#Rif responds

[readerinsertfanfiction]

Hello hello!! I was wondering if the full length Kyubei fanfic is anywhere besides Tumblr? I would love to be able to download it onto my laptop so I could read it offline... I love your work on it so much. Thank you!! 💛🌻✨

Heya Kisara! Thank you for the continued (Kyubei) love! Looking back at it I kinda wanna rewrite it, but I'm glad it makes others happy, still!

You can find the full collection of Kyubei's route on my Ao3 account (same username) but you will need to be logged in to gain access to it. I screened my account off public view because of spambots a while back. If you don't have an account yet I can try to generate a link for you? Otherwise I can also share the gdocs in which I wrote the route, just shoot me a DM!

Sorry for the hassle!

#rif responds

[neversetyoufree]

This is a random question, but which characters in vnc would be watching Barbie or Oppenheimer in the Barbenhiemer trend? Let's just imagine it's a Modern AU so that we can include deceased characters in Canon.

Sorry anon but I am not the person to make this meme for you lmao

#*insert a joke about joyless communists here* #I'm one of those boring people that has stopped finding barbenheimer funny #got too widespread. and the large-scale joyful non-critical riffing on a movie that's so blasé about atrocities is pretty off-putting to me #for reference: see japanese barbie/warner bros having to make public apologies for the american wings of their compananies #bc barbie US has been endorsing/responding to fans' barbenheimer content #oppenheimer's handling of the bombs' affect on japan (and on the people in the us affected by tests) is pretty offensively lacking #also generally I'm gonna respond to suggestions for jokey posts a lot less than meta questions lmao #just fair warning #about andie #ask #anon

[vidavalor]

(Non-Frozen) Peas. A Good Omens Sex Meta Thing Side Dish

Shorter little vegetable-themed side dish to Crepes, which you do not have to have read first. All by way of Aziraphale's dirty French in S2 about how he has a craving for Crowley's Eden.

*slips into GO fandom quietly* *whispers*

Do you all realize that another translation of Aziraphale's "Ou est la plume de la jardiniere de ma tante?" is...

"Where is the feathered garden box of my queen?"

I probably don't need to tell you that both 'garden' and 'box' are sexual euphemisms for lady parts and, to make matters funnier, remind you of this scene earlier in the season, in which a literal box became related to... well, it's somewhat open to interpretation so let's just call it a gasp-worthy, part-related situation. :)

"Where is the feathered garden box of my queen?" is Aziraphale saying that it's been a minute since he worshipped Lady Crowley and he misses her.

This would account for Aziraphale's impish "but you understood me" and flirty little smile and wiggles. He's so cute about it that Nina comes out of her coffee shop to try to hear what they're talking about that's made the bookseller look so alive and has Snarky Sunglasses all flustered.

Crowley's "Only because, for two hundred and fifty years, you've been wittering on about the plume of your imaginary 'tante.'" = "Only because, ever since you took French lessons the human way, I've had to listen to you euphemistically referring to my occasional wild flower garden and calling me your queen in two different languages and I love to hate how much I absolutely love it."

We know that Crowley did understand Aziraphale and not just because he also speaks French but because his traditional choices in translating it back to Aziraphale in protest-- "you don't have an aunt, she doesn't have a gardener and he doesn't have a... pen"-- is intentionally a bit incorrect because Aziraphale used the feminine French word for 'gardener'-- la jardiniere-- in his sentence. As a result, Crowley is protesting that "the gardener" is a he right now, Aziraphale, and he doesn't have a-- pause of 'wait, this isn't going to work if I translate 'plume' as 'feathers'-- euphemistic or literal-- as I have both so I'll go with the other thing the word means instead'--... pen.

(Which winds up even funnier since a pen is phallic and euphemistic, in this sense, for currently having a penis, which is actually Crowley's current state of effort in that moment. Hold those thoughts until we get to turnips and inkwells down below lol.)

A 'plume' in French is a pen, a feather, a quill, and a cloud of rising smoke. In Good Omens, it's also used in the smoke-like definition by Michael to describe the pink plume of magical energy that came from the bookshop when Crowley and Aziraphale miracled together. Crowley responded with 'pen'-- which is a riff on the fact that Aziraphale is riffing on "la plume de ma tante", a cliched line said derogatorily to mean 'those sentences that you learn when you learn a new language that you'd never say in real life.' Crowley used 'aunt', 'gardener' and 'pen' as the translation in reference to the cliche Aziraphale was referencing. Aziraphale, though, adjusted the line, as we saw-- adding words to it to make it a stealth, flirty request-- and Crowley did hear the innuendo. Crowley correctly heard Aziraphale using 'plume' in the 'feather' sense (hilariously, considering that they have actual feathers in their angel/demon forms lol), with the 'feather'-context 'plume' being euphemistic for Crowley keeping it real down below.

(It could be worse, Crowley. He could be in a blasphemous mood and referring to it as "The Burning Bush"... which I feel like you'd actually find hilarious but anyway, moving on...)

In English, appropriated from the French, a 'jardiniere' is a flower box/garden planter. 'Tante' is French for 'aunt' but it's also a word meaning both 'queen'/'pansy' in the queer sense of the words (a 'pansy' also being a kind of flower, of course, adding to the Eden motif that "*the* Southern Pansy" Aziraphale has going on for his gardener partner here) but 'tante' is also one of the words that just means 'queen' as well, in the 'regal' sense of the word. It might not be the first word Aziraphale would use if he were, instead, speaking a sentence in French about, say, Queen Camilla-- but it's maybe a more appropriate one for flirting with his gender-everything partner by telling him in French that it's been too long since he spent some quality time with his queen's jardiniere.

'A la jardiniere' is also a French cooking term. It translates as "in the manner of the gardener's wife" (Gabriel: "Whatever that is."). It is obviously an archaic-sounding term when it comes to gender but, for the purposes of metaphor here, it's actually a little useful. The phrase is born out of the idea that the chef would be male, straight and married and that his wife would be keeping their kitchen garden-- which, even though she was probably running it, is credited to him, because the patriarchy-- from which fresh vegetables could easily be picked and used in a dish. As such, it's a lot more fun that Aziraphale is using the French here because the actual gardener doing the garden work in the definition of 'jardiniere' is specifically female by the term's description, so it's another way to reference Crowley's femininity.

There's also, of course, that "in the manner of the gardener's wife" is about as porny a definition for a phrase that can possibly be translated from one language to another lol and so adds to the idea of 'jardiniere' being sexually euphemistic. Atop that, there's the fact that the word itself relates food to romance and sex by referring to the chef and the gardener as married in its definition. The second half of this scene is the Nina & Crowley "partners" conversation. In a season that has Crowley and Aziraphale unable to deal with words like 'couple' and 'partners', if only Maggie and Nina understood that maybe they don't know how to use traditional words but damned if Aziraphale isn't already on covertly calling Crowley his spouse when flirting with him.

While 'a la jardiniere' is a cooking term, 'la jardiniere/jardiniere' is also a French food term. It is a side dish or a garnish of mixed vegetables, usually spring garden vegetables. So, carrots, green beans, potatoes (Crowley: "You say 'potato', I say 'excellent'" lol), turnips (Aziraphale can turn garden variety sex into inkwells!-- haha 'garden' pun, get it? please send help-- and inkwells are the things one dips a quill pen into.... and, now, we're back to the 'pen' translation of 'la plume...').

The most signature vegetables of jardiniere, though, are peas.

As Crowley would tell Shax and anyone who will listen, literal ducks-the-water-fowl need not get their actual jardiniere defrosted.

