#and that the designers of those spaces are so far removed from the reality

[onemightygoldfish]

Every day, my love for desire paths grows stronger and stronger

#they're proof that most modern urban planning is complete bulls #and that the designers of those spaces are so far removed from the reality #of the regular human experience #that they don't know what the masses want #i just think they're neat #desire paths

[mdhwrites]

TOH's Double Ending Error

The show ends twice and the second one is way more fanservicey... And just objectively worse. Worse yet, it literally takes longer than the first ending by two minutes, making it so that six minutes of the finale is just... Pointless. In a show that was shortened and people say needed every bit of time it needed.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the first ending is what happens right after Belos is beaten. We get narration over scenes by Luz who is letting us know effectively the aftermath of the big events. This is actually pretty classic as far as endings go because it's a good way to de-escalate things and cover questions people might have. Here we see scenes showing people are safe, happy, back with their loved ones, better off than they were before, etc. like that. It even takes a realistic but optimistic viewpoint on how the Isles will be after Belos' defeat. That it will be hard but that people are interested in coming back together and putting aside old pains. The lingering shadows will be dealt with and the future is bright.

And then we have Luz come out of The Owl House with Stringbean to reminisce about herself. A farewell to the main character as she does mourn her magic but assures us that she doesn't need it anymore. That everything has made her stronger and ready to face the future. It is a genuinely good, final moment for her arc, regardless of if you think she has gone on an arc at all. Then, we get a glamour shot of her thinking about how this isn't the end of her story, but the start of a new chapter!

I... Genuinely like this ending. The only issues I have with it effectively are just ones that plague the entire series, like how Luz still has Stringbean so still has magic, just not the magic that made her special. The fact that she hasn't really changed or grown. She's just whined. And yes, the Collector does just bluntly suck dicks, especially without helping with the actual rebuilding efforts. But in general, objectively, this is a good ending. It works just on its own, brings the thematics together for a final statement, leaves the future open but also makes sure people know that everyone is happy and safe. It is classic, it works and it is a great capstone that takes four minutes.

There are still six minutes of the episode left.

The second finale is longer, shows off way more characters that I bet half of the viewers barely recognize if they even realize who they are, has a genuinely good like 30 seconds of showing the removal of the sigils, glamor shots of the Isles that really just highlight how few places we went to, are worse than the glamor shots in the first ending, and also remind people how few monsters were actually in the show. We do get future designs but a lot of people's jobs don't actually function with them or are so blunt as to be pointless to show. Luz is right back to wanting to be a witch of all trades explicitly when the first ending allowed some wiggle room for one to claim she did let go of her fantasies, or more so had a healthier relationship with them and reality now, and will move on to treating life differently. More responsibly. Like she isn't the hero of the story. That's part of why the first ending works thematically but now? Now Luz is just Luz from fucking episode one. The First Day at the latest. It just sucks.

All the thematic weight, all the resolution of plotlines, all the theoretical nuance and possibility space for what the future of the Isles would look like? GONE. And in it's place? Repetition. We already saw people get their happy endings. We already saw they were safe and going to do well. We already saw Luz have her twin families. I guess this ending gives us a portal door but we didn't need to see that when it was so blunt already that Luz would live in both worlds... Except because of the killing off Luz's final character moment by having her study EVERYTHING at the Isles' school, we're pretty much told that the human realm is just her Summer home. She clearly doesn't give a shit about anything other than her fantasy world or else she might have actually decided on a major than "A witch without magic."

It says so incredibly little about anything and loses even a nice, thematic ending that is supposed to be taken as the message of the show for... A fairy tale goodbye with some really lazy jokes and fanservice.

Which also explains why I pretty much ONLY heard about this ending. The first one is entirely skipped by the fandom to go "FUTURE DESIGNS!" And admittedly, why shouldn't they? The second ending invalidates the first but also the first ending makes the second one look like a joke. It's just a disaster.

Now, I actually want to bring up what could be considered something similar but... Not quite. Amphibia could be argued to have two endings as well. The first is after the Core's defeat where everyone is saying farewell to those closest to them. Marcy and the Newts, Sasha and Grime, and of course Anne and the Plantars. But... It's not actually presented as quite the end.

It is a final conflict. An acknowledgement that this does hurt and it's a pain not everyone wants. It shows how this final change is one that is reasonable to be scared of. Anne does talk about how they'll always have each other though and that could work for the final message, especially since that's theoretically the message the show wants to go out on. The problem is... That's a lot of tell, not a lot of show.

And so we get the actual ending of the timeskip. The show thematically wants to say that change is a positive thing and that even what you think you lose, still strengthens you for the better. So time HAD to pass. It's also why the narration over top only starts now, though it's mostly just a montage until we get to Anne's final thoughts. It shows how much better people are off now and how they don't forget those old connections. It is proving its thesis and then tacking on a final note that helps bring back a more optimistic tone.

"But of the things you let go, you'll be surprised what makes its way back to you."

A final note that says you don't have to lose things forever. A prayer that distance does indeed make the heart grow fonder. That change in all it's form, in loss and gain, can be positive. All while it keeps the possibility space of the girls' future, Amphibia's and everyone else's open but still lets us know that they'll be alright because these experiences and connections made them better.

It is a secondary finale that has a point to exist. It's not just for a victory lap and fanservice, it's actually thematically important and its message would not have hit as hard if not for the timeskip. It needed to be there, so it is.

TOH's timeskip doesn't have that excuse. It's just a circle jerk to give the fandom one more treat, one more redesign, and then leave. That is all it genuinely adds AND it takes over 10% of the finale just for that SINGLE purpose. Any other purpose was just as unnecessary, could have been just another minute on top of the first ending, or actively damages the story of the show.

Never tell me the shortening hurt the show. Not when even in its final moments, it undercut its own themes and pushed the story to the side just for fanservice, especially when this isn't new for TOH. Not by a long shot.

======+++++======

This post helped me know I could still be at least fair-ish to TOH. Genuinely, I liked the first ending. That wasn't just to setup the failure of the second ending, which I'd always thought fine before seeing the finale properly, but that I can appreciate a good, happy ending with a positive message. And that is a comfort to me I guess.

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead. If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

A Twitter you can follow too

And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.

#the owl house criticism #toh critical #toh #the owl house #The Owl House finale

[stardust-falling]

So I Identify as pro-ship (the original meaning, specifically) because I just don't think it's my business to cast moral judgment on people because of their tastes in fiction, and if someone's ship or fiction makes me uncomfortable I'll just block and move on. I have a lot of personal reasons for this, including but not limited to being raised for the later part of my childhood in a puritan cult in which basically all fiction was "problematic" and made you an evil person for enjoying it. So, I've seen where the anti line of thinking gets you, and even on the internet I've watched the definition of problematic grow and grow over the years-- if fandom keeps going on this way, eventually the label will consume everything.

