#for someone who was likely going through a lot but wasn't capable either emotionally or societally

[navree]

"tgc's acting is good enough that even when he doesn't say anything he conveys so much on his face" well now that it's been brought up i'm mad about the stupid domina show all over again because it's true

#personal #a friend was texting me this and it made me heated once again #you're telling me - like you're actually telling me to my face - that i *could* have had tgc giving it his all #for someone who was likely going through a lot but wasn't capable either emotionally or societally #to express how he was really feeling about a situation that's bound to give him a trillion different feelings #he plays post ides augustus!!!! post 'my one steady father figure got murdered and now i have to take charge of everything' augustus!! #like i'm sorry i don't shut up about this but it's just such a WASTE #you have the potential to create the definitive portrayal of someone that really doesn't get talked about #but lived an incredibly rich and fascinatingly complex life #and you BUNGLED IT #you bungled it so hard when you had such good talent to work with too!!!!! #caesar was MURDERED in cold blood when this kid was eighteen and tgc can't do his sad wet eyes thing once????? #the rage is Too Much

[skyesdaisys]

Hi! Love your work, could you write a dick Grayson fanfic abt him and a quiet female reader warming up to each other (set between season 1 and 2)?

yes, of course!!!! god, i've wanted to write for titans on here so bad i just didn't have the inspo so thank you<333

—

talk to him

titans dick grayson x fem!reader

sunmary: you weren't exactly much of a people person. especially since you were 1 of 2 adults living in a huge tower in san francisco, watching over 3 kids you don't really talk to outside of training. and the only other adult being closed off so who knows what'll happen when he decides to talk to you out of no where

cw: not much, there's just some fluff with a teaspoon of angst because of communication issues (they both suck at small talk and beyond)

a/n: idc what anyone says about this show, it's given me so much comfort and a lot of fun and likable characters. so i'm so glad i can write for them as long as you guys send requests for them. as well as other characters from other shows like yellowjackets and etc. also i love dick grayson, even though he can be a bit annoying in this show (that i can admit) but he's hot so ajsjfndmfmf. also, i'm sorry it took sooooo long, writers block got to me badly these past few months, so i apologize if it's cringey and awkward. but i do give the benefit the doubt here because this story is suppose to be like that (also the fact i'm projecting my "bad at small talk" trait here). two grown adults that can't seem to have a normal conversation, like at all

after the trigon incident you were dragged in by circumstance, you were the only other adult to volunteer to help dick with... whatever he was doing. you didn't have any life to go back to anyways, and you made a connection to everyone else so why part ways and it be unlikely to see them again. sure, you weren't particularly close with the kids, but, what are you supposed to do in order to bond with them? so that left dick in titans tower, but he wasn't as much of a talker as you outside of training.

everyday for the past few weeks have been, eat, train, sleep, repeat on a loop, no 'how was your day' questions, because the days are always the same so there wasn't any point of asking. and you could tell the kids were getting bored of it, very fast, and you could not blame them. being stuck in a repeating pattern with nothing else happening started getting old after the first couple weeks. so, you didn't really know how long it would take til something changed, it couldn't be like this forever.

during this time, you admired the grayson from afar, he was attractive, what else could you say? you weren't an idiot. and you also were aware of his previous entanglements with kory and you didn't wanna be involved in that. and, well... you felt like a teenage girl having a crush on a guy who was going through some shit, so it was better not to bother him.

and not being much of a talker doesn't make the conversation about feelings be any better. like, maybe this was attraction and nothing more? you were aware of the difference between liking someone physically and liking them emotionally (specifically in a romantic sense). but even as you admired him, you learn things about him, paying attention to the little things. deep down, he cared for other people, if he didn't, he wouldn't have taken rachel in and helped her, and he wouldn't have done the same for gar or jason either. people just have their own way of showing their love and care.

but your admiring wasn't exactly subtle. rachel had noticed it when you were looking at dick from across the room, talking with jason. the roth wasn't sugarcoating anything when it came to this, "you keep staring, you're probably gonna be capable of shooting lazers from your eyes." and you knew she was joking around but she caught you by surprise, making you face the young girl. "why is it any of your business?"

"because it's kind of sad seeing you pine for him like this." she points out, "and also, gar and jason made a bet whether or not you'd confess. we have eyes, you know?" and she lightly bumped your shoulder with hers with a smile on her face, "and i'm sure dick feels the same way, though he's not very good of showing it."

"that is ridiculous." you shake your head, "one, i don't like him. not like that. i just think he's cool."

"are you sure about that?" the roth rose her eyebrow, "talk to him." but you were not moving from where you were so rachel decided to take matters into her own hands, she then gave you a push (a literal one) towards him, and now you couldn't run away. all you could say was, "hey..."

"hey." he responded. jason just stood there awkwardly in between the two of you, "okay, well uh—" he pretends to look at a watch that's not even on his wrist, "look at the time, i must be going." and he had immediately ran out of there before dick tried to stop him. there was an silent pause and you were trying to figure out what to say, but before you could, he asks, "do you want some coffee?" all you did was nod. after that, there was even more silence, you two haven't had a conversation that wasn't training related in like, a while. it just felt like you were both strangers who didn't know each other nor were you fond of one another.

"you're just as bad at small talk as i am, huh?" you finally had spoken up. and dick just shook his head, "i don't know what you're talking about, i know how to make small talk."

"oh really?" you rose up your eyebrow, "okay mr. 'i know how to make small talk', what do you wanna talk about? and please, don't let it be training related. because if i have to hear you talk about that one more time, my head is gonna explode." you tried to look irritated, but he could notice a small smile on your face. then he immediately went into the 'deep, emotional' stuff, "you never told me why you came here. you just did, and i'm surprised you stuck around as long as you have."

you answered it anyway, because why not, "well, it's not like i have anywhere else to go." you set down your drink, making direct eye contact at him, "besides, the second i got here, and realized how big this place is and i have my own room... what, did you expect me to pass it up?" and you ended up making him laugh, which was surprising, "what is so funny, i'm just being honest." you were unsure why he was laughing, so you just took a sip of your coffee. he explained, "your honesty is refreshing, that's all."

"really?" and he nodded as a reply. you just sighed, taking your coffee and leaving. it's not like you had anything else to talk about and just sitting there would make it more awkward, so you just left. does it make it any less weird? absolutely not.

you guys didn't talk much after in the next few days, up until you decided to play hero on solo when you see a woman getting mugged by this guy in a mask. it was like one of the many movie cliches that you see brought into reality.

too bad it didn't turn out like expected, where you got shot in the leg. thankfully, the kids were able to track you down and bring you to the infirmary, gar was trying his best to patch you up and rachel was there for emotional support. as for jason... there wasn't much else he can do than just stand watch, up until dick had walked in with a worried expression, and the three teens immediately rushed out of there as soon as he walked in the room. you could've left if you wanted too but, obviously you couldn't.

"jesus fuck, you could've gotten yourself killed, what were you thinking?" all of his emotions were being let out in that moment, it was the most emotion you've seen him express towards you in like... ever. yet you couldn't help but be a bit sarcastic, "yeah, keep yelling... it's not like i'm literally a few feet away from you or whatever."

dick sat on the edge of the bed and started to explain, "sorry, it's just... when i heard what happened, i didn't know how to feel, or express it correctly." he gently set his hand on your injured leg, softly, "just if anything happened to you, i—"

"i'm tougher than you think, grayson." you reassured him, and you noticed a tiny smile creeping up on his face.

"i know it's just... i don't wanna lose anyone else."

you lean up a bit to set your hand on his shoulder, "i'm not going anywhere, dick." you then stopped for a second as you come to realize, "and we just had a conversation that didn't involve small talk. maybe i should get myself hurt more often." you were obviously joking at that last part, but dick's reaction to it was priceless, "i'm kidding. you are just... not what i expected."

"the feeling is mutual."

a part of you wanted to kiss him, that it felt right, but another part was saying how the timing of it all wasn't. and maybe these feelings you're having are actually real. because now, there was something in your heart that was growing that wasn't just admiration, and it felt weird, but a good weird.

maybe when the timing is right, they'll get to it, but until then, your growing friendship in the moment is enough for now.

#titans #dc titans #dc titans x reader #titans x reader #dick grayson x reader #titans dick grayson x reader #dick grayson x you #dick grayson x y/n #dick grayson imagine #jaiden writes things #maydayforus

[murky-tannin]

yeah fuck it foolish is pro-federation. theyre the one group that hasnt hurt him or his family (besides the capybaras) and gave him things to care about. if cellbit getting chased once with a chainsaw was enough to make him anti-fed, being emotionally and physically tortured by the islanders is enough to make foolish anti-islander. the codes/resistance attacked all the people he loves and cares about, and killed many of them, so why would he join them. his friends make him the butt of the joke and leave him out of important conversations - even before he was trying to work for the federation. cellbit repeatedly forgot that foolish was a founding member of the theory bros and ignored his efforts to continue helping the investigations. yeah the islanders can compliment his builds but their actions speak more than their words. even foolish going to help cellbit when he was in self-exile and isolated from all his friends and family was later revealed to only have been a test to see who was pro-federation and not seen as someone trying to be there as a friend, despite alliances. if people actually paid attention to his actions and not his words, they would see he takes a lot of precautions when the eggs were around, and was always looking out for them and keeping them safe; not only leo but all of the eggs. so why not. the eggs are gone, his family is gone, his friends dont trust him, theres no consequences.

Foolish has been like this since before any of this. And Foolish literally is one of if not the first islander to try and befriend/ally with the code. Also the Order isn't allied with the resistance. Foolish doesn't even know about it. What does that have to do with anything

And the federation has hurt his family. Both directly and indirectly. Unless the awful grief Leo has gone through over Trump or the constant stress she lives under due to the risk they pose to the islanders is nothing? Unless their dangerous living conditions is nothing?

also like. The torture. lets talk about this. Because qFoolish isn't bothered by this in any real sense. Both Bad and Foolish have stated it's pretty typical for them. They'd do it pre island and on the island. The people who are mad about it are the fans, not the character. And once again he was already a fed supporter before this in the first place.

As someone who was around during the founding of the theory bros, Foolish didn't and doesn't care. Cellbit includes him all the time when talking about this, especially back before Foolish became even more heavily pro fed.

If Foolish doesn't want to be the butt of the joke, he's at full capability to sit his friends down and ask them to stop. Instead he goes along with it and purposefully makes himself out to be. Because he's joking and having fun with his friends.

I know people project their feelings onto him and make him out to be bothered by this stuff or even make him out to be a victim when he's not but like. Please look at what the character actually cares about.

Also they include him in so many important convos, despite the fact that he's literally against them in many ways. It's literally the opposite situation 😭

Foolish went to help Cellbit in self exile because he wanted an excuse to start another build. He wasn't at all bothered by Cellbit secretly not being pro fed (it would be bad if he was??) and Cellbit's isolation was real either way. Please go back and listen to that conversation between the two of them about this.

The trust he's lost is entirely his own fault and his own actions. And yet they still include him and treat him as a friend even when doing so puts them at risk. This narrative of him being excluded and outcasted and bullied by islanders is fanon characterization

#murky mumbles #qsmp #foolish gamers #qsmp discourse

[galene-gothic]

Lilith synastry

Note: I'll be using h13 and 1181 here.

Regardless of how demonized Lilith is, I believe that she was actually a pretty loving individual, even though different cultures have different stories and lores about Lilith. According to what I've read so far, after the angels threatened to kill her children, she had to give them up to retain her independence and in revenge, she started robbing children of their lives. She's said to have tried to return to the garden of Eden after the angels left (even though Adam put her through so much) and then found out that Adam had a new wife, Eve, that's when she's said to have stolen Adam's seeds. If Lilith didn't care about Adam, she wouldn't have returned.

I dated a guy who's Lilith (h13) trined my moon and Lilith (1181) conjunct my ascendant, when I was like 14 and he was extremely obsessed with me. Keep in mind that I'm 17 now and kids including teens are very much capable of emotions and hurt. I won't talk shit about my younger self, however, I wasn't very physically attractive at that point of time. So, it was very shocking for me that someone like him even liked me, he was really popular among girls back then while I was more on the low-key side and struggled with even being confident. So, I kind of got bullied for dating him and people made fun of me very openly, I felt humiliated and shamed, however, he brought the positive characteristics of Lilith out of me and helped me accept and tame the negative characteristics of Lilith.

I'll state some points that you might be familiar with if you've shared this synastry with someone (Lilith person (only a guy/man here) is referred to as they/them and the planet person is referred to as you:

You feel like they have you under a spell.

They might get emotionally vulnerable with you faster than with others. Might even end up kind of victimizing themselves.

Might meet after one of your (usually their) break up.

Might involve a third party of some sort (usually their ex).

Might be a love at first sight situation especially if the ascendant is involved.

They won't be able to get you off their mind once they lay their eyes on you. You might have a similar feeling too, however, you are the most likely to shake it off.

This situationship/relationship will push you to the edge.

Usually, this person will be able to anger/upset you very easily.

'Us against the world' situation, forbidden relationship for some reason. People might strongly oppose of your relationship with them. People might also believe that you're inferior to them on some level or vice versa but I've only experienced it in this way.

You might unconsciously believe that you're inferior to them if this is your first lilith themed relationship.

This relationship will force you to be independent and stand up for yourself, even against this person if necessary.

Splitting might come out of the blue and they might initiate it if you want to continue this relationship regardless of how hard it gets.

The break up isn't easy for either of you, they'll learn a lot of lessons from you and vice versa.

You might feel like you constantly have to defend yourself from this person and it's not because you don't love them or trust their intentions, it's just genuinely your internal issues coming to light for independence and confidence to come through . Also, having to stand your ground with other people who aren't even involved in the relationship in any manner.

The whole Adam and Lilith theme comes out here, no matter how much Lilith adored Adam, she had to choose herself over him and if you don't, you'll be forced to.

They are completely infatuated with you but scared of you at the same time.

They might and will probably find their Eve after you guys split but no one can do it like Lilith, can they?

You might feel betrayed by them in some way just like when Lilith found out about Eve.

You'll still love them though, however, mostly it's going to be love-hate with love usually being stronger.

I've also only recently stopped liking a guy who's Lilith (h13) trined my moon and Lilith (1181) squared my ascendant, I never got past the talking stage with him and that's alright. This time, however, I was and still am very sure of myself and I won't allow him to push me around unlike last time.

Lilith themes that I noticed when I liked him:

He got into a relationship with someone else during our talking stage (his Eve) and it's funny because that girl doesn't share a single Lilith aspect with him. (Don't ask me how I got that info, also, they aren't dating anymore.)