Aziraphale-- the more discerning duck-- likes his hot, though.

~~~

If you have not already and would like to read more meta like this:

#ineffable husbands #good omens #crowley #aziraphale #good omens 2 #good omens meta #aziracrow #crowley x aziraphale #good omens s2 #genderfluid crowley

[firein-thesky]

|| zhongli x afab!reader || E/18+ || smut/a touch of angst/comfort || wc: 7k || ao3 ||

minors and ageless blogs do not interact, 18+ only

You have never been patient enough for worship. Sometimes, he thinks you always expect to be scorned or feared or hated. As a god of hunger, you are not beloved or worshiped by many, if any at all.

You’ve never known the sort of worship that he gives you. 

✧ meet fruit collab masterlist ✧

a/n: this is apart of @willowser 's house server summer collab, meet fruit!! i took plums as my prompt!! this really got away from me and i had a lot of fun with this dynamic and i WILL be writing more of godly wife!reader and zhongli. i have a whole backstory. a huge massive fic i shouldn't work on but will fjdkslfdk i also need to give a special thanks to @itoshisoup , @lorelune , and @petrichorium for helping me with brainstorming and riffing earlier! also finding some godly names for the reader! in particular, mao came up with the name Tanai Zhenjun, which i will leave a note at the end about!! i hope you enjoy this sweet taste!! thank you for reading and let me know your thoughts <333

tags: afab!reader referred to as wife, and has several godly titles that mortals have called her, etc., a complicated relationship between zhongli and reader, mentions of past fights/canon typical violence, erotic fruit eating and feeding, finger sucking, biting, oral sex (f!recieving), some over stimulation, praise, maybe a little sex pollen because the reader causes feelings of hunger/lust/etc. but its consensual and zhongli can withstand it if he wanted, scratching, unhealthy godly dynamics, let me know if i missed anything!

In the shadows of his home, he would know you anywhere. 

(He would know you even if you didn’t appear to him like this, fully formed, and in the visage of mortals. He’d know you in the thunder and the wolves’ howl. He’d know you in autumn’s bitter wind and the fox’s cry. Across all of time, he’d know you.) 

You slip, serpentine, slow and with the easy grace of a predator into the last falling light of the sun; bronzed, honeyed, and appearing before him like you did decades ago, perhaps a hundred of years ago. 

Has it been so long already? 

The sight of you–perhaps simply you, yourself, spark an ache in his chest. Fierce. Hunger pains. 

And after all these years, he welcomes it, savors the pit in his stomach like a sweet fruit. 

You, his god of hunger. 

You, his divine wife. 

He tips his head back, leaning further into the chair at his deep, mahogany desk, as if he could fix his eyes to better see you. As if he could take in more of you, somehow, greedily, hungirly. 

“Hello, my Morax.” You hum and the sun catches in your eye as you step into his life again, after so long without. 

“Hello, my love.” He responds, as if it could’ve just been yesterday.

As if you are his wife and you’ve come home to greet him. As if he is your husband and he’s been working all day without you. 

“It’s been a long time,” he says then, “you’ve been away a long time.” 

You meander closer, on the other side of his desk, peering at the scrolls and papers there. His hands are stained in ink. He catches the downturn of your lips, the small quirking of them in displeasure. Such mortal things, he can hear your voice, the little hiss you get when you dislike something. 

But then your eyes roam to the bowl of fruit, now untouched, that had been brought to him in hopes of eating;

Slices of plum, gold and orange and tender on the inside, their moon-dark skins still curved to them. One still has the pit attached to it, carefully nestled within its flesh. 

Plums always remind him of you. 

(In truth, anything with pits, with bones, with something that can be picked clean and left behind reminds him of you.) 

In an instant, your fingers, nimble–adorned with his jewels, the jewels of his earth, snag a slice.

He watches as you sink your teeth into it, juice bursting, caught on your lip. 

You chew only a moment, swallow slowly as you watch him. 

“I thought I wasn’t allowed around Liyue Harbor,” you begin, “I thought I wasn’t allowed around your precious mortals.” 

His voice, low and soft, rumbles in affirmation. “Yes, that is true.” 

“And yet you speak to me like I’m welcome.” You hold the last bite of your slice to your lips, speaking against it, “like I should’ve visited sooner.” 

You bear down into the fruit again. 

“You’ve come to pick a fight?” He asks, “I can feel you’re trying to stir trouble.” 

And it's true; your ability as a god of hunger, to spark it in others. To sharpen and change it from starvation to bloodlust to desire to despair to greed–to any form of hunger. 

You caused whole towns to be decimated, driven mad with just the residuals of you, the feeling of you too near, like a wraith haunting their doorway. You turned tides in the Archon war for him and against him. You have always been one of the biggest threats to Liyue’s peace—to the world. Perhaps even beyond.

You perch on the corner of his desk prettily. 

“I can’t visit my husband?” You purr.

He quirks a brow, “you only ever call me husband when you’re trying to kill me.”

Your grin is a wild slip of excitement, a fissure of heat in the clash of your gazes.

“I am trying to kill you,” you agree, but perhaps you have always been trying to kill him. The battles between you two carved the very land of Liyue and at the end of them, no matter what had transpired, he was still your husband. And you, his wife. “But I don’t feel like fighting tonight.” 

You pluck another slice of plum from the bowl and bring it to your mouth. He watches your lips part to take the fruit in again. 

He thinks of replacing your hand with his own. He thinks of the sticky sweet taste he would find if he licked into your mouth, he thinks of being between your teeth again like the little piece of plum.  

Something inside of him yawns open. 

You’re toying with him. 

“You’re in rare form, then.” he hums and does not deny your draw. He has long since stopped trying not to be swept up in you–he realized it was inevitable at some point. You would always pull at parts of him none of the world had, and like a puppeteer did you play with those strings. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” 

You gaze down at him, almost lovingly, if he didn’t know better. 

Then you shift slightly, adjust yourself. 

And the first touch he has of you in decades, perhaps a century, is just a brushing of your calf against his forearm from where you sit atop his desk. Your bare skin beneath the pooling silks of your skirts. 

Heat rips through him like a tearing wound. 

His gaze flicks up to yours. 

“Did you know I was in Liyue?” You ask. 

“I always know the moment you enter my land again.” 

I always know the moment you come home. 

You shift your leg again, this time, a steadier press to his arm. 

He can’t help himself–he shifts his arm, opens his palm up against the curve of your bare calf to fully feel you, to hold you, in any minute way you might let him. Rough calluses scrape up  against the soft skin of your leg, the silk of your dress pooling around his arm, cool and like spun moonlight. 

You let him hold you like this, curl against the contour of you. His hand moves, dips down almost to your ankle, and back up to the bend of your knee. 

“You missed me,” you accuse, your voice a teasing lilt. 

Perhaps it’s you and the heady rush you cast on a room, on him, “yes,” he agrees honestly, “I always do.” 

“So sentimental in your old age. You’ve spent too long around these mortals.” You tell him, looking away so all you give him is the profile of your lovely face. The upward tilt of your chin, the haughty way you look down your nose. 

“Did you miss me?” He asks and he isn’t looking for you to placate him, but his hand is broad and inching up the back of your thigh. He pulls at you, urges you to the edge of the desk, where his other hand fits around the curve of your waist. 

“Don’t get greedy,” you chastise gently, but you still go with the pull of his hold. 

You slip into his lap like you were always meant to be there, fitting to him the way the moon fits into the sky, or the land against the sea. It’s an ancient feeling, bone deep, soul-cut. 

You let your arms fall around his neck loosely and to have you again in his embrace, after so long, does in fact, make him feel greedy. 

“I can feel it,” he says instead, perhaps just to spite you a little–to move another piece in this eternal chess game with you. “I can feel how you ache. I can feel the way you missed me.” 

“I always feel like that,” you snip, deft fingers slipping the band in his hair out so that it all falls free, loose and flowing over his shoulders in a wave of inky black. “I am always hungry like that.” 

“No,” he says and his voice is low like a wolf’s growling, a tiger’s purr, “I know your hunger. And I know this hunger of yours. You missed me.” 

“If you’re looking for a heartfelt confession, you won’t find it in me.” You tell him, proud little god that you’ve always been, “perhaps you’ll find it in your precious mortals.” 

Your voice takes on an edge, just shy of a sneer.

He laughs, a low rumble from his chest, amused, and pleased.

“Oh, that jealousy of yours. I missed that, too.” 

“Don’t get full of yourself,” you hiss like an asp and now, he worries you’ll bring your claws out. Your eyes glint in the last rays of light, like a bolt of lightning, like a spark of flame in a cold night.

He reaches up to touch your face, thumb sweeping over the arc of your jaw bone in a possessive hold. He forces you to look at him. “Come now, I thought you said you weren’t in the mood for a fight.”

“Then don’t test me.” You snap.

He fights back another fond smile in order to not test you further than he already has. 

He leans closer, his nose almost nudging against yours, “if you’re not here to fight. What are you here for?” 

“To eat through all your land until it is barren again.” You murmur and he knows it is just to pester him. Your fingers are winding in his long, silky hair and your eyes have gone half-lidded, so he knows you are not nearly as waspish as you’re pretending to be.

“If I could satiate your hunger, I would.” He murmurs darkly, lips brushing against yours as you carefully hold yourself back, a dog on a strained leash. At your best, you have always been a caged beast, pacing and desperate for escape. At your worst, you have been nothing short of desolation, teeth upon the earth in a vicious grasp, shaking hard, tearing it to shreds. Your bite never compared to your bark. You’d threaten destruction and deliver devastation; even you, surprised with your own vitriol, your own capability for demolition. 

He threatened to muzzle you once, long ago. 

You rear back slightly to look at him, “no, you wouldn’t. What would you have me be? Content?” 

He laughs softly again, low and warm, terribly fond of you despite it all, “yes,” he says very frankly, and then, “soothed, for once in your life.” 

“I won’t ever be soothed while you walk this earth.” You tell him and he cannot tell if you mean it with vengeance or with love. Are you being romantic? Or threatening him? Sometimes, he felt that your violence was supposed to be more like a kiss, and your kiss the type of violence that leaves him ruined for decades after. 

“And you would be after?” He asks, “I don’t think you’d know what to do if you finally managed to kill me in a meaningful capacity. You’d be bored.” 

You move to pull away from him with a snarl but he fastens his hold onto you tighter to get you to stay, he touches your face again, coaxing. “I only tease you.” 

“I said don’t test me.” You respond, but again, there is nothing nearly so vicious in you tonight. 

No, he knows the hunger in you tonight is a soft creature, a warbling, tender one. He’ll be kind to it, he will feed it and tend to it, even if he knows it will only grow larger still. Like caring for a tiger cub, only for it to grow into all those teeth and muscles, to bite the hand that fed it. 

“Forgive me,” he rumbles, and this time, he angles your head so that he can skim the strong line of his nose against your jaw, “let me make it up to you.” 

“You will not be able to,” you say indignantly and his own smile now feels sharper with the challenge, with your throat so near. He settles himself into a burning kiss against your pulse. Inside of him, something catches and sparks. Your hands curl around the muscles of his shoulders. 

“I know,” he coos, low and soft, almost sympathetic. “Then at least indulge the hunger you’ve caused in me.” 

This, in the least, you settle into. 

He pulls away barely to sit back, to look at you fully in all of your glory a moment. 

You look back at him, perhaps taking him in as well. 

The smoldering turns into a flame. 

The decades of years unspool inside of him and give way to a racing mind, images of what he wants, how he wants you. 

It is always like this, he thinks, eternally, desiring you, and never getting enough.

He thinks he must know how you feel. 

And then he gives into one of several of his desires that are rearing their large, horned heads inside of him. The beasts of his desire are all chained to you, he thinks. He reaches for the bowl of fruit. 

Perhaps it's your turn to be amused as he brings a slice of plum to your lips. You must know how he was looking at you earlier, you must know his desires if you are the one to stoke them. 

