#for every phrase there are two synonyms that could have been used instead. and the writer made the choice they did for a REASON | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pumpkinpaix · 3 years

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hello there, hope you're having a nice day <3

so i've been reading a lot of fics lately, uk for sanity's sake, and i've noticed that in most of them, lwj doesn't use contractions (eg., says do not instead of don't)?? and i think he doesn't in the novel either but i don't remember lol so i can't be sure but anyway that made me curious - does chinese have contractions as well? does he not use it bc it's informal?

hello there! I’m doing all right, i started to answer this ask while waiting for a jingyeast loaf to come out of the oven 😊 many thanks to @bookofstars for helping me look over/edit/correct this post!! :D

anyways! the answer to your questions are complicated (of course it is when is anything simple with me), so let’s see if I can break it down--you’re asking a) whether chinese has contractions, b) if it does, how does they change the tone of the sentence--is it similar to english or no?, and c) how does this all end up with lan wangji pretty much never using contractions in english fic/translation?

I’m gonna start by talking about how formality is (generally) expressed in each language, and hopefully, by the end of this post, all the questions will have been answered in one way or another. so: chinese and english express variations in formality/register differently, oftentimes in ways that run contrary to one another. I am, as always, neither a linguist nor an expert in chinese and english uhhh sociological grammar? for lack of a better word. I’m speaking from my own experience and knowledge :D

so with a character like lan wangji, it makes perfect sense in english to write his dialogue without contractions, as contractions are considered informal or colloquial. I don’t know if this has changed in recent years, but I was always taught in school to never use contractions in my academic papers.

However! not using contractions necessarily extends the length of the sentence: “do not” takes longer to say than “don’t”, “cannot” is longer than “can’t” etc. in english, formality is often correlated with sentence length: the longest way you can say something ends up sounding the most formal. for a very simplified example, take this progression from least formal to absurdly formal:

whatcha doin’?

what’re you doing?

what are you doing? [standard colloquial]

may I ask what you are doing?

might I inquire as to what you are doing?

excuse me, but might I inquire as to what you are doing?

pardon my intrusion, but might I inquire as to what you are doing?

please pardon my intrusion, but might inquire as to the nature of your current actions?

this is obviously a somewhat overwrought example, but you get the point. oftentimes, the longer, more complex, more indirect sentence constructions indicate a greater formality, often because there is a simultaneous decreasing of certainty. downplaying the speaker’s certainty can show deference (or weakness) in english, while certainty tends to show authority/confidence (or aggression/rudeness).

different words also carry different implications of formality—in the example, I switched “excuse me” to “pardon me” during one of the step ups. pardon (to me at least) feels like a more formal word than “excuse”. Similarly, “inquire” is more formal than “ask” etc. I suspect that at least some of what makes one word seem more formal than one of its synonyms has to do with etymology. many of english’s most formal/academic words come from latin (which also tends to have longer words generally!), while our personal/colloquial words tend to have germanic origins (inquire [latin] vs ask [germanic]).

you’ll also notice that changing a more direct sentence structure (“may I ask what”) to a more indirect one (“might I inquire as to”) also jumps a register. a lot of english is like this — you can complicate simple direct sentences by switching the way you use the verbs/how many auxiliaries you use etc.

THE POINT IS: with regards to english, more formal sentence structures are often (not always) longer and more indirect than informal ones. this leads us to a problem with a character like lan wangji.

lan wangji is canonically very taciturn. if he can express his meaning in two words rather than three, then he will. and chinese allows for this—in extreme ways. if you haven’t already read @hunxi-guilai’s post on linguistic register (in CQL only, but it’s applicable across the board), I would start there because haha! I certainly do Not have a degree in Classical Chinese lit and she does a great job. :D

you can see from the examples that hunxi chose that often, longer sentences tend to be more informal in chinese (not always, which I’ll circle back to at the end lol). Colloquial chinese makes use of helping particles to indicate tone and meaning, as is shown in wei wuxian’s dialogue. and, as hunxi explained, those particles are largely absent from lan wangji’s speech pattern. chinese isn’t built of “words” in the way English is—each character is less a word and more a morpheme—and the language allows for a lot of information to be encoded in one character. a single character can often stand for a phrase within a sentence without sacrificing either meaning or formality. lan wangji makes ample use of this in order to express himself in the fewest syllables possible.

so this obviously leads to an incongruity when trying to translate his dialogue or capture his voice in English: shorter sentences are usually more direct by nature, and directness/certainty is often construed as rudeness -- but it might seem strange to see lan wangji’s dialogue full of longer sentences while the narration explicitly says that he uses very short sentences. so what happens is that many english fic writers extrapolated this into creating an english speech pattern for lan wangji that reads oddly. they’ll have lan wangji speak in grammatically incoherent fragments that distill his intended thought because they’re trying to recreate his succinctness. unfortunately, English doesn’t have as much freedom as Chinese does in this way, and it results in lan wangji sounding as if he has some kind of linguistic impediment and/or as if he’s being unspeakably rude in certain situations. In reality, lan wangji’s speech is perfectly polite for a young member of the gentry (though he’s still terribly rude in other ways lol). he speaks in full, and honestly, quite eloquent sentences.

hunxi’s post already has a lot of examples, but I figure I’ll do one as well focused on the specifics of this post.

I’m going to use this exchange from chapter 63 between the twin jades because I think it’s a pretty simple way to illustrate what I’m talking about:

蓝曦臣道：“你亲眼所见？”

蓝忘机道：“他亲眼所见。”

蓝曦臣道：“你相信他？”

蓝忘机道：“信。”

[...] 蓝曦臣道：“那么金光瑶呢？”

蓝忘机道：“不可信。”

my translation:

Lan Xichen said, “You saw it with your own eyes?”

Lan Wangji said, “He saw it with his own eyes.”

Lan Xichen said, “You believe him?”

Lan Wangji said, “I believe him.”

[...] Lan Xichen said, “Then what about Jin Guangyao?”

Lan Wangji said, “He cannot be believed.”

you can see how much longer the (pretty literal) english translations are! every single line of dialogue is expanded because things that can be omitted in chinese cannot be omitted in english without losing grammatical coherency. i‘ll break a few of them down:

Lan Xichen’s first line:

你 (you) 亲眼 (with one’s own eyes) 所 (literary auxiliary) 见 (met/saw)？

idk but i love this line a lot lmao. it just has such an elegant feel to me, probably because I am an uncultured rube. anyways, you see here that he expressed his full thought in five characters.

if I were to rewrite this sentence into something much less formal/much more modern, I might have it become something like this:

你是自己看见的吗？

你 (you) 是 (to be) 自己 (oneself) 看见 (see) 的 (auxiliary) 吗 (interrogative particle)？

i suspect that this construction might even be somewhat childish? I’ve replaced every single formal part of the sentence with a more colloquial one. instead of 亲眼 i’ve used 自己, instead of 所见 i’ve used 看见的 and then also added an interrogative particle at the end for good measure (吗). To translate this, I would probably go with “Did you see it yourself?”

contained in this is also an example of how one character can represent a whole concept that can also be represented with two characters: 见 vs 看见. in this example, both mean “to see”. we’ll see it again in the next example as well:

in response to lan xichen’s, “you believe him?” --> 你 (you) 相信 (believe) 他 (him)? lan wangji answers with, “信” (believe).

chinese does not do yes or no questions in the same way that english does. there is no catch-all for yes or no, though there are general affirmative (是／有) and negative (不／没) characters. there are other affirmative/negative characters, but these are the ones that I believe are the most common and also the ones that you may see in response to yes or no questions on their own. (don’t quote me on that lol)

regardless, the way you respond to a yes or no question is often by repeating the verb phrase either in affirmative or negative. so here, when lan xichen asks if lan wangji believes wei wuxian, lan wangji responds “believe”. once again, you can see that one character can stand in for a concept that may also be expressed in two characters: 信 takes the place of 相信. lan wangji could have responded with “相信” just as well, but, true to his character, he didn’t because he didn’t need to. this is still a complete sentence. lan wangji has discarded the subject (I), the object (him), and also half the verb (相), and lost no meaning whatsoever. you can’t do this in english!

and onto the last exchange:

lan xichen: 那么 (then) 金光瑶 (jin guangyao) 呢 (what about)？

lan wangji: 不可 (cannot) 信 (believe)

you can actually see the contrast between the two brothers’ speech patterns even in this. lan xichen’s question is not quite as pared down as it could be. if it were wangji’s line instead, I would expect it to read simply “金光瑶呢？” which would just be “what about jin guangyao?” 那么 isn’t necessary to convey the core thought -- it’s just as how “then what about” is different than “what about”, but “then” is not necessary to the central question. if we wanted to keep the “then” aspect, you could still cut out 么 and it would be the same meaning as well.

a FINAL example of how something can be cut down just because I think examples are helpful:

“I don’t know” is usually given as 我不知道. (this is what nie huaisang says lol) It contains subject (我) and full verb (知道). you can pare this straight down to just 不知 and it would mean the same thing in the correct context. i think most of the characters do this at least once? it sounds more literary -- i don’t know that i would ever use it in everyday speech, but the fact remains that it’s a possibility. both could be translated as “I do not know” and it would be accurate.

ANYWAYS, getting all the way back to one of your original questions: does chinese have contractions? and the answer is like... kind of...?? but not really. there’s certainly slang/dialect variants that can be used in ways that are reminiscent of english contractions. the example I’m thinking of is the character 啥 (sha2) which can be used as slang in place of 什么 (shen2 me). (which means “what”)

so for a standard sentence of, 你在做什么? (what are you doing), you could shorten down to just 做啥? and the second construction is less formal than the first, but they mean the same thing.

other slang i can think of off the top of my head: 干嘛 (gan4 ma2) is also informal slang for “what are you doing”. and i think this is a regional thing, but you can also use 搞 (gao3) and 整 (zheng3) to mean “do” as well.

so in the same way that you can replace 什么 with 啥, you can replace 做 as well to get constructions like 搞啥 (gao3 sha2) and 整啥 (zheng3 sha2).

these are all different ways to say “what are you doing” lmao, and in this case, shorter is not, in fact, more formal.

woo! we made it to the end! I hope it was informative and helpful to you anon. :D

this is where I would normally throw my ko-fi, but instead, I’m actually going to link you to this fundraising post for an old fandom friend of mine. her house burned down mid-september and they could still use help if anyone can spare it! if this post would have moved you to buy me a ko-fi, please send that money to her family instead. :) rbs are also appreciated on the post itself. (* ´▽` *)

anyways, here’s the loaf jingyeast made :3 it was very tasty.

#mdzs #mdzs meta #the untamed #the untamed meta #lan wangji #lan wangji meta #mine #mymeta #linguistics #chinese #english #cyan chinese school #cyan help desk #languages #contractions #register #look man idk how am i gonna tag this #*yeets into the void*

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sondepoch · 4 years

Text

HC: They see MC’s sketchbook!

Art. It’s a private thing. Showing someone your work is akin to showing them a piece of your soul, an insight into who you are and everything that lies within. So when the Obey Me! boys get a glimpse of your sketchbook, they find themselves wanting for more—and all in different ways.

Word Count: 6.0k

*Mild NSFW themes for Asmo & Diavolo

Characters: All Brothers + All Undateables + Luke

MASTERLIST

Lucifer

At the beginning of the year, there is 0 trust between the two of you

Not only has he actively tried to kill you, but he’s already so suspicious of the pacts you’re making with his brothers that he can’t help but be wary every time you cross paths

So when he realizes that you’re always absentmindedly scribbling in a notepad every time you interact, he’s more than a little perturbed by it

100% thinks you’re secretly taking notes on his and his brothers’ behavior to use it against them

So, obviously, when he next sees you using it in his presence, he wastes no time in snatching the notebook from your hands

“Oh hey, Lucif—what are you doing?!”

“Nothing you should be concerned with, human.”

“That’s my sketchbook you’re holding!”

“Sketchbook?”

Instantly flips it open and sure enough, inside there’s nothing but doodles and sketches

luci.is.confuzzled.exe

He’s still convinced that there must be something incriminating in the book, so he continues flipping through it. But the more he sees, the more he realizes how wrong he is

It’s only when he flips to the section with his family that he begins to feel guilty

In the beginning, you just draw basic poses. Mammon, glancing at you over his shoulder. Asmo, posing for a camera. Beel, about to bite down on a hamburger.

But the further he goes, the more elaborate the sketches get, and as he flips through the pages, he can feel the amount of work that has gone into each piece

And then he gets to the page where you drew him

Keep it lowkey, but he thinks his heart stopped for a second

He stares at the picture and wonders if that’s what you see every time he shifts into his demon form, because for the first time since his fall, he can’t help but think about how beautiful he looks. Everything looks so right in your art style, from the diamond on his forehead to the way his wings flutter out of his back.

It’s perfection

“I’m confiscating this,” He says quickly, not looking you in the eye.

He then escapes the room faster than you’ve ever seen, and never speaks of the incident again to you

But roughly a week later, you find a small red book on your pillow, and you know that it's a sketchbook from him, to replace the one he took

And even later—after the two of you grow close—you find your old sketchbook stored in his most secure drawer, locked away with a key he keeps hidden. And you know that he’s spent hours looking through the book on rough nights, through the doodles of him and his brothers and everything else you’ve ever drawn

And though he’s too proud to admit it, you know he loves your art

Mammon

He found it when he was going through your stuff, absentmindedly checking to see if you had any valuables on you

And the moment he flipped open to see your little notebook of doodles, his mind went B I N G O

He loves your art the second he sees it, spending a whole hour just sitting on your bedroom floor, flipping through the pages

Adores everything about your art style

And when he starts to see the little doodles you do of his brothers, he’s even more enraptured

You draw all the things he’s imagined but never seen: a sketch of Lucifer dressed in a onesie, snuggling a giant teddy bear. Beel, using a sleeping Belphie as a food tray for a pile of snacks as large as the sixth-born himself. Asmo with cat ears, being chased by Solomon, who appears to be a wolf.

And yet, there are no pictures of Mammon

Man is hurt by the fact that you’ve drawn all his brothers but not him. He’s your first man, after all. You should have been the first person he drew!

Gets a bit upset about it and throws your sketchbook back into the drawer he found it in, stomping back to his room with childlike indignation

Is just a bit petty about it afterward

“Hey, Mammon, can you walk me to school? Class starts in half an hour.”

“Huh? Oh, so now ya want me to do it, huh? Well, why don’t you ask Asmo instead?”

“Okay? I will???”

Soon everyone in the house has realized that Mammon’s being a bit off, and while it was nice at first to have peace and quiet from the resident troublemaker, you guys grow concerned pretty quick

And eventually, you go to his room to talk things out

Let’s just say that when you found out he’d been going through your stuff, you were not pleased. But seeing that he wasn’t going to be the mature one, you sucked it up and whacked the demon on the back of his head, telling him to “wait a second” while you went to “get something”

Cue the retrieval of your second sketchbook

And when Mammon sees it, he’s not sure what he feels more of: guilt or happiness

Every single page in this second notebook is of him. Only a few are colored, but Mammon finds himself enraptured by even the casual doodles in the corners, where he’s doing little things like eating a banana or flashing the viewer a few Grimm

Man is touched. He’s never had anyone do this for him, and certainly not out of their own volition. So suffice it to say that when he tackled you for a hug that night, he didn’t let you go for a long time

And maybe some other stuff happened too. Who knows? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Leviathan

TSL

The second Levi sees you sketching in your artbook (after an incoherent stumble of words which you assume are synonymous with praise), the only phrase coming out of this man’s mouth is TSL

Begins begging you to draw fanart of the Shadow Lord, asking you to sketch him in different outfits, draw him in different poses, put him in various backgrounds, etc.

Basically wants you to bring his imagination to life

“Oh! Oh! Can you draw him baking a cake now? Wouldn’t that be so cool?!”

Absolutely does the wwooooooOOOOOAAAHAHHHHHHH sound effect every single time you show him your work, even if you’ve only made minor changes from the last time you showed him

He takes you on a spending spree, pulling up Akuzon and offering to pay for whatever supplies you want if you’ll just make him a super fancy poster

And so you start

It actually gets to be a pretty good way to grow closer: every day, after school, you head up to Levi’s room to work on the poster he asked you to make him. In exchange, he lets you borrow his manga and you guys watch anime together

Eventually, boi gets the idea of throwing Ruri-chan into the poster, and the second he thinks it he won’t shut up about it

“Oh, come on! You can do it—look, just put her in this little corner right here!”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Levi?! Ruri-chan and the Shadow Lord are two completely different characters who are meant to be drawn in completely different art styles! If I mush Ruri-chan into the corner, it’ll ruin the poster’s dynamic!”

“But pleeeeeaaaassseeeee?”

Cue extra pouty Levi

Eventually, you agree to make a separate drawing of Ruri-chan for Levi to hang up next to the poster, because you think that otherwise, he’ll go crazy

When the date rolls around where you’re almost done with everything, Levi formally sends out an invitation to everyone of importance

Man invites everyone from Luke to Diavolo over for the “revealing ceremony” where he plans to hang the poster on his wall

Actually tried to get the demon king to come as well, but Lucifer stopped him before he could get an invitation out

When everyone sees what you’ve been working on for so many weeks, they’re all MEGA impressed because hello??? they did not know you were this skilled???

It quickly turns into a competition, with each one of them trying to outdo each other with how vigorously they can compliment you

And soon enough you find yourself swamped with requests from every other demon in the room, begging you to make them something as elaborate as you did Levi

Satan

It’s a system you guys have set up, where every Tuesday and Thursday night, you’ll sit in the common room on the couch facing each other and will simply open your books to do what you will

You always draw, and Satan always reads

And neither will bother the other until the grandfather clock chimes twelve times, whereupon you both bid each other goodnight and wait for the next session where you do it all over

Except for today, that is

“What are you drawing?”

Ah, there it is

The one question you were hoping Satan would never ask

You subtly (incredibly awkwardly) change the subject, commenting on the color of Satan’s jacket to distract him from his inquiry, and he picks up on the hint, quietly huffing as he turns back to his book

But the mild irritation he feels doesn’t let him fully delve back into the realm of the nonfiction novel he was reading, so he’s more than a little distracted as he goes back to reading about human anthropology

And it’s in this state of distraction that he notices the little glances you’re stealing every so often, before returning to your sketchpad

Yeah, it doesn’t take long for Satan to put two and two together

“Are you drawing me?”

An incredulous question, asked in such an offending tone

He sounds so irate by the fact that you can’t help but helplessly deny it, muttering something about drawing plants and flowers instead

But Satan doesn’t believe it, and in an instant he’s standing behind you, staring at the sketch in your hands which has oh-so-beautifully captured the essence of him on the couch, engrossed in a book with the light from the flames in the fireplace flickering gently against his skin

The anger at being drawn without having agreed to it quickly melts into a quiet awe for your skill

“Can I see your other drawings?” He asks gently, no longer irritated but actually impressed

“I-I’m not sure if you’ll want to—”

“Nonsense. Show me.”

