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#especially after such a long hiatus where we got to thrive in the idea of them.basking in the glow of what we imagined them to be
martianbugsbunny · 7 months
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Idk if I'm strong enough for either canon Kalluzeb or Kalluzeb getting destroyed
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haifengg · 3 years
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Pairing: NanamixGN!Reader
Note: I think I got this ask quite a while ago but due to my hiatus it got postponed a million times. Now that I am slowly coming back and am publishing the bits and pieces I wrote during being away this A-Z is finally leaving my drafts as well.
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A = Affection (How affectionate are they? How do they show affection?) Given his S/O is a sorcerer as well I think he would limit PDA at work to a minimum. Even if they are officially together or even married. He just likes to separate work and home. Tho it doesn’t mean that he is not making small intimate gestures at work like randomly dropping in with coffee or - when they are on a mission - sending a text asking how they are doing.
At home he is pretty affectionate. Randomly pulling them in for a hug, giving small back rubs when they are doing the dishes after he cooked. This kind of thing.
B = Before (What were they like when they had a crush?) Distant. Nanami would probably be a person who maybe actually mistakes the feeling for some other emotion at first. Leaving him confused about why he thinks about them so much. The poor man would likely be irritated every time they are nice to him. Why the heck doesn’t his heart stop pounding? And why is he suddenly excited to go to work? Disappointed when he is not assigned the same mission as them? Or - if they aren’t a sorcerer - sad when a mission takes him away from wherever he met them for too long?
C = Confession (What was their confession like?) Well-planned and straight forward. Nanami was already observing them for a while before making a move. Although he doesn’t actually confess it is pretty obvious when he likes someone because it happens so rarely. Just imagine him asking someone out for dinner. That gives away so much - don’t you agree?
D = Date (What was the first official date they went on?) If we don’t count the dinner mentioned above … I guess it would be something like a gallery. Nanami would definitely want to test his s/o’s taste in art because it tells a lot about a person’s character. What kind of art they prefer (paintings, photography, sculptures, … ) and how they look at it as well.
E = Ending (If they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?) Professionally. He would state the fact on why they aren’t compatible anymore and what made him draw this conclusion. I don’t think either one of them would cheat on the other mainly because Nanami wouldn’t get into a relationship with someone capable of doing that in the first place (I hope). He would sit down with his (not) s/o and talk it through. There might be tears on the other side but not on his. He thought about it a lot and made peace with his feelings before starting this conversation.
F = Fights (What would fights look like? What are things that upset them?) Kento barely looses his temper. And if he does I wouldn’t say that it is necessarily a bad thing. Getting him so worked up about something does only mean he cares. Fights would mostly be on the calmer/diplomatic side. He might be upset about something but there is no need for him to yell or anything. If the problem can be resolved just by talking about it - great! Why waste his precious energy on negative things, when he can use them elsewhere?
G = Gentle (How gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?) We all know - and all those rough sm*t fan fictions can’t proof me wrong - that he probably is the most gentle character in entire JJK. He despises the violence of his job therefore he doesn’t want to inflict pain or anything on anyone on his good side. Especially his S/O. Nanami has the most gentle touch, fleeing kisses, he will hold them tight but never smother them.
H = Hugs (Do they like hugs? How often do they do it? What are their hugs like?) As mentioned above: Tight and secure. Or soft. His S/O almost automatically buries their face in the crook of his neck because - who wouldn’t. Is there anything else I have to say about hugs by Nanami Kento? Yes. Am I able to put it into words? No. It’s just a very overwhelming feeling - that’s all.
I = Intimacy (What is their favorite form of intimacy? Do they have problems with it?) For him I think it would be things where they take care of him. While he shows his love through cooking and providing (which he takes a lot of pride from), he loves being taken care of as well. Maybe in departments he doesn’t know so much about. Like skincare. If his S/O teases him about his wrinkles and stern look he would gladly accept any advice in skincare from them, let them do their magic with face massages and serums. He doesn’t even care if it has any effect on his skin - he just loves the attention he gets and thrives on the feeling how much his S/O cares about him (and his skin apparently).
J = Jealousy (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they’re jealous?) This one I am really indecisive about. I can see him get more jealous that we would expect him too - which would be a nice surprise tbh. But also not jealous at all because he is confident. Kento knows what his S/O likes about him and he also knows what separates him from other men. What makes him special. I think the times he gets jealous are the days he doesn’t get to spent with his S/O because of work or a mission. Which rather results in being mad at Jujutsu Tech than jealous of someone else.
K = Kisses (Are they a good kisser? Where do they like to kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?) Forehead. Kisses. It doesn’t matter what height there S/O is. It is one of the most protective gestures and he enjoys giving those as much as his S/O enjoys receiving them.
The back of the hand cheesy kisses. Because they are his everything, he wants to treat them like it. Nanami knows it’s cheesy but neither one of them thinks too much about it. When they sit across the table, fingers sloppily interlocked on the table top, he occasionally picks up their hand and places a soft kiss on the back of it. Almost absent-minded.
L = Little ones (How are they around children?) He is not very fond of them. Not saying that he won’t love and do everything for his own kids but other people’s kids are usually a nuisance for him. If they are loud or misbehaving he is really not having it. Though he would never lash out or raise his voice against them/their parents. ‘Children’ as in ‘his students’ … he always makes sure to treat them as children in a way he wants them safe/won’t put them in unnecessary danger.
M = Messages (How often do they text his S/O?) Kento strikes me as a kind of guy who doesn’t text often. Mostly because in his line of work sharing attention could easily be his downfall or worse. He will let his s/o know if he’s running late or occasionally ask if there is anything they need from the store or things like that but aside from practical messages he doesn’t text much.
Though if he is on a long mission and away from his s/o for quite a time span he usually rather calls them than text.
N = Night (How are nights spent with them?) Nights as in ‘Nights Out’? Date nights? Well, he is a foodie so dinner is always a popular option. He takes the time to carefully research about the restaurant and the menu. If the rotate dishes, he will make sure they’re going at the exactly right season to get the best culinary experience possible.
Nanami is old fashioned. So he will hold the door for them, pull back the chair … helps them into their coat.
He also likes going to the movies. The intimacy of the dark theatre gives him the confidence to reach out for their hand or have his arm around their shoulder. Since he usually limits PDA in public this is exciting for him.
O = Opinion (Would they ask for their S/O’s opinion a lot? How important is it in terms of decisions?) Probably more than I would expect him too. Maybe not about the smaller things but decisions that involve the both of them he would definitely ask.
P = Patience (How easily angered are they?) Due to the time he spends exposed to Gojo this man has the patience of a saint. Literally. He rarely snaps at his S/O.
Q = Quizzes (How does a bar trivia night teamed up with them look like?) Stressed. Yes, this man in very educated and cultured but imagine him sitting in a loud-ass bar, having to answer questions about the transformers or Megan Thee Stallion. Absolutely absurd. How old he must feel …
R = Remember (How much do they remember about their S/O or their relationship in general?) Not everything but a lot. He will remember little things they mentioned early on in the relationship and bring it up again later. He also uses this ability for presents and such. As well as in fights. If they think they can outtalk him with something you accusedly said or didn’t say some time ago - I suggest they surrender, because he will remember much better.
S = Security (How protective are they? How would they protect you? How would they like to be protected?) Very Protective. I mean yes, he knows that they can stand up for themselves but why should they have to do that if he is around? One of the big perks dating him is that he is who he is and that his presence confuses most people. So he might as well use it. Not so much in a physical way but rather in addressing the people bothering his S/O directly in the typical manner of his.
I think his understanding of being protected equals being taken care of which plays into the skincare thing I mentioned earlier. It is not so much physical procreation from danger but preserving a future together where one cares about the other deeply and only wants their best.
T = Try (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?) Medium effort. He prepares and researches but he rarely comes up with a new idea. He knows what he likes and his S/O probably does too. His work is so stressful and has close to no repetition so that he enjoys doing the same things on dates over and over. That does not mean it will get boring. Because Nanami sometimes thrives on going the extra mile. There is a restaurant across the country that he really wants to dine at? Buckle up - he is going on a vacation. Short trips or spa weekends are also things he appreciates.
Since he remembers dates and anniversaries well he is usually well prepared for those occasions. He puts a lot of thought into presents and barely ever gifts useless things. He does not like to have a lot of stuff laying around so what he gives to people usually serves a purpose.
U = Unique (What makes them unique as a S/O?) Literally everything I mentioned above. Namai Kento is a unique mix of all his traits. A very balanced person.
V = Vanity (How concerned are they with their looks?) Well … he wears the same freaking suit everyday so … but yes I think cares about his looks and hygiene in general. As far as clothing goes he probably has one brand he is loyal too, which automatically sets his fashion style in stone as well. He has the same haircut for quite a while and sees no point in changing it.
Overall just the classic hetero dude who ones figured out what works for him and stuck with it. lol.
W = Whole (Would they feel incomplete without their S/O? Yes. His S/O is the other side of him. Is what balances his inner peace. Without them he worries too much, stresses too much. He needs them to tell him it’s going to be okay.
X = X-Ray (How transparent are they?) Nanami doesn’t actually tells them everything but will disclose if they ask. He just doesn’t think they are interested in small details about him.
Y = Yuck (Everyone has flaws. What is theirs?) He. Doesn’t. Do. The. Dishes.
Z = Zzz (What is a sleep habits of theirs?) Kento never lets go of his S/O. Which can be annoying. And suffocating. Especially in summer. He is not clingy and they don’t fall asleep like this but in the morning he always spoons them or weirdly holds their hand. Sometimes toes interlocked lmao. Which makes them even more lonely when they are apart, because they got used to it way too quickly.
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@kpopsnowball @soleilsuhh @jeonghanmoon @himitsu-luna
@sagedevans @shampoocifer @your-consulting-fangirl @gwynsapphire​
MASTERLIST
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dystopiandilfs · 3 years
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(cw cc!Karl negative/critical)
I don't know if this has been touched on in your previous posts but I wanted to talk on how Karls constant forced integration into groups or need for larger creators around is quite frustrating to watch.
What all began as a silly bit in his early days with him being a part of L'manburg from the beginning or the dream team, has developed into a cry for constant involvement within his friend groups. Be it from Tina and Georges "sunshine duo" nickname they created from an inside joke in uno which Karl immediately claimed himself a part of. Or, in the among us with corpse and friends, although not involved in the bit he would try and get the last word in. It's ok to not be a part of every conversation yet he doesn't seem to realize this.
Obviously, his friends aren't bothered by his actions and I have no intention on claiming they do. However, as a viewer I've recently started perceiving it as his fear that something new could begin without him being a part of it. So what if it did? I feel like Karl is on a constant attempt at staying relevant and dreads the thought of someone forgetting him. Tales seems to be a prime example of such, consisting of 4 well known CCs (techno, dream, corpse, etc.) and potentially one who averages less than 50k.
Although I understand the need for viewer retention, the Dream SMP itself incorporates a wide variety of streamers of varying sizes, surely they all deserve a spot. Yet tales has had a castlist barely breaching half of such over the course of 8 episodes. Although he may not have established connections with such streamers I'm sure many would be thrilled to recieve a request at something bigger than the average stream. He seems to care little for the story's and more for the cast he pulls together and the build they reside on. Due to such, there is no hype for tales, there is just hype for the creators taking part. The project isn't passion filled, it's a reminder on why we should all look at Karls streams and remember Karl, he brings creators together don't forget! He's relevant.
Karl has become too lenient on his friends for content, I can't recall the last time we had a solo stream (minus his apology). His fatal flaw seems to be disregarding a viewer base centered around him and more so turning the attention to his friends. Thus, solo content would be left lacking. His ability to entertain an audience requires others to bounce off of or divert the attention to. I think he realizes such judging by this behavior. However, for the long term survival of a streamer this is far from ideal.
(Don't feel any need to respond, this was a mess of a rant that took twelve turns midway)
Yeah that has been bought up a lot recently. Especially since Sykkuno apparently sounded genuinely annoyed during an among us stream after Karl kept of claiming he was always part of the amigops. As well as him going on about how he built Kinoko Kingdom, people saying at least credit Foolish instead of dismissing his hard work that you're not been going to use. I said before that Karl's stream are never solo minus like 2 but even then it's him watching someone else do something. Karl physically seems unable to do anything that is just him and his own content.
The nickname for him is Klout Khaser Karl for a reason. I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if he dropped his own family for a bit of clout. Like I have no issue with people making friends and benefitting for clout but when you have to rely on clout and popular streamers to keep your career going it's not a good thing.
Not to mention that when he tried to claim that he was part of the original group on the DreamSMP a lot of newer viewers got genuinely confused thinking that he was their from the start. Like if you're going to have a bit you need to clarify afterwards otherwise it's just going to cause chaos and confusion. Also it's not just clout he has this thing where if he's not got the attention on him he starts doing things to be noticed like moaning loud, screeching and just generally being obnoxiously loud.
I see a lot of people saying that Karl isn't using his friends for clout because he doesn't care which literally isn't true. One big example being one of his streams with Sapnap where he refused to start until he got more viewers and was telling people to tweet out a stream link. Someone else also recently mentioned that during the egg painting stream he constantly mentioned about how far away he was from his subgoal to which others mentioned how he mentions his subgoal a ridiculous amount of times. I was also sent a link on twitter to a thread (now unfortunately deleted) that was Someone comparing the difference between Karl, Technoblade and Ranboo about how much they go on about followers, subgoals, giving money, gifting bits and subs. Like how did Karl spend 30 more minutes asking people to sub than Ranboo when Ranboo streams 3 times as often and twice as long. (Including his subathons)
I genuinely think that Karl has a stable enough fanbase and he doesn't need to rely on bigger names like Dream and Corpse to get views so I don't know why he does it if it's not for clout.
In my opinion Karl started this persona of being an uwu soft boy and now he's got this mentality of doing what's popular and trendy at the time to the point of him no longer having an individual personality. I do think it's a bit of narcissism but I do think it's also got a lot to do with the fact that he's surrounded by Mr Beast and his "Bigger and Better or scrap it" mentality as well as Dream's growth mentality. I think he's adopted Dream's ideas about growth but put if towards himself compared to Dream who thrives off of growing others.
Honestly I think he needs to take time off to re-evaluate everything and start fresh. Not relying on names and not being obsessed with views. I think he needs to take a short hiatus and when he comes back to only do a few solo streams to show his individual personality. (but also to appear in others streams as support) Similar to people staying off the internet for a bit to improve mental health I think he needs to leave to find a personality that's not ridiculously fabricated.
(Can't wait for the anonymous hate comments for this one)
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junhaoshua · 3 years
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my ode to fandom
2020, the start of a new decade, is ending. 2021, the start of my adulthood, is beginning. I’ve always wanted to do a post about my fandom journey, and I’ve also decided to change my url starting next year: from the old faithful @moonlightmasquerade to a url for my new fandom, @junhaoshua. So before taking such a huge step, this felt like a perfect time to thank all the media that has shaped me as a person throughout my journey of youth.
This is half-chronological, half-remembered. This isn't comprehensive, because it doesn't have to be to be meaningful. It can't list every single fandom that has made its mark on me, because there are too many to count. 
This is about many people’s stories, including my own. This is about love and power and growing up and changing. This is about how transformative work can transform lives. 
To fandom: this is my ode to you.
To Frozen, the fandom that was my first love: thank you for being the place I discovered fanfic. Thank you for teaching me that it was okay to be myself. For teaching me that my parents could make mistakes when raising me even though they love me. For showing me that villains can be redeemed. 
To MLP, the fandom of my early teens and beyond: thank you for being such a big part of my life. Fallout Equestria, making me realise the impact of war and giving me hope that people can heal from the worst, that we can make a difference in the darkness. The Immortal Game, telling me that trauma can be overcome and my fate is in my hands. Hard Reset, teaching me to persevere despite the odds. Turnabout Storm, introducing me to the franchise that would inspire my future career. Freeport Venture, guiding me as I grew into my own person. These are lessons that kept me going throughout the rough years. Thank you for teaching me to write magic systems and epic fight scenes. Thank you for giving me hope that one day, even a shy bookworm like me would find my friends. 
To Wicked, the fandom of my tumultuous years: thank you for teaching me that I could be beautiful and loved no matter how I look. For opening my eyes to the cowardice of people. For helping me to understand why injustice can thrive. For telling me that sometimes you lose your best friend but you don't stop loving them. Thank you for preparing me to face all this in real life. 
To Star Wars, the fandom I was “born” into: thank you for creating a world that inspires writers. For the trilogies and the beautiful fics that were born from them. For the flaws in canon that made fans want to fix them, and write wonderful stories. Double Agent Vader and the questions of agency and power and justice and the need for righteous indignation. Reylo fics and redemption and atonement and forgiveness. The sequel trilogy stories, too many to count, about finding your family and being your own person and healing from trauma.
To Marvel, the fandom that has brought me comfort for years: thank you for starting a franchise that lasted me throughout my childhood. For the stories of X-Men and being ostracised for being born different. For the ideas of Avengers Tower and the Defenders and Spider-verses and other teams, which may not have been well handled in canon, but which inspired so many stories about dangerous people coming together and being accepted for who they are. For Daredevil and making me decide that yes I’m going to be a lawyer and no my disability will not stop me. 
To DC, the fandom I grew up in: thank you for the DCAU that I spent hours watching as a child. Thank you for inspiring so many amazing, creative people to write. Batfamily fics and the stories of well-meaning Dad Bruce who screws up despite his best efforts. Babs Gordon and being a total badass from her wheelchair. bricklaying and its discussion of power and class issues and trauma and identity, a story that I go back to time and time again. 
To Hamilton, the fandom that inspired me: thank you for introducing me to the wonderful genre of rap and hip-hop. For helping me to realise that there are villains, there are people who make mistakes, and there are people who exploit others’ mistakes. For awakening a fire and ambition in me that I had long tried to douse to try to fit in and be more likable, and telling me it was okay to be young scrappy and hungry. And for reminding me that the people I love are important, too.
And now, to the grand prizes, to the fandoms that have been the biggest part of my life.
To Harry Potter, the fandom I first participated in: thank you for opening my mind and broadening my horizons. For helping me to move past my conservative upbringing and my prejudices (the thanks is all to the fandom, not to canon). For helping me to find my first fandom family, my best friends @reapersbarge and @a-symphony-in-vellichor. For being full of stories about healing just when I needed it. For Dramione, a ship that would lead to me publishing my very first fanfiction, inspired by the wonderful @colubrina. For Drarry and my second fic that gave me the chance to tell a story with my best friend and the other half of my brain. Without HP, without these friends, I would never have found the courage or inspiration to finally finish and publish my stories.
To Six of Crows, the fandom I grew in: thank you for being my first experience with representation in stories. For opening my eyes to the world of YA novels and so many wonderful, amazing stories. (SoC was literally one of the first YA novels I ever read and I wouldn’t have gotten into bookblr without it). For helping me learn how to work with an ensemble cast of characters that all got a chance to shine. For inspiring me to come back from my long writing hiatus and rediscover the joy of being an author. 
To Taylor Swift and Marina, my two favourite solo artists: thank you for music that perfectly fits whatever I’m going through. Thank you for reputation and Electra Heart when I was hurt and angry and trying to build a shield to hide my scars. Thank you for Lover and Froot when I was trying to learn to be happy again, to conceal my hurt with a smile. Thank you for folklore and evermore and Love + Fear when I was finally ready to unbandage my scars and confront everything that I had faced and declare that it did not break me.
To Seventeen, my biggest current fandom: thank you for bringing me joy during this tough year. For always giving me something to look forward to every Monday when the days passed in a blur. For the new friends I’ve met here who welcomed me to caratblr, especially @soonhoonsol, @thekidultlife, @haosvteen, @myunqho, @xuseokgyu and @haoranghae. For reminding me what it feels like to fall deeply into a new fandom for the first time. For the amazing fics and gifs that always bless my dash (there may be another, separate post on that). For awakening my desire to write fic again after a long drought where I couldn’t think of a single thing, and giving me more plot bunnies than I know what to do with. Thank you for being a safe space that helped me to grow and heal and smile again.
To conclude this story:
Throughout my journey, I’ve seen the same threads and themes over and over again. To be my own person and not the person that others moulded me into. To be ambitious and hungry and the hero of my own story. To find my own family, to choose the people I claim as my own. To see injustice and apathy and evil and hopelessness, and to be angry and stand up against it. To believe that people can change, can atone for what they’ve done, can be redeemed. To believe in the power of hope and light against the darkness. 
Fandom is a part of my life that I truly can’t imagine being without. It has been the lifebuoy when I was stuck in trauma and unable to escape. The bandage when I was broken and bleeding and despondent. The glue to put me back together when I shattered into a million sharp-edged pieces. The armor when all I wanted to do was rip out my feelings and put up stone walls around myself. The candle that guided me through the night until I was ready to step into the daylight. 
For the fandoms of my past: I may have become less active, less involved, but I still return to the songs and stories that have been an integral part of my youth. I see them now with older, wiser eyes, and recognise bits and pieces of my personality that I absorbed from them. I’ve never truly left a fandom; how can you leave something when it’s part of you?
For the fandoms of my present: I want to live in the moment and enjoy my experiences for as long as I can, even if I’ll outgrow them one day. I know that even if I move on from them one day, I’ll always treasure the lessons learnt and the memories made, and they’ll have a special place in my heart no matter what.
I believe in the power of stories, of movies, of music, of fandom. I would not be who I am today without it. Every fandom I’ve been in has left an impression on who I am, made its mark on me, a golden tattoo. I can look at them and trace the way each and every one has shaped me into the person I am today. 
And as I hover in the in-between of childhood and adulthood, as I stand now a kidult, I’ll embark on this new phase of life with all the lessons that fandom has taught me, and will continue to teach me for many years to come.
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louistomlinsoncouk · 4 years
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He became a bona-fide teen pop superstar as part of One Direction, then suffered unthinkable personal loss. Louis Tomlinson talks to Guy Kelly about fame, family and what comes next.
Louis Tomlinson took part in an online video recently, in which he was tasked with answering the internet’s most-searched questions about him. It was fairly tame, as you might expect of a pop quiz thrown at a pop star. ‘How do you pronounce Louis Tomlinson?’ the first read. There’s an interesting answer to that, actually, but we’ll come to it. ‘How old is Louis Tomlinson?’ was the second. He’s 28. And then came the third. ‘How is Louis Tomlinson?’
In the video, the man himself looks a little bewildered, dismissing the query as ‘random’ before moving on. But underneath, in the YouTube comments – one of the few nooks of the internet where love and goodwill still thrives – a fan repeated it. ‘“How is Louis Tomlinson,”’ they wrote, ‘the only question that matters.’ More than 7,000 people ‘liked’ it.
Given all Tomlinson’s been through in the past four years, it seems reasonable to ask. In 2016, the band he’d been in man and boy, One Direction, went on an indefinite hiatus after six years. Since being welded together by Simon Cowell on The X Factor in 2010, ‘1D’ had enjoyed perhaps the most stratospheric rise in music (five platinum albums, four world tours) since The Beatles. It hadn’t been Tomlinson’s decision to break up the band, and he wasn’t – still isn’t – particularly happy about it.
