#actually these characters must get increasingly frustrated with each other

[katierosefun]

oh my god I forgot how much i actually hate writing kiss scenes because i need to build up to it and at first i thought “aw this will be soft and happy and angsty but mostly soft” but now these idiots are fighting each other about when are you going to stop apologizing for something that wasn’t your fault and how come we don’t talk to each other anymore and what the fuck are we anyways and they’re in the same bed and oh god is one of them going to cry i think one of them might cry i hate writing kissing scenes i just wanted two idiots to kiss but now i’m 6K words deep in angst

#caroline talks #actually these characters must get increasingly frustrated with each other #because that is how i feel about the two of them #GOD i just wanted you two to kiss already but NOoooOoOoOoO one of you had to have a NIGHTMARE while sharing the same BED #and then get ANGSTY and wait there was a bar fight before this what? #and uGhHHhhHHHHHHh #[kicks Han joo won] stupid little brat why can’t you let me control the story good god

[morsking]

is shirou a mary sue? the guy is universally well liked, cooks like a pro at 17, has the most op power from all fate (and arguably one of the most cool powers on media), nothing ever happens to him on the true/canon path of each route, he does many stupid things but no one cares 5 minutes later, other times like in salter vs rider he is just a tactical genius out of nowhere

he is not.

shirou is well-liked but he isn't particularly popular. he is known at school for being helpful and handy but otherwise not that many people are aching to get to know him or involve him in their lives. most people only know shirou very superficially. he is not sought after as a person, only as a handy man. there's a really neat scene at the beginning of hf1 where people are talking about shirou in the dojo and see that while he's earnest, hard-working, and talented, he's a bit odd and intense and that makes him a little difficult to approach casually. the only people who really like him are those who sit down and actually spend time with him. apart from the heroines of the story with whom he has time to develop a romantic bond, you don't see other girls falling head over heels for him. in fact, in hollow ataraxia the homurahara trio and mitsuzuri are quick to write him off as someone they are vehemently not interested in romantically whatsoever.

he only cooks like a pro because he had to teach himself to cook since he was 8. it's vital to understand that since kiritsugu became increasingly disabled and was utterly incapable of living as a normal human being, shirou was forced to grow up well before he was ready to take care of his adoptive father. he learned to cook, do the dishes, do the laundry, and clean the house because there were no other real adults in the house. shirou's domestic usefulness didn't come out of nowhere, it's a set of skills he took on out of necessity and came at the expense of his emotional growth.

shirou's power also isn't op. it's stated multiple times in the story how difficult it is for him to tap into it. he's not a natural mage with strong magical circuits, and neither does he have any real "useful" magical alignments that would make it easy for him to use conventional magecraft. every training session shirou has is a life-threatening act where he pushes his body and mind to the utmost limit for the low chance he might succeed at strengthening or projecting something. whenever he grabs hold of an ability that elevates his combat skills, it's either a) done with saber's help in the fate route, b) acquired as his soul inherits experience from his proximity to archer in ubw and receiving mana from rin, or c) obtained at the expense of the integrity of his mind and body as archer's arm starts to supplant his existence in heaven's feel. and even then, there's limits to what he can trace and project. he can't trace divine constructs normally as seen with ea, and his projections eat through his mana. think about what happens in heaven's feel too. every time he projects something with archer's arm he leaps closer to death because he can't handle the strain.

to say nothing ever happens to him in canon is also disingenuous. he doesn't die in a permanent sense, but take a moment to consider the amount of mental and physical pain he suffers that forces him to confront something about himself and change. did "nothing" happen when he faced gilgamesh and heracles with saber? is growing closer to her to find the best way to help her assert her personhood "nothing"? did "nothing" happen when he fought archer? is realizing the truth of your ideals and grasping the resolve to realize them anyway in a healthier and more self-aware manner "nothing"? did "nothing" happen when he fought heracles, saber alter, and kotomine? is saving your loved ones and claiming your life as your own after years of not seeing yourself as a human being to protect those dear to you so they too learn to love and accept themselves "nothing"?

take a moment to consider in what ways shirou is stupid that aren't contradicted by him being smart in others. shirou is socially inept and utterly incapable of asking for help because he is a traumatized teenager who doesn't know what a normal life is. he has few friends. he survived a fire. he is constantly trying to make up for being unable to rescue anyone in the calamity that destroyed his childhood. he constantly jumps in front of danger to save others for that very reason and refuses help because he doesn't want others to get hurt because of him until he learns to overcome that fear of being destroyed and seeing others be destroyed. he is dumb at being a person because he's never let himself be one. he is smart in a fight because he's at least been able to process his stress and trauma in a way that helps him rationalize his way out of a crisis.

i feel the need to stress that a protagonist having special qualities fit for the narrative isn't them being a mary sue. it's them simply being a main character with agency, a main character that is engaging and interesting. how boring do you think shirou and the story would be if he was really a shit-ass mcnobody with no talents, personality, qualities, or meaningful connections to the setting? he'd be no different from every other harem protag the cishet male audience can use as a self-insert. he is supposed to subvert ideas of masculinity by being domestic. he challenges conventional ideas of heroism by showing how his ideals are flawed and how important it is that he self-actualize.

shirou faces consequences for his inaction and inexperience multiple times too. saber gets frustrated because he won't (tell her why he really won't) fight and that causes a rift in their relationship he must fix with honesty and mutual understanding. shirou's inability to protect himself from hypnotic suggestion gets him kidnapped by caster and forces archer to rescue him, and in turn their shared stubbornness elevates their conflict to deadly levels until they're forced to fight to work out their differences. heaven's feel shows you how his unwillingness to forsake who he is to properly scold sakura and save her makes the situation worse when sakura loses faith that shirou will keep his promise to her until he decides he will fulfill it for both their sakes. people do care! saber cares when her master doesn't see eye to eye with her! rin cares that shirou is too willing to throw away his own life for others! archer cares that he is at risk of becoming that which archer can't forgive himself for being! sakura cares because seeing the man she loves come home bruised and bloodied every night is wrong! illya cares because he is her only true family! rider cares because if shirou can't be sakura's ally then she's as good as dead! everyone cares because shirou has to learn to care too, and he does!

i'm going to ask you to try to engage with media without trying to uncover flaws under rigid standards like this because all it does is keep you from properly understanding what is being shown to you. you cannot hope to judge a story and its characters for all their flaws or merits if this is how you approach things.

#long post

[ericspinkhair]

quarantine longings

pairing: best friend!kevin x fem!reader

word count: 3.2k

synopsis: you and your best friend have sex because quarantine made you horny

warnings: best friends to lovers, takes place during the pandemic, spoiler of 356 days (but not the end, just generally the plot), no use of condoms but only the pill, creampie, sexual fantasies, fingering, hand-job, sex, slight angst at the end if you squint

a/n: I would literally die for kevin, I love him so much. I'll be writing a multiple parts series about him after I'm done writing scenarios for every member first.

requests are open!

masterlist + requests

you slammed your foot hard against the wall and cursed in pain. you hopped on one foot to your bed, holding your other leg in agony and tasted blood as you bit your lip to keep the volume of your suffering groans in check. someone knocked on the door.

'are you okay?' your roommate asked concerned.

'no, leave me alone, kevin,' you croaked out. you wanted to suffer by yourself.

there was an awkward silence and then you heard him sigh. soon after, the door next to your room closed shut.

why were you so frustrated, one might ask? well, the pandemic was kicking your butt and you just couldn't take it anymore. when the news of the virus had first spread, no one thought it would become this serious. but suddenly everyone was walking around with masks and spent most of their time staying at home.

after graduating high school, you and kevin had decided to move in together for college because both of you were broke and couldn't afford to live alone. you had been best friends since middle school and had been convinced that it was a smart idea at the time.

and everything went smoothly for the first one and a half years. however, after not seeing anyone else since the start of the pandemic over a year ago, it became increasingly difficult to share an apartment, but not in the way one might assume. you were neither sick of each other nor did you fight a lot. to tell the truth, it was quite the opposite.

earlier, before you had kicked the wall in anger, the two of you had painted together. kevin was majoring in art and, since you didn't have anything better to do, you joined him while he did projects for his classes. you might have been majoring in journalism but you had always liked drawing and painting, even though you weren't particularly skilled. you were a naturally clumsy person, always tripping over air and dropping things. today you were hecticly moving around your hands while telling him about a stupid video you had seen and you accidently let go of the brush in your hand. it hit the side of kevin's face, leaving a wide splodge of red paint on his right cheek.

to get back at you, he jerked his paint brush and splattered some green color on your white shirt. you saw this as a challenge and soon both of you were both drenched in the colors of the rainbow, laughing hysterically on the floor, not caring that you were spreading the paint on the poor carpet.

you turned your heads to look at each other and you felt absolutely in peace. you loved this man and couldn't be more glad that it was him and not anyone else you were stuck with inside of this apartment.

he stood up to take off his stained shirt and your smile quickly faded off your face. your lips slightly parted and you couldn't help but stare at his now exposed biceps and abs.

your mouth watered and you felt heat pooling between your legs as you took your time to study his architecture. thoughts about how badly you wanted him to thrust into you while his strong arms held you up invaded your mind. you tried to shake them off but it was impossible.

occasions like this were slowly becoming a common occurrence for you.

having mostly stayed inside for over a year, also meant that you didn't have sex for that long. it's not like you were the horniest person on the planet but you still had needs that were being neglected. with kevin being home all the time you didn't even dare to masturbate, scared that he would be able to hear you through the frustratingly thin walls. you must have gone insane with all the lust building up inside you and that's why you suddenly craved to have sex with your best friend. this whole thing was destroying everything. it was hard to act normal when he was making you this nervous and heated but you tried to pretend that everything was fine anyway for the sake of your friendship.

that was the reason why you were angry and had hurt yourself. you hated the way you felt about your best friend and you hated the pandemic for not giving you an outlet to escape so you could recollect yourself.

what you weren't aware of was that kevin was no stranger to the exact same frustration.

he would need more than his ten fingers and ten toes to be able to count the amount of times he had to run to the bathroom to hide his boner because he had done so much as look at you bend over or stretch. he didn't want to make you uncomfortable but it was a challenge to try and calm down his hormones.

whenever he jacked off, images of you flashed through his mind; your sweet curves and pink lips drove him insane.

last week, you two were cooking together and you had asked him to get the salt. he stood behind you to reach for it on the highest shelf. he was forced to press his crotch against your butt cheeks and his dick hardened against his will. he quickly handed you the salt, excused himself and ran off before you could figure out what had happened.

he might not have known the cause of your sudden outburst but he sympathized with your fury because he had a lot of pent up anger towards covid as well.

he lay in his bed and tried to focus on the book he was reading but he couldn't tune out the groans coming from the room next to his. he cursed.

'stop it!' he was panicking as he saw a familiar tent forming in his pants. your sounds triggered some weird perverted part of his brain that sent signals right to his genitals. his dick was hardening and he saw no other solution to his problem than to give in to his subconscious desires.

he pulled down his pants just far enough so that his cock had enough room to spring out. it only needed a few strokes before it stood tall and angry. kevin pressed his head into his pillow and moved his hand fast. he wanted to get over with it quickly. he emptied his cum on his stomach while imagining your greedy little mouth being stuffed by his cock. he lay there panting as yet another round of shame flushed over him.

'get yourself together,' he whispered, mentally slapping himself.

***

'do you want to order japanese or italian?' you asked kevin. today was friday which meant it was time for your weekly tradition of ordering take out and watching a movie.

'definitely italian. we've already had japanese for the past four days. I need something else for a change,' kevin complained and shuddered at the thought of having to eat sushi again. the japanese restaurant prepared absolutely delicious food but he just couldn't stand it anymore.

you laughed at his pained facial expression. 'fine, italian it is.'

within twenty minutes the doorbell rang and after about half a minute kevin came back with two huge boxes.

he opened them on the small table situated in front of your couch and the smell of freshly cooked pasta seasoned with basil made your stomach growl.

kevin wanted to dig in already but you stopped him. you had to choose a movie first.

'let's watch tall girl. I saw everyone hate on it on tiktok,' you suggested.

'I think we should watch 365 days, that was all over my for you page as well,' kevin argued. you hadn't heard of it so you weren't sure whether it would be the right movie for you. the rule was that it had to be as bad as possible.

'according to what I have heard, it's apparently even worse than 50 shades of grey,' kevin added which piqued your interest. the both of you had watched 50 shades about two months ago and you were honestly shocked by how awful it actually was. you couldn't understand why everyone had been so obsessed with it when it was first released. if 356 days was really worse, then you'd hit the jackpot. you clapped your hands.

'fine, you win. I swear if the movie isn't as horrible as you say it is then you owe me something!' he intertwined his pinky with yours to promise.

watching horrible movies was way better than watching good ones. making fun of bad storylines, stupid characters or horrible editing was one of your favorite past times.

'I guess I'll have to add are you lost, baby girl to the top 10 worst lines ever spoken. who thought ah yes this is sexy, let's have him repeat it over and over again', you complained, shoving some pasta into your mouth.

'so he's like I won't do anything without your permission while he is literally groping her boobs against her will, like make it make sense, massimo', added kevin, ruffling his hair in frustration. he almost completely forgot about the food.

'so let me get this straight: he drugged her, kidnapped her, tied her up, hung up a painting of her just because he saw her face when his dad was shot?'

'totally relatable.' both of you giggled.

you were enjoying complaining about the plot. it was horrible.

there were plenty of erotic scenes but they were honestly so funny and kinda gross that you could bare it without really being affected by them. kevin, on the other hand, had placed a pillow over his hard-on to hide the embarrassing fact that these terrible, smutty scenes had turned him on.

and then the infamous boat scene came.

massimo and laura had a huge fight, she fell of the boat, he saved her and now she was suddenly so in love with him that she begs him to fuck her. which he does.

you felt your panties become increasingly wet as the couple had steaming hot sex.

'this is embarrassing but I'm so horny,' you admitted but in a way that should have suggested that you meant it as a joke. something about this statement stirred something in kevin.

'well, what can I say?' he replied and lifted the pillow. your pupils widened at the sight of your best friend's bulge.

his eyes darkened and he looked at you with lust clearly written on his face. you reciprocated his stare with the same intensity. you tried to focus on his dark brown orbs instead of his boner but the image you had just seen was present in your mind.

his gaze shifted to your lips and, before you knew it, kevin climbed above you and pressed your back flat onto the couch.

your lips locked and you immediately buried your hands in his hair to pull him closer. you moved in sync, his lips fitting perfectly onto yours. you bucked your hips up against his crotch and earned a moan from kevin. he opened his eyes in shock as realization hit him. he quickly pulled away and jumped off the coach.

'I'm so sorry, y/n. I shouldn't have just done that. I don't know what came over me,' he apologized profusely, staring at his feet. did he really think that you didn't want this?

'give me your hand,' you told him and held out your hand.

'why?' he raised his eyebrows in confusion. you rolled your eyes.

'just do it.'

you took his hand and led it to your crotch.

'what are you- oh my god.' your juices had completely soaked through your panties and your sweatpants. 'you are so wet.'

'for you,' you added. 'there's no need to apologize. I'm literally begging you to continue.'

you didn't have to say that twice before he pulled you closer to him by your hips and engaged you in another desperate kiss. his hands were groping your butt while you let yours slide under his hoodie. you felt his naked skin and toned abs, as you rubbed his stomach. you lowered your hands and bravely palmed his boner through his clothes.

'y/n,' he hissed out against your lips. you hooked your thumbs in the elastic of his pants and underwear, and pushed the material down to his thighs. he struggled to get them off.

you stroked his hard dick as he slipped his hand into your panties to massage your pussy at the same time.

he slipped one finger inside and began working it in and out. you finally were getting the relief you had been desperately craving for for so long. kevin was skilled and your walls were trying to swallow his slim finger. you were quickly coming close to your orgasm after having abstained for more than a year. you pulled his hand out.

'I bet you can make me come even better with your dick,' you challenged kevin.

'you bet I will.' he was confident.

'let me just look for a condom.' he was already turning away to go search in his room but you held him back by the arm.

'forget about it. I'm on the pill and I want you raw. I want you to come inside me and not spill into a stupid condom.'

the idea of this sounded very tempting to kevin. he picked you up and threw you back onto the couch, drawing your hips closer to him so he could pull off all the pieces of clothing that were hindering him from accessing your pussy.

he propped up his arms next to your sides and spread your thighs apart. strings of arousal were hanging from your folds and he saw your hole desperately clench around nothing. his dick hurt from how much he wanted to finally be inside of you. he wanted to find out how close he had been able to imagine how you would feel around him.

your hole took him in easily, welcoming him happily by embracing it tightly. kevin swore he could've cum right here and there.

he went slow at first to give you a chance to adjust but you were already fully ready, rocking your hips forward to meet his thrusts.

he crashed your mouths together and you kissed him like he was oxygen and you were short of air. you smiled and your eyes rolled back, satisfied with how things had played out today and the prospects of coming looked fairly promising.

desperate for release, kevin picked up the pace, his eyes closed while fucking into you like a horny animal. he couldn't help himself and all the 'faster's and 'harder's spilling from your mouth only encouraged him to drive himself deeper into you.

you wrapped your legs around his torso in an attempt to regain the control you were losing.

'fuck fuck fuck,' you cursed, feeling your muscles starting to contract. kevin brushed away some hair that was stuck to your sweaty forehead.

'it's fine, I'm coming too,' he announced and it took only a few more thrusts before a body shaking orgasm flushed over you, making you see only white. this drove kevin over the edge too and he spilled inside you, filling you up with his hot cum. he continued to slowly ease his dick in and out of you, fucking his semen right back into you until you had ridden out both of your orgasms. he let himself fall onto the couch right next to you, panting hard.

'I very much needed this,' you sighed in content.

'same, I wasn't sure whether I could hold out any longer without having a proper orgasm.' he watched his cum drip out of you.

'we should've thought of this sooner,' you said. 'this was a great idea.'

kevin hummed in agreement.

***

so now you and kevin were having sex on a regular basis, your high score being five times in a day. it felt good to finally live out your sexuality and not having to restrict yourself. sure, you guys did it more than necessary but it was a great way to pass time and it felt fucking amazing.

today you had done it in the shower after waking up, then on the kitchen counter and you had just finished having sex in his bed.

he was spooning you from behind, his cock still placed inside of you. he nuzzled his nose into your neck.

'stop, that tickles,' you chuckled.

'sorry.'

after a while of comfortable silence you heard him let out a big sigh.

'what's wrong?' you asked as he pulled out of you. you turned around to be able to look at him.

'I don't think I can do it like this anymore,' he confessed.

'what do you mean?' you asked. 'are you talking about us having sex?'

he nodded. your heart dropped and you started feeling dizzy. you tried to search for answers in his eyes but he avoided looking at you.

'w-why?' you stuttered, trying to hold back the tears that were welling up in your eyes.

'it was amazing at first,' he started and finally raised his head to meet your gaze, 'and I went into it without much thought. I went crazy during quarantine and began fantasizing about having sex with you. then it became reality but now I understand that was probably wrong of me. I've always thought of myself as a gentleman, yet I slept with you without much thought. you see, my issue is this…'

suspense hung in the air and you were impatiently waiting for him to get to the point.

'I like you.'

you quietly gasped in surprise. you had been expecting him to say you were bad at sex and that he regretted everything but not this.

'I shouldn't be sleeping with you unless you were my girlfriend,' he finished off his ramble. you felt immensely relieved.

'do you want me to?' you asked him.

'want you to what?' kevin was confused. he had been a hundred percent sure you'd immediately jump out of the bed in disgust when he confessed.

'be your girlfriend. after all, I like you too, you moron.' you realized that you had known this for a while. you might have even been crushing on your best friend since way before the pandemic struck but it was kind of hard to track your feelings. still, you were sure you liked him too. now that he had admitted his feelings, you were able to admit yours not only to him but to yourself as well.

'wow, I didn't expect this,' kevin confessed surprised. you laughed.

'yeah, we should've realized this sooner.' he pulled you closer and kissed you. it was different than the other times. his lips moved softly against yours, in contrast to all of your rough and passionate kisses you had exchanged these past few weeks. he conveyed his emotions through the kiss.

'you're ready again?' you groaned as you felt kevin's dick harden against your upper thigh. he chuckled.

'sorry, you just turn me on so much.'

so then you did it for the fourth time. that day, you set a new record of having sex six times. you might have been happy now but still just as horny.

#kevin moon smut #kevin moon scenario #the boyz kevin smut #the boyz kevin scenario #moon hyungseo smut #moon hyungseo scenario #the boyz kevin moon smut #the boyz kevin moon scenario #the boyz hyungseo smut #the boyz hyungseo scenario #the boyz smut #the boyz scenario #kpop smut #kpop scenarios

[letapollojusticesayfuck]

"the way you flirt is shameful." Klavier (klapollo) and ema ?

"short fics," I said, like a liar.

anyway please enjoy almost 2k of Klapollo Nonsense.

Send me a random line of dialogue and some characters, and I'll write a short fic!

---

Another grey morning, another lukewarm cup of coffee. Apollo pulls his coat a little tighter around him, scowling at nothing in particular. It’s just his luck, isn’t it, that this week’s defendant is a fisherman, accused of murdering their boat’s captain out on the docks.

It’s also just his luck that it’s March, and he hadn’t even thought anyone would be out on the water this early in the year. Shows how much he knows about the fishing industry.

He jumps when an arm lands around his shoulders, and has to fight to keep his awful beverage from sloshing entirely out of its styrofoam cup. With an irritated huff, Apollo turns to reprimand his unexpected company, but the words die in his throat when he looks over to see Klavier Gavin—and, more specifically, the woolly hat perched on his head. It appears to be lovingly hand-knitted, in a shade of purple he’d swear he’d seen in scraps of wool lying around the office in previous weeks. It also happens to be emblazoned with Gavin’s ridiculous logo, the angular G as distinctive as ever.

“Uh…” he says instead, eyebrow raised in what he hopes is a skeptical, yet bewildered expression. He’s not sure he succeeds with that, though, considering the way Gavin’s casual smile crooks up at the edges into a more genuine grin.

“Ja, Herr Forehead? How goes the investigation?” Lazy curls of steam rise from the stainless steel travel mug clasped in his hand, dissipating into the pervasive fog that’s blanketing the docks. Typical. Apollo considers asking him if he’d like to swap drinks.

“Cold. Damp. And is this a good time to mention that I’m allergic to shellfish? I think that’s probably an important detail, considering….this.” he replies, poking an errant mussel with the point of his dress shoe. His dress shoe that he’s for some reason wearing to a crime scene out by the harbour, because Apollo has misplaced ideas of professionalism, apparently.

“Ach, it’s not that bad! For one, you have my company to brighten up your day! And for another thing...I have news for you about the case.”

“Really. And it’s not just going to be something that you’ll immediately rescind in court tomorrow?”

“HerrForehead, what kind of prosecutor do you take me for? We’re on the same side, you know—both seeking the truth.”

“That’s cheesy as anything.”

“But correct! Anyway. FräuleinSkye has just uncovered something tangled around one of the fishing lines on the boat, and she’s attempting to piece it back together. If you hurry, you might get a glimpse before it goes straight into the evidence dossier.”

Apollo hmms, considering. He’s not sure he wants to just take Klavier’s tip-off; it could be seen as collusion under some circumstances. But he’s really not accomplishing anything on his own, and any new evidence could help him prove Annette Sloop’s innocence.

He also realizes, belatedly, that Klavier still has his arm around his shoulders, and that he’s been unconsciously leaning into the warmth of the taller man’s down jacket.

“Okay, sure—it’s gotta be better than anything I can find here,” Apollo decides, and tries to subtly extricate himself from Klavier’s grasp without drawing attention to the fact that he’s actually found some kind of comfort in their proximity, that he’s really not particularly enthusiastic about losing his human space-heater.

Luckily, Klavier realizes that he’ll have to grant Apollo his freedom if he wants the shorter man to be able to take advantage of his newly-gained intel, and drops his arm back to his own side. Apollo stifles a shiver as the cool, damp air rushes back against him, clinging to his skin with a pervasive chill.

He’d assumed that Klavier had business to take care of on the dock, so the fact that the prosecutor follows him as he boards the fishing boat takes him by surprise. What also takes him by surprise is the intensity of the fishy aroma around the vessel, something that Apollo really should have considered as a factor beforehand. He wrinkles his nose and tries to breathe shallowly—and when that doesn’t work out, he buries his nose in the collar of his jacket.

And that brings with it its own set of problems, because somehow the short amount of time his jacket was in contact with Klavier’s own was enough to allow the other man’s sandalwood cologne to seep into the thin fabric. Apollo wishes this wasn’t his life. Isn’t this the kind of stuff teenagers write about?

Luckily, his panicking is cut short by Ema Skye clearing her throat from the other end of the deck, midway through spreading fabric scraps onto a plastic folding table. She appears decidedly unimpressed, but waves them over.

“Justice. I take it you were informed of the recent developments by the fop here?” she remarks, as disinterestedly as possible for someone who’s practically vibrating with the excitement of being able to do something actually forensically significant.

“Er...yeah, Klavier told me that you’d found something?” Apollo replies, trying to look as though he understands more of the situation than he actually does. He thinks he pulls it off. If not, Ema doesn’t comment on it.

Klavier, however, smiles impossibly wide at Apollo’s words, and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s because he’d called the man by his first name, as opposed to his more professional title. A slip of the tongue, nothing more! And yet…

If it’d get a reaction like that, Apollo might start using Klavier’s first name significantly more often.

“Oh, come on, do neither of you actually care about this T-shirt I found? This apparently-bloodstainedT-shirt?” Ema taps her foot against the plank wood of the ship’s deck. Apollo breaks out of his thoughts with just about enough time to look marginally interested in the new evidence—which he hopes is convincing.

And it’s not that he doesn’t want to solve the murder! It’s really just that—well, Klavier is just there, being distracting, like he always is—except it’s worse, recently, somehow. Apollo swears he used to be able to spend time focusing on other things, that he wasn’t always this preoccupied with what the prosecutor was doing, where he was standing, if he was looking at--

“Oh, for God’s sake. The way you flirt is shameful,” Ema says, entirely exasperated. She also seems to be looking at Apollo, for some reason.

“Are you talking to me?” he asks, confused. The detective rolls her eyes and sighs dramatically, visibly resisting the urge to throw up her hands.

“You, him, both of you! This used to be almost funny, you know, watching Gavin be all glimmerous in your direction and seeing you shut him down. But recently you’ve been playing into it and—you know what? I’m done! You don’t get to listen to my stunning forensic breakthroughs until you’ve sorted your shit out, because I just can’t be doing with this. It’s ridiculous. Why can’t you just act like adults?”

The outburst is followed by Ema Skye whirling around, the sensible shoes she’s wearing clacking against the ship’s deck. Halfway to the door to the crew’s quarters, she remembers that she’s left all her forensic materials spread out next to where Klavier and Apollo are standing, and backtracks with increasingly evident frustration.

“You know what? I’m not leaving! You two—off my ship!Go figure yourselves out, and I won’t tell you about this case-changing evidence until you’ve stopped acting like this.”

Apollo’s a little taken-aback—not the least because he doesn’t think that he’s been doing any flirting, especially not with Klavier. He’s been hiding his feelings far too well for that—right?

Klavier looks at him and shrugs, motioning with his head that they should retreat the way they’d arrived. It’s not necessarily the most dignified thing, climbing off a boat in shame after being reprimanded by the detective on the case.

Once they’re back on “solid” ground (as solid as one can call a fishing boat’s dock, anyway), Apollo turns to Klavier.

“So, what was that about? I’ve never seen her that angry.”

Interestingly enough, color rises to Klavier’s cheeks. “Well...I think that, perhaps, she’s...misinterpreting the situation?”

And if Klavier’s strange statement hadn’t been enough to tip Apollo off that maybe something strange is going on here, there’s the familiar pinch of warm metal against his left wrist, his bracelet constricting at the taller man’s fib.

And—they know each other well enough, by this point, that all Apollo has to do is level an unimpressed stare in the prosecutor’s direction, and deadpan “Klavier” with all the air of a man who is taking no bullshit for an answer, for him to deflate and give up, shoving a hand in his back pocket awkwardly.

“Ugh. Okay. Erm. So, HerrForehead, this wasn’t...exactly...unprovoked. It’s possible that FräuleinSkye has been on the receiving end of many conversations about how I would like to….uh…”

It’s quite something, seeing Klavier at a loss for words. Apollo hadn’t thought that the former rockstar could look as awkward as he does now, the hand not trapped in his pocket fiddling with a loose strand of his hair.

He really, really tries not to think about how endearing it is.

Klavier seems to have reached a point, however, where he’s just decided to say things and worry about the consequences later. So Apollo’s contemplations are brought to a screeching halt when the man sighs, flips his hair, and stares at him straight-on, enunciating with perfect clarity:

“Apollo Justice, would you like to go out with me? On a date? Because I must say, I’ve been trying to find the best way to ask you for a while now, but unfortunately all I’ve succeeded in doing is, apparently, annoying the FräuleinDetective until not even Snackoos are a valid enough weapon.”

And—this isn’t the setting Apollo had pictured, in his often-hastily-repressed daydreams about Klavier asking him out. For one, he’d not quite imagined the quantity of fish, or the less-than-steady footing. But Klavier looks so earnest about his request, and Apollo can’t deny the way his heart’s skipped a beat, the way he’s almost petrified to say anything just in case this isn’t real—and so, he takes a deep breath, steps forward, and twines his fingers with Klavier’s.

“You know what? I’d love to. I’ll go anywhere you’d like—with the exception of a sushi restaurant” Apollo smiles, hesitantly at first, and then more genuinely as he sees the softly disbelieving expression on Klavier’s face.

“Really?” the prosecutor asks, and isn’t that incredible—that Klavier Gavin had been worried about being turned down. Apollo can’t quite believe it himself, yet.

“Yeah, really,” he says, smiling up at Klavier, who beams down at him in return. He feels the other man squeeze his hand briefly, and can’t quite contain the impulse to lean in closer to him, consciously this time, sharing both warmth and physical contact in a meaningful way.

When they return to the fishing vessel, Ema takes one look at the two of them and narrows her eyes, proceeding to mime nausea at the way they’re still holding hands.

However, she does follow through on her promise—and by the time they’re ready to leave the crime scene, both Klavier and Apollo are fairly certain of the next day’s trial’s outcome—as well as of the location of their post-trial dinner date.

#lucy's thoughts #my writing #klapollo #thank you for the prompt!! #mogoliz #ask #asks #ask game #sorry these are taking me ages!! #you might have noticed that they keep getting away from me #also i am going to be on an island for five days starting tomorrow #so i will be very slow in answering the other two i've got sitting in my inbox #just know i am getting around to them!! #i will just have to write them out on paper rather than on a laptop #and then type them up later

[hanascrisis]

A REVIEW: Scum Villain’s Self Saving System (MXTX)

I. GENERAL OVERVIEW

LENGTH: 81 Chapters and 20 Extras

GENRE: (BL) Chinese Cultivation Novel - Historical Period

MAIN COUPLE:  Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu

BRIEF SUMMARY: After binge reading legendary harem stallion web novel “Proud Immortal Demon Way”, Shen Yuan (a millennial increasingly frustrated by the story’s outrageous and senseless plot) dies choking on food and transmitigates into the novel... as the villain shizun of the main protagonist, Shen Qingqiu. Shen Yuan, now Shen Qingqiu, must navigate through the original PIDW’s plot points to gain the favor of the original protagonist, Luo Binghe, to avoid being tortured and cut into a human stick. However, in doing so, Shen Qingqiu eventually finds that the original plot changes, awakening new feelings in the protagonist previously unexplored. 

II. CATEGORICAL RANKING & BREAKDOWN

This was my second danmei novel I had ever read, and one that really helped. familiarize me with the ins and outs of the typical cultivation novel tropes. With Shen Qingqiu’s unfortunately relatable inner monologging complete with millennial, largely inappropriate vocabulary AND emoticons was undeniably very entertaining, and I spent the majority of the book laughing along with his misfortune. It was a book in which the reader got to experience the stereotypical romance, adventure, and fantasy tropes through the lens of a character living out these tropes with a mindset not so dissimilar from our own. With that, let’s move on to my personal categorical rankings for this novel.  

1. CHARACTERIZATION ~ Rated 7/10

With every single character within this book, I can confidently say I really liked their characterization. Each character’s personality was constructed in a way that did not adhere to one stereotype, and the interactions between characters never felt stale or forced (especially in a book where Shen Qingqiu has a sudden change in personality, I was worried these interactions with characters such as Yue Qingyuan and Liu Qingge would be strange, but it was indeed quite cute and funny). Even with the minor characters that seemed to be the main antagonists Tianlang Jun, their characterizations and relationship still had a familial sense of warmth that made them feel a lot more human. However, due to the length of the book, not all the side characters were really flushed out in terms of backstory. 

With the main protagonist, Luo Binghe, as to deviate from the original “black hearted protagonist” of PIDW, his back story and past abuses led to his motivations as a person being a lot more complex, deeper, and especially tragic. Through the novel we are able to see that the original protagonist crafted from resentment started out as a boy too naive, with a heart full of warmth and kindness, only to be bludgeoned and abandoned over and over again. Even by the end of the book, in interactions with Shen Qingqiu, we can still evidently see Luo Binghe’s past emotional trauma within his feelings of inadequacy and his villainization at the peak. I personally really liked this new depth of character that gave me a new perspective on his actions and motivations. Generally, I also love the change in Binghe’s demeanor when he’s around Shen Qingqiu vs. anyone else, and one can easily forget how manipulative, cunning, and overpowered he is as the “protagonist”. He is endearing and I love him so much, but that’s deviating from the original point.

As discussed previously, Shen Qingqiu’s character, while having a. fairly distinct personality, is almost a self-insert character that the reader can. project on directly. While I THOROUGHLY enjoyed his narration throughout (which served as much needed comic relief), I personally wished there to be a little more character development, especially regarding the paradigm shift that occurred in his mindset and attitude towards the other characters in the book. At the beginning of the novel, there is a certain subconscious wall Shen Qingqiu creates, where he thinks of the other people as strictly “character from PIDW with concrete fates and personailites”, which is especially evident in the way he treated Luo Binghe post-Immortal alliance conference. But overtime, there is a subtle shift in which by the end of the book, we see Shen Qingqiu resolve some misunderstandings (to an extent) and see him start to regard the characters around him as true people that he can build deep relationships with. I personally wanted this aspect to be highlighted a little more and that this had good potential in being an essential piece of plot could have led to more resolution (discussed below). 

2. WORLD BUILDING ~ Rated 9/10

From my perspective, especially in cultivation novels, world building becomes exceedingly important in order to aid the reader in understanding the power structure and dynamic of the cultivation world, which reflects in the interactions between characters of different factions. Because of Shen Qingqiu’s commentary as a “reader of PIDW”, I felt the author was able to do a stellar job in explaining the different dynamics within the sect and between the different peak lords, as well as major conflicts between demons. Hence, it was really easy to understand and follow how the world revolved around each of the conflicts, as well as justify some of the characters’ motivations within SVSSS. 

3. PLOT DEVELOPMENT ~ Rated 8/10

What I found extremely compelling about the plot of this book in particular is that it is a lot more complex and darker than the audience originally grasps. With my first read, I found the book hilarious through and through, and couldn’t get enough of the comedic aspects and commentary that seemed to seep through to even the most serious moments. But as I started to think back on some of the events that ended up transpiring, I came to the realization that the plot itself is extremely tragic. If one were to think about the book from Luo Binghe’s perspective, as a child abandoned with no one to care for and love him, to then finding someone who cherishes him and believes in him, only to have that very same person push him off a cliff and have him experience hell for the next 5 years; frankly the plot is really devastating. That’s also what makes it such an interesting book to read and then reread. 

Another aspect of the plot that is notable is how outrageous some of the events are, especially when thinking from a logical perspective. From Shen Qingqiu dying and growing a new body underground, to the thousands of elephant demons (?) that Luo Binghe gathers, one is simply overwhelmed by how random the book is sometimes. Even better, we get to witness this exact reaction through Shen Qingqiu, as someone to transmitigated into this nonsensical book. Hence, somehow the book manages to be completely unrelatable, yet also very relatable, hitting both extremes in a perfect equillibrium.

My main reservation/criticism of the plot is personally~ I felt that it lacked a little bit of resolution in some of the major plot points, such as “Bingge”, as well as the Bingqiu relationship. A lot of the original misunderstandings and misgivings between Shen Qingqiu during and after the 5 years (pre-relationship) weren’t really resolved. It sort of left me wanting some more development from Binghe where his is able to heal from his past to a certain extent. Regarding Shen Qingqiu, I also wanted to see more development with him in terms of his obvious shift in mindset from viewing the people around him as characters from the original PIDW, to actual people whose fates aren’t predetermined. It could be a fun idea to explore more. But these are just small things that really don’t take away from the experience that is reading SVSSS. 

III. FINAL THOUGHTS

RECOMMENDATION: YES I DO RECOMMEND IT , especially for people who enjoy comedy, modern humor mixed with ridiculous xianxia plot points, and an action filled BL cultivation novel. It really is an absolute joy to read and all the characters are so endearing in their own way - Luo Binghe with his selective duality and various complexes, Shen Qingqiu with his alleged “straigtness” and internalized heteronormativity, Tianlang Jun with his desire to be a malewife, the misunderstandings in the relationship between Shen Qingqiu and Zhuzhi Lang, etc. etc. It is really a fun read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This concludes my first casual book review haha.  

#danmei #mxtx #mxtxnovel #svsss #scumvillainsselfsavingsystem #shenqingqiu #shen qingqiu #luo binghe #book review #hanashonestreviews

[knuffled]

some writing tips (pt. one)

warning: this is a long post bc brevity isn’t one of my strong suits. also another disclaimer: these are just things i have learned/have worked for me. feel free to ignore them if they don’t help you! 

1. the crossroads of plot and character 

there will often come times when writing where the plot must move in a direction that the characters don’t want to follow. this usually results in characters being forced to act in ways that are not congruous with who they are, making them feel wooden or inconsistent to the reader. 

one thing that has really helped me is some advice i heard from the writer’s of breaking bad. they said that one thing that really helped them was to ask “where is character x’s head at?”, or basically “what is my character thinking/feeling at this point in the story?”. it is almost always superior to have character drive plot instead of the other way around, so this question can help solve the issue of plot not gelling with character. i like to ask myself this question and reorganize the plot around my answer, and i have found it very useful for combatting content-based writer’s block.

2. rethinking character flaws

i have only recently learned how to better write character flaws, and i have found that they are huge for making a character feel real. whenever i used to think about flaws, i thought of them as huge, character-warping traits that basically defined an individual (example: prince zuko), but i always struggled to write them myself. lately, i have come view them as subtle beliefs or tendencies my character has that frames the way they interact with the world and others, and that has been massively helpful for me.

as sleazy as it is, i’m going to use my own writing as an example because i don’t read books anymore lmfao. anyhow, in my fic, “just practice”, annabeth has a tendency to be self-absorbed, which manifests in her assuming everyone thinks the way she does. nothing impressive, really. we see a few examples of it in action sprinkled throughout the story, and at first, it seems harmless, but the more we see of it, the more we realize what a huge issue it is in the context of the narrative as a whole. we see that it cripples the way that she communicates with others, how it has led her to hurting people she cares about because she assumed things about them, etc. 

the fic is written from her perspective, so when she interacts with people, we can see that she genuinely doesn’t mean any harm. she just has a certain way of thinking. but in reality, the way that her flaw impacts others in the story becomes a huge source of conflict. it requires people to call her out and make her reflect on things. this is something that i think a lot of people can relate to. pretty much everyone acts with good intentions, but in reality they could be causing a lot of harm to those around them without meaning to. 

i have found that using subtle flaws like this can be really helpful in making a believable character. i would suggest looking at people in your own life and their flaws as material you can use. most of them aren’t prince zuko - they have much subtler flaws about them that still have a huge role in who they are. once you have a flaw in mind for a character, it should inform their psychological make up, in either a minor or major way. i like to make this influence as subtle as i possibly can because that is what i personally find to be most realistic (note: by influence, i mean the way that the flaw manifests itself).

these flaws can be used to completely drive the plot depending on your genre. romance, young adult, literary fiction, etc. are all great candidates. for example, “catcher in the rye” is literally a plotless story about a teenage boy navigating his flaws. 

here is some additional advice: show examples of the character’s flaws in action, first without drawing much attention to them, but with each new instance, crank up the impact of the flaw. this results in a natural escalation that flows really well with character development.