My moon is in Capricorn and his Lilith (1181) is in Capricorn, it does not conjunct my moon, however, I think he could still pick up on the Lilith woman that he desires and fears in me.

I found myself feeling similar but more empowered feelings compared to the first Lilith themed relationship that I had.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⏜︵♡︵⏜︵୨୧︵⏜︵♡︵⏜

#astro notes #astrology #astro observations #intuitive readings #astrovations #pick a gif #pick a deck #pick a card #pick a picture #pick a photo #synastry notes #lilith aspects #lilith synastry observations

[hiiragi7]

(**Note: This post is about CDDs and discussions of CDDs being trauma-based, not about origins or any relations between origins and CDD development, for clarification. This post also does not address any nuances of possibilities of CDDs which are genuinely not trauma-based, and centers the discussion around trauma-based CDDs, denial, trauma, etc.. Discussing any hypotheticals surrounding non-trauma-based CDDs is beyond the scope of this post and not the focus of what I am wanting to say here.)

So, I'm just chewing on a half-formed thought here, but... I wonder how many more conversations within syscourse and plural spaces would be more productive if we shifted our language in some conversations to "dissociation is often caused by struggles or suffering" rather than "dissociation is caused by trauma"?

Not because it's not traumatic, but because people get so... caught up on "What I went through wasn't trauma" that it feels like many discussions we have go nowhere.

This may seem like a very minor wording change, and you may argue they're synonyms in most if not all cases, but I want to remind people that... to most people, the word "trauma" is heavy, it takes time to accept, it's a big word to process, much less self-identify your experiences as being. Trauma is something which completely shifts your entire view of your life and your experiences. Trauma is life-changing.

Struggles or suffering may seem gentler as a word to some. It is an emotional state, it seems temporary.

Maybe some genuinely just do not view what happened to them as traumatic, maybe it's a symptom of the heavy denial aspect of CDDs, maybe it's a lack of awareness of what trauma is, either way we have people claiming heavy dissociative disorders without trauma, yet claim other life stressors as the cause - Things that they may not define as traumatic but another person absolutely would.

I think for a lot of people that... "trauma" is a very scary, big, heavy word with a lot of weight. And things that are not commonly discussed as traumatic may lead someone to believe their experiences were "normal" or "not bad enough to be trauma", even when suffering badly emotionally or mentally.

Also, within media and most social spaces most discussions of trauma and common trauma responses revolve around heavy things like war and trafficking and flashbacks and nightmares and addiction, it can be hard to know what trauma is and what a trauma response is for someone who is not familiar.

I've seen many people claim reasons that are either not as often spoken about in the context of trauma or those which have heavy stigma around them, such as chronic pain, lifelong medical issues, getting bullied at school, having neglectful parents, struggling academically, being socially isolated, growing up disabled, etc. as reasons they have a CDD without trauma.

These are all things I would personally consider traumatic, but I've had people argue with me about how it's not.

Trauma as a word also has a heavy and nearly inseperable association with abuse (even though not all trauma comes from abuse) which also brings up many, many complex feelings - Placing blame on an abuser for your suffering is not easy, not when it's someone who claimed to try to help you or love you or who told you it was love and that they were trying their best and only human. Especially not with those whose abuse is inconsistent or far in the past.

Most people cannot seem to view abusers and "good people" as being capable of being part of the same group. Because of this, people will go "well my mother is a good person, so she could not have abused me".

I believe with time many people will come to the conclusion on their own that it was traumatic, especially when given space and patience to process it as a traumatic experience, education on what trauma is, resources, and preferably professional help where possible, but I'm not going to force the trauma label onto them. That's their business and thing to figure out, not mine.

I think a lot of ways we discuss CDDs needs to be multi-approach and much more gentle.

Telling someone "DID only happens from severe childhood trauma, so if you have DID you have severe childhood trauma and need to accept that" will not often make someone come out of denial - If you have a person who does not even accept they have an ounce of trauma at all, how will they react to hearing they must have *severe* trauma, especially severe, often repeated, lifelong or multi-decade-spanning childhood trauma, likely beginning before they even reached their 10th birthday?

In my experience, often not well. It just leads to heavier denial, spiralling, worsening of symptoms, and in some people uncovering things they were not prepared for such as traumatic memories.

You cannot get someone to accept they have been traumatized before they accept they have been harmed, and you cannot get someone to accept they have been harmed before they accept their life was not all sunshine and rainbows. You cannot just skip steps like that without massive consequences. It is counterproductive and hurts people.

I really don't enjoy this culture within syscourse we have of someone with a CDD experiencing some of the most common symptoms of CDDs, such as heavy denial, amnesia, numbness to pain, not recognizing their own emotional reactions to their trauma, distancing from the trauma, etc. and viewing that as spreading misinformation rather than viewing this as a common struggle with CDDs. These people are not trying to be malicious, these people are having symptoms.

It may be maladaptive or unhealthy, but it is not an attempt to cause genuine harm.

The goal for them is not purposefully spreading misinformation, it is an attempt to make sense of themselves, their symptoms, their struggles, and their identity while also actively fighting off CDD symptoms such as amnesia and denial. That ends up with a person who may recognize some of the symptoms of a CDD within themselves but does not see the trauma or the harm done that caused it.

This is a disorder presentation, not a smear campaign against DID.

I personally find it much more helpful and honestly fulfilling to provide people with information on what trauma is rather than just saying they have it without explaining what trauma is, because I promise you when most people hear "trauma", especially "severe trauma", they are thinking rape, being beaten, warzones, being starved for days on end, kidnapping, trafficking, and things described in horrific crime cases.

They do not know that things such as feeling chronically unloved by your parents, failing in school, having an undiagnosed learning disorder throughout your childhood, being in chronic pain, being unable to connect with others socially or make friends, being forced into things you did not want to do which caused you stress or upset repeatedly (such as being forced to hug family members or the loss of autonomy many children may feel when being forced to go to events which may be incredibly stressful for them such as church) can also be incredibly damaging, because trauma is a response, not an event.

People also seem to misunderstand that trauma is not about your emotional reaction in the moment. People will say "I felt happy during it, and so I could not have been traumatized and feel weird calling what happened to me grooming", or "I felt numb or was able to laugh it off, so their comments or screaming did not hurt me, and so I am not traumatized by it".

People may recognize the actions taken during abuse as being wrong, but because they had an emotional reaction that was not complete panic and distress, they will not see the true extent of the damage done and will not see it as traumatic. This, ironically, is often a trauma response, if not even a trained response.

When we describe "severe trauma", it is not solely about the events or actions that happened to you, it's an extremely complex experience with a countless number of factors to consider. What may be highly traumatic to one person may not be to another.

Access to social and environmental supports during and after the trauma, ability to escape the situation, ability to regulate, your own natural reactions to the world around you, what mindsets you already had about the world and opinions about situations similar to the trauma before it happened, to give just a small handful of important factors to consider. It's not just about what happened but everything surrounding it too.

If you struggle seeing people talk about having a non-trauma-based CDD, consider just... blocking them instead of trying to bash it into them that they must have trauma, because it does not help.

If they are traumatized, there is a reason that denial is there and the reason may not be safe to peel back without a professional or at least a close friend to work through it with, and it absolutely isn't safe to do in a discourse setting with internet strangers.

It can be frustrating to watch someone describe what is obvious abuse or trauma in your mind while also watching them claim it was not abuse or trauma, but you will not get them to accept it by getting into an argument with them on the internet. If you don't know what you're doing, you can seriously fuck someone up by trying to strip those trauma responses away before they are ready and force them to accept trauma in an online discourse debate.

Vent about it in private, block them, create positive resources and information on CDDs and trauma responses which do not focus on forced sudden trauma acceptance, but don't go after others. Being pro-healing does not mean forcing someone to accept things they are clearly not ready for during a tumblr argument.

#syscourse #long post

[whenthechickencry]

Umineko EP4. Replay Part 1

Certainly not her genes, Kryie, also Rudolf sees through Kyrie in that even when she's talking friendly about Asumu she's burning with jealousy. Certainly was never a healthy dynamic in any case.

The talk of miracles here is so interesting and I will probably talk about it in more detail later. Rika's belief in a miracle is what allowed her to break through her dead-end fate. Ange's belief in a miracle is what is slowly destroying her life. I don't think either framing is entirely right or wrong, and unlike others, I don't see Umineko as a sort of response/rebuttal to Higurashi as much as something that expands on its themes, but still... it's really interesting to think about.

You can tell that R07 has been in kind of damage control mode for Beatrice since the end of ep3 lol. He really needs to hammer it isn't as black and white as you might think and she isn't just an evil monster who tricked Battler for fun.

This is a really funny scene too, by the way.

Battler's is, as Beato says, in a lot better state than last time shit like this happened. I think he got the general gist that Beato wasn't acting 100% and that there is more to what is going on than meets the eye.

Ange's right. Battler is starting to try and seriously understand Beatrice's heart but that's opposed to Ange's purposes, which are for him to completely trample on her heart as soon as possible so she can get Battler back.

You can tell Ane's view of others is really warped by now, it's basically a less over-the-top version of Erika. Sure if you never trust anyone you will never get tricked but you will never build genuine relations either...

This is in complete opposition to how Satoko entered the school in GouSotsu, so I guess the schools work differently across... universes or whatever it is you would call this.

Well... considering the events of this chapter where she continuously gets attempted to get murdered by her family I can't really blame her for strongarming Ange's family....

The game is pretty clear the abuse didn't take long to start.... it's easy to take a more sympathetic reading of Eva later but it is clear she bears responsibility for attempting to take care of a child she was in no way emotionally capable of doing at the time.

Ha.... the way Maria got mocked at her school but she didn't get it and saw it as genuine praise really makes me think she has autism... I remember at school laughing along at jokes I didn't get until I finally got that the joke was disparaging me. The game doesn't show this as an entirely negative thing, though... after all she is able to create 1s from 0s. Also, I am not disparaging Ange in any way but it shows the level of her isolation that the closest image to best friend she can conjure in her head is the girl she hung out with once a year on a family conference.

I have never heard of enchilada cheesecakes before and now I want to try them out.

....uh huh Rosa....

It's no surprise Ange latched on to the diary.... she does the same magic Maria does towards Rosa to Rudolf. "He sometimes came home at my birthday so he loved me a lot" aka he couldn't be bothered to even be at my birthday usually.

Haha.... this scene is so sad to read.... Rosa is constantly embarrassed of Maria even in his idealized version of the scene.

Huh... I wonder if this kind of bullying is common for autistic children? This is exactly word for word what was done to me in school.

This is also a common thing for abused people to think, I used to think I had to stay in abusive relationships because if I didn't someone else would get abused. I am sometimes kind of in awe about how R07 can accurately represent many kinds of situations.

It's not really sustainable in the long term for Maria, though. She can pretend she isn't sad and that she's fine all she wants but in the end, she chose the Golden Land over living. You can't exactly blame Maria for her thinking like this, though, she's just a 9-year-old making the best of an awful situation.

In other words, "I am glad I can neglect my daughter now that she has a stuffed toy I bought at a supermarket to keep her company instead of me"

Rosa, you set way too many fucking rules for someone that can't even be bothered to get home.

Maria knows perfectly that her mom considers her an embarrassment, huh.....

Man, Ange is so fucking depressed.... almost every line she says has a hint of extreme sadness behind it....

He uh.... didn't ask that Maria.... you can really tell she's extremely lonely.

Okonogi shows up and immediately wants Ange to do something that would kill her, lmfao.

Okonogi hits the mark right on the head but mixes up "Yasu" and "Eva" which is pretty interesting!

Of course, the one who actually had that ring was Yasu and not Kinzo at the time, so Okonogi's theory came from false assumptions.

I had.... completely forgotten that Okonogi of all people was the one to introduce the concept that without love, it can't be seen... haha I was very shocked here. Okonogi is also pretty much 100% right here, esp wrt Ange being unequipped to find the truth as she is.

An impressive resume would be a shame if you would get beaten and tortured by a nine-year-old girl.

Ange's already making hints about the fact it's really a suicide plan more than anything, Beatrice and Ange parallels are bigger later on but the fact they both had elaborate suicide plans with Rokkenjima is interesting to me...

#umineko #umiepisode4

[practically-an-x-man]

again for whoever you like :) not-so-nice asks betrayal, bound, break, pain, and torture

thank you again! Let's see here... I feel like I haven't talked about Robin or Indigo in a while (since I finished their main fics), so we'll go with them. Their stories are super angsty anyway, it's perfect!

Not-So-Nice OC Asks

betrayal: Has your OC ever been betrayed by someone they thought they could trust? Has your OC ever betrayed someone who trusted them?

Robin: No, but she's managed to do the reverse: turning a few former enemies into allies. She's one of those people that's just got such a spirit about her, she's both so kind and so strong that a lot of people don't want to make her an enemy.

Indigo: Not exactly. There was a time where she and her partner had to pretend to be enemies in order to infiltrate another ship, and he was so convincing she nearly believed he'd turned her in for real, but it wasn't an actual betrayal. She did, however, become a spy for the Resistance, so you could say she betrayed the First Order as a whole.

bound: Has your OC ever been imprisoned or captured? What happened? How did they get out? Did the experience leave any scars?

Robin: Yep. She and a few other X-Men were captured in a cloning facility. They had their blood drawn a few times, and there would likely be more to come if they hadn't managed to escape. Physical scars? No. Emotional trauma? For sure. She loves her family more than anything, so being separated and watching them in pain was just about the worst thing in the world for her.

Indigo: Also a yes. She was captured, tortured for information, and finally was put through an attempt at reconditioning. The reconditioning was interrupted, so it didn't take (thankfully), and she was rescued in the end, but that experience left her with both physical and emotional scars.

break: What would cause your OC to break down completely? What do they look like when that happens? Has anyone ever seen them at their lowest?

Robin: Losing a loved one - especially her brother or her partner. She's done so much to keep them safe, it would crush her to suddenly lose them. She'd always feel like there was something more she could have done, either to save them or at least to share a bit more love, even if she'd done all she was capable of. I don't know if she's ever been seen at her lowest possible point, but Peter (her partner) has certainly helped her through the worst moments in her life.

Indigo: Learning everything she'd done was for naught: the First Order wins, the Resistance is destroyed, her partner is viewed as a traitor, and all her friends are killed. Honestly, I feel like it would be the think to break her: she's such a fighter and has pushed through near-endless pain of her own, but losing that much would drive her into silence. She'd go numb, or fall into destructive habits. And again: she hasn't been through her worst thing imaginable, but she's had friends and her partner to help her through the darkness moment she's experienced.

pain: What's the worst pain your OC has ever felt? Do they have a high pain tolerance?