In December of that year, his beloved mother, Johannah Deakin, died a few months after being diagnosed with leukaemia. She was 43. Tomlinson pressed on with his nascent solo career, but unimaginable tragedy struck again. In March 2019, his 18-year-old half-sister, Félicité, was found unconscious at her flat in London and couldn’t be revived. An inquest later found she had died of an accidental drug overdose. Again, he buckled down, looked after his remaining siblings, and committed himself to finishing his debut album.
Settling down with Tomlinson in the corner of a west London photo studio, then, it seems as good a place as any to start: how is he?
‘I’m good, mate, I’m feeling good,’ he says, spreading his arms across a sofa. After wearing a series of high-end outfits for our photo shoot (‘I never feel super-comfortable on shoots; I’ve got one f—king pose – moody’), he’s in a black ’90s-inspired collared jumper, black trousers and black trainers.
He pushes his fringe to one side. The Doncaster accent, which softened in his 1D days, is back to pure, unfettered South Yorks. It’s all ‘in t’band’, ‘I didn’t know owt’, and swearing like a navvy. He’s honest, funny, and if his feet were planted any more firmly on the ground he’d be unable to walk.
I tell him about the YouTube comment, which seems to reflect the genuine care his fans have for him.
‘Ah, yeah I know, they’re considerate, they are. We’ve got a special, interesting bond. They’ve grown up with me – and I’ve been through some personal stuff and they’ve always been there for me.’
Tomlinson’s album, Walls, has been a long time coming. Immediately after One Direction split, he released a couple of singles – dance-y pop collaborations – which were fine, but not what he wanted to make. Halfway through writing Walls he realised, ‘If I’m chasing radio with every song I write, I’m not going to be doing this job for very long.’
So he relaxed, and the result is a mix of strong, melody-driven pop of the kind One Direction mastered, and what Tomlinson is really into, namely guitar-driven indie and Britpop. Some songs for the fans; some nodding to the future.
‘It’s a five-album plan. There’s bits where I’ve been almost selfish, and bits where I’ve been respectful to the fan base and what they love listening to,’ he says. ‘Then the next will be a step closer to the stuff I want to make. But I’ve got to earn my stripes.’
The dominant theme, I say, appears to be resilience. On the single Don’t Let It Break Your Heart, he advises, ‘Even when it hurts like hell / Oh, whatever tears you apart / Don’t let it break your heart.’ On the rousing title track (which features a writing credit for Noel Gallagher, who gave his blessing for a chorus strikingly similar to an Oasis tune), he sings, ‘These high walls that broke my soul / I watched all come falling down.’
It could be to do with grief, professional struggles, or his relationship. He nods.
‘Yeah, I write very autobiographically and had so much going on in my head, but in the struggle I’m trying to paint the message that you’re always left with a choice: to see the glass half-full or half-empty. It’s showing there’s hope.’
Some songwriters have found grief productive, others paralysing. Tomlinson was the former. One track on Walls is the previously released Two of Us, a beautiful, simple song written about his mum (‘You’ll never know how much I miss you / The day that they took you, I wish it was me instead’).
‘What’s amazing about this job is that regardless of the situation, you get something positive at the end of it. That’s obviously an emotionally heavy song for me, but fans have come up to me in floods of tears and talked about how it’s helped in their own tragedy. It’s incredible. From the dark, you can give hope.’
For the first three years of his life, Tomlinson was raised alone by Johannah, who split from his father, Troy Austin, when he was a baby. They lived above a launderette in Doncaster, where his mother worked multiple jobs, principally as a midwife, before she married Mark Tomlinson, a van salesman who became Louis’s stepfather. The three moved into a two-up, two-down, which was soon filled with half-sisters: Lottie, now 21, Félicité, then twins Daisy and Phoebe, now 16.
‘It was mad. They’re manic, young girls…’ he says. ‘Mum and Mark had a decent income but they couldn’t spread it around [a family of] seven. At times things were really good, you’d get 20 quid in a birthday card, but others were really difficult. I remember the electricity meter – you’d get five quid on the house as an emergency when you couldn’t top it up. Sometimes it’d be a gamble when it’d run out…’
Tomlinson wasn’t particularly academic – ‘though I’m not daft or owt’ – but loved school. There, he joined a band at 16 and found he was OK at singing, so he applied to audition for The X Factor. He failed, twice, but succeeded on the third try, in 2010, performing a fairly terrible (he admits it) version of Plain White T’s Hey There Delilah.
A few months later, at the ‘bootcamp’ stage, Cowell had the idea of creating a band comprised of Tomlinson and four other solo boys: Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Liam Payne. They were to be called One Direction. Tomlinson, who’d been intimidated by the standard of other vocalists in the competition, ‘bit their hand off’ at the offer. ‘I was like, “This is my ticket.”’
The show came just after his second run at the first year of his A levels. He’d failed the first time, with UUE in psychology, PE and English, which his mum had ‘absolutely ripped [his] head off’ for. The second time he’d gone one better, UEE. So he lied, telling her he got a smattering of Ds, and came up with a plan.
‘I waited until after the X Factor final, when we were all sat around drinking champagne, and told her, “By the way, I bulls—tted you on those results. I failed again, but hopefully we’ll be all right now…”’ he laughs. ‘She was fine. I picked my moment well.’
One Direction came third in the final, losing to runner-up Rebecca Ferguson and winner Matt Cardle, a former painter-decorator who now performs in the West End. But it was always felt that the group would go furthest, not least because Cowell was such a supporter (all the other boys have now left his record label, Syco, but because ‘loyalty is the biggest thing’ for Tomlinson, he’s stayed).
Eighteen when the group started, Tomlinson was the oldest member (the others were 16 and 17), ‘just allowed to drink, just allowed to drive’, but suddenly everything in his life was controlled.
‘You’re ready to be reckless and stupid, but then I was in the band and couldn’t ever act like that, especially not publicly,’ he says. They went on their first headline concert tour in 2011, and soon had fans surrounding their hotels overnight, wherever in the world they went. Naturally, they embraced partying.
‘There was a good 18 months where I was going out all the time. The press love to write about that as if it’s this chaotic thing, and at times it was, but it’s also an escape. Once you have a couple of drinks down you in a club, you’re just someone in the club, part of everyone else, and not everyone is looking at you.’
Even when he was away, he kept in contact with his mum by phone – or in person, when she could join him – as much as possible. The two were impossibly close: she had access to his emails; he told her when he lost his virginity; she knew about his finances.
‘One thing I’ve learnt since losing her is that any decision, even if I knew the answer, I’d call her,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise how reliant I’d become on her. That was the hardest thing for me, understanding that living life after meant making decisions on my own. I thought I’d always have a sounding board. There was a different level of credibility with my mum, because I idolised her.’
Styles has recently joked that One Direction were ‘grown in test tubes’ by Cowell, but Tomlinson insists that part of their appeal lay in the fact that they all had their own personalities and talents, which weren’t forced on them. Still, it took him years to know where he fitted. Styles was cool, a heart-throb. Malik was moody and mysterious. Horan was cute and Irish. Payne was whatever Payne was. But Tomlinson wasn’t sure.
‘You’ve got to be dead cocky in Doncaster to survive – it’s either that or be picked on. So I used to walk around with a chip on my shoulder. But I’d always been the funny guy, centre of attention, so I never struggled to make mates,’ he says. ‘It was weird suddenly being in a situation where one or two members are constantly in a better position. It took me a while to understand my strengths. I was the oldest and it wasn’t until the third album when I made it my mission to write the most.’
He succeeded: Tomlinson’s writing credit appears on 39 of the 96 songs One Direction recorded, four more than Payne and dozens more than the rest. But it was intense. There were times when he considered quitting the band, if only to allow him to escape the attention, but he likens that to children running away from home. ‘By the time you get halfway down the street you regret it and go back…’
‘Directioners’ were ‘fanatical’ about the boys, to a frequently absurd degree. And not every encounter was surreally funny. The year after the hiatus began, in 2017, Tomlinson and Calder were involved in a scuffle with paparazzi and fans at the airport in LA. Fists possibly flew, and Tomlinson was arrested, only for no further action to be taken. The fans now are still loyal, still ardent, but they’ve matured with him.
What kept him grounded, as the money rolled in (I have heard that each of the boys amassed a £40 million fortune from the band, and that collectively they still earn around £38,000 a week from royalties, merchandise and so on) and the fans bayed, was keeping friends from Doncaster around. When I arrived at today’s photo shoot, Tomlinson was busy doing his singular pose at one end of the room, while at the other, near the free pastries, a young redheaded bloke in a tracksuit lurked, scrolling through his phone.
He introduced himself as Oli, Tomlinson’s ‘mate from Donny’, who has spent the better part of a decade travelling the world with his pop-star friend, and seems to operate as a walking comfort blanket. They live together when Tomlinson’s in LA.
They also live together when he’s in London. I imagine there’s space for house guests wherever he is, though: it has been reported that he put his Hollywood Hills mansion on the market last year for $6.995 million, and the previous year valued another property in California at $13.999 million, after apparently renting it out for $40,000 per month.
‘I’m hoping to do a bit of work with Louis’s tour manager this year,’ Oli says, cheerfully. I later discover he’s so ever-present with Tomlinson that he even has his own fan accounts on social media.
‘I remember bringing a mate out for our first US tour. He called from his hotel with his mind blown by being able to pick up a phone and they’d just bring you food,’ Tomlinson says. ‘I go back to Donny and hear heavy s—t – struggles with jobs, money, family, health. That humbles me, and gives me a better emotional intelligence.’
He reckons ‘eight out of 10 people have an ulterior motive’ when they meet him. Luckily he can tell if someone’s a pre-fame friend. His name is pronounced ‘Loo-ee’, but he wasn’t keen on it as a child, so had mates, like Oli, pronounce it ‘Lewis’, which they still do. Unfortunately Cowell guessed at ‘Loo-ee’ on The X Factor, so that was that for the stage name.
By 2015, some members of One Direction felt an itch to break off – or just have a break – and try their own thing. Malik had gone in March, and while a full split seemed inevitable, Tomlinson was still caught off-guard.
‘I was f—king fuming at first. We were working really hard – people [namely, Payne] have said overworked, but we weren’t overworked, that’s just what happens when you’re a band that size, though I understand. I thought I’d mentally prepared myself for a break, but it hit me hard.’
He was finally feeling comfortable in the band, and hadn’t thought about a solo career.
‘About a week after, I sat there thinking, “Strike while the iron’s hot,” but I wasn’t ready. I was bitter and angry, I didn’t know why we couldn’t just carry on. But now, even though I don’t fully understand everyone’s individual reasons, I respect them.’
They’re ostensibly all still mates, despite going in radically different musical directions, though some are closer than others. Tomlinson seems to mention Horan with most affection, and the pair performed at the same event in Mexico in November, titillating 1D fans by sound-checking together with one of the band’s old songs.
If it was up to you, I ask, would the group still be going? He considers this for a moment.
‘It if was up to me, yeah. I’d maybe have said, “Let’s have a year off.” But yeah, probably. I’m sure there’s a better analogy out there but it’s a bit like [shutting down] Coca-Cola. You don’t say, “Right, let’s hang the boots up on that,” because it’s a massive thing.’
Afterwards he muddled around for a bit, including releasing those early singles – one of which he performed on The X Factor, rigid with grief, just days after his mum’s death. Then he returned to the show last year as a judge, alongside Cowell, Robbie Williams and Williams’s wife, Ayda Field.
Did he get on with Robbie? He smiles, arching an eyebrow. ‘Why do you ask?’ Well, he came out of a boy band, went solo…
‘Oh, yeah, he was all right. He’s a good man, we were just different from each other. Certain moments I thought, “F—king hell, Robbie, just sit down for five minutes, I’ve got something to say.” I love his missus though, Ayda, she’s sound.’
Tomlinson liked mentoring, and during our conversation it becomes clear he’s fuelled by responsibility. He was the oldest sibling in his house, and although Mark Tomlinson and Johannah’s second husband (after divorcing Mark in 2011, she married Dan Deakin in 2014; they had twins Ernest and Doris) are still around, he became a paternal figure after she died. He’s particularly involved in the lives of Daisy and Phoebe, to whom he’s ‘a kind of second parent’.
‘Without being too soppy, I like looking after people, it’s cool. At the moment I’m stressing trying to convince Daisy and Phoebe to go to sixth form. They’ve been to private school near Donny, and it’s proper expensive. I’m paying for it thinking they’re staying on, but now they don’t want to go. I told them education is important. I’m like, “You’re 16, you haven’t got a f—king idea what the real world is,”’ he says.
‘What’s difficult about those two is they’ve only known the 1D craziness. They’ve grown up in this elitist way, which is very different from my upbringing and Lottie’s, and the values my mum taught us.’
He gives a ‘kids, eh?’ sigh. ‘Consistency is the big thing. I’m trying to get better at being in their heads enough so they think, “I wonder if Louis thinks this is a good idea?”’
Lottie lives in Hackney, east London. When she was a teenager, Tomlinson got her a job assisting One Direction’s make-up artist, and within a few years she’d become a ridiculously popular Instagrammer (currently with 3.4 million followers, still 10 million shy of Louis). Her big brother told her Instagram’s fine, but she must ‘become a proper businesswoman’ in case the bubble bursts. In 2018 she launched Tanologist, a successful fake-tan brand.
‘I’m so proud of her. She’s just been in Australia, where she’s stocked in Melbourne’s version of Boots!’ Tomlinson says, beaming.
Félicité, known to the family as Fizz, was also a budding Instagrammer. After her death last March, a post-mortem revealed ‘toxic’ levels of anti-anxiety and pain medications, as well as cocaine, in her blood. Six months later, an inquest heard that she had visited her GP in August 2018 and ‘gave a history of recreational drug use… on a consistent basis since the death of her mother’. She had taken overdoses and been admitted to a rehabilitation clinic.
Tomlinson hesitates to say anything was ‘easier’, comparing the deaths of Félicité and his mum, as ‘both felt very individual, and hit me with a big impact… but I think dealing with the family, how I can be there for them, that was a lot easier the second time because the first time I was grieving and didn’t know what to say. As time went on I grew to understand what to say to my sisters.’
Prioritising the feelings of your sisters in the immediate aftermath is understandable, I say, but I wonder if anyone took care of you. He looks surprised.
‘No, but friends and family, my best mate… I feel their support but I get most out of doing stuff for other people. I don’t say that to sound like a good guy, it’s genuinely what gives me strength.’
Did you ever consider grief therapy?
‘Nah, a lot of people recommended it but I’m a little bit old-fashioned when it comes to therapy. I’m sure it’s incredible, but I thought I’d be all right, and I have been till now.’ One of his many tattoos consists of the words ‘It Is What It Is’ across his chest. ‘I know the things I’ve been upset about in my life are s—t, but I can’t change them, so you have to make the best of what you’ve got.’
Tomlinson gives his own big smile. Our time’s nearly up, and he’d like a cigarette. After all you’ve been through, I tell him, people would have understood if you’d called it a day. You could have lived off royalties, enjoyed a quiet life.
‘Definitely, definitely. But do you know what? It didn’t cross my mind once. I somehow have an inability to worry, and just get on with things,’ he says, shrugging. ‘It’s definitely made me stronger. I’ve gone through every emotion, and I’m just f—king excited now.’
I think we have an answer. How is Louis Tomlinson? Hopefully, he’ll be just fine.
Walls is released on 31 January
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elceeu2morrow · 4 years
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By Guy Kelly 17 JANUARY 2020 • 8:00PM
He became a bona-fide teen pop superstar as part of One Direction, then suffered unthinkable personal loss. Louis Tomlinson talks to Guy Kelly about fame, family and what comes next.
Louis Tomlinson took part in an online video recently, in which he was tasked with answering the internet’s most-searched questions about him. It was fairly tame, as you might expect of a pop quiz thrown at a pop star. ‘How do you pronounce Louis Tomlinson?’ the first read. There’s an interesting answer to that, actually, but we’ll come to it. ‘How old is Louis Tomlinson?’ was the second. He’s 28. And then came the third. ‘How is Louis Tomlinson?’
In the video, the man himself looks a little bewildered, dismissing the query as ‘random’ before moving on. But underneath, in the YouTube comments – one of the few nooks of the internet where love and goodwill still thrives – a fan repeated it. ‘“How is Louis Tomlinson,”’ they wrote, ‘the only question that matters.’ More than 7,000 people ‘liked’ it.
Given all Tomlinson’s been through in the past four years, it seems reasonable to ask. In 2016, the band he’d been in man and boy, One Direction, went on an indefinite hiatus after six years. Since being welded together by Simon Cowell on The X Factor in 2010, ‘1D’ had enjoyed perhaps the most stratospheric rise in music (five platinum albums, four world tours) since The Beatles. It hadn’t been Tomlinson’s decision to break up the band, and he wasn’t – still isn’t – particularly happy about it.
[complete article below the cut]
In December of that year, his beloved mother, Johannah Deakin, died a few months after being diagnosed with leukaemia. She was 43. Tomlinson pressed on with his nascent solo career, but unimaginable tragedy struck again. In March 2019, his 18-year-old half-sister, Félicité, was found unconscious at her flat in London and couldn’t be revived. An inquest later found she had died of an accidental drug overdose. Again, he buckled down, looked after his remaining siblings, and committed himself to finishing his debut album.
Settling down with Tomlinson in the corner of a west London photo studio, then, it seems as good a place as any to start: how is he?
‘I’m good, mate, I’m feeling good,’ he says, spreading his arms across a sofa. After wearing a series of high-end outfits for our photo shoot (‘I never feel super-comfortable on shoots; I’ve got one f—king pose – moody’), he’s in a black ’90s-inspired collared jumper, black trousers and black trainers.
He pushes his fringe to one side. The Doncaster accent, which softened in his 1D days, is back to pure, unfettered South Yorks. It’s all ‘in t’band’, ‘I didn’t know owt’, and swearing like a navvy. He’s honest, funny, and if his feet were planted any more firmly on the ground he’d be unable to walk.
I tell him about the YouTube comment, which seems to reflect the genuine care his fans have for him.
‘Ah, yeah I know, they’re considerate, they are. We’ve got a special, interesting bond. They’ve grown up with me – and I’ve been through some personal stuff and they’ve always been there for me.’
Tomlinson’s album, Walls, has been a long time coming. Immediately after One Direction split, he released a couple of singles – dance-y pop collaborations – which were fine, but not what he wanted to make. Halfway through writing Walls he realised, ‘If I’m chasing radio with every song I write, I’m not going to be doing this job for very long.’
So he relaxed, and the result is a mix of strong, melody-driven pop of the kind One Direction mastered, and what Tomlinson is really into, namely guitar-driven indie and Britpop. Some songs for the fans; some nodding to the future.
‘It’s a five-album plan. There’s bits where I’ve been almost selfish, and bits where I’ve been respectful to the fan base and what they love listening to,’ he says. ‘Then the next will be a step closer to the stuff I want to make. But I’ve got to earn my stripes.’
The dominant theme, I say, appears to be resilience. On the single Don’t Let It Break Your Heart, he advises, ‘Even when it hurts like hell / Oh, whatever tears you apart / Don’t let it break your heart.’ On the rousing title track (which features a writing credit for Noel Gallagher, who gave his blessing for a chorus strikingly similar to an Oasis tune), he sings, ‘These high walls that broke my soul / I watched all come falling down.’
It could be to do with grief, professional struggles, or his relationship – he’s happily with his girlfriend, 27-year-old fashion blogger Eleanor Calder, but they’ve been on and off over the years. He nods.
‘Yeah, I write very autobiographically and had so much going on in my head, but in the struggle I’m trying to paint the message that you’re always left with a choice: to see the glass half-full or half-empty. It’s showing there’s hope.’
Some songwriters have found grief productive, others paralysing. Tomlinson was the former. One track on Walls is the previously released Two of Us, a beautiful, simple song written about his mum (‘You’ll never know how much I miss you / The day that they took you, I wish it was me instead’).
‘What’s amazing about this job is that regardless of the situation, you get something positive at the end of it. That’s obviously an emotionally heavy song for me, but fans have come up to me in floods of tears and talked about how it’s helped in their own tragedy. It’s incredible. From the dark, you can give hope.’
For the first three years of his life, Tomlinson was raised alone by Johannah, who split from his father, Troy Austin, when he was a baby. They lived above a launderette in Doncaster, where his mother worked multiple jobs, principally as a midwife, before she married Mark Tomlinson, a van salesman who became Louis’s stepfather. The three moved into a two-up, two-down, which was soon filled with half-sisters: Lottie, now 21, Félicité, then twins Daisy and Phoebe, now 16.
‘It was mad. They’re manic, young girls…’ he says. ‘Mum and Mark had a decent income but they couldn’t spread it around [a family of] seven. At times things were really good, you’d get 20 quid in a birthday card, but others were really difficult. I remember the electricity meter – you’d get five quid on the house as an emergency when you couldn’t top it up. Sometimes it’d be a gamble when it’d run out…’
Tomlinson wasn’t particularly academic – ‘though I’m not daft or owt’ – but loved school. There, he joined a band at 16 and found he was OK at singing, so he applied to audition for The X Factor. He failed, twice, but succeeded on the third try, in 2010, performing a fairly terrible (he admits it) version of Plain White T’s Hey There Delilah.
A few months later, at the ‘bootcamp’ stage, Cowell had the idea of creating a band comprised of Tomlinson and four other solo boys: Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Liam Payne. They were to be called One Direction. Tomlinson, who’d been intimidated by the standard of other vocalists in the competition, ‘bit their hand off’ at the offer. ‘I was like, “This is my ticket.”’
The show came just after his second run at the first year of his A levels. He’d failed the first time, with UUE in psychology, PE and English, which his mum had ‘absolutely ripped [his] head off’ for. The second time he’d gone one better, UEE. So he lied, telling her he got a smattering of Ds, and came up with a plan.
‘I waited until after the X Factor final, when we were all sat around drinking champagne, and told her, “By the way, I bulls—tted you on those results. I failed again, but hopefully we’ll be all right now…”’ he laughs. ‘She was fine. I picked my moment well.’
One Direction came third in the final, losing to runner-up Rebecca Ferguson and winner Matt Cardle, a former painter-decorator who now performs in the West End. But it was always felt that the group would go furthest, not least because Cowell was such a supporter (all the other boys have now left his record label, Syco, but because ‘loyalty is the biggest thing’ for Tomlinson, he’s stayed).
Eighteen when the group started, Tomlinson was the oldest member (the others were 16 and 17), ‘just allowed to drink, just allowed to drive’, but suddenly everything in his life was controlled.
‘You’re ready to be reckless and stupid, but then I was in the band and couldn’t ever act like that, especially not publicly,’ he says. They went on their first headline concert tour in 2011, and soon had fans surrounding their hotels overnight, wherever in the world they went. Naturally, they embraced partying.
‘There was a good 18 months where I was going out all the time. The press love to write about that as if it’s this chaotic thing, and at times it was, but it’s also an escape. Once you have a couple of drinks down you in a club, you’re just someone in the club, part of everyone else, and not everyone is looking at you.’
Even when he was away, he kept in contact with his mum by phone – or in person, when she could join him – as much as possible. The two were impossibly close: she had access to his emails; he told her when he lost his virginity; she knew about his finances.
‘One thing I’ve learnt since losing her is that any decision, even if I knew the answer, I’d call her,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise how reliant I’d become on her. That was the hardest thing for me, understanding that living life after meant making decisions on my own. I thought I’d always have a sounding board. There was a different level of credibility with my mum, because I idolised her.’