Still, you accept the fruit easily, minding your teeth as his finger slips against your lips. Sticky and soft and warm. You draw his finger into your mouth briefly, closing around it. He can feel the edges of your teeth as he pulls it out. 

The moment you swallow around the piece, he surges up to kiss you. 

To finally kiss you. 

He wishes he could call it something of a greeting or reunion, but it is too desperate and too vicious for that. Your teeth click together, coming up against one another, like an old key coming up against a lock. 

He tastes the plum in your mouth, sweet and a little tart, and can’t help the groan that rumbles out of him. 

Your hands disappear into his hair, tangle in the strands so that he can feel the press of your nails against his scalp. He feels the way you arch into the slide of his hands along your torso, bending to them, as if he is a sculptor. It pulls you closer, opens your hips wider in his lap in a way that makes heat rip through him.

When he pulls away, you’re already hazy-eyed, heady with the quick-burn of this sort of hunger, this lust. 

It pulls at him like the tide on the shore to drag him under. 

This time, when he places his lips to your throat, he sinks into a bite at the tender flesh there. 

Sometimes, he wishes he’d treat you more tenderly. As if that might be all you ever needed; more gentleness, and less teeth at your throat. 

But you arch and from your mouth spills your own moan finally, fingers tightening in his hair as if to hold him there. He feels your hips twitch forward, into him, an aborted rock of them, perhaps unknowingly or subconscious.

He wishes you inspired patience in him. 

(Usually, he claims to have a great deal. Unfortunately, he cannot claim the same with you in his arms again. Forgive me, he thinks again, but I haven’t seen you in nearly a century.) 

He stands suddenly with you still wrapped around his waist, hands fit beneath your thighs to lift you and place you on the broad expanse of his desk. Papers get pushed aside, some topple onto the floor in a fluttering mess. You laugh when the bowl of plums rattle precariously, but his mouth covers yours again, and he swallows the sound eagerly. 

He kisses you hard again, hitching your hips up to fit snugly to his, fitting his broad hands over the curves of your waist. You respond in kind, though, and twine your leg around his waist to pull him closer, arch your back to press your chest up to his.

When he pulls away this time, he takes you in, splayed out beneath him. 

“I did miss you,” he gets out roughly.

“Then show me,” you respond, stretching out beneath him, as if to tempt him. 

His hands move over the silk of your dress, bunching parts of it, tangling it. He decides in an instant that he doesn’t actually wish to deal with it, so he sets his hands on the bust and simply pulls. It tears like paper beneath him. And again, you laugh, amused with him now, with what you do to him.

“So impatient.” 

“It’s been a long time, my love.” 

And this time when he kisses you, perhaps you give into him more, feed what he wants. You mewl into his mouth, arch against him, drag your nails down his covered back. 

“Touch me,” you get out, demanding, a little fussy. 

“So impatient.” He mocks dryly. 

For his trouble, you pull harshly on the hair at the nape of his neck, baring his throat to you. 

His broad palm roams up the expanse of your side, your bare stomach, and to your chest. He cups your breast, thumb brushing against the peak in a way that makes you hum and squirm beneath him eagerly. 

You bury your face in his now exposed neck, nudge your nose there, which turns into your warm, open mouth. 

For a moment, surprisingly gentle, until he feels the quick flash of pain from your teeth. He rolls your nipple between thumb and forefinger with a little more pressure than necessary, just to hear the little noise of pain you make. 

He drops his face to the crux of your chest, lips dragging along the skin there, above your beating heart. And for all your bite and bark, you still offer yourself up to him for the taking. You still draw your hands over his shoulders, pushing at the clothes still on him. He doesn’t indulge you, but draws lower, hair spilling over your chest as his mouth opens against your breast. 

He nips and marks, sets his teeth against the tender flesh and sucks a bruise into you. 

“I miss your sharp teeth,” you admit.

He huffs, breath fanning against your skin. He raises his eyes, molten gold, to meet your own, “there’s no pleasing you.” 

And then he captures the bud of your breast in his mouth and at least manages to pull another sound from you, meandering, growing in your own desire. You squirm beneath him again but something inside of him (old and draconic) blinks its eyes open and he seizes your waist to still you the way a predator subdues their prey, sharply, and with a slow rolling of muscle, a flex of their strength. A serpent squeezing down around a mouse. A tiger bearing down on the deer. 

You don’t go easily, though. 

And the moment you feel his resistance, you squirm and push harder, straining. Arching and impatient. 

He nips, he fights back the more base urge to growl, and readjusts his hold on you.

“Stop squirming,” he commands.

“Stop teasing,” you reply, stubborn, and disobedient. 

“Let me enjoy you.” Zhongli responds, watching his own hand sweep over your breast, cover it, and toy with you. 

“Enjoy me later.” You snip, fastening your legs tighter to his waist, hitching him closer. 

And he feels a head rush of your ability pour through him, the tightening of your desire and lust, of your hunger spilling from you. It’s purposeful. He feels the dull thud of his heart kick upwards, the warmth that simmers beneath his skin. He blinks hard with it, but does not succumb. 

“You’re so insolent.” He finally gets out, just shy of a growl, “now hold still for me.” 

His lips skim the top of your stomach as he lowers himself to his knees in front of you. 

You sit up onto your elbows, eyeing him, inching your hips to the edge of the desk eagerly. 

“I’ve always liked you best on your knees, Morax.” 

He sinks his teeth into your inner thigh in a more ruthless bite, forcing your legs open even as they threaten to close with the sudden jolt of pain. Hard enough that you hiss through your teeth, twitching towards or away from him, he can’t tell. 

(Images of days long past flash hotly in his mind, in another form, with those sharper teeth you’d said you missed.) 

He feels your hunger burst open like a ripe fruit, like the plum between your teeth. 

He soothes the bite with a slow, lingering pass of his tongue. 

His eyes flick upwards towards you. 

You look a little shaken finally, eyes glassy, teeth stuck in your bottom lip. 

He drags you closer, pulls you flush so that your hips are almost off the edge. You fall back with the movement and he doesn’t give you a moment. He isn’t feeling generous or very kind anymore. 

His mouth opens against you in a crush of heat, eager, perhaps impatient himself. 

A groan, low, from the back of his throat, works out of him at the first taste of you. 

Again, you try to squirm, and something ancient and vicious in him squeezes hard enough on your waist that if you were a mortal, he might sincerely hurt you. He doesn’t care if you’re trying to squirm closer or away, he realizes, he doesn’t care if it hurts a little, as long as he can have you like this. Open. His. 

Ah, he realizes, perhaps he isn’t ignoring your sway as well as he thought he was. 

He delves between soft folds, already slick, but he’ll make it worse still. 

(Perhaps, at one point, he had ideas of being a gentleman of some kind with you. Perhaps, at some point, he thought he would carefully work you open with mouth and soft tongue. He’d be loving and gentle with you. But you’ve always done something horrible to him, something he can’t tame, something he wishes he feared more.) 

You whine a little and the sound pools straight into his own desire for you. 

He fits himself closer, keeps your legs wider apart with his shoulders. 

“Morax,” you gasp and it’s with more heat and desperation than he is anticipating.

His eyes, heavy and gold, flick up towards your face, looking up at you beneath the dark fan of his lashes. 

Oh, you’re closer than he thought, he realizes. 

He doesn’t slow or stop or lessen himself, groans a little, and fits himself tighter to you. He digs his fingers into your skin and keeps you close. 

To his surprise, that is all it takes. 

Your gasp is strangled, perhaps a little surprised, as you arch off the desk in a bow-curve, poised to snap.

You fall to pieces as a cry loosens from your throat. 

He feels you pulse against his tongue and without thinking, he growls a little, a pleased rumble, and doesn’t stop.

He tastes you, savors it, and doesn’t let you hide or pull away from him.

Your hips twist and he follows the movement, wrestling you still, so that he can still enjoy you. 

You’re out of breath, hiccuping a little, trying to squirm away from him but there’s nowhere to go.

He won’t let you go.

He pulls away to rest his head on your inner thigh a moment, “so quick.” He teases, “you must’ve been pent up for it to be that easy.” 

He thinks, I wasn’t even doing that for you yet—I was still enjoying myself. I was being greedy. Hungry in my own way, in the way that you inspire.

“I should leave you now.” You huff, picking yourself up on your elbows to gaze down at him, but your eyes are simmering.

He squeezes at your thighs, “you’re not going anywhere tonight.”

And before he can hear your protests, he dips forward again and flattens his tongue against your folds. Slow, broad licks that make you twist and twitch. 

“Morax—“ 

“I’m not finished with you yet, my love.” He says lowly, somewhere against where you’re most tender and sensitive. 

He takes his time teasing now. 

Enjoy me later, you’d said, and he doesn’t think this is what you meant. 

You have never been patient enough for teasing–for worship. Sometimes he thinks you always expect to be scorned or feared. You were always Deus Inanis, Tanai Zhenjun, and later, Rapax Regina to the people. You have many names from them, none particularly kind or cherished. You were always the ghoulish god, the bad omen, the drooling maw of a starved predator. Your myth is not a beloved one by most. 

And some dare not even speak your name at all, for fear of inviting you. 

You are not a welcome god in the home and hearth, you are not for protection or courage. You are feared and warded off. You are, at best, used as a condemnation. 

(To him you were always softened with affection, even at your worst; little god, my curse, my love, keeper of my heart.) 

You’ve never known the sort of worship he gives you. 

You struggle with it, keen sharp and broken when he gives it to you. 

Sometimes you have all-out tried to refuse him or hasten him, poured your lust and impatience into him to get your way, to sway him to your own will. He can feel it again now but it never manifests in him the way you’d like it to. You assume his desire is one of his own pleasure. But it has always been this; 

You, belly-up and vulnerable, only for him, delicate in a way the rest of the world will never know. Pleasure-drunk and hazy. Lost to what he can give you–he wants to gorge you. He wishes he could fill the empty place inside of you. 

He’s spent an eternity trying. He’ll spend an eternity more. 

He focuses his intentions, strengthens the pass of his tongue with what he wants. He wants your pleasure. He wants it again and again. 

You curse a little, an ancient word, from when the land was Archon-less and free. 

He lifts his mouth from you briefly, “you are already cursing like that? This will be a long night for you then.” 

He opens his mouth again to taste you, to suck gently, your legs twitching over his shoulders as your breath hitches. 

This time you curse him, hissing through clenched teeth.  

He laughs against you in amusement, low and dark, and smooths a broad hand over the soft plain of your tensing stomach. As if he might soothe you, or perhaps because he wants to feel all of you, have you in his palms, in his arms. Against his mouth.

The next time you fall apart, he doesn’t let up once. His eyes have gone half-lidded and burning, a flint-strike of amber. You try to fight him again, wrestle out of his hold, but he strengthens himself. He steels himself, even, to your pulling of his hair, to your fussing and snapping–all of that melts to whining, to near-crying, as he continues. 

You’re too stubborn to cry for him now–there have been only a handful of times he’s broken you down that much. 

Perhaps if he were feeling crueler, he would try. 

(These instances have always come in the wake of something worse; your largest fights, or worst transgressions where he felt the need to punish. To strip you bare. These are saved, not for his desires, but for your catharsis after all your grief.) 

But your voice has gone higher with desperation, more broken, and he is pleased with that. 

Pleased enough that when you burst on his tongue again, your nails digging into the back of his hand as he holds you, he finally rises. 

Instantly, you twine yourself around him, legs around his waist, arms pulling at the front of his clothes to drag him down into your arms. You are always more desperate for affection like this, softened by pleasure, hungry for more. 

He goes down easily for you.

 Kisses you hard and open, so that you’ll taste yourself from his mouth, the way he tasted the plum from yours. 

