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lesser-mook · 1 month

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Male Loneliness isn’t an epidemic. The epidemic is the overarching agenda to gaslight men 24/7 and keep them disconnected from women at all cost.

Not “separate”, because obviously people are still hooking up but disconnected on a cultural level.

Which is way more important, if you can desensitize people’s respect for a relationship, each other, or even sex.

Hedonism can take place.

“Male loneliness in a nutshell”

Depends, some guys who are alone aren’t lonely. Nor alone cause of rejection, some ppl don’t put themselves out there, women too, so Imagine how many lonely women there are.

The actual situation, is more men are walking away. “Epidemic” is just a buzz word to fear monger.

The narrative is women get more action cause they don’t have to do anything (laziness), action comes to them. so how many of them can maintain what they have and avoid ending up lonely or alone anyway?

Because if you don’t have to work to get into it, how do you appreciate being in one? (relationship)

Fact is, if you EXPECT action and that’s the culture? You become entitled, useless even, it’s inevitable. And if success for you is entitled because of your sex, you WILL NOT appreciate what you have with anyone. Whether it be with a man or woman.

Which is why many bi-women learn really quick, when they go on dates with women where both of them likely expect SOMEONE to pay but since there’s no man there? Uh oh, no XY-slave to carry my weight, I guess I have to be an adult and pay for my own meal like a big girl.

Kinda like how you should be doing on any date? (And those of you who do? Well, I’m not thanking you for it because I’m not praising you for doing what men do anyway: Being an adult. But good on you for not listening when society tells you it’s okay to be a parasite because you’re a woman.)

Women learn true equality when a man isn’t there to be expected to do everything because he’s “the man” but all the entitlements he expects because you’re “the woman”, that doesn’t apply to you though. He’s not guaranteed to your body, your time etcetc., but you’re entitled to free shit. Even his life protecting you. And what are you giving back to deserve any of that?

This is why women aren’t the enemy. Corrosive culture is the issue, Women/Men/ WOMEN specifically are either built or corrupted by the culture. It takes a village.

And when women are told 24/7 they do nothing wrong, how are they going to grow up, or evolve, or do better as people when they think they come out the womb perfect?

Those are the arguments articles like to AVOID just to say men being lonely is an “epidemic” to yet again make it seem like males are behind in some way & women are A-Ok or men are the problem in some way, YET again.

It’s language like that that causes discord, which is the agenda.

A society where men & women are united. Is a society that’s much MUCH harder to

Lie to, manipulate and, control.

Thus a society united, is dangerous to people who would sabotage it on purpose. (Like allowing illegal aliens to invade a country and then make your citizen pay for the TP that wipes the shit off their ass with credit cards.)

Orchestrated chaos, intentional chaos. To either distract or destabilize or both.

Maintain disconnect, give women more incentive to be promiscuous, destroy men’s pride, keep em separate. Keep the lie going & Control masses through confusion.

Wake up. Always look under the epidermal layer of what you’re being fed by media outlets.

And if you’re too plugged into your life (because who wants to sweat bullets 24/7 over conspiracy, and underlying truths that the society that raised us is a fucking cesspool, like we didn’t already know that but it’s WORSE than we thought. I PERSONALLY don’t want to spend every waking day, thinking about it, I got shit to do and personally like enjoying stuff. But-)

Find time to plug into what’s going on around you, especially if you have babies. Because (While I have my strong beliefs about bringing kids into this degenerating world. But when they’re here, they’re here, it’s done- ) the world you leave behind when you pass on, is a worse one they have to inherit.

So if we’re being sabotaged now? Imagine the hell your children are going to have to deal with. Which plays into the dropping birthrates, because if you don’t have kids because the world is going to hell, the birthrates cause problems anyway because we need people.

It’s a lose-lose, but you’re the only one, you’re not taking an innocent to hell with you. And if you have one already? Well, put money away now, make sure you have something you can pass onto them besides good intentions- If you haven’t already, and you keep your eyes on what they’re watching & consuming from culture.

Cause that’s where the seeds of corruption start, the eyes, the window to the soul. Corrupt the children, you corrupt the future.

Take the minds of the children? Control the future.

Fact is, parenthood is the solution to the majority of male /female relation issues.

Just train your little girls & boys, everyone (raises) their children, people don’t TRAIN their children anymore. Which is why men/specifically women don’t & are not expected to exercise discipline or restraint. (Hedonism culture anyone?) We’re raising girls to remain girls forever.

But nobody is going to tell you any of that.

Why? Because a solution is not profitable. Peace is boring, birthrates going up and people being happy is not convenient to some other parties.

Soon, what I’m telling you here will be considered slander, or hate speech. Truth & Fact will become bigotry, a crime. Accounts will be erased, to erase the truth.

YouTube is spearheading that agenda right now by shadow-banning people they don’t deem “sponsor friendly” so what do you think is going to happen when they don’t deem certain voices “Public-Appropriate”.

It’s coming. It starts with an “S”, and ends with an “-ism”. I’ll let you put two and two together. The individual sacrificed for the good of whole.

Thus,

The traditional family unit has been trivialized, by design. It’s just something you do because you can, nobody takes it seriously anymore.

Many People don’t treat sex, themselves, or each other with any respect. So marriage and children is just prolonged recreation at this point until you just drop it like a hobby, children included, I know many people that treat raising their kids like a part-time job.

It pays more to say women are leaving men behind, XY Chromosome is a defect, Women need men to step up, Male loneliness epidemic, etc etc etc. Women are never faulty in any way, never struggling.

I saw an article from maybe 2012 that said “Women are becoming more unhappy” and you know what? Someone made sure to dispel that fact by saying (paraphrasing) it’s a “myth” because blabla “Education” bla bla bla “Sexual liberation” bla bla “Freedom” bla bla.

But men being lonely? OH That’s a definite fact!!! Nobody is going to challenge that! Because women being unhappy without men is an impossibility, we need women to keep thinking they’re superheroes but Men? Yeah, they’re hopeless without a Missus to tell him how to twist a doorknob. Hence the stupid dad trope, a very very VERRRRY early misandrist propaganda piece from before the century turned.

Very parallel to the dumb blonde trope, but much more mean spirited because some of these dads don’t even know how to raise their kids because they’re like children themselves that the wife has to clean up after, and she deserves better.

That’s the accepted propaganda. Keep men beaten like dogs until they start liking it, craving it, accepting it as the natural- UNNATURAL order, and it starts with language like:

“Epidemic”, Why? Well to make it seem inevitable of course: Which is the point, to make men feel like they have zero control over it, so might as well surrender to it. Even though the solution lies with men and women.

But the issue is, that implies women aren’t perfect, if the solution requires women to leave their comfort zone or god forbid “do better”.

Constant agitation toward men.

Then Men get pissed, or walk away, or being angry (disproportionately for many, some cats are just looking for a reason to hate women and blame women for why they choose to never leave the damn house, improve their personality, or at least say “Morning” to a lady in passing), etc. and so birthrates drop.

(Talking to you America. Your births have been dropping since the 70s, and the 70s specifically, because that was back when girls were raised to be women and not grownass children. And men weren’t whipped 24/7 by their own homeland, no hyper-advanced video game culture coddling boys to replace reality, replace women with artificial abominations, effigy’s of women in Anime actually convincing some males that infantile dumbasses that want to be slaves is more appealing than real women-

Or Stuff like “macrophilia” didn’t exist as much on mass back then, why? Because men were happy & involved with women for the most part. And when men are getting positive female attention on a healthy basis, they won’t be trying to replace women with a negative projection of women. Some pathetic, deranged feverdream fantasy about female induced macro-genocide. OR anything resembling abuse, hatred, humiliation, infantilization and inferiority compared to women. Something relating to evil, which Women are not. Or a woman being your handler, even if she’s nice about it, the point is, she’s bigger than you, she’s in charge, you obey. Obey Government, like you do your little goddess in your head.

But that’s how they translate it, and share it with the world, like they’re compelled to do it. It’s fucking sad. You have mothers that hopefully loved you, and that’s how you see women? As destroyers? Galleries and Galleries and videos of the same simulation of horror and misery)

And all of it, all of that poison in their heads?(Men AND Women too, women are macrophiles too) Is100% Culturally induced, because that’s the brainwashing they’ve come to accept, and crave. Social-Conditioning.

Current Gen- Society broke a lot of people, not all, but too many. Too damn many, some of em are giving macrophilia exposure on youtube, just women boasting the fact that they abuse men’s insecurities for money, all for attention. Or producing more normalized genocide horror and displaying it like a playful fucking joke. It pisses me off you can get warning or strikes for having a hot take on YouTube but a mf can post a child flattening a city underfoot and that’s 100% okay, laughable.

But you know what these people are not talking about with this giantess shit? The psychology, and how the origin of macrophilia rarely correlates to anything resembling good parenting or a good, healthy, productive experience for a child. But if you need to “surrender” control to women or domineered to the point of planetary oblivion to feel safe or right, something went wrong. Badly.

And nobody/ rarely anyone is going to say it, because culture tells you if it feels good, “Just DO IT” remember that slogan from 2013–2016? Just do it. Hedonism propaganda. Cultivating ego-centrism, people question nothing and just indulge in anything, even insanity.

The epidermal (surface level) meaning is (don't hold yourself back, follow your dreams) but that's not what it's saying verbatim is it?. It's telling you: Question nothing, and just act on it.

You read what you read, and then internalize the meaning in behavior. It's called subliminal messaging.

Like if you're not hungry but you see an add about food, and now you're hungry. Same thing.

There's double meanings to this stuff. And it's no accident that it dropped during 2015 and what happened that year but I rarely see it nowadays after what they sought to normalize has been normalized.

Which is sad, because marriage is a right, but that movement was USED to spearhead something else entirely. That we didn't get, until now, where our dropping birthrates are becoming hard to ignore.

It’s all connected to destabilization. And it starts with the family and leads to compromising children.

So, Antagonizing the protector class of your species, will hurt only your species. Like it is right now.

Making women believe they deserve something for nothing will only hurt women. Like it is right now, and will continue to do so.

It’s lie after lie after lie, you’re being played. The people. Wherever you are, because this is all going to converge into a One singular convergence of Government. You already know what I’m talking about…

(Listen, don’t listen, I don’t need you to. But just keep it back of your head, that’s enough.)

And have been played for the past 25, going on 30 years.

And it starts with excitable language. “Epidemic”, lies. It certainly is not as one-sided as they want you to think.

So don’t wonder why birthrates are dropping, do not be confused or wonder why. Because the “why”? Well you’ve been living it your entire life:

It’s called culture, society.

When your village sets you up for failure, you will fail. Birthrates, recession, are simply one of many failures to come.

And do NOT wonder why, it’s on purpose.

If you have little ones already. You can train them to be disciplined, skilled, have integrity. But the world will still try it’s hardest to undo all of that, and it will burn to the ground around those kids as the generations pass. War is coming, and there’s no attempt to prevent it.

You’re being sabotaged.

The epidemic isn’t male or female loneliness, it’s western, privileged culture normalizing dysfunction, then blames men when cultural dysfunction from women & men results in more dysfunction for women & men.

When the solution is women and men, but the only party we address for improvement or blame is men.

Men aren’t perfect, Women aren’t the problem. But they’re both key to the solution, we have the control to fix at least a portion of the problem.

And it benefits some people, to keep you believing you have zero control to change anything and keep blaming each other for an issue you can both fix, but only together.

But the agenda, the entire point of said propaganda is to keep you fighting, arguing, questioning , distracted, scorned, and disconnected so that solution never comes to pass.

That’s the punchline.

#culture #women #men #western culture #loneliness #parenthood #question and think #wake up #lessermook #the solution is us #women are not the enemy #men are not the problem #think before you do it #think and feel

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sharkwing · 1 year

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Tumblr is the place of every take. We love ourselves some unconventional ideas because it means we can voice our own unconventional ideas without fear. We don't talk about twitter.

Gimme all your erisol headcanons! I wanna hear bout why you like Eri. I love this hopeless troll XD. He n Sol are my faves so Erisol is legit the best ship in my eyes lmao

This is so sweet! I agree, both sites have their issues but I’m so glad I kept my tumblr active after the 2018 debacle. I did leave it alone for a bit, but after being active on both sites simultaneously for a little over a year now tumblr is definitely the better user experience imo.

Eridan has always been my favorite troll!!! I was a big greek mythology kid and have always loved the ocean, so both Eridan and Feferi were my automatic favorites (act 5 act 2 was a difficult time for me 🙃). Eridan won out just BARELY as my *favorite* favorite bc 1.) more obvious mythology/mediterranean history references, 2.) seahorse, 3.) wow, I like history too! and 4.) the cape is just…a LOOK. He’s a cool character! All the trolls are cool characters! It’s always bummed me out that people write him off as “the worst one” when he’s clearly just like. A bumbling edgy 13 year old from Planet Murder trying to be a supervillain in the most ineffectual way possible. It’s hilarious. Feferi even calls him out SUPER early for not actually having the guts nor the desire to go through with his “doomsday plans” and that’s…very endearing to me?? I’m not sure why a lot of people just gloss over that and take this kid’s word for it that he is DEFINITELY actually evil and he is DEFINITELY gonna blow everyone up! Including all his friends! He’ll do it! Any day now! Prommy!!! AM I BEING A GOOD VIOLET YET ARE YOU PROUD OF ME DUALSCAR

Sollux is a whole different can of worms, because I really didn’t appreciate how cool he was until I came back to homestuck as an adult. I think in any medium other than a webcomic he would have been one of my favorites from the jump, but for some reason I just found it really hard to read his text color as a kid and had a bad habit of skimming all his logs. I love him now though! There are a million cool things about him, but thing that always gets me with him is how angry he was with ghost Aradia for concealing the world-ending nature of sgrub from him. His society is shit, treats people like HIM like shit specifically, and if he’d lived to adulthood on Alternia he probably would’ve had the worst fate out of anyone in the main cast, including Karkat and Feferi—still, he was furious that the game he was working so hard on in hopes of saving his world ended up destroying it. Even though he had every right to be like “lol sucks for everyone who died but this works out great for me.” He’s just. So good.