Styles has recently joked that One Direction were ‘grown in test tubes’ by Cowell, but Tomlinson insists that part of their appeal lay in the fact that they all had their own personalities and talents, which weren’t forced on them. Still, it took him years to know where he fitted. Styles was cool, a heart-throb. Malik was moody and mysterious. Horan was cute and Irish. Payne was whatever Payne was. But Tomlinson wasn’t sure.
‘You’ve got to be dead cocky in Doncaster to survive – it’s either that or be picked on. So I used to walk around with a chip on my shoulder. But I’d always been the funny guy, centre of attention, so I never struggled to make mates,’ he says. ‘It was weird suddenly being in a situation where one or two members are constantly in a better position. It took me a while to understand my strengths. I was the oldest and it wasn’t until the third album when I made it my mission to write the most.’
He succeeded: Tomlinson’s writing credit appears on 39 of the 96 songs One Direction recorded, four more than Payne and dozens more than the rest. But it was intense. There were times when he considered quitting the band, if only to allow him to escape the attention, but he likens that to children running away from home. ‘By the time you get halfway down the street you regret it and go back…’
‘Directioners’ were ‘fanatical’ about the boys, to a frequently absurd degree. And not every encounter was surreally funny. The year after the hiatus began, in 2017, Tomlinson and Calder were involved in a scuffle with paparazzi and fans at the airport in LA. Fists possibly flew, and Tomlinson was arrested, only for no further action to be taken. The fans now are still loyal, still ardent, but they’ve matured with him.
What kept him grounded, as the money rolled in (I have heard that each of the boys amassed a £40 million fortune from the band, and that collectively they still earn around £38,000 a week from royalties, merchandise and so on) and the fans bayed, was keeping friends from Doncaster around. When I arrived at today’s photo shoot, Tomlinson was busy doing his singular pose at one end of the room, while at the other, near the free pastries, a young redheaded bloke in a tracksuit lurked, scrolling through his phone.
He introduced himself as Oli, Tomlinson’s ‘mate from Donny’, who has spent the better part of a decade travelling the world with his pop-star friend, and seems to operate as a walking comfort blanket. They live together when Tomlinson’s in LA, where he has a three-year-old son, Freddie, from a short relationship with stylist Briana Jungwirth.
They also live together when he’s in London, along with Calder, to whom it was recently reported that Tomlinson is engaged (his representatives denied the rumour). I imagine there’s space for house guests wherever he is, though: it has been reported that he put his Hollywood Hills mansion on the market last year for $6.995 million, and the previous year valued another property in California at $13.999 million, after apparently renting it out for $40,000 per month.
‘I’m hoping to do a bit of work with Louis’s tour manager this year,’ Oli says, cheerfully. I later discover he’s so ever-present with Tomlinson that he even has his own fan accounts on social media.
‘I remember bringing a mate out for our first US tour. He called from his hotel with his mind blown by being able to pick up a phone and they’d just bring you food,’ Tomlinson says. ‘I go back to Donny and hear heavy s—t – struggles with jobs, money, family, health. That humbles me, and gives me a better emotional intelligence.’
He reckons ‘eight out of 10 people have an ulterior motive’ when they meet him. Luckily he can tell if someone’s a pre-fame friend. His name is pronounced ‘Loo-ee’, but he wasn’t keen on it as a child, so had mates, like Oli, pronounce it ‘Lewis’, which they still do. Unfortunately Cowell guessed at ‘Loo-ee’ on The X Factor, so that was that for the stage name.
By 2015, some members of One Direction felt an itch to break off – or just have a break – and try their own thing. Malik had gone in March, and while a full split seemed inevitable, Tomlinson was still caught off-guard.
‘I was f—king fuming at first. We were working really hard – people [namely, Payne] have said overworked, but we weren’t overworked, that’s just what happens when you’re a band that size, though I understand. I thought I’d mentally prepared myself for a break, but it hit me hard.’
He was finally feeling comfortable in the band, and hadn’t thought about a solo career.
‘About a week after, I sat there thinking, “Strike while the iron’s hot,” but I wasn’t ready. I was bitter and angry, I didn’t know why we couldn’t just carry on. But now, even though I don’t fully understand everyone’s individual reasons, I respect them.’
They’re ostensibly all still mates, despite going in radically different musical directions, though some are closer than others. Tomlinson seems to mention Horan with most affection, and the pair performed at the same event in Mexico in November, titillating 1D fans by sound-checking together with one of the band’s old songs.
If it was up to you, I ask, would the group still be going? He considers this for a moment.
‘It if was up to me, yeah. I’d maybe have said, “Let’s have a year off.” But yeah, probably. I’m sure there’s a better analogy out there but it’s a bit like [shutting down] Coca-Cola. You don’t say, “Right, let’s hang the boots up on that,” because it’s a massive thing.’
Afterwards he muddled around for a bit, including releasing those early singles – one of which he performed on The X Factor, rigid with grief, just days after his mum’s death. Then he returned to the show last year as a judge, alongside Cowell, Robbie Williams and Williams’s wife, Ayda Field.
Did he get on with Robbie? He smiles, arching an eyebrow. ‘Why do you ask?’ Well, he came out of a boy band, went solo…
‘Oh, yeah, he was all right. He’s a good man, we were just different from each other. Certain moments I thought, “F—king hell, Robbie, just sit down for five minutes, I’ve got something to say.” I love his missus though, Ayda, she’s sound.’
Tomlinson liked mentoring, and during our conversation it becomes clear he’s fuelled by responsibility. He was the oldest sibling in his house, and although Mark Tomlinson and Johannah’s second husband (after divorcing Mark in 2011, she married Dan Deakin in 2014; they had twins Ernest and Doris) are still around, he became a paternal figure after she died. He’s particularly involved in the lives of Daisy and Phoebe, to whom he’s ‘a kind of second parent’.
‘Without being too soppy, I like looking after people, it’s cool. At the moment I’m stressing trying to convince Daisy and Phoebe to go to sixth form. They’ve been to private school near Donny, and it’s proper expensive. I’m paying for it thinking they’re staying on, but now they don’t want to go. I told them education is important. I’m like, “You’re 16, you haven’t got a f—king idea what the real world is,”’ he says.
‘What’s difficult about those two is they’ve only known the 1D craziness. They’ve grown up in this elitist way, which is very different from my upbringing and Lottie’s, and the values my mum taught us.’
He gives a ‘kids, eh?’ sigh. ‘Consistency is the big thing. I’m trying to get better at being in their heads enough so they think, “I wonder if Louis thinks this is a good idea?”’
Lottie lives in Hackney, east London. When she was a teenager, Tomlinson got her a job assisting One Direction’s make-up artist, and within a few years she’d become a ridiculously popular Instagrammer (currently with 3.4 million followers, still 10 million shy of Louis). Her big brother told her Instagram’s fine, but she must ‘become a proper businesswoman’ in case the bubble bursts. In 2018 she launched Tanologist, a successful fake-tan brand.
‘I’m so proud of her. She’s just been in Australia, where she’s stocked in Melbourne’s version of Boots!’ Tomlinson says, beaming.
Félicité, known to the family as Fizz, was also a budding Instagrammer. After her death last March, a post-mortem revealed ‘toxic’ levels of anti-anxiety and pain medications, as well as cocaine, in her blood. Six months later, an inquest heard that she had visited her GP in August 2018 and ‘gave a history of recreational drug use… on a consistent basis since the death of her mother’. She had taken overdoses and been admitted to a rehabilitation clinic.
Tomlinson hesitates to say anything was ‘easier’, comparing the deaths of Félicité and his mum, as ‘both felt very individual, and hit me with a big impact… but I think dealing with the family, how I can be there for them, that was a lot easier the second time because the first time I was grieving and didn’t know what to say. As time went on I grew to understand what to say to my sisters.’
Prioritising the feelings of your sisters in the immediate aftermath is understandable, I say, but I wonder if anyone took care of you. He looks surprised.
‘No, but friends and family, my best mate, my girlfriend, my son… I feel their support but I get most out of doing stuff for other people. I don’t say that to sound like a good guy, it’s genuinely what gives me strength.’
Did you ever consider grief therapy?
‘Nah, a lot of people recommended it but I’m a little bit old-fashioned when it comes to therapy. I’m sure it’s incredible, but I thought I’d be all right, and I have been till now.’ One of his many tattoos consists of the words ‘It Is What It Is’ across his chest. ‘I know the things I’ve been upset about in my life are s—t, but I can’t change them, so you have to make the best of what you’ve got.’
What he’s got is an album to launch, a world tour to prep for and, immediately, a flight to catch. He and Oli are off to see Freddie. ‘When I’m working I definitely don’t see him enough,’ Tomlinson says, ‘but he looks just like me, which is cool. I’m excited to see his big smile.’
Tomlinson gives his own big smile. Our time’s nearly up, and he’d like a cigarette. After all you’ve been through, I tell him, people would have understood if you’d called it a day. You could have lived off royalties, enjoyed a quiet life with Calder, Freddie, your sisters.
‘Definitely, definitely. But do you know what? It didn’t cross my mind once. I somehow have an inability to worry, and just get on with things,’ he says, shrugging. ‘It’s definitely made me stronger. I’ve gone through every emotion, and I’m just f—king excited now.’
I think we have an answer. How is Louis Tomlinson? Hopefully, he’ll be just fine.
Walls is released on 31 January
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overthinkingkdrama · 4 years
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Exit Review: Search WWW
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Synopsis
Bae Ta Mi is a highly intelligent, driven business woman working in the fast paced technology sector as a powerful executive with the popular web portal, Unicon.
At the same time she's got the opportunity to climb higher than ever in her career--and consequently has the furthest to fall--she meets a younger man named Park Morgan in a arcade, and after engaging in a few competitive games of Tekken the two of them get a drink together and have an immediate palpable attraction to one another. One thing leads to another and they end up sleeping together.
Ta Mi might have been willing to let the whole thing go as a one night stand, but shortly afterwards she finds out that Morgan--the CEO of his own small music company that composes music for videos games--has recently taken a contract with Unicon. and the two of them must navigate newly blossoming feelings and differing world views around their fast paced professional lives.
The story also revolves around the lives of two other high powered women in executive positions within the companies of Barro and Unicon, balancing issues of love and business as well as ethical dilemmas around technology, privacy and freedom of information.
Review
Story: The story of Search WWW happens on a couple different levels. On the one hand it's a kind of feminist wish fulfillment fantasy, where the majority of the powerful executives running this part of the world are beautiful women who are interested in forwarding their careers, forming friendships and rivals with each other as they do, and somehow managing to have thriving love lives at the same time.
On the other hand, it's about a collection of people with different struggles trying to find balance in their lives. Whether that balance is between their independence and their need to be loved, their idealism and their ambition, or between family duty and personal identity.
It's kind of a difficult drama to review for this reason. There's a lot of different elements at play, and many of them work well, though not always equally well. This is a drama with a lot to say, while also trying to be a fun piece of escapism. And sometimes it definitely seems to compromise the message for the escapism or vice versa. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think unless you are fully buying into the concept and the characters it's going to be difficult to find the drama wholly satisfying on every front. Kind of a jack of all trades, master of none kind of situation. It's a corporate drama, a female power fantasy, a noona-romance and a piece of social commentary about search engines. That's a lot of hats to wear at once and wear well.
Acting: Jang Ki Yong has been all over the place in the past year, and it looks like he isn't going anywhere but up from here. He already proved that he is capable of handling a male lead role in Come and Hug Me, although I don't feel that was his strongest performance. In Search he seems to be showing a more grounded performance. In interviews he talked about the director encouraging him to play a more relaxed version of himself, and because he often plays stiff, stoic individuals it was really refreshing even though the enthusiastic young man who is unreservedly in love with an older woman is not at all a new concept. I'd like to see more like this in the future from him.
Im Soo Jung has been acting for a long time, but she hasn't made a lot of dramas, and only came back to dramaland after a 13 year hiatus to make 2017's Chicago Typwriter and 2019's Search. If this is the kind of work she's going to keep putting out, I'm looking forward to her next projects. I really hope she keeps making drama in the coming years, because she's great as Ta Mi. Very fun, charismatic, and cutting, with just the right amount of pathos.
The main trio of women play off each other so well, and I loved the way the drama focused on their individual dynamics and developed them, especially the emphasis on female friendship which is oft neglected, but never should be. Especially in this kind of show.
This drama also gave us a very cute romance between Lee Da Hee's Scarlett and Lee Jae Wook's (also recently of Extraordinary You fame) adorable rookie actor, Ji Hwan. One hopes to see more from both of them in a similar vein, and even if it's a bit of a long shot it would be lovely to see them reunite in another project, because the chemistry was golden.
Production: I personally loved the way this drama looked and felt to watch. I thought the editing, sets, styling, etc had a lot of personality. There was obviously a lot of thought put into how each scene would be shot, the colors we associate with the different characters, the camera movements that clue us into how the characters are feeling and how they are relating to other characters. There's nothing phoned in about the editing and direction. I think the whole drama looks very expensive and very clean.
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However, I did see some complaints about the editing. My roommate didn't like the wobbly camera movements that are used in emotional scenes to indicate the characters are in distress, they made her feel sea sick. So something to be aware of. For me, however, it worked.
Feels: Man, I have heard every kind of reaction to this show. I've heard from people who liked the romance and had no interest in the business aspects of the drama. I've seen people who couldn't care less about the main romance but liked the parts of the drama that were about powerful women kicking ass and solving ethically complex problems regarding the business. I've seen people who deeply disliked Ta Mi, people who loved her, people who thought she and Morgan were boring as sin. I've seen people (a lot of them, mostly on tumblr) who thought that Scarlett and her actor were the only reason to watch this drama at all.
While, a lot of that is valid, I thoroughly enjoyed this drama. I do think it helps to be a little bit older in order to relate with the characters better. Teens and young twenties might have a hard time empathizing with Ta Mi, her priorities and her insecurities, and I could see that making this a frustrating watch at times. But I thought it was a realistic portrayal of a relationship between two people with radically different value systems and sets of life experiences. For me the romance really worked and I liked all three of the female leads.
I do also think it's going to significantly help if you like business dramas to begin with. I personally found the idea of a web portal business like Google or Bing, how much influence they have over the information people see and what people talk about and some of the moral dilemmas that go along with that really interesting and unique.
Would I recommend Search: WWW? Yes, especially if you like dramas with messy, realistic relationships, corporate intrigue or just female power fantasy.
8.5/10
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lokisasylum · 4 years
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Why are Kpop Predictions so... negative?
I'm not one to humor people who do Kpop Predictions (and for free? really? ya'll out here "spilling info/tea" about celebrities for FREE? IN THIS ECONOMY?). I just find them laughable/amusing because of how inaccurate they are 95% of the times, while toying with the fandoms' emotions. Creating unnecessary drama and stress about things that anyone with a common sense and logic could've predicted all on their own. But to give you guys an idea, here are a few by category:
#1. Twitter based Kpop Predictions
I’ve always had this MAJOR feeling that the great majority of them are run by THE SAME person on different accounts (kinda like how on Tumblr we're allowed to "manage" different blogs for whatever we may need 'em). Cause if you pay close attention they ALL share the same pattern:
SAME moon/crystal ball Icons
SAME way of "predicting" events ( *coughCOPY/PASTEcoughcough* )
They ALL go on hiatus at the SAME TIME and when they finally return they give the SAME excuse that they were depressed, drained of energy, mental blockage/migraine from predicting so much.
They throw shade at other prediction accounts and accuse them of "copying" them since they're "the original one."
They throw random predictions per day that never come true and when they don't and get called out its always the same excuse of "you choose what you want to believe" or "I never said it was gonna happen NOW, it could still happen in the future." (even after saying they would during the current year lol).
The great majority of these accounts are BIASED AF and mostly run by delulu shippers who tease the followers with incomplete information to keep ‘em interested.
🐍 Note: The one thing that I heavily dislike about these is that it's been proven in previous years that these accounts either work with or buy information from Sasaengs or insiders within the companies. Which is a big NO-NO in the Kpop community since Sasaengs are disgustingly invasive and have zero disregard for the Idol’s personal life and safety.
#2. Youtube Kpop Predictions/Tarot Card Readers, or as I like to call them: the "super-tragic-always-negative-BTS-are-gonna-disband-this-year-or-the-next-under-super-tragic-circumstances" accounts.
These youtubers  are known for spending and wasting 15-20 minutes of their videos (and viewers lives) doing self-promos and showing off the different card decks that they've just recently bought (as if the predictions change based on whether or not you're using a Classic Arcana or a Sailor Moon/Pokemon/YuGiOh with limited edition EXODIA & Shadow Realm included deck) And as mentioned above, ALL of them give super tragic/negative predictions, especially when it comes to BTS. Like I remember at the start of this year, there were around 10 (or more) of them saying that BTS would either disband in mid or near the end of 2019. 5 of them stated (in COPY/PASTE fashion) that 2 members would either abandon the group to pursue solo careers, or that 1 would leave and the other would be kicked out for either health issues or this super huge controversial scandal that would ruin BTS' or the member's image and something about "diva behavior" or that the same member was a huge bully towards the others (and annoyingly enough, all of them kept pointing to both Jin and Jimin for some strange reason). But as we've seen, 2019 came and practically went and BTS are still together, still thriving. Maybe one or two "dating rumors" here and there during their "time off" that died in a span of 1 month or so and everyone went on with their lives because it was found to be the product of antis wanting to start shit because everybody wants a BTS scandal (and of course, close to AWARD SEASON *LE GASP*).   So now those same "psychics" are correcting themselves and making up excuses that "they didn't have all the info" or "misunderstood it when they first got it". 🐍🐍 Note: I found it both hilarious and ignorant how the great majority of them are using the "members will start to leave one by one" as a sign of the group disbanding, when we know that starting next year they'll start enlisting in the military which is MANDATORY FOR ALL MEN IN KOREA. Meaning that all Male Korean Idols go through this process and DOES NOT necessarily mean imminent disbandment.
🐍🐍🐍 Extra: Oh yeah, can't forget that one account who said that all Kpop groups are part of the illuminati and they’re using some MK-Ultra shit on the fans through their music which is why fans all over the world now like Kpop and made it famous. Can't forget about those or someone will fight me. (The person deleted their channel too)
#3. Tumblr Kpop Predictions
*SIGH* .... where to start with this one....?
The group in this category is a strange hybrid between Twitter, Youtube and Wattpad/AO3. 'Cause i swear that some of the stuff I've read in a few of these account posts. while browsing for BTS. look like they were taken straight out of a super Angsty, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, Soulmate AU, 30 chapters summarized into a oneshot fic. So you'll be either heavily disturbed or highly entertained at how creative the person is with their "reading". Like there was this one person who alleged that Jimin had been a woman in like 3 of his past lives, but was always involved in very abusive relationships (in 1 of said lives his/her father had r*ped him/her and Jimin gave birth to a daughter and  when the daughter grew up they both fell in love with the same man. And the daughter ends up killing Jimin to keep the man for herself LOL what kind of twisted A/B/O shit is this?!) and apparently its...affecting him in the present with how he treats others? And like... the only way for him to "break the cycle" is by "making peace" with his past selves? Or else he'll keep repeating it?
(y'know...like The Avatar).
This same person also said that the Maknae Line have a beef with the Hyung Line. And that Jimin was gonna kill himself this year or when BTS disbands next year, cause without the group he was useless/talent-less and it didnt matter if he did solo projects cause they wouldn't be as famous as the other members, plus his supposed "girlfriend" would leave him at the same time which is why he'll kill himself. Like....BITCH, WHICH IS IT? Do you want him to make peace with himself and live a long healthy life or do you want him dead?? MAKE UP YOUR MIND! Or better yet, just say you're a Jimin anti and go (cause she didnt have any probs with the other members, always targeted Jimin). Although there ARE exceptions, like another user who told this past-lives reading on how they all used to be 1 person who died and their soul got divided into 7, and the 7 of them always managed to find one another on each and every one of the lives they've lived through (like the HEARTBEAT mv). That one was nice.
In Conclusion....
I just feel bad because of how ignorant and gullible the Kpop fandom in general has become in the past years (Especially the newer fans who don’t understand how Korean culture works, much less the Korean Entertainment Industry). To the point of giving these people clout when in reality they’re just taking advantage of them because they know how thirsty and obsessed some fans can get in their need to know MORE about the artists/group they stan.  
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rwbyremnants · 5 years
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WARNINGS: Rough sex, wall sex, analingus, anal prodding, sixty-nine, anal plug, double-ended dildo sex, facial, anal fingering, coitus interruptus.
NOTES: This is a flash-foward, but as far as “epilogues” go it’s going to be two chapters instead of just one. And don’t worry – there will be other stories in this universe! But this (and chapter 43) is the last of the fully Freezerburn-focused main story, even if Weiss and Yang will pop up in the spinoffs. Hope some of you enjoy what else emerges in the near future!
=Chapter 42
EPILOGUE, PART 1
Five years of bliss followed that magical first moment in the Iron Man-styled Schnee-Xiao Long home.
In that time, while their love for one another hadn't changed, there was so much more that had. The popstar/bodyguard couple that shocked that eventful Beach Fest were now an established act together. The occasional top ten hit aside, however, not as quite as earth-shattering as Weiss's original solo career. But they didn't mind. It was a manageable and less stressful target, one that was flexible to their new lifestyles.
Ruby and Penny had graduated, so they needed advice on finances and where to apply for jobs, which led to them buying an apartment of their own. Blake's career path also eventually brought her to Nashville, where she and Sun had settled into a home twenty minutes’ drive from Yang, and that involved helping them transport all their things. All sorts of new chaos required a lot of attention…
But for the latter two of those five years, their career had mostly been on hiatus, and for very good reasons. During that period, thankfully Weiss's father wasn't without an act he could earn from. Since the untimely end of Neon's last contract, she and three friends had formed a group act of their own, one now signed on by Papa Schnee himself at Weiss's emphatic insistence. And while the lax, unhurried schedule was healthily manageable for his daughter and her girlfriend, Neon’s “FNKI” was becoming a huge money maker, taking the world by storm. It meant the couple could worry more about their lives than career paths or job securities, while also assuring Weiss's good friend still had a thriving following.
Despite the hiatus, the couple had still been in the news on occasion. Some, as predicted, were trying to pick fault over their outing, but the rest seemed to have no problem whatsoever. Yang remembered the ridiculous grin Weiss had when she noticed in one of her trashier magazines that they had been placed in a “Top 50 cutest couples” list.
Some time after the official release of “Changes Come”, their first single as “Freezerburn”, Yang had made the much-debated decision to come out as trans to the public. And unlike she feared, the majority were accepting, and even proud of her. It was a weight off her chest, especially with the knowledge that people had facts rather than unreliable rumours.
Given the changing laws, there was even less barring them from getting their marriage license before they enjoyed a lovely tropical ceremony in Hawaii, open only to their closest friends. Glowing lanterns swung from the roof of the small gazebo set up on the beach, though both Yang and Weiss were wearing lovely white dresses more suited to an indoor event. Giddy smiles and blushes never left their faces for more than an instant throughout the entire ceremony. Both of their fathers had walked them down the aisle at the same time, completely casting aside that old convention that only "the girl" got to be "given away". Neither of them looked entirely comfortable, but both looked happy.