And so you do

You hand him the sketchbook, avoiding his eyes as he flips to the very first page—and imagine his surprise when he sees that even that is a sketch of his face, though the artwork is significantly less advanced than the piece he just saw. Satan flips to the next page, and then the next, and the next, and sure enough: they’re all of him

“I-I just needed a model to practice my artwork on,” You mumble, gaze fixated on the couch. “And you were right there, so I couldn’t resist...and then I needed a model again. And again. And you were always there, and I know I never asked, but I’m sorry, and if you don’t want me to, I won’t—“

“Nonsense,” Satan murmurs, pressing a finger to your lips. His smile has never looked as sincere as it looks now, his gaze flickering back and forth between your face and the sketchbook in his hands

“I’ll be your model, if you so desire it. Just tell me how you want me to sit.”

Asmodeus

Your model for everything

You’re trying to draw the Hulk and you a good frame of reference? And you need a really muscular model? And Beel ABSOLUTELY fits the bill?

Yeah no, Asmo’s your model

You want to draw a child? Someone small and short, roughly the exact same height as Luke (who is an ANGEL and would absolutely help you)? Yeah no, Asmo’s still going to be your model.

Want a cute guy? Asmo. Cute girl? Asmo. Cute animal? Still Asmo.

Man refuses to leave you alone - the second he learns that you’re an artist he insists on gracing your work with the holy sight of his body

Highkey wants to model nude

And you’d be lying if you said that he was a bad model—man can hold a pose for hours without moving even a little, his only fault is that he talks incessantly—but you can easily quiet him by saying that you’re drawing his lips - and the moment you do so, he’s suddenly he’s stiller than a statue, doing his absolute best to remain frozen so that you can capture his perfection

Boi posts 100% of your content on his Devilgram, and while you were hesitant about it at first, now you’re just used to it

Thanks to him, you’re a lowkey celebrity

Like demons love your art style

It’s apparently very refreshing and human-like as compared to the dark and dreary art found in the Devildom, so people go wild over Asmo’s Devilgram page for it

Man thinks that they’d go even more wild if you drew something where he modeled nude

In fact, it’s lowkey a business deal that the two of you have - you allow Asmo to post your work on his Devilgram (giving credit to you, of course), and in exchange he pays for all your art supplies, acts as your model (though that’s really more of him wanting to than it being your choice), and even goes as far as to keep Mammon apart from you while you work, insisting that you need “privacy” and “quiet” while you draw

100% acts like he isn’t even more chatty than Mammon when given the chance

On the bright side, it’s thanks to these weekly art sessions where you draw and Asmo models and talks that you’re always up to date on the latest gossip. You’re 100% caught up with the fact that Zahhak just found out he has another illegitimate son and that Baphomet just liked Rusalka’s post from fourteen centuries ago

So yeah, the two of you have a mutually beneficial relationship

Asmodeus still insists that one thing would make it better though: him modeling nude

But Asmo is a sweetheart about everything, and he goes out of his way to pamper you

Specifically, your hands—after all, those are what work your artistic magic!

Expect him to always be peppering your dominant hand with kisses, massaging it whenever you look tired, giving you weekly manicures completely free of charge, all out of the goodness of Asmo’s heart

*ahem* and weekly requests to model nude

Beelzebub

a m a z e m e n t

Boi is entranced

Like, he’s so mesmerized by your art that he’s not even paying attention to the food sitting right in front of him, simply opting to stare more intently at the drawing you’re holding up so eagerly

It’s quite beautiful, really: The seven demon brothers surrounding you, a reworking of a photograph Lucifer took a few months ago but in your art style. And for that last fact, Beel thinks he likes this version better

“Wow,” He finally manages to say, still too impressed to really think of anything else

He lets his brothers shower you in praise and compliments, silently nodding along and agreeing with every plaudit they thrust your way

But the moment you’re alone, expect to be scooped into his arms and carried to his room

Boi instantly wants to know the process

When do you draw? How long does it take? Where do you do it? How are you getting your supplies? Who pays?

It’s not so much the physical process he’s interested in, but rather the nuances of art that make your work look so you. He’s not interested in learning for the sake of doing, but simply for the sake of understanding because he already appreciates your art so much

Absolutely invites you to his room to have you show him the art process the next time you start working on a piece

And after the first time, then, he invites you back a second - then a third - and then the two of you have settled into a routine where after school, you come to his room and pencil away in your sketchpad, with Beel watching in the background, munching on snacks

It’s quite relaxing for him, actually

He likes watching as you bring a piece together, going over previously flat areas with a second layer of shading to make certain elements pop—and even if he doesn’t completely understand what you’re doing, he’s entirely willing to learn, listening peacefully as you explain what the various tools do

By the end of the month, man has actually memorized all the names of your supplies, handing them to you every time you ask for it - be it something as simple as a request for an eraser or just the blending stump

Lowkey, your work has actually improved since you began working up in Beel’s room

Not only does he have the most comfortable setup, but the man pampers you like royalty, always making sure that there’s water or food for you in case you need something

(And if you do happen to require something that isn’t already in Beel’s room, man will 100% get it for you so that you don’t have to stop what you’re doing)

Honestly, it’s the perfect arrangement: he gives you the ideal working space and you give him hours upon hours of intrigue

And if you happen to begin sitting in his lap one day while you work, something which quickly turns into a pattern, who’s there to stop anything? ;)

Belphegor

Man naps

A lot

And you just happen to be his favorite pillow, so it’s hardly a surprise when all your free time is spent in the presence of a dozing Belphie, always passed out over your legs

So once, just once, you pull your sketchpad out from under your pillow and work on it, a cautious eye trained on the seventh-born’s every move in case he stirs

And when that first time goes smoothly, you pull your sketchpad out a second time

Then a third

Then a fourth - and suddenly, you’re caught in a pattern

It was really just a matter of time until Belphie woke up one day and you didn’t notice

And it’s already too late when the drowsy demon lifts his head, peering curiously onto your lap to see what you’re working on—much to your horror

“Y-you’re awake,” You mutter halfheartedly, a sick feeling settling in your stomach as you watch the demon’s expression shift as he studies your artwork

You hate it

A bubble of anxiety begins to rise, fear over whether he will like your work or call it bad, whether he’ll make fun of your work or tell the brothers, whether he’ll be kind about it or mean

But then, much to your surprise, he flops back onto your lap, utterly unphased

“Nice,” The demon comments casually, stretching as he rests his head along your thigh. “It’s pretty.”

You can only blink as he falls back asleep, utterly confused as to what just happened

He woke up, right? And he saw your art? And he complimented it, telling you that he thought it was nice and pretty?

A sound of disbelief escapes your mouth as you try to process the utter nonchalance with which the whole exchange had concluded with, your shock only interrupted by the light sound of Belphie, who’s already snoring

You groan

But now that Belphie has seen your work, it’s not like there’s much point in hiding it any longer, right?

You pull your sketchbook out, silently continuing to work on the design that the man napping on your lap had said to be “nice,” adding some finishing touches to it

And when Belphie wakes up, he speaks nothing of the entire exchange

From that point and onward, you become a little more comfortable around him, relieved that you don’t need to talk about it with him

And he gets it

For all your free time, while he naps, you draw, and the two of you find a comfortable form of peace together, an odd tranquility lurking in the fact that there are no questions, no answers, just you and him, the sound of scribbling and snoring, your sketchpad and his pillow

And really, who needs anything else?

Solomon

He’s probably the first one to realize, on his own, that you’re an artist

The two of you have nearly all your classes together, thanks to Lord Diavolo, so it’s hardly surprising when the ever-astute sorcerer picks up on the fact that every time he casts you a second glance, you’re working on some mysterious sketch underneath your desk

Doesn’t really care at first

Until he sees your work

Man actually stops when he picks your sketchbook up off the ground, inspecting the page it had flipped open to after you dropped it

“Holy shit”

Doesn’t even ask for permission, he just begins browsing through the sketchbook, growing more and more impressed with each new page he sees

You only snatch the book back from his hands when you realize that the sketch he’s staring at so intently is one you drew of him, thanking him for picking it up with a huff and awkwardly trying to remove yourself from the situation as fast as humanly (heh, yes that is a pun) possible

Wizard boy stops you, ofc

“Come with me”

“But I have class soon—"

Again, doesn’t even wait for your agreement, man just drags you by the forearm to the library and flips open a book, throws down his own notebook, and demands that you use your “art skills or whatever” to help him

Sigh

Precious wizard boy isn’t very good with words when he’s all worked up

It takes you a good 5 minutes to understand that he wants you to compare the summoning circle outlined on the book with the one he sketched to identify where he went wrong, because apparently you have an “artist’s eye” and therefore you should be able to assist him - and he refuses to believe you when you try to convince him that no, this is not your strong suit and you will likely be unable to help him

He gets whinier than Asmo (probably where he gets it from) and will not stop nagging you even as you try to leave, so eventually you just give in and agree to try to help him - and it wounds up being surprisingly easy for you to realize that he missed the secondary outline of the inner circle, among another few minor mistakes

Huh, maybe you are naturally inclined toward this

From that moment and onward, Solomon decides that you are officially valuable (not only do you have magical potential, but you have an eye for summoning circles too? how UNFAIR) and begins spending all his time with you

Doesn’t really care about the fact that you’re an artist at first—is really more interested in how your skills can be applied

But then one day, after a particularly rough night of going through twelve whole summoning circles for twelve powerful demons, he takes a nap and wakes up to find you passed out on the floor, sleeping on top of your sketchbook where you fell asleep doodling him

Highkey touched

And slowly, he begins casually “falling asleep” around you more often, to see and flip through more of your artwork when he wakes up

Sigh

Bby is fucking shady even when he does wholesome shit

Simeon

Okay let’s be real

There’s no peace with the seven demon brothers. Solomon is chaotic. Luke, as much as we love him, is just a lot to be around. And even with Barbatos next to him, Diavolo is a walking tornado that tends to wreak havoc whenever he wills it (and he usually wills it).

So honestly, being with Simeon is the only place of tranquility you can find in the entire Devildom

Specifically, his room

*Which is off-limits to all the aforementioned individuals

He extended the invitation for you to spend some “relaxation time” in his quarters whenever you pleased at the beginning of the year, his angelic heart already sensing the absolute whirlwind of disaster you were walking into when you joined RAD

And while you declined his offer immediately out of politeness, you found yourself sheepishly knocking on his door not one week into the program

And now it’s become an every-day sort of thing

So yeah

Simeon knows about your art

In fact, you can’t seem to draw unless you’re in his presence, because at this point, he naturally soothes you so much that your hand is only steady when you hear the sound of his calm breathing in the background

In fact, you work best when the two of you are spread out on his couch, your back resting comfortably on Simeon’s shoulder while he writes (yes, he manually writes all his books on pen and paper) and you put your legs up on the couch, sketching away in your notebook

It’s the very image of peace, something you can’t seem to find anywhere else in this realm

And Simeon, bless his heart, may be a master of calligraphy, but the precious angel cannot draw to save his life - a fact which you have taken it upon yourself to handle

See, the angel gets tired every now and then—understandable, given that he produces literal masterpieces at his hands

And so when he gets tired, what does he do?

Make incomprehensible doodles in the upper left corners of his papers

So, of course, you’ve taken it upon yourself to bring those doodles to life (even if it requires a half-hour of inspection before you can make out what the sketch was supposed to be) and Simeon loves it

The expression of eagerness that surfaces every time you inform him that you’ve finished a piece is so rewarding, because the childlike glee with which he takes the paper from your hands to inspect it always sends a rush of warmth to your heart as he gushes in appreciation

But uh

Simeon is a special kind of chaotic, something that manifests every time he doodles something on paper

You stare at the angel in disbelief as he informs you that his latest doodle (what appears to be a banana-looking creature in sunglasses?) was actually a monkey ironing clothes—unsure what to say in light of this information

But it’s okay :) There only needs to be one artist in this relationship, and it clearly isn’t him

Luke

It started with cake

He needed “inspiration” to make something for Barbatos, as a thank-you gift for the pastry lessons the elder gave him, but Luke claimed that everything he made, while it tasted fine, lacked in the aesthetic department

And while normally you would play it Simeon-style, leaving it to the younger angel to handle things on his own so that he can grow individually, you felt too bad watching him discard another batch of cupcakes into Beel’s mouth, rubbing his head in aggravation over how annoying it was that nothing was looking right

So you helped him out

It was nothing major, really

Just eight doodles—subtle yet elegant designs for a triple-tiered cake, childish and bouncy arrangements to store flan, little details in frosting to give cupcakes the added element of specialty that makes them infinitely better

But the second Luke saw your paper, he went wild

Boi was running to the kitchen so fast he barely even had the time to shout “thank you”

Apparently, your little sketches sparked inspiration in him so strongly that the flames burned til midnight (much to Simeon’s disapproval), but when Luke was finally done with everything, he walked out of the kitchen with a tray of desserts that looked so perfect it was hard to imagine that he brought them to life from your sketches

Luke spent ages thanking you, shoving desserts down your throat even when you insisted that you were full, so unimaginably grateful that you helped him out of what he called “chef’s block”

Each “thank you” was accompanied either a brownie or a slice of mango mousse or whatever new pastry Luke was creating that day, and before long you were getting to enjoy luxury foods on the daily (much to Beel’s jealousy)

Boy only believed that the debt was paid when you told him that there was no debt to pay, that you sketched those quick little doodles for him out of kindness and not obligation

Believe it or not, Luke’s eyes actually welled with tears for a second at that, before he wrapped you up in a giant (is it really giant if the hugger is so little?) hug, wailing something about you being too “pure” and “perfect” for the Devildom, and that one day you would be very happy in the Celestial Realm

You pat his head, telling him that if it truly made him this happy, you would be glad to help him out again and sketch some food doodles whenever he wanted some new ideas

Cue another round of hugs, muffled crying, and sobs about how amazing you are

Barbatos

Barbatos knew, of course

Not because he used his powers or anything, he would hardly use them for something so trivial, but he was aware from the start that you were an artist because it was he who prepared for your arrival in the Devildom, ensuring that you had all the same amenities and comforts you were used to in the human realm

And, as such, that included art supplies

So the very moment he set his eyes on you, he was aware that you were an artist

What he didn’t expect was for you to actually be good at it

He sees your sketchbook when he’s casually strolling through the RAD library, finding you completely knocked out on one of the tables, the spiral binding of the sketchpad still digging indents into your cheek where you lie on top of it

At first, the butler rearranges your position as a courtesy

He lifts your head and rests it on your hand - which makes a much softer pillow - coincidentally placing your books back inside your bag and taking a moment to organize the papers strewn across the desk

But then he just happens to glance inside

And the second he does, he’s mesmerized

There’s not much in the world that can surprise Barbatos - not after he’s looked after Diavolo, of all people, for so many millennia - but the butler still finds himself holding his breath as he flips through your sketchpad, each piece telling a story so evocative that it leaves him wanting more even when he arrives at a blank page, abruptly realizing that he’s just gone through your entire sketchbook without your permission

Of course, you just have to wake up at that precise moment - sleepy eyes glancing up at the butler and wondering if you’re hallucinating, but the book in his hands is far too real and the shocked expression on his face is impossibly jarring and you flinch, suddenly feeling self-conscious as you realize what must have happened

Barbatos is a perfect gentleman about it, kindly telling you to get more rest so that you don’t pass out in a public library surrounded by demons who want to eat your soul, but he ends the sharp warning with a rather kind remark about your artwork

“I liked the second-last piece best,” He murmurs, casting you a cryptic smile before bidding you farewell

And obviously, the moment he’s out of sight, your nose is buried in your sketchbook, fingers flipping furiously to find the second-last piece you drew which you cannot seem to remember at all, and—

A flush immediately erupts on your cheeks as you see the colored sketch, something inspired by nothing more than a whim

It’s simply two people on a walk—both of them vague imitations of what your mind had wistfully conjured up—one of them bearing the telltale mismatched hair and olive green eyes, the other sharing a quiet resemblance to yourself - a conscious decision, of course

But just as you’re about to flip off the page, another detail you’d forgotten about draws your attention—and your cheeks suddenly burn in embarrassment as you realize why Barbatos singled this piece out

The figures are smiling, gazing at each other from the corners of their eyes. And there, in the very center of the piece, it is obvious:

They are holding hands

Diavolo

RIP to Diavolo’s royal painter

They have been replaced

By you

As much as you fought it, as much as you argued that you were not fitting of this position, as much as you pleaded with the demon lord to not force this title upon your shoulders, Diavolo’s decision to appoint you as the honorary Devildom painter was final—and nothing can change his mind once it’s made up

The title is really just that: a title. Diavolo knows that you’re a busy student, and while he honored your artistic talents with this position, he’s not about to actually force you through the expected proceedings of a true royal painter, not while you’re trying to survive being an exchange student in hell with an entirely unfamiliar curriculum in front of you

But on occasion, he’ll send you a text, asking if you’re free

And you’ll head on over to his palace, ready to paint him

And unlike every other demon, angel, and human in the Devildom, when Diavolo models for you, he actually models nude

Asmo is jealous

Sexual tension is high when you paint him, let’s just leave things at that

And honestly, it really doesn’t matter what you paint - Diavolo seems to be more interested in the fact that it’s a human who did the art in the first place

He once saw your RAD binder, noticing the little doodles you’d drawn on the corner of all your papers, and he immediately took them—declaring that they were art to be preserved for all eternity for historical documentation purposes

So yeah

There’s a hall in Diavolo’s palace filled with your RAD math homework, an eternal reminder of the assignments you copied off of Solomon

(You’re not sure what’s more embarrassing: the fact that you’ve drawn some rather inappropriate doodles on those pages or the fact that, despite having copied all the answers, you still managed to get nearly one-third of the problems wrong, and now your mistakes are to be showcased in the Devildom for centuries to come)

It gets to the point where you and Solomon start making bets over how basic you can get with your art for Diavolo to still consider it “amazing” and “utterly awe-inspiring,” as he likes to put it

In honor of that bet, there is currently a banana peel with a few marker doodles on it hanging in a preserved case in an iced room in the lowest levels of the palace, as none of the “art” can be wasted

But in truth, the demon lord’s fixation with human culture is endearing, especially when Diavolo tries so hard to be accepting of it

So eventually you stop giving Diavolo wacky art and actually start putting your full effort into your creations—your reward being the fact that the final piece you complete gets hung in Diavolo’s private bedroom, where he promises to gaze at it every night for the rest of eternity, vowing to remember his time with you every time he sees it

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alldayangst · 3 years

Text

100 letters, just for me (Tom Holland)

All of my fics are LGBT and PoC friendly. PAIRING: uni (fuckboy/frat) Tom x uni reader. Summary: ‘You wrote a hundred letters just for me / And I find them in my closet in the pockets of my jeans / Now I’m constantly reminded me of the time I was nineteen / Every single ones forgotten in a laundromat machine’.