However, I also take issue with the blanket statement "fiction doesn't affect reality." Because let's be honest, it does. Specifically, the racism and stereotypes present in fiction have a massive effect on peoples' perceptions of minorities-- this, I think, is by far the biggest negative effect fiction has on reality. Unfortunately, this is not what antis are concerned with, and from what I've seen it's only ever really been used as a "gotcha," while the condemnation of problematic media is almost always centered around nsfw content and relationships.

Even in those cases, yes, maybe there are some people who will copy "problematic" fiction, but let's be real-- the people who commit those kinds of crimes would do it with or without fiction. It's not the fiction's fault, nor is it the storyteller's if someone commits a copycat crime. Additionally, I can only think of one or maybe two incidents in which fiction is confirmed to have influenced a crime.

For the vast majority of people, fiction will not affect their real-life values and beliefs that way. Honestly, most pro-shippers I've seen also don't claim that fiction never affects reality, it's just that there's a difference between fiction and reality. Which is objectively true, and if you don't think so, then please reconsider that stance because it's honestly baffling-- especially when most antis don't have a problem with murder, theft, etc. and only have an issue when it comes to sexual themes.

Anyway, as to where I was going with this-- dark or problematic fiction may cause some harm to those who consume it. There are people who will be triggered by it (that's what warnings and avoiding are for). In very rare cases, there might be someone who is inspired by it. But people approach these issues the wrong way.

Fiction can affect reality, but instead of seeing it as radioactive waste, it should instead be treated as an allergen.

Foods that are allergens can literally kill some people-- but for other people, they're helpful. Problematic/dark fiction can be the same way. I process my trauma by both writing and reading certain dark topics, but other people would end up triggered by it-- like how I enjoy peanuts & they're good for me but they could kill someone else.

Look into studies on schools that have banned peanuts-- there's no significant difference in allergy triggers, and it removes a type of nutrition from the diet of those who need it. This sort of ban is not helpful, and not recommended. Problematic fiction is the same way.

People with allergies will know that they either need to look at a label to see if the allergen is listed, or ask the preparer, or just avoid the food if they're not sure. While there are designated allergen-free spaces, those are not the default-- because if you banned everything anyone could be allergic to, there would be no food anyone could eat. People should be able to avoid their allergens, but that doesn't mean no one else can enjoy eating those foods or benefit from them.

Just like you should stick to allergen-free meals if you're allergic to something, you should also stick to verifiably trigger-free media and spaces if you're triggered by certain content. That doesn't mean it needs to be banned, that doesn't even mean it needs to be sequestered away from wider fandom-- it just means that you need to not follow people or engage with people who post the thing that harms you, because guess what? Just because it may harm you doesn't mean it harms everyone.

#zhuixing posts #i was thinking about this earlier #specifically the allergen comparison #bc as someone who is very lactose intolerant i'm not going to say that people who enjoy milk are inherently evil or out to get me personall #and fiction just feels the same way to me tbh

[random-void-thoughts]

Pocket Dimension

Our apartment is divided into three sections: our space, our mom’s space, and the communal space. Our mom’s space is, well, hers, and we’ve always felt like a guest in the communal space instead of a resident, so the only place we can feel truly comfortable in is our space. This one section of the apartment is our living space. But there’s only one place where we truly feel at home.

Our space has three rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a walk-in closet connecting the two. Sometimes, at night, while our Mom and our neighbors are asleep, when all the lights are off, we step into the closet and shut the doors, creating a closed-off section of the apartment, removed physically and emotionally from everything else. And it’s beautiful.

Not only can we now control the amount of stimulus we receive, but we lose the ability to perceive a world outside the closet. There are no lights peeking under the door, no sounds of commotion from another room, only the stimuli of the closet, only that which we can’t help but feel or have chosen to perceive. Of course, the outside world still exists just beyond the door, it hasn’t gone anywhere, but there’s no sensory input to confirm that, so it becomes easier to ignore. As far as our senses know, there is only the closet.

In those moments, the closet becomes its own self-contained reality, like a pocket dimension. The only things that can affect us exist within the bounds of the closet. Anything else might not even be real, and even if it is, it can’t reach us here. A place designed for storage becomes a bunker, a safe haven from a world that we have only ever known to be unkind.

And if there’s no external reality to perceive, then there’s nothing to worry about. Oh, we’re trapped in poverty because we won’t ever be able to reliably secure a job with a living wage? What’s a wage? What’s a job? What’s poverty? We’re in the closet, those things don’t exist in the closet. Oh, the world is figuratively and literally on fire? Good thing we’re in the closet, that problem doesn’t exist in the closet. Nothing out there can hurt us in here.

Perhaps this is why liminal spaces are so comforting to us, at least when we’re not trapped in them. It’s like a self-contained moment in reality. There is no before and no after, no start and no end, no was and no will, there is only what currently is. There is no then, only now. Only what can be perceived. And it is our choice to stay.

This is home. This is what it means to be home.

#axalara #liminal #liminal space #liminal spaces #journal

[sebastianinjapan]

May 31 - Ueno Park/Tokyo National Museum and Akihabara

We visited yet another green space within Tokyo, which holds a shrine constructed in reverence to Ieyasu Tokugawa. The shrine was the most ornate that I’ve seen on this trip, covered in gold and surrounded by gardens on all sides. What truly wows me about these parks is how separated they are from the city. No clutter, no noise. It really allows one to fully immerse themselves in the site. Within the park was the Tokyo National Museum which has to be my favorite museum I’ve ever visited (better than the Smithsonian’s in DC). Listing the items I saw today would be futile as the museum is home to a wide array of art forms and historical objects. What I truly enjoyed was the range of time periods these items came from. The item that I found most intriguing was a mirror plate constructed in the 4th century. This mirror plate features incredibly detailed designs, and raised spirals protruding out. While all the items within the museum were of high craftsmanship, the time period in which this item was constructed is what drew me to it. While I was inspecting the mirror, I tried to imagine what level of civilization must have existed in 4th century Japan for metallurgy on this level to be facilitated. This particular line of reasoning was in my head because my professor had told us that during this time period no real records exist of how society had functioned.

Once we left the park we went to the Ameyako shopping district, and while I didn’t do much shopping I had a delicious Butadon bowl which was pork cooked in a black pepper sauce over rice. After eating we departed for Akihabara, and as a major fan of manga this is the place to be for me. However, this location is only 8 minutes away (on foot) from our hotel so I had already partially explored it. Still I walked around with some peers and ended up finding an art book I had been on the hunt for during my previous journey. I spent most of my night here before eventually going back to my hotel.

