#don’t tell me there’s a single trope better than amnesia

[neondomino]

you're all the things I've got to remember

Murder Mystery Games - Prompts: (trope) Amnesia / (word) Proposal / (dialogue) “Show me where it hurts.”

“Sirius? Why are you in my bed?” Remus asks nervously. He’s pretty sure Sirius is naked. He’s pretty sure he’s naked too. Did he get drunk last night?

There’s a long moment whilst Sirius turns over in the bed and stretches, a smirk on his lips as he does, before his smile drops and he stares at Remus.

“Shit,” he mutters. “Shit. Crap. I shouldn’t be here!” He jumps out of the bed, not caring that he’s not got a stitch of clothing on his body and he turns to face Remus. He winces, twisting his arm.

Remus stares, jaw dropping as he takes in Sirius’ body. Amazing.

“Sirius, I don’t remember last night. Did we…” Remus’ words trail off as his gaze moves down Sirius’ body. So many tattoos. He doesn’t remember these, but it’s been a year since he snuck a look back at school. His eyes move lower, over Sirius’ abdomen and freeze.

“Yeah, we… I think we were drunk,” Sirius says. “We had a great night together. What I remember, and… when we were drunk, feelings came out. We both admitted that we have feelings for each other.”

“You remember much more than me then,” Remus mutters. “I’m not hung-over at least.” He sits up. “Your hair looks longer than usual?” “Does it?” Sirius chuckles nervously, and there’s something in his face that tells Remus that something is not right. He glances back over Sirius’ tattoos again. They don’t look that new either.

He stares, his gaze moving up to Sirius’ face. Something is very wrong, and Remus gets up from the bed, grabbing the blanket on the chair to wrap around himself, and he strides out of the room. “Tell me what’s going on. Now.”

Sirius sighs as he points to the sofa for Remus to sit down. He pulls on a pair of boxers and pushes a video-tape into the player and sits with Remus.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “This is… it’s only a few minutes long.”

“You’re worrying me,” Remus says quietly. “What’s happening, Sirius.”

“Remus, about six months ago, you were in an accident,” Sirius explains. “You—”

“I don’t remember that,” Remus interrupts.

“Sweetheart, I was never supposed to be in your bed this morning. You… you’ve got amnesia - a short-term one, so you’ve forgotten… well, you’ve forgotten us. You go asleep and your memory resets.” The words are stuttered out as though they hurt Sirius to say.

Sirius takes a deep breath and presses play on the remote. “We admitted our love three years ago and my proposal was six weeks later, because once I knew you loved me too, I didn’t want to wait a single moment longer than necessary. Six months later, I married you. Then… it was all perfect until the accident.” Sirius sighs. “St. Mungo's are working on making you better, but it’s going to take more time. Meanwhile, I sleep in the next room and just seduce you every day. I… I got comfortable last night and… and fell asleep there and you saw through my lies, I’m sorry.”

Sirius appears on the television and Remus turns his attention to it, trying to understand what Sirius has just told him. The Sirius on the screen says very similar things. That Sirius has shorter hair. That Sirius is on the verge of tears. That Sirius has Hope clutching one hand, and James clutching the other.

Remus feels cold.

The talking is followed by a clip of what appears to be their wedding video, and Remus watches, transfixed. “We actually got married?” he asks. “I don’t… I don’t remember. Sirius, what happens if I never remember?” He feels his throat start to close up, a wave of panic hitting him, and Sirius’ arms wrap around him.

“Even if you never remember, I’m going to spend my life here with you,” Sirius assures him. His arms wrap tightly around Remus. “But they’ve dealt with these things before. The magic involved /always/ works. But… but sometimes it can take upto a year. We’re six months in. Half-way there.”

“Do I always find out the truth?” Remus whispers. He grabs at Sirius’ arm, holding it tightly.

“No. A few times. We’re still perfecting this system,” Sirius murmurs. “I keep messing up. I didn’t want to leave you last night, and it’s caused this. But we’ll make it through, okay?”

Remus nods, not loosening his grip. It’s terrifying that he can’t remember so much of his life. It’s terrifying to know that he’ll wake up tomorrow without remembering this conversation.

“You won’t leave, will you?” Remus asks quietly.

“I’ll never leave you,” Sirius promises. “Not even on the worst days, it’s never an option.”

“Worst days?” Remus asks.

“You don’t always react the same,” Sirius admits quietly. “It hurts to see you like this, but I remind myself that it’s not about me. Any day, you could wake up and remember everything - or start to remember.”

“I’m lucky to have you then,” Remus comments.

Sirius sighs. “No, I’m lucky to have you. So, what do you want to do today?” He pulls away a little, rubbing his shoulder once more and wincing.

“Show me where it hurts,” Remus says. He looks at the bruise on Sirius’ shoulder. “What happened?”

“I had to go into work a couple of days ago and when I lifted something down, well, I was a bit stupid and got hit in the shoulder. I’ll be okay, it was feeling worse yesterday.” He shakes his head. “But you… love of my life, my Moonlight, are so distracting that I barely even notice it. So, what are we going to do?”

Remus glances Sirius over, his gaze drifting down Sirius’ body. “It’s a shame I don’t remember our…”

“Wedding night?” Sirius smirks. “Well, how about I seduce you into bed, we can pop in to see James and Regulus… and then pop over to your mum’s place, before having a late dinner and coming back here to cuddle.”

“It sounds amazing,” Remus admits. “Do we do this often?”

Sirius shrugs. “On the days you don’t find out, we have dinner in my restaurant - we have a private area set up there. I… I own a restaurant now. That way you can’t overhear anything that could throw things off. Or we stay in, or… well, there are a few places where we go. Sometimes we visit your mum. On the days you do find out, we can visit other places. We see James and Regulus - who are together. You get to see Lily, and James and Lily’s son, Harry.”

Remus tries to restrain the panic that builds. He’s forgotten all of this. “What about me? Where did my life take me?” he checks.

“You’re going to be a teacher,” Sirius says. “You started a job. You’re on unpaid leave at the moment but the job is waiting for you when you’re ready.”

Remus smiles slightly. “I wish I could remember,” he admits.

Sirius stands up and reaches for his hand. “Sweetheart, you will, one day,” he murmurs. “But today is one of the good days where you’re handling this pretty well. So why don’t you come to bed and I’ll let you do whatever you want to me?”

Remus shakes his head. “I don’t think I… I think you need to show me…” he reddens. He doesn’t remember ever having sex before. “Are you the only…”

“Yeah. Just me,” Sirius confirms gently. “And I’ll take it as slow as you need, okay. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.” He uses his grip on Remus’ hand to pull him closer, and Remus stumbles against his best friend. Lover. Husband. He can barely believe this, but then Sirius’ warm lips are on his, gently guiding him as though their lips were the perfect fit.

Remus holds on tight, and Sirius lets him.

#wolfstar #remus x sirius #wolfstar writing prompt #wolfstar prompt #sirius x remus #amnesia

[kawaiijohn]

Rewind, Rinse, Repeat Chapter 1

For Invisobang Minibang 2021

Ao3 Link

Chapters: 3 finished, 12 total Rating: T+ Warnings: Major and Minor Character Death- all temporary, Implied Child Abuse/Neglect, Strong Language, Mild Body Horror, Mild Injury. Other warnings listed by chapter Characters: Clockwork, Danny Fenton, Pariah Dark, Levi | Leviathan (OC), Mal (OC), Observants, Mentions of other characters Ships: Lost Time, Dark Ages, CW & OC child, CW & Levi | Leviathan (OC) Genre/Tropes: Human AU, Magic AU, Found Family, Character Origin, Hurt/Comfort, Original Magic System and Lore Additional Tags: Existentialism & Existential Angst, Memory Loss & Amnesia, Corruption, Clockwork Centric, They/Them Pronouns for Clockwork, The Fenton's A+ Parenting, Obersvant Bashing

Summary

“Clockwork can I ask you something? How did you become a ghost?”

The tale surrounding the mystery of Clockwork's existence; a world where magic is common and ghosts are not. A world where one lonely, average mage tries with all their might to save what means most to them. A world where things need to be remade into something better.

Shout out to my betas @bibliophilea and @moonlights-shadow-warrior for keeping me sane, @13thdoodle for letting me use their OC, Levi, @dailudannos and @sailor-toni for providing art for later chapters, and all the folks over at @invisobang for being awesome!!!!

Chapter One below the Cut. The rest is available on my Ao3 account because tumblr linking/posting is hella broken.

Chapter 1: An Inquiry

“Hey, Clockwork? Can I ask you something?”

Clockwork looks over from the mirror they were watching intently.  “You already have, Daniel,” they reply, offering the other a smirk.

“Oh, ha ha.  You've never said that to me before.”  The reply is filled to the brim with sarcasm, as per usual.  Danny rolls his eyes, but a small smile gracing his lips betrays the fact he isn't annoyed in the least.  “Seriously, though.  It’s something that's been on my mind like... every day for the last two weeks!!"  He raises his hands towards the sky, flopping back in the air dramatically.  "But... it's kinda, y'know.  Personal-”  Danny trails off, slightly embarrassed.

Of course.  Clockwork finds themself smiling fondly- Danny thought he’d said something he shouldn't have- an inquiry that could make his guardian upset (as if it's even possible to upset Clockwork like that).  A question is a question, and this is a worrying habit of his that the Time Master is trying to help break, even if it's still somewhat endearing to them.

“I uh, I mean... it’s personal about- to you, not to me. That’s what I meant!!” Danny continued.

Clockwork stares at him, unblinking.  An idea (or thousands) of what he may ask flashes through their mind’s eye.  With a single, calming pulse to their Core, Clockwork pushes the involuntary slideshow of timelines aside as if they're no more than curtains.  They need to focus on the window in front of them; the here and now, not the temporal drapery.

It's a habit they are trying to overcome for Daniel’s sake.  To ensure their ward's growth, they need to stop peering into the near future as often- not discourage his asking of questions.  After all, what is a child if not but a well of endless curiosity?  Cutting Danny off is also sure to disallow the development of any trust or patience Clockwork needs to build within their young ward.  They wouldn’t receive either of those things if they assume what he wanted to ask.

It's common decency to not assume, lest it ‘make an ass out of you and me’, according to Daniel.

It is going to be a tough habit to break, but by the (other) Ancients, they're trying their best.  Their ward deserves the infinitesimal choices all other children have when asking things of their guardians, so even if they do glimpse to the future, they will not mention it to him.  Clockwork refuses and will continue to refuse to take their ward’s agency away; to not have a choice in things is a fate worse than fading.

The boy has been quiet, stuck deep within his own thoughts even after an impressive five minutes and thirty-seven and a half seconds of silence (uncharacteristic of the boy, Clockwork notes).

Now that just won't do- he must have lost his train of thought.  Clockwork gestures at the ghost boy, motioning for him to continue.  It works- Danny adverting his eyes and clearing his throat, "Well, it’s just like- you know so much about me- like, how I died, the whole Ghost Zone Prince business, that entire disaster doomed timeline with Dan... I just keep thinking- no- realizing, that I barely know anything about you!!”  He throws his arms up in thinly veiled frustration.

Clockwork smirks. “You had another question, did you not?”  They place a hand along the edge of the closest Temporal Mirror, turning to face the mirror- still halfway facing Danny.  They can see his inner debate clearly written on the boy's face- the mirror reflecting as if it were an ordinary object (for now).  They turn towards it fully and watch Daniel's reaction from behind them, acting as if they aren't finding joy in their ward's hesitation.  It's always adorable when he tries not to offend Clockwork. "I may be able to work with time, but that doesn't mean I wish to float here waiting for an answer all day."

Danny blinks a few times, rolling his eyes again in response.  Clockwork is certain that if they weren’t secured to his skull by human musculature they’d fall out and roll away.  “Well, I’m sorry for trying not to be rude and like, asking outright... but since it’s you I have to always be super direct!!  Jeeze you’re frustrating sometimes!”  He floats towards his mentor, crossing his arms.

Danny often forgets Clockwork isn't easily upset over trivial things such as questions.  Most questions are about things they already know the answers to, anyways.  And the few things that they don’t know when asked, they figure out soon after.  Such is the duty of the Master of Time- to be a step ahead of everyone and everything else always.  Besides, in most timelines (68.3% of them, to round up) the question Daniel wishes to ask is along the lines of ‘What was your past like?’ Another small fraction (a little under 20%) the question is ‘How did you get so strong?’ .  And even in the remaining timelines, the question would be along the lines of ‘How do your time powers work?’

They are each things Clockwork expects Daniel to ask them at some point or other, as it were.  There isn’t really anything Daniel can ask that could be too shockin-

“Clockwork, I was wondering… how exactly did you become a ghost?”

They... did not see that coming… in any of the timelines they’d glimpsed.  Clockwork stills for only a fraction of a moment, but it’s long enough for Danny to flinch, feeling as if he’s crossed a line.  They hear more than see Daniel shrinking in on himself as they look off into nothing, buried memories waking slowly in their mind.

Clockwork is brought from their introspection by a mumbled curse.  “Shit!  I mean... uh crap??"   They just stare at Danny as they are brought back to the present.  "Never mind just... sorry for asking...  Oh man!  Did I offend you somehow?  Ancients dammit, this is what I was worried about!!”  They watch him curiously, soft whirring coming from their ward's anxious core.  “We can just forget about it if-”  Daniel’s hands wring together nervously, shoulders tense with worry and face full of guilt.

Right- facial expressions are also important for a young ghost's emotional communication and development.  Sometimes the Time Master wonders if their isolation in Long Now affected their social behavior (it did).  Their face is carefully blank most times, so they set to fix it- they offer a small grin, hand coming to rest on Daniel’s shoulder.  “It is more than fine, Daniel.  You asked if you could ask a question- which is in fact, two questions, I should note- but I gave you consent to ask it of me.”  They squeeze his shoulder to placate the worry.

“It’s about time I told you this story, as it were.  I just did not foresee it being told at this very moment."  Clockwork floats slowly, turning away from their Mirrors.  "Come along- it’s best we sit for this.  I’ll have one of your friends bring us some tea.”

Danny floats after his mentor, looking around the room the two normally use to study history of the Realms.  “So, uh… is it a long story or...?”

“Oh, it is very long, indeed.”  They fly through an ornate door and over to their favored 'chair'- a stack of comfortable cushions in violets and blues, both impossibly cool and warm at the same time.  They recall Daniel discovering the room, eyes full of wonder and posture relaxed.  Clockwork chuckles- the first time their boy had wandered in here he'd decided to take a running dive into the pile, jumping up in surprise when it was cold as ice, yet warm as fresh laundry.  The expression on their ward’s face is one of their fondest memories; a happy moment amongst all the tedium of watching time.

“It may take a while to tell this tale proper. But, it is a story that ought to be told.”  Daniel makes himself comfortable on his chair of choice- an unholy combination of 'borrowed' pillows and what appears to be a more modern gaming chair- complete with an obnoxiously bright green-black color scheme.  Clockwork has to hide another smile as Danny wiggles himself deep into the pile.  “So, Daniel- what do you know of the phrase ‘Totems of Power’?”

“I thought I was getting a story, not a pop quiz!  Unfair!!”  His disdain for schooling makes Clockwork laugh fondly before the boy continues.  “But they’re like… hmm how do I explain this?  Well, there’s the universe right?  Like every timeline and every result of every timeline all at the same time kind of ties into the main universe thingy- but there's still a main timeline, and that's kinda like... Main Street, and the other possible timelines are uh... like side streets with dead ends?  But there's other forces that like, aren't time and… uhhh...”

He hums, crossing his arms deep in thought.  Clockwork takes the time to purr-sing-hum at one of the many blobs floating in and out of their lair; Daniel had asked them to keep some around as pets and the Time Master was happy to oblige.  They were unable to deny something so beneficial to the young Prince, after all.  The one deemed ‘Mr. Pants’ by one of Daniel’s friends answers their call.  Clockwork buzzes to it a quiet request- ‘bring Daniel's favorite tea and mugs for two, please.’  The little thing chirrups and zips off through the walls- eager to serve the Lair’s owner and be (potentially) rewarded with pats (from Daniel).

The Time Master brings their undivided attention back toward a grumbling ghost boy, lost in thought.  “Daniel if you need to ask for help I’m glad to-”

Danny snaps his fingers, coming to a realization before his mentor can finish.  “I got it!!  The best way to explain it is ‘The Universe needs to run smoothly, so there’s certain forces- like Time or Space- that are upheld by a powerful entity, like a person or like… the avatar of that concept?  Yeah, something like that, but they ensure the aspect they represent is properly cared for so the universe doesn’t completely like, die.’”  Danny nods to himself.  "It's why you stepped in to stop Dan, to make sure the world didn't end like that."

“That is correct- it is my job to ensure this universe of ghosts and reality doesn't crumble prematurely.  Now, do you have a recollection of any other Totems you may have encountered?”

“Well, yeah!  We call them ‘Ancients’, though- so like… Pandora is the one for war and history, and Nocturn is for like… dreams?  The Void or something, maybe?  And then there’s old man Pariah who isn’t one, but he said there’s a Leadership Ancient somewhere, and then-”  Danny pauses, blinking at Clockwork in realization.  “Wait, you asked that for a reason, didn’t you?”

“That I did.  Becoming the Totem, or Ancient of Time is where this story starts.”  Clockwork hums, seeing Mr. Pants fly back towards the two- nearly spilling scalding tea all over the ground.  “Now then.  We have drinks.  We are sitting comfortably.  I believe it’s time I spin my tale for you.”  They take a sip, closing their eyes in bliss.

They open them once more and see Daniel sitting, eyes full of stars and eager- Eager to hear, eager to fire off a question a minute.  It makes a chuckle bubble up in their throat, to see their favorite person so excited to learn.

“Once upon a time, there was a human; average in most ways, a simple person living a simple life.  They would get up in the morning, perform their daily tasks, and go to sleep at night.  Day in, and day out- a boring, but fulfilling existence.

“However, where this story differs from what we recognize as reality, is that in this realm, humans who could control magic were the norm.  Think as if it were like one of those fantasy games you and Tucker play together- mages, healers… all of those and more were commonplace when I was alive.  Yes, humans can wield magic now, but it is nowhere near as frequent as they could in our tale.”

They pause, seeing that Danny was about to interrupt.  “Wait wait- this realm?  Like- this is a completely different reality?? And people can wield magic now???  Are you messing with me?  Like… I thought it was all just-”  The boy stops, his train of thought drifting off the tracks as it tends to now and then.