Robin: I'd say her TBI, though I doubt she actually felt pain during it. Elements of the recovery were definitely painful though, either physically or emotionally. She's got a high pain tolerance, not inhuman but certainly up there (like a 7/10, maybe?)

Indigo: Being shocked by Force-lightning on Exegol. It was the most agonizing, totally overwhelming, unstoppable pain she'd ever experienced, and it left her with aches and pains for years after. And she's got a pain tolerance up in the stratosphere! Indie's been through some tough shit.

torture: Has your OC ever been tortured? Would your OC ever torture someone else?

Robin: Not really. Even when she was captured, everything was fairly clinical - they took her blood and kept her chained up, but didn't do anything that wasn't for a specific cause or reason. And no, she'd never come close to torturing someone else. She's not that type of person.

Indigo: Yep! Gotta love those interrogation droids... not. Like I said, Indie's been through some tough shit. She wouldn't really have the constitution to torture someone else, though. It would bring back too many painful memories for herself, even to be in the opposite position.

#thanks for the ask! haven't thought about these guys in a while #my friends!!! #answered asks #ask game #my ocs #oc indigo #robin cassidy #my writing #symphony in silver fic #bolts and blasters fic

[vibesaresimplyatrocious]

Dude your tags on that writing post are making me go wild because oh my gosh your fic does read like someone committing to the bit!! Like in the nicest possible way it does read like improv every plot point feels like a “yes and” moment and it’s AMAZING (also it’s great to know that the character assassination of Johnny Storm was not premeditated lmao)

oh yeah pretty much everything in it is just a "yes and" moment where I did something earlier and I decide to play off of it more. Like, especially in chewing coffee.

i decided to commit to chewing coffee because I had like. one specific scene with the avengers i wanted to write, and i needed a way to fucking get there. So i decided I'd just start with dealing with the narrative consequences of the last fic and I would get to the avengers when I figured out how to get peter's character emotionally to the place he needed to be for that bit. it's been three hundred pages, by the way. and we still have some decent ground to cover.

I like talking about writing and stories, so there's a huge fuckign data dump below the cut about how the improv developed and the johnny storm thing. don't feel obligated to read it, it's a lot.

One of my big pet peeves in stuff that has romance, especially when there's a "woman" character (since the omegaverse basically just always has a guy taking the "female" role in the relationship) is when that character's like. entire life becomes their love interest. Like nah. They have to have other shit going on. you gotta let them do their own things. having feelings for this person doesn't mean you don't have other shit in your life.

My other big pet peeve is when people do things for drama and then don't follow through with the logical consequences of that.

Which is one of the reasons why Matt's the love interest and has hardly been in the fic. peter's got his own shit going on. The biggest consequence of hand-spun silk wasn't them getting feelings for each other--that's manageable, even if they're going to be huge fucking dumbasses about it. It was the bridge. at the time, I decided i needed a big climax action scene thing to sort of make a transition moment in the narrative that would push matt and peter to commit fully to what they were doing. but the logical consequence of that is "wow the public got a HUGE FUCKING CLUE as to who this mystery omega is."

of course, i was never going to write chewing coffee, so i thought i was never going to deal with it. then, i wrote chewing coffee. so i had to deal with it.

so Peter's got bigger shit going on, and he's got a very full life outside of matt. Matt stilll adds to his life! even if they both have a huge amount of trouble realizing it, they both really love being with each other. They're both some of the most important people in each other's lives. But they still get to lead their own lives, which i find much healthier and does way better justice to Peter's character. Like, he is his own main character, and so is matt. Both of them are superheroes in their own right, and while they are huge allies, neither of them is less capable or some kind of damsel. neither of them is teh traditional hollywood love interest screaming for the hero to save them. So peter does not need his narrative chained to getting a boyfriend. he can get a boyfriend and stop a bomber.

and like. i want to be clear, i'm not shitting on romance as a genre. finding love can be the number one driving factor! that's okay! great even! especially if you don't want to have to devote a bunch of narrative space to a bunch of subplots. the pet peeve specifically arises when people set up a bunch of other stuff to make it more exciting, like some kind of villain or enemy, and either make it secondary to the love plot when the fucking murder attempt is objectively way more pressing, or when they make it into an excuse to damsel the "female" character for the love interest. Like, i'm sorry, peter can lift multiple fucking tons and you think the physically normal man is the one who does the rescuing? Peter is not a damsel. he has never been a damsel. like he looks like a twink but he is one of the most powerful heroes in comics and way too many people decide to damsel him just so whoever's playing his love interest can be a hero. In general, i don't like the entire trope of "love interest as damsel." Like. take MJ for example. She's been dangled off so many fucking bridges. but she's been in peter's life for forever. she's tough as nails and deserves having her own narrative and character independence outside of being someone you can dangle off a bridge.

I dunno, it's a balance that has to be struck for me, i'm not saying it's bad if love interests help each other. Like, Matt does help peter! Peter needed help that Matt specialized in (law), and Matt was able to help him! there's nothing wrong with needing help and matt and peter can and do pull each other's asses out of fires. but peter still gets to be strong and independent and capable and matt doesn't need to hold his hand through every fucking plot point, jesus christ. I think some of the best romances are ones where people are just looking at their partner being extremely badass and applauding. it just icks me out when one person is made less capable just so the other person can be a big fucking hero. so that's the number one thing i had in mind while improv'ing matt and peter's relationship.

I do plan on making matt more present in the plot, for the record! once i started getting a sense for what i was doing, i started realizing some things i wanted to have in there needed build up or they'd be coming out of left field, so we have a lot of narrative threads just set up that i'll be tying together soon.

The other reason why Matt hasn't been as present and will start being more present is because my biggest rule of writing is that I can never sacrifice character for plot. i've trashed and redone entire projects before because i decided that i hadn't brought the characters to the right point to make the decisions they were making for the sake of plot, so the plot had to go in order to make the characters right. it's more of a general vibe? the biggest guiding factor during all of this is whether I've gotten them to a point where I can understand why they're able to make the decisions they're making.

And there was no fucking way that Peter would ever get with Matt after hand-spun silk.

Part of this is because I very firmly believe that just sex cannot be a basis for a relationship, especially in the context of ABO. Like, if it's just that they spent a rut together? Nah. Losing control of your body and having hormone-fueled sex is not grounds for a relationship. if anything, it's the grounds for intensive therapy, not a relationship. Like, what do you like about their personality? how do you feel about their communication style? what if you hate the way they chew? Peter's never going to look at someone he just had a bunch of sex with and think "wow, we should be in love." Sex is great, fantastic, having good physical chemistry can be really valuable, but it's not the sole basis of love. He spent his entire life being objectified, and he's also someone who's in a very healthy long-term relationship where they had to work fucking hard to stay with each other.

MJ and Peter's love story was something that sort of strung itself together in the background and it became something I really, truly loved. Like, originally, I was trying to figure out how to just make Peter mentally good with offering to do this for a bro, and I decided he couldn't be in a relationship. He'd have to necessarily talk it through with someone else to clear it, and matt would have called the entire thing off the second it started causing more inconvenience than was already obvious, so that would derail it entirely. But I didn't want to do that thing where the preexisting female love interest is a huge bitch or inexplicably missing or whatever just to make way for a ship, so i decided that she was still a huge part of his life and decided to add in a gag where they called it on and off again like they were playing a game of hot potato. Inadvertently, that gave them an epic fucking love story of people who had to wake up every single day and make the conscious choice to love each other.

it's hard to show, because it's all stuff that happened in the past, but it's inherent in their everything. it's one of the reasons why they have such good communication--it was figure it out or destroy each other, and they figured it out. Inherently, Peter and MJ are extremely traumatized people subjected to structural violence and generational abuse. they spend every single day of their lives under extreme stress, from poverty and violence and inequality and fighting crime. their early relationship would have been a mess. they had to create ways to keep themselves from destroying each other. they had to spend a fucking decade meticulously laying boundaries and figuring out how the other worked best, and working fucking hard to respect and fulfill each other.

Like, most of it ended up written in their mannerisms. Like the scene where MJ's going off to get peter's camera--i fucking adored that scene, because Peter's arguing with her about how dangerous it is for her to go and how he doesn't want her to go while tying her shoes for her so she can go. That was extremely important for me because I felt it was the key to why their relationship ultimately worked. Because MJ would bitch slap anyone who tried to throw their weight around with her. She would never be with Peter if he was the kind of person who would think he could make that decision for her. Peter still gets a voice, he still gets to raise concerns, but he recognizes that it's her decision and he will enable her to make it. It's a huge act of respect and one of the fundamental building blocks of the way I made MJ's relationship with Peter was that they mutually respected each other.

The other thing I wanted was to make them deeply messy fucking people. That's why MJ's so crude in this--it's a choice, and a big source of trauma. She grew up in hyper traditionalism. I grew up in hypertraditionalism, and you aren't supposed to know what a dick joke is. You aren't supposed to swear. you're supposed to be perfect and ladylike and daren't say a word if the men say something unseemly and you shan't repeat such dastardly things.

Anyway, I have a mouth like a sailor and wrote a porn fic to see if i could. purity culture doesn't work.

So MJ grew up where she was just boxed in to only appear as perfect and ladylike as possible, so she went the opposite direction and became as crude as possible. she likes pushing people's buttons. she will make comments about your ass. And that's deeply inappropriate behavior at times. With peter and ned? They're used to it. They've consented to it. It's part of why they love her, actually. But slapping matt's ass? he didn't give her the green light to touch him like that, and she definitely wouldn't have done it if she hadn't been drunk. In the end, he didn't care, so no ultimately harm done, but there could have been harm done and she doesn't exactly get credit for lucking out. it doesn't mean that she's a bad person, it's just that she's not a perfect person and she does dumb fucking shit at times--which, everyone does. She's extremely messy, oversteps boundaries, and it's a direct product of trauma. Peter ain't exactly perfect either. he's borderline suicidially reckless and has trouble ever letting people into his decision-making process. He'll risk himself eleven days out of ten before giving an inch, which was one of the reasons he's nearly fucking killed himself with his heats.

So it ended with these extremely messy, imperfect people who had to try again and again to keep loving each other. So many romances, especially in the superhero genre, stem from some kind of inexplicable chemistry instead of conscious choice. MJ and Peter could have burnt out and stopped loving each other. They worked hard not to. That's important.

So Peter became this character that had an extremely hard won love that would have been invalidated every single day by people who thought biological chemistry was superior to a decade of fighting to be together. like, the omegaverse? It's fucking weird about biological predeterminism in general. one of the premises that i set for myself when i decided to do this was that i had to keep everything from the omegaverse but if it was something that was fucking stupid, i would make it a part of the stupid things that people believe or just a part of the absolute most extreme moments like heats and ruts.

like, for example, guys in my family would always say "men drink because they like it, women drink because they don't like something else." that's the stupidest fucking thing i've ever heard. do they think gender affects your fucking taste buds? also, have they ever thought for even half a second about the sheer number of men who are alcoholics and drink specifically as a coping mechanism? Women have better tasting drinks than men because someone randomly decided that beer was for men and fruity cocktails were for women, despite the fact that cocktails taste better and have stronger booze. it's the stupidest goddamn thing i've ever heard. but the world is full of dumb shit about biological predeterminism just like your fucking drink preference. So everything i hated in the ABO world just became that kind of thing.

So that thing in the ABO world? The thing where people just smell good and that means you're fated because you both smell really good to each other and, you know, you can base an entire relationship off smell? or the thing where you find someone of the opposite secondary gender and immediately they're the perfect alpha/omega for you and you're ready to do everything with them immediately upon meeting? That's present in this world. It's a dumb thing people tell Peter when trying to convince him and MJ that they'll never be happy with each other, and that some dumb fucking frat bro alpha can do more for them with goddamn body odor than a decade of dedicated love.

So Peter was never going to be able to get with Matt after hand-spun silk. Absolutely not. He's way too traumatized for that. If anyone suddenly developed feelings for him after years of platonic friendship when the most notable thing that changed was that they fucked due to a biological demand? He would never, in a million years, believe that they could have fallen for him because of his personality. He'd think it was just them deciding he made a good omega for them in bed and he'd leave deeply fucking hurt. Even if he realized he developed feelings for matt in the aftermath, he'd never trust any feelings matt developed to be real. Peter was in his right mind. matt wasn't. It would eternally fall into the same trap of "I was just play acting at being his obedient omega and that's what he was into."

Like, Matt too, for the record, just for different reasons. matt would have never gotten with Peter after hand-spun silk becuase he has a guilt complex the size of jupiter and he'd never in a million years make a move on peter after the guy just nuked his own life to save matt from dumbassery his twenty-something self willingly committed. No. He's going to crush everything down deep inside and then one day he'll die. And, honestly, I do think that would have been the right decision had Peter not liked him back.

One of the core distinctions i made between Peter and Matt's character is that Peter is really good at dealing with his emotions in a healthy way but is absolute shit at recognizing them. Matt's dumb as a fucking post about dealing with his emotions but tormented by his own awareness of them. So Peter's big problem is that he will be fully into someone and shuffle that away as something that's obviously not his own emotions, pshhhh. Matt, meanwhile, woke up after his rut, realized he had developed feelings fucking immediately, and then had a panic attack in the bathroom.

I'd like to go on record that neither of them developed feelings for each other because they fucked. it's because they, necessarily, had to be more intimate with each other than they would have ever been with like, their regular bro, and it made them realize that this person who'd they'd already die for is someone they'd really like to live for too. They had to go to bat for each other. Peter destroyed his own life to help matt. More than once, Matt fought through his hormones to try and give Peter an out because he'd rather he be hurt than Peter be hurt.

And, it's also the little shit. They talked a lot about things that they never would have talked about otherwise and realized how deeply they related to each other. they did a lot of little acts of intimacy, like when peter would scratch the base of Matt's neck because he liked it or when Matt would deny his impulses to help peter through anything. Neither of them really had to do that for the rut. They did it purely just as acts of caring, and those were the bits of each other that they got feelings for.

And those nice feelings would almost absolutely be crushed down forever in the aftermath of a rut. you'd have to drag them kicking and screaming to emotional realization. there's a lot of fucking work to put in before they can get past their own issues and realize that it's okay to give each other a shot.

I have a LOT of thoughts about the Johnny Storm debacle. It's going below, so if you're interested, read on. Some of it is what's outside of Peter's perspective and therefore not featured in hand-spun silk or chewing coffee. I doubt it will be able to make it into the fic, just because there's a lot that gets missed when you limit it to one character's perspective. There's still a chance it may come up, so there's a risk of spoilers.

