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dani-is-a-pixie · 3 years

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Shit they don’t tell you about Autism/Aspergers

Well, I’ve been learning more and more about different signs of being neurodiverse and I thought I’d put my own experiences here just in case it might be able to help someone else understand their diagnosis or themselves better. If you feel you have Autism, please speak to your GP or doctor to be able to talk to a professional because like all things, self diagnosing isn’t a good idea, ya feel me. - Let’s talk clothing b. Yes, so basically Autistics like to dress more comfortable, probably hate things like tags (I used to cut them off) and might only wear certain fabrics. Some people might wear certain colours only as well. Although, the general thing is that Autistics “aren’t expressive” you’ll find a lot of Autistics are and that might be reflected through their alternative clothing choices. Another thing is you might have very sensitive skin, washing powder can cause rashes and itchiness, you might not even be able to use soap. - Hair. Hair is so gross. So basically you might feel that having your hair in your face is so annoying. Ever since I was little I always remember just tying my hair up and leaving it like that. Wanting short hair to avoid it touching your face because of sensory issues. Although, you might like to have it coloured and expressive you might struggle to have your hair down because it just feels so gross. In relation to hair when washing it you might hate the sensation of shampoo and water and all that. - Although, being very monotone is a sign of Autism being very expressive is also a sign. The thing is I feel a lot of Autistic people without the correct support have probably got a diagnosis of depression or anxiety and I feel like that combined with feeling Autistic might make it hard for you to put any energy into things, whereas you know you are a expressive person. Also you probably have hella empathy. I know that is like the opposite of what you hear but seriously, myself and some other people I know with Autism are very empathetic people and feel emotions to an extreme. Although, it might not seem like we feel anything from facial expressions and responses we might be feeling so much it’s just too overwhelming to express it. - Let’s talk acting like a child. Not saying this to dig because I’m the same way, but most people who have Autism might regress into a childlike state which is known as age regressing. It’s usually a coping mechanism to deal with stress but I suppose it could also be triggered by sensory issues? Like I find when I’m really happy I’m very childlike. Oh and you might act younger then you are or be really immature, not always taking things seriously or understanding things. Which is okay and why having a specialist to help support you with the stuff you struggle with is key. - Stim. Stim. Stim. We hear about happy stim, sad stim but honestly you might just stim for every emotion. Also people with Autism might seem like they have tics but they can have vocal stims as well as motor. - Gender is complex right? Yeah I feel you. Feel like you flucuate between genders, have no gender, feel in the middle or might even be trans - although, this is a sensitive topic Autistics actually are more likely to have different relationships with gender due to how we view and feel about the world. So whatever gender you are b, you are valid! - Identity is confusing. The thing is you might feel like you have alters or different versions of yourself as well, which is why Autism is not diagnosed and you might be diagnosed with BPD or like DID. The thing is identity for us is always so confusing and we have such a different relationship about things about ourselves and how we view things. Sometimes it feels like someone were not and sometimes we feel like a different person, but that is okay and valid. - Control as a stress management. Now this is where things like eating disorders can be developed, maybe self destructive behaviours like self harming or perhaps being very toxic to keep everything the way you can because you feel like your life is going out of control. I really do feel you - and that’s why seeing a specialist can help you cope with shitty times like this. But that is a sign. - You have a safe space. Probably your house, your room and you barely leave it. You feel so fucking overwhelmed outside. Too many people, too many noises, too many things going on, which is why Autism can seem like an anxiety disorder but you just feel things very sensitive and can have sensory overload. - If you’re an adult now, probably as a child you were told you were just intelligent and there’s nothing wrong with you. Yep. Same here. Parents tried to get me diagnosed as a young age but they wouldn’t even test me. - For me, I cannot stop listening to music. I express myself through music. I’ll send people songs and tell them to pay attention to the lyrics or the video because it’s how I feel and it’s how I express myself. Some people might do that with art or writing or something they use to express that isn’t vocally with words, people might sing or make songs. There tends to be a creative or different way you express your emotions. - Special interests. They might change throughout your life. I thought you had to have something you were interested in since a kid but they can change and it’s known as hyperfixations! It can be literally anything, and they are valid. You probably hate talking to people if they don’t share one of your hyperfixations because you feel misunderstood or weird or lonely. Doesn’t have to be anything out of the ordinary. - Might blurt out how you feel to people, like having no filter. You like to have deep meaningful relationships and want friends you can talk about your deep routed emotions and dreams with rather then wow there is something on the news. That shit doesn’t interest you at all. - This might be an embarassing one but you might have a lot of issues with going to the toilet (ie. bleeding or runny stools and etc), especially when you’re stressed you might have really bad stomach issues or abdomen issues. That aren’t always explained but are probably stress induced when everything is too much for you, people tend to be more sensitive to those types of things if they’re Autistic due to sensory and sensitivites. - Meltdowns can be shown in crying breakdowns, anger breakdowns, can also be shown as completely shut down and you might experience catatonia, where you struggle to talk or move because you feel so sad, you might get so worked up and might even feel as low as feeling suicidal and might self harm as well when in these meltdowns. - You hate injustice and you probably are an advocate for the mentally ill or disabled. Seeing injustice might actually trigger a meltdown because you want to change things - due to your extreme empathy but you struggle to accept you can’t save the world. - Might have fake friends but as you grow older might cut those people off for using your energy and might end up with having barely any to no friends. Might feel extremely lonely and not understand why people can’t just be nice to you. - Relationships you probably take very seriously, like full on planning marriages when it might just seem like nothing to someone. This can make you prone to abusive relationships and you might not always notice if that person is good for you, no matter what they do you probably try to continue to fix the relationship. Took some notes from p-3a-s-life-resources <3 and personal experience.

#autism #asperger #aspergers #neurodivergent #neurodiverse #shit they dont tell you #signs #mental health #awareness #information #oh heck this is long

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symptoms-syndrome · 2 years

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Ok another rant but under a readmore this time bc of the weird tag search shenanigans and this has what would possibly be seen as "key words" that could come up in searches I don't want them to. Warning I guess that I'm really fucking angry rn and that this is about the introject thing again.

Ok so I haven't slept or anything so maybe this won't make sense, but I feel like a part of why I refuse to touch "introject" stuff as it currently exists online is because the struggles people post about (whether they're valid struggles or not is not my place to say) are utterly foreign to me and not relevant to my life or experience in the slightest and likely never will be. And also they're the only thing people talk about re:introjects and nobody ever shuts up about it. Primarily the issues are "people are treating me like my source and saying they love [character]" or "I saw some fanart of [character] and it made me uncomfortable" or generally? I guess fandom-y stuff. And I don't mean to victim blame here but 1. If you walk into a Danganronpa server and introduce yourself as Komaeda or smth. I'm not sure what you're expecting and 2. A lot of the issues IMO can be boiled down to "please just learn how to filter things and scroll away block tags block blogs not everything is about u"

Occasionally there's some things I relate to, but even then they're often parsed in a way extremely different from my experiences. For example, I have parts that have "memories" or feel like they miss people who never existed, but like. I am able to recognize that that's just my brain putting some new paint on old traumas to try and make them easier to swallow, for the most part, and are more symbolic than literal. I never understood "source calls" in the context of DID/OSDD, as I thought we all knew that introjects aren't from some parallel universe and are created by our brains, and thus any people in any false "memories" are not and will not ever be real people? Which I get is hard to swallow sometimes, but IDK what ppl expect to get out of meeting a stranger on the internet whos brain related to a different dude from the same thing ur brain related to. PwDID aren't like. Psychics. I feel like the advice given for these posts (if they're not just empty platitudes, which is the most common) is utterly unhelpful for me. "Do things that remind u of ur source" "buy some manga of your source" "remember ur valid as [character]" I don't want to do any of those things actually. I would actually prefer to not be validated as a character bc I am not one. It reminds me more of what I'd expect from old kin communities I was a part of as a teen than what I'd expect from people within the frame of mental illness and trauma. And like, back when I thought I was kin I guess sometimes stuff like that felt nice, but feeling nice isn't always the goal. Sometimes something feeling nice can be a detractor from something that actually does good.

Not to mention, it feels like a lot of these posts are operating on this idea that not only are introjects a Special Kind of Part (which people more eloquent than I have made posts about how that's bullshit at best) but that everyone puts their introjects front n center, "this is Naruto from Naruto and here's his pseudomemories and likes and dislikes and-" etc etc etc like I can eliminate 99% of posts about introjects from my consideration based on the fact alone that I don't tell people about my introjects. No shade to people who do share, but it's just not a universal experience like how people frame it to be.

There are definitely things that I struggle with related to introjection. I just feel like it's very uncommon to see anything beyond "people treat me like the real [character]" or "people DONT treat me like [character]" or other shit like that related to like. Entering a fandom space openly as an introject, something I could literally never imagine doing I'd sooner microwave tin foil than join a fandom discord for a media I introjected from. I feel like a lot of the things I struggle with are very internal. Between me myself and I. No pun intended.

Anyway this is more and more of an annoyance clawing at my brain every time I've made the mistake of looking at anything any of the hash tag fictives or whatever post online or even just any shit about introjects in general. And bc people can't shut the fuck up about introjects for two goddamn seconds and DID is basically treated as introject disease on tumblr.edu it feels like I can't escape it bc it's fucking everywhere everyone's gotta talk about fictives and factives and fucktives etc etc all the fucking time whenever we talk about DID bc it's sooooo important to treat the anime boys right and make sure all the shit u post online about [anime of the week] is suitable for if the real Joe Schmo from Joe Schmo Adventures sees your post about how Joe's pal Jake has a good ass or whatever. I'm sick of it.

Ironically one of the introjected parts of my sys is telling me to tone this shit down a little and the other main one isn't around RN but would definitely not approve. I don't fucking care though I need to talk about how sick I am of this shit. I know he's sick of it too even if he's nicer about it. I can bitch if I want to I'm not hurting anyone and I'm not calling anyone out or anything I'm literally just saying I'm sick of the entire DID conversation being turned into "how to make introjects comfy" esp when the answers are bullshit and only apply to niche communities but are treated like the word of fucking god. """Singlets""" getting """educated""" on why it's of utmost importance you make Bakugo from the shit system feel safe and supported and shield him from any criticism or people who just don't like that character or like him too much or whatever not to mention the fucking RACISM that keeps rearing it's ugly head every time some white motherfucker feels the need to make some weird out of touch post about racism re:introjects with "ohhh u can't say slurs" bc that's all white ppl ever talk about with racism is fucking slurs which have the least relevance to any systemic change at all.

#this is very angry im not sorry about it #T started out w this post w my help and i finished it #bc he's too nice about it i have to express how i really feel or im going to explode #i am TEMPTED to put this in the tags but I'll hold back bc i dont want a callout from some 13 year old with an AOT fic/tive

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rpbetter · 3 years

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Hi! How do you distinguish between a mun who has favorites but still treats their non favorites with respect, and a mun who has favorites but uses this as an excuse to disrespect everyone else? Sometimes it's hard for me to tell, and I'd love to hear what you think.

Hey, Anon! That's actually a great question.

It's also totally reasonable to have a hard time telling. When you feel like you might be a little more into the threads than the other mun is, no matter how much they're being respectful and caring, it can still feel a bit...lame. We all want to be a favorite writing partner, even as we know that's impossible, that we can't manage that ourselves. It's not a thing of logic!

I feel like I should probably preface the detailing I'm about to do - this is only my experience. There are always variables in anything dealing with other people, and any time we're already feeling down, it's really easy to see things in a way that might not be the reality.

Alright, then.

Muns who use this as an excuse or justification for what they're doing tend to be the ones that:

are likely to pair the excuse/justification with aggressively vilifying anyone who takes issue with their treatment of them for being too serious about RP/too emotionally invested in anything from friendships to ships/otherwise "not realizing it's just a hobby" - apparently, "hobby" actually means "you're not making a dollar, so, do whatever you want in whatever way you want, so long as it's making you and only you happy and comfortable," who knew?

will lead muns on, either because they're uncomfortable with telling those who are not the favorites that...well, they're not the favorites and they might wish to just drop the threads or because...

they have a bit of a habit of going through favorites/their favorites take frequent breaks or are slower to reply, and it's good to have other muns around for when either situation happens - it's okay if everyone else is bored and/or left out, but not them

become angry and defensive if you ask them about your thread(s) and/or if everything is alright after a reasonable period of inactivity only on your threads*

if they previously had OOC contact and/or a friendship with you, it's one pole or another of OOC behavior with you now - no contact/as little as they can possibly manage or they'll proceed like you also only want to have conversations about what is going on with the favorite(s), the ships, the threads, the fandom, the mun. Before anyone misconstrues this to mean that "so, no matter what they do it's sus lol," no. There is such a thing as neither insulting someone by having nothing else to talk about except the mun/muse/ship you're ignoring them for nor just stopping/avoiding conversation altogether. It's actually not normal or acceptable to treat people like disposable fixations or expect them to be thrilled or lie about it when you can't shut up about their replacement(s)

in general, if this mun just keeps making it apparent that neither you nor anyone else exists unless they're the favored mun? That's really it. That's the difference between having favorites and still treating other muns with respect - there isn't any respect, none of you exist to respect

*I'm not going to speak to what is reasonable to everyone, it's one of those things I think muns should mention to some degree in their rules, but with people taking it to mean things it doesn't, it's doubtful that's going to happen. (I encourage it, though, please, put in your rules when you'll ask about threads or if you'll assume there is no more interest and they've been dropped. "After one month of no reply and no OOC contact, I will either contact you to ask if you're still interested." No big deal!) For me, it would depend on the mun themselves, even if I've got in my rules that after x time, I will assume y. If this is a mun that has updated OOC that they're extra slow right now, and they're usually pretty slow, I'm going to just see that as them prioritizing preferred partners with what little time they have, that's not coming across as rude favoritism to me at that point. If it's a mun that has continued to reply as normal, posted no updates OOC, and they're specifically just replying to one or two favorites with that regular timing, I'm going to ask if they're still interested after a month or so.

The problem always is that, despite what the RPC likes to say for the same damn reason, we're all afraid to be acting on ridiculous suspicion and paranoia. We get treated a certain way, maybe it is once and it was just extremely bad, maybe it has happened over and over again, and we really do start seeing phantoms of ill-treatment. It becomes difficult to trust your own judgment and listen to your inner voice (one that, furthermore, is already at least a bit embattled by life on and offline).