Academic Reflection

Today’s readings were quite illuminating. While I had previously considered myself an “otaku” which I thought just meant someone who had a deep appreciation for Japanese media (mainly manga/anime), I will no longer apply that title to myself. The readings delved deep into the subculture, and pathology of those involved in the subculture which I am far removed from. Otakus are specifically concerned with objects of desire that take no physical form in reality. They exist in a mixture of their own fantasy world, the fantasy worlds they prescribe to, and reality. What I found most interesting about our readings was the concept of a “grand narrative” and how as we enter post modern times that grand narrative has begun to crack unable to provide the structure it used to. I think this is easily observable all throughout the globe as government and religious institutions no longer garner the same faith they used to as the stories they force onto the world are simply incompatible with the rapid change in our present society. Upon thinking about it a bit the turning point (if I had to choose one) would likely be the creation of the internet and it’s proliferation around the globe. While I should say I have never existed in a world before the internet, the vast amount of knowledge at my finger tips makes the framework of the grand narratives present in the West obsolete. I come to this conclusion because before the internet one would have to believe the institutions in power whether it be the government, religion, or news/media as no other sources of knowledge existed. While one could gain education, there would be no way to “fact check” current events against what the dominant institutions had to say. In this way the readings today almost treat the otaku as forerunners for what individuals who are no longer restricted by a grand narrative would look like.

However, this chance may also have some equally negative drawbacks. The otaku is believed to seclude themselves from certain parts of society, and while this is mainly a stereotype I would argue it’s inherent to the way they lead their lives. Even in the consumption of media like anime the otaku has a sort of removed attachment where the original work (that becomes parodied by otaku culture) is not of importance. The original work is comparable to the concept of the grand narrative, and when otakus move beyond that original work all the media consumed becomes a simulacrum. I would argue this is problematic as the lines of “reality” (talking about the reality of the media) becomes blurred/nonexistent giving way to complete fantasy. While I’m not quite sure I’m in a place to label Japanese individuals as otakus from a glance, I can sense a sort of detachment when a man in a suit who has come off work is purchasing pornographic material of what tends to be girls drawn to look like children. Maybe these men do not see a problem with depictions such as lolicon, for example, because they are so abstracted from the reality of it.

[fakesurprise]

Kado

I hated this. This morning pacing through rooms designed to be emptied. The pent in penthouse seemed to be short for pent-up aggression. For some reason, the Kith owned this under Higaldo Holdings. Which was fine. We owed many things under many names, some soley to stop humans from owning or using them. There were patents we had buried and sealed away, other things as well. But this? I was here, with no intel.

No duty, nothing to do beyond wait for orders which never came. If it was a test, I wasn’t happy about it We lived together: that was part of being Kith. Yes, I was wounded in ways that did not show. Yes, I was healing. But there was no reason to stick me in this human conceit of luxury for no reason. Taking it as a test of patience, I hadn’t broken anything except some trees so far. A few of those I didn’t even remember breaking.

One week was poised to become a second, and I wasn’t remotely happy about any of it. I knew there were spacers with breaker abilities who could monitor n-spaces, the only reason I’d hadn’t made one and used my minor talent with fire to burn and burn things, leave them whole after and get rid of anger that way. I had known Kith to be lectured about such loss of control and waste of Power. You never knew when you’d be called in to help deal with overlapping realities and whatever was trying to come through to this one.

I had not been needed for almost three weeks.

It was a record for me, and not one I was happy about.

I drank water, studied bottles and drinks I knew almost nothing about. There was hardly enough alcohol here for a Kith to get actually drunk, but several bottles of anything could bring a nice buzz. But, again, control. Need. Duty.

I clenched my left hand, considering going for a walk. For all our strength and skill, our bodies were flesh and bone most of the time. If I punched concrete hard enough, I would break my fingers. Kith heal fast: the pain would help centre me. But, again, duty. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a test, that someone was watching me for the moment I screwed up.

I wondered if this is how some humans felt all the time, with their god spying on every thought and casting judgment on the innocent because there was no one else to be judged. I needed to go for a walk, but this was where other Kith knew to find me. Not that any of them couldn’t call me, but I’d alienated the few friends I’d had. All you had to do was sleep with the wrong person and everything fell apart: that was even more true for the Kith than for humans.

Someone knocked on the door.

I didn’t move. Someone had two days ago: I’d had security come remove them, because no Kith would need to knock and housecleaning could wait until I left. I didn’t expect to be here much longer.

“Kado? Open the door, please?” The voice was human, male, scared. “Kado Tae, I need to talk with you!”

#writing #prose #nanowrimo 2022 #earthdusk

[solarisgod]

do certain individuals in the primordial pantheon ( e.g. life and death ) know that astereus would exist, even though xe isn't supposed to, and be as xe is now?

Strangely and terrifyingly enough, none of the Primevals knew about Astereus' existence until Death discovered xem at the age of five, sensing the several lost souls that It planned to guide, while questioning their sudden deaths, that were held in the burning house Micah set upon. The thing about Astereus is xe was born with no traces of existence in the cosmic designs: The Universe's history doesn't have any events involving xem, xe have no known dates and locations of xyr life and death, even Fate have no idea what will happen regarding to and regardless of the choices xe'd make.

Ilios and Fengari had to have Micah hidden in a forest where Gi, xyr surrogate parent, would take care of xem while subduing xyr cosmic powers by distancing xemself with xyr celestial origins ( i.e. not being in the outer space with other celestial beings and bodies ), that is until at the human age of two, Micah accidentally burnt the forest and was forced to live with the human society. Indeed, Micah wasn't supposed to exist while xyr celestial parents weren't allowed to birth their own kind together, only making their necessary creations to maintain the universe such as stars and satelies.

Although, ultimately, it was Love in the end that brought the Sun and Moon together for Micah ( then the Starwake System ) to exist beyond as the Incarnation of Eclipse, a cosmic horror that can disturb the Natural Order and destroy the whole Omniverse.

So, no, Life and Death had no awareness of Astereus the moment they came to just be. No one knew initially but, of course, Gi who did try to keep xem from being discovered. When Astereus was by Death, Fengari had to plea It to not erase xem.

Astereus is a threat to the Natural Order and those who are deeply connected with it and / or are responsible of preserving it ( e.g. Incarnations, deities, forces, etcetera ) because xe is very much capable of changing the Reality and any specific aspects of it, like Time and Space, by the impacts of xyr emotions and thoughts and memories, especially when it comes down to Love. Xyr existence does not generally follow the laws of nature and that can be dangerous to the cosmic works of the order, therefore, it would be an ideal to remove Astereus from the universe and erase xyr traces of life.

Even though no one in the Universe knows Starwake's fate at all, Ilios and Fengari promised to Life, Death, and other Primevals when they had a voting sessions to perish their child that Micah ( with the other Starwakers ) won't use xyr existence as xyr ultimate purpose to harm and kill despite what would happen to xem in the world. Micah's celestial parents hold so much love in their child that even when they mostly watched xem in the far distance like the real living bodies of sun and moon, they still believed their child won't ever turn out to be horrible enough to destroy the Omniverse.