The Johnny Storm thing is something that i think is a lot more nuanced than i was able to show. Part of it is that i made it up totally on the fly so it was very sloppy execution. Like, if you go back and read the Johnny parts of hand-spun silk? i shift the goal posts a LOT because i was still developing Peter's own character and figuring out how he would respond to all this. The other part of it is because this is totally from Peter's perspective, and so we have kind of a coke-bottle lens view of it.

See, the thing about the Johnny Storm thing is that i think it could have been a relatively minor speed bump in their relationship, and then circumstances, a few very poor choices, and plain bad luck blew it up into something major. I also think that Johnny Storm and Peter Parker would be great together, but that they could never work in an omegaverse specifically.

in the comics, i think they're fucking great together and make a fantastic ship. In the ABO world specifically, i think that Johnny would be ass over tea kettle in love with Peter, and Johnny would at best be a ship in the night for Peter.

Because the thing is, from Johnny's perspective, he was legitimately in love with Peter and did not ever want to hurt him.

I want to be clear, I'm not excusing the dumb shit he did. I have explanations for it, they're discussed below, but they're not excuses. He has to bear the blame all the same, but I think that it adds a little more nuance and makes it a little more tragic.

He was legitimately in love with Peter and it wasn't because of the rut in the same way Matt didn't get feelings for Peter because of the rut. Like, nothing about why Johnny fell for him had to do with the bits where Peter had to put on a show of being the perfect omega for him. Johnny actually really, truly loved him way better when he wasn't play-acting at being the perfect omega for him--which is why, at one point, Peter mentions that Johnny always made dumb fucking jokes during the rut and it would always snap him out of pretend and he'd instantly threaten to kick johnny's ass. Johnny really liked Peter's like, actual personality. He figured out early in their friendship that dumb fucking jokes always got a rise out of Peter, so he memorized them ahead of time and brought them up whenever he had enough sense to so he could get back to how Peter is normally, because that's the Peter he loved.

(which was another distinction I tried to draw between Matt and Johnny, incidentally. I decided to give Matt an identical moment in the rut where he was aware enough to realize that Peter was playing things up to cater to his hormones and try to get back to Peter's actual personality, which is the one that he actually had feelings for. However, Matt said directly to him that he was aware that he was putting on a show and let Peter consciously drop out of the headspace he had put himself into in favor of his genuine personality, whereas Johnny sort of tried to draw him out. Neither had any ill intentions behind it, but Matt's more consciously communicated with Peter.)

The thing about Peter is that he is the first partner Johnny ever had that treated him with the love and respect you'd give an actual partner, and they weren't even actually dating.

This entire thing has been a big mash up of the comics and the movies and the only rule is that I steal whatever i find funny. Like, Peter? I know most people think he's tom holland peter because of MJ and Ned, but his basis is actually comics Peter for me. Ned and MJ (and the Toomes plane crash) were the funniest fucking things from Homecoming for me, so I kept it. He has the key to the city like Tobey!Peter (because how the fuck do you explain having that, that's the most useless piece of decor over a guest can never see it) and a lot of the lines and personality i get from Andrew!Peter and most of the backstory and attitude is comics peter. Like, imagine whatever fucking Peter you want, I don't give a shit, I want everyone to have their own experiences with this fic, but all of the characters are really just a frankenstein, and Johnny is no exception.

Like the comics, he became a superhero when he was still a teenager, is the thing. He's been in the spotlight forever. Celebrity culture is fucking toxic as hell and he sort of was drowned in it young. Like, the thing in the movies, where he's dating an eternally changing supermodel who goes on live TV and announces that the most important thing about dating the human torch is fireproof lingerie? weird straight people celebrity bullshit. why would you ever fucking say that outloud to millions of people jesus christ. and it's all this johnny has ever really known, relationship-wise.

Like, it's give and take. He's not exactly a passive participant or victim or whatever. He likes having sex and has a lot of it (and there's nothing wrong with that). He fully wanted Peter Parker to be a notch on his belt and nothing more when they first met, and his expectation was that Peter Parker would be another person who wanted to happily fuck a celebrity--and then would probably post on Twitter a full review of how he was in bed, without ever asking Johnny and with Johnny never consenting to it.

So Johnny made the stupid fucking decision to roll up to Peter in a sports car to ask him if he could take Peter for a ride, and Peter immediately fucking laughed in his face, asked him if he thought dick size correlated with how stupid your car was, then proceeded to call MJ in front of him and heckle about it for seven minutes straight before walking off to catch the subway. this peter believes in eating the rich and was deeply unimpressed.

Like. johnny benefits from his public image, dont get me wrong. He gets a lot of hook ups because of his image and certainly isn't upset by this fact. But the standard that was set when he was very young and dating for the first time and getting his heart broken for the first time was that his body was public narrative and he was being used for his name and the publicity attached to it. he got fucked up by it. It was a long string of toxic relationships that usually ended up on the front page of a lot of tabloids--and that's how it always was and that's all he ever expected. his nudes get leaked without his consent and everyone acts like it's a completely okay thing on the person's part, and he should have known better and is at fault. his exes sell interviews. he gets photographed on his walk of shame and the person he hooked up with goes on ellen to reveal that he does perform oral. and i'm not going to say he was comfortable with any of that, he wasn't, he hated it, but he wasn't looking to change the status quo--partially because he didn't fully believe that the status quo would change, partially because he was having fun with hookups and wasn't looking to settle down (which, again--as long as both people go in knowing that's all it is, is not a bad thing). He'd always be johnny storm. There'd always be a price tag attached to intimate parts of his life, and a lot of fucking people would be more than happy to cash in.

Peter would rather rip out his own appendix than be publicly known as the person who risked getting set on fire to climb on Johnny Storm's dick, however.

So, for the first time, Johnny found himself in a relationship where the person was genuinely only in it for him. Peter didn't want the novelty of fucking a celebrity. He didn't want to go on a talkshow or go viral because he leaked a picture of johnny's dick. He rather violently and aggressively cared about Johnny and Johnny alone, actually. It was sort of Johnny's first experience ever, after years of dating in the public eye, where he was in a relationship where no one was looking to exploit him. The other thing was that they did this for a long time. This was a month they spent together, most of which didn't involve Peter having to play pretend because that wasn't necessary until right before the rut.

And from Peter's perspective, they did the same shit they always did, just with sex, so there wasn't any change. From Johnny's perspective, he got to spend a month in constant contact with someone who genuinely cared about him, was hilarious and ridiculous and one of the best fucking people he had ever met. Like, he loved that Peter brewed coffee with red bull. He thought it was ludicrous. He was in love with how ridiculous Peter was. So he found himself wanting to keep with it afterwards. he wanted his relationship to be with someone who genuinely cared about him and treated him with respect the way no one else had.

The problem was they were never in a fucking relationship in the first place, which was a slight wrench in the works.

There are three reasons why it blew up as bad as it did/why they would never work, and that's 1) outside forces, 2) privilege, and 3) just plain dumb immature love.

Outside forces:

This is the absolute biggest thing that I think sank them, and it's kind of sad in the sense that it was legitimately outside of Johnny's control. The media is the biggest one. If they got together, eventually, the news would get out. It would be chaos. Like. Johnny's an A-Lister, and a fucking superhero A-Lister. In the public eye, Peter's a total nobody. It would be rabid. It'd be like if every wattpad fanfic about one direction falling in love with some random girl from fucking iowa or whatever the trope is came true.

I could write an essay on how biological predeterminism and natural law resulted in like 97% percent of modern issues and inequality, but this is already too long for anyone to read. but the omegaverse would undoubtedly be 1000x worse about it, holy fucking hell. which means the way we treat women in our world? even worse in the omegaverse.

The public narrative fully thinks that he's a slut who will fuck any cape that looks at him twice. He's been considered a slut since before he even agreed to fuck Johnny. It was a given, and Peter knew that going into it. Like, no one had any illusions that the human torch was going to find a nice omega for his rut and settle down in holy matrimony before they so much as graze each other's hands god bless amen praise the lord jesus christ. The expectation is that whoever would be sharing the rut would just be doing it casually. that's PEAK slut behavior. Peter's a public whore from the start, and while it always bothered him, he didn't care about that nearly as much when there wasn't any chance people could find him or his loved ones.

If he actually ended up with Johnny? Nightmare situation. Jesus Christ, he'd never know peace. People would hate him and be jealous of him and psychoanalyze everything he ever did. he's queer. He's in love with MJ, a fellow omega. he drinks red bull with coffee and is a fucking mess. he wants zero children. Johnny's an alpha, and a superhero to boot. People would eternally expect him to be the perfect omega and it would not fucking work out.

And that's something that can be overcome, don't get me wrong. The important people in the relationship are teh ones actually in it. But it's a huge stressor factor, and It's one I don't think they could have overcome for other reasons.

The other big outside stressor is the Fantastic Four.

Full cop, I don't like Reed Richards. I think he's a dick. He is the only one i directly was trying to character assassinate. for the record? they were fully in the wrong for everything they did. But I think most of the shit they pulled arose from assumptions that would have been extremely likely had it been anyone other than Peter.

because from their perspective, they're trying to protect Johnny from what's already been the biggest violation of his life.

his private health information got leaked by people they hired, and it became a talk show matter. johnny was visibly tormented by it. they felt like shit and knew it was only going to get worse. he was going to live with whoever did this talking about his dick for a solid year after. it was going to be brutal if he ended up hurting whoever he fucked. they were in damage control mode. legally, NDAs around sex cannot be enforced (a lot of celebrities try to have them--it's just a scare tactic. not a court in the US would ever enforce one. it's legitmately impossible to make them binding, but i won't get into why). so whatever happens, it's almost definitely going to make the news.

Then, in strolls baby brother, having announced that he found an omega all on his own.

and it's a fucking reporter from the superhero slander newspaper. They were fully convinced that not only was peter doing this for fame, but this was basically a work assignment for him.

All of Peter's butting heads with them was him setting very healthy and necessary boundaries. From their perspective, it looked like he was trying to increase his bottom line.

He was forgoing all health precautions--because he refused to fuck their brother in a monitored room on videotape with eight medical professionals watching at all times and the EMTs and the fucking fire department in the next room listening to him get it on. he's got superhealing and a precognition for danger that let's him know when johnny's getting too riled up and he needs to calm him down or dodge a dick fire. From his perspective, danger is minimal and he isn't making a fucking sex tape or putting on a week-long peepshow for a bunch of total strangers.

The F4 saw a totally normal unenhanced human willing to get third degree burns inside of him if it meant that he'd get a bigger payout when he appeared on oprah.

Same thing with pregnancy. Peter demand a certain level of dignity from the proceedings. He was going out of his way and fucking a friend, their baby brother, exclusively for said friend's benefit. He gets the fucking dignity of not being treated like a cheap whore who needs to be monitored to make sure he's not going to baby trap someone he'd never be able to get otherwise. He was not going to let the Four watch him take the contraceptives or the pregnancy tests of his own free will, because that's fucking humiliating.

For the F4? Great, not only is Peter going to leak this all afterwards and break Johnny's heart, he's definitely going to be an eternal source of emotional devastation because he's looking to get a fucking child out of this that Johnny will forever be tied to.

And the problem was that it was all based on the assumption that Peter was doing this out of self-interest. And they don't get a pass for treating someone fucking terrible just because they thought he was going to hurt their baby brother down the line. But without the context that Peter was spider-man and a good person, it was the plainest thing in the world that he'd be leaking all of this. So the F4 became a huge source of stress and bad feelings that constantly hung over anything Johnny and Peter could have had.

Privilege

This is another thing where Johnny wasn't consciously trying to do something bad, but it is something that sort of made everything worse. Johnny's rich. A celebrity. Male. An alpha. White. He's about as privileged as you can possibly get.

And I think that it's important to note that that's not a source of fault, but it is a thing that you have to be aware of. And I didn't think Johnny would be aware of his privilege throughout this and it would make everything worse, simply because his privilege never really came into play with Peter.

Peter could not care less about whether or not Johnny was rich, or white, or an alpha. In fact, that's more likely to be an active deterrent than anything else. So Johnny walked in with the mindset of "this is someone who just cares about me for me. he doesn't care that i'm famous or rich or whatever. we just care about each other's actual selves." And that's true!

Doesn't take into account every fucking other person on the planet, though.

A lot of Johnny's fuck ups were directly sourced in the fact that he didn't consider his privilege. He sort of took this on with the mindset of the media being a storm they'd have to eventually weather together, if they did end up together. And he's used to that. He's been eternally in the public eye for years. It's hell, but it's something you can get through together. but he didn't consider that that storm would be extremely different for someone who had money, resources, clout, who wasn't an alpha, and also who wasn't at times in a publicly queer and interracial relationship.

The media storm for Johnny is horrible and invasive. For Peter, it's "hey, haha, is Someone Going To Kill My Entire Family." Johnny didn't even think about showing up on Peter's doorstep with roses, because he's never even goddamn had to pay rent before. it didn't even occur to him that this may make people come to try and kill Peter and his family (Peter's fucking Spider-Man--he's the last person in the world to worry about handling some random fangirl) and it didn't occur to him that it may put Peter in the very difficult position of not being able to afford to move. Johnny's already been to Peter's apartment before. So he didn't even think about how showing up with roses would end with months of serious agonizing stress for Peter.

And it's not an excuse, but it is an explanation and it is something that he has to learn from. Like, there's a lot of fuck ups i've unthinkingly done because i didn't even know it would be a fuck up. i've been privileged in ways I wasn't aware of and ended up with egg on my face. In Johnny's case, that wasn't a minor fuck up you learn from and move on from, it spiraled into something bigger than it otherwise might have been.

Immature dumb love

The last factor in why this went the way it did was simply because this was very much this Johnny's first real time being in love and he was sort of fucking stupid about it.

Like, Peter's lightyears ahead of Johnny when it comes to "being in love" maturity because he has intensive experience. He and MJ had to fight for their fucking lives figuring out how to navigate a relationship. Johnny's never once been in a real one that didn't come with the expectation of "hey so we're gonna fuck around for a while and in the end you're inevitably going to leak my dick pics and tell everyone that i'm good with my tongue and get a spot on a night show from it, and I'm going to feel embarrassed every time i leave my home for a while." Johnny's like. Early twenties. People in their early twenties have a vast fucking range of things they're really mature in and things they're total fucking dumbasses in. i'm 23 and i've got things i'm lightyears ahead of my peers in and things i'm like a toddler in. He's young and fucking stupid about some things, and in this case? He fell in love for the first time and blue screened completely.

he got butterflies and set himself on fucking fire on live TV at the mention of his crush, inadvertently starting a media frenzy. You could see his crush from fucking space. he had no idea how to handle doing this like an adult, because every other relationship started with making a pass and immediately hooking up. He tried that with Peter and Peter asked him if he thought dick size correlated with how stupid his car was he has no backup plan. So he just started choking on his own dumb feelings.