3. choices and consequences

foreshadowing is one of the most important tools a writer has to creating a satisfying narrative. in contrast, poor foreshadowing can ruin a narrative. nearly everyone can attest to how a deus ex machina or “subversion” completely derailed an otherwise good story (looking at your Game of Thrones Season 8). at the same time, foreshadowing is really hard to do well because of how much foresight it requires. outliners have the luxury of accounting for this before they write, but as a discovery writer, foreshadowing can feel impossible during your first draft. 

that being said, i have personally found a work-around as a discovery writer for this exact problem, and that answer is to have narrative consequences. pretty much every plot point in your story should have consequences for the rest of the narrative going forward. this makes it a lot more easy for a discovery writer to write a better first draft - you just have to think about what how current plot point impacts the story going forward. 

example: character gets into a foolish fight and loses their sword-fighting arm. now for the rest of the narrative, they can no longer rely on their prowess as a swordsman. 

the neat thing about consequences is that you don’t have to plan ahead of time, but they still function similarly to foreshadowing. 

4. foreshadowing proper 

okay, but what about actual foreshadowing, you might ask. i think this is really hard to give concrete advice for, but here are some things that have helped me. i tend to have a lose idea of really major plot points that need to happen in my stories (example: the kara conversation in chapter seven of just practice). then, i try and think about how i can lay a trail of bread crumbs for that plot point to happen and reverse engineer my way there (example: chapter six, kara is mentioned by annabeth’s friends as having done something unforgivable to percy). 

more specifically, i like to use character flaws as set up for plot points (this ties into the idea of consequences above). example: annabeth is increasingly frustrated by percy’s hiding secrets from her, stoking her already inquisitive nature to a boiling point, leading her to confront kara when she gets the opportunity, even though she knows she shouldn’t. 

i primarily write drama/romance, so using character flaws as foreshadowing is my favored way of foreshadowing. i don’t think it translates as well for a mystery or a fantasy, but in those cases, laying bread crumbs still helps. in the harry potter books, rowling was often fond of burying important clues in irrelevant information. example: in book two, there is a brief mention of tom riddle’s diary in ginny’s cauldron when lucius malfoy slips it there at diagon alley. 

another thing she does is to include information against the backdrop of another, more urgent plot point. example: in book four, harry tries to steal from professor snape for a task in the triwizard tournament or something, and snape accuses him of stealing ingredients to make polyjuice potion but it was barty crouch jr. who needed it to disguise himself as professor moody. you don’t pay much attention at the time because the tournament is more pressing.

#this took for fucking ever #please reblog this im actually begging #if it does well i will do more #i have tried to include examples but i barely read so big oof #i barely remember harry potter so dont murder me for getting plot points wrong #i bolded the important take aways as well #feel free to ask me questions if something was unclear

[grokebaby]

Summary of the eldritch angel story

Terminology masterpost

Central Characters

Heaven:

Lamera

ZZZ

Grandefel (Persecutor)

J'aimekiel

Ngah (High angel)

Kxxxtr (High angel)

Combfa (Caretaker)

Samuel (Angel in training) (not my character)

God's throne

Hell:

Deirdre (Persecutor)

Delilah (High demon)

Xerxes (High demon)

Hart (High demon)

Devoul

Limbo:

Godwatcher

Story summary/walkthrough under the cut

Our story kicks off when Lamera, J'aimekiel, ZZZ and Grandefel are all wondering what hell is like, since none of them (except Grandefel, who's lying about it) have ever been there. ZZZ is extremely curious by nature and decides to just go there because why not. Grandefel tries to resist and ZZZ calls her a coward (You can read this first part here, but it's not great quality imo)

About a day passes without much happening, until everyone hears a distress call from ZZZ. Ngah who's the mother of Lamera and ZZZ, scoops them out, whereupon everyone sees the sorry state the angel is in. Something bad and violent had happened in hell (You can read this part here, content warning for nonhuman gore)

We come back to the story not long after, with our two persecutors, Grandefel and Deirdre meeting secretly in limbo. Deirdre has news she's worried about but loses her chance to tell them when Ngah bursts into the scene, foaming at the mouth, demanding retribution for how ZZZ was treated down in hell. Grandefel is forced to leave and Ngah makes Deirdre escort her to speak to hells manager high judgement. Apparently ZZZ violated several rules upon entering hell and was generally very rude, driving some of Deirdre's friends to attack them on her behalf. Deirdre stayed compliant because she hasn't been feeling well lately and isn't fond of angels in general (except Grandefel). The explanation and lukewarm apology for what happened doesn't please Ngah and she decides to call on a high court case, aka essentially suing them. Hells high judgement has no option but to attend the case (You can read this part here)

After about an hour, hells high judgement along with Deirdre and a few punishers make their appearance in heaven, but not before J'aimekiel can wonder outloud about how empty heaven is. She tries to ask Lamera about why there's barely any angels but the high court case starts. Deirdre gets her apology in, but before it can be accepted properly by all high angels, Ngah directs the conversation elsewhere. She accuses Grandefel of "using her time unprofessionally", and starts trying to squeeze out something from both Persecutors. Delilah, Deirdre's sister, intervenes so the court won't dissolve to off topic accusations but Xerxes wants to hear what Ngah has to say. (You can read all that in more detail here)

After dancing around the topic with increasing frustration, Grandefel reveals that she and Deirdre are in a relationship. Ngah not-so-subtly expresses her disgust with this and makes a direct jab at Deirdre, revealing to everyone that she's pregnant. Since it's a surprise to everyone but Deirdre herself, the revelation is met with backlash. Ngah knows this because as a high angel she can sense angelic life, and because she has a habit of stalking keeping a very close eye on everyone around her. Now that everything has finally been outed, the court dissolves into arguing.

Most angels aside from Ngah and maybe Kxxxtr are actually pretty fine with this kind of crossover happening and Lamera would gladly step in to Grandefels defense but is held back in fear of Ngah's rage. J'aimekiel however isn't, and raises her voice from the crowd. She calls out Ngah for her hateful remarks and reminds everyone that she was born a demon but became an angel after, and if that is fine, this should also be fine, right? Ngah starkly disagrees and in vague terms makes it clear that J'aimekiels existence is only tolerated, and might be because they quote on quote don't have better options right now. J'aimekiel is quite distraught by this and Lamera tries to come to her defense but is shut down by Ngah.

After a painful few hours the court case finally draws to a close with some new rules put in place going forward. One of them being that only the persecutors can make cross visits regularly, since it's required for their job. If any high judgements want to make cross visits it needs to be agreed upon beforehand. This is to avoid all possible conflict. Ngah also makes it clear that, "if they ever survive birth", Grandefel and Deirdre's children must pick a side and that "it would be for the best" if they never knew what they really were, or who their parents were. Despite the backlash, she gets everyone to comply thanks to everyone still being a little confused about the whole ordeal, and Ngah promising to be their personal problem if the children act out of line.

Case closed, everyone goes home. Deirdre feels extremely isolated from everyone now. Grandefel is kept busy by being given alot of heaven-centric work. While not explicitly getting in trouble for it, it's heavily implied that Grandefel really shouldn't be seen with Deirdre again outside of work related situations. J'aimekiel also feels isolated from everyone now.

A few dreadful months later the children are born in hell with Delilah supporting her sister. There's three. One is confirmed an angel via her halo. When Grandefel hears about their birth she can't keep herself away from them anymore, and with her help the children are named. The oldest is Mihail, middle one Meredith and youngest Gabriel. They also make the difficult decision of who gets to live with who. Despite all Grandefel doesn't take the angel child with her, instead taking Gabriel who she thinks would fit in due to how he looks. The children are raised apart like this and don't get to meet their other parent, despite being aware of their existence.

Somewhere along the line, one of Lameras halos gets a crack, something that's painful and quite a big deal for an angel. It's on the collar halo. The crack is small enough that he manages to hide it from everyone, especially since his beard covers most of his neck from view anyway

About a year later things have mostly calmed back down again. Although there's now alot more people who hate Ngah. A certain rather ordinary demon named Devoul makes the news in hell, thanks to Lamera hearing about him from a mortal. The thing is that Devoul has been tricking mortals into working for him in exchange for superpowers and getting something they desperately want. He's been doing this under the guise of being "The Devil" who rules in hell. This is obviously unture and a trial ensues, but it's only kept to hell because nobody wants to involve heaven after last year's occurrence. It goes surprisingly smoothly, and a portion of the souls are reborn and the rest decide to continue on with their lives. One of them, Samuel, inspired to make up for his bad deeds, becomes an angel in training. Devoul is sentenced to 800+ years of tedious physical labor, case closed.

We resume to the story when in limbo, by pure happenstance, Devoul and Lamera bump into each other. They have a moment of "YOU" where Devoul manages to hit Lamera right in the mommy issues, making him drop all attempts at being nice. Devoul is taken aback by how much he unintentionally managed to rile up Lamera, knowing him to be one of the good™ angels. Devoul notices the crack in his halo and becomes curious, whilst also trying to pull up any shreds of decency he has. Lamera tries to deflect most of it and finds out Devoul is here to look for Godwatcher to ask some questions.

On their way to find them, the two talk over a few things and find themselves understanding each other better. Lamera still feels iffy about Devoul though, despite him trying to explain himself

They find Godwatcher together and ask some general questions about morality and the nature of angelhood. Godwatcher can't really give them any one correct answer, rather than "What you think is good or bad depends on what you value in this world. No angel is born being better and no demon is born being worse". The two mull over some of the things they've heard and talk about ""God"". Devoul keeps asking Lamera increasingly difficult questions that cause him to doubt his own worldview and dig into the fact that Ngah is absolutely not a good angel. This causes Lameras halo to crack all the way through, causing him pain and distress. He's deeply afraid of Ngah's reaction if she were to see him like this, and feels like he'll be in trouble. Devoul, having gained sympathy for Lamera, feels guilty that he caused this and tries to offer various ways to help, none of which end up helpful. Figuring that he'll have the next 800ish years of being punished anyway, he decides to dig his grave deeper by pretending to attact Lamera. As a cover up for what broke the halo, so Lamera himself won't be blamed since it obviously broke in conjunction with his trust in his mother.

Speak of which, Ngah hears them and scoops up both. Right on time too, since Deirdre was just about to retrieve Devoul to do his work. Up in heaven, Ngah Is "Dissapointed but not surprised" that Lameras halo broke. She lifts him up by it, intending to fix it, but being manhandled by his mother, through an injured body part, distresses Lamera alot. It doesn't sit right with Devoul and he tries talking to Ngah, who dismisses him as a speck of dust not worth listening to, and they dissolve into arguing. The stress of it all causes Lameras collar halo to finally shatter and fall off completely. He deflects any further attempts to fix it, and tries to confront Ngah about her behavior. This infuriates Ngah who then accuses Devoul of corrupting her child. More arguing ensues, during which Devoul uses his special power of reading people's memories to briefly look at Ngah. He sees her attempted murder and banishing of their third high angel who hasn't been seen in a long time. Apparently heaven had a big inner conflict some time back, which Ngah resolved this way. Their current low number of staff is due to a huge chunk of the angels leaving since they supported Ezekiels cause more.

Ngah, despite wanting to sweep it under the rug, doesn't deny that she did all this, which upsets Lamera even more. He and Ngah argue. Lamera hits her where it hurts (insulting her divinity) and she's about to possibly get violent, when Devoul casts a spell that paralyses her physically. As she's a powerful high angel it won't hold her for long, and the duo flee heaven

Devoul and Lamera hide out and rest at the foot of a mountain on earth. They go over everything and get to know each other better. Lamera is surprised that Devoul would care this much about what's happening upstairs to which he replies "Hey I still have morals" - "Except for that one time". Their bonding is interrupted by Deirdre who caught up to them finally, intending to take Devoul back. Lamera resists, to her surprise, and they explain the situation. Deirdre sympathises with them heavily but is unsure if they can do much. She promises to speak to the high judgements about this all anyway, as a start. Lamera decides to try talking things out with the high angels. Devoul makes a spell that allows him and Lamera to call and talk to each other just in case. The duo separate after sleeping through the night at that mountain.

Heaven: Lamera goes to talk to Kxxxtr about everything he's found out. Kxxxtr expresses regret over letting everything go on like this, especially since she doesn't necessarily agree with how Ngah works things around here. Witnessing the murder attempt has been traumatic for them, hence they stayed compliant out of fear. Kxxxtr does also make clear that whatever Lamera tries to do to change things in heaven, he'll have their support. Ngah who's been listening in on them, bursts in angrily, accusing them of conspiring against her. Kxxxtr tries to get past their fear and stand against Ngah, who proceeds to purposefully trigger them in order to get them to stand down. Instead of backing out, Kxxxtr strikes Ngah in a bout of rage. Regretting the move immediately, they send Lamera up to the higher heavens to safety, and so he could talk to the highest power: God's throne.

Hell: Devoul goes to his house to look at his spellbook in case there'd be anything useful, while Deirdre proceeds to talk to the high judgements. Before he can really find anything, Lamera calls him to tell that Ngah and Kxxxtr are at each other's throats and he's afraid and not sure what to do. Devoul helps him calm down and barely gets to explain what he's doing before the call forcefully disconnects with Lamera notifying how beautiful God's throne is (using both he and it pronouns). Devoul has just enough time to find a spell that will take away a big chunk of power from a powerful individual, before Deirdre comes to him in a rush. One of the high judgements, Xerxes, takes things related to Ngah very seriously and has decided to go fight her. It's not entirely clear if there's ulterior motives, other than wanting to fight her. Deirdre and Devoul head to an opening where they find the three: Delilah chewing out Xerxes for throwing his staff at the heavens, and Hart snickering in the background.

While waiting for the staff to hopefully return, Devoul decides to call Lamera back just in case. At first it feels like the call is forcefully blocked and directed away but eventually he responds. His answers are cryptic and he sounds overall very out of it. At one point, he starts talking entirely differently, way louder and with a completely different voice, asking Devoul if the staff should hit something. He makes it clear that it should definitely not hit anyone or anything and the staff gracefully floats back into Xerxes' hand. The call disconnects. Devoul is worried and decides he really needs to get up there. Luckily for him, despite Delilah's efforts to stop him, Xerxes is about to throw again. Impressed by Devouls determination, he puts the little demon onto the staff and throws it. This time the throw is alot less coordinated due to Delilah physically restraining his hand. Devoul however makes it to where Ngah has currently dropped Kxxxtr down from the cloud. They have a brief confrontation before Devoul uses the powersucking spell on her, causing her to also fall off the cloud. The spell takes a physical toll on him, partially by causing him to feel extremely hungry. All of Ngah's now removed power manifests as an orb. He hopes Lamera is okay and tries to look for him, and is suddenly lifted up to where he is, as if on command.

He enters the throne room where Lamera looks.. Off. He's extremely swollen, like a balloon blown to it's limits, and his entire face is engulfed in flames. He doesn't respond to Devoul trying to make sure he's okay. He only speaks in that different voice that's clearly not suited to his vocal chords. In the background Devoul sees God's throne, mouth moving slowly. He has a hard time really registering the Throne's physical form into something he can comprehend. There's separate elements (Crystals and gems, large mouth and eyes, galactic matter streaming in and out of it) but his brain can't bring them together in his head. Despite this he addresses the Throne With "What the fuck did you do him? (Lamera)". The throne proceeds to ignore his questions and attempts to take the orb from him through Lameras body, since the entity itself can't move much at all. Devoul is unwilling to hand it over until God's throne explains that now, since Kxxxtr is heavily injured, and Ngah technically not a high angel (in terms of strength), they need a new one. He exposits how He was just going to make Lamera into a high angel instead but having Devoul enter with the orb brought another option to the table. Devoul hands over the orb, which God's throne takes into it's mouth and Lamera falls limp, now presumably free from it's control. After both making sure they're okay, they exit the throne room and take a moment to collect themselves and pass out from the exhaustion.

Meanwhile Kxxxtr fell down to limbo, bleeding, where they're still laying, unable to move. Xerxes, who partially went to look for his staff, and partially to punt Ngah in the gut, discovers her. Kxxxtr is terrified at first but Xerxes offers her his armor, to cover for her leaking insides. She's taken aback by the kind gesture and they just sorta awkwardly hang out there while Kxxxtr explains what happens. Xerxes escorts her back later. Ngah has turned into a giant three headed serpent, and is having an episode somewhere, enraged and miserable at being demoted. Samuel and J'aimekiel are shook by the commotion and are trying to figure out what's going on. Xerxes finds Ngah on his way back and they start fighting (he still hasn't gotten his staff back).

Upon waking up, Devoul and Lamera lament over the whole mess. Samuel and J'aimekiel find the two and want an explanation. Devoul and Samuel aren't thrilled at seeing each other again. After a thoroughly uncomfortable interaction they part ways, Lamera leaving to clean up things upstairs and Devoul returning to his punishment work downstairs, dreading all the more trouble he might be in now. He stumbles upon Xerxes with Ngah in a chokehold, and doesn't even recognize her. Ngah is now even more pissed at him, but with some help he realizes who she is. Xerxes seems intent on killing her but Devoul tries to stop him, knowing Lamera would be destroyed by something like that happening. They heavily discuss it before concluding that Ngah really should answer for her crimes instead of getting the easy way out. She's locked up in the Void District until she can play nice again (and until they can figure out a proper punishment for her). Xerxes and Devoul chat on their way back, and Xerxes, still very impressed by the little demon's spirit, offers to recruit him. Devoul, although surprised, accepts the offer. He still has alot of punishment work left but at least he'd get to do it in consistent company.

About a day passes and everyone is almost getting to settle in, when something strange captures the attention of all the angels. God's throne is now finished making them a new High angel - how exciting! The new angel, instructed by the Throne, fetches and throws Xerxes' staff right back to him. They then backflip out of the high heavens to meet everyone, making a thoroughly.. Interesting first impression, to say the least.. The angels have a hard time swallowing that a demon - Devoul specifically, kickstarted the creation of their new High angel. Samuel nopes out, Grandefel heavily considers asking for a refund, and the new angel, not seeing anything wrong with any of this, hops down to hell to meet their "Daddy". Devoul is taken aback by the news but welcomes his "child" with open arms. He with Lameras help, proceed to name them Terjey, since God's throne didn't give them a name (which is very unusual). Heaven returns to cleaning up the mess and dealing with the staff shortage and Devoul returns to his work.

And that was everything that happened up to this point, the present day.

The end - for now!

#eldritch angel #My writings #Lore #Ref #No way I'm tagging every single character here #Original stories #Oc stories #my ocs #Wowowow applaud me I did it #And from now on everything is hypothetical. This is it. The whole story up to the latest point. #Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa #I may write little snippets of backstory or whatever the characters are doing but not too heavily #I need a break hah #Lmk if you read this because I'm dying to know what you thought

[honeymoonjin]

𝒑𝒂𝒊𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒈 namjoon x reader x hoseok x taehyung || 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒅 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒕 20.5k || 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒓𝒆 smut, surprisingly enough this is literally pwp

𝒔𝒖𝒎𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒚 in an effort to tame their increasingly bratty girlfriend, namjoon and hoseok take their sexual exploits to a new level and hire a professional dom to run a session with them in a bdsm dungeon

𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 HELLA smut, dom Namjoon, dom Hoseok, dom Taehyung, sub + bratty reader, roleplay, BDSM, mxm, overstimulation, exhibitionism, voyeurism, unprotected sex, protected sex, foursome, oral (m receiving), spanking, BDSM furniture, degradation (name calling), gagging, electrical play, orgasm delay and denial, use of sex toys, possessiveness, use of safewords, BDSM machines, fingering, masturbation, multiple orgasms, choking, squirting, sensory deprivation, fucking machine, vaginal sex, anal sex, creampie, double penetration, triple penetration?, nipple play, i guess tae is technically a sex worker, pet names, sexual hierarchy, fully consensual slave-owner dynamic (not between the main characters)

a/n: this is a sequel to Hot Fuzz (namseok x reader) but can be read on its own. also, this contains other members wink wonk but i’m keeping them a secret to save the suspense. a million thanks to @hobiandcoffee​ , @jhspetitegf​ and @honey-boyyoongi​ for their help. couldn’t have done it without your help! also happy early birthday @jamaisjoons​ i hope this ruins you xxx

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“Alright, he’s coming over. Remember our rules, princess?” Namjoon’s fingers wrap around your chin, digging in just enough to press your bottom lip into a pout. You do your best to nod, but his grip doesn’t waver. He raises an eyebrow at you.

“Yes, Daddy,” you murmur, feeling your heart warm when he smiles proudly at you. It’s relatively cool in the large space, and the contrast of the air with Hoseok’s warm body pressed against you makes you shiver.

The three of you had been waiting at the bar for the past ten or so minutes. Both you and Hoseok are practically vibrating with nervous excitement. The latter is on the bar stool next to you, looking very on-brand in black pants, combat boots, and a thin white tank. As always, his fingers are laden with rings, but it seems this time there’s a theme of silver bands, some with engravings or textures, others plain. You can’t help but wonder what pattern they’d welt on your ass if he spanked you. Perhaps today was a day for testing their limits as well as yours.

Namjoon, however, is the epitome of calm. Although both of your boyfriends had always been the ones in control, it was Namjoon who took charge earlier tonight when you were all getting ready. It was him that bought you the black lace bralette and matching miniskirt you were currently wearing; it was him who picked out what panties you were allowed to wear, before deciding nothing was better. It was him who booked you an appointment for waxing a few days prior so that you would be bare for him, able to feel everything. And now, as he kept your eyes fixed on him, he retained that composure. Going for a more subtle getup to Hoseok and you, he almost looked like he could walk into a high-profile business dinner and fit right in. Deep grey pants cinched at the waist with a belt were paired with a simple dress shirt, complete with expensive gold cufflinks.

The room is loud enough that you don’t hear the third man approaching until you hear his voice. You turn to look, but flush when Namjoon only lets your chin go after a moment, patting you condescendingly on the cheek. The newcomer, as he stands beside Namjoon and looks over the three of you, is decked out in leather, latex and buckles. A shot of anxious energy runs through your body as you look over how professional he looks. Leather pants, lace-up boots, and a latex top that is unzipped all the way to the middle of his chest, exposing a deep triangle of golden flesh. When he reaches out to shake Hoseok and Namjoon’s hands, a buckled strap around his bicep flexes slightly. You clench your thighs together, wishing Namjoon would’ve let you wear panties, anything to stop you from leaking onto the vinyl of the upholstered barstool.

“RM, Jay,” the man greets cordially, a surprisingly smooth-toned voice accompanying his fine-boned face. “My name is V, the sub will call me Master. Pleasure to meet you.”

“Oh, my name is Y/N,” you supply helpfully, but V turns to glare at you with narrowed eyebrows. Your smile drops.

“I was under the impression you read the email, sub,” he says steadily, words just sharp enough to provide a threat. “The scene was to begin the moment I arrived, which means you shouldn’t be speaking out of turn.”

You blink, turning to Hoseok for back-up, but he shoots you a salacious wink and looks back over to V. “She did read the email, yes. We’ve been having problems with her not following our rules, actually, so it’s great that you could fit us in for a session.”

You pout and jab Hoseok playfully in the side. On a normal night, your boyfriend would teasingly warn you, or perhaps you’d get a light spanking, but now he goes tense, eyes past you. You frown, and twist around, only for your blood to run cold.

“Did you just hit Sir?” V asks coldly.

“I just poked him,” you defend.

His eyes flare. “You aren’t making this very easy for yourself, little sub. I wouldn’t be testing my patience so early on in the evening if I were you.”

You pout and hunch over in your seat. “I’m sorry, um, Master, but I didn’t hit him. I just poked him,” you repeat petulantly.

His lips stretch into a disbelieving smile, sharp at the edges. “You’re right,” he affirms, “there is a difference between hitting and poking. Tell me, little sub; if I bend you over that bartop right now and flip up your skirt, which one do you think you’ll be getting?”

Namjoon intervenes, placing a hand on your knee and squeezing it gently. “Just apologise to Hoseok, baby girl. That was your first strike, but we know you must be nervous.”

His touch calms you, and you turn to your other boyfriend with what you hope is a cute pout. “Sorry, Sir,” you mumble, “I won’t do it again.”

“Good girl,” Hoseok replies warmly. “Now, we have some things we’d like to discuss, so just sit nice and pretty for us, hm?”

“And remember our rules,” Namjoon reminds you firmly. You nod dutifully and wriggle around on the stool a bit, getting comfortable as the three of them begin discussion.

For a while it’s admin stuff - payment, prior experience, limits - and you let yourself zone out, eyes curiously roaming the room that’s laid out in front of you.

Never having been to a BDSM dungeon before, you had sort of expected some sort of medieval, dimly-lit basement, but it’s comfortingly clean, tidy, and in fact to one side of the room there seems to be a social area where a pleasant hum of chatter fills the air. Some are dressed like V, others more incognito like Namjoon. There are women with fluffy tails between their legs, men wearing nothing but a jockstrap. On the far side of the room, a lady old enough to be your grandmother rests her feet on the bare back of a middle-aged man, whose arm muscles tremble violently.

But of course, this isn’t just a social gathering, and the majority of the room is taken up by what almost seems like an open-space office. It’s a large room, with two hallways at the far end that lead into what you know are the private rooms, available by booking. You had tried an interrogation room with your two boyfriends as a way of branching further out into BDSM, and only now are you realising how much of a baby step that was. The sights in front of you are far more intense and varied, and you shift in your seat, feeling Namjoon’s hand still resting on your knee, as you wonder which of the toys you’ll be using tonight.

Although the room is fairly loud with pleasured cries and sounds of impact, vibration, and electricity, it’s not terribly packed or crowded. The larger pieces of equipment are spread out around the room, and there are plenty of free spots. Men and women in plain black clothing rush around cleaning stations between uses, and even more keep watch over the crowd, stationed throughout the room. Each one has a little neon badge on their breast, and white lettering stamped on the back of their shirts that say DM. From the induction pamphlet you three had received when signing up, you knew this meant Dungeon Monitor, and they were the staff there to take care and keep an eye on the scenes. It reassured you to see just how many of them there were.

Occupying yourself with watching floggings and fucking machines and elaborate bondage only entertains you for so long, however, and you tune back in to the conversation, kicking your feet lazily back and forth. One rule of the dungeon was that all subs had to remove their shoes, since they’d be the ones getting up on the equipment and it was easier to avoid property damage that way, but you feel strangely vulnerable feeling the cold metal of the bar stool’s legs against your skin.

“Oh, wow, that long, huh?”

“Well, she was trained and had experience with suspension before that. Besides, there were two different spotters at the event to…”

You huff, feeling boredom make you restless. You only had the guy for one evening and here Hoseok and Namjoon were having a chat with V like they had all the time in the world. You glance up; nobody heard your noise of frustration, so you subtly inch your foot out to where Namjoon stands across from you, running it up and down, hitching his pant leg a little. As V continues to describe some encounters he had, Namjoon turns his head to you slightly and gives you a questioning stare. You pout at him, enough that he’ll notice but not so much that you’d draw unwanted attention from V.

His face clears out into an encouraging smile, and you perk up, expecting him to play with you a little or at the very least suggest to V that you properly begin the session. But, to your horror, he simply clears his throat, interrupting V mid-sentence. “What is it, baby girl?”

You shrink back, feeling three sets of eyes heavy on you. “I’m bored, Daddy.”

“You’re bored,” he repeats with a gentle tone that you would hear an adult use on a small child. “And what do you want me to do about that, hm? I was in the middle of a conversation, baby.”

“It’s rude to interrupt,” Hoseok pitches in.

Your mouth drops open. “I didn’t interrupt, Namjoon did!” The man in question tenses his jaw at your lack of a title. You swallow nervously, turning back to Hoseok. “I just don’t get why we’re still just sitting around at the bar, Sir. Isn’t chatting a waste of time?”

“Do you always speak to your doms that way, sub?”

You huff and stare at V. Needy for attention, boredom has always made you reckless, and so far he hadn’t done anything except empty threats. You shrug.

With his dark hair swept back off his forehead, you see the disapproving lines as he narrows his eyebrows at you. “That’s not an answer.”

You shrug again, with more emphasis. You do your best to stop from flat-out rolling your eyes, simply casting them upwards in frustration. “No, Master, I don’t. Because normally by now we’d actually be doing something.”

Namjoon sucks in a breath, and Hoseok tenses. You know you’ve fucked up by the way V’s back naturally straightens and his shoulders drop, slowly shaking his head.

“I warned you,” the master chides, “but little brats like you don’t listen. It’s clear that whatever I do will be a ‘waste of time’ as long as you have that attitude. Get off that stool and bend over it.”

Your stomach swirls anxiously, though it’s not entirely negative. You swallow, mutely shaking your head.

Undeterred, V turns to your boyfriends on either side. “Jay, bend her over and push up her skirt. RM, hold her torso down.” You squeak out in surprise as Hoseok doesn’t hesitate, picking you up and dragging the stool out further into the room before pressing you down onto it. V follows you with a languid pace, and you hear him cracking his knuckles. “It’s no wonder you called me, boys. Your sub is completely out of control. You have to teach her discipline if you expect to get anything out of this.”

You wriggle under the palm that pins you against the upholstery of the bar stool, Namjoon crouching so that his face is in your eyesight. His mouth is hard but his eyes are muted with sympathy. “You’re making us look bad, baby girl. Maybe if you take your punishment well, we can give you a reward, hm?”

The cool air on your ass as Hoseok lifts your skirt to rest on your back has you hissing in a breath, and with dawning horror, you realise the area around you has gone quieter. You make a noise of discomfort in your throat, and Hoseok gives one of your cheeks a light teasing pat.

“Everyone’s watching you, kitten,” he reveals with an edge of humor to his voice. “They wanna see your pretty little ass get lit up.” When he speaks again, it’s further away and in such a low murmur that you can’t make out what he’s saying. He confers quietly with V for a few moments, and you curl your toes into the carpet, unsure how you feel about your body being on display to so many strangers like this.

After a few moments, it goes silent, and you hold your breath, getting a fright when a stinging hand comes down upon your right cheek. “Ah, Sir,” you cry out in surprise.

“Wrong,” a voice says flatly, an unfamiliar hand brushing over the mark. You gasp and try to wiggle away, rising on your tiptoes to escape the touch. Namjoon gently shushes you, brushing your hair back from your face as V chuckles, his voice low with satisfaction. “Where’s that foolish confidence gone now, hm?”

When his hand comes down again, it’s on the other cheek and twice as hard. You whine at the sting, expecting another soothing rub or snarky comment, but he doesn’t give you the chance, instead raining down hit after hit, palm cupped slightly to increase the noise. Namjoon and Hoseok hold you down as you desperately shift away, trying in vain to tuck your ass away or twist out of their grip, but he doesn’t stop. You lose count sometime past eight, and your flesh heats up with each one, but still he continues. You feel the warmth spread; hits on your ass are spread evenly around but you also feel smacks that land on the tops of your thighs and, when you part your legs slightly to adjust your position, one lands right on your bare pussy. Though you can’t hear what he’s saying through your whimpers and cries, you can hear him laugh every now and again, kneading your tender flesh or giving you a pinch. He’s showing off.

When the air stills, you’re trembling. Your cheeks are on fire, not only your ass but also your face as you blush violently, tears running in hot tracks down your face. Vaguely, you hear your boyfriends praising you, hands lifting you up off the stool. Your vision swims with being raised so suddenly but Namjoon lets you lean on him, wrapping his arms around you and burying his chin in your hair.

“You did so well, baby,” he promises. “So well. Do you understand why he had to do that?”

You sniff and nod weakly.

“Good girl,” he croons, and your heart swells.

After a few moments, you feel another pair of hands on you. You turn, standing on shaky legs, and see Hoseok squeezing your shoulder. “We’re ready to play now, kitten. You still want us to play with you?”

Nervously, your eyes slide behind him to V, but instead of the disapproving hard stare you were expecting, you’re faced with sparkling eyes. Pride. The look of a teacher when their student finally grasps a difficult concept. It’s a look that you hope to see again. You turn back to Hoseok, blink away the last of your tears, and nod. “Yes, sir.”

“That’s my girl,” Namjoon praises warmly, and pats your extremely sore ass to get you moving.

You jump at the contact, but quickly hurry forward to follow the two men in front of you as they wind their way deeper into the room. You realise zoning out during their conversation perhaps wasn’t the best idea, since you now have no idea what they’re going to do and, being in the scene, have no way of asking.

The smell of arousal is heavy in the air, along with faint wisps of various scented lubes and wax play candles. You bite your lip as the modest crowd of people that had stopped to watch your punishment slowly return to what they’re doing, not after eyeing up your ass, which no doubt is bright red if the stinging heat is anything to go by. Your fingers itch to pull your skirt back down, but you’re unsure if you’re allowed to, and while you wish to continue poking and prodding your doms throughout the evening, you want to wait until your flesh isn’t so tender. Besides, a little reward for being a good girl sure sounds nice right about now. You keep your eyes low, conveniently resting them on the sight of Hoseok’s ass in those tight black pants, and try to ignore the slickness of your inner thighs as you walk.

You’re stopped suddenly when that ass halts in front of you, and you stumble to prevent yourself from smacking right into him. You look up as Namjoon comes around to stand beside them, a hand resting gently but possessively on your shoulder.

“I’m excited for this, baby girl. I know it’s something you wanted to try, and I can’t wait to see you up there.”

Up? You swivel in the direction he’s looking, where a massive contraption is bolted to the wall, two long, skinny blocks crossed over in a narrow X. Heat floods to your core as you recognise the equipment.

“A Saint Andrew's cross,” V explains easily, like he’s given the spiel a thousand times. “Named after Saint Andrew, who got crucified like this rather than the traditional way. Although I’m sure you’ll be having a lot more fun than he did.”

While you had done all this research before in anticipation of this evening, there was something far more electric about hearing it while the cross itself stood before you, especially since you knew you were about to be on it. Your mouth opens to breathe out a curse, but you snap it shut quickly.

V notices this and his lip twitches at your obedience. “Alright, little sub. Undress now.”

You blink. Somehow this hadn’t occurred to you. Taking a surreptitious glance around the room, it seems nobody is paying much attention to you; everyone around you is either a DM or actively engaging in their own scene. Still, you hesitate, before reluctantly slipping down your skirt and unhooking your bra. You cross your arms over your breasts and press your thighs as close together as possible, avoiding the eyes of the three men around you.

“For someone that was so concerned about wasting time, you sure did take a while to obey me, sub. Next time I expect you to do as I or your other doms say the moment we say it, understand?”

You stare at the way your toes curl between the fibres of the charcoal carpet. “Yes, Master.” You say it quickly, forcing the words out, and he sighs in displeasure.

You can feel rather than see his dark gaze on you. The tip of one of his boots taps impatiently in the corner of your vision. “Your two options are obedience and the use of your safeword. Anything else and you will receive due punishment. It’s clear to me your doms are soft on you; I can assure you, I am not. I won’t hesitate to discipline you without mercy.”

As much as your mind screams not to, you can’t help the grin that twitches at your lip at the thought. You duck your head down further, hoping he missed it.

Of course, no such luck. “Oh, it seems the sub likes the sound of that,” he muses in a humored tone. “Maybe you gentlemen picked a good one after all.”

Hoseok hums, reaching forward to squeeze one of your ass cheeks. You gasp, biting your lip at the heat that flares up under his calloused fingers. “Our pretty little painslut,” he confirms. “Get up on the cross, kitten.”

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassment curling in the pit of your stomach at how throaty your voice is already. You feel wetness smearing all the way down to the bottom of your thighs now, and if your core doesn’t get some attention, you might just go crazy.

With shaky legs, you step up, the bottom of each plank having a narrow platform just wide enough for a foot. The distance isn’t too far, with your feet spread apart a bit wider than your hips, but the waft of cool air causes you to clench. Like always, when approaching something new, you feel your heart seize up in equal parts arousal and anxiety.

With your back to the cross, you’re faced out onto the crowd, and you feel yourself go weak, all too aware of just how many people in the room there are. It’s filled up a bit over the past half hour or so, and while nobody actively ogles you, there’s nothing to stop them glancing up to catch you, naked and with thighs glossy. You buckle at the knees slightly, crouching to close the gap between your legs slightly.

Hoseok tuts. “Don’t go shy on us now, kitten. Arms up.”

Instinctively your hands lift in the air, but you pause. “Sir?”

“Yes, kitten?” He steps forward, close enough that you can just about feel the heat radiating off his body, giving the feeling of confidentiality - even as your two other doms watch you like a hawk behind him.

You swallow hard, lowering your voice to a whisper. “What are you going to do me?” Even asking the question sends a delicious shudder up your spine.

He grins, eyes bright. “That all depends on if you behave for us. Are you gonna be a good slut?” You nod quickly, though a part of you is already planning how you can rile them up while tied down. “Say it, kitten.”

“I’m gonna be a good slut for Sir.”

His grin sharpens into a sneer as he steps back, joining the two others. “I’m not the only one here, remember? Say it to them, too.”

Your hands find each other, wringing them to vent your embarrassment. Namjoon has slipped his hands casually into his pants pockets, and he tips his head to the side with a slight smile, expectant. V maintains his stoic posture as usual and just cocks an eyebrow, arms crossed. You clear your throat, eyes darting once more around the other patrons of the dungeon. “I-I’m gonna be a good slut for Daddy…. And I’m gonna be a good slut for,” your gaze lands on V, too far away for you to be sure, but you think you see his eyes dilate. “Master,” you finish. He gives you the most miniscule nod, you would’ve missed it had you not already been watching him.

“That’s right,” Hoseok affirms, and steps forward again. “Now I won’t ask again. Arms up.”

This time you don’t waste a moment, holding them up in the air over your head, feeling the cold metal of the buckles lightly brush the tops of your hands. You look up with a frown, only to see the fastening points too high up. You look back down with a disappointed pout.

Hoseok is staring at you in bemusement and Namjoon has delicately covered his mouth to laugh, but V just pushes past the two, crouching down suddenly to crank a lever on the cross beside your left foot. You squeak as that platform begins to lift, and to save yourself from tipping over, your hand flies down and steadies yourself on his shoulder. You manage to catch your balance and quickly go to lift off your hand, wary that he might’ve considered it breaking the rules, but his hand darts up the second your fingertips slip away from the leather, wrapping tightly around your wrist.

You freeze in uncertainty, but he simply switches planks and adjusts the other platform so that the two are even, with you higher up than before. Once he’s done, he tips his head up to look at you, and you feel yourself shrink back at the heat of his gaze. Somehow, even though you’re above him, he has a way of exerting his power over you with that one look.

Suddenly, your awareness is brought to the heat between your thighs, and how close he is to it. As if he can read your thoughts, his eyes slip down to stare openly at your exposed pussy. A hot strike of shame makes your toes curl on the wooden platforms as his nostrils flare, and he looks back up at you again with a slow grin.

You take a shuddering breath, bracing yourself for a scathing comment, but he just stands up in one smooth movement, silently taking your wrist up to hold it against the corresponding post, nodding to himself when your wrist slips nicely into the leather cuff. He buckles it efficiently, and you feel your heart pick up when the natural weight of your arm pulls on the tight circlet of leather, reminding you of your vulnerability. Your other arm is hoisted up and attached before you even realise it, rendering you spread-eagled on the cross. Your ankles remain free, but the wrist attachments are still high enough for you that your body is completely stretched out, heels barely brushing the platforms.

He steps back, bends over to murmur something in Namjoon and Hoseok’s ears one at a time, then promptly leaves. You feel an odd stab of disappointment as you watch his receding figure snake through couples and small groups at different stations, until he goes out of sight. “Where’d he go?” you murmur unhappily.

Hoseok frowns and surges forward, raining a sharp swat down on your breast. Your eyes squeeze shut and your hands instinctively jerk, but you’re unable to cover yourself. You startle when he gives the same treatment to the other breast. “What an ungrateful little slut,” you hear him say. “So desperate for another man’s cock. Filthy.”

Another voice from slightly further away, softer. “Are we not enough for you anymore, baby girl?’