You groan weakly and manage to gasp when he pulls away, “please–more. I need more. Need–” 

Always need, you say, when you get like this. Never want. 

“Need you.” 

He hums, the noise lumbering from his chest in a pleased, dark sound. 

“You have me,” he soothes, even as he feels dizzy with your own desire, a headrush of desperation–of need that rushes from you to him. 

Feed me, need me, fill me, possess me, take, take, take me. Fill. Aching–so empty, I’m so empty. Please, please, it hurts– please, I need more, need, need, need–

He lets out a harsh breath. It aches, almost sharply, almost on the wrong side of pain and pleasure. 

He does not torment you any longer. He does not torment himself, either. 

With fingers far more nimble than he feels, he loosens his slacks, he pushes his clothes out of the way just enough, enough to take himself in hand and hiss through his teeth as the head of his cock touches your slick folds. 

Molten. Fluttering still with sensitivity, with desperation. 

Your hips roll, eager, trying to urge him closer, inside–

“Morax–” you cry and the sound twists something in his chest, blooms like a bruise being pressed on. 

 He presses inside you and fills you in one, deep thrust. 

You gasp sharply, you pull at him, force him to collapse over you nearly, cover you completely. You cling to him, you wrap yourself around him like a serpent, now constricting him–

(He’s never been able to tell who is the serpent and who is the mouse, anyways. Who is the tiger or the deer? Was he capturing you? Or were you always capturing him?)

You hold him so tightly, calves flexing around his back, that he can hardly pull out from you to thrust.

He groans, almost in frustration, or maybe some form of defeat. 

“Darling,” he gets out roughly, “my love. My little god.”

The old, affectionate nickname burns through you and he can feel the desire like a knife’s blade in his own stomach. You moan– a soft, warbling sound. 

He manages to move his hips, barely leaving the hot clutch of you, to push back in deeper, harder. 

“Please–” you gasp, “more–kiss me. Touch me.”

“So demanding,” he scolds, but he kisses you hard, with too much teeth and roughness, and fits his palms over the sides of your body. He takes handfuls of curves, of your waist and your breasts, rough hands bending over the lines of you the way the light of the moon bends over the hills and valleys of his land. 

His next thrust is harder, a little rougher. You turn your face into his throat after you break the kiss and your teeth sink down into him hard. 

You always draw blood. You always have to leave your mark on him, on all that you’ve touched. 

But then you draw your tongue over the wound, licking softly, perhaps in apology. Perhaps to satiate another need that winds around inside you. 

Your hand tangles in his hair again and he bites back another raw groan as he thrusts, in and out, on a slow, rough drag. You’re clinging to him, tight and so wet that it’s making his thoughts bleary and clouded. Your lust shadows any rationality; your hunger possesses him. 

“Harder,” you gasp, you beg, you plead. 

And he thinks who am I to deny you? Who am I to deny the god of my hunger? 

His hand slips over your arm, your free one clawing at his clothed back still. He knows you will mourn not getting your nails into his skin after, but he will let you satiate the need all you like later. He’ll savor the way you try to tear him apart, like he always does. 

(And sometimes, he swears, you’re just trying to tear down his skin to be closer. Deeper in him. Scratching at his ribs and his sides like you want in, in, in. A bad dog at his door. A wraith that claws at his soul.)      

As he pulls at your forearm, flattening it out against the desk beneath you to pin you beneath him, he knocks into the bowl of fruit. 

The last of the plum slices tip out onto the desk and the remaining juice at the bottom of the bowl pools in a sticky mess over the wood, some over your forearm and wrist, over his own, too. 

He thinks you move without thinking, bringing his wrist up to your lips where you lick up a stripe up into his palm, against his thumb. 

You take his thumb into your mouth with ease and he cups your cheek in a possessive hold as he lets you suckle, tongue soft and warm and gentle against the pad of it. You groan, lashes fluttering, and this seems to please some part of you. 

His thumb in your mouth, cock lodged deep inside you. 

He pushes himself deeper on his next thrust, enough that you whine a little, eyes going glassy, cheeks hollowing around his thumb. 

He can feel the spit pooling in your mouth, wet and slick, can feel the way your walls squeeze and flutter around him desperately. 

He presses on your tongue, thrust growing a little faster, but still hard, deep–a little ruthless. 

But it’s what you need–so it’s what he gives you. 

You hold his wrist, little nails digging into his skin, desperate to keep his thumb between your lips. He can feel the press of your teeth in the meat of his hand. 

He readjusts, tries to draw his thumb out barely, only for you to latch down tighter on his wrist, and slide it back into your mouth with a noise of protest. Saliva spills a little, slick and messy against your bottom lip, against his hand. 

He coos, but it’s too dark to sound reassuring, and sounds more like a rough purr, just shy of a pleased growl. 

“I won’t go anywhere,” he soothes lowly, but it sounds like less of a comfort from a husband, and more of a promise from the beast you shouldn’t have let in in the first place. It’s loving in the same way a possession is. “My little god, I have you now.” 

Your peak this time makes something inside of him roar open. He feels your inner muscles bear down on him, fluttering desperately. 

Your eyes tip behind your eyelids, hiccuped breath against his hand as it twists into a guttural sound that he feels against his palm. 

“That’s it,” he murmurs, turning your face so that he can press open mouthed kisses against your throat, suck a bruise there, turn the flesh tender, “I’ve got you. Good girl–that’s it.” 

Perhaps he draws blood when he bites you this time, too. Tastes it sharp on his tongue, the blood of a god. He lifts his head from your neck and finally draws his thumb from your mouth, spit slick as he traces your bottom lip. He pulls himself up from you to gaze down at you, slack jawed and messy, near feverish with your lust. 

His hips quicken, harder, and you reach out to splay your hand out against his tensing stomach, to push at him a little. 

But he doesn’t stop, feels you nip at his thumb, still making a mess of your lips and chin. 

Your legs are still hitched tight around him, drawing him in, keeping him close. 

He squeezes your hip with his free hand, he loses his rhythm when you draw his thumb back into your mouth, suckling softly on it. 

He groans, feels his own pleasure in a rush down his spine, a burst of heat that unfurls like a supernova. Collapses inward. Expands outwards. He buries himself inside of you, as deep as he can manage, deep enough that you make a little noise of pain maybe, but you hold him tight to you. Again, you constrict around him, dragging him back down by his clothes to slot your mouth against his as he fills you. 

It’s your turn to hum, pleased, almost purring, tightening your hold around him, locking him against you.

The kiss this time is slower, but dirtier, all tongue, open and messy. He groans into it, holding your jaw, feeling himself twitch inside of you, his own eyes fluttering with pleasure, lashes against your cheek. 

When you both pull away, you’re out of breath. Chests rising and falling against each other. 

You seem subdued now, heavy-lidded, but your lips drag to his cheek, down to the curve of his jaw. 

You roll your hips a little.

“More–” You murmur, “I want more.” 

His laugh tapers into a moan. He flexes his hips a little, heat simmering beneath his own skin. 

Your hands pull at his clothes finally, tugging at them, pulling at buttons until they snap and burst beneath your fingers, until you reveal bare skin. Instantly, your hands are on him, nails scratching into his chest gently, over his shoulders. 

(He’s going to take you to bed after this and he’ll rid you of the scraps of your clothes and the rest of his. He'll get rid of anything between you.) 

The ache in him builds again and suddenly he’s rocking into you again, deep and slow, watching the way he disappears inside of you. The mess he’s already made of you, the way he wants to make it all worse. He feels feverish himself now, a little lost to the sight– his desire suddenly feels inhuman. Monstrous. Too big for his own skin. 

You always seem to remind him of his divinity. 

“Hold me,” you demand now and as if commanded, he goes to you. 

He gets his arms around you and he tucks his face into the crook of your neck. His desire unwinds. Time unspools from him. He loses himself in the pull of you, in the undertow of desire and hunger. He tries to satiate the ache you have carved in him. The ache you always have nestled inside of you. 

You beg him of more–more pain and more pleasure and more of him–until he feels near mindless with it. Gone with it. 

Shuddering with sensitivity and feeling you tremble with it, too. 

He doesn’t regain himself until another peak has been reached and fallen from, until he realizes the hour; the moon hanging in the window of his study like a copper penny. He forces himself to slow. To lodge himself deep and go still inside of you and let his head fall to your chest.

You cradle his skull, fingers slipping into his hair, catching your breath as the haze fades for a moment. 

He picks his head up barely, shifts only so he can catch your gaze. 

“Stay for a while.” He demands now. 

 You let go of a sigh, deep, perhaps tired. 

“I thought I wasn’t allowed.” You hum softly. 

“Will you behave?” He asks and you lean down to kiss him–sweeter now. Perhaps apologizing. He accepts your affection with warmth, though. 

“You know how I get restless.” You respond, fingers tracing along the nape of his neck, one of them trailing down the bend of his jaw. 

You are softest now, like this. It’s a rare sight; one he savors, one he will stay hungry for his whole life, he thinks. 

“Yes,” he agrees, perhaps fondly, perhaps sadly. “If you could keep mortals out of it, I wouldn’t mind.” 

“Even if I tried to kill you again?” You ask, finger tracing the bow of his upper lip. 

He smiles faintly and you touch the corner of his mouth, “yes,” he agrees, “even then.” 

“Or tried to steal your Gnosis again?” 

He snorts softly, picking himself up further to hover over you, to gaze down at you with more love than you have ever known what to do with. “You can certainly try again.” 

“Perhaps I should try harder this time.” The threat is fangless this time and you are at least soothed somewhat for now. He knows it won’t last long. 

But for now, he takes advantage of it. He cups your cheek, brushes his thumb along your jaw affectionately, and for once, you nuzzle into the touch. You rub your cheek into his palm like a cat. 

A flash of your teeth. You bite down into his hand. 

He laughs softly, but pulls his hand from you, dislodges your teeth from his flesh. 

Slowly, he tries to detangle himself from you. You are reluctant, but he appeases you with promises of more, of his bedroom. Of a bath and whatever you want. 

“More plums,” you say, letting him carry you to his bedroom like a young bride, cradled in his arms. “I’ve always loved plums.” 

He smiles, “I know. They remind me of you.” 

The admittance is a tender one, one that he has held for centuries that has finally loosened from his mouth like a bird taking to flight. 

In the morning, when you have slipped from him and his bed and his life once more, all that’s left are the marks you left on him, the deep scratches and latches of your teeth on tan skin–

And the pits of plums you devoured before you left. Not one is spared and he thinks his heart never has been, either. 

Not from you, his wife, his curse, his love–not from his god of hunger. 

***

a/n part ii: thank you for reading!! here are those notes on the reader's godly names:

There are three titles the reader is referred to. Two of them are latin, similar to Rex Lapis, and the third is from @itoshisoup, and is Tanai Zhenjun, which mao explained as such: "贪爱 (tanai) is a Buddhist term that is often translated as "craving", and refers to desire for both physical and mental things. From my understanding, tanai is sometimes considered a cause of suffering (苦 or ku), but is sometimes considered closely related to suffering in other ways. Given the motif of hunger, I would name the god Tanai, and additionally give them the honorific "Zhenjun" (a title associated with Taoist gods - much like "Dijun", which is the honorific in Zhongli's Chinese title, Yanwang Dijun; however, it is a lesser title than Dijun). Tanai Zhenjun is therefore what I'd call them."

The other two are Deus Inanis and Rapax Regina, which mean "empty god" and "rapacious/ravenous queen" in Latin.

i plan to write more of this reader and use these godly names again soon &lt;3

#zhongli x reader #zhongli x you #zhongli x y/n #genshin impact x you #genshin impact x reader #genshin impact x y/n #cielo collabs! #cielo writes! #cielo's writing! #god of my hunger

[femmespoiled]

Missed Her by Ivan Coyote

ID under read more

ID - images show a piece by Ivan Coyote from their book Missed Her.

Text in image 1 reads:

"Throwing in the Towel

Sometimes you say things without really thinking. Sometimes you write things on Facebook without really thinking about the nine hundred people who will read them.

