I just read your thoughts about Scarabia and Leona's arc development in game, and I got very interested.
There's very little info on Arabian culture online, at least that I've seen, and also African. A thing that makes me very curious is about their mythologies, folklore, and also music. We know a lot about food, since it's something so universal, but the rest is hard to get info on, unless it gets popularized or romanticized by someone else.
The scarabia arc is one of my favorites for a reason, and that is because I'm very sympathetic with Jamil, and very sad how his and Kalim's story together got so "twisted" so fast (ehe). Honestly there are so many layers to it that it would take many many chapters, and events, to close the situation. But I think it's good they left the future open like that, since it's something that can't be fixed overnight.
And also, *gets down* PLS PLS PLS PLS 🙏 I love the fluffy fics, are you going to also add Bolllywood songs? They are so good seriously it's so dancing and fun! I love Jamil so much and I MELTED with the headcanon short fic where we are taking care of him. I wanna hold his precious handsome face and just kiss it all over! He is so cute I will go FERAL-
hey qamar 💕 this was a pleasure to read! honestly, i feel like both the scarabia and savannaclaw chapters were too short? of course, we were introduced to the themes and then the whole conflict—resolution mountain for stories, however i just feel like they could have done more with the both of them.
also, i think the reason why the southwest-asian and african themes aren’t covered is because the source material is literally disney films 💀 like we get a warning before rewatching aladdin since they just now realized it was kind of racist (still a major part of my childhood though 😭 “a whole new world” in arabic is delicious). based on how yana has written other characters that are meant to be from south asia, there’s a big chance it would have been disappointing anyways.
plus, with scarabia in particular, there’s too many cultures trying to be represented due to how colonizers deemed all of the countries to be the same thing in different fonts 💀 you’d never confuse a nepali with an omani, but winston churchill sure did not care.
the original aladdin movie was meant to take place in baghdad, a city in iraq, but due to political conflicts at the time (george bush a war criminal regardless of saddam hussein’s crimes. the usa literally gave saddam weapons to kill kurds and then turned around and invaded when he wasn’t convenient anymore 💀). baghdad became agrabah—but the culture is still an amalgamation of west asian, south asian, north african, and like eurasian/turkish culture. im sure they’ve got stuff from central asia too 😭
the issue with this is that from ethnic group to ethnic group/country to country, the culture varies a lot. yemenis and palestinians are both arabs, but our cultures are vastly different, with yemenis having more eastern african influences and palestinians having mediterranean influences. i personally headcanon the scarabia duo as arab, but honestly, they could be from anywhere. for all we know, kalim is afghan and jamil is tunisian—it’s all up in the air due to the original source material. but i digress!! i rambled a lot 😭
ON THE BOLLYWOOD NOTE! omg this brought so many good memories back. we used to watch bollywood films with shitty arabic dubs 🥹 i miss those days. i love that idea and ive always wanted to write bollywood inspired fics, like based on the crazy and unrealistic romantic moments in bollywood. it’s just so much fun lmao. honestly, i think that’s a great idea especially when so many bollywood songs just lead the listener through a story anyways. im so glad you enjoy my fics!!! that’s very sweet 💕 have a great day, qamar, and take care of yourself
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June messages for you
Hello darlings 😌! This reading will give you some general messages about your upcoming June 🌞! Take a few breaths 😮💨 and use your intuition. 👁️
✨ Pick ~ A ~ Picture ✨
Pile 1
Your wishes are coming true ⭐️! June is telling you that no dream is too big to dream 💭 . The beginning of the month is a great time for you to starting “sowing the seeds” of your manifestations 🧑🌾 . The LOA and scripting methods will be useful to you. Have discernment in the middle of June. This is a very powerful time for you. I’m hearing “be careful what you wish for ” 🤫. You have the power to create your reality. Choose wisely what you want to bring into your life. Whatever you’ve been manifesting throughout the month, you will receive at the end of June 😱!
Confirmations: angel numbers 123, water signs ♋️ ♏️ ♓️ , copper, batteries 🔋, berries🍓, fashion 👗 , prayer, detachment, The matrix, black birds, money on the ground 🪙
Pile 2
Group 2 this summer your going to be shining 🌟! The beginning of June is very auspicious 🍀 for putting yourself out there and being noticed. Your meant to express your authentic self this June 🌞 . By the middle of June, you might start questioning if you want to keep being in the spotlight 🪩 . Don’t worry! This is actually healing and bringing wholeness to your inner child 🧚 . I’m seeing that at the end of the month you’re going to be recognized for a hidden/latent ability you have! I sense this is going to be a big surprise 🎁 for you as well. Because somehow this is something you never thought you had/could do 👀.
Confirmations: angel numbers 1111/11:11, Aladdin, genies 🧞♀️, peacocks 🦚, Aries, Capricorn, Cancer, Leo, projector type in human design, cameras 📸 , explosion 💥 , parade
Pile 3
You’re breaking free in June group 3 🙌! This June is all about you finding a way out of an undesirable situation. You might be hesitating to make decisions concerning your circumstances 😬. Don’t feel overwhelmed, keep your mind open 💆 👁️ ! This Jupiter North Node conjunction in beginning of June is going to bring some profound revelations to you 🗝️. These discoveries will give you strategies to help free you. Around the middle of June is when you’ll really notice and experience divine messages and downloads 💌. I’m hearing you could also receive a lot of messages from your dreams 💭! The end of June is when you can expect to see the ending of your current cycle and the beginning of a new and liberating one 💪🥳!