You open your eyes and shake your head adamantly. “No, Daddy,” you plead, “I was just curious.”

Namjoon has on an expression he rarely gets. Normally the softer of the two, he now presses his mouth into a tight line and furrows his brow. “And now you’re lying to Daddy,” he comments flatly. “If that greedy pussy of yours isn’t satisfied with two cocks, you should just tell us.”

Your pout deepens. “It isn’t that, Daddy! I was just having fun with three.”

After a moment, the tension in his face clears. “Ah, baby’s just having fun, hm? Special occasion?” You nod sulkily. “Oh, well there’s nothing wrong with that, baby girl. Daddy wants you to have fun. But if you wanna have fun you need to learn to follow the rules. And you didn’t even ask nicely.”

Your chest eases, the crisis averted. “Thank you, Daddy, I’m sorry. Please can you tell me why Master V left?”

Hoseok barks out a quick laugh. “He didn’t leave, kitten, he’s gone out back to get some toys for us to play with.”

You mouth opens and closes, unsure whether you’re allowed to talk back. You take the chance, curiosity getting the better of you. “But Sir, there are so many spare trolleys with toys on them here already.”

“I thought you deserved my personal collection,” a third voice says from your right. You glance over quickly, sticking your face out to see past your forearm, as V returns with what looks like a massive toolbox, metal painted black, and sets it down beside you. “Employee perks,” he explains shortly. “Some of our equipment isn’t safe to be used with untrained individuals for safety reasons. Others I just have a personal preference for.” He’s not speaking to you anymore, rather your two boyfriends. “Has the sub behaved while I’ve been gone?”

Hoseok raises an eyebrow but Namjoon beats him to it. “She most certainly has. Waiting patiently for her reward.” You blink at Namjoon, surprised, but the dark glimmer in his eyes just tells you that you’ll pay for his generosity later.

“Well, then,” V begins, flipping open the catches on the top of the chest, flipping the lid up, “let’s begin.”

You watch in anticipation, muscles in your upper arms twitching as he digs around. You can’t see anything from the way the lid blocks your view, but after a moment he pulls out a bottle of...lube?

“What’s that?” you ask curiously before you can think better of it.

V lets out a bitter scoff, passing the bottle - unlabeled except for a faded E written in Sharpie- to Namjoon, before turning back to his toolbox. “That mouth,” he remarks harshly, “will get you in trouble, little sub.” He lets out a low growl as he rummages around more hastily, and the sound rushes straight to your core, heat flaring. “I don’t even have a gag for you, normally my subs know not to run their mouths around me. Guess I’ll have to make do.”

He straights up, pulling out a long trail of thin rope, soft red nylon looking positively sinful as it runs over his tanned fingers. He loops it a few times, before collecting the bunch, one thick cylinder of rope, about two fingers wide. His lids are low when they focus on you, that proud glimmer long gone. “Open up.” You obey him without thinking, scrunching your nose as he fastens the rope around your head, strands of hair getting pinched between the individual lengths. The girth is enough that your jaw hangs a little open, and you curl your lips and bite down on the rope in an effort to prevent drooling.

“Now, I won’t give you another strike because you were asking a question. But that better be the last time I hear you speaking out of turn. This isn’t fucking Sunday School, I don’t need you asking questions. Look at where you are right now, princess. Tied and gagged, naked with your dripping pussy on full display. We could do whatever the fuck we wanted with you right now. Your pretty little boyfriends could leave right now to get an early night and leave you in my hands. Maybe I’d get sick of your attitude and walk away myself, leaving you available to anyone who wanted to play with you. How long do you think it would take a DM to notice the sub that was getting fucked by everyone in the room, hm?” You shudder, core clenching, as you remember the pure arousal that hit you when you felt V’s unfamiliar hands on your ass back at the bar. Your eyes slip shut at the thought, and you hear a chuckle. “You continue to surprise me, little sub. It seems that no matter what I say or do as punishment you go weak at the knees. I’ll have to think on how I’ll discipline you properly. In the meantime,” he breaks away from you to walk back to your boyfriends, patting Namjoon on the shoulder. “Like we discussed?”

You tilt your head at this comment, though Namjoon and Hoseok both nod, the latter biting his lip with a dark look in his eyes. As the two approach you, V falls behind, using the toolbox as a stool, legs splayed across the carpet lazily. You turn your attention back to your boyfriends, who have stopped at the foot of the cross, one to either side.

Namjoon lazily thumbs the cap open and closed; with every plastic click, you feel your core clench. He smiles at you, eyes glittering. “Most patrons of the dungeon don’t get to play with the toys we’re gonna play with, baby girl. We had to come here last week for a safety briefing.” You lower your brows in confusion and your boyfriend stays in character, tipping his head to the side innocently even as his eyes glitter with amusement. “What, did we not tell you that? Jay, did you tell our girl what we were preparing for?”

Hoseok’s eyes are nearly black. He doesn’t turn to Namjoon when he’s addressed, eyes heavy on you. “I guess I must’ve forgot,” he replies flatly, not even attempting to convincingly lie. “Wanna guess where we’re gonna put it?” His lip curls in amusement as you stare it him, hands tied and mouth gagged. He laughs darkly. “Oh, that’s right. You can’t. I suppose you’ll just have to sit back and take it, hm?” He takes the lube back off Namjoon and steps even closer, until you can see the shimmer of sweat on his temples and some strands on his hairline sticking to it.

You groan around the rope, steadily growing soaked with your spit. Tentatively, you push your hips forward as much as you can off the wood of the cross, whimpering in question. Hoseok, head ducked as he cracks open the bottle and squeezes some lube onto his fingers, misses it but your other boyfriend just chuckles.

“Not that greedy pussy of yours, baby girl,” he teases, “it’s so sloppy we wouldn’t need any lube at all. No, this is for those pretty little nipples of yours.”

You shudder, ass falling back to smack against the planks again. You moan out a word around the gag, though, as Hoseok’s slicked-up hands latch around your stiff buds, you know they all understand you. Why?

Namjoon’s eyes light up. “Do you know what the E on the bottle stands for, baby girl?” When he says the next word, he enunciates every syllable, the harsh sounds of the consonants cracking in his mouth, sending shivers down your spine. “Electric.”

As if rehearsed, V stands up off the chest, swinging his leg aside to open it back up, digging in deep and pulling out what looks like an electrical cord; the flat, black ribbon splitting off into two and ending on either end in delicate peg-like contraptions. Nipple clamps. You take a deep breath, chest soaring. Nipple clamps were one of your favorite toys to use in the bedroom. Many a time, even in your more vanilla forays, you’d bat your eyelashes and press out your chest and ask one of your boyfriends to pretty please put on the clamps, even just for a little bit, but you were used to bright silver, not this sleek black. You watch in curiosity as V ducks down again, pulling out what appears to be a remote - a rounded, roughly egg-shaped device that fits comfortably in his hand. Electric. Your jaw goes slack around the spit-slick ropes in your mouth. Your eyes are heavy on those two black pegs as they sway loosely in the air, and you feel yourself tremble, the muscles in your thighs weaker than they were before.

Hoseok’s fingers, still slightly cold from the air in the room, feel even more stimulating as they tweak your buds, coaxing them into stiff peaks as the lube makes it difficult for him to get a grasp. You suck in a harsh breath through your nose as he slips and scratches a fingernail across the top of one, your eyes finally breaking from the nipple clamps and onto him as he apologetically pats your breast with a rakish grin.

Without looking, he accepts the proffered toy, wrapping ring-laden fingers around the remote as he jokingly snaps one of the clamps in his other hand, opening and closing it like a tiny set of jaws. Slipping the black device into his pocket, he stands directly in front of you, slightly taller than you even as you’re raised on the platform of the cross, and licks his lips teasingly.

“This is how it’s going to go, kitten,” he instructs in a sultry tone, “we’re going to put these on, have a little fun. But you’re not allowed to cum, okay? A good girl always asks first.” You narrow your eyebrows at him, huffing around your makeshift gag, and his eyes light up, tip of his tongue remaining just past his teeth as he chuckles. “Mm, you can’t exactly ask if you’ve got that thing in your mouth, now can you?” You shake your head obediently, hoping he can read the pleading look in your eyes. “Maybe I’ll take it off later.”

Your shoulders droop. You let out a disappointed whine, but your boyfriend just laughs at you, shifting his focus down to your breasts as he palms one roughly, a thumb stroking over the nipple before he’s bringing the toy up to it without ceremony.

You crane your neck down, moaning as the sight of him affixing the black clamp to your glistening nipple is paired with the delicious pressure it brings. Your head tips back again, eyes falling shut in bliss as, for the first time in the evening, you receive some decent stimulation. You let out a groan, hands balling uselessly into fists high above your head as your other nipple receives the same treatment. You can’t help but whimper, back arching to follow him as he deftly tugs on the electrical ribbon between the two, ensuring they’re fastened correctly, but no doubt also doing it just to watch you squirm.

“That feel good, kitten?”

You garble affirmation and nod, moaning again as he continues to play with the cord, a dozen teasing flicks of his wrist to keep the warmth of pressure on your nipples rising. All is still for a moment, and you crack your eyes open to see Hoseok falling back to stand beside V, letting your other boyfriend take his place.

Your attention is immediately caught by the object he’s lazily tossing back and forth between his hands. A slender, curved vibrator. Your eyes light up, and it’s clear he sees the apparent joy on your face as he approaches.

“I did say this was a reward, baby girl,” Namjoon reminds you, looking sharp as ever in his dress shirt. His straining erection is clear to see even through the black pants, and a quick glance to Hoseok shows you he’s faring the same. You had hoped their desperation would have led to their cocks being inside you already, but you would happily settle for a vibrator, as long as something was filling you. Surreptitiously, you sneak a look over to V’s crotch as well, a dark glee lighting up inside you when you see the outline of a bulge running halfway down his thigh. Holy shit.

You swear your heart stops for a second when you look away, only to be faced with V himself as he stares you down, clearly having seen you ogle him. You sigh, muffled through the wet rope, as you feel smooth silicone slip between your soaked folds, but you can’t break your gaze from the man sitting atop his box of toys.

Languidly, like he has all the time in the world, the dark-haired man rests a hand on his thigh, and lets a single finger lay right where his head sits underneath the fabric, and swirls it, gently outlining his own erection, a promise of what could be to come. Your mouth waters even more, and the only thing that pulls you back is a sudden onslaught of sensation; somehow, as though they were timing it while you were distracted, Namjoon plunges the vibrator to the hilt inside of you just as an odd yet intense tingle in your nipples makes your very nerve endings shiver.

You let out a surprised yelp, smothered by the gag in your mouth, and flinch as the cord between your breasts is yanked roughly, very nearly dislodging the clamps with how vigorous the motion is. Your gaze shoots in front of you to Namjoon, the normally reserved demeanor alight with something deeper, something more possessive.

“Do we need to take him away?” Namjoon asks in a sharp tone. Without looking, without changing his stern expression at all, he flattens his palm against the base of the vibrator and presses, twisting it inside you, as deep as it can get. You whine lowly, attempting to rise on the tips of your toes to escape the sudden stretch, but he simply reaches out and grips your chin tightly. “Yes or no,” he spits out, “do we need to take him away or will you start behaving for us?”

You sniff as the base of his palm barely misses your clit, but articulate a vaguely disyllabic answer, asking for the latter.

“You promise to behave?” he confirms, and you hum your agreement. “Well then, I’m sick of your eyes being on him when you should be focussing on me. On us. Understood?” He releases your jaw so that you can nod in response. “Good. Now, before we continue, I want this gag off. I’m sick of you blabbering like a baby when I ask you a question.”

Simultaneous rage and humiliation flare in you at the statement, but you stay silent, all too relieved to finally be freeing your mouth. The ropes have been getting heavier as your spit is absorbed, and when he finally undoes the knots, accidentally ripping out a few hair strands with them, your jaw aches as you close it again, muscles sore from being held wide for some time. You lick your lips to soothe them and swallow the saliva that’s been pooling in your mouth, but your relief is only enjoyed for a few moments before Namjoon continues.

This time, instead of grinding the vibrator inside you - sadly still turned off - he begins thrusting it, gently tugging at the nipple clamps one at a time, or flicking them with his finger to get you to whimper. Your sounds are so much louder without the muffling, and you find yourself trying to keep your mouth shut, moans bubbling in the back of your throat as he strikes your g-spot with each thrust, the gentle curve in the silicon rubbing against that spongy tissue.

“Good?” he asks simply, picking up the pace as your abs clench with the urge to grind against the intrusion.

“Y-good,” you make out between pleasured whimpers, whole body shuddering when the sparks of electricity return, a lower intensity level but in regular thrumming instead of a single pulse. The stimulation merges with the vibrator inside you, warming your whole body with pleasure, but something is missing. “Turn it on,” you breathe out desperately, before adding a belated, “please, Daddy.”

Namjoon’s lip quirks in satisfaction. “My baby girl is so needy. Can you promise not to cum for me?”

You pout in disappointment. “Daddy…” But he doesn’t back down. “Yes, okay, I won’t cum, Daddy. Can Hoseokie come over too?”

“Ask him, princess.” While Namjoon waits, he takes out the vibrator with a wet noise and you hum unhappily at the emptiness in your core.

You bite your lip, turning to the man behind Namjoon with a glint in your eye. “Sir, please come touch me. I need you.”

Hoseok, always the one to be a little more susceptible to begging, makes his way forward, absentmindedly tapping the bulge in his pocket where the remote is. He smiles softly at the puppy dog eyes you send him, as you arch your chest enticingly.

You return it, though your smile quickly turns mischievous. The cool varnished wood of the cross has calmed down the sting in your ass, and you’re feeling like you could do with some more punishment. Besides, your arms are starting to ache from being held up so long. “Good boy.”

The warmth in his expression drops in an instant, and his lip curls. Like lightning, his hand dives into his pocket and you yelp as a sharp bite of electricity runs through your nipples and through your whole chest, making you tremble violently as your muscles contract.

“Okay,” you hear V say quickly, standing up off the chest and rushing over to you. As your shivers continue, you feel him firmly grab a hold of the black electrical ribbon between your breasts and tugs roughly, yanking the clamps right off your overstimulated nipples. You howl and instinctively try to curl in on yourself, the leather cuffs digging painfully into your wrists. You can see the hard lines of anger in his face, and duck your head, turning your face slightly to the side as you await punishment, but it seems the leather-clad man isn’t annoyed at you.

He stalks over to Hoseok, who has stepped back a little in confusion, and shoves his hand without ceremony into the other’s pants, drawing out the remote and chucking the two items back into his chest, kicking it shut with a metallic slam. Whirling back around, he draws his chest up, looking unbelievably intimidating even over your boyfriend. “Never,” he spits, “ever take your anger out on a sub,  no matter how bratty she may be. Yes, she deserves punishment for acting out and we’ll give it to her but that doesn’t mean you can use her as a punching bag.” With a jaw clenched bitterly, V shakes his head. “This is why I don’t let non-professionals use my equipment. Lesson fucking learned, I suppose.”

You watch with wide eyes as he approaches you slowly, hands on his hips. “Colour,” he requests quietly.

You swallow, eyes darting to your boyfriend, whose eyes are on you, rueful. Namjoon stands beside him, hand on his shoulder, and leans in to whisper quietly. “Green,” you say after a moment. “Yellow then, but green now.”

V nods after a moment, gaze running over every inch of your body thoroughly, paying close attention to the angry red of your nipples. “Alright. We continue, without any electric play.” Taking the slick vibrator off Namjoon, he chucks it into a plastic bag inside the chest that you can just make out a label on that reads ‘to be cleaned’. He stands over the box of toys for a moment, considering, before turning back around, glaring at you. You gasp, feeling that the scene is back in full swing now. “And the sub. It’s clear to me no matter what equipment I use on her, she drips for it.” You push your lips into a scowl when you realise, though his eyes are heavy on you, he’s addressing your boyfriends instead. “Maybe the problem here is that she enjoys the punishment she gets from you so much that she acts out constantly to receive it. Of course punishment can be fun, but when she’s as out of line as she is now, you need to teach her a lesson. So, if toys won’t work, we’ll try something else. Someone else.”

Your back straightens and your gaze trains on him warily. You have to bite your tongue to hold back a retort, and his eyes dance gleefully at the way you clench your jaw.

“Jay, RM, it seems to me that your sub likes being punished so much because you’re the ones who will give it to her. So, with your permission, we’re going to be changing it up.”

Your mouth drops open in indignation as the two nod calmly. “What about my permission?”

With a dark glare, V reaches out and grabs tightly onto one of your abused nipples, making you wince at the pinching sensation. “This far into the evening and you still can’t stop running your mouth. If you recall, sub, involving other individuals in play was something you ticked off on your application.”

You can’t help yourself. “Not for punishment, though,” you counter in a low whine.

His eyebrows lower. “I’ll keep the play safe, but beyond that I have no sympathy for you, you little brat. Use your safeword, otherwise it’s in your best interests to start following the rules.”

You smother your pout with another scowl and turn your head to the side, biting hard on the inside of your cheek when he releases your nipple with a final tweak and the blood rushes back in achingly.

He waits for a moment, letting out a heavy sigh when you remain silent. “Fine, then. We’re going to go find someone who wants to play, and you can just wait right here.”

In shock, your head snaps back and you look out onto the room, at all the people playing and watching. If your doms left, you wouldn’t be able to fend them off. Your heart rate increases, and you send your boyfriends a concerned look.

V catches it, and grins. “Don’t worry,” he remarks smugly as he reaches into his back pocket, “we won’t leave you up here alone. My friend Jimin over there is a DM, he’s been supervising us all night in case you hadn’t noticed. He’ll come stand by you while we’re gone.”

You look off in the direction the dom nods in and see a blonde-haired young man in the black shirt and neon badge, strolling over from the corner of the room closest to your station. He sees you staring and throws you a rakish grin, lifting an arm to run a hand through his hair cockily. God, you think, he better not want to make conversation while I’m stuck up here.

A plastic click draws your attention back in front of you, where V has what looks like a felt pen. “Washable ink,” he explains, “just to be safe.” You go completely still as he brings it forward to draw it in swoops across your chest, over the tops of your breasts. The tip of the pen tickles, and the ink is cool, a bright purple. Once he draws back and caps the pen, you draw your chin into your chest to try and make sense of the large block letters. It takes you a moment to reverse them in your mind, but you suck in a breath through your teeth when you work it out. TAKEN.

As you try and read, he speaks once more. “Wiggle your fingers,” he instructs calmly, and you look up, doing as he asks with a tinge of confusion. “And make a fist.” You do that two, feeling the very tips of your fingers are a little numb, otherwise the rest of you is fine. You realise he’s checking in to make sure the blood hasn’t completely left your extremities from being held above your head. As always, he manages to uphold safety without impairing the scene. Without further comment, he turns from you, converses quietly with the DM, and leaves, your two boyfriends in tow.

Left alone with the stranger, you watch warily as he sighs out and takes a seat on the carpet in front of you, kicking out his legs. “Ah,” he hums happily, stretching his arms in front of his chest. “This is the first time I’ve sat down all night. Standing sure gets tiring.” With a cheeky smile, he glances up at you. “Although I don’t need to tell you that.”

You simply stare at him quietly, unsure if you’re still on the ‘don’t speak unless you’re spoken to’ mode. Though, to be fair, you haven’t exactly been following that much tonight. “So, your name’s Jimin?” you ask after a moment.

He lets out a surprised laugh at your attempt at small-talk. “You know, normally the subs Tae gets me to supervise- ah fuck, V - normally the subs V gets me to supervise are way more timid than you. You a sucker for pain or something?”

Looking out onto the multiple stations in front of you, you shrug as much as you can within the restraints. “When in Rome.”

He runs his tongue over his teeth, eyes roaming over you. “God, the one day I’m DM-ing...” He looks out and perks up. “Fuck, that was fast. I guess they had no problem finding someone interested.”

Your eyes dart out into the crowd, craning your neck to glance around a few people watching a nearby scene, searching for your boyfriends or V. In front of you, Jimin is standing up hastily and brushing the seat of his pants, and you curse the fact that you can’t get up on tippy-toes to look over him.

“Nice to meet you,” he farewells cordially. He holds his arm out for a handshake and then realizes his mistake, shaking his head in embarrassment and turning away, quickly rushing back over to his corner. Your eyes widen as he leaves prematurely, glancing around to make sure no strangers approach, when you see the familiar broad frame of your boyfriend returning to you, his grin big even as his eyes are lidded with lust.

You smile at him warmly. Even five minutes without Namjoon makes your heart swell when you see him again, and you wiggle your hands in a grabby motion, making his dimple pop out when he smiles. There’s something else though, a sly quirk to his lips, and it makes you pause.

Behind him is Hoseok, wearing a look of satisfaction and contained excitement, and you can’t quite see past the two to see who might be following them.

As they get closer, you see V, but he’s a decent few paces back, and you don’t understand the distance, until you see a glimpse of bleached hair just past Hoseok’s shoulder. Your two boyfriends split up once they break through the lingering people, and step inside the station, one on either side of you, but further away than you’d like.

The owner of the pale hair is revealed as he walks through the two of you and you gasp in shock. Not at him, but at the man behind him. You have to lower your gaze quite a bit, because he’s crawling on his hands and knees, neck craned up to look at the light-haired man in adoration.

The two of them make quite the pair; the dom is wearing slick clothes, tight pants, a black turtleneck and leather jacket, and his hair is brushed back to reveal darker brows, undyed. Though he’s much smaller than any of the men around him, including the one that follows him like a dog, he has an undeniable presence, with the borderline apathetic yet critical gaze he adopts as he looks over you, head tilting to the side. He comes to a stop in front of you, and his sub remains slightly behind him and to the left. With thickly corded muscles in his arms and shoulders, he looks physically like he could pick any one of you up one-handed, yet he waits patiently on his hands and knees, looking unexpectedly soft with a baby face and a delicate garter set for underwear that accentuates his delicate waist.

“Position,” the standing man says in a barked command. Like clockwork, the sub sits back up to kneel, hands resting gently on his thick thighs and head bent down respectfully. As he waits, you can see a band of leather around his throat, studded with what almost looks like diamonds. “Good boy,” he praises, even though he doesn’t lift his gaze off of you. Still, the sub visibly trembles at the praise, toes wiggling happily on the carpet behind him.

V arrives last, and rests a hand warmly on the stranger’s shoulder. “Sub, pay attention.” The young man kneeling glances up, and a fond boxy smile rises on V’s face, one you only saw once after you took your spanking. A strange unfurling of jealousy opens in your chest. “Not you, slave. Eyes on the floor.” The slave quickly drops his head, trembling again when the dom reaches out to pat his cheek, like a sign that he’s not in trouble.

Master V keeps his gaze on you as he squeezes the shoulder of the man beside him. “Sub, this is Master Min, and his slave Koo.” Turning to your boyfriends to include them as well, he addresses the doms. “As discussed, I think the sub could benefit from a positive example of a good sub. Of course, she doesn’t have to do all the things Koo does, every dynamic is different, but she could learn a lot from his behaviour. More than that, Koo is much like her in what he likes, but he and Min have incorporated it into play so that it doesn’t require punishment to get what he needs. Perhaps your girl is such a brat because she’s feeling unfulfilled. RM, Jay, you can get her down.”

“Down?” you mumble without realising, luckily quiet enough that the others don’t overhear. With a confused frown on your face, you let your boyfriends unbuckle you from the cross, wrists first. Your shoulder muscles ache when you lower your arms, and thick red bands line the skin of your wrists, which you thumb at with a smile while they bend down to undo your ankles.

“Lean on me, kitten,” Hoseok instructs softly, and you wrap your arms around him tightly, letting him grip your ass and pick you up off the cross gently so you don’t fall. He lowers his torso so that your dangling feet drag on the carpet, but you whine and lift them, linking your ankles around his back so that you’re latched on like a koala. He laughs softly at your whine. “You don’t wanna walk, hm?” You shake your head, thriving at the physical contact even as your bared pussy soaks the bottom of his white tank top. He pats your hair, and your heart warms. Especially after he was so angry at you earlier, the intimacy feels more than comforting. “You might want to stretch your legs, though, before we move on…” He trails off teasingly, and you draw your face up, seeing the mischief in his eyes.

With a pout, you let your legs lower to the ground, supporting your weight steadily before you take your arms off of Hoseok’s shoulders. You look around at the others, awaiting further explanation.

Namjoon steps forward, sharing a glance with V and then Hoseok before cupping your face softly. “We’re gonna go watch Min and Koo play, okay? They’re gonna show you how to be a good sub for us.”

“Where do you want to do your scene?” V asks Min.

The dom glances down at his sub, who still has his neck bent, dark hair glossy from the lights overhead. “Koo,” Min calls softly but firmly, and the young man looks up immediately. “Do you want to pick which station we go to?”

With doe-like eyes, Koo shakes his head. “No, Master. Wan’ you to pick.”

“Uh-uh,” the dom chastises with a tut, “we talked about this. Big boys choose when they get offered. Don’t make me regret my generosity.”

“Sorry, Master,” he replies quickly, “Kookie would like the bed tonight.”

“Alright, then. Go check if it’s free for us first. You may walk.”

Almost reluctantly, the sub stands up, and you widen your eyes at just how tall he is, rising above his master to almost match Namjoon’s height. If it wasn’t for the way he clasps his hands together and ducks his head so submissively, and if it wasn’t for the collar around his neck and the garters on his thighs, you could easily mistake him for a dom. Physical appearance wasn’t everything, you supposed.

As you wait, V disappears too, mentioning something about more equipment he needed, and by the time a DM comes over and lets you know that Koo has found and reserved a bed on the second floor, he still hasn’t returned. Min offers to flick him a text, and after you’re allowed to put your skirt and bra back on, the four of you walk through the middle of the room to reach the set of stairs at the far corner beside the bar. All of upstairs is like a mezzanine floor around the edges of the room, with doors that go off into separate rooms. With Namjoon on your left and Hoseok on your right, you ascend the stairs, taking the left path to walk around the mezzanine. Each door is labelled: medical A, medical B, dungeon A, filming A, and so on, but you’re taken by what you can glimpse over the protective barriers, looking down onto the first floor.

You can see all the different stations from up here, all the people who occupy them. The bar reaches out in a semicircle, with curved rows of stations flowing out like petals or ripples, the smaller ones closer to that social area, and the biggest ones along the walls. There are more people than before, probably close to capacity, so it’s a wonder Koo managed to find exactly what he wanted without it already being taken.

As you walk, you can feel the obscene slick between your thighs, wetting all the way down to the sides of your knees. It feels uncomfortable, though nothing like the remaining fire of your nipples as they rub slightly against the fabric of your bra. More than anything, though, you still feel so needy, so wanting. Though there aren’t any clocks in the room downstairs, much like a casino, you managed to glance at Min’s watch as he strolled, and see that it had been over two and a half hours since the three of you first arrived, and you still hadn’t been even close to cumming. And now V was making you sit down and watch other people fuck instead of you. You were starting to realise just how clever he was with his punishments.

Distracted, you almost bump into Min as he halts in front of a door, which has a plaque at eye level reading ‘domestic’. He knocks, and instead of Koo answering the door like you expect, it’s V. You widen your eyes and follow the men inside the room in curiosity, wondering what equipment it was exactly that he had left to retrieve.

It’s immediately obvious. In the soft, romantic, bedroom-styled set, one thing stands out like a sore thumb. Past the foot of the bed, closer to the opposite wall, is a chair covered in undone leather straps. The black leather and silver buckles are totally at odds with the warm neutral shades of the room, and the soft, freshly washed linen and blankets on the large bed. More so than that, however, what really draws your attention is the hole cut out in the base, and the dildo that sticks through, attached to what can be described as nothing else but a machine, a motor which is plugged in to an electrical socket on the wall. The two back legs have wheels attached to them, so that should you tip the chair back, you can roll it around rather than having to lift it. All-in-all, it looks extremely expensive and extremely intimidating. You swallow down the saliva that collects in your mouth at the sight of it.

Other than the fucking machine, the other notable accessory is the sub kneeling beside the bed. He doesn’t look up when you all file in the room, even as his fingers curl into the lush carpet when he hears his master’s voice.

“Good boy, Koo,” Min praises warmly, “such a well-behaved slave tonight. Are you being extra good for our guests?” His eyes crinkle in satisfaction as the boy’s thick hair bobs with his enthusiastic nodding. Min approaches him, placing a hand on the sub’s cheek to lift his face up. He runs his fingers over Koo’s lips, who obediently opens his mouth, tongue flat. The dom places two fingers inside, slowly sliding them deeper in, up to his knuckles. “Are you gonna keep behaving for me?”

Koo’s eyes are wide, and you can see the way his nostrils flare as he breathes in through his nose, trying not to gag. Instead of nodding, he gargles out an affirmative hum, and Min’s lip curls proudly, drawing his fingers out and wiping the spit off on Koo’s cheek, the younger boy’s eyes fluttering shut even as his mouth still hangs slightly open.

“Kitten,” you hear Hoseok say, drawing your attention back to him. He has an evil glint in his eye as he grins. “Don’t you wanna rest those pretty little legs of yours? You must be feeling so weak. Why don’t you take a seat?” He gestures grandly to the elaborate contraption across from the bed, and although he’s stating it as a joke, you know it’s nothing less than a command.

With shaky legs, you walk over, hovering uncertainly. V steps forward, manually rotates the wheel so that the dildo lowers past the base of the chair, and lets you sit. Your skirt is so short that there’s no cover at all, and you can feel the very tip of the cold silicone brush over your folds. Once you put your back directly against the chair, and let your feet loosely rest on the carpet, you adjust your hips slightly so that it’s pressing against your entrance, and you glance up at your boyfriends for approval, feeling the budding excitement and nerves in your chest.

Namjoon comes over to help V do up the buckles, starting to bind your legs to the chair. “Now, baby girl,” he says conversationally, “Master Min and his slave are very kindly letting us watch them, so you better be a good girl and enjoy the show quietly. I’m sure you can learn something from Koo here.” He stands back up again, leaning over to fasten your left arm as V does the right, and soon enough you’re completely immobile for the second time in the evening. Namjoon grips your inner thigh, massaging the flesh with a humored smile. “And don’t forget, no cumming without permission.”

He reaches behind you, lifting something off the back of the chair, attached by a cord. You look over, to see something akin to a half-sized TV remote, with several settings and options. He winks at you, and presses one, watching between your legs carefully.

You gasp and tense up when the dildo begins to move, pressing up into you unbelievably slowly. Even though it penetrates you at a glacial pace, clearly just to make sure you’re at the right angle to take it safely, it’s an odd sensation having something push up into you so unforgivingly. No matter how hard you clench, it breaches your walls deeper and deeper, until just when it’s about to be too far, it begins to recede again. You let out a heaving sigh as it slowly pulls out of you, before coming to a stop.

“Good?” he questions, though you know by the way you’re already angling your hips better against it that he can see you are enjoying it. Nonetheless, you nod, and he hums happily. “Alright. Now we’re gonna sit quietly and nicely and watch these two gentlemen, okay?”

You go to nod again but let out a surprised yelp as he steps right behind you and tips the chair back. You feel your chest lurch as the legs slip out from under you, but they stop when you reach a 45-degree angle, and slowly you’re rolled a little closer, facing the two men directly. More chairs are pulled up; Namjoon and V on one side of you and Hoseok on the other.

Your hands grip the arms of the chair tightly, fighting the urge to reach out to your boyfriends, who barely give you a second glance, though Namjoon’s hand slips behind your hair to rest on the nape of your neck, the weight of it as both a comfort and a reminder of who was in control here. You tilt your head back and hum happily as his thumb lazily rubs back and forth, keeping you calm.

In front of you, Min takes one last look out to make sure you’re all seated, before turning back to look down at his slave. “Koo, why is that mouth of yours still open?” The younger shuts his mouth quickly with a barely-audible pop, and swallows, eyes as wide as ever. “Does it feel empty, hm? Want something between those pretty lips of yours?”

The sub nods, thighs clenching with visible excitement as Min sits on the edge of the bed beside him and spreads his legs. Though you notice the way his tongue darts out to wet his lips, he remains still kneeling patiently. All it takes is a nod from his master, however, for Koo to dart forward, hands fumbling eagerly at Min’s belt, tugging it through the belt loops of his pants so voraciously that Min’s hips almost get pulled off the mattress. You widen your eyes at just how spirited Koo is about sucking someone else off. As much as you didn’t mind giving your boyfriends blowjobs, you would always much rather their cocks somewhere else. But as you sit tied to the chair, the threat of the blunt tip of the dildo resting dormant between your outer folds, you feel a heat build in your stomach at the display of total devotion.

As Min lifts his hips to help Koo pull down his pants and underwear, not a moment is lost before the submissive wraps his lips around him and sucks him down as far as he can manage on the first go. Min’s chest heaves with a surprised huff, and a lazy grin tugs at his lips. “That’s it, good boy,” he breathes through a sigh of pleasure, and even though the comment is clearly not directed at you, you feel yourself dripping with need.

You turn your head to the side, towards Namjoon. As you do so, his hand comes around to brush fondly at your cheek. Rather than verbalising it, you wiggle your hips slightly against the chair and the dildo below and pout pleadingly at him. He flicks you a genial smile and takes his hand away from your face to fiddle with the controls.

Your mouth drops open silently when you feel the dildo push up into you, at least twice the speed of the tester run, though still slow enough that it makes no noise.

A violent shiver breaks goosebumps across your arms as you feel a warm breath waft against your opposite shoulder. “Don’t forget to keep quiet,” you hear Hoseok remind you. When you look over to face him, your noses bump, and even as your heart skips a beat at the proximity, you’re leaning forward to press a kiss to his lips.

Half-expecting him to pull away, you feel your insides go weak when he indulges you, slipping a hand around your neck where Namjoon’s was earlier to pull you closer, grounding you with deep swipes of his tongue even as the dildo fucks up into you on it’s slow yet insistent cycle. If you arch your back just right, you can get it to brush against your g-spot when it enters you, and your breath picks up, kisses growing sloppier as you begin to regularly grind against it, quiet moans smothered by Hoseok’s mouth.

When he finally pulls away, you blink open your eyes in just enough time to see a fat string of saliva between you, which stretches until it breaks, spattering on your chin. Hoseok gently shifts his hand to grip your jaw, guiding your attention back onto the two men in front of you.

You suck your slightly swollen bottom lip into your mouth to muffle a groan at what you’re greeted by. Min has a hand firmly bunched in Koo’s hair, holding him down onto his cock as the sub writhes and clutches at Min’s knees, whining. After a moment of struggling, Koo is pulled off him by the grip on his hair, and he sucks in heaved gasps of air, eyes watering. Through the involuntary tears, you can see the same hazy look in Koo’s eyes that you sometimes saw on yourself when you went to the bathroom to clean up after a scene with your boyfriends. It’s clear to you that even as he gurgles and trembles helplessly when he’s pushed back down, he’s loving it, and his gaze doesn’t leave Min for a second. Above him, though lidded with pleasure, you can see the adoration and fondness in Min’s eyes too. It’s undeniable just how much they love each other.

Your breath catches in your throat as the pace is suddenly picked up on the machine, a gentle metallic whir piercing the lull on your end of the room, and your gaze shoots over to Namjoon as the dildo rocks up into you fast enough for you to begin to shiver. When you do, you see it’s not Namjoon that has the remote, but V beside him. With one arched eyebrow, like he’s testing you, V holds a single finger up to his lips and mouths ‘shh’.

Your nails dig into the wood of the chair, and you bite down harshly on your tongue to prevent any moans escaping, nodding shakily. His eyes sparkle with mirth as he smiles, handing the remote back to Namjoon. Your eyes follow the transfer and look up at your boyfriend’s face, but he’s more focussed on what’s going on in front of you, a confused turn to his lips.

You stare forward, and see that the two have changed positions slightly. Barely coherent with the fucking machine driving up into you at an infuriatingly regular and unforgiving pace, you do your best to focus in to what’s going on.

Min is still on the edge of the bed, however he’s leaning down as Koo whispers something in his ear, ducking his head shyly once he’s done. Min sighs, but gives his sub a warm smile and gently pinches at his nose and pats his cheek, looking up at the four of you.

You let out an involuntary guttural whine when the dildo comes to a sudden stop, halfway inside you. Your walls clench around the couple of inches still inside, too shallow to get any real pleasure, but too deep to be able to rock your clit against it. It seems Namjoon has turned it off while V stands up and consults with Min.

You stare, thighs clenching and unclenching at the strange and unsatisfying sensation of the dildo. After a moment, V returns, walking leisurely over to the wall and unplugging the machine. Your mouth drops open in confusion.

“Sorry it’s such a quick show, folks, Kookie is apparently getting a bit shy.” Min tucks himself away and crouches down to press a soft peck to the younger man’s pink cheeks. “We don’t get to come here that often, I think he just wants all my attention on him, isn’t that right?”

Koo’s teeth come out to bite at his lip, failing to suppress a sheepish smile. Caught out, he nods cheekily.

Min weakly slaps his cheek, a playful scolding. “Well, you’ll get your wish, Kookie. The others are going to leave now. You wanna give them a kiss goodbye and say thank you?”

The sub is granted permission to stand up, and bounds over to press a quick kiss on V’s cheek, then Namjoon’s, before he reaches you. His eyes widen at your state, eyes hazed with pleasure and bare pussy leaking down the opening in the chair, and does a double take like he hadn’t noticed it before. Lightning fast, he ducks down and quickly presses his lips against the top of your cheekbone. You turn your head slightly to receive it, his lips unbelievably soft and still a little wet from saliva. He murmurs a quick, “thank you for watching” in your ear and moves on, doing the same to Hoseok before returning to his master, standing until he’s given the command to get on the bed beside him.

Koo quietly leans into Min’s clothed-chest and lets the older one wrap his arm around his shoulders, keeping him close. The two stay entwined like that, conversing under their breath, as your doms stand up and begin to unbuckle you from the chair, carefully lifting you off of the dildo.

You let out a grateful hum as Namjoon effortlessly lifts you into his arms, one hand under your ass, where your arousal has totally soaked the back of your short skirt. You feel more than hear him speak with the others, as his chest rumbles against your ear, and you let your eyes fall closed, wrapping your arms and legs around him tightly and snuggling in. Perhaps it was seeing the tenderness between the two men you had just watched, but you felt your bratty streak begin to settle down, just wanting to be close with your boyfriends.

You hear a door open, and suddenly you’re moving as Namjoon walks out. You let out a groan. “‘S it over?” you mumble into the warm skin of the crook of his neck, breathing in his natural musk paired with the simple cologne he had put on earlier in the night.

He chuckles. “No, baby girl. We’ll find somewhere else to go. Do you still want to keep playing? It is getting quite late.”

You sit up, blinking at your surroundings as they lurch around him, making your way back around the mezzanine towards the stairs. “I wanna keep playing, Daddy. Where’s Hoseokie?”

“That’s Sir to you,” you hear a voice from over your back call out. Hoseok must be leading the group. You clutch onto Namjoon tighter as you begin to descend the steps to the main playroom. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to find a station, kitten. It’s closing time soon so most of them are taken or blocked off for cleaning.”

“Let’s just fuck on the floor,” you quip back, reveling in the hearty laugh that shakes Namjoon’s shoulders.

“As much as I liked seeing you at our mercy, I have missed your snark, princess,” your boyfriend admits. “Bear with the no-speaking rule when V is around for tonight, and we can rework our rules tomorrow.”

You hum, wiggling your toes as the strength gradually returns to your limbs. “Where is V?”

Hoseok’s voice is thick with humour. “Weren’t you listening, little sub?” He laughs as you kick out weakly at the pet name your ‘Master’ had chosen to use. “He got called away. Something about helping out a sub that came alone or something.”

“Oh.” You can’t quite work out if what you’re feeling is dissatisfaction at still not having cum the entire night or disappointment that the other man left without saying goodbye. “Where are we gonna play, then?”

Namjoon grunts with exertion. “Okay, down you hop.” You do as he says, joints stiff as you slip in front of him to follow behind Hoseok. Namjoon’s voice continues from behind you. “We’re going to find that Jimin dude and ask if he knows of any free spots. Keep an eye out for him, baby girl.”