These are only some points to help you trust yourself or disprove yourself if you already feel like there might be this problem going on.

If you have someone who could be impartial when given evidence, you might want to consider asking if they'd mind helping you identify if this is a problem or not. Don't mention mun names or even muses if you're in the same intersections of the RPC, you're not trying to smear anyone here, just get a different viewpoint that isn't touched by any negative or positive feelings about that mun!

I said "evidence," so, I want to be clear that I did not mean screenshots or direct quotes. Give situations, what the mun is and is not doing, as both are important.

Some questions that might help you identify things to present to a third party for help:

Are they replying to any of your threads, how about asks?

If/when they reply to you IC, how do they reply? Is it shorter than it used to be, unenthusiastic? Or is it the same, just fewer and farther between, or less interesting to you than what they're doing with preferred partners?

Are the plots they're doing with the favorite(s) ones that you previously had with them or that you had plotted out and were working toward? And if that answer is yes, are these common plots that can be applied anywhere or specific ones?

Is this all something that is perhaps temporary overexcitement, or has this just kept going on for months, shows no sign of stopping?

Did you speak/were friends OOC? If so, how has this changed? Frequency of messaging, topics of conversation, enthusiasm, interest in you or your muse?

Are you now left out of games on the dash in which you used to be tagged, or unwelcome in things like "dash crack?" Is it, by contrast, that you might be welcome in the latter, but either it doesn't interest you by inclusion/focus of the favorite or because you lack a base of engagement with what's going on?

Do they send you memes, has that changed at all?

The way you feel is valid, but it might also be influencing the way you're viewing a situation, including in how you relate it to someone else for help. So, try to stick to actions when doing so.

By contrast, muns who have favorites but are not using this to justify being disrespectful to others tend to:

be open and upfront about having favorites and why - they're not trying to hide anything, including what makes their favorite writing partners, threads, and ships favorites to begin with

^they are not "open and upfront" by obnoxiously reminding everyone constantly who those favorites are, they're not shit posting how @munthatisntyou is their bestie/their muse is lusting after their muse/actually my wife. They are upfront about it by stating in their rules they can, will, and do have favorites. They're open about it by not lying or acting like it's the worst accusation ever when someone asks them about it

definitely have priority threads, might have an easier, thus faster, time responding to questions/prompts regarding those threads/ships, but still respond with equal interest to memes from others*

the same is true of interest and turnaround time with thread replies, they might get the preferred ones out faster, but they're still replying to everyone and still keeping other muns updated on what's going on*

will not be hostile when approached by fair, politely put concerns about threads, but rather, will respond with honesty as to their interests - whether they have, indeed, changed or haven't alike

they still express the same interest OOC outside of messages, liking and commenting on posts, sending memes, and being concerned or congratulatory when they see OOC posts dealing with life events

in general, muns who just have favorites like everyone does remain aware of others in the same way they always have, still make efforts to respond to threads, memes, messages, etc. with the same interest they always have - they appreciate everyone they interact with, not only their favorite(s)

*Everyone has a different way that works for them, and that influences their meme answering, thread replying, and OOC response turnaround time. A very social mun might respond to OOC messages more frequently, reliably, and with more zeal than a mun who is less socially active, forgetful, or dealing with different difficulties that might prevent doing so, for example. As another example, a mun who writes lengthy, detailed novella that takes a while to finish is going to take longer with everyone than a mun who writes in a way, or just has more time to write, that allows for replies to get out faster. Please, keep expectations and observances mindful of these factors and differences! What is typical of one mun might be perceived as legitimate favoritism when contrasted with a mun who operates differently than them.

That's really the difference, there is recognition and appreciation of everyone. They might have a visibly different friendship with their favorite(s), but it doesn't come with the cost of treating everyone else either like they don't exist or like total shit. And that comes in many ways, as many ways as there are possible interactions in the RPC. From being casual mutuals who do not write together (still acknowledging posts etc.) to outright writing partners (still giving replies with as much effort and quality).

You can think of muns like this as you would people who have different sorts of friendships as opposed to people who have rather cliquey friendships in which it's often enough a clique of two in which everyone else, even if included or otherwise used by those two, only exists out of necessity. The former is a normal social situation, we get on well with the people we do for a reason, and that's perfectly alright. The latter is some immature and self-interested behavior one should have grown out of in junior high.

As you didn't ask for this, I'm putting it under the cut as additional advice for others!

If you feel like someone is being disrespectful, or worse, and is glossing it over with "it's okay for people to have favorites, calm down" (a thing that's totally true but not meant to be used to excuse shitty behavior), you really do want to just remove yourself from the situation. In a situation like that, you're not going to change their behavior, and even if you did, are you ever going to be able unsee it?

What is more likely to happen is you'll be growing the seed of upset they planted into a big tree of animosity. Every time you are on your dash and see them replying or tagging their favorite(s), you're going to be either hurt or angry. Eventually, it's impossible to separate which of those things you are, and it's increasingly likely you're going to say or do something regrettable. And I mean regrettable in how it is likely to negatively affect you. You don't deserve to be branded a terrible person for an outburst. The situation has been bad enough.

Whether you should soft block to unfollow and force an unfollow, hard block, unfollow with or without communication is all subject to too many variables for me to advise any single course of action.

If it's possible to communicate politely that you're officially dropping threads or unfollowing, I will always advise doing so. If that isn't possible because this mun has been that terrible, or has proven in the past that they will react badly to such communications, then so be it, just quietly remove yourself from their presence.

You owe friends, even former ones if they've not done you awfully, the decency of communicating that you're ending things. You owe mutuals who haven't done anything more than ignoring you (as awful as that is, it's not as bad as being aggressively disrespectful, lying to you, leading you on, etc.) that decency and maturity as well. You do not owe anyone who has behaved like an immature ass that decency, it's okay to just leave in those cases. As it is in situations when you feel confident that speaking to them is going to cause drama for you.

When a mun hasn't ever really interacted with you, you've become mutuals, but it never went anywhere because they were already engaged in ignoring everyone except the favorite(s), it's alright to just leave quietly, too. They clearly don't register that you exist, so...don't exist. Go exist around muns who know you're there. But the caveat to that should be that if they decide to notice your vacant spot on the dash and come to you to ask about this, you should answer them. Be honest, but polite. Tell them that you just didn't see working out with them after all, and since you hadn't interacted, you unfollowed.

You never know (you just shouldn't count on it), in that latter case especially, that mun might honestly not be aware of the effect of their actions. Like everyone else, they're just doing what they enjoy, what makes them happy is what they're concentrated on, and might genuinely just have a narrow field of vision on it until spoken to.

Whatever is right for the unique situation at hand, don't lie to someone if they message you about it. Don't just act like it was an accidental unfollow or a tumblr glitch, grit your teeth, and add them back so that there is no unpleasantness. There is already unpleasantness if you felt the need to distance yourself from them, remember that!

#answered #anonymous #favoritism #rp advice #mun behavior

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lazuliquetzal · 3 years

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Don't Take It Personally, Asshole!

@snowlikestardust

BY POPULAR REQUEST: This is a (cleaned up) version of an early draft of CH11 of AA Batteries, which is in Akira’s POV instead of Miyuki’s! You’ll probably recognize a lot of turns of phrase because I’m unoriginal and like, 80% of what I cut gets recycled. This scene got cut up and Frankensteined a LOT into later chapters haha.

So this takes place during the Yakushi practice match, right after Eijun throws wild and Miyuki talks to Kataoka about his inability to throw to the inside.

“Akira.” Akira stiffens and turns his gaze away from the mound. Coach is standing on the sidelines, and he makes a ‘come here’ gesture. Akira jogs over. He tries to ignore the flicker of hope in his chest, but he can’t stop the way his heart is pounding out of control, leaving him barely able to hear. “Coach,” Akira dips his head in respect and clenches his jaw. His eyes fix upon the ground below. “Can you fix this?” ‘This’ being the obvious — the fact that Eijun can’t throw to the inside. He looks back to the mound. Eijun is stiff and pale, his left hand clenching and unclenching in unconscious denial. He looks a little scared, yes, but mostly, he looks confused. And — this is the important thing — he hasn’t given up. This Eijun won’t shuffle back to the dugout, defeated. This Eijun will go down kicking and screaming. Eijun still wants to pitch. Maybe he can’t pitch. But he wants to. Yeah, Akira thinks. I’ll take those odds.

He looks back at the coach and nods his head.

Kataoka breaks his gaze and looks to the outfield. “Asou!”

Their left fielder jogs in, mouth pulled into a firm line.

“Miyuki, you’re playing left field. Akira, you’re in.”

You’re in.

The words echo around Akira’s brain. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

While Kataoka sorts out the substitution with the umpires, Akira exhales. He drops down onto the bench and adjusts the straps on his leg guards, making sure they’re not too tight or too loose. Beside him, Furuya hovers, eyes narrowed.

Are you going to be okay?

Akira nods.

The truth is: he’d thought about the Inajitsu thing for a long time. And after the initial anger and grief and shame, he’d come to the following conclusion:

Coach Kataoka was right. Akira probably would not have survived that inning.

It wasn’t nerves. Akira had never been nervous in his life.

(Okay, he had been nervous, of course he had. But not for a baseball game.)

And it wasn’t lack of skill or experience, though that probably played a big role in the coach’s decision.

(Okay, definitely played a big role in the coach’s decision. Let’s be honest: Akira was not the best catcher in the dugout that day.)

The truth is this: Akira was scared, too.

For good or ill, better or worse, Eijun and Akira have always fed off each other like a chemical reaction. If Eijun got excited, Akira got excited. If Akira got competitive, Eijun got competitive. Having them play while they were both out of their minds would not have ended well.

Today is a different story.

He’s not going to lie: it is weird seeing Eijun unable to pitch to the inside. It’s practically unthinkable. Eijun and Akira lived and died by the inside pitch. It pretty much defined their entire middle school career.

But right now? Akira’s not scared. And as long as he can hold onto that, he can fix this.

Kataoka gestures for him to get out on the field, and Akira steps out of the dugout.

“Do your best,” Miyuki says, from behind him.

Akira resists the urge to roll his eyes. As if I’d do anything less.

They split off: Miyuki to the outfield, and Akira to the mound. He jogs up to where Eijun is standing. When he arrives, he stops just an arm’s length away from his brother.

Eijun stares at him for a moment, and Akira stares back.

“Hey,” Akira says. “What sign does Miyuki-senpai use for the cutter kai?”

Eijun blinks, caught off guard by the question. He shakes his head and answers the question. “Ah, he uses a ‘four,’” he says, and he makes the sign with his hand.

“Cool,” Akira says. “I’m gonna use a seven.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

Eijun makes a face. “You’re doing this just to be annoying, aren’t you.”

“Yep.”

“And even if I argue, you’re going to use it anyway.”

“Absolutely.”

“I hate you so much.”

“Great,” Akira says, in the flat voice that he knows Eijun finds irritating. “Good talk.”

He steps away and turns to the rest of the field. “So, uh, they’re probably gonna get a lot of hits,” Akira yells out. “Like, a lot. Sorry about the workout. Thanks for your cooperation.”

“You’re saying it wrong!” Eijun hisses at him. “And they are not gonna get a lot of hits!”

“I dunno, Ei,” Akira says, rolling his eyes. “You’re not exactly on top of your game, are you?”

“I’ll kick your ass if you make bad calls.”

“So shake them.” Akira glares at Eijun, daring him.

Eijun agitatedly waves his arms around. “You know I — ugh! Shut up! Get off my mound!”

Akira waves good-bye, as annoyingly as he can, and he walks down to home plate. He sketches a quick bow to the batter and the umpire, and then he crouches down.

The game resumes.

Akira takes a quick look around, the way Chris-senpai taught him to. The runners are at ease, barely paying attention to him. The guy on first base looks especially relaxed.

Hm. He’s never done a pickoff before. That would be pretty cool.

Akira turns his attention back to the mound, and he’s about to make a call —

And then he frowns.

He wants to tell Eijun to throw to the inside. And he knows, by the expression on his brother’s face, that it’s what Eijun wants to do, too.

But there’s something else in Eijun’s gaze. His eyes keep darting around — not to the runners, but to the batter.

Akira glances over at Todoroki Raichi. Yakushi’s monster first-year, a batter who can crush an ace in a single hit. Logic says to be careful; logic says to keep their guard up against the best batter in West Tokyo.

Well, fuck that, Akira decides. If Eijun really can’t pitch to the inside, then every batter might as well be Todoroki Raichi. It’s like middle school all over again.

He spreads his arms wide.

Eijun blinks.

Ignore him, Eijun. Just pitch whatever.

You’re joking, right?

Akira smirks. What, you think I can’t catch it?

Eijun sticks his tongue out — petty and dramatic as always. Akira rolls his eyes, and he knows that his brother can see it because he rolls his eyes back.

Eijun throws the ball.

It's instinctual, at this point, to move his feet and stretch his arm, catching the ball before it can fly out of reach. It slams into the back of his mitt, his vision tunnels — and before his brain can catch up with his body, he chucks the ball down to first base.

Wait, shit —

Thankfully, Zono-senpai catches the ball and tags out the runner. Pickoff.

"Out," says the umpire, looking just as surprised as Akira feels.

Holy crap! Akira thinks, in the safety of his own mind. That actually worked?

Zono tosses the ball back to Eijun, and then sends Akira a fiercely enraged expression.

Akira winces and ducks his head. He can hear Chris-senpai’s voice in his mind: baseball is a team sport.

Oops.

But they got the out, so at least he didn’t fuck up his very first play in the game.

Akira looks back to Eijun. Judging by the wild course of his last pitch, he’s still overly aware of the batter.

Akira spreads his arms, again.

Eijun grits his teeth. He steps onto the rubber and winds up.

It comes. Low. It hits dirt, and Akira stops it. Then he tosses it back.

Throw what you want.

“Are you leading me, or not?” Eijun yells, finally cracking.

“Depends!” Akira yells back.

Eijun crosses his arms. On what?

Akira mimes the motion of a ball hitting him in the face, and then flaps his hand around.

Eijun stares at him incredulously. Excuse me?

It’s a valid concern!

Eijun groans in frustration. I’m not gonna hit you in the face!

Aw, you do care! Akira grins and fires off a sarcastic thumbs up, just rile up his brother a little bit more.

It works, because Eijun’s eyes flash, bubbling up with barely contained fury.