Confirmations: foot pain 👣, Harry Potter, Taurus placements, Sagittarius placements, Robinhood, fishing, swimming 🏊♀️ , essays, loans, 💵 funding, something being approved ✔️ , goosebumps , deja vu
Thank you so much 😽!!
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please do something with nancy wheelr i miss my baby
-🧞♀️
SAVE ME FROM WHAT I WANT - nancy wheeler
author's note: my beautiful jean genie anon, i love you so much for asking for this and i hope to god you like it. this honestly maybe might be a prologue to something bigger i'm toying around with (spot the references l o l) but-- let's just get into it, shall we???
content warning: nancy wheeler being semi in denial about her sexuality, nancy wheeler is a lesbian, mentions of pussy eatin but no actual pussy eatin, references to complicated stancy and jancy, mention of parent illness, a little angst and a little fluff
word count: 1.7k
The first time Nancy Wheeler kissed a girl was not a light bulb moment.
There were no choirs of angels singing, no great and fantastic revelation about who she is.
Because it’s not like she hadn’t thought about it before.
Nancy, a student of the human scene, has entertained the curiosity the same way one might like, want to see what happens when they throw a watermelon off the top of an eleven story building. The fall and the impact will surely be thrilling, but then there’s the cleanup. Did you know it’s illegal to throw watermelons off buildings in most US states? So theoretically, if she were to throw the watermelon, she could always toss and run. But then she’d have to live with the guilt of not going back and owning up to her mess. It could have really hurt someone. Maybe it did!
But the temptation to throw is still there.
Anyway, she doesn’t think about it that much. So it’s fine.
She only thought about it when her feminist lit professor paused at her desk, returning the paper she’d written about Gloria Steinem infiltrating the Playboy Club. Professor Gonzalez, who Nancy can’t quite bring herself to call Flo despite her insistence, has sleek black hair that tumbles over her shoulder like dark and deadly sand through an hourglass. It fell in a sheet then too, almost hitting Nancy in the face as Flo told her, “This is great. I know Gloria, and she would totally love this.”
Despite Nancy’s best friend derisively protesting that Professor Gonzalez does not know Gloria, are you shitting me, Nancy entertains daydreams where she and Flo and Gloria Steinem meet up in a dark bar for a gorgeous, stimulating meeting of the minds. In some versions, Flo goes home first, leaving Nancy and Gloria alone. In other versions, the versions that throw heat on Nancy’s cheeks even just thinking about them, Gloria goes home first and Nancy and Flo are staring at each other through the brine-heavy buzz of dirty martinis.
Nancy doesn’t even like dirty martinis.
She discovered this at some dorm get together or another, where one of her similarly-affected-by-pretentiousness coursemates attempted to mix them. Badly, she assumed, because they tasted like crap. She winced on every sip.
“Someone once told me these were supposed to taste like pussy,” her best friend had said from the common area couch, to which Nancy had snorted, Jesus!, a little gin and vermouth and brine coming out of her nose.
“And?” That came from a girl in a smart ponytail, who was wearing smart suit slacks and a smart sweater in ultra smart, muted colors. She had taken a seat next to Nancy on the floor by the fire, and Nancy found herself awkwardly adjusting her off-the-shoulder sweatshirt. She should have dressed up for this, right? But these common room salons were always happening, and it felt like it was so hard to gauge the dress code.
“How does that flavor profile match up?”
Nancy realized that the low tone this girl was speaking in wasn’t meant for the room. It wasn’t even meant for her best friend, who’d posed the question. It was just meant for her.
Ah, Nancy mouthed. “Um. I don’t know. I’ve never… tried it.”
Oh, the girl mouthed back, her head cocked toward her shoulder. “Maybe you should think about expanding your palate.”
Nancy’s stomach had jumped and she had drunk the rest of her shitty martini way too fast. By the time she had figured it was time to head to bed, her head felt like it was floating a couple of inches above her neck, and she was hand-in-hand with the smart girl from the fire.
Back slumping against the door in a clumsy stumble. Nancy giggled. The girl, who said her name was Sal, which Nancy thought was very glamorous, leaned against the door next to her.
“I wish I dressed like you,” Nancy said, reaching out to finger the arm of her sweater. Cashmere. Something expensive. People were always wearing expensive things here. They looked so grown-up, so continental, compared to Nancy’s department store skirts and pastel shades.
“We can swap outfits,” Sal hummed, the words coming from low in her throat as she tilted her head towards Nancy’s, “if your roommate isn’t home.”
Nancy Wheeler, even four crapshoot dirty martinis in, is not obtuse. Seeing double might make it a quadruple entendre, but she still knows one when she hears it.