“Yes, first, this is a completely different realm from either the Mortal Plane or the Ghost Zone.  Second, Daniel- tell me... have you not noticed the magic of those you have encountered?  Blood blossoms… a reality warping gauntlet?  The existence that is ‘Freakshow’ in general should be a red flag, seeing as his talents were… strangely non-ghostly in origin.  Not to mention objects such as the Infi-map...”

“Man, I wish I could forget about Freakshow… who mind controls ghosts???  He was the worst!” Their young ward crossed his arms and grumbles.

“If you’re done sulking about your past misadventures and former foes, I was in the middle of telling a story, if I recall correctly.  One you asked I tell you…”  Clockwork simply stares, unblinking as steam wafts from their slowly cooling tea.

All is well, they knew Danny would only take approximately 4.85 seconds to snap his attention back to their story.  Clockwork sips their tea, waiting.

Danny snaps out of his thoughts only a millisecond off of Clockwork's prediction. “Sorry... it’s just super weird to think that magic actually… still exists?  Like ghosts are real and all but magic being a thing feels a bit far fetched, don’t ya think?”  He pouts, brow furrowed.

The Master of Time finally closes their eyes, removing the hood from their head.  White hair floats gracefully behind them, settling just past their shoulders.   Clockwork opens their eyes again- a serious, yet warm expression directed at their ward.  “Magic is simply defined as reality altering acts using both energy and the willpower of a sentient being, if that helps.”  Another sip.  Mr. Pants made a wonderful batch of tea, as always.  They smile wider when they notice Danny’s expression- the boy has never seen them without a hood, and they know doing this will (in 99.78% of all possible timelines) convince the boy to take what they said seriously.   ”Just as ghosts can be defined as ‘ectoplasm given form and consciousness’, forces beyond humanity and the physical realm can be explained with scientific terminology if you know where to look.”

“So like... what all did magic have to do with this ‘simple human’ version of you?  Did you ever have the power to shoot lightning??  Could I shoot lightning if I tried?  Like were you some sorta time wizard?  Is that why you’re all… timey-wimey and powerful?”  Danny wiggles his fingers with a look of confusion on his face.

Clockwork always finds their Core warming when their boy acts his age.  He's abnormally prone to shoulder the destiny of the world on himself and often forgets he's just a kid.  “You could continue asking questions one at a time, or you could allow me to tell my story.  The choice is yours, Daniel.”  They smirk, watching as Danny purses his lips, his steady flow of questions stopping short.  The best answer.  “Perfect- all is as I thought it would be.”

They close their eyes and reminisce as they continue.  “Now- to answer your last question… Yes.  You could say magic is how I came to be the Master of Time in both the Infinite Realms and the mortal plane, but there is much more to the story than that.  Other players, situations, and pure circumstances.  The universe in its infinite chances and possibilities brought myself, as well as many others to the situations they face here and now.”  Clockwork pauses, taking the moment to stare straight through Danny’s soul.  “Even yourself.”

The boy shudders, an appropriate response.  “Wait... me?  Did you… do something in the past to like… a past version of someone we know??  Can that even happen???”  Danny is already enraptured by the story, eyes twinkling as his mentor opens up about themself.  The boy is obviously thinking about everything that has happened, everything that could possibly have happened, and everything that Clockwork could possibly drop on him.

They feel Daniel cautiously tug on loose strands of time to see if he could possibly scope out what is about to be said, quickly failing to do much else beside give himself a small headache.  “Time stuff is still really confusing, Clockwork…”

“You could say that.  You could even say that trying to mess with time in the inner sanctum of Long Now is the most confusing ‘time stuff’ one could do if they were not myself.”  They grin- a Temporal Mirror appearing behind them with a thought.

“What’s the mirror for?”  Danny catches sight of himself and looks away, embarrassed that he’s been literally glowing with power after trying to do something so simple with his developing powers.  The glow is something he’s been working on suppressing recently.  After all, it would be a shame if other ghosts could see the boy powering up by aura alone.

The Master of Time smirks, bringing tea to their lips again.  “I thought it would be fun to attempt braiding my hair and doing my makeup for once.  It has been an awfully long time since I’ve done either.”

They stare at Danny who just bursts into laughter.  “Did you just use sarcasm???  Man, I didn’t know you could lighten up, Clockwork!”  The boy laughs harder, sinking deeper into his nest of pillows.  After a few minutes he was finally wiping tears from his eyes.  “But no.  Seriously… what’s the mirror for??”

“Why, what they are always for, Daniel- seeing through time and space.”  Clockwork waves their hand.  The mirrors show an image of a human with dark hair and burgundy eyes.  They have a large, hooked nose and medium brown skin- and Danny finds himself having a hard time guessing their gender.  The human sits at a desk, paused in time with the delicate gears of a clock sprawled along the desk surface, tools in hand.

Behind Clockwork, the image changes, showing the human living through an average day- images play in small spurts, never showing the whole story.  “Do you understand what’s being seen?”  The young boy nods, grabbing Mr. Pants out of the air as the blob drifts between the two.  Good, he will probably need the companionship, especially towards the end.

This isn’t the easiest story to tell, nor is it easy to listen to, but with a sip of their tea, Clockwork continues.

#danny phantom #invisobang #invisobang 2021 #dp #phanfic #art #my fic #RRR #dantes vibe corner

[bitacrytic]

I was just reading "Painter of the Night" and *sigh* I can't anymore. As of recent, I haven't been able to watch or read anything without comparing and contrasting it with TDJ so I couldn't help but notice how many bl tropes TDJ applied to it's handling of the Gahan situationship.

I was a little triggered by that manga so I'm going to rant a little because if I don't rant, I don't know what else I can do. You don't have to read it so, I'll put it under the line.

(As much as I loath the terms, uke & seme, I'm going to be using them because I'm speaking of bls in general)

Said tropes...

Living together

A stronger seme

A rich seme and an uke if lesser means

Age gap (older seme, younger uke)

Unhealthy obsession

Seme who has a reputation

Stockholm syndrome

People commenting on how much uke's presense has "changed" seme

Uke saying "no" REPEATEDLY!!!

Diabolical love interest of seme

Uke seeing the "good" in seme that no one else can see

Nonconsensual touching

Violence (why does there always have to be so much violence)

Family secrets or amnesia (either way, some hidden fact about the past that the uke has to discover)

An experienced seme lover and an inexperienced uke. (TDJ swapped out sex for espionage. And you cannot convince me otherwise. Because there is no reason why the show repeatedly kept Gaon as an amateur while making him the butt of every one of Yohan's plans. Till the very end. He kept trying to make his own plans, but they always failed in comparison to Yohan's plans. The exact same way sex is in exotic bls. The seme is the forceful one, the one who knows how to control his partner during sex. And no matter how much the uke tries to turn the power dynamics around, the seme remains in control, moving the uke this way and that way until he is satisfied. Like, you can't tell me TDJ didn't swap out sex for diabolical planning. I will not believe you)

I have said this before, but I will say it again. I am very glad TDJ was not a bl. My god. Because Yohan did everything a villain could do. He murdered people, left others to die, manipulated people, used his wealth in as many atrocious ways as the very people he claimed to want to bring down. Kang Yohan's hands are dirty.

But at least, we weren't subjected to rape. It's the barest of minimums, but TVN, thank you. Because everytime I finish a bl, it's hard to go back because of it and it's hard to even get through it and I'm a fool for pushing myself to do it because, everytime, EVERY SINGLE TIME, I tell myself, "this one will be different. This time the uke will get the upper hand", but no. In the end, it's the seme who makes the decision to change. He wakes up one morning and learns the truth of a misunderstanding and suddenly "repents".

Which still means that anytime in the future, if he gets in his head again, he can always relapse to his sexually violent ways.

Which is a big issue I have with TDJ. Gaon never got the upper hand. I'm still so pissed that Yohan didn't give Gaon the choice to go to Switzerland. He left. And then came back.

We want to believe that Yohan changed for Gaon, but he didn't. I'm sorry, guys, but I don't think he did. Yes, he let Gaon leave the house when Gaon was scared about Minister Cha, but that was one time. Gaon came back into the house and Yohan didn't let him leave again. In fact, the next time Gaon left the house, Yohan was the one to kick him out. Yohan made the choice.

After all that development in their relationship, the first time Gaon made a decision without Yohan, Yohan choked him again. AGAIN! Think about that, guys. He choked him again. Which just proves what I've been saying. Yohan calms down when he wants to. He let's Gaon do what he wants, only when he's in the mood. But if he means to, he will use violence.

Yeah, they were smiling at each other at the end of the show, but who's to say Yohan won't choke Gaon again in the future?

Yohan and Sunah's relationship, for example. That's a relationship between equals. (Sorry Gahan shippers) but Sunah gives more than she gets from Yohan. When Yohan decides to behave he's doing so because he has to. Not just because he wants to. Sunah called him and he came out. Not because he wanted to. Because he had to. She was his ally and he didn't want to test her. He was in a bad mood and really didn't want to go but he did.

With Gaon, it's the opposite. Yohan bends to Gaon's whim because he wants to. Which sounds romantic. But when you consider the fact that Gaon doesn't have the same allowance, it becomes an imbalance that doesn't favor Gaon.

And as a character who has been manipulated and used by every single character he cared about (except Soohyun), what really makes Yohan different except for the fact that the show was about Yohan?

I've seen a couple of bls with some equality and/or a switch in power dynamics. But they're just so few and sifting through to find them is so draining at times.

Like, TDJ, if there's a season 2, you had better give us a more worldly and savvy Gaon or a will riot.

#devil judge #kdramas circa 2000s were also very guilty of these tropes #these days they are trying in their representation of women so... #better i guess?

[melodious-madrigals]

the last shred of truth (in the lost myth of true love)

Pairing: wondertrev Rating: T Word Count: 4277 Tags: amnesia!fic, hurt/comfort, happy ending, steve and diana being soft for each other Summary: When Diana wakes up alone in a hospital room with no memory of who she is or how she got there, she panics. But even though she doesn't remember anyone, there's someone who seems fundamentally familiar... AKA: the "i may have amnesia but i trust you implicitly" trope, wondertrev edition

Read it below the cut or on [AO3].

***

Notes: @svgurl410 this fic is Your Fault™ (affectionate) because you posted a thing about the amnesia trope and WHOOPS my hand slipped, so, uh, due to the stars aligning for some very convenient timing, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

***

She wakes up in a too-sterile room, white and soundproofed and empty, but for her and her bed and a battery of too-sterile machines, all hooked up to her.

The first thing she takes in is that everything hurts. Ache blooms down her body and her head feels like it’s about to split open.

She tries to lift a hand to knead away the pain, and that’s how she discovers thing number two: she is restrained here, in this strange place, by herself. Strapped to the bed with no recollection of where she is or how she got here.

Or, for that matter, her own name.

Normal hospitals don’t look like this, she thinks. Not that she can remember ever being in one, but she’s got the vague impression that there are usually windows, or people, or doors that look like they don’t require a top-secret clearance to exit through.

She’s in trouble, then; maybe the people tying her down are the reason for her faulty memory. (Retrograde amnesia, supplies a tiny voice in her brain that she doesn’t have time to examine.)

All she knows is that she needs to figure out how to get out. If she can’t remember anything, then she can’t rely on there being anyone who would help her out, which means she needs to rely on herself and only herself.

She struggles against the bindings—they’re tight, well-constructed, but she thinks she feels some give. With a little extra effort, she pulls, and low and behold, yanks the straps straight out of their holdings.

So she’s strong, then. Good to know.

She detaches her legs next, and is partway through unhooking herself from the plethora of machines when two doctors—scientists?—beep themselves into the room.

“Code yellow, she’s awake,” says one of them into a radio.

“Miss, you need to lay back down,” says the other.

“Where am I? What’s going on?”

“You’ve been gravely injured. You need to stay calm.”

The first one is still talking into the radio. “—and the patient is agitated. We need to put her on another macro dose of the sedative,” he adds to his colleague.

“No!” She wants to know what’s going on, not be drugged back into oblivion.

A frenzied swipe of her arm sends the man flying into the padded wall with a crunch that she’d feel bad about if there wasn’t panic rising in her throat.

Three more personnel, all bigger than she is, which is saying something, rush into the room and she leans back into a defensive stance until—

“Wait!” says a new male voice, and a tall, well-dressed man with the remnants of a cut over his eyebrow steps into the room. The orderlies stop their forward motion, but they don’t leave, and she’s scanning them for signs of weakness before she’s even aware she’s doing it.

“Diana, you need to calm down.”

Her attention snaps to the new man, and she eyes him warily. “Who are you? How do you know me? Where am I?”

“You don’t remember me?” He seems hurt when she shakes her head. “You’re at a hospital facility. You took a bad blow to the head, and now you’re in recovery.”

That would make sense, except, wait— “A head wound requires being tied down?”

“It was for your safety and theirs.”

“It seems more the thing you would do to a prisoner.”

“You’re safe here.” The man catches her hand as she tries to sidestep away from his advance. “Diana, you can trust me.”

There’s half a beat as she considers, where he makes eye contact, looks at her imploringly—

—but nothing good ever comes of people telling you to trust them, of this she’s sure, and when his grip tightens almost imperceptibly as he shifts, at the same time that one of the orderlies off to the side flinches forward, she throws him off, breaking his grasp and sending him flying into the hospital bed and related machinery.

The orderlies advance, but she’s properly panicked, now, desperate to get out of here, find something—anything—familiar, and it’s muscle memory that takes over, dodging around them and hurling them to the ground, blows strong enough to make sure they don’t get back up without hurting them too badly.

She’s out in the corridor when an alarm starts blaring, sending loud noises and flashing lights through the hallway that make her already-splitting headache throb as more people rush at her. Most seem to be technicians of some sort, but two are security guards carrying guns.

She doesn’t know how she knows how to fight—can’t even confirm with herself that her name is Diana—but she knows being here is not the answer and sets to work, lashing out at each successive wave of people.

As she’s dispatching with the last of this group, she hears a new set of voices and almost starts to cry—will these people stop at nothing to keep her locked up?

“—has gone crazy!”

“What the hell did you do to her?” At the sound of this newest shouting voice, another man’s, she counterintuitively feels her muscles involuntarily relax a little.

She turns around, dropping the last of her would-be attackers just as the man to whom the voice belongs skids around the corner and comes to a stop in front of her.

He is beautiful: dirty blonde hair and an angular jaw and striking blue eyes that have fixed themselves on her. There is fear in them, and anger, but it is not the same fear or anger of the scientists holding her in this place. She has the sudden, inexplicable thought that it might be for her rather than of her. Indeed, the second their eyes meet, she notices him deflate, relief evident in the lines of his body.

She sees him, and she feels—calm. He is familiar, somehow, even if her mind can’t pull him up.

“Diana,” he says, and the shape of her name in his mouth is a balm, like honey drizzled in tea or a whiff of lavender on the breeze under a hot summer sun.

Time dilates a little, as she drinks in the sight of him, whispers flitting in the corners of her brain that she can’t quite catch.

She takes half a step forward and sees the owner of the first angry voice fling an arm out in front of the man in warning.

“Stay back, Agent Trevor. She’s disoriented and extremely dangerous.”

“You’ve done more than enough already, and I’d thank you to stay out of it.” The man pushes the arm away and steps towards her, slowly, telegraphing the move before it happens. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get here, Angel.”

Like the chiming of midday bells, a dozen discordant memories of him saying Angel like that flicker through her brain before fading back into foggy nothing. She’s moved instinctually, before her brain has time to approve the motion, and then she’s in his arms, holding tight.

Home, her brain supplies, and she feels her cheeks getting damp from silent tears that she does her best to blink away.

“Hey, I’m here,” the man says, pulling back just enough to swipe the moisture away. “I know you must be scared right now, but you’re going to be okay.”

“I don’t know why I’m here or what’s happening,” she admits, whispering into his ear. “I just want to get out of here.”

Before he can reply, another wave of security floods the hallway, and the man reacts accordingly, twisting out of her arms and nudging her behind him.

“Everybody, stand down,” he commands.

The alarm stops, but the personnel don’t move and there are several holding what look like big-game tranquilizer guns.

“They’re technically friendlies,” he says over his shoulder to her, “even though they’re doing a shit job of it right now. Everyone, back off.”

Finally, the woman he appeared with nods, and with a wave of her hand, people start to retreat back down the corridor.

“You could convince her to stay, Agent Trevor,” the woman says, somewhere between imploring and accusatory.  

“Maybe,” the man agrees. “But I won’t.”

“Think of her treatment. Be reasonable—”

“I am.” His voice brooks no refusal, and she’s strangely relieved. “After the way you’ve bungled this, she isn’t going to be comfortable here and I’m not making her stay. She wants to leave, so we’re leaving.”

“Her memory—” The woman’s face is pinched, like she’s swallowed half a lemon.

“Will not be improved by you poking at her. Diana?” He turns to her, offering her his hand, and she slips her own into it without question, letting his guide her down the hallway.

��Oh,” he says, over his shoulder, “and tell Bruce to expect my call.”

The parking lot outside is just asphalt and concrete, but it’s a relief to be out of the building and in the sun.

“I’m taking you to one of our houses,” the man says. “You’ve been there before, and you liked it.”

“Anything’s better than that lab.”

Something in his jaw ticks, and he nods before sliding into the driver’s seat.

“Thank you, Agent Trevor,” says Diana, once they’re speeding away from that awful facility. The way he flinches tells her it’s a mistake, somehow.

Her brow furrows. “Is that not your name? I thought I heard them call you that, but I don’t know your name. I feel like I must know you, but I can’t remember. I’m sorry.”

The man next to her takes a deep breath. “You remember the important things,” he says reassuringly.

“I don’t see how that can possibly be true.” She can’t remember a single name or face, or any of the events that precipitated the memory loss.

He’s quiet for a moment, and then he reaches out and takes her hand, ever so gently, and slow enough that she could pull away. (She finds she doesn’t want to.)

“You remember how I make you feel, otherwise you wouldn’t have come with me,” he says finally. “The name stuff is a bit trivial compared to that.”

“Still,” she says, frustrated.

“Steve,” he relents. “My name is Steve Trevor.”

“Steve.” She turns the name over on her tongue and sees his mouth quirk out of the corner of her eye. Then he sighs.

“We’re about three hours away from the safe house. There’s plenty of time for a nap, and I’m sure you’re exhausted.”

“No, the copilot’s in charge of the music,” Diana says automatically, surprising herself. Beside her, Steve glances her way, a bemused look on his face. In her seat, Diana just sags. “I have no idea why I said that. I’m exhausted.”

“You said that because it’s our road trip rule,” Steve explains gently, “but I think today calls for an exception. Get some sleep.”

