#god i feel so big blained for this

[marcirose]

Nobody understands Kingdom Hearts that well cause everybody compares it to shonen anime when it's actually a magical girl anime because it has:

-A protagonist who is an ordinary lad who got given a special power that could save the universe

Teammates that the protagonist can lean on and who help the protagonist with said special power

A love interest heavily involved in the plot that both motivates the protagonist and is motivated by the protagonist

A monster of the week format that has its own standalone conflict that eventually leads to the next major plot point in the story

Overarching themes about love and friendships and connections and identity

#kingdom hearts #kh #i haven't stopped thinking about this #it literally started with recoded #and how recoded is basically the first arc in sailor moon ghjkdfshfds #and then i realized that it literally applies to the whole series #oh ye and let's not forget that kairi is the protag's bestie who gets caught up in the monster of the week conflicts #kingdom hearts is a shoujo #this is exactly why nobody understands #god i feel so big blained for this #nomura pls just tell me you've watched magical girl anime cause it's all right there #i feel so smart rn stg lmao

[stuffedteen]

A Bro-Tastic Saga

This is the story of Blaine, Carter, and Mason, three frat bros whose lives were forever changed by a mysterious and magical brew. Their tale began with a secret recipe, and the desire to be the kings of the frat house.

Blaine, the charismatic leader of the trio, had a thing for big guys. He had found a special brew of beer online that would turn Carter & Mason into the bros of his dreams. All he needed to do was to get each of them to drink one cup, and then the beer would take it from there...

"Guys," Blaine said, "I've got a special brew thats gonna take this party to the next level."

Carter and Mason exchanged puzzled looks. Mason spoke up, his voice tinged with curiosity, "What's the brew, Blaine?"

Blaine leaned in, his voice low and conspiratorial, "We're gonna get so drunk off this beer bros! I've got this recipe from my uncle. It's a secret family formula. We'll call it 'Doughboys Beer."

The plan was set in motion. The party raged on, and Carter and Mason down their first cups of Doughboys. The frat house was filled with laughter, music, and shirtless frat bros. Little did anyone know that Blaine had laced the brew with a touch of magic.

Over time, the effects of Doughboys Beer became increasingly apparent. Carter and Mason began to pack on the pounds. Their once-toned bodies gave way to soft guts that seemed to grow by the minute.

Carter rubbed his expanding belly, letting out a satisfied burp, "Man, I've been eating like a horse lately."

Mason patted his own soft gut, "Yeah, me too. What's happening, guys?"

Blaine, feigning innocence, shrugged, "Must be all those late-night pizzas, dudes."

The transformation continued, their softness becoming more pronounced, but what truly fascinated the bros were the newfound desires they couldn't quite explain.

Carter looked at Mason, his voice tinged with an unfamiliar attraction, "You ever feel...different around Blaine?"

Mason nodded, "Yeah, dude. It's like, I can't take my eyes off him."

Blaine couldn't help but grin, his plan working even better than he had hoped, "Guess it's just my charm, guys."

Their infatuation with Blaine only grew as they continued to consume Doughboys Beer. The two bros became lazier, spending their days lounging on the couch, munching on snacks, and craving the magical brew that seemed to have them under its spell. All while obsessing over Blaine and his god-like fit body.

Carter looked at Mason, his voice dripping with desire, "Man, I can't get enough of this beer. It's like it's calling me."

Mason agreed, "You're right, dude. We need more Doughboys Beer."

Their desires had shifted, and their craving for Blaine and the magical brew consumed their thoughts.

Blaine, in the know about the beer's enchanting properties, decided to take advantage of the situation. He encouraged their growing desire, all while maintaining his own physique for them to worship. But he stayed well clear of consuming any of the special brew himself.

One night, as the three bros were hanging out at another rager, Carter and Mason decided to hatch a plan of their own. They couldn't resist the allure of the beer any longer, and it was time to introduce Blaine to the magical elixir he had created.

Carter and Mason exchanged knowing glances and shared a chuckle. Blaine was going to taste the very brew he had concocted and used to control them.

Mason slapped Blaine on the back and practically poured the cup into Blaine's mouth, "Hey, man, you've gotta try this beer. It's epic."

Carter chimed in, "It's like, it tastes so good, dude. It will change your life."

As the magical brew touched his lips, he felt a warmth spreading through his body, followed by an overwhelming sense of desire. His senses tingled with a newfound attraction, and he couldn't tear his eyes away from Carter and Mason.

Carter leaned in, his voice low and seductive, "You feelin' it, Blaine?"

Blaine nodded, "Yeah, guys, this is amazing."

Mason joined in, "We've got more. Let's party."

The three of them drank and laughed, their inhibitions vanishing with each sip. Blaine was now under the spell of the very brew he had created, and he couldn't resist the allure of his transformed bros.