I don’t think I have that many groundbreaking erisol headcanons. I just like them separately as characters and I think that (citing erisol as evidence) they’re WAY more similar than they like to think they are, and they would probably be much better friends (yes, I’m an “all the trolls are friends” person) if their circumstances were different. I know Pesterquest was kind of controversial and not everyone takes the routes as canon, but Eridan’s route kind of cemented for me that on some level, Sollux realizes this. That’s why he keeps answering Eridan’s phone calls, and why he seems to flip flop between wanting nothing to do with him and engaging with his antics. In both universes Sollux spends a lot of time talking to Feferi, and Feferi is still Eridan’s friend, even though she’s been frustrated with him for a long time. At a certain point Sollux has probably heard all the bad AND the good, and he knows that Eridan can be better, and that makes it even more frustrating that he goes around enforcing a system that he doesn’t even believe in because he’s desperate for approval from…does he even know who he’s seeking approval from?? Because the bastard could be getting approval from real people who care about him if he’d just stop being so terrible all the time, but NOOOOO. And that kind of frustration and desire to force someone to improve is exactly what caliginous relationships are supposed to be about!

I guess I hc that Sollux is rarely angry that Eridan is pitch flirting with him period, but that Eridan’s attempts at establishing a rivalry are so shallow and based on cheap shots at Sollux’s blood color and him “stealing Feferi” rather than anything about Sollux specifically. At first glance anyone would peg Eridan as the tryhard in their situation, but to Sollux it feels like he’s the one who’s gone to the trouble of finding actual personal things to dislike about Eridan, and Eridan is being lazy and not meeting him halfway at all. If pressed I do think that Eridan would be able to articulate that he cares about Sollux for reasons beyond that stuff (because seriously, he’s calling this boy in the wee hours of the morning just to complain at him he is down horrendous), but he’s not exactly good at the whole “introspection” thing, so. A slow burn ship for sure :/

#this is so long i’m so sorry #thank you for the ask though! this really cheered me up!#It’s been a couple days now so i hope you’re still around and can see that i appreciated the thought :’)#shark.txt #anon #ask #eridan #sollux #homestuck

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jackalopey · 2 years

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this is about ridiculous online discourse so theres your warning to not read it

but i am so fucking tired of grown adults thinking that theyre in the right for going out of their way to belittle and patronise children on the internet

does it matter if a 15 year old thinks your ship is creepy? like, seriously, why does that bother you? if you’ve been tagging it appropriately then the 15 year old shouldnt be seeing it in the first place, but also, if you dont like what someone’s saying you can block them

i don’t understand how people can reach their late 20s, early 30s or older and still not know how to maturely handle disagreements, but then, i guess it’s not that uncommon for adults to be insanely disrespectful towards children

not like the whole ‘discourse’ is actually ‘adults v minors’, anyway. it’s ridiculous that it gets characterised that way. there are adults who are ‘antis’ and kids who are ‘proship’ (which, you know is a whole issue itself, but let’s not get into it)

im not an ‘anti’ or a ‘proship’ because i think both labels are absolutely ridiculous and reductive, and if you make shipping discourse a major part of your identity and youre not a 15 year old im going to think youre fucking weird and want nothing to do with you, though id take being around an ‘anti’ any day

because, like, what impact is the anti really going to have on the real world? you can block them and move on. if it gets really bad you can turn off your anon or spend less time online. sure that sucks for you, and im not pro-harassment, but there are practical things you can do to limit how much of an impact it has on you

but rape culture is a thing that impacts every survivor, which is what’s being perpetuated when people romanticise sexual assault, csa, grooming or incest. i can’t get away from a society that thinks im to blame for my abuse, that im over-reacting being traumatised, or that abuse simply doesnt happen. i cant just turn my computer off and get away from it because its fucking everywhere

‘fiction doesn’t impact reality’ is absolute bullshit and if you’re an adult you must know that’s true. the simple fact that you’re writing or reading fic is evidence of fiction impacting reality. there have been countless sociological studies on the impact of fiction on how we think, propaganda is a thing, and fiction impacting reality is the entire reason why things like positive representation matters. or do you also think its fine for every fictional character to be a white cishet man?

to you, what you’re writing or reading about might ‘just’ be fiction, and you may not think that impacts your real life, but to me and many other survivors it reflects things that we’ve really experienced, and attitudes that we’ve seen

you write a fic where someone gets groomed, but the fic presents this as cute and romantic? yeah, well, that’s how my abuser wanted our relationship to be presented, too. you write a fic that involves an incestuous relationship, but hey it’s not a big deal because it’s not like they lived together, or it’s not like they had a big age gap, or it’s okay because they really care for each other? cool, that’s another justification that abusers use. you can’t separate these things from reality because these are real ideas that real abusers use to control their real victims

what’s a fun ‘taboo’ story to you is a lifetime of real trauma to someone else

this shit is why i don’t feel safe engaging with fandom. i love writing, i love discussing fandom with other people, and i’ve even started to enjoy drawing, but it feels like more trouble than it’s worth. do i really want to risk having an episode because some self-centered, patronising git thinks that pedophilia is actually super hot? hell fucking no

and like, i dont think either side is ‘right’, because it’s not like either side is one set ideology, it’s a bunch of different people all saying different things. but when the worst crime of one side is saying ‘thats a problematic heigh difference’ and the worst crime of the other side is saying ‘that 6 year old is sexy’, it’s really fucking easy to decide which one i’d rather deal with

(and yes i know im strawmanning both sides there, thats the point)

like god yall are so hostile towards survivors, and you either don’t know or don’t care, but i’m erring more towards the second one, because i bet not a single proshipper would ever be willing to actually listen

literally all i want is to be able to engage with fandom without having to see this fucked up discourse, but yall keep proving my point by refusing to tag shit

(and none of this is even getting into the way some of yall think youre above criticism. you want your fanwork to be respected but only when people are kissing your ass. cant take basic levels of social critique, throwing a tantrum if a 15 yr old doesnt want to see your porn)

#.txt #discourse /#ill probably delete this later #im just having a bad day #and im so fucking tired of not being able to engage with my hobbies #because i dont know when im going to see the most fucked up thing ever #idc if anyone wants to talk about this but im not here to argue it #if you disagree with what im saying please do us both a favour and hardblock me #no one needs to read this bc its literally just a rant #abuse /#csa /

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writing-prompts-for-friends · 4 years

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Questions to Help World Build

I’ve realized I have a big problem with my writing. I am awful at world-building. Like, I just start writing without thinking about the world. And since I write fantasy. Well. That’s pretty no bueno and leads to all kinds of problems down the road. So I did some brainstorming with my friends and we created a list of over 100 questions to help think about our stories’ worlds and make them more concrete. Thanks to everyone who chimed in and gave me a hand!

A traditional Japanese clock, wadokei, that counted hours from 9 to 4, starting from sunrise, and then starting once again from sunset. (1-3 were not used for religious purposes.) They’re super interesting and confusing. You should definitely check them out.

Temporal

Is your story set in the past, present, or future?

Specifically, what year(s), month(s), day(s)?

Are days 24 hours? Or does time pass differently in this world?

How many months are there in a year? Is it a seven day weekday? Does the concept of weekends exist?

Have most existing societies developed a timekeeping device?

Is there a way to communicate across long distances?

The concept of time zones is still relatively new to our world. Prior to the late nineteenth century, timekeeping was a purely local phenomenon. Each town would set their clocks to noon when the sun reached its zenith each day. Do standardized time zones exist across the world?

Geographical

From a planet perspective, is it Earth? If it is not Earth, or an alternative version of Earth, what is it like? Is gravity the same? Does it have a moon or multiple moons? Can you see other planets? Is it closer or further from the sun? If so, what impact does that have on the climate and passage of time?

What town, state, region, country, continent, planet does this story take place in? What are its bordering/nearest neighbors? Draw a world map if you want.

What kind of land is it? Landlocked? Mountainous? Along the sea? Desert? Tundra? Tropical forest? Plains? Agricultural? Industrial?

What kind of plants and animals are common to the area? Are there any that do not exist in the real world?

What are the most common crops and livestock in various regions? What geographic features influence certain regions ability to grow/raise their crops and livestock (positively and negatively)? Are the regions diets strongly influenced by what they are able to grow themselves, or do other circumstances (like strong international trade) allow them to have more varied selections? How does religion influence what is considered ‘normal’ to eat?

What, if any, natural disasters are common to the region? Earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, monsoons, blizzards?

How many seasons does it have? Are any longer than others?

What is the typical weather like for those seasons?

Does the region have any unusual geographical features that set it apart? Perhaps there is some weird thing like Devil’s Tower just chilling out. Or hot springs because of volcanic activity?

Is it easy to travel from place to place within the area? Is it difficult to travel because of terrain/technology issues, or because travel is strictly regulated?

Main Locations: Cities

Many stories take place within one city. In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, a character remarks, “So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams.” What personality does this city have? What soul does it have? What does it dream of when it slumbers? If your story takes place within a settlement, town, or city, give these questions some thought.

Exactly where is it located within the lands you conjured up in the above Geography questions? Does it have a bay? A river? Does it butt up against mountains? Draw a map of the city.

How big is the city? Is it compact, or sprawling?

How old is the city?

What is the history of the city? How did it come to be? What tumults and triumphs has it seen?

What is the population? Is it currently increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same?

Does the town have any claim to fame? Any tourist attractions? What are they? What’s the story behind them?

If it’s a big enough city, how many and what kind of districts does it have? Residential, Commercial, Industrial, etc. Where are they?

Are there any areas that are deemed unsafe? If so, where are they and why are they unsafe?

Is there public transportation? What kind, bus, tram, train, subway, monorail? Is it good?

How do people get around this city if not by public transportation?

Are the roads narrow or wide? Crisscrossing in a methodical grid or higgledy-piggledy?

What are the buildings like? What materials are they made of? If they’re wooden, are they new wood, old wood? If they’re painted, what colors? If they’re stone, what stone? If they’re brick, is it new red brick or blackened, crumbling brick? If they’re glass and metal, are they sparkling with new hope or dull and jaded?

Are there many skyscrapers? Or are most buildings 1-3 stories tall? What does the skyline look like?

Are there many parks?

How is the city powered? Coal? Hydroelectric? Wind? Nuclear? Has it always been so?

What is the city’s main source of revenue? Agriculture? Tourism? Manufacturing? Mining? Something else? A combination? Dive deeper into this. If it’s agriculture, what do they grow? Tourism–what is famous? etc. This will help to determine what a lot of people do for a living.

What are the demographics? Ethnicity, age distribution, distribution of upper, middle, and lower class, etc.

How many schools are there? Universities? Are any of them good? Do they specialize in anything? Do schools even exist? Perhaps there are clans that teach their children everything they need, for example, or education isn’t viewed as important.

Are there any particular landmarks within the city that standout?

How many and what kind of restaurants are there?

Are there supermarkets, open air markets, or both?

Where do young people go to spend time? What about adults?

Do people there bustle or do they amble?

What are the nights like? Does the city grow quiet, or does it grow rowdy?

What does the city smell like?

If you had to give your town a color, one that represented its personality, what color would it be?

Main Locations: Houses (or buildings, but mainly houses)

There are many stories that have a house or headquarters or hospital or some sort of building as their main setting. These questions will mostly be geared towards helping you figure out a house, but you can apply these to other buildings too probably.

Exactly where is the house located within the city or outside the city? How does your character usually get there? Draw a map.

What year was the house built?

Was this house built by the current family or their ancestors? Who else lived in the house before the current dwellers? What were they like? Did they leave their mark on the house somehow?

What style is the house? Bungalow? Cabin? A shed? A cave? (makes the following questions mostly useless if so lol)

How many stories is it?

What is it made of? Wood? Brick? What color is it?

Does it have a lot of windows?

Are the curtains usually open or drawn? Are thee curtains at all?

What does the front door look like?

Is there a porch?

You enter the front door. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you use the side door because the front door is for show or something. Anyways. You enter the house. What room do you step foot into?

Draw out the floor plans for each floor. How many rooms are there? Where are they? How big are they? How are they connected? What color are they? What style of decor?

Is there a basement? Is it used or is it just a home for spiders and darkness and unwanted things? How about an attic? Crawlspace?

How many bathrooms?

Are there any rooms that only certain people are allowed to enter? If so, why?

What is the flooring? Carpet? Wood? Tile? Linoleum?

What does the house smell like?

Government/Military/Economy

In other words, “the boring stuff,” if you ask me. But this is a very important aspect of any world.

What sort of government is in place? Democracy, oligarchy, etc? Is it a just or corrupt government?

How are goods exchanged? Bartering? Money? Coins and bills? Credit cards? A specific kind of sea shell? Lol

What are the police like? Strict? Lax? Is there a curfew?

Do taxes exist? If so, do the people feel as though they are heavily or unduly taxed?

Where is the intersection between theology and law? Is it common to have religious leaders in positions of power? Are laws based around religious ideology, or is there an effort to keep them separate?

Is there an organised structure devoted to halting criminal acts? Are they corrupt? Who runs the organisation? How does their reputation change based on demographic? What is the history of the organisation, and how does that history influence how it operates today?

Regarding potentially criminal acts, what is the elgality of prostitution, sex work, ect.?

What about drugs and other illicit substances? Alcohol, illicit drugs, recreational use. Legality, festivity, age limits, etc.

Underbelly. How prevalent is crime, what sort of crime (scaled from pickpocketing to human trafficking) is there? Are there areas that have bad reputations because of it?

Regarding war, are there currently conflicts in the world? Are they international or civil wars? How common is it to have an active war? What is the history of war? What does current warfare look like (Is it dudes in metal suits swinging swords? Have longbows been invented? Gunpowder? Tanks? Missiles?) Is military service mandatory or voluntary? How is the military seen? Is there a sense of patriotism for the military, or does the common man fear it?