For the record? His intent was never to make Peter feel like he was less capable. He knows Peter is capable. But he got within twenty fucking feet of peter and ended up choking on his own panic and emotions like a school kid with a crush. So he just ended up hanging around his crush and fumbling around him and checking in with him way too often and being extremely conscious of how sweaty his palms are or how many times he asked Peter how he was doing in the span of one conversation, fuck that was too many this got weird.

But we don't see Johnny's internal reasoning. We see his actions through Peter. Who has spent his entire life being pushed down and treated like he's some helpless damsel when he's the most competent person in any room he's in. So everything gets filtered through a narrator who's not entirely reliable, and intentions get read in that aren't exactly there.

Johnny's plan when confessing his feelings was to try and handle it like an adult. He dressed up and got roses, because that's what Sue told him you do when you're trying to make a big romantic gesture. He was going to confess his feelings as best he could and respect Peter's decision no matter what.

.... And then he walked right into the knowledge that Peter was in that very moment fucking another alpha and got brutally kneecapped by his own disappointment. His entire plan got put on the off-step.

When Peter let him down, what was going through his head was that he was extremely disappointed and didn't want to put that on peter, so he wanted to give them space so Johnny could get over him and not impose his feelings on Peter unfairly. What came out was "let's not be friends for a while," which isn't actually what he meant but people don't say exactly what they mean in the moment a lot. He realized that after the fact, got panicked that he might have fucked up the best friendship he ever had, and then fucked up even worse by trying to fix it in the moment instead of respecting the words Peter was actively telling him. And that's still his fuck up, and he still needed to respect boundaries. But the reasoning wasn't "I don't see you as someone worthy of respect," it was "i'm in a panic spiral and making poor decisions."

The worst, most egregious thing Johnny did, and in my opinion the one that's the absolute hardest to forgive, was when he started a public fight with matt on the bridge where he directly talked about peter's fucking sex life in front of people.

Like holy fucking hell, that one there's no real valid explanation for. Like, i included it because comic book characters, especially Johnny Storm, are very impulsive and hotheaded and a lot of people do fucking stupid things in the heat of a bad moment. It was an act of total immaturity, jealousy, and the culmination of a lot of disappointment and bad feelings that resulted in him saying a lot of really fucking dumb things that he regretted immediately after he said them and has been absolutely torturing himself over ever since. And, once again, his regret doesn't excuse his actions, and it's up to peter as to whether he'll ever get forgiveness.

I think the entire Johnny Storm thing, under different circumstances, could have been minor. Johnny could have confessed his feelings, Peter could have turned him down. Johnny could have swallowed his disappointment and they would have moved on. But a lot of outside stressors, bad timing, and people being their worst selves resulted in Johnny fucking up with way worse effects than otherwise it could have been. His decisions are on him, don't get me wrong, but I think sometimes just plain bad luck can also lead us to being worse versions of ourselves. I will say that a lot of the harm he caused was unintentional, and he is actively in deep regret over it--and not because he lost out on a romantic partner, for the record. He regrets hurting the best friend he ever had, hurting someone who helped him at dear cost to himself, and potentially losing him forever.

#chewing coffee #this is very long due to who i am as a person #i wrote an extreme slow burn after having them fuck for eight chapters straight like i'm just long winded #i answer comments on the fic like this too it's ridiculous #why am i like this

[seekingsolacex]

these days -

These days I've been processing my feelings a little more often, analysing my current life situation and planning for what's to come in time.

In my previous post, there's this one quote that really stuck by me. "Allow yourself to grieve for what wasn't" I am someone who is very sentimental; I hold value in a lot of things and aspects of my life - and this means I am very easily emotionally attached. Bad, I know. But this is really just an innate part of me and it's not something I can easily get rid of. Ever since my departure from the previous season, it's been a hell of a roller coaster ride.

There was so, so much hurt and despair - you have no idea. I think I've never felt such a low, but it's been an awakening I'd say (on good days, lol) Occasionally, I find myself grieving over the IFs. What if, why didn't, why not, why, how? And then I start spiralling down into the black hole all over again.

Previously, a close colleague who's been through enough of (similar) shit said this to me, on the day of my departure.

He said: "thank you for everything and i pray that as the days go by you let any wounds go through its needful healing and you let go of any bitterness and anger that you may have developed and you allow yourself to be the best version you can be!! not for anyone else but yourself!!" It hit me so hard, I cried like hell. I think it was both an acknowledgement and closure that I never knew I needed, for someone to recognise the hurt I was going through and the repercussions of it; how the resentment started building up and how i was just wrecked, at the end of the journey. Truth be told, there was an awful lot of resentment towards certain individuals / work processes / issues. But throughout these months of unemployment, I think I've slowly healed. Maybe not, not an entire 100% but I can say for sure I am in the midst of healing. I am trying my best to heal and learn at the same time. There is so much to process, so much to unlearn & relearn, so much to forgive myself for, so much to forget about and let go... but I'm still trying and I think that's good enough.

But like what I've shared on IG a couple nights ago, I think it's safe to say that I no longer feel anything at all towards the said individuals. No hard feelings, but nothing pleasant either. If you were to ask me to describe it, I think I'd describe it as blank. It really feels weird. It's like, knowing this person and yet knowing nothing at all. Feels like a blank canvas to me.

If you ask me 3 months ago if I were capable of letting go of the resentment, I'd probably have answered "no". But right now I think I've come to peace with it; I've come to accept the terms. I really no longer harbour any resentment, but it really just feels empty.

[thememoriesofaqueen]

You’re missing our point , yes it is fast. But also you can’t maintain an illusion or dream or whatever else u want to call it, if you break it. You can’t drive in a car w a dream a dream can’t take you to dinner. You can’t maintain the illusion if you present them both w tangible proof that the other person is in fact very real. Like for example other people being around and interacting w that person.

Me personally if someone broke my heart and left me to die and ‘ignored’ me when I was dying (she thinks) I wouldn’t be jumping at asking them, not even him asking.. to take me to dinner. I would be to hurt to interact w them on a romantic situation like to a dinner. We never said she would cry. But she absolutely has the right to after hell she’s been through and he put her through, just him. And especially if I don’t know if that person is in my head.

Katherine especially would have been able to admit and talk about things w him if she thought she was talking to herself and he wasn’t real. She won’t be able to think that if they go to dinner of all things. Other people will have to see him and talk to him, not just her. So any honest admission that could have come from either of them thinking they weren’t actually talking to an actual person is gone.

It also lets Elijah off the hook waaayyyy too easy IMO Like I said, it’s your story. You choose the pace 🤷 But you also ask feedback

First of all, thank you for your polite feedback ♥

I don't necessarily think one has to exclude the other. I, personally, have often dreams in which I interact with people I know in places I know and when I wake up and eventually remember the dream, I ask myself whether it's a memory of something that has truly happened or if it was the memory of something that wasn't real. I think it will work for Katherine, although this dream-like state will stop working for Elijah because he definitely remembers that it had been real. Then, on the other hand, 'Katherine' reacts differently / ignores him during the daytime which will continue to challenge him.

It also won't be a romantic dinner of any sort. Just someone who offers something which is helpful to her at the time at a place she has never been during a time when not so many people are looking for something to eat. Katherine is a woman that uses others to her benefit or at least doesn't turn down things that are advantageous. That hasn't changed, especially after she became more dependent on others. Yes, she would choose / prefer another company but let's not forget this is Katherine whose first priority is surviving. She knows that it's always good to have a backup plan but that doesn't have to mean she's emotionally available for him or is capable of forgiving him (which she won’t do – she’ll react and treat him at most like she would treat anyone else but with less desire to share information).

And yes, Elijah has broken her heart, betrayed her trust, and didn't react when she called out for help but he didn't leave her to die. He also didn't physically hurt her (like Damon did). The situation is bad but it somehow resembles what happened after 1492 where his role has been a lot worse in my opinion. Yet she interacted with him in the present and reached out to him when word of the cure arrived. And, if one wants to take a further step, she was also glad to see 'him' in season 5 (though the situation was different because she actually had been dying at that moment).

I get that it would be more angsty and more magically enchanting if they continue to meet at that fountain night after night, but I personally don't know what they should do there. Talking about hurt feelings and disappointment works for one more night but then it's getting difficult (and lets not forget she already admitted her thoughts when she was drunk so Elijah knows how she feels). And more importantly, what would it change? Words are great and all and it's good to talk and try to heal but eventually, actions must follow. Otherwise, words are just meaningless, empty shells.

Another anon also once pointed out that Katherine must feel like she's losing her mind if she's constantly, night after night, imagining things. And that's honestly something I'm not comfortable with.

I appreciate your feedback though (especially because your criticism is polite - thank you so much for staying friendly ♥) and I will put three - four weeks between their first interaction to their second interaction so that there's more time for Elijah to watch Maisie and wait for Katherine in hopes she will show up. Hopefully, this will make it more natural.

#answered #ial #ial 11

[mimas-thoughts]

Niño O. Convicto

BAC 2-2

BLOG #3 The Chronicle of My Success Foretold

"A Sparkling Dreamer"

A twenty-year-old gay man has dreamt of studying in the city and leaving the countryside

he loves. That gay man dreamed of being a journalist, lawyer, and teacher. He believes that nothing is impossible when you believe in yourself.

That gay man is me. I'm Niño Convicto, born and raised in the Bicol Region in the province of Albay, and I'm proud to say that my grandparents raised me. I was not born rich, but I was not born poor either. I came from a middle-class family wherein we enjoy living in the countryside and having a simple but fantastic life.

I've been through a lot in my twenty years of existence in this world. Achieving my dreams wasn't easy for me. I was once told that being gay is a disadvantage, and also, as a student who came from the countryside and went to the city to study, I was told that I was arrogant.

But knowing that I have my family and friends as my backbone, I told myself that I must focus on achieving my dreams.

They'll have a lot to say when you're doing good and a lot to say when you're doing bad. So, we have to learn to listen to those who matter.

Hello, dear self. This is the first time that I'm going to ask you. Are you okay? Are you sure about the path you've taken?

We have our ups and downs, and it's part of our roller coaster journey. We always choose to be happy, but sometimes pretending is terrible. We always believed that happiness is a choice, but we must never forget that showing our real emotions is a must. We can never be happy all the time, but what is essential is that we know how to be satisfied on our own.

I dreamt of becoming a journalist, a teacher, and a lawyer. But to achieve my dreams, I made a decision that changed my life. I decided to leave my hometown and start a new life here in the city to achieve my goals. I left my family, especially my grandma and my friends, in the countryside, it's not for my good but for theirs.

I want to make my grandma proud of me because she's the first person who taught me that it's okay if others don't like you as long as you enjoy yourself. I want her to see me not just as a gay grandson that she has but to be proud that she raised a gay grandson who is capable enough to do things on his own. I want her to know that even though I'm softhearted, I'm also strong. Not physically, but mentally and emotionally. I will endure everything to make her happy.

And to answer the question of I'm okay, I'm okay, but not a hundred percent. I get tired of doing many things, but it will not stop me from achieving my dreams and making my grandma proud.

In my twenty years of existence, I realized it's okay to be hurt by someone

you love. It's normal, but never hurt yourself if that person hurts you so much. Just let him go.

I'm okay, but I need to move forward slowly.

And the next question is whether I'm sure about my path. Yes, I'm confident about the decision that I made. Before entering college life I asked myself what you wanted to do in life, and my answer was just the same as what I wanted when I was just in grade school; I wanted to be a journalist, a teacher, and a lawyer.

As a person with many dreams, I saw myself achieving all my dreams and achieving all my goals, and I saw myself as a sparkling and shining journalist because that's what I dreamt of becoming. A journalist who is famous in his way, a journalist who is like Miss. Kara David, passionate and hard-working. I saw myself receiving many awards because, as a competitive person receiving a mention is the best gift, the fruit of your labor.

My ultimate dream is to be a famous journalist. Still, I will not disregard my mom's dream; she wanted me to become a teacher, so I took a Bachelor of Arts in Communication in Pamantasan ng Lungsod Manila after completing my four-year course. I will have my Master in Arts. I saw myself as a strict but considerate teacher with a huge heart for his learners—a teacher like a mother.

And lastly, my dream is to become a lawyer. I always ask myself if I will continue that dream, and I always say yes. I want to be a voice for everyone who doesn't have a voice to speak for their rights. As a part of the LGBTQIA Community, I want equality and for everyone to feel loved and special. I know it's another journey for me, but I always stick to my motto that every dream is achievable if you persevere.

I saw myself as Miriam Defensor Santiago, who received many awards because of her boldness and wit. I'm a Lawyer who will be the next big thing in the Philippines if Miriam Defensor is the Iron Lady of Asia; I'm going to be the Iron Gay of Asia. I will show everyone that being gay is not a hindrance to becoming a leader.

We must know that no one can stop us from achieving what we want. We must learn the importance of taking a single step to achieving our dreams because there are no shortcuts to achieving dreams.

[chanandlersstuff]

Summer isn't the only thing that breaks

Pairing: Charles Leclerc x Reader.

Summary: Sometimes loving the other person it's not enough.

Word count: 2.545.

Author’s note: I don't take charge or pay psychologists for what you may feel reading this. I was in my feelings and needed to write something to get all out of my system. English is my second language so sorry for the misspellings. Sorry if the title doesnt make sence but its the only things that comes to my mind.

Part two

You were walking through the airport suitcase in one hand and phone in the other. His number appears on the screen and a smile on your lips. His raspy voice telling you that he was waiting for you in the parking lot, just like you agree, even without seeing him you can sense his smile while he was talking. You hop on the passenger seat and he didn't let you close the door that he was already kissing you like his life deppen of it. His hands on your neck bringing you imposible close to him.

-Hi to you too.- Your voice sounds happy and your eyes close in case this was a dream, again.

-I miss you so fucking much.- Your breath mixing with each other and your noses touching.

-Me too, Charles.- No pet names were needed, that was the deal.

-Come on, the summer break await for us.- A little peck on your lips and the car was moving.

The ride to your destination was full of low music, your hand in his while Charles was driving and now and then he leaves kisses in your knuckles. No work related talk, it was too painful that way. In a moment of your relationship, even when you were friends, the two of us could talk about everything. Even a look could say all that was on your mind and the other would knew exactly what to do.

You two met so many years ago that you lost count. The chemistry was undeniable, the same silly jokes and pranks, the way you move in sync when you were together and even when you weren't together but in the same place, the fond smiles and shiny eyes. It was a matter of time for you two to end up together, or a matter of putting everything on the table. Either way you confess your love for each other the same day, even in that you were connected.