As the night wore on, Blaine's body began to change, his once-toned physique giving way to a soft, doughy middle. His t-shirt stretched across his expanding waistline, and his once-defined abs were replaced by a burgeoning belly.

Carter and Mason watched with amusement, their desires growing stronger as they saw the changes in their once-fit leader. Blaine's attraction to them intensified, and he couldn't resist their allure. He was under their spell, just as they had once been under his.

Carter looked at Mason, his voice tinged with desire, "Man, I can't get enough of this beer. It's like it's calling me."

Mason agreed, "You're right, dude. We need more Doughboys Beer."

Their plan had worked. Blaine was now under the enchantment of the beer, and the power dynamic had shifted. He had become just as addicted to the magical brew as they were.

In the days that followed, Blaine, Carter, and Mason continued their life of indulgence, their desires and cravings entwined in a way they could never have imagined. The frat house parties were wilder than ever, and Doughboys Beer remained their secret, a source of their cravings and desires.

Blaine had unwittingly joined the ranks of the transformed, becoming just as addicted and infatuated with his two bros as they were with him. They had become a trio bound by their shared addiction.

As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, their indulgence knew no bounds. They reveled in their transformed physiques and the enchanting power of Doughboys Beer. Their desires grew stronger with each passing day, their cravings unrelenting.

Their once-toned bodies had become soft and doughy, their once-healthy habits replaced by a relentless pursuit of the magical brew. Blaine, Carter, and Mason had fallen completely under its spell, and the frat house was their kingdom of indulgence.

#fat #chubby #ex twink #exjock #ex jock

[total-aroace-island]

OOO this blog idea is so fun... ily /p

gonna list a few off, bare in mind a lot of these are kinda just projecting onto my faves lololol

okay so

1. dawn, quite a popular aroace hc!

2. cameron, also quite popular

3. dakota!!!!!!!!!!DAKOTA!!!! i looove samkota Do Not get me wrong. but i feel like she'd be arospec in some way, whether thats fully aro and samkota is a qpr or a relationship that doesnt fit the norms or whether thats something like demiromantic and her n sam actually got to know eachother really deeply off camera ^^

4. DJ OH MY GOD. i am SUCH a big aroace dj truther that i cannot stand to look at dj ships. dont get me wrong! if u like dj ships/ship them, thats super cool and ive seen some great artists for them but i personally cannot engage with them (besides djuncan??for some reason?? i actually really love djuncan)

5. BOTH of the adversity twins. like pls 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏 (projecting like a lot)

6. taylor (projecting but also i feel like she'd love herself too much to love anyone else in that way. even after she starts to appreciate others more i think she'd put herself first and start her own business. she does not give a fuck about men yall!! aroallo lesbian trust me)

7. blainely, don, josh. putting them together cause theyre all hosts but idk they just. give me them vibes

ANYWAYS ill probably end up having more so i will be back!!

- 🪐

.

#long post #these are all canon btw i can confirm i was in the writers room /j #also thank you :) ilyt anon /p #planet anon #< idk if you simply want planet or saturn anon come back in my inbox and we’ll figure it out #total drama #aro takes #ace takes #aroace takes #td dawn #td cameron #td dakota #td dj #td jay #td mickey #td taylor #td blaineley #td don #td josh #microlabels #qpr takes #(mentioned) #aroallo takes #ridonculous race

[forabeatofadrum]

Wahoo, hello~!!!!! Thanks @you-remind-me-of-the-babe for the tag!! GOD hi I am tired but also in a weird mood. For the ones who might've missed: I had a lil vacation and went to London to see Hadestown. It was a lot of fun, and we also got last minute Hamilton tickets. I also jokingly said to someone that it was "London, of Carry On fame", but to be honest, fandom was on my mind a lot.

My mum and I went to Chelsea for a restaurant she wanted to try out and yes, okay, Fiona really is rich, huh? It's also so hard to grasp that London really is that big. Yes, Baz lives with Fiona in Chelsea and Simon and Penny move to Camberwell. Close by, right? It's both in London, right? RIGHT?

We also visited Soho, which I know from sconey's fic The Gay Bar (lol) and I almost convinced mum to check out Mayfair, for Lady Ruth, but she was too tired (fair, I dragged her along everywhere). Mayfair felt easier than, you know, Hackney Wick, since that is also on the other side of London. Jeez.

I also went back to Waterstones Picadilly (... several times), which is where I first met Simon and Baz in 2013, because that's where I bought Fangirl!

Funnily enough, the Myosotis series, aka a Klaine fic, was also on my mind a lot. In Myosotis sylvatica, you learn that Pret a Manger is EVERYWHERE in New York (I think it bought Starbucks?? Don't quote me on it.) (I know it's my own fic, but it's been a while.) and I did that because I was inspired by the massive amount of Pret a Manger in London. Also, yes, I went to this city for Hadestown. Shout out to, uh, me, for replanning the entire timeline of Myosotis verna so that Kurt and Blaine could go to Hadestown on their first date.