The use of ‘baby girl’ rather than just ‘baby’ gently reinforces you that the roles are still in place. Although having to move locations, your two boyfriends - as well as you - clearly want the scene to continue. “Yes, Daddy,” you affirm compliantly.

It takes a couple of times circling and winding between stations before you spot him. He’s not in that same corner from before, but instead you find him at the bar, nursing a glass bottle of coke. He looks up in mild interest as you approach, before widening his eyes once he recognises the three of you.

“V’s studious apprentices,” he greets warmly, eyes lingering on the wetness on your thighs visible past the hem of your skirt. “How may I be of assistance?”

Like it’s choreographed, Namjoon and Hoseok both reach out to touch you; Hoseok, slipping his fingers into yours, and Namjoon placing his hand possessively around your shoulders. You smother a smirk at the way Jimin’s eyes dart up and waver back and forth, sizing the two doms up before his shoulders lower in defeat.

“We just wanted to see if there were any free stations,” Hoseok explains. “I figured if your job is to supervise, you’d know.” Hoseok takes another glance at the languid curve of Jimin’s body as he leans against the bench, and the coke bottle dripping condensation over his fingers. The unspoken implication of Hoseok’s statement hangs in the air, as your two boyfriends share a look over your shoulder.. When he thinks your boyfriends aren’t looking, the DM flicks you a cheeky wink. The moment the two men turn back, his face falls frigid again.

“I’m on break,” Jimin explains petulantly, gesturing to the neon badge which has been unclipped from his shirt and is resting beside the cardboard coaster. “But no, sadly there aren’t. The last hour and a half before closing is our busiest time since everyone figures it’s their last chance to get in a scene. We do have five different stations in the process of being cleaned, though.” Using the neck of the half-empty bottle to point, the DM indicates a few different spots that are cordoned off with orange tape, the same neon as his badge. “That one just began a minute or so ago, so that’s out of commission for the night, that one has been being cleaned for a good twenty minutes but it was wax play which is quite difficult to get out of the furniture without damaging it, and those two on the far side have been reserved already. Your best bet is the sawhorse down past the restrooms, but you’re looking at a good fifteen, twenty minutes for them to finish up.” Spiel done, he lowers his eyebrows and quirks his lips smugly. “So yes, I suppose I was the right person to come to. And if I was on duty, I would’ve been able to go over and reserve it for you, but since I’m not, you’ll just have to fight to be the quickest to snatch it up. Pity.”

Hoseok’s grip tightens around your hand. “Thank you for your help. Enjoy the rest of your evening.” His nostrils flare, and you feel a tug on his wrist as he begins to pull you away.

Jimin holds his defiant stare for a moment longer before breaking out into a cheery grin, giggling at the matching looks of confusion. “I’m just messing with you! I’m not even on break, us DMs get one free drink a night to keep us going. Come on, while you wait I can grab you a spare trolley and you can use some of the toys at the bar if you want. We actually aren’t allowed to reserve stations, though; so sadly you will still have to snag the spot when it opens up. Come with me, I spotted a free trolley down here.”

As the four of you make your way through the gatherings of people, you remark at how quickly you’ve accustomed to the place. The smell of sweat and arousal has increased over the evening, but you barely notice it, and it’s easy enough to tune out pleasured cries and cracks of whips even as you walk right past them. As your two boyfriends mutter behind you, you hear Jimin murmur to you and jog to catch up and walk beside him.

“2 years,” he starts with a self-satisfied grin, “2 years I’ve worked here and I still marvel at the way I can one-up even the most hardcore dominants. I swear this job has increased my confidence like nothing else.”

You laugh. “You do that often, then?”

“God, yeah,” he admits easily. “Gotta make things fun when you can. As long as I’m serious whenever a scene is taking place, or there’s a situation, the owner kinda lets me take some liberties.”

“Who is the owner?” you question curiously. You can’t help but wonder what type of person would open a business like this.

Jimin smiles with mirth but doesn’t answer. “Well, here it is,” he states instead, reaching out and grabbing an unclaimed trolley that was previously sitting abandoned by a set of stocks. “Looks like there are some things missing, but it’s the best you’re gonna get this time of night. People aren’t meant to hog them for more than two hours but it’s kind of a courtesy thing, not a hard rule, so there’s not much we can do.” He looks up as your two boyfriends join you. “You folks need anything else?”

“That’s all,” Hoseok says shortly, still clearly not over the jig Jimin pulled. “Come on, kitten, let’s go find a table.”

Rather than the bar, which Jimin returns to to finish off his drink, you’re tugged unceremoniously down to the small socialising area, which is all but empty by now. They’ve even lowered the lights, and your eyes are happy to have a break from the brightness of the main play area.

In the far back, there are a couple of booths, all vacant, and Hoseok sits on the side in the corner, gesturing for you to sit across from him. You slide in, sighing at the plush upholstery that soothes your still slightly aching ass. Once the trolley is pushed up beside the outer edge of the table, Namjoon slides in beside you, moving over to the middle of the seat so that you’re pressed snugly between him and the wall. You gasp at the sudden warm of his body flush against yours, and feel need wash through you for the thousandth time this evening. Your mouth opens to plead for something, anything, but he beats you to the punch.

“Baby girl, we know you’re probably feeling pretty desperate, hm? You want our cocks?”

You let out a moan at his words. “Yes,” you croak, “please.” A violent shudder runs through you when you feel the tip of a shoe run up your shin, and pushes at the knee closest to the wall until you’re parting your legs. You glance over at Hoseok, who’s leaning back languidly in his seat, though his eyes are predatorial and his grin is sharp.

Namjoon’s eyes dart over to Hoseok, then at you, and finally down past the edge of the table, where your skirt is rising up dangerously high as Hoseok keeps you spread open. “We should get you ready to take us, then.” Your mouth drops open in a silent moan, incoherent as Namjoon reaches down in one smooth movement and cups your pussy, two fingers dipping in automatically with how sopping wet you are. “Fuck,” he hisses, but you just bite your lip and try and rock your hips forward, wanting him deeper.

Hoseok feels you shift and tuts, pinning your leg more firmly against the wall. “Careful, kitten,” he warns, “do you really want to risk punishment when we only have-” he breaks off to consult his watch, “twenty-three minutes before closing?”

You swallow and force yourself to stay still, but that doesn’t stop you from clenching tightly around the tips of Namjoon’s fingers, drawing another hiss from the man.

“Besides,” Namjoon drawls, massaging his palm against you slightly so that your clit got the slightest hint of friction, “if you want both of us we better prepare you first.” His eyes don’t leave yours, a caramel smile tugging at his lips as those fingers slip out, only to seek another entrance lower down. “Will you be good for us?”

You nod hurriedly, shakily, as a single finger teases at your rim. “I’ll be good, Daddy.” Your voice cracks on the last word, but it just makes him grin, flashing teeth wolfishly.

You exhale roughly when suddenly he pulls away from you, sliding to the outskirts of the booth. With glossily wet fingers, he slaps your bare thigh, pinching lightly at the flesh. “Face down, ass up,” he commands, “we can’t prepare you properly if you’re sitting down.”

You open your mouth to protest, but Hoseok’s foot leaves you too, and the dark impatience in his eyes as he cocks his head forces you into action. As you scramble to bring your knees up on the cushioning, you cringe at the audible wet noises and the slipperiness of your thighs. You groan at how empty you feel when you arch your back obscenely for them, cheek planted against the seat.

Your face is below the table, and it takes your eyes a moment to adjust to the darker setting, sighing in relief as you feel the calloused palms of your boyfriend roam over your ass, hips and thighs. About fucking time.

You let your gaze rest lazily on Hoseok’s ringed fingers as they rest on his thighs, framing the tent in his crotch that you can barely make out in the shadows, eyes falling to half mast as you feel Namjoon collecting your slick on a single finger, before beginning the first press into your puckered hole.

You take deep breaths, forcing your muscles to relax, and let out a high whine as it sinks suddenly to the base knuckle, crooking inside you exploratively.

“Good girl,” Namjoon passionately praises, placing his free hand on your lower back to keep you arched for him as he fucks you on his one finger until you’re relaxed enough to take a second.

Your jaw is unable to close and you feel drool gathering in the corner of your mouth, and you squeeze your eyes shut at the intense sensation after so much deprivation. It’s not until he works his way to three fingers, curling and scissoring them inside you, that you hear a masculine grunt and crack one back open. The sight that greets you makes you clench violently around Namjoon, and he has to lightly smack your ass for you to relax again.

Across from you, with legs splayed wide, Hoseok has reached into his pants, tucking his cock out so that just the head peeks out past the waistband of his underwear. Even in the dim lighting, you can see how flushed it is, a deep purple-red that glints with precum when the lazily thumbs at the slit, just enough to keep himself on edge but not nearly enough to get close to cumming.

Automatically, your hand slips off the seat and stretches out to reach for him, but you cry out when Namjoon’s hand snakes around your elbow and roughly tugs your arm away, pinning it to your back. You feel the muscles in your thighs shiver uncontrollably as he plunges his fingers repeatedly into your tight hole, almost too much at once.

After an uncountable amount of time, the three of you are made to pause when the electrical crackle of a loudspeaker resonantes through the room. You let out a frustrated groan as you hear it declare the club to be closing, instructing all patrons to make their way to the exits or the showers, Namjoon’s fingers slipping wetly out of you moments later. Bonelessly, your hips fall to the side and bang on the tabletop.

“Dammit,” you whine hopelessly. “Please, Namjoon, I’m gonna go crazy, just fuck me quickly now and we can finish at home, please.”

“All this time,” a familiar voice calls out in bemusement, “and the sub still hasn’t learnt to refer to her doms by their appropriate titles.”

You jump, hustling to push your knees back down and twist, sitting down normally again to look past Namjoon. Master V stands just past the booth, hair more tousled than when you had last seen him and dark red lines across the exposed skin of his sternum where someone had clearly scratched him. “What are you doing here?” you ask automatically, mind not even comprehending the fact that you’d broken protocol yet again.

V simply raises his eyebrows at you warningly before turning to your boyfriends. “If you wanna stay longer, you can. Employee perks,” he explains. “The one catch is that you can’t use the stations because they all need cleaning at this point.”

Hoseok purses his lips together in thought. “That’s fine,” he dismisses. “We can find someplace. Anyone thirsty?”

You blink, not understanding the statement, but clearly the others do. Namjoon wraps a strong arm around your torso, just under your breasts, and pulls you off the seat so that your back is pressed against his chest and the tips of your toes barely brush the carpet. “Hey-!” you squeak, feeling even more worked up now that the time restraint on the club had interrupted your fun yet again.

Without missing a beat, V and Hoseok reach out, latching tightly onto one ankle each and lifting you so that you’re swinging horizontally between the three, dipping at the waist.

You grumble as they carry you away from the tables, following the edge of the room to arrive at the bar. Jimin has left, as have everyone else, only the last few stragglers making their way to the exits. “Are you finally gonna fuck me then?” you complain in frustration. You swear to God if you don’t get at least one of them inside you in the next five minutes, you’ll go insane.

V, not even turning back to look at you, scoffs. “You haven’t learnt a fucking thing, have you?”

“What?” you fire back, too consumed by a lust-driven haze to care about consequences.

“Right now, little sub, your body is ours. We get to decide whether you get fucked or not, so this whole time you’ve been making trouble when you should’ve been sucking up. If you don’t get what you want, that’s nobody’s fault but yours.” His nails dig into the sensitive skin around your ankle, and you feel it raise, as you’re lifted higher in the air and unceremoniously dumped on a surface taller than a table, and narrow. You crane your neck up, eyes wide as you see where you are. As V temporarily lets go to walk around the edge and rejoin on the other side, you realise they’ve splayed you out on the bar, one man on either side to keep your legs wide open, and Namjoon’s hand rising up your chest to wrap lightly, warningly, around your throat, pushing your head back down so that you can only see him and the high ceiling above. V’s voice comes from below, a stern growl. “So far tonight you haven’t done a single thing to earn one of our cocks in that messy pussy of yours, understand? Now you have to lie back and take what you’re fucking given.”

“This isn’t fucking fair,” you cry out in frustration, tears pricking at your eyes. “I just need to cu-um.” Your core feels neglected, almost painful in its longing for sensation. As you attempt to kick your legs out, you realise something. Your hands are free.

As fast as you can, you shove both between your legs, one plunging three fingers deep into your pussy, the other rubbing frantically at your swollen clit. You let the tears fall, sobbing at the relief, but it’s short lived. With a disappointed shout, Namjoon grabs your hands together with his free one. You howl as he rips them away from you, keeping them captive pinned to the middle of your torso.

Hoseok slaps you sharply right on your folds, making you jump. “This is our pussy, kitten. Paws off.”

“Please,” you scream, “I’ll do anything, come on!”

Driven half-mad by need, you barely hear V as he mutters to the other two. “Okay, she’s there. It’s time.”

You look up in confusion, as much as you can with the weight of Namjoon’s hand around your neck, and immediately your eyes roll back into your head with relief. A steady thrum of power reinforces what you saw. V holding a battery-run Hitachi vibrator.

The second he places it against your clit, you see a white-hot flash behind your eyelids as the powerful vibration sends you violently into your first orgasm after what must be over four hours of waiting.

“That’s it,” V coos, voice dripping with pure satisfaction, “take it all.”

You moan, a low garble in your throat, as the pleasure ripples through you, tingling in your fingertips and the skin of your calves where Hoseok and V hold on tightly, keeping you prone on the benchtop even as your muscles seize and tense as much as they can, feeling like you need to curl up into a ball around the epicenture of your orgasmic euphoria.

“Tha-ank you,” you sob out desperately, hands digging into the soft flesh of your stomach, the only part of your body you can really move as you’re pinned down by the strength of your three doms.

“Thank Master,” V commands shortly.

Tears pool in your temples as the pleasure begins to slowly settle, even as the vibrations continue. “Thank you, Master,” you praise mindlessly.

“Thank your other doms too,” he reminds, twisting his wrist so that the vibrator pushes your hood aside, resting against your bared clit, and you let out a weakened scream as the pleasure begins to prickle, overwhelming you.

“Thank you, Daddy, thank you, Sir,” you make out through shudders, your eyebrows knitting, unsure whether what you’re feeling is pleasure anymore or just pain. “N-no, too much,” you protest, swearing colorfully when V simply runs the Hitachi back and forth across your clit, sending sharp spikes of stimulation through you.

“No?” Hoseok questions rhetorically. “I thought you wanted to cum, you greedy slut.”

“Too much,” you repeat weakly.

“I don’t care,” he counters, “cum again.”

You let out a loud sustained moan as pain returns to pleasure in a hot flash, and you’re pitched over the edge again, tensing up and trying to grind your hips into the sensation as you gush over it, and all over V’s hand. You hear him laughing at you as you go fully limp, energy gone as your nerves run alight through your body.

“Not so brave now, are you?” he remarks dryly, chuckling again when you simply let out an incoherent moan.

You expect he’s made his point now that your body has given up the fight, but instead all you get is a warning click before he’s turning up the power of the vibrator to another level.

You hear yourself yell out, louder than you’ve been all night, unable to stop from screaming and shouting in stuttered moans as you’re wracked with blinding, overwhelming pleasure. “Not again,” you beg, “no more, I can’t-”

Your protests are cut off by a strong call coming from far away. The vibrator is clicked off immediately, and you go lax in relief, though your pussy continues to tremble uncontrollably as you pant on the sweat-soaked bar.

You don’t have any energy to look up properly, but you tiredly turn your head to the side to see an unfamiliar figure approach.

He’s dressed somewhat like Namjoon, with dress pants and an ironed shirt, but a deep navy suit jacket finishes up his outfit, hair carefully styled so that even as he stomps over, it stays in place swept to the side to reveal some of his forehead and brows. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, making a racket after closing?”

Master V pauses, his grip on your calf instinctively loosening. “You said we were allowed to, Jin.”

“I didn’t expect you’d be bringing so many friends,” Jin defends, “normally your subs are so quiet that it’s never been a problem.” His gaze falls on you and you hiccup as the last of the shivers run through you. “What are you doing to this poor girl?”

A tired smile plays at your lips in relief. Sure, it was a little embarrassing having what must be the owner of the place walk in on you, but at least Hoseok and Namjoon would have no choice but to leave with you. You’d have an Uber ride to recover, and then by the time you reached your apartment they’d be so desperate that they’d give in straight away and fuck you. You just about hum audibly at the thought.

“I thought I taught you better,” the stranger criticises with a disappointed look as he approaches to stand at the edge of the bench.

V bites his lip, placing the Hitachi on the counter in resignation, flicking your boyfriends an apologetic look. “Sorry, Jin, I-”

“If you’re gonna overstimulate a sub, you need to make sure she won’t wake the neighbors,” Jin interrupts, picking up the toy himself. “And for fuck’s sake, use one of the pulse settings so her clit doesn’t get used to it. You in the white shirt, tighten your grip around her throat.”

Your eyes widen and you open your mouth to protest, but Namjoon effectively cuts you off by pressing you more firmly to the bench, thumb and forefinger on either side of the column of your throat, intruding on your airways enough to make you groan gutturally.

You jump as you feel a sharp pinch on your inner thigh. “Alright, sub, your safeword is now making two fists and shaking your hands. Do it know so I know you can.”

The pressure on your throat eases slightly as you suck in a breath and follow the owner’s command, relaxing your hands again once he grunts in affirmation.

The pulsating whine of the vibrator fills the air after he clicks it back on. “Good, now lie there and shut up while I show these men how it’s done.”

The brief respite on your poor clit clearly isn’t enough as the second the toy is placed back on you, you let out a shriek that’s cut off midway as Namjoon tightens his grip around your throat again. You thrash as much as you can, but now that Hoseok and V both have two hands on you again, there’s no way you can overpower them.

“Bend her knees,” Jin commands, “open her up for me.”

You moan, drooling unwittingly as they obey, feeling your pelvis shift up so that you’re fully vulnerably to the attack on your abused clit.

“This way,” the boss instructs, “no matter how much she wriggles, she can’t escape it, and you’ve got free access to everything else too.”

Crying out as incomprehensible stimulation is forced on you by the flickering of the toy over your bud, you scratch and grab and bat at the flesh of your stomach, careful to make sure you don’t curl your fingers into fists.

When your third orgasm tears through you, all sensation cuts out for the briefest second, everything going black for one blissful moment before you’re taken over by the warm rush, feeling release like you never have before. Namjoon releases his grip on your throat, and the sudden return of oxygen pitches you into euphoria, too far gone to do anything more than whimpering.

Jin holds you there, in that totally mindless state for a few more trembling seconds before he flicks it off and dumps it on the bartop. “Got my fucking sleeve wet,” he mutters to himself, before reaching out and massaging your inner thigh reassuringly, relaxing the muscles. “Have you ever made your girl squirt before?”

Namjoon’s voice is reluctant. “Not yet.”

“Looks like you have some more learning to do yourself, then. Sub; are you still with us?”

You’re shaking like a leaf, but Hoseok helps prop you up, letting your leg flop weakly off the edge of the bench. You look down and see the wet shine of the table between your legs, and the dark splotches covering Jin’s suit. “Wh-why would you do that?” you question, your voice wobbling from sheer exhaustion. “Aren’t you meant to be professional?”

His eyes darken, a brow arching delicately. “You seem to forget what my profession is, young lady.” Lifting his gaze to include the three other men, he lets out a patient sigh. “The night cleaners will be arriving in a couple of minutes, and I will not be fronting a late fee if they have to wait around for you jokers to get your rocks off.”

Namjoon nods understandingly. “That’s alright, we can be out of your wa-”

“So if you’d like to fuck her,” the owner continues on, “you’re going to have to come do it in my office. It gets cleaned last, so you’ll have more time.”

Your mouth drops open.

Namjoon and Hoseok share a glance with each other, then at V. Finally, Namjoon reaches down and brushes back some of the hair back that had gotten stuck on your face. “It’s up to you, baby girl,” he says with a fond smile. “Either the two of us can take you home and fuck you there, or you can stay here and have all of us.”

Your mouth waters, eyes lingering on V, how sinful he looks with black locks low over his brow, tanned skin beaded with sweat. Your gaze lowers, taking in the way his erection strains under his pants. This whole time, he had been calmly in control, always composed, even when you had acted out more than you ever had before. You wanted to see him how he’d seen you; out of your mind with pleasure. You wanted to see him let go. “I wanna stay, Daddy.”

“Then we’ll stay.”

The way to Jin’s office is longer than expected, and your legs tremble so violently that the group of you move at a near-glacial pace up the stairs to the second floor, going to the right instead of the left like last time when you reach the mezzanine. There’s a side corridor that you hadn’t noticed earlier, the entrance partly concealed by a lube-and-condoms refill station. You take that, the five of you winding down single-file with the owner himself taking the lead, down to V at the rear.

Upon arriving and being let inside, you loiter uncertainly just inside the doorway beside your two boyfriends as Jin walks behind the desk and takes a seat. Even if it wasn’t for the fact that the evening’s protocol forbids you from speaking out of turn (as if you ever really followed it), you can’t bring yourself to form a single sentence.

Luckily, Hoseok can. “Aren’t you gonna leave?” he asks brusquely.

Jin smiles patiently, holding his palms out in a broad gesture. “This is my office. I said you could use it, and you can.” He lets the statement hang in the air as he loosens his tie with a shit eating grin. “Whenever you’re ready.”

You swallow hard and look over to the other men.  Even though you had been seen by an entire club of people downstairs in your most vulnerable moments, they were all occupied, and there were so many that it didn’t feel real. Now, with Jin’s eyes heavy on you, waiting, there’s something far more intimidating about it.

Hoseok has a glimmer of something in his eyes, and murmurs in Namjoon’s ear, grin stretching across his face as he whispers, until Namjoon shares that same look. Without speaking, your younger boyfriend makes his way over to one of the chairs and sits down in it. It looks expensive; deep maroon upholstery with a mahogany base. He spreads his legs wide, and silently pats his thigh, eyes locked onto you.

You bite your lip and walk over, feeling a strange pressure in your chest at the silence. All eyes are on you. You just wish someone would say something. You bump knees with Namjoon still standing, but pause.

“Have you gotten all shy on us now, kitten?”

You mentally sigh in relief, turning to Hoseok and nodding. He doesn’t smile but his eyes crinkle as he steps forward, flattening your hair with his palm and pressing a kiss to the top of your head.

“I think I know what you need,” he answers, “to take the pressure off.”

You blink in confusion as he leaves your side, strolling around to desk to the owner, who’s seated at his desk chair, aimlessly swivelling back and forth. Jin stops when Hoseok plants himself between the man’s knees and reaches down. With wary eyes, Jin waits as Hoseok fully loosens the man’s tie, slipping it off completely and bringing it back to you.

“Turn around,” he commands firmly, and you obey without thought, feeling comforted in his guidance. The fabric falls down sideways over your eyes, and you gasp silently in realisation as he fastens the makeshift blindfold with a knot at the back of your head. “Better?” he questions, and you nod hastily, already calming down and not feeling so exposed. “Then go sit on Daddy’s cock.”

You shudder, feet stumbling as Hoseok’s hand on your back guides to to the chair, almost tripping over one of Namjoon’s shoes. The seated man reaches out and grips your hips and you let your knees buckle, straddling him in the armchair. The feeling of his hard crotch rubbing against your still-sensitive core is enough to make you let out an unconscious whimper, and he chuckles lowly in your ear as you let your head rest on his shoulder.

“Joonie,” you mumble. Immediately, a sharp swat  lands on your ass, and you jump. With no other context, you don’t even know who did it. It didn’t feel like Namjoon’s arms moved at all. “Daddy.”

“Right,” he states with a squeeze to your hip. “Sit up, Daddy’s waited for that pretty pussy long enough.”

You whine and comply, raising yourself up on your knees, tilting your chin as your ears desperately train in on the delicate sound of a zipper being lowered. You hiss in a breath when you feel his cockhead run through your folds, catching the overstimulated tip of your clit, before pushing it back to rest snugly at your entrance. Your thighs ache with the need to sit, but you force yourself to wait, fingers gripping the fabric of his shirt over his shoulders tightly.

The guiding pressure of his hands on your upper hips are your only instruction before you begin to sink down onto him. Even if you weren’t blindfolded, you wouldn’t be able to see a thing anyway with the way your eyes squeeze tightly shut, eyebrows knitting together as your mouth drops open. He’s big, thicker than the dildo on the fucking machine but just about as hard, swearing profusely when your wet heat envelops him inch by glorious inch. You’re so wet from the previous teasing and orgasms, and so needy to be filled, that the moment he bottoms out in you, you’re steadying yourself on him for leverage and beginning to ride him, head tipping back in ecstasy.

“Good, baby girl?”

You bite your lip and nod, feeling him strike nerves deep inside of you with every bounce. “So good, Daddy, fuck.” He rewards your compliment by propping his feet on the floor and beginning to thrust up into you, grunting with the exertion. A warm curl of pleasure begins to build deep inside you at the satisfaction of finally being fucked properly, and you work your thighs, meeting him halfway on every thrust, deepening his reach.

Your body stiffens when he suddenly pushes down heavily on your hips, halting your thrusts and holding you pinned fully onto him. “No, Daddy, please, don’t do thi-”

“Sh, don’t worry,” Namjoon soothes quickly, palms gripping meaty handfuls of your ass and massaging them reassuringly, spreading you apart. “We aren’t going to tease you anymore, princess, but you don’t want Daddy cumming before anyone else has joined in, now do you? Who do you want next? Who’s gonna fill that tight little ass of yours?”

You shudder, but your answer is immediate. “I want Sir.”

“Ask nicely.”

You turn your head blindly around in the direction you vaguely remember Hoseok last standing in. “Sir, please, I need you inside me. I’ll be good.” You startle, clenching tightly around Namjoon when you feel a hot breath on the back of your neck, and Hoseok’s hands - cold where the rings touch you - run up your back to rest on your waist.

“Okay, kitten. Ass up for me.”

You whine and obey, tilting forward so that your back arches forward onto Namjoon’s solid frame and your hips are tilted back for better access. You can’t help but clench when you feel the blunt head of his cock pressing at the tight right of your ass, muscles fluttering around the attempted intrusion. Namjoon swears as his cock is milked by your walls, but Hoseok simply swats you on your ass, matching the sting of the strike from earlier.

“Take it,” he hisses, before you hear him spit, the fluid landing on you, some slipping in as you fight to relax your muscles. He pushes in again, and this time you accept it, crying out as he thrusts forward, fucking up into you in one smooth motion. As you adjust to both men inside you, you feel the lubed-up rubber of a condom around Hoseok. Almost delirious with the sensation of fullness, your mind cooks up the image of Hoseok fiddling with a condom packet, trying to be quiet as you bounced on Namjoon’s cock. A smile tugs at your lips, but it’s dropped when Hoseok suddenly draws away and snaps his hips, plunging in to the hilt at the same time that Namjoon bends forward and begins to bite at your nipples through the fabric.

“Is something funny to you?” Hoseok asks through a tensed jaw.

You wince at the feeling of teeth around your sore nipple even as deep pleasure makes your toes curl. “No,” you protest weakly, another moan being ripped from your throat as Hoseok begins a regular pace. With every thrust, you feel the wall between Namjoon and Hoseok, the two of them filling you in a way you had become addicted to over the years. “God, don’t stop.”

“I know something that’ll wipe that smirk off your fuckin’ face,” he huffs out, and your heart skips a beat until you hear a third voice.

“Open up, little sub,” you hear V mutter, and you moan when you feel his cock tapping teasingly on your cheek.

You open your jaw wide and stick your tongue out, turning your head to the side his cock was on, waiting for it. You hear him chuckle and pat your tongue with the head, salting it with his precum before sliding down. Your mouth closes around him and sucks, and he lets out a low groan, his hand on the back of your head as he guides you.

Even though it was a relief earlier, now you curse the blindfold. There’s nothing you want more than to watch V’s face as he finally comes apart on your tongue, and the image of it alone makes your mouth water, deepening your bobs as you strain to take him all in. While most cocks feel large when they’re spreading your jaw, you know he’s long, so long that even as you gag and splutter around him, your nose doesn’t once touch the skin of his stomach.

“God, look at you,” he praises, a thumb pressing at the corner of your lips to wipe away drool that had slid down, before jerking his hips so that you choked on him once again. “Do you finally feel satisfied, you greedy girl?”

You gargle around him in agreement, and he curses, fingers tightening on the crown of your head. Although they’d lain dormant while you were adjusting to a third cock, your boyfriends’ hands are all over your torso, lifting you up so that they can simultaneously fuck into you, and you let out an inhuman whine around V’s dick, one hand flying off Namjoon’s shoulder and behind you to push at Hoseok.

V tugs you off his cock with a handful of hair and you gasp in lungfuls of air, feeling the cold air on your wet chin and cheeks. You take the chance to use your already-battered vocal cords. “Too fast,” you complain, gripping Hoseok’s wrist as he grabs your ass, keeping you spread. With that, V’s cock is thrust unceremoniously back into your throat and you cough around it, but hollow your cheeks and flick your tongue on his underside, moaning when your boyfriend heeds your words and slows down, opting to grind into you, slow and deep.

“This better, kitten?” he questions, rutting himself against you.

You go to whine enthusiastically, but a new noise takes you by surprise. An unfamiliar groan. V pulls you off him again and as you gasp to catch your breath, light pierces your eyes. You wince, panting, as the blindfold is ripped off. After adjusting to the brightness, you let him guide your gaze across the desk, where on the other side Jin sits, legs spread, gaze heavy on you with his eyebrows furrowed in focus.

He’s breathing heavily, and a flash of movement attracts your eyes downwards, where an angry red cock lies up against his stomach, a fist firmly running up and down it in indulgent tugs. His knuckles are glossy with precum and his pupils are blown wide, and you feel your mouth water at the fact that the image of you alone was enough to make him this desperate.

That thought lights a fire within you, a need, and you bend down to take V in your mouth again, freeing a hand to reach out and jerk off what doesn’t fit in your mouth. He swears at your renewed efforts, gathering your hair into a ponytail so that it doesn’t cover your face. As you do this, you grind yourself between the two cocks you’re impaled on, moaning wantonly at the way they shift inside you, alternating.

Namjoon groans and slips his hands around your hips more firmly, keeping you steady so that he can begin to fuck you, frenzied and desperate. “I’m so close, baby girl, keep that pussy open for me.”

You moan around V’s dick and his hips stutter at the vibration, clearly near his end too by the way he begins to lose control. You blink up through teary eyes, taking him down your throat and breathing through your nose so that you can finally watch him. The crease in his brow and the slackness of his jaw as he’s overcome by pleasure sends hot pleasure straight to your cunt.

Every time Namjoon or Hoseok thrust up into you, that spark of pleasure is ignited further and further, until you can’t even suck off V properly anymore, taking him out of your mouth to suckle at the sensitive skin instead, reaching lower to massage his balls.

The moment Hoseok reaches around to thumb at your clit and Namjoon lowers his mouth to your neck to suck a violent hickey, you’re gone. Your orgasm takes you by surprise, and you collapse, forehead knocking on Namjoon’s shoulder as the two men continue to fuck you through it, moaning sinful nothings into your ear as you gush over them, shaking bonelessly.

Above you, you hear the slick sound of V jerking off and you force your head up with the last reserves of your energy, groaning as you feel Hoseok and Namjoon release inside you; Hoseok into the condom and Namjoon painting your walls. V looks like he isn’t too far off, and he reaches down to tug at your bra, pulling it down to expose your breasts.

“You better not fucking cum on her tits, kid,” Jin warns, “I just had this carpet deep cleaned. Sub’s mouth or the trash can.”

V twitches his eyebrows with a salacious grin, not stopping for a moment. “You heard him, little sub, open up.” You lick your swollen lips and stick your tongue out, humming around the rush of cum that fills your mouth, swallowing it down. After wringing the last few spurts out, he sighs in satisfaction and draws himself out, tucking his slowly softening cock away.

You tremble violently when Hoseok pulls out of you, leaving you empty, but nothing can prepare you for the void inside you when Namjoon follows suit, immediately cupping his hand over your soiled pussy.

“Keep it in, baby girl,” he commands, “you’ve been so good for us.”

You hum warmly at the praise. “Tired,” you mumble mindlessly, letting him bundle you up on his lap as Hoseok took off the condom, knotting the end and leaving to discard it.

Namjoon pats your hair down, smoothing out the mess. “Come on, princess,” he murmurs in your ear as he looks out across the desk. “This kind young man let us use his office. Are you gonna let him use your mouth?”

Your eyes darken with exhausted lust as Jin stands up, one hand holding his pants up and the other still jerking hurriedly at his length. You nod, opening your mouth in submission as you wait for him to come over.

“Good girl,” Namjoon mutters, “you’ll let anyone take you, won’t you?”

Jin stops in front of you, gripping your hair and tipping your neck back so that you’re at the right level. You whimper as Namjoon palms your breasts possessively, rolling your nipples between his fingers as you take Jin into your mouth as deep as you can with your aching jaw. You work to bring him to the edge, knowing your energy will be fully depleted any minute now, and the owner groans at the effort.

“But whose tits are these, princess?” You gargle out a response around Jin’s thick cock, tears pricking your eyes. “And whose mouth is this?” Namjoon moves a hand up to wrap his fingers around your jaw, holding it open so that Jin can thrust inside. You groan, your reply trapped in your throat by his dick. Namjoon’s other hand leaves your tits and slips down, swiping his fingers through the cum that seeps out of your abused core. “And whose pussy is this?” You scream your reply, choking and sputtering as a hot wave of cum runs down your throat, soothing the rawness. You swallow it down and collapse back against Namjoon, spent.

For a few moments, the only sound in the room is your collective panting. Finally, V speaks. “Well; that was fun. Did you enjoy yourself, little sub?”

You let an exhausted smile tug at your lips as your eyes flutter shut. “Yes,” you sigh. “Thank you, Master.”

He chuckles warmly. “Guess you learned your lesson tonight, after all.”

#bts smut #hoseok smut #namjoon smut #taehyung smut #bangtanarmynet #ksmutclub #thekimlinenet #smutcentralnet #btswriterscollective #btswritingcafe #bts x reader smut #hoseok x reader smut #taehyung x reader smut #namjoon x reader smut #yoonkook smut #jin x reader smut #dom namjoon #dom taehyung #dom hoseok #dom jin #dom yoongi #sub jungkook

[tree-wizard]

I tried writing a fan fic for the first time! I didn’t really know what I was doing but here it is. It’s inspired by @an-aspiring-jester ‘s post about Scroldie tending to wounds in the Klondike(I tried to make the wound description not too graphic). Also have no idea if Scrooge and Goldie are in character, I might have made them too mushy cause I MUST HAVE FLUFF.

Thanks to @promiseddifferent for encouraging me.

And oh the title is a line from the song “Ghost Love Score” by Nightwish.

Redeem Me Into Childhood

Goldie briskly walked into the cabin and carelessly tossed her pickaxe and shovel aside.

“Be careful! If ye break my supplies, you’ll have tae pay me!”

She turned her head over her shoulder to look at the miserly grungy miner, walking into the cabin behind her and rolled her eyes. He growled and went to carefully lay down his tools, and check on the ones Goldie had thrown.

Goldie slumped down on the bed and started picking the semi dried scab on her hand. An hour ago when they had been mining, Scrooge had yelled at her for being too slow and lazy and in her frustration and determination to show him that she was just as capable as him she accidentally gashed her left hand. That certainly didn’t make her seem any more capable, so she had assured Scrooge that she was fine and when he turned away from her and focused on his own mining, she wrapped her hand in the under skirt from her dress and tried to continue working.

It was pretty bad but she didn’t want to further show him how out of her element she was. She could have used the injury and feigned being super hurt so that she could get out of doing the terrible work and maybe even had time to look for the lockbox. But she knew Scrooge would never let her in the cabin alone. In fact, once he noticed that she was using her pickaxe with one hand and that really wasn’t doing anything he grudgingly, and with a lot of muttered curses, sent her to the cabin and decided to end early for the day himself so that he could go and make sure she didn’t steal anything. Showing weakness wouldn’t do her any good while she was stuck out here with him.

She felt her cheeks slightly burn from the embarrassment and frustration with herself that was starting to swirl in her empty stomach. Ughhh, she had been so foolish. She couldn’t let his angry words affect her this much. She always had to be under control, not a klutzy damsel in distress. But why did she care what he thought of her anyways? She was the Ice Queen of the North. That’s why. She had a reputation to keep. She couldn’t let him see her as less of a formidable threat. But strangely that explanation seemed hollow and almost like an excuse and the implications of that made her feel nauseous.

Suddenly she felt a sharp spark of pain that pulled her out of her thoughts and made her hiss under her breath. Absorbed in her reflections on the events of the day, she had lost attention of her hands and now noticed that she had scraped open a part of the gash that had already been starting to heal. Her hiss spread through the cramped air of the small cabin and startled Scrooge. He was crouched by the stove, putting in wood to build up a fire, and now he looked up and across the room at Goldie.

“There’s some gauze on the table. Ye should go wrap up yer hand.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you cared about me?” Goldie scoffed.

Scrooge lowered his head and Goldie couldn’t see the pink rising on the surface of his cheeks. It's just the fire, he told himself.

“I don’t care about you. Just your ability to dig up gold.”

“Ha! I almost forgot that you’re an inconsiderate and selfish jerk.”

“As if you aren’t,” Scrooge retorted and she gasped, pretending to be offended. She continued to sit pouting on the bed. She was so frustrating. If she didn’t want to deal with her hand, so be it.

She wanted to snap back at him in some way to restore her pride and not let him win but her hand was aching and the part she had just scraped open was starting to bleed. As much as she hated following his advice, she got up and walked over to the table. She took the roll of gauze and tried to rip a portion, but she felt a sharp prickling sensation shoot through her hand and she tried to stifle a shriek.

Scrooge had stood up and walked over to the table by this time and she felt his eyes fixed on her. “Hmm, ye seem to be managing this well” he taunted her and she furrowed her eyebrows in exasperation. She lifted up the gauze to her beak and sunk her teeth into it, hoping to tear a part off. It was way pretty tough though and she struggled to even make a slight rip.

She didn’t seem so vile when she was focusing her neverending fury on something other than him. It reminded him of his younger sister Hortense and that filled him with a sense of warm comfort and tenderness that diffused his annoyance and bitterness. Scrooge chuckled and extended a hand.

“Let me help,” he said, much softer than Goldie expected. He seemed genuine and benign which caught her off guard and made her wonder if she should be cautious. She grunted and reluctantly dropped the roll of gauze into his open palm. He closed his fingers over it and then gestured at one of the chairs by the table. Goldie sat down and watched Scrooge grab a bucket of water, a cloth and a second chair from the other side of the table and bring them over to her.

“Give me your hand,” he said as he sat down beside her. She obeyed and felt his rough fingers grip her hand. He dipped the cloth into the bucket, squeezed out the excess water and started to wipe the blood and dirt off the small matted feathers of her palm. She flinched and jerked her hand when she felt the damp wetness trickle over the ravenous edge of her exposed gash. Scrooge tightened his grip on her hand and continued going over her wound. As much as she annoyed and infuriated him, he didn’t particularly want to inflict her any pain. But this was for her own good.

He finished cleaning her wound and started to wrap the gauze around her hand. He was slow and thorough and the repetition made her feel a bit more relaxed. It was almost hypnotic. Normally it irked her to have her personal autonomy restrained but his strong grip on her hand was actually oddly comforting. She settled into the calmness of the moment and let herself lower her defenses as she raised up her eyes to watch him.

She prided herself for her self sufficiency, her ability to take care of herself after her family kicked her out many many years ago, to survive in this lawless wilderness and build a business and a name for herself. But here was this rough mean miner, holding her hand in his and actually caring for her wellbeing like no one had done ever since she was a very young child and her mother sang to her a special lullaby when she was sick. She had so many painful memories from her childhood that she tried to hide behind tall icy walls and never think about, so even the few happy ones were veiled by a forgetful haze. She was surprised she was even remembering this now. She had no idea when she had last thought about her mother’s song. She couldn’t remember the words anymore but a faint melody floated to the forefront of her mind from her subconscious. Her cold exterior was melting and an innocent peacefulness slowly spread through her.

