manifests in very different ways. Between "She Is 13 and thus Thinks She Knows Better Than Everyone" and her general upbringing, Minnie tends to default to distrusting everyone around her, and it's very difficult to convince her otherwise (in part because she's not self-aware enough to recognize how distrusting she is or how much that kind of behavior ultimately harms her). Buck, similarly, has lived the kind of life where vulnerability is Extremely dangerous for him, and defaults to distrusting people as a rule (Davey being the major hard-won exception to the rule). Davey's mistrust is subtler because he's a generally amicable and sociable guy, but if you look close you'll realize he really doesn't give up any kind of personal or vulnerable information, and while he mostly tries to give people the benefit of the doubt, if you do anything to give him significant reason to feel unsafe with you he will NOT let that go easily.

11. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

Minnie's a stubborn thing who's the exact age to be most Well I Know Everything am Basically A Grownup Actually, so she usually pretends she understands and attempts to brute force her way through. results of this approach may vary wildly.

14. What animal do they fear most?

she doesn't really fear Any, specifically because she knows a lot about animals! like, I think she would have a healthy caution-slash-respect for Large Creatures What Which Can Kill You, but nothing she's particularly afraid of. Probably the closest thing would be the Bioengineered Monster Hybrids of side character Animal, since those are very much Not natural animals she's learned about, and thus she can't really make educated guesses about their behavior.

19. What is their favorite number?

I don't know if she would have one! I don't think she'd think too hard about that kind of thing. she'd probably call you a nerd if you asked her this because she's a little shit

21. Why do they get up in the morning? 

I think all three would answer something along the lines of "because I have to". Like, what's the alternative? Not getting up? (I think Buck and Davey definitely use each other, and little by little Minnie, as motivation on this front, Davey especially - he gets up because he's got a family to take care of, y'know?) Minnie's also excited to learn the Villain Lifestyle, especially early on, so that keeps her getting up every morning too.

32. Do they have a go-to story in conversation? Or a joke? 

I don't think any of them do, for exact opposite reasons - Buck and Minnie are both Extremely socially inept and don't like sharing a lot about themselves in conversation, so they don't have a good go-to, meanwhile Davey is a conversationalist so he likes to vary things up based on the audience more. (He's also deceptively private about his life, so also not a lot to share there that makes for a funny casual convo story.)

35. How do they treat the things their friends come to them excited about? Are they supportive? 

It varies wildly depending on the thing and the friend. Buck and Minnie are both very under-socialized and very socially inept as a result, and Minnie in particular is kind of a little shithead, so I think if someone was talking about something they're excited about but Buck and/or Minnie weren't, they'd be kind of blunt about it, like, hey, I don't care about that actually. (Buck's at least slightly less actively malicious about it than Minnie, and has gotten better about it with age - though mostly with Davey, who, like. he's in love with that man. Davey could talk about Basically Anything and Buck would be down.) Davey, on the other hand, LOVES to hear people talk about things they love, especially people he cares about - listening to Buck ramble on about cars for hours on end is like his Favorite Activity - so he's generally VERY engaged and supportive in such scenarios.

A. Why are you excited about this character?

I Just Think They're Neat :) (but seriously, I think their dynamics with each other and the world around them are really interesting and fun to explore, and I'm a sucker for Family Of Choice and Becoming Better Thanks To Your Bonds With People Who Love You shit, so.)

#anonymous puzzler answers #anonymous puzzler originals #villain coded comic #laurzzz #bjrdy00 #bubblymiilk #long post

[singsweetmelodies]

With all respect and love, I absolutely love your fake dating au. If I had to choose an update between that and the kissing fic (or anything else really) I would always choose the fake dating au. There is so much potential! Please tell me you plan on updating and finishing it? If you’re not, can you at least share with us the fic plans so we can have some closure about it? Would you consider letting another author adopt the gif to finish it if you won’t? It really is a Piarles must-read. I hope I can learn the ending!

but see, anon, you DON'T get to choose. only i get to choose, and i have chosen to update the 2023 kisses fic. 😌

... you know, i debated for a long time if i would even bother answering this ask, or just delete it right off the bat. because in my opinion, this is an incredibly rude, insensitive and entitled thing to send to any writer. it was ONLY A FEW DAYS AGO that i talked publicly about how important it is to remember that writers are humans, too, not machines, and to please treat us like humans. and yet here i am again.