Also, I am obsessed with Chinatown and YES it made me think of the struggles of 吃了吗? again but HEY the hotpot that I talked about last week ended up being amazing! Also, close to Chinatown is the theatre that hosts Magic Mike Live, which played a big role in my Snowbaz textfic.

If you're still reading this, hi, hello, my banner wasn't lying. Here are the six sentences you were waiting for. Matty Chris D. is still kicking around:

It all started with the Humdrum sending magickal monkeys to disrupt the welcome picnic. I’m actually quite afraid of monkeys. When I was a kid a monkey had escaped from the zoo and this asshole at primary school kept telling everyone that this monkey would kill us. So I am glad I wasn’t there. It would feel like the Humdrum would’ve sent them to torture me personally, which is ridiculous, because I am so unimportant I have trouble believing that the Humdrum knows I exist. The Humdrum is clearly obsessed with Simon Snow and boy, I am no Chosen One.

And now, the weather: @quizasvivamos @coffeegleek @caramelcoffeeaddict @raenestee @tectonicduck @nightimedreamersworld @urban-sith @thnxforknowingme @captain-aralias @cerriddwenluna @bookish-bogwitch @confused-bi-queer @that-disabled-princess @special-bc-ur-part-of-it @larkral @cutestkilla ​ @wellbelesbian ​ @artsyunderstudy ​ @martsonmars ​ @facewithoutheart ​ @shrekgogurt @rockitmans @bitbybitwrites @whatevertheweather @theotherhufflepuff @shame-is-a-wasted-emotion @esilher @kurtsascot @blackberrysummerblog @nightimedreamersghost

#six sentence sunday #tagged in

[rockitmans]

7. ...to shut them up.

