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#every single one of her stylists hits the mark every time
lyramundana · 4 months
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Ok so hear me out:
Yknow that one tiny crop top hannie wore which showed off the entirety of his slutty jaist and cute lil toned belly in a lalalala stage?
What is reader sees all the horny stays on twt describing just what filthy things they want to do to him? What if she shows them to lino too? What is they both get so painfully turned on and deliciously jealous by it that they decide to teach our quokka a lesson? How, you may ask? By fucking him absolutely brainless and marking every single bit of his gorgeous body, especially his waist and stomach (and lower ofc)
And, the lil cherry on top of the poly!minsung sundae, what if reader makes hanni take a picture to post on his bubble while she's pounding him with her big ass strap, and lino playing with his pretty nipples?
It'll be their dirty secret, they do have quite a possessive streak (poor hannie can't wear crops for a long time after that)
ohoho you dirty anon, i love your brain so much🤭👀
Me personally, if i was the girlfriend, i'll be proud of the chaos he unleashed and join the Stays's excitement, but the idea of marking him and reducing him to a pile of tears and begs sounds far too tempting.
You bet they won't leave a single trace of his skin clean. If there's not cum in it, there's a bruise, if not a bruise, a hickey, and the list goes on. They want to imprint themselves in Hannie's body, make an statement to the world that this beautiful angel is theirs and only theirs. And sweet boy is enjoying it so much, getting punished by both of his loves is his utmost fantasy. Having their greedy hands over him, playing with him, scratching him, slapping him, it makes his cock so hard it hurts. It hurts deliciously.
They can't help it, he looked so damn good and irresistible in that top, and he knew what he was doing. He wanted to push the buttons, delight in their hungry stares on him. He loved it. It thrilled him to no end. Meanwhile, Lino is too busy counting the time until the shooting ends to drag him to the nearest empty room and teach him a lesson. When the door is closed and there's only the two of them, it's on. The only thing preventing him from ripping the damn top off it's knowing that their sweet girl would want to see it first, so he just pulls it up and rips off the jeans instead, forces him on one of the make up tables and slams unto him with a fast pace, not even prepping him. He covers Jisung's mouth with his hand to mute his moans, while the others grips his waist. Minho bites his neck roughly and sucks on it until the familiar purple-redish bruise starts to appear. His handprints are all over Jisung's butt cheeks, still bouncing against his cock helpessly. Minho has to close his eyes and groan lowly when his orgasm hits, thousands of white spots filling his vision. He ruts into Jisung's hips to push his cum deeper, and then drops him like an used toy...without making cum.
"What's the matter, slut? You wanted to cum? Too bad you don't fucking deserve it. We'll see when we get home, wonder what Mommy has to say about this"
Once they arrive, it's obvious "Mommy" isn't happy about it. Not in the slighest. She spent the entire morning seeing Stay's feral reactions to that top, and her blood boils at the idea of so many people seeing and wanting what belongs to her. She sees Jisung's glossed eyes, his trembling lips, the bruises in his pretty skin. "Mommy, please, help me. It hurts so much. Daddy left me hanging li-"
She grabs his jaw and seethes on his lips.
"You should be grateful he actually put his dick inside you, you fucking whore. You really think you deserve anything after that stunt you pulled, letting the entire world see you like this?"
He stutters, eyes wide in fear and excitement. God, he loves this.
"B-but, I didn't want to! It was my job, the stylists said-" Minho scoffs.
"Bullshit, they told me you insisted on wearing that. Said you wanted to cause an impression on our fans.."
A dark, tense silence fills the room.
"So, not only you're showing off without our permission, but you have the nerve to lie to me?" she growls.
His eyes start to get teary again. "Mommy, I.."
Minho places a firm hand on her shoulder.
"It's okay, love, it's not his fault. I think we might neglected him a bit, our poor baby. You know how much he hates not being the centre of attention all the time"
"Is that it, baby? Aw, i'm so sorry. Don't worry then, we'll make up for it"
And they do. By the end of it, he's tied on the bed, completely naked except for the top. Blindfolded and Minho thrusting his hips brutally while folds him in half by his legs. His pretty thights covered in teeth marks and bruises, same with this abdomen and cute waist. Minho whispering dirty things in his ear as the boy cries out and tries to free himself from the handcuffs. He lost count how many times he has cum, but he can feel the excess of his cum (or your and minho, he doesn't know at this point) tainting his face and lower body. She's holding a vibrator against his dick, her free hand holding the phone and recording everything.
"C'mon, Sungie, smile at the camera. Wasn't this what you wanted? Leave an impression on Stays? I'm sure they'll love this one"
Minho lets out a breathy chuckle, panting and groaning.
"Too bad they won't ever get to see this"
Jisung is a mess. His cheeks wet with his tears and reminiscence of both of his lovers' cum, drooling with his tongue out and gasping.
Such a pretty picture for Stays.
Tags: @channieandhisgoonsquad @moonlightndaydreams @2chopsticks2eyes @skzms @hyunsvngs @noellllslut @hanjibug @hanjisunglover @queenmea604 @thightswideforhanin @roseykat @minsungisvreal
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majestical · 4 years
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rina sawayama for high snobiety
style: nazanin shahnavaz
hair: tomi roppongi
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martelldoran · 3 years
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WHAT'S THE CAUSALITY LOOP THEORY
Why Emma, thank you so much for asking. I’m not going to waste time before jumping into this because this is gonna get long so without further ado...
Steve Rogers’ Ending and How Endgame Doesn’t Support a Causality Loop and other such rambles
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Last month, I came across a TikTok that proposed that Steve’s ending made sense because it existed within a causality loop. I would link the TikTok but I didn’t save it at the time and trying to find videos on that app is impossible. You think Tumblr’s search function is bad? 🙄 But I digress. The TL;DR of the video is that due to time travel and Steve choosing to go back in time to be Peggy’s husband, it created a causality loop where he was always meant to be her husband because he went back in time and stayed there. The TikToker supported his argument by using Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (PoA), another film that uses time travel and has a clearly defined example of a causality loop. However, his argument is fundamentally flawed so I’m going to combine my knowledge of my two biggest fandoms to tell you why.
Continued under the cut because I have no chill. Beware, it's long.
To first tell you how Endgame (EG) doesn’t support a causality loop, we must establish how PoA does establish one and does it successfully. The TikToker specifically mentions the scenes that take place at Hagrid’s Hut surrounding Buckbeak the hippogriff’s execution, so we’ll look at those first. What the film does really well is establish early on that there is something weird going on well before anyone actually goes back in time. There are three things that happen in quick succession during this scene which sets up the causality loop we see later in the film. First, a rock flies through the window and breaks a jar. Second, another rock hits Harry in the back of the head. Third, once outside, Hermione hears a branch snap and thinks she sees ‘something’. There are also two additional moments later on in the film once the Harry, Ron, and Hermione have come out of the Shrieking Shack which should also be noted: a wolf howl that distracts Remus Lupin in werewolf form from attacking the group and somebody casting a full-bodied stag patronus at the edge of the lake to save Harry and Sirius from the Dementors.
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Of these occurrences, the first is arguably the most important because it does the most to establish that there is something going on outside of the Trio’s current understanding of their situation. The film makes a point to frame the jar breaking as Important Information the Audience Must Remember because it shows a visibly confused Hermione reacting to it as she picks up the rock for closer inspection and we the audience are given close up of it in her hand. Not only is it framed front and centre in the shot but the rock itself is very distinctive. It’s almost wholly smooth but for a swirl of fossil, thus marking it as not just any rock but An Important Rock To Be Remembered. This was an intentional choice by director Alfonso Curon because he uses this rock to connect this moment to its mirrored scene later on once Harry and Hermione use the Time Turner.
The audience and the characters find out about the causality loop at the same time. There are clearly stated rules of time travel that say that they aren’t to meddle with time but when Harry and Hermione see that Dumbledore, the Minister for Magic, and the executioner are on their way to Hagrid’s hut they panic because their counterparts aren’t leaving. Then, we see Hermione notice something in the pumpkin patch: a distinctive rock, smooth with a swirl of fossil. Again, we see have a close up shot with the rock centred to show its importance. Stylistically, it’s very similar to the shot we saw earlier in the film which gives the audience an emotional pay off for noticing the connection. When Hermione throws the rock and breaks the jar, it sets the causality loop in motion. The jar was always going to break because they went back in time to throw the rock that breaks it.
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And it’s the same with all the other instances. Hermione throws the second rock that hits Harry in the back of the head to alert him to the fact they need to get out of the hut. Hermione snaps the branch and is almost seen by her counterpart in the past. Hermione makes the wolf call to distract Lupin from attacking. Harry, and not his father as he had assumed, casts the patronus to save himself and Sirius from the Dementors. But each of these moments are set up clearly in the ‘first run through’ to set up their payoff when the characters realise, ‘Oh, I did these things. They were always meant to happen.’ From a narrative standpoint, these are planned out moments to clue the audience into the fact that there’s something bigger at play. It keeps them ‘in the loop’ as it were.
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This doesn’t happen in EG.
To successfully have set up a causality loop that made sense and had the same kind of set up and pay off as we see in PoA, it would have had to have been established as early as 2014 in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (CA:TWS). This does not happen. One of the main themes of CA:TWS is moving on from the past. Peggy Carter herself even says, “I’ve lived my life, my only regret is that you didn’t get to live yours.” Then saying soon after, “Sometimes the best thing we can do is to start over.” Peggy’s character in Captain America: The First Avenger is set up as someone who acts as the backup/back bone of Steve’s own moral compass. When Steve falters at Azzano about what to about the captured 107th, Peggy is there to remind him of what is right. She serves a similar narrative function in CA:TWS. Steve is struggling with life in the present. He’s just seen the helecarriers and argued with Nick Fury about protection vs fear after the botched Lumerian Star mission. Morally, he’s in turmoil and has turned to Peggy for council because he’s trying to find purpose in world where his rigid morality seems to have no place.
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From the point of view of creating a causality loop, one would think that this scene in the hospital would be the place where an initial set-up could be made and alert the audience to the long term plan for Steve’s character. Instead, we have Peggy mourning the fact that Steve didn’t get to live his life the way it should have played out, and why would a woman who has supposedly been married to another version of Steve tell him to move on? In addition, when Steve visits the Smithsonian, he watches a video where he sees Peggy talking about how he influenced her life and how during one of his missions, he saved the man that would go on to become her husband. This is the only mention of Peggy’s husband in the entire franchise until Steve reappears as an old man at the end of EG.
Captain America: Civil War (CA:CW) also offers an opportunity to set up the causality loop at Peggy’s funeral but again, this does not happen. The only family we are introduced to is Sharon Carter, Peggy’s grand-niece. When it comes to filmmaking, every choice made is intentional. From the hair and makeup to the clothes, to the music used, everything in a film means something whether it is to further character development, world-building, or the plot. Filmmakers have a limited amount of time to convey a story and anything that doesn’t matter isn’t shown. Therefore, we can conclude from the text of the film that Peggy’s husband doesn’t matter to the narrative. The person in Peggy’s family who matters to the narrative is Sharon Carter which is why she is given prominence during CA:CW’s funeral scene. Had the causality loop been set up here, there would have been a defining moment like in PoA where the audience is clued into the larger story arc. Maybe someone says something, or he meets his older self, but that doesn’t happen. It should also be noted that apart from a small scene in Ant Man, Peggy isn’t mentioned again until EG.
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In Endgame itself, the film still fails to set up a causality loop. It could be argued that this is the most important film for the set-up because this is when the audience gets the payoff. The first thing we see after the 5-yer time jump is Steve in a group therapy session for those that survived Thanos’ snap. Survivors share their stories and Steve talks about Peggy, a woman who has been dead in canon for 7-years and who died of old age. It’s incongruous and sticks out because narratively it doesn’t make sense for him to talk about her and not someone he watched disintegrate in front of his eyes. Steve watches his best friend and hundreds of others turn to ash around him and that film ends on his horrified face as he sits by his best friend’s ashes. Narratively, this is the thread that should carry through to EG but instead, he talks about missing his chance with Peggy. However, unlike PoA, there is no indication whether through dialogue or framing that clues the audience into Steve’s eventual ending at the end of the film.
Even when he goes back to the 70s, we see him looking mournfully at Peggy through the blinds in her office and a picture of him, pre-serum, on her desk. Steve and Peggy’s relationship prior to Endgame is supposed to represent the bittersweet loss of the life he could have had had he not sacrificed himself to the cause in CA:TFA. Then, since the audience knows from Steve and Peggy’s conversation in the hospital in CA:TWS that she moved on from Steve to live a happy life, we can assume that this picture is meant as nothing more than a fond memento of someone that meant a lot to her. Once more, there is no indication that Steve is ever meant to be her husband.