Neon, Blake, and Winter, in an even less traditional fashion, were wearing matching blue one-piece bathing suits with seafoam-patterned sarongs to befit the locale, and the groomsmen — Sun, and oddly enough, Ruby and Penny, who had assured everyone that they didn't mind balancing out the wedding party on that side — were decked out in tuxedos with quite tropical cummerbunds and bowties. The rest of Neon's band was in attendance, clapping and cheering boisterously.
By the end of the proceedings, a couple of paparazzi had figured out what they had stumbled across and snapped a few blurry, zoomed-out photos, but for the most part their special day was kept private. There were more pictures of their reception, which was a luau during which the two were wearing original top-of-the-line designer swimsuits, Yang's with jean shorts on over the top of them for understandable reasons. In fact, the picture that popped up on the news most often was of Weiss losing her shot at the limbo contest when she fell straight down on her butt, laughing up a storm.
And a lot more had taken place between that marriage and the present day. Many stories for another time.
Their lakeside house was in a state that was very rare these days: quiet as a mouse. Ruby had offered them a day of peace while she took care of other matters, well aware that they would need as much space as they could get. After all, Freezerburn was arranging its return in style — back on another two-month tour alongside FNKI around the country. Weiss was currently making all the arrangements, writing notes and chatting to Neon herself, who'd thought of the idea.
"So we're agreed the last performance should be the Big Apple? That time of year, at least it shouldn't be snowing too hard."
"Even if it is, who cares?" Weiss chuckled, fingers flying over the keys of her laptop while glancing over at the phone now and then. "Nobody will want to miss this. But you're right, it never hurts to give the fans some consideration."
"Yeah, exactly. I mean, they'll be warm anyways with the crowd but who wants to wade in slush when they wanna see a show?" Clearly biting the top of her pencil for a moment, her eyes then lit up again when she thought of something else. "Oh! Did you and Yang wanna do a few of the signings? They're totally optional, and I know you got things to think about but I figured I should ask."
"You did need to ask, but… yeah, I think we should. I mean, if we're going to do this thing, we should really go all the way. And we've set it up with a little more time between shows, so it won't be like the hectic tours I did as a solo act." Then she smiled again. "But I'm really glad we're doing this. It's gonna be like old times!"
"Except with considerably less drinking… you were a pretty hilarious drunk but you'd be a bad influence to you-know-who now." Finally taking off the ridiculous reading glasses, Neon folded her arms and leaned in toward the camera. "So how’s life, girl?"
"Life… is perfect," Weiss sighed easily, pushing aside her laptop. "Not every second of it is, I mean, there's always little bumps in every relationship. Just, ours are honestly so tiny… I think one day we had a fight over whether or not to buy a new mattress. I wanted to get one shipped in from one of those online companies; Yang said we didn’t need it. But I mean, it was a fight that ended with us banging on top of the old one, so how does that really count as 'marital strife', right?"
"Angry seeeex," Neon teased for a moment, ending it with a small giggle, as per usual. "But that's really great to hear! I mean, we all know you and Yang are forever. Little arguments and shit are nothing. Healthy even, sometimes."
Nodding, Weiss arranged the few papers she had in addition to all the online delegating and scheduling, laying them further away and bringing her now-cold cup of cappuccino toward herself. "True. I believe that any relationship without any strife is more or less a lie – and a ticking time bomb. Better to get the worries out in the open."
Then she hesitated. There was something she wanted to bring up, but wasn't sure it would be the best idea. After all, some ancient history should stay that way. But she and Yang had been talking about it off and on for a year or so, at first only as a joke, but then more seriously as time wore on.
"Um…"
"What?" She asked, tilting her head. But when Weiss wouldn't answer, she seemed to give a friendly glare at the camera. "Come on, Weiss, I know that look. What's on your mind?"
"Okay, this will sound stupid," she laughed, even if the discomfort shone through. "But we were kind of talking about… ancient history, and some stuff that almost happened with Blake and Sun one time, and… well, you don't have a steady girlfriend. So we were wondering if during the tour, you'd want to… crash with us on the bus? It's a pretty big bed…"
"Oh." Clearly in the phone screen, even with the slightly jumpy picture at times, Neon was blushing, having to look away from the screen a moment. It seemed as though she was considering that proposal at first, but then when she looked back: "I… didn't tell you about me and Inu, did I?"
"Sure you did. And that groupie from your show in Ireland," Weiss teased, but very lightly. Then she cleared her throat. "That was part of why we considered this, actually. Plus how much you liked Yang's little video way back when. But of course, if you're not comfortable, or interested…"
"While the idea is extremely tempting, and I do still think that's a very pretty dick from what I remember…" She couldn't even hide the blush now, and the ridiculous attempts to try as she rested her head on her hand only made it more obvious. Eventually, however, she cleared her throat. "People don't know yet, and we wanna keep it that way, for now… but yeah, Inu and I are… more than just a fling. When you spend so much time on a tour bus and the other two sleep all the time… things kinda happen, heh."
"Really? With Inu?!" Weiss blinked for a moment, a little stunned. Partly at the rejection of her offer, which was a minor disappointment in the grand scheme of things, but there was another reason. "Wow… I mean, she's always so quiet, wearing those headphones all the time. I figured you'd go for a more outgoing type, like yourself."
Usually, she'd agree straight away. But this time, she didn't. She instead appeared offended. "Have you ever tried talking to her? You have her Instagram and Facebook and everything. Once you get her talking, she won't stop. It's adorable, she gets so excited."
"Well… no, I haven't; just in person at a couple of the signings, the company parties. She didn't say a word back to me." Weiss seemed most definitely startled by Neon's annoyance, because the last thing she had wanted to do was offend.
"Because she can't. You honestly haven’t noticed that as soon as fans talk to her, she either pulls out her phone or she just nods really intense?"
Shrugging her shoulders, she responded, "Hey, I just thought she was trying for that whole 'aloof celebrity' vibe! What do you mean, she 'can't'?"
"Dude, no way! She loves that people are talking to her; people usually give her the cold shoulder because she doesn't talk back. But she is listening." Soon after, she rested her hands on the table instead. No longer was she offended, simply trying to explain. "She's mute, dude. Honestly, I thought everyone knew."
"She's… wait, what?" But Neon didn't need to repeat herself. "She's a member of your band, she's a musician, so I… wow. I did not expect that." Her eyebrows shot up. "What… I mean, oh God, I've been so stupid! She probably thinks I hated her and just thought she was boring, I- I walked away from her because she wasn't talking back, I didn't know what else to do!"
"Hey hey, don't sweat it! Happens to her all the time, she knows. I'm sure if you talk to her next time you see her, she'll understand. And we'll have tons of time on tour, right?" She didn't know how else to respond. She couldn't tell Weiss she wasn't offensive; lying would do nothing. But at least she could reassure her. "Inu's pretty easy-going, she won't dwell on anything, so just apologise and she'll probably do her adorable little happy bounce she does."
Slumping down in her chair, Weiss let out a long, slow groan. "Alright… wow, I really hope she doesn't resent me too bad. And this isn't all my fault, you know; a lot of unpleasantness could have been avoided if you just somehow let me know she wouldn't be responding verbally! I mean, I felt like she was only looking and listening to be polite but she secretly wanted me to leave her alone, so I did!"
She couldn't help but chuckle to herself when seeing how flustered Weiss was getting. "Of course she didn't want that! And of course she won't resent you. She'll be fine. In fact…" Seeming to blush once again, she looked around for a moment; before leaning further in toward the camera. "If you're okay with it… I can ask if she wants to take part in that offer? Might be a little more than you were angling for, though."
"Oh, that's…" The notion made Weiss sit back and blink, several times. It was true that she hadn't thought much about Inu Shibe, not more than in passing. She'd had a few scattered conversations with Flynt, and they got along fairly well, but the other two members of FNKI were still somewhat of a mystery.
But when she thought about Inu's dyed-blonde hair, her gentle face and almond-shaped brown eyes, and especially how she was one of the few women she knew that was actually shorter than her and Neon, she felt a little guilty rush of curiosity about what it might be like, being with her in that way.
"I'll… ask Yang. This isn't the original idea, so it seems unwise to assume on her behalf, but… y-yeah, that might be okay," she began to sputter. Already, she had felt nervous about asking Neon in the first place, but had several weeks to rehearse the question, build up her confidence. This was an entirely new ballgame.
"That's fair. You want me to ask her?" But before she could even answer that question again, she began to laugh. "Wait, is this a regular thing you two do? I never expected you guys to be the swingin' type!"
"Actually…" For some reason, even though they were definitely alone on both ends of the call, Weiss's voice dropped to a whisper. "This will be the first time it's actually happened, if it does. We tossed the idea around with, um, this other couple, but we all decided in the end that the timing wasn't right. But…" Her blush was starting to rival Neon's now, despite promising herself she would be as casual about this as she could. "I've never forgotten how much fun you are. And how you drooled over Yang's video. So you're a natural choice, right?"
The blush was getting no better on Neon’s end as she was rather obviously rendering a mental image. Especially when she was squirming in her seat a little while avoiding eye contact. But rather than comment further, after the brief pause, she teased, "Think of the children."
Snorting in bemusement, Weiss finally took another sip of her coffee as she forced herself to calm down a bit. "Glowstick dipstick. But seriously, listen… I know Inu's very cute, and I’m no hag exactly, but… well, I guess what I'm saying is, if either of you aren't interested because my body's gone to Hell in a handbasket the past few years, don't even worry about it."
"Psshhh, are you kidding me? You look fine, and I'm sure even without clothes you'll look fine as well. You got a rockin' body anyone'd be jealous of."
"Well, thank you," Weiss said primly, not letting on how much that helped ease her still-fragile pride on the issue. Having Yang to reassure her all the time that she was still the "perfect ten" pop star she married went a long way toward that, and her doubts were never quite so pronounced as they had been before their relationship began. Still, it was something she would probably struggle with for a long time yet.
"Anyway, I'm looking forward to your answer. I only suggested the bus because despite the previous break-in, it's rather discreet, the new one has better locks, and no one will question why we're all in there together." Then in a still-stunned voice, she added, "All… four of us. Wow, my life turned out so much different than I expected at nineteen!"
Snorting herself, she looked straight to the screen again, smiling endearingly. "But I'm sure you wouldn't change a thing, right? Total perfect life. Got your family, your career, that sweet place on the lake… you're living the dream, I'm jealous."
"Then be part of that dream," she wheedled, mostly kidding as she displayed a moment later when she giggled. "Okay, okay, I'll drop it for now. And we seem to be all set here, so I'll have Father follow up on that date in DC and then we'll see where we are tomorrow. Sound good?"
"Can do! Right, I'll let you go, and I'll text you if Inu is a maybe or not, if you ask Yang." But just as she reached toward the phone, she paused. "Oh yeah! And, give the little one a kiss from me."
"Don't worry, I will. She's-"
At that moment, a small furry bundle leapt into her lap, and she laughed, petting her idly. "I think she heard you, Neon! Xu-Xu, say hi to your 'cousin'!"
The other side the screen, Neon was quite obviously giggling, even giving a wave with her fingers toward the small white flat-faced cat that was purring away while Weiss petted it. "Hi Xu-Xu! Us cats gotta stick together, huh?"
Picking up her little paw, Weiss helped the ball of fluff wave back. Then she laughed when she jumped down. "And hates it when I make her do human things."
"Hey, I hate it when people make me do human things too. Like getting dressed and having to be presentable when I'd rather just lay down and lick my own-"
"NEON!" But she was laughing, despite being so scandalised. "If you figure out how to accomplish that, tell me how; I think Yang would be just as interested in that lesson!"
"And I'm sure you'd be interested in watching that." Laughing again, she finally did reach for the phone this time. "You fuss over said darling wife, while I go… pick an outfit for when Inu comes over tonight. Call you soon!"
"Alright, have fuuuun!" The extra emphasis was clear in its intent, but she hung up before Neon could even so much as roll her eyes.
Then Weiss walked into the kitchen and dumped out the rest of her cappuccino. Her mood was light; the new tour was on track, their tentative plans to explore "recreational activities" with outside parties had not been met with a definite negative, and all else was as it should be. How had she got so lucky?
"Okay, the one you saw in that magazine would look great on you. That's if you wanted to go with white, I mean, have you seen some of the gorgeous purple dresses they've been doing?"
There was the faint voice of her wife from the other end of the kitchen. She too was locked in conversation with her phone screen, but unlike Weiss, was actually making sure to drink her coffee. While Weiss's call was to handle business, Yang's was to help Blake plan her own big day.
She remembered fondly how that even came to be. The rest of the Schnee-Xiao Long wedding party had plotted it without Blake's knowledge, had made sure that Blake was the one to catch Yang's bouquet when it was thrown, and have him right behind her down on one knee when she caught it. Of course she said yes; the two had been a couple for longer than Weiss and Yang had. And the several “It's about time!” comments from the other attendees confirmed it was the right decision.
Of course, now it meant all the stress of the organisation, which Yang had assisted with.
"But the purple ones will make me look like a giant plumb," Blake lamented weakly, running a hand through her bangs. "And you know I already hate how I look in dresses… can't I just borrow yours? Maybe it's not original, but it's a great dress, right?"
"If you want to you're more than welcome, but don't you want your own for your special day? Plus mine only really works if you're gonna have your wedding in Hawaii as well, with the flowers ‘n’ stuff." She took another sip of her drink while flicking through a couple more of the magazines she had to hand. Some which she'd saved just for helping Blake with this task.
"I'm just really stressing about this whole thing… and it's more about Sun's parents than him, they're all about us having a super traditional huge church wedding so they can show off the photos to everybody, and we just want you guys there at the Justice of the Peace and to get on with the reception, you know?" With a quiet laugh, she added, "But you have been awesome through all this. Thanks so much."
"Sounds like Sun's parents aren't quite ready to admit their little boy's a grown man. He told 'em to buzz off yet?" She continued to go through one of the magazines a bit longer, eventually stopping on one page. Folding the corner over so it was saved, she then looked back to her smiling friend. "And shut up. You were a godsend when it came to mine and Weiss's. And our bachelorette party was the best thing ever, told you I'd make it up to you."
"Oh that was totally my pleasure! You guys looked awesome, the party was a blast, and I've used the 'bridesmaid dress' every time we go to the beach, since I'm not much of a bikini girl. But yeah, Sun's parents are pretty traditional like that, they either want us to have an Eastern wedding or a Western one. Alternative ceremonies make them get all grumpy."
"Would ours have made them go 'Aaaaaahhhhh!' ?" she asked with a giggle. However, that did give her another idea. While she and Weiss were debating the style of their wedding, an Eastern wedding did come up. Especially when Yang knew how keen Weiss would be on it. Even if in the end they opted for something else instead, that didn't mean Blake and Sun had to.
"You know, what about a hanfu? I could hook you up with the place that did mine."
"O-oh? You… sure you won't have a problem with that?" The question was subtle, but necessary. "Not just because of that time, but I'm still a white girl. It wouldn't seem like I was trying to be something I'm not?"
Yang smiled in sympathy. "Dude, that’s ancient history. Me being mad doesn’t mean you didn’t look really good in it. And I say go for it! I know he's not really big on Chinese shit, exactly like me; but no reason why you can't ask him, right? May even keep his mom and dad off your back."
The image of Blake on the screen paused to think that over. "Well… I did always think yours was beautiful… would you go with me to have one fitted, so I don't look like some weirdo with an Asian fetish?" Then she laughed. "Even if it might be slightly true."
"Considering your dating history, yeah," Yang giggled with her. "Course I'll come with you, girl. I got another appointment on Friday, we can meet up afterward and go then?"
Alas, that was something that still hadn't quite changed. There had never been another near-miss again, but on the odd occasion, a rough patch would come. Thankfully now Yang was doing a much better job of admitting she wasn’t okay, and accepting the help. Although she probably didn't need ongoing counselling any longer, she continued to attend once a week until told otherwise “just in case” - and with Weiss and her friends’ encouragement that there was nothing wrong with mental health maintenance.
"Definitely," Blake responded immediately, nodding her understanding. "We'll have to get dinner afterward, Sun is off with his buddies doing some kind of… rock climbing thing, whatever. I mean, unless I'm taking you away from Wifey?"
"Lemme check. Oh wifey-dearest?" She turned, slightly tilting her chair so Blake could quite clearly see Weiss was in the background, making herself another cappuccino to replace the cold one she had to dispose of. Batting her eyelashes toward her, she tilted her head. "May I please, please, pretty please go for lunch with my bestie on Friday?"
"Alright," Weiss called back in an intentionally droll tone of voice as she turned the machine on. "Just don't have any sex unless you bring protection."
Of course, Blake was immediately sputtering and shouting, "H-hey, we haven't done that in forever, and we agreed that- oh, just shut the fuck up!"
But all the while Yang was laughing, even if she was surprised by the comment. They kept joking about it, even if they hadn't re-engaged in that activity since she and Weiss reunited, but it didn't stop the teasing. Even if she 'barked' right back, "Well, it's not as if we're getting any with how loud you get!"
And just as loudly, Weiss rebutted, "You ride me too hard! Especially in the ass! How do you expect me to keep it down when you're stretching out my-"
"WOW, okay, I do not need to hear this!" Blake laughed uncomfortably.
"Holy fucking shit, I did not think you'd yell about that across the room." Now it was Yang who ended up blushing uncontrollably as she went back to the camera, trying to bring her hair forward to cover her face however she could, groaning behind it.
"You really like that?" Blake called out, clearly intending it for Weiss.
"Sure!" Once her beverage was ready, she came over to stand behind Yang's chair, sipping at the mug. "Was pretty unusual at first, I'll admit, but… now it's a good alternative once in awhile. Sometimes I'm more in the mood for that, to be entirely honest with you."
Now Blake and Yang were both blushing, with Weiss the only one oddly calm. "Huh," the brunette breathed, pressing a hand into her mouth for a few seconds. "I mean, I've done it to Sun a million times, but never felt like I wanted to be on the receiving end…"
"I can't speak for those without a prostate, but it's hella fun even if you don't touch it directly…" The voice came from behind the blonde hair, still slightly muffled as Yang tried to hide away the violently red cheeks. Eventually, when the other two were done laughing at her, she did come out again, taking a sip of her drink to try and distract herself for a little while longer, before suddenly saying, "Hey, you could always save that for the wedding night."
"Good point," Blake laughed, still sounding uncertain. "My regular virginity's a distant memory by now, but the anal kind can be my wedding present to the big dope. Then again, he's just as likely to insist he's the one on bottom."
"Oh, I remember," Weiss chuckled. "He seemed to enjoy Yang's lap the few times we got him to sit on it…"
"You guys just use me as a sex toy to turn him on, I swear to god." Her wife rolled her eyes, looking off to one side. She never meant it, even if it was a very common occurrence when it came to teasing Blake's fiance.
"Don't be fooled by his 'nah, I'm not about that life' act," Blake told Yang with a slightly devilish smirk. "If you ever did want to bend him over the bed, he'd be thrilled." Then she held up a hand to forestall any comments. "Not saying we aren't satisfied with our decision to keep things, you know, separated. Just… he sure is a butt-slut."
"Yes, thank you, Miss Belladonna — soon to be Wukong." The thought was still appealing to her even now. Even if it had been many years of sleeping with Weiss and only Weiss, the occasional fantasy of sleeping with men again did cross her mind. She'd more or less accepted that no matter who her partner was, she was pansexual. It was just that sleeping with someone like Sun meant that she could still be the top.
But that would remain a fantasy. She was happy with who she was with, and happy with their current status. Even if it was only on occasion, they had other things to worry about. More important things.
"Although…"
Blake raised an eyebrow. "Although?"
"Well," Weiss began with a smirk as she calmly slid into Yang's lap, "Our decision stands. But how about… a competition? To span two nights during our honeymoon. First you and I on bottom, then Sun and Yang on bottom. And we see who's the loudest. In the event of a tie, we have one final round of the usual missionary as a tie-breaker."
Seeing that Blake was seriously considering that offer, Yang frantically looked between them back and forth, eventually raising a hand to her face again in an attempt to cover it. "Seriously?! Are you in heat right now or something? First that little ‘idea’ about Neon, and now this! Do I need to hose you down?!"
"Hey, it'd be kind of hot without getting our wires crossed," Blake admitted, though she too was still holding a hand in front of her face. "But… yeah, I'll have to talk it over with Sun. I won't tell him about the back door, since that's a surprise, but just… the other part, and see where we end up."
"Excellent!" Weiss said, cheeks only slightly pink as she wriggled more comfortably into her wife's thighs. "And honestly, it's just a random idea I had, based on… well, another conversation I had recently. No pressure."
"Okay, yeah, good to know there's no pressure," Blake snorted. "Yang, uh, you okay over there?"
"Oh, just fine. I thought we were just asking one another about dinner plans and it leads to sex contests, so I'm a little flustered, that's all." Yang instead tried to go for her coffee, even if Weiss, now present on her lap made that incredibly difficult. But realising how long they'd been on the phone, she asked, "Should I let you go? Gotta get back to work, right?"
"Oh! Good point, I only have ten minutes left on my lunch, so I should probably warm up that tuna-noodle bake. Love you guys — see you Friday, Yang!"
"Text ya later!" And with that, she reached toward the phone, giving a brief wave before she cut off the call. Then she was left with her wife on her lap, who was still smirking even with her faint blush. The smug expression Yang grew to love. "You are a nightmare."
"You have NO idea." As she shifted back and forth, intentionally winding up her wife now, she immediately transitioned into the business they had most hoped to get around to after all the other was taken care of, and using the tail end of her own call to get there. "So about our potential arrangement with Neon. There's a snag that might not be a snag."
"Arrangement with- oh." At least her cheeks were already red, so she didn't have to make any excuses. Sliding her hands around her wife's body to hold her on her lap, she asked, "And what snag is that?"
"She wants to possibly invite Inu. You know, that shy girl from her band?"
"Oh, the cute little mute girl? She wants to make it a foursome? Really?" She assumed the “bonding session” would be more than enough to ask, but now this seemed to be even better than they hoped! More to assist with, should the mood call for it – and if they paired off, no matter who with, it wouldn’t be so awkward and nobody would feel left out. Even if adding more than just Neon made her more nervous.
"YOU KNEW?!" Weiss burst out, drawing back in alarm. Then she deflated, mouth still hanging open. "Why am I always the last one to know anything?! Like honestly, I feel so stupid all the time!"
"You didn't?!" Yang couldn't help but laugh at her misfortune. She really had slipped on noticing so many things. From Yang being trans to even Neon's obvious flirting when on the talk show. Seemed it expanded even to this.
Weiss merely sat there looking grumpy and embarrassed until Yang's laughter died down. Then she continued, "Alright, listen… I just assumed she didn't like me, or wasn't very sociable. My mistake. Anyway, she is pretty cute, I just haven't ever had any reason to think about her before now since — through no fault of my own — I thought she wasn't interested in talking to me, okay?"
Finally Yang nodded, keeping her giggle suppressed as best she could so Weiss didn't have to hear her continuously making fun of her slow realisation skills. Then went back to the subject again. "Yeah… Inu is pretty fucking cute. Would be a good tale."