Is there stigma around certain genders entering the military? Are come genders regarded as better recruits than others? Is it illegal for some genders to enter the military? Does a person's sexuality affect their ability to serve?

How has religion influenced war? Have there been holy wars in the past? Do any religious institutions hold their own military forces?

Cultural/Historical

I’ve put these together because events in history lead to cultural change. You can apply these questions not only to the world/country, but also the city or even the neighborhood, workplace, or school that your story takes place in.

What is the history of the region? Who was it settled by? Was another group of people displaced? After that, did any new cultures come in? Did they get along?

Were there ever any wars or serious conflicts in the region? What was the cause and what was the outcome of the war if there was one?

In our world, the internet, social media, and film/tv are massive cultural drivers. They determine the latest fashions, jokes, topics, and expressions. What are the big cultural drivers in your world? Books? Plays? Radio? Oral tradition?

Is it a collectivistic or individualistic society?

What languages are spoken by your characters? Is multilingualism common?

What sorts of cultures can be seen? Do any clash? Do any mesh?

What sort of foods are most common?

What superstitions do people hold? Is there a version of “knock on wood” or throwing salt over your shoulder after a funeral? What are the roots of these superstitions?

Are there religions? If so, what are they? Do any conflict with each other? Are zealots or extremists an issue?

Does slavery or indentured servitude exist?

Are there any class or caste systems? If so, what are they, and what does an average day look like for a member of each class/caste?

How does a person's appearance change from country to country? Do certain countries have very distinct fashions? If so, are the fashions influenced by religion, surrounding countries, the cultural majority or international trade partners?

How does a person's clothing relate to their social standing? Is it very easy to assume someone's roll by appearance alone? Are there punishments for dressing above or below your social standing?

Does the society place a great deal of importance on a person's presentation, or is the society more lenient on such things?

Is there an emphasis on conformity to a dress code, or is individuality encouraged? How strictly is clothing regulated by gender binary? Is it commonplace to see a man and a woman walking down the street in the same cut of clothes? Is there a social stigma when a person does not conform to the most common form of dress for their gender?

How are sexual rights viewed? Does the LGBTQ community have the same rights as people outside the community? How are sex acts between people of the same sex viewed? Is it legal? Taboo? Are there cultures that encourage those relationships in some circumstances (like how the romans were down with guys with guys in the military)?

Are there any groups of people that are victims of prejudice? If so, who are they, who holds these views against them, and what views specifically are they?

In regards to gender, do certain societies hold differing beliefs? Is there a commonly accepted number of gender identities or does it change regionally? Is the most common gender spectrum a binary, or do certain racial and cultural differences allow for a wider range to be seen as the baseline?

Are children raised by their biological parents or are children considered to be in the care of the wider community? Is it common/acceptable for extended family to raise children, such as parents needing to study, work, or serve time in the military? Is adoption a common thing in society? Is there a stigma around adoption/being adopted? Do cultural or religious views impact how adoption is seen by the wider community? What is adoption like for a single perspective parent? When adopting, is interracial adoption accepted/common, or is it seen in a negative light? Are some societies more open to adopting children outside of their own race?

How is sex and virginity viewed? Does religion influence it? What is the age of consent? What is appropriate on a first, second, third date? Is sex something that is talked about openly, or something taboo? Are you supposed to wait until marriage? Do couples stay monogamous while dating? Do some regions place higher importance on virginity than others? Do some place higher importance on one gender’s virginity than others?

How is marriage viewed? Are arranged marriages a big thing, or are people free to choose? Is monogamy common? How is a marriage symbolized? A wedding ring, or something different?

How is divorce viewed? What is the divorce rate? Can people remarry?

Magic and the Supernatural

If magic or spooky stuff doesn’t exist in your story, disregard this section.

Does magic exist? If so, who can use it? What are the limitations to their magic? What things are they capable of using their magic to do? What things are they incapable of doing?

Are there laws against what kind of magic can/cannot be used? What sort of laws? Who enforces them? What are the punishments for breaking said laws if they exist?

How does the existence of magic affect religion? Are there religious institutions that infuse magic into their worship? Are there religious sects that see magic as immoral and in direct opposition to their faith? Have there been conflicts in recent or ancient history between religion and the supernatural? Do some sects employ people to hunt and/or enforce law over the supernatural?

Assuming that magic does exist, is it taught? Are there different schools of magic? Is there a system of ranking for magic users based on their skill level?

Do non-magic users look towards magic users with respect or fear?

What role does magic play in this world? Has technology not advanced because magic solves many problems? Or has technology advanced and the use of some magics has become unnecessary?

Are there any mythological creatures/monsters, such as vampires, demons, skinwalkers, dragons, or other creatures of your own creation? Are they common? Do people believe in their existence? Do people worship them? Where can they be found? Do they interact with humans? Do humans fear them or try to put up with them as they do nature?

Do the dead continue to exist in some form, such as ghosts or zombies or the like? Can the dead be summoned or brought back to life?

Are there human/supernatural hybrids? Perhaps a half-demon half-human, for example? How are these people viewed by their peoples, and by society as a whole?

How has the supernatural influenced war? Do armies tend to have a mix of regular and supernatural soldiers/weapons? Have there been wars between the supernatural/magical and those without? How does magic influence a person standing in a mixed army? Is it more likely for a magical being to be promoted than a non-magical being? Conversely, are supernatural being forced into service and seen as pawns?

The End!

Please feel free to reblog and share, and add on any questions you think should be added!

#worldbuilding #world building #creative writing #writing fiction #writing tips #brainstorming #creative writing methodology #writing prompt #writing exercise #writing prompts for friends resources #long post #writing inspiration #writing prompts for friends

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demetriandelibinaryboyfriends · 3 years

Text

So I was thinking about the parallels between Cobra Kai and Fight Club--mainly that macho dudebros who idolize Tyler Durden and/or the entirety of the “Hawk” persona are entirely missing the point and the general commentary that toxic masculinity is like...bad--and before I knew it, my mind wandered to an Elimetri Fight Club AU and I realized it’d be like...beyond perfect??? I’m shitting myself with excitement so y’all get to hear about it, buckle up!

BIG BOI SPOILERS FOR FIGHT CLUB BELOW, DON’T KEEP READING IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET AND YOU WANT TO

Anyways just imagine Eli as the protagonist, “Hawk” as Tyler Durden, and Demetri as Marla (genderbent, obviously lol). Like maybe Eli stays in Cobra Kai under Kreese’s influence and as a result, his mental health just COMPLETELY tanks to the point where his grip on reality itself starts slipping (which isn’t really THAT far-fetched, considering that not a single goddamn person has tried SENDING THIS POOR KID TO THERAPY and every adult in his life is FUCKIN USELESS) and he’s in a bad enough place a few years down the line to actually start seeing Hawk as a completely separate person. Of course, before this happens, he eventually feels like he has to “grow up” and give up the “Hawk” persona--he stops taking karate, he goes to college, he gets a “normal,” well-paying, respectable job. But even escaping from Kreese, even assimilating into what seems to be a peaceful and stable life, it doesn’t make him happy--he figures all his bridges are too far burned to mend, and his old friends who he alienated now probably hate him too much to ever want anything to do with him again, after all the shit he pulled while in Cobra Kai. Never having the best social skills, Eli is certainly no natural at making new friends either---he’s decently friendly with some of his coworkers, but that’s about all he has in the way of a social life. He’s lonely, he’s frustrated with his repetitive, empty life, he’s bored with his job, and perhaps worst of all--the remnants of his Hawk personality never really left. That aggressive streak, that thirst for violence, that burn for a fight--it’s still there, no matter how deep he’s pushed it. Then one day, on the way back from another dull business trip, he meets a guy about his age who wears his hair just like Eli wore it back in high school. He even goes by the same old nickname Johnny Lawrence once gave to Eli--how about that? Hawk encourages Eli to get back into karate to get out some of that pent-up aggression, but isn’t interested in doing it with all the “suffocating constraints” of a normal adult martial arts class. Before Eli knows it, he and Hawk have started an underground “Karate Club” where basically, anything goes.

Demetri, meanwhile, has gone off the deep end arguably just as much as Eli--his grief at losing his friendship with Eli sent him spiraling into a deep depression, and he ended up feeling so numb and unmotivated that he dropped out of school, turning to drugs and alcohol to cope and to just be able to feel something again. His new self-destructive tendencies and crushing depression have completely exhausted and driven most of his old friends away--Miguel, Sam, Chris, Nate. Now, scraping by working at a dingy convenience store, Demetri is nearly as alone as Eli. He starts going to random support groups just to have someone to talk to--imagine his surprise when he runs into his old friend Eli Moskowitz, infiltrating support groups for exactly the same reason. He’s ecstatic when Eli reaches out, wanting to reconnect and try being friends again after all these years. However, with as much as both their minds have already spiraled, it’s hardly going to be rainbows and butterflies for Demetri just because Eli is back in his life. And the same Hawk who once snapped his arm in half is not nearly as gone as Demetri thinks...

As relieved as Eli is to have Demetri back, his new friend Hawk...complicates things. Hawk treats Demetri with open scorn and contempt, chastising him for being a “weak pussy” whose relative maturity and logical senses (which, Eli can’t help but notice, have seemed to increased back to what he remembers from high school since Demetri started spending time with Eli--almost like the self-destructive habits and drug and alcohol abuse stopped as soon as Demetri had something to live for) are “suppressing” the violent, primal urges Hawk so much revels in. And yet, somewhat unexpectedly, Hawk lusts for Demetri like Eli never expected. Before Eli knows it, Hawk and Demetri are regularly fucking like the world is on fire and they’ll never get the chance again. And Eli doesn’t know what to think--he can’t imagine why Demetri would want to sleep with someone who treats him like utter filth the rest of the time. And Eli doesn’t much like the way Hawk treats Demetri, either--to the point where he questions if he really wants to be around his cool new friend as much as he thinks. And of course, there’s the fucking awful icing on the cake to top everything off--Eli is falling in love with Demetri, and he knows it’ll end terribly.

Demetri is...concerned, to say the least. It’s starting to baffle him, how Eli is flipping back and forth seemingly at random between the timid, meek best friend he had for years and the hyper-masculine asshole with spiked hair who made his life hell in high school. But he vows he’s going to get Eli through...whatever this is, and he’s not going to let Eli lose his mind. Demetri refuses to lose him again, no matter what it takes. But that might be harder than Demetri thinks, given the fact that the karate club Eli’s started with “Hawk” is already getting WAY out of hand...