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It’s impossible to infer a causality loop here in the same way as we saw in PoA. In PoA, there is a payoff for every single unusual or weird moment the story presents the audience before and after the use of time travel but this is something that’s completely absent from Endgame’s narrative. Steve himself doesn’t even vocalise a desire to go back in time at any point in EG nor at any point during the other films he appears in. In fact, when questioned by Tony Stark about the possibility of ‘going home’ in Avengers: Age of Ulton, he says, “The guy who wanted all that went in the ice 75 years ago. I think someone else came out.” While it is indicative of his unhappiness in the modern-day, it does indicate a level of acceptance of the fact that this is his life and he has to make his peace with it. He’s taken what Peggy said in CA:TWS on board. He’s starting over and moving on.
With time travel, and Steve choosing to stay in the past came the fan theory that one of the pallbearers carrying Peggy’s casket in CA:CW is Old Man Steve, her husband. When presented with this fan theory, writer Christopher Markus said during an interview with the LA Times at SDCC 2019,
“I would very much like that. There is no set explanation for Cap’s time travel . . .I mean, we’ve had public disagreements with [directors Anthony and Joe Russo] about what it [time travel] necessarily means, but I love the idea of there being two Steve Rogers in the timeline. One who lived a long life with Peggy and is in the background of that funeral scene watching his young self carry his wife’s coffin up. Not just for the time travel mumbo jumbo of it, but for the just weird, personal pain and satisfaction that would be happening between two Steve Rogers there. I kind of love it.” [emphasis mine]
This shows that unlike in PoA there was no intention of creating a causality loop prior to Markus writing EG with his writing partner Stephen McFeely. In fact, it makes clear that the actual rules of time travel were in contention and that even those making the film didn’t have a unified idea of what they wanted to create in the first place. The fact that there is confusion surrounding EG's time travel is due to the fact that the people behind it, didn't seem to know what they were writing or consider the consequences of it.
What all of this shows is that an argument of a PoA style causality loop doesn’t hold water. The film doesn’t support it, nor do any of the previous films, because there aren’t any indicators for the audience to latch onto. There is no moment of the rock breaking the jar, or the patronus chasing away the dementors, no moment where that the audience is told to hold into this information for later because there’s some timey wimey stuff going on. Ultimately, when examined, there is no set-up for a causality loop that supports the theory he was always supposed to go back and be Peggy’s husband, particularly when examined against a film that successfully lays it out from the start.
Right, the more academic (lol) part of this post is done. I just want to address one more TikTok that bothered me because I have opinions and MCU Captain America is my Mastermind specialist subject.
The TL;DR of this one was that Steve’s ending made sense because he got out of the fight and was at peace and that that has been the ultimate goal of his character arc. This person argued that Steve used the Avengers to distract himself from the fact that he’s this man out of time and he can’t find peace without a fight which to some extent, I agree with. I don’t deny that that is a major driving force to his story. We see that in Age of Ultron with his WandaNightmare. I don’t deny that that is key to his character. However, this creator then made a comment at the end of this video to the tune of, ‘bUt BuCkY iS hIs StOrY aRc’ and tried to play it off like this wasn’t true or that people were wrong to think that this is the case.
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These two things aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re both true. They’re intertwined. But you cannot say that Bucky Barnes isn’t at the heart of Steve Rogers’ story. Bucky was the catalyst for every single one of Steve’s movies. He becomes CA because of Bucky. He goes against SHIELD because of Bucky. He defies 107 countries and the Sokovia Accords because of Bucky. You take Bucky out of the equation and what do you have? What happens in those films if you take Bucky Barnes out of the equation? Viewing it objectively, and even without shipper goggles on, you simply cannot sit there and claim that Bucky Barnes isn't a defining component to Steve’s story. Steve Rogers is motivated by Bucky Barnes. Steve Rogers is motivated by the depth of their relationship and the fact that Bucky Barnes is one of the few things connecting his new present to his old life.
You can definitely see the fact that Steve is uncomfortable in the modern world. He doesn’t address any of his trauma but he still attempts to move on. However, if they wanted him getting out of the fight and finding life as a civilian to be the natural end to his story arc then there was a way to do it which didn’t require him going back to Peggy. It would have been a better and more satisfying ending if he’d actively chosen to retire because I often see the argument that him going back to Peggy is him finally allowing him to be selfish after shouldering so much over the past decade or more. If Steve chose to retire and put himself first, then that sends a better message. He’s still getting the chance to ‘be selfish’ but he’s not throwing the life he’s built away. At this point in EG, he’s spent a huge portion of his adult life in the modern-day. This isn’t the future for him anymore, it’s the present and he’s lived a life and made real connections with people. The MCU does a piss poor job of showing the interpersonal relationships between the Avengers but he is at least shown to be friends with Sam, Nat, and Bucky.
But he goes back to a delusion. Or an idea of something that was never his in the first place.
When I see people make these videos and share their opinions, I can see their points but it’s like they’re taking EG on its own when that's impossible. Endgame only ‘works’ if you have the context of 10 years’ worth of films. You have to at least be somewhat familiar with the characters, who they are and what they’ve done up until now to be able to make sense of it.
However, in saying that, they wrote and filmed the movie in a way to make you think you didn’t have to take into account anything you’ve seen in the past ten years. If you only watch Endgame, you only see a grieving man mourning the love he never had. You see a man, regretful that he didn’t get to be with woman he loved. So at the end, of course it would make sense that he goes back to her. But you can only do that if you completely divorce Endgame from its ten-year canon and in a franchise like this where they make a big deal about everything being interconnected, it simply doesn’t work. Steve’s story arc in Endgame is incongruous to the narrative arc we’ve been presented in previous films.
Ultimately, Endgame is a movie you’re supposed to watch once and then not think about again. It’s made for that first viewing when everything is shocking and exciting because if you stop to think about it even a little bit, it falls apart under scrutiny.
Finally, I think that the downfall of a lot of these ‘Steve’s ending makes sense’ posts is that made by people who are most certainly MCU fans but not Steve Rogers fans and it shows.
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oceans-foundfamily · 4 years
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Making my little sister identify The Mechanisms:
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“Little Man” Eridan:
(she doesn’t know about Homestuck so I don’t know where she got that name).
“Hang on, I have to study him for a second.”
Her: “His nickname is Little Man because he’s so small.” Me: “How do you know he’s small?” Her: “He just seems small.”
“The crew is trying to get him to quit smoking because it’s not good for the air on the ship. They want him to space-vape instead, but he’s not into it. He’s also the guy who does everyone’s nails on the ship because his look amazing.”
Her: “His signature move is turning around and shooting when they’re being chased by space pirates.” Me: “They... are space pirates.”
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“I think her name is Renee.”:
“She used to be a space cop.”
“She’s extremely opposed to guns, but she’s always armed with something.”
“I know they’re all musicians, but she’s probably actually a musician. She keeps them all entertained with music.”
“She’s probably the chillest one. I haven’t seen the others yet, but I know she’s the chillest.”
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Markson:
Me: “Who’s he?” Her: *starts to speak* Me: “You can’t say Hozier.” Her: *closes mouth*
“Markson is technically his first name, but it could also be his last name, because his father’s name was Mark.”
“He’s probably pretty good at space yodeling.” Me: “wHAT-”
“On his planet, you cut your hair every time you fall in love with someone. As you can see, he’s never been in love.”
(She refused to elaborate on the space yodeling).
“On the ship, he either sings to Renee’s music or... I don’t know, what do people do on a ship besides the cool stuff I want them to do?”
“He’s a hit with the old ladies.”
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Markson’s brother, Clarkson:
“His hat has goggles on it which means... it’s alive.”
“Actually, I think he might just be an empty body that the hat controls like a puppet.”
“He wants to be the next captain. He keeps handing in his resume to become the captain of the ship, but the captain refuses to give him an interview.”
Me: “Have we seen the captain yet?” Her: “Nah.”
“Does he have stuff on his face? It looks like he has a plant growing out of him.”
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Barnabus:
“He’s just a happy man.”
“Hang on, his head kind of looks like a Pokeball.”
“He’s definitely the tailor, because he has really fancy clothes. He doesn’t have a gun, but he has that little poker thing. It probably zaps you or something.
“He’s not the captain, he’s too frilly.”
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Floria:
“She’s not the captain. Her name is Floria because she loves flowers.”
“She had the tailor make her that special belt that makes a force-field around her. She has defense abilities, but only to defend herself. Nobody else.”
“Her job is the interpreter for Clarkson’s hat, because she can talk to flowers. She only kind of understand it, though, so the translations always come out a little wrong. She’s probably hard-of-hearing because she’s got a force field around her all the time.”
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“Oh that’s Natalie.”:
“She’s a certified space nerd.”
“She’s the unofficial hair stylist because she knows how to cut and dye it. She and Barnabus have a rivalry because he never wants her to cut his hair and she never wants his clothes.”
“I think she’s a pretty normal lady.”
Me: “Is she the captain?” Her: “She is second-in-command, but she is not the captain.”
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Oliver:
“That’s not the captain. Just show me the captain. Show me someone who looks like they could be a captain.”
“Okay, I think their name is Oliver. They are the engineer, because they know how the gears work. That bow-tie is a multipurpose tool that takes care of everything on the ship.”
“The crew keeps them locked away downstairs. They kind of forget about Oliver because Oliver is so small.”
Me: “How small are we talking?” Her: “About a foot. Oliver’s feet are very small though, so don’t use that feet.” (verbatim what she said)
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The Captain:
*very excitedly* “THEY are the captain.”
“That instrument they’re holding is an instrument of war. It shoots many bullets and it also… bakes… coffee…” Me: “Bakes coffee?” Her: “Yep.”
“They keep refusing Clarkson’s applications to be the captain because they don’t know what the hat is, and they’re scared.”
“Their best friend is Oliver. They carry them on their shoulder.”
“They can bench press every single crew member, but they don’t, and that’s the end.”
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blackswan18 · 3 years
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Too Good To Be True - Ch. 42 | kth(m)
Summary: Kim Taehyung is a world famous idol in the hit K-pop group, BTS, and you are his personal stylist. Per your contract with Big Hit, he is absolutely, 100% off-limits, and yet, you are completely and hopelessly in love with him. You’ve spent years trying to shove your feelings down, but it’s getting harder and harder to ignore and hide them, especially considering the way Tae always treats you. He’s affectionate and protective and sometimes outright flirtatious, but that’s how he is with everyone, right? Confused, frustrated, and lovesick, you find yourself wondering if it might finally be worth risking your career and your heart to find out.
pairing: Taehyung x reader
genre: Idol! au, fluff, angst, eventual smut, friends to lovers, slow burn
rating: 18+
word count: 2.4k
warnings: despair, just utter despair
Chapter 42: Far Too Late
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For several minutes, neither of you spoke. The only sound you heard was that of your own rapidly increasing heartbeat. As you stood there, staring down at his phone, the words on the screen slowly blurring together until not a single letter was distinguishable from the next, the contentment you had been filled with just moments ago drained out of you. In its place arose the now all too familiar sense of dread which had been haunting you every moment of every day.
Seeing Tae and Jisoo together these last few weeks had been agonizing. Just watching him hold her hand and hearing him call her Jagi had left you curled up in a ball, sobbing on the floor of the bathroom, so the idea of them being even more affectionate with one another was truly horrifying. As your mind filled with awful images of all the ways Tae and Jisoo could ‘up their game’, you waited with bated breath for him to say something, anything to calm you down and assure you that your worst fears were not about to be realized. Eventually, his voice did cut through the silence, but it was with the absolute last words you wanted to hear.
“She’s right,” he said quietly, his eyes still downcast.
“I am awkward and uncomfortable around her,” he admitted, sounding so guilty. “Far more than a boyfriend should be.”
“And, I-I don’t think Seung is the only person to have noticed,” he then added as he lifted his head and met your expectant gaze.
The room went silent again for a few moments as you anxiously waited for him to elaborate on that fateful statement.
“Jisoo and I had a meeting with Bang PD on Friday,” he confessed, his voice shaking with obvious nervousness. “He brought us in to talk about our upcoming public appearances like award shows and the Itaewon Class premier.”
“He wanted to set some ground rules for how we’ll interact with one another,” he went on. “I think he’s worried we’ll accidentally reveal our relationship or, rather, that Jisoo will reveal it with her usual antics.”
When he said that your mind instantly flashed with images from the Golden Disc Awards last year where Jisoo gave Tae a surprise kiss on the cheek and left that stupid blue lipstick mark. At the time a stunt like that was relatively harmless, albeit infuriating for you to witness, but she certainly couldn’t do something like that if they were trying to hide an actual ‘relationship’.