“Walk of shame?” your friend, Camren, sat in the lounge, TV on low as Tom walked with his clothes carelessly thrown on his body, recovered hoodies and jumpers you previously stole sat in a pile as high as mountains in his hands, leading Camren to wonder whether or not it was really the end this time round. “Third time this week!”

“Don’t worry, I won’t be back anytime soon.” Tom slams the door behind him as hard as he could, and just when Camren thinks they can get a moment of peace, they hear a screeching sob rip through the air through the walls of your room. And Camren swears they live in a movie; a scratched CD of a bad romantic drama, that replays the part where the lovers face their problems over and over again.

‘My mouth hasn’t shut up about you since you kissed it’

You remembered the start of this debacle like it was yesterday. You and Tom were in the bathtub and Tom told you to reach inside the back pocket of your jeans, he’d left something important in there. “I’m not ready to get married, if you left a ring in there. I’m only 19.” Tom kissed your shoulder, back cold and pressed against the tub - but he’d been willing to compromise to be the crutch you leaned against, to be the haven you found refuge in. To be the hill you died on.

“It better not be a ring, Holland. I swear.”

“I’ve never met someone who didn’t want to get proposed to as much as you.” He laid his chin against your shoulder once your search become successful, and you found a strip of paper in your trouser back pocket.

“My mouth hasn’t shut up about you, since you kissed it.” You turned to Tom who could only see your face in the corner of his eye, having found a new living situation of the warm, wet slope previously called your shoulder. “Tom, what is this?”

“100 letters, just for you. You’ll find them in every pair of your jeans. I’m with you forever.” He wrapped his arms around your waist and press a hard, loving kiss on your lips, causing you to drop the tiny piece upon which Tom scribbled his message. “Just for me? You stole this from a love letter by Alex Turner to Alexa Chung!” Tom couldn’t take his love-hazed gaze off of you, and kissed you again like he was oblivious to the words you were saying or you were speaking a foreign language he didn’t understand. “You don’t stop complaining, do you?”

Six months later marked the end of yours and Tom’s gap year, and you decided to move in together off campus.

“I can’t find it.” Tom smiled as he shook his head, your orange in his hand as he sat on a stool opposite your lunchbox. He knew you had a presentation that day and was eager to impress, so you’d shoved your most sensible pair of slacks in the washing machine without a care and when Tom went to unload it, his note for you torn into tiny pieces and covered in botched ink slithered out and caplunked into a minuscule puddle on your wooden floor.

“I’m serious, you didn’t write one this time.” You rummaged through your blazer pockets just to check for certain you were right before you turned to Tom with every bit of confidence that he’d truly forgotten to write you a little love letter this time around.

Tom placed the orange back into the fruit basket and opted for a tomato instead. He took note of the shock in your face and the wince you made as he juggled it, and it drew dangerously close to the ground. “Tom, don’t juggle that. If it hits the ground, it will splatter everywhere.” Tom giggled.

“Have you checked your slacks?”

“You think I haven’t checked my trousers?” You turned your trouser pockets inside out with the flare of pride.”You’ve forgotten. It’s OK, Tom.”

You opened your lunchbox to place your orange in, but a piece of red card occupied the compartment usually owed to your snacks.

You held the card up: “I love you from my head tomatoes.” Tom chuckled cheekily, not watching as the tomato rolled off the counter and depicted a large, red splatter on the kitchen floor. But Tom promised he would clean it up.

Tom didn’t forget about writing one love letter, until he did. And by that point, his letters had felt almost as autonomous as the days of the week. You didn’t even have to think about it, they just went by. So you’d be raking through every end of the house, expecting to find his letter.

“Tom, where’s the letter?”

“Huh? I don’t know.” Tom locked the door as if he’d been chased by wolves, looking up and down through the peephole and then giving a satisfied lick of the lip.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“As in, I don’t know - you’d have to look for it darling.”

Little did he know that’s what you spent your whole day doing. And you hadn’t found anyone with sharper eyes or a bigger will to find it for you.

You didn’t find the note that night. You didn’t know there wasn’t any.

“I found one! ‘You’re my happy place’.” Huh. Tom hadn’t written a new one in a while. He must have put a note in both of the pockets in this pair of jeans. These jeans had been tossed aside, barely worn, in fact - never worn since you’d tried them out in the dressing room at the store two months ago. You were in awe of how young love could take you so far, and kissed the tired Tom that laid beside you. You pulled back and caressed his cheek.

“Why didn’t you kiss back?” You asked, too drunk on ignorant bliss to acknowledge the warning signs and the parade of red flags that told you to leave before you got truly hurt. “M’ just tired.” And it showed. His hair was matted, clad to his face, a few shades darker that it usually was due to all the sweat. He took in every breath like he’d never breathed before and kept watering at the eye; the kind of cry you did when even the fatigue wouldn’t let you sleep.

It was inevitable. Three months later, you and Tom broke up. You were freshly twenty, and freshly out of a relationship. Tom moved out of your shared apartment, and you found yourself trying to navigate university with a compass that seemed to only point South. You never had to have friends here before, because you had Tom. It was out of sheer luck that you stumbled upon Camren who not only shared your soul and your mind, but agreed to share your home. Tom Holland quickly became synonymous with London nightlife and out of reluctance to let you go (call it withdrawal symptoms), requested that you continue to see each other as long as romance was left out of the equation. You’d happily obliged and incessantly kept a cobweb-covered carousel going years after it stopped being the main attraction. On the nights you left with Tom, Camren was tossed aside, forgotten like coat in a cloakroom, so it was only fair game that they’d tease and whine at you when Tom left in the morning. If Tom left in the morning.

Tom was ravenous, and you ended up on Camren’s nest of a sofa. “I love the bones off you.” he muttered, and Tom was perhaps too keen to grab a handful of your backside, he docked both hands into both your pockets, fingernails scrambling at little torn pieces of paper. His heart went into panic mode. He squirmed to get out. The piece of paper landed beside you as he forcefully yanked his hands out, feeling like a prisoner freed to a world that was only half of what it was before.

‘I’d be a crazy, blind man to ever leave you.’

The room fell silent. Maybe with Camren’s TV on low, you didn’t have the space to have these moments. To stop indulging in the highs of life and really examine why the lows were the lows.

“Tom. I’m demanding honesty.”

Tom sighs. He’s so different these days, so cold. He unentangles your bodies and huffs and puffs like a little kid who hasn’t gotten their way. This, before you’d even said anything. You don’t know if you can deal with this white noise.

“I just want to know why we broke up.”

Tom chooses to look at the artwork opposite the couch, because his safe place is no longer his safe place. Because now that you’re demanding honesty, instead of taking it when it comes, his happy place becomes his vulnerable. Tom didn’t like to be vulnerable. It’s why he ended things in the first place.

“Well, we’re in uni..” Tom’s not sure if he wants to continue. He can feel the spotlight on him, you looking at him. He’s center stage but not one for attention. He’s suddenly painfully aware of the fragility of his answer, and worries it will go ‘splat!’ and make like a tomato, and then you’ll really never speak to him again. He furrows his brows as he looks down into his lap, twiddling and pulling at his fingers as if they had the answer (they used to) before he says it in the best way he knows how, your eyes boring into him. “We’re at uni, and there’s so many beautiful women and handsome men, and mighty attractive human beings walking around here, and it’s hard to believe one person you met at a stupid age could compare to the pool of people that are here.”

And how it sounds in Tom’s head, how he meant it is so much better to the way it sounds and means to you. Because words like ‘compare’ and ‘pool of people’ highlight how insignificant and worthless Tom felt he was to you. He felt he communicated how he insecure he was feeling. To you? Words like ‘comapre’ only shine a torch on your own insecurities and phrases like ‘pool of people’ makes you contemplate whether Tom was ever unfaithful, and it made you feel insignificant, worthless.

“So, I’m definitely not the only person in your life right now.” Tom looks up and before he can say anything- “I’m not something you can butter up and taste when you get bored.”

“Y/N.” Tom starts. “That would never be the way I could see you.”

“I’d like you to leave, Tom.”

And leave he does.

Two weeks later, you and Camren found yourself in a predicament. “Can you get it out?” Camren had their hand down the drain of your bathtub. Cautiously, they launched two fingers in. “Can you get it out?” You asked again, nibbling lightly on the tip of your nails out of nervousness.

“Honestly, it doesn’t feel that big.” Camren stops their search after hooking their finger around the culprit of which blocked your plughole. “It’s a piece of fucking paper.” Camren sighs a breath of relief. “My mouth hasn’t shut up about you since you kissed it.”

You breathe in.

Credit for the gif goes to: /dreamyyholland

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septembriseur · 3 years

Text

Snippet of Zemo fic I’m working on as a change of scenery.

The Pashtuns have a story they tell, dating back to the nineteenth century— to the time of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. A girl walks onto a battlefield: not just any battlefield, but a small pass in the mountains. It is distinguished by no notable history, this pass, and with no notable history yet to come. Amidst this breach in the wall of individually-named mountains— Tabal Koh, Torah Shah, and Shah Maksud— two armies mingle. On one side, the turban-hatted tribesmen, barefoot perhaps in their shalwar kameez; and on the other, the empire in their red coats and khaki.

(He has always enjoyed the way that the English say khaki, inventing an implicit r and in the process rendering it less a color than a state of being. In the Persian it was a color; to be khak-e was to be earth-genitive, dirt-affiliated. But the British: oh, they are so very much feeling khaki.)

The battle, as you might expect, is not exactly even-sided. The turban-wearers are being massacred. And yet onto the field this girl comes— this girl called Malala, this water-bearer, daughter of shepherds, and when she sees that the flag has fallen, she takes the scarf from about her head and waves it to her countrymen as a battle standard. In her own language, she sings a poem of war, a landay, saying: I will take the blood from my lover, who has died for our homeland, and I will wear it upon my forehead as a beauty-mark.

And, as you might then expect, the Pashtuns won the battle.

Today the story is told with different morals, which we need not delve too deep into: the strength of women, the glory of Afghanistan. Ask a Pashtun, however, and he may tell you that you have misunderstood the story entirely. Only in Pashtu could Malala have made such a cry, and it was by the secret power of this language that she rallied the people of Maiwand. That power remains within the words now, though quiescent. You can feel it with each pronunciation, in the bones of your teeth. Try.

***

These days, Zemo speaks English, although he reads in French and German— sometimes Russian, if he’s feeling particularly full of vim. When James Barnes visited him in the prison, it had been four hundred and eighty-five days since he spoke the Sokovian language. He was surprised, following his escape from the prison, by how naturally it came to his lips, and then disturbed to find it recurring without his permission. He would search for a Russian word, and find the Sokovian word there instead. Phrases disarticulated themselves and reassembled in podge-hodge chunks of polyglottism. Dayte mi le knigu. Hast du li videl’ mokh ami?

He feels out of control, no longer practiced at wrangling the storm of undercurrents that run seething, awaiting the moment to reassert themselves again.

***

It’s easier reassuming the role of baron. And when Zemo welcomes his new companions into his automotive collection, his personal jet, the Avenger (Wilson) looks at him with intermingled disgust and envy. Zemo wonders what Wilson knows about growing up in a place synonymous with war zone, a place that can be, with such indifference, wiped from the map. Perhaps: a bit. Perhaps he knows the precarity of the rat that strains against the limits of its rat-world; the alacrity with which it will climb atop the backs of other rats. Perhaps he knows enough to have some measure of admiration for the nimble and swift acrobatics involved in becoming the king rat.

His family’s title has been meaningless since 1939. His grandparents and great-grandparents were shiftless and malcontent exiles before that, drifting about the upscale resorts of Europe, racking up some truly aristocratic bills on credit and mysteriously vanishing as part of their exotic-Ottoman act. Only after they’d been stripped of their status did they settle down to make some money: who better to sell you some exceptionally dodgy artifacts than an exceptionally dodgy artifact? He wonders sometimes how many of Sokovia’s Thracian tombs and medieval churches had their treasures pried loose at his grandfather’s hand.

Better, perhaps, that the art survived, he supposes. Given—

See, a man can justify anything. This is his great skill. Imagine the elaborate artifices, or perhaps edifices is the word he intended to have chosen, the high structures he constructs for himself to pretend that he has escaped the land of rats at last.

***

He likes Barnes, and not just with the noblesse oblige that his family, fantastically gifted at speaking in one way and acting in another, took care to drill into him. He likes Barnes because it’s instructive to observe his struggle: here is a man who was a men among men, and now he is not a man any longer, and he thinks this means he can no longer live in the land of men. You can see it on his face, a haunted look, as though the world has invented a new kind of pain just for him.

Zemo knows him better, perhaps, than anyone has ever known him. Better than he perhaps knows himself. Every video, where video footage exists: Zemo has seen it. Every audio recording of a sound that the Winter Soldier made.

(What Zemo would confess to an interviewer, if one asked: in all honesty, it becomes rather boring, consuming repeated acts of violence. One person dying looks much like another, and any honest soldier will say so. After a time, you find yourself skipping past the screams and gurgling. You are irritated with how long it takes them to die. With torture, the same: how many times can Barnes’s face achieve the same contortions? Must they use the electricity over and over? Haven’t they a creative bone between them? Zemo knows, of course, that the monotony itself is an aspect of the torture. And, too, it’s useful for the torturers: past a certain point, not only habit but an exhaustion of the empathy sets in. Still, something in him rebels, perhaps his last moral instinct. Yes, it’s true, his boredom is moral! He would like to believe so. Do what you’re going to do, he thinks, but for fuck’s sake don’t make it commonplace.)

He’s even watched the tapes of Barnes’s earliest therapy sessions— not his deprogramming, in Wakanda, where Zemo had failed, to his frustration, to find an in from his prison, but the psychotherapy that followed his return to the United States. The sessions made for quite compelling viewing; in his earliest days of isolation, they obsessed him. Barnes was a ragged, still-feral creature in them. He was prone to prolonged and uncomfortable bouts of silence. It took him a long time to find language. When asked to reflect on this, he sat for a long time without speaking. Zemo can picture him now: oddly soft-edged where he hunched in the oversized armchair, pulling the sleeves of his jumper over his fingers. He had lost a dramatic amount of weight, and his face looked haunted, but he had not yet cut his hair.

“Maybe there are words for what I want to say,” Barnes said, “but don’t know ’em. I don’t know how you would learn ’em. So everything has to be translated. You know? Or— not even translated. It’s like I’m the first person who’s ever had to say it. I’ve got to find the right shape cookie cutter to show you. The right…sharpness.” His metal fingers twitched. Zemo liked to think that he was looking for a knife.

A knife was a cookie cutter that was always the right shape cookie cutter.

In that moment, watching, Zemo had wished too for a knife. Not because he did not know the borders or form of his response, his reminiscence, but out of outrage at the very authenticity of Barnes’s speechlessness. How, Zemo thought, do you not know the words?

He had thought that everyone possessed this secret language, though you did not reveal your fluency in it, at least not in polite company. No wonder Barnes is so unmade. He has passed the age when one acquires such skill through sudden immersion.

(He himself experienced, perhaps, the opposite form of immersion. His childhood between the wars was sheltered by privilege, he knew only that any persons could vanish without warning, and that you would hear, later, hushed whispers when their bodies were found: exegesis of the marks from a which a saga of pain could be inferred. Then came age nine, and the daring, unprecedented separatist attack on his prestigious lycée. The wet red flesh of a classmate; the smeared trajectory of a body sketched out where a child had collapsed against a wall. His parents said, This Is No Place For a Child. In a month’s time he was living comfortably in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Madripoor, places that were For a Child. He spoke French, German, and English. In time, he came to associate the Sokovian language with that other language of his childhood: fear and grief. He thought less of his classmates because they were ignorant of these languages, acquired a kind of hauteur about it— at the same time as he understood, on some childish level that resisted penetration, how his expertise was the source of a morbid, drenching shame. )

Perhaps there is a kinship that comes between two men who speak the same language. In Madripoor, he feels it, as he caresses Barnes’s body and detects no flinch. An almost sexual pull there, maybe. Dangerous; electric.

Does Barnes know that Zemo plans to kill him at the conclusion of this escapade?

Difficult to guess.

#tfatws #my fic

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the-ace-with-spades · 3 years

Text

(1/6) the best is yet to be

five times someone realized Ronan and Adam were basically married and one time they actually were

Part 2 │ Part 3 │ Part 4 │ Part 5 │ Part 6

Read it on ao3

Gansey did not expect anything to change in their group dynamic when Ronan and Adam admitted they were in a relationship — not because he thought it wasn't a big deal, but because Adam and Ronan did not seem like the type of a couple who was very affectionate in public, simple due to their exteriorly harsh personalities. He was sure that, with time, they were going to be whispering sweet nothings and devouring any small touches they could give each other behind closed doors, but he never hoped to be a witness to any of it.

Although Gansey loved them dearly, Ronan and Adam were both heavily experienced by life and for them, expressing emotions was greatly limited to those of negative nature. They were getting better, both of them, and the progress of the last year was evident but Gansey did not expect them to get rid of those habits easily.

Gansey, as he often is, was wrong.

Now that they search for Glendower was forgotten, they all had more time and they all spent it differently. Gansey himself was having a bit of a mid-life crisis — or after second death crisis — and was desperately searching for something else that could provide life-long interest and simultaneously be useful for a future degree in history as his mother expected that he would at least attend some kind of higher education.

Adam was doing things only Adam could do, which consisted of things mundane but exhausting. Working three jobs, interviewing for scholarships, preparing for exams, and helping Ronan with the Barns didn't leave him much freedom and he still managed to somehow fit his friends in between. Apparently, he was even also meeting up with the psychics at the Fox Way, although Blue didn’t know the details — she was also preparing for exams, helping her family with the business and working, so in between the sparse time she didn't spend with Gansey or Gansey and the others, she wasn't present for most of Adam's visits.

Out of all of them, Ronan had the most empty calendar. He hadn't dropped out of school yet but at this point, it was only a formality — his absence was so frequent and his grades so nonexistent that no one was deluding themselves, Ronan wasn't going to graduate. It meant that there would be days Gansey wouldn't see him at all while he stayed in the Barns, repairing anything the time consumed and making the place resemble the warm home it used to be.

It made Gansey feel incredibly lonely, more than usual, especially at night, when he was now the only person pacing around the Monmouth Manufacturing.

But there were days like the one now, and Adam would come for a study session that would slowly track off into a different territory and he would stay until his night shift was about to begin.