Every Primevals knew Astereus' existence later on, but while Death was hesitate to erase Astereus and Life was very much so certain to do so for the sake of the Natural Order and Universe, there's no doubt there would be theories shared between certain Primevals that perhaps, Astereus can not really ever die by the hands of other beings. Only Astereus, the endless love and light, bearer of the stars, can decide xyr own fate.

#ANONYMOUS #/// #// #/ #𓁹 ༑ ࿐ྂ ⩇⩇ : ⩇⩇ ⚠︎ [ 𝙴𝚇𝙸(𝚂)𝚃 : 𝙶𝙾𝙳 ] * ‹ ANSWERS . › #𓁹 ༑ ࿐ྂ ⩇⩇ : ⩇⩇ ⚠︎ [ 𝙴𝚇𝙸(𝚂)𝚃 : 𝙶𝙾𝙳 ] * ‹ META . › #𓁹 ༑ ࿐ྂ ⩇⩇ : ⩇⩇ ⚠︎ [ 𝙴𝚇𝙸(𝚂)𝚃 : 𝙶𝙾𝙳 ] * ‹ STUDY . › #𓁹 ༑ ࿐ྂ ⩇⩇ : ⩇⩇ ⚠︎ [ 𝙴𝚇𝙸(𝚂)𝚃 : 𝙶𝙾𝙳 ] * ‹ CANONS . › #𓁹 ༑ ࿐ྂ ⩇⩇ : ⩇⩇ ⚠︎ [ 𝙴𝚇𝙸(𝚂)𝚃 : 𝙶𝙾𝙳 ] * ‹ ASTEREUS . › #𓁹 ༑ ࿐ྂ ⩇⩇ : ⩇⩇ ⚠︎ [ 𝙴𝚇𝙸(𝚂)𝚃 : 𝙶𝙾𝙳 ] * ‹ MICAH . › #[ thank you so much for this question omfg this is. A Lot but ] #[ Starwake brainrot do be always going brbrbrbrbrbrrrrrrrrr... ]

[mdmcustom-remodeling]

TRENDY LA KITCHEN REMODELING IDEAS FROM OUR EXPERT CONTRACTORS!

Do you know what the best part comes out in the last couple of years of Pandemic? Amazing cooking skills almost in every homeowner that have remained hidden so far, and the kitchen becomes the true hub of what anyone could even imagine! So, if you feel like upgrading the entire look of the cooking space, there’s no wonder. With our kitchen remodeling contractors in LA, you can have the latest kitchen remodeling and renovation ideas. We have gathered up here some of those!

Top Kitchen Remodeling Ideas You Can Embrace

While having plenty of time, you might utilize that working in new flavors, right? But apart from this, you have figured out that your cooking space requires an upgrade a bit. And we are here with some stunning and trendy LA kitchen design ideas to bring that change! Such as:

Go for open shelves

Do you want to have a complete change in your kitchen? Then, removing the upper cabinets and replacing those with open shelves may be apt to let in the trend and create unique architecture. Also, you can show off your stunning art pieces and potted plants here for decor while highlighting shimmering backsplash.

Cabinet updates

Though your kitchen cabinets are in good condition, the style and color upgrade is essential to give your cooking space a contemporary look. We recommend neutral tones or a bright white to bring a sophisticated look to a small kitchen. A fresh coat of paint can make you feel like preparing meals in a new space.

In fact, you should pay attention to the flooring and go for hardwood, tiles, stones, or green alternatives. Do you want to ensure whether our suggestions are reliable? Follow the feedback of our previous clients on Yelp.

Rock the countertops

At MDM Custom Remodeling Inc, our kitchen remodeling contractors in LA consider replacing kitchen countertops an essential part of renovating a cooking space. In fact, we suggest taking time in research to decide on the perfect one to fit your kitchen design and functionality but within budget. For example:

For a busy kitchen, laminate may be apt as a low-maintenance option.

For a custom look, granite is appropriate to install.

Quartz gives easy to maintain and scratch-resistant surface.

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#room addition companies in los angeles #second story addition los angeles #remodeling companies in los angeles #remodeling los angeles ca #kitchen remodeling contractor los angeles #remodeling

[gingermcl]

The word Attention means “a giving heed, active direction of the mind upon some object or topic," from Latin attentionem “attentiveness," past-participle of attendere meaning “give heed to," literally "to stretch toward," from ad "to, toward" in space or time; "with regard to, in relation to” + tendere "stretch"

Recently I thought attention is similar to a tension. Tensions can rise when horrific actions are brought to light. When we “pay attention” we are giving away a flow of energy.

As above, so below. As within, so without. Everything has an internal and external function. Paying attention is sending out a flow of energy, which affects the internal and external environment.

We are constantly charged for our life force energy in this matrix. Our life force energy is the battery powering the simulation.

The vampiric races in this realm continuously attempt to push or pull our attention toward what they want to be created. These beings do not have the power to conceptualize an idea and it physically manifest like man. Man is a powerful creator being who creates with his thoughts. An idea may be the most powerful thing in the world. Idea is like an item of God. Thoughts create reality and what you pay attention to will affect your existence.

Awareness is the first step to making any change. That is why the vampiric races have worked so hard to Remove man from his spiritual nature, brainwash, spellbind and place a veil over man’s eyes. Those who are happy with how things are do not want us to become aware; like the bakers dozen of families holding 90% of the worlds wealth while the rest of us fight over the remaining 10%.

The evil ones are constantly fighting for mankinds attention. I typically call them archons. They are cons here to deceive man. Continuously attempting to pulling our attention towards mainstream narratives they want to come to pass. Television and movies are weapons. Movies are designed to move energy.

Once you discover how powerful our thoughts truly are, you may try hard not to envision things you don’t want to see literally manifest in the physical. You are far better off to sit there and daydream about a seemingly impossible utopia than to send a single second of energy, pushing main stream narratives that implement crimes against humanity.