Get mad. It’s better than being scared.

Eijun steps back onto the rubber and tightens his grip on the ball, daring Akira to make the call.

Akira places his mitt. Fastball to the outside.

Eijun throws. Todoroki swings. Foul.

Akira barely registers the hit — as soon as he realized it was a foul, he’d already started planning the next move. Another outside pitch, again, but a four-seamer this time.

Eijun throws.

Foul.

Okay, Akira thinks. He looks back at his brother and studies his expression.

He still looks annoyed and irritated. And even better — he’s not looking at Todoroki Raichi anymore.

Good.

He makes the call. And Eijun follows.

It’s like déjà vu, Akira thinks, as the ball makes its way toward him. A fastball to the inside corner, a sight he’s seen thousands of times. The batter tenses, squares his hips, and swings the bat.

Clang.

Like lightning, a sudden stab of oh shit flashes across Akira’s chest. That was a good hit — firm and loud and solid.

Oops, Akira thinks, as Todoroki takes off running and the runners start trickling in. In retrospect? It was probably obvious that they were gunning for an inside pitch. Most batters are pretty comfortable with the gambler’s fallacy —

Someone clicks their tongue, and Akira blinks, crashing back into the present. Eijun’s glaring at him, again.

Deal with that later, dumbass.

Akira rolls his eyes, but Eijun’s right. Unfortunately.

They’re in the middle of a game right now. He can reflect upon his baseball sins at two in the morning.

The moment the next batter steps up to the plate, Akira calls for another inside pitch. And Eijun delivers.

The ball slams into the back of his mitt, and it’s like a gear clicking into place. How long has it been since he caught for his brother outside of mandatory practice? How long has it been since they formed a battery on the field?

The familiar sensation doesn’t wipe away the anger, but it does drown it out. Who needs feelings? They have baseball.

“Nice pitch,” Akira calls out, and he tosses the ball back to the mound. Truce?

Eijun receives the toss. He nods and straightens his back. Truce.

The rest of their play time blurs by after that.

#lazuli writes #this is hilarious to me because eijun and akira are just so stupidly insular with their chaos #they don't even notice that everyone else is terrified #the twins are like: i'm angy >:(( and miyuki is like WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING #aa batteries dna #daiya no ace

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wolfpawn · 3 years

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Hiding in Plain Sight, Chapter 10

Story Summary - Imagine coming from a line of nobility or royalty and being in an arranged marriage with Loki in an attempt to strengthen your kingdom/alliance with Asgard. You’re not entirely on board with the idea but figured that the best you could do was to get to know your fiancé. You form an agreement with Frigga for you to pose as Loki’s personal servant for a few months so you can get to know who Loki really is – beyond the veil of his responsibility to the Asgardian throne, behind all the masks he wears when facing the public, to really know who Loki is behind closed doors as you slowly fall for each other. How long will you keep up the ruse with the God of Lies?

Chapter Summary - The conflict.

Previous Chapter

Tags - @peppermint-j @alexakeyloveloki @cateyes315 @laserpente @bravotheroyalfool @teylacarter91 @heavenly1927

Raven gave him a withering look. “Again with the ‘she’ and ‘her’. You are going out of your way to be insulting at this stage.” “But you are Raven? Not ‘Breanna’?” Loki demanded.

“My grandmother called me Breanna. It’s one and the same.” She dismissed.

“You hid yourself as a maid?”

“I did.” “Why?” “I heard so many stories about you, so incredibly conflicting, I wanted to see for myself.” “So you pretended to be a maid? You…” Loki’s eyes widened. “You scrubbed my toilet.” He grimaced at that thought.

“In fairness, whatever else was ever said about you, your hygiene is impeccable.”

“Why?” “I told you.” “But why?”

“I learnt you are intelligent and can understand many languages and are very much able to comprehend the spoken word so I don’t think I need to repeat myself again. I know it is something you also dislike. You told me that the first day I spoke to you.” She walked around a little.

Loki studied her for a moment. Watching how she walked, so obviously well-bred and the manner in which she was speaking showing a significant education. He shook his head slightly as he spoke. “My brother said time and again that the Elven princess was raised in a manner that was meek and subservient. You have been insubordinate since the day you walked in here.”

“How can I be insubordinate to you, we are of equal standing. The extra children of the ruling monarch, merely existing in the slight offchance our older siblings do not make it to taking the throne.” She challenged.

“I think your father would rather a republic than have you on the throne.” Loki pointed out, his tone half of anger, half merely stating fact.

“I think he would too but the law is that I can take it regardless of my gender, I just need all four of my brothers to not get on it and have heirs.” She eyed him with intrigue, watching the glut of emotions swirling around in his face. Anger seemed to be winning as the most notable one. “I suggest airing your anger now. It will make this easier in the long run.”

“Was my mother in on this all along?” “Yes. I wrote to her to get her words on your character. Sadly, she gave the view of a biased and loving mother. So, convinced I would see your personality for myself in other ways by being your maid, she suggested I take Tatianna’s place for a few weeks. I can see you have a good rapport with her, so I can see why she would think that.”

Loki felt his anger rise at his mother’s involvement. “My brother, my father?”

“For the Allfather to know anything, he would have had to have come to your rooms whilst I was here, he never did, ergo, he never knew anything of it. Thor was not part of the plan. What I had not anticipated was that he recalled the few occasions that he met me in passing while talking to my brothers over the centuries, especially in Vanaheim. He confronted me, wanting to know why I was playing such games. He did not agree with it but the Allmother and I convinced him to remain silent.”

Loki’s lip curled in anger at his brother knowing such things but also knowing that he had the excuse of being told to say nothing. Not that it would save him from a few choice words and more than a few spells and hard blows when Loki would be able to inflict such on him again. “You spied on me, and you thought it wise?” He scoffed in disgust. “How did you envisage this little reveal going? Pray, do tell.” “I suppose it’s obvious that I had not thought through that fully. I was hoping the Aesir I was meeting was actually a nice being so I would at least feel guilty.”

Loki’s brow rose at that. “You have the audacity to say such things with all your deceit.”

“You literally are nicknamed the God of Lies, tricks and mischief, I would have thought you would have been impressed if nothing else.” “I am anything but.” He became irate at her answers. “You have no right to speak to me like this, you deceitful wench.” He walked to the bedroom door and opened it. “Get out.”

Raven felt hurt but understood fully and had expected him to react in such a manner, sighing, she walked to the door. “Well, it’s done now anyway.”

“What?” Loki had no inkling as to what she was referring to. “Getting this conflict out of the way. I was getting bothered waiting for it.” She spoke as she walked through the door.

“You anticipated this, really?” He did not believe her.

“I anticipated this, at best. I thought you would fly into a rage and throw me out at worst but then again, I thought you had not arrived for lunch because you had realised who I was and were giving me the very much expected silent treatment. Something I would wager all the ore on Alfheim I am going to be receiving from this point forth. I did not think it would last this long.” “What would last this long?” “This conversation. It lasted far longer than I had expected.” She shrugged as she walked to the door.

“Did you really learn to be a maid for this?” “I hardly knew how to be one before. I had to at least pretend to know what I was doing.” “You were so desperate to try and make a fool of me?” “It was never about making a fool of you, Loki. I told you, I wanted to know what to expect here. I tried to find out by other means but to no avail. Unlike you, I had to move to another realm and live with a man I had not met in almost seven hundred years outside of the briefest of moments.” “So you thought the way to get to know me was to scrub my toilet, that is your thinking of me? That is what you considered in getting to know me? I honestly expected you to have little self-respect with how you were raised, what with it being a misogynistic realm but you really do not have any self-worth with how you acted.” He walked over to the main door of his rooms to open it.

“Well, when your muscles ached and you wanted them relieved and when I neatened your belongings, you did not complain and don’t you ever look down at those who clean your toilet. You would not last five minutes in the real realm without your seidr, you pretentious prick.”

Irate at her venomous words, Loki walked forward towards her but stopped suddenly when she flinched as though expecting to be struck. As much as he wanted to say something as vitriolic back, he refrained. “Your little stunt was nothing more than pathetic and ridiculous and your name calling even more so, but it clearly was futile because if your observations were even the slightest bit accurate, you would know I would never lay a hand on you.”

“I knew that. If anyone will bear any physical brunt of this, it will be Thor.”

Loki had to admit, she did learn something in all of this with that comment. “Yet, you flinched as though expecting me to strike you?” “I am not a warrior, I have not learnt how to not flinch when someone rushes forward. But I know you would not. If you had been a risk to me, I would never have come here alone.” She ensured to look him in the eye as she spoke to show her sincerity.

Loki had to admit, that was a valid excuse and indeed statement regarding her safety. “Good, at least you grasped that much in this.” He opened the door fully and indicated outside.

“I guess the deceitful wench will leave the pretentious prick to his day, then.” She walked towards the door.

“Norns but you have to have the last word, don’t you?” Loki pushed the door shut again with some force. “You’re supposed to be silent.” “You literally said one of the things you were looking forward to least about being married to me was that you loathed the idea of a subservient and silent wife. My father should have had someone warn you, I tend to be too sarcastic for my own good, always have been, but you noticed that already too.” “If I had only known.” Sarcasm dripped heavily from every syllable he spoke. He looked at her for another moment. “How could you possibly have thought that we could even attempt to build anything on this?” “You never wanted to build anything, you spoke terribly of me the whole time I was here. You would not even use my name.” “What is with you and that particular issue? Why does it matter so greatly to you?” Loki snapped. “You are like a dog with a bone.”

“What is your obsession with not using it? You have nothing but contempt for me, both in your actions and your words, and have done so before you even realised it was me and do not think for one second I have forgotten your horrid words to your little friend about me, much less my realms’ people. Whatever damage I have done to the idea of creating a cordial relationship, you clean blasted it off the realm long before.” “I already told you, I do not think such, I was just venting.” “I told you in that very same conversation that I do not suffer fools. And if you think me to believe that statement, you are calling me one also.” “I bear no ill thoughts to the Ljósáfar. I would not have my seidr be so strong but for the ability to wield it perfected on Alfheim. I have nothing but respect for the race, you as an individual, on the other hand, not so much since you decided to try and trick me.” “There was no try, I succeeded in doing so.” There was some smugness to Raven’s smirk.

Loki’s lip curled in anger at that statement.

“I recall that day too that you wished to show me that you have no ill against my race, yet my parents and brothers did not deserve the respect required to welcome them, did they?” She shook her head. “You don’t respect us, you respect no one, not even yourself.” This time, she walked to the door and opened it, not wanting to speak to him any further.

“What comes of this?” Loki asked, not wanting to acknowledge her fairly accurate analysis.

“I do not know. You were adamant before, I am nothing but a duty. As a prince, you will be forced to do such duty. Our parents will not forfeit this agreement. My parents because it ensures I am no longer a burden, yours because, as you so crassly put it before, it solidifies my father’s alliance. So I guess we simply avoid one another outside of required interactions. I will not bother you, and you will ignore me. When this farce is done, I will stay in my rooms, you in yours and since I know Thor is being forced to court soon, we do some form of ritual dance that he has as many children as my father and we will not be required to do such things and you can have your conceited little harpy mistress and be happy.”

Loki was going to spit a comment back at her about the woman in reference but he noticed the genuine hurt and heartache in her features that startled him to silence on that matter. He quickly analysed her words again while she seemingly attempted to recompose herself. He did not know what in her statement caused her to react in such a way but it did startle him. “I am still trying to fathom the reasoning for all of this.”

“I wanted to know the true Loki, the one not putting on a facade for his father, or society, the being I would see every single evening after a long day.” “For what purpose?” “I spent my whole life having to be silent in public and mostly silent in private. I spent it being told how to act and who to speak to and how to speak to them. I wanted to know if I had to do that for the next few thousand years again or if it would be different. That is why I did it. I wanted to know if I could finally have someone to actually care for me as a being and not expect me to be what they want me to be, nothing more than a living doll. Norns, but you are right, had I but known.” And with that, she left the room.

#hiding in plain sight #Chapter 10 #wolfpawn #loki fic

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linkspooky · 4 years

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Hi, I’m Link and it’s time to talk about my terrible / horrible / amazing taste in men. If you are a bastard who is planning to destroy the world because of your unresolved trauma, please call me. Kiss kiss.

Also I’m tagging @thyandrawrites and @inumaqi who by law have to do this with me.

Shigaraki Tomura - MY HERO ACADEMIA

“What I really despise is everything. Everything that breathes pisses me off.”

I like how Shigaraki is severely mentally ill. He’s one of the most raw portrayals of an abuse victim. He murders his abusive father, and the story takes his side. He develops violent tendencies, he refuses to grow up, he can’t forgive. He’s just holding all of his negative feelings inside of him as he slowly rots inside out, and that’s just great.

Shigaraki is so shaped and moulded by his abuse, but he still chooses who he wants to be. He was literally raised in a basement to be a carbon copy of AFO, and yet he’s so different from AFO it’s obvious he could never live up to his Sensei. He’s too bad of a person to ever be a hero, but he’s also too good of a person to ever be the king of evil and what you get is this really chaotic mess in between.

It’s interested to see who Shigaraki chooses to be, in spite of how much he has been indoctrinated towards a cause and how many choices are taken away from him. Despite being a character with supposedly little agency you can see he always tries to fight for his own agency. Don’t deny me. He can’t be with his family even though he loves them, because they’ll never accept him for who he is. Tenko was a kind boy who played with the bullied kids. Shigaraki fights for the people who would never be saved by hero society because he wasn’t saved. He gives them what he doesn’t have, freedom and a place to belong. It’s an interesting character to see how much of him has become the unpredictable ball of trauma that Shigaraki is, while the core of him Tenko still remains in his humanizing moments of how he interacts with the league. Shigaraki who has so many choices taken from him, chooses to reach out and sympathize with the feelings of others, especially those who have been ostracized the same way he has.

Shigaraki is introduced to us as an inhuman monster, and we see him slowly work his way back from the edge. We see him regain his humanity by coming to care about the people under his wing. It gives you the message that there’s no such thing as a point of no return.

All of the heroes are good people in mha but that feels more like an informed character trait. We’re supposed to root for them because… they’re the heroes, they’re good. They have to look good because they’re the good guys. Shigaraki is allowed to be ugly and unlikable, he gets worse. But then he still always chooses to fight for ugly victims like him. I like both sides of him, I like the volatile explosive bomb that just wants to blow up and destroy others, and the gentle way he interacts with the rest of the league.