Another benefit of having Adam at the Monmouth was that Ronan had an almost abnormal gift of knowing when Adam was going to be there and therefore always showed that day too. He would mostly provide to be a distraction and more often than not he would still leave for the night, either to Adam's or to the Barns, Gansey never asked.

He figured that Ronan being there every time Adam showed up was in itself a public display of affection and the only kind Gansey would ever witness from the two.

He should have known something like that would happen sometime mid-evening but he purposefully ignored it.

Adam was sitting at the coffee table, his body curving on the hard floor, things scattered around him. He'd been sitting like that for an hour and there wasn't anything unusual about it.

Ronan, who had previously been in his room, blasting that awful thing he calls music, materialized behind the sofa an hour into the session when they were already slowly going off-topic. It confirmed Gansey's suspicions, as Ronan indeed had a sixth sense when it came to Parrish-related things. It was kind of funny, kind of heartwarming and kind of weird to observe this unusual sign of love from him.

Ronan did not stay behind the couch long, instead deciding to throw himself onto it, lying on his stomach. For the most part, he didn't say anything, not even a greeting Adam could reply to. Observing that, no one would have said, if they didn't know Ronan and Adam as well as Gansey, that they were a couple.

Adam didn't seem to mind much, still paying attention to his math homework and still giving Gansey glances from time to time, to show that he was still listening.

Ronan provided to be a distraction, but not to Adam — to Gansey. The further from studying they were, the more obvious it became how close Ronan's face was to Adam's neck.

Finally finished with his homework, Adam leaned back.

Gansey tried — really, really tried — not to stare but he was utmostly sure Ronan was nuzzling into Adam's neck. The touches could be easily mistaken for tiny little kisses scattered over Adam's freckled skin. It was a very strange sight, as it was simultaneously looking seductive, almost like tiny little kisses scattering over Adam's freckled skin, and disturbing in a way that made Gansey feel hot all over his body but it also made Ronan, who was slightly curled onto himself and hiding his nose in Adam's nape, look like an overgrown lap dog that was pawing its owner for attention.

Adam didn't react at first, and Gansey would say he didn't notice, but he also leaned further back, allowing Ronan's thumb to brush his shoulder blade.

This wasn't exactly outrageous but it was also enough that Gansey noticed. More wasn't allowed to show, but Adam and Ronan's affection wasn't exactly public in the sense that no stranger would call it affection.

Gansey wasn't a stranger so he could see the way Ronan's breathing calmed down and the way his eyes hovered closed a second or two longer. He almost looked sleepy, or peacefully content.

And then Adam had to get up.

And Gansey could see how Ronan's body sharpened within seconds, lazily turning onto his side and shaking off any easiness off his shoulders.

"You sure you don't want me to drive you?" Ronan asked, voice rough and lazy from not talking for so long.

Gansey's brain, at that moment, was showing him red flags — there was a way too much intimacy within this short period of time and this little question was another example of it. Ronan hadn't said anything for the duration of his stay on the couch. This was a conversation he hadn't been a part of.

The corner of Adam's lips quirked up, almost unnoticeably. He adjusted the strap of his bag, filled up with notebooks, textbooks, and his work uniform and there was something light about his posture.

"No, Lynch," he said. "Not today."

Gansey wished he could, just like that, offer Adam a ride, and not be placed under his questioning gaze and assessed for ulterior motives. Maybe it was a boyfriend privilege, or rather — a Ronan privilege, as this had been happening even when they weren't in a relationship.

"I will see you tomorrow in the library?" Adam asked, snapping Gansey out of the stupor.

"Yeah, and at lunch."

Adam waves at them, turning around.

"Hey, Parrish," Ronan spoke up. He waited for Adam to turn back to them before continuing.

Adam raised an eyebrow, slightly amused. "Huh?"

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Ronan asked. Adam gave him an empty look. "You suck."

And then Ronan turned his face, his jaw slightly up so that his side was directed at Adam. He tapped his cheek with one finger, brows creased, and waited.

Adam rolled his eyes but his expression was unbelievably fond. Gansey stared.

Adam took a step back to the sofa. Gansey stared more.

Before Gansey could even register what was happening, Adam leaned down over Ronan's sprawled body and kisses his cheek, an inch away from his chin, so long and so sweet that Gansey's mouth opened as he gaped. It was casual but looking weirdly domestic — it reminded Gansey of early childhood and the way his parents would often kiss in the doorframe, whenever one of them was leaving for work, or grocery shopping, or dentist appointment, or to pick up the kids from school.

Ronan's hand searched for Adam's and they met in a soft squeeze.

"What, no tongue?" Ronan asked, with a face that could easily be synonymous with the phrase the cat that got the cream.

"Screw you," Adam said, a tiny smile present over his reddened face.

Ronan's hand gave him a barely-there squeeze again.

Gansey couldn't tell if this was something normal for them or something Ronan played up to tease him and Adam simply indulged. It seemed too smooth and too habitual to be something done on the spot, especially with the level of softness they both displayed — it was almost as if Gansey wasn't in the room with them, silently observing everything; he didn't feel teased, he felt absent.

Ronan was usually the one that walked Adam to his car or took Adam home — Gansey hadn't seen them saying goodbye yet and quite frankly, he didn't think they would be saying any kind of goodbye at all. This seemed like something only sappy couples would do and although he could easily call Ronan sentimental, there was a difference. Out of the two of them, he had never thought that Adam would ever allow himself to be this vulnerable — the intimacy felt like something earned too early, something that shouldn't be there for months or years.

(It was. Something normal for them, that is.)

#pynch #my writing #my fics #TRC #outsider pov #pynch fic #idk how to tag this #the raven cycle

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pundergrad · 3 years

Text

Guys I. I've had a revelation tonight.

All my group essay team members put their work in the google doc and I had a read through most of it. And I. I don't know the emotion that I'm feeling. It's somewhere between humour and sadness.

The revelation is that I can just. Not care so much about school, apparently.

I'm in my fourth year of uni and I wish I was as carefree as my team members seem to be. Maybe this is a class they don't mind bludging, and they're only doing it to complete course requirements. But this essay is worth 40% of our grade so I thought maybe they'd bring some kinda Big Game to the table, y'know?

The quality of half of their paragraphs was... Not what I expected of third-year uni students. One person, who I will refer to as Shakespeare, had around 30% of their work written as direct quotes, and I couldn't tell where the description of research ended and analytic thought began. Another person, henceforth Bart Simpson, has basically written the same sentence about 25 times, all in slightly different ways, extremely vague, had missed so many citations, and hadn't connected the majority of points made across their paragraphs. The introduction could have easily been written last, because the person responsible for it, hereto-forth known as Skimp, was the last to upload their sections, and there were no references in the intro, so it would have been easy to make a bunch of vague statements about what would be mentioned in the body of the essay. But no. Instead Skimp wrote an intro that contradicts many of the points made in other sections of the essay, a lot of which is not followed up on in the body, and they haven't given even a single source for the definition they were tasked with.

I swear I must have collected 30 sources for my sections, dug deep into the digital libraries for original sources wherever possible, and tried so many variations of how to arrange my statements to create the smoothest flow - which is difficult when my sections would be so far apart in the final draft, but I tried. I tried to cover a broad range of topics as concisely as possible. I at least made an effort to use synonyms.

Shakespeare said at least 4 different things were crucial to understanding the topic. I get that it's easy to reuse words when the goal is to write 1700-ish, but William. Buddy. Thesaurus.com is right there. I'm pretty sure Shakespeare didn't fill their part of the word count, they must've been about 250 words short.

Meanwhile there was Bart Simpson, beginning and ending all their paragraphs with basically the same phrase, and filling out the paragraphs with 'the studies say this... But this isn't always true' and then not providing evidence for this contradiction, all the while leaving out citations and forgetting to finish half of their sentences. They got almost 1200 words out of this technique, with maybe 13 sources in total, one of which was the textbook for the class which is. Not a primary source. And they cited the author of the textbook as a researcher for the ideas that were mentioned, instead of the three very specific theorists these ideas came from during the second week of class. There's no way that'll fly when it comes to judging the extent of our research!

Finally, after the three of us have tried checking over each other's paragraphs, making edits, desperately trying to find clarity and extra words because we're still under even after I exceeded my word count goal, Skimp rolls into the doc. By this point, Shakespeare and I have finalised our sections, and proofread/edited each others work because that's what was agreed. Bart Simpson and Skimp were meant to proofread and edit for each other. If we had time, we'd go over the whole thing and try to make it coherent.

Skimp struts into the group document and starts reading from the beginning. Keep in mind, I had to take on the role of editing and proofreading Bart Simpson's work. So as the realisation dawns on me that, when Bart Simpson reported to the professor that our group was doing Really Well and we were On Track for the Deadline - filling me with dread because I felt like I hadn't written a thing of worth - they were really saying I Don't Care If This Essay Flops, 'at least we wrote words', etc. But then.

Then Skimp starts editing from the beginning of the essay. Making edits to Shakespeare and my sections, which had been finalised. Filling up our email boxes with tens of Suggestions, instead of leaving Comments. Following up on comments that I had already made with further Suggestions that repeated what I'd commented about. My phone is buzzing every five minutes with Suggestions. Anyone who's used Google Docs knows that Suggestions clog up the body of text with incoherent blue text. I am drowning in a sea of blue Suggestions.

By now I've finished editing Bart Simpson's work for Skimp. The comments I left asking for citations are half followed up on, half ignored. I still don't know whether they edited the unfinished sentences, but a promise was made to do so. Bart Simpson has decided to collate everyone's work even though they won't be available tomorrow for final revision, so I left it up to them to fulfil their part of the editing.

Skimp finally finishes giving Suggestions on the whole essay. Despite the chat history for this group, Skimp only now realises that my and Shakespeare's sections had been finalised, and that their Suggestions probably won't be involved in the final draft. Skimp approves their own work for the final draft and sends their sections to Bart Simpson, who - if their responses I'm the group chat are anything to go by - I can only assume is fed up from my relatively excessive editing and comments, and also from the delay in the finalisation process. Bart makes a promise that they'll be at work for all of Submission Day, so the three of us will be responsible for the final product. Sure. Work is a commitment. We were behind schedule. That's a reasonable outcome. But this was coming from someone who copied a dot-pointed list from the source into the essay and forgot to cite it as a direct quote, which would have put us all at risk of plagiarism.

I haven't read the rest of Skimp's sections. Frankly, I dread the potential plagiarism charges that we'll get from directly quoting so much content. We are barely scraping the minimum word count. This essay doesn't make a lick of sense.

Maybe there's reasons for this. I don't know what my team members' lives are like. They could be Going Through It right now.

But they gave me the impression they were 100% on board, in sync, and on task for this essay. I thought I was the one falling off the horse, with how badly my executive dysfunction hit when faced with such a massive assignment. I thought I was a Science Student in a group of Social Studies Geniuses. I haven't felt this responsible for a group project since seventh grade.

I can't believe I put off two other projects for this, and got an extension for another. I'm tired.

#adhd #adhd c #adhd combined #executive dysfunction #studyblr #self diagnosed #group project

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ace-beef · 3 years

Text

Truth Seekers spoilers

okay so I have a lot of thoughts surrounding the characters Dave and Jojo and I’m gonna talk about them under the cut so don’t look any further if you haven’t watched the show yet and don’t want to be spoiled!!

so... what exactly ARE Dave and Jojo?

I think we have three main options: gods (more specifically God and Satan), angels and/or demons, or aliens, and there’s a decent bit of evidence for each thing/stuff that could be interpreted to link to each thing, and I’m gonna delve into that in this post. So buckle up lads this is gonna be a long one.

First I’m gonna go over the possibility that they’re aliens since that is the one I personally think is least likely since most, if not all, of the evidence that suggests that they’re aliens is linked to Dave and not Jojo. Anyway, Alien Evidence: - Dave pulls out the Pioneer Plaques to show Jojo what he based his human appearance on. So they could be aliens that came across the Pioneer spacecraft and decided to investigate Earth further - Dave himself is a huge Carl Sagan reference, as listed by this tumblr post here, so his appearance could have been a result of him being inspired by one particular human he happened to like a lot (similar to how he appears to like Gus and Astrid a lot) - the slogan on the side of Gus’ van says “connecting worlds”, and we can safely assume that that is Smyle’s slogan, the slogan of the company that Dave is in charge of. So this could be a similar situation to The Network in The World’s End in the sense that Dave could be an alien aiming to connect different intelligent civilisations throughout space. Although it definitely seems like Dave isn’t seeking to aggressively convert and control these civilisations that he connects like The Network... right? I’m fairly confident that he’s supposed to be a Good(TM) character and not some surprise twist villain but y’know we’ll never know

So yeah while there is definitely some stuff to suggest that this mysterious pair are aliens, I personally don’t think they are since I’ve found more evidence suggesting that they are something else. They appear to be too in tune with Earth, the creatures inhabiting it, and “the other side” that souls pass on to after animals and humans die just to be aliens from another world that are observing the planet. Plus the use of the phrase “Super Being” for some reason doesn’t feel alien to me, because unless they’re very self entitled aliens (and Dave definitely doesn’t give off that vibe) then I don’t think they would consider themselves as above humanity, which is the energy that the phrase “Super Being” gives off. I heard that phrase and interpreted it as meaning ‘beings that are above humanity and above human comprehension’. Aliens for the most part are depicted as being just another race of beings, not above humanity despite how much further advanced they are. There is the possibility of Dave being the only alien of the two but then how did these two creatures meet? It just doesn’t feel right since they both appear to be on the same level as each other and have some kind of mutual understanding as if they were both the same thing, not two different creatures.

Anyway next I’m going to move onto the things suggesting that they’re angels and/or demons. This seems more plausible to me than aliens but I’m still not 100% sure on this one but I will say that there is a lot of evidence/interpretations that could suggest both this possibility and the possibility of them being gods. Angel/Demon Evidence: - the name ‘Jojo’ could be a link to the angel Jophiel - there is a mention of a ‘bigger picture’ so we could have a Good Omens-type situation where there is a plan in motion that both Dave and Jojo are a part of and are making sure that it is played out - the “what did you come as?” “same as always, a man” bit obviously suggests that their actual forms are definitely not human and probably not even humanoid (whereas an alien would be at least humanoid in some capacity). Bibically accurate angels do not look human/humanoid in the slightest, and demons, while a bit more humanoid than angels, are still very animalistic in appearance. Also, imagine an innocent angel that has never pried to look at what a human ACTUALLY looks/acts like suddenly panics about having to look and act like a human and pulls up that one thing the humans sent out to the aliens as a reference and goes entirely on that (listen I really like Dave he seems like such a Good Boy who isn’t the brightest but he’s trying his best) - Dave’s aversion to swearing, links to the theme of purity which is obviously an angel thing. Plus ‘Good’ characters will often have a trait of being against swearing to reinforce the idea that they are Good and Pure - Gus makes a comment about Dave “never not being [at Smyle HQ]” so he’s clearly there all the time, which could suggest a lack of needing to go home and do basic human functions such as eat and sleep etc (I do want to bring up that an alien still would probably need to continue with some kind of basic functions that have similar purposes). Plus while he does have a coffee cup on his desk, it’s only filled with pens - in a similar vein, Jojo appears to spend all of her time in the abandoned Happy Eater, and even though it’s an abandoned restaurant, it’s been abandoned for over 20 years and therefore won’t have any edible food still in it (except for the crisps but let’s be real Elton why did you try and get those out they’re probably horribly out of date). The still steaming cup of tea/coffee and the crisps in the vending machine I feel like were put there by Jojo to play to the gang’s curiosity and prompt them to explore further and find her

there are a few things here that could also be used to suggest that they are gods/God and Satan, plus there’s a few more bits that would also go in this section but I’m saving them for the next bit. Anyway there’s the stuff pointing to them being either both angels or Dave being an angel and Jojo being a demon, and there’s plenty more evidence compared to the amount of things that suggest that they’re aliens.

Finally we have the things linked to the idea of them being gods of some kind, or more specifically God and Satan. This is the idea that I am the most sure of. Gods/God and Satan Evidence: - as I mentioned already, the idea of the ‘bigger picture’, but instead they are the ones in charge of carrying this out. This feels more likely especially when considering the way that Jojo talks about her ‘use’ of Toynbe. Plus the way that the two go about doing everything, the ambiguous vibe that the two are either having the equivalent of a friendly card game against each other or are actually on opposite sides. Consider the placement of the rose in the field and the planting of the cameras etc - also as mentioned earlier, the implication that Dave never leaves Smyle HQ and Jojo stays in the abandoned restaurant. Also I want to add on the fact that neither of them appear to have cars, like Dave outright says “I don’t have a car” and yet knows how to drive the one he borrows, and there’s no sign of a car at Jojo’s hideout. Plus the way she doesn’t make any kind of journey and just appears in Dave’s office: he doesn’t look up to see who’s walking through the door and there is no shot of Jojo walking through the door, he simply smiles as if he senses her presence appearing in the room before looking at her - Dave wears blue, white, and grey clothing, which are also the same colours used in his office, and the lighting whenever he’s in shot is always either bright and white or a light blue, especially in that last scene where Jojo and Dave are chatting in his office; every time the camera is on him, the lighting of the shot is always blue. White especially is associated with holiness and purity, as well as being a colour that is associated with God, angels, and heaven. Blue is similar in the sense that heaven is always depicted with white clouds and bright blue skies, as well as blue often being a colour used to represent ‘Good’ characters - speaking of colours, Jojo is also linked to certain colours, with those colours being red and black (but primarily red). The abandoned restaurant is dark and barely lit, and her hideout in the basement is primarily lit with red lighting, both in the scene where she encounters the Truth Seekers gang and at the end where she rings Gus and orders that guy to send a cleanup crew. Also, once again in that last scene, she not only is wearing a black item of clothing, the lighting of her shots are always red to oppose Dave’s blue lighting. Red obviously is synonymous with hell, evil, the Devil/Satan, sin etc. Red is also often used to represent villains and evil characters, and black is similar with its themes of darkness and it’s use for villains. I like to think that Jojo got that blue rose for Dave partially to mock him, especially when considering that apparently blue roses are often used to symbolize mystery or attaining the impossible. (Also I want to point out that we already know that these boys do love their colour coding/theming as evidenced by the Cornetto Trilogy) - once again I’ll bring up the phrase “Super Being”, which really does sound like a phrase that a god who is very much above humanity would use, like that just screams ‘gods’ to me - I used this as alien evidence but Dave looking like Carl Sagan could also be applied to him being a god and just deciding to base his appearance on a human he liked a lot - same with the “connecting worlds” slogan, since I think that part of Dave and Jojo’s game/contest involves experimenting with and/or influencing the boundaries between the ghost realm and the living realm, this slogan could have something to do with that - the way that Jojo says she “shouldn’t have used [Toynbe]”, which reminds me of the story in the Bible where the Devil tempts Jesus, except Toynbe succumbed to the temptation and “focused too much on the immortality” - speaking of that line in particular, it also makes me think that Dave and Jojo are the ones ‘in charge’ of whatever game or contest or battle that the two are having, as I mentioned already. But that line, as well as other things, also gives the impression that they are alone in this, like Dave isn’t just one of many angels or a god with loads of angel lackeys to do things for him, and the same goes for Jojo. They do appear to have human ‘lackeys’ to do more basic tasks such as Jojo requesting the cleanup crew and Dave having a company with human employees, but overall the humans are unaware of what is really happening. Whatever thing that these two have with each other, whether they’re friends having a casual game or are on opposing sides and having a serious battle of some kind but are remaining friendly with each other because there isn’t anyone else like them, it definitely feels like these two are pitting against each other alone, with nobody else who really knows what is happening

Overall, I think the two are some kind of higher entities that are above humanity yet they are still very strongly linked to and woven into the fabric of the Earth and the human race, so like they’re not outsiders to the mechanisms/forces of the planet. They seem more knowledgeable on the ghost realm/afterlife than humanity is, but whether they can actually control/influence it is still a bit of a mystery, like part of their game/contest could be one big experiment with the living realm and the ghost realm. Who knows? Not us, since season 2 isn’t going to be a thing, so I’m just gonna theorise until I die /j

So there ya go, all of my current evidence and thoughts on what the hell is going on with Dave and Jojo. I will probably update this post if I come up with/find any more things to add, probably by reblogging it. Also of course do feel free to reblog and add your own theories!