But Demetri can’t say anything about that, can he? After all, the first rule of Karate Club is you don’t TALK about Karate Club. Well...unless you’re talking to yourself about it where you think Demetri can’t hear, anyways. Things are just getting more insane by the day.

~~~

Legit SO HYPED about this, like I can’t stop thinking about how similar the Eli/Hawk and Narrator/Tyler dichotomies are??? Like we’ve got this meek, timid, rule-following guy who just does what other people want him to for the most part and tries not to stand out, and then we have the side of him that has all this explosive, repressed anger at the world and the society he’s forced to live in (even if it’s just the “society” of high school lol) and this destructive hypermasculine energy and it’s lowkey FASCINATING to me??? And Tyler even has flashy, flamboyant clothing the same way Hawk has flashy, flamboyant hair!!! And of course Demetri tries to be the “Marla” in that he’s the Voice of Reason who’s the only one who really tries to help this guy battling his own head. And some of Marla’s dialogue to the narrator/Tyler sounds EXACTLY like the kind of thing Demetri would say when Eli is flipping back and forth between “Hawk” and “Eli,” it’s PERFECT. Like I am SO DOWN for this AU, if someone writes this I will sell you every limb on my body. It’d be dark as shit and probably can’t really work without both Eli and Demetri being a LITTLE insane, but ohhhh baby, that’s what I love about it <3 THE ANGST! THE DRAMA! THE PAIN! I live for it!!!</p>

Anyways Fight Club AU with the Binary Boyfriends 2021 please and thank you

#hawk x demetri #demetri x eli #binary boyfriends #hawkmeat #eli x demetri #demetri x hawk #elimetri #demetri cobra kai #eli moskowitz #hawk #cobra kai #alternate universe #cobra kai au #fight club #fight club au #my textpost

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3laxx · 3 years

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Bonebreaker

Having at least some extra endurance and strength proved to be quite useful and it was fun, too. With the classmates in her old school, it had been fun at least. Here in Glandus, it was a massacre. --- At one of the infamous Bonebreaker duels Hexside vs Glandus, Luz makes a risky decision that she may not even regret.

This is honestly just a self-indulgent impulse Oneshot again xD I watched a YouTube video of some soccer injuries (YT recommendations amirite) it somehow didn't let me rest anymore. That produced this Oneshot that I've been contemplating uploading for quite some time, especially because of where I took the inspiration. So yeah, have this I guess? Oh yeah and I have no idea of all the medical stuff so don't ask me plis this is fictional

Ao3 / FF.net

---

Glandus and Hexside had always been rivals. That’s how it has been, that’s how it would be years from now.

And not just rivals in any sporting event that Bonesborough held, no, their schools were rivals everywhere they went. Dedicated bus lines were running through the same neighborhoods for Glandus and for Hexside students.

Even the teachers weren’t spared from the rivalry. They claimed they knew the best, that the other school didn’t teach their subject right, and that all their students were better than those that went to the other campus.

Luz hadn’t really gotten any of that.

Just because she went to Glandus because it was closer to her home, she didn’t get hating on Hexside all the time. Sure, she understood what the school spirit meant to most and she was picking a side whenever there were matches of competitions and cheering for her own school, but she didn’t get the threats and the separation Bonesborough had to suffer through that. It went as far that parents started moving neighborhoods, just to be in the area of their kids’ school. Not because Bonesborough was big, but because no Glandus parent wanted a Hexside neighbor.

Sometimes it even went as far that some people quit their job because their colleagues went to the opposing school in the past. Her Mama had told her of that.

Luz had never been one to hate Hexside. Actually, she quite liked their campus – that’s what she could tell from looking from afar, at least, because she hadn’t even been allowed closer than that – and she had met some Hexside kids in the mall once.

They hadn’t exactly been side picking either and they had spent a nice day together, even if their contact had stopped there because of their opposing schools.

Willow and Gus had probably righteously feared bullying, upon being seen with a Glandus student.

Even if Luz had never been much of a Glandus student herself.

She had moved here when she had been thirteen and spent one year in this new city by now because her mother had gotten a better job here than where they had been before. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy being here, it was just that the whole hatred going on had gotten on her nerves. In Glandus she had never really been accepted because she had been new and the kids here didn’t want her included in any activity because she was no “true Glandus student”, but the label still kept her from making friends.

By now Luz had just accepted that she had to finish school in Glandus and be done with the whole class society in Bonesborough. Maybe someday, her mother and her could leave again, leave this whole stupid town behind and not worry about school up into her adult life.

Well, to somehow make the Glandus kids accept her, Luz had joined the soccer team. If she was fighting for their school, at least they’d know she was no threat?

She hated that she had to actively prove to be a part of their school. In her old school, it hadn’t mattered in the slightest if someone was cheering for the school or not. People had just gone there because they had to, because they wanted to study and learn or because they were actively part of a team and wanted to play sports. Here, it was a whole different thing.

If you didn’t go to all games, you were immediately flagged as a traitor, and if you even remotely showed any sympathy towards the other school, you were automatically bullied.

Oh well.

In her old school, she had been on the soccer team as well, and while never being a major player, she had been relatively good at chasing the ball off of the opposing striker and send it back to the other team’s side again.

It had just been school soccer as well, so nobody had expected her to play like a professional, and that’s where she had belonged. In the comfortable mediocrity and at least being active three times a week during practice. Her Mama had told her that was important for her health if she decided to spend the rest of her free time reading and gaming.

Luz supposed that was right.

Having at least some extra endurance and strength proved to be quite useful and it was fun, too.

With the classmates in her old school, it had been fun at least.

Here in Glandus, it was a massacre.

They had let her play once, in a practice match, and she had immediately known that this was no joke. The Glandus students, desperate to be better than the opposing team of Hexside, were playing in a whole different league.

Not even during the practice match, where some of the players had been forced to wear similar jerseys as the Hexside team wore, they had spared their own teammates. Luz had wandered to the bench almost immediately, as per the order of her coach, and had only been allowed to participate in practice from then on.

Of course, she had also been there as Glandus had played a match against Hexside for her first time. The game had been brutal.

Some students had jokingly referred to it as a Bonebreaker, which is what they called the matches whenever Glandus and Hexside ran up against each other. And Luz had been dumbfounded to find that, in fact, no less than three students had been carried off the field with broken bones.

After that, she had voluntarily stayed on the bench, be grateful for the extra sports activity in her weeks, and otherwise kept her mouth tightly shut whenever the coach would announce their next run-up team and their active bench players. She was so glad to be a passive one.

That was until the new season started and she had to watch the Hexside versus Glandus matches again. She didn’t like being at these matches. They usually ended in heartbreak and a lot of people crying while the team and the fans of the winning school gloated and shoved it in everyone’s face.

Especially once it was clear that one school was starting to fall behind in the season.

Which was the case with Glandus this year.

Falling behind usually meant losing, and losing meant berserk mode.

Luz had never seen anyone play as aggressively as her team once more and more points went to Hexside for scoring in several matches.

Glandus had already switched out their goalkeeper and Luz hadn’t heard from them in a while. She supposed they had been excused from school for extreme bullying and having Hexside score so many goals. They also had switched out their team captain in between games, to a much more aggressive character, a striker, who screamed at their team and urged them to attack as much as they could.

Meanwhile, Luz had worked to slip lower and lower on the passive bench. She absolutely wanted no part in this.

Especially since, if Glandus was playing more aggressively, Hexside was, too.

Usually, towards the end of a season, their schools’ hatred grew to unfathomable extents and their matches went so brutal not even the referees cared to whistle at every foul play.

Right now, Luz was watching a match happening again, and she honestly just wanted to hide her eyes and ears from the brutality on the field and the roaring audience behind her.

Her Mama had stopped coming to her games because she couldn’t watch as well, and Luz would’ve loved to stay home with her, but sadly, she had mandatory first-row seats to the massacre that was this match.

Another foul play sent a Glandus student to be carried out by paramedics and their coach switched in their next to last active bench player.

Luz was safe for the moment.

She was the second passive bench player because the coach hadn’t been able to deny her skill in defense techniques, but for now, they were sending in more strikers to give Hexside the final nail in the coffin in their tied match.

And the last minutes were running already. They were approaching the ninety-minute mark and in ten minutes, everything would be over and Luz could finally go home again.

Her gaze went over the field, following the ball and doing her best to drone out the hateful comments her coach made about the Hexside team. The team captain of the Hexside team took the ball and ran up to their goal and while Luz didn’t really want them to score a goal, because she was afraid her team would straight-up murder them, she also hoped they’d make it.

The Hexside team captain was a girl around Luz’s age, with dyed green hair that she kept tied back in a half ponytail. She was really good at this.

Like, stupid good.

Luz imagined she must’ve spent hours over hours perfecting her technique and perfecting her dribbling, her ball control, and her reflexes.

The captain that went by the name Blight dribbled her way up to the front and double passed the ball to a colleague of hers, then she shot and Luz almost held her breath. But the Glandus goalkeeper threw his entire body against the shot, no matter the consequences, not to let it pass.

Frustratedly, the Blight captain gave her teammate a high five and jogged back across the field to get back into her position as the left side striker, rubbing over her face. When she got closer, Luz saw that her golden eyes were furious.

Apparently, she was a true and furious Hexside student and must’ve dreamt of scoring the goal to relieve her team and her audience.

Honestly, Luz was impressed with her technique. She wouldn’t have minded this Blight girl scoring in the least, because if she did, she’d deserve it.

Didn’t she already score the first goal for Hexside?

Luz couldn’t remember.

Her teammates began sprinting after the ball again and Luz squinted her eyes at the captain. She seemed like she was in total control of the game and that the ball only obeyed her. How did she do that?

Almost, Luz considered asking her for a few lessons, but then she remembered that she was wearing the wrong jersey for that.

A girl with pink hair chased the ball off of their defense again and ran for the goal, but was quickly stopped by a foul, and Luz groaned. Her team just wouldn’t stop kicking after their enemies’ ankles and trying to get them out of a good run. In her opinion, the match had to be flowing, not constantly interrupted.

Luckily, her fellow teammates on the bench considered her groan as a reaction to Hexside getting a free-kick. She would’ve been in serious trouble if they had any doubts about her loyalty.

Once again, the match restarted when Hexside lost the ball to a Glandus midfield player who jumped in and secured the possession, before running back up front and passing the ball to a striker who was in position. They were intercepted by a few Hexside defenses but managed to run up to their opposing goalkeeper and try to shoot a goal, yet the Hexside keeper was really good. Her practiced hands caught the ball right out of the air and she immediately threw it to a teammate to try and get the ball away from their goal.

Luz leaned back, her eyes scanning the field to spot the green-haired captain running with the number 12, observing her closely.

She didn’t belong in a school team. Luz was sure that this Blight girl could go much higher if she wanted to, but her coach probably wouldn’t let her join another team to get back at Glandus for winning last season. Or maybe she chose to stay here and shared the hatred of the schools against one another.

Either way, Luz wouldn’t deny her abilities. And if she chose to stay in her school’s team, she was free to.

The Blight passed the ball to the pink striker with the 3, then she ran up front, gracefully maneuvering around a Glandus midfield player, before taking back the ball from number 3 and trying the other side instead, passing the ball to a defense teammate that ran up with her.

Just when she was about to shoot, a suit blocked Luz’s view. She looked up to see the furious expression of her coach glaring down at her, then she gulped.

“Noceda, get up and warm yourself up. You’re up next.”

Grimacing, she looked up the active bench, where no defense players were left. Huffing, she quickly got up not to play the risk of angering him more, then she started jogging alongside the sidelines.

Oh boy, she sure was glad her mother wasn’t around to witness her getting sent on the field. She would probably die worrying for her.

And honestly, Luz was not up to playing against Hexside. The longer the tie remained, the more brutal the match became and usually, the worst injuries happened in the last few minutes when the players tried everything to get the ball where they wanted it.

She jogged around the field, doing a few exercises to get her muscles warmed up and her ligaments properly stretched before the coach already whistled in a completely run-down midfielder and lined her up for next.

Luz hopped a bit in place, puffing her cheeks in an attempt to calm herself down, then she looked around. The entire passive bench seemed glad that she was up and not them, while the active field players looked down on her once they realized she was gonna be in.

She wasn’t the worst but she knew, if the Hexside captain would choose her for a duel, she was done for. Jumping in place, she held her hand out to be switched in but the player coming in barely touched her fingers, shooting her a glare. Their intentions were clear.

If she was to lose this match for Glandus, she would be in hell.

Luz gulped and jogged on the field, then she searched her place on the left side defense, grimacing. She would absolutely have to face the Blight girl, after all, she played left-side striker. This was not going to be good. Despite being light and flexible, and able to squeeze through tight spots, Luz was nowhere near outplaying a captain like her in tactics or technique. She was just a damn good soccer player.

Keeping the ball in her vision and moving along with the instructions from her Glandus goalkeeper, she did her best not to die from the nerves. Here, on the field, the cheers and boo yells seemed that much louder, that much more intimidating. Luz moved along with her teammates when they approached the goal and passed the ball a few times with her defense mates, then she dared a shot towards the middle, a high cross into the penalty area, where her team captain was smart enough to accept with their chest and guide to the front lines. The shot to the goal was defended by the Blight she had seen earlier and shot into the sidelines, making Luz groan. They almost had it.

Her defense teammate gave her a clap on the shoulder, a gesture that could’ve been a compliment but Luz knew better. She had proved her worth – for now.

Gulping, she ran herself free again and accepted a pass from a midfielder, then she tried once again over the left flank, but this time, she ran into the Blight team captain. Her golden eyes looked that much more intimidating up close and after a short duel, Blight stormed past her.

With the ball.

For a short moment, Luz looked down to her feet where the ball had been before, dumbfounded, then she chased after the captain. Thanks to not having to control the ball, she was just a little faster and chased it off her feet in the last moment before she could make a preparing shot into the box just before the Glandus goal. The audience cheered when Luz passed the ball back to her striker, but soon, she felt a shoulder hitting hers and Blight sneered when she caught her gaze.

Apparently, she was not happy that a passive bench substitute had taken her ball and eventually foiled another attempt at the goal. Luz furrowed her eyebrows but kept quiet about it when the Hexside captain began sprinting upfront to her own goal again.

Luz was just happy she hadn’t made a complete fool of herself.

The last five minutes came around and another two Hexside players had been fouled, one even having to leave the field because of his injuries.

The game picked up now. They knew they would have at least 5 minutes additional time due to all the fouls and interruptions the match had to suffer, so it was actually going to be another 10 minutes.