Kumagawa Misogi - MEDAKA BOX

“I want to beat them. Even though I’m not cool, or strong, or just, or beautiful, or cute, or pretty, I want to beat the cool strong just beautiful cute and pretty people.”

Kumagawa is aggressively mediocre. He’s a good for nothing. He’s like the embodiment of a bad victim, he blames everyone else, he lashes out. He has nothing but flaws but he still strives to be better than what he is. That’s what so inspiring about his character. Even if you’re miserable it doesn’t mean you have to be having a miserable time about it. Kumagawa will push back against anything, even if the whole world is pushing down on his shoulders.

He has a vibe with his character that even if you’re the worst person in the world don’t run away from who you are. You have to accept yourself exactly as you are without lies or artifice before you can start to improve. That’s why kumagawa tries to accept the ugliness of people.

He’s very sympathetic with other people, but that isn’t there to make him look like a good person. If anything he always sympathizes with the victim too much and encourages their worst qualities. At the beginning of the series hes so desperate to heal the wounds of these traumatized, people he’s taken in he just encourages them to lash out because that’s something. Kumagawa is just this very nihilistic, and fatalist character who is somehow at the same time one of the most optimistic characters ever written. He’s a lazy good for nothing, but he tries hard. He’s fickle and childish, but he never gives up. He might never get better, he might always lose in the end, but he still thinks the struggle to win is always inherently worth it. He gives all of himself in everything he does, and to the people around him. And he always gets hurt because of it, but that pain is just living.

He’s completely insane but he’s also living his life the best way he can. There’s just such a manic, insane, and positive energy to his character. Kumagawa will accept you at your worst, and yet he’ll still encourage you to be better. I also like characters written to represent the ugliness in people, and striving to find beauty in that ugliness rather than characters who are just happy all the time because they’re good people.

Natsuki Subaru - RE ZERO

“You think I’m getting drunk on my own tragedy just so I can shut everyone up?”

like how Subaru is a shitty person but not in a really interesting way, but in a really petty, self absorbed and weak way. I like it because the world doesn’t tolerate his bs, he is continually punished and kicked in the teeth for it. He doesn’t have a tragic backstory before the story begins. His tragic backstory is that he did nothing, made nothing of his life, but he still feels entitled and expects to be rewarded. There’s nothing special about him, but he wants to be treated like he’s special.

I’m usually protagonist-phobic because most stories center around the main character so a lot of the time the world bends to their whims in unnatural ways. Subaru is the main character, but hes not the protagonist, and not even particularly important which is why he’s valid.

Subaru is continually punished for his mistakes and I love the way we see how trauma changes him and shapes him. His narrative reads to me as a metaphor for a mentally ill person with the absolute worst habits constantly struggling to be better despite constant backtracking. That’s why with the constant resets in his narrative, none of his actions ever seem to matter. Even when he makes progress he loses it just as quickly, and the world seems indifferent to his suffering. Because the stroy isn’t actually about the world, it’s about Subaru’s personal journey to learn to be a less shitty person.

Subaru is confronted with the fact that hes a very self important and entitled person and he chooses to grow from that rather than run away. He’s so self aware by this point he knows hes the most annoying human on earth and he owns it.

Doma - KIMETSU NO YAIBA

“From a young age I was kind and clever. I always helped people and made them happy, because that was my mission.”

Doma’s story is hard to empathize with because it doesn’t really look tragic. It’s more like a comedy. He’s smiling the whole way through.

Doma feels like an inhuman monster and he chooses to act that way. Literally everything in this story just tells you he was basically born that way. Doma tells you himself. But like, if you look into his background he was raised in a literal cult. Doma despises the cult, because he could see through it. He could see the adults were using him even as a child. But at the same time Doma’s heart has never really left the cult either. Doma, like everybody else, unintentionally reflects the environment he grew up in.

Doma’s just never been shown real tears or a real smile, so he doesn’t know it. He sees his parents kill each other in front of them, and feels nothing, because they literally never acted like parents to him once. He sees life as empty because to him, it is. And then.

By the time he encounters the real thing it’s too late for him. I just like this part of Doma that’s like, emptily trying to imitate all the other humans around him, and feel the things they feel, and always falling short because of his jacked up sense of empathy. It’s adorable. Doma doesn’t feel human at all. He couldn’t possibly understand what a normal human being feels because he’s never lived that life. He’s a total human failure. Rather than try to be something he feels like he’s not, he decides to embrace his inhumanity.

Iichan - ZAREGOTO

“Nonsense.”

Iichan is a character who doesn’t want to choose, but wants to be chosen regardless. In other words Iichan has a paradoxical way of thinking about his life. He’s not the main character. He’s not important. So therefore, whatever happens around him he’s not at fault. However, he is the centerpiece of a tragedy. He’s still important in the sense that all of this tragic suffering is being unleashed upon him. Being the main character of the tragedy means his suffering is important and meaningful, but none of it is ever his fault, and he can’t help it.

That way he avoids ever having to take responsiblity for his actions, or do the hard work of trying to change as a person. He’s a narcicisst, but he hates himself, and he tries to balance out his total egoism by constantly playing up his own suffering and how much he loathes himself. That’s where the main character of the tragedy complex comes in.

What’s interesting about Iichan is that for all the tricks and avoidance he goes through, he’s very self aware as a character. He knows how deficient he is in comparison to others and how his problems really aren’t as important in the grand scheme of things. That’s why it’s interesting to watch all the mental gymnastics he goes through.

Knowing that the author also knows that Iichan is a tool, and clearly frames him as such, I can appreciate the more positive parts of his character. I can know that deep down, despite everything he does want to become a person that’s capable of making the other people in his life happy. He just doesn’t know how.

Hitoshiki Zerozaki - NINGEN

“What a riot.”

Iichan’s equal and opposite force. His boy on the other side of the mirror. What if your reflection in the mirror could talk, and what if it was laughing at you? That’s basically Zerozaki’s character in a nutshell.

Iichan is a character who dwells on his intense mediocrity and desires to be special because of it. Zerozaki is the opposite, he’s been special all of his life and has no idea what a normal life is even like.

Zerozaki is a murderer from a family of murderers and yet he doesn’t enjoy murder. He doesn’t feel its evil or feel a lot of remorse. He feels nothing at all about killing, he thinks people who kill for pleasure are weird, and kills at random.

What I like about Zerozaki is that he’s way more human and down to earth than his perfect foil iichan even though he’s a murderer. Despite being a psycho killer he makes connections with other killers, his little sister, and ninoumiya. A human failure who’s way too human, and that somehow makes him even more of a failure.

Emiya Shirou / Heroic Spirit Emiya - FATE / STAY NIGHT.

“So as I pray. Unlimited Blade Works.”

Counterfeit. Hypocrite. Holy shit. A fake who knows that his desire to save people doesn’t come from the goodness of his heart, but his own selfish desire to be a hero. Shirou emiya is the only valid protagonist, because he’s an extremely traumatized deconstruction of every protagonist before him. Shirou’s not a good person. Shirou’s barely even a person. He has friends but he doesn’t really feel like he deserves to have them. He smiles, but he doesn’t mean it.

I love how Shirou is so terrible at handling his own trauma that he thinks having a strong sense of justice is a personality. I love how Shirous need to sacrifice himself makes him an idiot and is something his narrative continually gruesomely punishes. He has one of the most brutal narratives ever, and the writing behind his character serves to highlight how Shirou’s bad decision making not only hurts himself, but literally everybody around him.

I love how Shirou has completely emptied out as a person and feels unable to feel basic emotions because its totally relatable. He just copes so poorly, but at the same time there’s something beautiful in Shirous struggle to be a good person. Shirou has completely given up on himself as a person, but he still wants to help other people, and so he keeps trying.

Getou Suguru - JUJUTSU KAISEN

“I hate monkeys.”

Some villains just want to destroy everything for reasons deeply rooted to emotional trauma. I feel like I’m repeating myself here.

I like characters where empathy is a dangerous quality to have. Getou is driven to villainy because he cares, overwhelmingly so. He cares about people’s individual agency and freedom and rights to be happy and sees the world stomp on it. His breaking point was that he wanted a girl who had been raised as a literal human sacrifice for the system her entire life to be able to live out the rest of her life free as a person, and being completely powerless and unable to help her as she was killed. Getou was struck in that moment by the inherent unfairness in the world and it broke him.

Empathy is such a debilitating flaw for Getou that he literally has to decide certain people are human and disqualify others from being human so his brain doesn’t completely break. Being a decent caring guy in Getous world breaks you.

Getou tries so hard not to care, to be the maniacal laughing villain he claims to be, but his empathy is the one part of his brain he can never shut off. Even as the most hated man in the world he protects weak and exploited people and takes them in as a family. He does everything he does to make a better world for the people he cares about, and that’s why he’s so broken because the ones he doesn’t care about he’s completely fine with sacrificing en masse.

Akechi Goro - PERSONA 5

“JUSTICE?! RIGHTEOUS?! KEEP THAT SHIT TO YOURSELVES! YOU AND YOUR TEAMMATES PISS ME OFF!!”

I like Goro way more for his potential rather than what we see in canon, but there’s a lot of strong ideas his character is written with. I love the idea that Goro wants to be a good person, wants to be connected to others, but is far too dmaged and because of that

He can only pretend to be a good person and play people pleaser to others. he’s someone who desires at the core of his being to be righteous, and failing that he becomes self-righteous instead. I just love how thoroughly fake he is as a person, and how that makes him covet the real thing.

I also love the insane, twisted and obsessive part of Akechi. I love how much he hates the world for rejecting him, and how much of his actions are just petty revenge on the world, his father, every single person who rejected him. I love him when he’s at his most desperate, when he’s screaming at the people he’s trying to kill asking them why nobody wants him around even though he’s famous and popular.

Ogata Hyakunosuke - GOLDEN KAMUY

Walk your own wild path. Straight and true.

Ogata is a character that is somehow incredibly complex and nuanced character with tons of carefully written development in story, and also a character you have no fucking clue what’s going on in his head. Basically, Ogata is a masterpiece.

Ogata feels like the other half of the story. Sugimoto acts, Ogata reacts. Sugimoto chases, Ogata evades. We are uncomfortably deep in Sugimotos head, but we only catch brief glimpses of Ogatas moments of Frank honesty. The entire story is about Sugimoto and Ogata chaisng after each other and everything else seems incidental sometime. Ogata’s not the main character, but he’s the other half of the heart of the narrative that’s about these really, really bad murderous men who are deeply broken trying to find a way to live in a world without war.

Its not that Ogata is unfeeling it’s that he never allows himself to feel. What other characters lost during the war, Ogata never had in the first place. He sees himself as deformed and malnourished compared to everybody else. Ogatas always been noticing the difference between - himself and others.Even if he wanted to love his brother he kept comparing himself to his father’s beloved son, and realizing how much he lacked. He just kept being reminded over and over again what a child who was loved could have turned out as. Eventually Ogata convinced himself he was unfeeling. Because somehow that’s easier. He can process everything that happened in his life if he’s detached from it all watching from a tree somewhere. He’s so repressed he doesn’t allow himself to feel guilt about his brothers death because he doesn’t view himself as a person capable of loving another. However, just like Sugis desire is to be saved from the hell of war deep down theres a kid in Ogata who wanted to be a good son

Ogata is basically my main point of investment in Golden Kamuy, I just want to see him unravel like a big ball of yarn.

#shigaraki tomura #kumagawa misogi #subaru natsuki #iichan #hitoshiki zerozaki #shirou emiya #doma #akechi goro #ogata hyakunosuke #suguru getou #spooky speaks #top ten favorite characters

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shhh-no-ones-home · 4 years

Text

night watchmen josh balz x reader

+++++++++ Song: diamond girl by set it off

tag list: @thisplace-ishaunted @lifeisabitchandsoareyou @musicsexandpizza69 @svintsandghosts @alilpunkrock @cynic-spirit @theoneandonlykymberlee +++++++++

I sat on the couch in silence, leant over, my elbows digging into my thighs as I propped my head up on my hands. I had come home early to surprise my fiance but he was nowhere to be found. i was hoping to get him and head out for a date on the town but now i had been sitting here for an hour by myself, three glasses of wine deep, and no text back. this sucked. it was slowly creeping up on seven o'clock and i couldnt help but check my phone over and over again, but still nothing. i sighed and sat back, slouching into the couch.

"fuck this."

i said before standing up, freezing in my tracks as the front door unlocked. i heard laughing and got confused before he pushed the door fully open, him walking in with a tall thin woman tucked under his arm. when she saw me she stopped, looking to him for answers.

"baby?"

he asked, also confused.

"youre home early."

i tucked my phone into my pocket and nodded.

"yeah, if you would have answered my text three hours ago you wouldve known that."

i said sarcastically.

"i was hoping we could go out on a date but it looks like you did that already."

he pulled his arm off her shoulders and stood there uncomfortably.

"baby its not what you think-"

he started and i held my hand up.

"no, youre right, what it looks like is you moving out."

i said firmly.

"baby please."

He tried to protest. i shook my head, pulling my engagement ring off and pressing it into his hand.

"you have till tomorrow to get your shit out of my house and then im changing the locks. if you need me ill be at josh's, calling the landlord and taking you off the lease."

i said walking past him to our room. i texted josh as quickly as i could and began packing. as i stuffed clothing into a bag i tried so hard to fight the tears back. we had been together for three years. what happened to all that time? i guess it didnt matter anymore. i guess it didnt for either of us. the truth is i wasnt even that heartbroken. at some point i think i stopped loving him too, it just didnt matter till now. it didnt matter till i was faced with the truth of it all. now i had to deal with that. when i walked back out into the living room he was standing there alone, a sad look on his face. he reached out for me as i made my way to the door.

"wait, baby, can we please talk about this?"

he said and i turned to look at him.

"there is nothing to talk about."

he laughed in disbelief.

"yes there is, just hear me out."

i shook my head.

"no, i dont want to hear anything from you right now. other than maybe how long this has been going on and if you still love me, that i think i deserve to know."

he dropped his gaze to the floor in shame.

"no, i dont."

i nodded.

"and ive been seeing a few different women for the last year."

i closed my eyes tightly for a second.

"so when you proposed to me and said all those things, you didnt mean any of it?"

he slowly shook his head, looking to me with a sad look on his face. i blinked slowly, turning back to the door and reaching for the handle.