#my brain apparently remembered that it did English A Level while writing this all out #but yeah these two characters have captivated me #literally have been thinking about them 24/7 for the past few days #especially Dave I really like him #NO not just because he's played by Simon Pegg #truth seekers #truth seekers show #amazon prime #jojo74 #truth seekers dave #truth seekers jojo #simon pegg #nick frost #beef speaks

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purplesurveys · 3 years

Text

1252

A - Appearance.

What are you wearing? I have a gray turtleneck and brown shorts at the moment.

What are on your feet right now? I never wear anything for my feet when I’m at home.

What color are your fingernails? I say this a lot on surveys but mine are never painted. Nothing against them, I’ve just never felt the need to spend on something like my nails.

What does your hair look like right now? I have apple hair at the moment to temporarily get rid of my bangs, which I am more than sick of at this point.

B - Best Friend

Who is your best friend? Angela and Andi.

What was the last thing you two did together? The last time I saw Angela we went to the BTS pop-up store. I haven’t seen Andi since January, but when we hung out that evening we just had Korean barbecue and we also parked somewhere in UP to just talk about life in my car. My breakup had been fresh at the time and back then I just needed someone to whom I could vent.

What is (s)he doing right now? I’m sure Andi’s doing something with Leigh, maybe having a video call or something since I think they tend to have one every evening. I’m not sure what Angela’s up to but considering her replies have been a bit slow tonight, I guess she’s somewhat busy at home.

Are you talking to her/him online right now? Angela just replied to something I sent her around 15 minutes ago but the exchange wasn’t meant to be a full-blown conversation, if that’s what you mean.

C - Crush.

Who is (s)he? Eh, I don’t have a crush these days; too obsessed with work to figure out what I find attractive lmaooooo. I do have a main celebrity crush and I might just cite them instead so that I can at least fill this section out.

What does (s)he look like? Curly hair; mismatched eyes; moles underneath his right eye, on his nose, and on his lower lip, and the widest smile I’ve seen on any person.

What was the last thing you two talked about? He’s a celebrity crush...

Does (s)he make you smile? Yes.

D - Dad

What’s your dad’s name? Edgardo.

What does he do for a living? He’s an executive chef for a luxury liner company. He hasn’t worked in a year and a half due to the pandemic and has stayed in the country this whole time, but we’ve *very* recently been informed that he can go back abroad in around two weeks! Of course it will suck letting go of him again after having him back for such a long time, but I’m just glad the family can finally be on track again, financially speaking. It had been something I’ve been worrying silently about.

What was the last thing you two did together? Had dinner last night, but we did that with the whole family too. We don’t really do things that’s just the two of us.

Do you get along better with him than your mother? Yes.

E - Ebay.

Have you ever bought anything from ebay? No. I’m not sure we have eBay here anyway.

Do you just shop around when you’re online? I don’t really shop ‘around.’ I usually have an idea of what I want to get myself, and it’s just a matter of finding the right shop from which to buy.

Do you know anybody who is addicted to it? I know a couple of co-workers who love shopping, like Gabi.

Have you ever sold anything on it? I’ve never tried selling, but I’m actually in the middle of doing something for the very first time – I’ve decided to get into trading! I got my BTS Butter album yesterday but didn’t get to pull the photocard I was vying for – the pull I got, though, was of the most popular member, which means it would be a very easy trade. I put the trade offer up the other day and I finally got a match yesterday.

F - Facebook.

When was the last time you logged on? Like five minutes ago. I constantly check it.

How many friends do you have? Just checked and it says I have 686. I wanna get rid like half of them though.

Do you hate when your facebook chat messes up? Hmm, that doesn’t really happen.

Who was the last person to leave you a wall post? Angela.

G - Google.

Do you Google everything? Yeah, I think I look up a random item or phrase at least once a day. Doesn’t hurt to learn a new thing each day. :)

What was the last thing you Googled? The K-Pop group g.o.d., since my teacher mentioned them in our Korean lessons earlier.

Would you ever trade Google in for Bing? No, I haven’t used Bing in like 12 years.

What do you Google the most? Synonyms, I think, since I’m constantly writing for work.

H - Hair.

Do you like your hair? It’s a love-hate relationship most days because I hate how thick and frizzy it can be...but I recently had mine trimmed all the way up to my neck and for some reason it’s taken on a wavy form, which I didn’t expect to come out at all. And I’ve found that it actually suits me quite a bit, so I’m enjoying my hair for now.

What color is your hair? Black.

What does it look like right now? Slightly damp since I took a shower not too long ago.

What kind of shampoo for you use? Just a normal Dove one.

I - Ibuprofen

When was the last time you took ibuprofen? I don’t think I’ve ever taken it? I usually take paracetamol...idrk the difference either. Do you rely on it for everything (cramps, headache)? I only ever take medicine for headaches/migraines.

Are you so thankful people made it? I mean sure, I’m glad there are those who have been able to create products that can instantly relieve pain or discomfort, but I’m not obsessively grateful.

Do you have any right now? I don’t think we have any.

J - Jobs.

Do you need a job? Nah, I already have one.

Where do you work? Media/PR industry.

Where would you work? I wouldn’t change jobs/industries. This is where I wanted to end up in, and I’m really really glad and fortunate to have landed here on my first shot, right out of college, and during a pendemic.

How much money would you like to get paid? An additional P5k (~$100) would probably be more satisfying, but considering my parents aren’t the traditional Filipino parents who suck 100% of my earnings right out of me the second payday comes, I’m able to enjoy a substantial chunk of money to myself, give them a portion of my earnings, and still be able to save.

K - Kissing.

Who was the last person you kissed? That would be my ex.

Will you next kiss be a mistake? I have no idea when that would be and with whom it will be shared, so I won’t be able to give you a definite answer.

Do you kiss someone everyday? Other than my dogs, nah.

Who was your first kiss? The aforementioned ex.

L - Love.

Who do you love the most in your life? My best friends. I’m also doing a whole lot better in the self-love department these days, so that too :)

Have you ever been in love before? Yeah.

Does it make you so happy when you feel the feeling of love? Sure. It feels light and comfortable, especially when it’s shared.

Why is this word so hard to describe? Because everyone feels love differently. < There we go.

M - Mom.

What is your mom’s name? Abigail.

What is she doing right now? She was watching The Good Doctor the last time I checked on her like five minutes ago. It’s her latest obsession.

Where does she work? She works in the food and beverage department of a 5-star hotel in the city.

Do you two shop together a lot? I rarely do my shopping with either of my parents.

N - Netflix.

Do you have Netflix? Technically, I guess. My dad pays for it and we have a family account.

If not, what movies would you order? I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a movie before. Before streaming on Netflix, I just used to get illegal torrents lol.

Do you rent a lot of movies? I’ve never rented a movie. Was too young for it, I think.

Do you have the tool where it just downloads to your tv? No.

O - Ohio.

Is this the state in which you live in? I don’t even live in the US. Never been there either. < Same.

Is Ohio State your favorite football team? I don’t like football.

Did you know Ohio Is For Lovers? I’m not familiar.

Have you ever been to Ohio? See first answer in this section.

Q - Quitting.

What was the last thing you quit doing? Practicing on Duolingo. I had an extremely short period of using the app again a couple of months ago, but I lasted all of two days hahaha I had been trying to get back on learning Korean, but I enrolled in official lessons not long after that anyway so it didn’t make sense to continue the stages in the app.

Do you need to quit talking to someone right now? Nope. The people I’m talking to right now in between this survey are all welcome conversations.

Would you ever quit school? That wasn’t an option for me and I never would’ve done it anyway.

Don’t you think quitting is stupid? No. Sometimes it can be the strongest thing you can do for yourself.

R - Reading.

What was the last book you read? Does my Korean lesson textbook count hahaha...if not, I haven’t really read anything in years.

Do you own a lot of books? I do, but they are all books from my childhood and teenage years. It’s been a while since I last updated my bookshelf.

Do you have a library card? No, haven’t had one since Grade 1.

Have you ever read a book that changed your life? Without Seeing the Dawn was pretty influential to me, but I dunno about ‘life-changing.’ I need to read more to find the book that would have that effect on me.

S - Safety.

Do you always wear your seat belt? I do these days. I didn’t really practice it when I used to drive to school, whoops. Always forgot to do it.

When riding a four-wheeler do you wear a helmet? I rarely get to do that.

Did you ever wear knee pads and a helmet when riding your bike? Nah. I can’t ride a bike either. Do you always think safety first? In COVID terms, yeah. I have a face mask and shield on as soon as I find myself outdoors.

T - Talk

Who was the last person you talked to? Reena. Who are you talking to right now? Nobody. It’s just me, this survey, and some music in the background.

Who did you last talk to before you went to bed last night? Angela and Reena, if I’m not mistaken.

Do you need to talk to anybody right now? No, I’m good.

U - US ARMY

Do you support it? I don’t know enough about it to have a bold opinion, considering I’m not even from the US and it’s been a while since their army has had any strong contact with my country.

Do you know anybody who is in the army right now? I think one of Angela’s uncles has a high position in our national army.

Don’t you ever wonder why their camo doesn’t match anything? Not really.

Would you ever go to the army? No.

V - Virgin.

Are you a virgin? Nope.

When did you lose your virginity? I was 18.

Do you wish you would’ve waited? Nah, it felt right when I did it the first time; and I maintain that stance now even though I’m no longer with that person.

Do you think you could have stayed a virgin until marriage? I could. Sex isn’t a big deal to me.

W - What.

What are you doing right now besides this survey? I’m also listening to mono. and taking bites from my doughnut every now and then.

What are you craving? Spicy tuna salad, but it can wait. Andi got me my favorite truffle baked macaroni because it’s CM Punk day today :D :D and that’s able to satisfy my savory cravings for now.

What do you need to buy? Shelves.

Why are you taking my survey? I’ve mentioned this before but I like categorized/themed surveys, so alphabetical ones are always fun for me.

X -Xanax

Do you know anybody who is addicted to Xanax? I don’t think so.

Have you ever taken it before? No.

Do you even know what it is? No, actually.

Have you ever suffered from anxiety or depression? I’m sure I have.

Y - Yourself.

Name. Robyn.

Age. 23.

Do you smile a lot? Sure, I’d say that’s common these days.

Z - Zebra.

Are you addicted to zebra striped? Not really.

Do you own anything zebra striped? Nah. I have some stuff that come in black and white stripes, but not zebra print. Is anything on any of your websites zebra striped? No.

#survey #surveys

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writing-with-olive · 3 years

Text

How to write a five paragraph essay

This is going to be my third and last of these posts, unless people have questions that arise from them (at which point I am more than happy to make more - just let me know!) You can find my post about writing thesis statements here, and my post on essay conclusions here (both imbedded). Unlike my previous posts, this is going more in-depth about five paragraph essays, though I imagine you can take the tips here and apply them elsewhere.

Alrighty guys. Strap in because this one’s gonna be a bit long.

1) Prewriting

Okay. Since I hate prewriting as a concept (seriously. You do all this work and you don’t have any essay to show for it? what is this?), I tend to keep it pretty short and sweet, but it is necessary.

What do do?

Read through your source material, and get an understanding of what you’re going to argue about

As you’re reading, make sure you write down your sources or else doing your bibliography is going to be a pain (just copy/pasting urls should suffice at this point)

Create an argument (generally, what is the point you’re trying to get across)

Write your thesis. It’s important that you do this AFTER reading the material, as you won’t know what to argue if you come up with a thesis before doing the reading. Constructing your thesis is also important to do before you actually get to writing, as it informs a lot of the structure of the essay. For more info on how to construct a thesis, I made this post as part of this mini series not too long ago (same link as above).

Outline your essay. This can be detailed if you like it like that, or it can just be a few words for each paragraph. As I personally find outlines to be both necessary and a pain, I tend to go with the latter of the two (described further in the example below). However, experiement with both - some people work better when they have detailed outlines with all of their sources and arguments listed under each paragraph heading.

How to outline

(How to outline, as well as how to write the intro paragraph, body paragraphs, a link to how to write conclusion paragraphs, and general tips all under the cut)

As you may have guessed, there are a number of ways to outline. The most basic looks like this:

Paragraph 1: Intro Paragraph 2: [insert topic 1] Paragraph 3: [insert topic 2] Paragraph 4: [insert topic 3] Paragraph 5: Conclusion

From here, you can make things more and more detailed if you like. Some common things people put in outlines are:

evidence presented

points made

relevant sources for each paragraph

their topic sentence

etc...

My advice is to play around and see what works best for you. If you’re like me and really really hate prewriting, you may go with a simpler approach. Or, if you find drafting to be hell on earth, maybe put more time into prewriting to make drafting faster.

2) Introduction

This is arguably the most important part of your essay (at least, that’s what my middle school teachers always said). The common difficulty is that everyone seems to be saying how important it is, and how cructial it is, and how [insert synonym for important and crutial] it is, and all that jazz. Which means after a twenty minute lecture of WHY you should write an introduction, there never seems to be enough time to teach people how to actually WRITE it.

Here’s the thing. The point of your intro is to ease your reader into the topic. You don’t want to blind side them with something hyperspecific out of the blue. At the same time, you don’t want them to loose interest because you’re taking too long.

The trick is to use the funnel method.

It works like this: each sentence is a layer, and how wide the funnel is represents how broad your statement is. Your first statement is going to be huge - something that encompases a lot. Each sentence should encompass less and less, until you get to your thesis, which is very narrow.

A formula I frequently use (depending on if it’s applicable) is:

Intro: Sentence about humanity as a whole (establishes basic concept)

NS 1: Sentence that establishes that Intro thing applies to certain time/place (establishes the what/where)

NS 2: Sentence that specifies how, exactly, Intro thing applies to time/place (establishes how)

NS 3: Sentence that specifies relevant groups within this time and place

Thesis: the specific thing I am arguing.

In this (very generic, and also very fake) example, I’m going to bold every other sentence so they are easy to distinguish from one another. It’s the same pattern featured above.

Conflict is one of the universal truths of life. Throughout the ages, individuals and groups have found themselves on opposing sides of a disagreement, but few could compare to the 1789 B.C. Battle of the Frogs in what is now modern-day Tatooine. Dissention had been brewing for years, but when the Narnians finally stole all of native unicorns, the civillians of the sandy outer-rim planet finally hit a tipping point; they were prepared to sacrifice anything if it meant being free. Despite the epic proportions of the Battle, a few individuals were able to record the events of the conflict in journals that have survived to this day. In his journal “Of life on the Desert,” Percy Jackson describes the effects of war, including the impact it had on his family, his work, and the state of his village.

3) Body Paragraphs

These three paragraphs are where you will be backing up your thesis statement. This is a fair bit of space, to work with if you do it right, but it’s also not a lot of space, so you do have to make sure to use it wisely. An easy way to make sure you’re doing this right is to.....

Follow yet MORE paragraph formulas

(yay!)

Seriously though. Using formulas in your essays will set you free, and it makes it look like you know what you’re doing.

Sentence 1: Topic Sentence

This is usually going to start out with some kind of transition phrase such as “in addition to [previous thing]” or whatever. Then it’s going to introduce the thing you’re actually going to talk about in this paragraph.

Sentence 2 - Second to Last: Evidence and Analysis

For each paragraph, you’re probably going to want between three and four pieces of evidence (as two looks like there’s not actually solid evidence, and five becomes tedious).

For this structure, you’re going to want to spend a sentence introducing a piece of evidence, making sure to include the proper in-text citations (which I am not going to cover here, but I can cover in another post if someone asks me to).

After your evidence citation, you’re going to want to write at least one or two sentences of analysis, either picking apart just that piece of evidence, or linking that evidence to other pieces of evidence. For beginners, many teachers will expect about one line of analysis, from about sophomore year of highschool up, teachers begin to expect two or more.

Make sure that your evidence and analysis flows together - that is, organize your evidence into a logical order, and use transition words (there’s huge lists out there - google is your friend) to go from an analysis sentence to another piece of evidence.

Sentence 3 - Conclusion Sentence

This is one of the harder sentences to nail, but the idea is that you want to restate what your topic sentence is.

If you can’t think of a good conclusion sentence, you can write a transition sentence instead, and on the topic sentence of your next paragraph, leave off the transition.

4) Conclusions

I already did a post on conclusions, which is linked here (imbedded).

5) Miscellaneous Tips!

Never use “you” statements. This is because you can never be sure of your reader’s background, so it wrecks some of the credibility of your argument! If you’re describing something and you feel a burning urge to write “you might do X” or something along those lines, switch “you” out for the word “one”

Similarly, never use I statements. They make things look like opinions rather than facts. NOT GOOD. A good fix is to not use personal experiences that would force you to use I statements (unless explicitely asked to), and to cut off all phrases such as “I think” or “I researched.” These are implied, and you make your argument look stronger without them.

Avoid using the word “that.” If you can cut it out and the sentence still makes sense, cut it. It’ll make your narrative voice stronger.

If you need to make your essay look longer, find places where paragraphs end at the end of a line. Then, throughout the paragraph, un-abbreviate words that can be sensably un-abbreviated. This will push a few words onto the next line and give the apperance of a longer essay.