[cosmicangel888]

2023 The Game of Joy 5D

Prepare yourself for the new heights of loving divine essence -

When you have time through the holidays to reflect and objectively soften into your heart - call forth your inner child, the parts of you that need to be healed and soothed - what is your most profound excitement for your new year ahead -

as multi-dimensional beings; physical, mental, emotional, spiritual aspects of what it takes to be balanced and healthy, in all ways, we must now consider our new perspectives of what it takes to nourish and divinely bathe you in a blessing that is of you for you and through you -

looking back for what lessons - knowing that none are your saviour and home; it is you - and it will always be you ~ there is none outside of you that is meant to heal you, be there and fix you, or support you financially - and when you think of your life this way, you will always be cycling in co-dependency and imbalance

you & the alignment with Spirit is ALL THAT IS needed

you are here to know in alliance with spirit, your highest self there is nothing outside of you that you need, - you are your own hero

get excited about designing a life that is purely aligned with spirit and enrichment of soulful connections that are caring, truthful and gentle and honouring - releasing all that want you when only the getting is good and when things are coming in -

Release the toxicity and the energies that take - justice is you living in your truth so the Divine can bring to you what you are worthy of; opportunities and love and play with our sacred earth - not everyone is worthy of being with you on a daily basis -

Be in your divine strength to say no and keep closed what has only been trauma, games, depletion, and deceit - life is far too short to the be the debasement of anothers wounds; send what needs to go to go - and stand fully in your own light and truth.

you are your own hero - that is how aliveness within is serving you - God will always meet you - truth is - who are you?

stability is only within - you need none outside of you - once you master this - then your true soul mates enter - until then, you attract karmic partners because you have not done the healing

You have to look at your life and suss out what is the drama, negativity what is not nourishing you - and only you are the one to fix, make right, re-align and never feel the need to say yes to anyone that wants to dump their Karma burdened life when they need, want, or running on empty -

Their karma becomes your karma the moment you allow such beings that are not doing the work to entangle in a quantum energetic way, or physical way to now make you a part of their mess - all are now seeing what choices affect others and the reality in front of them -

Marrying someone is not the answer to self healing - it is a karma ploy to get back into the graces of what it took years and turmoil to dig yourself out of - it is discerning for all - what is it that you left and showed yourself true self love to keep it at a distance - for if there was 0 self respect then - have them build it in their time and space while you move on - keep the door closed so your own new year is worthy of your new vibration

Clearing cleansing, seeing your reality completely done with chaotic messy deceivers and takers - those that thread wild stories and smoke and mirrors and play shapeshifter to confuse and block you from your intuition - there are those, narcists and skilled manipulators that know how to deceive even the best at seeing truth - so discern -

What in the past have you been shown, proven, and were there when you were at your darkest? What have you sacrificed to help others and all that you received was deceit, loss, trauma and pain?

When those are truly in their light - they need none and build a life on their own with clarity, simplicity and truth - honest is the only foundation of which to build - truth is

Make 2023 a year which all choices release and remove, transmute all toxicity -

What have you been given and shown that is transparent and truth; confusion is of the devil energy of shady trickery and only wanting and getting, taking - Spirit is clear and truth and simple it is never discombobulated and messy - have all work it out -

Bravery is working out your own life and healing what needs to be healed - Healing is and should be the highest priority - for nothing will attract or stay without pure and loving health -

How may you see your life as a balanced piece of art - you and your choices; health, wellness and truth is the way to such profound health and higher knowing - spirit and light flow through what is clear - flowing through your matter is light - love the design of love is flowing and simple never complicated, messy and disorganized - spirit is always truthful and transparent - release for good what is not - surrender to spirit in all great life choices -

Your heart will know - and know that manipulation of any kind in any way is not the purity of heart -

spell work, cohersion, forcing, making with mental or emotional ploys or trinkets is not simple and transparent - discern what is truth - and how you are ever spiralling anew - creating new dimensions of play is truthful in which souls feel safe and loved and cared for and treasured -

this is our new earth - it is our earth of gentleness and it deserves we all deserve truth, fairness, and simplicity of our joyful souls - it is our time to play - light workers have been paving the way for eons- it is time to play  © 

Heal your wounds, so they do not become another's

All is healable -

Blessings and light

Joanna

#ascension

#2023design

#healyourwounds

#healinghumanity

Human evolution, re-writing all aspects of our co-creative experiences through love, light, harmony of all that is sacred, always been sacred; World Ascension Healing Classes, Intuitive Sessions, Healing Sessions, Ascension Books, Healing Systems, 5D human-socio-altruistic re-write ~

DONATIONS - see our PayPal link here; paypal.me/JoannaLRoss PATREON new community link ~ for monthly subscribers;

https://patreon.com/JoannaGalacticTut... * [email protected] For our Tumblr Blog and weekly Ascension Posts

#Youtube

[freshmaple]

Professional Upholstery Cleaning in Milton VS. DIY Cleaning

 Upholstery Cleaning in Milton

In all honesty, upholstery cleaning in Milton is one of those tasks that can cause anxiety. Why? Because it is neither simple nor enjoyable. It's not done commonly at houses for the same purpose. Because it's such great work, most individuals only perform comprehensive cleaning once every few years or at most once per year. But the reality is that you can pretend to have a clean and neat space without clean couches, chairs, and other furniture. Not only can clean furniture improve the aesthetics of your house, but it also promotes health and safety. Bonus!!! It lengthens the durability of your home furnishings.

Difference Between Professional Vs. DIY Cleaning

Therefore, you have two choices: hire professionals to clean your upholstery or do it yourself. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Let's look at the situation and decide which course of action you ought to pursue.

What Are The Charges?

Okay! So let's start by discussing dollars. When you consider the price, it is evident that DIY outperforms professional services. It is far too inexpensive compared to cleaning services. Additionally, you can hire tools and supplies to add a professional finish to your do-it-yourself cleaning. However, doing theupholstery cleaningoneself takes a lot of time, attention, and effort. Even if you do manage to save some income, is that worthwhile? What do you think? We suggest you take time when professionals offer services under your budget. Yes! We are right.

Time for Professional and DIY Cleaning

Experts win when it comes to the amount of time needed to clean upholstery. Professional cleaning services can complete a hefty cleaning operation in 2 or 3 days. Yes! Thanks to their training, experience, and effective equipment, giving you more time to do other tasks. Hiring expert services will save you a great deal of time because upholstery cleaning in Burlington is not done daily. Let's admit it; no matter how carefully you clean with your hired design tools. The likelihood is that the outcomes will not be as excellent as the services from a specialist. Compared to DIY cleaning with your tools or at-home solutions, a professional cleaning crew with their intense cleaning system can remove considerably more filth from your upholstery. It bothers us when you don't invest your time in DIY cleaning. Well! When are you calling Fresh Maple?

Taking Out Strong Stains

Professional cleaners can more thoroughly clean heavy fabrics and furniture. Because they have access to tools and machinery, they can remove stubborn dirt in much more detail than a DIY method. Cleaning can be done more thoroughly with the help of hot water suction power, steam cleaning, and hot water extraction devices. Adopting a DIY strategy to get rid of heavy cloth stains that heaving might yield little benefits. You might not enjoy the smell of some ingredients, such as white vinegar and isopropyl alcohol. It's important to keep in mind that both of these smells will disappear within a few days, taking any odd odors with them. However, by adding a few natural ingredients, you may give your homemade upholstery cleaner a wonderful scent.