"good, cause i dont think i did either."

i said harshly as i pulled the door open, stepping out into the cool night air and closing it behind me. for the first time in forever i could just breathe, relax, revel in freedom. this was a feeling i missed. being with him felt like a trap for so long. i sighed in relief as i saw josh's car pull up in front of the house, making me smile for the first time today. he got out of the car, a look of pity strewn across his features. i practically ran to him, him hugging me tightly to his body and rubbing my back gently.

"you okay?"

he asked and i nodded into his shoulder.

"i am now."

i said softly as he pulled away. he ran his hands down my arms, examining my face before opening the passenger door.

"lets get out of here."

°°°°°°°°°

as i sat on joshs couch i sipped the coffee he had offered and waited for him to come back from the kitchen. the dogs were sitting in a blanket about a foot away from me, staring in my direction. usually they were all over me but maybe they knew something was wrong.

"sorry that took so long."

josh said walking in behind me, another mug in his hand.

"its fine, nothing im not used to."

i let out a soft laugh as he sat, sending me an apologetic look.

"so, uh, do you wanna talk about it?"

he asked and i shrugged.

"i dont even know what there is to talk about now. its over. if im honest it was kind of over a long time ago."

he placed his hand on my thigh, squeezing it lightly.

"im sorry it ended up this way for you y/n. i know you said months ago that you didnt think this would last. but i never even wouldve imagined it would happen like this."

i side nodded before taking a sip of the coffee.

"you and me both."

i said, raising my brows.

"are you gonna be okay?"

i sighed, slouching into the back of the couch.

"thats the thing josh. every part of me says i should be sad. i should be mad. hell maybe even a little vengeful. but im not. i dont really feel anything other than annoyed."

he raised a brow in confusion.

"annoyed?"

i nodded lightly.

"i guess im just fed up with the fact that i waisted three years of my life. three years of time and emotion. three years i couldve been looking for an actual partner and friend. looking for someone who actually cares about me."

he cleared his throat.

"someone like me?"

i sent him a small smile.

"maybe."

he smiled back at me, knowingly.

"its not like we havent been flirting the past few months. when you called me i was almost expecting you to tell me you had ended things with him and you were gonna come running into my arms. ya know, like those shitty fairytale fantasy type things."

i couldnt help but laugh.

"honestly i think i wanted to but it didnt feel right. besides, i dont think it wouldve been appropriate to kiss you in front of him considering he had been cheating on me. that wouldnt exactly look good on paper."

he laughed a little too at that.

"yeah but whats keeping us from doing that now?"

i sent him a look.

"i dont know."

he side nodded.

"im single, youre single, we're too grown adults who have been slightly pining after each other for a few months."

i nodded back.

"all valid points."

i said, inching towards him. he looked down to my lips, inching closer too.

"then theres nothing keeping us apart anymore."

i looked over his eyes.

"i think youre exactly right."

i said softly, shutting my eyes as he closed the gap between us, connecting our lips. it was a lot softer then i had dreamed it to be and he tasted like caramel. it was quick though. when he pulled away we both smiled at each other like idiots.

"why did that take us so long?"

he said through a laugh and i shook my head.

"i have no idea."

i said before pulling him in for another kiss, this time much deeper and smoother, as if that were possible. he hummed into my mouth, bringing his hand around to the back of my head and holding me to him. when we both pulled away again he rested his forehead against mine, keeping his eyes closed.

"god i wish i wouldve done that forever ago."

i smiled at him as he opened his yes, pecking him quickly on the lips.

"god i do too."

we both laughed lightly for a second, him pulling me closer to him.

"y/n?"

he said, taking my hand in his.

"yeah?"

i asked.

"will you be mine?"

i let out a relieved laugh.

"yeah."

he brought his free hand up to stroke my cheek gently.

"i promise ill treat you so much better."

i sat back and held up my pinkie.

"promise?"

i asked and he sent me a knowing smile, connecting our fingers.

"promise."

#wattpad #x reader #276 #josh balz #miw #imagines #one shots

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misinformedgenic · 3 years

Text

The last post on this god awful blog

Hello, I ask everyone who see’s this to unfollow this blog, if you are following me. I can’t look at the reblogs and posts I posted anymore, without feeling incredibly embarassed and I know that I am being aggressive to the people who gave me notes but you know what I don’t care.

(Overall trigger warning: trauma,syscourse,swearing and apologies.)

My message for those who are anti-endogenic:

(tw: abelism,mental ilness)

The truth is, whether all systems are formed by trauma or some can be born that way or it can be formed by something else, it really doesn’t matter. All endogenic systems are just trying to exist and communicate their experiences, and instead of listening and supporting those who might experience their plurality differently from you, you just villanize them and insult them and do the exact same thing that neurotypicals have been doing to us for YEARS. Calling us fake, saying we are trying to get attention, saying we should be ashamed of ourselves for “appropriaiting” from people who had a more severe form of an illness or was priveliged enough to get a diagnosis . If you are traumagenic and you haven’t had that kind of experience, I genuinely envy you. That shit was done to me and it really hurt me. People called me attention seeking for saying I was depressed,or had social anxiety or that I was transgender, or that I was traumatised or plural when all I was trying to do was be myself openly and to accept myself. Why is it that when someone who experiences some sort of plurality and they don’t feel comfortable assosciating their system with trauma, you jump straight to accusing them of something as awful as FAKING or BEING A THIEF!

And yes I know being endogenic means it’s not an illness, but being called a fake for expressing who you truly are when you’ve been forced to hide who you are is such a awful experience. How could you be so callous and careless to even risk that happening to someone else, even once more, in this cruel world. Even if every single endogenic system, who says I can’t help being a plural, was trauma genic, they still associate themselves with that word, endogenic. When you say something horrible about endogenic systems, you are doing so much damage to those people. I mean, to assume without a shadow of a doubt that every single “veritable” endogenic system is actually traumagenic with the limited amount of understanding of DID/OSDD IN ITSELF, as opposed to how this phenomenon could work outside of a disordered framework, really shows you have your head far up your ass. But even then, it doesn’t matter because whether they ended up being traumagenic or not, according to science, no one deserves that treatment.

Even then,in regards to the post on this blog that got the most notes, we need to understand that people with plurality are forced to label their pluraility as a symptom of a disorder. Many systems who needed psychiatry and systems who didn’t and just masked themselves mingled, and they shared terms. This is still happening today, more then ever.

(Just in case you want to know, fictive is not a term used in psychology or psychiatry. It literally came from the soul bonding community, and people who are anti endogenic are still using it. If you don’t believe me use a web browser, and provide some sources to prove otherwise. I didn’t know this, and I’m not going to tag the OP who told me this,because I’m not sure whether they want to be tagged, but thank you. I felt pretty humiliated but it helped to come to realize what I was doing was wrong and that my opinions were wrong, and it helped me to become a kinder and more understanding individual.)

And we need to understand that systems shouldn’t be forced to be involved in exploring their plurality through a lense of trauma, because for many it doesn’t make sense because thats not how they experience it. Even if it is repressed memories ,sometimes or always, systems need a space to be systems without talking about trauma or applying trauma to it. DID and OSDD spaces are not providing that and in those spaces trauma is going to be talked about. Systems shouldn’t have to force themselves to think about trauma and go through pain, just to be able to call themselves a plural and have people acknowledge and accept them.

My message for any endogenic systems and their supporters:

I apologize for everything that you had to go through, from me and my behaviour. My behaviour was terrible and none of you deserved it at all. You deserve so much more than what you get from the anti-endogenic crowd, and you are absolutely valid, and I hope that in the future things will be easier all of you. You deserve love, acceptance and support, and I hope that nobody will ever be able to take that reality from you. You are doing nothing wrong by just being a plural, and it’s really sad that people were and still are fighting about this. Fuck anyone who says otherwise.

Conclusion:

(tw: s***** abuse,ableism,self hatred)

I know I was guilty of what I criticized, and that is really embarassing, but I’m glad I realize that now. I admit I was angry because I was jealous and bitter and I didn’t understand the history properly around this community or how it formed. I went through a lot of online g******g and s***al abuse and my experience with being a system was horrible, I had to deal with alters who had horrible del****ns and wanted to incite gruesome s*** h*** and wanted to k*** me. My system has introjects of my a****rs and random men I see on the streets making pe****ted comments at me pretty much all the time, and I was really jealous of systems who could experience the joys of being a system while avoiding the horrible parts. It made me feel worthless and inferior, because all the interesting and fun parts of being a system could be paraded on TikTok or whether and displayed by people who weren’t f***ed *p and dis*****ng like I was. I am not saying that’s the only basis as to why anti-endogenics hold their opinions, but I am saying this because if you ever see those anti-endogenic posts of mine somewhere and I am very passive agressive or vicious, that’s where it comes from and it isn’t objective or fair.

end of abuse trigger warning.

I decided that I am going to delete all the mean comments I made on other people’s posts that didn’t get any response, so that not another person has to see it again, and for which did get a response I am going to apologize to all those I harmed. If you want to respond to my argument, I can’t stop you from reblogging and making a comment, and that’s your freedom on this website, but I am not going to be replying because discourse on here is so nasty and I’m just done with that. I would rather help contribute to a community of people who feel isolated and who will be empowered by building a culture around plurality, whether that be around trauma or not. I’m tired of focusing on my trauma, it’s in the past and I don’t give a shit about it. It just sucks and I hate it and I am done with it. I will need therapy for it of course,yadi ya, but in terms of my limited free time on this earth I would rather contribute to making people feel happy and supported then argue and be angry about something that is kind of pointless anyway.

So bye, I would like to make a normal system blog in the future and we’ll be using the same names but for now I need to shut the fuck up and reflect.

- Luca

Also hey, on a additional note, my name is Milo and I allowed my name to be associated with this blog and it was irresponsible and unkind for me to do promote this kind of thinking. I am really sorry for any harm I caused by being a part of this blog. Additionally Stanley understands that his post on pride flags was inaccurate and he made some very nasty comments/did some nasty stuff to, he is very sorry to all those he harmed with his previous posts. He is in a really bad situation at the moment, which has gotten worse over time, he is a trauma holder and he is in a lot of emotional turmoil,so neither me or Luca wanted him to be involved in writing this specific post, but that doesn’t mean what he did was okay and all three of us recognize this now.

Best regards,

Milo.

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imagine-loki · 4 years

Text

Pride and Prejudice

TITLE: Pride and Prejudice CHAPTER NO./ONE SHOT: Chapter 24 AUTHOR: wolfpawn

ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine Loki was raised on Jotunheim as Laufey’s son after the war, but an agreement was then made that he would wed Odin’s daughter so Odin could secure the alliance of Jotunheim through the marriage. Loki, in turn, was raised to be king of Jotunheim, but how he views Asgard is far different from how Odin’s daughter is raised leading to a clash of cultures as well as uncertainty between the pair of betrothed youths. RATING: Mature NOTES/WARNINGS: Forced Marriage, not all fun and games. My first real step back into the Loki scene in over a year.

toga-honk was Norse tug-of-war.

Tags - @skulliebythesea @asimovethroughthisworld @blackcherry26-blog @we-shadowhunter2901

Loki did not rest most of the night. He thought over the evening, over everything that occurred and how Ella had ensured everything went as smoothly as possible, even when he was confused. He was grateful for that. He looked to the other side of the bed. She had turned to face him in her sleep, her face peaceful, almost serene as she did so. He was envious, he could not rest yet she did so with ease.

"What's wrong?"

He jumped slightly when she spoke, not realising she had been awake. "Nothing."

"You have been twisting in the sheets all night, what is it?"

"It's too odd."

"Being here?"

"The bed."

"Too soft?"

"And too warm." Loki did not wish to complain, but it was bothering him and she seemed to understand that much at least. A moment later, the bed glowed green and to his surprise, Loki felt the bed cool and the mattress beneath him harden.

"Better?"

"Yes, thank you. But what about you?"

"I am used to hard ice beds by now." She commented, turning to face the window again. "Now, try and get some sleep, it will be a long day tomorrow, regardless. You may as well rest for it."

Being more comfortable, Loki did as she suggested and closed his eyes, grateful that sleep seemed more willing to come to him after her alterations to the bed.

The Jotnar did not need much warning about Nigel, it was clear from the off that he had nothing but contempt for them. But for the most part, though there were those that were wary, most seemed simply curious by the Jotnar. Their height caught everyone's attention, even Loki, who was the shortest by far towered over many. His wife seemed almost dainty by his side yet for an Aesir woman, she was fairly tall. They sat and ate quietly, speaking mostly only when spoken to and watched as everyone entered and exited the dining room.

Loki spent the majority of his time between Arden and Ella, the three of them discussing different matters to do with Jotunheim and how to extract good trade deals from the Vanir. When Thor entered the room, he did so with one of the King’s other sons and his friends who seemed to have arrived during the night. They quickly noted the Jotnar dining at their table, both groupings looking at each other curiously. As they approached their table, they looked at Ella, who gave a slight nod of recognition to her brother and his friends as they passed. She noted the odd looks on their faces as they did so. Beside her, Loki and Helbindi, who had come closer to his brother and sister-in-law to speak to them on some matter, noted it too. When Hogun leant towards Thor and stated something, Thor’s confused look became slightly colder. On him doing so, Loki actually leaning forward slightly in a manner that would suggest he was protecting his wife from the other Aesirs’ stares.

“Dare I ask?” Helbindi looked between Ella and Loki.

“I have no idea,” Loki confessed. When Ella looked at him, she shook her head to imply she had no idea why her brother reacted in such a matter.

“Ella?” She turned to see her brother not far away. “I need to speak to you for a moment.”

The manner in which Thor demanded her attention and not simply asked for it irked her. “Arden, could you please tell Loki that I will be with him in a moment?”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Arden bowed and walked off.

“Have I insulted you in some manner, Dear Brother?”

“What are you doing?” Ella stared silently at him, not knowing why he snarled at her. “The whole palace is talking about you.”

“Really?” Ella was sincerely doubtful of such a statement, as she had done nothing to warrant them doing so and of the grouping she was in, she would be, by far, the least interesting. “What for may I ask?”

“Your hair is loose and the way you are dressed. You are supposed to be married.”