Similarly, if you want your essay to appear shorter (if you have a page limit or something), look for places where a paragraph just barely makes it onto a new line, and cut extra words so that the words move back until that new line isn’t there.

Keep track of all new sources as you go - it saves so much time.

Make in-text citations as you go, rather than trying to put them in after the fact.

Run spell check before turning in your work

Make sure your grammar is correct, and understand how to use colons and semi-colons (they will save your life)

Now, here are 1000 awesome points for reading until the end, and good luck with your essay!

#writing #writeblr #studyblr #writers on tumblr #school papers #essays #thesis statements #introductions #conclusions #body paragraphs #english #language arts #homework #schoolwork #olive’s writing vibes

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cuculine-nelipot · 4 years

Text

Wish We Could

Chapter Two: London

{ Pairing: Hermione Granger x Fred Weasley

Summary: After the Battle of Howgarts, Hermione and Ron start dating; their slow-burn friends to lovers arc complete. He’s nice, and she’s comfortable, and everyone is happy for them. Everyone but Fred, who can’t stop thinking that he loved her first, and Hermione, who begins to wonder if they really are as over as she thought they were. }

22nd August 1998, Night

“Well that was a colossally stupid thing to do,” George says from his old bed in The Burrow, spending the night at their mother’s insistence. Half laying down, he doesn’t look up from his magazine. Fred stands uncomfortably still, staring out the window, as though shell-shocked, even though Errol has long been out of sight.

“Yup.”

23rd August 1998, Morning

It was true that it didn’t take an awful lot to keep her up all night: a new book, a good essay, or better, a long one. Hermione had pulled her fair share of all-nighters, but none like this.

“Were you up all night reading again darling?” Her mother asks, taking stock of her daughter’s messier than usual hair, the shadows around her puffy eyes.

“Yes.” This wasn’t a lie exactly — she’d read that letter countless times.

“You look awful.” It sounds harsh, but her mother’s furrowed brow shows real concern.

“It was a sad story.”

1st July 1996

Summer had come to engender mixed emotions in Hermione. On the one hand she was of course excited to see her parents again, but on the other, she missed her friends terribly. She never had friends like Ron and Harry before; friends she saw day and night, friends she shared every meal with, friends she knew from experience would risk their lives for her as quickly as she would for them. She had no siblings, and had hardly kept in touch with the few friends from primary school. It was too difficult to keep fabricating stories about her Very Normal Boarding School Where Nothing Life-Threatening Ever Happened. So home for Hermione had become synonymous with the sort of deep-seated loneliness one only feels when one knows precisely what they are missing.

And now, to make matters worse, there was Fred. Fred who had kissed her in the hospital, and again by the lake, and again in several empty hallways while they waited for term to officially end. Fred who had, over the past year become more important to her than she ever would have expected. Fred, who didn’t look at her like he was lost and she was supposed to have the map, or make it. Fred, who so often grabbed her by the hand with a whiny come on Hermione, mischief dancing across his face, and dragged her along for some pure and honest thrill-seeking, who showed her the world as she had never seen it before.

The shrill ring of the telephone abruptly cut through her melancholia. Assuming it was only her parents phoning from work, she took her time making her way downstairs.

“Hello?”

“Hermione?”

“Fred?” She asked, her voice pitched with incredulity. “How are you calling? Why are you calling?”

“I believe it’s called a payphone and I am using one because I wanted to talk to you.” Even through the crackle and static, the teasing grin in his voice was obvious.

“Wanted?”

“Want.” He could hear the smile in her voice too.

24th August 1998, 10:17 a.m.

Perhaps George was right, and that her silence over the weekend means she isn’t coming. She is wiser than Fred after all. And George is usually right. Still, Fred waits, at an al fresco table at Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlour, his right leg bouncing manically up and down, his eyes flitting to his watch every few seconds. He has been sitting there for forty-eight minutes.

Of course, Hermione knew at once that it was an undoubtedly bad idea, going to see Fred. Though really, it would only be a bad idea if she still has feelings for him, which she doesn’t, or if he still has feeling fore her, which she is sure isn’t true either. Then there is the fact that she had hardly made it to Florean’s all summer, and he has a lovely blackcurrant and gin ice-cream that he’s meant to stop making once Autumn rolls round. But then there is the question of why precisely Fred wants to meet her. And then there is Ron. Such thoughts chased each other in circles around her head, nipping at each other’s heals all Saturday night and most of Sunday, until another owl arrived. This one with a note from Flourish and Blotts asking her to please collect her order at her earliest convenience. Was Monday morning around 10 a.m. not her earliest convenience?

And so at eight-thirty on this almost chilly August morning, Hermione left her house for Belsize Park station, hopped on the Northern line, and alighted five stops later at Leister Square. She walked two minutes in the direction of The Leaky Cauldron, changed her mind, and instead went to Foyles, which reminded her that she did indeed need to go to Flourish and Blotts. After buying just three books and a new book bag, she again made her way to The Leaky Cauldron, then onward to Diagon Alley. This whole harrowing ordeal took over an a hour, and so apart from picking up Merlin’s Annotated Dante’s Inferno, she decided to splurge a little on some new quills, a well of peacock blue ink, and a couple of fancy leather bound notebooks.

It is perhaps this added weight that, on observing Fred Weasley’s anxious form outside Florean’s, impedes her attempted escape. Instead, before she can take two steps back the way she just came, she feels a hand pulling at her wrist.

“Hermione, wait.” She turns to see him looking imploringly at her with his bright green eyes, so wide and so close she can see flecks of gold in them, reflecting the morning sun. “It’s just ice-cream.”

Just ice-cream — who could argue with that? They order two scoops each and return to the table he had already occupied, Hermione dumping her bag on an empty chair emphatically in a show of annoyance. For a while they sit in silence; her refusing to speak first, and him not wanting to risk ruining their fragile peace. She scoops ice-cream into her mouth without looking up from her bowl, and he eats slowly, without looking away from her.

“I want the record to show that I think this is a colossally stupid thing to do,” she says suddenly, her eyes still fixed on her food.

“Well I suppose ice-cream’s never the healthiest thing in the world but Florean’s is pretty —“

“You know what I mean,” she cuts him off bitingly.

“The record will reflect that both you and George think that this is a colossally stupid thing to do. However, I would like to remind all relevant parties that it was my idea, and between the two of us I am the only Ravenclaw so therefore—“

“What do you want Fred.” She phrased it like a question, but her tone makes it abundantly clear that she would like nothing more than for him to just shut up.

“I just want to talk.” He looks abashed, or as abashed as he can look for Fred Weasley.

“I’m not sure we have anything to talk about.”

“Oh,” he says in a tone both needled and needling, “I think we have plenty to talk about.”

“Like what Frederick? You broke us up remember? Not me. You’re the one who walked away —”

“I walked away? You were the one who was leaving. You left —”

“I had to go. You’re the one who said you couldn’t —“

“And you’re the one who hung up the phone. And you’re the one who kissed —”

“I knew this was a mistake.” She grabs her bag, her chair scraping harshly on the flagstones in her haste to leave, desperate to not hear the end of that sentence.

“Hermione —“ He whines, but she doesn’t look at him. Can’t.

“Good bye Fred.”

17th July 1997

“Good bye Fred.”

“Hermione —“

A click as the phone disconnected. He stood alone in the red phone booth, in the flat above the store.

“You alright there mate?” George asked from the couch, turning from the Daily Prophet, his brows furrowed with concern.

The receiver still held to his ear. The singular, monotonous hang-up tone filled his head, his body, pervading the very fibre of his being.

2nd July 1996, Morning

“Buoyant” was the only word that came to mind as Hermione walked down Charing Cross. She felt buoyant. She had resigned herself to spending the week or so before she and her parents went on vacation wandering around Hampstead with nothing but her books for entertainment, until Fred called and asked if they could meet the following day — today — at The Leaky Cauldron. So she made her way there, buoyantly, glad for some company and more so that it was his.

“Granger!” He hailed from the curb. Of course, her heart didn’t actually skip a beat, but it felt like it did.

“Why are you waiting out here?”

“Well the Cauldron’s a bit of a dive yeah? And Diagon Alley is just the one alley and we’ve been loads so I thought maybe you could show me your London?” He says, all in one breath. She wasn’t sure but she thought his face pinked a little.

“My London?”

“You know… Muggle London.”

“Why?”

“I dunno — if I’m going to live here I should know the area. And,” he added, looking down and rubbing the back of his neck. His speech became stilted. “I want to know what your world’s like.”

“Okay,” she smiled. Buoyantly.

The first place she thought to take him was of course Foyles bookstore, because it was close, and because, well, books. A whole monumental treasury of books.

“Bloody hell,” his eyes widened in child-like wonderment the second they walked through the door. The patchwork rainbow of spines and covers, the smell of new books, the sheer notion of being surrounded by so many stories, and so much knowledge. Even if it only lasted a moment, Hermione had never seen him so still or so quiet before, and she briefly wondered if she had broken him. “This place is massive,” he spun around as he spoke, taking it all in, “is everything in London this big?”

“Not everything. Just a lot of things.” She couldn’t look away from him, the spark in his eyes eliciting an adoring smile. “Did you bring any quid?”

“What’s that?” He asked, not really listening.

“Pounds, muggle money, did you bring any?”

His face blanched as he turned to look at her sheepishly. “Might have forgotten. But I have regular money.”

“‘Regular’ is a state of mind Frederick. And wizard currency far from regular. It’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not!”

“29 knuts to a sickle and 17 sickles to a galleon? It’s completely impractical.”

“Okay fine. Maybe you have a point.”

“Oh I definitely have a point.” Hermione retorted, grinning from ear to ear. She insisted that she had been meaning to change some money anyway, so they switched 10 galleonss for £50.

He moved further inside slowly, overwhelmed and unsure of where to start. At first he simply trailed behind her, but eventually wandered off on his own, winding through the stacks and pulling books off the shelves to peruse at length. She found him in a corner near the children’s section over an hour later, surrounded by piles of books ranging from classic literature to astrophysics. The only things he seemed sure of were a home improvement manual for Mr. Weasley, and the first two volumes of Asterix and Obelix.

“You alright there, Frederick?” She asked, crouching down beside him.

“There’s so many Hermione. How am I supposed to pick? I’ve never even heard of half these subjects before. Do I need a book about aerospace technology? Do I need seven? How should I know?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say you don’t need any.”

“Help me,” he whined, looking up at her with his big, doleful green eyes. He had never in his life felt quite so distressed. She sorted through the volumes surrounding him, eventually selecting The English Patient — one of her personal favourites — A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a history of 20th century archaeological discoveries.

When they at last emerged, it was onto a London bustling with the lunch-time rush. Rather hungry themselves they went in search of sustenance and managed, with a little magical persuasion, to find a table in a small French bakery. At their window seat they split a quiche Lorraine and a croque monsieur, drank iced-chocolate, and tried to stave off the crash that inevitably follows a bookstore-high.

“You’re being awfully quiet today.”

“Hm?” He perked up. “Oh, sorry. It’s just a lot to take in, this.” He gestured vaguely to the sprawling city outside.

“But do you like it?”

He shrugged. “I love it.”

“Good.” She smiled, satisfied, settling further back in her seat.

“Do you like it?” He asked after a moment’s silence, studying her face carefully.

She picked at her food, considering. “I do but… I’m usually alone. I think I like it better with you.” She paused, then nodded as if affirming the truth of it to herself. “This quiche is pretty good.” She raised her fork but before she could take another bite, he was leaning across the table, one hand lightly holding her face, pressing his mouth to hers.

24th August 1998, Evening/Night

This time, Hermione is certain of it. She will not leave her room until the first of September. Her parents however are not on the same page.

“Hermione dear?” Her mother calls, hearing the jingle of keys in the front door. “Is that you? Come into the kitchen.” Hermione obliges, and finds her parents reading different newspapers at the kitchen table, with a steaming pot of earl grey and a plate of shortbread between them like they did everyday after work. The sight is enough to warm Hermione’s heart. She had missed this almost more than she could bear.

“How was your day darling?” Her father asks without looking up.

“Fine.”

“Did you buy any books?” Mrs. Granger does not look up either.

“I bought a few, yes.”

“That’s nice.” Her father offers, taking a sip of his tea.

Hermione lingers by the doorway, not saying anything. Eventually her mother looks at her, and observes a certain heaviness in her countenance. “Why do you look upset? Come sit down and have some tea.”

“Is this about Ron?” Mr Granger inquires, a particularly paternal brand of protectiveness evident in both his tone and in his eyes.

“Is it about the brother?” Her mother asks with hawklike instinct.

“Are you thinking about your… adventures?”

“You promised no more secrets darling.”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Hermione interjects before they can pursue their line of questioning any further. They blink at her, equally taken aback. “If that’s okay with you,” she adds imploringly, unwaveringly meeting their eyes. They in turn consider their daughter carefully.

“Well alright then,” her mother says, turning back to her paper. “Dinner is in an hour. Go wash up.”

So she does, and she eats dinner with her parents, and after that she re-reads her new herbology textbook in the living room while her mother reads a le Carré and her father listens to a radio comedy. And she’s happy, honestly. She’s happy to be nestled in the warm glow of her childhood home, with her unchanging parents. She’s happy they are safe, and that for the first time in years there was nothing foreboding hovering on the horizon. She is happy, or at least, she is content.

Fred Weasley on the other hand is far from happy or content. After his rather disastrous morning he went straight back to the flat above the store, determined to spend the rest of his day off in bed. He didn’t move for hours. Rather impressively, he was still in bed when George came up after closing. His hair stuck out at odd angles as though he had been trying to pull it out, his sheets were fitfully dishevelled.

“Oh mate,” said George with an emphatically slow shake of his head, “you really need to get a grip.”

Fred looked up from Asterix and Cleopatra, shooting his brother a reproachful look.

“I’m going into London to get dinner. Do try to regain some level of composure before I get back yeah?”

That seemed like too much effort, so Fred fell asleep instead. He wakes up much later, at 1:38 a.m with London rolling round his head like a marble dipped in luminous dye, tracing webs of light. Quietly, he grabs his Nimbus 2001, climbs out the window onto the roof, and shoots off into the night. A certain frost sparks in the air, pinching at his skin. The wind whips through his hair, at his cheeks, stirs something inside his chest.

All the lights are off in the Grangers’ Hampstead home when he arrives, about 20 minutes later. All but the warm glow of a reading lamp emanating from what he knows is Hermione’s window. He hovers across the street, obscured by trees and shadow. He can see her silhouette on the sheer white curtains, sitting in bed, perfectly still, her head bowed slightly. Reading, most likely. His mind wanders to all the times he’d seen her in that exact posture, in a zen-state of complete focus; her small placid mouth, her smooth brow, the inward curve of her nose, mahogany brown ringlets framing her face. He remembers how he used to try and touch her cheek, her nose, her mouth, and how she would swat him away like she was shooing a fly.

She moves; her arms stretch above her head, her hands intertwined. She switches off the light, and Fred goes home.

2nd July 1996, Evening

“Had a good day darling?” Her mother called from the kitchen as Hermione closed the front door.

“It was alright, yes,” she said, leaning against the kitchen doorway. But the smile spread across her face suggested that it was a lot more than simply alright.

“What did you do?” Her father asked, his nose still in his paper.

“Oh you know, just went central. I met up with Fred. Went to Foyles. Had lunch. Walked around.”

“Who’s Fred?” Her father asked sharply, head snapping to face her.

“Ron’s brother,” she replied. Suddenly embarrassed, she shifted her weight nervously. “One of the twins. You’ve met him before dad.”

“Why were you with Fred?” Her mother’s stare was as piercing as her father’s tone.

“Well he and George just moved to Diagon Alley and he asked me to show him around a bit,” she replied in one breath.

“Just Fred?”

“Yes.” Her face burned under her parents’ scrutiny, and she struggled to hold their gaze, not wanting to seem guilty, like she was hiding something.

“Why?”

Hermione only shrugged in response, pursed her lips, desperate for this to be over. “I’m going to shower now.” She turned abruptly and left the room.

“Dinner’s in an hour,” Mrs. Granger called after her daughter. A door slammed shut upstairs. She turned to her husband, and they shared a look of utter disbelief.

chapter one | chapter two

taglist: @thelasttime @bchnan @lovedyouthreesummers @keoghans

#fremione #fremione fanfiction #fred x hermione #hermione granger #fred weasley #harry potter fanfiction #fred weasley fanfiction #hermione granger fanfic #fred x hermione fanfinction #can you tell that I miss foyles?

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Mortal Kombat (2021) vs. Mortal Kombat (1995): Which is Better?

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This article contains Mortal Kombat (2021) spoilers.

“Test your might.” These are the words of a minigame in the original Mortal Kombat arcade fighter from 1992. They were meant to signal an interlude between the simple pleasures of digitized sprites spilling buckets of blood. Yet they’ve also become synonymous with a franchise that’s arguably the most popular video game fighter of all-time. The phrase is also a pretty apt description for the various filmmakers who’ve attempted the challenge of taming this crazy dragon on screen.

More than any other video game series, Mortal Kombat has seen a plethora of live-action adaptations, from Hollywood movies to syndicated television. This weekend marks another milestone in that history, too, with Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema’s hotly anticipated Mortal Kombat reboot opening in theaters and premiering on HBO Max. It’s the third Mortal Kombat movie released under the New Line banner, but let’s just call it the second serious attempt at putting this universe on screen after the 1995 cult classic directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.

That ’95 movie holds the dubious honor of being generally considered the best video game movie adaptation of all-time, thanks to a tongue-in-cheek tone perfect for its mid-‘90s moment and maybe the greatest use of techno music in film. Genuinely, how many other pictures have the soundtrack scream the title of the movie over and over again, and it seems like a good idea?

The new movie took a different approach to the material, and certainly a bloodier one. While both adaptations share the same basic premise of chosen “Earthrealm” guardians protecting our dimension from an invading force via martial arts fights, the executions diverge radically. Here’s how.

The Story

The starkly different approach to storytelling in director Simon McQuoid’s 2021 Mortal Kombat is evident during the film’s opening scene. Beginning in 1600s Japan with a gnarly, brutal fight sequence between Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) and Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), this version of Mortal Kombat relies heavily on lore and world-building. If you know the video game backstory of Sub-Zero/Bi-Han, and how he was kidnapped as a child by the Lin Kuei cult so they could brainwash him into the magical ninja we now see slaughtering Scorpion’s family, the scene has a sense of fateful tragedy.

If you don’t, well Taslim and Sanada are such gifted martial artists that it still looks really cool. By contrast, Mortal Kombat of the ’95 vintage is pretty straightforward and to the point. This is basically an interdimensional version of the Bruce Lee classic, Enter the Dragon (1973), only with magical powers and the fate of the world at stake.