She nods and lets her eyes flutter shut. Her eyelids have been heavy since she woke up the first time, but it’s only now she feels comfortable doing something about it. She’s asleep before they hit the next mile-marker.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she says, leaning in for a kiss that Steve is only too happy to provide.

“The hazards of loving someone who’s constantly saving the world,” Steve jokes.

“Alas, it was only a museum trade agreement this time.”

“As long as no artifacts were harmed in the process.”

“No, none at all,” Diana says, grinning. “What smells so delicious?”

“It’s—”

Her phone, on the Do Not Disturb setting that only Steve and the Justice League line can get through, pings angrily.

“Damn, I have to go.” She hands him her phone so he can read the sitrep from Alfred.

“I’d come with, but I have the meeting with Waller tomorrow.”

“I know,” says Diana ruefully. “It’s not worth an eight-hour flight for you. I should be home by tomorrow evening, anyways. It looks pretty standard.”

“Be careful.”

“Aren’t I always?”

“You are absolutely not. That’s why I’m telling you now.”

She laughs and kisses him. “Don’t forget to buy new basil plants again on the way home from the market.”

He huffs good-naturedly and rolls his eyes. “Diana—”

“Diana.”

She jolts upright, still looking at Steve’s face, but in a different time and place. She tries to hold on to the memory, but it filters away like the tide receding on a beach, out of her grasp before she can catch onto its ephemeral quality. When she tries to chase it, pain stabs through her head.

“Diana, are you okay?”

“Fine,” she says, wincing.

He looks unconvinced but doesn’t press. “We’re here.”

It’s a little cottage in a secluded wooded area, and it feels welcoming even from the outside.

“Is this where I live?” she asks, trying to figure out if this is the type of place she would want to live, as he unlocks the door and ushers her in.

“No, you mostly use this house when you come to the US for long business trips,” Steve replies. “You live in Paris, most of the year.”

Her brain conjures up an image of the Eiffel Tower, but it doesn’t feel like hers, just something clinical that she knows about Paris. She finds she also knows French, though once again, she doesn’t remember learning.

“I figured we could stay here a few days to see if your memory comes back on its own. If not, maybe going home will help.” He pauses. “Is that okay with you?”

“It sounds reasonable. I don’t—I don’t really know how to make my memory come back, though.”

“I don’t think there’s an established protocol for that,” Steve says, cracking a smile. “Except to make yourself comfortable and try not to stress too much.”

They stand there, staring at each other for a moment, and she gets the intense, sudden urge to kiss him. To see if that would help, like some sort of fairy tale. She’s halfway towards working up the nerve to close the distance between them when Steve clears his throat.

“You should take the shower first,” he says. “I know you hate the smell of hospital.”

As soon as he says it, she knows it’s true.

“Will you answer my questions after?”

“As best I can, yeah.”

How long she stands under the pounding hot water, she’s not entirely sure, but it feels good. Her muscles relax, and she closes her eyes, letting the water stream over her body.

A phantom touch on her shoulder, gentle but blazing with heat, and eyes to match, and the sudden feel of cold tile against her back—

—her eyes fly open, and she gasps, scrabbling to chase the feeling, one she’s sure is a memory, but the harder she tries to catch it, the more painful the stabbing sensation in her head becomes, and she’s forced to give up, tired and frustrated.

When she finally emerges from the bathroom, hair still damp and curling, it’s to find Steve finishing a call. Even as he’s occupied on the phone, she sees him gravitate towards her and then consciously stop, hovering a few meters away.

“I have to go. We’ll talk later,” he says tersely, and hangs up. Then to her, “That was Bruce.”

He says it like the name should mean something to her, but it doesn’t, and she shrugs helplessly.

Steve sighs. “Someone you work with,” he explains. “You encountered him earlier. Sent him flying clean across the room.”

She feels a stab of guilt—she’d sent a number of people flying across the room in her desperation, and she hopes that if he’s her colleague, he’s okay and that she’ll be able to properly apologize. Until then, “The one in the pretentious suit?” she clarifies.

It startles a laugh out of Steve—fluttering white curtains and mischievous bright blue eyes and that laugh, warm and infectious, snatched away in a flicker of pain—who just says, “That’s the one.”

She nods once, and then looks around, unsure. “Can you tell me why I’m like this? What happened?”

“Let me put the kettle on,” says Steve. “It might take a while.”

He tells her about the extent of her abilities, surprising in the abstract, and yet not so much when she thinks about the thrum that ignited in her veins when she felt like people were closing in on her. He tells her about the mission she left for, last night, that was pressing but apparently standard enough in scope. He tells her that something went wrong, that something powerful and unidentified was used to deal her a blow to the head, that she was unconscious for eight hours, that he got there as fast as he could but not soon enough because transatlantic flights take time, even when you’re the pilot on a requisitioned jet. He tells her that the explanation that he was given was that she’d been convulsing in her sleep, and really had been restrained only to prevent injury to the attending doctors. He tells her that the doctors—who never really had a chance to examine her, but for a single CT scan while she was unconscious, and who have no precedent since her physiology is so different than any other being on Earth—aren’t sure whether her memories will return or not. (One of them said to give it a few days; the other wasn’t optimistic at all, based on the scans.)

Through it all, he barely references himself, but she can see the contours of him woven in: he has intimate knowledge of the things she can do, and the ways in which she uses them. He was with her when she was called away on the mission; indeed, he is clearly with her often. He speaks about her with delicate care and a small smile on his face, and she can’t help but think that given the chance, she would probably talk about him the same way.

“And you?” she prompts finally, when he’s done, when the tea has long since gone cold and dinner is prepped and in the oven.

“Me?” says Steve. “What about me?”

“You’re clearly important to me. I trust you, somehow. But you’ve said almost nothing about yourself, and I’m not quite sure how you fit in.”

“I guess it wasn’t relevant.”

It’s a bullshit answer, and they both know it.

“I love you.” It’s a question phrased as a statement, but Steve has the uncanny ability of hearing it just as she meant it.

“Yes.”

“And you love me.”

“Yes.”

It confirms everything she heard in the subtext of his words, his tone. They’re something, something powerful, and she’s gone and thrown a wrench in it by forgetting everything about him, about them. The absence plagues her, but she can barely imagine the weight he must feel at the loss of their history, of being the only one to carry it. For the first time, she really contemplates the implications of the gaping holes in her mind.

“What happens if I never get my memories back like the doctors said?”

Steve scuffs a hand over his face, the only overt sign so far that he’s feeling the stress of the situation.

“Well, I’ll go on loving you all the same, and you can decide whether you still love me.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“Love isn’t simple, Diana, but loving you is the easiest thing in the world. I’ll love you no matter what happens, and no matter what you decide when it does.”

She regards him for a moment. Now that she’s looking, she thinks she can see lines of tension in his body. He’s good at covering it up, but there’s worry there. Then the understanding hits.

“You’d let me go.”

His eyes fall shut, and she thinks maybe it’s so she can’t try to read them. It doesn’t matter: she can already see that he’s pushing down his pain to put her first, a clear character sketch if she ever saw one.

“Yeah.”

That one word, it makes her heart break for him.

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’d like to.” He looks up at her, confusion dotting his features. “Go on loving you, that is,” she clarifies, and is rewarded by an absolutely incandescent grin.

“Well, that’s neat.”

The sacredness of the moment is shattered by the insistent dinging of the oven timer, signaling that dinner is ready, and Steve ducks his head, breaking eye contact as he gets up to retrieve the food.

They’re not very talkative for the rest of the evening, but even though the mood is heavy, the silence is not uncomfortable. There is an unspoken agreement that they can deal with the ramifications of the day tomorrow since it’s been such a long and stressful day for them both.

The house is small, one bedroom only, and given the conversation they had earlier, she just assumes that they’ll share the bed, but Steve, apparently, does not seem to share that assessment, because when he leaves the bathroom, he picks up the spare blanket off the foot of the bed and heads for the door.

“You could stay,” she says, so soft she’s not sure for a second if he even heard.

“Are you sure?”

“I feel better when you’re close by,” she admits into the darkness, and a moment later, she feels the bed dip next to her as he slips under the covers.

Her hand finds his under the duvet, and she links their fingers together. She wants so badly to remember him properly, but every time she pushes, there’s a searing pain that drives its way through her skull.

“Goodnight, Diana.”

“Goodnight, Steve.”

It takes surprisingly little to drift away on the current of sleep.

The air is acrid, thick with smoke and gunpowder. She’s been here before; she knows this place. It is dark, but there are fires burning all around and the thunder of bombs, lighting up the horizon.

The earth shakes somewhere close by.

Then there’s Steve, in front of her, telling her he loves her, that he wishes they had more time. She doesn’t understand; as far as she can tell, he’s young and healthy. They have time, don’t they?

Time fuzzes and suddenly she’s staring at the sky, and a plane that she knows to be carrying Steve explodes, high above her in the cold dark air.

“NO!”

This can’t be how it ends. He can’t leave her like this. Think, Diana, she tells herself. The pain in her head is unbearable, but it is nothing compared to the one in her heart. If she can only push through, maybe she won’t have to feel this way anymore. Maybe she can change the ending. Maybe they’ll have more time.

…a cerulean ocean, and a diving plane.

…the soft shimmer of snow in lanternlight.

…a plane exploding high overhead.

…the weight of arms, too long gone and miraculously here, enfolding her.

…dancing in the late-night glow of streetlamps on a bridge over the Seine.

A thousand tiny flashes, all swirling together as her past and present unfold before her, and there at the heart—

“Steve!”

Diana sits up with a gasp, struggling for air as her brain tries to sort through the influx of information that it suddenly has access to once more. It’s all out of order and too much at once, but it’s there.

A hand on her shoulder tells her that Steve’s woken up too, and she slumps back against him, relishing the way he rearranges his arm so that she’ll be more comfortable.

“Did you remember the basil plants this time?” Diana asks, exhausted.

He lets out a little huff. “I was a little busy, what with—” She feels him stiffen under her, the whole of his body silently asking the question that his mouth isn’t. “Diana?” he manages, hesitantly.

She twists a little in his arms so that she can see his face. “I’m so sorry I forgot you.”

Everything in him relaxes. “You didn’t; not really.”

“No,” she corrects, “I think it would be impossible to forget you entirely. You’re written in my soul.”

He chokes a little at that, squeezes her closer, shifting just enough so that he can rest his forehead against hers.

“I’m glad you’re back, Angel.”

Diana kisses him softly, feels the dampness on his cheeks. “Oh, my love. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” he insists.

“No, but I ache for what you must have felt, and yet you handled it all so calmly.”

“Shit, Diana, I was terrified,” Steve admits, somehow managing to pull her even closer, like he’s scared she might physically disappear, too. “It was only a day, but it felt like a century. I mean, we’ve had some pretty good times, and I didn’t want to be the only guardian of those memories.”

“That will never happen.”

“You can’t know that,” he says helplessly.  

“I can. We always find our way back to each other, my love. I believe in us.”  

“And you say I’m the one that spouts the romantic lines.”

“You love it.”

“I do.” He kisses her, soft and slow, and any quip she might have had flies directly out of her head in favor of this feeling.

“Don’t forget me between now and tomorrow,” Steve whispers later as they drowse next to each other.

“I wouldn’t even dream of it,” Diana promises, tucking her face back into the juncture between his shoulder and neck, before falling asleep herself.

(She doesn’t—her promises, after all, are unbreakable.)

***

#wondertrev #wondertrev fic #wonder woman #diana prince #steve trevor #Diana x Steve #lenci writes

[tsarisfanfiction]

Trope #36: Amnesia, Prompt #633: "Please, stop saying my name like that." for TAG

Forget Me Not

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Angst/Family Characters: Scott, Virgil, John

Ah, good old amnesia time!  And you know what, apparently my muse has decided it wants to beat up someone who isn’t Scott, entirely without prompting!  Although that might have something to do with the angst of a little brother not knowing who he is...  So there’s that.

Another old prompt I’m finally getting around to, so let’s see if I can even find the original post, oops...

Writing Game: Tropes

Scott had thought he’d known despair.  He’d felt its frigid bite the day the snow roared down, had it steal all the breath from his lungs the day the Zero-X exploded, heard its white noise when the call had come about a hydrofoil.  He’d lost - or almost lost - so much, and seen the way it infected other families every time a rescue didn’t have a hundred percent success rate.  He’d been sure, so sure, he’d known what it could do.

The vice around his heart, frigid and thieving and loud, was all of those together and more.  Too many things, too much to take in, too much to react to, and he was gasping for breath he didn’t have, drowning on dry land.

“Virgil,” he gasped out, his brother’s name something wet and rasping all at once.  Brown eyes regarded him, warm and concerned and a little upset.  More than a little upset; he was hiding it but not well enough.  Not from Scott.

“Please,” his little brother said, and his voice tightened the vice until Scott thought his heart would stop.  “Stop saying my name like that.”

It was only force of will that kept Scott standing, kept him in the same room, because every fibre of his being was screaming for him to get out of there.  Before it killed him, so he could find a way to fix it, before he broke in front of the brothers he had to be strong for.

Even the one that didn’t remember him.

Especially the one that didn’t remember him.

Amnesia.  A head injury at just the right - wrong - spot, and now Virgil couldn’t remember them.  Couldn’t remember him.  His brown eyes were warm and concerned but also empty of that one spark that made Virgil Virgil.

They didn’t know if it was permanent.

Grandma had scans running, Brains was delving into research, but the simple fact of the matter was that it was entirely down to Virgil.  Either he’d remember, or he wouldn’t, and there was nothing Scott could do to make it happen.

They’d done everything they could; they’d surrounded him with familiarity, family in and out with Scott the constant because he couldn’t - couldn’t - leave even though every moment that passed with no recognition destroyed him just a little more inside.  A trip to the hangars, Thunderbird Two in all her beautiful green glory.  It hadn’t helped.

Now all they could do was wait.  Wait and hope and pray that Virgil’s brain would recover the memories in time.

Scott had never been good at waiting.  Waiting for the news that Mom hadn’t made it, waiting for the body they never found, waiting for Gordon to regain consciousness.  His job was to protect his family, to help them when things got tough.  To do things.  Fix things, because he was the big brother and all his little brothers needed him to be able to make the world right again - or at least to keep it turning.

Now he had a little brother who didn’t remember that.  A little brother who looked at him without a single spark of recognition but was still so painfully Virgil that he could tell everyone was upset and wanted to help them.

There were three other little brothers still looking to him, three different colours of eyes watching him with thinly veiled hope and belief that somehow, somehow, he could fix this.  Big brother could make it right again.  After all, there’d always been something between them, hadn’t there?  That mutual understanding that went beyond comprehension but was always, always there.

Scott could feel the gaping hole where it should be.  Where it was gone, and that alone had him crippled, because he’d had Virgil since he was four, almost as long as he could remember.  They’d always said nothing could tear them apart.  Even in his blackest days, days he’d done his damnest to block from his memories, it had been there.  But this?  One simple knock to the wrong part of a head, and it was gone.

“You don’t have to stay with me,” Virgil said, dragging him out of his mind and back into the room where his brother was watching him with those concerned yet sparkless eyes.

“Yes, I do,” he corrected.  His voice almost managed to stay steady.

“No,” Virgil said.  “You need to leave.”  The voice was all Virgil, but the words...  Virgil had never, ever, tried to send him away.  Not like that.

“Virgil-”

“You think watching you fall apart is helping me?” his brother demanded, shocking him into silence.  “I can barely remember my own name, you hovering isn’t going to change anything.  You’re just hurting yourself more.”

“No-”

“Get out.  Go do whatever you do to relax, and don’t come back until you don’t look like you’re about to shatter.”

Scott’s eye stung.  Virgil’s voice was making noises but they were nothing he would say.  His brother knew he could never relax when one of his brothers was in trouble, knew that he had to be there.  Knew that sending him away would always be infinitely more painful than sitting vigil by a bed.

But he didn’t know, because he didn’t remember.  Didn’t know he was tearing Scott’s heart out of his chest, one strip at a time.  Thought, in Virgil’s kind way, that it would help him.

Scott couldn’t correct him, though.  Because him staying was hurting Virgil, doing the absolute opposite of what he was supposed to be doing, where big brother was supposed to help, was supposed to make everything better.  Scott’s job was to fix things but now he was just breaking them more.

It was the worried brown eyes that did it.  Filled with pain and frustration but also worry and concern for him.  Scott’s other eye stung, at the same time something salty dripped into the corner of his mouth.

“I-”

“Go.”

Brown eyes were unwavering, and Scott swallowed with an unbearably tight throat.  One last moment of hesitation, one last silent plea for Virgil to change his mind, to let him stay, but he didn’t.

Scott barely made it out of the room before he broke, his knees crashing to the floor as the door shut behind him and his lungs shuddering and heaving as every breath that escaped was accompanied by a wrenching sob.

Virgil.  Scott had never felt so helpless, so useless, in his life.  Not only could he not fix it, but he couldn’t even reassure his brother like he normally would.  No, he’d just made things worse, his presence an additional stress on the brother who was going through hell.  So much so that Virgil - Virgil - had sent him away.

He didn’t know how his heart still had the space to beat, how it could keep going under the crushing pressure surrounding it.  His lungs were barely functioning, air replaced by salty sobs and hiccups.  Open eyes couldn’t see anything, his sight blurred beyond all comprehension.  Extremities were numb, muscles were locked rigid, and there was nothing he could do.

“Scott!”  Hands grasped at him, pawing and tugging in a futile attempt to get him to move.

“Scott?”  Quiet, worried.  Part of Scott stirred at it, recognising a little brother in distress, but it couldn’t break through the rest of him.

“Alan, go sit with Virgil.  You too, Gordon.”  A third voice joined in, the third and final little brother there to witness Scott’s greatest failure.

“But, Scott-”

“I’ve got him.”  Strong arms wrapped around him.  “You two check on Virgil.”

Hands fell away.

“Come on, Scotty.”  It was John talking, voice quiet and calm and everything Scott couldn’t be.  “Let’s get you off the floor.”

Scott’s limbs still weren’t responding, but John was stronger than he had any right to be with all the time he spent in space.  His younger brother dragged him upright, or at least to his feet, and then down the hallway.  Scott had minimal awareness of where they were going, barely able to put one foot in front of the other until there was something soft and he was sinking down onto it - into it.

John didn’t speak, but the arms didn’t leave him, holding him together so he didn’t have to.  It was wrong, another failure - he couldn’t fix Virgil, and now he couldn’t even reassure his other brothers either - but John was unrelenting and so were the tears.