For a moment, she thought he was joking with her, but realising her brother was serious, she began to laugh. “Thor, firstly, have you any idea how warm it is for me and the Jotnar on this realm after the most of a year in Jotunheim, I feel like I am in an oven, and with regards my attire and my hair, on Jotunheim, women wear less than we were reared seeing women dressed, as you so quickly pointed out when we got there, and on the matter of my hair, I am not held to Asgardian standards any more. I am of Jotunheim now. I hated having it pinned. My husband happens to like my hair like this, so do I for that matter.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” Thor turned slightly to see Loki and Helbindi walking towards him. “I think it suits her far better. Anyone in possession of sight can see so. Pulled back it looks too harsh against her features, they look better framed by loose tendrils.” He commented as he came closer to them. “Surely, having been raised with my wife, you would know that she does not tend to mince words and none can make her do something she does not wish to. So when she says she wishes to wear certain clothes and do her hair in certain ways, you surely know that it is her decision and hers alone.” Loki stood between Thor and Ella, though his build was slighter than the Aesir prince’s, his height was more and he showed such in his stance. “By Jotnar standard, we think her overly dressed, yet not one being on Jotunheim ever thought it appropriate to make mention of such as it is her choice how she should dress and hers alone."

Both crowned princes stood almost chest to chest in a challenging manner by the time Loki had ceased speaking, though his words were more growls than comprehensible sentences. Hogun and Fandral seemed to appear at the end of the hall at that moment. Ella would not have been startled if she were to find out that they had stationed themselves there when Thor had sought to speak to her.

“Enough, both of you. The last thing we need is an argument.” Ella stood between her brother and her husband. “We are all guests here and so help me but if I have to be embarrassed by either of you, I will turn whichever of you it is into farmyard poultry and set you out amongst the hunting dogs...again.”

Thor took a step back while Hogun and Fandral ceased walking towards them and looked apprehensive, telling Loki and Helbindi that this was no mere idle threat, the ‘again’ adding to the situation.

“After what he did,” Thor began.

“And I thank you for your concern, Brother, I sincerely do. But what occurred between my husband and I has, for one, been rectified by our better communication with one another and for two, is our concern, alone. Loki and I will deal with Loki and I, no one else will be welcome to interject, not you, Father or even the Norns.”

“They’d be brave to try,” Fandral whispered to Hogun, who nodded in agreement. One warning glare from Ella made both warriors take a step back in caution.

“But…” Thor began.

“No, no buts, ifs, or any other objections, just no. This peace has been long overdue and I am not risking it because you and your friends don’t think my clothes and hair are appropriate. For Norns’ sake, this is a fraught enough peace as it is, both sides are wary of the other and in the middle are Loki and I, the two to actually be forced to sacrifice for it and neither of us should have to deal with further issues, it is not fair to expect that.”

Loki looked at her sadly at her words. Her acknowledgement of the situation was nothing new, but seeing her acknowledge his sacrifices as well as her own validated some of the thoughts he feared to vocalise.

“It is your business, none others,” Thor acknowledged. Ella gave him a slight smile. Then he turned to Loki. “But surely I am permitted to be angry at nearly losing my sister because of another’s actions?”

“We are all permitted to have our emotions,” Ella commented. “But with them, we should have all available information. My isolation and subsequent illness were indeed partly because Loki did not wish to be in my company, but so too was it due to my not knowing social etiquette on Jotunheim and him thinking it was snobbery that caused me to not talk to others. I have my part in this. I said nothing of my ill-health, Norns, but he is not a mind reader, you cannot blame him for my not saying anything.” Thor was forced to admit her statements to be true. “We also have enough to be concerned about with Prince Nigel getting the notion to think it something of an amusing idea to try and imply the Jotnar are nothing more than mindless beasts by antagonising them into a fight and I am not risking everything for an idiot with limited intelligence.”

“Wait, what?” Thor’s interest piqued at the mention of a fight. “How do you find out these things? It’s like the time you knew we were going to the forests hunting instead of training all over again. What sort of magic do you use to learn the things you do?”

“There’s no magic involved, I just use my ears. Sometimes keeping your mouth shut and your ears open is far more useful than the other way around.” She growled. “He is planning to use you and your hot head in this, I might add, as well as digging up what happened with me. So do not fall for his tricks.”

“I am not as dim as you think me to be,” Thor growled. Ella gave him a look of scepticism. “That was years ago. We all grow with time.”

“Well, good for you, you get a chance to prove it. Keep your cool.” She had ordered, half pleaded.

“I am not as volatile as you make out.”

“You’re a Berserker, Thor. You are a Berserker who wields thunder, you are the very definition of volatile.” Ella pointed out, Thor clenching his jaw at her saying so, shame filling his face.

Loki looked at Ella and Thor in shock at her words. He then looked to Arden and Helbindi who both had similar looks. They did not know this before now, and it terrified them all.

#loki #others #submission #Submitted fic #Pride and Prejudice #Chapter 24 #wolfpawn

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clansayeed · 4 years

Text

Bound by Choice ― IV.iii. What is a Trinity Without Three

PAIRING: OC x OC x OC (Valdas x Isseya x Cynbel) RATING: Mature (reader discretion advised)

⥼ MASTERLIST ⥽

⥼ Bound by Choice ⥽

Before there were Clans and Councils, before the fate of the world rested in certain hands, before the rise and fall of a Shadow King ― there was the Trinity. Three souls intertwined in the early hands of the universe who came to define the concept of eternity together. Because that was how they began and how they hoped to end; together. For over 2,000 years Valdas, Cynbel, and Isseya have walked through histories both mortal and supernatural. But in the early years of the 20th century something happened―something terrible. Their story has a beginning, and this is the end.

Bound by Choice and the rest of the Oblivion Bound series is an ongoing dramatic retelling project of the Bloodbound series. Find out more [HERE].

Note: Choice is the only book in the series not based on an existing Choices story. It is set in the Bloodbound universe and features many canon characters.

*Let me know if you would like to be added to the Choice/series tag list!

⥼ Chapter Summary ⥽

Cynbel tackles a new world problem with old world solutions, though Valdas and Isseya are less than pleased with the result. The world may seek to divide them but who would they be if they let it?

WARNING: this chapter contains sensitive themes regarding violence

[READ IT ON AO3]

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

The vampire laughs at the steady barrel of Moray’s pistol now level at his face. Laughs and laughs and watches that surety slip with every passing moment.

“If you think one crime less than another Lord Montes, let me assure you that breaking into the home of a detective of Scotland Yard and threatening his life is much the same severity as your current charges.”

“Current charges,” Cynbel feigns innocence and terribly so, “what current charges? I was unaware you had yet to formally accuse us of anything.”

He takes pity on the poor man’s mortal eyes; takes the withering end of his cigarette and tosses it behind him to the hearth and lets it flicker alight. The room is steadily cast in the fire’s warm glow and leaves Cynbel framed in shadowy silhouette before it.

The perfect spot to watch every expression that flits across the detective’s weary features.

“This madman’s act will give me more than enough credibility to do so.”

Oh will it now? Cynbel picks at his fingernails absently. “Fascinating, though, that you do not ask how I came to know where you lived, how I found my way inside, why I’m here…”

“In my experience there are men on this earth who act without reason. I assume you are — one… of them…”

Watching Moray’s revelation is a rare delicacy. How his pistol wavers to the left slightly when he turns his head so harsh Cynbel hears the crack of old joints at the neck. Lingering, then, on the closed doorway behind him.

“My wife —”

“She’s resting, detective, and rather uneasily so. I suggest you keep your voice down. If she awakens before she is ready you really won’t have any hope.”

Grief, it’s impossible to keep the glee from his words as he says them. If he won’t be placated with a war then this will do — however small a measure.

But Moray doesn’t listen and advances on the door. Which Cynbel can’t have — it will ruin everything. The moment Moray grasps the door knob the vampire is behind him, enveloping him. Holding him as intimate as a lover as their cradled hands slowly pull back from the metal. “It’s for the best…” he whispers; the last act before he pulls back.

When he recovers from his stupor Moray advances; presses the cold metal barrel between Cynbel’s eyes. As if it would do a thing.

“What have you done to her?”

“Didn’t I tell you to speak low?”

“What have you done to my wife?!”

Thunk.

The noise is soft but the silence echoes loudly. Quickly Cynbel bats the pistol aside. It clatters to the wooden floor and shocks Moray enough to take heed of his words and step away from one danger and towards the other.

He sighs. “Now look what you’ve done. She could have had a chance.”

The implication makes Moray’s eyes widen. “If you have harmed her I will personally see you hanged.”

“As if that would take —” Cynbel rolls his eyes as if to say really, this again and listens for any sign of life on the other side of the door.

There is. Faint, yes, but there. Smelling of rot and foulness and craving as only the newborn do. It skitters closer and closer, away from the bed where Cynbel had laid her to rest.

“You have only yourself to blame.”

“That lies with her killer!”

“Really? Do you think I could have gotten to Mrs. Moray had you been here with her; tonight, if at all?”

Moray’s voice falters when the first thud sounds at the door. For once the greater threat is not he, Golden Son of Valdemaras, but the thing on the other side. Some innate, mortal part of Moray knows this.

“Trust me, detective, I know better than most the toll years can take on a marriage.” Though if they were here they would ream him for such an implication — so Cynbel corrects himself. “Now of course I’ve never been married, myself — we always agreed such binding contracts were just that; contracts. Only recently have they become such tawdry affairs and those too we’ve deemed too much for our unique relationship. For what we are to one another.

“I can’t help but wonder, though, how different things would be had you taken the time to discuss and repair your relationship with your dear wife. And not just for you— We would not have this meddlesome investigation. My beloveds would not have their hard-earned dalliances in this lifetime ripped out from under them. Your wife would still be alive.

“All you had to do was talk. Which… for the likes of men like us—men of action, that is to say—can be the hardest thing in the world to do.”

“Really,” Moray scoffs and his voice is thick, emotive; tearing him between the impulse to act and the desire for that which is long gone, “I’ve found that you never shut up.”

It makes Cynbel laugh again, wagging his finger; “You know I’ll give you that one. You gentlemen think murder such a grisly business but I find it brings out my inner poet.”

To Cynbel, to the door. To Cynbel again, to the door again. Moray reminds him of frightened game. “You—You admit it then? You confess?”

“On the contrary; I figured you were so determined to pin murder on my lovers and I… that I might as well give you a murder to validate your claim.”

“Y-You —”

“What I did not do, detective, was murder the Viscount. Not I, nor Isseya, nor Valdas. Fucking ill timing, that’s all it was. I couldn’t give less of a fuck who actually did the deed — he deserved it for how he spoke to my darling.

“Your justice is linear. I’m here to show you the truth; that justice is like everything else in this world. It is a part of the eternal cycle. I’ve bent it into place for you — you’re welcome.”

The banging on the door resumes and with it the lowest, barest of growls. Something sharp eats away at the already thin wood on the other side and soon it will break free.

Sweat rolls down Moray’s temples in teardrops of fear. The sight of it is euphoric. “Turning these days is a trickier process than it once was. For everyone else, of course. I had thought that the purity of my blood would be enough to compensate for your wife’s tragically fragile willpower but I guess not.”

So many words he struggles to understand and piece together. Apparently Cynbel is going to have to walk him through it.

“When a Turning goes foul,” he continues, “it still takes — more than it should. It takes the soul, the mind, the things that make a person who they are. And the thing left behind is truly ugly indeed.”

With a crack the door before them begins to splinter. Moray jumps at the sound. Needle-thin shards falling to the floorboards growing in number. The creature on the other side smells the blood so close and only grows in determination and fervor.

Fear paralyzes him. It runs sour down his trousers but Cynbel holds on because this is the most fun he’s had since they stepped foot in London.

“What… what is left behind?” Moray asks, his voice a whisper.

“They call it a Feral.”

And so the time for words passes. Cynbel holds Detective Moray through every fit and spasm of his body; the humanity inside desperate to flee the void it can feel through the growing hole in the door. Large enough for a taloned hand to scrape through; greying skin and veins bulging black along the length of it.

The door doesn’t last much longer after that.

Given their recent trials he doesn’t expect to be welcomed home to praise, to affection, to lust. They are — for the first time in his memory — too weary for that.

Not so weary enough, though, that they are made weak.

Valdas backhands his firstborn’s cheek with enough force to send him flying. He collides with the far wall, feels wooden frame and plaster yield to the weight of centuries, but still falls.

Isseya looks for a moment as if to speak, but changes her mind at a glance from her God.

But Cynbel’s still riding so fucking high from the thrill of it all that he can’t understand why his Maker is mad at him to begin with. He can still taste Mrs. Moray’s blood on his tongue, feel the detective’s sweat oily on his palms. The memory of it makes him laugh — though it barely lasts when the same hands that caress him lift him up by the throat again.

“You would mock me now?! Insufferable, ungrateful —!”

“Ungrateful?!” Cynbel spits the word bloody on Valdas’ cheek. “It is born from gratitude that I would do this for you, for the both of you! As I would for no one else!”

“Don’t color your words so, Cynbel,” mumbles their darling from her chair and he can’t fucking believe the look she gives him is angry too—how are they angry with him?! “You may say you’ve done this for us but the root of them is a selfish one.”

Valdas grasps harder; pushes him into the wall until it, too, starts to crack like the hole beside it. “Do you never think about the consequences of your actions? That I have to clean up the messes you wreak on the world?”

“In your name, Valdemaras!”

“In no name but your own!” Blood runs down Cynbel’s forehead and stings at his eyes but not enough to spare him the anguish and hatred that ghosts over his beloved’s faces.

He seemingly comes back to sense. Enough to drop Cynbel to the floor and cross the room in a breath; yet not to Isseya and the wounds that choice makes show gaping and festered.

“You are not so deluded, Cynbel, that you can’t see it,” he continues low as he watches the other vampire ease himself off his knees, “and perhaps the fault lies with me that I humored you for so long. That I didn’t punish you enough — that you thought you could risk what is mine time and time again…”

He always thought no word could ever cause the same pain as a blade, and hates that it is now that he is proven wrong.

“Forgive me, but you punished me a great many ti—”

“No.”

He looks to his God confused. “What?”

“No, Cynbel, I will not forgive you this time.”

It leaves him gaping and confused. Angry, scared; alone on an island of his own making. One they have all made for themselves where they are, for the first time, apart both physically and… and everywhere else.

Isseya shifts in discomfort. “Valdas, brash though he is… Cynbel has always acted for us.”

“Has he?”

“I have tried.”