The cold Yukon winds pushing against the walls of the cabin, all his past failures that always hung over him, his dwindling hope in finding his fortune all faded away as he focused on bandaging Goldie’s hand and her soft humming that curiously almost sounded like a lullaby.

He’d spent all these years mainly on his own and while that generally didn’t bother him, there were increasingly many nights this past year in the Klondike when he’d lay in bed in his small cabin and feel almost crushed by the emptiness, the vastness of the valley around him, the distance and time away from his family. But now he didn’t feel as lonely. She was here with him.

He stopped to take a quick glance at her. Her eyelids had closed over her emerald eyes and she was resting her head sideways on the back of the chair. The light from fire had reached out and hugged around her golden locks of hair, surrounding them in a warm glow that made them even more beautiful than they already were.

Goldie felt Scrooge’s fingers slip from her hand, taking their warmth with them. She opened her eyes and saw that he had finished wrapping her hand up and had neatly tied the ends of the bandages. She reached out with her hands to his, yearning for their comfort again. Scrooge looked up at her as she wrapped her hands around his. He knew she’d never thank him but the soft gratitude in her eyes was enough for him. Scrooge slightly smiled at her and she couldn’t help smiling back. They sat a while longer, holding each other’s hands, in a small warm cabin, safe from the boundless shimmering white snow and deep northern darkness of the desolate Klondike. Two silent souls not alone for once.

#ducktales #scrooge mcduck #Goldie o gilt #scroldie #fanfic #I spent way too long searching up wound treatment history #Klondike Scroldie #my writing

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‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing Them Softly’ By Roxana Hadadi

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ...”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It's a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

#killing them softly #andrew dominik #andrew dominik film #brad pitt #Jackie Cogan #james gandolfini #richard jenkins #ray liotta #scoot mcnairy #ben mendelsohn #american cinematographer #financial crisis 2008 #independent film #beastie boys #oscilloscope laboratories #film writing #musings

[deadmomjokes]

First time Stormlight Archives Read-thru: The Way of Kings Part One

Since I actually somehow made it through the library’s waitlist to get my Icarusian hands on a copy of this thing, and because I am a completionist who cannot leave character arcs unfinished, I’m dragging y’all with me on this adventure that I guarantee you doesn’t need to be this long.

Yes I’m salty about it and it’s gonna take some serious literary magic to make me NOT salty about it because trying to hold this book at a decent angle activated my carpal tunnel issues and now I can’t feel my pinky finger and my thumb is tingling. So yeah. It better be worth it.

Anyway, we just finished Part One. Wait, “we” you ask? Oh yeah, my husband loves worldbuilding and hard magic systems, so we’re taking turns reading chapters aloud so that we don’t have to hold onto the book twice as long so we can both read it, and we can keep reminding each other of what’s what.

ANYWAY, we just finished Part One, so have my thoughts, positives, negatives, and overall impressions. Then get your road trip snacks because like I said, I don’t do things halfway and I already started this journey so here we mcfreakin go I guess.

The Good Stuff

There’s some pretty good lines so far.

B. Sandy actually appears to know what he’s talking about with drawing and sewing? Wild.

I’m digging how the currency system is, like, also functional. The pieces of currency act as lights and power sources and stuff. Neat.

The two main characters from this section are: depressed mom friend and his Conscience, and a snarky nerd with delusions of criminal grandeur, and between them they have exactly 0.84 brain cells. These all belong to Jiminy Cricket the literal airhead the Conscience.

Depressed softboy who just wants to be a good big brother? Well darn it, you found my weakness. I’ll pull up my “adoption papers” folder.

Each chapter from a new POV has a unique voice. Rather hard to pull off in writing, but very clearly and expertly done here.

I have some questions moving forward, which is always a plus. However...

The Bad Stuff

I really, REALLY don’t like feeling like I’m the dumbest person in the room. While he did manage to avoid infodumping, Mr. Sanderson also managed to make me feel like I’m missing vital information at basically every turn. And not in the “ooh, what a mystery” kind of way-- in the “what the freak am looking at, I have zero idea what you’re describing because you’re using in-universe jargon.” This piecemeal revelation thing works for the characters’ stories and plots; I’m all for that! I’m intrigued at what’s up with Ms. Davar, and exactly how Kal ended up where he is, what’s up with the war, etc. The problem is with handling the worldbuilding this way when you’re trying to situate these mystery plots in said world. It is not immersive for me; it is distracting, frustrating, and makes it hard for me to focus on the story. A few points handled this way would have been fine, but I lost track of how many times I had to stop and groan because yet another new term was getting lobbed at me and my comprehension of the situation depended on having an understanding of the world which he just hadn’t given us yet. I’m really over it.

I get that we were trying to establish her character, but I could have done without these lead-up chapters with Shallan. I wasn’t at all as interested in her as I was with Kaladin. We could have learned all that we needed-- her family situation, her big plan, her big mouth, her skills, her mysterious past and the weird stuff about her father that we still haven’t learned fully yet-- in media res when she’s already Jasnah’s ward. It felt kind of tire-spinny, though I admit it was fun at times.

The sentences and wording get sticky at times. Especially with reading it out loud, there are quite a few places that make my brain stumble because the words sound wrong next to each other, or the same word appears in the sentence too many times, and so on.

There’s a lot going on that just isn’t important. This ties back in to the first point, but we’re getting so much information about this world that it becomes tiring and tiresome to keep track of all the different things we’re learning about-- cultural rules around slaves, ‘safehands’, eye color, and so on; ‘fabrials’; the currency denominations; a whole religious system, some of which appears to be important but also has a bunch of tiddly little details that don’t; a caste system; a military structure; however the freak the ecosystem works and all the different animals and plants; the weather systems; etc ad nauseum. How much of this is important to know? I don’t know! That’s what’s frustrating about it! So much of it seems like by-the-way kind of stuff, but some of it could end up being important, so here I am wondering what’s gonna be on the quiz and what’s just for fun.

Impressions and Thoughts

Why must carcinization haunt me even in escapist fantasy?

Am not a fan of the phrase “skyeels” and “poisonous skyeels.” Don’t like that one bit.

Dudes are religiously required to be himbos, and girls are religiously expected to be scholars and nerds. Am love.

I’m getting increasingly concerned by the death-blood-collection ominous mystery quotes at the beginning of each chapter.

I’ve only known Sylphrena for a day and a half but if anything happens to her I would.... Not.... Not harm anyone or myself because she would be sad. 😭

I was warned about “suicidal ideation” being a thing, but I’m going to put a little brighter of a warning label on that and say that if anyone is about to read this and gets upset or triggered by suicidal ideation, plans, and attempts, be very careful and know that’s kind of all a thing. Not sure how much a thing it’ll be moving forward, I’m hoping “not”, but, yeah. That was an attempt, not just ideation, tho I’m grateful for the person who warned me because if it had come out of nowhere instead of just being a step further than what I expected, I’d be really, really not okay.

Yalb is the real MVP.

Verdict Thus Far

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is “I will actually find strength to abandon this book because I’m so done” and 10 is “I’m willing to give up sleep to read more,” I’m sitting at a 6.5 right now. Good, and I’m looking forward to continuing, but I have a little ways to go before I’m hooked. But thumbs up, thanks for convincing me! (from everyone except my tingling numb fingers, I should have tried the ebook instead -_-)

#stormlight archives #stormlight #way of kings #brandon sanderson #writing #long post

[fabdante]

The Vergil and Kat Post

So um. This like idk essay, analysis, rant thing took took like five attempts to write because I would not stop rambling and it’s still like just barely five pages long. And that’s after I cut it down from like 11 pages.

The short version is: Kat and Vergil are really interesting and complex as we view their relationship usually from an outside perspective which leaves much up to interpretation. If you’ve been on my blog for a while you probably know the interpretation I have of them because I eat up tragedy like candy, but that’s not the only one. 

The (very) long version is beneath the cut. And unfortunately this time there are no pictures. There’s some analysis but also just a lot of rambling. If Kat and Vergil, in any form, are not your cup of tea, this is probably not a post for you which is chill!

I’m going to start with the end. Vergil’s Downfall.

Recap, when Vergil encounters Hollow Vergil in his personal trip to his personal hell and all, Hollow Vergil eventually asks ‘but what would you do if you had another chance’. Vergil doesn’t answer. But since he’s the player character, we get access to his thoughts. And we get a montage of Kat. At first one might think this is about how the plan went wrong. Vergil’s regretting the plan. Then it becomes increasingly more apparent the thread that ties all the scenes together isn’t the plan, isn’t the plans failings. It’s Kat. Not Dante and Kat. Not the plan. Just Kat. The scene ends with a scene from mission 2, a moment from the end of the only cutscene Vergil and the real Kat share alone. There’s this little moment that seems to exist to show how pretty Kat is.

This is his last thought. Not the plan. Not how Kat relates to the plan. Not how he mistreated Kat in service to the plan. It’s just Kat.

Act one of Vergil’s Downfall is all about Vergil and Kat. The whole things a reenactment, just somewhat twisted, of how they met. Kat in Limbo, in danger from a demon, and Vergil doing what he can to help. He doesn’t hesitate either. He hears Kat call for him, call for help, and he runs. Except in Downfall the threat is with them, something he can fight and slay head on. So he does. But everything is wrong now. ‘Kat’ berates him. She tells him what Vergil must think she’s thinking. That she feels used, that she thinks Dante’s better, and all that. And Vergil tries to explain, he tries to justify himself, even if this ‘Kat’ is not his Kat. He wants her to understand, though. Because she’s Kat after all.

He needs to hurt her to proceed, of course. But he can’t. He can’t until she turns into a physical monster. Not until this fake Kat becomes something entirely unKat can he actually hurt her and proceed.

The Hollows represent aspects of Vergil that he needs to kill to gain power, as well as his insecurities and the people he cares about and more. Kat represents his humanity. So I suppose, in a way, it’s not surprising that she’s the hardest for him to kill and the one who receives the least of his cruelty that we see later in the game. But, the point still remains. He faces Hollow Kat first. And he begs her to understand him, longs for things to go back in what way they can.

(Also, an aside, it’s interesting to think about how Kat is not only humanity, but Vergil’s humanity. The implication being that Kat in a sense grounds him. A foil to how inhuman Vergil is.)

Downfall takes the scraps that the game gives and gives them a revamped, strengthened context for Kat and Vergil and their true feelings and intentions. The first game doesn’t give us much and why should it? They are built in a show don’t tell philosophy because, well, Dante can’t tell us about Vergil and Kat. He can only see. So we only see. But Downfall, we are explicitly told that yes, Vergil cared for Kat. She is important. And she is his one regret.

So, Downfall proposes that Vergil genuinely cared for Kat. And the base game proposes that Kat genuinely cared for Vergil. And it’s hard for me not to talk ramble when I talk about them because there’s…a lot of little moments between them that I love, little things that I find interesting to pick apart and wonder about (and have over the past 8 years). I’m going to try not to do that, though. Try being the operative word (I have failed all five write ups preceding this one).

Kat is often described as naïve because of her relationship with Vergil. But I think this is an inaccurate description. We never see her blindly trust anyone in the game. She doesn’t trust Dante because she just believes in him. We know this because she’s immensely skeptical of him and if he’s going to be helpful up until after the succubus boss fight. And we know she’s skeptical of him because she questions Vergil about it and she remains skeptical, keeping Dante an arm’s length away. She is not naïve. She trusts Vergil because he’s earned that trust.

It’s hard not to see how he managed to do that. He helped her kill her foster father and escape a bad situation, but it’s what happened after that solidifies this deep connection between the two. Kat tells Dante how Vergil helped her afterwards while she coped with the trauma and it’s something she mentions more then once. Kat’s trust and loyalty to Vergil is because he’s earned it. Because he has seen her at her worst and did not run. He stayed. He helped her through it. And still he stays now. It’s easy to imagine this going both ways, that seeing Kat ‘raw’ as he says makes Vergil vulnerable right back.

Plus, Vergil compares Kat when he first met her to Dante (‘He’s raw. Just like you were when I found you.’).  I think one would be hard pressed to refer to reboot Dante, the one with self proclaimed trust issues, as naïve.

So, we have a relationship of deep trust between the two over what is implied to be a long time. The sort of trust and intimacy you get when someone sees all of you and knows all of you. At least, I think that’s Kat’s end. When it comes to Vergil…well, opinions are complicated.

There are the three options of how Vergil feels about Kat if we simplify it down. One, he was using her and this was all to use her and get the plan finished. Two, he was using her but grew to care for her over time. Three, he was never using her and this was all real. I’m three all the way but one and two aren’t really contradicted anymore than three is. Which is an issue when talking about Kat and Vergil and trying to be all inclusive but also concise. There’s no one answer. There are just different opinions on what the answer is.

For me, it’s hard to reconcile the idea that he did not care for her with what we see in Vergil’s Downfall. Or when we have moments like his genuine joy that she’s alive in the server room. It’s hard for me to reconcile the idea of Vergil using her this whole time when it feels like a lot of work to keep her at his side when she can’t even control her powers. It’s hard for me to reconcile the deep connection I see between them.

For other people, the opposite is hard. Seeing what happened in the server room, seeing Vergil write off Kat entirely, seeing him call her useful and referring to humans as subjects, cannot be reconciled with the idea that he genuinely cared for and about her. Or how one could get a very loyal side kick the way he goes about this, saving her and giving her a home and purpose and everything. It’s an easy way into getting a loyal assistant.

All that I can tell you is how I see it. And what I see is two people with a deep intimacy with each other. The relationship may be messy and complicated and not perfect, but that’s what I see. That’s not what everyone sees, and that’s ok. That’s just what I see and that’s what this post is about.

I think its notable to about how important this relationship is because Vergil actually gets like, jealous about it. I get side tracked for too long when I go on about this so, in keeping things short, we see Vergil in the background get frustrated with things Dante says to Kat (namely the ‘I like it rough’) and we see him get kind of jealous in the game. But we really see it in Downfall. And sure, there are things he’s jealous about that pertain to Dante that aren’t Kat related. But there are things that do relate to that. We mostly see this, again, with Hollow Kat. She pisses him off when she mentions Dante being a real man. There’s of course stoking at Vergil’s insecurities since he’s lost to his twin and he already seems to feel envious about how easy things are for Dante and everything. But there’s also the fact it’s Kat saying it. It’s Kat who’s telling him she prefers Dante. That stings Vergil, this idea Kat cares about Dante more than him.

Part of this I think is from the fear that Kat will run off to Dante because of their similar backgrounds. They both have similar childhoods, something Vergil didn’t experience. Which, going back to what I said, a person who must pride himself on how well he knows Kat (and how well she knows him) must find that kind of threatening. 

There’s this scene added in the Definitive Edition. Before that we were left to assume Kat wandered the tower and that’s how she mapped it for the twins, but the Definitive Edition makes it clear canon. This makes the scene where Mundus records himself with Kat as a threat to the twins the only time we see Kat out of body in the game. During this experience, she assumedly betrays Vergil’s name to Mundus. Before the Definitive Edition scene, I always just kind of wrote off that moment. Kat’s under extreme duress, she’s just saying whatever at this point. I thought this for years after, to.

But then one day, after replaying the game for the umpteenth time, a thought came into my head. She’s out of body, in Limbo, surrounded by demons. She says his name because Kat is looking for him. She say’s his name because despite what happened in the server room, she still trusts Vergil. She doesn’t say Dante’s name, she doesn’t call for anyone else. She calls for Vergil. Because who else would she call for if not Vergil, the person she’s closest to and the person who saved her before?

It’s this sort of thing that makes the betrayal hurt as badly as it does for well, everyone. Us, Kat, Vergil, Dante. But focusing on Kat and Vergil, it’s the trust. It’s this deep bond between the two of them that’s suddenly shattered. What do you do when this person you think you know so well doesn’t do what you expect? When they do the exact opposite, actually? When they suddenly don’t understand you at all? It’s such a foundational relationship for the two of them to, it’s earth shattering to go from knowing a person so truly and deeply to looking at a stranger. This is all kinda true for Vergil who must have expected Kat to understand even if he may have thought she’d get upset. But this is all extremely true for Kat

It’s kind of a double sided betrayal. While I’m not really going to say Kat betrayed Vergil, because she didn’t she stayed true to her word and what she thought they were fighting for and everything, Vergil feels betrayed to, just like Kat and Dante. And oh does Kat feel betrayed. One of my favorite like, animation, character moments is like the pure disbelief, anguish and betrayal on Kat’s face at the betrayal it’s so well done. Like even the little look she does out over the city then back to Vergil like it’s just its good but not important back to topic. Kat thought they were fighting to free humanity. And Vergil seems to truly think this is for the best, if humanity is under his rule.

While one can argue Vergil’s goal was power, I feel like Vergil’s goal was the same he had from the start. Vergil wanted to free humans. He’s not even wrong, really. If Dante and Vergil do not put someone on the throne to replace Mundus, a new demon will take his place. Without someone controlling the demons, the demons will wreck havoc uncontrolled. However his wording could use some work. That said do I think Vergil is susceptible to power corrupting him. Absolute power corrupts absolutely sort of deal. I feel like him and Dante are similar in this regard, neither I think is quite equipped to rule with the amount of power that Vergil proposes they get. I also think Vergil didn’t think he’d get to this part, I don’t think he really thought about what happens after Mundus. Not the specifics. He ended up with this conclusion later in the game, and as a result never floated it by anyone. And to be fair, no one asked.

Kat always seems so full of hope at the end, right after she get’s Dante to stop killing Vergil and everything. She’s got these big Kat eyes, like she expects now things will go back. Vergil will say this was a joke and he’ll come back and things will be normal and she will have her best friend and the world will be safe. But that’s not what happens. Vergil leaves, of course (not after him and Kat have a long extended stare where they must be wondering mutually if the other will change their mind, if she will follow or he will stay). The whole ending in general from start to finish we get a lot with Kat and Vergil subtext. How she manages to get him to listen for a moment, even if Dante ends up getting him too angry to listen by the end. How Kat goes out on a limb to save Vergil, even if she didn’t have to.

She must be wondering, to, how real it all was. Dante’s answer I think is that it wasn’t. From what he saw, from his limited scope, it wasn’t. He cannot reconcile it, and why should he? He was thrown into their lives and resistance group with no context and he ends with little more. But Kat’s left wondering, and Vergil’s left regretting, and I’m left lamenting about the very large lack of post game Vergil/Kat content. 

I don’t know. I could keep going. At just over four Microsoft Word pages, this is the shortest attempt I’ve made at this. And I will surely write up some more analysis on them, I didn’t even get to talk about fun stuff like Kat’s theme (or the comics but I left those out on purpose I have…complicated opinions on the comic), or like more about the whole divine/human angle here. I could keep going on and on and on like analyze every little microsecond and sound like this:

Which, to clarify, I will 100 percent do if prompted lmao. But I guess the short of it is, in my biased opinion, I think Kat and Vergil are in love. I think it was real. I think Vergil found her and he helped her because she needed help. I think they know each other better than anyone else. I think some things may have gotten muddled in the mists of being in a rebellion and saving the world and that rebellion was their priority. I think going into the DmC: Devil May Cry post game must be complicated for them, unable to let go of the other but unable to come back. It’s the sort of complicated relationship and tragedy I find fun to write and to read. That’s how I see it, anyway.

Also I mean idk if we are to believe Vergil’s bigger dick comment as truth, who else saw both Dante and Vergil’s dicks? Who except Kat? Who else had this info? Who else would Vergil believe? Just saying. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.  

(edit: also I spelled hollow wrong like multiple times in this essay forgive me it should be fixed now lmao)

#dmc devil may cry #dmc reboot #devil may cry reboot #vergil/kat #vergilxkat #fab talks meta #can you tell i started a really long fan fic about kat and vergil that i never finished or posted #because thats 100 percent what i did they live rent free in my brain 24/7 #long post

[blvejeanbaby]

The Farmhouse (m)

Pairing: Wooyoung x reader, San x reader, Yeosang x reader + multiple Ateez members x OC characters + boy x boy action Word count: 14.9k Warning: sex (though mostly foreplay), threesome, mentions of sex, alcohol use, some Ateez members are gay

disclaimer: I am not trying to assume anyone’s sexuality with this story, that was not what this was meant for! This is all a work of fiction and what I write in this story doesn’t necessarily reflect my thoughts in real life.

A/N: I had originally planned for this story to end up very, very differently but I like to write wherever my mind goes. That’s why I had originally planned to split this up into four parts, with a different ending in my mind. You’ll find out part of what that different ending was in the extra scene at the end n.n

Day 1 On a trip, the last mile is always the longest - it’s not so much the truth as the truth of a feeling. Yunho made sure the last mile wouldn’t come for a while. Even though he had proclaimed himself to be an excellent driver, perfectly capable of following up instructions while driving safely, he hadn’t been too successful in making that statement come true. With Jongho screaming different directions at him, increasingly getting more frustrated with Yunho’s inability to follow these, Yechan from the back attempting to give directions without really knowing where all of you were, you were more so focused on what was outside of the car. Over the course of your journey to the countryside, the landscape had gradually changed; from the tall buildings of the busy city, you got closer and closer to the national park, where you would be staying nearby.                “This must be it!” Daemi said excitedly. She had been quiet while the others had been arguing, but when you looked out of the front window, you noticed she was right. The building, a large two-storey farmhouse, concealing an even bigger backyard, with a vineyard next to it, matched the AirBnB advertisement perfectly.                “Oh, that’s Seonghwa’s car,” Yunho said, unable to keep the relief out of his voice. He steered the car onto the driveway and parked it right next to Seonghwa’s.                When you got out of the car, you were instantly greeted by a voice from higher up: “Hey, look up!” You shielded your eyes from the sun as you looked up to find a half-naked Wooyoung hanging out of an open window. “You’re the last ones to arrive.”                “It’s because Yunho can’t drive,” Jongho said, at the same time Daemi said: “It’s because Jongho doesn’t know how to read a map.”                “Well, you’d better come up and get yourselves a room,” Wooyoung said. “The others have already started drinking and none of the groceries have been done yet.”                To that, everyone nearly fell over each other to collect their bags from the trunk of the car. The house had enough rooms to accommodate 16 people, but because of some being less comfortable sleeping in rooms with certain others, everyone had more or less divided up the rooms beforehand, and mattresses were dragged around to make sure everyone had a bed to sleep in at night. Or during the day, considering the objective of this trip was not to have a wholesome trip to escape from your usual busy lives in the city. Of course it was that too, but there was also the idea that you would just get away to party and get drunk, the way you couldn’t so easily in the city, where there was always some authority to monitor you.                 You shared a room with Daemi and Yechan, your best girl friends. To accommodate Yechan, you got an extra mattress from the room opposite yours, which was one with an in-room shower. “…so that’s our bathroom,” Yechan concluded as she flopped down onto her unmade mattress and closed her eyes. “I’m going to take a nap.”                “A nap? We have to make our beds first. And the groceries still need to be done,” Daemi said.                “Why didn’t anybody else go while we were gone?” you sighed.                “Well, if Wooyoung’s right and they already started drinking…” Daemi shrugged. “Maybe we should do the groceries. Before everyone gets too drunk.”                When you got downstairs, you saw that Daemi had been right; a lot of people were already quite drunk. Seonghwa was one of them, pressing his car keys into your hands, despite you not having a drivers’ license. “Take them,” he said. “Take them. Take more beer with you too. The good ones.”                “Hwa, I don’t drink beer-“ you started, but Seonghwa kept rambling about the beer you needed to get.                “I’ll come with you,” San said, jumping up from his seat next to Alice and pushing Seonghwa into it. “I know which brand of beer he likes.” He smiled at you and you smiled back thankfully. You were glad to find that it wasn’t just going to be you and San doing the groceries – as he had been drinking and you didn’t have your license, there was no one who could even legally drive the car off the property if you had wanted to. You were glad to find it wasn’t just going to be the two of you. That would’ve probably made for some awkward moments between you. You had been alone with just San before, and it had been normal, until it wasn’t anymore. Something snuck into your relationship that could only be described as attraction. Perhaps it was just plain physical attraction, as your heart always beat slightly quicker when you saw him, or perhaps it ran deeper, but what you did know was that your friendship was good and you didn’t want to ruin it with a crush.                The dynamic in the friend group had always been amazing. The traditional idea about boys and girls not being able to be friends without romantic feelings involved, was completely destroyed by you guys’ friendships. Only Seonghwa and Sooyoung were officially dating, following a set-up Hongjoong had cooked up by himself. Sooyoung had never been part of the friend group before, and the same went for Soojin, her best friend. The friend group dynamics had actually improved upon Sooyoung and Soojin’s introductions to the group nearly two years ago.                It was for that reason you didn’t feel uncomfortable while in the car with only boys: Yunho drove again, Jongho navigating once more. You were squished in between Hongjoong and San in the backseat of Yunho’s car, which was roomier than Seonghwa’s, with the latter’s car keys pressing into your leg through your jeans. While Jongho and Yunho already started arguing about which way to go and which supermarket to choose, you turned to Hongjoong as he talked about the plans for the next couple of days: “…sauna, so maybe we can hop in there tonight. And tomorrow Anna and I want to do a barbecue by the lakeside. It’s not that far a drive but if we want to take beer there, we can walk too.”                “Of course we’ll want to take beer,” San said. “Maybe even wine and stuff. Hey, Y/N, we have your favourite drink too. It’s cheaper in cities than in the countryside, we figured out.”                “My favourite drink?” you turned to him.                “That soju-yogurt cocktail you like so much. Wooyoung and Yeosang made it for you.”                You felt your heart swell at San remembering you liking soju-yogurt cocktails. It had been a while since you told him about loving it the first time you tried it and it becoming your signature drink when going out. You weren’t big on alcohol the way other people could be, but sometimes you found yourself casually wanting to make your own soju-yogurt cocktail at home. “I hope there’s still left when we get back.”                Once at the grocery store – which was tucked away behind a scary-looking church that, according to Yunho’s limited amount of information about the surrounding area, once belonged to a cult – Hongjoong was in charge of listing off the grocery list and checking the boxes corresponding with what the others put into the cart. You were staying close to San’s side, as you always did when he was around. Yes, you found him physically attractive, which made you want to look at him all the time, but there was also something absolutely magnetic about his personality that made you want to be talking to him always. And it seemed like San was really into your conversation as you wandered off from Hongjoong and Jongho to find a certain brand of pasta sauce. Despite the simplicity of the topics you were talking about, which ranged from Yunho not being able to drive and Yechan karate chopping you in the head when she saw a mosquito flying past that she wanted to kill, you felt a little nervous around San. Once you had told Daemi about it, hoping she would come with valuable advice, but instead she had laughed at you and just declared you were crushing on San, hard. And perhaps she was right.                When you got back to the farmhouse, needless to say, the soju-yogurt cocktail was gone. Feeling robbed of the one thing you were looking forward to about returning, you opted to drink water instead. You’d start drinking alcohol after dinner, you told yourself, so you wouldn’t get sick. Finally, when it was clear there were little to no sober people you could strike up conversation with, you excused yourself to go upstairs and shower.                The summer heat made everything hot and sticky, including your body. You grabbed a towel and some clean clothes as well as your toiletry bag before going to the single room with the shower. The room was small and simple, with a window overlooking the backyard and the mountains in the distance. You cracked the window open, quickly glancing down to see the back patio, only accessible through the kitchen. As you put on the shower, you enjoyed the smell of freshly cut grass and summer drafting in through the window, as well as the sound of the water cascading on your body mixing with the sounds of a chirping bird outside and the sounds of cows in the distance. Until your attention was caught by a sudden yelp: “Wooyoung!”                Your eyes shot wide open when you recognized that voice. Rose. Along with Alice and Anna, they were in your friend group because Daemi liked them a lot. Your personality didn’t match well with Rose and although you didn’t hate each other or anything, you weren’t very fond of Rose and you were sure the sentiment was shared by her. As far as you knew, Wooyoung, however, thought she was amazing.                “Don’t tell me you don’t like it,” Wooyoung’s voice sounded, loud, as if he was right there in the room with you. It immediately gave you goose bumps.                “Hm, I like it,” Rose’s voice came again. You could just about imagine her shaking her blonde hair out of her face, over her shoulder… You had always thought she looked closest to an angel as was humanly possible. Perhaps your dislike of her had something to do with how you were jealous of her always getting the guys she wanted, how she managed to get every single boy to ever lay eyes on her to fall in love with her and how she could effortlessly keep and make friends… “You like this?”                “Hm, Rose…” That was a groan. A groan from Wooyoung. You had never heard something so utterly sexual. You shivered. Saying you were feeling increasingly uncomfortable was nearly an understatement. They continued to make sounds that made you want to throw up in your mouth. Had they been drinking this much already? Or were they just that into each other that it didn’t bother them it was broad daylight outside? Did they not hear your shower running too? Or were they not aware how perfectly audible they were? You felt like you weren’t supposed to be naked while you could hear them so clearly; it felt weird.                You quickly turned off the shower and wrapped your towel around yourself. Even though you had taken your clothes and toiletry bag into the single room, you didn’t want to hear a single sound anymore, so you made your way back to your room where you took your time getting ready, trying to shake off the nasty feeling Wooyoung and Rose’s acts had left behind.                While putting on clothes and jewellery and smearing light makeup on your face, you felt the urge to dress the best you could, despite the fact you were just going to be cooking and eating and drinking with your group of best friends. There was something inside of you screaming that you wanted to prove to everyone that you, too, were worthy of getting fingered and giving handjobs on the patio as well – there was no other explanation for what they had been doing and no need to lie to yourself about it. More importantly, you felt the need to prove to specifically Wooyoung you could handle whatever he would give you on that patio. More so than Rose. But that was ridiculous. You wouldn’t really want Wooyoung to touch you like that.                As you finished the perfect winged eyeliner, you decided that was enough makeup. You made your way downstairs, collecting Anna, Daemi and Hongjoong for dinner. “Let’s get going,” you said.                “Seems like you already got going,” Daemi chuckled, following you closely into the kitchen. “Who is that outfit for?”                “For you, of course.” You sent her a wink.                “San is one lucky boy,” Daemi said quietly, so no one else could hear, before getting to work on cutting up onions. If only she knew, you thought to yourself, taking it upon yourself to cut up the potatoes.                It took a surprisingly long time to cook for 16 people, despite the extra hands pitching in to slice up vegetables and do the washing up. You realized how much you’d been underappreciating the restaurant people who churn out dishes at an insane speed, compared to how you’re cooking a relatively simple dish with little ingredients while needing all the help you can get.                “Ah,” you hear a voice, “can I taste?” Before getting confirmation, the spoon is already in the pasta sauce and before you can scold him, the spoon is already in his mouth. “Hm, needs a little more spice, I think.”                “Yeah? Well, you think wrong.”                “What? You haven’t even tasted yet,” Wooyoung said, putting the spoon back on the counter. There’s a smirk on his face that your hands are itching to wipe off with a slap, and a blush on his cheeks that you know is not the effect of the hot weather.                “The recipe doesn’t call for extra spices, thank you very much.”                “What’s got you all upset?”                “I’m not upset,” you bite back, proving the opposite.                “Ah, it must be the period,” Wooyoung said, with an air of superiority.                “Fuck you, Wooyoung.” You threw your own wooden spoon down into the pasta mixture, splattering both yourself and Wooyoung with the red sauce, before storming out onto the patio – only to find Rose standing, a gleeful smile on her face and a cigarette between her lips.                She looked up instantly. “You look a little upset.” Her smile faded away as she stuck out her hand to you. “Need a drag?”                You didn’t even bother responding, instead dealing with the embarrassment of having to go back through the kitchen to escape. When dinner is served, you can’t even muster up the faintest of smiles or feign happiness. At least what got you so upset wasn’t your period. And quite frankly, you were even angrier that Wooyoung thought it was okay to make such a joke, whilst normally being so attuned to girls’ feelings, especially yours.                You hated the pasta, but you ate it anyway. You glanced over to where Wooyoung was seated, chatting excitedly to Seonghwa and Mingi, the left-overs of the splattered sauce staining his white shirt. You didn’t even feel remotely guilty.                You were glad when dinner was finished, so you could commit yourself to working on another batch of soju-yogurt cocktail, this time without Wooyoung, since he was too busy in the sauna. Probably flirting with Rose, you thought to yourself as you grumpily got to work on the ingredients. San and Yeosang were right there with you; Yeosang because he knew how to make it and San because he evidently wanted to cheer you up. He kept saying cheesy jokes and poking your cheeks and then his own ‘to see if he could give you his dimples’. Every time you gave him an annoyed look, his smile made your heart flutter and your mouth shut.                As the night progressed, you were aware you were drinking a bit too much of the mixture. Maybe a bit too much of any liquor, really, because by the time the clock struck 11 o’clock, you were already very close to quitting alcohol for the night, while Soojin was only on her second drink of the evening.                “I’m going to get some air,” you said to no one in particular, before getting up and stepping outside, sliding the door closed behind you. Away from the stifling heat inside, the cool mountain air managed to cool you down enough to not sway on your feet as you threw your head back to look at the night sky. It was dotted with stars, only visible because you were so far away from cities and their light pollution. You were in the middle of deep contemplations about the universe, when you heard a noise. Oh no, not again, you thought to yourself, your head snapping down to look over the balustrade, down at the swimming pool.                On the edge of it you could see two figures, barely visible in the darkness. But from what little light the porchlight shone on them, you could make out that it’s San – it’s unmistakably him. But who is with him? It takes a little more squinting and a moan before you make yourself rip away from the sight, stomping back into the house. You don’t even tell anyone that you’re heading up to bed.                Only when you’re finally underneath the covers, you allow yourself to think about what you saw. Your long-time crush, Choi San, shoving his tongue down the throat of Kim Alice, someone you had always figured was rather harmless a person to have around. She didn’t speak much in big groups – kind of like you – but when she did, she was funny. She was a joy to be around, seemed to have a life devoid of problems, she was conventionally attractive… With a sigh you turned on your side, closing your eyes, willing yourself to fall asleep. But all you saw with eyes closed was San and Alice, kissing as if their lives depended on it.