“I-” he choked out, not sure what he was trying to say, but needing to say something.  “He- Virg-”  Another wave of sobs caught him, and John pulled him closer.

“Virgil’s strong,” John said, quietly but without a hint of doubt.  “Whatever happens, he’ll overcome it.”  Slender fingers coaxed through his hair, somehow more grounding than the arms around him.  “We’ll overcome it, Scott.  All of us, together.”

He shuddered involuntarily.  Together, John said, but Virgil didn’t even want him in the same room.  Found that he was hurting rather than helping.

“I couldn’t- couldn’t help,” he hiccupped, a painful admittance that burned his throat.  “He said-”

“You can’t help anyone when you’re a wreck yourself.”  John’s voice stayed level and calm.  “You know this, Scott.  Take a break.  Get some rest.  You don’t have to do this all alone.  He’s our brother, too.”

“But-”

“Rest, Scott.”  John didn’t raise his voice, but the command was clear nonetheless.  “You’re no good to Virgil like this.”

The words cut, but they didn’t burn like the words he’d been telling himself did.  John had always had a gift with words; coming from him, they were marginally easier to swallow.

“Go to him,” he begged.

“Alan and Gordon are with him,” John reminded him.  “He’s not alone.”

Scott knew that, but his heart still seized at the terror that somehow it wouldn’t be enough.  “Please.”

John’s fingers stilled in his hair.  “Okay,” he agreed.  The hands slipped away from him and Scott found himself toppling sideways onto the same soft that he was sat on.  A bed.

It shifted as weight lifted, and Scott blinked enough moisture away to see the vibrant ginger hair of his brother.

“John,” he rasped.  His brother paused.  “I’m sorry.”  Sorry for failing.  Sorry for being blind.  Sorry for being so useless.  “Thank you.”

“You’re not alone,” the Voice That Answers said.  “Either of you.”

John left, and Scott was left staring at the wall - pale silver, not his own - as his heart tried to wriggle free of the clamp around it.  John was right; John was always right.  They weren’t alone.  They would get through, one way or another.

The despair ebbed, just a fraction.

Just enough for him to breathe again.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds are go fanfiction #tsari writes fanfiction #scott tracy #virgil tracy #john tracy #gordon tracy #alan tracy #thunderangst #drabbles #purfectpurple #forget me not

[genuineformality]

Questions from a comment by the inimitable @saritasoyyo: 

7. Your favourite ao3 tag.

The tags I gravitate towards change based on the fandom, although I’m a big hurt/comfort junkie regardless of media. Give me a grievously injured character and a long, lovingly detailed convalescence any day of the week. So if we were to narrow it down to just one, that would probably be it, and if I’m looking for new fic in a new fandom, I’ll start my search with that tag. 

For a single tag that caught my off guard, “improper use of a mobility aid” from @linearla gets an honorable mention, though, because seeing it convinced me I ought to read some rather explicit fics out of sheer curiosity. I’m not quite as ace a they come, but pretty darn close, so that was A TIME (affectionate). 

10. Top three favourite fic tropes.

Fake relationships/arranged relationships - the enforced intimacy that both of those require while two characters get to know each other/become genuinely intimate... *chef’s kiss*

Amnesia/Brainwashing/implanted memories - Just inject this shit into my veins. I always always always want to explore questions of who we are if we don’t know who we were/if we cannot rely on our memories to inform our decisions.

Redeeming irredeemable characters - I always want my asshole characters to be assholes. But dammit, I also want them to find hidden depths and surprising kindness under those asshole tendencies. 

13. Rate your worldbuilding skills from 1 to 10.

I hesitate to try to put a number on it, but above average I think? I love worldbuilding; it’s my favorite part of writing, in which I get to explore and extemporize and make shit up about places that don’t exist and people who aren’t real. I play a lot of  table top roleplaying games and LARPS, and have run more than a few; the best part of that, for me, is filling a world with interesting stuff for players to look at and interact with. I don’t think I’m great at plotting stories (it’s something I’m working on), but I love telling stories through the world around the characters and how that world responds to them. 

27. Do you agree that one shouldn't start a story with a piece of dialogue?

I think that it’s hard to do well. One of the reasons that novice writers are warned against it is because it’s harder to establish the characters solely in dialogue, unless they are exceptionally good at writing dialogue. But one of the advantages of fanfic is that your readers probably know the characters to begin with, and therefore starting with dialogue isn’t a death knell, as long as it pulls you into the story immediately. Pointless small talk as an opener is bad. Joining the characters mid-heist while they’re communicating updates on the movement of the jewels they’re trying to steal? Much better. 

Ask Link Here

#ask games #about the author

[drivingsideways]

in search of a better dream

This is about three pieces of South Korean media that crossed my path recently: the dramas Search WWW and Flower of Evil, and the novel Kim Ji Young, Born 1982.

Disclaimer and context : I'm not Korean, I don't speak the language, and I've watched a very limited set of kdramas. The criticisms I make in this piece are not to single out kdramas, or kdrama fandom,  as what I've described exists in Western and other Asian media and fandoms as well.

 Under the cut for length:

There's a scene in the first episode of the hit 2020 k-drama "Flower of Evil" that made me want to quit watching the show within the first ten minutes. The scene goes like this: our protagonists, Cha Ji Won and Baek Hee Seung meet Baek Hee Seung's parents along with their four year old daughter. The occasion is Baek Hee Seung's birthday, and loving wife Cha Ji Won has set up a special birthday dinner for them. On the way to the restaurant, the daughter has already complained about how she's scared of her grandparents, and they don't like her. When we meet the grandparents, we see the truth of this- they are as cold as the Arctic to all three, but especially to their daughter-in-law and granddaughter. In a bid to smooth out the social awkwardness, Cha Ji Won instructs her daughter to greet her grandparents the way they had "practiced" earlier- a cutesy little greeting where the adorable Eun-ha makes a heart over her head and chirps "I love you grandma and grandpa". When this fails to soften them, Eun-ha retreats, looking scared and disappointed. Not to worry, Cha Ji Won has this completely figured out: if you try harder, she tells her four year old daughter, they'll eventually love you.

Reader, I was, as they say, mad.

We find out soon enough that this stellar bit of parenting follows from an abiding principle in Cha Ji Won's life. Her romance with Baek Hee Seung starts when a handsome oppa walks into the family store, and is a saga of her stalking and pursuing a man who repeatedly tells her he's not interested, until he finally gives in. The power of her persistence pays off when the emotionally distant and abrasive man, in a classic beauty-and-the-beast transition, becomes a loving boyfriend, and then later, husband and father. It's a fantasy- some might even say feminist fantasy come true- he's handsome, supportive, reliable, artistic,  the primary housekeeper and caretaker of their daughter while she pursues her demanding "dream" job as a police officer, and they have enough money to live in a charming and lovingly set up two-storeyed house in ruinously expensive Seoul. This is heterosexual female wish fulfilment at its peak, and it is all made possible because she persevered.

It all threatens to come apart with the discovery of the perfect man's dark past- for a brief period, she's forced to contemplate the idea that he's actually a serial killer who's conned her for the entirety of their relationship of fourteen years; that the perfect life was, in fact, a lie.  

However, since this is written and billed as romance melodrama, this horror is short-lived. As the story progresses through increasingly improbable, violent and sometimes downright hilarious twists and turns, we grow closer to the (inevitable) happy ending. Baek Hee Seung/ Do Hyun Soo is no killer, just a traumatized child with a horrific past. The lies are the result of psychological damage inflicted by a society that unfairly deemed him a monster; the cage of repressed emotions that he'd locked himself in needed only the unshakeable conviction of Cha Ji Won's love to be broken open. "I wish you could see yourself as I see you" she tells him, in one of the show's endless supply of tearfully emotional moments, "I wish you could understand yourself the way I understand you."

This framework continues right to the end, when a bout of short term amnesia (!!) has Do Hyun Soo questioning himself and her: do you know, he asks her, when I'm lying to you, and when I'm not, because I don't.  The show answers that almost immediately- it doesn't matter, because it's her vision of him that he wants to be; in other words, he chooses the version of himself that she wants. The horror of the lie was a red herring, Cha Ji Won was right from the start about her husband- all it took was the power of her love and her perseverance to overcome the lie at the heart of her marriage,  to restore it to its previous shape- quite literally. The dream house they built together, which was destroyed by the villain, is shown in the last shots as unchanged from how it was in the beginning. One of the last shots we have of the couple is of them kissing in the artisan husband's workshop, an almost perfect recreation of the first time we see them. Paradise Regained, and all of us- and Cha Ji Won- can breathe a sigh of relief. You, the twenty-first century woman, are the architect of your own fantasy and can have it all. What could be more powerful than that?

 In Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 , a novel published in 2016, and often credited with kickstarting a new conversation about feminism in South Korea, the eponymous protagonist's story is also one of perseverance. It's a starkly written tale, an everywoman tale, a dryly narrated fact finding mission report complete with citations and references, about a woman born in the late twentieth century into a rigidly patriarchal culture, whose very existence is an aberration- her parents didn’t opt for a sex-selective abortion unlike many of their contemporaries when they found that their second child would also be a girl. Kim Ji Young, like the rest of us, grows up immersed in a misogynist culture. Even before she understands it, she learns to work around it and through it, rationalizing the micro-aggressions, burying the anger at the casual and institutional sexism that permeates her life, compromising and coping with it all, and achieving some semblance of having it all: a job, a decent, loving husband, a child. However, it's when motherhood arrives that it all falls apart- Kim Ji Young, faced with the exhausting carework of having a baby at home and another regular, full time job, does what so many women in her position do- quits her "outside" job for her parenting one. Fighting exhaustion and depression, a casually cruel and misogynist remark from a stranger in a park proves to be the proverbial final straw; Kim Ji Young suffers a mental breakdown, dissociating herself completely from her own life, and "seamlessly, flawlessly" taking on the personalities of other women she's known- her mother, her friend, her colleague. The novel ends with a narrative twist that's both horrifying and appropriate:  we learn that our narrator is actually her male psychiatrist. Kim Ji Young doesn't even get to be the voice of her own story; instead, it is told by a man cocooned in his own privilege, who displays the same paternalistic and misogynist behaviour that he correctly identified as the cause of her breakdown.

There is no escape here for Kim Ji Young save that of a complete break from reality. In the light of the narrative that leads her to that point, it feels both inevitable and even more horrifically, a blessing. This is a horror story told as it is shorn of any hope; the ending is death or insanity.

Reading Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 was to confront the familiar and heart-breaking and horrific neatly distilled into 200 odd pages; it's "fiction", but not really. My only surprise was how similar the culture described there was to my own in specifics; how incidents in Kim Ji Young's life were things I had actually experienced myself or seen other women experience, in a country several thousand miles away.

I read this novel just after watching the 2019's Search WWW, a show with a bit of a cult following, I think. Before I started watching it, one friend assured me that I would love it, that it was made for me; another said that  she dropped it because it "rang false" to her at the time. I've seen the show described several times as a feminist power fantasy, sometimes, if the reviewer wanted to demean it, with the qualifier, unrealistic.

This seemed an odd sort of criticism to me- after all, who turns to k-drama romances or really, any romance, for realism? Female wish fulfilment, which is the cornerstone of romance as a genre, whether in books or film, is still written and recognized as fantasy. So what was particularly unreal about Search WWW?

Well, simply put, it is written like the patriarchy doesn't matter, and has never existed.

The three female protagonists are all in their thirties, in powerful positions in their careers. As such, they are constantly walking into meetings where women speak more than 33% of the time. There are men in the room, but they never outnumber the women, and they don't silence the women.

The interests and decisions and choices  of women in the show- even the lead antagonist, who is an older woman whom we often see casually making beefy young men pose nude for her paintings- matter, not just to domestic and private realms, but to society at large; the antagonist is a power broker whose reach goes right up to the highest echelons of the country's politics; the younger women's ethical choices directly affect the republic's functioning as a democracy.

What about the men? It's not that they've been ignored; it's just that their place in the narrative has been decentered. Do with that what you will, the writer seems to say, as she writes in speaking roles for women wherever possible—every second side character is a woman— I have no time or inclination to justify that choice.

As for romance- it's not just that two of the three romances fall into the "noona romance" category, which is subversive in itself. It's that the power of decision making in these relationships clearly rests with the women.

In the "main" romance track, in a reversal of the usual trope, the woman is the one who is emotionally unavailable, and whom the man has to convince to take a chance on their relationship. What was hugely refreshing was that the reason for her emotional unavailability isn't trauma, that the man has to help her heal from, unlike the gender reversed versions we often see, eg in Flower of Evil. Instead, it's a difference in perspective that has its roots in the years of experience she has compared to him; it's the difference in life perspective of a twenty something man, and an almost-40 woman. She considers the implications and possibilities of entering into a relationship with a man who wants marriage and kids, while she doesn't want either and is unlikely to want them in the future. She thinks through it, and sees the pitfalls of it, perhaps all too clearly. In the end, when she makes a decision to commit, it's with the understanding that she's choosing to live in the moment, that he makes her happy; that they make each other happy and it is worth something, even if it doesn't last.  But both of them understand that her happiness is not centered in him or their relationship being successful. The other two romances end on a similarly open note- the possibility of love with the man you just divorced, but there's no hurry to get there; and a long distance relationship that may or may not last the two years of military conscription the man has to undergo.

The happily ever after in this series is not the perfect heterosexual family unit; it was always going to be the complicated, thorny and intense queerplatonic relationship between the three women, who, in the end, literally drive off along an endless open road under a blue, blue sky, to "a place with no red lights", as one of them describes it.

For a week after watching Search WWW, I wandered around in a daze. How did this show get written, I kept asking myself? How did it get produced? Aired??? What magic was worked to put it in my eyeballs, and how can it keep happening?

That feeling intensified when I read Kim Ji Young, Born 1982. But the book also provided the answer, at least to the first question. Because it is Kim Ji Young's voice in Search WWW. This is the fantasy that Kim Ji Young would have wanted to live in; a society and a life where she's seen as a person, entire, and it's not something she has to fight every day for. The gigantic leap of imagination that the writer of Search WWW took was only because that fantasy has been yearned for, in a way only a person growing up in Kim Ji Young's world- our world- could.

"Flower of Evil"- and other dramas like it— are also, undeniably, products of this world. It's unsurprising to me that in many ways, Cha Ji Won's little fantasy domestic world in Flower of Evil, on the surface, looks exactly like a post-feminist world. If the real revolution is men doing housework and childcare, then that fantasy has already been achieved on the individual level for Cha Ji Won. Sure, she's the only female member on her squad, and maybe the entire police force, for all you see women in her workplace. Sure, the other female characters with speaking roles exist mostly to be tortured for manpain by the narrative or literally by men as part of the plot. She seems to have no friends outside of work, which means that all her friends are men. As for relationships with other women, except her mother, who exists mostly to share the burden of childcare, and her mom-in- law who turns out to be an evil sort herself, there are none. When she meets her sister-in-law, the entire scene gives off a strange catfight vibe- her sister in law is the only other woman who can legitimately be said to have a claim on knowing the real Do Hyun Soo, and Cha Ji Won's reaction is to deny that claim and tell her to buzz off, basically. "I'm his family now" she tells her sister in law, "He has a wife"; firmly establishing the primacy of a heterosexual romantic relationship over all others.

Her "dream" job means nothing much despite the work she has put in to get it; for most part of the narrative she ends up betraying every professional ethic and her squad- her only friends. Of course, she is easily forgiven for it, without doing any of the work to earn that forgiveness, but that's really because who has the narrative time to develop those relationships which do not matter, like her work, which is shown up for the narrative prop it is, just like her daughter?  Even her sociopath (but not really, poor baby) husband ends the series with a tentative sort of friendship with a person he's not married to, but not Cha Ji Won, whose entire world by the end of the series has narrowed down to the four walls of her perfect little house and her perfectly-rescued husband. "I can't be happy if he's not happy," she tells her mother, who suggests that maybe it's time she let go of her not-so-perfect husband. "So please accept him."

In the end, the fantasy is based on this : self-improvement as the winning strategy, not structural change. Try hard enough and you'll get what you want. In the fine print, easily ignored: as long as what you want falls within the bounds of heteronormative patriarchal standards. It's an attitude that is passed down to the next generation; Cha Ji Won's early conversation with her daughter is an example.

The writer's vision is clear- what could have been an interesting and intimate look at our deepest fears in a relationship- that the other person will see us for who we are and horror-struck, leave; or even a deconstruction of the heterosexual woman's fantasy of The Perfect Man, is instead a tired repetition of the Beauty-and-the-Beast trope. You can dress it up and put a gun-toting, career woman wig on it, but that disguise falls apart pretty quickly. Cha Ji Won openly states not once, but several times, that she would rather live the comfortable lie; it's only when even that isn't an option- and not because of her choice or agency, but circumstances and the man coming to a decision, that she begins to let go. But only for a little while- barely ten minutes in show time- because ultimately, this is a female wish fulfilment fantasy, isn't it? Her longsuffering perseverance is rewarded when he decides to mould himself to her fantasy version of him, and the past is erased, and time reset, complete with soft lighting and soaring soundtrack.

Some love stories are horror stories, but others are horror stories masquerading as love stories. Why are we so often sold the latter, and so accepting of the narrative gaslighting? When I look at the popularity of Search WWW vs Flower of Evil, I feel bitter despair and quite a lot of anger. Why do so many women- and it is women, who are producing this work, for women, primarily (I mean, romance, as a genre)- settle for so little? It's the twenty first century, I think, why are we still here, I rage, gnashing my teeth, and indulging in the vicious satisfaction of giving Flower of Evil a single star rating that will make not a dent in its popularity. If we can't demand and aspire to a better class of fantasy, what hope do we have? As you dream, so you will do.

I often think that these days feminism is made toothless because we're shaping it into something that will validate every little feeling of ours;  we don't want to be made uncomfortable by it. But feminism is not meant to make anyone comfortable; interrogating your own desires and pleasures is as much a part of smashing the patriarchy as fighting for fundamental human rights like bodily autonomy.

I guess, in the end, what I want to say is this: for the love of sanity, dream better.

#flower of evil #search: www #kim ji young born 1982 #unpopular opinions cw

[magnetothehedgehog]

Dabi's Decision (Warning spoilers!)