“The meeting was kind of tense, though,” he then said as he ran his hands through his hair. “He asked a lot of questions and kept looking at us really curiously and I don’t know. He just...he seemed suspicious, just like he was that first day we met with him.”
It took you a couple seconds to process all that he had just said, but when the weight of his admission finally sank in, your jaw dropped open in disbelief.
“You didn’t think to tell me about this meeting?” you asked, trying your best not to shout as you stared at him incredulously. “Before or after it took place?”
“I’m sorry, Jagi,” he replied sorrowfully. “I know it was wrong to keep it from you.”
“He called the meeting unexpectedly so I couldn’t have told you beforehand,” he then quickly explained. “But, afterwards...I just didn’t know what to say.”
“I thought maybe I was just being paranoid so I wanted some time to think about things before I told you,” he said, giving you a desperate, pleading look. “I didn’t want to worry you for no reason. You were already so sad when I got home.”
“But, seeing Jisoo’s conversation with Seung makes me think maybe it wasn’t just in my head and that he might actually be questioning our relationship,” he said, now looking genuinely fearful.
His words hung in the air between you, thick and heavy and suffocating. Over the last few weeks you had been so distracted watching Jisoo move in on your boyfriend that you’d almost forgotten the reason why this all started in the first place: to keep your big secret. The idea that Bang PD of all people might be doubting the legitimacy of their relationship was downright terrifying. Having your actual relationship be discovered would have been bad enough, but getting caught in an elaborate cover up of that relationship would be infinitely worse. Your career would be over, Tae’s would be in serious jeopardy, and your relationship would no doubt be subjected to all manner of scrutiny and criticism.
You couldn’t believe Tae hadn’t told you about this right away and that he had instead chosen to butter you up all weekend with attention and affection before dropping the bomb. You also couldn’t help but wonder if and when he would have told you if Jisoo hadn’t sent those texts. It was alarming how nonchalant he had been the last two days, how easily he was able to mask his emotions. You couldn’t deny that you felt betrayed, but before you let yourself get carried away with anger, something occurred to you: for the last few weeks you had also been hiding your true feelings so as not to upset him. The situations weren’t the exact same, but even still, you felt yourself softening ever-so-slightly. You knew he had good intentions, just like you did.
“Does Jisoo know you think Bang PD is suspicious?” you asked to break the silence, trying not to sound as hurt as you felt.
“We didn't specifically talk about it, but I think she got a similar vibe during the meeting,” he replied solemnly.
If Jisoo also thought Bang PD was questioning their relationship it could explain why Seung’s comments led her to reach out to Tae with the suggestion for them to ‘up their game’. And yet, as you looked back down at her messages, you felt a gnawing, uneasy feeling in your stomach. After watching her push the envelope for weeks with her subtle flirting, you simply could not shake the thought that she was using this as an excuse to cozy up to Tae and circumvent the rules, ones which were specifically put in place to protect the sanctity of your actual relationship. Whether she was doing it to milk all she could out of this once-in-a-lifetime situation with Tae or because she was legitimately trying to take him away, you didn’t know, but you knew you needed to speak up about it.
“Is upping your PDA really going to help?” you questioned, the slight edge in your voice evident by the grimace it drew from Tae. “Is it truly necessary?”
“It would make things look more believable,” he replied reluctantly as the pained expression he wore deepened.
“I know that, but I just…,” you began, not knowing exactly how to phrase what you were trying to say.
You took a deep, steadying breath to try and calm down before you spoke again.
“Could Jisoo be suggesting it for selfish reasons?” you finally asked. “Just so you’ll give her more attention?”
Tae looked at you for a long time after you spoke, his dark eyes searching yours as he seemed to be wrestling with his thoughts. You could tell he was a bit taken aback by your question. You supposed that made sense given this was the first time since the night of your dream that you admitted to having doubts about Jisoo and her motives. Still, you were surprised that this thought seemed not to have crossed his mind and were even more surprised by what he said next.
“I don’t think she would do that, Jagi,” he eventually said, his tone cautious.
“I know she did some hurtful things in the past, and that we were worried at first about trusting her, but she’s done everything we’ve asked of her so far,” he went on tentatively. “She’s followed all the rules.”
“I honestly think she’s just trying to help,” he concluded, giving you a hopeful look.
At the sound of his words, you felt a sharp pang in your chest. After weeks of holding it all in, weeks of being strong and suffering in silence, it hurt that he didn’t believe you when you finally, finally opened up to him and shared one of your worries. The fact that he defended Jisoo of all people only made the pain worse.
While she hadn’t technically violated any of the PDA rules, she had definitely acted in a way that was borderline inappropriate given that she knew you and Tae were together. It seemed obvious to you what she had been trying to do with her revealing clothes and lingering touches these past few weeks. You found it hard to believe that Tae hadn’t also noticed and couldn’t help but be a little upset and also slightly concerned that he hadn’t acknowledged it in any way.
For the briefest of moments, you allowed your mind to wander to a very dark place. You had not realized how close they had apparently grown over the last three weeks. The fact that she had earned his trust so quickly was incredibly unsettling and had you once again worrying about what they did together when you weren’t there. You also couldn’t help but wonder if the reason why he didn’t bring up her flirtatious behavior was because he liked the way it made him feel. That thought then led to another even more unpleasant one: that he was secretly excited to have an excuse to be more affectionate with her.
A second later, though, you were overcome by a deep sense of shame for having allowed those thoughts to enter your mind at all. Throughout all of this, Tae still had done nothing to give you legitimate reason to doubt him like this. He had done everything and anything possible to make sure you felt loved and desired at all times. He had even told you he wanted to marry you and have a family with you one day. His trust in your relationship and vision for your future together were crystal clear; the last thing you wanted to do was ruin everything with your insecurity. You loved him and trusted him wholeheartedly and weren’t going to let Jisoo get in the way of that.  
“If you believe her and think it will help then I trust you,” you replied, your voice catching a bit at the end.
Despite trusting Tae and knowing he would be doing it with good reason, it still hurt to know he was going to do more with Jisoo. He was going to touch her more tenderly, speak to her more softly; he was going to treat her like his actual lover. There was no doubt in your mind that watching it was going to be torture.
“It’s just a week, though, right?” you then added giving him a tight-lipped smile, trying to convince yourself that you were OK with this. “We can make it through one more week with a little extra PDA.”
The way his face crumpled when you said those words had your heart plummeting into your stomach. You hadn’t seen him look at you this guiltily since the night of your big fight when he realized he forgot your birthday.
“Jagi,” he started, his voice strained as his grief-stricken gaze met yours. “We’re going to have to keep doing this a little longer.”
And, just like that, the last bit of hope you had been clinging to disintegrated. The possibility of this nightmare extending beyond a month had always been there, but you had allowed yourself to live in denial of this fact in a desperate act of self preservation. Had you been aware all along of just how long you would need to endure this heartache, you probably would have given up weeks ago.
“How much longer?” you all but whispered.
“I don’t know,” he replied with a deep sigh. “Until the Big Hit Banquet maybe? Or just after?”
“We need Bang PD to actually see us together so we can convince him it's real,” he added quietly.
You felt the room spinning. The Big Hit Banquet was over a month away. You had only just mustered the strength to brave another week of your current misery, but now here you were being asked to increase both the intensity and duration of your suffering. The thought alone was almost more than you could bear and you felt your body beginning to give out under the crushing weight of it all.
“I’m sorry, Jagi,” he then said, sounding so completely and utterly broken that you felt his pain in your own soul. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“I know it’s going to hurt,” he went on shakily. “But, we have to keep going.”
“We can’t let all of this have been for nothing,” he concluded despondently as he slumped his head back into his hands.
At that moment, there were so many things you wanted to say.
That the pain was already unbearable.
That you honestly didn’t know if you could handle this anymore.
That if you kept going and irrevocably damaged your relationship it all would have been for nothing anyway.
All those words were right there, stuck in your throat, threatening to suffocate you. Tears pricked at the corners of your eyes as you struggled to force them out, but every time they came close to passing your lips your body failed you and all that came out was an inaudible gasp. Silently, you begged him to look up and just see it, the sheer panic that was enveloping you, but his head remained in his hands, his eyes fixed on the floor in a blank, lifeless stare.
The two of you stayed there like that for a long time, you not saying what needed to be said, Tae not seeing what needed to be seen, until eventually your crippling anxiety subsided and was replaced with empty resignation.
He was right: you had to keep going.
It was far too late now to turn back.
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odetogyus · 3 years
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↳pairing/s: idol boyfriend!yugyeom x fem!reader
↳genre: angst (w/ a happy ending lol), idol!au
↳warnings: profanity, mentions of alcohol consumption, trust issues
↳song: wait by maroon 5
✎author's note: idk what I was going through when I wrote this but this was from my 2018 archive and I think this baby needs to see the light of day,, so here it is!
"The concert should be done now," you thought to yourself while staring at your phone.
Since your brother's wedding was in 2 days, you didn't have time to fly to Toronto to see your boyfriend and his group perform. You've been on a few tours with them– sometimes working as a stylist for Yugyeom and the whole team. JYP himself even sends you an extra ticket to every single country the boys go to just in case you wanted to come with, but this time however, you had to stay home to help out with your brother's wedding.
It's been almost 3 years since you started dating Yugyeom. What started out as a very unexpected interaction at a dance showcase, later bloomed into something so beautiful. Your relationship wasn't always pretty. In fact, it's true what they say about the first year; it definitely is the hardest.
You've seen them grow, not just as artists but as people, too. You've built such tight relationships with each and every one of them, even the staff members. GOT7 was a family and you were over the moon to be a part of it.
After a few hours of waiting, you decided to take a hot shower before taking a nap. It was a tiring day for you and your family. The wedding was in 2 days and there were a lot of things left to do. You also knew very well that the boys come out exhausted after every show, and so you fought back the slightest feeling of worry in your head and fell into a deep sleep.
You woke up to the sound of your phone going off.
BREAKING NEWS
MEMBERS OF THE KPOP GROUP– GOT7, WERE SEEN AT A CLUB IN TORONTO AFTER THEIR CONCERT. MEMBERS MARK TUAN, JACKSON WANG & KIM YUGYEOM WERE SPOTTED HEAVILY INTOXICATED WITH 3 UNKNOWN WOMEN JOINING THEM AT THEIR TABLE. NO OFFICIAL STATEMENTS REGARDING THE INCIDENT HAS BEEN RELEASED BY JYP ENTERTAINMENT.
People you knew and didn't know were tagging you everywhere. Every photograph, every article, they all had their eyes on Yugyeom, and they all had their eyes on you, too.
Your brother's fiancée barged into your room shortly after the news broke out. She was always there for you, and the relationship you shared was a very special one. You trusted her, and you never hid anything from her after the first time she saw you cry.
"Y/N," your almost sister-in-law cooed. You both knew that it was very unlikely of Yugyeom to act that way, but then again, the people surrounding them aren’t always angels. No one really is.
Just then, the name you've been waiting to see finally popped up on your screen, but this time, you weren't sure if you had the guts to answer him.
"Should I answer?" You asked, sounding miserable as ever. Tears escaped your eyes, glistening like broken glass when the sunlight hits the surface.
"You need to hear it from him, Y/N. I'll be in the kitchen, let me know if you need anything."
Accepting the call, you swallowed hard enough and prepared yourself for what could either be the most painful truth you had to hear, or the biggest lie ever you had to believe.
"Y/N.. hey, please let me explain," Yugyeom's voice was incredibly raspy and shaky, and you knew damn well that he was in tears. It's only been a few hours since the incident, so it was safe to say that he was still quite hungover. You knew they were well taken care of, but what happened cannot be rewritten again. What's done is done.
"Go ahead," you answered. Holding back your tears is always the hardest when you know that you have no choice but to endure the pain.
"We had a few drinks, and we had fun. We had so much fun. The boys and I, the staff. Me and Jackson hyung tried the hose thingy, it was so– cool– but, but I'm sorry babe, I'm so sorry–"
"Do you just.. wanna talk when you’re not like.. this, Yugyeom? Because if you're gonna keep doing this, I might as well just hang up and talk to my fucking wall–"
Oh, the theatrics of a brokenhearted beast.
"No.. stop, listen to me, I'm trying to explain!"
"Okay, then do it," you said angrily. The tears from your eyes were flowing down uncontrollably. It was so painful that you couldn't even hear anything else but the sound of his lies breaking you continuously.
"Mark hyung joined us, and we got so drunk, and next thing you know, these random girls sat with us at the table. I don't remember a lot but– I think one even bit my neck– it hurts, and she– I think she sat on my lap but I think I tried to push her off but I passed out. I don't really remember anything else–"
"You know, Gyeom? Sometimes, I wish you knew what it's like to be the one that patiently waits for you to come home, hoping that the worries in your head just disappear. How could you be so irresponsible? Man.. how could you do this to me? To us?"