The laugh he gets in reply is harsh and clipped and choked in the throat Cynbel knows so well. “Tell me you tried to show restraint at the detective and I will have your tongue. You reveled in it; fear, pain and suffering. You have always reveled in it.”

Cynbel raises his chin not in defiance, but in pride. “And you have loved that about me before.”

“Indeed — but you’ve let it blind you. Do you think you’ve gotten away with this? That that man’s slaughter will not go uninvestigated and unpunished?!”

“There’s nothing left of him to be investigated.”

“And the Order will not seek answer for this, I assume. Because you took such great care in your actions. In your beloved actions.”

“Now you border cruelty,” snaps Isseya, but his red-eyed stare wilts her again, “my Holy One.”

Which isn’t fair, not in the least. Throw him against walls, into furniture, out into the sun for all he cares but to turn that ire onto Isseya as though she had led him to the Moray home by the hand…

Cynbel groans as he stands. Feels bones slot back together and something in his spine dislodge itself from where it ought not to be. He wipes the blood from his eye though the cut is already healed. “Do not look to her that way.”

The audacity leaves Valdas bewildered. “What did you say?”

“What else should I have done?! Should I have been content to watch you both suffer? For weeks I have stood idle while that feeble cretin has torn everything you’ve built here to pieces. I might as well have been drowning in your blood — and from my own hands! Hands that are yours, Valdas, now as they always have been.”

“I did not command my hands to act.”

“You have never needed to before,” Cynbel’s voice cracks as if to prove his heart is breaking even if they cannot see it, “just like I’ve never not done everything in my power and much beyond to ease your pain… to bring you joy.”

“Joy,” whispers Isseya, “would have been staying here. But we cannot now, Cyn’, you know that don’t you?”

“Our lives have never been stagnant, Iss’. Why would we not move on from here as we have from any other place in the world?”

“Because the world is no longer the same!” The Made-God’s voice booms through the house. It is something they feel down to their very bones and further still. It silences them, sees them scolded children not yet defiant enough to dare risk their lives should he continue.

“Perhaps a century ago, two, ten even this would have been the answer. I would have rewarded you for it. But as the world changes so we must adapt to it to survive. Have you learned nothing? This place has been our greatest trial so far and you, my darling Cynbel, have never disappointed me so utterly in your failure.”

So many firsts this wretched city has wrought. Their first blows, the first night without familiar comfort. Their first true human threat and one that Cynbel had felt warranted swift action to please them; to save them.

And now… this.

“I—I am… I am not made for civility, Valdas; my love. Please do not ask me to be anything more or less than what I am.”

“I love you too much to do otherwise.”

He doesn’t look up — he can’t. Head cast down shoulders bearing the weight of their loathing towards him in that moment. And he is not irrational—he knows this is not something they have harboured for him for a time. But it is not a knowledge that numbs the pain of it.

Valdas approaches him with even and measured steps. Mortal steps at mortal speed; as if to give him chance to run should he wish. He could never. He could never.

From the edges of his sight he catches when Valdas kneels—his Divinity on bended knee—and tries to take Cynbel’s face in hand. Neither man can tell who of them trembles more but they do so as they do everything. Together.

The sight of tears on his Maker’s face is agony still.

“I love you far too much Cynbel,” he repeats just as broken, just as wounded, “to sit back and let you burn yourself with the flames of the past. That is what lesser vampires do — that is what those who are not my blood do. They relish on days in glory and the world leaves them to history, to places like the Musea Sanguis.

“You are no relic of rust. You are mine; my Golden Son. And I would not see you join the ranks of those beneath us — not when I know it would lead to your death.”

The noise that tumbles from him is animal and wretched. But Valdas takes it with love; wipes his thumbs over tear-tracks and looks as if to kiss him for apology but he hesitates — unsure. And in the one thing they have always been certain of.

The shadow darkening his eyeline grows and Cynbel feels a much surer touch at his hands where they rest on his lap. Fingers the barest touch away from breaking.

“You risked your life tonight,” she chides lukewarm, “and even the thought hurts us.”

“It means nothing.”

“No —” says Valdas; firm like his kiss “— do not. You are my blood—our blood—and that makes you so much more than nothing. For what trinity is without three? The world will always seek to divide us, and men better than Detective Moray have tried. We have weathered them all, remember? And we will weather them still.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because we are better. And if we are to survive every time the world changes then we must continue to be better. Even if it hurts us.”

Isseya’s cool touch fixes at his hair. Valdas uses his tongue to wet his finger and wipe away the blood he spilled. Cynbel can feel the regret in every soft stroke.

He’s paralyzed by the freedom of burden from their love.

“But what does it change? I—I cannot bring Moray back to life or ease the complications he caused your public lives.”

“No, and even if his death remains hidden he’s taken too much. We’ll have to leave within the season.” Honey-voiced Isseya has never been one to sugarcoat the truth. She doesn’t now, either. “And it will take me some time to forgive you for that, Cyn’.”

“As you see me suffering now I too saw you. And… and I could not take the pain of standing still.”

“Justify it for yourself all you want. What’s done is done.”

His God drags a worshipful touch over Cynbel’s features. “But it will never happen again.”

Say it, says the press of a thumb against his lips, and mean it well.

“It will not, my love.” Because it is for them both.

They could not risk losing sight of such an important thing again.

But ideas are just that — there is nothing corporeal about them. Nothing they can hold in their hands beyond one another and what of when the world takes them far away again? Then how will they remember?

So Isseya suggests a portrait.

“We’ve never had the like before.”

“And for good reason,” Valdas blows the smoke of his cigarette up, up where it curls into the stagnant air above their bed and remains until it reaches the ceiling, “it has been in the best interests of our kind not to leave such permanent traces.”

“Tell that to Augustine.”

“I have. Of course he didn’t listen.”

“The gall of you.”

His laugh is rich as he offers it to Cynbel, but their minx takes it before he has the chance. Teasingly she holds it out of reach, though really if she insists on keeping her leg thrown wide over his waist she will always be in reach, but it is light and it is fun and most important of all it is the best and safest he’s felt in a long time.

“Then we keep it with us.”

Isseya flicks ash on his bare chest at the suggestion. “I forbid it. No doubt you would insist the youngest carry it for the first century or two.”

“You know me so well!” She hits him—hard—but it only makes him laugh harder.

“Don’t make me come over there and break you two up.” Valdas warns with little heat; though he is amused by the way his Golden Son tries to push himself deeper into the mattress as though to make his space between them permanent.

“I so rarely get this, don’t take it from me just yet.”

“And why do you think that is?”

“Because you know it’s where I belong?”

Valdas snorts softly into his blond hair. “More like there’s never enough bed. Pull your limbs in tighter, darling.”

But he is Cynbel, the Golden Son, so he does quite the opposite. Valdas and Isseya give matching noises of protest and struggle to fight for their rightfully-earned spaces.

He will always prefer their laughter to their tears.

Tobias catches them discussing the finer details of such a portrait come the next sunset.

Cynbel’s main argument — vanity. “If by some rare chance this thing turns out favorably I would hate to look mortal upon it.”

But Valdas only shrugs. “Rather mortal than that which could serve as direct condemnation. Shame Signore Da Vinci passed last year — he detailed Augustine’s grim disposition quite well if I’m remembering correctly.”

“I wouldn’t stand for it even if he were.” Isseya beckons for the teapot and Tobias comes round quickly, though his soft laughter catches the three vampires by surprise.

“Something funny?” she asks, though it’s clear she couldn’t give a damn.

“You remind me of my cousin afar,” but does not let his musings detract from his work clearing the dining table, “back home, I should say. You see I had the mind to portrait every member of our house in my youth. They were wretched about it — I wasted a dozen canvases on the hair alone. Perhaps I could have finished in time had they not demanded I try again and again…

“I think I had but a mere few left to do… such things happen in families of a hundred or more. But my exile put a stopper in it.”

“Is there a point to this beyond you withholding my tea?” asks Isseya clipped and curt. Tobias quickly rushes back to her side with the teapot.

“I would be honored of the chance to take up the brush and palette again. Should you find the whimsy for it, of course.”

They have their painter, and the subjects willing. His payment, they decide as one, will be the Montes Estate.

Immediately Tobias refuses. “I could never! What would I do with all… this?”

“We will find safe storage for that which we covet. As for the house and the rest… Sell it for all I give a shit,” the Made-God replies, “I’m coming around to the idea of this painting being the only memory we claim from this place. We shall stay until it is complete and not an evening more.”

The following silence draws their attentions; to the pointed look their Maker gives Isseya. “Is there a meaning to that I’m missing?” she asks.

“I trust you will find a way to expedite your collegiate business within the time frame.”

“And if I cannot?”

Cynbel shrugs. “We find another college for you to attend. Switzerland, maybe — or Auvernal, I’ve always been fond of the border of Cordonia and Auvernal, forests there remind me of back when.”

Three weeks pass. Isseya might just well finish on time. Time they are already hoarding — and much of it not theirs to steal.

Detective Moray sought to slander them and he succeeded. Feeble and easily devoured as he had been, he still joins the ranks of the very few who have bested the Trinity throughout time.

Their drawing room parties are no more than fancies of things wistfully remembered. Shared in secret among those who knew but when left to the wild imaginations of the growing generation they quickly grow out of hand. Whispers of ritual sacrifice and demonic worship and how one young lady is convinced she saw the Lady Isseya Montes eat a beating human heart with her own eyes.

Though that could very well have happened. None of them can rightly remember.

It is best they leave London. England too, for that matter. The entire ordeal may have been eclipsed by the London Summer Season but Isseya’s absence does not go undiscussed.

“We cannot leave this godforsaken island soon enough,” is the first thing she says after returning from her final examination of autopsy, “I was just accosted by two wretched little birds. Do you know what they said to me?”

They can hear her all the way up to the drawing room; her lovers exchanging uneasy glances while Tobias helps adjust her hair for the portrait before coaxing her between them.

“What did they say dearest?” asks Valdas as he takes a kiss from her.

Cynbel takes one of his own. “And do they still breathe?”

“Indeed, though not for lack of wanting to gut them,” she bats the pair of them away and back into position; the portrait was her idea but she loathes the process the most, “apparently the current word of mouth is that bastard Viscount yet lives and I ran away with him. To France.”

That particular sitting takes longer than the others. When it comes time to sleep she banishes them to the floor for their laughter.

But even with their combined years and experiences — though the Trinity did not know it they did not prepare themselves even the least for what it would look like when complete.

It is clear from the moment Tobias turns the canvas for their final critique that there is magic in every stroke.

They look…

They look exactly as he sees them, Cynbel thinks as he makes sure to mind the fresh paint and keep his touch just shy of them. His largest hesitation was that this portrait, like other likenesses of them over the centuries, would not show him what he sees with his own eyes. But today Tobias has proven it possible. More than that — he has made it real.

“Does it meet your expectations, Made-God? Is the trade fair?”

Valdas has to actually wrench his gaze away from it. “Indeed. Perhaps… imbalanced on our part.”

With amusement Cynbel watches how their darling girl’s mouth opens and closes, opens and closes. Whatever witty remark or critique she had planned (and to think she did not would do her a disservice) simply will not do.

Finally she manages a reverent whisper. “You look as you did… in my mind. How I imagined the great God of Death Valdemaras and his Lover Risen from Mortality all those years ago. When I fell in love with you.”

Of course they only see the others. The better parts of themselves.

“Your compliments do me no credit. I realize just now even in your years you’ve probably not come across fae art. It all looks like this.”

Odd little thing, their fae butler. Perhaps one day, should their paths cross again, Cynbel might take it upon himself to discover what exactly sent the creature into exile — how he came upon London and if it was on purpose or otherwise that he slipped his way in among their staff. Or perhaps he is just glad to have not met the same fate as the rest of them.

“Nothing looks like this,” says Valdas — his lovers who agree, “a fitting thing to be our only memory of this place.”

“I’m glad to know I’ve done you justice, my Lords and Lady.”

Odd little thing, indeed.

“Beyond so, Tobias,” imbalanced though he indeed agrees, “if ever the unlikely event that we cross paths again should occur… call upon us, the chance to even this debt would be nice.”

Odd and funny — Tobias who has served them for years now, who knows the lengths they would go for their together, and who has the audacity to say; “I think I should fit the Lordship Montes quite nicely.”

Ultimately the Trinity must suffer the sane decision of sending the few things they want to keep safe overseas to Isseya’s progeny and the Musea Sanguis. They pay handsomely for everything to be taken to the docks at night and care little of thieves. Anyone unlucky enough to steal from them won’t live long enough to enjoy the spoils.

Emptier and emptier, their house, until the painting is the last thing of theirs left.

When the paint has dried and morning light come to London, Tobias commits his final act under their service. He dons his hat and coat, tucks the painting rolled tight to rest in a display that once held Valdas’ champion sword under his arm, and summons the carriage to take him to the docks.

#bloodbound #choices bloodbound #bloodbound fanfiction #playchoices fanfiction #choices fanfiction #oc: isseya #oc: valdas #oc: cynbel #oblv: bound by choice #oblv: new chapter #; my fics #tw: domestic violence

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linogram · 5 years

Text

50 questions tag

tagged by @chngbok

1. what takes too much of your time?

school

2. what’s makes your day better?

music

3. what is the best thing that happened to you today?

that ask, where someone said they were also ace and I was the first ace stay they'd met

4. what fictional place would you like to go to?

in a ghibli film

5. are you good at giving advice?

yes, but i'm bad at following it

6. do you have any mental illness?

I mean yeah, like I'm not gonna say, but u could probably easily figure it out

7. have you ever experienced sleep paralysis?

no, tho I think I used to have night terrors where I would scream out and scare my cousins, those were fun times

8. what musician inspired you the most?

if we wanna get all deep n personal n mushy gushy n stuff, then my cello teacher and a rlly close friend of mine, but like not as deep n mushy gushy n stuff, suga, day6, and skz

9. have you fallen in love?

nope!

10. what’s your dream date?

hmm, ig like a walk and just wandering around

11. what do others notice about you?

uh, I've had someone say that when I play cello I act differently, does that count?