Luz did her best not to let the Hexside players pass through her defense and while she did okay on the most part, their strikers were more technically skilled and were working together better than Luz did with her teammates.

They didn’t trust her that much, and while she did try her best, she only had the ball whenever she was defending the goal. Her teammates never passed to her and Blight and the pink one quickly picked up on that. The attacks shifted to her side of the field and Luz had to do a lot more suddenly, trying to have a foot in Blights dribbling or foiling her passes to the main striker.

Glandus had another failed attempt at the Hexside goal and Luz had wisely stayed behind, because suddenly, Blight started sprinting towards her like mad.

Luz suddenly realized what happened. The pink-haired striker sent a long shot up front and Blight accepted it with ease, running towards her full sprint. Luz knew, behind her, there was only their goalkeeper. She had to do her job.

Searching for an opening in Blight’s sprint, she closed the direct shot to the goal. Blight hinted to the left but Luz sprinted right and as she expected, the striker’s foot pushed the ball right into her feet.

Turning, Luz ran to the sidelines, attempting to shoot back upfront but number 12 was faster. She pulled on her jersey and she considered taking the foul but decided against it, not deeming it enough to get a whistle, so she changed directions to the back of the field and towards the Glandus goal to shoot back to the goalkeeper, but Blight had her feet in her sprint.

When Luz went to the ground yelling in pain because the opposing team captain’s spikes had dug right into her heels, she felt the girl behind her stumbling as well and falling on top of her.

That hindered any attempt of getting up and kicking the ball out of a corner shot. Luz looked up to see the ball rolling over the backline. This was a corner for Hexside.

Huffing, she suddenly felt the anger surging through her and grabbed behind her to shove the Hexside girl’s shoulder while she was still lying across her back, causing her to kneel back and let Luz get back up as well.

“You did that on purpose!”, she accused the captain over the roaring audience of Hexside cheering for their corner, and the accusing screams from Glandus that Luz had been fouled.

The Blight just shrugged and glared at her.

“I didn’t choose to fall over Glandus scum, your dirty feet caused this.”, she shot back and Luz got back to her feet, rubbing her ankle. So, turned out the Blight did share the school’s hatred for Glandus.

Growling, Luz retreated back to her goal without getting a whistle from the referee who had been too far away – and didn’t consider anything below broken bones a foul anyway – to get ready for the corner.

The team captain of Hexside followed her and Luz turned around to shoot another glare at her, but the green-haired girl didn’t even acknowledge her anymore. She was focusing on the corner shot her fellow striker, the pink-haired one, would deliver.

Luz huffed in anger, still feeling the spikes of number 12 hurting in her heel, but she couldn’t focus on that yet.

After the corner shot, she’d wait for a little moment to adjust her kneepad and shoes and be done with it. Unfair players, all of Hexside, she grumbled to herself, before shaking her head. She would not start hating Hexside for playing unfairly. It was an unnecessary foul but she didn’t get the whistle. And besides, nobody probably knew the Blight flopped all over her just to prevent her from getting up and saving the ball to the sidelines.

Huffing and jumping, she waited for the pink-haired striker to deliver the shot. She raised her arm, then she ran up and shot the ball.

Suddenly, everything around Luz went into slow motion. She bent her knees to wind up, then she jumped, along with a few players around her. The ball was flying towards the closer goal post so Luz quickly realized she had jumped unnecessarily since she had positioned herself on the far side goalpost.

Watching one of her teammates, she went down again. The Blight captain had jumped as well but the Glandus player forced her shoulder down, pushing himself up higher. The ball came sailing down on his head and he directed it away from the goal, towards an open area where a Glandus striker was already sprinting to get the ball before a Hexside defense player would get to it.

Luz hit the ground with her feet and was about to chase after her team that was aiming to get to the opposing side as quickly as possible when she noticed someone lying on the field.

The Blight girl had gotten a hard hit on her head by the Glandus player’s knee when he had forced her down. Luz hesitated, even when her goalkeeper started sprinting after the game. Nobody from Hexside or Glandus had stayed in front of the goal. Glandus had taken the opportunity to sprint to the front and Hexside couldn’t let the goal happen.

Nobody but Luz had stayed behind.

Another glance back to the Hexside team captain confirmed that this was no attention-seeking foul. This was also no attempt to get a penalty kick since she was outside the penalty area.

Taking the few quick steps, Luz then went down to her knees and softly shook the girl’s shoulders. She was out for the count. Panic started taking over her when she realized that this could become really serious really quick, so she let her emergency training take over.

Every player in Glandus was trained to take emergency first aid training, in case something like this would happen during their games. Luz had been no exception.

The girl was convulsing and her jaw was pressed shut, so Luz swung a leg over the player’s middle and turned her on her side while forcing open her mouth. She had to make sure the girl’s tongue would not be in danger of being swallowed.

When she had managed that, she kept her fingers in the girl’s mouth, relieved to feel her breathing still, before waving her arm to the sidelines to call for a medic.

“She’s injured!! She’s injured, come here! HERE!!”, Luz yelled desperately, still kneeling over the Hexside captain, but all eyes were peeled to the front. Only a few Hexside fans were shouting, probably angry that an opposing teammate was touching their captain, and that the referee hadn’t realized a player on the ground yet. But Luz couldn’t care for that.

Over the roaring crowd, she yelled back to their coaches, waving her arm frantically.

“HEEEEEEEEY!!!!”

Suddenly, the match became quieter. Glandus had probably failed to score.

Heads were suddenly turned at Luz’s screaming and she waved some more, before turning back to the girl beneath her, who was unmoving but was still breathing. She kept her fingers between Blight’s teeth to keep her from shutting her mouth, then she looked back up again.

The crowd had become a lot quieter now. Some were probably still processing that a Glandus player had started attending to a Hexside player’s need.

Finally, the medics came running, as well as the Hexside players and trainer, while the Glandus players stayed away.

Luz looked back down again, putting her hand in the nape of the team captain’s neck, to make sure it was overstretched. She started convulsing again and her teeth snapped shut, but despite the pain, she wouldn’t pull them out. She had to ensure Blight wouldn’t swallow her tongue.

Screaming, she tried forcing her jaws apart again, before the first Hexside players finally arrived, the medics still a few steps apart. Immediately, as soon as Luz had freed her fingers, her job was overtaken by some other Hexside players and she felt herself being hoisted to her feet while the medics started attending to the Hexside team captain.

The pink-haired striker was suddenly taking all of Luz’s attention. “Who do you think you are, huh?!”, she snapped and Luz, holding her bitten fingers, stumbled back, bewildered when the striker pushed her again, “Who the fuck told you to fucking touch her, huh?!?!”

Luz furrowed her eyebrows, but before she could say anything, a Glandus player approached as well and shoved the Hexside striker away with their shoulder. Gulping, Luz recognized her team captain.

“Louis, I-”

“SHUT your damn mouth, Noceda!”, he growled, then she was grabbed on her ear before he pulled her to the sidelines, “This is the LAST DAMN TIME you’re on this team.”

She winced in pain when she was thrown to the sidelines, stumbling into her coach who glared down at her.

“Go take a shower, and then go home. You’re off the team.”, he quietly scowled and Luz’s face fell while she was holding her ear. All she had done was to help a teammate, what-

“B-But-”

“I’ll talk to the principal about your behavior. Now go before I beat you up right here in front of everyone.”

With tears stinging in her eyes, Luz made her way off the field, feeling the glares of the crowd and the field players in her back.

She didn’t witness the rest of the game. After taking a shower and changing out of her gear, she threw everything into her bag and left the stadium. It was like she was walking in a trance.

All she had done was help someone in a life-threatening situation. It wasn’t like she had betrayed her team or scored a goal in the wrong direction.

It wasn’t like she had done something wrong… Right?

That Blight girl would’ve probably been in real trouble if she hadn’t reacted fast. None of her teammates had stayed behind, and none of the audience had noticed anything. Luz didn’t know if that Blight girl would’ve actually died, but she’d rather not risk it. And if she had learned anything from watching soccer matches on TV, it was to think about the person behind the jersey first.

If she had learned anything from her mother, it was to always help, no matter who was in need.

And if she had learned anything from playing soccer, it was that sportsmanship was worth more than any winning goal.

Soccer was supposed to be fun, bring people together, not divide them.

She sighed when she walked up the front stairs to the porch, before fumbling her keys out. Her mother was probably cooking dinner right now.

When she entered, a questioning gaze met hers. Kicking off her shoes, she broke the eye contact again and focused on getting her jacket off her shoulders.

“Mija? I thought the match wasn’t finished yet?”, she heard her mother’s warm voice ask, and she just shook her head.

“… It was a tie. I don’t know more.”, she finally replied and her mother made her way over, weaving a hand through her hair.

“Aw, Mija, you don’t need to be sad about this. I’m sure next game your team can-”

Shaking her head, she avoided her mother’s touch, grabbing her sports bag again.

“I’ll-… I’ll be down soon. I need a minute.”

Her mother was sensible enough to let her be, so Luz took her things and ran upstairs to put the soccer stuff in the laundry and used the opportunity to launch herself on her bed. What she had done had been right.

It had caused her to lose her spot on the team and she would probably be bullied for the rest of her school life, but she had saved someone’s life. Probably.

Burying her head in the pillow, the tears came. How the crowd had booed her. Both Glandus for caring for a Hexside player, and the Hexside fans for touching one of them.

How the teams had looked at her, how none of the players had cared that the team captain was out, unconscious on the floor, convulsing and-

Dry sobs escaped Luz’s throat when she nuzzled deeper into the pillow, shaking her head and trying not to doubt her actions. She had done the right thing. She had saved someone’s life. Why did it feel so wrong, though?

Sobbing more, she didn’t hear her mother entering the room after knocking several times. She only sensed her mother’s presence when Camila was already sitting down on the mattress and running a hand through Luz’s hair again.

“Oh, Mija… What’s wrong?”, she softly asked while lying down beside her, nudging her to turn her head out of the pillow. Luz sniffled, then she exhaled and looked at her mother.

“… I’m off the team.”, she finally mumbled and squeezed her eyes shut, expecting her mother to be disappointed in her. After all, Luz had never managed to stay in any club until now. Her weirdness usually kicked her out fast, made her an outcast, and not even the soccer team from the last school had wanted her.

But being kicked off for a reason like helping an unconscious player?

Luz couldn’t help but be mad about that.

Instead of disappointment, her mother just gently scratched her scalp, then she hummed.

“What happened, Mija?”

She sighed. It was time to recount the story, apparently. Telling her mom what had happened was harder than she thought, though.

It didn’t help that Camila got quieter and quieter the longer she listened to what Luz had to tell her. When she came to the part where the Hexside team captain had fallen to the ground and everyone had continued the game, her Mama’s hand in her hair stilled. Being a nurse, she knew exactly how dangerous a hit to the head could become. Luz continued telling her how she had put the girl on her side and forced her mouth open before Camila continued stroking her hair. In the end, she told her how the Hexside players had pulled her off their team captain and how her own team and coach had reacted to her helping a Hexside player before sending her home.

Once again, Camila’s hand stilled. She had some choice words to say about that, but she bit them down, in favor of Luz telling her story until the end.

When Luz was finished, her mother wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close.

“Mija, I am so proud of you. You did the right thing and neither your coach nor your team can deny that.”

Sniffling, Luz pressed closer to her mother and nuzzled her nose in the crook of her neck, as she always did when she was distressed.

“But Mama, they kicked me off the team. They-… I think they hate me now.”

Camila huffed at that, wrinkling her nose.

“If they can’t realize that you did the right thing, it’s their fault for being blind, Mija. You saved someone’s life.”

Luz supposed that was the right thing to do. Even if it got her kicked off the team.

---

When Amity woke up, she found that her siblings were both standing next to a white bed, and looked way too concerned for this not to be a dream.

Amity was skeptical.

What had happened that she was in this strange bed? And what were her siblings doing here, all serious and completely non-teasing?

“What-…”, she tried but Emira’s hand in her hair quickly made her shut up, moving with such softness that she had never felt from her siblings.

“You got knocked out pretty bad, mittens…”, Edric said, no hint of a bit in his voice when he shuffled in closer, taking her hand. Amity was speechless at the sheer worry they displayed.

“It was-… Really scary. Do you remember what happened?”, her sister now chimed in, taking her hand out of Amity’s hair.

Her mouth felt dry. Gulping, she tried speaking again, but her voice came out raspy.

“… I was-… Playing…?”, she slowly recounted, but she only remembered that she had been on the field, not what had caused this or anything after.

Her siblings nodded, then Emira tried a smile, though it came out very shaky and not that reassuring.

“You got knocked out cold and started convulsing. If that girl hadn’t been there to help you, the doctors said you would’ve been in a very different situation now.”

Desperately, Amity racked her head to try and remember but she couldn’t. She just remembered the fact that she had played in the Bone Breaker match, not exactly how or why it had come to the accident. And which girl?

Furrowing her eyebrows, Amity looked back up to Emira and Edric, trying to formulate her thoughts somehow, until she decided on the most pressing question she had.

“Girl? What girl?”, she inquired and Edric hummed.

“That other player that you fouled before, the Glandus girl. She stayed behind and made sure you were going to be okay.”

At that, Amity wanted to sit up and scream, but her sister reacted fast and pushed her back down on the sheets. A Glandus payer had touched her?! Made sure she was-… Okay?

“Hey, wow, calm down mittens. Nobody from your team cared to stay, she was the only one who got the medics to notice.”, her sister reasoned and Amity huffed. That made her no less a Glandus student.

“She touched me!”, Amity tried but Emira gave her a pointed glare.

“She was the only one who cared about you. This could’ve ended very differently if she hadn’t.”

Growling, Amity crossed her arms, before Edric lifted his eyebrows.

“… She had her fingers in your mouth.”

Cringing, Amity gagged and covered her ears, shaking her head.

“That’s disgusting! Ew, ew, ew, I had Glandus stuff in my mouth, EW!”, she squirmed, while Edric laughed and clapped his knee. Emira merely rolled her eyes, before she got up and announced that she’d get the doctor notified and would bring some snacks. Edric chimed up that he wanted something from the vending machine, of course, something they weren’t allowed to eat at home since their parents required them to watch their figure, before she exited the room, still hearing Amity complaining.

Huffing, Emira balled her fists. This was ridiculous. She had never understood why the two schools in the Bonesborough area were so petty about each other. It was so useless, especially to rule out half the dating pool in their cities. Oh, and of course it pissed her parents off when they associated with Glandus students.

Most of all, Emira just couldn’t understand why they would battle each other so hard.

This was just school, who cared about that?

Except for Edric, only a handful of students of both schools shared their opinion about the borderline racism between their two schools. Apparently, this girl couldn’t care either.

Emira found a doctor and told them that her sister had woken up, as well as directing them to the room, before making her way down to the lobby where the vending machines stood.

Tapping her foot on the tiles, she pondered on what to get. Meanwhile, her head was still racing. The girl who had cared for her sister had worn the number 18, and her last name had been Noceda. Maybe Emira could find her family and get them a thank you gift, like a box of chocolates or a card. She at least wanted to show her that there were a few people that cared that she had helped out her sister, despite them wearing different jerseys. It’s the least she could do.

She didn’t know exactly how dangerous it had been for Amity, but one thing was very important. None of her sister’s teammates had stayed behind, nobody had even cared. Just that girl.