It all started with the towels. Not just any towels, mind you. These were brand new, fresh out of the laundry, white, pristine, and über-fluffy. I had just stepped out of my clawfoot bathtub in my new-to-me bathroom in my recently painted apartment and into the softest, most absorbent and slightly lemony scented towel this forty- year-old ass has ever felt. That towel wicked the moisture away from my butt like a dream. It felt better than my mother's towels. Better than a fancy hotel towel, even, mostly because it was mine and I knew for a fact mine was the first ass it had ever wicked water from.

It's the little things, right? I sat my luxurious towel-wrapped ass down at my desk in front of my computer and wrote, "My new towels are so fluffy and absorbent. I feel like a queen. A queen, I tell you." And then I hit "share."

Within minutes, the comments started to roll in. My lady friends all concurred. Some of my butch friends, well, some butch bonding time. A small debate ensued. A femme friend of mine suggested we all conceptualize fine linens as a high quality tool, used to entice fine ladies into your bathtub. We riffed some"

Text in image 2 reads:

"about stereotypes. I thought it was over.

The next day, I hung the freshly hemmed and pressed, sand-coloured velvet draperies in my living room, and stood back to appreciate how well they complemented the dark olive accent wall and the bone-white window trim. What can I say? It has pretty much been five years since I have had a stable, solo, sexy roof over my head. I am nesting. I sat at my desk and wrote: "Enjoying my new draperies like I do does not make me any less butch."

And again with the stream of comments. One of my friends responded that butches were supposed to keep thoughts like that to ourselves. Someone said that draperies could be butch as long as there were no pink bows on them. Someone else suggested that we needed a word for a butch metrosexual. This began a longer discussion on the various types of butch: soft butch, stone butch, old school, fag butch, gentlebutch, dandy.

I should say that all of this was fairly good- natured, and everyone's feathers went for the most part unruffled, at least on the page. But something about the whole discussion bugged me, and it got me to thinking about it all.

My first question was for myself. Why did I care if my butchness was called into question anyway? In my whole entire life I have never felt anything but butch, even before I knew the word. That is certainly the way the world views me (going mostly on what rednecks call me from passing truck windows) and how my lovers place me on the fuckability spectrum. So why did someone I barely knew"

Text in image 3 reads:

"calling me a girl and suggesting I needed some butch bonding time chap my tender ass so much? Perhaps it was all those soft towels making me more thin-skinned than usual? And what was up with my butch brothers and sisters? I re-read the comments. Most of the femmes who responded maintained that the word butch didn't need adjectives or qualifiers: just butch would do the trick. It was mostly butches who were uncomfortable with my love of fluffy towels and draperies, and mostly butches who felt the need to further categorize ourselves.

One of the femmes who responded posed the following: "There's also an element of internalized homophobia in all of this. Maybe it's a conceptual leap but it seems to me that the notion that a 'real' butch can't like a fluffy towel or use words coded as feminine to describe her-/him-/hir-self isn't that far from the idea that it's not okay for boys to play with dolls. Are queer masculinities (or whatever you want to call them) so fragile? Their beauty, diversity, and resilience over the generations prove otherwise."

I thought about it all some more. Thought back to being eight years old, and frozen in the girl's dressing room at the ladies' wear store on Main Street in Whitehorse. My aunt was getting married and my mom was insisting that wearing anything but a dress to the wedding would be rude and she wasn't going to tolerate any more arguments from me about how dressy my brown corduroy suit could really be with the right blouse. I was being forced to try on this yellow and grey dress. My mom and the shop lady were"

Text in the last image reads:

"looming outside the dressing room door, taking turns cajoling and threatening me to come out and show them how I looked. My guts were in my throat and all the moisture in my mouth was now collecting in my eyes. I was seriously too humiliated to open the door and come out. I was afraid of the wrath of my mother, and scared of the scorn of the saleswoman, but I was even more terrified of how vulnerable and wrong I felt in my body, in my skin, in my life in that dress. It wasn't just that I didn't want to be a girl. And it wasn't as easy as just wishing that I was a boy. It was the horrible realization that I was facing a world where there were no clothes for me because I didn't fit the world.

So I don't think that butch fear of our own femininity is all that simple to unravel. It is not just our own misogyny that makes us see anything less than manly as weak or less than. Our fear of our own inner girl is so much more complicated than that. Most of us grew up uncomfortable not only in our clothes, but in our pink bedrooms, our gender roles, our families' expectations, and even our own skins. We had to fight to find ourselves in all of that. And sometimes that makes it hard to drop all that armor and just sit back and enjoy the fucking draperies."

End ID

#bellas books #btexts #book recommendations #bellas butch/femme tag #sorry for the light mode on the images folks

[stillness-in-green]

What Helck Does Right That BNHA Is Doing Wrong

I wrote this out in a spate of frustration a while back, lost it, and then was able to recover it again, so in the interest of conservation, I figure I might as well share. It contains massive spoilers for Helck—details of its ending, its overarching plot, deep world secrets, and so on—so read at your own risk if you're one of the few people following the anime. On the other hand, very few people do seem to be watching Helck, so if you watched the first episode and then dumped it for being too goofy and comedic, this write-up will definitely give you some context for where that story goes. 

(More people should read/watch Helck.  Please read this and then go read Helck.)

(If you prefer, you can also just skim the Helck bits until you get to me complaining about BNHA’s crappy endgame.  Hit the jump, either way!)

Helck: What It Does

For my readers unfamiliar with the series (e.g. probably most of you), Helck’s elevator pitch is, “After the Hero defeats the Demon King, the demons hold a tournament to select the new Demon King.  But wait, why is there a human here?!”  It’s riffing, obviously, on the foundational JRPG story, and starts out in a high-key goofy comedy mode, which, while representative of its sense of humor, is not actually very reflective of the tonal zone it winds up occupying for most of its run.  The darkness and horror elements of the series are foreshadowed by the title character—Helck, the human who showed up to join the Demon King selection tournament—cheerily proclaiming that he hates and wants to destroy all humans.  Something is very wrong in the human lands, it seems, and the main character—Vamirio, one of the Four Heavenly Kings of the demon empire, sent to oversee the tournament—uncovering and then responding to that wrong forms the bulk of the story.

That said, it takes a good long while for Helck to reveal the true nature of its conflict.  While there are some key villainous figures that have been in play for long before that point, the ultimate truth is that the world of Helck contains a disembodied force that contacts people when they’re in their darkest, most despairing moments, providing them an “answer” for why their situations are so miserable and how to go about fixing the world that hurt them so badly, as well as power to help them do so.  The answer given by this force, called “The Will of the World,” is twisted and omnicidal, but between a degree of implied mental influence and the timing of the approach, lots of otherwise innocent, hurt people can wind up becoming the figures behind literally world-threatening dangers.

Eventually, we find out that Helck himself was approached by The Will when he was a child in a bad situation.  He wasn’t quite ready to give in yet—he had a kid brother to look out for—and so he powered past it, but it’s remained in the back of his head since that day, ever-ready to whisper its apocalyptic solutions to extreme class disparity and abuse.  This gives him a degree of empathy for the villains of the series, even as they do extremely awful stuff that he can’t otherwise forgive.

In the epilogue, a new king is crowned and we’re generally assured that things in Helck’s country are going to improve from now on.  The demons are developing magical treatment to reverse a once-thought-irreversible transformation from sentient person into mindless monster, preparing groups that will venture forth to find all the affected humans still wandering the countryside so that they can be helped.  Helck himself could easily rest on his laurels, either settling in with the human friends he had to go to extreme lengths to save or accepting his demon friends’ invitation to come live with them, the ones who fought at his side and gave him hope when he was so often on the verge of despair.

But he does neither, because he knows that The Will of the World is still out there whispering to other people in pain—it’s a force of nature that will always be out there, until someday it succeeds at finding someone it can use to overturn and restart the world.  It can never be killed, only circumvented.  However, The Will can’t act on its own, only through those that have fallen under its sway, and those people don’t start out as raving, gleefully evil maniacs! They start out as people experiencing unconscionable suffering, because people suffering to that extent are the only ones who can be convinced to believe that the answer is total annihilation.

Helck knows better than to assume that simply installing one good king in one overall-good country will be enough to save everyone in the world—or even in that one country!—from despair, and he’s intimately familiar with what that despair is like.  So, he packs up with one of his besties and they set out on a journey that will, implicitly, never really have an end.  Of course, he’ll come visit his friends and loved ones from time to time, but what he’s really dedicating himself to is finding and rescuing other people, other victims, giving them reasons to hope, reasons to believe in the world as it is now, because, as he himself experienced, that’s the only thing that can really stop someone from falling prey to The Will of the World.

Saving those victims is a practical means of preventing all the harm they would have gone on to wreak, yes, but it also means said victims don’t have to be put to the sword when they turn up at the head of an army of monsters or some shit a few decades down the line.

Helck’s answer to the problem of recurrent, inevitable suffering is thus threefold:

Improve the system at large by clearing out the corruption on top.

Dedicate active, ongoing efforts to redressing the sins of the previous system and helping its victims, even if they seem too far gone.

Proactively seek out and bring aid to problem areas before the sufferers there metastasize into world-shaking dangers.

Its characters are involved in all three of those stages—the heroic side cast does Point 1, Vamirio and her allies handle Point 2, and Helck takes up the responsibility of Point 3.  He goes out into the world to be that extra safety net when the better society he helped put in place inevitably still fails people, in places where his allies can’t reach.  To find them—the people who are in such bad situations that apocalypse looks like a reasonable solution—he’s going to have to wade, personally, into the deepest and worst mires he can find, pulling people out of that darkness one hand at a time.

As a series, then, Helck believes in systemic change while also believing that systemic change will never be sufficient on its own to prevent all suffering.  However, rather than then simply shrugging and accepting that suffering is inevitable and so the heroes will have no choice but to deal violently with the people who fell through the cracks when they inevitably return as dangerous villains, it sends its hero out to do that ground-level work of saving people.  And he himself isn’t enough either, but his actions are still meaningful, because every life he saves is both that one soul saved from darkness, and one more vector cut off that could otherwise spiral into exponential amounts of suffering and death.

BNHA: What It's Not Doing

We can see an echo of the path into darkness which turns victims into villains in BNHA, where the villains are not Born Monsters, but rather become monsters because of the circumstances of their lives.  The pain they endure, the discrimination and violence they face, leads them to their extremist reactions to try and repair—or simply destroy—a world they perceive as fundamentally hostile to them.  While there’s no overarching Will of the World manipulating them for its own ends—All For One is akin to it in how he operates, but at the end of the day, he’s still just another man, not a literal planetary anima—the end result remains the same: people forged by suffering into enemies so dangerous and resolute that they threaten the entire foundation of the world as it currently exists, as well as all those who are living in peace and happiness in the current world.