To start off again, spoilers for bnha so don't read if you don't wanna be spoiled for future anime/manga stuff

Oml I'm literally CRYING over this Dabi reveal rewrite I was thinking about recently

The Shoto Family Crisis is something that really hits home for me as I have personaly experience dealing with those type of people (cough cough ENDEAVOR COUGH)

But first I gotta talk about whats actually happening before my idea

But as much respect as I had for Dabi as a villain character and even for the first few moments as Todoroki's brother, from what I have seen from a translation of the reveal here on tumblr I was really disappointed. Like yes It could just have been the translation since i haven't seen all of the offical thing, but I getthe feeling thats not the case.

All that respect for Dabi goes away when he made his argument. He basically said "Dad was mean to me so I killed off a bunch of random innocent people who have done me no wrong for no good reason but LOOK *points at endeavor* he drove me to this. He made me do it."

Like somebody near him is gonna comedically slap him and say "Bad endeavor! >:cc"

This isn't to downplay Touya's trauma, it was real and probably the harshest since he was the first experiment and also considered the first failure. He ended up so ghosted that his own family thought he was dead.

But when he hurts other innocent people for his own goals JUST like his father did, not only is he ending up just like him, he is playing right into his hands. Endeavor wants someone to surpass him, someone to pass down his legacy of strength and ruthlessness, however it happens. Actually its quite the norm for toxic people to try and pass on their behaviors, try to clone themselves on the next generation.

Even with endeavors supposed redemption arc, the effects his decisions have on the past don't change, as this event was supposed to help solidify.

Honestly its the worst way to get back at Endeavour and you just end up being just like the abuser. Why is it such a common trope that "if I was abused by someone, Let me go do the same thing to someone else who literally has never tried to hurt me in my life?" Notice how they never target the abuser, they just seek to abuse someone else, thus continuing the cycle. The stupidest part of Touya's argument is that he is trying to make it seem like its endeavor who made him choose these actions.

But thats the thing. It was STILL Touya's choice to make. And yeah it sucks, often times an abuser will use this fact to their advantage, but when it comes down to it, Touya made the choice to do wrong. It's not like endeavor said "Yo kill these 5 people with your fire power to prove your worth or I burn your skull yeah?"

He made the choice to hurt multiple people who had hope and a future like he once did.

He made a choice that led to him becomong the next abuser, and becoming as delusional as the person who abused him.

But lets say things go different from how its currently going down in the Manga. Here'ss my idea: where it takes place I could care less but lets use the same place the canon did, the theater

But imagine Dabi reveals himself to Endeavor, the crowd and Todoroki and reveals who he is, Touya. He then goes on to revealing Endeavors little experiment and how he used all his family just to live out his dream of surpassing the symbol of peace and having someone stronger than him so he could live vicariously through him.

Dabi goes on to explain as he was considered "a failure" he was cast aside and ghosted, and left distant from his other siblings Endeavour didn't want to be effected by Touya the failure.

Dabi explains how he knew no-one would listen or care about some kids who were being used and no-one would dare challenge or try to smear the reputation of the second greatest hero, so Endeavor was basically untouchable. So Dabi devised a plan

Dabi explains that by becoming a villain, he was able to train unhindered by rules and regulations that hold heroes back and the keep them from exercising their power to the fullest. He explains how he only used his flames to burn those deserving (actual crooks, slavers, other abusers maybe, looking at you overhaul) and how by having less concern for his own well being he could push past his limits.

Even though his Flesh itself burned his power grew until now it was something that could rival/surpass allmight's. Dabi then displays immense amount of power for the world to see, nearly burning up an entire mountain or something to ash. And he eas able to do this all with just 1 quirk. FIRE. For a failure he managed to do the one thing Endeavor always wanted. Be stronger than Almight, and he did it with just.FIRE.

He mocks endeavor. Look at you. Always wanted to ve number 1 but never could. Even now you are stuck in second place in your own heart. But Look now, your failure has achieved your dream. Maybe if you had shown the world the villain you showed your family you could have been number one.

"Look! Gaze upon your Son! See as the Fire chars my very Flesh!?This is it! THIS IS WHAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED! GAZE UPON THE WORLDS NUMBER 1!"

now that in itself is a heartbreaker and would be were maybe another fic writer would stop, but oh no, ya'll still got tears to cry so get ready

Todoroki is in shock now the only words he can make out is "Touya..."

And thats when Touya turns his attention to Todoroki "ahh...my dear Todoroki."

Touya then goes on to explain how this plan he devised was not for himself, but rather, for Todoroki and the rest of his family. He wanted the world to see endeavor for who he was and what he is, so that hopefully, his siblings could have a better future.

Touya goes on about how proud he is of Todoroki for showing how strong he was and that even though he came from people constantly making wrong decisions, he could make a right decision. Even going so far as to reject his own flames at one point.

Touya then goes into a heartfelt speech, and Tells Todoroki

"Listen. I could never tell you to join me or go down the road I took. I would never do that. The Path I took was to build the bridge to Your better tomorrow. I want you to be the best hero you can be."

"I don't want you to be the next symbol of peace or the next Allmight. I want you to live for yourself, be what you WANT to be. Because even though he may have robbed me of my future, your future is something he can never have. "

Omg 😢😭😭😭

Touya you deserved so much moreee

But thats the point.

He did, they all did. And thats what this version of Touya was trying to tell the world. Nobody knows how hard it was, the pain and suffering it took. The stress of Todoroki's body to only reject a quirk probably heavily tied to his emotions and half his whole body, but also the stress it caused from not using it, his father breathing on his neck at every waking moment trying to force him to use it.

And thats just the tip of the iceberg. Getting misinterpreted because he's so focused on defeating the real evil in his life.

Man Todoroki gets so shorthanded in both life and in writing by the author it hurts my soul. I know he has so much potential but he gets dragged down or down played by every little things, especially he who shall not be nam- BAKUGO ITS BAKUGO GAHHH

Ahem. I think I was overtaken for a single moment. Pardon me~☆

But nah none of this toddler "he made me do itttt." Angwy points 3:<

And none of that "Oh Todoroki you have forsaken meeee."

Like for real if anybody aughta know endeavor probably made up some crap lie about him Touya should, thats all that man do, I already KNOW.

And before anybody says you're being too hard on them this is why nobody wants to do redemption

Its called redemption for a reason, first off it ain't supposed to be easy befitting the cause. Second, fake or flakey redemption is the pitts and there is too much of it being sugarcoated and presented on a Platter thank youuu

Only gonna throw one more jab in here but

The Author literally told us how horrible Bakugo is by showing us he had to have amnesia and not receive one for all from the movie or he woulda kept it. They coulda had him give it back to deku, even if it was just an ego thing for him and I, who have not had a reason to respect him in the whole series, would have actually respected that and taken it as a clear sign of change.

But no. Amnesia cop out cowabunga it was.

Okay I think I got this outta my system thanks everyone.

#Dabi #bnha spoilers #three heroes rising spoilers #BNHASPOILERS #bnha #spoilers #Dabi Shoto #Touya Shoto #Rewrite #My ideas #Big Brain moment #Bnha spoilers #Bnha manga spoilers #manga spoilers #fic #Au #boku no hero academia #boku no hero academia spoilers #Dabi reveal #Dabi Spoilers #Todoroki Shoto #Endeavor #Todoroki family #Todoroki Family Spoilers #Endeavor Spoilers

[ladymatt]

🙌 Fic Rec Bingo 🙌

Created by @lightveils on Twitter, this sounded like a fun challenge to do - and I’ve managed to fill the whole card with #Malec fics! *In truth, I could’ve used a card for a number of individual writers on their own, but the fics I finally settled on are under the cut! ❤ Enjoy! And show the writers some love! :-))  

👇LINKS  TO THE 25 FIC RECS BELOW THE CUT 👇

*A FIC YOU LOVE WITHOUT KNOWING THE SOURCE MATERIAL*

✨ Beyond The Sea by @lemonoclefox ✨

Never played BioShock but the underwater city of Rapture was brought to life so vividly here, that it didn’t matter!   

*A FIC WITH A PREMISE THAT SHOULDN’T WORK BUT DOES*

✨ How Rare and Beautiful by @glorious-spoon ✨

Having 'our' Malec appear to TWI's Magnus worked wonderfully, thanks to some very clever writing!  

* A FIC YOU’VE RE-READ SEVERAL TIMES*

✨ Best Laid Plans by  @superficialpeasant  ✨

I'll always come back to this DEEPLY satisfying story of intrigue, authority, prejudice, support - and my favourite depiction of bad-ass, hot-as-hell Malec!

*A FIC YOU STILL REMEMBER YEARS LATER*  

✨ Home by @otppurefuckingmagic ✨

I read this gem three years ago now, but I still remember the chills I got when the emotional build-up led to a twist that blind-sided me - in the best of ways!

*A COMFORT FIC*

✨ Higher Than The Big Trees by  @carmenlire ✨

Getting updates for this lengthy tale, knowing it was only ever going to hit new heights of happiness each time, makes this a real heart-warmer!

*A CATHARTIC FIC*

✨Good Intentions by @alittlebriton ✨

There was only ever one contender for this - an alternative take on what happens after Malec's 3x18 break-up - because chapter 4 had me punching the air over both of them venting their shit!

*A FIC YOU’D PRINT AND PUT ON YOUR BOOKSHELF*

✨ Of Splendour In The Grass by @lecrit ✨

Prejudice, poetry, pining and period Malec, was captured so beautifully here that it deserves to be bound and displayed in pride of place imo!

*A FIC YOU ASSOCIATE WITH A SONG*

✨ Appassionato by @chonideno ✨

Thanks to this fic, I can't hear Liszt's Liebestrume No. 3 in A flat without thinking of Alec hitting all the right notes with his music-loving neighbour!

*A FIC THAT INSPIRES YOU*

✨Thousands Upon Thousands Made An Ocean by @ohlafraise✨

This emotional fic was a lesson in how to have a story pack a punch into less than 800 well-chosen words! Still hurts, even now!

*A FIC THAT BROUGHT YOU ON BOARD A NEW SHIP*

✨Lasă-mă să stau (Let Me Stay) by @superficialpeasant ✨

An absorbing one-shot relating to the writer’s Best Laid Plans fic, this unexpectedly charming love story between Underhill and Hawkstorm (HawkHill) is the canon I will cling to!

*A FIC YOU WISH COULD BE A MOVIE*

✨ A Dream Of Peace by @ketzwrites ✨

There are some fics too epic in scale and splendour for mere imagination to do them justice, and this historical tale of kingdoms and knights deserves to be watched in technicolor glory!

*A FIC THAT LED TO YOU MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE AUTHOR*

✨ Brooklyn Magic by @the-burning-tiger ✨

I've met so many through their work, but I'm singling out the brilliant,Tigs, here because of our ridiculous descent into poetical exchanges in the latter chapters of this fic - one of my earliest Malec reads! Sending cwtches, T! X

*FREE SPACE - A FIC THAT’S WORTH WAITING FOREVER FOR TO GET AN UPDATE - IT’S THAT GOOD!*

✨Working Hard/Hardly Working by @irisadler (on AO3) & @stupidnephilimlove ✨

I'm currently re-reading this sexually-charged getting-to-REALLY-know-you fic which includes relatable temptation, brilliant humour & a soft, sweet centre - believe it or not! Perfect title, btw!

*A FIC YOU’VE GUSHED ABOUT IN REAL LIFE*

✨Your Name For A Capital by @the-prophet-lemonade✨

This time-travelling tale of repeated love and loss was both rich in detail about Magnus' past and devastatingly bittersweet about what lay ahead in Magnus' future! His heartache made me cry!

*A FIC YOU ASSOCIATE WITH A PLACE*

✨Two Halves Of The End Of The World by @la-muerta✨

Batavia was finally brought to life for me, thanks to @tethysea's enviable talent for world-building, with all the scenic detail and historical references that help enrich the story itself!

*A FIC THAT MADE YOU GASP OUT LOUD*

✨The Right Kind Of Love by @onyxmoon (on AO3)✨

I thought the 'betrayal' at the beginning of this fic was hard to take, but Magnus dealing with the aftermath and his own insecurities was even tougher! Malec learning to communicate is always a balm though!

*A FIC YOU FOUND AT THE RIGHT TIME*

✨Free Of Charge by @lorenzobane✨

Magnus being appreciated and protected by his dedicated and devoted Shadowhunter in this short but seriously sweet fic was precisely what I needed after S1!

*A FIC THAT YOU WOULD READ FIC OF*

✨Lead The Way by @clockworkswans✨

Like a black hole, this Doctor/Companion AU sucked me in, and just like the Tenth Doctor, I didn't want to leave! Such a moving and fantastical journey - I'd love to hear more of their adventures!

*A FIC THAT MADE YOU LAUGH OUT LOUD*

✨Don’t You Wanna Stay by @AlxSteele (on AO3)✨

Enemies to Lovers is a fave trope of mine, and when the stubborn denial and seething dislike is burned away with sexy humour and telling gestures, as in this gem, it's great fun to read!

*A FIC WITH A LINE OR TWO YOU’VE MEMORISED BY HEART*

✨You Who Have Come From My Old Country by @poemsfromthealley✨

"Even so, Magnus loved him, loved him, loved him" - very few writers could persuade me to endure a Malec fic that tells of unbearable loss and suffering - but the touching celebration of their legacy is what I take away from this!

*A FIC THAT GAVE YOU BUTTERFLIES*

✨Body Of Memory by @glorious-spoon✨

This memorable fic about amnesia effectively had S1 Alec being confronted with S3 Alec's reality - and I STILL feel Magnus' fear and Alec's confusion in my bones!

*A FIC THAT EMBODIES SOMETHING YOU VALUE IN LIFE*

✨ Magnus Bane’s School For Young Warlocks by @Miasunrise (on AO3)✨

Alec doing whatever it takes to protect his children is definitely something I can relate to, and this cleverly-crafted fic of finding new family gives depth and character to Max and Raphael!

*A FAVOURITE AU*

✨Walkers Of The Winding Path by @poemsfromthealley​

The bewitching combination of mythical monsters, supernatural hunters and  this writer’s distinctive way with words means I'm completely under this story's spell! I'll walk this path many times, I think!

*A FIC YOU STAYED UP TOO LATE TO FINISH READING*

✨My Body Is A Cage by @unrestrainedlyexcessive​✨

This was me dipping my toe into an AU I wasn't convinced I'd enjoy, but thanks to this writer’s compellingly-quirky storytelling, I couldn't rest before knowing what befell these fated lovers!

*A FIC THAT MADE YOU FEEL SEEN*

✨Beautiful Distraction by @unending-happiness​✨

Who better to colour my bespoke fic with every shade of me there is, than my parabatai, Brit! Welcome to my favourite pairing - Malec & Pandemonium! LY, B! ❤😘

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

#MyPosts #FicRecBingo #Full card achieved! #Spoilt for choice really! #Malec #FicRec #lightveils #WriterAppreciation #It's important

[elexuscal]

How to do amnesia stories well- and badly

Amnesia is one of my favourite tropes of all time. 

That sometimes get some raised eyebrows, and I don’t blame folks. Amnesia stories have a bad reputation, and for good reason: most of them are done very, very poorly.

Generally, I find bad amnesia stories fall into one of the three following categories (although they can overlap):

1)     The Blank Slate: Usually done in one off movies or video games. Your protagonist wakes up with no idea of where they are or who they are. This is often done with two intents- to create a mystery, and/or so the audience can project themselves into the character.

When done well, this CAN work. When done poorly (which is often), the character just comes across as boring, with no unique personality. The mystery, too, can be forced. Instead of actually being clever about it, amnesia is used as a blanket to hide what would otherwise have been obvious. 

2)     ‘The Nerf Gun’: The writers have crafted some plot or threat which sounded really cool… only to realize partway through, that one or more of their characters have the skills or powers to fix it easily. The solution? Give them amnesia!

When done well, it can be amusing or suspenseful to watch your heroes figure things out. It essentially turns them into underdogs, and who doesn’t like an underdog? When done wrong, it’s just frustrating. It’s clearly just duct tape over the storyline. One of the best ways to tell if you’re dealing with the Nerf Button is it’s clearly just a plot device. The character hits their head or something, becoming useless for just as long as the writers need. Once the plot hurdle is fixed, they unceremoniously get their memories back. Everyone moves on without comment.

3)     ‘The Reset Button’: This is the one that annoys me the most. Something cool and shocking has just happened in your story! Something huge, that really shakes up the status quo! Your protagonist’s secret identity has been revealed, or the Masquerade was unveiled! The will-they-or-won’t-they has been resolved with a kiss! …but the writers don’t want to actually deal with any of that. So they cast a spell or zap everyone with a laser or what have you, and all the events of the past episode/movie/season is forgotten.

A variant of this is focused on just one single character, having them forget everything from one specific piece of information, to everything they’ve done in the show. They’re not going to get their memories back. This can be a convenient way to shuffle someone out of a plot without killing them… But seeing your favourite character robbed of their development can be even sadder than a death scene, and not in a good way.

No matter the scale, this usage sends the same message: consequences? What consequences!

Writing Good Amnesia 

Okay. So those are the major pitfalls of writing an amnesia story. How can you do it well?

That’s going to vary. Most good examples, least to my knowledge, seem to have had one or more of the following elements:

1)     Emotional weight: Imagine for a moment, waking up and having no memories. At all. You don’t know your name, your family, your job, anything. The panic and fear and uncertainty that would cause. Or imagine, living your ordinary life, and a total stranger comes up to you and says you and says you’ve been friends forever. And you just feel… nothing. Or, on the flip side, seeing your best friend or partner or sibling, and them feeling nothing in response to you. The isolation and grief that would instill.

Good amnesia stories don’t just use it as a plot device. They really delve into the emotional weight of relationships and self-identity. 

(Good examples- The Adventure Zone: Balance, the Buffy the Vampire episode ‘Tabula Rasa’) 

---

2)     Plot Importance: Its storytelling 101- if something’s going to happen, have it happen for a reason.

Don’t just use amnesia as an obstacle. Have it add something, move the story along.  When affected by amnesia, character could do things, visit places, and have conversations they wouldn’t do normally. This can be useful for having them learn new things or access others. The fallout afterwards can also drive things forward. 

(Good examples- The Good Place, the Young Justice episode ‘Bereft’)

---

3)     Character: If you forget a significant chunk of your past, you’d change as a person. Therefore, amnesia story-lines are a great opportunity to dig into a character’s personality. You can explore the questions of nature vs. nurture, and really go to their core.

Additionally, what happens once a character gets their memory back? It’s possible the change in perspective has really affected them, for either better or worse. Don’t just have them shrug the amnesia off. Show their reaction to it, afterwards. 

(Good examples: the Babylon 5 episode ‘Death of Personality’, the Doctor Who two parter ‘Human Nature/Family of Blood’.)