Last but not the least

People have illusions about the expense and hassle of professional upholstery cleaning in Milton. But the truth is that it is more comfortable and cost-effective in the long run. Professional cleaning maintains heavy textiles besides cleaning them. This lengthens the upholstery's lifespan. Because you can want to clean furniture at any time. DIY fabric cleaning may appear more affordable or handy. Yet, you run the risk of treating the upholstery while cleaning, which would cause more harm than good. You can preserve your upholstery and get rid of bugs, dirt, and odors from your fabric by using professional upholstery cleaning in Milton. Consider hiring fresh Maple if you live in Milton and want to cut down on break time. We come in and thoroughly clean your entire house so you can spend more time doing the things you enjoy.

Reference

#upholsterycleaninginmilton #upholsterycleaninginburlington

[fictionzsurveys]

1 - Are you interested in any reality TV shows? Nope.

2 - When was the last time you made plans with someone? What are you going to do with that person? I made plans to play a board game yesterday and we did. It was a trick-taking game with cats.

3 - How often (if ever) do you use moisturizer? Every once in a while during winter. My hands can get ashy.

4 - Name five things you can touch from where you’re sitting right now: Keyboard, mouse, fidget spinner, mac pro, backpack.

5 - Have you had any of your wisdom teeth removed? What was the reason? (eg. infection, impaction, lack of space). Nope, they’re still in there.

6 - What was the reason for your last hospital visit? Getting a mole and a cyst removed.

7 - Where was the last place you had an itch? The side of my stomach with a mystery itch. I’m paranoid it’s a bed bug lurking around my bed.

8 - If you’re on a long car journey, would you rather drive or be the passenger? Drive.

9 - What’s the earliest time you’ve had to wake up for work? What about the latest time you’ve clocked off for the day? Hm maybe about 5 to 5:30 AM? One job required me to be in pretty early. But I got transferred out of there because I lived far from the office and kept showing up late.

10 - Do you use a laptop, desktop, tablet or phone to take your surveys? Usually a PC, sometimes my phone.

11 - Are you fussy when it comes to how your surveys are formatted on your blog? Yep.

12 - How old were you when you first got internet access at home? Was it broadband or did you have dial-up first? It would’ve been dial-up in 1999.

13 - When was the last time you painted your nails? Never.

14 - What’s your typical order when you go to Starbucks (or wherever your favourite coffee shop is)? Some kinda cold tea or coffee.

15 - What’s your favourite thing to have on toast? Not a fan of toast. It scratches the roof of my mouth.

16 - Do you have any debt? If so, are you on top of paying it all back? About $1,600. I pay off my cards every month.

17 - What was the last thing you purchased with a credit card? This morning’s breakfast. I put everything on cards for the mileage points and rewards.

18 - Have you been to college/university? If so, has your degree been useful to you or was it a bit of a waste of money? Yep, for three years in the early 00s and then non-stop since 2008. I got an associates degree in graphic and web design and it helped for sure.

19 - How often do you travel by public transport? Every day since I don’t have a car.

20 - Do you have an instagram account? If so, how often do you post on there and what kind of things do you post? No I shut it down.

21 - Are you close to your extended family? Do you wish you were closer? Not so much these days. I’m a distant type.

22 - Do you prefer to give your pets human names or not? Not.

23 - Do you like having ice in your drinks? Yep.

24 - When was the last time you went to a BBQ restaurant? Oh man... years.

25 - When was the last time you re-arranged the furniture? Is this something you like to do often? A few days ago to accommodate some upcoming construction. I used to like to move things around but now that most of my stuff is in storage I’m fine with the layout.

26 - Have you ever used a fire extinguisher? Would you know how to use one without reading the instructions? Nope, and I think I could figure it out.

27 - What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to deal with at your job? Talking with devs who have emotional difficulty.

28 - What was the last thing you used your mobile phone for? Listen to a podcast.

29 - Did you used to play The Sims? What version or expansion pack was your favourite one to play? Nope, but I worked on Sims 2 and Sims 3 so I did get to play those. I liked Sims 3 more than 2 when I had to poke around in there.

30 - What was the last thing you used a lighter for? Probably to melt a plastic part back together after it snapped off, but I can’t recall which device.

#source #ssurveys #survey #surveys

[copelandcontreras]

Decor Recommendations From The Benefits

Have you ever wished to help make your house more stunning? Should you be like most people, you might have. Altering your house is much less tough while you feel. Actually, there are several actions to take to modify your house which can be inexpensive and straightforward. Here are several design and style guidelines to help you out. Before you start any style function, determine what feeling you are going for. You can make add more any mood for your room, whether it be thrilling or peaceful. When you know what sensing you would like any room to provide you with, you will notice that it's quicker to map out jobs to perform the room design. One of many quickest actions in home design entails artwork an area. Paint provides a area a fresh seem, also it can entirely alter the sensation from the room. Fresh paint enables you to place a dash of the specific style from the room, and it is an inexpensive method to commence redesigning your property. Use decorative mirrors when decorating your house. Mirrors are often very helpful, particularly if you are living in a tiny area. A mirror on a couple of walls isn't just hassle-free for fixing your head of hair out and about. They can also offer the false impression of more area. A single tactically located vanity mirror are capable of doing miracles for opening up a room. For areas with good ceilings, you have to vary the places of your lamps. The reality that the ceilings are really high can destroy the lighting inside a place. To fight that, use equally xưởng gỗ an cường lighting the two and lamps that stay soil-stage. thiết kế nội thất chung cư nova home will help to make more sufficient illumination inside the room. Removing clutter is the greatest action you can take for all inside tasks. Just about any house may benefit from a nice de-cluttering. You can give additional stuff to charitable trust, recycle them, or sell them by way of a yard transaction so that you can generate a little extra funds. Drawing out a design of your place that you just decide to redecorate, and thoroughly determine your space. This will be significant info to take when you shop for furniture and other products. Should you not have exact specifications, you may purchase home furniture which will not squeeze into your home. Include brilliant hues in your the place to find established a very gentle mood for your friends, family and friends. This can be achieved by placing a dazzling couch or cushions with your living room area. These can be any size that you would like and in any colour to match your particular area. All those trying to design and style a room inside their property should be intelligent regarding this. Whichever goods you choose to decorate your living space with ought not acquire away from the usefulness of your place. By way of example, don't placed a big item within an place that where by there will be a lot of traffic. Use wallpaper to update shelving. Construct- sản xuất sofa are an economical option, however they are typically boring and look a bit inexpensive. To ensure they more fashionable, try out incorporating a strong wallpaper on the rear of every single shelf. Arrange your textbooks and knickknacks to exhibit the style. This simple trick will provide a shop-acquired rack some pizzazz without having to break the budget. When you very own numerous things, be sure you keep things easy in relation to your wall surfaces. Some individuals convey more stuff as opposed to others. In case you have lots of valuables that you will not devote safe-keeping, usually do not set something on the surfaces. Should you place things about the wall, your home is just planning to appearance far more messy. Keep to the suggestions on this page and you are sure to acquire inspired to transform the look of your property. Regardless of whether you change a whole lot or possibly a tiny, interior design may be fun and simple to do. Continue to keep looking for ways to increase your house up until you are content with how everything seems!