"Y/N, you know I love you more than anything else but for fuck's sake, will you please believe me? My head hurts so much and you're acting up! Jesus!"
Yugyeom knew not to push your buttons, but in that state of his, he pushed it all, not missing one.
"Well, if that’s the case then I’m sorry. I’m sorry for caring too much, and for being all up in your business all the fucking time. Have fun remembering how you got that stupid hickey of yours, I’m done–"
"No, you are not hanging up on me, Y/N. It was a mistake, okay? God, my head is killing me and I just.. need you to believe me. I drank too much, and I know it’s bad, but I swear to fucking God, I didn’t do anything to hurt you. I would never hurt you. But you need.. to stop being difficult.. you’re making things worse here–"
The tension grew even more. You were both screaming your lungs out at each other, thousands of miles away from the other.
"Really now?" You spat bitterly. That was it for you. The last straw. "Well then, I know my brother invited you to the wedding, but don't bother showing up. I don't want to see you."
Your harsh words must've hurt Yugyeom so much, that his screams of anger just managed to slip out of his already worn out body.
"You're really throwing this all away– huh? Almost 3 years worth of memories? Just because I made a mistake, just because I don't remember everything that happened to me while I was intoxicated? You think I wanted those girls to come close to us? You're so– Y/N, you really think I wanted to hurt you, don't you? So now.. you do this? You're really breaking up with me? On the phone? Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Trust, Yugyeom. Trust. You broke the most important thing we built. Do you know how hard it is to do this? To date someone like you? People send me death threats, Yugyeom. Just because I decided to be with you. Do you even know how I feel? Do you know how Mark's girlfriend feels? How Jackson's girlfriend feels? Because I do. We all fucking get it!"
"Okay, trust. But let me ask you Y/N, if things were so difficult, why are you still here? Why date me when you could've left? That's what you wanna do anyway, right? You wanna leave, you wanna be free, right?"
But it’s not freedom if it’s not with you.
The bitter taste of surprise was too much for you. It was never meant to hurt that much, but it did.
"Wanna know why I'm still here, Yugyeom?"
"Why," he spat coldly.
"Because I thought that– loving you, oh god, I thought that that was more than enough to believe that we'd make it. But at this point, maybe we're both just better off alone. Separate ways, Gyeom."
Yugyeom let out a faint laugh. The most painful laugh one could ever laugh. A laugh of defeat.
"You're really doing this, huh? This is what you want? You're really doing this to us–"
"You don't need to show up at the wedding.. I'll just, tell them about us after. We'll meet when we're both ready to talk. Be safe."
"Fuck this, Y/N. Fuck–"
And with that, you hung up.
Your heart was broken once again, not by the same person, but because of the same reason you kept your heart safe and hidden in the first place.
Trust.
Yugyeom was your true love. The man you believed to be was your person. The person you entrusted your fragile self to. The person you needed.
But maybe he doesn't need you.
Putting your phone on silent, you cried yourself to sleep, wishing you'd never wake up.
wedding day.
Your eyes were still tired and gloomy, but you were better. You haven't heard from him since the fight and although it hurt you too much to be that person to hang up and end things, you knew better than to mope all day and question your existence.
"You look so beautiful in that dress! I'm so happy you chose that style! It's just perfect," your brother's soon-to-be wife exclaimed. She was the one who held you tight when your heart broke for the wrong guy, and she was also the one who held you when Yugyeom couldn't. It's safe to say she's the sister you never had.
"Thanks, I'm happy to be here. I'm so excited for you and my brother. I don't know what you see in him but I'm thankful you stuck around."
The bride smiled with tears welling up in her eyes. "You stick around for the one you love, Y/N. Even when the storm hits and everything falls apart, wait it out, then love again."
The wedding venue was everything you imagined it to be. A beautiful pathway to the garden, red and white roses everywhere, and photographs of your brother and his soon-to-be wife hung from the stringed lights wrapped around the tall trees to create the most beautiful ambiance.
Your quick peek of the venue ended since it was almost time for the actual ceremony. You were one of the bridesmaids, and you had to be wherever the bride was.
From afar, a tall figure walked towards the venue in a red suit. His dark hair complemented his outfit, and his handsome face was the cherry on top of it all.
Yugyeom showed up to the wedding a few minutes before it actually started. He took his time exchanging words of happiness and support to your brother. Yugyeom's relationship with your brother started out like any other brother – boyfriend relationship, but the two ended up being very close friends. A few moments before announcing the beginning of the ceremony, Yugyeom found his way to his seat. He sat close to the front, but in the corner.
The ceremony began, and every second felt longer than it should have. Closing your eyes, you took slow, but steady, steps to the podium where your brother was. You both agreed to welcome the bride with your whole family present next to him.
dirty looks from your mother
never seen you in a dress that color, no
it's a special occasion
not invited but I'm glad I made it
He looked at you like it's the first time he's ever laid eyes on you. His heart thumped like crazy, seeing how your hair fell perfectly down the length of your spine, in a red dress that exposed most of your back. Yugyeom couldn't resist every urge to kiss you. Every thought of you possibly breaking up with him completely made the poor boy pale. He was madly in love with you, in every possible way, that losing you meant losing everything to him.
The moment you stood next to your brother, your eyes met his. The eyes you hated to look into, but missed the most. Yugyeom stared at you for a long time, before you both snapped out of the trance only you two were in. You saw him mouth a "wow" before facing the bride and giving her a hug.
Walking to your designated seat, your mind went crazy just imagining how hard it would be to keep your composure when Yugyeom would literally be inches away from you.
"Beautiful," Yugyeom said in awe as you sat next to him. "You're beautiful, Y/N."
Without looking at him, you extended your gratitude. "Thank you, Yugyeom," was all you could say.
You both tried so hard to focus on the wedding. For the most part, it felt like no one else was there. You were in the moment, and so was he.
The exchange of vows was definitely something. Every word your brother and his wife exchanged was pure love. And deep down, you prayed that the love you needed was Yugyeom's.
oh, let me apologize
i'll make up, make up, make up, make up for all those times
your love, I don't wanna lose
i'm begging, begging, begging, begging, I'm begging you
As if on cue, Yugyeom held your hand without looking at you. His hand was shaky, and so was yours, but you didn't pull away. You held onto him, too. You held onto him like your life depended on it, and you held onto the person that longs for you the most.
"I do," your brother speaks into the microphone, looking at his woman. Yugyeom holds your hand even tighter, saying the same words your brother said, loud enough for you to hear it. Only you.
I do.
The bride reciprocates, and tears immediately stream down your face as the rush of emotions take over you.
Not wanting to lose the love of your life ever again, you follow suit, and said the same words the bride said. Only for you and Yugyeom, it meant something else. Only something the two of you could understand.
I do.
You both stood firmly, not letting go of each other, when the officiator finally said the words everyone wanted to hear.
You may now kiss the bride.
Not wasting a precious second, Yugyeom pulled you into a tight embrace, holding your head against his chest. His lips planted kisses at the top of your head, and suddenly everything was right in the world.
The scent of his perfume was home to you, and it made you feel so much better.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm so stupid, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry," Yugyeom whispered, still keeping you in his arms.
"I'm sorry, too, Gyeom," you answered, trying hard not to let the tears roll down your cheek and ruin your makeup.
Yugyeom finally kissed you.
He kissed you without stealing the spotlight from the newly weds. He kissed you softly, but it was clear that he longed for it. For you. He kissed you just the way you needed to be kissed, reminding you that he is yours in full surrender.
"I love you, Gyeom."
You finally meet his gaze. The prettiest eyes you've ever seen, and he really was the best thing that's ever happened to you.
"I love you, Y/N. I love you."
Wait it out, then love again.
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farchanter · 3 years
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Steven Hall: Maxwell’s Demon
It’s an unsettling business, when you really look at it.
Unsettling to think that when we read a novel, we’re burning through years of a writer’s life in a matter of hours. Unsettling too, though in a different way, the realisation that a reader will rarely have any sense of the temporal disparity at all. From a reader’s perspective, the words invite movement across a page at an obvious pace, sometimes racing, sometimes ambling, sometimes moving with a slow, deliberate creep, and for all the world as though the writer is right there alongside the reader, that the two are in this together, tiptoeing, then sprinting, then pausing for breath at one another’s side. But none of that’s true. The truth is, it took me forty-eight minutes to get from writing the words ‘It’s an unsettling business’ to here, to build that little road with its various curves, slopes and rises. To work it over, to stamp its surface as flat as I possibly could, to do my best to ensure you wouldn’t trip or stumble along the way. How long did it take you to go from there, to there, to here?
Since I committed to reading more books a few years ago, I’ve read some outstanding work. My favorite discovery, however, is likely Steven Hall’s debut The Raw Shark Texts. It’s a literary laser-beam targeted right at me— it’s an ambitious, cerebral, maybe even somewhat pretentious horror story built around the idea of the transformative power of communication. It lives in a space adjacant to Mark Z. Danielewski’s seminal House of Leaves, and comes closer to that mark than any fiction I’ve read since. I don’t know that it’s strictly the best book I’ve read on this journey, but it’s such a big story— such a titantic swing for the fences— that I couldn’t help but fall in love with it and its warts.
So, when it came out that Hall’s second novel— this, Maxwell’s Demon— I was both excited and nervous. Nervous, because when an author succeeds with a book as high-brow and artsy as The Raw Sharks Texts, that tends to give them the license they need to turn their next work into something even more into the avant garde— and this jump is particularly difficult to do well. After all, House of Leaves was followed by Only Revolutions— despite that novel’s success, I found it so prose-y as to damage one’s ability to consume the story.
It came as quite the surprise, then, that when Maxwell’s Demon was finally in my hands it came across as much more restrained than The Raw Shark Texts.
Thomas Quinn is a writer living in a shadow. His father, Stanley, was one of the most celebrated journalists and poets of his generation. When his mother passes away, his father all-but vanishes from Thomas’s life, too— but not from the public. In fact, Stanley takes up a protégé— a fiction writer named Andrew Black who goes on to write Cupid’s Engine: in-universe, one of the most popular and world-changing novels of all time. And right there, on the cover, is the glowing accolade of Stanley Quinn.
Once Stanley passes, however, Black and Thomas strike up an unusual relationship. On one side is Black, one of the most venerated popular English novelists of all time. The literary press styles him as Stanley Quinn’s stylistic son. On the other is Stanley’s actual son, an author struggling to make ends meet. Yet, through Stanley, they are bound— one bitter of the other’s relationship, the other curious in turn. That strange partnership leads Black to send Quinn a mysterious photograph of an unsettling black orb. In investigating, Quinn starts down a rabbit hole of people who believe in a magical power of the written word— not magical in the sense that one’s eighth-grade English teacher would use it, but instead a literal supernatural force with the power to change reality.
In many ways, Maxwell’s Demon is an extension of the philosophy Hall explores in The Raw Shark Texts— the idea that humans don’t simply write down things that happen to them or wish would happen. Instead, the act of writing has a real ability to prescriptively recontextualize and alter the world around it.
If The Raw Shark Texts is that philosophy viewed through the lens of the horror genre (and particularly a House of Leaves lens), then Maxwell’s Demon is that same philosophy presented as a mystery novel (and, especially, it makes no pretense about what it owes The Da Vinci Code).
There’s a lot to like here, and once the book hits its stride you find yourself on a fun pendulum: you’re fully willing to accept a supernatural cause before Hall slowly presents evidence to walk you back to a mundane explanation, right before another shocking moment which casts the entirety of that mundane explanation into doubt— and the cycle begins again. Once we got there, I couldn’t read through the story fast enough.
There are two problems, after a fashion, with Maxwell’s Demon. I mention in the previous paragraph that the story has a good pace once it gets rolling, but it takes a while for that to happen. Relatedly, it lacks the “popcorn movie” feel that defines Dan Brown’s writing, the “pageturnability” that leads you to plow through Angels & Demons in one night. Brown is an expert at ending each chapter in a particular way to compell you to continue, to read just one more, which Maxwell’s Demon doesn’t do. This may be a deliberate choice— I’ve heard other writers refer to Brown’s technique as “cheap tricks"— but between the relatively slow build-up of the relationship between Black and Quinn and Hall’s predilection to philosophical explainers, I don’t think he quite nails the difficult highwire act between high-concept metafiction and mass-market pop culture he was shooting for.