Day 2 After you and Anna had put away the dirty plates and cutlery into the dishwasher and turned it on, everyone was about ready to leave for the lake. The morning had been off to a slow start but with the sun beaming down on everyone, scorching hot, they were all suddenly up and running. Their sudden energy was not the reason you left the cars at the house and instead walked through the significantly cooler forest to get to the lake. After all, according to Hongjoong, it’s not a far walk. The reason was solely to be able to drink.                Jongho and Yeosang carried the cool box filled to the brim with drinks and meat, which was undoubtedly the heaviest thing to carry, while Daemi and Alice offered to carry the blankets to sit on. Everyone else was assigned their own towels and clothes to carry. You stayed at the back of the group with Mingi, who was positively hungover from the night before and had to stop every few minutes or so to clutch at his stomach and complain about how nauseous he felt. Needless to say, the two of you arrived only when Seonghwa had already started to set up ‘camp’, as he called it, and the others were already half-undressed and in the water.                Soojin was in the midst of stripping off her sundress, convincing Alice to do the same. Both were trying to get Yunho to abandon his duties of helping Seonghwa lay down the blankets, for him to come swimming with them. Jongho and Yeosang, who had been in the front with Hongjoong, setting the pace and navigating, had already put the cool box down, Jongho in the process of taking off his pants.                “Y/N,” Sooyoung appeared in front of you suddenly. “Do you want to come with us to the village? It’s just a ten minute walk, Hongjoong said, and it’s apparently really pretty. Maybe you can take some photos.” She gestured toward your film camera, a gift from Wooyoung for your last birthday. You had taken it with you to the lake, thinking you could get a lot of use out of it to capture the memories of the trip.                “Sure, seems like fun,” you said. “Who’s coming?” You felt torn as Sooyoung told you it was just going to be you, Seonghwa, Hongjoong and Yeosang. On the one hand you were glad that San and Wooyoung were staying behind, as you weren’t sure you could handle having to deal with them for too long. On the other hand, you were a little torn on leaving them behind with Alice and Rose. You had to remind yourself they were nothing to you but your friends as you shrugged your heavy backpack off and gave Mingi a pat on the head before he threw himself down on the blankets. Even though he was groaning and being apologetic, no one believed he found it really terrible he could not come with.                Hongjoong and Seonghwa were completely attached to Sooyoung, which caused you to stay with Yeosang. He was typically a very observant but quiet person; he noticed a lot but never said a thing about it. Imagine your surprise when he asked: “So, you were not having a great time last night?”                “Was it that obvious?” you groaned.                “Wooyoung told me you cursed at him. You know, he was joking about the period thing.”                “I know. Doesn’t make it okay.”                Yeosang turned semi-serious. “He hates it when you two fight.”                “Has he told you that as well?” You were starting to lose your temper, which you did not want. After all, Yeosang had nothing to say about what Wooyoung was feeling, saying or doing.                “No,” Yeosang said. “I just know. You’re his best friend, even though it might not seem like it sometimes. What were you mad about anyway?”                You gnawed at your lip. The fact was, you weren’t entirely sure what you were particularly mad about. That he was fingering Rose on the patio while everyone could notice? That he was fingering Rose on the patio of all places? That he was fingering Rose to begin with? That it was Rose, of all people? And what reason did you have anyway to care about what Wooyoung was doing romantically or sexually? You were only friends.                But if there was someone you could talk to this about, it would surely be Yeosang, right? Apart from you, he had known Wooyoung the longest. Before it was you and Yechan and Daemi, it had been you and Wooyoung and Yeosang. And even before that, it had been Wooyoung and Yeosang. That was before San had come in and essentially stolen Wooyoung away. It was before a lot of things.                You sighed. “Well, when I was showering last night? Before dinner?” You mentally cringed at what you were about to say: “I heard some noises outside. I’m pretty sure – No, I’m 100 percent confident that it was Wooyoung and Rose going at it. If you know what I mean.”                “I can guess,” Yeosang said. “And that bothered you, why?”                “I never said it bothered me,” you said. Too defensive. “I don’t like Rose,” you admitted, knowing damn well it was not just that. From the look on Yeosang’s face, you could see he was thinking the same thing. And there was something else too... You were grateful and relieved when he left it at that, though. Instead, Hongjoong pointed you to a small café.                Although it might be small, it was not characterless. There were few people inside that afternoon, leaving a lot of different cakes and pies for you and your friends to try out. As you waited for your order, you glanced around the café. It was covered in pink flowers, even the walls were painted pink. You saw what Hongjoong liked about it – it had a certain charm. One that apparently made Sooyoung feel like she had to excessively comment on everything in a squealy voice. You liked her, but her excitement was giving you headaches. Honestly, you were still feeling kind of miserable and sorry for yourself.                Yeosang cheered you up by sharing the remainder of his chocolate-cherry cake with you when you had finished your own, knowing the best remedy for what you were feeling was food. While on your way back to the lakeside, Yeosang kept to your side, purposefully bringing up things you had done together where Wooyoung hadn’t been involved. The happy memories you had shared with Yeosang were plenty enough to make you smile again and by the time you arrived back to camp, you were genuinely in a good mood.                “Y/N!” Yechan exclaimed as she saw you. “Come jump in! The water’s so good.”                “Gotta set up the barbecue,” you said. “Sorry!” All of that was a lie. After all, you didn’t really have to set up the barbecue and there was Hongjoong already getting started on it. In all honesty, you just didn’t feel like joining the happy couples in the water. As soon as Seonghwa and Sooyoung had raced each other to the campsite, they had discarded their clothes and jumped in the water, engaging in a splash war against Jongho and Soojin. Alice was seated on San’s shoulders, battling Rose, who was on Wooyoung’s shoulders. You didn’t want anything to do with them.                Instead you chose a soft spot on the blankets next to Mingi, who was sound asleep, Rose’s straw sunhat shading his eyes from the sun, relentlessly beating down. Yunho and Daemi were on his other side, playing a game of cards that Yeosang immediately joined, claiming it as his favourite game, although he then proceeded to ask what the rules were.                You watched Hongjoong struggle with the barbecue for a while until you decided it was time to help him out of his misery. As he noticed you helping him, his face immediately brightened up. “What did you think? Of the café?”                “It was great, Joongie,” you said, giving him your brightest smile. You actually meant it. “Thanks for taking us.”                “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I just wanted you to have some fun.”                With a sigh you leaned back to sit. “Is everyone just a mind reader now?”                “No, I just overheard your conversation with Yeo on the way to town. Sorry about that. If you allow me to give you some advice – I think you should just be having fun and not letting something like that bother you. And anyway, I always thought you had a crush on San, not Wooyoung.”                You looked at him, shocked. “What?”                “You heard what I said. Hand me the coals, please.”                You did as he said. “What do you mean I have a crush on San?”                Joong shrugged. “It’s pretty clear from the way you behave around him that you do. Or maybe did?” He winked at you playfully. “I mean, why else would you be angry at Wooyoung for finally approaching Rose? You know he’s been talking about her for years now.”                You didn’t know. Perhaps your friendship with Wooyoung was not as unconditional and carefree and honest as you always thought it had been. “Joongie, you’re not making me feel any better right now,” you said, your mind wandering off to his previous comment about you crushing on San. It was true that you liked him, there was nearly no denying it. But if Hongjoong knew, then did the others as well?                “I don’t know, Y/N. I think you should just let loose and have some fun.”                When the fire beneath the barbecue was finally going and Daemi took your place at it to grill chicken satay, you took her place at the card game. When the first batch of food was served, you woke Mingi to call for the others, still in the water. They were quick to join at the mention of food.                Everyone gathered in a circle, smiling and laughing, but all you could do was stab at your food as you looked around the group, wondering who out of all of them knew of your crush on San, who, by the way, looked absolutely stunning with the water droplets on his naked chest glimmering in the afternoon sunlight, like little diamonds. You hated it.                “Say ‘ah’.” You turned to look at Wooyoung, an apologetic smile on his face.                “Ah?”                “No, like this.” He widened his mouth and stuck out his tongue a little, dragging out the ‘ah’ longer. You rolled your eyes but followed his example, which was followed by Wooyoung putting a piece of meat on your tongue. You chewed on it, watching him as he sat down next to you. “Here. Have some more.”                “My favourite,” you said, grabbing the plate from him. “Is this your version of a white flag?”                “Yes,” Wooyoung said. “I’m sorry about the joke I made. Yeosang might have mentioned you really didn’t like it and I guess it’s a pretty assholey thing to say anyway. I don’t want to fight with you.”                “I guess I have to apologize as well,” you said. “I’m not in the best mood and I’m taking it out on you. Among others.” You glanced over at San before focusing back on Woo. “I don’t want to fight with you either.”                “Good.” Wooyoung stuck out his pinkie finger to you, as if you were kindergartners still. “Promise me that we won’t fight during this trip again.”                “Just this trip?” you joked, curling your own pinkie around his. You’re just about to say something else, when a girl plops down on Wooyoung’s other side. You would recognize that blonde hair anywhere.                “Got you pork belly, like you asked.” Rose handed a new plate to Wooyoung. “Hi, Y/N. Why didn’t you go swimming?”                “I might swim after dinner,” you said, surprised she even talked to you. You were not so surprised to find out this was the only thing she was going to say to you, instead looking at Wooyoung, totally transfixed by him. You sighed, going back to stabbing at your food. At least there was no fighting with your best friend now.                You’re glad when the drinking begins and you have an excuse to chug down liquor. You even go swimming for a bit, hanging around Yechan and Yeosang the most. It’s not long after evening falls that Soojin calls out for everyone to return to the farmhouse. You’re clinging onto your beer bottle on the way back, walking next to Yeosang, your arm linked through his. After all, he managed to majorly cheer you up and perhaps he could perform that same magic trick again.                Back at the farmhouse, Mingi perked up enough from his massive hangover to call everyone to him for a beer pong match. With a little help of Anna, he set up teams of two to compete against each other. “Y/N and Yeosang, you begin! Against Yechan and Daemi.”                As you took your place next to Yeosang, you realized it was obvious either Mingi or Anna had picked up on the tension in the house. You kind of wanted to convince Yeosang to cheat and purposefully lose the game, but when you saw his fanatism at landing the first ball in Daemi’s cup, you didn’t have the heart to tell him you didn’t want to play. He was just so smiley and happy… You convinced yourself that a) you wanted to win this game just as badly as he did and b) that you’re not absolutely shit at beer pong.                The first opponents were luckily nearly as bad as you are at the game. Although the ball takes awfully long to land in the last cup, you and Yeosang still manage to defeat Yechan and Daemi. While the two of you are not up against anyone yet, you vow to yourself to get even more tipsy. It won’t help with aim but you were sure it would help your mood. It’s a fine line between tipsy and drunk and you were walking it with little care in the world.                Your next opponents were Hongjoong and Jongho, who already proclaimed themselves Kings of Beer Pong. Only to be beat by you and Yeosang; turns out Hongjoong just had extreme luck playing against Seonghwa and Sooyoung, for his aim is honestly worse than yours, and Jongho can’t keep up against Yeosang, who deserves to officially be crowned King of Beer Pong.                Yeosang’s so surprisingly good at the game that you’re not surprised when you win the finale round against Wooyoung and San. Overcome with emotions that you can’t properly explain and do not want to face and will probably never address ever again, you reached for Yeosang’s face, cupping it in your hands and pressing your lips against his. You felt a shock of surprise run through his body, but his hands effortlessly found your hips to steady you and kiss back.                Despite the absence of butterflies or fireworks or any of the sorts, you become aware of how unaware you are of the sounds around you two. The only sound that’s coming through is Yeosang’s small moans and the sounds kisses tend to make. It doesn’t help that you’re both using an obscene amount of tongue, but you might be drunk and you don’t care – especially not that anyone or everyone is watching and cheering.                When you pull away, you smile at Yeosang, who looks a little stunned but not unhappy about your actions. “Congratulations, King of Beer Pong,” you tell him.                “Thanks, Queen.” He even has the liberty of squeezing your ass, earning him a yelp that broadens his smile. Take that, Woosan, you think to yourself. “Let’s get you another drink.” With his arm still around you, Yeosang guides you to the kitchen, away from prying eyes, both unaware that Mingi was ready to crown you both winners and offer you a prize. You couldn’t care less about what the prize was.                The kitchen is completely empty except for a collection of trash and dirty plates and glasses. After clearing a space on the countertop, Yeosang picked you up with a surprising amount of strength and sat you down on it, then going to fix you a glass of water. “There you go.”                “Water?” you complain. “Yeo-“                “No, you need to sober up a little,” he spoke in a tone of amusement. “I think you’re an amazing kisser and I really enjoyed that, but I also know that kiss wasn’t meant for me.”                “Oh, are you going to tell me who the kiss was meant for then? Because, last I checked, my lips were on yours and not on anyone else’s. I think that was meant for you, Yeosang.”                “Maybe,” he said, “but then with the intent of hurting someone else. Or whatever you thought you were doing back there. You’re not attracted to me.”                “Says who?” you pull Yeosang closer to you by his shirt collar, capturing him between your legs. He looks profoundly comfortable in between them, but you know what he means when he says: “I do. You do, with your body language.”                You rolled your eyes at him, setting the glass of water down next to you. “I’m not going to endure another talk about how in love I am with San and how everyone can tell.”                “I wasn’t going to say you’re in love with San.”                “Okay, Wooyoung then. Only because I was jealous he fingered Rose on the patio. The patio! That one over there!” You pointed at it for emphasis. “All of those feelings are not yours to comment on, Yeosang. Hongjoong.” You narrowed your eyes at him as he entered the kitchen rather innocently.                “Wh-“ Hongjoong locked eyes with Yeosang and immediately his eyes widened. “I’m out of here right now. Sorry.”                “Drink your water,” Yeosang said, giving you a little pat on the knee before following Hongjoong out of the kitchen. You sighed in frustration, grabbing the glass and bringing it to your lips. It actually tasted pretty nice to be drinking something as pure as water after all of the alcohol you had been consuming. Perhaps Yeosang was right and the kiss hadn’t been meant for him at all, not even a little bit. Perhaps you were just trying to make him jealous. And you weren’t quite sure which him you meant with that.                Perhaps the him that came walking into the kitchen right at that moment, empty bottle of beer in hand. “Oh, have you come to lecture me too?” you said before he could even open his mouth – just one look was enough. “I’m sick of it.”                “Well,” San said, “now that you mention it. Why did you kiss Yeosang?”                “Why wouldn’t I? You have been all over Alice too, haven’t you?”                “You really don’t understand, do you?”                “Understand what?” There was a viciousness to your voice that made San shake his head. “I’m not going to argue with you while you’re still drunk.”                “Yeah? Well-“ But you didn’t get a chance to say anything hurtful to him as he had already left the kitchen. With a sigh you chugged down the water, slid off the countertop and walked to your room. You could faintly hear all the noises in the living room, the partiers, but you were glad you weren’t there with them. This was not the fun trip you had planned for it to be.

Day 3 Even though Anna had planned something to do the day after, everyone was so hungover that no one really felt like going anywhere. You woke up first, quietly stepping over a snoring Yechan and trying not to wake a sleep-talking Daemi as you went to the single room across the floor to have a shower. This time without opening the window, even though you knew it was highly unlikely you would hear Wooyoung and Rose again. You went downstairs, made yourself breakfast, and by the time you had finished, the first people started coming down. The first was Jongho, followed by Soojin and Anna. Soon thereafter, Yunho and Daemi appeared as well, looking different states of dishevelled. There was still dried up spit in the corner of Yunho’s mouth. “Who’s up for a walk?” he excitedly said.                No one felt like going, but you jumped up at the opportunity to be away from the farmhouse for a bit. Accompanying Yunho on his walk was quite peaceful. You never had a really close relationship with him as you did Wooyoung or Yeosang, but you were happy to be around him. It certainly helped that your surroundings were breath-taking, with views you could barely get enough of. It was so vastly different from what you were used to living in the city, that being at the farmhouse felt all the more special. You were reminded that this was partially why you had agreed to come on this trip; to see the beauty of the nature park. Not to get wound up in drama you yourself created by being… Well, was there a word for the way you were feeling? The way you were acting?                It gave you some peace of mind walking with Yunho and realizing that he wasn’t going to break out in a lecture about not kissing Yeosang if you don’t like him, your everlasting crush on San, or whatever was going on with your friendship with Wooyoung. You had no desire to talk about any of that, but as you walked alongside Yunho, basking in the warm morning sunlight, it was the only thing you were thinking about.                By the time you guys circled back to the farmhouse, the others were up already. Most were still yawning and staring at their untouched plates of eggs and bacon with sleep in their eyes, but Yeosang perked up as you came in. He nodded with his head to get you outside on the patio from which you had seen San and Alice kissing the first night.                “I think I know what this is about,” you started. “Yeo, I was very drunk. It didn’t mean anything between us, at least not to me. I hope you understand.”                “I-“ Yeosang started, but he was interrupted by someone you really didn’t want to see at this particular moment.                “If you don’t like him, then why would you kiss him?” Wooyoung said, his arms crossing over one another in front of his chest. He stood leaning against the closed sliding door, obviously not understanding that this was a private conversation. Obviously not understanding that this was the last straw.                “Okay, I’m done with this,” you said. “Normally I feel like I can be honest with you both but for the past few days-“ You sighed, not fully comfortable with sharing every thought you had, the things that had drove you to go bed so early in the night to mull over by yourself. “You know, I did it because I had something to prove. And besides, why is everyone so upset over this? San is always face sucking Alice whenever he can and you!” You had subconsciously moved closer to Wooyoung, now pricking his chest with your finger. “You did whatever with Rose out there and you didn’t even know that everything you did, I could perfectly hear. You’re both having so much fun with the girls here, but are so quick to scold me for wanting to do the same with Yeosang?”                “That’s really not the same thing,” Wooyoung started.                “Oh, and what makes it different?”                “You’ve known Yeosang for years!”                “You’ve known Rose for years. San has known Alice for years.”                “It’s all not the same thing.”                “Do I get a say in this?” Yeosang said, finally intercepting. Perhaps he had got quite uncomfortable with seeing Wooyoung and you so close to each other, staring each other down.                You both broke away from each others’ gaze at the same time and spoke simultaneously: “No!”                There was a silence and finally a sigh from Wooyoung. “Come find me when you think you can talk like a grown-up, yeah?” He didn’t even really sound mad, perhaps somewhere between defeated and disappointed. He tugged open the door and slammed it shut behind him. You waited for a second, not daring to look at Yeosang, before you followed Wooyoung inside. Instead of heading up the stairs behind him, you went into the kitchen and out onto the patio.                There was no one out. You hoped for Yeosang that he was inside, since clouds had gathered above and there was a light drizzle coming down now. You let it cool your temper as well as your skin, thinking of the trip. You had looked forward to it for so long but it really wasn’t going as you had planned. Yes, you had joked with Daemi and Yechan that some crazy things would happen, claiming that Mingi would be the first one to throw up because of all of the alcohol (you were right about that) and that someone would accidentally throw someone in the pool while they still had their phones on them (hadn’t happened yet, but the trip wasn’t over). Daemi had bet that she would get into an argument with Yechan, Yechan had bet that she would catch Seonghwa and Sooyoung in a compromising position.                The bet made about yourself had been that you would drunkenly act upon your crush on San. You had known when placing the bets with your friends that there was a very slim chance you would ever dare to approach San in that way and as you stood outside, overlooking the mountain area, you realised you didn’t want San anymore. Not the way you had always wanted him, at least.                You used to think San was relationship material, the only guy you wanted to fulfil the need of having a boyfriend. But he wasn’t. He was perhaps too flirty, perhaps too much a person you could only look at from a distance and admire. He wasn’t boyfriend material. Just a friend.                So what about Yeosang? Was that you drunkenly acting upon your hidden crush for him? Was that kiss because you liked him? Was he even boyfriend material to you? No. The answer was simple and clear, you didn’t even have to think about it. Yeosang was just one of your closest friends. He was sweet, really, and you would be lying if you said you had never thought about how it would have been if you were to date him. You were sure he harboured fond feelings for you as well, but those were probably along the same line as what you felt for him. Nothing romantic. After all, it was Yeosang, and you two had known each other for forever. You’d seen each others’ good and bad sides and you thought you knew what he would be like in a relationship. You’d seen his failed relationships play out in the past. You thought you had that figured out.                So then that kiss… Who were you trying to prove something to? What were you even trying to prove? It was true what you had said, however. You were trying to prove to yourself that... Your mind flicked to the first night, when you had heard Wooyoung and Rose’s escapades. You were bothered about it, in a different way than what you had felt when you caught San and Alice.                You replayed the fight you just had with Wooyoung in your head. What did he care what you were up to? You sat down on the small bench. It was wet now, washed clean by the rain; there was no way you otherwise would have sat down on it, considering what had happened a few days before. You rested your head against the wall of the farmhouse. Closing your eyes, you saw the look in Wooyoung’s eyes. You felt how close you had been standing to him.                A knock on the patio door startled you. When you opened your eyes you saw Yeosang, eyes big and with two mugs on a tray. “Hey, Y/N… Can we talk? I brought hot chocolate.”                “Sure,” you said, patting the spot next to you. Yeosang came outside, handing you the tray as he closed the door behind him. “What did you want to talk about?”                “Well… I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea. About anything.” This was clearly something that had been bothering him for a while, longer than everything that has gone on in the farmhouse. “Yesterday when you kissed me… I know why you did it and I know why you’ve been so upset these past couple of days. But I just wanted to clear things up so there’s no misunderstandings between us. And besides, I feel like I have lied to you all these years I’ve known you.” He took a deep breath, his hands wrapping around the mug. You saw he was shaking and his nails were bitten down. Maybe you hadn’t paid enough attention to his feelings, instead only rambling on about yours. “I guess I got a little upset this morning too. I hate seeing you and Wooyoung fight, for many reasons. But also because… because I am in love with Wooyoung.”                “W-what?”                “I like Wooyoung. Y/N… I’m gay.”                “But, Yeo…” You bit your lip, wrapping your own hands around the mug. From everything he could’ve said, this was the least of what you had expected. “Wooyoung is… straight.”                “I know, I know!” Yeosang quickly said. “I’ve always known I don’t have a chance with him. Not romantically. I’m fine being his friend, just his friend. You have to believe me.” He was still shaking however. “I also know that no matter what, I want to see him happy. And knowing what I know, you would realize that the Wooyoung he is around Rose? That’s not him being truly happy.”                You frowned. “What are you trying to say?”                “I mean that he’s more into you than he’s into Rose.”                “What?” You shook your head. “Yeo, that’s not right. Wooyoung doesn’t like me like that. I mean, it’s pretty clear-“                “Why do you think that everyone is so upset with you kissing me?” Yeosang chuckled. “They might’ve thought you were into San, or now that you’re into me. But they know for sure that Wooyoung is into you. He’s told San and I that much before. And I think you like him back.”                “How does everyone know that better than I do myself?”                He shrugged. “I can’t speak for everyone, but… All these years of being in love with Wooyoung means I look at him more or less the same way he looks at you. And when you look at him? I see the same thing. You two are just oblivious to each other.”                You finally took a sip of the hot chocolate, your thoughts aligning in your head to form a question: “So what does this thing with Rose mean? Why did he… finger her?” You realized how pathetic it sounded to ask.                “I don’t know. That’s something you have to ask him yourself.”                You nodded and then you turned to Yeosang again. “Yeo, thanks for telling me. I appreciate knowing that you trust me enough to.” You put your arm around him, pulling him into a side-hug like you used to do when you two were younger. “Who else knows?”                “Only Hongjoong does.”                “Of course,” you said. Joong had come out of the closet as bisexual about two years ago. It made sense Yeosang would want to go to him, knowing Hongjoong wouldn’t judge him. “Nothing changes, Yeo.”                You hope Yeosang feels relieved, finally having that burden off his shoulders. You talk a little about how long he’s known and eventually Yeosang asks to leave the subject alone for now and go swimming instead. You are not one to deny him, so you head upstairs to get changed and meet him at the swimming pool. It’s empty except for Yechan and Seonghwa. Sooyoung and Soojin are on sunbeds on the side, but it’s clear the girls were fast asleep. The drizzle of before has stopped but the clouds have remained, however the temperature is climbing upwards as you’re in the pool.                When you and Yeosang join, it breaks up the conversation between Yechan and Seonghwa, the latter of them suggesting to play a game instead. You team up with Seonghwa to even out the playing field and through multiple rounds of a handball-resembling game, you realise that it was futile because you and Seonghwa were bound to lose the second you agreed to teaming up together.                The sun started going down while you were still hanging by the pool, wrinkled out like a raisin but enjoying the contrast between the cool water of the pool and the stifling heat of the overcast summer weather. You and Yeosang didn’t get out of the pool until Anna came to collect everyone for dinnertime. You’re happy sitting in between Yeosang and Mingi – who had remained in his room for the better part of the day, insanely hungover again and having emptied his stomach multiple times – as they talk over your head about this TV show they figured out they both had been watching.                Having not changed out of your bikini for dinner, you are the first to get back into the water afterwards. It’s still warm outside, although it’s pretty much pitch black except for the porchlight. It’s bound to rain and you guess there will probably be thunder and lightning involved. After a moment, you’re joined in the water with Daemi and Yechan, and then Yunho and Mingi, and then San and Alice. As you float around, trying to avoid getting caught in the middle of Daemi-Mingi against Yechan-Yunho, you glance over at San and Alice. They were laughing at whatever joke they told each other, genuine happiness in their eyes, and you knew it didn’t matter that you thought you had a crush on San. He was obviously very happy with Alice. It didn’t matter.                That feeling was amplified when you noticed Wooyoung, just a small distance behind San and Alice, kicking around a ball with Jongho. You were about to look away when you saw him glance over and shoot you a smile. Despite your fight, you smiled back. Maybe this was the right time to make up. You nodded your head in the direction of the trampoline, farther our into the field behind the farmhouse. It was too dark to see out by the trampoline, even with the porchlight, so no one went there at night. It was the perfect spot.                Wooyoung nodded, kicked the ball back to Jongho and said: “I’ll be right back. Go annoy Hongjoong, he looks bored.”                You both laid down on the trampoline in silence, staring up at the sky. Clouds were chasing each other and there was a low rumble in the distance. Thunder. “I’m sorry about how I reacted,” you said, knowing to speed this up. You had known Wooyoung since you two were little and he was still scared of thunder and lightning. By now he had grown up more and also matured – he had told you he still was a little scared, but at least he saw the beauty in the violence of Mother Nature.                “Me too.”                “I just didn’t want to see Yeosang get hurt.”                You were hit suddenly with the realisation that Wooyoung had no idea about Yeosang’s sexuality, or his crush on him. You wouldn’t tell him, because it was up to Yeosang to tell, and that meant that you couldn’t say that it didn’t matter you had kissed Yeosang, because of obvious reasons. Instead you said: “Yeo and I discussed it earlier today. We’re not mad at each other or anything. And I figured this was the best possible time to be honest with you.”                “About what?”                “About…” you sighed lightly. “About that I might… like you?”                “You like me?” Wooyoung sounded no longer like himself, but a little more choked up, his tone of voice very serious. Was he angry at you for sharing this? For fucking up your friendship? You hadn’t even considered the consequences to your friendship, or what any of this would do to your dynamic between you two and Yeosang.                “I guess?”                “You guess or you know?”                “I don’t know. I think I do. Everyone tells me I do.”                “Well, if you don’t know, then I cannot tell you that I like you too.”                Now it was your turn to feel stunned. “What?” You had been told by Yeosang, of course, but that was different. Now you heard it right from the source, from Wooyoung himself.                “I like you too.”                “But I thought you were more into Rose,” you said. “I mean, you two… out on the patio… I thought you were more into her.”                Wooyoung shrugged, making the whole trampoline wiggle. “She’s pretty. I- Okay, I have shared so much with you before but it feels so weird saying it now.” He let out an awkward laugh before he said: “I just felt horny. You know? And Rose was there and she was horny too and she’s not a sight for sore eyes, so I thought: what’s so bad about this? I didn’t know you were showering right above us, or that you had the window open. Otherwise I would’ve probably taken her somewhere else. Or not done it at all.”                “You were just horny?” you repeated. Wooyoung nodded, the trampoline shaking again. “So no feelings for Rose then?”                “Nope,” he said, letting the p pop. “Nothing serious. Not like the way I feel for you.”                You moved over closer to him, shakily reaching out for his hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t realise it sooner. Then we wouldn’t have had to fight.”                “I should’ve told you the second I knew,” he said, taking your hand in his and squeezing it lightly. “So what made you realise? I knew you liked San-“                You blushed, which fortunately, he could not see. “Can we not talk about San right now? I mean, yes, I had a crush on him, but it was silly. I mean, I liked him when we were still in high school, you know? He was the guy every girl had a crush on and I guess I just jumped on the bandwagon. And I always thought it would be easier to hook up with him because we were already friends, but that just makes it more difficult. And I don’t know him as well as I know you. I just don’t feel what I think you’re supposed to feel when you’re in love – with him. I never noticed the way I feel about you, though, until I compared my feelings for you to what I feel for San or Yeosang.”                “Well, you’d best believe it was torture to see you kissing Yeosang, not knowing what you were truly feeling.”                “Would it be better if I kissed you instead?” And with no further words, you bridged the distance between the two of you, softly kissing his lips. Where your kiss with Yeosang had primarily taken place because you were drunk and trying to make whoever else jealous, the way you had been jealous all throughout the trip, this kiss served an entirely different purpose. It was strange too, kissing Wooyoung, whom you had known for so long and never imagined you would harbour romantic feelings for. But there was a spark, a spark that caught and ignited a flame inside of you. A flame that apparently burned inside of Wooyoung as well, for he pulled you infinitely closer, until you were on his lap.                It was very uncomfortable on that trampoline, and you were glad when a dizzyingly bright flash of lightning followed by deafening thunder caused Wooyoung to yelp. “Let’s go inside,” you said, hopping off the trampoline and pulling Wooyoung with you.                As you walked back, your hand in his, he bent down a little to whisper in your ear: “Come to my room tonight, yeah? Take your film camera.”                And so you did. After everyone had gone to bed, you sneaked out of yours to cross the floor to the room Wooyoung shared with San.

Day 4 The room smelled of boy. And not just any boy. You glanced around in the darkness, the first thing that stuck out to you being Shiber. San had brought his cuddle toy to this trip? You wondered for a second what Alice would think of her having to share the bed and San with Shiber, until you realized that she wasn’t there. You shut the door after yourself, blocking out the light from the hallway to prevent San from waking up, instead going over to Wooyoung. You set your film camera down on the night stand and when you turned to look at Woo, he was already sitting up in the bed.                “There you are,” he said. He sounded surprisingly relieved.                “Did you think I wasn’t going to show up?”                Wooyoung didn’t answer but instead pulled you onto the bed, blindly placing his hands on your cheeks and pulling you in for a kiss. Instantly, it clouded your mind with desire for him. Your head spun as he pulled you on top of him. You gasped as he let himself fall backwards onto the bed, allowing him to slip his tongue inside of your mouth. It was almost obscene – how good of a kisser Wooyoung was, how his tongue softly tapped against yours, how his hands slid down from your face to the hem of your pyjama shorts, slipping his hands under the fabric and onto your ass.                You groaned into his mouth as his hands knead your ass, pulling you closer to him. Wooyoung pulled back only a little bit, but you hated the moment, his voice slightly breathless as he said: “Don’t be too loud. San might wake.”                You glanced over to the other bed and yelped to find San already sitting upright, Shiber wrapped in his arms, just staring at you. “What the fuck!” you exclaimed.                “I’m already awake,” San said.                Wooyoung pushed himself up on his elbows. “Have you just been… listening to us? Watching us? The whole time?”                San shrugged. “It was kind of hot. Maybe next time you’ll allow me to join in.”                You looked at Wooyoung for a second, exchanging a glance. There was an unspoken conversation within that glance, a result of many years of friendship in which you had been a unit, had had an unbreakable bond. And now all of that was transforming into whatever this was, and someone was asking to partake in this same adventure with you? You gulped as you realized what you were seeing in Wooyoung’s eyes. “Fuck,” you muttered. And you nodded.                “San, come here,” Wooyoung said, his voice an octave deeper. San was quick to throw Shiber aside and make his way over to you. You don’t think you’ve ever seen him move this fast, although he was as quick to come to a halt at the side of the bed. You felt your breath hitch as Wooyoung grabbed San’s shirt in his hand and pulled him closer, essentially making San topple over on the bed as he lost his balance. “I think Y/N hasn’t had enough love this trip. If you know what I mean.”                You gulped, not entirely knowing what to say. The boy you were currently into and the boy you had always been harbouring a crush on were on the bed together with you and it was pretty clear what was going to happen now. You felt a familiar wetness, synchronic with San nodding to Wooyoung’s statement. “I think we should give her whatever she wants, don’t you agree?” San nodded again. Wooyoung then turned to you: “Tell us what you want us to do.”                For a moment you were about to ask for what you had always lusted after, which was a filthy, intense make out session with San. But right now, looking at him – his shirt crumpled in the place Wooyoung had pulled him in, his hair messy from having been in bed earlier, his plump lips slightly parted and with a small tent visible through his pyjama pants – you knew what you wanted to see. And still it even surprised you a little when you said: “Kiss each other.”                San’s head shot around to look at Wooyoung, physically below the both of you but in some other way he was dominating you both. “Is that okay?”                Wooyoung leaned up only a little bit to put his hand on the back of San’s head and pull him in, their lips locking. Right off the bat there was tongue involved. You were well aware that you were staring, and well aware that there was no one to catch you staring as San increasingly got more comfortable and seemed more into the kiss. “Slowly,” you instructed. “Slowly.” They listened as if they were puppets, entirely under your control.               ��The kiss was somehow more heated now that they weren’t hungrily clawing at each other. You thought to yourself how this couldn’t be real life. Just a couple of days ago you had been wanting San as badly as ever, then you had thought him to belong to Alice, and now he was here. Let alone the entire situation with Wooyoung – how just a few hours ago you had still been angry with him for fingering Rose on the patio. But that was something you didn’t want to think about at that moment. “Woo, strip San for me, please.”                Wooyoung listened well – he helped San lift his arms above his head and proceeded to take off his shirt for him, tossing it aside. Next were San’s pants. It took a bit more effort to strip those and then get rid of his boxers too. “San, your turn,” you said. There was no shame visible in Wooyoung, who seemed utterly comfortable with stripping as well. They were still kissing, albeit a little bit more clumsy now San was trying to take Wooyoung’s pyjama’s off. It had never occurred to you that perhaps San wasn’t all that confident and experienced as you had taken him to be. Perhaps he had only been truly intimate with a handful of people. Perhaps this was a first for him – the first time he had a threesome. You couldn’t say you had any experience in this department either.                “Woo-“ you started, but the instructions you were about to give him stuck in your throat as Wooyoung ripped himself free off San and said: “Aren’t you going to get undressed, baby?”                Your mouth almost fell open in an o-shape at the pet name. You had never heard Wooyoung call anyone by a pet name. Let alone be the one to be called one by him. “Sorry.” You felt like you had to say sorry. Why? You weren’t sure. “San?”                San, who visibly wasn’t entirely sure what was going on but was along for the ride regardless, scooted over so he could reach for you. He was less clumsy with you, but you weren’t sure if you had to attribute that to past experiences with girls or to not being engaged in a wild make out session with you. Which quickly changed as your lips smashed together.                Now the three of you were all fully naked, everything that was uncomfortable or awkward about the situation seemed to ebb away. You wrapped your arms around San’s neck, pulling yourself up a little bit so you could rub yourself on him. You couldn’t remember how long it had been since you had started crushing on him, but you had had some fantasies and wet dreams about San before. Admittedly, you’d had them about Wooyoung too. You felt his hands sneak in between San and you and jumped a little from the sudden sensation of Wooyoung’s thumb against your clit. You were sure his other hand was wrapped around San’s shaft – there was no other explanation for the sudden noise that erupted from the boy, your kiss temporaily stopping.                “What do you want me to do, baby?” Wooyoung’s soft voice sounded.                “Hm-“ You didn’t trust yourself to be able to properly tell him what you wanted, so instead you let go of San to kiss Wooyoung instead. San chased after you, attaching his lips to your neck. The confidence he gained made you groan into Wooyoung’s mouth as San nibbled and licked and sucked, sure to leave marks behind. There were noises from San as well, noises that were only explainable by Wooyoung moving his hand on San.                It occurred to you that this was every girls’ dirtiest fantasy and you weren’t taking one second for granted. You let Wooyoung push you back onto the bed, which was in no way able to fit three people in it, but you somehow made it work. You were glad Wooyoung didn’t need any verbal instructions; softly pushing his head down, in the direction of where you needed him most, was enough. He went to work, expertly licking and sucking. It nearly made you fold in on yourself from the sheer pleasure he was giving you, but you were too busy tending to San’s proud erection, oozing precum from Wooyoung’s earlier ministrations.                You wrapped your lips around him, working your mouth in a way that was sure to earn San’s approval – it was audible in his moans and groans, ones you gave back to him from Wooyoung’s actions. San was the first to succumb. The pleasure rendered him nearly unable to speak, but you understood the little taps on your cheek well enough. You didn’t pull away however, allowing San’s cum to fill your mouth. And you swallowed.                San seemed just about spent, but he didn’t leave you hanging. Instead, he went to work on your neck again, his hands coming up to cup your boobs. San didn’t have to do much for Wooyoung had done most of the work on getting you to your high. You came with a high-pitched moan; there was a certain shyness overtaking you at the sound you hadn’t previously thought you could make. You were panting, admiring Wooyoung and your glistening juices on his lips as he came up. There was very little to no talking as you motioned for him to come closer. The sudden urge overcame you – you couldn’t explain what had triggered it. You pushed yourself up just a little bit, in a way that wouldn’t disturb San, as you pulled Wooyoung just a little bit closer, your tongue darting out to lick Wooyoung’s lips, getting a taste of yourself.                “What about you?” you asked tracing your hand down Wooyoung’s chest, down his happy trail, to his cock. “What do you want? Tell me.”                “San-ie,” he said. San looked up from his work on your neck, his eyes slightly hazy. “I want you… to suck me.” That was the first time you saw Wooyoung seem even just a little bit fazed by the situation, instead of looking like he had everything under control. “And Y/N, baby… kiss me.”                You gave San a quick kiss on his lips before coming up onto your knees so you could reach Wooyoung better. There was equal part of kissing and moaning from Wooyoung’s side – he was a lot more vocal than you had expected. The part of Wooyoung that was moaning mirrored the part of you that wanted him inside of you, but tonight was not the night. Instead, tonight was the night Wooyoung grabbed your film camera from his night stand and, in the dark, figured out how to take photos of you and San, coated in Woo’s cum. Yes, tonight was the night Wooyoung coated both you and San in cum – and then went to clean it up himself with San’s T-shirt from the floor.                “Woo,” San complained, but you both heard quite clearly that his heart wasn’t in it.                “Ssh.” Wooyoung pressed a kiss against San’s forehead and then to yours. “Let’s go to sleep.”

The bed really was too small for three people. You had thought it the night before and you were proven right the next morning, when you woke up to a yelp from a distraught San – he had fallen off the bed. He was disgustingly handsome, but your heart didn’t flutter the way it had before. What had remained the same, however, was the heat in your cheeks at the memory of what you got up to the night before, the evidence right there on San’s T-shirt, which he had picked up off the floor with a disgusted expression. “I probably won’t be able to wear this ever again. Damn you, Wooyoung.”                You were surprised to find Wooyoung awake already too, one of his arms folded behind his head. His eyes had been closed before, which lead you to believe he was still asleep, but the smile that played on his lips was unmistakably one of someone who was awake and heard every word of what San had just said.                You watched as San strode across the room and threw his T-shirt in the trash can behind the door. “I’m taking a shower,” he announced, leaving you and Wooyoung in the bed by yourselves as he closed the door behind him.                Wooyoung’s eyes stayed closed, his smile having slightly faded. You pushed yourself up on one elbow and looked at Wooyoung, really looked at him. You had known him for so many years, had gone on so many adventures with him… This was the next big adventure. You reached out, doing something you had always thought of doing but never felt confident enough to. You traced his finely shaped eyebrows, the curve of his eyes… You trailed your finger down his cheeks to rest at the corner of his lips. You were about to carefully trace his lips, full and relaxed, when Wooyoung suddenly snapped his teeth at your finger.                “Woo!” you complained, pouting at him. His eyes were open now, the brown highlighted to several shades of gold in the narrow stroke of sunlight from the window. By the way the sun shone into the room, you could see it was nearing noon. Although in that case, it wasn’t exactly morning anymore, this was by far the best morning you had spent at the farmhouse. “Why did you do that?” You let your finger fall back to his lips and this time he let you trace them, his warm breath hitting your skin. When you let his lips alone, opting to crawl into his embrace instead, you said: “San joined us last night…” Stating the obvious. Great.                “Was it good?” Wooyoung asked, his hand coming up to play with your hair.                “Yeah. I liked it.”                “Me too.” You could hear from his tone of voice – delicious, delicious morning voice – that he was smiling. “I hope San had a good time too. But next time I want you all to myself.”                You felt your heart flutter at his words. There was a next time and that next time would consist of you and Wooyoung exploring each other. You were absolutely certain that this was the best morning at the farmhouse – you felt like the happiest girl on earth. You didn’t know what to say, so instead you just hummed in agreement.                “Would you like me to bring you breakfast?” Wooyoung asked after a while.                “Eggs and sausages,” you said.                “Ooh, making demands now? Actually using your words?” He chuckled and tapped your shoulder, signalling you to get up so he could move. You pushed yourself up and watched as Wooyoung got out of bed. With his back toward you, you saw his muscles stand out as he bend to pick up his shirt off the floor. The room was a mess. “Any preferences for your breakfast beverage, milady?”                You grinned. “The finest tea you serve, milord.”                “Of course.” He bowed before making his way out of the room.                As you were left alone in Wooyoung’s bed you tried to wrap your head around the events of the night before. Coming to the farmhouse you had never expected that this was the way you would end the trip. You hadn’t even suspected anything remotely like this would happen. You got out of bed, dressing yourself in the clothes from the night before, before crossing the room to open up the window.                You had just crawled back into bed, sitting up with your back against the wall, when San came back, his hair wet and a towel hung lowly around his waist. He closed the door behind him and got to getting dressed as you watched him. The silence between the two of you was palpable but nonetheless quite comfortable. You wouldn’t know what to say anyway.                “I didn’t mean to insert myself,” San suddenly spoke up, sitting down on the edge of his bed, clutching Shiber to his chest, “in between you and Woo. I know it was all quite new to you both.”                You shrugged, leaning your head against the wall. “We both wanted it. You didn’t insert yourself in at all. Was it good?” you couldn’t help yourself asking.                San nodded, his cheeks turning pink. “I hadn’t expected it.”                “Believe me, me neither.” You looked at the way San was playing with Shiber’s tail. “It was really new to us,” you then said, surprising the both of you. “I mean, we were friends. And now we’re more.”                “I think everyone saw it coming.”                “I don’t think so,” you said, shaking your head. “You know, I was always crushing on you.”                “You were?” San looked up, stopping his playful antics with Shiber. “I didn’t notice.”                You nodded. “It was a long time crush. But there’s a difference between crushing on someone and loving someone. I realised that because I watched you and Alice.”                There was no response to the mention of Alice. You found you didn’t really care. San resumed playing with Shiber, but his eyes stayed trained on you. “So why Yeosang?”                “Vengeance.” You knew how terrible that sounded but there was no other word for it. “He was… there. I know it’s wrong. But I needed to know why I felt so jealous of Rose.” With a sigh you let yourself fall sideways onto the bed. “Now I do. And now I know why I don’t love you. Not in that way.”                The door opened to reveal Wooyoung carrying a tray, a literal mountain of food on the plate that he carried, a tea pot and three cups next to it. “Breakfast!” He set the tray down on the floor, and despite the mess that was the room, the three of you crowded around the tray to eat the breakfast Wooyoung had prepared.                The idyllic bubble of Woosan’s room had to be broken some time. You regretted stepping foot out of the room the second you did it, but you felt dirty so you wanted to shower, and besides that, you had to pack up the rest of your belongings to return home. You got into the shower, the same one you had been in the first day. The window was cracked open, letting in the sounds of nature and summer. You shut your eyes, enjoying the feeling of the water scorching your body.                Yechan was waiting for you in your bedroom when you got back to pack up. “I know where you went last night. I’m glad I didn’t have to hear it. I know Seonghwa and Sooyoung had a front row seat though.” She smiled. “So, you have to tell me all the details. How was your first threesome?”                “Yechan!” you covered your face with your hands. “I’m not going to talk about this with you.”                “Okay, maybe without details, then,” she said. “At least tell me you had a good time.”                You lowered your hands a little bit to look at her. Your best friend, with you through everything… “It was really good.” You bit your lip at the excitement that erupted from Yechan. Her happiness rubbed off on you, though, and soon enough you were, despite yourself, telling her just a few details. Like San having to throw out his shirt afterwards. You left out the pictures Wooyoung took of you and San. Those were private.                “Are you in a polyamorous relationship now?” she asked, her eyes wide and genuine.                You shook your head. “I don’t think so. I think it’s just me and Woo.”                Yechan nodded. “That’s good too.” She took your hand and softly squeezed, her smile saying more than words ever could.