“I… have a boyfriend,” she’d whispered, almost into Sal’s mouth. That was, at the time, only half true. She and Steve were still navigating long distance in a post-Jonathan-breakup world. It wasn’t perfect yet, so no promises were made. But history weighed heavy on them.
Sal reached out to pluck at Nancy’s old sweatshirt, the one she’d cut the neck out of to make it drape around her shoulders like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. It was a comfort thing, an old blanket, a teddy bear. “A Hawkins Tiger, no doubt?”
“Used to be.”
“And what does a Hawkins Tiger know about pussy?” This, Sal had whispered into the shell of her ear, arm tightening around her waist. Her lips met that spot of skin behind Nancy’s ears that she liked to have touched, how did Sal know that. Giggling lowly, Nancy tilted her head to meet Sal’s lips, the kiss so small and so delicate that it hardly felt like launching anything at all. No great pull, no absolute passionate urgency.
Suddenly, as Sal flushed her chest against Nancy’s and deepened the kiss, she had a vision of splattered watermelon.
Projectiles are so dangerous.
“They know… more than you’d think,” Nancy said, and smiled, and slipped away from Sal and into the darkness of her bedroom.
Better to be safe than sorry.
The second time Nancy kissed a girl, she didn’t even look like herself.
She had come stomping into her best friend’s off-campus apartment (this girl being one year her senior) with her makeup kit in hand, like she was cashing in a makeover coupon that was about to expire. “Please, help me out here. I need to– it needs to be different this time.”
Now, that statement could have meant anything; it being New Years Eve, which they were about to celebrate, it being the most recent iteration of her breakup with Steve, it being her entire vision of herself.
Nancy was fashioned into a vixen of epically out-of-her skin proportions, but she loved it. And maybe it was the bottle of cheap champagne they’d indulged in while getting ready, but she couldn’t quit gazing at her sparkling sapphire eyelids, the dress with chains for straps draping over her lithe little frame, the body waves her perm had been gelled into. She felt so far away from the hardheaded provincial do-gooder she’d admonished herself for being, a tiny bumpkin of a fish in the humongous, rushing, risque pond of college life. She felt alive and mischievous, like a nymph, her blood sparkling in her veins like the bubbles in her coupe.
She and her best friend set off out to a party, shivering against the sub-zero temperatures and whooping like hyenas all the way there. Arms linked, sharing what little body heat they had, their mood soon flatlined as they settled into the festivities– average college fare, you know, with all of their other friends already paired off for their New Years’ kisses. They were the only two single people there, it seemed– she, recently liberated and her best friend, taking her seasonal sabbatical from mistletoe-themed hookups. It reminds her too much of a boy she knew in high school, though she’d never admit that.
But Nancy knows. And Nancy loves her, despite the collegiate wild streak that has alienated her a little bit. And Nancy wanted to show her as much.
Before the countdown even began, Nancy entwined their glitter painted fingers and said, “Hey! Promise me something?”
“Anything, Pants.”
“Promise me we’ll always be as fun as we are right now,” she said, beaming. “Promise that no matter what happens, we’ll never lose it.”
Aw! her best friend had mouthed, and took Nancy’s heart-shaped face in her hands. She leaned in, lips pulling Nancy’s in. Like tulip petals, Nancy had thought, but hadn’t exactly known why. They kissed and kissed, as the countdown raged and the ball dropped into sparkling smithereens. And as she felt her best friend’s tongue try and brace against her lips, Nancy pulled away. They stood together, forehead-to-forehead, giggling again.
When their bubbles finally flattened, they spent the rest of the night and much of the morning talking about what life would be like if they could be together– because as much as Nancy loved her, and as fun as kissing her was, it was no watermelon. “It was a gas,” her best friend said, in that Fitzgeraldian way she had about her.
They would celebrate the anniversary of what could have been, if they only worked out every year after.
Her first year out of college, Nancy spent her nights praying for a thrill. Six months filled with pulling doubles at a college bar in Indianapolis, hospital rooms, speaking to doctors when her mother couldn’t, fighting against her brother’s sullen silences and explaining to her sister what remission meant. Misery metastasized into monotony. She started staring down watermelons at the market.
And she knows that’s a terrible thing to say and think, but it’s true. Even with all the support she had from Steve, who never knew exactly what to do when she’d report on her father’s diminishing health with the cadence of a newscaster, or even the help she was getting from Eddie, who took her on as a roommate in his shithole apartment. He got her a job in that divey college bar so she could be closer to her family as they all fell apart, shuttling her back and forth to Hawkins in his van. He was a better sibling to Mike than she ever was, she thought. Mike certainly seemed to like him more.
The first time Nancy Wheeler realizes she really, really, really wants to kiss a girl, she stinks of fryer grease and spilled beer. And she should have expected it.
Expected to see her, anyway.
Steve had told her about it weeks ago, but she had smoked half a joint of Eddie’s without telling either of them and zoned out. Very unlike the Nancy Wheeler that Hawkins had once known.
She should have expected to see her, but here she is. Like a shock to the system, a last alarm. Nervous hands curved around a glass of Pilsner. Baseball cap on backwards. Cheeks ruddy with the chill of the city.
“Oh! Hey– hi, Robin.”
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