"Just imagine," she continued softly, settling in against her once more as she gazed up at the ceiling. "Two months of unrestricted exploration with two women as gorgeous as them… and then, when the tour is over, back to our lives like nothing ever happened. No strings."
"Yeah? Well, that does sound pretty interesting…" Even if she wasn’t totally sure about the ‘no strings’ part working. After all, Blake had still acted a little weird around her for a year or so after their ‘no strings’ romps. She pulled Weiss slightly more towards her, lightly groping the ass cheek as she looked up with a slight smirk of her own. "And after two years of worrying about volume, will be nice to just cut loose and forget about it."
Biting her bottom lip, Weiss allowed her eyes to close as she relished the gentle sensations of pleasure, thrived upon them. "Mmm… yeah, and Neon can get pretty loud. Not as loud as me, though. And…" She sighed, though she began to rub her hand up and down Yang's shoulder through her orange t-shirt. "I am sorry that it makes it so hard for us to… to do you-know-what lately. But when you really get me going-"
"Yeah, have you at least thought about the ball gag?" She smirked teasingly, continuing to stroke her backside and keep grasping on occasion, lightly shrugging the shoulder that Weiss was stroking. "So we don't have to worry about it. Last thing we want is tiny feets walking into the room to see what's up with all the racket."
At that moment, Xu-Xu meowed and came up to them, and Weiss blinked down at her. "Silly kitty. Hmm… you may have a point. Let's adjourn to our bedroom." As she stood, she added, "And we talked about all that ball gag and BDSM stuff, and I told you that I am not interested! Handcuffs are kinky enough for me!"
"I never said the rest! Literally just the gag, for noise reasons!" She laughed, taking her hand and following her straight away. As they turned the corner to head up the stairs, however, Yang spared a small wave to Xu-xu, putting on a babying voice. "And you're going to stay down here and be a good girl! Yes you are, yes you are!"
"Or we'll get out the spray bottle again, yes we will, yes we will!" Weiss said in the same cloying tone. Of course, the cat knew no difference in their words, and simply blinked up at them curiously.
Once they were in the room, Weiss kicked the door shut with her heel and whipped her white blouse off so fast that a few buttons popped free, forever ruining it unless she took the time to sew them back on. Which she likely wouldn't. And Yang quickly threw off her top in response, already reaching behind herself to unclasp her bra. It seemed like forever ago that the cast stopped her before. In fact, she could barely remember it at all.
When she threw the bra among their shirts, Yang spared a glance to the digital clock on their bed side table. Three PM. "We got one hour before Ruby gets here. Ready to race?"
"PAH!" Weiss burst out as she shucked her yoga pants and panties all in one go. "We both know that we can get so much done in an hour, it's not even funny!" Then she fluffed out her hair once she was standing there entirely nude. "Now then… what are you gonna do to your 'princess'?"
Still unbuckling her belt and shorts, she was trying to shuffle them and her underwear down as quickly as she could, quickly pushing her own hair up and out her face. Seemed Weiss's lap sitting and teasing had completely paid off, considering Yang was already semi-erect out of the gate.
"Oh I don't know… There's so many things I could do. Maybe I should pin you up against a wall; or bend you over the bed…"
"The wall?" Weiss gasped, face lighting up in excitement. "Wow, we haven't done that since… Belize, I think it was." She began to stride forward. "Do it, if you think you can."
Moving forward to meet her, Yang grasped her arms right away, using them to push her back into the nearest wall with no hope of release. "Don't think I won't," she said with a smirk, before dipping to kiss her more firmly. It'd been so long, no wonder they were each so desperate to rough one another up in the sheets. Or against the nearest flat surface, in this case.
"Nnhhh!" Weiss groaned against the lips crushing down on hers, already feeling Yang's hardness getting harder up against her curling hairs. There was a reason she did not take as much care trimming them lately, but she would reinitiate her beautification rituals from back in her solo tour days soon enough, when she and Yang were on the bus. With or without Neon and her silent companion.
Satisfied she was pinned long enough, her hands released Weiss's wrists, instead moving down her body while they kissed up a storm. Tongues battling, bodies grinding against one another firmly; just like their adrenaline filled days on tour. When they had their moments, it never really changed. Sure, they sped things up by removing their own clothes rather than each other's, and protection was no longer an issue; but in that sense, the two of them never truly grew up. They adored their time together.
"God, your rocket is already clearing the launch pad," Weiss half-laughed, half-groaned as she leaned her neck to the side to allow Yang to have her way with it. But she didn't mind; that was the goal, after all. To enjoy each other with their stolen moment.
"Always is for you." But she immediately fell to biting and suckling without a single care as to who saw the mark afterward. By now neither of them did; anyone who had a problem was simply laughed at by Yang. One hand was brushing it's way over her body, brushing to the small area above the hair. A finger seemed to stroke over something in particular; a scar that wasn't there before. It was only a slight bump of skin, but all the same, Yang fussed over it. Breaking from her kiss to whisper, "Because who can resist your gorgeous body? This included."
Weiss froze and looked away. Collected herself, suppressed strong reactions that wanted to take over the mood. It didn’t take as long as it had once upon a time, and a few seconds later, she was already looking back to Yang, smiling a small, coy smile.
"Apparently, not you," she whispered gratefully.
Noticing the slight funk in her mood, she moved the hand to her hips. Once her diva was smiling again, she brushed that hand downward, pulling Weiss's leg up against her rather firmly. "Are you kidding me?" she asked, pecking at her neck once more. "I don't stand a single chance of turning up my nose at this beautiful prize."
Another sigh, one of great need, escaped Weiss as she hitched herself up higher, wrapping her legs around Yang and locking them at the ankles to help support her weight. Between that and the wall, they were able to keep her weight upward. The thickness grinding up against her clit was delectable, but she couldn't wait to get more out of Yang than just that.
"Fuck me hard," she urged, pressing her cheek urgently against the crown of her head. "Mmhhh… more!"
"You got it, princess." Not lingering to tease further, she drew her hips back, sparing a hand to line herself up with the entrance of her lover's body. Then she surged forward, releasing a needy moan when she felt her length enter the warm, wet folds. The hand returned to her ass to support her again before she set to work. They hadn't time to waste, and were eager to enjoy their precious hour.
Screams of pleasure erupted the instant she felt herself being filled by her wife, head thrown back in ecstasy, arms coming up to wrap around Yang's back as she shifted her hips back and forth. Already, she felt ready to burst — and they had been at it mere seconds! At this rate, they would not only finish, but have time for an episode of Jessica Jones.
It was a good thing they were somewhat alone in the house with the volume of those moans. Not that Xu-Xu would bother them, thanks to the closed door. There was one occasion where the ball of fluff thought it appropriate to hop and curl up on the bedsheets above the couple, despite them quite obviously playing with each other underneath – even trying to pounce on certain bumps under the sheet. Needless to say, it was still a hilarious encounter.
Yang's own moans were simply desperate with need. Pumping herself in and out at a hard and fast pace, she bit her own lip to try and prevent them becoming too loud. For the sake of her own sense of pride more than anything. And Weiss was already fast approaching her own finish. Could she really have been this hard up for time spent alone with Yang? They should never have let themselves get this busy, this often; she would have to start setting aside more time for them to get wild and uninhibited.
"NNhhah! Yang, you're so… GOD, I needed this!"
She'd barely started, but could already feel the telltale signs her wife was about to finish. Not this soon already, she needed more time. Playing this into the game, she leaned in close and purred, "Don't you dare come. I'm not done with you yet."
A little thrill shot down into Weiss’s stomach; she loved when she was forceful. Just enough of a thrill, being commanded like that… and besides, she wanted to see how much better she could feel if she held out longer. Nodding her understanding, she tried to suppress the onslaught of pleasure that the thrusting was bringing her, licking her lips as she was bounced up and down against the wall. Yang was like an animal, unhinged and wild, desperately set on one thing and one thing only. There was a moan each time she pushed deep into her lover's body, feeling as Weiss's muscles twitched in a desperate attempt to hold off. She knew she wouldn't be able to for long, but hopefully enough time so she could find her own release. Which at this rate was building fast.
Alas, Weiss couldn't manage it any longer than that. All she had time to pant was, "K-keep going, don't stop!" before she was already riding out an orgasm unlike any she had felt in weeks. It was as sudden as it was intense.
And Yang didn’t stop. She continued to pump fast and hard, even when Weiss's muscles were trying to clamp onto her member, trying to get something out of it. The build up was quick, but getting to the finish line wasn't quite as quick at arriving.
Or arriving at all. An annoyed groan later she stopped, slipping herself out of Weiss's body. Her member was still hard, and now more or less dripping with Weiss's juices but even that wasn't enough.
"It's no good… I can't quite get there. Damnit."
"Now I… remember why we haven't done this in a while," Weiss laughed breathlessly as she was slowly let down to stand on her own. "Takes too long. Take me to the bed."
As she had become accustomed to Yang throwing her over her shoulder, it had happened so many times, she didn't even truly ask about it anymore. Which was exactly what happened; Yang lifted her up and over, quickly pacing toward the bed while she still had herself in its full glory. There was no way she wanted that to fade yet, not when they were barely fifteen minutes into their hour. While they both giggled, she tossed Weiss down into the plush mattress, about to climb on top of her when…
She paused, spying the bedside drawer. And remembered something they hadn't done in a long long time. It'd been the initial subject of her phone call with Blake, ironically enough, yet she could barely remember the last time they tried. Pausing as she was straddled over Weiss's hips, she asked, "What about… you taking me?"
"How about you taking me?" Weiss playfully teased, but she wasn't truly going to ignore her wife's request. Instead, she thumbed over her shoulder at the table. "Go on, get your best friend, but… I want you to play with me a little more first, if that's alright."
"That can easily be arranged…" She grinned, crawling over her petite wife to get to the bedside drawer. Shuffling through the various things placed in there to hide the particularly raunchy items, she pulled out the bottle of lubricant first, and then hesitated. "Hmm… double-ender, or you want me to just hit your clit this round?"
"Ooh, you're so playful today… I can't decide." Her smile was genuine; this was a lot of fun for her. "Get a few toys out and we'll figure it out later. Right now… just use your tongue. God, I miss that tongue…"
Nodding in agreement with her wife, Yang did as she was asked, pulling out the few toys they had. Their first, the icey blue friend from that video together, a double ended yellow one, a butt plug and a small vibrator. Then she went back to work. Climbing down her lover's body, she left a trail of kisses down the soft delicate skin, hands grasping her legs to prise them apart. All Weiss did was stretch out luxuriously, a contented smile on her face. Having just climaxed, she really loved having that moment to simply bask in the worship, to let Yang's lips graze over her…
Even her soft thatch of hair, which she had flinched at earlier. It did not happen a second time; she merely moaned slightly lower, loving how much her bodyguard loved her as she began to glide her toes up and down Yang's hips and thighs, trying to repay the attention in some small way. They had plenty of time to spare, plenty of time to slow down and give attention to Yang’s favourite body in the world. Even if Weiss was touchy about certain areas these days, Yang wasn’t. She would lavish the faint marks with attention, kissing continuously, all the way along the length of it.
"You've given me so much," she seemed to whisper directly to the skin, kissing one more time before she started to make her way lower. "Allow me, princess, to give back."
"Anytime," she responded, with tears of gratitude in her eyes. They wouldn't quite fall, she was past that by now, but they always welled up slightly when Yang was so considerate.
And then the eyes fell closed with a sigh of pleasure when lips hit home. "Ooh…"
This time, Yang treated her lover’s flower it with delicate care. A huge contrast between the rough treatment she'd given it not even five minutes ago. Not wanting to disappoint, she allowed her tongue to dip between the lips. Arching her back into the contact, Weiss allowed her legs to come to a rest on Yang's hips while the tongue worked its magic. Even though she had already finished, she wanted more; always more from Yang, she needed it! Licking her lips, her idle hands came up to squeeze her own chest, hoping to coax that much more pleasure from the moment.
Feeling her lips curl into a smile, she continued to savour the flavours of her lover, kissing and licking and dipping her tongue all around the softer skin. Occasionally she made sure to raise her tongue more than usual, flicking it across the surface of the delicate nub at the top. Just enough to give her a taste of what was to come. Every instant that the wet muscle met her nub, the diva bucked upward, as if chasing the sensation. And in a way, she was, though at the same time she also relished the chase, and welcomed waiting for Yang to pursue her again.
Lightly smirking this time, she waited for when Weiss seemed to be unsuspecting… and then did it again. And she continued that pattern, waiting until her guard was down before attacking. It wasn't until the fifth time it happened that she started to giggle, looking up to her from below with a cheeky grin.
"Stop teasing!" Weiss gasped breathlessly, bringing her heel down on Yang's back. "You're… so bad!"
"I know." She giggled, wincing at the brief pain from the kick. "But you already came once. That's not fair."
"And I'd want you to come five or six times if it was possible, but… we know there's only one way you can technically do it twice." Reaching over blindly, she was finally able to pick up and present Yang with the correct implement; the yellow one. "Care to… share the banana?"
She rolled her eyes, hitching herself up to take it from her. "And here I thought you were gonna treat me. Rude." But there was still a smile on her face when she crawled over again to fetch the bottle of lube, sitting it by Weiss's side for a moment so she could prepare the rest. Holding the 'giving' end toward her, she smirked. "Open wide."
Amused, she did as Yang asked — to the best of her abilities. Though Weiss may have been complaining about her aging body a few minutes ago, it wasn't as if she was taking the passage of time lying down; she was still in damn good shape. She curled her abdomen inward, reaching down and clasping her ankles to pull her feet up and position them behind her head.
"Is… this wide enough?"
Every time, Yang was amazed at the displays Weiss put on for her. She remembered how flexible Blake was, but when she told Weiss that, she was determined to beat her. And that training seemed to pay off, certainly now more than ever.
"It's good… But." She held up the dildo again, looking between it, and where it would be pushed into. "You're making this difficult to put on."
"Too bad," Weiss goaded with a grin, obviously clenching her hindmuscles. "Let's see how you pull this off; I'm curious now."
"Geeze, you make this difficult," she groaned, looking toward the now-tightened opening of her lover again. This position was going to make it so much more filling for her, but also so awkward for Yang to work with. Still, she was up for the challenge. Shuffling toward her target, she held up the yellow cock, slowly lining up the end of it with her entrance. Gradually, she pushed it up against her, slowly applying more pressure to push it inside.
"Ohhhh, that's what I like," the diva groaned in an almost obscene voice, eyes closing in bliss at the feeling of the length filling her. None of the toys were that small, but the thing she liked about this end of the yellow one was that it was just about the same size as Yang. Meanwhile, the other end… well, that was quite a bit larger.
Once it was fully slid inside, Yang took a long look at her while holding up the straps on either side. Which was making it increasingly difficult to determine how she would do it. She couldn't thread it around herself like normal, or move her legs much from that position. Eventually, she just blushed and let out a whine of annoyance.
"Stop ogling and start strapping," Weiss taunted. But when Yang only scratched her head, she rolled her eyes and lowered her legs with a slight grunt, pushing her hips up off the bed. "Is this easier for you?"
"Was that so hard to do instead of just showing off, Mrs Flexible?" she asked sarcastically, finally getting back to work now she could reach things properly. Strapping the ends around both her legs to keep it in place, she was finally ready to take her.
Of course, while Yang waited for a response, she was also looking at the much bigger end. The one she'd be receiving. It was slightly bigger than their icey blue friend in width, but Yang assured Weiss she could handle it. And a handful of times, she certainly did. Still, the sight was always one that made her weak in the knees.
Licking her lips as she watched Yang gaze at the opening, unbelievably turned on by the notion, Weiss couldn't resist any longer. Voice husky and needy, she whispered, "Hand me that lube and get your ass over my face. You have no idea how much I want to get you ready for my cock."
Immediately, Yang’s blush doubled. She looked in shock back at Weiss again, barely able to believe how forward she was being today. But she loved it and wasn't about to argue. Still needy herself, she did just as she was asked, handing the bottle straight over and climbing toward her, turning herself around once close enough so she'd present herself.
"Whatever you say, princess."
"Don't act like we don't both know how much you love it," Weiss breathed, taking in the glorious sight. Perhaps she didn't speak this plainly all the time, and it had been a while since they got to have a good, long session like this, but she had made no secret of how much fun she found toying with the tight little opening below her lover's organ.
Which was partly why she wasted no time in drawing it down closer, pressing her lips up against the tightly-puckered skin with a contented little mewl. And why Yang bit her lip, suppressing the shaky moan that attempted to escape. The fact she hadn't yet come was really taking its toll on her, making her grow desperate with desire and lust. She could even feel the slight chill from where it was still wet with her wife’s essence. But if only she could place such wetness to the opening Weiss required.
At least she knew her lover would handle that with the lubricant. She enjoyed doing that, and often insisted she'd do it over Yang herself.
However, the smaller woman was still engaged in prelubrication. As her thumb flicked open the bottle next to her, the other hand kept Yang's hips still as she pressed her tongue up against the ring of muscle as hard as she could, trying to worm her way inside without any forewarning or coaxing.
"NNNN!!! Jesus, is it even possible to work out with your t-tongue?!" she asked, trying to suppress the moans once more as she let Weiss do her work, feeling the attempts to push inside very easily. Grasping the bedsheets tightly for a moment to try and hold on, she slowly looked backwards at what was happening, barely able to keep herself contained. The moans into the skin were completely uninhibited, but she didn't take long to fully enjoy them before she was bringing up the bottle and drizzling the clear liquid onto where her tongue had just opened very slightly.
"Do you have any idea how much I wish we had more time than we do today?" she sighed shakily as she brought one fingertip up to rest against the slicked skin, pressing in gently. "It's been like, five seconds, and I miss the taste of your ass already… weird as that sounds, I know."
"I never said it was weird when you first admitted you liked the taste, I sure as hell ain't gonna start saying it now." Hanging onto the sheets even still as she felt the tip begin to slide inside, she let out a moan of her own, grinning in sheer delight as her finger easily penetrated it, and teasingly began to open her up. "Thaaaaat's it, right like that…"
Biting her lip — partly just because she was enjoying participating in the show, but partly to further enjoy the lingering taste of Yang on her lips — she watched as her finger slid all the way into the tight little opening, looked on in detached wonder as it drew out again. Feeling some resistance, she raised the bottle and added a little more, letting it start to drip down around the sides before she pushed again. A few more repeated attempts, and it was flying in and out of Yang freely.
She knew her weakness too well. Sure, getting her dick off was good, but this had her wife singing. Each time the finger slid inside, she couldn't hold back, letting out yet another needy moan into the air. And now it was going at a rapid pace, it was becoming very difficult not to jerk herself off whilst this was happening.
Speaking of which… Holding her hand back, she tried to stop her moans a moment, asking, "The bottle… Lemme prepare you."
That made Weiss pause entirely. "Oh, you… want to prepare me, too?" Her abdomen clenched, which Yang would have to be completely overtaken by the throes of the teasing in her hindquarters to miss. Gulping, she glanced over at the black plug; it had been so long since they used that, and with good reason. It was not at all petite. Her secondary entrance was only used to Yang being in there, and not the wider girth of said toy.
"Yeah, make things slide all the more easier," Yang explained. Although she noticed the clenching, and sudden anticipation when it came to her suggestion, she hadn't seemed to have guessed what Weiss was thinking. Only moving one of her hands to the banana for a moment. Seemed they were both on a slightly different page and didn't realise it.
Gulping at the thought of being double-penetrated for only the second or third time in her life, and the first with the hefty plug they had purchased primarily for Yang's needs, Weiss nodded and reached over to grasp it, passing both it and the bottle to her wife.
"Okay, j-just… just go slow?"
"…W-wait, what?" Suddenly appearing to have noticed what Weiss was implying, she looked at the items being handed to her. All she had expected was to be taken herself with the other end of the strap on, and then to put the rest away. Now Weiss wanted to use that as well? She really did want to cram everything into one hour. "You serious? You want this?"
"Yeah! I mean… wait, was that not what you were talking about?" Letting out a weakly nervous laugh, she licked her lips and said, "O-oh. Wow, I guess I really have ass on the brain." Then she giggled and said, "Does that make me a butthead?"
Chuckling to herself, Yang crawled forward and away from Weiss's finger at last, shuffling forward enough to prepare things down below. "Yep, it sure does. But who can blame you, it's been a while." Bringing the bottle up into her hands, she squeezed a hearty helping onto the yellow dildo first, getting right to work as she stroked it up and down, thoroughly soaking the entirety of what wasn’t inside her wife. There were times where she'd make her grip rather tight, enough to make the other side pump in and out of her.
Then she let a little more drizzle down between Weiss’s cheeks. Once the bottle was set down, she slid a finger into her – all at once. By now, they both knew her princess’s ass could take that with almost no effort. It pumped in and out of her until she felt the muscles give, ready to receive more.
"Mmhhh," Weiss sighed, allowing her eyes to close from the dull pleasure of the twin sensations. "Yeah… jack me off, you beautiful woman. Make your man proud."
Smirking to herself, she continued to coat the length as wet as she could. That in addition to how wet her own opening was, thanks to Weiss, she knew this would be an easy and smooth ride. Now it was her turn. She looked over her shoulder to deliberately check Weiss was looking, holding the large plug into her view. Then with the other hand, she squeezed a large helping of the liquid all over it. "And does my man… want his butt to be claimed?"
The fleeting relief that Weiss had felt when the attention returned to the "banana" was now draining away as she stared at the implement again. Her lips parted, and she had intended to go ahead and tell her wife that maybe they shouldn't bother tonight. That she liked the idea, but wanted to work up to it gradually; worry about the huge thing another time.
What came out was, "Yes."
However, Yang noticed the worried expression. It was true that they didn’t play with Weiss’s butt nearly as much as the other way around – well, with the exception of Yang claiming it with her cock. But she could give her the choice. Turning around to line her cheeks up with the phallus, she placed the plug down a moment to pick up the last toy she'd picked out. The vibrator. It was a lot smaller in comparison, however, if she was already penetrated in one hole, it would be plenty.
"Seriously, we can just use this baby instead if you don't want the plug. I know it's fucking huge; not the biggest on the market, but a lot to take up the ass."
"Maybe I want you to use both," she joked, not even laughing or smiling at the quip as she considered. "But… no, we have to use a plug; the other thing would fall out once I start fucking you." Then she took a deep breath. "You've opened up my ass a hundred times. I think I'm ready to… at least try this thing. See if I can take it. And if it doesn’t work, that’s fine."
"Well, alright, Princess." And here she was thinking she could get her end, but Weiss was so insatiable she needed more – and what Weiss wanted, Weiss got. Retrieving the plug again and putting the vibrator back, she climbed down once again to between Weiss's legs. Pressing the tapering end of the well-lubricated silicon between those cheeks, she lined it up with the slightly-loosened ring of muscle, starting to rotate around it to open her.
"Ohhhh God," Weiss breathed shakily, cheeks moving from side to side at the sensation. "Oh, I hope I open right up for it…" But already, she loved the sensation against her skin; she knew she would, she always had. It was only the thought of how much pressure was about to befall the tightly-puckered opening that kept her from letting go to enjoy the magic befalling her body.