12. what is an annoying habit that you have?

talking way too much when I'm w my friends, tbh I need to just shut up when I'm w them and only speak to when spoken to

13. do you still talk to your first love

never had one so, nes

14. how many ex’s do you have?

none

15. how many songs are in your playlist?

uh main one about 2390

16. what instruments do you play?

only cello and piano, tho im trying to learn acoustic and bass guitar, and I do chorus (if u count that)

17. who do you have the most pictures of?

oof I have a fuck ton of skz and suga

18. where would you like to go before you die?

out of the US

19. what’s your zodiac?

aries

20. do you relate to it?

meh, sometimes, usually when I wanna fight someone

21. what is happiness to you?

uhhh,,,, ermmm, I wanna think of some cheesy ass shit, but nothings coming to mind :/

22. are you going through anything right now?

I sure am buddy boy! :)

23. what’s the worst decision you’ve ever made?

uh, deciding to bottle up my emotions in like 8th grade (or maybe 7th), rlly fucked me over tbh

24. what’s your favorite store?

this music store called opus

25. what's your opinion on abortion?

pro-choice

26. do you keep a bucket list?

nope

27. do you have a favorite album?

it's not stray kids, but mitski? be the cowboy? absolutely owns my entire heart

28. what do you want for your birthday?

it'd be nice to see skz live and thank them, yknow?

29. what are most people’s first impression of you?

that I'm younger than I am and I'm quiet, tho idk if that's right bc thats wha I assume is their first impression of me

30. what age to you seem according to most people?

ayy!! I've already sorta hinted at the answer in this in the last one, like I'd say 15-16, tho I've had someone think I was like 14/15

31. where do you keep your phone while sleeping?

next to me, I listen to music through headphones while sleeping

32. what word do you say the most?

not to sound like a stereotypical teenager, but "like"

33. what’s the oldest age would you date?

so, I'm 18 rn, probably like 19 maybe 20

34. what’s the youngest age would you date?

like 17

35. what job/career do most people say sould suit you?

tbh, ppl don't rlly tell me things like this, but when I tell ppl im doing music they're like "yeah, makes complete sense, good choice", so ig music?

36. what’s your favorite music genre?

pfltlbenr, beats me idunno

37. if you would live in any country in the world, where would it be?

I have never actually been outside of the US, but maybe like uh,, idk some place in Europe? where I could go to different countries easily as I pleased?

38. what’s your current favorite song?

nfwmb - hozier

39. how long have you have this blog for?

for a while, but I just started posting on this one in like January and I had another (same blog I just moved, so it'd be my main) that I started in like july/August of last year (so 2018)

40. what are you excited for?

this year to be done so I can finally be some w high school

41. are you a better talker or a listener?

uh, tbh I keep being told I talk too much, so ig a better talker (even tho im shit at talking)

42. what is the last productive thing you did?

hmm, probably get up and use the bathroom this morning

43. what do you want for Christmas?

uh,, tbh idk

44. what classes do you get the best grades in?

music, hands down

45. on a scale of 1-10 how are you feeling right now?

like a solid 4

46. what can you see yourself doing in 10 years?

music teacher? maybe?

47. when did you first get your heartbreak?

tbh, never, I mean i pair a grandparent I was sorta close to, but like that was more of a long term thing, so ig if that counts as heartbreak, then that

48. at what age do you want to get married?

lol. never

49. what career did you want to have as a child?

anything and everything, like for a while I wanted to be a firefighter

50. what do you crave right now?

validation

tagging: @honeyboyfelix @jal-hago-isseo @hwangwhatjin

#🍯 talks #tagged

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freedom-of-fanfic · 7 years

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I have been reading and reblogging some of your posts and wanted to thank you for that detailed account. I have been out of fandom for a while, and antis really baffled me at first. But now I have a question: Could you talk some more about how current antis relate back to the LJ social justice scene and when the morph from debating fanworks to dissing people happened? Thank you!

I’m glad you’ve been enjoying this blog!

I think this reddit post does a nice job of summarizing the history of fandom and how it’s led to our current point. But I’m going to go more into how tumblr’s very structure led to a ‘race to the bottom’ sort of enacting of punishment via social justice.

Almost all of this is from personal observation, having been here since late 2010.

To get more into the actual history of it: Racefail ‘09 is the name given to the big, public 2009 debates about racism in genre fiction (published fantasy and sci-fi), which happened primarily on livejournal and private websites. (Racefail was itself the result of the rising awareness of social justice in the real world thanks to the democratization of information via the internet.) Racefail raised a couple of big questions: were non-white (and non-straight/non-cis/non-male) creators being silenced and erased in published genre fiction? And were the stories being told primarily racist/sexist/homophobic and lacking in representation for non-white/Western cultures (and LGBT+/queer/female stories)?

From everything I’ve read I feel like a lot of good came out of these talks; in particular, it greatly raised the awareness of social justice in genre fiction and fandom spaces - which had been there before, but not quite so prominent. But one major bad came out of it: it revealed, via the shitty behavior of one member of the genre fiction community, how social justice could easily be used as a silencing tactic by applying arguments meant to dismantle power structures to individuals who may (or may not!) benefit from those power structures.

Fast-forward to 2010-2012 tumblr. LJ has undergone multiple journal purges and partial restorations, been bought out by a Russian company, and - final straw - changed the way anonymous threaded posts were handled, ending its value as a space for anon memes like kinkmemes. Fandom dispersed. A not-insignificant number of us eventually end up on tumblr, and those of us coming from LJ have brought with us a greater awareness of social justice, particularly lgbt/queer culture and feminism.

At the same time, Facebook has opened its doors to everyone instead of only allowing college students to use it. Facebook has almost single-handedly popularized the notion of making your offline life publicly available online. Gone are the days of keeping your age, real name, and offline identity hidden; we share everything except maybe last names and exact locations.

Tumblr democratizes the fandom experience like never before. Livejournal and forums had moderators; tumblr has none. Communities are gone - instead we have tags where people gather to talk about shared interests. People who previously felt shut out, forced to be ‘lurkers’ because they had nothing to say, could now have a blog and share the work of others via reblogging. The main way to gain social capital is by having the most followers and therefore the most widespread content.

But tumblr is a weird experience compared to other blogging sites because at the time it was the only one with a ‘reblog’ function. any one post can go absolutely viral and the people who see it beyond your immediate circle will lack the context of the rest of your blog. This means that either every single post needs to be entirely self-contained … or get wildly misunderstood. (Guess which one happens.) It also means that that the posts that spread the fastest and furthest are the short, witty ones or - you guessed it - the controversial ones. Finally, people tend to not fact-check - if something is interesting and seems believable, people reblog it uncritically. Tumblr’s dashboard structure actively encourages people to not leave their dash to look at provided external links - you’ll lose your ‘place’ on your endless-scrolling dash, and the little ‘home’ button in the corner is reminding you how many new posts have been created since you last refreshed. You don’t have time to fact-check.

Controversy without context is polarizing - without the original context, people provide their own context and agree or disagree based on a bunch of assumptions. Tumblr is a breeding ground for this. Opinions don’t get more nuanced - they get more vitriolic, more sharp and quick-witted. And with people not bothering to fact-check or click linked information, misinformation spreads like wildfire.

The early experience of fandom on tumblr is one of widespread acceptance. Possibly because FB does this, people feel safe to share their age, sexuality, and gender on their tumblr profiles - and those identities get more and more specific as people learn more about gender identities and sexual orientations that are off the gender binary. People spread educational posts about queer/LGBT+ culture, feminist theory, and racism alongside fandom posts. The importance of minority representation in the media is a hot topic and posts that criticize media for their lack of (or bad) representation get thousands of notes. Social justice theory - fighting the appropriation of colonized cultures by imperialists, promoting the voices of the oppressed over those of the privileged, the right to be angry because of the oppression and trauma you’ve experienced, not tone-policing people who have been hurt, and not erasing the experiences of others - are widely discussed.

A lot of good came out of this, too, but I believe a natural backlash resulted. Earnestly working to promote the voices of the least privileged and trying to avoid silencing or erasure, what started as an effort to even out the social strata gradually became a kind of reversed social strata. People who were oppressed on any axis could not be corrected by anybody of lesser oppression - it was considered to be silencing. People could not say their feelings had been hurt by a marginalized person’s word choice - that was tone policing.

And this led to a secondary, and probably lesser conclusion: people who identified as ‘privileged’ - that is, white, cis, straight, mentally well, able-bodied, (and male) - felt guilty for all the privilege they had. and the promotion of marginalized voices over their own - the tendency to tell people, regardless of the validity of their points, that if they were privileged their voice did not matter - to escape their privilege, at least on tumblr.

I think we hit Peak Tumblr in 2012-2013-ish. Non-human and nonbinary identities proliferated. Asexuality awareness exploded, as did other lesser-known sexualities and paraphilias. People wondered what it meant to be trans in a world with no gender binary. People self-diagnosed severe mental illnesses. And this unto itself wasn’t a bad thing! Probably many people learned a lot about themselves from the openness and acceptance.

However: there’s no way to know how much of this was from people self-discovering and how much was from people who realized that unless they had some axis of oppression they could point to they could be silenced. And people were extremely open about these identities as well: despite all of the talk about social awareness, interactions on tumblr suggested that most people still assumed that everyone else was white, cis, straight, able-bodied and mentally well (and therefore completely unaware of social issues and in need of education). And due to how tumblr’s reblogging system could separate posts entirely from the context of the original poster’s blog and personal details, this assumption happened a lot!

Whatever the actual numbers of people who were self-discovering versus self-deluding, this extreme acceptance got its own natural backlash. It wasn’t possible for everyone on tumblr to be oppressed, but everyone on tumblr seemed to be finding some way to be marginalized - they weren’t cis, they were ‘a demigirl’. They weren’t straight, they were ‘gray asexual’. There had to be some way to distinguish the real marginalized people from the fakers.*

Enter gatekeeping - which seems reasonable enough at first, given the sheer number of people who are claiming to be part of the marginalized club. People start making fun of ‘transtrenders’ and ‘starselves’ and say ‘heteroromantic demisexuals’ are ‘just normal’. People call one another ‘cishet’ specifically to erase their gender identity/sexual orientation.

This environment makes tumblr ripe for radfems, who greatly benefit from people putting limits on what identities other people can have. And radfems feed the gatekeeping mentality, leading to more and more policing of one another on tumblr instead of acceptance. Instead of trusting others to be honest about their gender identity, sexual orientation, race or mental health, people increasingly decide the identity and experiences of others based on whether or not they say and do the right things. Conversely, if you say or do the wrong things you are ostracized and your identity is erased using the reverse social strata of tumblr: ’cishet’ becomes shorthand for ‘ignorant asshole’ - and ignorant assholes are not to be listened to.

One no longer has to identify wrongly to have the wrong identity to be worth listening to. One only has to do the wrong thing.

So how does this tie back to debating fanworks vs dissing people? Well: tumblr isn’t just the home of social justice. It’s also the home of fandom, and these two spaces heavily overlap.

Like our genre fiction friend that I mentioned back at the beginning of this long-ass post, tumblr had already begun - with the best of intentions - to silence people for having the wrong level of marginalization. And when radfems and gatekeepers entered the scene, one’s level of marginalization became a function of how you behaved. Now you had to behave right to have the right to be listened to - and fanworks, far from being the exception, are the rule for determining if people behave ‘right’ in fandom spaces.

In other words: debating fanworks/fan opinions and dissing people have become the same thing. If a fanwork is for the wrong pairing, that makes a person a bad person. And bad people are only able to create bad fanworks.

This attitude is how you get things like ‘if you ship [x] you’re straight’ and ‘oh, you ship [x], your opinion on this unrelated social justice issue is invalid’ or ‘i’m not surprised to find that this person is [x]-phobic, they created problematic fanworks.’

And that’s where we’re at today.

Man this is much. I’m sorry for your eyes.

*And in case it isn’t obvious, I think policing sexual orientations and gender identities is nonsense - demigirls and gray-ace people count as much as everyone else.

#makamu-a-tumbling #gatekeeping #a history of tumblr

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wolfpawn · 4 years

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Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 24

Story Summary - Based on an idea I had that I submitted to Imagine Loki. Imagine Loki was raised on Jotunheim as Laufey’s son after the war, but an agreement was then made that he would wed Odin’s daughter so Odin could secure the alliance of Jotunheim through the marriage. Loki, in turn, was raised to be king of Jotunheim, but how he views Asgard is far different from how Odin’s daughter is raised leading to a clash of cultures as well as uncertainty between the pair of betrothed youths.

Chapter Summary - Loki cannot get comfortable in bed but Ella assists. When Thor speaks to his sister, she is not overly happy with his comments.

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"What's wrong?"

He jumped slightly when she spoke, not realising she had been awake. "Nothing."

"You have been twisting in the sheets all night, what is it?"

"It's too odd."

"Being here?"

"The bed."

"Too soft?"

"Better?"

"Yes, thank you. But what about you?"

"I am used to hard ice beds by now." She commented, turning to face the window again. "Now, try and get some sleep, it will be a long day tomorrow, regardless. You may as well rest for it."

Being more comfortable, Loki did as she suggested and closed his eyes, grateful that sleep seemed more willing to come to him after her alterations to the bed.

“Dare I ask?” Helbindi looked between Ella and Loki.

“I have no idea,” Loki confessed. When Ella looked at him, she shook her head to imply she had no idea why her brother reacted in such a matter.

“Ella?” She turned to see her brother not far away. “I need to speak to you for a moment.”

The manner in which Thor demanded her attention and not simply asked for it irked her. “Arden, could you please tell Loki that I will be with him in a moment?”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Arden bowed and walked off.

“Have I insulted you in some manner, Dear Brother?”

“What are you doing?” Ella stared silently at him, not knowing why he snarled at her. “The whole palace is talking about you.”

“Your hair is loose and the way you are dressed. You are supposed to be married.”

“Really?”

“After what he did,” Thor began.

“They’d be brave to try,” Fandral whispered to Hogun, who nodded in agreement. One warning glare from Ella made both warriors take a step back in caution.

“But…” Thor began.

“I am not as dim as you think me to be,” Thor growled. Ella gave him a look of scepticism. “That was years ago. We all grow with time.”

“Well, good for you, you get a chance to prove it. Keep your cool.” She had ordered, half pleaded.

“I am not as volatile as you make out.”

“You’re a Berserker, Thor. You are a Berserker who wields thunder, you are the very definition of volatile.” Ella pointed out, Thor clenching his jaw at her saying so, shame filling his face.

Loki looked at Ella and Thor in shock at her words. He then looked to Arden and Helbindi who both had similar looks. They did not know this before now, and it terrified them all.

#Pride and Prejudice #wolfpawn #loki fic #chapter 24

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