We’re introduced to three fighters in ‘95, Liu Kang (Robin Shou), Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby), and Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras), who all get on a boat to the tournament for different reasons. And while Liu Kang was raised by his Shaolin monk upbringing to know what this tournament is, the other two act as our eyes and ears into this strange world of mysticism and Outworld menace. By the time they reach the island, they understand they need to compete with superpowered foes to save Earth in a structured tournament.

Conversely, Mortal Kombat (2021) is curiously both more secretive and open about its bizarre universe. For a much larger chunk of its running time, the new movie’s point-of-view character Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is completely mystified by the superpowered horrors happening around him while the viewer is keyed in early by scenes set in the evil dimension of Outworld. There we see the dastardly sorcerer Shang Tsung (Chin Han) scheme from a throne about killing Cole in order to prevent a prophecy vaguely connected with the movie’s prologue scene in the 1600s. So he sends Sub-Zero to kill Cole in his day-to-day life as an MMA fighter, slaughtering him before he understands he’s been chosen to participate in the sacred Mortal Kombat tournament, which is held in secret every generation.

In fact, there is no actual tournament in the new film. Rather the plot eventually becomes Shang Tsung’s chosen band of evil warriors attempting to cheat ahead of the conflict by attacking Earthrealm’s depleted champions before they even discover they have superpowers (or “arcanas”) and know what Mortal Kombat is. The film thus becomes a quest movie with Cole joining forces with other “chosen ones” (or chosen one-aspirants) to find the Temple of Raiden, a lightning god (played by Tadanobu Asano) who represents the interests of Earthrealm in the tournaments. From there the heroes must learn their powers and evade preemptive, cheating attacks from Outworld’s thuggish baddies.

Side by side, the approaches appear to be the differences between a traditional (if derivative) martial arts flick and a modern studio blockbuster that is trying to cram as much fan service and world-building lore into a two-hour movie as possible in the hopes of making fanboys happy. I hesitate to say the 2021 film is fully following the Marvel Studios template given its copious amounts of blood and (seeming) lack of interest in building a shared universe of interconnected franchises. However, the 2021 film was certainly released in a post-Marvel world where the focus in studio committee rooms is less on telling a single story and more on building a whole convoluted mythology filled with fan favorite characters who are begging to be explored endlessly by future movies. It’s less story-driven than it is content-driven.

As a result, it leaves the narrative lacking. Viewers know long before Cole or 2021’s Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) what’s going on, and all the anticipation for a tournament that never materializes feels anti-climactic. With its simple structure, the Anderson-directed movie in the ‘90s plays out much more satisfyingly with three heroes (plus poor dead meat like “Art Lean”) entering a tournament by choice or trickery and then trying to survive it while learning vanilla, if tangible, life lessons. Liu Kang needs to accept his destiny; Johnny Cage must look before he leaps; and Sonya has to accept she’ll be the film’s damsel in distress even though she kicks ass. It’s an Enter the Dragon knockoff but it still has more kick than fan service.

Round One goes to 1995.

The Tone

The tone and aesthetics are also jarringly different between the two movies. Released in 1995, the same year Pierce Brosnan became James Bond, and two years before Arnold Schwarzenegger chilled out as Mr. Freeze, Mortal Kombat (1995) is an unmistakably campy movie and it leans into that fact.

Working with a low budget for a Hollywood spectacle even before New Line Cinema cut his funds by another $2 million right before cameras rolled, Anderson directed a B-movie that accepted its limitations and had fun with it. Apparently stars Ashby and Christopher Lambert, who played Lord Raiden in the ’95 movie, improvised dialogue throughout the shoot and rewrote entire scenes. As a consequence, Lambert’s lightning god was more of a jovial trickster in temperament, reminiscent of Loki instead of Odin. Johnny Cage, meanwhile, was essentially the film’s Han Solo: a cocksure wiseacre next to the stoic hero (Liu Kang) and a no-nonsense woman who doesn’t like to be called princess (Sonya).

As again signaled by the almost funereal opening sequence of Mortal Kombat (2021), where Sub-Zero murders Scorpion’s young family, the 2021 film is going for a differing sensibility. There is actually quite a bit of humor still present, with the real reason the Johnny Cage character got cut becoming apparent the moment we meet Kano (Josh Lawson), a loudmouth smartass who takes on the comic relief role but with an added slice of thuggery. Hence his dialogue has a lot more F-bombs than it does cracks about $500 sunglasses.

Other than moments where Kano is allowed to steal scenes, however, Mortal Kombat (2021) plays it pretty straight. Asano’s Raiden is imperious and his fighters stoic. However, it’s also worth noting Raiden is played by a Japanese actor, as opposed to a white American-born Frenchman who was raised in Switzerland (Lambert has quite the international background). Indeed, one of the more admirable qualities of the 2021 film is the focus on a diverse cast that includes more roles for Asian actors and people of color, whereas the 1995 film whitewashed Raiden and left out the Black American character Jax for little more than a cameo.

The 2021 film also upped the gore quotient considerably. While the martial arts of the 1995 film were decidedly PG-13, the tone of the movie was only a few steps removed from Power Rangers in some respects, including its introduction of a horrible CGI creation known as Reptile. The Reptile in the 2021 film appears more convincingly, like the latest monstrosity out of a Jurassic World lab, and the violence he commits is visually gruesome (more on that later).

Honestly, preferences over the aesthetic differences between the two films comes down to a matter of taste. I prefer the tongue-in-cheek eye rolls of the 1995 film given how nonsensical this universe is, and how at the end of the day its target audience remains children. Yet I imagine many adult fans of the video games will prefer the blood-soaked earnestness found in 2021.

Round Two is a draw.

Chosen Players

Anyone who’s picked up a fighting game will tell you it’s all about finding a character or two you like and then training up with them. In 1995, Anderson had the advantage of primarily adapting the original 1992 arcade game with its limited collection of playable characters. Ergo, his film’s lineup easily focused on the three aforementioned heroes of Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, and Sonya Blade, plus the ambiguous Princess Kitana (Talisa Soto), and Lord Raiden. Meanwhile he divided his villain screen time between the sorcerer Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and Shang Tsung’s minions, who were essentially glorified Bond henchmen with individual gimmicks.

Fan favorites Sub-Zero and Scorpion are present in the ’95 movie—with much more colorful, game-accurate costumes—yet they’re relatively low-hanging fruit in the tournament’s brackets. Their rivalry is given lip-service but they are dispatched by heroes Liu Kang and Johnny Cage relatively easily. Meanwhile Trevor Goddard’s Kano is more a hapless comic relief baddie who Wilson-Sampras’ Sonya kills with a great laugh line. “Give me a break,” Kano pleads with his head pinned between her thighs. “Okay,” she shoots back before snapping his neck.

Still, the movie largely belongs to Tagawa who makes a meal out of the scenery as the big bad. The guttural pleasure he has in so naturally turning all the over-the-top commands in the video game into his dialogue—“Finish Him!;” “Fatality;” “Test Your Might”—is infectious.

The 2021 film relies on a much larger cast of characters and, unlike the 1995 movie, attempts to give them each a moment to shine in the way Kitana and the original Kano could only dream. This surprisingly begins with the introduction of a totally new character in Cole Young as our point-of-view protagonist. While fan favorite Liu Kang was the hero in ’95, the character is now a supporting player played by Ludi Lin in 2021. And he’s not alone. The new Liu Kang’s cousin, Kung Lao (Max Huang), also gets enough screen time to show off his character’s beloved razor-rimmed hat, which he dispatches one of the movie’s villains with.

There is also the new Sonya, who may have the most complete arc as she strives to be accepted as a champion for Earthrealm, and Jax (Mechad Brooks), who is Sonya’s partner with the chosen one birthmark and who gets a new nasty origin story for his metal arms. And then the new Kano spends as much time working with the good guys as he does becoming a villain in an entirely rushed and unconvincing third act plot twist.

Movies

Mortal Kombat Easter Eggs and Reference Guide

By Gavin Jasper

Games

Mortal Kombat: Biggest Changes the Movie Makes to the Games

By Matthew Byrd

There are even more villains, most of whom amount to glorified cameos, including Mileena (Sisi Stringer), Nitara (Mel Jarnson), and Kabal (Daniel Nelson). However, they’re all even more perfunctory than Sub-Zero and Scorpion were in 1995. At least the ‘90s ninjas each got a few minutes to show off before being dispatched. Even the ostensible main villain of 2021, the new Shang Tsung, is fairly underserved, left to state banal dialogue from a throne without a throne room, and he’s never allowed to dominate scenes the way Tagawa did so gleefully back in the day.

Unfortunately, this is because the 2021 film has so many characters that it lacks any sense of narrative focus or cohesion. Tan’s arc of wanting to learn his power/arcana to defend his family is as broad and serviceable a hook as Shou’s 1995 Liu Kang wanting to avenge the murder of his brother. But Tan’s Cole Young gets lost in the shuffle after the first act and until the movie’s ending. Character turns like Kano betraying the other heroes similarly feels hackneyed because there is too much noise on screen to really care about who’s making it. Even Kang Lao’s death falls flat. It’s admirable that it’s a good guy fans theoretically should care about (unlike 1995’s token Black character created by the filmmakers to die), but the 2021 movie fails to make the uninitiated be concerned.

Of course there are exceptions. Namely Sub-Zero and Scorpion. Even though Scorpion ill-advisedly disappears for nearly all of the movie’s running time after the film’s terrific opening 10 minutes, Sanada has such presence, and such strong chemistry with Taslim’s Sub-Zero, that their opening salvo leaves you waiting the rest of the movie for Scorpion’s revenge. Taslim is also able to give Sub-Zero some surprisingly tangible, if only hinted at, pathos even after he kills a kid in his first scene and is then forced to act behind a mask thereafter. He’s the real villain of the piece you want to see go down, and his death scene is incredibly satisfying as a result.

It’s probably enough for fans of the games to favor this kitchen sink approach. But overall, less is more.

Round Three goes to 1995.

Fight Scenes

If there is one realm where the 2021 movie truly excels in over the previous film, this is it. And yes, a big part of that is the gore quotient. Whereas the 1995 flick was produced with a PG-13 rating in mind (my elementary school thanks New Line for that), the 2021 movie was able to embrace the gross out charm that made the original game stand out at the arcade all those decades ago. Street Fighter might’ve been first, but only Mortal Kombat let you pull the other player’s spine out.

While that effect doesn’t quite happen in the 2021 movie, almost everything else does. Nitara goes face first into a Kung Lao’s buzzsaw hat, which cuts her cleanly in half; Sub-Zero freezing Jax’s arms and then shattering them in a stomach-churning effect; and instead of going off a cliff, Prince Goro is disemboweled by Cole Young—which almost makes up for the fact that Goro is reduced to a mindless mute this time.

It’s like a highlight reel of fatalities from the video game. But the reason why this film’s fight scenes really stand above the 1995 film isn’t the bloodletting; it’s the action leading up to it. With brutal fight choreography, the new Mortal Kombat shines whenever it lets actors who can actually do the stunts take the arena. That includes Lewis Tan, whose Cole Young mostly fights other MMA types or CG monsters. But it’s especially true for Joe Taslim of The Raid fame. As the villainous Sub-Zero, his moves are lightning quick, even if his powers leave opponents frozen stiff. So when he shares the screen with Tan or Sanada, the action reveals an auhentic flair.

In comparison, the 1995 film suffers a bit from the sin Johnny Cage is trying to dodge within the story: it relies on stunt doubles and tight editing to make the fights exciting. It’s a shame too since Shou is an excellent martial artist, and the one scene he got to choreograph—Liu Kang versus Reptile—has an edge. But much of the time, Shou’s constrained by the direction and editing. Ashby and Wilson-Sampras, conversely, are not actual martial artists, though credit must be given to Wilson-Sampras for doing all her own stunts when getting the role of Sonya at the last minute.

Still, the fights stand taller in 2021. It’s a bit of a shame though that the movie is so heavily edited that it too often hides this fact. Unlike the 1995 ensemble, most of the cast has the moves in 2021, but the editing still feels stuck in the past with its reliance on confounding quick cuts and coverage. During our current era of John Wick and Atomic Blonde this is both a bizarre and disappointing choice. Nevertheless, this is an easy call.

Round Four goes to 2021.

Ending

The final fight was relatively satisfying in 1995. Tagawa is a preening villain, and when the Immortals’ techno “Mortal Kombat” theme plays, it’s a pleasure to watch Liu Kang wipe that smug smile off Shang Tsung’s face. However, the ending keeps going with a Star Wars-esque sendoff to Liu Kang’s force ghost brother, and then the movie undermines its catharsis by immediately setting up a sequel.

In the picture’s final moments, our three heroes, plus Kitana, return to the real-life Thai temple that’s supposed to be Liu Kang’s home. Lord Raiden waits for them there, getting some final sideways cracks in before Outworld’s evil emperor Shao Khan appears like a giant specter in the clouds. He immediately threatens an Earthrealm invasion, despite losing the tournament.

I can attest that in 1995, this was a stunning cliffhanger for eight-year-olds everywhere. But then… Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), one of the worst films of the late ‘90s, happened.

Meanwhile in the 2021 film, we have a much more satisfying death for its villain when Scorpion returns from hell to send Sub-Zero to the hot place. Their fight is much more technically satisfying, and the cliffhanger setup is a lot more subtle. After defeating Shang Tsung’s warriors, if not Shang Tsung himself, the heroes of Earthrealm saved us all without an actual tournament ever occurring. And instead of Outworld cheating in this moment by invading anyway, they retreat. It’s an odd choice since they’ve been cheating the whole film, so why start playing by the rules now?

Even so, it leaves a destination for a second movie to actually head toward. And to tease that fact further, it’s implied Cole Young will now travel to Hollywood to recruit movie star Johnny Cage for a sequel. It’s pure fan service, but the kind that leaves the possibility open for better things to come. Considering we know where the 1995 movie’s cliffhanger leads—to pits of cinematic hell worse than any faced by Scorpion in the last 400 years—this is a victory for 2021 by default.

Round Five goes to 2021.

Final Victor

Ultimately, neither of these films are high art nor do they aspire to be. In some ways, it’s a case of picking your poison between schlock or schlock. Each has advantages over the other, as laid out above, and each is a long way from a flawless victory. Nonetheless, due simply to narrative and tonal cohesiveness, and just more memorable lead characters, I’ll go with the one that actually gets to the tournament this whole damn thing’s designed around.

Game over.

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nattsunoyume · 4 years

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Something that always bothered me about All For The Game is the lack of verisimilitude in its portrayal of languages and bi/multilinguals. So, because I’m a firm believer that critiques are useful (especially to other writers who might not be familiar with this reality) and because I want to give you a more realistic portrayal of our favorite characters, I’ll be analyzing where Nora Sakavic went wrong and what would be more truthful to each of our beloved characters (I’ll be focusing mainly on Kevin and Neil, but also the Minyard twins – no Nicky because his fluency is pretty believable).

SO, stick around if you’re a) interested in multilingualism b) are a writer who could benefit from reading this/use the critiques I’ll make as a reference c) are interested in deeper dynamics of your favorite characters

First of all, I want to make sure you all know that I’m not saying that this lack of depth in Nora’s work is in any way detrimental to the story. But, with a narrative that utilizes foreign languages use as a plot point, I have to say that Sakavic’s portrayal just fell flat. Being bi/multilingual is very nuanced and has very interesting and complicated dynamics that can shape and give character to a narration/story. Knowing how to speak multiple languages is not just a feat that you can use like a superpower every now and then and then forget about it (*cof cof* that’s exactly what Neil does *cof cof*). Also, disclaimer: I don’t know whether Sakavic speaks any language other than English, but from her portrayal of foreign language speakers I’ll assume that she does not. Disclaimer number two: I’m writing this as a multilingual (I speak four languages), a linguist (I study linguistic mediation) and writer myself, so I feel like I’m qualified enough. I’d love to have other bi/multilinguals add their thoughts though!

To begin our analysis, let’s go over the three things that Nora got /very/ wrong:

Time: the length of time that it takes any character to become proficient in a language is incredibly off. e.g. from what we see with the Minyards I’d say that they are portrayed to have a B2/C1 level* in German, this just from studying the language as an off-course for three-ish years. As much as I’d love that to be true, you can’t become that fluent in that small of a time frame (unless you dedicate each of your living, breathing moments to said language; and we can all agree that the twins did not, in fact, do that). Neil is also another concerning example: he is portrayed to have – once again – B2/C1 levels (I’m deducing this from the way he is said to be speaking – never struggles to find words, speaks fluently without having to stop, is very witty and confident in the languages he uses). We’ll go over some quotes in the following part, for now just know that, given the context in which he learnt these languages, his fluency is completely unrealistic.

Vocabulary: the characters are shown to use vocabulary that is not, in fact, that easy to use when speaking a foreign language. You don’t need to speak multiple language to know that, when learning, you focus on more common words and phrases (the specific language comes much later-on: I’d say C1-C2). But the foxes use very specific language (e.g. the Minyards all understand the word “dashboard lighter”, “gopher” – those are not words that you learn in high-school-level German. They’re words that you learn with extensive use of the language/extensive reading). There are better ways to include a character’s not-that-high-proficiency rather than just make them all-knowing: how do you portray a certain lack in vocabulary without hindering the narrative? Gesturing (Character A doesn’t remember word X so they trail off and mimic it) or roundabout ways to say a certain word (i.e. You don’t remember the word vase so you use “the thing to hold flowers”) are great alternatives to get a point across!!

Sentence Structure: this is probably the thing that bothered me the most, because it shows laziness in writing. When speaking in a different language, the sentence structure remains unvaried!!! If Sakavic didn’t mention that a certain sentence/exchange happened in X language, you wouldn’t be able to tell at all. But, when speaking in a foreign language you’ll use easier syntax – it’s a small change but it truly goes a long way. You also won’t use complicated tenses or long, overly difficult sentences. That’s because, when speaking in a foreign language, your major aim is to get a message across. Your job as a writer is to show this change. Writing what you want your characters to say and then slapping a “X said in X language” isn’t enough, it’s lazy.

* I’m using CEFRL levels all throughout this analysis, it’s the abbreviation of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Its levels go from A1 to C2. Where A1 is very early beginner, A2 is elementary stage. B1 is intermediate, B2 is upper intermediate (where you basically can have normal, every-day life conversations without any hindrance – you can also read books with only some inconvenience). Finally, C1 is almost fluent, in this level you can approach Specific Vocabulary and Specific Speech (for example, you could – if you were interested in it – talk about deeper topics, ie. Philosophy, Science etc. with little to no difficulty) and C2 is deep proficiency, where you’re basically fluent. If you need to read more about it click here

I’ll now analyze Neil and Kevin’s respective use of the language. Neil is supposed to be a self-taught learner, whereas Kevin grew up with native speakers so their approaches and fluency are going to be very different and diverse.