Humming, she got Edric his treat, then she tapped her chin this time, pursing her lips in thought. The girl had been sent home, as far as Emira could see. Maybe she has even been kicked off the team, as competitive and hostile as she knew their schools. As a Hexside student, they wouldn’t have handled her differently and she doubted the Glandus team was much nicer.

Due to it being a weekday and pretty much nighttime by now, there wasn’t a lot going on in the lobby. Some people were waiting around for treatment, some patients from upstairs that stayed the night wandered around, to get fresh air or socialize, and otherwise, nobody was really loud.

So, she immediately heard when someone said the name she had just been thinking about.

Whipping her head around, she saw a woman on the counter, holding a card that almost looked like a staff card, accompanied by a kind of scrawny girl. She squinted her eyes.

“… Name’s Luz Noceda, my daughter. Could we visit a girl that was admitted here tonight, her name’s-… What was it again, Luz?”

The girl mumbled something that sounded distinctly like her last name, so Emira was quick to pull her own treat and approach them quickly, getting their attention when she got closer.

“Blight, I assume?”

The woman turned to her with kind, brown eyes and she began to smile, nodding.

“Yes, actually. We don’t know her first name, but Luz said her jersey read Blight. Do you know her?”

Emira grinned and puffed her chest, gesturing to herself.

“I’m Emira Blight, her older sister.”, turning around the woman to the girl behind her, she smiled and offered her hand, “Luz, I assume? Noceda? Hi, I saw what you did on the field tonight.”

A little skeptical, Luz took her hand and she shook it, before pulling the girl into a big hug. Surprised, she stumbled into the embrace, obviously because she was suddenly being hugged by a stranger.

“Thank you so much, Luz. Because of you, Amity’s okay. I was really impressed by that.”

Slowly, Luz’s stiff posture relaxed and she patted her back before Emira released her and smiled back at the girl’s mother and spoke to Luz again.

“Thank you, really. I-… I’d really like to express my gratitude. Not everyone would’ve done what you did, Luz. How can I repay you?”

Rubbing the back of her pixie cut, Luz shook her head and for the first time, she said something to Emira.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’d, uh-… I’d just like to know how your sister is. I mean, we don’t have to visit her or anything, but-”

Emira already waved off and gestured them to follow her, something the mother more than readily did. Only now, she could also read the card that hung around her neck, which identified her as a nurse in this very hospital. Pulling Luz along, they followed Emira down the hall to the elevator.

“Nonsense. I’m sure my brother would like to thank you as well, and we’ll see to it that Amity will behave. You know-… School stuff.”

Luz grimaced and nodded, which only strengthened Emira’s suspicion that Luz wasn’t exactly a fan of the school’s hostility as well.

“But I’m sure she’ll be grateful as well.”

The elevator door opened and the three of them entered, waiting for Emira to press the right button and have the doors close again, then Luz began switching her weight on her feet, nervously bobbing around.

“We, uh-… I just wanna know if she’s okay, you know if she’s uncomfortable having me around…”

Once again, Emira shrugged that off and laughed.

“She’ll be fine. You helped her today, she ought to understand to accept that.”, then, the twin leaned against the wall of the elevator, eyeing Luz, “Hey, by the way. I saw neither your teammate nor your trainer was really nice to you after that. And you got sent off the field. Are you off the team?”

At that, her mother grumbled and Luz grimaced, rubbing her biceps. She was quite cute, Emira noticed.

“More like off the school… After dinner, my principal called and expelled me from Glandus. We wanted to object but, uh, I have a file that’s not exactly stellar and we can’t afford a lawyer. So-… I guess I’ll have to try Hexside now. If they’ll have me.”

At that, she felt her jaw falling. They had actually expelled her for helping a student of a different team?! Shaking her head, Emira pushed off the wall and threw her arm around Luz’s shoulders, not caring that the girl stiffened up with the touches of the stranger. Huffing, she squeezed her shoulder.

“They will accept you. I’ll get you in and when principal Bump realizes you saved his team captain, he’ll for sure accept you in. Plus, I’d guess he’d love getting an edge on Glandus and making it into the local news.”, rolling her eyes, Emira continued, “And besides. My parents are-… A little bit influential. Regarding the funding of the school. Bump would be stupid not to let you in after you saved their daughter.”

With wide eyes, Luz and her mother stared at Emira, then the older woman placed a hand on her arm.

“You would put in a good word for my Luz? It’d be-… Fairly difficult to get her back into Glandus with a lawyer. I-… We’d be so relieved.”

Nodding confidently, Emira grinned at them.

“It’s time I use the Blight family name for a good cause.”, she decided, which sent her being pulled into a tight hug by both Nocedas this time, a good, heartwarming hug.

“Thank you so much!”, her mother sighed, and even if Luz was a little bit hesitant, still, she was hugging her as well. Pulling back, Emira softly punched her arm.

“Consider it a thank you, for tonight. And don’t worry about the Hexside students. They might be biased towards Glandus, but I’ll look out for you. Nobody will breathe towards you wrongly. After all, you did kind of betray Glandus for our Hexside captain.”

Chuckling, Luz rolled her eyes.

“That’s honestly so stupid. I never understood this rivalry when I came here a year ago.”, she mumbled and Emira laughed.

“It’s so stupid.”, she agreed, “But only a handful of people seem to understand that.”

The elevator stopped and they exited to walk down the hall, passing some patients and nurses who greeted Luz’s mother, before arriving at Amity’s room.

When they entered, the doctor was already gone, having left behind Edric and Amity who were talking about what happened after Amity had been knocked out, then Emira got their attention by tossing Edric his treat which hit him in the back of the head.

“Hey siblings, guess who’s here!”

Edric turned with a slight scowl but his face immediately shifted to confusion when he spotted Emira’s company. Much in contrast to Amity, actually, who furrowed her eyebrows and stared at Luz. The poor girl was so taken aback by her younger sister’s reaction that she stopped walking and stood completely still.

Emira rolled her eyes and stepped to the bed, nudging Amity’s shoulder.

“Be nice, mittens. She did a lot for you.”

Edric’s face lit up at that and he turned from his sister back to the Nocedas, getting up to shake both their hands.

“You must be that Glandus player! I saw what you did today. Thank you so, so much, honestly.”, he exclaimed and Luz managed a smile for him before turning back to his younger sister. She was crossing her arms and looked down to her feet. This didn’t look good.

“Mittens.”, Emira pressed out with a forced grin, catching her sister’s glare, “We will go outside now to have a word with Mrs. Noceda regarding Luz’s enrollment in Hexside High. Why don’t you two become good friends until then?”

The bite in the older girl’s voice was unmistakable, even so, obvious that Luz flinched. She pulled her shoulders up when Amity gave a snarl before Emira waved her brother – they looked like twins – and her mother out the door, leaving them to their own devices.

After the door clicked into its lock, silence filled the room and Luz found herself swaying from side to side again, before sighing. Amity glared out the window, obviously very focused on ignoring her.

“… So-… Uh, you’re Amity, huh?”, she tried to make conversation but the girl still ignored her, “Uhm, you play well. I believe you trained a lot…?”

Still, no answer. Luz sighed and nodded, looking around the room. There was the light blue hospital floor, the white walls, and ceiling, a small table and chairs, as well as another empty bed. There honestly wasn’t much to distract herself with.

“… Okay…”, she tried again, no reaction, “So, uhm, are you feeling any better?”

Finally, the girl whipped around to her and looked just about ready to snap at her, but something inside her made her hesitate. Finally, she huffed and gave a rigid nod.

“… I’m fine. You can stop talking now.”

Softly nodding, Luz kicked the floor, then she tried looking around again before the girl spoke up once more.

“… But, uhm. Thank you. For tonight.”, it sounded forced, but Luz didn’t care. She dared a little smile, before nodding.

“You’re welcome. It was honestly what everyone should’ve done, though.”

Fidgeting, the girl then looked down to her feet again, before breathing through a few times. It looked like she was struggling to formulate a sentence.

“… I-I heard I bit you.”, she finally mumbled and Luz grimaced, making a fist with her still somewhat aching fingers. It hadn’t been bad, hadn’t been open as well, but she had bitten down pretty hard.

“Oh, yeah. That’s okay, though, it was more important to keep you safe.”

Once again, they fell into silence, but this time, it was a little easier to bear for Luz than before.

“… You’ll start in Hexside now?”, Amity began again and Luz had to suppress a little smile at the curiosity. For someone who had tried so adamantly to ignore her at first, Amity was starting a lot of conversation now.

“Oh, uh, yeah. My principal called and expelled me. I guess helping you was the last straw to kick me out.”, she admitted and Amity looked back to her, tilting her head. Something like disgust snuck back on her face.

“You’re a troublemaker?”, she asked and Luz was quick to shake her head.

“Not really. The Glandus community never really liked me because I only moved here a year ago. They blamed a lot of stuff on me, most of it was me being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I try to be a good student, really.”

That seemed to somewhat settle Amity again because she began fidgeting with her blanket again.

“… Oh. So you’re new.”, she noted and Luz nodded again, “Which year do you go to?”

Luz looked up again to meet her gaze, trying a smile.

“I’m a freshman, 9th grade. You?”

Amity really, honestly, gave her a small smile. Luz wasn’t sure if it was a mean or a genuine one.

“Me, too. Looks like we’ll be classmates.”, she finally said and Luz rubbed the back of her head again, biting her lip.

“… Is that okay? I mean-… I come from Glandus, so… I’d understand if I won’t fit in at Hexside, too.”

At that, Amity shrugged, leaning back against her pillow again.

“You know, as far as I’m concerned, you come from the outside and got off in the wrong school.”, she said and Luz thought she hadn’t heard right, “Besides, Emira is right… You did help me tonight. I think it’d only be fair if I helped you a bit, too.”

Luz managed another smile at that and offered a hand, one Amity took after a bit of hesitation.

“Uhm… Thank you.”

When they parted their hands again, Amity looked back up to her.

“Actually, I was thinking to let you join the soccer team. You know, because you’re not that bad a player and, uh, with a lot of practice you could actually become useful.”, she offered and Luz grinned.

“You know what, I’d actually like that.”

---

Let me know if you liked it!

#toh #the owl house #luz noceda #amity blight #emira blight #edric blight #blight siblings #camila noceda #boscha #fanfic #soccer au #human au #injuries

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surveys-at-your-service · 3 years

Text

Survey #389

“i’m well aware i’m a danger to myself / are you aware i’m a danger to others?”

How much do you weigh? Yeah, we're starting off on a bad foot. If you are outside, what are you most likely doing? Putting Roman's used litter in the trash. Do you think you can love someone without trusting them? Hm... I guess you could love them, but it'd be a complicated situation. What’s your opinion on people who go hunting for sport? If it's purely for sport, from the very bottom of my heart, fuck you. Do you have a fairly fast or slow internet connection? I'd say it's decently fast. Have you ever been someplace tropical? Yeah, Florida. My grandma lived there. Are you sensitive to caffeine? No. It does like... nothing to me. How do you usually get around? My mom's car. Have you ever been accused of being too clingy? No actually, but I know I kinda am. What do you think about Kim Kardashian? I don't have an opinion of her. Can you speak any French? No. Favorite yogurt flavor? The only yogurt I've been liking lately is cookies and cream to add a different texture, because otherwise, I don't like its natural texture very much??? Idk man, my taste buds are wild. How much money do you have in your wallet right now? Just like $5. What bottled water brand do you like? Essentia. Your favorite way to eat chocolate? As chocolate bars, probably. How often do you listen to country music? Like, never. Linkin Park or Avenged Sevenfold? Linkin Park. Last surgery you had? Pilonidal cyst removal. Have you ever played guitar? I briefly took classes for it in high school, yes. Best I got to was playing some of the intro to "Crazy Train." I enjoyed it, but not enough to be consistent and really learn. Is there someone in your life whose career/life choices you find immoral/unethical? Have you ever told that person your views? Do you find it difficult to support them (emotionally or otherwise) because of their choices? I don't think so? What trait do you feel you lack that you wish you possessed? Independence and confidence would be nice... Have you ever considered writing your memoirs? No. Do you find it difficult to stay invested in online relationships? God no. I love my online friends. Half of 'em more than "irl" ones. Are you the type of person who pays close attention to the release dates of movies, music, etc., and will, for example, go see a movie or buy an album on the date it is released? If so, when is the last time you did so? I have to be VERY invested in it to care THAT much. It happened most recently when Meerkat Manor: Rise of the Dynasty premiered. Do you have any stickers on your laptop? No. Would you rather have a job for which you had to go in early in the morning or one you had to stay late into the evening at? Early in the morning. I'm in a better mood in the morning. Do you use any apps to track your health or medications? I have a calorie-counting app, as well as one to track my period. Whose opinions/recommendations do you value most? My mom's, best friend's, and psychiatrist's. If you could’ve been at any historical event, which would you have liked to witness firsthand? I don't really know. Maybe the very first Pride event? Is there something that you really want to do but are afraid of doing? If so, why are you afraid of doing it? Ride a rollercoaster, for one. I know I never will, though. I'm too afraid of throwing up, but even more realistically, I fear passing out before of the twisting and turning and just standing up makes me very dizzy. My blood pressure is STUPID low. What is something society “expects” you to do that you don’t want to do and/or don’t plan on doing? Have kids. That's a big 'ole fat no from me. Have Jehovah's Witnesses ever come to your door? Twice at least. Are you well-known by people in your area? No. Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? No, thank Christ. It sounds terrifying. What's your favourite type of bird? Barn owls. Melanistic ones, to be exact. Stunning. What tv show(s) have you been watching currently? I'm only keeping up with Meerkat Manor: Rise of the Dynasty. Have you ever dated a smoker? For less than a day. Do you share a middle name with any of your siblings? Yes. Have you ever been a member in a band? No. Besides the school band. Can you cry on command? If so, have you ever used it to your advantage? No. Do you have separate emails for personal and business? No. Have you ever missed a flight? Yes. Have you ever seen a lunar eclipse? Multiple times. Have you ever taken a ride in a convertible? I think once with my brother. Why did you last need to use a band-aid? I'unno. What fruit do you eat most often? Apples. Who was the last person you visited in the hospital? My ma. Has someone ever tried to start an argument with you over Facebook? What happened? A few times. I don't feel like thinking over this. Have you ever had an unusual type of milk (eg. oat, rice, almond)? I've tried almond milk, and I hated it. If you could experience life as a Disney princess for a week, which princess would you pick and why? uhhhhhh idk When you’re at home, do you spend most of your time in your room? I'm essentially always in my room. If you like to sleep in late, have your parents ever told you off for doing so? No. Do you find piercings attractive? Yep. Do you like potato chips? Loooove 'em. What’s the most stalker-like/creepy thing you’ve ever done? If you don’t think you’ve done anything like that, what’s the most stalker-like thing someone’s done to you? Nothing beyond checking Jason's Facebook sometimes after the breakup, I think. Even that though I wouldn't recommend doing. You're just going to get yourself hurt. Stay away from exes' profiles. Do you think it’s a double standard that a woman can hit a man and expect to get away with it, but if a man hits a woman it’s assault? Yep. I don't give a fuck what's in your pants, you don't hit anybody unless you're fighting to defend yourself. What’s your favorite old Disney movie and favorite new Disney movie? I mean... define "old." I'll go with The Lion King for old, and for new, uh... Finding Dory, probs. Name something “trendy” or popular that you dislike. I don't really know what IS trendy right now... Is Snapchat still "in?" Because I've never gotten that. “Dirty talk” in the bedroom…love it, like it, don’t care, dislike it, or hate it? I think I'm kinda neutral about it? Like I mean it also depends on exactly what is said. I prefer more loving talk, though. What is/are your favorite type(s) of ethnic food, and what’s your favorite food within that type? I'm a basic fatass that likes American cuisine most, aha... Like give me a cheeseburger and I'm happy lmao. How would you