#nội thất #xưởng gỗ công nghiệp

[seo411]

Episode 213: How To Read an SEO Report

Each month I sit down to pick topics that are most relevant to the Digital Marketing landscape. Or, I am asked questions from clients that really can be a strong class topic. That is exactly what happened here. I had two different clients ask us to help them understand an SEO report. So out of that, this topic was born. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9vglF2gAU&feature=youtu.be Google Analytics The reality is I used at least 2 and sometimes as high as 4 types of reporting daily for websites. The elephant of the room is Google Analytics and I decided to talk through the parts of it that I use. Really the information in GA is outstanding and helps you understand how to make better decisions on your website if you know how to interpret the data. When you look at analytics it helps you understand active pages, demographics, and the customer journey. Now, long-ago Google Removed Keywords from those reports, because as I’ve come to understand now, you cannot provide a good customer experience if we are writing on just a keyword. Rather you should be topic-centered. This is a theme you will find in most of our classes and blogs. However, I still want to know what keywords my website is drawing so I can make sure that I am meeting the needs and that the website is being used as I intended. If I look at Vertical Web in total, there are four distinct topics and audiences I wish to draw with it.  Truly it all comes down to small business owners that need digital marketing services. But I have the web hosting component, the web design component and the SEO, including local SEO or digital marketing component. And then I have our SEO classes that are live and on-demand. I have to account for each audience and client need on this website so the Keyword data helps me to understand what we’ve done well and what needs more attention to keep this all in balance. So keywords are important to help pick topics but not writing pages to the keyword. SEM Rush The second type of SEO report we use here is SEM Rush which allows us to pull through multiple different aspects of Google, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Business profiles.  This is also the report we give clients to see their overall progress for the most part. In addition, we encourage clients to look back at the previous year for their data rather than the previous month. The reason behind that is that all businesses are cyclical in nature. Retail may do more during Christmas and Back to School than it does 4th of July or St. Patrick’s Day unless you’re an Irish Pub. Looking at the aggregated data helps clients understand the progress that has been made on the website. Although some SEO companies talk about how many terms they have in the top 10, we often find that what is missing in that analysis is are they money terms. If I look at Vertical Web, we have several thousand words in the top 10 and do 1.5 Million impressions per month through organic traffic. But, we need to look at how many of them have the probability to create a conversion. For us the page that talks about how to set up DNS for a Square Space domain, something we put up for a registration customer, does not really net us anything. So although it garners a lot of terms for use and that page ranks on well over 300 variants, it does not put one dollar in our company. Conversely, a term like Houston SEO or Web Design Houston is far more advantageous for us. Therefore, we need to nurture those terms. So don’t buy the line that your SEO company is doing anything for you just because you have a list of terms. Review those terms and make sure those terms support the goals of your business. Ahrefs The next tool we use, and we’ve seen reports is Ahrefs. I often see people ask which one is better SEMRush vs Ahrefs. And to me, it’s like asking which is better water or food. You need both to sustain yourself. And I think the answer here is the same. AHrefs, does a far better job at reporting the backlink profile. Although we track keywords and positions in it, I don’t think it gives as nice of a report for the clients. So, therefore, to check link profiles we use this vs. SEMRush which provides a much better overall comprehensive reporting package IMO.  Maybe it’s better to say it this way, Ahrefs provides the webmaster with better tools whereas SEM Rush accounts for both the webmaster and the client.  But we still need both. Stat Counter Last but not least we use this frequently on clients whereas it gives an interpretation of the raw data without interference or extrapolation. Google Analytics often extrapolates the data and throws out the things it thinks is irrelevant. I find this useful in analysis because we can take each client individually and track each page visit and the path they took through the website. The data says with the user this way and doesn’t get put in different places. Overall it can give clients a day-to-day vision of their website, and what their potential clients thought was important that day. It allows the spotting of trends easier for sure. And it allows making a better overall view of the website without having to plod through the different google screens. We still have the old log parsing software like Webalizer, but they often don’t tell a true story. The bottom line is learning to understand the SEO report is a way to understand what your SEO service is doing for you. It also gives you the vision to make better decisions about your website and how to better market it. Read the full article

[qqueenofhades]

The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

#the green knight #the green knight meta #sir gawain and the green knight #medieval literature #medieval history #this meta is goddamn 5.2k words #and has its own reading list #i uh #said i had a lot of thoughts?

[bluesfortheredj]

The spy who loved me.

Smut ahead. Like, seriously. Smut.

It had been a long time, a very long time, since seeing Eggsy. Even professional spies weren’t immune to the restrictions and rules when it came to lockdown. The daily texts, phone calls, and video chats had satiated your need for contact with him only so much, and you were both desperate for some intimacy with one another in person. At this point even the thought of holding his hand was enough to make you feel giddy; those slender fingers of his linked with yours again before exploring your body… it was positively breath taking.

Eggsy had stayed in London with his mum and sister in the new house he’d purchased for them only a couple of weeks before the world turned upside down and finally, now that lockdown was being lifted and you could form bubbles with other households, you were on your way to join them thanks to your job allowing you to continue to work from home; not that you were planning on working too much when you arrived. Butterflies were fluttering around your stomach as you pull up on the driveway and see his car parked half in and half out of the garage, and when you knock on the door your heart leaps as you see his familiar shadowy figure walk towards it.

He opens the door with a breathy ‘hey’ and you immediately fall into his chest before his arms wrap themselves around the body he’d missed so very much the last few months. The two of you stand there for what seems like hours yet minutes all at the same time, only separating when you shiver from the cool breeze blowing around both of you in the doorway. His hands stay on your arms as he leans away with a smile to take in the sight of you standing there in person finally, then he bends down to scoop your suitcase up and leads you inside, kicking the door shut behind you both.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he sighs in disbelief as places your luggage down at the foot of the stairs before taking you through to the large lounge, “is this actually real?”

You press your lips to his in what begins as quite an innocent kiss but ends as a desperate, sloppy, heated embrace as he pushes you against the nearest wall before his hands begin to explore every inch of skin he can possibly touch underneath your top. Your hands grab at his jeans blindly, trying to find his belt so you could set him free from the confines of his underwear, and the two of you are freely moaning at the heightened feel of touching one another after so long. Neither of you hear the front door open and then close again, and Eggsy’s mum has to loudly clear her throat for the two of you to even notice that someone else was in the room.

“Shit!” Eggsy gasps, facing away as he does his jeans up.

“Oh my god,” you whisper with hot cheeks as you smooth your clothes down, “I’m so sorry Mrs. Unwin.”

“Sorry mum!”