i'm going to answer this one more time, and i'm going to answer it in detail, and then in future if i get any asks in this vein, they WILL be deleted without any interaction. you guys are making me consider turning off anon asks entirely, which i really don't want to do, because the other half of my anons are SO very lovely!! but i also have had enough of waking up to rudeness and blatant entitlement in my inbox.

so. why exactly is it that i think this ask is so entitled and insensitive? didn't the anon say "with all respect and love" and compliment my fic at the start of it?

yes. yes, they did. but the thing is, saying "with all respect and love" doesn't mean you can then proceed to be rude to me and it's all fine. that's like me saying "with all due love and respect, i have decided to delete the fic entirely." the fact that i prefaced it with "love and respect" does not make what i did later alright. (although in this case, it WOULD be alright regardless of whether i prefaced it with "love and respect" or not, since it's MY fic and i can do what i want with it.) this anon, on the other hand - this anon has no right to demand anything of me. i am a fanfic author and i do this for free. it is not my job. i have no obligation to do any of this. which means that nobody out there, really, has any right to demand performance from me. (lmao can you tell i have been deep in the law textbooks lately) but the point stands! i don't owe you anything at all.

yes, you can ask me nicely, and i can choose to reply if i want. (hell, if you ask me nicely, i'd probably LOVE to write things for you!!) but you don't get to DEMAND updates from me. and "tell me you plan on updating and finishing // can you at least share with us the fic plans so we can have some closure" is not asking nicely. that's demanding. YES, anon gave me a compliment and they said "with all respect and love." but they're STILL demanding performance from me, and that's not okay. the anon is making it sound like i owe you "closure" (even though this is a work of fiction, not a break-up you're going through, and i think the word "closure" is a VERY dramatic one to use.)

once again (because apparently i LITERALLY CANNOT emphasise it enough) i do not actually owe you anything. i, katie singsweetmelodies, owe you NOTHING. i do not owe you updates or fic plans or whatever the case may be. i might choose to share them with you, yes, but on my own schedule, since they're MY creations made in MY free time.

right. got that off my chest. gosh. NOW! one other thing that i want to make very, very clear before i end this off - i do not give my permission for anyone to "adopt" my work or to write a continuation of it. i am the one who's put in the hours to write all the setup we have so far. i'm not letting someone else benefit off that. if you so badly want a fake dating fic with the conclusion already ready, then you are more than welcome to put in the hours and create it from scratch yourself. but for someone else to take over my work and take it in a direction i probably won't even like? no. absolutely not. permission emphatically NOT granted.

anon: i'm sorry if you feel that this reply is unnecessarily harsh. but this could not have come at a worse time for me, because i really did talk about the importance of treating writers like people just here, just a day or two ago. needless to say, it really struck a very bad chord with me to get an ask like this right after i took pains to explain, publicly, why these kinds of asks are not okay.

i really am happy that you are enjoying the fake dating fic. and i do appreciate that you tried to tell me that, even though the way you did it was completely out of line. i hope that this answer won't... preclude you from enjoying the fic in the future? or something? i'm not sure, to be honest. the whole thing has left rather a bad taste in my mouth.

but one thing i will say to anyone reading this: i know it's been a long time, but just bear with me. i mean it when i say that there will be an update eventually. no, i can't tell you when. i'm not even going to try and give you a schedule, because like i said, i'm a human and not a writing machine. but the fake dating fic is very close to my heart, and i want to see it finished someday just as much as you do. ❤️

(P.S. - if anyone was very worried reading the first part of this answer: NO, i am not actually going to delete the fake dating fic!!! i was just using a very dramatic example, lmao. the fake dating fic is one of my favourite things i've written, and despite the slight... mess... about its updates recently, that's not going to change anytime soon. 💙)

#asks & answers #anon #WARNING: long rant beneath the cut #the bit above the cut is just me being petty because this ask REALLY rubbed me the wrong way #'if i had to choose' WELL GEE ANON HERE'S A NEWSFLASH. you DON'T get to choose actually #one of my friends said 'you should update like a hundred things before the fake dating au now. just to show them' #and that did make me laugh #will i do it? probably not #not even i am THAT petty #(then again.....................) #nah but all jokes aside: this really is NOT on; guys. it's not on. #i don't want to turn off anon asks; but if i get another one like this? i really might #much as i enjoy having the occasional rage-rant on tumblr... i'd really rather have a good time; you know? #so please PLEASE let's keep it nice and respectful of the fact that i'm a human and not a writing machine #thank you EVER SO #katie rants