When she felt Weiss relaxing more, Yang began to push pushing harder, rolling the plug around to open her up as much as possible. Easing gently, bearing in mind how much bigger it was toward the base than Yang’s cock. Pressing her cleaner hand to her face, Weiss panted with the effort of not crying out at the intensity. It was so big! Too big, possibly, but it was only about halfway inside of her. Maybe this wouldn’t work, but how would she know if she didn't try? Part of her said that she should be taking out the yellow one while trying this, but somehow, it was also making it easier to take; the whole area being stimulated made her muscles feel more alive, ready for anything. And this certainly qualified as "anything"!
"Doing okay?" she asked, pushing more of it inside even firmer. It was beginning to surpass the width of the strap on itself, the bigger end that Yang was going to take, gradually getting even wider. Still taking in the sight, she could barely believe how much her petite girlfriend could handle.
"WAIT!" Weiss finally gasped out when she felt the pleasure very slightly starting to edge closer to pain – a warning sign both women had learned to heed after a few unfortunate incidents. "Just… it needs a second to catch up!"
“Okay.” Holding it still again, her bodyguard gazed in awe at just how much she had taken already. Above halfway; and only a tiny amount to go. But still, she looked back up to try and catch her expression. "You're like, a finger's width off from the end, y'know. You gonna be okay?"
A weak nod. "Y-yeah… but if you kept going before… I think it would have been bad." Swallowing, she brushed her bangs away from her face; they were beginning to stick. "Can you… twist it a little, stimulate the skin?"
Tilting her head in response, she turned her hand slowly around, spinning the plug within her, inside the right ring of muscle it was forced into. "Like this?"
"NNhhhhhHH! More lube!" she demanded weakly, though her legs were shifting this way and that in extreme pleasure. Even if she might need more lubrication, it being rough was definitely not making her change her mind.
Drawing a very small amount of the plug back out again, Yang went to grasp the bottle, squirting a hearty helping around her skin, and the length itself. Managing to rub it against both, she attempted again, turning the plug around and around to spread the coating evenly.
"Ohhh… okay, I think… yeah, we're good now, it's good… thank you, baby." Her eyes were full of love for the bodyguard suddenly, lips turned up into an adoring smile even as she panted with the effort of weathering the bullet being ground past her defenses.
Nodding, she smiled back for a moment before getting right back to it. Slowly she pushed her hand forward again, stretching Weiss out wider and wider… back to where they were at before, and beyond, until she finally felt the skin accept the rest of it, releasing as the grip took the entire plug in for her and the base sat against her backside.
There was a little "AH!" from Weiss at the plug going all the way in, and then she relaxed completely. "Oh… ooh… oh that feels… interesting…" The two masses inside of her were pressing into one another through the membranes of her body, and it was not an altogether unpleasant sensation. Just a new one.
Simply taking a moment to stare, Yang was blushing anew yet again. Her lover, now with her bigger sized plug inside her dark opening, was ready to go. Phallus lubed up and waiting, just begging to be ridden. Not to mention, Weiss was filled in both her entrances. Not only would this be fantastic for Yang, but it would be something new altogether for her wife.
Grasping the phallus and slowly jerking it up and down again, she asked, "So… how do you want me? Facing you?"
"Ohhhh yeah," Weiss replied without hesitation, twitching all over from even that slight pressure in her cavity. Both of them, now. "That's… yeah, I want to see you… watch you enjoy me…"
Half closing her eyes seductively, she nodded, soon climbing over her yet again to get into position. Straddling her lover's hips, she leant right forward, sparing one of her hands to reach down to grasp the dick of her lover. After a brief pat around, she found it. Pulling it in toward her, she continued to make eye contact with her while she maneuvered that into position, lining it up with her moistened entrance. Until finally, she began to slide down, eyes slightly widening as she felt the pleasure swim through her.
"God, Yang, you look so good!" Weiss glowed, watching as the implement slowly sank deeper and deeper into her the lower her body went. Though Yang's beautiful example of a sex was partially obstructing her view, she still valued both highly, wanting to reach down and play with everything in sight. Again, another time.
Sliding down all the more, Yang eventually let out more needy moans into the air, leaning back to stare at the ceiling as she tried to process. It was so big! And so long… It always felt like something close to a train ramming its way in every time. But she loved every second. Sooner than usual, her cheeks landed right into Weiss’s lap as she moaned out again, "G-god… Ah…"
Weiss couldn’t resist. Even though it was very slightly mean, she moved her hips from side to side a bit earlier than she normally would. She also let out a quiet gasp of pleasure from it shifting inside herself before asking in a playful voice, “Does my wife like being filled by her husband?”
"Is that a trick question?" she asked, adjusting the position of her knees so she was straddling her again, making it much easier to shift herself upward to pull it out slightly. Biting her lip again, she struggled to keep in another moan. It was pushing against her inner walls so easily with each shift, touching all different areas. It felt fantastic! "Of course I do."
Already, Weiss felt almost as if she could finish again; the sensations paired with the sights were incredible, and that was without the mammoth thing inside her rear entrance. She really could scarcely stand it! Yet she wanted it there, was happy to be teased in two different ways at once. Always had been; this was just taking it to the next level.
Forcing herself back down onto it again, Yang looked straight back into Weiss's eyes again when she moaned out, pressing one of her hands onto one of the bare breasts before her. Meanwhile, she didn’t know if she should use her other hand to toy with Weiss more, or for leverage in case her knees didn't suffice. Yet also felt a dying need for something else, the sensation that had never been allowed to come to a close. That needed to be handled.
Once sure Weiss was watching, she reached downward, grasping her length and beginning to jerk firmly, matching the pace of her mild movements on Weiss's fake cock, moaning even more. "Mmm… Yeah."
"HEY!" Weiss yelped out, slapping weakly at Yang's hand as it stroked her erect length feverishly. "What… do you think you're doing with that? It… belongs to me! You have to ask!"
"O-oh, right." Releasing it from her grip, she instead placed it on her stomach a moment, slowing her riding down to give her enough time to ask. "Please, may I stroke myself?"
But to Yang's surprise, what Weiss said was, "No." Then she reached down and grasped it firmly herself, biting her lip at the sensation of her own essence mixing with the small amount that had already escaped from the head. This wasn’t the easiest angle to jerk her off from, but she really wanted to. "No, you may not. Just ride me."
Looking down at Weiss's hand, she nodded in agreement, placing her hand back down to better balance herself as she rode her “husband” again, doing just what she asked. Nodding to show that she understood, and eagerly waited for what was to come. The delicate hand angled up, holding the cock just right so that with every bounce up and down on the rigid length within her, Yang would also end up thrusting into her fist. Seeing as how each bounce also shoved the length inside her tortured sex right up against the filling presence in her other orifice, she somehow almost felt as if she were fucking herself in the ass.
Why was that idea so hot?!
Fucking Weiss’s hand was all the motivation Yang needed to go faster. Allowing herself to be filled over and over, she thrust harder, quicker. The moans practically poured through her mouth as she looked toward her with a grin, even starting to laugh.
"Oh, this is amusing to you, is it?" Weiss teased breathlessly, licking her lips as she felt Yang sliding in and out of her fingers, teasing everything in the back region of herself. "We'll… see how funny you find it… NOW!"
And with that, she began to raise her hips up to meet Yang's with increasing frequency, nearly doubling how hard and fast she rammed into her over and over. The screams of pleasure only got louder. Such a thick cock, and the fist was curled so tight around her own! The more she backed her hips to meet with Weiss's own, the closer she was getting. Especially when on a few particular thrusts, she felt her favourite spot being assaulted again and again, unable to help the higher pitched squeal that came from her when it did.
Meanwhile, Weiss was trying not to scream out from her own mistreatment; every thrust up into Yang slammed the other end into her fragile sex, torturing her insides so much that she could feel her toes tingling, her knees weakening. This was so good — and she had needed it so, so bad.
"HNNN! Aaah! Weiss!" One particularly hard thrust hit Yang's spot, making her entire lower half shudder. And then each thrust was hitting it over and over. Legs shuddering, muscles starting to clamp onto that thick length sailing in and out of her body… She could feel it now, she was incredibly close. "Faster!" she begged, licking her lips to try and regain a little composure for the end. "Y-your hand… I-it's g-gonna…!"
So it was time. Weiss had been preparing for this; she knew what she wanted. Maybe it wouldn't happen, but she had one chance to do what she could. Curling her abdomen inward, she leaned up as much as she could with the other elbow that wasn't busy helping Yang. Then, once she was as far forward as she could comfortably get…
Her hand moved faster up and down Yang while she squeezed tighter than usual. The added pressure might bring about a result they both wanted. By now they were rather practiced at this; it worked a few times, and Weiss was delighted with the results, but others it simply lead to embarrassment or even a laughable moment. Still to this day, Yang had no idea why her wife enjoyed that so much, when most would brand it as disgusting.
But finally, after a few firmer thrusts into her backside, Yang's mouth fell open, gasping loudly as she felt the waves of intense pleasure flow through her entire being, length throbbing in Weiss's grip as it shot out its seed fast and hard. She never got to see where it went, her eyes were closed tightly while she felt the pure ecstasy taking over. More shudders of joy went across her lower half. It had been far too long since she got to enjoy an orgasm as intense as this one.
An orgasm so intense that it led to Weiss's, as well — not purely from Yang gasping, but from the feeling of hot seed splashing across her cheek. She'd made it. She had not missed her mark!
"NNHAAAAHHH!!!!" she moaned out in pure joy as she climaxed again, feeling more droplets landing on her stomach. Only the one spurt had made it all the way up toward her face, but one was enough to send her gasping and shivering, completely overjoyed.
Letting the waves fizzle out gradually, Yang came to rest on Weiss's lap, completely content. The length was still fully inside her, something she didn't want to shift just yet. It felt good there, oddly warm and filling. She needed to simply savour the moment, especially now that her lover had climaxed as well.
The clock on the bedside table read 3:40pm. Twenty minutes: plenty of time to cool down and take care of everything.
"Want the plug out?" she asked when Weiss had finished her own screaming.
"Ahhh… not yet," Weiss sighed. "Let's take care of… other stuff first." Her hands glided up and down Yang's thighs now, and she let out a small chuckle when she felt a little of the cum being smeared on the skin from where it had dripped onto her thumb. "Oops… sorry about that."
"Nice." She laughed, still not completely moving off it when she leant forward to fetch a tissue from the box on the table, biting her lip when the yellow presence shifted back inside her when she sat down again. "Gah… That's what these tissues are for, you know. Don't wipe it on me!" But still, she took care of the mess, dabbing her own skin and the top of her member, then moving on to her wife's stomach and cheek.
"Thank you," she told her doting wife primly as she was cleansed, smiling as if she were a queen on her throne instead of a girl with two implements deep inside of her, naked on her back. "Now… I have something I want to do for you. Maybe you can guess what it is without any hints, but here's one; I'll need a glove."
"Does this mean I have to get up?" she asked, teasingly moving her hips side to side, but also biting her lip at the sensations it caused to her insides.
"Up off the banana, at the least." Once Yang started to lean up slightly, she reached forward and weakly swatted at her hip. "Come on; time is a luxury today! Let me get in there, I want my baby to have two O's like I did!"
"Alright, alright. I just find the banana appealing, okay?" She let that pun sink for a short moment, listening to her wife groan as she pulled herself upward, unable to help the small shudder that happened when she was out entirely. Once that was done she straddled Weiss's hips again. "Where do you want me?"
"In me." Then she let out a theatrical sigh and shrugged. "However, since I doubt you'll be 'up' for that…"
Apparently, Yang wasn't the only one who could make jokes. Sighing as she looked down to her member, now limp and lacklustre, she took a moment to reach for the gloves in the drawer. "Less taunting, more fingering, Wifey."
"Hey, I am capable of multitasking." But the taunting smile gave way to a more earnest one. "You want it on your back so I can really get in there? It's been a good while since your spot and I had a chance to bond."
"Now you're talkin'." She purred with delight, hopping off her lap and instead laying to one side on her back, spreading her legs to give Weiss more than enough of the room she needed. "It's been way too long."
Leaning up and sliding her arm over Yang's thigh, gazing down, she couldn't help the greedy little smirk that crept over her face as she began to pull the glove on. "Ooohhh, where shall I begin? Everything looks so good; I can't decide." Her now-gloved fingertips poked Yang's soft sack, making sure to avoid its contents for fear of hurting her.
"Hmm…" Instinctively she tensed, but nonetheless rested a leg up on her diva's shoulder, looking up with a smile. "Well, it's all yours. I think that was the agreement when I married you right?"
"True." As her fingers came to a rest up against Yang's slick entrance, feeling how it was already so wide open and ready to receive more, she leaned down to press her lips up against the fragile sack. "All mine, and all delicious."
Quickly glancing at the clock once more, just to double check, she then looked back toward her with another smirk, tensing the muscles deliberately against the fingers. "Well you better hurry then, clock's ticking."
Nodding, Weiss leaned up and took the partially-softened cock into her mouth. The muted salty tang of her essence hit her taste buds as she groaned against the flesh, swirling her tongue around the head as two of her fingers began to slide past her wife's loosened opening. Right away, Yang felt slight relief from feeling such wetness touching the member again after it'd become sore from the movements of her strokes, so feeling its coolness made her grin with delight. Just as the fingers heading into her backside did, which she bit her lip to try and suppress a louder noise. Her diva really was determined to make her go again!
The stirring didn't go unnoticed; Yang was getting slightly more aroused from her teasings. Of course, Weiss already knew that the chances of getting Yang all the way hard again weren't high, let alone a second spurting. But just feeling the warm flesh in her mouth was reason enough for her to keep going — so long as Yang didn't complain of discomfort.
And speaking of which… a pleased little chuckle sounded in her throat when she felt the little ridged mass she had been seeking out, deep within her lover. There it was.
"O-ooohh…" A quiet, but content purr sounded out from her bodyguard, unable to help when her legs twitched against Weiss's shoulders. Laying her head back and grinning from ear to ear, her wife was going to fuss over her favourite spot again and again, going to bring her to a second clima-
DING DONG!
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Eye of the Storm, Ch. 1
So, I'm going to take the plunge into something multichapter. I'm not sure where it will end up, and I'm not sure how long it will be, but I'll keep going as long as I can (but no regular publishing schedule). It's going to be AU-ish, with Robert single, but with as much as of the legit Zeppelin timeline in place as possible. It's starting in 1976, after his car accident, right before the release of Presence. And it brings back Maggie, of San Diego beach fic fame. 😁
Thank you, as always, to @firethatgrewsolow for your expert advice, guidance, and review. Thank you also to @starchild0985 for your encouragement for me to just do it. And thanks to @callmethehunter for the Maggie character idea to begin with.
No smut in at least the first 2 parts, but we'll get there.
Thank you. Please send positive vibes--I am a bit nervous about my ability to pull off a bigger story. ❤️❤️❤️
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Robert was enjoying himself at one of his favorite places besides the stage: the soccer field. He smiled as he watched the LA Aztecs thwart another Dallas Tornado goal attempt at 80 minutes into the match. He had to admit it wasn't as exciting as being at a Wolverhampton game, but it would do. Few people in America got feverishly passionate about soccer like his countrymen and women. This was especially so in LA, the playground of starlets and rock stars, most of whom thrived on nocturnal indulgences rather than daylight spectating.
He swept his hair out of his face for the umpteenth time. The wind meant that Old Man Winter, as gentle as he was in The Golden State, was not ready to retreat. Robert was glad he'd brought his leather jacket with him from Benji's car; his black, long-sleeved tee wasn't enough to ward off the coolness of the air. He had to laugh at the thought that the weather could be considered chilly, having survived much worse winters across the pond.
It was a few weeks shy of spring, a few weeks before he'd be thrust back into the spotlight with the release of the seventh album. He was proud that the band was still standing. During their forced hiatus there had been an influx of raw, hungry, minimalist groups openly mocking bands that reveled in grandiose musical ideas on grandiose stages, and Zeppelin was not immune to these kinds of attacks. But being in the studio a few months prior in front of a microphone felt like home, even if he was still on the mend.
Just like his pride in the band's resilience, he was thankful to be on his feet unaided, a couple months removed from the confines of a wheelchair or leg brace. He was also extremely thankful that his fall in the studio, during a moment of excitement, didn't cause another injury and another setback. He wouldn't have wanted to let the band or himself down in that way.
He shifted his attention back to the game. He refused to sit while soaking in the sun and the sport, the camaraderie with his friends, and the feeling of being alive and well. He also was enjoying being off duty, as Robert Anthony, rather than the Golden God. He would enjoy that feeling while it lasted; it never lasted long.
He had been scanning the crowd periodically as, in addition to the game, he was looking to score a lineup for a passionate match in his bedroom. It seemed a bust, because the few women present were tightly clinging to their significant others. But then he saw a familiar face, and he couldn't help but smile.
Maggie.
He hadn't seen her in about a year, though she lived a road trip away. And now he realized that had been a mistake. With too much on his mind after his accident, instead of reconnecting, he felt it safer to conjure up the memory of her body on their first night together. He remembered fondly how she lay underneath him in San Diego, slightly dusted with sand, as the world spun in a haze of tequila and the ocean waves rolled incessantly a few yards behind them. He also frequently thought of seeing her the following year at Kezar. Bonzo joked that she was the second bird who felt the clutch of his hand that day. It was an apt description, because Robert couldn't keep his hands off of her. After that reunion, he stole as much time as he could to visit her in San Diego or spirit her away to LA, whenever the band was camped in its American home base. Their relationship was free-flowing and undefined, but fueled with enough passion for it to bloom whenever they got together. He hoped they could pick right back up.
He watched her approach the stands, alone, and he took that as a positive sign. “Maggie, love!” he exclaimed. He raised a hand and waved; his cuff bracelet was almost in danger of flying off in his excitement. The gesture bordered on absurdity, as if she wouldn't be able identify a tall, otherworldly attractive man, one with whom she'd had many happy memories, who also just happened to be a household name. He grimaced at his overeagerness. But if his convalescence in Malibu told him anything, it was that cabin fever was possible in paradise. He wasn't quite ready to engage in tour life, but he was ready to be the prowling, pouncing lion again, not the broken man who was the receiver of TLC, even though the women were very lovely and very willing. He craved a fun fling, or more, with the right woman. The sight of Maggie gave him hope that he would get his wish.
She looked his way. Her mouth went wide, but her face soon settled on delight.
“Robert!” she squealed when she reached him. “What are the odds? How are you?” She threw her arms around his neck.
His spirited bear hug lifted her petite body from the ground before he initiated a kiss, one that successfully conveyed how much he missed her.
“Much better,” he said, putting her down and smiling some more.
“That's right, your accident! You're lucky to be alive!”
“I'm also lucky to be walking without a limp or anything… Some of the specialists had their doubts, but I never gave up.”
“That sounds like you. You look great,” she said, appreciating every inch of him from his hair, which was bigger than usual due to the vicious wind, to the red Converse sneakers on his feet.
“So do you.” He realized nothing had changed: her dark, wavy hair still grew past her shoulders, her smile still warmed his heart, and her curves, swathed in jeans and a thin sweater under an open peacoat, still called to his primal core.
He brushed her wind-blown hair out of her eyes. It was a futile gesture, because there was no shortage of wind. But when his hand came to rest on her cheek, it did accomplish what Robert ultimately wanted: a tender connection.
Maggie closed her eyes to savor the feel of his large hand. Robert beamed at the thought of how much she seemed to have missed it.
She greeted Benji, whom she had met at Kezar Stadium, and introduced herself to the rest of Robert's friends.
“Can I get you something? A hot dog? A beer?” Robert asked Maggie.
“I'm OK, thanks.” She turned to watch the play on the field.
“No worries. If you have time, maybe we can stop somewhere after the game?”
“I'd like that.”
Robert picked up his beer and took a sip. “So, what brings you up here, love?”
“I actually live in LA now. The band, we were signed, and we released our first album last month. We've been doing a bunch of LA gigs and are gearing up for a short tour in the summer. And we're going to open for Santana on a couple of dates this fall!”
“How wonderful! The time of year will be perfect for your tour. No risk of an icy car crash death, as when we first hit America…”
“I'm definitely glad for that! And you'll have to tell me that story another time. How frightening! So, I think I've read that you all have a new album coming out soon?” Maggie asked.
“In a few weeks’ time.” Robert sighed.
“Not excited?”
“I'm glad we recorded again, and it was really amazing that the album came together so quickly, but I have been enjoying the slow pace of our time off. I've missed the stage, but the circus that forms up around us, night after night? It's been good to have some distance from that, you know?” He watched LA race down the field and score a goal. He pumped his fist in the air and cheered.
“Lifelong soccer fan? Here by yourself?” he asked, changing the subject.
“I am,” Maggie said. My father got us kids interested in soccer, and we all played in the neighborhood. My one brother was supposed to be here with me today, but he's a bit under the weather.”
“Rough and tumble tomboy past, then?” Robert took another sip of beer.
“I did have more boy friends than girl friends growing up. It led to lots of crazy adventures, but it also gave me the confidence to lead the band and deal with trashy men in the industry...”
“I bet you've come across tons of them already.”
“Tons,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
“Well, if I know you, you've reduced them to damn near tears at the end, yeah? I know you don't take shit from anyone.”
“Thankfully we have a manager now, so I can step out of that role, but yes, I have fought for what we deserve.” She grinned proudly. “My band is my life and my family. I can't keep quiet when things seem to be going wrong for us.”
“That's my girl!” Robert leaned in closer to Maggie. “I also remember that you're a lady who knows what she wants and doesn't stop until she's satisfied,” he whispered in her ear before nipping her earlobe. A hungry smile spread across his face as he contemplated her fiery spirit.
“And that has not changed,” she said, turning and looking into his eyes.
She placed a hand on his chest as he tilted her face and kissed her slowly.
Robert marveled at his eagerness to consider leaving the match early, to spend some alone time with Maggie. This was new behavior, and it spoke volumes about the importance he had placed on her.
With only a handful of regulation minutes left, and LA comfortably ahead, he decided to break with tradition. For her.
“I think we know how this is going to go…” He put on his sunglasses and zipped up his jacket.
“The game, or our time together?” Maggie asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Ah!” Robert ran a hand through his hair. “I meant the game,” he said with a chuckle. “But--”
“--I'm teasing you. I'm sure both of your thoughts are spot-on. In fact, I'm counting on it.”
“One catch, though, Maggie dear: you'd need to drive, as I'm still at the mercy of Mr. Lefevre, here, for getting around. LA traffic is too much work too soon for my delicate bones, I'm afraid.”
“At my mercy… I like the sound of that, even if you left out the detail of me being your chauffeur…”
“You'll forgive an invalid lad and be gentle, won't you, love?” His sweet gaze became more seductive the longer their eyes connected.
She sighed, remembering how Robert could charm his way out of anything, and how willing she had been to let him do it. “Sure, if that's what you really want…”
“For now, anyway,” Robert countered.
With a warm smile, Maggie linked her arm with Robert's. The two of them said goodbye to his friends and headed to Maggie's car.
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Author Spotlight: AlexxAplin
Every week we interview a writer from The Magicians fandom. If you would like to be interviewed or you want to nominate a writer, get in touch via our ask box.
First things first, tell us a little about yourself.
I am a gay, 25 year old who loves most things entertainment related, from gaming, to TV and Film. I'm an Entertainment Journalist by trade, and I write (and roleplay) in my spare time as well, mostly because my creative energy can't be contained by just articles alone.
How long have you been writing for?