from the kiss list / see the rest

7. to shut them up

~~~~~~

“Oh my God, you will not believe the idiocy I have been subjected to today,” Kurt fumes, the second he steps through the door. 

“Oh?” Blaine abandons his vegetable chopping to move towards his husband instead, aiming a kiss at his cheek that Kurt distractedly turns his face into out of habit.  

“I don’t why I thought becoming a creative director of photo shoots would actually mean people listen to me,” Kurt rages. “I mean God forbid, anyone actually tries to understand my vision.” He rips his coat off in a dramatic flair and thrusts it onto the hook. “I put my heart into these concepts.”

“I know you do,” Blaine murmurs. Not that Kurt feels positioned to listen to anything right now. He’s clearly in full flow. Blaine leans back against the counter, content to watch as Kurt moves naturally into an agitated pace across the room. 

“And the new guy, oh my God. He has the creativity of a teaspoon. Not to get too Miranda Priestly about this but florals in spring?” Kurt throws his hands up in exasperation and Blaine nods emphatically to show he’s listening even though he’s mostly just distracted by how especially gorgeous his husband looks today. Kurt is dressed in a shirt and tie with a suit jacket that is perfectly tailored to his body and shows off his broad shoulders and narrow waist. Blaine has never been able to resist Kurt in formal wear. He wants to tug that tie away from his throat so he can put his mouth there instead. Thank God for important work meetings that make Kurt want to dress up. 

“Like why not just pair that with pastels and be done with it. Fucking spring florals, what am I even paying this guy for?” Kurt asks but it’s clearly rhetorical because he just keeps on going. “I can’t even get into what I would like to do because it involves bird feathers and people clearly aren’t ready for that conversation.” 

Blaine bites his lip against a smile. He knows Kurt is frustrated, but he’s just so lovely like this. Flushed and slightly wild, all big gestures and mussed up hair. He wants to mess it up further. Sink his hands into it and push Kurt to his knees. 

“So instead I came to them with the neon concept. You know how we spoke about neons.”

“Due a comeback,” Blaine chirps obediently. 

“Exactly. So I came at them with the neons but it’s like everyone is determined to live in a sad, grey, closed off little world. What exactly is people’s problem with orange? And yellow for God’s sake? What did yellow ever do to anyone?” Kurt reaches up to loosen his tie and undo his top buttons and now looks so perfectly dishevelled that Blaine can’t follow his ranting any longer. He swallows. His eyes are glued to the way Kurt’s lips are moving. The way Kurt’s muscles move under the tight fabric. That small sliver of skin he’s exposed at his collarbone.  

He zones out for long enough that Kurt pauses in his pacing, moving to stand in front of Blaine with his arms crossed. “Are you even listening? Because I don’t think you seem outraged enough about mph-” 

Blaine can’t hold himself back any more. Not with Kurt so beautiful and animated and now close enough to touch. He hooks his fingers through Kurt’s belt loops and pulls him close, crashing their mouths together. Kurt staggers but Blaine steadies him and Kurt almost instantly relaxes, arms wrapping around Blaine’s back and shoulders. His mouth turns warm and willing under Blaine’s in a heartbeat and Blaine can’t stop the small, desperate noise that escapes him. 

He spins them, pressing Kurt up against the counter he was leaning against. He doesn’t have the patience for slow build up. His fingers go to Kurt’s button, undoing it and immediately sliding the jacket down Kurt’s shoulders. His mouth opens in invitation and Kurt takes it without pause, his tongue slick and hot and perfect. Kurt helps detangle himself from the jacket and Blaine’s hands go immediately to his waist, pressing in, feeling the shape of him through his shirt before yanking it out of his waistband. 

“Mm,” Kurt hums happily, leaning back to snatch a breath. “I'm all in favour of wherever this is going but, be honest. Did you kiss me just to stop me busting you for not listening?”

“Kurt, please. That is offensive,” Blaine jokes, smiling at Kurt’s soft huff of exasperation. “I kissed you because watching you get impassioned about anything, even the stupidity of other people is so insanely sexy that I just can’t help-” 

This time it’s Blaine that gets silenced with a kiss.  From the way Kurt smiles against his mouth, he thinks it was probably deliberate. 

#klaine #klaine fic #klaine fanfiction #glee #my fic #the kiss fics #asks #mynonah #i meant to write this yesterday but I had a vaguely awkward interaction with someone at work #and had to lie down in a dark room for six hours

[sapphic-agent]

You know, Santana wasn't wrong when she called Finn a hypocrite. It's also one of the reasons I hate his character. But how many instances of him being a hypocrite are there? Let's get into it.

2x09 (the very episode Santana called him out on it):

"I knew you were a lot of things, Rachel, and I loved you because and in spite of all of them, but... I never thought you were mean."

This is when Rachel confessed that she made out with Puck to get back at him. Mind you, this is after she lied to a younger foreign exchange student and tricked her to going to a crack house. And... that's not mean to you, Finn? It was surely vindictive and borderline cruel. Not to mention the comments she's thrown around that could definitely constitute as mean. Why is Rachel only mean when it pertains to how she hurt him specifically?

2x02:

"Well, Santana has a point. Just trying to be honest."

/

2x06:

"Hey, ever notice that when the Beiste gets all fired up, her underpants go right up her butt?"

So, you know how in season 3 where they (both the show and the fans) attempt to justify Finn outing Santana by pointing out that she body-shamed/bullied him. Well, surely, Finn didn't also body-shame/make fun of Coach Bieste in season 2. Which, yes Sam, Mike, and Tina were also guilty, Finn was the one who started it. And he didn't apologize because he was wrong, he apologized because Bieste was going to quit and "the football team was finally doing well." There's also the instance where Finn laughs at one of Santana's insults towards Rachel, then agrees with her.