The memories bring a bittersweet smile to your face. In another time those exact memories would make you the most happy person on the planet but right now, after all those years, it didn't. From the corner of his eye Charles could see you and he could bet he knew what was on your mind, because of the look on your face. Because he had the same look when he thought of the two of you.

Everyone knows that you two love each other. Your familys, your common friends and the ones that were not common, even his fans kwen it. But sometimes love isn't enough, sometimes loving the other person so much that it doesn't fit in your body isn't enough. A whole year of relationship where you only saw him in his summer break, in his home grand prix and two other races where it. That was how long the relationship lasted.

You try to make those memories leave your head and live the moment. Your hand in his, Levitating from Dua Lipa playing in the background, your head moving side to side in sync to the rhythm of the song, his hair moving thanks to the breeze and the summer in the air. It was he and you for a couple of weeks. Nothing else, nothing more. You tell yourself that everything was going to be alright.

The first days were amazing, like always. Traveling from here to there in Europe, days with his family that love you like you were their own, nights with your mutual friends clubbing and having the time of your lifes. Dancing glue to each other, drunk kisses and hot sex all night in every sourfaces that you were capable making up for all those days that you weren’t in his arms.

His mum love you, love both of you and was the first one to be over the moon when you were together, but also was the first one to knew that this agreement or this kind of relationship, if you could call it like that, wasn't healthy and it will end bad.

Maybe it was that the two of you were growing up, becoming more mature persons or maybe you were more nostalgic than normal. But seeing him driving the boat with that bandana in his head, that one time it was yours, made you walk down memory lane and end up on the day that the two of you called it quits.

Your relationship was based on constant facetimes, calls and that was it. It was like you were 13 again and it was a virtual boyfriend. His busy schedule and your first year in the job of your dreams didn't let you see him often. You knew he needed someone that was free to be with him travelling the world, encouraging him, giving him a shoulder to cry in his bad days and to be there applauding him in his best days. In a few words he needed someone that was capable of being there for him all the way in his career, not on the other side of the word in a 4 walls office 24/7. You knew that person he needed wasn't you. But the blame, if there was someone to blame, wasn't all yours. Charles also knew that you need someone to be there for you when the days in the office weren't the best, when you arrive at your house exhausted and not on the other side of the phone, traveling across the world, when you cried your eyes out from stress. When you belittle yourself thinking you weren't enough and capable for your job. He knew that you deserved some better, someone who could be there for you.

When the words “I think that we should take a time apart.” were said and the other nodded . When the moment was so fucking sad, so fucking heart breaking, because the two of you came to the same conclusion. Sad tears running in your faces and salty kisses. A whole day to make the mourning of the love that wasn't enough holding each other in your arms agreeing to be friends and love each other no matter what. Only to find you in his sheets a couple of months later agreeing to be together only in the summer break and love you all those days and when the summer ends the two of you would go to their worlds with the memories of the summer. Because the thought of not being together at all hurt much more than being together only a season of the year.

A little peck on your lips brought you back to the present and his smiley face melted your heart. Out of impulse you cup his face and kiss him love and tenderly. From outside that scene appear to be two people who love the other wholeheartedly and were happy and it was true but at the same time you were two persons who had to accept the fact to love the other only in summer time.

Charles knew you were a clingy person when the two of you were alone, but not in public. So it came to his surprise that you were holding his hand all the time and stolen kisses here and there but he didn't complain about it. Moreover he was happy and a little sparkle ignite in his interior.

Days pass like leaves falling from trees in autumn. One day he took you for a ride on his bike, because he knew how much you like it, and to have a picnic to see the sunset. Cute date nights and walks on the beach. Breakfast in bed and coffee spilled on the white sheets thanks to a hot kissing session that ends in sex. Everything was like a fairytale but those only exist in books and movies. Real life hurts like hell and not everything could be like we want.

You made up your mind two days before when you woke up and his arms were hugging your naked body to his firm chest. You couldn't put it into words the feeling that ran through your body and that was when you knew what you had to do. This day was the last one before you had to leave for the real one, it was always bittersweet.

For some reason Charles woke up feeling the most lucky man in the world, he was happy. Walking from here to there in the yacht humming songs and loving the way the sun kisses his skin. A complete breakfast on the table and kisses all over your face to wake up. Sex before and after breakfast, swimming in the cristal water and photos of the other in their galleries that would never leave your phones. You walk around with your hair wet in his favorite t-shirt and a red bandana in your ankle, nothing else nothing more.

After lunch you were sleeping in the front of the yacht with that red bikini that made him lose his mind and he was by your side. His legs flexed, his arm in your waist and his face hid in your neck. Your legs on top of his, your arms on top of his and your head lean on his. The two of you were like a puzzle that fit perfectly, but that didn't mean anything. Hour passes and you wake up, his left hand in your boob and yours on top of it, his face in your chest and your legs tangled. His face is clear of concern, smooth features a little sunburned, and you run your fingers tracing paths with his moles. The same feeling of two days ago appeared again and the only thing you could do was swallow the lump in your throat.

Charles seems to wake up and get you closer to his body, so close that you end up on top of him. Talking in his native language and raspy voice almost made you break into tears. He senses it and looks at you concern. -Il y a un problème, ma belle?

You shake your head with your eyes closed. -Don’t do that Charles, no pet names. We promise.- If you were with your eyes oppended you could see how he rolled his.

-Tell me what's wrong, please.- His seat up with you on his lap. His hands on your back and your chest close. The worry in his voice breaks your heart.

-We can't keep doing this. It's breaking us inside. Is breaking me inside.- Your words make him move away and frown his brows.

-What are you talking about?- You tried to get up from his lap and he grabbed your waist so you stayed still. -Don't do this for a second time, please.

-You need to let me go emotionally and physically, Charles.- He put his hands up and you started walking around, something you do when you are nervous.

-Why?- His eyes burning your figure.

-Because it's the healthiest thing to do. We can't keep doing this to each other. We can't keep fooling ourselves and you know it. You mean everything to me but I can't keep doing this. Every time I leave you after summer, I rip my heart out and I don't think I can keep suffering it.- Your eyes full of tears and your hands shaking a little.

-You think that it's easy for me? That all this it's easy?- You shake your head. -It 's not! Sometimes I dream about us and it seems so real, and when I fucking wake up I see the harsh reality THAT I DONT HAVE YOU COMPLETLY.- He was standing up and looking at you with red eyes.

-That is what I’m saying. Don't you see? This fucking situation is killing us. I know what you want from me and you know what I want from you but wanting something and having something it's not the same thing.- He looks at you without saying anything.

-Do you still love me?- You almost laugh at his question.

-How could you ask me that?- Charles looked at you in disbelieve.

-Because you are standing there, breaking my heart all over again that's why I’m asking you that.- You were trying so hard not to cry.

-Of course I still love you, just like the first day. But sometimes that's not enough. We agreed something years ago hoping that that way it didn't hurt that much but the only thing we agreed on was to prolong the heart break and make it bigger.- You took little steps towards him.

-I know you are right but don't want you out of my life. I dont think I’m capable of that.- His voice was so low and the look in his eyes was like a lost puppy.

-Its for the best Charles. I don't want to keep hurting you and me. It's not fair that we can only love each other for a couple of days out of 365 days a year.

-There’s nothing we can do?- His and your eyes were full of tears and his words broke you and seeing you cry made him cry.

-I won't let you give up your career to be with me and you won't let me give up my career to be with you. We love each other that much and we are fools for thinking that this would end well.- He closes the gap between the two of you.

-I can't believe I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you. Will you let me love you the time we have left?- Charles put his hands in your face and you nod.

The hours left of that day were spent with salty kisses, tears in each others body and sad and slow sex where not even an inch of distance could be beetween you two, your skins touching trying to became one or trying to remember the other for the rest of your lives, hands running through your bodies to remember it even with the eyes closed. You kiss his tears away and his kiss yours. The ride to the airport was in silence and fast but Charles held your hand in his glued to his chest, he was lost in his thoughts and you in yours. Getting used to the idea of not seeing or being with the other anymore, just the couple of minutes that you got together in the car and then that was it, all over again.

He parked the car, took your suitcase out and without saying anything you started walking to the airport door. He watches you walk away from his life but his brain screams to kiss you just one more time. Just like an addict, one more fix and that was it. Charles grabs your wrist and stamps a kiss on your lips like he did at the start of the summer break in his car, all those days ago, but this time it was full of sadness and love. He holds you close, but not too close. Just enough for you to count his slowing breaths, but not too much so that you’ll hear the slow cracking of his heart.

#charles leclerc #charles leclerc imagine #charles leclerc imagines #charles leclerc x reader #formula 1 x reader #Charles leclerc x y/n #Charles leclerc x you #f1 imagine #formula one imagine #formula one fanfiction #formula one one shot #formula one x reader #formula 1 x you #f1 x you #charles leclerc drabble #charles leclerc fanfic #charles leclerc f1 #charles leclerc one shot

[lazykcdoodler]

Thoughts on Louie and Della's Relationship + which of the triplets is my vote for Most Likely to hold any sort of longterm grudge against their mom (and why it would be Huey)

I was looking through the Della Duck tag in my blog, when I came across some discourse about the Della-Louie relationship dynamic that I reblogged a while back. I was reading thru the comments and saw someone's HC about how S3 Louie might still hold a small grudge against Della for stealing the Spear of Selene.

And I'm like, no?? If any of the kids in S3 and beyond would hold any sort of substantial grudge against Della for taking the Spear, it would obviously be Huey.

Wait, why did I think that-

Then because Huey's not explored enough, I had to take a step back and think about why I thought of him as the most likely candidate.

First, to work thru my thoughts on Louie and Della's relationship, and why he's less likely to hold a grudge against her in the long run. To start things off, he and Della already had their big clash and make up in the S2 finale. Remember this?

Their small arc in S2 did important things for their character development. That's not to say that they'll never argue again, or that they won't ever have problems. I can certainly see Louie using the Spear as ammunition for a future fight, if things came to that. But Louie and Della have other traits in common, aside from sharp scheminess and their tendency to think that they're the smartest people in any room.

Louie and Della are communicators. Yes, they're both sly and manipulative. But their success in that department comes from their ability to understand people. Dewey might've inherited Della's impulsiveness and natural charisma- but his inclination toward dramatics, his need to be well liked by others, and his desire to stand out among his family and peers, all mean that Dewey is more likely than Louie (but not Huey) to keep secrets and his personal feelings quiet. Della and Louie? Much less so.

It took Louie less than a year to voice his insecurities about his capabilities as an adventurer to Huey. When their mom came back to the Manor, Louie voiced his personal concerns in the very same episode. Louie is a crier. He complains a lot. He's an excellent orator. By far, Louie is the easiest triplet to read as a character, because his thoughts and his intentions are made known to the audience very quickly.

On Della's side of the equation, it's strongly implied throughout the series that she served as the emotional translator between Donald and Scrooge. Don't get me wrong; Scrooge and Donald love each other very much, and they understand each other in a way that very few others do. But when wires get crossed and either of them clam up on their hurt feelings (or fight about other things to avoid the elephant in the room), Della comes in to mediate. She voices whatever the other person won't say out loud. But that deserves its own post.

Regardless of any trouble between Louie and Della, I'm sure of three things. 1) Della and Louie love and care about each other, 2) Della is trying her hardest, Louie doesn't like getting into fights, and he admires passion as a trait in other people, and 3) in spite of everything- despite how agreeable Huey is, or how Dewey's such a momma's boy- out of the boys, Della's relationship with Louie is probably the healthiest in the long run. When it comes to his feelings, Louie is the most emotionally honest triplet. If he beats around the bush, it won't be for long.

While Dewey and Della ride the same wavelength (which causes its own problems), she grounded Louie in Timephoon and said those infamous words because she's been in Louie's place before. She knows what scheming and selfishness got her and her family, and she doesn't want Louie to do the same thing. Because she knows she was harsh- and she knows she might've been too harsh, since she just began learning how to be an authority figure- Della is probably less confident with her ability to handle Louie properly. Which means she's more likely to go to Donald for help with Louie's issues, far more often than she might for Dewey and Huey. Louie will always let Della know where she stands with him. And while she won't take his shit, Della will listen and reciprocate his emotional honesty with her own.

Huey is not good at emotional honesty. Don't get me wrong, he's great at helping other people. But unlike Louie, Huey is as emotionally transparent with his insecurities as a steel bear trap.

So. Why Huey? As I mentioned above, he and Della have stuff in common. They enjoy video games and exploring. They're both outdoorsy. Della is giving this her best shot, and Huey's a kind kid. They get along fine, so obviously things must be fine. Right?

Rrriiiigggghhhhtttt. So, why do I think that Huey's the most likely of the triplets to have any residual resentment toward Della for taking the Spear?

Dewey admired Donald's commitment to his family, but he had to learn to respect him. Louie respected Donald's passion and work ethic, but he had to learn to admire him. Huey never had to learn any of that; Donald has held Huey's respect and admiration from Day 1.

Huey's uncle has a terrible temper. He's easily misunderstood by others. He's the hardest worker on the planet, but he's often underappreciated. Huey can relate. This intrinsic understanding is the root of Huey's longstanding admiration and respect for Donald's character and Donald's efforts. Despite their pre-series financial insecurities, Donald successfully raised three boys on his own while providing them with a relatively middle class lifestyle. Despite everything, Donald is rich in the love of his family and friends.

When it comes to Donald's difficulties with public society, out of his brothers, Huey is the most empathetic to their uncle's plight. He might not be a father of three, but Huey holds the best understanding of the responsibilities that Donald undertook on their behalf.

And therein lies the rub.

Huey Duck is the Responsible One. He works hard, takes his duties as the eldest triplet very seriously, and helps Donald wherever he can. Whether by serving as a vocal translator during a bank transaction, taking charge of his siblings when their uncle is away, or speaking in Donald's defense when his brothers call him boring or lame, Huey tries to makes things easier.

Della probably did some of those things for Donald when they were younger, and vice versa. I'm 99 percent sure that Donald has been teaching her how to AdultTM since she got back from the Moon.

(Because her impulsiveness got her stranded for 10 years).

Huey and Della love each other. They get along great. They have plenty in common. But Huey Duck is by-the-book, and naturally inclined toward hard work- just like his Uncle Donald. Della ripped up the book, took a shortcut, and had to learn to become hardworking the hard way. Huey Duck is the Responsible One. Della had to take a crash course in becoming a Responsible Authority Figure after Louie's scheming almost erased the family from history.