That is quite a hard question. Technically I've been writing various things since I was 13, but I didn't really get into Roleplaying or Fandom writing until I was about 16, so...almost 10 years?
What inspired you to start writing for The Magicians?
That is a tough question, but I think I can answer it fairly concisely by saying that Prior to 4x13, I had written mostly with a few people that weren't REALLY fans, but were humoring me lol. After the finale, I was very upset and aimless, until I met a group of like-minded people on Discord, who not only encouraged me and supported my ideas, but also decided to write with me too (a few of them anyhow :) )
Who is/are your favourite character(s) to write? What it is about them that makes them your favourite?
I absolutely LOVE writing Q. I identify him pretty well, and I enjoy playing him a little more...sensual than he is allowed to be in the show or in the books. I think my second favorite (not counting a character i've created and haven't ACTUALLY shared yet) would have to be Eliot, because he is just so much fun in general.
Do you have a preference for a particular season/point in time to write about?
It really depends on my mood honestly. I love doing Fix-its, Canon-Divergent AUs, and anything involving reworking things, or adding new ideas to make things even crazier. My favorite season is Season 3 though, so I need to write more in that timeline context.
Are you working on anything right now? Care to give us an idea about it?
Oh boy, do you have all week? Lol. Uh, right now i'm in the process of editing a fic I wrote with a friend of mine, and I have another collaborative fic (that I worked on with the same Author) that i've got to find time to post.
I also have a fic for the MHHE (Magicians Hallmark Holiday Extravaganza) I'm working on with a friend, and a DOZEN and one other projects that are in progress.
How long is your “to do list”?
Too long to name to be honest, and it keeps growing! I swear my brain is housing these ideas in some flubbery substance.
What is your favourite fic that you’ve written for The Magicians? Why?
I only have two fics up right now, but my favorite fic is one I hope to actually put up on Ao3 either today or tomorrow, called Eau De Spicy Nerd. It is a cheeky little play on a few things, and I can't wait for people to see it.
Many writers have a fic that they are passionate about that doesn’t get the reception from the fandom that they hoped for. Do you have a fic you would like more people to read and appreciate?
I'll be honest, most of my favorite fics are from other people. However, I think of my fics, my "Is that Alright?" Fic (which is currently two standalone chapters but will be expanded soon for a full cohesive story) is an emotional feelings train that I hope more people see and resonate with. Fair warning I have been told it will make you cry.
What is your writing process like? Do you have any traditions or superstitions that you like to stick to when you’re writing?
My writing process is very instinctual. I'm terrible at writing by myself in most cases, because I thrive on interaction, bouncing ideas back and forth, and then just letting things go where they go. As stupid as it may sound, sometimes I feel like the characters are more in control of what lands on the page than I am. I just...feel it. Sometimes I lay awake with scenes playing in my head, that i have to write down or I just can't sleep at all.
I usually write a fic (with a friend usually, minus Is That Alright? and its first two chapters) and then afterward I compile it all in a doc (usually pasted from Discord) and work my way through, adding things that come to mind. I pass it off to any other authors collaborating, then once it is polished it goes on to a Beta.
Do you write while the seasons are airing or do you prefer to wait for hiatus? How does the ongoing development of the canon influence and inspire your writing process?
I am quite literally ALWAYS writing. It keeps me sane, especially when work is hectic. Unless work is taking too much of my focus, i'm always working on things. Canon ACTUALLY has helped me finish things before, or has given me ideas to start new things. Sometimes even the smallest plot thread will spark a full idea for me, for example I had the idea for a full AU verse I haven't started yet, just from a conversation about Fillorian marriage and Polyamory.
What has been the most challenging fic for you to write?
Well, I can't REALLY talk too heavily about it because it is my MHHE fic, but the hardest part for me has been sticking to the prompt and not deviating. Sometimes I have ideas for things that stray too far, and i'm having to learn to NOT do that, since it is for a challenge and not my own enjoyment.
Are there any themes or tropes that you like particularly like to explore in your writing?
I love writing smutty things. I think our society should be more sex positive, and so I often try to make my fics the "NC17" version if possible. Some plots aren't conducive for that, which is fine, but anything with smut, or fluff, is A++ in my book. I also love soulmate AU's, Soul bonding, and lots and lots of cheesy things.
Are there any writers that inspire your work? Fanfiction or otherwise?
Oh goodness, I'm not sure I should call out individual folks here, but I am totally inspired by SO MANY Fanfic writers. I also love Neil Gaiman and Lev Grossman as artists and people. To be honest though I am most inspired by fanfic writers these days, because the world is a scary place and fanfic gives me a break. I've learned so many great techniques from fanfic writers too.
What are you currently reading? Fanfiction or otherwise?
I gobble up as much Magicians fic as I can, usually the fluffy or smutty stuff unless i'm in the mood for tears lol. I also keep up with a few different authors, but these days I don't have as much time to read novels as i'd like.
What is the most valuable piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?
The best advice I've ever been given is actually two pieces of advice. 1. Never force yourself to finish something your heart isn't in. If you do, you won't be satisfied with the end result. 2. Do not set out to tell the story you planned. Set out to tell a GOOD story you and your readers will love. If you love it, other people will too.
Are there any words or phrases you worry about over using in your work?
Oh there are plenty, most are descriptors for facial expressions. I sometimes find it hard to balance too much detail with not enough detail.
What was the first fanfic that you wrote? Do you still have access to it?
I actually don't remember what my first Fanfic was. I don't think I've posted most of my beginning work. I think the first one was a Queer as Folk fanfic that got lost on an old, dead hard-drive lol.
Rapidfire Round!
Self-edit or Beta?
Both, a good author knows their flaws and also seeks critique.
Comments or Kudos/Reblogs or Likes?
Give it all to me, or whatever makes you feel most comfortable. I'm not fussy, I just want people to enjoy what I write.
Smut, Fluff or Angst?
Smut or Fluff. Angst is reserved for if i'm in the right headspace, i've had...bad experiences.
Quick & Dirty or Slow Burn?
Depends on my mood, some days I don't have the attention span for a slow burn fic, especially if it is incomplete.
Favourite Season?
Season Three
Favourite Episode?
The Musical Episode with Under Pressure. So much of that was AMAZINGLY done.
Favourite Book?
Haven’t read them.
Three favourite words?
Love, Fuck (it fits so many purposes) and Symphony
Want to be interviewed for our author spotlight? Get in touch here.
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textswithmonstax · 7 years
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MONSTA X in San Francisco!!
Hello my lovelies!! I know I haven't updated in forever, but I did want to share my experience of MX in SF on 7/21/2017 with all of you! Warning: This is very long but it’s pretty detailed. Props to you if you manage to read all of it!!
OKAY LETS START WITH THE FACT I WASNT EVEN GOING TO GO TO THIS CONCERT. When tickets had originally gone on sale in May, I was like on a kpop hiatus bc of school and I was also super broke so I decided not to go and didnt buy tickets. Im not sure why I went about this because as soon as the first show happened in Chicago and I saw fan accounts about it on twitter and everything i had immediately regretted it and went to find tickets as soon as possible. i managed to get my hands on a p1 ticket and found out that some of my mutuals were going as well so i had talked to them about meeting up etc etc. I aM SOSOSOSOSOSSO THANKFUL FOR THEM bc they let me join them in line after I got off of work which was late and required so much effort including wristbands and SO MUCH STRESS.
SO IN THE END AFTER THE MESS i was lucky enough to the front row on the very left side, and there were no speakers blocking or a barricade in front of me WHICJ WAS NICE. i ended up getting separated from my friends who were in the middle second row but i had preferred the side bc i thought i could get better fan service especially since i was in the front row. the show finally started and even though it was sometimes difficult to see what was in the middle due to the speakers,   during dances their formations had them pretty spaced out on the stage so there was a lot of dancing close by. they were so close and gorgeous and it was so breathtaking bc they’re real and just right there. For example during wonho's solo performance when he was shirtless I was so in awe of him bc you could see how defined and sculpted his torso is, and all the little details. i especially appreciated when he danced and poured his heart out right in front of me.
FANSERVICE MOMENTS:
AS KIHYUN TRASH I WENT ALL OUT AND MADE A LIGHT UP SIGN AND FAN WITH DERP PICS TO GET HIM TO NOTICE ME AND IT HAPPENED ONLY ONCE IN THE BEGINNING MENT. ALL IS WELL BC RAP LINE CURED MY SOUL.
A lot of the time jooheon and changkyun were on my side and close by, and i would always just give a little wave and smile ans EVERY TIME THEY WOULD WAVE OR SMILE BACK I WAS SO TAKEN ABACK BC IT HAPPENED ABOUT 10 TIMES. During I'll Be There, they all have different places where they are the entire song and Changkyun was on the stairwell right in front of me. he would be a little spacey at times, but if he was looking in the direction where I was standing I would wave and he noticed and waved/smiled back which happened twice during the song. White Sugar is the next song and when they handed out chocolates and I got 4 total from Changkyun, Minhyuk, Jooheon and then the security guard gave me the one Wonho gave him lol. But basically as soon as Changkyun got his basket, i had immediately searched him out and we made eye contact and he tossed it to me first akdiqjsiwoqlsbdja. I had it on video but i was so set on making sure i got it the filming was terrible. 
There was a large distance between the barricade and edge of the stage, so a lot of the chocolate was thrown out. Because there were no speakers where I was;  the members all came over to throw out candy, which got me one that i caught from minhyuk. Wonho came over, made eye contact with me then gave it to the security guard and laughed........ that tease. By the last chorus, the members had all emptied their baskets but there were a few pieces of candy left on stage. JOOHEON STARTED WALKING TO WHERE I WAS AND THERE WAS A SNICKERS RIGHT IN THE WIRES IN FRONT OF ME. I SMILED AT HIM AND WAVED AND HE WALKED OVER WITH A SMILE LOOKING AND ME, BENT DOWN AND GOT THE SNICKERS AND HANDED IT TO ME!!! HOMIE WAS DEAD SET ON GIVING IT TO ME TOO I GOT THEM RECEIPTS IN THE SLOW MO VIDEOS AND SCREENSHOTS.
ANYWAYS AFTER THIS; I STILL THRIVED IN INTERACTIONS WITH RAP LINE. There was a particular moment I remember later in the choreography when Jooheon was on my side of the stage and he was kneeling, looked over, I waved and he like laughed and had the cutest eyesmiles. Later on during 5:14, Changkyun was right in front of me and (I had my video on selfie video mode to see if he would take it but they didnt take phones from fans) but he pointed to it and then waved later hes :') so :') cute :')
Something else that had happened to me was Minhyuk would tend to look at me when he was in front of me and i would politely wave and smile to him! I know that they meet thousands and thousands of fans, but according to the group he and KH have the best memory of faces. My friend had also sent the video of me from the airport last uear to his mom who sent it to him, so i doubt he remembered and was just giving fan service but a girl can dream.
HiTouch/Photo-Op Experience!!
Okay so after the show I finally found my friends again and we were all waiting for hi-touch and photo op. When we lined up, and started actually going, i had no idea they were going to be in the venue lobby as all of the other kpop concerts I had gone to had benefits on the stage. But as soon and I turned the corner they were right there! The order was Kihyun -> Wonho -> Changkyun -> Shownu -> Jooheon -> Minhyuk. It was really fast if I'm being honest and I couldn't really drag it out, but I did as much as I could. I simply said thank you to all of them except for when I got to Minhyuk, in which i said "Thank you! You're my friend _____'s cousin!" And he smiled at me at first, then did a complete double take and looked at me as I walked away in complete shock.
For photo-op, we were in groups of 20, and my friends were numbers 4-7, so we were in the group right in front of the members. One of my friends and another girl had already said they wanted to be in front of Kihyun, so I decided to go between Changkyun and Wonho. That friend had ended up in front of Shownu, and then ran over to Kihyun to be next to him. When this happened, the spacing was off AND CHANGKYUN GRABBED MY SHOULDERS AND DRAGGED ME TO BE RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM!! His touch is honestly so gentle and he didn't even really say anything and just moved me to him where I ended up getting blocked by someone taller in front of me. I whined a little bit if I'm being honest, and was like "Oh I'm so short though" and he was just like "It's okay just stand here" then took his hands off of me. I'm still swooning over it and when I think about it, I get the chills because of it and I must be crazy but I still feel like his hands are there. I was so shaken up I forgot to ask to do anything like a heart and just smiled lol but I'm perfectly okay with it because of what happened. After 2 or 3 photos, we all left and I definitely milked saying bye and Changkyun and I smiled at eachother again and wow I'm suddenly a Changkyun stan.
This was very very long and I didn't intend for it to be like this, but that was my fan account for MX in San Francisco!! If you have any questions hit up my inbox or follow my twitter @aachiyuto! :)
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sueboohscorner · 7 years
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A 'Villain' is Born! #Gotham S3 Ep15 "How the Riddler Got His Name" Spoilers, Recap, & Review
Great, green garment, Batman! Gotham has returned after a long, long hiatus, much to the delight of fans of the show. Even the title alone is sure to catch anyone’s attention: ‘How the Riddler Got His Name’. Along with the title of the spring premiere of season 3, you might catch something else: The original tagline for the first part of season 3 was Mad City, aptly named after the Mad Hatter himself, Jervis Tetch, played with a somewhat perverted view of childlike innocence that the villain is mostly known for by the Australian actor Benedict Samuel. However, the tagline has changed into Heroes Rise. Now, it’s no secret that I myself tend to lean towards the villains, but we have seen many badass bad guys grow and thrive in the city of Gotham, but now it’s time to see just what our heroes will do to combat said villainy. Remember: a good villain inspires change. A villain acts. Heroes react.
Well, to use a cheesy line, the episode started out (literally) with a BANG! We first see a professor in his laboratory. Now, why should we care about this guy? Because Edward Nygma does, that’s why! (Played by Corey Michael Smith) He manages to tie up the professor and what does Ed do? Ask the poor egghead riddle after riddle. Unfortunately, the professor was not smart enough to match I.Q.’s with Edward. Nygma becomes enraged and almost saddened by each wrong answer to his riddles, until Edward basically smart shames the professor and then, well…… BOOM! You may be asking “Why would he do that? What’s his plan?” Calm down, and I’m going to get to that; I’m just giving you a spoiler recap for starters.
Speaking of villainy, we also see our favorite group that works in the shadows, the Court of Owls. You remember Bruce Wayne’s clone? (Played by David Mazouz) Well, guess what? The Court has been training him to become the perfect imposter of our hero Bruce. We see that Kathryn (played by Leslie Hendrix) declare that the clone’s training is complete. We also see a new character, Frank (played by James Remar), who turns out to be Jim Gordon’s uncle. Yeesh. Talk about a family history; Jim’s father was a decorated veteran and cop, and now we see that Jim’s uncle has been a member of the Court for who knows how long? Apparently, Kathryn wants Frank to reach out to Jim and ask him to join the Court. But if he can’t convince him….. use your imagination.
Back to Edward, still living in Dahl Manor, we see that he has been losing sleep and he has been taking pills. What kind of pills? My best guess is some form of the hallucinogenic drug. Why? The audience has seen, throughout the seasons that Edward does tend to see hallucinations, much to Ed’s chagrin. This time he’s taking pills to see visions whenever he needs to. And who he might be seeing in his head? Why, his ex-best friend, Oswald Cobblepot. (Played by Robin Lord Taylor) Yeah, it turns out that Edward is still in need of guidance to become more of who he is; more of a villain (his words, not mine). In Edward’s mind, Oswald is soaking wet, has a crab or two crawling on him, and is covered in scum. That would make sense, because the last time those two saw each other, Edward shot Oswald point-blank and pushed him into the cold waters by the docks. Literally, most things in Gotham go down at the docks. So Edward imagines his dead partner and summons him whenever he needs someone to talk to or some guidance. It would be more heartfelt if Edward’s mentality weren't deteriorating before our eyes. What Edward wants now in his life is to feel whole, complete, to figure out just who he really is. Nygma’s conclusion to that answer is to find the brightest minds in Gotham and see who can match his own intellect. To each their own, and all that. Mirage Oswald keeps fighting him on every step, saying that the way he’s going about this in a completely stupid way. Then Edward gets an idea for another contestant: Jim Gordon (Played by Ben McKenzie). Now, I like Jim, I really do, but come on. He is intelligent and strong in his own right, but I don’t think he would last a few rounds with Edward Nygma.
Edward sends a singing telegram to the GCPD, where Captain Harvey Bullock (Played by Donal Logue) is still cleaning up from the big hoopla that was left in Jerome Valeska’s wake. Lucius Fox (Played by Chris Chalk) informs Bullock about recent killings that have been going on in the city as of late. He takes note that each victim is either artistic or very intellectual. Fox is interrupted by the singing mentioned above telegram, telling them about the next possible victim. The card, of course, has a puzzle on it. The puzzle turns out to be a location: a chess tournament. Of course, Lucius Fox figures it out in less than a minute, and he, Harvey, and other cops from the precinct are on the move.
If you’re wondering about Jim, don’t worry. He’s just taking some time off to go on a hunting trip with his estranged uncle Frank. What could go wrong?
At the chess tournament, we notice that Edward Hazen overlooking view of the event.  Again, he summons Oswald.  Edward’s attitude towards his hallucination of Oswald is not necessarily bitter.  That may seem strange, give in their last encounter, but we see that Edward does not hold much malice towards Oswald.  In fact he still regards him as his best friend.  Of course there is tension, but Edward does not really care for that at the moment.  However the hallucination of Oswald is still fighting Edward at every step in turn that he makes.  Edward even thanks Oswald for coming, to which Oswald replied that he did not have much of a choice.  Edward is not too surprised when he sees the GCPD come in, but he is surprised to see Lucius Fox.  You could consider it a delightful surprise.  Ed activates an electrical device that is rigged to every chessboard in the building.  No one is safe for the then move or not.  But that does not matter, Edward has found his intellectual match.  Lucius Fox.  And he is already solved another riddle, a phone number leading to the person responsible.  Edward Nygma.  The phone call consisted of another riddle.  Which leads Lucius to a grim answer: the belly of the beast.  Which literally means that he had to cut into the belly of one of Edward’s victims for his next clue…..ew.
We take a minute to focus on Bruce and Alfred (played by Sean Pertwee) as they continue their training.  Knife throwing training, which is freaking awesome in my book.  But Bruce is clearly distracted in it interferes with his training.  Alfred calls him on it, and what is on his mind is Selina Kyle (played by Camren Bicondova).  Long story short: Selina’s mom turned out to be a garbage human and Bruce kind of knew about it, but did not tell her.  They had kind of a messy breakup.  Bruce tells Alfred that he received a note in the mail recently from Selina asking him to meet up with her.  Bruce knows that his training is really important, especially after what happened with Jerome, but he can’t get her out of his head.  So Alfred suggests that he takes her up on her note.
While Bruce is wandering the city, he comes across Sonny Gilzean and a bunch of his thugs.  They start messing with him until Selina arrives.  As it turns out, she did not send that note to Bruce.  And then she storms away. Sonny and his guys start beating up Bruce at first, but the rejection from Selina seemed to take its toll on him and he fought back, and kicked major ass, I might say.  As he turns to go back home, he encounters his clone, who drugs him unconscious as he plans to take his place.
We go back to Bullock, who is speaking at the police officer’s graduation ceremony. Until, uh-oh, Edward shows up and knocks him out.  All the while, Mirage Oswald insists that there is no Edward without him.  Edward admits some truth about that statement, but he will find something new in something better to replace Oswald with in his heart.
We see Lucius and Lee (played by Morena Baccarin) examining a dead body, cutting open his stomach, to reveal a police badge.  That match belongs to Harvey.  Lucius knows where Harvey is and he immediately leaves for the ceremony. To the young cadet’s remorse, Edward replaces Harvey as speaker.  He throws a grenade into the crowd, but not before giving a riddle.
Lucius finally meets up with Edward who has Harvey tide up in a chair which is suspended over a stairway. Edward gives Lucius three chances, three riddles, to save Harvey.  Fox gets the first two riddles wrong, but the last one he got absolutely right. Lucius also finds out that Edward killed Oswald Cobblepot, their mayor. But, we get a thumbs up from Edward while still making Harvey fall to his death.  Lucius manages to catch him in time, only to find that the green suited man was gone.
On Jim Gordon’s end, he and his uncle have a long talk.  Franks says that he came back to Gotham to patch things up. Then he comes clean about the Court of Owls, and how they are a secret organization that really pull the strings in Gotham.  He reveals that he and Jim’s father were members of the Court and that that originally wanted him to join as well. But Jim’s father saw how much of a threat they were to the city and try to fight back.  Frank reveals that the Court had set up a car accident that would cause Jim’s father his death.  French had to prove his loyalty, so the Court sent in a way for years to an unknown location. Jim is of course, outraged by this and is unsure whether or not to believe his uncle.
After saving Harvey, he, and some GCPD members go out and try to find Edward in the Dahl Manor.  The only thing that they find is a portrait of the mayor with a big, bright, green question mark on its face.
 After a long day, we see Lucius get into his car.  Edward was waiting for him in the back seat with a gun.  Instead of completely submitting to the threat, to Lucius psychoanalyzes Edward.  He sees that everything that Edward has done is some sort of act and he questions him about it.  Nygma states that he feels like there’s someone inside of him, someone that could be feared, and someone that could replace Oswald.  Lucius turns to Edward with a concern to look on his face and tells him that if there’s any part of him, that is still sane, he needs to get help.  Edward seemed shocked at first.  But he shakes it off and says…
“I am the Riddler!”
And he knocks Lucius unconscious.
We cut to inside a house filled with plants.  We see a bed with someone in it.  Hey, guys too, Oswald is ALIVE!!!!!!  To and apparently he was rescued by Ivy Pepper.  He wakes up and says one thing:
“I just remembered, there is someone I have to kill.”
The final moment that we see in the episode is Edward at the docks where he shot Oswald.  He has one final conversation with his hallucination.  To Oswald says that no one will ever be afraid of anyone called the ‘Riddler.'  Edwards says that he did a value their friendship, but now he will pull it Oswald behind him.  He dumps his pills into the water.  He stands up straight placing a bowler hat on his head.  The last thing that we see is a green suited man, Edward Nygma, no, the Riddler walk away.
Overall I did love the episode.  It was really nice to welcome Gotham to back on Monday nights.  It was so great seeing the characters come back and it was so great to see their next step or their journey in a pre-Batman Gotham. It does my heart good to see the actors bring more and more to the characters that we to all know and love to the table.
Things I liked:
Every single scene that Corey Michael Smith was in, he is now the Riddler, to and he loves every single minute of it. The Riddler is someone that a lot of us know even if we don’t read the comics.  He is flashy, showy, intelligent, incredibly vain, and absolutely arrogant.  Smith has already begun to take on to the Riddler, and already he is showing much potential, and he will certainly make his mark as the third person to ever be a live actor for the Riddler, and I can’t wait.
I always love me some Harvey Bullock. That should go without saying.
The relationship between Edward and Oswald as it continued seemingly after death.  The illusion of Oswald said to Edward that he really isn’t talking to the real person.  That he just imagined something that is already in his mind, but he just won’t face it.  It shows that Edward really did respect Oswald and that he did see him as a teacher for him.  Edward knew that he couldn’t just turn away from Oswald after he shot him.  He needed to figure out who he was without Oswald.  And the conclusions that Edward reached as he trudged through his epiphany was really enjoyable to see.