Again, he was fine with Santana's bullying until the minute it was directed towards him.

2x09 (again):

"Look, I'm all for pumping up the team, making everyone feel special, but that's for practice. You don't take the star quarterback out before the big game."

Oh, but what was that in season 1? Where Finn admits he wasn't putting in as much effort into Glee because Jesse was being given the spotlight. Or in season 3 when he was openly jealous of and threatened by Blaine's talent. Also, earlier in season 2 when he prayed to be put in the game instead of Sam who was the better player. He was fine with others being pushed aside when he was the favorite, but God forbid it happen to him.

(Also, who was the one who threw Nationals with that kiss? It certainly wasn't Sam or Quinn or Santana)

2x01:

"...you got to admit the truth. You didn't do this because you love Glee Club. You did it because you love yourself more."

I'm not going to lie and say that Finn's wrong here. However, it's only a few episodes later in 2x04 that he's doing almost the exact same thing. Strong-arming Kurt into not dueting with Sam under the pretense that it's for the good of Sam and the club, when it's actually because he's still uncomfortable with Kurt being gay and projecting that onto Sam. Screw what Sam and Kurt want, screw that Quinn didn't even want to duet with or date Sam, it's all about what Finn (and Rachel) wants.

1x13

"No! They're both lying to me!"

Remember how (understandably) hurt and angry Finn was when he found out that Puck was the father? Remember how he was angry at Puck and refused to speak to him for months? Remember how their friendship was never the same after that?

So then why- after perpetuating the guise of being his friend and looking out for him- did he push Quinn into cheating on Sam with him? True, there was no pregnancy or baby involved, but that was still shitty. And unlike Puck, Finn faced almost no repercussion from Sam after that (even when he was being accused of seeing Quinn behind Finn's back later, he never threw that back in Finn's face).

3x19:

"Make you stand up and show everybody how much of a crazy liar you are? Yeah."

Fun fact, Finn lied and said he was disabled to get a job at a restaurant in season 1. So it's actually interesting how mad he is that Quinn was "faking" being in a wheelchair (she wasn't faking, she was exaggerating, but she still couldn't walk well after her accident).

2x08:

"Rachel, I'm sorry. I want to, but I can't."

Also fun fact, Finn quit the club and condemned Rachel in season 1 because she was protecting her (and the club's) reputation by hiring a show director that harped on them for their flaws. It's funny how when it came to protecting Kurt who was being continuously harassed and assaulted, Finn cared more about saving his reputation.

3x04:

"Santana, stay out of this."

I need two hands to count the number of times Finn's inserted himself into business that isn't his. Hell, this very episode he was eavesdropping on Mercedes trying to convince Santana to join the Troubletones. He reported Rachel to Schue when she was seeing Jesse, chimed into the conversation Mercedes was having with Schue, tried to control Sam's entire social life, etc. And, he was trying to push Brittany into making a decision because he didn't like the choice she had already made in this very moment. What Brittany does is none of Finn's business.

3x04:

"Yeah. All the guys in Glee Club call me that. And you're the leader, so that makes you the worst of them all."

It's interesting that Brittany pointing this out doesn't ignite the same rage from the fandom as Santana's fat shaming. The guys in the Glee Club- including Finn, who definitely shouldn't be one to talk- have been collectively calling Brittany an idiot for years at this point. How is that any better than Santana calling Finn fat? Why is only she a bully? Why are Finn's feelings the only ones that matter?

And before anyone says "well it's true," so? That means Santana calling Finn fat is also justified because it's true, right? Brittany doesn't deserve to be mocked repeatedly just because she isn't as smart at the people around her. That's ableism.

2x05:

"Guys whisper behind our backs about how we girls look every day. They objectify us all the time."

Speaking of the fat-shaming, why don't we rewind to why Santana started it in the first place. The Glee guys- including Finn- are (again) just as culpable of talking about the girls' bodies. Finn especially has done this consistently throughout the show (most of which being centered around Rachel, y'know, his girlfriend). It's so interesting that no one ever brings this up. Almost like it's acceptable for men, but the moment women cross that line, it's intolerable.

Finn is a hypocrite who's fine with allowing and participating in rotten behavior until the very moment he's on the receiving end. No, I won't be taking criticism. Argue with the wall.

#anti finn hudson #lol glee #finn hudson is a hypocrite #and so are his stans #argue with the wall #santana lopez #brittany pierce #quinn fabray #unholy trinity

[americanwh0resstuff]

- Don’t ignore me -

Big time angst, with some fluff at the end.

After some harsh words from Candy, you seek solace on the roof of the scratching post, sending Blaine into a frenzy

Word count: 1,187

Angst 🗡️ and a lil fluff ☁️

I made a promise to complete this list by @creativepromptsforwriting in a months time, using a random number generator I got number 9! “Don’t ignore me”

- Don’t ignore me -

It was a Saturday afternoon, I could hear the wind blowing past my ears, whisking my hair around me, I watched in a trance as the leaves made a tornado like shape while whipping through the streets, I steadied my breathing by syncing with the storm, letting the soft raindrops wash over me.

I was sitting on the roof of the scratching post, 4 stories high and far from the noise of Don E cleaning the bar, far from the sounds of candys heals clicking against the tiles, and especially far from Blaine.