There’s a truly startling twist ending here, and it achieves the same thing that a lot of modern mystery stories do— it’s so shocking it overpowers the part of your brain that would ordinarily realize that it makes no sense. If one were coming to Maxwell’s Demon purely as a mystery, one would find it disappointing. The careful layering of evidence and use of negative space which defined, say, Agatha Christie is absent. There’s no real plausible way to deduce what’s really going on from a plain reading of Maxwell’s Demon, and that would bother genre fans.
But, to my mind, this isn’t really a mystery story— it wears the clothing of a mystery, but those trappings are a vehicle for Hall’s metaphysics more than a sincere adoption of the genre per se. As someone who enjoys those metaphysics, I similarly enjoyed Maxwell’s Demon.
There’s a recurring theme of inadequacy in the story, and it humanizes Thomas Quinn to the point where it’s painful and upsetting to read. He holds an idealized version of himself— he is Thomas Quinn, novelist— but over the course of Maxwell’s Demon that ideal is slowly burned away. He is a man undergoing an identity crisis, and it feels so personal that a reader’s heart goes out to Quinn. He comes to realize that he is failing as a writer— on the verge of financial catastrophe. His wife is a successful scientists chasing down her dream, and he comes to realize that he is inadequate as a partner to her— that he is failing her romantically and sexually. He carries the weight of losing both parents, and of his father’s seeming discarding of him for Black. These bitter pills lead Quinn to make some very poor choices— but, with the care Hall takes in painting these inadequacies as the background for Quinn’s character, we can’t help but understand why he makes them. The outstanding humanization of Thomas Quinn, the careful characterization, is what carries the novel.
After two books, it’s fair to say that Hall has difficulty writing women. In both The Raw Shark Texts and Maxwell’s Demon, the characters have brilliant wives who work tirelessly to pull their husbands out of the mud. But they don’t necessarily have a ton of depth of their own— in the case of Maxwell’s Demon’s Imogen, her primary role is to shine so brightly that we both can’t look at her directly and cast all the darker Thomas’s shadows. She is the Guide on Thomas’s Hero’s Journey, but she does not seem to grow otherwise.
Possibly a spoiler in this next paragraph, although I’m going to endeavor to not spoil the entire mystery.
In fact, Hall’s tiny cast of women serves as an interesting literary device here. The moment the mystery ends, where the ending begins, involves the use of a "she” where we were expecting to read a “he”. Because there are so few women in the story— and every one of them is accounted for at that moment, save one— that single change of pronoun, that single added character is enough to collapse the wave function of the mystery into its only possible remaining solution.
So, all that to say: Maxwell’s Demon is more thoughtful than it is engrossing, but that thoughtfulness— the idea of writing as a literal magic— makes for a fun read.
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c1oak · 4 years
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Nothing upsets me more than the fact that if we had been renewed, season 3 would be playing right now. Tandy and Tyrone would be back, taking on a new location, new adventures. And the slow-burn romance would be going FULL FORCE. Season 3 is the season they would have kissed. We would have seen them learning more about their powers, living together, navigating life on their own.. Would Mina and Brigid be together? How's Tandy's mom doing? Tyrone's parents? Father Delgado? Evita!?!? Evita just practically gave up her future for the divine pairing. Does she still get to become a doctor?
There will never be a show like cloak and dagger. The symbolism and parallels were incredible. The music and stylistic choices beyond incredible. The way records were used last season?!? The topics cad explored? Sexual assault, sex trafficking, drug abuse, police brutality, racism, abuse... No show will ever touch upon those subjects in such a classy and flawless way. The acting was incredible too.
Think of how far Ty and Tandy have come since season 1. When the show started, they were strangers, arguably even sorta enemies. They couldn't even touch. We ended season 2 with them on a bus holding hands. The character development was unparalleled..
Last semester I took a gender studies class and one of the units was sex trafficking. But although it was the first time I had learned about it in a classroom setting, it felt like I was RElearning it. Season 2 hit every single mark. Season 2 taught me just as much about sex trafficking as a college course did. Imagine the impact cloak and dagger's storylines have had on those who haven't had the opportunity to learn about its issues formally. I know it impacted me.
There was a plan for seven seasons. SEVEN. The story was just getting started.
Cloak and Dagger was an important show. It meant something, and it ended far too soon.
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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Writing Dialogue
While some choices in dialogue will come down to style preference, most fanfic dialogue suffers from a much earlier problem of being done incorrectly, no matter what the stylistic preference. Once basic spelling & grammar is mastered, and assuming the fic contains more than a handful of dialogue, I think bad dialogue is the thing that kills my enjoyment the fastest. I can handwave plotholes and understand emotions that weren’t conveyed right, but I can’t read people having a conversation that doesn’t look anything like an actual human conversation.
Problem 1: Too Much Drama
We want our scenes to pulse with energy! Of course we want the dialogue to be dramatic! The problem here is, what makes for good dramatic dialogue is not people yelling powerful words at each other very passionately. What makes for dramatic dialogue is mostly the importance of that scene to the plot & the characters, so to achieve dramatic dialogue, the best thing you can do is not overly rely on the dialogue itself to be dramatic. Set up a dramatic situation, and then people don’t have to yell. They can say a few basic sentences and the audience already knows why it is important and why the characters care so much.
Have you ever seen the scene in The Room where Tommy Wiseau yells “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” Did you actually find that dramatic or did it just make you laugh because it was overdramatized? That’s what dramatic dialogue does to a story. Unless your characters are middle schoolers exclaiming it out in the hall between classes, chances are, older and more mature characters aren’t going to do a lot of yelling or make weirdly dramatic statements like the world is ending.
One of the biggest offenses on this count is overusing exclamation points and overusing emphasis. Exclamation points should be used very, very rarely, as should telling your reader what words are meant to be emphasized. Your character’s mood should primarily come through action - are they slamming doors, pacing back and forth, collapsing into a chair? Dialogue tags like “shouted” or “replied angrily” can be used to help, but should not stand on their own as the only thing portraying mood.
Instead of looking like this: “OMG! Can you believe it! Drama! Let me scream all the drama out in a monologue!” Lisa screamed, it should look like *Lisa kicks off her shoes, one leaves a mark on the wall* *Lisa slams bag down on counter, opens fridge for beer* *Lisa’s boyfriend stands frozen, as this is not normally how Lisa comes home from work. “This thing happened.” *Lisa collapses into kitchen chair and sticks head in her hands.* *Lisa’s boyfriend comes to put a hand on her back*. “One sentence reminding reader why Lisa is upset about this”.
Problem 2: Too Little Drama
Alternatively, you get scenes that sometimes look like two college roommates got high and are trying to acquire a pizza with as little effort as possible. Let’s say, for example, you have one character that has a crush on another character, and they are trying to find out information about them. While maybe the character learning this information is going to do something with it, so it’s important to the plot in another way, so the conversation itself does not need to be dramatic, it might end up looking like this:
I met Crush after class and we walked together. “What’s your favorite color?” - “Red” - “Do you like dogs?” - “Yes. Did you do the homework?” - “Yes. Math is my favorite class. How about you?” - “P.E.”
Like with the above, setup and action are everything. If you set up the scene where we know in advance how long it has taken Karen to get up the courage to talk to Chad and things like that, and then include actions in between the dialogue to show that she is nervous and therefore not very talkative, like her glancing up at him briefly but looking away as soon as he makes eye contact, or have her analyze Chad’s mood and wonder if he’s annoyed, etc, the scene can be made much more meaningful without needing to be a “dramatic” scene.
Problem 3: Dialogue is written like exposition
This tends to go unnoticed by some authors who are otherwise decent, and for me really ruins an otherwise decent story. The writing within the dialogue tags is written well, it just isn’t written like dialogue. It is written like exposition/narration.
In exposition: This project was doomed from the beginning. The improvements might look nice on paper, but the law of diminishing returns was going to stop it before it really started. Sounds...not excellent, I just pulled an example out of my ass, but fine.
In dialogue: “I think this project is doomed already,” Bob said, looking around the meeting room. “The improvements might look nice on paper, but the law of diminishing returns is going to stop it before it really starts.”
...sounds like Bob is kind of a psycho, or possibly your most pompous and hated coworker. Who the hell says “Law of Diminishing Returns” out loud if they aren’t a professor? The longer the dialogue and more flowery/technical/big vocab it becomes, which often *adds* to exposition, the worse and more unnatural the dialogue becomes.
Dialogue should not feel the same as the “speech” when a character is thinking. We tend to be fairly limited in how we express ourselves, use shorter and more simple sentence structures, more basic vocabulary, and haven’t memorized what we are going to say, so it doesn’t come out eloquently.
The one real exception to this that isn’t really dialogue, but is speech, is if you have a character making a speech or presentation, which they have prepared for in advance, and it is reasonable for them to give it uninterrupted.
If you want to make a point of one of your characters sounding like a total tool when they speak, you can also do this to achieve that and make it immediately clear to the audience why everyone hates them, but unless that’s what you’re going for, avoid this at all costs.
Problem 4: Dialogue is otherwise unnatural
Always, always, until you’re pretty damn sure you’re pretty damn good at it, say your dialogue out loud.
Would that personally really say “What is that?” or is it “What’s that?” Along the lines of not needing to use emphasis as much as you might think, if you were, say, in Scotland and just saw the Loch Ness monster pop out and want to ask your companion what it is, “What is that?” is fairly unnecessary. “What is that?” suffices. The simple fact that you didn’t use the standard contraction means the character emphasized the “is”. If you just see a piece of mail on someone’s desk that you are curious about, you’re going to say “What’s that?” and it won’t sound like you are dramatically asking about a generic piece of mail.
There are lots of very minor and small things that can easily go wrong in dialogue of this nature. It’s really important to say to yourself: if I was in this situation, how would I say it? Read it like you are acting it out in a movie and see. Also, question if a person would even say a sentence like that to begin with, or if they would be more or less direct in their approach. More direct is appropriate in many cases because people are usually trying to communicate clearly. Even if they are lying, they usually just say a direct statement that is a lie, they don’t dance around it indirectly and give hints to the other character. More indirect is appropriate when a character is trying to have a difficult conversation - we don’t tend to give tough advice or be directly rude, we try to work around it to make it sound better.
Because people want to have “exciting” or “cool” dialogue, they will often also give characters great rebuttals all the time, where they have these snappy conversations. This *can* work, but it’s really hard to pull off well, so in general I’d limit it to having a character having the occasional good rebuttal than a conversation of back-and-forth snark. Honestly, most of us just can’t think on our feet that well, and unless you’ve built the case that these characters can [ie, they’ve been married 20 years and are having the same arguments over and over so have it all thought out] it just seems very unrealistic.
Problem 5: Underutilizing dialogue tags
If you have two characters speaking, theoretically, if we know who the first speaker is and they switch off, a reader can follow the conversation indefinitely and know who is speaking.
In practice, that doesn’t happen. We like to be occasionally reminded. Personally, I try to max out at four consecutive lines of untagged speech, so no more than:
“Hey” said Kyle when he saw Brad.
“Hey.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Partying, bro, what did you think?”
“Haha, true. Do you think Lindsey will be there?”
“Man, you have such a crush on her,” Brad laughed.
Problem 6: Overusing dialogue tags
Conversely, in a conversation that is easy to follow, every single line does not need to be followed by a variation of “X person said”. If you are going for a tight back and forth conversation where neither character is thinking in between, you want to gum it up as little as possible with extraneous non-conversation. Hit us with occasional dialogue tags, and that’s it.
Problem 7: Not breaking dialogue up
This is somewhat of a style question, but in general, conversations should only be quick back and forth when that’s the point, but otherwise should generally pause briefly to “show” people doing actions, give some character thoughts, or otherwise break it up so the entire scene isn’t just a conversation.
Also, you can use these pauses as a way of showing hesitation/actual pauses that happen in the conversation.
Problem 8: Huge breaks between dialogue
This is something I am probably the *most* guilty of myself, because I’m writing a story where characters analyze the other characters a lot, so sometimes they’ll pause and think for a while in between. I haven’t quite arrived at the level where I’ve figured out how to get that all to flow in a way that breaks the dialogue up nicely, but not so much it is jarring and you’ve forgotten what the last thing a character said was.
But, anyway, definitely something to keep in mind. While a scene shouldn’t usually be all conversation, breaking the conversation up too much makes it feel like it isn’t a conversation at all.
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siteeco15 · 3 years
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thecloserkin · 4 years
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book review: Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now (2004)
Genre: Young Adult
Is it the main pairing: yes
Is it canon: yes
Is it explicit: no
Is it endgame: yes
Is it shippable: yes
Bottom line: It finally happened, I broke my own “no cousincest—in this house we turn the TABOO dial up to eleven” rule. In my defense this book is gobsmackingly good.