So, when faced with the prospect of enemies who are an unavoidable consequence of the endurance of the status quo (because the status quo the heroes have chosen to support is full of discrimination and repression), what exactly is BNHA proposing to do about those enemies arising in the future?  How will the heroes’ course of action regarding those enemies be different at the end of the story than it was at the beginning?  Well, so far we’ve got:

Shouji functionally telling the heteromorphs at the hospital that all they can do is endure their suffering until the people around them decide on their own to improve.

Even as she’s embraced by a Hero, Toga believing there’s no possible ending in which she can reach a world she wants to live in, and so resigning herself to finding a satisfactory death instead.

The seeming resolution of the subplot concerning the civilians lashing out at the heroes for their failure being for them to collectively agree to support heroes even more, with no explanation of what that would change for the children out of view of a hero, like Tenko was, or being victimized by a hero, like Touya.

I feel like the manga wants us to believe that the future will be better because heroes as a group, inspired by the kids of 1-A and with the corruption of the HPSC purged, are going to be more empathetic towards villains as a group going forward.  I don’t believe that, however, thanks to even the students’ (and especially Deku’s) continued willingness to completely ignore the humanity of the villains they don’t have pre-existing bonds with.  Their empathy for “their” designated villains is admirable, certainly, and a good start on the necessary change, but it’s not sufficient if it starts and ends with that highly conditional empathy.

What is going to be different on a systemic level to help people like Toga or Spinner?  What will change in society at large such that the average person on the street will become willing to help someone off-putting and potentially dangerous like Tenko or Jin?  What overhaul of professional heroism can we expect to help prevent situations like Touya’s or assuage the generational grudges behind Mr. Compress or Re-Destro?  What new oversight mechanisms will be put in place to prevent more children from being scooped up to be raised as weapons like Lady Nagant and Hawks?  What can be done to catch people like Muscular or Moonfish at a younger age and intervene before they grow up into murderers?  What better counselling programs in prison could be introduced such that someone like Ending might actually be less suicidal when their prison sentence ends than they were when it began?  What social safety nets need to be strengthened such that children like Overhaul and Geten wind up in normal, loving homes with the resources to help them sort through their issues rather than criminal organizations and cults?

After the dust settles on this endgame, what in god’s name is going to change?

Further, even if those changes are enacted, what are the main characters going to do personally for those who still slip through the cracks?  As @robotlesbianjavert wrote previously, once everything has been done as best it can for the greater good, what’s the second safety net there to catch those who can’t be saved in the greater good’s first pass?

BNHA vs. Helck's Threefold Answer

Consider again the three points Helck’s ending contained—improve the system, care for the victims that already exist, and proactively seek to prevent the creation of new victims—and contrast them to how things are going in BNHA’s end game.

1: Have the main characters improved the system?

No, not at all.  The most concrete change to the system has surely been the death of the HPSC President, but no heroes had no hand in that, much less one of the kids.  Clone Re-Destro took her out, one villain to another, so no hero had to sully their hands or risk taking on the very office that grants them their authority.  Even with her death, we have no guarantee that whoever takes her position next will be any different than she was.

All Might’s retirement shook the system, but the series is out there as I type this recanonizing All Might and his legacy as wholly beyond reproach. 

Endeavor and Hawks were exposed as, respectively, an abuser and a murderer on national TV and absolutely no official consequences befell them.

A heteromorphic mob stormed a hospital and the best a professional hero could muster was a feeble apology for not “realizing sooner,” with not a single word from anyone about being more mindful going forward.

Ujiko was removed from the web of orphanages he was maintaining, but there’s been nothing to address how he managed to get away with cultivating his “seedbeds of hatred and ferocity” right out in the open for decades, either, and so we have no real reason to believe the vulnerable children in those institutions are going to be safe from the next unscrupulous figure with ulterior motives to come along after him.

There’s been no recognition whatsoever of the role quirk counselling played in Toga’s repression, no discussion of making prisons more humane, no intention stated of making the current system even the tiniest bit less regressive via actual changes to the law and government-funded social safety nets.  The system shows no signs whatsoever of improving, least of all due to any actions on the part of the main characters.

Neither Deku nor any other student has shown the faintest inclination to push back against the reactionary violence demanded of them by the system they intend to join.  While they may act mercifully on their own time, they are wholly unwilling to actually protest against the authority that gives them their orders.

2: Are the main characters making efforts to care for the victims that already exist?

Yes and no.  This is about the only one I can give them even partial credit for, but partial credit they do still get. 

Ochaco made a world-shaking offer for Toga, one that melted away Toga’s aggression and brought her violence to a dead stop.  That’s amazing!  Shouto has managed to stop Dabi from killing himself and everyone around him against all odds, and we have every indication that he’ll keep dedicating himself to that for as long as it takes.  Deku has concretely changed the paths of Gentle Criminal, La Brava and Lady Nagant,[*] and I have little reason to believe he’ll do any less for Shigaraki, however that turns out to look.  Attempts are even being made to help the Noumu, following the reveal of Shirakumo’s lingering presence in Kurogiri.

…But that’s about where it stops.

[*] I hate absolutely everything about the way Lady N reacted to him, mind you, but what’s on the page is on the page.

Shouji never bothered to actually ask Spinner or Scarecrow what drove them to villainy, nor do we have any indication that he’s going to follow up with them now that the riot they were leading has been quelled.

Deku’s compassion begins and ends with people whose motivations he can understand; he has none to spare on those whose desires and goals are alien to him, or he attaches that compassion to stone-hearted ultimatums he has no authority to make.

Tsuyu’s got Ochaco’s back, and Iida has a line that you could interpret as being charitably disposed towards Dabi, but no one else in the class seems to be making any efforts to reach out to villains.  Shinsou might have brought Gigantomachia to a place where he could confront AFO, but he damn sure didn’t give him a choice in the matter.

Things are even worse on the professional level.  Between the flying coffin and the mass arrests, we’ve had no indication that the Pros are doing or are interested in doing the first damn thing to try and help the victims of their flawed status quo.

The first thing Hawks does when confronted with a risen Twice is scream to kill him again, for god’s sake.  That’s as clear an indication as I could possibly ask for that nothing he’s experienced has altered Hawks’s methods or his willingness to use them.

As I said above, the empathy a tiny handful of students have for their villain foils is commendable, but insufficient to serve as tidemarks indicating an improved status quo.

3: Is there any indication that the main characters will proactively seek to prevent the pain that leads to the birth of villains? 

No.  In fact, under the current system, that isn’t even possible for them.  That is simply not what professional heroism is or does.  Under the current system, heroes are definitionally reactive; they’re not there as a preventative against suffering so much as they’re a topical ointment for it once it’s already arisen.  Because the role of heroes seems on track to remain the same as it ever was, heroes can’t go into the dark places because that’s simply not their job.

Addressing bigotry and discrimination is not a hero’s job unless someone perpetuating it is using their quirk to do so.

Preventing domestic abuse is not a hero’s job even if a quirk is in use because quirk use is legal inside the home; abuse is thus a problem for police and social workers to handle, not heroes.

Dealing with corrupt systems and repressive laws is not a hero’s job because they’re enforcers for systems and laws; they can try to change them through the legal pathways available to all citizens, but they can’t bring their powers to bear without becoming villains themselves.

Heroes cannot walk into the heart of darkness of Hero Society because their job is to exist outside, in the open, in the light.  Their only function is to stop villains—people using their quirks illegally—and to help out in disaster situations.  That’s it.  That’s all they’re there to do.  And if the parameters of their jobs don’t change, that’s all they’re ever going to be able to do: try to talk a victim who’s already gone sour out of getting worse.

As it stands, if the 1-A kids are still just running around being Cool Heroes Punching Out Villains in the epilogue, they are failing to act as the second layer of aid Helck represents, but rather still only acting as their society’s last defense against those who have become twisted by pain and unaddressed need.  In effect, they will continue to be the sword that puts down a monster rather than the hand that reaches out to a victim before the monster can be born.

Right now, I have seen precious little to convince me that, ten years down the line, they’re going to be anything more than fractionally better heroes than their predecessors were—punching first, asking questions virtually never, standing around in the aftermath congratulating themselves for their victories, posing for cameras as the people they just unthinkingly pummeled get packed into police cars to be dumped into a perfunctory legal system followed by a monstrously inhuman carceral complex. 

The Impact of Timing

Is anyone thinking that it's not fair of me to compare stuff in BNHA's endgame to stuff in Helck's epilogue? Couldn't most of my complaints be handwaved in BNHA's epilogue?  I mean, I guess, yeah, but with the small problem that such a resolution would be incredibly unsatisfying.

The thing with Helck is, that series doesn’t leave those three points for the epilogue; rather, its epilogue is a natural extension of the choices its characters have been making all along.

Helck leaves his chain of command, his kingdom, even his own species, when he realizes how deep their corruption runs.  Helck’s struggle to overcome corrupt authority is the foundation the entire series rests on, from its beginning hook of, “Human hero tries to become the new Demon Lord,” to its climax of fighting against The Will of the World itself.  (Point 1: Improve the system.)

Vamirio decides upon getting to know Helck that humans, her enemies, are ultimately victims of the corrupt power manipulating them.  She shouts out loud her intention to save them, exulting in the sense of relief it gives her to clear away her uncertainty and come to that decision.  Later, she passionately declares that she will disobey orders from her Emperor himself, if those orders are to fight humans with the intent of killing them.  She’s a figure of authority amidst her own kind, but she is more than willing to go against that authority—and vocally so—if her morals tell her she must.  (Point 2: Dedicate active efforts to helping the victims of the corrupt system, even if they already seem too far gone.)

I’ve already talked about Helck’s decision to wander the earth in the series’s epilogue, and this of all points would seem most likely to be relegated to the aftermath, but no, dedication to preventing future tragedies can be found in the body of the series itself as well.  Vamirio’s peer Azudora has history with both humans and the transformations wrought by The Will of the World, and he’s been working on a cure since before the series even began.  His efforts bring hope to the series at a critical point and provide a model for Helck’s decision at the series’s end, as both men make the same choice: to devote their lives to the hope of doing something that will better the future, even if it doesn’t change things for those who have already been lost.  (Point 3: Proactively work to save today’s victims so that they don’t become tomorrow’s monsters.)