There are many reasons to admire Donald, but his ability to wrangle the three of them is probably near the top of Huey's list. If Donald wasn't responsible before the SOS Incident, he certainly learned to be. Huey has his own lifetime of trouble dealing with Louie's cons, Dewey's impulsiveness, and their collective recklessness and disregard for Huey's work and Huey's passions. They're difficult and infuriating, but Huey tries. And whenever Huey tries, his respect for Donald probably rises. Because Donald isn't their sibling- he's their uncle, their guardian, their first parent since the day the triplets hatched. While the triplets probably had honorary family in their lives long before they met Scrooge (apparently, Mouseton and Duckburg are very close to each other), Donald was HDL's only parent for 10 years.

Because Huey's mom was reckless, and got stranded on the Moon.

At least Huey knows where Louie and Dewey got it from. (It's bad enough, coming from them).

But Huey Duck is the oldest. He needs to be a figure of strength and capability. He needs to be a leader, needs to provide support, needs to be a good role model. His family relies on him for that sort of thing. Mom's been through a lot. Uncle Donald has been through a lot. Huey spent ten years watching his uncle go through a lot. Huey needs to set an example. He's the oldest- which means he needs to extend a hand, make an effort, and bury any proverbial hatchet even if it kills him a little.

(Huey wants things to run smoothly. Huey doesn't want to be a burden for others. Canonically, Huey locks away a lot of his own problems and internal anxieties...until his control slips. Huey hates it when that happens).

Let the record show that I love Della Duck. She's one of my favourite characters. I love how hard she tries, and she's come amazingly far. I'm sure Huey appreciates her efforts.

I'm not saying that canon Huey holds a grudge, or that he secretly resents his mom. I just think that out of all the triplets, he's who I'd pick as the most likely to do so. And unlike Louie and Dewey, Huey knows how to hide certain thoughts and feelings successfully. Huey can be anxious, but he can't be mean (he's already weird and nerdy, he can't afford to be mean). Huey has spent his entire life honing his control over his less...socially acceptable emotions. (Hello, Duke). If Huey has grudges about Della and the Spear or anyone and anything else, I have faith in his ability to hide those negative thoughts for a long, long time.

Until he can't.

#ducktales #my stuff #meta #analysis #ducktales meta #ducktales analysis #della duck #huey duck #louie duck #dewey duck #the duke of making a mess #hdl #donald duck #scrooge mcduck #i really wish huey and webby didnt have to share a season

[raptorific]

i was raised by authoritarian fascists who mentally and emotionally abused me, isolated me, and controlled what i was allowed to consume. it took years of continuing to be traumatized by interacting with fiction that affirmed their behavior and told me that i deserved my abuse before i learned it wasn't normal.

so maybe saying people should bring their own judgements "from home" when interacting with media "beyond disney's ducktales" isn't the morally superior take you think it is. you are essentially blaming people for not being you, or having the same advantages you do. there is no allowance for people with learning disabilities in your stance either.

your experience is not universal. your knowledge and the circumstances by which you came into your knowledge is not universal. your ability to form your own opinions and think critically about media is not universal. some of us were denied those privileges in our formative years. try jumping down from your high horse and exercise some empathy once in a while.

Okay so like... a few things, right off the bat:

First, I’m sorry that happened to you! You didn’t deserve that, nor should people, nor should those stories, have told you that you deserved it. It sounds like those works of fiction made a point to spell out where they stood on the actions they depicted, if they affirmed your parents’ behavior and told you that you deserved your abuse. 

Otherwise, and I’m sure you’ll agree on this, the problem with the development of your moral compass was what was your parents told you and did to you, not the fact that there is such a thing as works of fiction that depict bad things like Fascism and Abuse without having characters look into a camera and say “this is wrong, do not try this at home.” Sometimes, in fact, works of fiction have things to say that can’t be covered by a story where bad behavior is always punished, especially since many stories seek to make the point that bad people often do bad things and get away with it, even though they shouldn’t. 

Should a story about a pedophile being caught and arrested, only to be let free on a legal technicality be discounted just because it doesn’t end with the pedophile being adequately punished for his crimes? Even though having the story end that way would defeat the purpose of the story itself, which is to illustrate how unfair it is that a sexual predator can walk free just because protocol wasn’t followed to the letter, which happens all the time in real life? Is “this doesn’t happen because good always triumphs over evil” which is an outright lie, a better lesson than “this does happen and it’s bad?”

I completely stand by my belief that adults engaging with fiction intended for adults should be able to form their own opinions and use their own moral compass to navigate those works without said works holding their hands and walking them through it. If they can’t do that, it doesn’t mean the work shouldn’t exist, only that it’s a bit too advanced for them, and if they want to navigate it, they should work on developing that skill rather than blaming the writer for making a story that’s too hard for them to comprehend. 

If, using Breaking Bad as an example, you watch a show about a man who abuses his wife, deals drugs, murders people, and you think it’s about what a hero he is for doing those things? Whether you got that opinion just because you don’t see the problem with meth and murder OR you got that opinion because you had terrible parents who left you unequipped to tell right from wrong, you should absolutely be expected to improve your ability to parse media before complaining that the writers didn’t go out of their way to avoid every possible reason why someone with a warped moral compass might misinterpret it. The problem isn’t that Breaking Bad shouldn’t exist, or that Breaking Bad should have to clearly and explicitly condemn each immoral act Walter does, rather than expecting adults watching a prestige television drama to have covered “Murder Is Wrong” at some point in their lives. The problem is with your moral compass, and that’s yours to solve, it’s not the job of every writer whose work you might decide to pick up to compensate for your inability (whatever its cause might be) to tell the difference between right and wrong. 

When I say “from home,” I don’t mean from your parents. I mean from yourself. I have to assume, having been through what you’ve been through, that if you (as an adult) saw someone in a movie acting the way your parents acted and did not say “child abuse is okay,” you would know what they were doing was wrong, even if the movie didn’t say “child abuse is wrong.” I understand that wasn’t always the case! But now, as an adult, you understand that child abuse is wrong, right? If you see child abuse happening in a work of fiction that does not say “it’s good that they’re doing this,” you understand that what the abuser is doing is bad? If so, congratulations, you are already following my advice. 

What really bothers me about this message, though, is that you’re asking me to disrespect a lot of people, including you. Those people who didn’t learn critical thinking, reading comprehension, and media literacy? I believe in their ability to gain those skills, and if they’re going to engage in media analysis, I expect them to try! I don’t think, as you seem to, that “the difference between right and wrong, and the ability to identify them in fiction” is too advanced for people with learning disabilities. Incidentally, you don’t actually know jack shit about what my academic experience was like, or what disorders I might or might not have, so like... I’d thank you to not try to use people with learning disabilities as a cudgel to shut people up when they say “if you’re going to tell writers how to do their job, you should probably make an effort to know how to read at the level on which they write.”

But why do you ask me to believe you’re unable to do this? I’m not going to disrespect you like that. I know you don’t think people with learning disabilities and people who grew up in abusive backgrounds are capable of developing their media literacy skills, personal moral compass, and reading comprehension, but I don’t have any such contempt for them. Believe it or not, I actually don’t think I’m superior to those people, morally or in any other way. I believe they’re fully capable of everything I’m capable of. 

You should be able to form your own opinions and think critically about media. If you aren’t able to do that, you should learn, and I know you can. You might believe that people are simply too stupid to ride the bike without the training wheels, but I don’t, so don’t put your hang-ups on me. Unlearn that shit. 

#Anonymous

[fakeikemen]

Katara's Grief

(This is my first attempt at a meta post and I know that this has probably been already done but I just needed to get it off my chest and go on a little rant and it kinda got long so bear with me.)

A lot of the hate on Katara stems from the fact that she keeps on mentioning her mother's death at every chance she gets and invalidates other people's pain to assert that her suffering is the worst of the lot.

And even though everybody is entitled to their own opinions, I'm gonna point out why I think the aforesaid claims are not exactly correct.

First we'll take a look at; Katara's Backstory:

We know that Kya is killed in a fire nation raid and that Katara had been the last person to see her alive before she leaves the tent on her mother's insistence. Only to come back a few moments later and find her dead body. This, in itself is a traumatising event.

So yes, her mother died. Other people in the story go through far worse. You're not wrong when you say that.

But what is more important in Katara's story is the aftermath of her mother's death.

As Sokka says while talking to Toph in "The Runaway" in B3 Ep7:

Sokka: When our mom died, that was the hardest time in my life. Our family was a mess, but Katara? She had so much strength. She stepped up and took on so much responsibility. She helped fill the void that was left by our mom.

As an eight year old, she had to force herself to grow up to step into her mother's shoes and raise herself and her elder brother and simultaneously look after the entire village after her father left to fight in the war. She had to do all of it by herself.

In face of all her responsibilities, she never really had the chance to simply be a grieving child lamenting the loss of her mother. She habituated herself to caring more about others than herself (We see this trait in the entire series as she acts as the stand-in mom friend for the entire Gaang with an exception of Suki and Zuko). She ended up bottling her feelings of grief, resentment, guilt and rage deep within herself.

She had to give up an extensive part of her childhood where most children focus on figuring themselves out, to become a mature and responsible person who was working as the immovable pillar holding up the family and even the whole village not much later.

She put up a strong front to help others and pretended to be fine even though she was hurting inside the whole time.

She could never find any closure from the situation. She never got over it.

Moving on to the criticisms:

1. Katara keeps on mentioning her mother like a broken record:

Here are the number of times Katara mentions her mother's death (not sure if that's all of it, lmk if there are any others):

1. In her first scene with Sokka

Katara: Ever since mom died, I've been doing all the work around camp while you've been off playing soldier!

2. A short while after she meets Aang

Katara: Well, I just want you to be prepared for what you might see. The Fire Nation is ruthless. They killed my mother, and they could have done the same to your people.

3. A short while after she meets Haru

Katara: I lost my mother in a Fire Nation raid. This necklace is all I have left of her.

4. A short while after she meets Jet

Katara: Sokka and I lost our mother to the Fire Nation.

5. In the swamp after she sees a vision of her mother

Katara: I thought I saw Mom.

6. In the Crystal Catacombs with Zuko

Katara: I don't? How dare you! You have no idea what this war has put me through! Me personally! The Fire Nation took my mother away from me.

7. A short while after she meets Hama

Katara: We completely understand. We lost our mother in a raid.

8. Repeated mentions in The Southern Raiders episode

(Most of the episode basically)

The first mention with Sokka is in the middle of a siblings' spat where she tells off Sokka for trying to act as if he were superior when it was obvious that in the face of the gaping hole that was left by Kya's sudden death, Katara had shouldered much more responsibility.

When she tells it to Aang, she uses it as a proof that the Fire Nation is capable of immense cruelty and destruction.

The Gaang travel all around the world and meet different people affected by the war in different ways. So when Haru, Jet and Hama narrate their own stories, Katara sympathises with them and talks about Kya's death in lieu of "I understand, the Fire Nation hurt me too."

After they got separated, Aang, Sokka and Katara each had their visions and after they get back together, they all mention their visions and so does Katara.

When left alone in catacombs with Zuko, whom she considered as the face of the Fire Nation— the same Fire Nation that had her mother killed and forced her father to leave to fight in the war, she has a meltdown where she rightfully accuses him of all the bad things he's done and then breaks down while talking about how the war has cost her i.e., by causing her mother's death.

The Southern Raiders is the episode where Katara hunts down the man responsible for her mother's death. If you think mentioning Kya repeatedly in this episode is uncalled for, then I don't know what to tell you.

In all the incidents mentioned above, Katara mentioning her mother's death is a very natural occurrence is the respective conversations. She mostly talks about Kya's death to either extend her sympathy or to use it as an example of the ruthlessness of the Fire Nation.

Another fact to be noted is that 70% of the Gaang's storyline is followed via Katara from a narrative point of view. Plus, being the mom-friend, she acts as the spokesperson. Considering that Kya's death is a major event that played a huge role in shaping Katara's life and is also the source of her severe, unresolved trauma, which acts as the driving force of her story, it is only natural that she brings up this topic whenever she is engaging in a deeper conversation.

It is us as the viewers who have seen her from the start and already know about her mother's death and we see her talking to multiple people about it. Which is why it might come across as repetitive to some people.

While, Kya's death is not necessary information that everyone needs to know, Katara talking about it never comes across as a forced or unnatural.

2. Katara invalidates others' pain because she thinks she has suffered the most:

First of all, if anything, Katara is the most empathetic person of them all. As the mom-friend of the group, not only is she their constant moral support, she also helps them untangle and sort out their own feelings. She is also able to tap into issues that aren't said out loud.

Instances of Katara helping and supporting Aang, emotionally are uncountable.

She is the first one to notice Sokka's sour mood in B3 Ep4 "Sokka's Master". And even though his insecurities seem baseless, she validates him (by saying "I'm sorry you're feeling so down" instead of something like "That's a dumb thing to say") and knows exactly what to do to cheer him up.

In B3 Ep7 "The Runaway" she has the insight to understand that Toph's unruly behaviour is caused by the mixed feelings she has about her parents even though Toph's herself never talked about it.

She even reaches out to Zuko in B2 Ep19 "Crossroads of Destiny" even though she used to think of him as the face of the enemy.

But then there's The Southern Raiders.

Ah yes, that episode where Katara is extremely OOC and a total b*tch.

Agreed that she said some things that she definitely shouldn't have said. But like, she's just 14?? And has been hurting on the inside since she was 8?? And pretended to be fine just for the sake of other people?? Like, there's a limit to how much she can have her shit under control?? And she did a real good job of Sokka's upbringing and taking care of the village and taking care of Gaang on her own?? Some people out there are really willing to forget everything she has ever done just because she was mean for 5 minutes?? A traumatised 14 yo shouldn't be villianised and called toxic because she got mad and lashed out at people that one time??

But here's my take on the scene anyway:

When Aang gets to know that she's going to go face her mother's killer:

Aang: Um ... and what exactly do you think this will accomplish?

Katara: I knew you wouldn't understand. 

Aang is a non-confrontational person who prefers running away from difficult situations as opposed to Katara who firmly stands her ground and is never afraid of confrontations. Katara had approached Aang only hoping that he would understand. But going by his dismissal, he obviously doesn't understand the burning need that she has to confront the man who had single-handedly destroyed her childhood. (Most people infer that what Katara means is that she thinks that Aang doesn't understand the pain of losing people. And so does Aang, I guess)

But things start getting even more tricky when:

Aang: Katara, you sound like Jet.

In all honesty, this is probably the most insensitive thing that she could've heard from anyone right then, let alone one of her closest friends. Hearing herself being compared to a homicidal maniac just because she wants to avenge her mother's killer. (No, I'm not justifying murder but there's a clear difference between homicide and avenging someone's death. And Aang may not be my favourite character but I do love him but this wasn't really a good thing to say either. And he wasn't even mentally distressed in the very least to be completely lacking tact or a filter.)