Lately I’ve been mulling on the difference between books about teenagers and books for teenagers. This one is the former, and a joy to reread as an adult. Our American heroine Daisy is sent across the pond to live with her British cousins; a war breaks out; details are scant but who cares about the war, she starts fucking one of the cousins. She describes it as “falling into sexual and emotional thrall” she said THRALL I am living for it. On a scale from “pure” to “problematic” this ship is almost all light and no darkness—what darkness menaces our protagonists emanates from outside the charmed circle of their big ol’ farmhouse and their sheepdogs and their goat:
The real truth is that the war didn’t have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop. There were no parents, no teachers, no schedules. There was no where to go and nothing to do that would remind us that this sort of thing didn’t happen in the Real World. There no longer was any Real World.
The notion of carving out an idyll where you & the object of your desire spend all day doing nothing but drink each other up? It’s attractive even for those of us conducting mundane relationships in the “real” world. Maybe especially for those of us in the real world, where we compartmentalize our relationships and no one person can fill every filament in our universe. Daisy’s cousins live a cloistered life in the countryside and within a week she’s saying stuff like “I felt like I’d belonged to this house for centuries.” Which is an awfully dramatic way of saying she never felt like she belonged in New York. She doesn’t just fall for Cousin Edmond; she falls for the whole telepathic dog-whispering cousinly clan and their big anarchist energy. When Daisy, an only child, says “I had about as much experience with sex and boyfriends as I did with brothers and sisters,” she is intentionally conflating romantic and familial relationships and I am 1000% here for it. Sure it’s technically cousincest but it feels claustrophobic and codependent and everything I want out of an incest ship.
Every step of Daisy’s obsessive infatuation is chronicled with agonizing tenderness:
I wondered if that’s the feeling you’re supposed to have when your cousin touches a totally innocent part of your anatomy that’s fully clothed.
that’s right it’s the thought and the intention and the pining behind the touch, not the bare fact of physical contact.
Things were so intense I was sure that other people could hear the hum coming off of us.
Imagine desire rising like mist from the surface of one’s skin. And the “other people” part of the equation is important, because it’s the sneaking around behind the other kids’ backs that gives urgency to their coupling:
we started sleeping most of the daylight hours so we could be awake at night when everyone else was in bed … Then we would sleep for a little while and eventually reappear and try to act normal
But what is “normal”? There are no adults and no rules; nothing is forbidden save that they themselves deem it so. What then explains Daisy’s conviction that this is “not a good idea”? Why shroud their affair in secrecy if the most powerful reaction they provoke from smol!cousin who learns about Daisy/Edmond is “Well I’m glad you love him because I do too”? That’s pretty anticlimactic given the lengths Daisy & Edmond have gone to be stealthy. It also emphasizes (in case we’ve forgotten that Daisy has both no siblings and no boyfriends) how romantic & familial attachments spring from a common source. I think what the text is getting at here is that it’s dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket the way Daisy puts all hers in Edmond. It’s dangerous and unhealthy to make one person your whole world, as we see later when Daisy comes to much grief. At no point, however, does she regret her decision.
we could try and try to get enough of each other but it was llike some witch’s curse where the more we tried to stop being hungry the more starving we got.
That’s a hard-hitting simile right there. The thing about curses in fairy tales is they don’t always do what they’re designed to do; frequently they accomplish different ends entirely. If we look at what Daisy’s insatiable hunger for Edmond is displacing we note that Daisy is no stranger to the feeling of constant, gnawing, unsatiated hunger because Daisy has an eating disorder. In her own words:
at first not wanting to get poisoned by my stepmother and how much it annoyed her and how after a while I discovered I liked the feeling of being hungry and the fact that it drove everyone stark raving mad and cost my father a fortune in shrinks and also it was something I was good at.
…which is just about the world’s most cogent account of eating disorders as quests for control & autonomy. By the end of the novel she no longer experiences hunger as “a punishment or a crime or a weapon or a mode of self-destruction” and that's something, anyway.
Y’all know I’m a big skimmer right? I mention this because I want you to take my full meaning when I say I read every single word of this (very short) novel. The syntax helped—most sentences are structured like so: “… and …. and … and then …” but it was engrossing af and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use Ironic Capitalization to such devastating effect. The stylistic choice to use zero dialogue brackets means Daisy’s thoughts and Edmond’s thoughts (Edmond’s a telepath) and external action and internal commentary all run together. I didn’t find this confusing btw I just found it extremely effective.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Daisy and Edmond are separated at about the one-third mark and she spends the remainder of the book trying to get back to him, traversing a war-torn countryside with Edmond’s smol!sister and his dog in tow (since Daisy is a city girl who can’t even read a compass, maybe it’s more accurate to say smol!cousin + dog have Daisy in tow):
I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn’t love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn’t have to howl all night.
The parallel between Edmond’s girl and Edmond’s dog is not an idle one. There’s consistent strain of anticapitalist sentiment that runs through this book, that comes out most strongly in the relationships between Daisy’s cousins and their animals. Some military junta appropriates the farmhouse and displaces Daisy, her cousins, and the menagerie of animals that depend on them—that’s how Edmond and Daisy become separated, they’re “relocated.” The army is hierarchal and in wartime, the army is in charge. By contrast, Daisy’s cousins model a nonhierarchical kind of relationship with their animals, a relationship based on reciprocal obligations rather than dominating other people. “At times,” professes Daisy, “I thought I was more animal than human.” In other words, human beings live under an absolutely barbaric system, and it’s often more “humane” to behave like animals. It’s Edmond’s sheepdog who proves key to Daisy’s successful escape. City girl Daisy still can’t wrap her head around it:
one of the things I most dislike about nature, namely that the rules are not at all precise. Like when Piper says I’m pretty sure that mushrooms aren’t poisonous.
But nature’s strength lies precisely in the fuzziness of its rules! It encourages interdependence & reliance on others, rather than trying to go it alone as an atomized individual. So surviving on the run actually forces one to prioritize community (however you define it) over individual, which has salutary effects on Daisy, who reports “Somewhere along the way I’d lost the will not to eat.” She’s defeated her eating disorder, that’s good news. Unfortunately, Edmond and Daisy are not even reunited before she’s expelled from England and shipped back to America for Reasons. Dw she comes back! As soon as the borders reopen she comes back:
The soldier had stamped my passport FAMILY in heavy black capital letters and I checked it now for reassurance because I liked how fierce the word looked.
Very powerful passage but now for the ending. Let’s not talk about that ending. I don’t know why I called this a good book I am still incredulous we got THAT ending after everything we went through brb I’m suing Meg Rosoff for emotional damages
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jessejostark · 4 years
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10 Questions w/ Jesse Jo Stark About Cool Parents, the Awesomeness of Cher + Still Believing in Rock & Roll
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Other than maybe Sean Lennon and Jakob Dylan, Jesse Jo Stark grew up with surely the most inspirational people a future musician could possibly hope for. Indeed, her parents Richard Stark and Laurie Lynn Stark are the founders of rock & roll jewelry studio-turned-empire Chrome Hearts—whose clientele includes the likes of Bono, Elton John and Slash. And her Godmother is none other than the goddess of stage, screen and song Cher, who has been a continuing influence on her very talented niece.
Not just that, but she was sort of mentored from the start of her music career by Sex Pistol Steve Jones, who hosts the now legendary radio show Jonesy’s Jukebox in Los Angeles, where Jesse Jo also resides. And most recently, she appeared in the video for Brit punker YUNGBLUD’s new single “Strawberry Lipstick,” while corona had stranded him in LA.
But for all they may have rubbed off on her, the young Ms. Stark makes music that surely comes from somewhere deep within herself. Each song seems a little piece of her that she allows out into the world, revealing the inner intensity and intimacy that belie a very public persona.
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Her previous single, a cover of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” was a languid, fuzzed-out country gem of a ballad. But new track “Tangerine” is a mini-masterpiece of sorts, exhibiting her ease with crossing genres and weaving them seamlessly together. The twangy guitars are back, but there’s a little Beatles, a little widescreen Britpop, and just a hint of retro Cali dreaming as well. With its lush strings, and Stark’s haunted voice so full of longing, it vividly evokes so many life memories of love’s powerful pull.
For the video, she reached out to fans to create their own vision for the visual accompaniment to the song, and they were then edited together—a way of crossing the quarantine divide via the power of art. She describes it thusly:
“What I’ve missed most in this new way of livin’ has been the live shows and hanging out with everyone every night. So along with the ‘Tangerine’ track release, we thought it would be super sweet to get everyone involved in the video, so it’s almost like we’re all having this one big party together, no matter where we are in the world, physically we are together in heart. i’ve been at home watching everyone’s videos in full tears with the biggest smile wrapped around my face. everyone’s creativity and love for this song has been overwhelming. It makes my heart beat knowing that they can take away a little piece of ‘Tangerine’ and make it their own. it’s fucking beautiful. it’s art.”
We hit Jesse Jo with ten questions about all of the above, and as it turned out, even her answers were uniquely stylish.
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Your influences are distinctly 1960s + ’70s. Do you feel a bit out of place in the current musical zeitgeist of hip-hop preeminence and so much over-glossed pop? my influences are not only 60’s and 70’s
and the thing about the current state of music right now is that there is nothing out of place. hip hop artists pull samples from old soul, country, and r&b records and it’s all turning into a place you can do anything you want. the only thing that pisses me off is when people chase chart positions by making the same shit over and over.
there is a difference between being out of place and making a place for yourself. so to answer. no i do not feel out of place. i feel like i’m right where i should be
What was some of the music you grew up listening to? my dad was always my go-to with music. he always played the clash, merle, john lennon, brian eno, david bowie on the way to school. with the occasional britney n christina.
i remember this one time,i think i was about 7 years old, he picked me up at my friend sasha’s house and i was throwing a fit because i didn’t want to leave. as we pulled out of the drive way he turned on “should i stay or should i go” by the clash. i had never heard it before. he looked at me and smiled and i felt my bad mood melt away. i remember thinking, as i tried my best to keep scowling at him, “i wanna make something this cool” . n i’m still tryin
What was it like growing up with rocker parents? Did that imprint on your personal aesthetic? are they rocker !? i mean i know they are pretty damn cool. everything about them has left a huge beautiful mark all over me. they are my favorite legends and they inspire me completely and truly .
On “Tangerine,” one can detect references to the The Beatles, Oasis, Patsy Cline, Mazzy Star…what has been your musical state of mind of late? what a major line up i wanna go to that show.
my musical state of mind has been to make more.
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Image by Laurie Lynn Stark
Your music is very raw and seemingly unfussed over. Does inspiration find you in a mostly spontaneous fashion? oh it’s fussed . i am fussy . music for me is never just one thing. sometimes a song comes easy like it was layin on my night stand when i woke up. other times i feel like i have to cut my body open, drown in my tears and claw at the floor just to get one word out. inspiration is endless when you show up for it.
How did you come to work with YUNGBLUD? he called me n asked for me to be in his video . he said there’d be lips n latex. and so…
Cher is your godmother – has she been a mentor and influence? in every single way. i am in awe of her.
As opposed to those with batteries of stylists, you seem to really own your sense of style. Who are your fashion inspirations? my brother n sister, the cramps, cher, audrey hepburn, hands, animal print, love n london. i want to dress up like my favorite singers voices.
just like in every medium, i have people i’ve worked with forever. they’re my family. we understand each other. challenge each other and force each other to be brutally honest in the things we make.
i also love fresh eyes and ears and people that find new ways to look at the same things.
Is a full Jesse Jo Stark album on the horizon? it is n soon
Rock & roll as we know it seems to be on life support. What do you think is left for it? only if you aren’t lookin. there are so many insane bands in the world. some of my favorite bands now are kids my age. it isn’t dead. you just gotta find it.
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geoyahalgeoya · 5 years
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Dingo staff x Changmo
Changmo x Dingo Staff
Plot: Dingo has decided to collab with ambition boys once again, taking them for a 1 night trip away from the city. Changmo and the boys agreed without a fuss after all, its Dingo who’s paying for everything.
During the filming, Changmo noticed an unfamiliar staff member, someone who wasn’t part of the last video that they filmed with Dingo. For sure, she has caught Changmo’s attention as well.
The filming was going through smoothly, Mina has gotten used to how everything works specially collaborating with big stars such as these Ambition boys. They have to provide them with everything since all of the boys were high maintenance.
Mina is currently studying film and directing, and she was fortunate enough to be hired as the director assistant for Dingo. She gets to learn, and she gets to see her favourite artists, it’s a win win for her.
“Damn, Changmo has been working out huh.” She mumbled to herself as she stood next to the director, filming the boys get thrown in the pool before getting ordered to hand them towels. She acted right away, grabbing an armful of towels while walking towards them.