describe your relationship with your hair over the years? I love it more now at a short length than I ever did long. When it was long and I was in my deepest depression, I was awful about brushing it. It would get so knotted. Like looking back, it nearly makes me shiver. I HIGHLY recommend cutting your hair for anyone who struggles with selfcare. How do you feel about your SO daily/regularly checking up on a couple of his exes on social media? I'm single, but hypothetically, if you're checking an ex's page nearly every day, I would not be okay with that. I'm totally fine with exes remaining friends and just cordially talking now and again, but that's it. It's a respect thing. Do you prefer your guy to wear cologne or not? I personally like cologne if it's not overwhelming. I really don't care if you wear it or not, though. Ladies, how important is it to you that your SO wears/would wear a wedding ring? This survey is so heteronormative. But anyway, unless there was an issue like it not fitting, I'd want my spouse to wear their ring. What was the turning point that led you to decide for or against having children? There are a lot of reasons I don't want kids. I'm too selfish with my "me" time, I stress out too easily, I don't want to dedicate my life to keeping another person alive and fed and happy, I have bad genes... I could go on and on. I just wouldn't be a good, "present" enough mom. I am much more interested in ensuring *I* am okay. Is having your “dream” wedding really that important to have? Not at all. I mean I want a smooth and memorable wedding, but I'm not obsessed with it being perfect. Do you consider it cheating if your SO goes to a strip club and then doesn’t tell you? That's certainly not cheating, but I wouldn't like it. Being secretive about anything in a relationship is unhealthy, imo. I'd be hurt and also very insecure because I wouldn't feel like "enough." How old is too old for trick-or-treating? Honestly? I don't think you ever are. Like come on, does it REALLY matter? Let people have fun. I don't do it because of societal standards, but I would if I didn't care about being judged. Do you sleep with your arms over or under the covers? It depends on the temperature, but I normally wake up with them under. Do you own any t-shirts of your favorite band? I have an Ozzy one stored somewhere, but it doesn't fit me now. There was another I really liked too, but that one is WAY too small now. Fries or onion rings? Fries. I'm not a fan of onion rings. True/False: you’ve had an odd dream this week. Story of my life. I had one last night where I kept dying in different ways, and I actually felt the pain, like drowning in magma. Do you find tattoo sleeves attractive? YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Do you like carving pumpkins? Yeah. What’s an animal you want to have as a pet but can’t? My mom has absolutely forbidden me to get a tarantula (uh, many tarantulas in my case) until I move out, lol. That doesn't stop me from checking Craigslist like every day. ;_; Have your parents ever caught you drinking? "Caught," no. Any time I've drunk, I've had permission or was a legal adult by then. How would you react if your celebrity crush came to your door? First be humiliated at my appearance and then absolutely pass out lmao. Has your mom/dad ever walked in on you kissing or anything more with someone? No, thank fuck. The person you have a crush on is drunk and goes to kiss you, you know they don’t realize what they’re doing, but do you kiss anyways? If I know it's something they wouldn't do sober, absolutely not. What would you prefer to get from a guy/girl: flowers, a hand written poem, a picture he drew of you or a nice night out? Any would be lovely, but the poem would appeal most to me because of the amount of thought that goes into poetry. Do you any shirts with any kind of images of food on them? What? I don't think so, no. Which holiday is the most fun to decorate for? Halloween. What was the first website you had an email account on? Yahoo. Have you ever written a fanfic? No. Tattoos or piercings? Both are grand, but tats win. What’s the last gross movie/show/video you saw? I saw this picture of a snake split open that had eaten another snake. Would you rather live in a huuuge house or a little cozy one? Lil cozy one! I don't want more space than is needed for cleaning reasons, as well as price. Do you have a tutor for anything? No. Who’s the best kisser you know? Jason was. Has anyone ever threatened you with a knife? No. I'd like it to stay that way. (If you’re a girl) Has anyone ever called you "shortie" instead of girl? Ew, no. Do you have a deep voice? For a woman, yes. Do you play games with boys/girls, like 'hard to get’? Hi, I'm an adult. Is there a Sonic where you live? YES. It's my fave fast-food place. What do you like on your pizza? I have three go-tos depending on my mood: Pepperoni, jalapenos, or meat lovers.

#survey #surveys #questions #lyrics: ''leave a scar'' by marilyn manson

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ms-demeanor · 4 years

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After reading your "ultra-long postivity post", now I have kind of a weird feeling because i relate a lot to pretty much everything you said, but i ended up approaching the "not everyone can x" from the opposite side, being the "gifted kid" teachers used to hold everyone to unrealistic standards (that i knew most couldnt achieve in the given timeframes), and now i get frustrated when i dont develop skills immediately, because i have done it before and feel like i should be able to and aaaaaaaaaa

Funny story: when I was a kid my parents had both my sister and I tested for learning and developmental disabilities. This testing included IQ testing.

It identified that we were both “gifted” kids* and that I’m dyslexic.

It totally missed my ADHD, though!

The problem with that is that my parents. Hm.

Okay my parents both grew up in very poor families. VERY poor. And they both wanted to go to college and knew the only way that they could was through scholarships. So they became debaters. They met at a tournament in high school.

Debaters are weird. You need an efficient working memory and strong recall and the ability to think quickly on your feet. Being witty and kind of an asshole are also good traits for debaters. Basically you’ve either gotta be really fuck-off smart to be a competitive debater or you’ve gotta at least *seem* really fuck-off smart.

And my parents were champion debaters at a national level. The Whittier College debate trophy has my mom’s name written directly under Richard goddamn Nixon. My dad was on the USC debate team and competed against Harvard and won. Not only that but he ended up coaching debate for USC and Cal Tech.

So as kids who grew up in extremely poor families and were able to go to college and get middle-class jobs and buy a house because of intellectual ability my parents placed A LOT of importance on intellectual ability.

So that IQ score became a large part of my life.

First we attacked the dyslexia. The approach was basically teaching me a bunch of sight words because sounding out phonics doesn’t work when the letters get screwed up. And because I was *gifted* we did a lot of really BIG sight words.

It took about six months to get me up to speed from “memorizing the pages of a story to match the pictures because I couldn’t read along in class” to “the first book I read on my own was The Hobbit.” I guess that counted as “cured” because that was the last time I got any kind of educational assistance.

At that time I was at a gifted school, a really tiny private school that was also an after-school daycare where we did full-day classes and then did gymnastics and swim from 3-6pm. I also was there over the summer because my parents worked.

So going from “tiny private school where the teacher has you stand up in class to read your failing grade in front of everyone so that she could shame you into performing better” to “fine public school in a suburb wealthy enough to have arts programs” was a major, major change. They did an aptitude test because I was transferring in from a different district and there was much discussion about whether or not to move me directly from the second to the sixth grade.

The district refused, thank fuck.

The public elementary school didn’t *have* a gifted program so it took very little time for me to become the Certified Weird Kid. My third grade teacher had me read aloud to our class for twenty minutes a day. I taught the class the multiplication table.

When it got to be time to go to the junior high school my mom went to a meeting for the school’s gifted kids program. APPARENTLY one of the kid’s dad’s basically said “I don’t understand why you’re wasting school funds on field trips for the stupid kids, the school should spend more of its resources on kids who have a chance of actually meaning something to the world” and my mom decided that while being gifted was important it was less important than making sure I wasn’t exposed to assholes of that caliber on a regular basis.

(thanks mom, I actually do really appreciate that reprieve)

Several teachers pushed me into advanced classes - my math teacher insisted that I take the advanced algebra classes in the seventh and eighth grade.

The GATE kids *WERE* assholes and were extra bonus special assholes to me because math was the only advanced class that I was in. (At my junior high school you had to pick your elective based on what level of classes you were in - to take the GATE classes you HAD to take a music elective; if you took art, drama, shop, or home ec you couldn’t take the smart kid classes. The algebra class was a new, separate addition to the program so *some* of the kids in the “electives for dropouts” program could take algebra. Schools are really fucked up, guys, in case you didn’t know schools are really fucked up and that was BEFORE No Child Left Behind).

I got a C in that algebra class and sat in my room for literally an hour screaming at myself for being such a selfish, distracted idiot that I let myself read my books instead of studying harder for the class. (clearly very healthy, normal twelve-year-old behavior)

When it was time to go to high school my teachers made a united plea to the district to transfer me into honors/IB/AP classes.

The kids in the honors/IB/AP classes continued to be kind of awful to me. I got extremely depressed and basically started doing the lazy-but-brilliant thing of completely ignoring homework or in-class work but performing spectacularly well on tests or essays in the classes that I wasn’t catastrophically failing

I was the only person at the school who got a perfect score on the vocab part of my SAT. I was the only honors kid who hadn’t been in SAT prep classes. There was only one other kid who graduated with the same number of units as I had, we’d outstripped the valedictorian and salutatorian but three classes each. I only applied to one college - I got accepted for painting but my interviewer urged me to move to the writing program and I got accepted for that too.

My financial aid didn’t come through and my dad wasn’t willing to cosign for loans on “an art program at a trade school.”

I got accepted to Pratt Institute on their Writing for Publication track which included an internship with the New York Times for third-year students in the program.

At that point I had a Columbia Scholastic Press award for my work on my high school yearbook.

Let me tell you, the community college that I went to and spent five years variously failing and succeeding at had a fucking *killer* newspaper and magazine when I was there. The local community newspaper that hired me when I was 21 was also much better designed and edited than it had any right to be for the three years I worked there (getting paid a whole eight dollars an hour and sometimes working 20 hours straight to get it in to the printer on time).

When I transferred to the state school I got perfect grades and worked full time and won every contest offered by the school’s English Honors society (which I couldn’t join because I was a transfer student and hadn’t done honors classes my freshman and sophomore years). I started a literary magazine with some friends when I graduated; we published four full issues online before it fell apart.

You know what’s also funny?

Even the food-service job I had to pay my way though the community college I felt terrible about attending was a skills test. I was a barista, so of course for a while I was a competitive barista.

I disappointed my parents a lot. I heard a lot of “we know you’re better than this.” I got told I was too smart to be screwing up this bad. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago but my results from that IQ test got compared to my sister’s and that was the justification for holding me to a higher standard. “You’re measurably brilliant, why aren’t you acting like it?”

Here lies the corpse of a gifted kid. Look on my works ye might and despair.

I am the perfect picture of a twice exceptional gifted kid and the reason I wrote all of this out is to tell you one thing:

“Gifted Kid” is a label that someone applied to you, it has nothing to do with who and what you ARE.

It’s very, very unfair that the adults in your life used you that way. I have an exceptionally terrible memory of being singled out as the only one who passed the first test in my IB World History class; “Why is Alli the only one of all of you who is writing at grade level? You’re supposed to be the smartest kids in the school, why did you all fail?”

That’s awful for the kids around you, that’s awful for you. It doesn’t do anybody any favors if people around you are being informed that you’re setting the curve they’ll be judged against. And it really, really doesn’t do YOU any favors because it doesn’t take long *at all* for your brain to learn that that’s all you’re good for. If you aren’t the best at a thing then what’s the point, you HAVE to be best because they already SAID you were best and if you aren’t then all these other people hate you for setting a standard that even you can’t keep up with.

You end up competing with past versions of yourself and focusing on those things that make the grownups in your life praise you because the grownups in your life has praised you in such a way that it’s turned all the other kids against you.

You know who bullied the fuck out of me? The kids I taught the times tables to, the kids I read to for half an hour a day.

Those kids were MEAN to me but the teacher who told me to read Boxcar Kids to the class after lunch everyday was NICE and she told me not to worry, they were just jealous and I should be proud of my gifts.

“Anon did this in three minutes. What’s taking the rest of you so long?” - what a terrible weight to put on a child. You’re right. Not everyone can do everything.

Fucking hell.

Adults what the everloving shit is wrong with us? Please don’t treat kids like that.

Okay.

But here’s the other thing:

If there’s any time in your life that it’s easy to acquire skills with no apparent effort it’s when you’re a child surrounded by a support system that is engaged in making sure that you can acquire those skills.

It took three adults, two dictionaries, and several hours a day to teach me enough sight-words to throw me into “look at baby genius*” territory but from my perspective as a little kid I was just reading cool stories.

I spent four hours a day in the yearbook room and ditched and failed other classes so that I could work on the yearbook. I collected hundreds of magazines to get an eye for layout. But from my perspective as a teenager it was a fun activity that I did with the closest thing I had to friends.

I’m sure that there are some skills that you had a natural aptitude for, some things that came naturally. But I’m also sure that you didn’t learn those skills with no effort, it’s just that now as an adult with a life and other shit going on it takes more effort to learn to do things.

In all likelihood you weren’t a savant who did everything perfectly the first time you tried. It just seems that way because even really smart kids don’t know when they’re bad at things and are mostly being compared against other kids (with the few rare exceptions of music prodigies or math prodigies or those kids who end up in science grad programs at 12 and boy howdy do I think there’s a whole other can of worms when it comes to the way child prodigies* interact with the world).

You wanna know what probably saved my life in the last few years?

That “anti-capitalist love notes” tumblr post.

You are worth more than your productivity.

I was actually kind of offended the first time I saw that post on my dash. “No I’m not,” I thought. “You’re only worth what you can do, everyone knows that. People care about what you do for them.”

And why the hell would I think anything else? That’s what I’d learned for pretty much my whole life.

It took me a really long time to understand that I was wrong. I matter outside of what I can do for people or how well I perform. I matter more than being able to perfectly recite poetry from memory or do calculations on command or sit down at a piano and play a piece I’ve never played by sight-reading it.

And you matter outside of that too. You’re more than your performance, you’re better than being gifted. There are people who love you for the way you make them laugh and how you listen to their stories and for the simple joy of your presence.

It’s nice to be clever, it’s handy in a lot of situations even if it does come with a lot of baggage for some people.

But god damn, it’s important to be kind.

* Personally I have issues with the way that society constructs the concepts of giftedness, genius, and prodigies. There are a lot of “gifted” kids who were the kids who scored in the top 5% of their class in school but there are also gifted kids who were doing high-level math or reading novels as toddlers; there are prodigies who showed an aptitude for music young and who were then schooled in that instrument to the exclusion of all other activities (and I bet there are a fair number of kids who might be considered prodigies if they were trained to play flute for nine hours a day and didn’t have friends but thankfully we don’t *do* that to very many people - side note, ask me my opinion about olympic athletes some time). Words like “genius” and “gifted” are very nearly meaningless and almost *never* accurately reflect skills proficiency or long-term success or are reflected in income or respect. People think that geniuses are hypercompetent robots with their shit together but literally every adult I know with a genius-level IQ is some variety or other of total fucking tire fire.