Let’s talk about Neil, first.

Here’s the thing: his fluency is more believable than that of the twins, and that’s because he actually lived in the places where those languages are spoken (that accelerates learning rates because you’re fully immersed in the language). But the thing is 1) He lived there for a too short period of time: 18 months in French speaking locations does not grant you the fluency that he demonstrates in French. 2) Yes, he lived there, but he was HIDING: I’ll assume he didn’t attend school or even have lengthy conversations with native speakers, so, apart from essential conversations, he probably didn’t interact that much with native speakers 3) He is said to be reading as much as he can, but I can assure you that reading and speaking are two completely different ordeals. He should not be so fluent in speaking. From what we know of Neil (very smart, quick witted and has a deeper reasoning for being fluent in those languages) I’d say that it would be much more believable to have him be a B2 (AT BEST) in German and a B1 (again, AT BEST) in French. So, let’s see how a B2 conversation in German would work shall we?

As you can see, it’s still perfectly legible, except it uses simpler words (seriously? Skimming? Gopher?) and less-fancy sentences. Of course, how Sakavic wrote it sounds cooler , but if we want to showcase a stark difference this is the way to go. The key to writing a foreign language speaker (that’s not a C1-C2) when you’re not a foreign language speaker is to ask yourself: would I have been able to come up with a word like this in middle school? If the answer is no, then don’t use it. Another tip is to ask yourself, is this word that I’m using the most common synonym? Or is there a easier, more approachable word? Go for the basic vocab first.

Let’s now talk about Kevin. Ironically enough, he is the character that – alongside Nicky – is the most believable in having the highest fluency and yet, he’s the one that showcases his fluency the least out of all the foxes *sigh*. Also, ironically enough, he’s the character that should showcase this fluency the most and here’s why: this guy grew up in a highly multilingual context!!! He’s a native English speaker who grew up speaking Japanese and, later on, French! From what we know of Kevin’s upbringing I’d venture to say that he speaks fluent Japanese (C1-C2 levels) because he was exposed to it from a very early age (and kids learn languages at an easier and faster rate than teenagers and adults alike). Similarly to Japanese, we can assume that he came in contact with Jean at 10-13 years old, still in the perfect prime for learning languages with ease. Because he spent so much of his life in a multilingual environment, I’d imagine he employed a heavy use of code mixing/code switching. What is code-mixing/code-switching? I’m Glad you asked!! It’s the mixing of words, phrases, clauses or even complete sentences of two (or more) languages. Code-mixing happens within the same sentence (this is INCREDIBLY common between multilinguals; I cannot stress this enough. If I’m with someone that speaks my same languages there won’t be a sentence that I utter that will be only in one language and that’s because code-switching is faster: instead of having to scramble for words in a certain language I can just use the first one that comes to mind.), whereas code-switching happens in a conversation (so one sentence will be in a language and the following in another one). So, Kevin’s problem in his realistic portrayal is the opposite of Neil: where Neil sounds too much of a multilingual when he shouldn’t (he speaks multiple languages, which is arguably different from being multilingual), Kevin sounds too little like one. You can’t look me in the eyes and tell me that someone that spent his entire life surrounded by two different languages doesn’t struggle with self-expression when that environment is taken away. Think about it: the closest people to him were Riko (Japanese-speaker) and Jean (French-speaker, who is said to speak with a thick French-accent: that means that when he came to the Nest he probably wasn’t fluent in English), Kevin must have spent the better part of his life submerged in those languages and then he leaves. And you mean to tell me he doesn’t struggle with using ONLY English to express himself? Bullshit. Arguably Kevin is the character that, throughout the series, struggles with his identity the most, his multilingualism is part of that!! Address it you cowards!!!!! Multilinguals showcase slightly different personalities with each change of language! What’s he like in French! What’s he like in Japanese! Plus never, in the series does he forget a word. It’s so unrealistic I could cry.

Lastly, I’d like to tackle a big issue in Sakavic’s lack of awareness of LSPs. LSP (language for specific purposes) indicates a subset of a specific language. LSPs vary from the common everyday use of a language, it concerns those branches of language that aren’t the vocabulary or sentence structure you would need on a day-to-day basis (e.g. the language used in the medical field, language used in business settings etc.). To make a long story short: every foreign language learner knows/will eventually know all common vocabulary, but not every learner will know certain LSPs. As an author writing about bi/multilinguals it’s important to make the distinction between Common Language and LSP. This is an issue in Nora’s work because every character uses words that are related to certain fields with an ease that’s unrealistic – once again, I know I’m being nit-picky but these things are important. Why is Andrew able to understand gang-related language in a language that he learned from high school and from his cousin who is very much not a gang member? Whilst Neil is perfectly able to understand words like the french for “withdrawal” without batting an eye. And I know, I know, that I should suspend my disbelief and just go with it, but I don’t want to. These are the things that, as an author that wants to use speaking multiple languages as a plot device, are essential to the building of the narrative-world. You don’t get to use language-speaking as a deus ex machina to then not acknowledge it entirely when it’s not useful. Have your characters forget words! Have them stop to think about the sentence structure! Have them pronounce things weird! Have them speak in easier patterns! Have them say things wrong! Have them flail their arms about trying to mimic what they mean! Have them ask people what a certain word means! Or have them understand said word from its context! Speaking languages has nuances, so please keep them in mind!!! You can include these touches and still make a story entertaining, please don’t forgo them just because it’s easier to ignore them.

Finally, I’d like to offer an example of a GOOD portrayal of bilingualism and, specifically, of LSP awareness. It’s an excerpt from C.S. Pacat’s Captive Prince Series. Pacat speaks multiple languages herself and this deeper understanding is reflected in her work. You can’t begin to understand how happy reading this paragraph made me. It’s a simple addition, but it made the entire story feel much more realistic and relatable to me. The excerpt is from Prince’s Gambit and it holds not spoilers (if you haven’t read the book don’t worry, this is just for comparison-purposes).

It’s not even a page’s worth, it doesn’t delay or obstruct the narration. Instead, it makes it feel all the more real. Imagine what All For The Game could’ve been with similar assessments on Neil’s part.

Anyway, I’d have so many headcanons concerning a deeper assessment of the foxes’ language skills (mainly concerning Kevin because I speak all the languages that he speaks so I might be a bit biased) but I’ve written too much already. If you’ve reached this further down thank you! Please let me know what you think or, if you need any further insights/questions, please don’t shy away and come ask them to me! If you need help with references, analysis of this sort or anything really, I’d love to help!

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kneebleed · 4 years

Text

Achillea Millefolium

Summary: Delicate yellow yarrows printed in their skin, preparing themselves to glow in the years to come; falling more every day that pass, this is them about to commit to the eternity and beyond.

Word count: 2784

Note: Hi! So here's my entry to the @phandomreversebang of this year. This is the first time that I participate in one of this, and I enjoyed my time doing so. Special thanks to @microoowave for being an amazing beta and pointing out the mistakes that I was doing (that were a lot), and to @jorzuela as well that did an awesome piece of art that you guys should check out.

AO3

PS: Please go to check out this post.

In all honesty, the flower of their wedding day has to be yarrows. Those flowers mean the world to them. They represent them in a way that no other flower could. Love, those flowers represent their love, and a flower with a meaning that's so beautiful and perfect can make the planning of everything so much easier.

Well, it kinda does.

"Look, it doesn't matter how much we want to decorate everything with yellow yarrows, we can't do that, Phil."

"But why not? The flower represents us, look at this," Phil unbuttoned his shirt to show Dan the flower that bloomed on his skin the moment that they met, "See? You have that one too, here," then he proceeded to put his hand under Dan's t-shirt to touch the exact place where the flowers were at.

"I know, but it will be boring if we do that," he took Phil by the hips to embrace him and play with his hair, "there's plenty of flowers that we could use too."

"Our flower won't glow as it deserves," Phil looked at Dan's chocolate eyes and saw that pure love that he always had expressed during those years that they have been together. And with that look into his lover's eyes, he knew that he had lost the battle already.

"It will, I promise," Dan kissed Phil's forehead then, and yeah, Phil gave up entirely into his arms.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

The first time that they met, Phil was searching for a composer. He was writing a musical; he had the actors, the scenography, but he didn't have the perfect music for all the acts. And then, he found Dan.

The way that they found the other was funny; it was in the street, Phil was going to the theatre and Dan was going there too. They ran into one another at the door of the building and they had a debate of who was going in first.

Phil then told him that he needed a composer and Dan said that he played the piano, and since Phil was feeling something in the bottom of his belly, he asked Dan if he knew how to compose music too.

Then, they touched the other's hand by accident, and that was when the yellow yarrows that are now on their chest bloomed.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

"Red roses," Phil said when they were watching a movie together that night.

"What?" Dan asked in confusion by the words that left his fiancé's lips out of the sudden.

"The flowers," Dan made a face, Phil chuckled in response, maybe his phrasing wasn't clear enough, "For our wedding, I mean. We could use red roses too."

Dan felt something in his chest, a wave of love spreading all over his body. He knew why Phil wanted those roses at their wedding. The red roses became one of the most important things in their relationship a few months after they met.

"Yes, red roses are perfect."

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

Seven months after their first encounter, Dan and Phil were planning to have a date. It wasn't their first one, but for some reason, Phil felt extremely nervous about it; he was planning to say the words, but he didn't know how to phrase it, and then an idea crossed his mind.

The majority of the people that lived in their world knew the significance of the different types of flowers; every single one of them had a different meaning, some of them were similar to one another, but they were never the same. The yellow yarrows that were printed by the universe in Phil's skin meant love, but there were plenty of other flowers that meant the same but different at the same time. And Phil wanted to say the three words to him, so he thought about flowers that meant that.

He bought a single flower at the store that was close to his house, smiling at it every time that the flower was in his eyesight. He hoped that Dan knew the meaning of the flower that he bought for him.

They met at a restaurant that serves that wine that they both enjoy, and the first thing that Phil did when they saw each other, was giving Dan that flower that he carried on his way towards the restaurant

"Why?" was Dan’s response.

"I don't know, search for the meaning and we will see."

"Ominous."

"It's not."

Later that night, when they were at their respective houses, Dan called Phil, and instead of hello, he went to the point straight away.

"I red rose you too."

I love you.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

They were making a list of the flowers that they wanted to have at their wedding. They wrote down the words "yellow yarrows" in big letters that Phil coloured, they wrote "red roses" too; they added "gardenias", "hydrangeas", "chrysanthemums" and "peonies" as well.

"This wedding will be so colourful that I will have to close my eyes every time I enter our house afterwards."

"So edgy."

"It's not that, I just enjoy minimalistic stuff."

"Our suits are minimalistic."

"I can live with that, I think," he kissed Phil's hair, and both of them smiled brightly.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

Most of the couples around the world told everyone about the flowers that bloomed in their skin, but Dan and Phil didn't tell anyone about them. It wasn't because they didn't have friends or family that wanted to know, they just thought that their flower was something private; the flowers on their skin were something personal for them, somehow.

Besides, they didn't meet each other's parents until a year into their relationship; their families knew that they found each other, yes, but there wasn't enough time in their schedules for them to meet properly. Phil's parents called at least once per week to know when they were going to visit, and Dan's parents called sometimes to ask if they were engaged already or not.

(At that time they weren't, but Dan's parents always made them nervous when they asked; Dan and Phil have talked about it, and both of them were waiting for the right moment to ask the other, the thing here was that they didn't know who was going to ask the other first. It was like a secret competition between them).

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

"Child! I haven't heard from you for a long time!"

"Sorry, mum, things have been busy for a while."

"I can understand that, with the wedding plans and everything..."

"I should have called earlier, though."

"Don't worry, my child," Phil felt how his mum smiled at the other side of the line. "how's everything going with the wedding plans?"

Phil looked out the window and saw Dan watering some plants while he was calling the flower shop; Phil could see a little bit of the permanent flower tattoo that was on Dan's skin due to the exposing shirt that he was wearing (Phil loved that shirt so much), and Phil felt a wave of love spread through his whole body.

He loved that man so much.

"Yeah, we choose the flowers for it yesterday.”

"Oh, that's wonderful! Will I know about what's your soulmate mark, then?"

"You guys have to figure it out."

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

When Dan met Phil's parents, he experienced something that he couldn't explain; they welcomed him with open arms and warm smiles, and Dan felt like he belonged there. The Lesters were the best people that he could have ever met in his whole life, and honestly, he regrets not making at least a little bit of space on his schedule to meet them earlier.

Phil's experience wasn't much different, besides the fact that he was scared to hear Dan's mom ask if he asked the big question to Dan yet. (She did that, in fact)

After those meetings, they realised why they wanted to be with the other forever, even ignoring the fact that they were actual soulmates.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

In all of those years that they have been together, Phil can't stop feeling waves of love running through his system every time that he landed his eyes on Dan. Just looking at him doing nothing can make him feel mesmerised with his presence. But even with that thing on his mind, he's unable to sit down and write his vows.

There's so much that he wants to say about Daniel Howell; how his chestnut hair glows under the sunlight, how his rosy cheeks are the cutest thing that he's ever seen and so many other stuff. He feels like some of the things that he loves the most about Dan are things that the world hasn't seen yet, and Phil doesn't feel prepared for that.

They built their relationship around privacy, and sharing certain things about their life as a couple doesn't feel right to Phil. He wants to keep all those cute yawns and stolen smiles for himself, but those things are the type of stuff that he would write down for his vows in the first place.

Phil feels trapped in a dictionary of different synonyms of the name "Dan", and all those words are things that he whispered into Dan's ear when they were cuddling or doing other things. He isn't sure about what to do with his vows and he doesn't want to ask Dan about what his vows say.

Maybe he could say what he said the day that he proposed to Dan, but more elaborated and smart.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

When they became fiancés, both of them felt like they were swimming in an infinite pool of happiness. It started when Phil knelt at the same time that Dan did. Both of them cried that evening, they couldn't believe that they were that type of couple.

"I wanted to do it, I hate you," said Dan while he was wiping his tears away.

"Then ask, I'm waiting."

"No, you do it."

"Okay then," Phil opened the box, revealing the delicate silver ring that it was keeping safe. "Daniel Howell, I know that in this universe that we are living, when two people are destined to be together is crystal clear, but I'm sure that even without those tattoos, I'd love you anyway; will you marry me?"

"Yes, always."

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

Phil called the wedding venue since Dan was the one who called the flower shop. They decided that June 1st was a good date for the wedding, it's a good month and it's in spring, and since their wedding is going to be filled with flowers, it seems like it's the perfect time for them.

Phil felt nervous, which was something completely understandable, though. Having to call the venue where your wedding is going to be celebrated in a few weeks is something that is beyond imagination; everyone can imagine how their wedding is going to be. After all, having to decide what colour scheme the wedding itself is going to be something simple, but making the calls to contact the people that are going to work at your wedding is thrilling enough to make anyone respond in the same way that Phil is doing.

At least he can stay calm thanks to the hand that's holding his.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

When the musical that Phil wrote was at the display, he and Dan discovered how powerful a simple touch can be. Phil was shaking from head to toe when the play started, and the only useful thing that Dan found himself able to do was holding Phil's hand; it worked.

Phil was still shaking, yes, but he wasn't feeling that nervous knowing that Dan was right next to him. He wasn't going to leave him for anything else in the world. It didn't matter if Phil's musical wasn't successful, at the end of the day, he has a Dan, and he doesn't need anything besides him.

Their souls promised to never let go a long time ago, and they have plans on keeping that promise for eternity.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

Tasting the food and choosing the flavour of the cake was something fun, Phil liked the experience of it all. They even tasted vegan things. Phil was having a great time experiencing different flavours that he didn't even imagine could taste good together at all.

"Of course you're having a great time, how could you not?" it seemed like Dan wasn't surprised by Phil's remark at all.

"You are having a good time too, I can see it in your eyes," he touched Dan's nose, who made a cute face back.

"Maybe I am having a good time, who knows?" Dan smiled at Phil and kissed him.

"I love you."

"To the moon and back a hundred times."

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

Trust. That was also something that has been playing a big part in their relationship. Being able to open up to each other and learn how the other was feeling was something that took a long time for them to work on, but when they did the bond that they were forming became even stronger than before.

At first, both of them were worried that they would lose the other. Because that was a possibility. If you don't put work in your relationship with your soulmate, you could lose them and live the rest of your life without them, and they didn't want that.

Thankfully, none of that happened, and now they can live happily ever after.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

Phil regrets suggesting to not see the other the day before the wedding. It was an awful idea and he can't comprehend why Dan accepted it in the first place. They haven't been apart from each other for almost 3 years now, Phil couldn't remember what sleeping without Dan by his side was like and now he's forcing himself to do that on purpose.

He wants to take a bus to where Dan is staying and run away with him anywhere in the world, but he can't do that since Dan didn't tell him where he was staying, and he didn't let Phil tell him where he was staying either. Phil doesn't have another option besides being patient and wait until tomorrow to hear anything from Dan again.

Or maybe he doesn't have to wait anymore since Dan was calling him at that very moment.

"I can't handle this anymore, tell me where you are," Phil let out the loudest laugh that he ever had, "Hey, don't laugh at me, I'm suffering."

"I know, but you sound so desperate, calm down."

"As if you're not."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Phil..."

"Okay, maybe a little, but don't tell anyone that I said that."

"Your secret is safe with me."

They kept talking for hours until Phil said that he wanted to sleep soon so when he woke up it's already the big day, and when those words left Phil's mouth, Dan felt like he loved the man on the other line even more than he did yesterday.

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

Being around the other for such a long time made them realise little things that made them more fond of the other as if that was something even possible. But they managed to fall in love with the other every day for years, and they will keep doing that in the future.

"If I wasn't your destiny, would you love me anyway?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't love you because you're my destiny or whatever, I love you because you are you. And yeah, I cannot deny that maybe destiny was what brought us together, but something tells me that even if we weren't living in this universe, I could always find you."

✦---------------|•❁•|---------------✦

And finally, the big day arrived.

They bought tuxedos that had yellow yarrows printed on them and they adorned their hairs with yellow yarrows as well. Phil loved how they made Dan's hair even more perfect under the sun.

They walked alongside the other towards the altar; they refused to follow another stupid tradition except for one that they followed the day before. Besides, who needed to be carried to the altar anyway?

They read their respective vows; both promised to stay and share their life with the other. They used different words, but the meaning was just the same. Phil cried when Dan read his vows and Dan did too when Phil read his. The love that they expressed to the other was clear as the water itself; feeling emotional was something inevitable, Dan and Phil could tell, after all, they saw both of their parents cry as well.

We will be together in all the lives after and before this one, I promise.

#phan #phandom #phanfiction #my phanfic #phan fluff #fluff #wedding #phandom reverse bang

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