Last night I sat at my usual spot at the bar, chatting with Blaine as he served customers, handing me expensive drinks and enjoying what should have been a calm evening, until it wasn’t.

I headed to the bathroom around 1am, touching up my worn off makeup and messy hair, when candy walked in.

I was never her biggest fan, she’d always given me dirty looks, downright ignoring me when she walked into a room, and blatantly flirting with Blaine right in front of me.

So when she walked into the small restroom, drunk out of her mind and most likely high, I tried to ignore her, keep looking in the mirror and leave as soon as I was done.

That didn’t happen.

“You know Blaine only keeps you around cuz you’re easy…” her words trailed off, slurred as she swayed behind me.

“You’re wrapped around his finger (y/n), he’s got you right where he wants you”

I kept looking forward, not even looking back at her as she spoke, tho I could see her in the mirror, bracing herself against the stalls.

“I was once his favourite, you know? I was just like you… but now… well I’m a god-damn-fucking treasure compared to you…” her eyes were like daggers in my back, staring me down, metaphorically stabbing me with each word.

“He only fucks you cuz he knows that once he goes back to me… well, it’ll be like finding a diamond in a pile of horseshit…”

With that I put my lipstick back in my pocket and walked out the door, letting it slam shut behind me, hearing a drunken “don’t let it hit you on the way out!” As I left.

I needed a breather, even though I wanted to not believe her, her words spiralled in my mind, spinning and circling around. I saw the way she looked at him, the way her hand lingers too long when handing him paperwork, the way she perches herself on her desk like some prized canary. It drove me nuts.

I walked passed the bar and into the back office, into the small bedroom where I spent the vast majority of my time, the bed I shared with Blaine.

I laid back, letting my head hit the pillow, I felt tears well in my eyes.

It was stupid, I know, I felt like I was 15 again, getting picked on by the school bully, she wasn’t worth it, but it still hurt.

It didn’t take long for me to fall asleep, my head hurting from tears and exhaustion, I was so tired that I didn’t even hear Blaine coming in, pulling my shoes off and placing the soft blanket over me.

I woke up hours later, still in my black leather jeans and button up shirt, my makeup smudged at hair an absolute mess, I looked a wreck. I turned my head, seeing Blaine sleeping softly besides me, normally this would instantly make me smile, it would urge me to cuddle closer and stay in bed all day, but all I wanted to do was run, run from my feelings, run from my problems and run from him.

So that’s how I ended up here, my hands raw from climbing the fire escape, my head hurting and my body shaking, partly from the hangover and partly from the cold.

I left my phone on the bedside table, knowing that as soon as Blaine sees I’m not in bed, he’d call me till my phone quite literally blew up.

I knew he’d be panicking, but the horrible, jealous part of me, wanted him to worry, I wanted him to feel that same sinking feeling I felt.

I stayed there for hours, sitting, walking around, laying down and watching the clouds, doing anything but go back down.

It wasn’t until I heard Blaine’s car pull back into the alley behind the bar that I sat down facing him, letting my legs dangle off the side of the building.

An hour before I’d heard him leave, shouting at Don E to drive up to my favourite cafe, and that he was headed to my apartment to look for me.

Now he was back, I watched him step out of his car and pick up his phone, he dialed a number, running his hand through his hair, he looked distraught, and part of me felt suddenly awful, I frowned as he leaned back against his car, looking down at his feet.

“Hey, Liv… I’m sorry to call I just- I can’t fi-“ he looked up, his eyes meeting mine as he froze, putting his phone down.

He didn’t even hesitate before rushing to the fire escape, making his way up to me.

“(Y/n)!” I looked down at my feet, still hanging over the street below.

He repeated my name again, softer this time, I winced, he didn’t sound mad, or even upset anymore… he sounded relieved.

And that killed me

He sat down behind me and pulled me into his arms, away from the ledge, holding me close and trembling slightly.

“What happened baby? What’s wrong?” He was mumbling questions into my hair, gripping me tightly as I lay stiff in his arms.

“Baby, please, don’t ignore me…”

He knew. I could tell right then, he knew.

I broke down, sobbing as I relaxed in his arms, gripping his arms to steady myself.

“I’m sorry, it’s stupid…” my voice broke, tears streaming down my face.

“It’s not (y/n), Candy told me what happened… well, she came onto me and told me you were out of the picture…”

I sniffed and looked up at him, my eyebrows furrowed.

“Listen to me (y/n), no one could ever replace you… you make me want to be a better person, you make me smile every single day, when I woke up this morning and you weren’t there… I don’t think I’ve ever felt that scared…” he caressed my cheek, pulling me closer, his words now coming out as a whisper, as if his words would shatter me like a piece of glass.

He held me there for what felt like an eternity, soothing me as I sobbed, apologising for what seemed like hours. I was so out of it that I was practically out of my body as he lead me back to the bar, pulling me into the warm shower with him and curling into bed with me.

Holding me until I knew she was wrong, I knew he had chosen me.

#blaine debeers #izombie #blaine mcdonough #blaine debeers x reader #blaine debeers fanfiction #izombie fanfiction

[pathogenic]

Vampire the Masquerade Questions for Anabell, Harriet, Cali, and Jules

I. ESSENTIALS

1. What name did they go by as a Kine, and what name do they go by now? Why and how did they choose this name, if it’s different?

Anabell - It's no different than the one she has now - she has always been Anabell Blaines, she will die Anabell Blaines. She would only pick up a new name if she starts to live for a little too long (but so far, this has not happened).