In essence, the entire run of Helck is dedicated to presenting the problem Vamirio and Helck are facing, exploring how and why they come to the decisions they do about how to solve that problem, and then forcing them, over and over, to face down their own doubt and fear, their allies’ hesitancy, and their opponents’ highly dedicated efforts to break them down and defeat them, be it through force of arms or despair.  The heroes get the ending they do because they decide on the ending they want and then they spend the rest of the series damn well fighting for it.

BNHA’s epilogue handing the kids the passel of resolutions and changes they so desperately need for their bright futures to be remotely convincing—offscreened, timeskipped victories to battles they haven’t even yet realized the need to fight!—will just cement this rant’s contention that the series and its heroes don’t have half of the clarity of purpose and intellectual integrity of Helck and its lead duo of shounen manga Determinators.

In summary, please read Helck.

Disclaimer at the bottom: I don’t want to utterly oversell Helck here.  The way it handles its classism angle is simplistic, even reductive, a bog-standard portrayal of, “All nobles are cartoonishly evil save the one (1) pure-hearted exception who just isn’t for some reason.”  Its big change to its corrupt system at the end is simply to replace a “bad king” with a “good king,” which is self-evidently not a change that’s guaranteed-effective beyond the good king’s lifespan.  Further, there’s obviously going to be a difference in realism between a story set in a medieval fantasy JRPG world and one set in a modified version of real-life, present-day Japan—BNHA does portray a much more complex, well-articulated society.

Still, even acknowledging that comparing the two series is kind of comparing apples and mandrakes, it’s striking to me how similar the themes are when you strip out the language of their respective genre idioms.  Both are interrogating notions of traditional heroism and villainy, examining what drives villains, pushing to recognize the humanity in the traditionally monstrous. In that sense, Helck is just across-the-board better, more honest, and more passionate at portraying those themes, while BNHA consistently gestures at them only to bafflingly write them off again the moment they get a little too challenging to deal with.

#bnha #helck #helck propaganda #bnha critical #stillness has salt #my writing #unrelated note: i was reading helck for the first time as i was also reading frieren for the first time #and let me tell you guys #THAT is a fun compare and contrast exercise #need frieren to be a blowout success so it can get a season two and i can get the golden city arc animated please and thank you #but it'd be nice if helck's very...adequate anime did well enough that they could at least get through the whole thing

[zibanii]

Apparently spez has said that the blackout is 'noise' and 'will pass'. Two days was never enough. I'm not using Reddit until pigboy backs off. This blackout needs to be indefinite.

And when you leave for good, make sure to delete your valuable content. Shitheel isnt making a cent of my posts.

The content of spez's internal memo:

Hi Snoos,

Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.

I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.

Again, we’ll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.

#Fuck spez #fuck u/spez #fuck reddit #Reddit #196 #r/196 #reddit blackout #Tumblr is my new home now #fuck transphobes #Just while we're at it.

[olderthannetfic]

"you're practically the only person in OTNF's ask box right now sending open ended "what do you think of thing/is thing bad/good?" questions"

Honestly, this kind of question is really noticeable around here. It strikes a discordant note with the other asks.

Most people show up to go "I saw something annoying and just have to rant" or to respond to past conversations. They might be going off on a tangent, but they often mention how the idea came up when they read another ask or they're obviously, if subtextually, riffing off of something else that either came through my blog recently or that's been going around in fandom lately.

What makes this other type of ask so distinctive is that it's so solipsistic. The asker floats in space. Nobody else is real.

This type of ask also tends to sound odd because it's usually laden with presuppositions that aren't written out and that don't match the snap judgments of most of the people around here. There's an implicit culture clash that people immediately detect.

[nkjemisin]

Hi! (Just to get in front of it, I'm not asking you for anything. I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your work and I SEE the decolonization in it. I'm definitely also neurodivergent, so forgive me if I over- or under-explain a point.) But I realize this is an Ask Me Anything... egad.

I'm working on a piece about Broken Earth for the Decolonizing the EcoGothic volume of the Gothic Nature Journal, and I just wanted to let you know that I am blown away by the way you tell stories. I was in a Gothic Horror (I'm really not that big of a Gothic literature nerd, I swear!) class while I was in graduate school last year and we read Toni Morrison's Beloved. That was the second time that I read that novel in particular, and the first time I read it I got hung up on Mama Suggs. Her character and her ceremonies in the clearing were very powerful, and I couldn't put a pin in why until I read Broken Earth. Something about the connection between Essun and Alabaster's bodies transforming as a result of their magic use and the utter negation and abuse and colonization of the black body in both stories and historic times of slavery (and the prison industrial complex today, let's be real). Reading Broken Earth helped me understand that. So thank you.

I'm sorry this is turning into a mini essay, but I also wanted to mention another connection I found between the two on my second read (a connection I formed, I'm definitely not trying to say that I know for sure what you were going for because of course there's a lot to the stories) was between that of the characters Nassun and Denver. Near the end of the novel, after Beloved's ghost has all but taken everything from Sethe, Denver begins to step off of the safe porch and enter into the unsafe world alone for the first time to try and find help. She finds herself recalling a conversation that she heard between Baby Suggs and her mother:

“Oh, some of them [white people] do all right by us,” Sethe said. Baby suggs responds,

“And every time it’s a surprise, ain’t it? Don’t box with me. There’s more of us they drowned than there is all of them ever lived from the start of time. Lay down your sword. This ain’t a battle; it’s a rout” (287). Denver then asks the memory of her grandmother what she should do, then. “Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on,” her grandmother responds (288).

What should Denver, or Nassun, do with the knowledge that they will never truly be safe? She has to accept it, but go on anyway. One foot after another, and so on. I felt a bit of this driving Nassun after her father takes her away from their home in Tirimo... and I dunno. You and Toni Morrison both write stories that stick with me, personally, and make me think. And think and think.

Oh I'm also not assuming you've read Beloved, either. I'm sorry! I this is turning into a mess. I think I'll stop there. Just, thank you. For your stories and for your characters and for the story of Syl Anagist. I loved the Inheritance Trilogy also, I'm just very stuck on Broken Earth because of this piece I'm working on. Thank you! Sorry.

No need to apologize! But I can't answer your question because I haven't read Beloved. Read and loved several Morrison novels, but not that one. (I keep meaning to, but my Mount ToBeRead is the size of Everest and growing.) Both books are inspired by the same historical event, and I think because of that, folks who don't know about Margaret Garner reasonably assume I'm riffing on Morrison rather than reality. But nope, the Broken Earth trilogy is just one of several creative works that are in conversation with the Garner tragedy. Any similarities you see probably come from the fact that Morrison and I share a racial and gender identity, and had a similar reaction to realizing just how much our current lives are impacted by hidden historical horrors.

Even if I'd read Beloved, however, I probably wouldn't be able to answer your question. Lit crit is best done by people other than the author, IMO. We're too close to our work to tell you very much about it.

#answered asks

[kuliak]

Giving the filters something to chew on.

This patch started off with inspiration from a new Cinematic Lab video where he explored a patch from Soma Digest 16 that mixed an LFO and a clock for an interesting rhythmic effect. Reading over the comments, this behavior is because the triggers on the Pulsar 23 are velocity sensitive, so the LFO effectively offsets the velocity - when it's high, the pulses hit extra hard, and when it's low they can be softer or even completely nullified. If the two sources are unrelated, their phase/frequency relationship creates a slowly drifting groove.

I set up this behavior using Maths Ch 4 EOC as the clock and Ch 1 with an offset as the LFO, then mixed via Quantus Pax. It took a bit of tuning, but this allowed me to get the variable strength trigger sequence as well as a lot of related modulation: EOR from 1 gates Just Friends, which modulates a lot of filter behavior, and both envelopes control a number of other parameters through the patch. The other part of this behavior needs a "velocity sensitive" envelope or VCA, so I used my old friend Sinc Bucina to get that gnarly resonance. The pings were still a bit harsh, so I actually sent the trigger sequence to the gate input instead - I still found the attack to be plenty fast on the strong gates, but it mellowed out the weaker ones so the whole sequence can breathe.

The only melodic voice is Three Body, receiving phase modulation from both of its side oscillators. The saw and "cosaw" outs are mixed via Waver with mild waveshaping and AM, and the fold out goes through Bucina - since the gate is resonant, all of this shape modulation gives the gate a lot to respond to and creates that rich "riffing" texture.

The straight mix output goes through QPAS, receiving all of those linked envelopes from Just Friends, then through Electus Versio for some interesting texture. Kick is Taiko, synthy snare is Daiko, and hats are Crucible, with the drum mix going through Milky Way for compression then Ikarie for some resonant distortion.

My only real qualm here, and it's a small one, is the sequencing. I used a locked sequence in Marbles (clocked by Ch4 EOC) on +/-5v, with Planar controlling spread and bias. This is a far stretch from what I usually do, but allows for more range in transposing the sequence - loosely, bias controls the root note and spread controls how far apart the highest and lowest note of the phrase can be. I think this is much more expressive than I'd been doing it before, however I need to attenuate the XY outs before sending them into Marbles. The direct output had so much sway over the sequence that I had a very small zone of the Joystick that made musical changes. So I need to attenuate that for the future, and also need some modulation on the drums. More cables coming in the near future which should fix that problem.

#modular synth #eurorack #glitch #glitch music #experimental music #electronic music #my music #ambient #ambient music #generative music #patch notes #gif #flashing gif #visual stim #modular synthesis #sound design #idm #insutrial #industrial music #make noise

[readerinsertfanfiction]

Rif, I just found your Kyubei route and I've been distracted from work because I want to binge read it so bad. I can't believe you wrote that amazing side character his own route! I've been reading a handful of other short Kyubei fics and came across yours and almost screamed when I saw it was a complete route with dramatic and romantic endings. You even have the challenges and letters too 😭❤️ This is amazing! Thank you so much! I will be reading the rest tonight after work 😂

Aaaah, thank you!!! It isn't my best work but it is my largest and I'm so, so glad so many enjoy it. Don't get too distracted from work, read one chapter per day, like the game limits you. 🤪 (And consider a reblog to spread the word!)

#rif responds

[slocumjoe]

Not to harken back to the Nick Valentine quest post but one point you made really struck home for me - that Eddie was effectively already dead. It made the whole quest feel dead as well. Whats the point? I understand the human aspect, still wanting someone dead out of rage even if theyre no longer doing harm, but, come on, the name of the series is fallout. The ongoing violent aftermath of tragedy, how the harm and damage lingers like (or sometimes literally being) radiation. How much more powerful a quest would it have been if Nick had thought there was no point to it at all - that Eddie was dead and the past was burried but part of him just couldnt let go, and would you mind indulging an old private dick in a dusty old mystery? And THEN they find out that Eddie (or his legacy or his wealth or weapons being passed on to the next asshole or something) WAS doing active harm to people 200 years later, and that examining the past wasnt pointless because the past shaped their future and we can never move on without holding ourselves accountable for it. I just. Idk. Theres a lot of potential all of it wasted