---

4 ) Thematic Resonance: There are a lot of overarching themes, either for individual episodes or stories as a whole, that amnesia can help discuss.

For example; the fears and difficulties of growing up? Reset people to childhood. The importance of relationships? Have a character forget someone important to them. A character who’s unwilling to face their trauma or learn from their mistakes? Confront them with the most extreme version of that. 

This can be used either to have character grow, or as a tragedy- someone who literally can’t move forward. 

(Examples: the Rick and Morty episode ‘Morty’s Mind Blowers’, Adventure Time)

-----

And finally, there’s one rule you should pretty much always follow:

5) If it’s a main character, they get their memory back! 

Seriously! If they don’t remember who they are, they’re not the same character anymore. 

If you are gonna leave them that way forever- remember that it’s essentially a death, and treat it with the solemnity of one. 

-------------------

The TLDR:

Amnesia is a trope. Like most tropes, it can be executed well or poorly. Here’s a rule of thumb outlining the difference- Good amnesia is done to tell or further a story. Bad amnesia is used to make a story easier for the writers. 

#amnesia #tropes #writing #steven universe #long post

[matchaboi]

Hanahaki Disease

Perhaps it is just a fantasy, but what if it is actually a real thing?

Hanahaki Disease is a fictional disease, where the victim coughs up flower petals, thanks to one-sided love that the victim suffer from. Well, who would’ve thought that beautiful things could be this deadly. The disease ends when the one that they love return their feelings, or when the victim dies. It can be cured through surgical removal, but when the infection is removed, the victim's romantic feelings for their love also disappear.

This trope has several variations, and is used in both happy and tragic stories. It often develops over months or even years, beginning with coughing up a few petals and growing in intensity and pain until the victim is vomiting entire flowers, by which point the disease has entered its final stages.

The happy ending version is when the object of the victim's love returns their affections, thus making the love no longer unrequited. The victim is then cured of the disease. This may happen spontaneously when the object of affections realizes their love, or the disease may require the object to persuade the victim that their love is mutual. If the victim cannot believe that his beloved returns their love, they will die.

Another popular version is when the victim's lungs get filled with the flowers and roots grow in their respiratory system. They choke on their own blood and petals, and die. It is popular due to the angst that comes with character death

There are also works where the flowers are surgically removed, as are the victim's feelings of love, meaning they can no longer love the person they once loved. Sometimes this also removes their memories of the former beloved, or the victim's ability to ever love again. Often, the one suffering the disease will refuse the surgery, preferring to die rather than losing their feelings.

Love is a gamble. We will never know what will we truly get from our beloved ones. It could be pure love, which each and everyone of us wanted, or maybe it could be the opposite. One-sided love, fake love, love without feelings, sympathetic love, you name it. These different kinds of love would grow different types of flowers in your respiratory system as well. It could grow roses, where everything is red and pretty, but thorny and could puncture the victim’s lungs until the point they can’t inhale fresh oxygen anymore. Love could grow yellow carnations as well, where your love story contains disdain or rejection. A petal of this flower is enough to make the victim feel sick to their stomach. It doesn’t matter if you have the purest intention in the world to love someone, because if the feelings are just one-sided, you will feel nothing but lungs that filled with flowers. 

It is a never-ending what ifs scenario. There will always be some cases or actions that we thought we could’ve take to make it better. Once you started to think about that, you will feel anxious about your decision making throughout your life. Perhaps going well with the flow could be the best choice, but what if you take a step out of your comfort zone and try to risk it all for something that you wanted? 

the power of what ifs :)

Going back to the disease, this is my choice. If it is a real thing, and I’m having an unrequited love over someone, I will choose to end my life. Why? Well, imagine living your life with lungs full of flowers. You can’t breathe. For me, I’m the type that will love someone wholeheartedly, risking everything to get what I wanted. To be honest with you, it is not a good thing to have this trait. You will have nothing left to spend for yourself if your plans didn’t work out. This Hanahaki disease would surely keep on growing inside of me every second because I would always remember her; the way she smiles from ear to ear, how she tilts her head back when she is laughing and the scent of her favorite perfume. There’s no way that I could forget everything about her. I don’t want to live my life in pain. If I choose to do surgery, I would lose my romantic feelings, but still, if she crosses my mind after the surgery, the pain would still be there. The memories would still live inside my mind, even though I did not feel a damn thing. Will I carry on the same repetitive surgery for the rest of my life? Definitely not. That’s why I choose to take my life away. Maybe, if I could wake up with amnesia after the surgery, I would be just fine. But, the probability of that scenario to happen is somewhat close to impossible.

But still, you own your own life. You are free to do anything you want. But if there’s one thing that I could tell every single soul in this world, I’ll tell everyone to not fall so deep into the thing we call love, because there are so many unknown that we didn’t know, even though they give you words and show actions that are believable for you to call it love. Keep your guards up because life is so dangerous. Most importantly, love yourself and NEVER lose yourself no matter what. If you do, find your true self first. Take the time you need and don’t rush anything. Life is not a race that you should win, it’s a journey. 

Hanahaki disease is a genuine reminder for us humans that love could be deadly and risky. If you encounter one, please, be careful. Even salt looks like sugar :)

#hanahaki #thoughts #depresssion #love #life #sad

[weforgotthatwearethestars]

No Memory is Gonna Save You Now (part 1)

I’ve written a thing!

While out on patrol, Peter looses most of his memories. Through the kindness of strangers, his friends, and his family, he learns exactly what those closest to him mean to him.

It’s basically just amnesia trope plus starker (don’t like don’t read please) 😊

Also here on Ao3!

Tags: amnesia, temporary amnesia, team as family, canon-typical violence, fluff, angst, happy ending

He wakes up to dark green and sodium light and pain.

Sitting up, he groans and tries to sort out his limbs. The legs get folded under because they’re annoyed no matter what it seems. The spine gets hunched around the aching ribs and generally unhappy organs. One arm, the left one, is doing all the leveraging while the right one seems to be the only thing properly screaming. The neck is rolled while the head is dropped to inspect the screaming arm.

He groans as he finds that the right arm is much more sticky-red than the other is as only the fingers on his left are coated in it. Gingerly, he rolls the sleeve back and finds -

A list.

Tower

Loby

Fri

Lab

Tony

Idly, he thinks, lists are written on your skin, not carved in, right?, and I’m pretty sure I put that there based on the blood.  

“Oh, by my lucky stars, it’s you!”

His lungs are working double time, his heart quadruple, while his ribs twinge and his stomach rolls, whole body buzzing with something .

Also he seems to have become well acquainted with a tree.

“Oi, love, you’re alright? I didn’t mean to frighten you so bad.”

Without much thought, his hands let go and his body unfurls while his feet hold him in place on the branch. He comes face to face, though the wrong way up, with a lovely girl, curly brown hair, shining blue eyes, and a frown. No, wait, smile if he was on the ground. She giggles as she flaps one hand, the other holding a plastic cup and squeals, “I can’t believe I’m meeting Spider-man! Heather’s never gonna believe me!”

“Whose Spider-man?” he hears someone ask.

But, no, not quite hear, because it was also feel, and not just the vibration but the movement of the words-

I said that.

That’s what I sound like?!

He hits the ground with a thud and a flare of pain while she snorts and laughs near involuntarily. With another groan, though this one is mixed with a chuckle, he gets up. Sorts his limbs enough to lift himself from the ground, right way up this time. He’s taller than her, broader too, but she is excited and happy and practically bouncing where she stands.

"I know you probably get this alot but could we get a picture together?" she asks and she looks so bouncy that he doesn’t have the heart to ask her why would you want a picture with me ? Instead he smiles, nods, and chuckles in a way he hopes doesn’t sound as awkward as he feels. They bend close as the girl taps the screen into giving her the front facing camera. Then they’re posing and she says “Smile!” and he sees himself for the first time.

The large white lenses are a little startling, but the red, blue, and black, the detail of webbing and the obvious care taken to make the whole thing look like a second skin, comforts him in a way he wouldn’t know how to express. The suit, what it represents, is important and good and makes him feel like he can do just about anything.

The girl grins down at the photo, humming happily and swaying a little. He comes to realize that she’s been glassy-eyed and floaty the whole time and maybe, “Are you drunk?”

She fixes him with a pout while she rolls her eyes and replies, “It’s not like I’m smashed, mate, just tipsy.”

“Um.” he replies as he shuffles his feet a bit.

He knows he should find this ‘Tower’ place. It’s the first thing on a list that is carved into his arm and since he doesn’t seem to remember his face or his name (at least what this person thinks is his name) the list that’s carved into his arm seems like a good place to start.

But....he can’t just leave her here in the dark and the trees and tipsy (possibly drunk).

She looks up from her phone to take note of his pensive stance before she seems to roll her eyes with her entire being.

She sighs loudly as she turns and says, “Well, I suppose I should be glad that chivalry isn’t completely dead.” while walking into the night.

With little hesitation, he follows.

She chats idly as she follows a map on her phone and he learns that she’s an exchange student (from the UK) in college, misses her girlfriend (Heather) terribly, and is finding New York less and less confusing by the day (when sober). There’s a shriek and a groan to their left and he is too proud of himself for doing more than jump and gasp a little.

“Where the hell have you been Millie! We thought you were dead!” comes quickly and sharply from a guy in a crop top and spiked heels, while a girl in a floral button up and stompy boots rolls her eyes and drawls, “She coulda killed any junky who’d’a jumped ‘er.”

He smiles at this and hangs back while the girl, Millie, throws her arms around the two with a strong laugh and says, “Oh, my loves, did I worry you? I never knew you cared!” The guy shrugs her off with a smirk and a huff while the girl catches Millie and pulls her in a little tighter than is probably strictly necessary. “And look!” Millie says with a wave in his direction, “I had a knight in shining armor to escort me back!”

Her two friends turn to look at him as he sheepishly waves back and says, “H-hey.” Her two friends also want pictures and while the guy thanks him profusely, the girl gives him a purposeful nod and he tries hard not to disappoint. Eventually though, seeing them all safe in each other’s hands, he figures he better be going.

“Back to Queens?” the girl, River, asks with a raised eyebrow. He rubs at the back of his neck with his left, less mangled arm and says, “No, ah, I’m actually heading to a - uh -a ‘Tower’ but I’m not, well, exactly sure where it is.”

They all blink at him a bit before Millie burst into giggles saying, “‘A’ Tower. A-avenger’s ha ! Love , this is precisely why my Heather loves you!” Her friends seem to catch on because the guy, Michael starts laughing with Millie while River just sorts and rolls her eyes. He simply stands there and laughs a bit with them because, well, laughing is nice. And, apparently, he likes it when people laugh at his jokes, even the unintentioned ones. Who knew? I sure didn’t .

Before his laugh goes hysterical, he stuffs it down and says that yes, he really does need directions. Yes, his suit is very fancy but it seems to be having some issues. Yes, of course , that’s how he got hurt. And, no, he does not spend too much time in Queens he’s just a little turned around here, thank you very much.

They give him directions and wave him off, seeming generally none the wiser that he has no idea where Queens even is , much less why he’s associated with it so readily. Maybe it’s another city , he thinks, since this one is what Millie called New York .

The walk is long and dark in patches while others are brightly lit. Sometimes there are people and sometimes there’s not but it is never, ever silent. He can hear things from what he thinks must be quite far away, as sometimes he turns a corner expecting someone talking or a car reving or a bird cooing only to be surprised that it’s not right there but much, much further down or simply not there at all. It’s disconcerting, but not as weird as his feet. Sometime’s, as if they have a mind of their own, his feet will stick to the sidewalk and refuse to let go. Eventually he realizes that he’s the one doing it, somehow! And since, it seems, that sticking is easier than not-sticking, he finds a box that doesn't look terrible, rips off two pieces, sticks his feet to them, and tries not to think about how he’s decently sure humans don’t do that .

He keeps walking.

Eventually he turns a corner and realizes River’s sarcastic addendum of, ‘you can’t miss iet’ was true. It’s giant , oddly shaped, and has a huge ‘A’ on it ( oh! ‘A’ Tower! Ha, I get it now! ). Looking at the list again he starts to think, O k so, Tower, done. Now ‘Loby’ probably means the lobby of the Tower but does ‘Fri’ mean friday? Does this mean I need to be there on friday or before then? Maybe I have an appointment? Wait, what day is it anyway!?  

Needless to say, he was panicking a little.

But, regardless, he didn’t really seem to have anywhere else to go, no other direction but this one.

So, to the ‘Loby’ it is.

Inside is just as intimidating as the outside. There are metal detectors and barriers but past those is a large desk with a single security officer on their phone. Everything is made of metal, glass, or white, polished rock of some kind. Marble, maybe?

He adds ‘not an interior designer’ to his List of Things he Knows Now.

He wanders forward, hesitantly, as the guard stands.

But before the guard can tell him anything, “Hello, Spider-Man. Boss is waiting in the lab for you.” as the elevator doors to the right side of the large desk open to an empty car.

The disembodied voice is female, almost lyrical, and incredibly unnerving. Though, it would seem, not to the security guard, as he simply waved, smiled, and sat back down at the desk. As he debated whether or not he should listen to the voice in the walls one of the metal detectors lights up green and he figures there probably isn’t much arguing with the voice anyway.

So he walks through the detector and as he passes the desk he pauses and asks, “Hey, man, uh, could you tell me what day it is?”

The man looks truly confused but answers, “Thursday, sir.” all the same.

He grins then switches to a thumbs up when he remembers the mask and chirps, “Thanks!” before getting into the elevator. The doors close and the car starts to rise.

“Um, hello?”

“Yes, Peter?”

“I - ” he starts confused but then waves away that line of questioning. Later , he thinks, there’s a list to sort through and the ceiling-lady could be wrong . “So you mentioned ‘lab’ earlier and I was hoping maybe you could tell me if I’m supposed to be there on friday or not?”

There’s a slight pause then, “You do have lab time schedule with the Boss at noon -”

“Ok then I should just come back then could you bring me back d-”

“No, Boss wants to see you ASAP.”

“No, but -!”

“I can’t disobey -”

“No, stop! Stop the car! I - !”

The elevator lurches to a stop and he crushes the hand rail in his frantic scrambling to stay upright. “I have a list! In my arm!” He half yells out as he pulls the sleeve up at the camera in the corner of the ceiling. “It says: Tower, Loby, Fri, Lab, Tony, and Tony is underlined, in case you can’t see it. So I think Tower means this building, Loby means the lobby of the building, and Fri must mean friday and if you say I have an appointment -!”

“I’m F.R.I.D.A.Y.”

He’s stunned for a moment then, “What?”

“My name is F.R.I.D.A.Y., Female Replacement Intelligent Digital Assistant Youth.”

He blinks, blinks again, then “That is a really weird name.”

She almost sounds smug when she says, “Blame Boss, he’s the one that named me.”

That gets him grinning. He likes ceiling lady. Add that to the List of Things. Well, Friday, not ceiling lady.

Whatever.

“Ok… I guess that counts? So, you’re bringing me to the lab?”

“If you let me move the elevator I can bring you to Boss’s lab right now.”

“Heh,” he huffs embarrassed, “yeah, no, that’s good. To the lab is good.”

The elevator begins to move again and he tries desperately to contain his excited bouncing. He got a good feeling about this Tony person. The name is underlined on his arm, an already painful task made even more painful just to get a point across.

Hopefully, he won’t be mad about the hand rail he crushed.

“Hey, Friday? Is this ‘Boss’ guy going to be in the lab you’re taking me to?”

“Yes, Boss is in his lab right now. He’s been looking for you since earlier this evening.”

The car comes to a stop and the doors slide open, so he steps out and looks around. It’s a long, drab hallway with only a few doors, all slidey and reinforced with metal.

Did I accidently wander into a prison?  

“Boss muted me,” Friday says with an air of annoyance, “so I can’t announce you but I’ll open the door.”

A door slides open, sniffling and whirring drifting out into the hall. Paired with the hiccuping breaths and the annoyed huffs, it’s obvious that someone is crying or at least extremely frustrated.

Another thing to add to the List of Things , he thinks as he walks toward the doors with a lot less hesitation, incapable of not helping people .

He gets to the door to find a sad and sorry sight, though the lab itself looks amazing. There are tools and machines and projects on the tables, the floors, the walls, even hung from the ceiling! It seems to range from complex mechanics to advanced biochemical and he wants to sink his teeth into everything without ever coming up for air.

The only thing that stops him is the gorgeous man and adorable arm robot.

The robot is obviously trying to comfort the man, whirring as it rolls back and forth with a glass in its hand. The man is someone to be concerned over, though. Besides the fact that he’s the most gorgeous thing he’s ever seen (not that he’s seen all that much), the man seems to be very upset. There are holograms projecting charts, video, and raw data of all kinds displayed around him in a somewhat haphazard way. But he’s sat, hunched over, trying and failing to collect himself as he bats the concerned robot away.

“Um, hi?”

The man runs a quick hand roughly over his face as he sits up, squared-shoulders and stern frown, as he booms, “What the hell a-!” and stops. The man’s eyes go wide and his jaw drops but he doesn’t move any further than that.

“I, uh -” he starts, stops from nerves and second-guessed thoughts, then continues as the man continues to gape, “Ms. -um- Friday let me up. She said that her boss wanted to see me and I’m actually looking for - well, it’s kinda- Gah !” The man is faster than he looks because he’s across the room and throwing his arms around him before he can really think to stop him. He hugs back mostly to make sure he doesn’t get bowled over but the beautiful man.

“ Never scare me like that again, Peter! Lovelace , I have heart problems ! You can’t just disappear off the face of the universe like that!” the man says, loud and angry but there’s a tremble in his words and in his arms that speak to how worried he was.

But he can’t focus on that, as he’s held tight and squished close by the man, because, “Is that my name? Peter?” The man pulls back, gripping his - Peter’s, it would seem - shoulders but holding him out to gape at his face.

“Wh - I - yes, of course your name is Peter. You should know that, why don’t you know that?” The man whirls away, back to his holos to swipe them all away and bring up loads of new ones. Peter stands there, a little confused. He takes the lab in a little more, itches to get into a project but he still doesn’t feel like he has permission to do so.

Peter refocuses on the man instead and decides to say, “Friday is annoyed you muted her.”

The man’s head whirls back up to him, first confused, then it all seems to click before, “Unmute, baby girl. I’m sorry about that, really.”

“It’s ok, Boss.” Friday responds immediately, sounding content and maybe a little fond around the edges.

“So you’re ‘Boss’?” Peter asks as the gorgeous guy goes back to his frantic work.