The next person you had to talk to was Yeosang. You were carrying your bags out to the car when he popped up beside you. “Let’s go on the trampoline,” he said. You nodded, following him across the backyard to the trampoline, overlooking the vineyard. It was better in the day than it was last night.                The little kids in you jumped out by the way you nearly toppled over each other to get onto the trampoline, performing tricks as you jumped. After a bit you let yourself fall down, out of breath. “Yeo, I need to tell you something,” you said and he stopped jumping as well. “I had s-“                “Sex with Wooyoung. I know,” he said.                “You do?” Okay, perhaps you weren’t right to be surprised he knew. If you had to believe Yechan, the three of you hadn’t been very quiet. “I mean- San was there with us too.”                “I know. I heard everything,” Yeosang sat down on the trampoline now too. “The walls are pretty thin, you know.”                “I’m sorry.”                “You’re sorry that I heard?”                You chuckled. “Yes, that too. But also that I did that. Now that I know you like him-“                “It doesn’t matter,” Yeosang said, turning his head to look up at the sky, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand. “He’s not into guys anyway and I know how much you two like each other. I haven’t been completely blind over the last couple of years, you know? I’ll find someone that likes me like that and that I’ll like back. I’m fine with what happened. Don’t worry about me.”                “If you’re so sure,” you said, looking up at the sky too. “I just feel guilty.”                “Don’t.” Yeosang reached over and grabbed your hand in his, giving it a squeeze. “Just know that Rose also heard and she’s crazy upset with you two.”                You sat up, looking over at him. “Just about how many people have heard every single second of last night?”                “How many people are with us on the trip?” Yeosang started counting on his fingers. “So 13. Except maybe Mingi. He was out cold. That makes 12.”                “Jesus Christ,” you swear. And you do so again when you return to the farmhouse to find Rose already storming out to find you. Apparently someone had told her you and Yeosang were hanging out on the trampoline. There’s a look in her eyes that you’re not sure you ever want to see in anyone’s eyes ever again. It speaks of all-consuming anger. “Rose-“ you start. And that’s also where you end. She didn’t even take the time or effort to talk it out. Her first reaction was violence.                You had always jealously compared Rose’s visuals to that of an angel, but the way she lashed out at you proved she was all but that. “You slut!” she shrieked, her nails finding a hold in your skin. You barely felt the pain as she raked her nails down your face. You had never thought of yourself as a violent person, but you also weren’t the person to back down from someone attacking you like this. Your pent up frustrations were threatening to spill out of you in a violent manner, but before you could do much damage to her, Mingi’s strong arms wrapped around you, picking you up as if you weighed absolutely nothing, carrying you away as Jongho did the same to Rose, who was now clawing at him.                Mingi set you down on the countertop of the downstairs bathroom, checking you for injuries like the worried big brother he always acts like towards you. “You’re bleeding.” He grabbed tissues for you to hold against the wound, as if that would help much. Silly, hungover Mingi.                “She has sharp nails,” you said, wincing as you pressed the tissues against the marks.                Wooyoung came storming in, carrying a white box with a red cross on it. “First aid!” he said, to which Mingi nodded and left. You bet he knew why Rose had got violent with you too. “I didn’t know she was going to do that,” Wooyoung said, opening up the first aid kit.                “It’s fine,” you said. “Did I at least fight her off a little bit?”                He laughed. “God, that that’s the first thing you’re thinking about… Here, you’re bleeding.” He got to work, cleaning up the scratches Rose’s nails left behind on your face and arm. His fingers were soft on your skin, leaving behind a trail of heat. Even though you hadn’t known him to be very skilled with cleaning up wounds and bandaging up injuries, he was doing quite a good job. Better than Mingi would have done, had this been his job to do. “And the way you stood your ground was pretty hot, Y/N.”                You chuckled. “You’re just saying that.” You looked at Wooyoung as he took expert care of you, the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth in concentration, a habit you had always loved about him. You realized suddenly how blind you had been all along not to notice him, or his love for you. You had never actively fantasized about Wooyoung in a sexual way, although you had sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a romantic relationship with him. In your mind it had never worked out, whereas a relationship with San would seem the most plausible. He had always been the one boy you thought you would end up with, if it was going to be anyone out of the friend group. Everyone had known each other for varying lengths and with different intensities, something which had never lead you to believe that you and Wooyoung would be a good match.                “What are you looking at?” Wooyoung asked, chuckling, throwing away the stuff he had used to clean and bandage your wound.                “You,” you said, no trace of shyness.                “Like what you see?” Wooyoung wiggled his eyebrows, his classic playfulness erasing what you had felt over the past couple of days, leaving only behind what you had always thought to be simple, platonic feelings for your best friend. But now you knew it was more.                You shrugged. “I think you could do better, but this’ll have to do.” You stuck out your feet, wrapping your legs around him and pulling him closer. “Thanks for stitching me up.”                “I’m sorry about Rose,” he said, his arms coming to rest around your waist. “Take the same car as me back?”                “So you can finger me in the backseat while no one notices?” You chuckled at the surprise on his face. Must be due to your sudden dirty mouth. “No, thanks. I’ll ride with Yunho and Jongho. But maybe we can see each other when we get back? Get lunch, or dinner… Go out on a real date…”                “A real date.” Wooyoung nodded. “Sounds wonderful.”

Alternative scene How the ‘morning after’ would have had gone, had I decided to stick with the shower Woosan x reader threesome I had originally planned to happen after the initial Wooyoung x reader sex scene

The room smells. Of what you’re not entirely sure, but it’s sour and makes your nose crunch up as you slowly open your eyes, only to find Wooyoung next to you. His dark brown hair was curling up at the ends and his mouth was slightly open, his chest bare. You had managed to wrap most of the blankets around yourself, leaving Wooyoung uncovered. Not just his chest was bare. You draped the blankets over him and in the process, noticed you were only wearing a T-shirt. That’s it. Just a T-shirt. When you glance underneath the covers, you see it’s Woo’s, one you got together while he was shopping for his First Date T-Shirt, nearly 4 years ago now. You smiled to yourself at the memory and turned onto your back.                That’s when you realize that it wasn’t just you and Wooyoung in the room. “San!” You pull up the covers again to cover yourself, even though there’s no bit of you left uncovered. He’s casually resting on his bed, eyes trained on you and Wooyoung in the bed.                “Good morning. What a coincidence I catch you here. Morning, Woo.”                “San,” Wooyoung groans out from next to you. He seems utterly unfazed to see you laying next to him. He must know you’re wearing nothing but his T-shirt. You also reckon San must know what has happened between you and Wooyoung. “Aren’t you supposed to complain about your headache?”                “I think throwing up prevented my headache,” San said, pointing at a bucket at his side of the room, standing half under half next to his bed. You guessed that was what the sour smell was all about. “Aren’t you two supposed to be even a little bit ashamed that you two had steamy, hot sex while I was literally in the same room with you?”                “I just seized the opportunity,” Wooyoung said, wrapping his arm around you and pulling you against him. “And you were asleep.”                “Apparently not,” San said. “I was miserable, though. Maybe next time you decide to fuck each other again, you could invite me.”                “Oh, shut up,” you said, hiding your face in Woo’s chest. This is really just way worse than seeing San and Alice kissing on the edge of the swimming pool or Wooyoung fingering Rose while you’re in the shower. This is humiliation of a different kind.                “Why were you actually listening to us?” Wooyoung said.                San shrugged. “Like I said, I was miserable. Couldn’t sleep, especially not with those sounds. Disgusting. What would Rose say?” That remark landed him with Wooyoung’s pillow in his face. “Okay, yes, that was slightly mean. Sorry. Will it make you feel better if I say it was kind of hot though? Like, I don’t know what you did that made Y/N go like-“ He made a noise that landed him with your pillow in his face. “Okay, yes, shouldn’t have said that. But! Promise me next time you won’t let me get so drunk I won’t be able to join in, yeah?”                “Would you actually want to join?” you said. You weren’t sure if you were completely disgusted by this morning conversation with San, or if you were getting turned on again. You also weren’t entirely sure if you would have had Wooyoung pin you down underneath him if you had known San was in the bed opposite.                “Could be hot,” Woo said.                “Honestly, it’s been on my to-do list,” San said. “A threesome with someone who claims himself to be a sex god and also the hottest girl from high school? I wouldn’t say no to that.”                “You tell others you’re a sex god?” you laughed at Wooyoung who turned a suspicious shade of pink.

#wooyoung x reader #wooyoung imagine #wooyoung smut #yeosang x reader #yeosang imagine #yeosang smut #san x reader #san imagine #san smut #kpop x reader #kpop imagine #kpop smut #ateez x reader #ateez imagine #ateez smut #my writing

[snkpolls]

SnK Chapter 134 Poll Results

The chapter poll closed with 1747 responses. This month’s poll results were brought to you by /u/_Puppet_, /u/berthototototo, /u/staraves and @momtaku​.

RATE THE CHAPTER 1,675 Responses

Chapter 134 “Depths of Despair” was another solid chapter with an average rating of 4.52, making it the highest rated chapter of the volume and 15th highest since we started keeping records.

The art was incredible

The best chapter in the volume, bar none.

it was really fucking cool and a definite step up from Chapter 133. This chapter does well to inform you that we *are* at the final battle now, and nothing is stopping this story from crashing to a sudden end pretty damn soon.

This chapter, like every other in the volume, feels like it was stretching. I was actively bored reading it. With so few chapters left, does Isayama really have time to stretch this much? He has so many loose ends to tie up and it's concerning. He obviously wanted a volume cliffhanger with the alliance facing Eren so I hope that his pacing next volume is much tighter because this ain't it, chief

This has easily become one of my favourite chapters in the while manga. [...] Overall, it's as good as 112, 122, 131 and other popular "masterpieces" in my opinion

Bruh I have been waiting for this so long and Isayama fucking DELIVERED. I was so worried with all the build-up and sometimes sloppy pacing that the final Eren vs Alliance showdown wouldn't live up to the hype but NOPE, it was amazing and beyond expectations. The moment where the refugees realize that Paradis forces had come to save them?? Gold. Beautiful. 10/10. Isayama I am sorry for ever doubting you, you are a god and I am thankful for your existence.

Rank this chapter a 5 for the Source of All Organic YEEKS.

Is there any button to press in order to rate this chapter 20/10?

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOMENT? 1,692 Responses

It was a very close race, but “the crowd attempting to save the baby” ultimately came out on top and once again demonstrated the fanbase’s affinity for despair… or was it hope this time? In a close second comes Armin’s cliffhanger question to Eren, third place going to Reiner stomping the Beast Titan, which beat the rumbling scenery across the world by a single vote, which beat seeing the final audio by a single vote. If the extremely close results mean anything, this chapter certainly had something for everyone.

The crowd lifting the baby to safety is an image that will leave a permanent mark on me. I don’t have words to describe that scene.

Honestly, each goddamn panel is impacting, exciting or badass. I love the Historia scene, the chaos and destruction left me speechless, Karina and Mr. Leonhart's reflexion was heartbreaking, as well as the Marleyan general's.

“That Fucking Monkey!”

Reiner Helos was the most hype part of the chapter.

I could never really decide what’s my favorite scene or anything, it’s all just amazing.

as an eren stan it was rly brutal and eye opening to actually see all the innocent people and kids dying, overall it was a great chapter, just very gruesome

Reiners armored body slam and Levi’s monkey comment were best moments. Really appreciated seeing the worlds POV one more time.

I loved Reiner's moment but otherwise boring chapter.

I loved armin in this chapter he finally looks like hes acting as a commander.hopefully we will get more of this.

I love how much of other countries we get to see through rumbling, it helps to show more details for the wolrd building.

I liked Levi calling Zeke a “Big, furry bastard”.

We finally see Eren's new titan for doing something other than moving forward, and the beast titan scene was epic.

i cried when i saw the families saying goodbye. seeing eren as the founding titan hurts too.

Amazing. Literally lost for words. The last panel with Armin was so emotional/amazing. His character growth is phenomenal. Cannot wait for the next one

The tower guard's words were too much but I LOVED the moment with the baby on the cliff. I wasn't expecting something like that.

WHO WAS THIS CHAPTER'S MVP? 1,669 Responses

As well as earning the favorite moment this month, the crowd at the cliffs also scored a collective MVP, showing that teamwork does indeed make the dream work. Closely coming in second is Reiner, no doubt from his valiant attack on the Beast Titan, and in third place is the commander of the alliance, Armin.

ARMIN GOAT

I love reiner so much :D

CHADERENFTW

The final pages just shows why i love Armin so much

Karina's regret was one of best parts of this chapter.

Reiner such a badass.

Wow just wow, the crowd, the alliance with their shit together (for the most part) can’t wait to see how this ends

WE SEE HISTORIA AGAIN! FOR ONE PAGE… THOUGHTS ON HER GOING INTO LABOR? 1,666 Responses

28 months since we last saw Historia in the present time, and now we finally see her again. But is this one page worth the wait? 36.6% are glad that this plot point is finally coming back, 33.1% are glad to see her but wish we’d gotten her side of the story, 12.3% are glad it seems to be a real pregnancy, and 11.6% are done with Isayama’s handling of her in the story.

I thought she was only like five months pregnant.

i hope she survives this :(

I just want this subplot to be over.

It's alright? I still wish she would have joined the scouts in the final battle instead of the pregnancy tho…

I'm so disgusted by the whole Historia situation. The execution of this plot point was abysmal from the beginning and I hate it

None of the above options square with how I feel. Historia's perspective (in addition to Eren's) is being set up as the final "basement"; so while I can see why some are frustrated, it has actually piqued my interest to see where this may end up

EH is endgame

EreHisu would ruin the manga

Each chapter I become increasingly pessimistic about Historia as a character. In the beginning of this chapter when we got the close-up of her eyes as she closed them in pain, I was certain the next page would have her inner monologue as she thought back on how she got into this position. But instead it cuts away, us seeing absolutely nothing from Historia, and I'm back to thinking she really has no agency anymore. Even if she is super important in the ending and a pivotal player in determining the state of the world after the rumbling, it won't be worth what she's been reduced to. To be fair, she was in one scene in Return to Shiganshina, no scenes in Marley arc, and this arc... well, we know how she's been treated. So maybe I should have seen this coming, but it was still disappointing for Isayama to hint that she will have a role this arc like in Uprising arc, only for that to be a breeding machine.

Why Historia was crying when she was having a child?

She finally is realizing the regret of the pregnancy decision and that she once again chose something she didn't necessarily want to do.

her life was always miserable and I don't believe that she will get some ray of light. She was the happiest when she had Ymir by her side. Now, even if she survives and has her child with her, she will always feel the heavy weight of her decision and the blood of millions innocent people will always stay on her hands.

I'm dropping the series after this. It just hurts seeing a queer-coded character like Historia constantly being beaten and reduced to literally nothing. First it was Ymir's death. Then Zeke's plan that involved her having children to be eaten by them (WHY NOT HAVE ZEKE IMPREGNATE WOMEN? WHY MUST IT BE THE QUEER FEMALE CHARACTER?? WHO'S ALSO THE QUEEN?). Then all the talk about her as a mere breeder, as a not-so-walking womb. Then the awful, awful ship-tease with Eren. Then her not opposing Eren's plan?? This is just it.  I was holding onto the fake pregnancy, but now I envy the people who dropped the series once they saw the first panel of her pregnant.

I am tired of Tumblr crying over Historia. You are taking this pregnancy plot way too seriously. Newsflash: women don't automatically lose their agency when they get pregnant, kinda problematic of you to think that's what's going on. Historia has a plan and we will hear it

I think this may be a HUGE death flag for her. I mean if he can kill Sasha off with a gun says who histortia can’t be killed off by child birth?

I DONT WANT HER TO DIE

Historia gets what she deserves. She agreed to help Eren and now A LOT of innocent mothers and children is losing their lives in the rumbling. Historia has their blood on her hands and she won't be free from it. I don't feel sorry for her, at all.

If there's any character, besides Eren, who has humanity's blood on their hands, it's Historia, and her labor acting as a prelude to the moment that will decide the fate of humanity is incredibly poetic.

Hisu's baby is definitely having a titan inherited. So someone with titan powers will die in the final battle.

Don’t care about her

Well I guess she aint faking it after all

She's committing to the bit. There's no baby, it's all an act

WHO IS THE FATHER AAAAAAAAAA

Why did she want this child?

...all i can think is why does yams draw mouths/teeth like that? it’s so weird...

WHICH OF THE NEW LOCALS HAVE YOU FOUND MOST INTERESTING? 1,669 Responses

We get to see new corners of the earth… just before seeing them crushed. 37.3% found the cliffside of chaos to be the best, 31.3% enjoyed seeing Onynakopon’s London-esque homeland, and 23.9% enjoyed the scenery of the shrines in what could be Hizuru.

the panel with the people praying in the shrine was amazing also the cliff,  these rumbling chapters are really dark yet visually beautiful (maybe I'm sick for finding it beautiful lol). "

The Titans drove Pennywise off that cliff

I really liked how it shows the different places where the rumblings is effecting like the Snk London etc

I’m a little confused about the timeline and placement of the cliffs and where the Titans are. Can someone explain how the Titans were seen pushing people off the cliff sides (also how were so many people herded into the middle of nowhere to be shoved off the cliffs?) and then also seen heading toward the fleeing Eldian/Marleyans? Are those two different places, a montage, etc? Do we suspend some disbelief to take in the apocalyptic scene of people falling from the cliffs into the sea? The opening scenes had me a bit turned around.

These shots where absolute nightmare fuel and they did an amazing job at showing how horrifying this situation is

  HOW DO THE DEPICTIONS OF THE RUMBLING IN THIS CHAPTER, INCLUDING THE CROWD HOLDING THE BABY AWAY FROM THE CLIFF, RANK IN TERMS OF DARK MOMENTS INVOLVING CHILDREN? 1,652 Responses

Let’s just rename the series “In the Depths of Despair”. 39.2% think this chapter ranks near the top of the darkest moments in the series, 28.1% think Ymir’s daughters cannibalizing their dead mother is the darkest, while 19.1% hold to the other incredibly dark rumbling chapter we got with Ramzi and Halil.

All are equally dark.

Eternal winner is Udo trampled to death by a crowd while trying to save crushed Zofia

Every scene of children's deaths are all gruesome. Not one tops each other.

the mother throwing her baby away hoping to save them made me feel something and it broke my heart

I didn't think the cliff scene was that dark tbh, it was actually faintly uplifting. Though I also felt that way after reading chapter 131, so maybe I think that about any tragedy Isayama depicts.

Kruger saw his entire Family burn to death

It's a dark moment but I also think it's sort of hopeful, that humanity isn't completely fucked and they're all eager to try save this child rather than let it fall and die.

The entire imagery of masses of people barely hanging for their lives at the edge of a cliff is so abyssmal and daunting. This is seriously peak bleakness SnK. I still can't believe that there are people that support Eren after this.

he opening panels of the Rumbling were some of the most horrifying so far, especially the one with the baby.

This was, to me, possibly the single most powerful moment in the ENTIRE series -- and that's not something I say lightly.

Very little about this manga shocks me anymore. This moment is really no worse or better compared to every other disturbing scene

All the above are horrendous. I cannot choose.

TV Tropes has an entry called Darkness Induced Audience Apathy and that pretty much sums up my feelings at this point. Everything is so unrelentingly bleak and miserable that I’m rapidly losing my ability to care about these characters and what happens to them anymore.

The Rumbling; Yam's biggest middle finger to the world. Can't wait for this shit to end so my life can continue. Forever Yeagerist, because I am free, and Floch did nothing wrong.

  THE GENERAL AT FORT SALTA GAVE A SPEECH ABOUT HATE AND MISTAKES, WHAT DID YOU THINK OF IT? 1,663 Responses

In the face of annihilation, the general stationed at Fort Salta has an epiphany on the path that brought everyone there. A solid 60% of respondents thought it was a great speech – it covers perhaps the grandest theme of the final arc of the story and someone needed to hammer home the message. 27.3% liked the message of the speech but thought it was a little too ham-fisted for the moment, but 6.8% just thought it was silly.

The general at Fort Salta’s words were really... desperate. It showed the truth of Eren’s rampage as the founding and I think it showed that Eren was more than what he hoped to become. He shows no pity now: I don’t even think he cares about the 104th and co. anymore. Really dark and I’m living for it.

The parts with no speech was great. Isayama is great with visuals which I love. The Marleyan speech was very cringe unfortunately.

Great to see the world let go of their hatred for the enemy. Still, Eren's stubborn charge is pissing me off!

FUCKING FINALLY. All this bullshit and guilting of the children and Eldians and we finally get SOMEONE owning up that their bigotry is the fucking problem here. And of course, too fucking late. But that seems to be how real history is

Nothing unrealistic about desperate people about to die thinking of second chances.

Great message, but would've meant more if it came from a more significant character such as Magath

Great speech showing that people always have the biggest realization when it's already too late and you can only count on miracles

I think it was honestly fine, but one tiny change could have been made to make it flow more naturally and not be so jarring to so many people: Rather than having the general talk about "us adults", and how "we" used hatred, I think it would have been more natural if he only talked about himself. This is a very common trope in war movies, and we're all capable of reading in between the lines and understanding how what he says applies to the different characters and the world as a whole. For him to point it out for us is a little jarring

hammy, but on theme

I feel like it's isayama's way of forcing his audience to understand his narrative by spelling it out for us. indicating that he has failed as a writer to just make his narrative naturally understood

IF the rumbling get stopped are they gonna still gonna keep their promise

In context it is fine, but I'm cautious about it being the end solution.

It was a desperate man's final words, and it showed.

It was a fitting speech that showed the Marleyans were finally ready to let go of their hatred towards the Eldians. It also felt like last-ditch speech to try to move Eren into reconsidering flattering the whole world with the Rumbling, but knowing Eren, the speech wouldn't sway him at all.

It was way to convenient and unrealistic for the general and the liberio Eldians to realize that they were wrong and I hope they die. That is all.

It was good to see they realized how terrible they were but as a wise man once said... “It’s too laaate to apologiiize. It’s too laaaaaaaate! Ay. Ay. Ay.”

Its good because its shows the message of the series of trying to stop the cycle of hate by either changing our actions or by sacrificing others for the "greater good". Placement is not bad tho, the general is realizing it is the true end

It’s okay, everyone has their own opinion. The general's opinion just happened to be like that.

I understand it, but I’m also bothered by the suggested idea that it took total annihilation to make people decide to finally “be considerate” of each other. It also feels very black and white to me, some of the subtleties of this whole situation was lost I think.

It was a great speech and super satisfying moment to see non-Eldians recognize how they played a part leading up to this, but there's no guarantee there won't be residual hatred for Eldians once all of this is over.

i honestly loved it. i don't mind the cheese one bit

  KARINA THINKS BACK TO A YOUNG REINER AND REGRETS HER ACTIONS AS A MOTHER. WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT THIS? 1,659 Responses

There are many bad parents in SnK, and Karina has certainly been one of them. The majority of fans accept her seeking redemption, while 25% think it’s too little too late. 20.8% are willing to give her a chance if she proves she means it through her actions.

I liked the moment between Karina and Mr. Leonhardt. Awful parents unite. XD At least they showed a change of heart, even if it was too late.

Felt like she just wanted to live a normal life

Anyways, Karina saved the chapter. We've seen a more logical character evolution than in Annie's father, and at least she got to see Reiner again.

IF the rumbling stopped are they still gonna keep their promise

the attempt to make me feel sympathy for Karina Braun was just obnoxious

Only took advantage of the boy

I’m glad Reiner mom is realizing her mistake of using her son as a tool but there’s not really much she can do.

Fuck Karina in particular.

Am I the only one who thought that Karina and Mr Leonhart looked good together? 😳

  WHAT DID KARINA MEAN WHEN SHE SAID THAT SHE USED REINER AS A TOOL OF REVENGE? 1,653 Responses

Karina mentions that she only ever used Reiner as a tool for revenge. 31.1% think he was a tool to use against her former lover, 19.1% think he was primarily a tool for Marley, but 47.9% believe it to be a mix of both purposes.

All of the above and perhaps just a general narcissistic “I’ll show all of you how special I am by proxy of my child. Reiner being a Warrior means I am a Good Mother TM”

Reiner was a tool to make Karina feel like she had worth in a world where everyone, from the man she may have loved to her nation to the rest of the world was telling her she was worthless.

Karina hated Paradis' Eldians for "abandoning" her and the others to the mainland and wanted revenge on them for that.

Clearly revenge on his father and if anyone thinks Karina intended on Reiner being used to get revenge on Paradis is really reaching to villify Karina.

She said it on panel: Why did Karl Fritz leave them in Marley's power?

I believe it's "both of the above", but with the revenge on Paradis being from Karina, not Marley, as an allegory for Reiner's father. She always talks about how Paradis abandoned the Eldians on Marley, and I figured this was her way of expressing the sorrow and anger at Reiner's father for abandoning her and Reiner. So she did believe Paradis were devils who abandoned them, but that was fuelled by her personal issue

I didn’t and still don’t understand what Karina means by revenge.

It was both but also to give herself a higher status given her self-hatred.

  WHAT IS THE BEAST TITAN WE SAW? 1,668 Responses

That was unexpected! The Beast Titan showed up, but not in a way we saw anyone predict. A very close tie between it being Zeke’s beast being controlled/manipulated and it being a War Hammer formation created by Eren, with the former just edging out the latter. 14% believe Eren can make titans however he wants via the Founding Titan/paths, and 2.4% think this was just straight up Zeke.

Don’t know, very confused. But whenever I don’t clearly see the eyes of a character, I usually feel like something fishy is going on....

Eren ate zeke and took his power.

Eren using the WHT to generate a Zeke dummy, using Zeke's titan blueprints.

I think he used the Founding Titan powers, not the WH. Ymir/the founding titan is the one that builds the titan forms so I think that makes more sense.

I do believe eren is  controlling him since his titan was attached to eren at the neck, and then reiner broke that off.

I think it's Zeke being mind controlled and treated like a puppet by Eren.

I think Zeke is crystalized somewhere in the Founders body and Eren is using him to create a zombie Beast Titan.

It could be Zeke in there, it could be a clone. Nonetheless it's a puppet and he still needs Zeke to do a complete exact rendition.

It took Eren all three powers of the Founder, WHT, and Beast Titan, combined to pull this off. The WHT alone can create anything with hardening but i doubt it could create another titan moving by itself.

It's obviously a War Hammer construct, but I can't stop laughing at the idea that the Alliance don't realise how vastly different he looks. It kind of reminds me of when they would go "There's no opening in the Armored Titan's armor, it's covering everything" even though there's clearly spaces in between where you can see the red muscle

YFW another Beast Titan clone shows up next chapter

if monke isn't a Warhammer construct, where the heck does he get those rocks?

  HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT EREN SEEMINGLY CONTROLLING THE BEAST? 1,656 Responses

So we’ve discussed what you think the Beast is, now what do fans think of the development from a narrative standpoint? Most fans are happy with this development finding it cool and surprising, with 17.9% being happy just to see monke again. 12.1% feel it’s another ability coming out of nowhere, and 9.4% don’t like Zeke being handled this way. 4.4% think Zeke is in full autonomy, which is somehow 33 more people than when that was an option last question...

ZEKE DEAD IN BEAST TITAN BODY AND EREN CONTROLLING HIM

I just wanna see Zeke :(

I was so happy to finally see Zeke but all along it was just a puppet Beast Titan :(

If Zeke is just going to be a mindless powerup for Eren to keep Levi or Reiner busy, he'd better have been dead. We already had the Warhammer doing that job, why this again?

Tired of the Eren OPness to be honest, its stale and old and overall poorly writter. It's clear from the start Isayama's willing to bend backwards to not only power up Eren randomly but to try and justify everything he does.

  THE ALLIANCE CONTINUES TO FOCUS ON ZEKE DESPITE EREN STANDING WITH YMIR IN THE PATHS REALM LAST CHAPTER. WHY HAVE NONE OF THE CHARACTERS MENTIONED HER? 1,650 Responses

Despite us fans freaking out every time we see Ymir, the alliance doesn’t seem to care. 43.9% believe they’ve just been a little too busy to focus on the minutiae of the lore, while 39.5% just have no idea. 11.1% don’t think they saw her standing there in the first place.

Did any of them really know who the little girl was?

Easier to focus on what they know than what they don’t

Do they recognize her! Are they familiar with the iconography of this creation story? Either way, they’re probably at the “Oh look, Eren’s in his child body and standing with a little girl who is the progenitor of our race. This might as well happen.”

I'm pretty sure they at least discussed it and formed a plan in the plane

They don't wanna face the fact they have to kill Eren, plus killing the beast titan may be easier than killing the founding titan

They still are still not as informed of the relationship between Eren and Ymir, their first goal is to rid the connection of royal blood to Eren preventing further destruction

Wait, are you saying we as the readers can see Ymir but the others can't? in that case, Ymir may have appeared multiple times throughout this mess and yet we've only seen her for Ramzi's death and when the alliance were in paths…

Only Eren can see Ymir since he has the founding Titan, as well as Zeke since he has royal blood. The rest can see Eren because he has the founding Titan and is connected to all Eldians and Ackermanns via paths.

seems like they hold Zeke more accountable to the rumbling than Eren himself. Yeah I get it, he's their friend. But fuck that, humanity is at stakes, and when Zeke turned against the warriors, they accepted that they had to kill him, even if they didn't wan't to (especially Pieck), even if he was their comrade and leader, even if they grew up together, because it needed to done.

They’re saving it for when they discuss Levi’s hand

They're like Ramzi -- they have no bloody idea who this loli is.

Nothing to do with the question but I'm bummed the official translation for this image was not "THAT FUCKING MONKEY!" like earlier ones

Alliance are stupid Motherfuckers

  THE BLIMPS CERTAINLY TRIED THEIR BEST, HOW WOULD YOU RATE THEIR PERFORMANCE? 1,646 Responses

Surprising no one (except for 5.6% of you from last month who predicted the blimps would deal a decisive blow), Eren tore through the bombing fleet like it was nothing. On a 1-5 scale from “Abysmal” to “They tried their best, okay?”, the plurality of you have decided to lend some sympathy to the squadron, with some erring on the side of neutrality. Low expectations seem to have prevented disappointment, as not many people are criticizing them in the write ins either.

as a WWI nerd I really disappointed by the airship "battle." Isayama has done his research on some aspects of early modern day tech (like the detail on the firearms), but then has the airships dropping what looks like submarine depth charges instead of zeppelin bombs (I was like--why are they dropping oil canisters?!) and then has the airships go down in Hollywood-style explosions from having rocks thrown on them.

WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE PART IN THE PLANE’S ARRIVAL? 1,659 Responses

35.4% of respondents loved Reiner’s dynamic entry, followed by 23.6% of respondents who loved Levi’s war cry of MOONNKEEEE. 17.1% were happy to see the image of Armin leading the charge that we’ve been expecting since hearing that final audio sample. 9.1% embrace the ongoing Avengers theme of everyone jumping into battle at once. 8.3% appreciated Onyankopon’s sweet fighter pilot moves, and 5.2% liked seeing the Eldian evacuees getting a glimmer of hope.

Finally, shoutouts to the handful of people whose favourite moment was Pieck bounding out with the bombs like a happy dog with sausage links.

This chapter was pure adrenaline. The Alliance's entrance in the plane was seriously badass. I can't wait for 135!!

Reiner with the Buddha's Palm. Respect!

I love how Levi is still so focused on killing Monke.  Avenge your husband, sweetie.

Armin is finally grabbing Eren by the collar again and I like that. Safe to assume we're going to see more of the Eren vs Armin showdown now. Armin delivered a truly powerful line, "Which part of you is free" and I'm curious how Eren will respond to that

Reiner's transformation is probably my favourite one, and seeing the rest of the alliance jumping down in a tense but at the same time epic scene was priceless.

It was impossible to choose what part of the plane scene was the best, it was *chef's kiss* all of it.

PIECK TRANSFORMED AND GOT THE BOMBS IN THE CART’S MOUTH WITHOUT BLOWING THEM UP. IS THIS UNREALISTIC BASED ON THE WORLD’S RULES TO YOU? 1,602 Responses

Chekhov’s bombs are now in the hands, er, mouth, of Pieck Finger, via grabbing them from the plane and transforming into a titan while holding them. About half of fans had no issue with this, seeing that titan transformations are just summoning flesh around you. 17.5% did think the transformation explosion should have detonated them, and 30% are just wondering how she also managed to perfectly unravel the bombs midair.

Bold of you to imply Isayama cares about physics after the wet gun and the plane being ready in 5 minut... 1 hour excuse me.

Bombs are detonated through fire reacting to the gunpowder right? Do we know that the Titan's 'explosions' are made from fire?

Pieck has probably done this many times before, the cart titan is mainly used as a war mule after all.

She's just very very gentle ok ?

Cart titan has experienced in carrying things in different situations and the explosives shown could be improvised. Also, these types are initiated with fire and will not explode with any impact occurred.

I assumed that she let go of the bombs, transformed, then caught them. This does not bother me in the slightest.

I think it's kinda like Eren with the spoon, the objective was holding it, which is why it wan't damaged when Hanji noticed it. Same thing with Pieck and the explosives.

Rule of Cool, doesn't matter either way to me.

No, Cart Titan is especially a strange titan to begin with and a use for delicate and ambushing situations(read the chapters where Pieck transport Bertold in a barrel before the attack on Paradise)

It's kinda unrealistic, but falling from 50 meters with all your body burned and survive is way worse.

WAS THIS THE START OF REINER’S HELOS MOMENT? 1,615 Responses

Reiner being Helos has been a popular theory for a while, and now he seems to be acting as a hero to those left at Fort Salta.  54.4% believe this is the start of Reiner embodying the idea of Helos, while 12.9% are holding out for if he kills Eren.  27.9% don’t believe Reiner to be connected to Helos in any way.

Appeared as a small hope

Are people really still going on about Helos?

can he kill Eren? If he can, then hes Helos

H E L O S

What is Helos

Half-Eldian, half-Marleyan -- he represents so much more than Helos ever did.

He could be Helos, but I think Armin will be the one to save humanity, but Reiner can join him

I dont really like the whole X is helos thing, reiner definately is acting the part of the hero but i think its more redemption for reiner than trying to be some kimd of savior of humanity and i think that fots his character better.

The real "Helos" is not just Reiner, but the whole alliance.

He going to be Helos not when he kills Eren, but when he makes a sacrifice of some sorts.

He's not Helos, and will never be, but he is definitely a big hope

Who is Helos

Reiner does not deserve to be a ‘Helos’

HELL YEAH REINER

He'll do something sick

Helos was a fake hero, just a mask. Their is no comparison with Reiner's journey to maturity..

I won’t compare him to Helos. But this is sure a hero moment

Captain Suicide to the rescue

I think he’s helos but it’s gonna be armin who saves the day

I’m not sure if he’ll be helos but he’s still going to be essential to the story

Helos was a hollow and fake historical figure made up to push the "Eldians are evil" narrative. Reiner, on the other hand, is someone who was raised with a hatred for Eldians and committed atrocities because of it, but came to face his past actions and save the world as a true hero. Reiner isn't Helos, he's so much better than that.

  WITH THE BEAST TITAN THROWING AT THE PLANE AND SKYDIVERS INDISCRIMINATELY, IT SEEMS LIKE EREN IS OK WITH KILLING ANY OF HIS FRIENDS. THOUGHTS? 1,630 Responses

The question of how far Eren would go to achieve his goal of freedom has plagued the community for a while, and this chapter seemingly confirmed his willingness to even kill his friends, as seen by the deadly projectiles that the alliance only narrowly avoided. 61.8% of respondents aren’t surprised by this, despite Armin and Mikasa, who were in the line of fire, being voted as very unlikely for Eren to willingly kill last month. While 16.6% were indeed shocked by this, 19.1% believe this can be explained away by Eren knowing his friends aren’t in any serious danger.

Eren has to kill everybody, the rest of the world and if they don't stop even the alliance. Otherwise this story will be worse then Game of Thrones Season 8.

Scared that eren is fine with killing the friends he wants to protect

  ARMIN SEEMS TO RECALL THE 112 CONVERSATION WHEN HE SAYS HE WANTS TO ASK EREN ONE MORE QUESTION HE WON’T LIKE, “WHAT ABOUT YOU IS FREE”. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? 1,636 Responses

Eren’s quest for freedom and Armin’s quest for understanding come to a head in this chapter’s cliffhanger question from the latter: “What about you is free?” More of you think he is still in the reasoning stage (37%) than those who think the question was an affirmation of his determination to say goodbye to his old friend (30.1%). Some of you think the callback to chapter 112 is indicative of Armin believing Eren to be controlled in some way (27.6%).

Armin is trying to manipulate Eren like what he did with Berthold but I think he will 100% fail .

Armin is really being built up here for an amazing redemption. These last three chapters we've seen him carefully being inserted into the pivotal role in the series just like in RtS.  I'm 90% confident the biggest plot twist of the entire series is coming, and Armin is the catalyst as he's always been for every amazing moment in the show prior to chapter 91. I think the ending is going to blow everyone out of the water, and that everyone predicting a side to win is missing entirely how the manga will end.

I'm so happy to see that Armin is basically done coddling Erin. He's ready to take him out, especially since he's become the commander

in line with what kenny ackerman said, armin thinks eren is a slave of his own obsession.

Please stop blaming Eren for everything, he needs Help. It makes me sad to see Eren has to face his best friends, and I dont like Armins way of confronting him,  it looks like Armin has erased his memory of his best friend…

He's a fucking clown, I can't stand his shit. Still selfishly trying to talk Eren out of it when he's causing the fucking apocalypse and asserted many times that no, he won't stop. Who cares about Eren's vision of freedom when he's killing millions of people ? Just nuke him, you're supposed to be the colossal titan ffs

Their ideas clash at the moment. However, Armin still believes that his friend behaves unnaturally and won't let go until he discovers the truth.

we have continuously witnessed Eren being a hypocrite it makes perfect sense why he would say that

We need Armin's POV to know if he's now fully prepared to kill Eren or not

What I think is that armin might think that eren is being controlled by the attack Titan

Perhaps to get a rise or reaction out of him? Or just a cool way to introduce himself to the conflict!

that seashell fucker joke of a commander still wants to talk rather than kill him when Eren repeatedly made it clear that he won't ever stop the rumbling.

Hoping to see how this ideological conflict between Eren and Armin will end.

  THIS CHAPTER HAS AN EMPHASIS ON THE SURVIVAL OF CHILDREN. WHICH ONES DO YOU SEE SURVIVING THIS CONFLICT? 1,649 Responses

This chapter’s repeated motif of humans coming together to save children, especially infants, has been noticed by many. As for what it means for the survival of the ones in this chapter, the majority of readers believe Historia’s child is in the clear (81.4%). The children at the fort appear to have much less of a chance (32.8%), but are believed to be comparatively less doomed than the baby at the cliff (26.1%). On the bright side, only about a hundred of you (7.6%) think they will all perish.

Great chapter showing the contrast between a child being born in Paradis and a child dying on the other side of the world.

Sometimes people will trample each other to escape (as we've seen in Marley), but sometimes through the mindless fear people try and protect a tiny helpless thing for a few moments. Whether the baby lives or not it was amazing imagery.

The crowd trying to save the baby from the cliff as the Wall Titans arrived was very dark, but I still think Ymir's daughters eating their own mother is still the darkest moment in the series involving the children, while the runner-up is Faye's death.

we all theorized that the final panel was Historia's child but maybe it's the baby at the cliff. Eren might actually win and destroy the world, then through the wreckage he approaches the child and picks it up and tells it that's it's free

Cliff baby is toast

While the Rumbling is still as horrible as ever, this time it didn't feel quite as hopeless as when we saw Ramzi and his brother. The baby lifting scene was chilling and yet strangely inspiring.

damn bruh seriously the poor kids

MANY CHARACTERS HAVE BEEN SHOWN TAKING ON THE BLAME FOR THE CURRENT SITUATION, INSTEAD OF POINTING TO EREN. DOES ISAYAMA WANT THE WORLD TO BE AT FAULT INSTEAD OF EREN? 1,636 Responses

With the story presenting us a complicated situation, does Isayama’s approach lead to the wrong conclusions?  Almost 70% of fans believe that he wants us to view both parties as at fault for the current situation.  About 17% believe the hatred of the world is squarely to blame, while 8.3% think it all lands on Eren for his own actions.  5.3% think Isayama is just really clumsy with his messaging.

this chapter makes you realise that eren is actually at fault. I used to make more excuses for him, but this chapter really sealed the deal for me atleast. No one deserves this pain. It is not marley vs eldians anymore it is everyone vs Eren.

While it makes sense for them to feel regret, I still disagree that its their fault. Like look at Grisha's parents, they didnt do any wrong to deserve this. They just lived their life the way they were told to. Thats why i dislike the argumentations. Most people just were forced to hate someone they never met, so I dont this like the speech that much.

i think isayama states that the alliance is at fault too because they decided to still fight on eren's side until it was already too late and he activated the rumbling. not because they are killing people directly.

while I think that Eren is the main culprit of the Rumbling, true peace cannot be reached if everyone acts all high and mighty ""well, it wasn't MY fault"". After all this, the whole world has to be humble and willing to work together, otherwise it has all been for nothing.