i've had this one in my inbox for so long and never really found the words to respond to it, but I'm posting it now as a followup to my last post because this is pretty much my problem with that quest in general. So much of fo4 is riffing on the past and history and its really aggravating once you notice how much of it is just "this thing happened x amount of years ago, and I'm real sad about it"

#the plot of the game was resolved sixty years ago. you never find your baby you find a grody old man #like. can anything happen CURRENTLY. that isnt blowing up a faction #you just blow them up over shit that happened years ago like come on man

[itsoneofthemuses]

tagged by the one and only, the inimitable @rememberthismomentx

1. How many works do you have on Ao3?

62

2. What’s your total Ao3 word count?

225 819

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Generally only one at a time, but I've technically published fic in five fandoms: The Rookie, Community, Supernatural, Archer, and Thor.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

if you smile at me again i may do something stupid (The Rookie)

don't wanna stop just because people walking by are watching us (The Rookie)

let me go under your skin, let me find the demons that drive those heavenly limbs (The Rookie)

you be screamin' now they banging on our door (The Rookie)

i've got time, i've got love (The Rookie)

5. Do you respond to comments?

I do! As much as I can! You could probably rope me into a whole ass conversation because I don't know how to end the call and response.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

The as of yet publicly unpublished "random angst prompt" which will breach containment eventually, after I clean it up.

As for published fics, angst is not my forte, so I don't do it often, and it's rarely actually that angsty... But maybe a tie between we drank a toast to innocence (The Rookie) or between the drinks and subtle things, the holes in my apologies (The Rookie)

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Uh... Hmm. 95% of my fics have happy endings so it's hard for me to judge. Maybe my recent one, she's just a girl and she's on fire (The Rookie)?

I also took a few steps past sappy in you're one of the few things that i'm sure of (The Rookie) and Life Lessons in Absurdist Storytelling (Community)

8. Do you get hate on fics?

All my good luck must get used up here, because I really don't.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I do write smut! And I guess it's mostly the cishet kind because those have mostly been my ships (special place in my heart for Troy/Abed).

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

I've dabbled, on occasion, but it's not really my go-to. I have an unfinished Supernatural/Community crossover and that's about it.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Don't think so!

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? 

Not that I'm aware of.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I've riffed back and forth in comments and on discord or email, but no, never a properly co-authored fic.

14. What’s your all time favorite ship?

Oh gosh, well, I'm still here with chenford but Jeff/Annie will always have my heart even if I'm not involved in the fandom anymore.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

The only WIP is the aforementioned Supernatural/Community crossover and, like, sorry... It's probably never happening. I do have a jucy lay-turned-chenford fic that has been under construction since 2021-ish.

16. What are your writing strengths?

I like to think I'm funnyish and can get some decent banter going. Not totally sure what my writing strengths are... Entertaining myself, most probably.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Ha, well, this I could write an essay on. Occasionally my worst impulses run away with me and I try to be really poetic and it just comes off cloying, I think? Or incoherent, maybe.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

I can passably write some French and I might occasionally, if the situation calls for it, use google translate (Community was initially centred around a study group for Spanish, for instance) but I typically stick to English as it's the language I know best and the one, usually, that my characters know best too.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Ha, I don't know if I want to admit this... But X-Men (the comics, not the movie, my fics predated the movies 😅)

20. Favorite fic you’ve written?

Ooh, I'm terrible at picking favourites, but I enjoyed both of my vampire slayer AUs: 'cause i know you and you know me (The Rookie) and Special Topics in Demonology (A): Vampire Basics (Community).

And, fine, fine, not popular in a shipping community obviously, but as the founding member of the Let Lucy Get Laid Brigade, I wrote a few fics featuring Lucy with other partners for #30daysoflovingforlucy and cast various Canadians, and it was just fun. All five fics are part of my series but baby it's okay if i am still the best you had

Obviously, anyone who would like to participate should (would love to see gif makers like @detectivechen or @relentlessescapism answer these kinds of questions...), but for the purposes of spreading the joy far and wide (no pressure), @dollsome-does-tumblr, @write-or-wrong88, @doomedship, @jakelovesamy, @universallongings, @farfarawaygirl

#chenford #lucy chen #the rookie #lucy x tim #sixseasonsandamovie #yahoo community #nbc community #jeff x annie

[1lostsoul0fishbowl]

do u have any sibling headcanons for Max and Eddie?

like maybe activities they do together or shenanigans they get into?

Okay first of all I LOVE YOU for asking this, because I live and breathe the Munson-Mayfield Sibling Agenda! 😄 I have a zillion headcanons for them but here are just a few:

They made up their own secret code language and absolutely refuse to explain it to anyone else. Eddie won’t even tell Chrissy what the code words mean.

They have their own private walkie-talkie channel, which they immediately change if one of the other kids manages to find it.

They talk every single day. Even if it’s only for two minutes, a quick “Hey. You doing okay? Alright, great. Catch ya tomorrow. Love you.”

In the Lostsoul Universe, Max escaped Vecna with only one arm badly broken. While her arm was in a cast, Eddie would brush and braid her hair for her every morning before school. He was actually a little sad when she finally got the cast off and could do it herself again, so every now and then she still asks him to do it for her.

Whenever they go grocery shopping together they play a game where they try to sneak something weird into the other person’s cart without them noticing. Five points if they don’t notice until the checkout line. Ten points if they accidentally buy the thing. They’ve kept a running tally for over a year now, and Max is winning 35-5.

If Eddie loses Max in the store, he will absolutely scream “MARCO!” at the top of his lungs. And as embarrassed as she is, she never fails to holler back “POLO!”

They both love McDonald’s and they eat there, as Chrissy says, way too often. Eddie introduced Max to dipping fries into a milkshake, and Max taught Eddie to put the hash brown right into the middle of the Egg McMuffin.

They also play a game called “my sibling’s an expert”. It involves going to the flea market and waiting to be approached by a seller. Some lady will innocently say “would you like to buy a picture frame?” And Eddie will immediately respond “oh, my sister’s an expert on picture frames!” and then Max has to make up some ridiculous facts about why frames are always rectangular and never square. Or at the homemade jellies table Max will casually tell the old couple “you know, my brother’s an expert jelly checker” and Eddie has to convince them not only what a jelly checker is but that he definitely is one. 25 points to whoever makes up a plausible sounding story without laughing. 50 points if they can get the seller to believe it.

Before Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a thing, Eddie and Max had perfected the art of wisecracking and riffing on movies. They actually got banned from the local movie theater for talking too much and distracting everyone around them. Before renting a movie, sometimes Chrissy will make Eddie swear to just keep quiet and let her watch without adding his own dialogue. More than once she’s threatened to duct-tape their mouths shut.

Eddie sometimes forgets that Max isn’t actually his biological sister. Once an old lady in the grocery store asked him where his sister got that lovely red hair, and Eddie spent a few minutes trying to think if he had any ginger relatives before he remembered.

Max, on the other hand, never forgets that Eddie isn’t actually her brother, and worries a lot about him replacing her. Finally Eddie made up a set of fake adoption papers, formally adopting her as his little sister “until the end of time”. He set up a ‘courtroom’ in the Harrington’s living room and had Hopper act as the judge and made it into a whole big thing. They goofed around and acted silly the whole time until Hopper formally pronounced them siblings. Then they both started crying.

I could seriously go on and on but I’ll stop here - thank you again for the fun ask!!!

#eddie munson #max mayfield #the munson mayfield sibling agenda #ask losty #losty headcanons

[ophiocordyceps]

ok i need to know how v2 preserves itself and what kind of being it becomes in a sense, how it changes and what it's able to retain as it saves itself from its decay. ALSO very interested in gabriel's response to it - both like. how he takes the plans it enacts with regard to its study of angels and its transition into a new entity (hope it's not too much but i love these ideas uuwahhhh)

im not yet sure how gabe would react other than it being generally bittersweet !! (unless @presidentbungus has any input there), though he probably wouldnt've been too surprised when it first started studying angels since V2 was just extremely curious all around and initially it just wanted to learn more about them, since that was wayyy before any of end-of-life plans had ever even been relevant. but the whole backup thing is kind of stressful for V2, at least in a 'you need to get this done while you still can' sense. the whole reason phoenix is more of another, separate entity than just V2 resurrected is that I kind of took from the idea of how artificial intelligence works in the mass effect universe, where you can't even transfer an AI to different hardware without fundamentally altering it by virtue of slight variables between different bits of hardware, even when it's presumably identical on the surface, combined with the fact that in my interpretation the Vs computers are neuromorphic and modelled after the human brain and have artificial synapses and everything, so instead it decides to create some sort of esoteric hybrid processor (which takes a lot of trial and error and probably some suspension of disbelief) that'll last for a very, very long time (it's capable of regenerating itself, but puts a lot of strain on the rest of its body's systems, meaning phoenix has to do a lot more frequent upkeep) and then uploading some of it's memories and other archived data to it that it deems important or vital; mostly important events in its life and various bits of info that would otherwise be lost, and then it leaves gabriel the instructions for how to actually swap out the parts and upload the data backup onto it. it really is a sort of bittersweet 'came back wrong' sort of deal because of the inherent differences between iterations, which is something they would need to work out for sure. it's aware that it's a derivative of someone else who it can never truly be, but it doesn't dwell on that because it knows it was created out of it's predecessor's love for it's friend and to make sure someone would be there still with him, it has those memories and has at least part of that connection still.

phoenix is also initially just kind of. off-putting, vaguely. being an angelic machine (or a mechanical angel), it operates at far higher temperatures and its lights are all bleached white and are brighter and trying to output light from any possible place on its body. it's aware that it's not quite the same entity as V2, though it will respond to both that name and it's given designation (PHNX-AM or just phoenix, V2 named it that both to play into the idea of something being reborn from ashes and also riffing off its mechanical nature and angels as messengers). it's generally more hollow and blank seeming at first, though it does start to relearn a few of V2's mannerisms, and as time goes on it eventually begins modifying its body again into something more unique over the course of what would be several lifetimes both for optimization reasons and identity realization reasons. the whole dual nature thing probably messes with gabe for a good while at first, reminding him of things he's lost or left behind

instead of asking whether a doctor has a doctor, we're asking if angels can have guardian angels, basically.

#this is kind of inspired a bit by that one ultkl oc someone posted a while back that was like. a machine made from an angel's corpse #ultrakill #qpr for insane people #phoenix posting #ask #muzzleroars #rev2 #bugriel

[toskarinfr]

similarly to the other person, when you interact with rin prime posts, my mind interprets you as frin

that's completely natural!

most of the time when I make standalone posts it's meant to be said in rin's typing style (usually) about whatever comes to mind, while for responses it's more responding to the progenitor's bits and riffing on the inherent comedy of the situation

#froskarin and frin are very funny monikers though