She approached Hash first and made her way down to the last guy, which is Changmo. She doesn’t know what is it about him, but for some reason. She’s fucking attracted to him, not in any romantic way.
He turned around to her direction and immediately, thoughts came running in his mind.
“Thanks” he suddenly said, which caught her off guard his none of the boys said it but him.
“Ah… all good”
She went back to her position, writing down all the things the director is telling her. After a while, they all took a small break from the pool. She sat down on one of the benches off set, watching everyone interact with the boys, except for her.
But being an assistant, you really don’t get any rest. The stylist approached her with a shirtless changmo beside her, she immediately stood up; putting her phone away.
“I can’t find Changmo’s things anywhere, can you show him where did you put it? I got to fix up ash’s brush ass hair” she groaned before walking away, Mina couldn’t even protest.
“I— uh… follow me I guess?” She tried to look .away, yet she couldn’t, it was such a rare sight to see him with such exposure.
Changmo caught her shy behaviour, finding it cute. However, he always saw her swallow a lump in her throat, giving him the thought of what she thinks of him.
They walked towards the rooms upstairs where she placed his things, she wasn’t sure where she was supposed to put his belongings, so she just took a wild guess.
Once they reached the room, there was an awkward silence while he rummages through his things. It was dead silence until she heard him spoke.
“I haven’t seen you before. You must be new right?” He walks towards her, towering over her small frame. She looked away from his bare chest, not wanting to fawn over his exposed upper bust and be obvious about it.
“Y-yeah I’m new.” She fumbled with her words, unable to speak properly. If you were in her position, breathing won’t be an option.
He studied her facial features, finding her eyes cute when she looks away; her cheeks heating up from embarrassment. Her subtle movements were taking a toll on him and being in a closed room like this wasn’t helping.
“H-hurry up and put your clothes on, we need film the closing segment” She turned around but Changmo turned her back around, she widened her eyes in surprise.
“Don’t pretend that you don’t like it, the stylist told me that you’ve been thirsting over me before you even worked here.” He laughed which made Mina even more nervous, she wanted this more than anything. Like holy fuck, its Changmo; no one really knows how he is in bed.
A few moments later, Mina wrapped her arms around his neck to pull him down and captures his plump tiers on hers. She wasn’t the type to be verbal about the things she wanted. Taking actions is definitely better.
Changmo curved his lips into a smirk as he hoists her off the ground, wrapping her legs around his waist while reaching back to lock the door so he could finally take her on the bed.
He slammed her down on the mattress, pinning her down with his fingers around her neck.
“Is choking alright?”
“yes”
“Spanking?” He hooked his fingers on the hem of her pants, pulling it down in a swift, caressing her thighs before sending a stinging slap against her skin. She let out a quiet hiss, daring to make a sound but Changmo kept her quiet by pressing his lips on hers.
“can’t be too loud baby”
“You’re literally the one being loud” she whined, raising her legs up in the air as he slid her pants off her. Changmo gripped on her jaw to keep her head still while the other is making its way down underneath her panties.
She let out a gasp when his fingers found its way on her aching heat, circling the sensitive nub.
“Oh? What a reaction” he said cockily, licking his lips as he picked up the pace; his fingers toyed with her clit until he was driving her to edge. He enjoyed the faces she was making; however, it wasn’t easy for him either. His pants were getting uncomfortable too.
He licked his lips, satisfied on how affected she was just from teasing her sensitive clit, her moans made him groan; eventually giving in. He gave her a cocky grin before spitting on his fingertips and sliding his two digits past her entrance.
“yeah you like that?” He kept his other hand wrapped around her neck as he abused her heat, enjoying the warmth feeling of her walls as it swallows his fingers in.
Mina parted her lips to let out a throaty moan, biting it when he started to move his fingers in; repeatedly pumping it in and out and curling them until she was shaking once again.
“Changmo I’m going to cum- “She whispered, grabbing onto his wrist.
He smirked, pulling his soaked fingers away to rub her clit to edge her again and again. It was getting painful and frustrating that he wouldn’t give her what she wanted.
“are you gonna do it?”
“Yes, Changmo please…” She pleaded, almost sounded like a sob but Changmo couldn’t care less. He liked the way she begs.
“Yes? You’re gonna cum for me baby?”
Mina just nodded, tightening her grip around his wrist as she tried to reach her orgasm without interruptions but of course, Changmo won’t have that.
He pulled away once more, giving her heat a light slap before pulling his pants down along with his boxers. He wrapped his fingers around the girth of his cock, stroking it until it was fully erected.
His other hand left her neck, caressing the mark it left before teasing her heat and finally lining the tip of his cock against her core.
“You want this? Yeah?” The way he teases by asking questions with the most obvious answers just made her more aroused and frustrated. Changmo really enjoyed toying with her.
He pushed the head in then pulling it out just to see her reactions, he continued to tease until he himself couldn’t hold it in any further.
He pushed himself deep in her, gripping onto her waist as her walls engulfs his cock tightly.
“Baby you’ve got to relax, you’re so fucking tight” He muttered under his breath, biting his lips when he started to move; starting with a swift rhythm, thrusting in and out of her in a slow pace.
“Oh fuck” She closed her eyes, savouring the feeling of Changmo being inside, wanting to voice out the pleasure that she was receiving but she couldn’t. His breathy moans blended in with her soft moans.
Mina would accidentally let out a yelp from time to time as his movements became harsher and his pace became faster. He would grip onto her neck again, limiting the air she’s receiving until her moans were quieted down.
“So fucking tight” His nails dug onto her skin, earning a small hiss from her but she didn’t mind as the pain was soon replaced with pleasure when he snapped his hips harder.
Mina realised that Changmo is a big talker when it comes to sex, asking her a lot of things; he was just so verbal with everything and she loved every single bit of it.
“You like taking this cock baby?” He asked, working his hips against hers as he pounded harder and faster, making her moan in approval. Though, she couldn’t give him an answer since she was too occupied and distracted by his cock hitting her spot repeatedly. Changmo didn’t quite like that.
“I asked you a question princess” he let go of her waist to grip on her jaw, forcing her to look at him before giving her cheeks a slap. She moaned loudly from the unexpected stinging sensation from her cheeks. It wasn’t something that she thought she wouldn’t be into but surprisingly, it gave her a sense of satisfaction being slapped.
“Yes I like taking your cock in me Chang-“
“Oppa” He gave her another slap,
“O-Oppa” She cried out, making his movements harsher each time passes by.
He then stopped to turn her around, pressing her head against the mattress and lifted her ass up in the air as he pounded into her from behind. He let out a groan while sending her ass a harsh spank over and over again.
“Fuck… Yeah you like that?” He gripped onto her hips once again, triggering his own orgasm as he repeatedly abuses her spot. She cried out in pleasure, clenching her fist on the sheets as she felt her walls contracting around his cock.
“Oppa I love it so much” Her moans were muffled by his hand pressing her face against the mattress before getting another spank from him.
“You love it?”
“Yes… please let me cum Oppa” She cried out, not caring any longer if she was being loud.
“Cum baby”
He pulled her up against his body so he could thrust deeper and faster, grabbing her face to capture her tiers for a heated messy kiss as they both reached their own climax.
Her legs tensed as she reaches her orgasm, closing her eyes to ride her high as he kept moving despite from reaching their climax.
“You alright?” He pulled away and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear as he laid her properly on the bed. She nodded, mentally cursing herself after realising that they didn’t use a protection.
“Changmo… I’m not on pill” She muttered, lightly slapping his arms while burying her face on the pillows. He laughed and gave her cheeks a kiss.
“Shit, I’m sorry. We’ll get you a morning pill tomorrow”
She groaned, trying to stand up but he stopped her. “Just stay there, it’s okay.”
“What do you mean just stay! I’m supposed to be working!” She whispered, hiding her body as she watched him peek behind the doors.
He got off the bed after putting his boxers on and walks towards the door, opening it quietly and peeking in to see if everyone was around. Surprisingly everyone was gone, he opened the door completely and saw Mingyeom walk past with a cup of water.
“Ya, where’s everyone?”
The small rapper gave him a scowl.
“They all left because you disappeared! I swear to god, we have to film again the next night” Mingyeom whined, earning an apologetic laugh from Changmo before shutting the door on his face.
“This ass hat!” Mingyeom sighed before walking away.
“They’re all gone lol” Changmo went back to the bed, wrapping his arms around her body. “Fuck, what if I got fired” She chewed on her lips but Changmo stopped her by placing a kiss on her lips.
“Then you can work for ambition, So I can see you more often”
THE END.
fuck i didnt check the spelling errors and shit because im too lazy but here it is!! 
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handmaidensofnaboo · 5 years
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“Ultimately, it is very apparent this novel was noticeably, lovingly, and carefully crafted by a Prequel fan, a Padmé fan, a Handmaiden fan... Queen's Shadow is a fitting tribute.”
Queen's Shadow had a somewhat impossible task for me as a handmaiden “super fan,” a potentially “tough critic,” so I commend E.K. Johnston for willingly providing me with an early copy to share my thoughts on it with you all... I was nervous about how Queen's Shadow would turn out to be honest, but EKJ was up to the task...
I'll preface this review by saying Handmaidens were my first real community engagement in fandom. My older sister and I joined the Royal Handmaiden Society on TheForce.Net boards back around 2001 when I was about 14. The RHS was the reason I went to my first convention (Celebration II) and although the group isn't as present online as it once was (please follow @royalhandmaidensociety​), I made life long friends and it forever shaped and changed me. It was an overwhelmingly positive fandom experience at a very impressionable age and for that I'm forever thankful...  So for those of us who have such deep roots to this, who have, for the past 20 years, analyzed the handmaidens’ every micro expression, every costume, and have carved out our own understanding of them (from what little information that would could find), this book might be a bit "complicated " to process.

 At least it was for me.
With the announcement of Queen's Shadow, I was of course initially ecstatic, validated even, that they/we were being seen and heard, finally!! Yet mixed feelings slowly sunk in too. Despite us RHSers long lamenting the lack of content—handmaidens unjustly being overlooked in both Star Wars official media and for a long time in mainstream fandom—it also became this amazing small community space for each of us to freely imagine and play in. It’s been a kind of safe haven I've come to greatly appreciate. With a book featuring them... That could all potentially change. This fandom could change. I found myself wondering a few weeks ago, "Will I even like these girls? Will I love these new versions of Eiraté, Rabé, Sabé...” Something I've previously never had to consider. My fictional friends were about to be exposed on a larger than ever level, and reshaped, officially, forever. I was worried.


I knew I had to go into this book open minded, no way could EKJ take each one of our different headcanons and fantasies and appease us all in one ultimate text—but to my surprise, there were certainly select striking scenes, moments, I had while reading, where (for me) she did accomplish just that.  

After both the prologue and the first chapter in particular (which were centered around my favorite Handmaidens, from TPM), I had to put the book down for a while because I was so overwhelmed in the best kind of way. It truly was so close to capturing what I have wanted all these years that I just wanted to bask in it. Maybe that sounds silly but even simply one chapter filled with handmaidens, is an overwhelming amount of content for us to receive, let alone an ENTIRE book. This little fandom is just so used to excavating for scraps. I reread the beginning of the book again the next day, out of pure enjoyment, before I continued on.


The unbelievable news, the great news... Something I can't believe even is real... Is that Queen's Shadow starts with handmaidens and ends with handmaidens, and there are handmaidens in… NEARLY? Every. Single. Chapter. I really never thought I'd never see the day. I’m stunned. Yes, they are different then I imagine them, but I'm happy to see them, I still like them, just the same. And Padmé, who has also been sorely ignored, unappreciated, and underutilized within general Star Wars media/merchandise, is also finally getting the spotlight she deeply deserves.
Queen's Shadow is woven like an intricate tapestry threading together Padmé's stories throughout the entire prequel trilogy (especially the first two films), and highlights some of my favorite stylistic and thematic choices within them. Similar to the prequels (especially TPM) it reminded me of a period drama, with it's more formal dialogue, richly detailed costumes, ceremonies and politics, and admittedly a more contemplative pace than the swashbuckling fairy tales of the OT (but still engaging in it's own way). Also like the prequels, you get that occasional ominous foreboding, that sense of pieces being moved behind the curtains by shadowy figures, of unclear motivations by supposed "allies," of tragic destinies being spun—but still find yourself swept away by moments of hope and idealism, despite it all.  There is a particularly heartbreaking yet beautiful finale moment of this book with her that was so fitting to George Lucas' vision of Star Wars, it was, as he once said, "like poetry—it rhymes." Anytime something can capture that Lucas approach to storytelling, I am thankful to be reminded of why I loved Star Wars in the first place. (Especially in the Disney era years when I've felt a bit "post break up" about the franchise, to be honest.)