Harriet - Harriet is much the same, but it would take a lot more for her to pick up a new name. She'll just say she was named after her mother if things get too long.

Cali - Cali's fun - he's had this nickname his entire life, but I did toy with the idea that once he's lived long enough (and if his humanity continues to drop), that he'd be Nero to those he doesn't know. They don't get that familiarity.

Jules - Jules picked this name for themselves prior to death. Works well since it isn't documented anywhere. They're not parting with it any time soon, thanks.

2. What year were they born (or how old would they be in life), and what age do they appear? What age do they feel?

This is where I have to admit that my bookkeeping for my vampires and their ages is very weak!

Anabell - Anabell would have been born in the 40s as she was in her 20s when the 60s rolled around. During this time she was a party girl and definitely was big in the hippie scene. It wasn't until the 70s that she had her crisis and worked to become a priest, then in the 80s she was Embraced. So she appears to be in her early 40s, but she should be pushing 80 by now. She still feels pretty young.

Harriet - Harriet would have been in the start of her 30s when she was Embraced, and she's only been Kindred for a few years. She doesn't feel that different from when she died just yet.

Cali - Cali would have been born around 92, and I'd have to double check my notes to see if he was embraced 2014 (We have the luxury of real dates here, ST is that organized and I'm in awe still). He was 22 when he died, so by now, he would be 32. He certainly looks like he could pass for being older than he is, which is his saving grace right now. This won't be the case for much longer and boy is he aware of it. Cali is my youngest Embrace.

Jules - Okay so by my math, the game Jules is set in is in the year 2000, Jules have been Kindred for about 3-ish years at that point, so they were embraced roughly 1997. By then Jules would be starting to hit their thirties, so they would be born between 1967-1970. By now they would be hitting their 50s in 2024, and certainly doesn't feel it.

3. Which Clan do they belong to? How do they feel about their Clan?

Anabell - Anabell is a Brujah! She matches the idealist portion of her Clan very well as she is very passionate about the idea of salvation and the fact that folks can be redeemed. She doesn't like the iconoclast portion of her clan and finds them all to be ruffians with nothing better to do than to cause problems. Her emotions run hot and she can have a difficult time keeping a lid on them during tense moments making her Very Brujah.

Harriet - Harriet is a Ventrue. So far her main exposure to the clan is her husband, Frederick, and the Prince of London, Mithras, so her opinion of them is incredibly skewed. She feels like she has some very big shoes to fill and is doing her best to live up to the examples provided to her. No doubt once she meets some more Ventrues and sees some more... tame examples, she will flourish in this clan just fine.

Cali - Look at him. Look at his personality. This man is a Toreador who should have been a Ventrue, but my god doesn't he make one hell of a Toreador? His general opinion of the clan is rather good since both Frankie and Callum are Toreadors as well. True there are some horrid people in the clan that he'd rather not acknowledge, but he rather likes his clan. He wouldn't say that out loud however.

Jules - Jules is Caitiff and would be the first to tell you that this shit sucks. 0/10, do not do this. They're constantly being picked on for this fact and they're not trusted by most Kindred. This shit is NOT fun.

4. Which Predator type do they most align with and why?

Anabell - She is an Osiris predator type! She feeds off of her own congregation because that is what was easy to do. They trust her, and she doesn't think she is hurting them since the Kiss seems to feel good. She is a natural leader and it is very easy to keep them in line so no one blabs (She is... very good with Presence, whether she likes to admit it or not)

Harriet - She is a Scene Queen that feeds from her own occult circles. She liked to invite them over for seances and other scary events. When the lights are low, it's not hard to sneak in a little nibble - plus it adds to the atmosphere! Do those girls even know they really are in a room with a monster? That's her fun little secret.

Cali - Oh this is a fun one, he was a Scene Queen who worked hipster bars and would start bar fights if he was caught being a little too on the nose, but now? Well, now Cali is an Extortionist who learned that by working with Finlay (who went from Sandman to Trapdoor), he can coerce folks into letting him take blood and not saying a word about it. To be fair, with the way he hunted previously where he'd single out someone who looked like an easy target and then abandon them somewhere for others to clean up, he was already heading down this path.

Jules - Jules is presently a Bagger. Due to how much they unsettle others and the fact that they're just... not comfortable with this whole Kiss ordeal, they find it a lot easier to just buy blood from their buddy Broseph. Of course, they'll come to discover that this won't work forever and that their wallet DOES have a bottom...

5. Who Sired them, and into what Generation were they Sired? What’s their relationship with their Sire like, and what were the circumstances of their Embrace?

Anabell - Her name is Shirley and she was a prostitute from the 1800s out in Texas when the cattle trade was huge. Anabell is 11th generation Brujah. Shirley had selected Anabell for the Embrace because she discovered that she had True Faith.

Shirley WANTS to live again and thought that maybe if she pushed Anabell and tested her faith, she could get her to the point where she could turn the undead back into living beings. If it worked - well, Anabell could revive herself and then Shirley and they could be done with this whole thing! No harm, no foul.