I find it weird everyone (SC, warriors, the world) is blaming themselves for everything and readers are using their pre-death laments as a confirmation that Eren is right/justified. I don't like Eren being portrayed just like the product of his context, especially because he himself deny it and many chapters exist to reforce that (100, 121, 123, 130, 131, etc). I feel nobody is treating Eren as an individual, but as a force of nature coming to punish humanity for their sins. It's uncomfortable, because he's just a person like everybody else and not a god even if he has some god-like powers.

I don’t think the narrative is on eren side, but it also doesn’t absolve the rest of the world, the narrative shows that both sides have good and bad people, innocent and guilty, how each decision affect each character, and what they feel about it all. This story is about a cycle of hate, eldia used titan power to attack the world, then the world revolted and decided to attack eldia, now eldia (eren) attacks the world again, cycles have no end unless someone interrupts it, the question is; What is the most effective way to end this cycle?

Eren already lost. He wanted protect people on Paradis, his friends and Historia but it looks like his actions only have created more sadness and misery. A lot of people on the island died when the walls collapsed and now they most likely will have a civil war. Two of his closest friends are already dead and the rest feels depressed and miserable. The things for Historia don't look good either. Even if he fully rumbles the world, he will never really save anyone.

I think genocide is the solution to stop Racism

  AS THE ALLIANCE PREPARES TO FIGHT EREN, ONYANKOPON IS MAKING AN EMERGENCY LANDING WITH THE PLANE. HOW WILL THIS GO? 1,638 Responses

Onyankopon flew the alliance where they needed to go, but the plane’s in trouble and he might be as well! 44.5% think he’s going to die or has already died in a crash, 41.3% think he’ll land with injuries, and 14.2% think he’ll be a-ok and join the onlookers for the battle.

Onyankopon is probably dead but I really hope he’s not. 

WHO DO YOU SEE DYING BEFORE THE MANGA ENDS? 1,602 Responses

Going into the final battle, it’s useful to have some data on everybody’s predictions, as well as a follow-up to the same question that was asked for the chapter 127 poll, back in March. The characters who were voted more likely to die than survive are led by Zeke, who has a clear majority (78.1%), followed by Connie (59.8%), Onyankopon (59.2%), Levi (57.5%) and Eren (54.6%). Coming close, but still more likely to survive according to voters, is Pieck (48.9%), Reiner (47.9%) and Yelena (44.9%). Gabi (11.5%), Falco (15.1%), Armin (16.2%) and Historia (17.4%) are expected to make it till the end.

Interestingly, as we approach the end, every single character who was present in the March poll has increased in perceived likelihood of dying. Except for one, Yelena, who dropped 6.6% in votes, perhaps due to her injury rendering her a more sidelined and subdued character. The characters that the fandom changed their mind on the most are Levi (+39.1%), Onyankopon (+37.3%) and Connie (+23.8%). The characters that have remained relatively unchanged include Gabi (+3.5%), Jean (+1%) and Kiyomi (+1%).

if he kills Jean without giving him anything important in the whole arc I'm going feral.

I really hope there’ll be no casualties to any of my favorite characters

IM FUCKING SCARED TO SEE LEVI DIE

i hope reiner didn't die untill the last chap

I sadly think everyone will die besides the main three and levi since he’s an ackerman.

ARMIN, SON, PLEASE DON'T DIE. YOU'RE THE MOST PRECIOUS LITTLE BUNDLE OF HOPE. PLEASE DON'T DIE!! 😭

  WE’RE STEALING THIS ONE FROM THE WIKI. ARE YOU MORE EXCITED FOR CHAPTER 135 OR THE SEASON 4 ANIME PREMIERE NEXT MONTH? 1,661 Responses

Monthly waits between chapters are rough, but so are the years between seasons! Luckily we have both with the next chapter and the Final Season coming out within days of each other. 57.9% are more excited for the next chapter following the pretty popular 134, and 42.1% are more excited for the anime to kick off.

FINAL SEASON HYPE LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO

Can't wait to see what will happen 135 and beyond!

I am overall completely hooked on the manga chapters, and I love Eren’s characteristic traits and mental strength. I am really excited on the final season.

can't wait for the final season!! It's going to be EPIC

Super emotional, everything seems to be leading to a tragic crescendo and all of this is going to look bonkers if MAPPA adapts it well for the final season

Incrediblesuperawesomethebestimsohypedineedchapter135

Cant wait for the next chapter and the final season!!

  DESCRIBE THE CHAPTER IN ONE WORD 1,181 Responses

The top 5 words used to describe the chapter this month are below. As opposed to the usual superlatives as well as a resurfacing of pain, the standout this month is monke, thanks to Zeke’s return. We seem to be fully done with the recipe shenanigans after a few months.

Amazing [60] Monke [38] Epic [36] Pain [33] Awesome [31]

  ISAYAMA RECENTLY ESTIMATED THERE IS 1-2% LEFT OF THE STORY. WHAT CHAPTER DO YOU THINK THE MANGA WILL END AT? 1,657 Responses

At the statue unveiling on November 7th, Isayama dropped another clue in the ever evolving mystery of when this series will end. His new estimate of 1-2% would translate into two more chapters (!). That estimate did little to dissuade our fandom from our most popular choice of 138.

Between Isayama's comments and this chapter, I'm really afraid there's 1 volume left and Isayama might rush everything, thus giving a shitty ending for everyone.

I really hope it doesn’t end at 135, there’s no way Isayama can muster a proper conclusion out of that unless it was all a dream or some dumb shit.

I'm confused as to how there is 1-2% left. Is Isayama really going to make Eren a cold-blooded killer after all the character development, I wonder. Honestly, I constantly feel like it's going to fast and that there are some things that need to go into more detail.  

I fear the ending could feel too rushed if it really ends in ~4 chapters from now.

I'm glad we're closer to the ending. I just want to leave this series behind me and never look back again.

idk but i just dont want it to end too fast😭😭😭

  WHAT ARE YOU MOST HOPING TO SEE NEXT CHAPTER? 1,657 Responses

The countdown clock is ticking away but there are still plot points to be completed and mysteries to be solved. To kick off what is likely the final volume of this series, nearly half of us hope the focus next month is The Alliance vs Eren (45%). In second place with slightly over 1/5 of the fandom, is interest in Eren POV (21.7%). Falco’s Flying Titan (9.2%), Historia (9.1%) and Zeke (8.1%) fill out the remainder of the pie with the smallest fraction (5.6%) wanting to know what is up with OG Ymir.

I still want to see Eren redeemed and saved, as that felt teased too much. Eren vs Zeke also felt teased too much. I also wanted to see Historia in action again. And how will Annie and Falco fit into the equation? And what of the titan powers? And the aftermath?

Kinda want to see this conversation between Eren and Armin more than anything

I want to see more Mikasa action.

i want armin to shift into the colossal titan and give spider-eren a big smooch on the lips

I personally would like to see Historia's pov because we still haven't gotten it and I want to know if Zeke is actually dead or not

I want to see more of Historia

v excited to see Zeke again, same w historia, hope eren pov is soon, liked seeing more of the world

Has Hajime forgotten Riko or will she have an interesting role in this ending? Can she be the child's mother in the end?

  WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING PLATFORMS DO YOU USE TO DISCUSS THE SERIES? 1,562 Responses

It’s official, after months of steady growth since we allowed multiple social media to be chosen, twitter has finally dethroned reddit on the polls as the most popular platform to discuss SNK. The more distant third place goes to real life, which managed to overtake discord again after falling behind a little last month. And 38 snapchatters now! Are you multiplying?!

  ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHAPTER? 479 Responses

this chapter got me fucked up.

Isayama: Hold my plum wine.

I haven’t seen anyone talk about it yet but in one of the manga panel you can see levi holding his sword in his way as if he had all his fingers back. So I think he does.

Save for chapters 130-131, the manga has been noticeably become underwhelming since 124. Like I implied above, there are many hints that this manga is going to have a GOT season 8 tier ending. Eren will be defeated and all the hate in the world will magically disappear. There will be some sort of unity between Marley and Cringevengers that brings peace to the world even though it shouldn't realistically be possible. And lastly, that baby near the cliff will end up living at the last moment and will end up being the baby from the final panel. "You are free", most likely being held by Armin or Reiner.

Go get him, Armin!

ALLIANCE HAS ME SO HYPED BYE

I wish it were longer but no thoughts my heart is heavy

I know Eren wants to destroy the world but HOLY FUCK.

I just, really hope that baby will be ok

I LOVED EVERY PANEL !!!!! I WAS FILLED WITH EMOTIONS WHILST READING 😭😭😭

I’m just really excited to see what’s gonna happen on the next chapter because everything is really chaotic and I’m just curious what’s the ending really like after years of making up theories and stories in my head.

I’m just so ready to see what’s really going on with Eren and which side will win. Also Armin is amazing in this chapter and his last question to Eren in this chapter gave me chills

I think Isayama is trying too hard to excuse Eren. Despite everything, he exterminted humanity instead of saving it. Other have gone trhough worst and would never have gone that far.

I’m not sure how to word it for English isn’t my first language, but it’s kinda sad to see a fictional world realize their mistakes/bad things they’ve done and how hatred can affect things

is the baby in the final panel (the « you’re free » one) the one that was saved or historias??? 😳

I'm so tired.

I think it will be more clear if we got eren pov sooner

I think that it doesn't make any sense if Isayama gave us Historia in labor for nothing. I want to know more about her and her baby, how have they been all these times after the squad left the island and before the rumbling. And Zeke, too. We haven't seen him for a while so i'm glad that he's back, but i think he's under Eren's control now. The chapter is kinda short for me. It's gonna perfect if we have more scenes of Historia and her baby, or at least Zeke's POV.

I think that we will have a lot of deaths in the next chapter

I think the current titan shifters will die. And then it will be reborn by historia's child. In short, the titan shifting powers won't end

I think this will end bittersweet at best

I think what Eren will do when seeing his friends are fighting him. Does him will hurt them back

Big fan of seeing Historia again, and that baby being held up is a very chilling image we haven’t seen the likes of for a few months.

I think with all the hype, it still was a setup chapter  and I think the last 4-6 chapters will be monstrous and very bitter sweet.

I think zeke is there but only partially controlled, but the titan is formed by warhammer capability

I thought it was a very good chapter to end the volume off of. Now I expect the next 4 final chapters to be amazing Isyama writing we are use too.

I thought that it was interesting because we got to see zeke again and the alliance going to try to save eren and to fight again

I thought that that eren will go back to mikasa

I want a goodass ending

Rumbling hits Hiruzu but the base is still there? That can't happening at the same time.

SADDDDD

i have no idea I just stressed out with this chapter.

Safe pregnancy for Historia

THAT FUCKING MONKEY 🐒

the art is amazing but i'd like to see more dialogue

so much happened in a single chapter, i can't believe we're reaching the end

I've been here since 2013, and it's finally at the final volume, AND I'M NOT READY! ALL HAIL ELDIA! ALL HAIL EREN!

Isayama's art keeps evolving every month, it was live watching anime key frames before any color was applied.

it made me cry so much i hope it will have a happy ending

It was a rollercoaster of hype and regret lmao

yams says fuck dem kids

Can’t wait to see this animated

It was awful. All those big questions without answer... And I hate what he did with Hisu. I hate it as a woman.

It was cool like always hope isayama feels good like we do

It was cool, but it had some cheesy moments. Does the title suggest that History is in despair too? Is she having complications in her labor or is feeling guilty because of the rumbling? Or both?

It was cruel, it made me uncomfortable, I don't understand Isayama's joy in drawing scenes of suffering without a reason. And Historia, wow, I don't even know what to say, I still don't understand why she's pregnant.

wondering why she’s giving birth 2-3 months earlier, and why she lied to the mps. Unless it’s a premature birth but I doubt it.

astonishing, astounding, surprising, bewildering, stunning, staggering, shocking, startling, stupefying, breathtaking, perplexing, confounding, dismaying, disconcerting, shattering.

At last the end is near, but despite that the ending is not clear, it can end in so many ways but I don't think Isayama will disappoints us.

Avengers will beat the bad guy.

The biggest victims are always innocent children and that's the darkest and saddest part for me.

Great setup for the final battle, and that cliff scene broke me.

i tilt with helos theories :)

Armin and company, except Mikasa, are NOW ready to fight Eren to the death. Eren is also prepare to finish what he started, no matter who dies. Final result could go either way as Falco, Gabi, and Annie will come eventually, and their arrival will turn the tide one way or the other.

I hope armin and the gang can get through to eren :(

I hope eren kills them all

i hope eren win, to show the consequence of hatred

I just don’t care anymore

I just dont want that if the alliance wins, the marleyans and other races forgive eldia because that does not even make any type of sense

If it somehow wasn't clear before, this manga's message is about peace. It is NOT some n*zi propaganda, and it never has been. This chapter perfectly conveyed that.

Confusing but interesting alliance is making me angry they don’t understand Eren still think he’s being controlled

When a host for one of the Nine Titans dies without being devoured, their powers are transferred to an Eldian child through Paths. If one, some or all of the Nine Titan holders die during the current battle, would it be possible that the newborn, which is also of royal blood, inherits the Titan power?

Death Flags for Armin give me joy…

Why are men so afraid of letting lesbians be lesbians

did eren awake? will the wall titam fall off the cliff because it sweeps the area there? i always think about this, does eren have any secret plans behind this rumble? lol maybe, find a path tree and destroy it? lmao

downer chapter, I expected something better for the chapter where we see the final audio at last

Eren already won.

Eren and the rumbling is reminding me of Shin Godzilla

Eren best character

Eren goat, hisu goat

Eren holding his and historias baby in final panel seems more and more likely  

EREN IS 100% THE FATHER AFTER THIS CHAPTER, IT'S NO LONGER EVEN A DEBATE

EreHisu would ruin the series

Eren, please stop the Fucking rumblimg. You killed A lot of innocent people.

Eren's eaten Zeke, and that's why he can form and control a beast titan. Sorry Levi, the only person that your gonna beat up is Eren yet again.

eren’s face with this dino titan just creeps me the fuck out, and i don’t look forward to the transformation being animated.

It was definitely surprising for me when I saw historia while some people predict she will die when giving birth although that could be a possibility I see her dying due to either old age or somehow her inheriting the beast titan since the Ymir curse exists

It was epic!

It was great but can we see eren and Mikasa moments in the upcoming chapters before the manga ends and also show some light on how to cure ymir's curse and stuffs

It was great to see Historia again.

It was necessary to show all the chaos Eren is doing, and i'm so excited to see the Alliance fight him!

It was really good set up for 135

all the violence !! Like was this even necessary ?? No ! Too much violence just "kills" the whole thing ! Damn it was just awful and a waste of time to read for me !

This is probably going to be the most disturbing episode in the show's history once it gets animated, even if it's heavily censored. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up having to put a disclaimer at the beginning as well. I can already see it now, God this is going to be insane...

This is the first chapter that has really felt like the end REALLY is here.  The gang is engaged in battle with Eren, there is no turning back from this point.  They will either succeed, or perish in the attempt.

This story used to have the character growth and the plot at the center of the focus. I'm sad that it is all blown away in favor of cheap spectacle.

This won't end well, for anyone. I know Isayama has something significant planned for Historia's baby (my pet theory is that all the titans will die without heirs, be recombined with OG Ymir, and then she can finally be reborn and GTFO of PATHS), but thanks, I hate it.

Armin already grew up. he was from a coward child and now he is a brave man. i wanna cry

Geez, I hope the alliance can stop eren

This is all a series of bad plot choices falling like domino. Are things gonna work out once we get to final revelations? Probably. Is it gonna feel earned? At this point I doubt it. I miss the passion in this story. Char. develp. has never been the finest but they've always been human. Historia's a uterus. Eren just cares about his freedom. Dialogue falls flat as if Isayama didn't believe in what he writes and he's trying so hard to force feed the reader. If the rumbling is the final stop why was half of this necessary when it gave no closure to any character? But if it isn't, we deserved a real build up of events.

Zeke finally back but we still didn't know if he being controlled or willingly

Zeke is not being controlled and instead helping his brother, Eren is going to win and killed some of his friends, Levi is going to survive, Historia is going to survive with her baby and showed up at the final chapter. That's all I'm sure at this point. Mark my words.

it was sad

It was so cool but very chaotic I feel like I need a flashback or something or a tiny break.

It was so depressing, I can't imagine how Isayama would end this manga in only 1-2 chapters, it definitely need more

Omg this chaoter make me cry and relived, im just relieved that marleyan know they are wrong, that paradis not a devil blooded

one of the best chapters

Poor pacing and seems like a lot of unnecessary convolutions to the overall message

Pure masterpiece! Thanks Isayama

The chapter is fine but ,The story is leading to an obvious ending .I want to be wrong about that . I want a satisfying end . But part of knows that is not possible , let's watch isayama handle this shitshow he created.

The chapter leaves you with just the right question.

ERREEHH REINEERR!!???

Even if I don't want many people to die, I think that everyone will die, humanity will go extinct :(

Ever since 133, it's two chapters which have amazing elements but ultimately falls off as dissapointing. The plot needs to move forward. I thought we were going to have Bertholttalk and Ackertalk. 132 was such a masterpiece of a chapter that it becomes a let down.

Everyone told Eren early on that he'd have to abandon his humanity to make a difference, to save Paradis- especially Armin. Regardless of whose on which side, its ironic that now Armin is the one who can't accept this.

Excitement😎

There are two panels where Levi and mikasa are showing a shocked expression, idk if it’s just coincidence but can this possibly be relating to the Ackerman instinct?

This chapter is amazing good job isayama thx for a another masterpiece chapter

This chapter is really intense. Also, I wish I could've seen Zeke's POV.

Waiting for royal blooded Armin

was good until it spoke

We miss you, Hange, fly high our angel

We're finally at the final showdown boys and girls

We're truly at the beginning of the end for my favorite anime/manga series, huh?

What a series!

What happens with Yelena when either Falco or Annie transforms on the ship? Kiyomi said she‘s ready to sink with it but Yelena?

i hope eren isn't the father

What’s up to come seems uncertain.

Where is Ymir

falco or annie is definitely gna come flying in sooner or later

I really hope we don’t get a peace treaty ending.

I really hope we get a good ending... not happy necesarily....but good.....

I really just don’t care anymore. Yet I come back for more every time. Curse my completionism nature.

I really liked it. Definitely worth the month wait.

I really love the detail from this chapter and my favourite was when seeing Isayama drawing all those colossal titans and those people being crush. That's so amazing.

The end is near. I think we'll see Eren's next (final) POV in the final chapter.

Very cinematic, impressive setup/start to the alliance vs Eren fight

Very devastating

WHY is historia pregnant? (idc about father) Please give us the real answer yams! It was nice to see final audio. I loved Armin’s final comments and can’t wait to see the EMA confrontation.

Wonderful chapter, it's nice seeing another of Armin's plans. Reiner decking the beast titan was hype. The babies and the rumbling were a great juxtaposition too.

Would love to see if eren is really being controlled or if he’s willingly doing this to be stopped and perhaps killed?

I still wanna hope Hänge IS alive

i still wanna know how the hell eren's titan moves forward. the only thing i can imagine is some of the big bois carrying him. i can't get over it

I suffer

#snk poll #snk polls #snk chapter 134 #snk 134 #snk poll results

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - King Pascal

This is, in my opinion, the worst episode of season two and I’ll get into why under the cut. 

Summary:  The group is stranded on an island after a storm. The tiny islanders, the Lorbs, mistake Pascal for their mystical ruler; the chameleon loves the adulation, until he’s expected to protect his people from a vicious monster.

Since When Did You Learn How to Sail, Rapunzel? 

So they hit the storm and Rapunzel starts doling out orders like she always does, but like, she logically shouldn’t know what to do here. She’s only been out of the tower for a little over a year and sailing takes time to learn. There’s been nothing to establish beforehand that she’s learned this stuff. If anything Eugene and Lance should be the one giving the orders here as their backgrounds could feasibly included sailing as they’re world travelers. 

Here lies part of the problem with Rapunzel’s characterization, and I’ve already touched upon it back in The Alchemist Returns, but Rapunzel can’t and shouldn’t be magically good at everything. She can be incredibly skilled in some areas, like acrobatics and the arts, but she also should have lapses in knowellage just due to a lack of experience and expertise. 

A female character isn’t ‘weak’ just because they have to sometimes rely on other characters. They shouldn’t be written to be magically better than the male characters just because they got boobs. That’s not empowering; that’s condescending. Women are people, and real people have varied skill sets and weaknesses that match their interests and backgrounds. 

So Why Is the Island Tropical? 

According to what few maps we see in the show (and yes, they are inconsistent, but bare with me), Corona is somewhere in Northern Europe near an ocean or sea. According to dialogue at the end Forest of No Return, they’ve been traveling east, and according to the map in Rapunzel’s Return, the Dark Kingdom is north east of Corona specifically. Meaning that they must be somewhere in the northern Baltic Sea right now, which is not tropical at all.  

This is part of the problem with Tangled’s ‘throw it all into a blender’ style of approach to worldbuilding. If traveling the world is going to be a major plot point for a season then we kind of need to know where things are in relation to each other. Climate should help determine such things, but if you’re all willy nilly about culture, which climate affects, than nothing is going to make sense. 

My only guess is that the island is suppose to be magical so it has a different climate to the surrounding environment, but that’s just a headcanon and not actually stated by anything in the show itself. I shouldn’t have to be doing the work of the writers for them. 

So Why are We Separating the Guys Again? 

Back in Freebird the writers needed to get Cass and Raps alone in order for them to have their bonding time and a heart to heart, but here, it’s just lazy writing. This is a Pascal focus episode and it requires that Rapunzel interact with lots of other characters, so splitting the group up doesn’t benefit the story in any way. 

The writers just didn’t want to fool with writing for eight characters at one time (I’m not counting Fidella or Owl, though logically they should be considered characters in their own right and not just props for the story, but oh well); which begs the question of why they wrote in so many characters to begin with. 

It’s also an excuse to make the girls seem more competent than the boys, which, as I explained above, is not real ‘girl power’; just bad writing.  

Let’s Talk About the Outfit Changes and How Marketing Affects the Story 

The entire point of this episode and indeed this whole island arc, is just because of marketing stipulations. Every season is required to have one Pascal focused episode and one Max focused episode, because Disney marketing wanted to sell cute animal toys. Another requirement of the story was outfit changes for the mains so that once again marketing could sell dolls and variants and such. It’s why Rapunzel, Cass, and Eugene get so many alternate costumes, while Lance doesn’t despite being with them on this journey too. 

Which is understandable to a point. American television animation has always been about selling toys and merchandise. It’s how these shows make most of their money back. If there’s a show that you enjoy and you want to support it being on the air, you need to buy the toys. Priating doesn’t do jack to the bottom line, it does not affect ratings as most people don't own a nielsen rating box. (an increasingly outdated method to calculate popularity anyways) But whether or not the toys sell is the make it or break it point of every show. 

However, there are better ways to implement these stipulations then how Tangled goes about it. You want to give Max and Pascal focus? Then actually give them focus that relates to the overall plot and not just meaningless filler. You want to the characters switch up outfits and have that tie into the story? Then make sure it fits all of the characters and don’t drag it out more than it needs to be, because this island arc it too damn long. 

And you want to know what the biggest kick in the teeth is? There’s barely any merchandise for this outfit. There’s like one paper doll set and that’s it. The toys for Tangled the Series did not sell and they stopped merchandising the show after season one. Now add in the rating plummet during seasons two and three, and we’re incredibly lucky the show didn’t get canceled outright because it’s by all accounts a financial flop. 

I suspect there was an upfront contract that guaranteed them three seasons no matter what, and that’s the only reason it managed to escape the chopping block and why Chris and Ben weren’t let go sooner from the project. Because Chris at least no longer works for Disney. He left as soon as production ended on the show. 

The False God Trope is Over Played 

I can find examples of this trope dating all the way back to the early 60s, and arguably even sooner than that. However around the 80s, after Return of the Jedi hit theaters, the trope was inescapable in children's media. Every cartoon since has had this same plot shoved in somewhere. It also became paired with the ‘liar revealed’ trope (the bane of my existence) more often. 

And that’s what this is; an incredibly stale take on an incredibly by the numbers story. I kept waiting all episode for the other shoe to drop, for some sort of twist on the usual cliche, but it never came. 

This episode is boring, aggravatingly so. It’s the main reason why it’s in my bottom five. Because while you could argue that really little kids wouldn’t be as over exposed to the trope like an adult such as myself, the writers themselves desperately tried to distance themselves from that targeted audience. They’re the ones that yell ‘it’s not a kid show’, while feeding us crap like this, and I just have to roll my eyes. 

Tangled doesn’t know who it’s audience is. It should be pre-teen girls, but the creators want shoot for an older audience, teens, while marketing wants this to be a preschool show. So the series careens wildly all over the place in terms of tone and winds up satisfying no one. Older audiences are frustrated by childish filler such as this, while younger audiences are exposed to themes and messages that they probably shouldn’t be. I know several parents who have stopped their kids from watching the series because they don’t approve of the toxic values the show prometes in its incompetence. 

It bungles so many of its attempts to be mature because it won’t actually explore the complexities of the plot. Either cause it’s wasting too much time on filler, it can’t explore it’s more disturbing elements to their natural conclusions due to the audience, or it just mistakes ‘shocking’ as deep. 

King Pascal isn’t mature or deep. It’s pointless guff that adds nothing while actively taking away from more interesting storylines. I say skip this dreck and go watch Doctor Who’s The Aztecs instead if you want to see this trope done right with maturity while still being all audience friendly. 

It’s also has the added bonus of featuring two well developed strong female characters who hold their own with the equally capable guys while actually developing all of those characters simultaneously, and was co-produced by an actual woman. If they could pull that off in the early sixties than Disney and Chris have no excuse today. 

This Is the Same ‘Lesson’ As Pascal’s Story

In addition to being boring and unoriginal, this episode is also redundant. Rapunzel already learned to show appreciation to Pascal back in season one. Why are we having her relearn this lesson instead of giving Pascal a new arc? 

It’s not even consistent as Rapunzel only acts this way towards him in his focus episodes. It’s also not a lesson in behaving condescendingly in general because Rapunzel goes on to be condensing to everyone anyways. 

So Did We Really Need This Episode Just to Introduce the Island and the Firefly? 

Yes both of these things come into play later, but not in any significant way. We’re here on this island for four whole episodes and it only comes back for one in season three, and only to further a side character’s story; not the main plot. Also the Firefly will help resolve the plot in five episodes time, but it’s just given a reintroduction there anyways. Why couldn’t this information have been condensed down and repackaged into another episode entirely? 

That’s what I mean by poor pacing. Tangled is not efficient in its storytelling. It drags things out only to give us rushed endings or no resolutions at all. Stop drop feeding info in the backgrounds of filler episodes where it’s not relevant and actually give us stories that focus on the plot, dang it. 

Once Again, Rapunzel is a Hypocrite 

Just like in Pascal’s Story during season one, Rapunzel is quick to show consideration for her oldest friend but can’t be bothered to admit fault to a teenager that she abused. One that she knows is currently facing horrendous and inhumane treatment inside of a jail cell right now and still does not give a damn. 

You can’t claim Rapunzel is a kind and compassionate person so long as Varian and his story exists.You just can’t. Because no matter how you slice it, being a minor means that there is a power imbalance in how adults and the government treats them. A power imbalance that is constantly being exploited by the mains. 

Conclusion

You won’t miss anything other than the shipwreck itself if you skipped the episode. Which is aggravating because it means it’s technically necessary to the on going story without actually adding anything substantial to it. It’s like the series opener all over again, only made worse by how boring and redundant it all is. Worst episode of season two; and now I just want to go watch Doctor Who instead. 

#tangled #anti-tangled #anti-rapunzel #pascal #tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure

[glittering-snowfall]

When talking to people about the ice boat scene from different corners of the fandom, I found it fascinating that both the Elsanna shippers I’ve talked to and the Kristanna shippers I’ve talked to are incredibly pained and devastated by it.

The Elsanna shippers I’ve talked to describe a sense of pain and heartbreak that Elsa would push Anna away again. I’ve talked with people who’ve described watching the scene in horror, in grief, because, “Elsa, what are you doing? You promised Anna you’d do this together! Don’t push her away again! Elsa, please, don’t do this!” 

I know that I, as an Elsanna shipper, felt that devastation in my heart. Watching the ice boat scene feels crushing to me because it feels like a betrayal. The sisters were able to heal Arendelle in the first film because they came together, because Elsa finally let her heart feel what her heart had been yearning for, for years, and let Anna in. All those years in the first film, trusting the prescripts of others instead of your own heart, and you’re able to help heal the land when you stop putting p walls against your sister. Their love, their faith in each other, gives them both strength in the first film and saves the land.

Elsanna shippers feel hurt because the ice boat scene feels like Elsa putting up those walls again. And many Elsanna shippers sympathize deeply with Anna’s position in Frozen 2. They sympathize deeply with Anna. Anna, who has been talking good sense this whole movie: “Elsa, don’t be reckless. Don’t be rash. Don’t run into fire. You don’t have to go this alone. We’re stronger together,” while Elsa hasn’t been listening. It’s heartbreaking for them to watch, especially as the movie emphasizes Anna having to learn things (apologizing for leaving Kristoff behind because she was just so desperate to protect Elsa) when it seems like, Anna doesn’t have to learn anything. Anna is in the right. Anna is in the right. And yet the film frames it as her having to come to terms with change and her sister operating out of her sphere when really, the conflict rests on trust.

There’s a definite sense from Elsanna shippers (myself included) that Elsa should be better than this - that she shouldn’t have pushed Anna and Olaf away. There were other ways, ways that were more rooted in actually “doing this together” - in making a mission plan together even if it meant Elsa going on alone. And there’s also a sense that - even if Elsa isn’t better than this because it logically makes sense that she’s in a traumatic situation and does not want her loved ones to die - she should have more clearly apologized for her actions.

It does genuinely feel out-of-character for Elsa to me - at least to a degree. I’m not one of those people who claims, “Elsa was completely rewritten in F2!” In fact, seeing Elsa relapse into bad choices that were ingrained in her from childhood seems very in-character for Elsa during a crisis. People don’t outgrow things like that easily - and having Elsa completely outgrow that conditioning would be unrealistic. But it feels off to me that Elsa wouldn’t apologize immediately upon reunion with Anna and Olaf. And, I know, the filmmakers wanted Elsa to be less apologetic in this movie. But they also wrote her doing something that they wanted to stress was so intense that they had Olaf get angry about it. Elsa apologizing for her actions in this one scene wouldn’t be like the times she’s apologized for existing.

(On that note, to the people who used the post about the ice boat scene I wrote on my other blog to claim that “Elsa never apologizes because Elsa never feels she’s done something wrong,” your assessment of Elsa is factually incorrect. Elsa feels she does things wrong constantly, sometimes to a crippling degree. Elsa has apologized multiple times throughout the franchise and that anxiety and pain on Elsa’s part is why the filmmaker’s desire for her to be less apologetic makes a certain degree of sense. It doesn’t make sense in the context of the ice boat scene and its aftermath, however, because of the specific way the filmmakers frame the moment for Anna and Olaf... meaning that we as the audience want Anna and Olaf to get closure and then... the film doesn’t give it to them.

And that’s the thing: the sentiment of pain, grief, and anger from Elsanna shippers over the ice boat scene isn’t irrational. In fact, it’s very rational because the film itself frames the moment as a kind of betrayal. The film wants the moment to be a gut-punch. That’s why it goes so far to have Olaf, the most innocent of characters, express anger at Elsa’s actions. So Elsanna shippers aren’t just angry because our headcanons/hopes of the sisters genuinely working together were dashed. We’re feeling what the film explicitly wants us to feel and conditions us to feel.

And the fact that Olaf’s anger and Anna’s anger never gets brought up again? That’s a legitimate flaw in the film. I know I’ve seen people’s defenses of it saying, “It makes sense in-universe that Anna would be too relieved to be angry at that moment, and they must have talked it over at a later time,” but that’s an excuse for a dangling plot thread, not a resolution to the plot thread. It’s headcanon.

So Elsanna shippers have to sit back and watch, while agreeing with the sensible things Anna is saying, and suffer through the film trying to teach Anna a lesson when Anna’s protectiveness of Elsa (Elsa, who is doing increasingly reckless things without consulting her family much at all) makes the most sense onscreen.

Meanwhile, Kristanna shippers can be incredibly devastated by the ice boat scene as well. (I’m specifically referring to a specific number of Anna fans, most of whom ship KA, hence my initially describing them by ship and not just calling them “Anna fans” - because there are Anna fans who ship Elsanna too and I don’t want to be needlessly confusing.)

And, interestingly, these KA shippers’ frustrations often mirror the EA shippers’ frustrations in key ways. They relate to Anna’s pain deeply. Like the grieving Elsanna shippers, they also feel, Anna is in the right, Anna is in the right and I’ve talked to people in this circle who feel the most agonizing thing about F2 is watching Anna try to hold her family together while being torn apart at the seams. And I sympathize with that deeply. It also stings me to see Anna leaving Kristoff behind.

But, where the EA shippers tend to feel, “Elsa should be better than this,” there’s sometimes a tendency among these KA shippers to be like, “Elsa should be better than this - and, because she isn’t, that proves that Elsa is a horrible person and Anna needs to break free of her.”

Where the EA shippers see Elsa’s actions as out-of-character (or, at least, in-character but a character flaw that needs resolution by the film’s end... which the film doesn’t give), this group seems to see Elsa’s actions as validation of something they’ve been arguing since before F2 - that there are unhealthy aspects to the sisters’ dynamic and/or awkward elements in the way the franchise writes that dynamic. And, judging from F2, there are uncomfortable and negative aspects to the sisters’ dynamic (which the film doesn’t really give any firm closure on - yes, they’re in different places now, but did they talk about what happened with the ice boat? Did anyone get closure on that, and what does that say about both of them?) And, yes, the franchise can sometimes idealize Elsa at the expense of Anna. These are valid critiques.

Still, as someone who remembers cracks about “Elsa never letting Anna enjoy a party” before F2 came out, I feel that some of the negativity towards Elsa is born of these people’s own biases. (For those unfamiliar, there was a post going around before F2 came out “joking” about how Elsa never lets Anna enjoy a party. First she flees the coronation ball and Anna has to go after her. Then she gets sick in Frozen Fever and Anna has to be stressed about her all the time. Then she shuts the door on Anna in OFA. Of these examples in the “joke,” I feel the first two are very much unfounded. Elsa’s powers were revealed at the coronation ball and she was fleeing for her life; she didn’t “ruin the party” out of spite. Also, how dare Elsa... get sick and still want to give Anna a happy experience on her birthday? However, I don’t like the moment in OFA either, myself, especially considering the visible pain on Anna’s face seeing that door close again. Regarding the “Elsa never lets Anna enjoy a party” comments, I mentioned to a friend that I found them mean-spirited. She told me they were “just a joke” and I was overreacting.)

EDIT: A friend came to me, frustrated that I was bringing up the “Elsa never lets Anna enjoy a party post from years ago - even though I made clear that the post was from years ago by saying that it was from before F2 came out. I realize that it is unfair to equate the negativity towards Elsa in that post with the negativity I have seen in recent weeks towards Elsa. So I want to make clear again that I didn’t mean to EQUATE that negativity with the anti-Elsa negativity I’ve seen from certain people recently.

I mean, I tried to make that clear by making a deliberate distinction between people who are critical of Elsa for valid reasons and extreme people - and by “extreme people,” I mean people who put things like this in their bios:

I didn’t want to bring up this individual, even though they ship KA, because I didn’t want people to feel I was generalizing all KA shippers as being like this person. I know all KA shippers are NOT like this person, that’s why I describe people like this person as “extremists” and “people on the other extreme.”

I brought up the party meme, not to dredge up old wounds, but because the party meme was a lesser example of negativity towards Elsa that didn’t feel as incendiary as bringing this person up.

I’ll also admit, I was trying to convey a sense of the history of negativity towards Elsa by bringing up a time before F2 and all of its controversial choices came out, when people were still making what I felt to be unfair statements about Elsa that are contradicted by looking back at the actual text of the franchise.

I’m sorry to those that felt hurt by me mentioning this again. I’m sorry that I still feel that the old joke was in poor taste and distorted and twisted canon for the sake of snark. 

I do feel, though, that the extremist negativity towards Elsa that is around today doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It didn’t just emerge fully formed out of the blue - and citing something from the past can highlight that. it can prove that there was undue negativity towards Elsa in certain circles even before F2 came out.

And I know it was just a joke and I don’t mean to rain on your fun years later, but I still feel it’s a joke rooted in a deliberate misreading of the text.  If people years ago said, “Elsa was being hurtful to Anna by fleeing for her life” and “Elsa was being hurtful to Anna by trying to make her birthday a happy one even at the expense of Elsa’s own health,” then that’s a deliberate misreading of the text, especially in the first instance, even if it was just a joke, a lark (jokes can still be in poor taste, or based on falseness, however old they may be) - and such misreadings of the text have only gotten worse in the intervening years.

But I NEVER meant to equate the joke from years ago with the “Elsa should have been killed off” attitude.

And I apologize - because I know all too well what it’s like to be lumped in with extremists. People do it to Elsanna shippers all the time. Again, that’s why, across the post, I made distinctions between the beliefs of extremists and the beliefs of people who have genuine frustrations based on the franchise’s flaws.

Forgive me, I meant for this post to highlight connections between disparate groups of people - and I went out of my way to express sympathy and solidarity with KA shippers who have valid critiques. The purpose of this post was meant to be connective, not disruptive - and I’m sorry I failed in that.

END OF EDIT

I don’t believe the filmmakers intended to make Elsa a horrible person. I also don’t believe the filmmakers meant to portray the sisters’ bond as inherently toxic.

But, like the EA shippers, these KA shippers are reacting to legitimate flaws in the text, loose ends that the film doesn’t return to. If the ice boat scene was important enough for there to be a visible turning of Olaf’s emotions, something that is so notable that even the film takes note of it, then the fact that the scene is brushed aside later in the movie feels... off. Like we’re not getting resolution or conclusion. Besides the sentiment, “It makes sense that no one would bring it up at the end because that would kill the mood (even though it seems emotionally important for all involved) and of course it was all resolved offscreen somewhere more fully instead of being resolved onscreen.”  And I can sympathize with that, even if I fundamentally disagree with those that overly-demonize Elsa.

Interestingly, when I wrote my old post about the ice boat scene on my other blog, Isa of all people reblogged it (as did several KA shippers) - but I get the feeling her take on the ice boat scene is probably something like, “Yes, it’s out of character for Elsa... but that means the filmmakers hate Elsa and want to prop up Anna.” Which is wrong. Like, really wrong.  Isa’s tone can also be surprisingly callous towards Anna - which is why I didn’t include her in my discussion of EA shippers whose heartbreak about the scene stems mainly from their empathizing with Anna. Her racist rhetoric and her fury is corrosive to everyone. 

Likewise, the people on the other extreme who feel that Elsa is abusive and that the filmmakers hate Anna and love Elsa are wrong. (Note: I am not equating people’s Bad Takes on Elsa with racism. But the Bad Elsa takes are still wrong.)

I think extremists need to shake the idea that filmmakers “hate” their characters. Sometimes, bad writing is just bad writing. 

Sometimes, bad ramifications can come from good intentions.

Like, I’ve spent a great deal of this post criticizing the ice boat scene - and especially criticizing the way the aftermath is handled onscreen. But the scene itself also has many merits. It’s complicated. It’s a moment of crisis. And both sisters are partly right and partly wrong. In and of itself, the scene actually displays good writing. But the fact the film later brushes aside the complicated themes it introduces in that moment, undermines the good in the scene taken alone. It leaves that aspect of the narrative feeling emotionally unsatisfying.

Sometimes, the flaws in a film are complicated. 

And sometimes, people can agree on certain things without even realizing it. Because I’ve referenced ways that two groups of people with opposite ships actually have similar frustrations about the scene.

And I know, I’m not “on the outside looking in” when it comes to any of this. I ship EA and KA, so I’m in the thick of it and I’m not trying to portray myself as a neutral third party. That’s why I wrote about my own grief and frustrations with the scene.

And to everyone who was aggrieved that my post about the ice boat scene from ages ago furthered anti-Elsa sentiment because it was reblogged by negative people, that was never my intention. And I hope this post comes across as more neutral and well-argued.

Thank you.

#frozen #frozen 2