Queen's Shadow is foremost about Padmé's work, shifting and hardening herself into her new role as senator. It does justice to the themes and qualities that originally enchanted and inspired me about her: fulfilling her duty to her people, her compassion for vulnerable communities, and fighting for what's right—through language, through political and inner power, strategy, and unexpected partnerships. And as always, Padmé is luminous. 
There is one cause in particular she is advocating for that is notably poignant in its connections to TPM. I was incredibly pleased it was there, relieved even. It was so important and needed for her character. It enriches the choices she makes in the later films. And it is just one of a number of political themes in the book that are timeless and ever relevant, but wasn't inserted into the story in a heavy-handed way. I love that the main audience for this book (young girls), will get these meaty concepts presented to them through our beloved political heroine and the diversely talented women supporting her.  While we do see the various skills and character moments of Padmé and her handmaidens, I admit (and this is just my first read impressions) they all still did feel somewhat at a distance for me. I personally would've liked to have dug deeper into their personalities. I'm not sure how to properly articulate it, but I just felt a bit left "wanting more"—for more walls to come down, to have gotten further into their inner thoughts... But I think it's partly the challenge of the large number of characters, the book’s YA length, and a personal preference of writing style. Which, in EKJ’s defense, does compliment these particular characters, who have long had these kind of untouchable, unknowable presences, these masks over them (and she does address that). I think as I reread it, my feelings on may improve as I retain all the subtleties better. But if they remain elusive, that gives us room to fill it out with our own head canons, which is something many of us all ~clearly~ enjoy! It is part of their appeal, part of why we first loved them after all. 
It's also important to note the impressive attention to various Star Wars lore that is entwined throughout Queen's Shadow, from remnant gems of "Legends" handmaiden lore (and even RHS in jokes), to architectural details found in Battlefront II, to various appearances by Clone Wars characters... And many more I’m sure I’ve missed. Yet thankfully I can't recall any of it is done in a way that comes off as showy, elitist, or hard to follow (if for example, you're like me and admittedly haven't watched hardly any of the Clone Wars).  Additionally, here and there, there were some scenes or lines that didn't quite hit the mark for me personally, one minor set of changes from "Legends" handmaiden ages irked me a bit (we had so little to cling to ok! lol), frustration at already established lore (such as Panaka and Clovis, which EKJ can’t help), and other things that were simply just creative choices of the author (which of course happens for me with almost every Star Wars spin-off). 


Regarding the last point, that was the only other occurrence where I put the book willingly down, this time because I needed to get some space—to process something I decidedly didn't like. It was about midway through the book regarding a particular minor storyline. I don't want to spoil, but I will say it involved a new character that, for me, was taking up too much room in a book that already had plenty of amazing characters I wanted to spend more time with. I just felt he wasn’t exactly needed, or that others easily could've substituted his place and it would've been more meaningful to the lore.  These critiques are relatively minor however, and most of them are easy to move beyond, especially when I consider the bigger picture, and the majority of scenes, quotable lines, and pivotal interactions in Queen's Shadow that do seamlessly work. Those more than make up for the handful of things I struggled with.

 Ultimately, it is very apparent this novel was noticeably, lovingly, and carefully crafted by a Prequel fan, a Padmé fan, a Handmaiden fan. For this I'm deeply thankful, because it's easy to imagine if it wasn't—How poorly or sloppily Padmé could've been mischaracterized or the possible omission and/or confusion regarding the handmaidens… The latter of which BOTH the revered Dave Filoni and Timothy Zahn are woefully guilty of, (full offense). It hits me sometimes how so much damage could've been done were this in less capable, less attentive hands, with an author that would've cared less. EKJ clearly cared a lot. Minor issues aside, that's really what mattered most to me, at the root of it. So I'm very glad.


The more open minded you go in, the more you will enjoy Queen's Shadow, and (I say this for myself, as much as for anyone else who can relate) we can still make space for and enjoy our old head canons alongside to the new lore, or even mesh them together... I admittedly struggled a few times, but I definitely enjoyed reading it overall, particularly all the scenes on Naboo (and another planet that will go unnamed for now)... 

If you love Padmé, the handmaidens, Naboo culture, prequel politics—this book is a must read. The more time that passes, and as I reflect back, the more I feel that Queen's Shadow is a fitting tribute to Padmé and our handmaidens, let alone the prequel era itself. Queen's Shadow will be comfortably situated on my bookshelf beside our other established classics: Queen Amidala's Journal and Queen's Amulet, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it again when the audiobook comes out (holy heck we're finally gonna hear almost all the handmaiden names pronounced??! Have we been saying them "correct" all these years?? Stay tuned lmao...) I'll probably be posting my spoiler thoughts on Queen's Shadow after the book's release on March 5, 2019. Pre-orders are available online, though I really recommend purchasing it at your local independent book store if you can, and/or requesting your local libraries get a copy! Please share your own pictures/thoughts/reviews on here, twitter, instagram etc. and tag it. We gotta encourage Disney to give us more, because this book definitively ends with an invitation for a sequel or spin off of some sort, and I, a bit desperately, want it!!  The more we can support Queen's Shadow with the language Disney knows best ($$ and exposure) the better chance of future Padmé and handmaiden content, and they deserve it!! All of it—books, comics, Disney+ streaming miniseries, video games—Give them the legacy Rogue Squadron got. It's their time.


Again, thank you so much E.K. Johnston for creating this beautiful book, and going out of your way to provide me a copy. I'll always treasure that moment when I got that surprise package in the mail, a book nearly 20 years in the waiting. I was 12 years old again, that snowy day on my porch.


Can't wait to read everyone's thoughts. MTFBWY. ✨✨✨
Thank you for reading,
@handmaidensofnaboo​
♕ Pre Order Queen's Shadow 
♕ Purchase Queen’s Shadow at your local independent bookstore
♕ Follow author E.K. Johnston: website | twitter | instagram | tumblr
♕ Follow cover artist Tara C. Philips: website | twitter | instagram | tumblr
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bensboynton · 5 years
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reckless b.h
HI WOW IT’S BEEN A SECOND. 
i’m genuinely so sorry for being inactive i’ve been crazy busy these past few weeks and frankly uninspired. i just wrote this and i have literally no idea what this was. i had the first four paragraphs planned and then it all kind of spiraled out of control. 
enjoy tho.
rough summary: fucked up, fast-paced and very detailed love story? i guess.
word count: 1.4k
pairing: ben hardy x female!reader
warnings: very angsty for no reason... like so much angst, mentions of drugs and alcohol, unedited, ben is kind of portrayed as the bad guy in this but i love ben he’s my baby, mentions of sex
--
she was rash about all things.
she was too quick to decide what she wanted at a restaurant, she walked into tattoo parlors with no rhyme or reason and got whatever design or word she couldn’t get out of her head tattooed on her thigh. she’d leap into unstable relationships with unstable people and try to fix the unfixable.
and she lived her life like that for a long time. constantly taking risks, never being fearful of the “what-if’s.” 
and she was fine with that. it worked out in her favor a lot of the time. until one day, it didn’t. 
she’d order the spaghetti and then realize that she wanted steak. she’d stumble out of tattoo parlors late at night holding gauze over a permanent marking in her skin unsure of if she truly wanted it there. she’d be left dizzy with heartbreak after every man who was unsure of himself would up and leave her alone in an unfamiliar city. 
and then, as a last-ditch effort to desperately cling to her reckless lifestyle, she fell into a relationship with a blonde-haired man who had an accent that threw her weak heart for a loop every time he opened his mouth to speak. he had calloused hands and an even more calloused heart, and she threw herself into his arms, his sheets, and his soul. 
he was mysterious. quiet, but sarcastic. he hid a lifetime of stories and wisdom and jokes beneath his normally stoic manner. he cast a fishing line and caught her bottom lip with the hook and drew her mouth in to meet his. he tasted like candy. 
he’d take her to nice dinners and pay for dresses and shoes that were way too expensive, whisk her away to far-away places in first-class airplane tickets that always made her feel out of place. he’d shush her concerned stutters with his soft lips and press a glass of champagne to her tongue. she never objected. 
he was an actor, and she was a poor girl from the streets of New Jersey who grew up with cigarettes and alcohol. she lived at the heart of a darkened city. the people there would wake just to rub the grimy film off their lukewarm eyes and she was just like them. 
her hair was frizzy and she wore leather jackets and drank way too much whiskey. she smoked cigarettes and felt a lot of relief when she discovered that he did too. 
he took her to big events and lavish parties and showed her the world she didn’t even know she was missing. she met big hollywood stars and suddenly became someone she didn’t know. someone she didn’t want to be. 
he convinced her to love him, and she thought she did. but she loved the idea of him more. 
she fell into his soft sheets every night and he’d crawl between her legs and make a home there, and she would do the same for him. she’d leave her things strewn across his ridiculously soft floor, and they were both on fire.
he was in love with almost everything that she was. her voice, her smell, her hair that was always a little bit too frizzy. he loved her bitten down fingernails and the way her lips wrapped around his tongue. he loved the way his hand fit around her neck and the sparkle she’d get in her eye. she was flawed but something about her had him infatuated. 
she was rash about all things until she met him. 
they were a fiery, red hot ball of passion and love for six months. they couldn’t keep their hands off of each other. there were breathy moans and soft sighs and light giggles. it was a rollercoaster of ecstasy. 
she’d roll around in silk sheets in fancy hotel rooms, bathe in the shiny porcelain of the expensive bathtubs in different countries while he left for work every morning with a kiss on her forehead. 
she was content until one day she realized she had stopped being rash. 
she’d read the whole menu before even considering what she wanted, would never get a tattoo unless he approved, she started biting her tongue and stopped saying the things she wanted to say. she’d never do anything to her hair unless the stylist he hired said she should. she lost her fast, risk-taking lifestyle and six months into their relationship she realized just how much she missed it. 
the matchstick that was their love burnt out faster than it was ignited. the red-hot nights turned icy cold when she told him she wasn’t in the mood. his hand was never around her waist at fancy movie premieres anymore. the coldest days in the winter got colder. 
they would fight a lot. their hearts quickly began to ache as they began going to bed angry. too many nights ended with broken hearts and mascara running down cheeks and slammed doors and screaming and shouting and things being broken. 
she decided she had enough. 
after letting him suffocate her with his fancy dinners and etiquette and expensive high heel shoes, she looked him in the eyes and said that she forgot who she was. she lost her rash decision making and became who he wanted her to be. 
he spat acid at her, telling her of how when he found her she might as well have been homeless. she felt tears sting the back of her eyes and felt a pang in her fragile chest. so this is what he really thought of her. she grabbed her leather jacket that had slowly collected dust and she hit the ground running. he didn’t go after her.
she left him standing in a crisp hotel room while she flew back home to her dirty city and cried a river almost every night in her tiny studio apartment. her skin was shocked at the feeling of her stiff sheets and not his soft silk ones. 
her hair lost it’s shine that her stylists had spent so many months perfecting. he was the only thing on her mind for months. 
he had waltzed into her life and taken over her mind and soul. she became a shell of who she used to be. she’d sit in front of mirrors and disconnect from her body. she felt empty. she didn’t even know what was looking back at her. 
she had loved him through the seasons. in the summer, she had gazed into his crystal clear eyes and sunburnt cheeks and kissed his puckered lips with a love so childish and strong it made her weak in the knees. 
in the fall, she’d lightly graze his forehead with her lips as he slept in her arms after a long night of making love. 
in the winter, she’d cuddle up next to his warm body that smelt like hot chocolate and felt like home. 
in the spring, she fell out of love with a man who was hopelessly in love with the way she looked and the way she made him feel. 
and it was summer again, and she sat alone in her hometown trying to regain her previous reckless spirit but it left her body and never returned. she thought he was just another boy. 
but he strolled into her life with shiny leather dress shoes and perfectly slicked back hair, and a smile so perfectly aligned it could’ve been piano keys. he stole her heart, her mind, and her spirit with one fatal swoop. 
she never spoke to the blonde-haired actor ever again, but she thought about him every night when her eyes bored holes into the ceiling above her. his eyes were burned into the skin on the inside of her eyelids. 
she read magazine covers of his new girl that came from money and had smooth skin and beach blonde hair that looked flawless all the time. he bought a nice house and fell in love with lots of women but none of them would ever be like her. none of them made him feel the way she did. and he hated that he’d never find someone as perfectly imperfect as she was and he’d curse himself every night at how he let someone he thought he loved slip away. 
when she met him, she was reckless and rash and every single thing that her mother tried to force her not to be. and when she left him, she was everything she had promised herself since childhood not to be. 
neither of them have been the same since. 
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