LUCIUS FOX, BABY!!!!!!!!  A lot of people know only about Alfred taking care of Bruce.  But Lucius Fox has just an important a role in Bruce’s life.  Sometimes I see Alfred as the bright side of Bruce’s brain, and Lucius is definitely the left side.  As a singular person, Lucius Fox is absolutely not one to be trifled with, especially when it comes to intelligence.
Poison Ivy saving the Penguin? AWESOME!!! 
Bruce Wayne KICKING ASS!!!!
Alfred’s Shepard’s pie
Things I didn’t like:
Lee Thompkins. Don’t like her. Never did from the beginning.
8 out of to10!
Well done, Gotham. Well, freaking done!
Until next time, stay weird, Gotham
1 note · View note
cristinajourdanqp · 6 years
Text
10 Tips for Sticking with Primal
Primal is simple, but it’s not exactly easy. At every turn, detractors and temptations appear. We have health authorities telling us we’re killing ourselves. Worried friends and family sharing news articles decrying the consumption of fat and meat and promoting wholly plant-based diets. Food companies employ food chemists to engineer delicious processed junk that hijacks our brains’ reward systems, making food that’s addictive on a biochemical level. It’s going to take a mix of concrete, tangible tactics and psychological tricks to stick with Primal.
Plan Your Meals Each Week
The modern world excels at rewarding poor planning. Its whole appeal revolves around convenience. It’s always tugging at us, leaving hints, suggesting easy ways to go astray. When you’re just starting on this Primal journey and things aren’t quite second nature…(like finishing your first 21-Day Challenge).
No time to make dinner? Grab a happy meal!
In the grocery line with your meat and produce? Hey, check out this 40 ounce sack of fried potato slices; bet you could finish half of it on the drive home!
Every week, plan your meals. Go shopping, get what you need, and have things ready to go. Keep a clean kitchen, so you can launch into cooking without fretting over dirty pots and dishes.
Look At Your “Before” Photos
You got into this Primal stuff for a reason. If you’ve seen benefits, lost body fat, improved body composition, gotten noticeably stronger and fitter, go back and look at those old photos. Look at yourself and remember. Immerse yourself in what it felt like before you went Primal.
Realize that it will all come flooding back if you go back to your old ways.
Think Of the Worst That Could Happen
A lot of things can go wrong in life. Many things will go wrong. But we don’t have to hasten the disintegration of absolutely everything. All the recommendations I make in the Primal Blueprint and on this blog are designed to reduce your chances of being reduced to that terrible situation. Read those words, feel them, and imagine yourself in that situation. Not great, is it? So, how about you stick with the program?
Imagine everything that could go wrong health-wise. Imagine you’re 20 years older than you are now. You’re on a slew of medications. Your monthly checkup with your cardiologist is the closest thing you have to a friend. You have a weight set, but it sits unused amidst the ruins of the great spider kingdoms that have come and gone over the years. Your bones are porous, your arteries are clogged, your blood sugar runs high, your heart rate stays elevated. Your muscles are marbled, your mind is foggy. Remember that each choice—including the one before you right now—has the power to determine your future scenario.
Realize That Perfect Is Not the Goal
Many people have the idea that going Primal is a life sentence of ascetic purity. That’s a big misconception. Actually, these are just guidelines. Recommendations. Modes of eating, living, and being that, from my reading of the scientific literature and experience coaching people, help a lot of people get healthier, fitter, leaner, and happier. But it all exists on a spectrum. It isn’t “all or nothing.”
Eating some rice won’t derail the whole train.
Skipping a week of training won’t dissolve your gains.
Even eating a french fry cooked in the most rancid of seed oils won’t imbue your adipose tissue with permanently imbalanced omega-3/omega-6 ratios (not that I’d recommend it, but still).
Unless you’re celiac or truly gluten-sensitive, ingesting a bite of gluten probably won’t perforate your gut lining and open you up to a month’s worth of bacterial endotoxins and allergens.
A date won’t set you back to square one on the keto journey.
Some heeled dress shoes are perfectly fine for a wedding or the office. They won’t ruin your feet or posture.
It’s not about Primal perfection. It’s about making the guidelines work for you to push your health and happiness forward.
Don’t Forget the 80/20 Rule
This dovetails nicely with the previous tip. The 80/20 rule is a built-in “get out of jail free” card. It’s not an actual, literal card, although that’s certainly an idea if an entrepreneur wants to get in on that. It’s the formal acknowledgement that if you do the right (healthy, Primal, keto, etc.) thing 80% of the time, you’ll be doing better than 95% of the population and garnering the majority of the benefits we can expect from living healthy.
What’s 80/20 look like?
It doesn’t mean eating fast food every fifth meal. It doesn’t mean eating 1/5 of a birthday cake. It means giving yourself some slack. It means realizing that you work hard, you eat well most of the time, and it’s okay if you slip up and have a beer or a few bites of pizza at the end of a long week.
The 80/20 rule helps prevent you from heaping additional guilt and stress and despair over a single bad choice onto the first order effects of the choice. It cements the reality that you’re going to be okay.
Join a Gym
If you think you hate the gym, you probably haven’t been in awhile. No longer must you do the globo=gym thing, where staff members frown at you for deadlifting and everyone’s preening for the mirrors. You can try CrossFit. You could try parkour. You could try BJJ or Pilates or kickboxing. You could find a great personal training gym, interview the owners and trainers, and find someone who melds well with your personality and goals. You can try FitWall. There are thousands of movement options out there. The point is throwing down the money and investing in yourself.
When you put down money, you put skin in the game. Rather than lose your sunk cost, you’ll be more likely to follow through and stick with it.
Buy New Cooking Equipment
Are you trying to cook incredible meals in damaged teflon skillets? Sear steaks on lightweight aluminum pans? Julienne vegetables with a blunt chef’s knife that hasn’t been sharpened since the 80s? Get yourself some quality equipment. You don’t need to drop $500 or anything close to that.
Grab a cast iron pan for searing steaks. Some heavy stainless steel pots and pans. A dutch oven for braising, if you do that sort of thing. Consider an Instant Pot. A decent chef’s knife. Maybe a small, simple food processor if chopping vegetables is keeping you from enjoying Big-Ass salads. It doesn’t take much, and it will make cooking that much more pleasurable (and effective).
Pick One Thing and Start There
Getting your entire lifestyle back on track is daunting. What, you expect a person to overhaul how they eat, move, consume electronics at night, interact with the sun, supplement, and sleep right away? Some people can do that no problem, but many people find it an intimidating prospect.
Just pick one thing, do it well, and see the dominos start to fall in other areas. Purge your pantry. Ditch grains and seed oils. Start walking every day. Get back into barbell training. Go to sleep at the same time every night. Doing all those things would be great—and not as hard as you think—but even just one will make a big difference.
Get a Friend Involved
Getting a friend to join you in sticking with the Primal way of life is a simple and effective way to keep you engaged. The hardest part is breaking through the resistance and mustering the willpower to enlist the friend. Then, once you’ve both agreed to do the thing, you have to do it. Neither of you wants to let the other person down. As social animals, we value the input and opinions of others. Especially when those others are close to us.
You could do family, like you mom, your brother, or your spouse, but in my experience those relationships can get testy real fast. Friendships are more durable, in a way. It’s usually easier to get strict and abrasive when required with your friend than it is with your husband or wife.
Go Hardcore
Some people can’t go all-in at once. They sputter and fail, and would be better served just picking one thing at a time (as I mentioned above). But some people thrive when they overhaul their entire lives. That’s how I am—I didn’t just change how I ate when I developed the Primal Blueprint. I changed how I ate, slept, exercised, and lived in general.
Maybe you’re going too cautiously. Maybe you need to go all in.
Work With a Primal Health Coach
Primal Health Coaches are well trained to help you hit your goals, work through tough sticking points, solve problems, and motivate you. This is quite literally their job. They combine motivational power with a strong knowledge base, so whether you have a motivation problem or a knowledge problem, they can help.
Hiring a Primal Health Coach also gives you that skin in the game effect—with a literal voice on the other end. For some people, that level of accountability is the linchpin.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of ways to get yourself back on track. This is the list of ways I find most effective at getting others, and even myself, back on track after an extended hiatus, or sticking with it when doubt begins creeping in.
What are your favorite ways to stick with Primal?
Thanks for reading, all. Take care.
0 notes
fishermariawo · 6 years
Text
10 Tips for Sticking with Primal
Primal is simple, but it’s not exactly easy. At every turn, detractors and temptations appear. We have health authorities telling us we’re killing ourselves. Worried friends and family sharing news articles decrying the consumption of fat and meat and promoting wholly plant-based diets. Food companies employ food chemists to engineer delicious processed junk that hijacks our brains’ reward systems, making food that’s addictive on a biochemical level. It’s going to take a mix of concrete, tangible tactics and psychological tricks to stick with Primal.
Plan Your Meals Each Week
The modern world excels at rewarding poor planning. Its whole appeal revolves around convenience. It’s always tugging at us, leaving hints, suggesting easy ways to go astray. When you’re just starting on this Primal journey and things aren’t quite second nature…(like finishing your first 21-Day Challenge).
No time to make dinner? Grab a happy meal!
In the grocery line with your meat and produce? Hey, check out this 40 ounce sack of fried potato slices; bet you could finish half of it on the drive home!
Every week, plan your meals. Go shopping, get what you need, and have things ready to go. Keep a clean kitchen, so you can launch into cooking without fretting over dirty pots and dishes.
Look At Your “Before” Photos
You got into this Primal stuff for a reason. If you’ve seen benefits, lost body fat, improved body composition, gotten noticeably stronger and fitter, go back and look at those old photos. Look at yourself and remember. Immerse yourself in what it felt like before you went Primal.
Realize that it will all come flooding back if you go back to your old ways.
Think Of the Worst That Could Happen
A lot of things can go wrong in life. Many things will go wrong. But we don’t have to hasten the disintegration of absolutely everything. All the recommendations I make in the Primal Blueprint and on this blog are designed to reduce your chances of being reduced to that terrible situation. Read those words, feel them, and imagine yourself in that situation. Not great, is it? So, how about you stick with the program?
Imagine everything that could go wrong health-wise. Imagine you’re 20 years older than you are now. You’re on a slew of medications. Your monthly checkup with your cardiologist is the closest thing you have to a friend. You have a weight set, but it sits unused amidst the ruins of the great spider kingdoms that have come and gone over the years. Your bones are porous, your arteries are clogged, your blood sugar runs high, your heart rate stays elevated. Your muscles are marbled, your mind is foggy. Remember that each choice—including the one before you right now—has the power to determine your future scenario.
Realize That Perfect Is Not the Goal
Many people have the idea that going Primal is a life sentence of ascetic purity. That’s a big misconception. Actually, these are just guidelines. Recommendations. Modes of eating, living, and being that, from my reading of the scientific literature and experience coaching people, help a lot of people get healthier, fitter, leaner, and happier. But it all exists on a spectrum. It isn’t “all or nothing.”
Eating some rice won’t derail the whole train.
Skipping a week of training won’t dissolve your gains.
Even eating a french fry cooked in the most rancid of seed oils won’t imbue your adipose tissue with permanently imbalanced omega-3/omega-6 ratios (not that I’d recommend it, but still).
Unless you’re celiac or truly gluten-sensitive, ingesting a bite of gluten probably won’t perforate your gut lining and open you up to a month’s worth of bacterial endotoxins and allergens.
A date won’t set you back to square one on the keto journey.
Some heeled dress shoes are perfectly fine for a wedding or the office. They won’t ruin your feet or posture.
It’s not about Primal perfection. It’s about making the guidelines work for you to push your health and happiness forward.
Don’t Forget the 80/20 Rule
This dovetails nicely with the previous tip. The 80/20 rule is a built-in “get out of jail free” card. It’s not an actual, literal card, although that’s certainly an idea if an entrepreneur wants to get in on that. It’s the formal acknowledgement that if you do the right (healthy, Primal, keto, etc.) thing 80% of the time, you’ll be doing better than 95% of the population and garnering the majority of the benefits we can expect from living healthy.
What’s 80/20 look like?
It doesn’t mean eating fast food every fifth meal. It doesn’t mean eating 1/5 of a birthday cake. It means giving yourself some slack. It means realizing that you work hard, you eat well most of the time, and it’s okay if you slip up and have a beer or a few bites of pizza at the end of a long week.
The 80/20 rule helps prevent you from heaping additional guilt and stress and despair over a single bad choice onto the first order effects of the choice. It cements the reality that you’re going to be okay.
Join a Gym
If you think you hate the gym, you probably haven’t been in awhile. No longer must you do the globo=gym thing, where staff members frown at you for deadlifting and everyone’s preening for the mirrors. You can try CrossFit. You could try parkour. You could try BJJ or Pilates or kickboxing. You could find a great personal training gym, interview the owners and trainers, and find someone who melds well with your personality and goals. You can try FitWall. There are thousands of movement options out there. The point is throwing down the money and investing in yourself.
When you put down money, you put skin in the game. Rather than lose your sunk cost, you’ll be more likely to follow through and stick with it.
Buy New Cooking Equipment
Are you trying to cook incredible meals in damaged teflon skillets? Sear steaks on lightweight aluminum pans? Julienne vegetables with a blunt chef’s knife that hasn’t been sharpened since the 80s? Get yourself some quality equipment. You don’t need to drop $500 or anything close to that.
Grab a cast iron pan for searing steaks. Some heavy stainless steel pots and pans. A dutch oven for braising, if you do that sort of thing. Consider an Instant Pot. A decent chef’s knife. Maybe a small, simple food processor if chopping vegetables is keeping you from enjoying Big-Ass salads. It doesn’t take much, and it will make cooking that much more pleasurable (and effective).
Pick One Thing and Start There
Getting your entire lifestyle back on track is daunting. What, you expect a person to overhaul how they eat, move, consume electronics at night, interact with the sun, supplement, and sleep right away? Some people can do that no problem, but many people find it an intimidating prospect.
Just pick one thing, do it well, and see the dominos start to fall in other areas. Purge your pantry. Ditch grains and seed oils. Start walking every day. Get back into barbell training. Go to sleep at the same time every night. Doing all those things would be great—and not as hard as you think—but even just one will make a big difference.
Get a Friend Involved
Getting a friend to join you in sticking with the Primal way of life is a simple and effective way to keep you engaged. The hardest part is breaking through the resistance and mustering the willpower to enlist the friend. Then, once you’ve both agreed to do the thing, you have to do it. Neither of you wants to let the other person down. As social animals, we value the input and opinions of others. Especially when those others are close to us.
You could do family, like you mom, your brother, or your spouse, but in my experience those relationships can get testy real fast. Friendships are more durable, in a way. It’s usually easier to get strict and abrasive when required with your friend than it is with your husband or wife.
Go Hardcore
Some people can’t go all-in at once. They sputter and fail, and would be better served just picking one thing at a time (as I mentioned above). But some people thrive when they overhaul their entire lives. That’s how I am—I didn’t just change how I ate when I developed the Primal Blueprint. I changed how I ate, slept, exercised, and lived in general.
Maybe you’re going too cautiously. Maybe you need to go all in.
Work With a Primal Health Coach
Primal Health Coaches are well trained to help you hit your goals, work through tough sticking points, solve problems, and motivate you. This is quite literally their job. They combine motivational power with a strong knowledge base, so whether you have a motivation problem or a knowledge problem, they can help.
Hiring a Primal Health Coach also gives you that skin in the game effect—with a literal voice on the other end. For some people, that level of accountability is the linchpin.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of ways to get yourself back on track. This is the list of ways I find most effective at getting others, and even myself, back on track after an extended hiatus, or sticking with it when doubt begins creeping in.
What are your favorite ways to stick with Primal?
Thanks for reading, all. Take care.
0 notes
watsonrodriquezie · 6 years
Text
10 Tips for Sticking with Primal
Primal is simple, but it’s not exactly easy. At every turn, detractors and temptations appear. We have health authorities telling us we’re killing ourselves. Worried friends and family sharing news articles decrying the consumption of fat and meat and promoting wholly plant-based diets. Food companies employ food chemists to engineer delicious processed junk that hijacks our brains’ reward systems, making food that’s addictive on a biochemical level. It’s going to take a mix of concrete, tangible tactics and psychological tricks to stick with Primal.
Plan Your Meals Each Week
The modern world excels at rewarding poor planning. Its whole appeal revolves around convenience. It’s always tugging at us, leaving hints, suggesting easy ways to go astray. When you’re just starting on this Primal journey and things aren’t quite second nature…(like finishing your first 21-Day Challenge).
No time to make dinner? Grab a happy meal!
In the grocery line with your meat and produce? Hey, check out this 40 ounce sack of fried potato slices; bet you could finish half of it on the drive home!
Every week, plan your meals. Go shopping, get what you need, and have things ready to go. Keep a clean kitchen, so you can launch into cooking without fretting over dirty pots and dishes.
Look At Your “Before” Photos
You got into this Primal stuff for a reason. If you’ve seen benefits, lost body fat, improved body composition, gotten noticeably stronger and fitter, go back and look at those old photos. Look at yourself and remember. Immerse yourself in what it felt like before you went Primal.
Realize that it will all come flooding back if you go back to your old ways.
Think Of the Worst That Could Happen
A lot of things can go wrong in life. Many things will go wrong. But we don’t have to hasten the disintegration of absolutely everything. All the recommendations I make in the Primal Blueprint and on this blog are designed to reduce your chances of being reduced to that terrible situation. Read those words, feel them, and imagine yourself in that situation. Not great, is it? So, how about you stick with the program?
Imagine everything that could go wrong health-wise. Imagine you’re 20 years older than you are now. You’re on a slew of medications. Your monthly checkup with your cardiologist is the closest thing you have to a friend. You have a weight set, but it sits unused amidst the ruins of the great spider kingdoms that have come and gone over the years. Your bones are porous, your arteries are clogged, your blood sugar runs high, your heart rate stays elevated. Your muscles are marbled, your mind is foggy. Remember that each choice—including the one before you right now—has the power to determine your future scenario.
Realize That Perfect Is Not the Goal
Many people have the idea that going Primal is a life sentence of ascetic purity. That’s a big misconception. Actually, these are just guidelines. Recommendations. Modes of eating, living, and being that, from my reading of the scientific literature and experience coaching people, help a lot of people get healthier, fitter, leaner, and happier. But it all exists on a spectrum. It isn’t “all or nothing.”
Eating some rice won’t derail the whole train.
Skipping a week of training won’t dissolve your gains.
Even eating a french fry cooked in the most rancid of seed oils won’t imbue your adipose tissue with permanently imbalanced omega-3/omega-6 ratios (not that I’d recommend it, but still).
Unless you’re celiac or truly gluten-sensitive, ingesting a bite of gluten probably won’t perforate your gut lining and open you up to a month’s worth of bacterial endotoxins and allergens.
A date won’t set you back to square one on the keto journey.
Some heeled dress shoes are perfectly fine for a wedding or the office. They won’t ruin your feet or posture.
It’s not about Primal perfection. It’s about making the guidelines work for you to push your health and happiness forward.
Don’t Forget the 80/20 Rule
This dovetails nicely with the previous tip. The 80/20 rule is a built-in “get out of jail free” card. It’s not an actual, literal card, although that’s certainly an idea if an entrepreneur wants to get in on that. It’s the formal acknowledgement that if you do the right (healthy, Primal, keto, etc.) thing 80% of the time, you’ll be doing better than 95% of the population and garnering the majority of the benefits we can expect from living healthy.
What’s 80/20 look like?
It doesn’t mean eating fast food every fifth meal. It doesn’t mean eating 1/5 of a birthday cake. It means giving yourself some slack. It means realizing that you work hard, you eat well most of the time, and it’s okay if you slip up and have a beer or a few bites of pizza at the end of a long week.
The 80/20 rule helps prevent you from heaping additional guilt and stress and despair over a single bad choice onto the first order effects of the choice. It cements the reality that you’re going to be okay.
Join a Gym
If you think you hate the gym, you probably haven’t been in awhile. No longer must you do the globo=gym thing, where staff members frown at you for deadlifting and everyone’s preening for the mirrors. You can try CrossFit. You could try parkour. You could try BJJ or Pilates or kickboxing. You could find a great personal training gym, interview the owners and trainers, and find someone who melds well with your personality and goals. You can try FitWall. There are thousands of movement options out there. The point is throwing down the money and investing in yourself.
When you put down money, you put skin in the game. Rather than lose your sunk cost, you’ll be more likely to follow through and stick with it.
Buy New Cooking Equipment
Are you trying to cook incredible meals in damaged teflon skillets? Sear steaks on lightweight aluminum pans? Julienne vegetables with a blunt chef’s knife that hasn’t been sharpened since the 80s? Get yourself some quality equipment. You don’t need to drop $500 or anything close to that.
Grab a cast iron pan for searing steaks. Some heavy stainless steel pots and pans. A dutch oven for braising, if you do that sort of thing. Consider an Instant Pot. A decent chef’s knife. Maybe a small, simple food processor if chopping vegetables is keeping you from enjoying Big-Ass salads. It doesn’t take much, and it will make cooking that much more pleasurable (and effective).
Pick One Thing and Start There
Getting your entire lifestyle back on track is daunting. What, you expect a person to overhaul how they eat, move, consume electronics at night, interact with the sun, supplement, and sleep right away? Some people can do that no problem, but many people find it an intimidating prospect.
Just pick one thing, do it well, and see the dominos start to fall in other areas. Purge your pantry. Ditch grains and seed oils. Start walking every day. Get back into barbell training. Go to sleep at the same time every night. Doing all those things would be great—and not as hard as you think—but even just one will make a big difference.
Get a Friend Involved
Getting a friend to join you in sticking with the Primal way of life is a simple and effective way to keep you engaged. The hardest part is breaking through the resistance and mustering the willpower to enlist the friend. Then, once you’ve both agreed to do the thing, you have to do it. Neither of you wants to let the other person down. As social animals, we value the input and opinions of others. Especially when those others are close to us.
You could do family, like you mom, your brother, or your spouse, but in my experience those relationships can get testy real fast. Friendships are more durable, in a way. It’s usually easier to get strict and abrasive when required with your friend than it is with your husband or wife.
Go Hardcore
Some people can’t go all-in at once. They sputter and fail, and would be better served just picking one thing at a time (as I mentioned above). But some people thrive when they overhaul their entire lives. That’s how I am—I didn’t just change how I ate when I developed the Primal Blueprint. I changed how I ate, slept, exercised, and lived in general.
Maybe you’re going too cautiously. Maybe you need to go all in.
Work With a Primal Health Coach
Primal Health Coaches are well trained to help you hit your goals, work through tough sticking points, solve problems, and motivate you. This is quite literally their job. They combine motivational power with a strong knowledge base, so whether you have a motivation problem or a knowledge problem, they can help.
Hiring a Primal Health Coach also gives you that skin in the game effect—with a literal voice on the other end. For some people, that level of accountability is the linchpin.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of ways to get yourself back on track. This is the list of ways I find most effective at getting others, and even myself, back on track after an extended hiatus, or sticking with it when doubt begins creeping in.
What are your favorite ways to stick with Primal?
Thanks for reading, all. Take care.
0 notes