#congratulations you have unlocked level two of my tragic backstory #long post

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kotoplasm · 3 years

Text

𝐈𝐕 ; FEAR

synopsis: in a world filled with so many people and respective talents, you feel like an outcast in normality.

previous chapter .... masterlist .... next chapter

to you, love was a fickle thing. it was unpredictable, spontaneous and incomprehensible. you recall sitting behind the counter, crossing off the flowers that were due for watering whilst your mother provided guidance for the teenager who had come to buy some flowers for his girlfriend.

"she doesn't like anything too flashy or cliché so i obviously had to cross off roses but then i didn't have any options left so i was hoping that you could...." and his words became muffled in your ears.

this emotion that everyone spoke so fondly of was something that your younger self found so interesting; so fanatical that the pockets of imagery your mind would paint whilst reading became so full with astonishment.

middle school was another story. for one, you had akaashi. despite being seperated from each other by a year, you felt comforted during your lunch breaks when you had someone to share your snacks and novels with.

a boy who would come to the florist and play hide and seek with you, hiding behind the shrubbery until you found him, his stone blue eyes staring up at you in fondness as he faced your bright and cheesy smile, was enthralled by you. so much, that he felt a piece of himself missing when the two of you were now separated by a volleyball net and a distance of twenty-seven kilometres between your respective high schools. he missed the innocence that middle school humbled them down to.

but unfortunately life was cruel. and life treated you like any other person living on earth. you faced problems such as how your skin didn't feel like your own. your thighs were starting to feel a little too thick around certain areas and stretch marks were drawn around your legs, arms and chest.

the first time someone had mentioned them, you felt sick to your stomach and came into school the next day with thick black tights. you left your blazer unbuttoned so you wouldn't have to think of how the button felt so suffocating against your body or decided to discard it all together, coming to school with the respective jumper and long sleeved shirt.

you remember kuroo and yaku (two people who you had befriended due to sharing the same classes) saying that they liked your new look.

"it gives you this mature and sexy look!" says yaku, earning a slap from kuroo who glared at him.

"she's sexy either way!"

"i never said that she wasn't!"

sometimes morisuke's blunt way of putting things were both a blessing and a curse.

kuroo didn't propose the idea of becoming a manager until you were both in your second year. the workload had increased steadily and your shifts at the florist were reduced to one every saturday and wednesday so in the time that you did have spare, you were either found doing nothing or studying for tests that you'd completely forgotten about. being given the responsibility of managing a volleyball team of a powerhouse school just sounded like another problem that would eventually stress you out.

so why did you accept it? and why did it feel like the best decision that you've made in a very long time? it felt so welcoming and warm and the friends you made were good people.

albeit, the occasional problem would arise here and there such as having to diffuse a problem between two first years when fukunaga wasn't there or trying to make sure that yaku and kuroo didn't bite each other's heads off when kai was too tired to deal with their nonsense.

so the team relied on you to be their anchor in a way. and you didn't mind it one bit.

bokuto koutarou was introduced not so long after your first introduction to the team. your little lunch break with him in the infirmary gave you time to collect enough information about what sort of person he was and his other characteristics. he was an interesting person afterall and you wanted to find out what it was that he found so interesting about you.

during practice matches, his eyes would always be on you so you couldn't help but feel flustered. and he would laugh it off, wearing this big grin that made your chest feel heavy and palms eject sweat more profusely. despite this, you got to know each other a little more over late night phone calls and texts, listening to each others voices until the other fell asleep.

it was always bokuto by the way.

his gruff voice did wonders to you when you were barely awake. the deep ripples of his voice tickled your spine and felt so soft in your ears, lulling you to sleep at three o clock in the morning.

kuroo had questions when he noticed your sudden obsession with your phone, always needing to look at your notifications to see if a new one had been deposited in the pile. of course, your answers were as ambiguous as ever because if he knew that it was bokuto who was constantly running on your mind, he as well as the rest of the team, would tease you eternally. lev had almost ruined it if it weren't for your quick senses.

"ney y/n-san, isn't that the guy who you were murmuring about just a few ho—" his sentence is cut short when you successfully slap his chest hard enough to wind him, clutching his stomach to breathe properly again.

the team stares at you knowingly (smirking. they were definitely smirking) and return back to their previous activities.

winter comes quickly soon after autumn. the trees were naked, decorated in a sheet of shallow snow from the mild blizzard that blew the night before. for some reason, you found yourself at the foot of bokuto's bed, having visted him to improve his maths skills in time for his upcoming exam. his room was a good representation of his personality: medals and photos of his achievements as well as his family. you noted that his sisters were beautiful when you found a picture of the three of them, submerged in the ocean with toddler bokuto balanced on their shoulders.

"don't tell them that head on or i'll never hear the end of it," he replies, sitting opposite you with his maths homework laid across the floor.

"wait, so you don't think so?"

he pauses, pulling his lips into a deep in thought pout. "well sort of? i don't know. they're definitely not ugly." and you snort, something he found endearing.

an hour or so passed and you had moved onto bokuto's bed, sifting through your twitter timeline. as usual nothing interesting was trending and the usual headlines were irrelevant for you. products it advertised claiming to make you lose twenty kilos overnight flashed your eyes but you paid no attention to it, bokuto's occasional glance your way going unnoticed by you.

"can i ask you a question?"

he scans your face briefly before nodding in response, the words "yeah go for it" evident.

"do you sometimes feel like your existence feels extremely ordinary compared to others? like if you were to disappear now, nobody would ever be able to truly remember your name or what mark you've left on the world?"

he remembers that late monday evening, running past akaashi to enter the florist that his kohai spoke so fondly of. the smallest glint of your features, peering into his eyes and begging him not to say a word.

"society liked to believe that amongst caffeine driven adults and stressed beyond repair broken teenagers, the world still ran on an abstract emotion known as intimacy, to put things simply, love." he remembers his teacher reading a line similar to this in his literature class and glaring at the four page analysis on that single line.

"like i can see most of you do great things like become international players for the country or become the head of important corporations that would make an prominent impact on our generation. but sometimes i feel like i won't be able to do such great things. i don't have that many talents and i'm not even that smart so what if i just disappear and nobody would even care or remember me?"

so that's what's been eating you up. he found it odd how you'd spend most your days alone or going to bed earlier than usual when he knew you were the type of person to stay up three hours later binging youtube videos. he knows that you've been feeling guilty about something but he didn't want to pry about it. he may be emphatic but he could tell when someone wants to be left alone.

so that's what he did.

his texts decreased by a substantial amount and your conversations reduced significantly. however, he still promised to check up on you. whether that catching a train to your house after school or waiting at the florist when your shift was due, he was always watching, always making sure that you were okay.

maybe if you noticed his intentions, you wouldn't be sat on his bed, tearing up at the fear of being forgotten by everyone you loved.

he could only really hold you in his arms, crawling over to your weeping figure as his arms wrapped around your frame, patting your back softly.

"if it helps, i'd remember you!" "in the urban streets of tokyo where the lights never seemed to darken...."

bokuto koutarou used to wonder whether he was just another puzzle piece just waiting to be slotted into society. but it only took you to make him realise that he wasn't the only one who felt like an "outcast" to normality.

he was a star. amongst the many others on the court, you could always spot him, projecting himself into the air and striking the ball through a barrade of hands earning him the title of a top five ace.

normality. the noun felt bitter on your tongue. was it because you envied anyone who fit into the category.

"i mean how could anyone forget you of all people? someone who's as pretty, definitely smarter than anyone else who i know, mature, responsible, funny, caring... i could list so many other things but i think you get my point."

"you're just saying that bokuto," you reply, your voice muffled into his now damp t-shirt.

"no i'm not," he says sternly as you pull away from him, wiping away stray tears. "you don't give yourself enough credit. i mean, i see you tutoring lev and some of the other first and second years on your team. i doubt they'd forget someone who helped them stay on the team."

"that's because lev begged me to. i wouldn't have done it otherwise," you tried to explain.

"well personally, i think nekoma is lucky to have such an amazing manager. to me, it doesn't really matter whether or not you've found your talents yet. or maybe you won't ever find your them. maybe some people are just naturally meant to have a larger impact on the world than others without having something that they're naturally good at. and that's alright! but isn't it more fun to try and get to their position through all the hardships and happiness?"

you said that love was a fickle thing. something unpredictable, spontaneous and incomprehensible. but at the ripe age of 18, you finally understood that maybe that was the point. you were afraid of something that you couldn't predict or understand, like any other human being. you were afraid of being hurt by something that not even scientists understood completely. it was all based off a feeling of some sort.

a feeling that had been building up inside you since that lunchtime in the infirmary. he left your mind frazzled and confused. instead of fear, you felt comfort.

love was unpredictable. you understood that now as your hands move to cup his cheeks, rubbing circles into the cherubs of fat that circulated them. you gaze intently, failing to hide the flushed smile on your face.

"ne akaashi, do you think you'll ever get married?"

"that's a very random question bokuto-san," he replies, eyes never leaving the road ahead of them. "but i hope so. i don't like the idea of spending my adult years alone."

"yeah, i guess you're right."

there was no hesitation against your lips, slowly moving his against your own with every movement pouring his passion into the mix. there was something so delicate about you. the way he was afraid to touch your body, fingers ghosting over your skin or the fact that he was too afraid to slip his tongue in case you grew uncomfortable.

but he realises as you've climbed onto his lap, straddling him that maybe you weren't thinking about that at all. maybe you were just trying to vent these pent up feelings, hoping that he'd reciprocate the same burning desire that you never realised existed for so long.

"this is okay right?" you whisper, still out of breath.

yes. this was fine.

adolescence taglist:

@sirachano0dles (send an ask to be added)

#haikyuu x reader #haikyuu #haikyuu headcanons #haikyuu!!#haikyuu imagines #haikyuu scenarios #myworks #bokuto scenario #bokuto headcanon #bokuto x you #bokuto x reader #bokuto hq #bokuto koutarou #bokuto koutaro #bokuto koutarou hcs #koutarou bokuto #bokuto koutarou x reader

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c-ptsdrecovery · 4 years

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If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

...Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens—when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

... But while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn’t choose. There’s more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life.

... The period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families—so long as women are relegated to the household, nuclear families are so intertwined that they are basically extended families by another name, and every economic and sociological condition in society is working together to support the institution.

But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-’70s, young men’s wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.

...Finally, over the past two generations, families have grown more unequal. America now has two entirely different family regimes. Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children’s development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.

... When you put everything together, we’re likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once. People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mind-set than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan. People with an individualistic mind-set tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption. People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don’t have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.

Many people growing up in this era have no secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood. For those who have the human capital to explore, fall down, and have their fall cushioned, that means great freedom and opportunity—and for those who lack those resources, it tends to mean great confusion, drift, and pain.

... The people who suffer the most from the decline in family support are the vulnerable—especially children. ... We all know stable and loving single-parent families. But on average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents. According to work by Richard V. Reeves, a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

... Consider single men. Extended families provided men with the fortifying influences of male bonding and female companionship. Today many American males spend the first 20 years of their life without a father and the next 15 without a spouse. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has spent a good chunk of her career examining the wreckage caused by the decline of the American family, and cites evidence showing that, in the absence of the connection and meaning that family provides, unmarried men are less healthy—alcohol and drug abuse are common—earn less, and die sooner than married men.

For women, the nuclear-family structure imposes different pressures. Though women have benefited greatly from the loosening of traditional family structures—they have more freedom to choose the lives they want—many mothers who decide to raise their young children without extended family nearby find that they have chosen a lifestyle that is brutally hard and isolating. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that women still spend significantly more time on housework and child care than men do, according to recent data. Thus, the reality we see around us: stressed, tired mothers trying to balance work and parenting, and having to reschedule work when family life gets messy.

Without extended families, older Americans have also suffered. According to the AARP, 35 percent of Americans over 45 say they are chronically lonely. Many older people are now “elder orphans,” with no close relatives or friends to take care of them.

Finally, because groups that have endured greater levels of discrimination tend to have more fragile families, African Americans have suffered disproportionately in the era of the detached nuclear family. Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.) ... Research by John Iceland, a professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, suggests that the differences between white and black family structure explain 30 percent of the affluence gap between the two groups.

... We can’t go back, of course. Western individualists are no longer the kind of people who live in prehistoric bands. ...We value privacy and individual freedom too much.

...Yet recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging. Many of the statistics I’ve cited are dire. But they describe the past—what got us to where we are now. In reaction to family chaos, accumulating evidence suggests, the prioritization of family is beginning to make a comeback. Americans are experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

... In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans—64 million people, an all-time high—live in multigenerational homes.

...T he most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode, single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common, a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way.

#trauma #childhood trauma #found family

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