And then the situation escalates:

Sokka: Katara, she was my mother, too, but I think Aang might be right.

Katara: Then you didn't love her the way I did!

After 6 long years of Katara bottling in her dark feelings and letting them fester inside herself, she is finally letting them out and the first things she faces in a span of few minutes are outright rejection, invalidation of her feelings, comparison to a homicidal maniac and nothing akin to the unconditional support that she has provided to everybody. Her own brother tells her that he is siding with the boy who just compared her to a homicidal maniac.

Yes, accusing your own brother of not loving your mother enough is a very cruel thing to do. But both Sokka and Katara know that she doesn't entirely mean it.

But also, there is one very important factor in here:

In B3 Ep7 "The Runaway", Sokka says to Toph:

Sokka: I'm gonna tell you something crazy. I never told anyone this before, but honestly? I'm not sure I can remember what my mother looked like. It really seems like my whole life, Katara's been the one looking out for me. She's always been the one that's there. And now, when I try to remember my mom, Katara's is the only face I can picture. 

Katara overhears this conversation just as Sokka had meant her to.

This dialogue lets us know that Sokka's coping mechanism has made him suppress all memories of Kya and replace them with memories of Katara in order to attain a semblance of normalcy.

Both Katara and Sokka had very different ways of coping with Kya's death. Katara pressed down her feelings and tried her best to pretend to ignore them while Sokka partially succeeded in forgetting her.

When Katara first hears these words she is shown to be crying. But if she were to remember these very words while she was justifying herself infront of her own brother and a close friend for wanting to avenge her mother, it would've had a negative impact on her.

In her rage, she would've thought: "Of course he doesn't want to avenge mom. Because he doesn't think it's worth it and that's because he doesn't even remember enough of her to be mad about her death."

And for someone who has spent each day of the last 6 years trying to fill in the shoes of her mother and experiencing her absence everyday, the idea of forgetting her mother is a ridiculous concept to her.

Her thoughts would have quickly derailed to: "He didn't love her enough to remember her."

In light of these thoughts, saying "Then you didn't love her the way I did" doesn't feel out of the blue.

No, I am definitely not justifying what she said, I'm just laying out a possible explanation to why she said what she said.

Yes, she should've apologized to Sokka for this and I think that they definitely should've had a long conversation about their mother's death and how it affected them. Between Katara supressing her feelings and Sokka supressing his memories, i don't think they ever had this conversation.

But sadly we are given neither of these scenes.

Tl;dr: Everytime Katara mentions her mother, it's with good reason and I don't think it's fair to call a character toxic when they lack a mind to mouth filter for 5 minutes and say some mean things. And considering all that Katara has done for everybody, it isn't fair at all.

Peace out!

#antis really be out there ignoring everything she does to hate on her because of two lines she said #nvm katara is one strong badass girl stan her for good grades and clear skin #katara #atla #atla meta #meta analysis #avatar the last airbender #water tribe #kya #sokka #hakoda #gaang #atla gaang #avatar gaang #zuko #aang #toph #ira's posts

[boop-le-snoot]

PARTY FAVOURS I CHAPTER 31

First time reader click here

it's a mental breakdown *off-key kazoo*. One (1) incident of physical abuse from a parent. And Stephen Strange arc begins opening. Kind of angsty, but more of a filler chapter to resolve the parents-suck thing.

A couple of days was all it took for me to get back on my feet... Figuratively speaking. Neither Bruce nor Tony was particularly excited about me being up and about, I was carried to my desired destination point by one or the other on most occasions. Physically, my body grew tired very easily - I took a lot of sporadic naps throughout the day, more often than not falling asleep in someone's arms. Nobody minded, really - even Loki, who wasn't a touchy-feely person by any means, relented and acted as a body pillow for me when we crashed on the common room couch to catch up with the TV show episodes I'd missed.

Tony was very obviously on the verge of a nervous breakdown. During the few hours I had spent being chased by the Cursed Box Demon in my nightmares, all the leads towards the contractor proved to be cold. Natasha was the most irritated of them all - a late-night talk with Clint through the vent above my room revealed that she took it as a personal insult, unprepared for a simple merc to be so good at evading the world's most notorious spy.

Hulk kept taking over Bruce's body - eyes shining fluorescent green - at the times we were together, periodically clutching me to his chest with clumsy but careful movements. I pitied the mercenary should he encounter my gentle scientist - I didn't think Bruce would even attempt to hold back Mean Green. They seemed to have achieved some sort of symbiosis those days, switching between the two personalities in one body almost effortlessly. Circumstances aside, I was very happy that the tension and the persistent internal conflict inside Bruce had almost disappeared.

What made me upset was Strange. The sorcerer was behaving, well, strangely. He began avoiding all of us - his excuses of helping the search for the merc were flimsy, and Wong's long, deep sigh, when asked about the sorcerer's state of mind, spoke volumes. I suspected Stephen was either seething with anger or drowning himself in the sea of guilt; I had a hunch he was similar to Tony in a way that he hid his vulnerability behind an impenetrable wall of malice and sarcasm and dry wit.

Perhaps I was wrong. But the pent up frustration resulting from the conflict between my overactive brain and my uncooperative body had to blow - and my mother was the fire to my already short fuse. Somehow, she got ahold of the information that I was hurt indirectly because of the actions of the Avengers - and she had called the first available phone she found, which meant Pepper Potts got an earful of vitriol regarding Stark Industries, SHIELD, Tony, and everyone else, including my father. Stoic as she was, Pepper took it all with grace, replying politely to my mother until she hung up on the redhead.

Pepper placed an urgent call to Coulson immediately after that, making the already uncomfortable situation spiral into something truly disgraceful. It ended with strict orders for me to return home - not that anyone besides me and Coulson knew about it. I was a legal adult, I could choose to stay in the tower and my mother was told so on numerous occasions... Knowing her, I was well aware she wouldn't be above storming Tony's home with a small army of her lawyer friends.

Inwardly seething, melting with the anger sitting in the pit of my stomach like a sharp piece of ice, I managed to convince Tony to have Happy escort me home at the guise of gathering more necessities. Tony, being Tony, offered me to buy anything and everything I needed, but relented under my puppy-eyed pleading. It was getting harder and harder to lie to any of my men, the weight of it settling unpleasantly bitter on top of my already foul mood.

Happy grumbled in displeasure at being tailed by a nondescript black SUV - I knew SHIELD would have eyes on me 24/7 now, at least until they catch the rogue mercenary - but seemed to be happy at my general state of relative wellness in his own... Happy... way. Five-second side-grin and "Glad you're up and about, Princess," was probably the most I was going to get from the man who's nickname contradicted his personality. In my humble opinion, he should've been called Brick instead. He was built like a shit house, too.

The moment I stepped into the living room, wearing Wanda's spare sweats and Tony's hoodie, I took a slow look around the room and immediately knew this was it. Most of my anger had receded, courtesy of finally being able to get out of the tower and do something, but the ice in my stomach persisted. The smell of whiskey and cigarettes hit me like a wall, news playing on the TV doing very little to dissolve the viscid, tense silence.

"Sit down," My mother instructed me in the tone of voice she used on people in the courtroom - convicts, people who knowingly broke NDAs.

"I don't think so," I replied, refusing to give in to her bullying. I was being absolutely reckless, I knew it, and still it didn't stop me from standing up for my men. Logically speaking, it could have happened to me anyway, Avengers or not. The cursed box came along long before I'd even met Peter Parker or any of his rag-tag superhero friends.

"Fine," She turned around, steely eyes leveled on me. I was but a speck of dirt under her nails - for the first time in my life, I felt terrified of my mother. I knew what she was capable of. "Listen well, daughter of mine. I'm going to only repeat myself once," She started in that deceptively calm tone of hers. "You are to stop mingling with Stark and his... Company. Immediately. I do not want to hear any more of that Parker boy, either. You will not destroy your future and our family's legacy over some fling with a man twice your age. This little game has gone long enough and it's time for you to get back to reality."

The more she spoke, the higher my eyebrows rose. I was supposed to take orders from my own mother now? Something thin, something thin and crackling with electricity within me just snapped - like a live wire. The hairs on my nape stood up, goosebumps appearing all over my skin. "And what if I do not?" I asked, just as quietly.

I was not prepared for her reaction. One second, she was sitting on the couch and the other - my cheek was burning and my mother was standing over me, breathing the stench of alcohol and tobacco right in my face. I saw the whites of her eyes. "Then you are no daughter of mine. I did not raise you to be someone's cumrag and all this play-pretend scientist shit had to have ended in middle school. I hoped you'd grow up but apparently, you insist on being a baby," She was full-on screaming in my face, so rabid she was shaking.

All I could think of was... How wrong she was. How wrong she would be, her sad little world broken when she finds out just exactly how much I'm capable of. Long gone were the days where I timidly questioned my scientific contributions; thanks to my men - the same men she'd hated so much - I knew my value. I knew I could achieve the things that I wanted.

"If that is your choice, you have thirty minutes to get your shit and get lost. I will not have a whore of a daughter living under my roof," I had missed a good part of her rant; most likely, it consisted of nothing but meaningless insults anyway. After she'd finished, she gave me a shove towards the stairs.

It didn't bother me as much as it should, I think. My cheek smarted and somewhere deep inside, I knew that the eerie calm that had settled over me wasn't normal - on the surface, I felt only relief. The things I suspected all along, finally came to light - she didn't even perceive me as a human being, I was no more than a means to her end. A tool. A thing.

The waterworks started when I frantically shoved most of the shit I could fit in my three suitcases. Upset as I was, my scatterbrain did me a favor that time and I gathered most of the important things. Notebooks full of my research - projects that my mother had called a child's game, projects that could be patented in a week, add a tweak or two. With sudden clarity, I realized I needed none of her money. None of her... At all. In short, I was emotionally all over the place and at the end of it... None of it made sense.

I threw the credit cards with her name on them on the coffee table as I hauled out my suitcases, not sparing the bitch a glance. She was equally quiet, boring into my back with those steely eyes of hers. I felt my skin peel under her stare. In my distraught state, hauling and dumping the suitcases in my car was quick work. Detaching the house key and tossing the last things that connected me to her house on the floor at her feet was a spur of the moment decision; my mother was right, to some extent, and I still had childish tendencies. "You had no right to call yourself my mother in the first place. All you were was an egg donor with more money than you could make sense of. Enjoy your hoard, you damned dragon," I seethed, seeing her frozen in place with her arms crossed and chin held high.

Some part of me hoped she would apologize. That naïve, childish part - I knew my mother and I knew myself, and the trait that we shared was stubbornness. I sped out of the estate without ever looking back, driving aimlessly for a while until the honking coming from drivers around me began reaching alarming levels of volume; tears began flowing down my face at some point, all but obscuring my vision. I parked in the nearest place I could find, in front of a Waffle House out of all places.

Crying in a Waffle House parking lot, how pathetic was that. Logically, I knew at least five people had my back: Tony and Bruce, who surprisingly loved me back; Loki, who had become strangely clingy after my declaration - clingy in the best way. Together with Wanda and Peter, they made my heart warm and my eternally racing brain feel calm and safe.

I called my dad, he didn't pick up. I don't know what I expected of the man, but any and all remnants of my respect for him shattered, breaking into tiny little pieces as I helplessly banged my fists against the steering wheel in a fit of desperate rage. One look in the mirror and my already ashen complexion was made worse by red, puffy eyes and the blooming bruise on my cheek where my mother had slapped me. It was the first time she'd laid a hand on me; I wanted to throw up.

I sat in the car until my breathing slowed; completely and utterly clueless as to what to do. I had no home of my own, three suitcases worth of clothes and research that was useless without a lab to run experiments in, my car, and a small trust fund in my name. The recent incident with the curse box had left me mentally drained as it was, now, I could surely say that my head was empty: no thoughts.

And throughout it all, Stephen's avoidance crossed my mind. As if the self-loathing wasn't enough, as if my own blood, the people who were supposed to care for me, rejecting and ignoring me wasn't strong enough of a blow... The sorcerer's avoidance raised more anger within me. I didn't know why but the thought of him made me want to cry and seethe once again.

Logic gone out of the window, I typed in the Sanctum's address into my GPS with shaking fingers, figuring that if he wasn't willing to do the legwork, I will come to him myself and clarify things for all at once. The mixed signals were just a cherry on top of my sky-high problem sundae.

I banged on the door and it flew open immediately, a surprised sorcerer quickly turning concerned and panicky, noticing my general state of appearance. I was still wearing the same clothes and my hair was in disarray, my face looking somewhere between a coke bender and a manic episode.

"You," I stated darkly, taking a deep breath. "You need to tell me what the fuck is wrong with me and reject me, so I can move on already. And you," I poked the man in the chest, right above the fancy eye-shaped necklace, "Need to stop it with the mixed signals. Stop wallowing in self-pity. Whatever you are doing, STOP IT," My voice involuntarily raised in pitch from all those emotional rollercoasters I've been on that day. "Get back to being normal. Let me fucking live," I finished my tirade as the man stared at me, frozen and open-mouthed.

"I..." He stammered, eyeing me with concern. "What in the multiverse happened to you? What..?" He was so confused, pulling out his phone the moment I bailed my fists.

"My mother threw me out, my father doesn't give a fuck about me, apparently I'm a cheap whore with delusions of grandeur. You're avoiding me and everybody is waiting for me to blow up," I screeched, all but vibrating in my spot. "This is me blowing up. I want answers!" I demanded.

Strange recoiled from me, frowning and pocketing his phone. A deep sigh left him, the kind that made his whole body sag. He ran a careful hand through his hair before looking away and slowly pulling me against his chest, the door shutting behind me and keeping the cold out. I hadn't even noticed I was freezing; my feet were wet from the NYC winter slush and mud.

Stephen's embrace was warm and tender; I wanted to lean into it and push him away at the same time. I was so messed up, it was embarrassing. There was nothing acceptable about this situation - I felt guilty as soon as his face fell.

"Jesus Christ, baby," He mumbled quietly. "Sounds like you had one hell of a day. Let's go, I'll put on some tea," He rubbed soothing circles on my back, something that confused me - I just had stormed in and dumped a bucket of bile right on top of his head.

"I should go," I mumbled, yet had no real strength to move away from him.

"You're not going anywhere. I suppose I need to explain myself, too," He sighed, and despite his obvious discomfort, picked me up, letting my limbs to wrap around his torso like a monkey. I was careful to keep my weight off his hands, even if the trip to the fireplace room was short. As soon as I was placed onto the couch and my shoes were removed, Cloaky drifted over from a dark corner, urging me to take off my soggy hoodie, and wrapped itself tightly around me.

Turns out, semi-sentient cloaks were quite warm.

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