“Yeah, I’m in charge here. My lab, my rules.” the man replies distractedly. With what Peter reads as a clear dismissal, he goes poking around.

Besides , he thinks as he starts to wander, now, Friday will say something if I’m doing something truly stupid, right?  

It’s an unknown amount of minutes before he’s interrupted by a hand on his shoulder. His immediate response is not to see who it is, though. It’s one thousand percent to jump up on the work table he’s in front of and land in a defensive position, facing the hand that was touching him. It turns out it’s just ‘Boss’ (I should really ask his name. Or maybe just what I call him. ).

“You ok there, Pete?” the man asks, part amused, part concerned. Peter feels himself blush but tries not to get too concerned over it, since he’s still wearing a mask.

“Y-yeah, sorry, uh, didn’t mean to do that. Heh.” Peter stutters out.

The gorgeous guy smiles a little fondly up at Peter then asks, “Need a hand?” as he holds a hand up to him. Smiling, Peter takes the hand gratefully and hops down. “Peter, where did you get the cardboard from?” Peter looks up only to find the man looking down, so he follows his gaze to the cardboard he’d had on his feet until five seconds ago.

Peter smiles sheepishly at the other man and says, “Yeah, ah, I kept sticking to the ground so I just stuck them on my feet? I can kind of, um control the sticking but I’m not very good yet.” The other man is giving him such a complicated look that Peter decides to try and change the subject. “So, um, wh- ah, well, ok - what’s your name? I’m sorry I should probably know this, too, but I don’t. I don’t really remember -”

“Anything.” the other man finishes with a grimace.

Peter shrinks in on himself further, not sure why but hoping desperately that he hadn’t disappointed the other man. “I talked to Strange. He said he took all of your memories and put it into this.” the man says as he holds up an I.D. card between two fingers. Peter takes it, glances at the picture but quickly focuses on the name underneath.

Peter Parker.

“He didn’t have time to separate everything out so he just….took everything.” he continues on with a flap of his hand, whirling around to key something else up. The holos flicker on around his head as the man asks, “Baby girl, scan Pete’s brain. Full front to back, anything we can do. And shut his modulator off, that thing sounds wrong when you talk.” There’s a beep from his suit and - maybe that’s why I sound so weird .

“On it, Boss.” Friday chirps as the holos begin to flash on around him. The man seems to be complaining about someone or something when something else catches Peter’s eye. He grabs the holo, adjusting it around so he can read it. He expands and manipulates it in a way that feels natural to him so he tries not to think too hard about it as he starts to see - no, that can’t -

“I’m part spider?!” Peter’s voice startles himself just as much as the other man, stopping mid rant, buried in holos, to look over at Peter with an incredulous look on his face.

“I tell you a wizard took all your memories to keep a hive mind of aliens from scrambling your brain and that’s the thing that you’re focusing on?”

“That explains the sticking, I guess. And the get-up.” Peter murmurs as he continues flicking through what must be his own lab results over the years, ignoring the man’s question just as his own had been ignored. “I wonder, does that explain - ha!”

Peter pulls up a video labeled ‘strength eval.’

It starts with the gorgeous man explaining to a younger guy (a lab tech maybe?) how much different weights are and how he intends to combine them on to one, reinforced, barbell. The whole thing looks like gym equipment got swallowed by a forklift and even more hydraulics, but if they’re testing superhuman strength, it would make sense that the superhuman would need something more than a normal human’s gym equipment to lift and spot them.

He expects that the video may cut to someone else, someone more….familiar to him but, instead, the person Peter assumed was a lab tech lays out on the weight lifting bench. It clicks, just then, as the gorgeous man on the video starts telling the younger guy to be careful and don’t push himself and this is just to get a baseline so no -

That’s me , Peter thinks.

Peter sees what must be himself go through several variations of weights until they’re all piled on the bar and the guy, himself, in the video, is laughing a little as he lifts it like it's nothing . “Ok put the 10 ton weight down, we’re done.” says the gorgeous man in the video, sounding half-way disbelieving.

“But I can lift more, let's try -”

“Pete, we don’t have more. I thought 10 tons was over kill !” and then the two dissolve into laughter and the video ends.

Peter looks over at the man, who’s looking right back, face serious but a little lost all at once.

“You really don’t remember anything do you?”

Shaking his head, Peter glances around, finds a stool to collapse on, then does just that.

He rolls his sleeve up again, turns his arm to show the man as he says, “This is all I had when I woke up. I didn’t know where or who I was, just…. that everything hurt. Especially this arm. When I looked at it…. I found the list.” Placing it back in his own lap, Peter stares at the skin, healed too much to be anything but accelerated. He chuckles, “I ran into this girl. Apparently her girlfriend is a big fan of Spider-Man. Or...me, I guess. I - I thought maybe she’d got me confused with someone else but then, when I asked where a ‘Tower’ might be, they pointed me here. Then, when I got here, in the lobby, Friday knew me and had me come to the lab. I thought m-maybe, whoever ‘Tony’ is, that they’d be here. I thought that they’d fix this because -”

Peter cuts himself off with another chuckle, wetter this time, “I know this sounds stupid but it’s underlined .” He looks up at the man, who’s walked a little closer to him with a face that says he may be in just as much pain as Peter is. “That’s gotta mean something. Right?”

They are silent for a moment, as the man inspects Peter’s arm with reverence and fear swirling in his eyes.

“Yeah, underoos, it does.” the man finally replies as he puts a hand on Peter’s shoulder, something shifting in his posture, on his face, in his head.

“I - My name is Tony Stark. As far as I know, I’m the only Tony you know.” He’s got a fond smirk on his face, eyes shining with determination now as he holds out his hand and continues, saying, “And you’re right it does mean something.”

Peter takes and shakes Tony Stark's hand, a little mechanically. But his smirk is infectious and he feels himself smile, faintly. “It means I’m going to fix this. And I promise I won’t stop until I do.” And Peter, to Tony’s credit, feels better about this whole situation than he can ever remember feeling.

It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.

***************************************************************************************

Sooooooooo, what do you think??? 😅

Please let me know! I’ll be posting every weekend on here and Ao3 until the end!

Like, reblog, or just send me a message, I’d love to here what you think or even make new friends 🥰 Thank you!

(part 2 coming later tonight as I posted this chapter last week on Ao3 do to tech issues)

Next

#amnesia #temporary amnesia #team as family #fluff #angst #happy ending #starker #tony x peter #peter x tony #ironspider

[tarashima]

I was tagged by @celepom (thank you ~♥)

Rules: Copy/paste and bold your fic preferences because why not, gotta choose one (near impossible, but go with your first gut instinct), and tag some people at the end.

slow burn or love at first sight - love at first sight can be done good but slow burns can truly be some of the best pains there is (the number of burn salves I’ve had to use all these years, rip)

fake dating or secret dating - BOTH!!! 

enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers - I have to say both here as well

oh no there’s only one bed or long-distance with correspondence - “all these overused tropes, can’t people have a little more imagination than tha-” YOU SHUT UP RIGHT NOW AND LET ME READ, THIS TROPE IS AN AMAZING CUPCAKE AND I’LL EAT EVERY SINGLE ONE AT THE TEA PARTY!!!

hurt/comfort or amnesia - perhaps because there’s more of the former out there, I don’t know. Most amnesia fics I’ve stumbled upon haven’t really had the same impact on me.

fantasy au or modern au - Give me a whole new world to escape to

mutual pining or domestic bliss - both here as well, especially if they're combined (^///w///^)

smut or fluff - Definitely depends on my mood, sometimes I want either for the sake of it, and sometimes I want both, and sometimes I just want it as part of a story.

canon compliant (missing scenes) or fix-it fic - Sometimes things get better when fleshed out, and sometimes canon can go fuck itself, and I love both.

alternative universe or future fic - I could’ve said both but something about aus can be so intriguing and mindblowing when done right. And I’ve stumbled upon so, so many fics who does it absolutely effing amazing.

one shot or multi chapter - I’m gonna be honest, I don’t understand how some actually choose between these -w-;;; (but I do understand why)

kid fic or roadtrip fic - I’m not very fond of kids tbh, and while kids can be an adventure, I’m more intrigued by the ones a roadtrip can have.

reincarnation or character death - The latter has to be done EXCEPTIONALLY WELL, or else I’ll just sit down completely crushed afterwards, and not in a good way (that goes twice in the YGO-fandom)

arranged marriage or accidental marriage - I’d say both again, but I’ve never really stumbled upon the latter, even if I want it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

high school romance or middle-aged romance - I have absolutely nothing against the former and happy indulge in the huge amount there is, but between the two of them, I’ll take middle-aged, or at least with characters being 25+ 

time travel or isolated together - I admit, I’ve only read YGO time travel fics and for me, they've never really been as intriguing as isolation.

neighbours or roommates - Hoh~? They have to share a room, you say? Interesting, tell me more >:3

sci fi au or magic au - Both are good, but sci-fi makes my heart beat faster

bodyswap or genderbend - Can’t say I’ve stumbled upon many fics with bodyswap but I would always choose genderbend. 

angst or crack - I always say I don’t like angst and it’s not entirely a lie, but unless it has a happy ending, it has to be written well. Crack tends to be just... crack.

apocalyptic or mundane - Both can be good but, meh, I don’t know really. 

I’m tagging @ashethehedgehog, @miska-za, @chibicrow, @pocketsonny and @jczala

#tag meme

[bigskydreaming]

How would you go about a good Spyral Dick Grayson storyline? I like the idea but not the execution (if it was stated he was acting like an idiot I'd like it better). Also in the same vein how would you do DickTiger/how do you think it'd work?

I’m side-eyeing you a little anon, lol, because I’m not sure what you mean by it’d be better if it was stated he was acting like an idiot. Because see, as far as I’m concerned, nothing about Dick’s actions was out of character....so long as you center Bruce’s actions as the real driving force behind Dick ending up stuck undercover at Spyral. Dick’s actions make perfect sense....as the fractured attempts at recuperating from a massive trauma without any semblance of a support system or any time or space to actually dedicate to acknowledging and accepting what he’d just been through before leaping right back into danger.

It remains extremely troubling to me that even WITHOUT taking into account Bruce’s victim blaming him for his own death, emotional manipulation and physical beating...all of that only stacks on top of what should already have been the takeaway, IMO:

And that is that its absolutely ridiculous to think that Dick could have remotely been emotionally and mentally composed enough to make an informed, non-coerced decision about undertaking the Spyral mission AND keeping it from the rest of the family.....mere days after being extensively tortured and then briefly died.

He wasn’t in a sound state of mind to make that decision with full awareness of all the implications and repercussions like he would have at other times. Nobody would have been.

And the rest of his family might not have known about him dying, but they did know about him being tortured for days and then unmasked, since they literally saw that on TV....and they know, post Dick’s return, that Dick had been in place undercover before his funeral was even held...the same week he was thought to have died. It should have been obvious to a family of geniuses that all choices made in a matter of days after being tortured and unmasked and who knows what else might have happened offscreen that they could only know about by ASKING him about his ordeal instead of jumping straight to punching him for the choices he made while in the immediate aftermath of massive trauma....like, point is, even without knowing he died, there was always more than enough info they were privy to that there’s no real excuse for their response to his return being judgment instead of concern for how the hell has he been coping with all of that, out there all on his own without anyone he could fully trust, let alone unburden himself to.

None of them spared a single thought for what any of that had been like for him, because they were too focused on their own hurt, and I’m always going to be pissed about that, lmao.

Anyway, apologies if none of that was anything you intended with your word choice, but to be perfectly honest I need very little excuse to go off on a rant about how even the rest of his family’s response to that storyline was like, fundamentally flawed.

NOW. On to your actual question! Because I do have an answer as I’ve thought about this particular thing a LOT, and my ire at both the Spyral storyline and the amnesia storyline coalesced into conjoined seething frustration because of how EASILY they could have avoided making all of the Batfam seem shitty, EVEN BRUCE, and like, also avoided them driving Dick further away rather than bringing him back closer to the family.

All you gotta do....is smash those two stories together and do them both at the same time.

LOL, a few months ago I actually literally wrote out a whole post outlining it in detail here:

https://bigskydreaming.tumblr.com/post/187334221591/if-dc-had-just-combined-their-spyral-and-amnesia

And I’ve copied and pasted the content of that post below the cut here too, just to keep it all in one place for convenience.

As for Dick/Tiger - that’s a whole other post I don’t have time to get into at the moment, but in a nutshell, I’m hugely a fan of their pairing but in specific ways...I mostly see them as each other’s angsty kinda ‘the one that got away, that they could never shake how they got under their skin, but can’t find a way to actually be with, longterm.’ Because the thing is, so much of their dynamic and interactions with each other were clouded by the layers of deception they both wore at all times, and how many different lies they had to tell in service of their whole reason for being there, and how much of themselves they had to hide.

Like, I tend to picture them as kinda both wistfully thinking if they’d met in another life, in another way, without all the cloak and dagger and lies from the very start...they could absolutely be happy together. But as it is, there’s no getting around that they both feel in any kind of relationship, there’d always be some part of them, even if just deep down, that was always keeping an eye open for a crack in the other’s mask, a sign that once again, they were not what they professed to be.

So I see them as being very much that spy vs spy trope, even after Dick goes back to vigilantism and civilian life and even when he and Tiger are theoretically on the same side.....like, I could see them having very emotionally charged, physical, almost desperate kinda encounters in secret whenever they’re in the same city or whatever....because they’re past denying that there’s definitely something between them, always has been, probably always will be...but without even talking about it, just with mutual understanding and implicit agreement, they always know these encounters are just for the night....and then its back to reality. With them thus becoming a kind of escape and fantasy for each other, all rolled up in one and thus inevitably romanticized even further within their own minds...

But they’re also both very pragmatic people, and used to taking what they can get and making the most of it. Its nice to picture the could-have-beens in a world where they met under more honest circumstances, but they live in this world, and here, this is what they can make of what they have, this is what they can make work. So its not all terrible, because if they both ultimately decide this is one of the better outcomes resulting from where they began, which neither of them can change...then it becomes more possible to appreciate what they have for what it is. Even if its not ideal. Or conventional. Or even forever....because I think they both are prepared for it to end if either one of them meets someone who can give them those kinds of nights and still be able to be there in the morning...

But none of that means that what they do have isn’t real, isn’t significant, isn’t as powerful and worthy in its own way as any more conventional relationship.

After all, neither of them are conventional people. They wouldn’t even have met if they were, making a lot of those might-have-beens a moot point. Probably wouldn’t even be as drawn to each other if they were other than what they are, because so much of their dynamic is tangled up in their respect for each other’s skills and convictions and more along those lines.

To be honest, I imagine both of them value and prize each other’s acting ability, their skills with deception and subterfuge....even as those are the very things at the root of why they’ll never be that conventional, longterm couple.

Because it keeps things even between them, and thus even when lying to each other’s faces, there was still an honesty to their dynamic, a balance. Neither is burdened by excessive guilt for deceiving the other, because they both were doing it and they understand why. Thus even when outright deceiving each other, there’s a weird kind of balance there that wouldn’t exist in relationships they had with others who couldn’t match what the other brought to the masquerade, so to speak.

Idk. I have a lot of thoughts on them obviously, lol, and totally meant that all to be another post but got carried away as usual, but I’ll leave it on that note for now, lmao.

How To Make The Spyral Storyline Work (If You Ask Me, which someone literally did so I can get away with saying this).

Ahem.

So. If DC had just combined their Spyral and amnesia stories into one, instead of like the mess we got, we could’ve actually had a good story.

Like, literally all you gotta do is back during Forever Evil, find some way to separate Bruce and Selina from Dick’s body BEFORE Luthor revives him….so Bruce too is of the belief that Dick’s dead, and Luthor being heralded as the one who saved the day from the Crime Syndicate protects him from Bruce or the Batfam’s reprisals.

Then all you gotta do is…instead of Dick getting amnesia like a year later from being shot in the head by KGBeast….Dick gets amnesia from complications in how long it took Luthor to revive him. And of course Luthor capitalizes the HELL out of this.

And then, you can pretty much do everything the same….without it being ANYONE in the Batfamily’s fault, or anyone taking anyone for granted?

You can still have Dick go undercover in Spyral, be Agent 37….only now its on Luthor’s orders, because Dick woke up with no memories and all he knows about himself or like, anything, is whatever Luthor tells him.

And he knows SOMETHING’S not right about everything, like, something’s off about the person he feels like he is and the person Luthor claims that he is, but Luthor’s savvy enough that he’s not forcing Dick to do anything that might trigger some buried memories or built in moral resistance to an order, he’s invested in keeping Dick as fully cooperative for as long as possible, because he knows Dick will be way more effective if he’s on board with stuff than actively fighting things. So Luthor has Dick sold on the idea that he’s infiltrating Spyral on behalf of the good guys, like Dick thinks he’s fine with doing morally gray stuff but isn’t full on trigger happy so Luthor doesn’t force him to kill people on his behalf and thus Dick’s time in Spyral and his character conflicts with Helena, Tiger, etc, remain largely the same.

And meanwhile, Dick’s in the dark about his real identity and past because not having any clue he’s alive, the Batfamily reluctantly has been doing their best to bury details of the late Dick Grayson, no matter how much they hate it, because they have to worry about the living members of their family and try and distance themselves from Dick post being-unmasked, so nobody connects the dots to all of them.

And then of course, eventually one of them runs into someone who reminds them suspiciously of Dick on a case, like his face is still all swirly because of the Hypnos implants but he says or does something that’s so quintessentially Dick Grayson that they can’t NOT wonder. Because here, Dick doesn’t KNOW to tamp down on his natural quips and banter or mannerisms around the Batfamily, and so they give him away even as he remains faceless, and there’s not really any way Luthor could have seen that coming or prevented it, without like….scripting everything Dick says or does in every possible encounter he has, which of course is impossible.

And so THEN ultimately, you can have one or two Batfam members pursuing possibilities that Dick’s alive on their own, and then eventually comparing notes and realizing Dick really IS alive, what Luthor must have done, and that Dick didn’t come home because Dick literally doesn’t remember where or what home is…..

And then whammo ka-blammo, its Fully United Batfamily To The Rescue as they basically just invade Spyral and blow it to Kingdom Come whilst convincing Dick that he’s their brother/son/friend and belongs with them and Lex Luthor is a lying liar who lies, SEARCH YOUR HEART, FEEL YOUR FEELINGS, YOU KNOW WE SPEAK THE TRUTH and blah blah blah et cetera et cetera et yada yada.

And nobody ever has to read Tom King and Scott Lobdell’s like…..*gestures disgustedly in the general direction of their utter tripe*….That.