“I think it can be forgiven under the current circumstances,” she chuckles, “good to see you again (Y/N)!”

Daisy sits in her pram giggling at her own foot and your heart melts at the sight of her, “it’s lovely to see you both, Daisy’s grown so much!”

“She’s eating us out of house and home!” Michelle exclaims, “she’s going through the longest growth spurt I’ve ever known of!”

“Well that’s lucky, because a little birdie told me that she’s partial to a certain dinosaur shaped biscuit, and I happen to have a couple of packs of them in my suitcase.”

“You’re a life saver,” she sighs in relief, “Eggsy, why don’t you show her around the house? I guess you didn’t quite get that far...”

“Will do mum,” he nods as a blush creeps up his cheeks, “this way.”

He picks your suitcase up and leads you up the floating staircase as you take in the very modern and expensive surroundings you now find yourself in.

“Bloody hell Eggs, this house is amazing!” you exhale in disbelief as your fingers glide along the wall.

“Nice, init?”

“Nice? Bit of an understatement!”

“Wait until you see our room… the walk in shower is to die for,” he says with a wink and a light bite of his lip, “plus we’re the opposite end of the top floor so we don’t need to be too quiet.”

You give his arm a playful slap and he takes your hand as the two of you head to his side of the house and the more than generous bedroom he got to call his own until life could continue as normal. It felt as if you were in an episode of Grand Designs with how modern and clean everything was, and you walk through the wardrobe space with long rails either side of you filled with variations of the same suit to the extravagant en suite with charcoal tiles lining the floor and walls and the biggest walk in shower you’d ever seen in your life; only one sheet of glass slap bang in the middle of the room to separate the shower area and the toilet and sink.

“This is literally bigger than my flat,” you groan, “I think I need to become a spy as well.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” Eggsy scolds as his brow furrows, “anyway, you’ve got me, and what’s mine is yours.”

“Yeah but that’s not fair for me to rely on you like that, plus I don’t have anything to give you in return.”

“Uh… I would disagree with that statement…”

“Huh?” you question as you look up at the square shower head and wonder what it must feel like underneath it.

You’re so transfixed by the fitting you don’t even notice Eggsy creep up to you until his sultry breath flows over your ear, “you have plenty to give me,” he whispers.

You shiver involuntarily as his fingers creep their way around your hips before walking along into the waistband of your jeans. Your head rolls back to lean on his shoulder as your hands grip firmly onto his forearms while his fingers tease your lips apart and stroke along your hidden folds gently, and you can feel his own excitement at the intimate touch against your backside.

“What would you two like for dinner?” Michelle shouts up the stairs, tearing you both away from your quiet moment and forcing you back to reality with a jolt.

Eggsy groans in frustration as he reluctantly retracts his hands from your body and you find yourself now completely worked up and more than ready for him to show you exactly what you’d been missing the last few months. A sigh escapes your lips as you steady yourself on the shower screen and Eggsy can see just how desperate you are to continue what he’d just started.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“It’s fine, I just didn’t realise how much I missed that.”

What the two of you needed right now was, quite simply, a fuck; something that would just purely release the initial tension that had built during lockdown. You had plenty of time to make love romantically now that you were staying there, and you could take your time with it hen Michelle and Daisy were out doing the food shop or something, but what you needed at this precise moment was a quick and messy release. The two of you look at one another, knowing exactly what was going to happen, and Eggsy quickly runs downstairs to give his mum an idea of what you wanted to eat that would take at least half an hour or so to give you a small window of opportunity.

“Right,” he exhales as he shuts the bedroom door behind him when he returns, “oh…” he pauses as he sees you’re already in his bed, your clothes and underwear in a pile on the floor next to it, and he discards his own clothing on his way over to you.

“How long have we got?” you ask as he settles on top of your body and adjusts the duvet accordingly.

“Like half an hour I think?” he grins before removing his glasses and leaning down to kiss you.

He’s almost pressing his entire body weight onto you as your mouths move around one another’s in a sloppy kiss that’s more teeth and saliva than anything else in all honesty, and your hands are grabbing at every inch of skin you can get a hold of as he manoeuvres himself between your legs hastily and carefully guides his length inside your already slick walls that had been waiting for him for what seemed like so long. The sensation of him inside you and his body on top of yours once more is overwhelming, and it doesn’t take you long to fall into a fast and needy rhythm as you two of you moan unashamedly while the bed rocks beneath you. This is exactly what you both needed; passionate, hot, fast, handsy, loud sex. It was purely to scratch an itch that was in desperate need of attention, and as the need to orgasm heightens with each deep thrust you find yourselves going out of rhythm as the aching for release takes over.

“Eggsy… Eggsy!” you moan as his lips attempt to kiss your neck.

“Fuck, (Y/N), I ain’t gonna last,” he pants against your skin.

The sound of your bodies slapping against one another in quick succession drifts up from underneath the duvet and the two of you are truly lost in the haze of impending orgasms just as Michelle opens the door while asking a question that isn’t even distinguishable to either of you until there’s a gasp at the doorway which shocks you both to stillness.

“Mum!” Eggsy shouts, “get out!”

She quickly retreats and slams the door shut before you hear her practically running away down the landing towards the stairs. You look up at Eggsy who slowly turns to face you, then his lips land on yours within seconds as his hips start up again; his stiff member filling you with ease as your legs wrap around his backside.

“You know I love you,” he breathes heavily between intermittent pants.

“I know,” you nod, “I love you too.”

“Good,” he smiles, then leans his head down and bites onto your breast so he can flick his tongue over your nipple.

You cry out with pleasure at his sudden move and your hands weave their way through his hair to keep him where he is as your muscles begin to tense inside, ready for the much needed release. Before you can get to yours though, Eggsy lets out a hot, stuttered breath over your chest and his entire body tenses as he finally lets go with the longest groan you’d ever heard him make. He soldiers on after his climax and with some encouragement from his thumb rubbing over your sweet spot, you soon clench around him and release to the sound of whispered pants of his name which are emanating from your throat without you even realising. You blink away the stars in your eyes and finally look at his satisfied face hovering above you, then he flops down next to you and takes your hand in his as you both catch your breath.

“You do realise I will never be able to look your mum in the eye again, right?” you chuckle after a few moments of silence.

“Same,” he grimaces playfully, “I think we’ll just hide up here the rest of the night.”

could you make it as smutty as possible with some fluff, there visiting his parents back home and they can’t keep their hands off each other and his parents notice but don’t say anything until his mum walks in on them on the sofa in a very heated and handsy make out they apologise and try forget what happened but then she walks in on them the next evening in his room having sex there embarrassed again but still continue after she has left as they just can’t get enough of each other – Taron or Eggsy – @sarahegerton96

#eggsy x reader #eggsy unwin imagine #eggsy unwin fanfic #eggsy unwin x reader #taron egerton #eggsy unwin smut