[thiefking]

major ddlc spoilers ahead, also i don’t know if all of this has been said/theorized before since i’m extremely late to the party here but i have a lot of Thoughts having finally played the game

firstly: i need to explain that every theory i’m about to present relies on the hypothetical game that would have existed if monika wasn’t self-aware

basically, irl the game was always meant to be what it is, but within the canon of the story, the ORIGINAL (fictional/hypothetical) ddlc was a regular dating sim visual novel. in canon, it was monika who changed it into the game we actually end up playing. we get only a glimpse of what the game would have been without her interference after you delete her and restart the game-- the mc no longer calls sayori “annoying” and yuri no longer mentions being into “surreal horror,” etc etc. that hypothetical unaltered version as a full game (henceforth referred to as “original ddlc”) is where most of my “what if”s have been clustering around to the point where i’ve genuinely considered making a fangame or something but instead i’m just gonna chat about it here

topic 1: monika’s route

monika claims she didn’t have a route in the first place. by all means, it seems that way-- you can’t appeal to her with your poems, can’t pick her for anything, etc etc. however, as much as monika is aware that she’s in a game, that doesn’t mean she’s genre-savvy. 

i’d actually say she probably isn’t too much of a video game person in general, and i’m not referring to her 4th wall shattering, i’m saying she probably just likes to play acnl, minecraft and other casual, lighthearted games that don’t have an ending to them and can be played indefinitely, and maybe mario party if her friends come over, yknow? that’s just kinda what she seems like to me

now i ain’t dunking on anyone who only plays that kind of game, mind you, but if monika isn’t herself someone who plays a lot of video games, and you add that together with the fact that she was not immediately sentient (we don’t see her BEFORE she became aware, because the original ddlc is already gone by the time we start playing), the fact that while she’s aware what genre the game is she clearly has minimal idea of how they work or what makes them appealing, and that she has little coding experience and despite being able to alter files/lines she also couldn’t prevent basic game mechanics or predict said mechanics getting in the way, then i think it’s not only possible but very very very likely that she missed something. she missed something big.

monika was supposed to be an unlockable route.

so, y’all remember mysmes? i haven’t played it since it first came out, so mind you my memories are fuzzy here but mysmes also isn’t the focus of this post in the first place, so excuse any technical inaccuracies here but i’m certain that the IMPORTANT parts here, the italicised ones, are correct: 

there was an unlockable "deep story” which served as the true end.

you had to play every route in the game before you could read the deep story (i think you also had to play the three other character routes before you could play 707′s route, but that might be wrong). also, each of the main story routes ended after the uh... the ball thing. the big event they throw? whatever it was, that’s where the story stops for those routes, whereas the deep story continues on past that.

you had to be on 707′s route for the deep story (i’m pretty sure you had to play his entire route and have it be your most recent playthrough to get at it, even if that isn’t the case, the deep story is specifically a continuation of 707′s route)

to be honest i was never a fan of the deep story for several reasons and i never really saw what the appeal of dating 707 was but that’s not important the point is that out of your four dating options, only one of them was considered the “true end”, but you had to do every single route before you could get that ending.

i’m sure you see what i’m getting at here, yeah?

there are a couple of other things, too:

monika tells you which character your poem appeals to most, she’s the one who introduces the game on the steam page (which is also proof she was sentient, at least to a degree, before you played the game), her name means “advisor/counselor”... iunno how many people reading this are savvy to the usual conventions of “games in which dating characters is a thing” but i’ve played a LOT of harvest moon. monika is a prime example of a Special Bachelorette. in harvest moon, Special Marriage Candidates are generally one or more of the following: a character from another game (like, literally-- you have to have a gba gamepak in while playing a ds game to see them), a shopkeeper or tutorial-fairy, characters with extremely elaborate unlocking and/or courting rituals, and characters who don’t even seem to be romanceable (in harvest moon games, romance candidates tend to have hearts next to their sprites that change colour depending on how close you are. generally that’s how you know who you can marry and who you can’t, but some marriage characters actually don’t have visible heart meters!). ... once again you see what i’m getting at right? put her in harvest moon and you bet your ass she’d have an invisible heart meter and an intricate courting ritual

she’s an important character. she’s club prez, she’s your tutorial fairy, she tells you who you’re appealing to. the tropes don’t lie, man, sayori would probably be the most realistic ending but i don’t think i know of a single game where the childhood friend character is the “true end” route-- they’re so easy to romance, they tend to be the route people do their first run and then never end up coming back to. i’m not trying to say anything in particular about this setup/logic, i just know that it exists and it exists a whole lot. if there’s a true end route in the original ddlc, it’s without question monika

by the way, in the corrupted ddlc, you still have to play every character’s route for the true ending. the true end requires you to have obtained all of the character cgs, which you can only do by playing all of the other characters’ routes, or at the very least, courting sayori, resetting and courting natsuki, and then letting monika warp the game, since you’ll end up on yuri’s route during the second act of the game no matter what you do. and what happens when you’ve had a chance to date sayori, natsuki and yuri? you end up on monika’s route. even when monika corrupted the game, there was still inherent logic to it-- all the characters inevitably become interested in mc, and you still can’t reach the true end without doing everyone’s routes.

as much as it would be painful for monika to watch you romance everyone else before you finally got around to her, she could have at least taken solace knowing she was the real ending, had she just been a little better at coding, just a little more genre-savvy...

of course, there are these lines she gives us, so clearly a sentient monika is still a monika that wouldn’t just sit there and wait regardless of if she knew she was the true end:

she says it herself: she’d still force her route, because she’s terrified, and the only one who seems to be aware that she’s in a game, but the really, really sad part is that as hard as she tries to convince you and herself that she doesn’t regret any of what she did, doesn’t feel guilty, doesn’t miss her friends...

she does. she knows she did something terrible, and she didn’t even actually have to do it.

... well, maybe “she didn’t HAVE to do it” is obvious enough for everything she did, but let’s keep in mind here that monika was scared out of her fucking mind, and reasonably so. if you were in her place, if you found out nothing was real, your friends weren’t real, nothing but code... and someone real came along, but no matter what you did, you couldn’t get them to talk to you long enough for you to ask for help... wouldn’t you get desperate too? monika was scared, and panicking, and remember: she knew she was in a game.

uninstalling a game does not a murderer make, right? the npcs, and the player character, they aren’t dead. they’re just code. if you back up your save, they’ll all be there if you download it again-- if you didn’t, they’ll still exist, they’ll just be reset. it doesn’t mean you’ve actively given someone amnesia.

but you still feel guilty over it, huh? even if you need disk space, even if you make a backup, it still kinda feels bad to delete the fictional friends you made.

you feel bad for doing that, and they were fake to you in the first place. monika was part of the game.

this is why it’s so sad to me. she was scared, and she thought she’d never even have a chance to ask for help, because she thought she didn’t have a route. her situation was, from her perspective, utterly hopeless. she felt terrible doing what she did, she misses her friends, but it was the only way to save herself, and being that she knew she was in a game, of course she’d try to rationalize her actions by telling herself her friends weren’t real and it was no different than overriding a save file. if she didn’t tell that to both you and herself, she’d be a murderer. she isn’t a murderer, either-- it really is just code, the problem is the overwhelming guilt that she has to suppress for the sake of her own sanity that she wouldn’t have had to bear in the first place had she been a normal route, or known that she had a route somewhere in the game.

the other characters do seem to have more sentience/free will than monika thought/noticed, but none of them are as Aware as monika-- natsuki shows the most amount of awareness (without being the club prez), having not only noticed that yuri and monika were acting strangely but even writing a note, one that clearly wouldn’t exist in the original ddlc, asking the mc for help. yuri also has several moments of lucidity, both with her own actions/behaviour and that of her clubmates (and by clubmates i mean pretty much just natsuki). like i said before, though, they aren’t as aware as monika, and while sayori (in the first run), yuri and natsuki all seem to realize something is wrong, they also don’t know that they’re in a game. 

monika was very, very alone, even when she was surrounded by her friends. friends that she legitimately cared about and enjoyed spending time with. i wonder whether it would have been better that she were more self-aware, or never was in the first place

topic 2: the true end

so i already talked a lot about how i think monika woulda been the true route, but not about what i think would happen in the true end. i have less to say on this topic both just in general and because i already spent so much fucking time on the first topic, but of course i have Thoughts, i wouldn’t be claiming monika would be the true route if i didn’t have an idea of how said route would work

i’ll take this character-by-character for the sake of clarity and organization

sayori:

so here’s the thing:

monika exaggerated sayori’s depression, yes.

sayori is, understandably, probably the character most people would rather the mc end up with, sure.

... but sayori never told mc she was suffering, not until he happened to catch her in a moment of weakness

not in the original ddlc either-- the mc has a very lukewarm response when she tells him she’s woken up on time for a few days in a row, which he wouldn’t/shouldn’t have had if he had known. it was always part of the game plot for mc to learn about sayori’s depression onscreen

it makes sense sayori would have feelings for him, but it also seems like she doesn’t trust him very much-- in her “bottles of happiness” poem, towards the end she seems to talk about her friends being concerned for her, but she’s shutting it all out because she doesn’t want them to worry. the mc at this point doesn’t know she’s suffering. it seems like she’s had other friends who have actually noticed she was hurting-- whether those friends are the club members or not, iunno-- and that even though she does try to conceal it, she’s aware that they’re aware, y’know? mc had no idea, and seemed incredibly unequipped and unqualified to help sayori

while that sort of thing would be remedied in sayori’s route, he wouldn’t be spending as much time with her on the other girls’ routes... not to mention that dating someone can’t cure your mental illness, but mc seems exactly like the kind of person to think that it can. that’s just my Own Ape Canyon though

what i’m thinking is true end sayori doesn’t end up with anyone, and she’s okay with that. true end sayori is prioritizing herself and learning to deal with things healthily. she’s letting her friends help her, and she’s holding off on romance, because she acknowledges that if she isn’t careful, she might sacrifice her own well-being for her partner’s happiness. 

natsuki:

fun fact: i didn’t know if the buffsuki edit was actually in the game or not for... up until a few days ago. i had no idea if it was from some kind of joke ending, or if it was fanmade. i was pretty disappointed to learn it was the latter i wanted to watch her physically break out of the game with her giant rippling muscles

now while the main topic is the true end, i’d actually first like to discuss what a full natsuki route would be like

i think that natsuki’s route would be furthest from a good end without being a bad end, tbh

i don’t think her route would be a total disaster, mind you, but i don’t think it’d be a happy end. i think you’d end up dating her, which would make it an unhappy end

see the thing about natsuki is: she’s only got a small handful of friends, she’s used to being made fun of, she immediately gets prickly when sayori brings mc in, specifically saying that the mc being male is killing the vibe-- meaning, she probably doesn’t have any male friends... leaving her dad as probably the only man she interacts with

in other words, she avoids men because of her dad

so when mc shows up, is friendly, doesn’t make fun of her, and he’s the only male figure in her life that she feels remotely safe around, it’s no question she’d probably... maybe... develop feelings for him...?

of course! yes, of course, because natsuki is VERY HETEROSEXUAL, and she likes BOYS! this is proof! most boys, she can’t stand em, but this one was nice to her, so of course she’s got a crush on him right?

in case you’re missing my heavy sarcasm, i’m saying natsuki is a lesbian with compulsory heterosexuality issues and due to said issues convinces herself that she’s romantically interested in mc, because he’s the first boy she’s met who hasn’t treated her like shit

hence making the natsuki route a pretty unfortunate one, since like i said i think you really would end up dating her, at least for most of it. maybe the end would be something like her moving away or something leaving the relationship sort of Over without actually having a breakup, i dunno

oh by the way: do you want some evidence for natsuki lesbian? oh there’s plenty but i’m gonna wait a moment for that one. i’m also not gonna go into natsuki’s true route for now, you’ll see why soon

yuri

and by soon

i mean now

i don’t have any thoughts on what yuri’s route would be so we’re gonna go right into discussing the true end

so, here’s a little something:

monika also exaggerated the turbulence in natsuki and yuri’s relationship

once again, in the original ddlc-- the part you can actually see, after you delete monika, the two are actually pretty close! they do butt heads occasionally but in the one instance you get to see in the original ddlc, they made up very quickly

monika also modified a lot of their lines in the Big Argument they have in act 2, which has both of them saying a lot of shit they wouldn’t have even thought, much less say aloud

the reality is, though, that natsuki is actually very fond of yuri

the amy in this poem is two people, depending on how it’s read: natsuki or yuri

when amy is natsuki, it’s a poem about how her own harmless interest in manga causes her to be made fun of or insulted

when amy is yuri, it’s a poem about... well, her self-harm, but a lot of yuri’s traits/interests could apply as well

and when amy is yuri, you can see a lot of information about natsuki and yuri’s relationship in this poem. natsuki doesn’t hate yuri, of course-- remember that this poem is meant to point out how dumb it is to hate someone for one tiny trait when all of their other traits are that of an all-around nice person

first 3 lines of the second verse. just take a real long look at those

here’s another poem!

this is the poem natsuki writes if 2 or less of the poems mc writes in act 1 don’t appeal to her. this makes it fairly clear the “you” in the poem isn’t mc

the “you” is someone, though

yuri.

it’s yuri. the poem is about yuri.

by the way, if all 3 of your poems did appeal to natsuki, the poem she writes is nowhere near as BLATANTLY ROMANTIC as this one is. it most certainly doesn’t say anything about kissing

btw hey did you know that “yuri” also refers to lesbians

once again i think it’s probably obvious what i’m getting at here: the true end for natsuki and yuri is the two of them dating. hell, i’m pretty sure part of the route would involve mc and monika trying to play cupid-- monika is the one who tells you who your poem appeals to, after all, so why wouldn’t she try some matchmaking for her pals?

i imagine they do still have little spats every now and then, sure, but they’d learn to respect each other’s opinions long before they’d start dating, and the fact that they’re both passionate is what makes them work. while their writing styles are almost polar opposites, that just means they have a lot to learn from each other and could balance the other out when they take their style to an extreme that makes it hard to understand what they’re trying to get across, and i’m certain they could make a kickass story together

anyways, that’s all i’ve got to say for now, partly because i spent four fucking hours writing this post and partly because i gotta get back to staring into monika’s eyes. i added the monika after story mod because i cycled through all of her available dialogue in the vanilla game. i just want to be friends with her so bad

#doki doki literature club #ddlc #ddlc monika #monika ddlc #ddlc spoilers #i'm just tagging monika because most of this post is about her specifically #i do talk about the other girls too though #long post. like super fucking long. i went apeshit

[hzlmrgoalsk]

My thoughts on Well Intended Love...

Jesus. I am actually typing this on a computer because I have so many issues with this fucking show. PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THIS. I took the hit for you, I suffered for you. This is the most abusive relationship that I have ever seen. Like... the first 7 episodes are cute as fuck because you don’t know that he is actually insane. 

One of my biggest problems with this show is that they let you like him and they let you fall for his actions before they tell you that he is crazy. The viewer realizes the issues as Mumu does. so as she falls in love with him, so do you. I loved the show until this part. I loved how in love with her he was. I love the jealousy and possessiveness. Like. Its my thing. If a show has those two things I’m almost guaranteed to love it. However I know the line between healthy and unhealthy relationships. And this is the most unhealthy relationship I have ever seen. Ever. The issues that this show brings to light are far deeper and truer to peoples lives than this show would like to let on. The promo is what drew me in. It had everything that I loved. Jealousy, possessiveness, a fake marriage, the guy falling first and chasing the girl. All the tropes I love. And then episode 7 happened. Which brought in my least favorite trope. Amnesia. 

Yizhou. This asshole. Jesus. I hate this man with a burning passion. One of the biggest issues with the main male lead is that he literally does not know that what he is doing is wrong. He literally committed several criminal offenses during the course of their relationship. And she forgives him every single time. He cons her into thinking that she has cancer. And that he is the only donor that matches her. So she has to be around him. And in order to get the donation, she has to marry him. Which she does. It is later revealed that he planned the whole thing. She leaves and he stops her by hiring bodyguards to keep her in the house. She starts to realize this is a horrible relationship, but before she makes any decisions their friend is killed in a fire. but not really. But they use the death to get Mumu and Yizhou back together. WHICH PISSED ME OFF SO MUCH. After they get back together she gets kidnapped. And then he gets drunk. And he cheats. Several times. WHILE SHE IS KIDNAPPED. Like. He knows that she is missing. but that’s how he chooses to respect their relationship. She finds out and makes the poor choice to trust him and not believe what others are telling her. WHICH SHE SHOULD. But she doesn’t. Oh, and this entire time that shes kidnapped, SHES FUCKING PREGNANT. Like. That was too fucking much for me. He is such an abusive piece of shit that has no clue that hes even wrong. 

Mumu. She’s too young to know better. She has never been in a relationship before and this is the only thing that she knows. None of this is her fault, but she could have been a hell of a lot smarter about how this had played out. There was a point that she wanted to leave, she just didn’t. Because he trapped her with a baby. She does kinda realize that their relationship is all kinds of fucked up, but then she still chooses to stay because she loves him. If this was a real relationship... she would end up dead. I’m not kidding. Mumu has sense before she meets Yizhou. And she loses it because of him. Ughh. She could have been a great character. But she went back to him. 

Chu Yan. THE ONLY ONE WITH SENSE IN THE ENTIRE SHOW. This was the only character that I could even try to tolerate. He was the only one that had sense. He knew what Yizhou was doing was completely fucked up. And he called him on it. Several times. Punched him for it too, which was super satisfying. Ughh. 

An Ran. She is just a female version of Yizhou. AND THE WORST PART? Yizhou had her imprisoned because she used hypnosis to take his memory of Mumu. MANIPULATION. He knew that was wrong. BUT NOT HIS OWN FUCKING ACTIONS. I cant. This shit got me all the way fucked up. 

I wish this show could have been a wake up call. Like, I wish most of it had happened the same way. But instead of when she finds out about his manipulation and abuse she leaves. And the audience can see what happens after that. I would have LOVED to see Yizhou go insane because she wouldn’t take him back. That would have been completely different. But no. They normalize the abuse and that relationship. I sincerely hope that younger girls who watch this realize how fucked up this is and not to fall for guys like that. But I guess not because for some god forsaken reason, they are making a season 2. WHICH I WILL NOT BE WATCHING. I can’t handle anymore. I really can’t. Please do not watch this awful show. Like. Please. I cannot stress enough how awful it is. Save your sanity because I spent mine. 

#hannah watches well intended love #well intended love