Except it didn't work, and Anabell lost her faith. They both resent each other for this. Shirley did the bare minimum as a Sire afterwards, and Anabell had to figure out how to live on her own, which fucked her up because hey. This is her mother again, isn't it?

Harriet - Her husband is her sire, and iirc she is an 12th generation Ventrue, but I would need to double check. She was Embraced partially because she wanted to be (due to her fascination with what her husband is), but also because she was a danger since she did snoop and found out more than she should have.

She is blood bound to her husband, so she cannot act against him easily. She is aware that he is not the best person ever, but well, she still loves him because she has to, and she's not about to be a bad wife. That would be a bad, terrible stain on her reputation.

Cali - Cali was embraced by the ex-Prince of Glasgow, Alex. He is a 10th generation Toreador. Their relationship is... Woof. Cali initially liked her a lot because she was his ticket to success. He worked hard to please her and to provide her with the art pieces she wanted to gentrify Glasgow. He was her ghoul for awhile.

The problem is Cali is not a romantic guy, he has fallen in love with exactly one person both in life and death, and it was not Alex. He could never be the object of fascination that she wanted. When he was Embraced, it was rushed, panicked, and sloppy.

Cali soon found that he chaffed under the Camarilla. How could he be the Childe of the Prince and be nobody at all? This caused them to have frequent spats before Cali finally fucked off and then his friend Frankie was Embraced instead. He still has a very sour relationship with Alex and refuses to have much of anything to do with her.

Jules - Jules doesn't know their sire, nor their generation, not that that matters. They just know that when trying to figure out what happened to Lloyd, they got too close and someone took care of them after that. Now here they are.

6. What level of Humanity are they? Has this changed over the years they’ve been dead?

Anabell - She is at Humanity 7 and does everything she can to keep it that way. She does not want to become a real monster and she wants to make sure she can always go back to being human (nevermind the fact that you need Humanity 10 for that - I know it, she doesn't)

Harriet - Currently she is at Humanity 7, though ideally she should be closer to Humanity 6. She is not very humane when it comes to more Kine and is eager to let go of her humanity. I'm sure this will be normal and fine.

Cali - My boy is at Humanity 5. He's brutal, pure and simple, and that willingness to step on others and his methods for hunting has caused him to get more detatched from his humanity. Plus killing and Embracing his ghoul didn't help any...

Jules - Humanity 7. Rather in touch with people and does their best to keep it that way, even if they're a little unnerving to be around.

7. Which Disciplines do they possess, and which do they favor using?

Anabell - Presence, Dominate, Potence. Best discipline is Presence, though it is tied with Potence right now. Best ability is Spark of Rage.

Harriet - Dominate, Presence, Fortitude. Best discipline is Dominate, best ability is Cloud Memory (she's baby right now). Wants Auspex.

Cali - Wide spread actually... Presence, Dominate, Auspex, Fortitude. Best discipline is tied between Presence and Fortitude. Best ability is Toughness. Got Fortitude by swapping blood with his partner, Finlay (Hecata).

Jules - Auspex, Obfuscate, and Potence. Best discipline is Obfuscate. Best ability is Prowess. More dots in Obfuscate to hide and steal, but uses Prowess more to keep coteriemates safe.

8. Who are their Touchstones, if any?

I'll do one each since I find that is the best way to do Touchstones is to have A person who represents that character's humanity. (Thanks Von)

Anabell - That would be Father Ryan. He is a very non-judgemental guy and was the first real friend Anabell made since she started her new work. He is very kind and open and that is what she aspires to be.

Harriet - Her butler Ellis fits the bill here. He has been something of a father figure since hers left her life. He is dedicated, loyal, and very kind towards her. She would be very lost without him.

Cali - His lawyer, ha. He was supposed to go to college to work for Mr. Morcambe, but life changed for him and he decided to drop out and go to art school instead. He still keeps in touch with Mr. Morcambe for... reasons. (He is a troublemaker.)

Jules - Mr. Boshaw - he runs a lot of the local venues, so Jules keeps in touch with him to make sure Lloyd's radio show has accurate information on upcoming shows. They love Mr. Boshaw's jovial, playful demeanor. Helps keep them light as well.

9. What are their Convictions (moral opinions and standings they hold fast to)?

Anabell - Keep to the Commandments, Seek forgiveness whenever possible.

Harriet - Keep your hand hidden and a smile on your face, Curiosity is the most important part of life

Cali - Never be poor again, Be prepared to step on others to get ahead in life

Jules - The most important thing in life is to have fun, Keep those closest to you safe and stand your ground.

10. Do they belong to any sect or are they independent?

Camarilla - Anabell Blaines, Jules Guillory, Harriet Berkeley

Sabbat - For one game, Anabell was converted to the Sabbat

Anarch - Nero "Cali" Ramsay

II. LIFE

1. What did they do (as a career or in general) before they were Embraced?

Anabell - She was a priest for an Anglican church.

Harriet - She was a housewife.

Cali - An artist in resident doing public works of art.

Jules - Ran a record store and a radio show with their partner.

2. Do they still have mortal family or friends, or descendants of those people? Who were they closest to during life, and is there anyone they’ve contacted after their Embrace?

Anabell - Well, functionally yes, she would still consider herself to be a friend to Father Ryan, but they lost touch, and now she knows she would definitely register as wrong to him since they're getting on in years and she has not aged. She doesn't keep in contact with her family, but she does keep in touch with those that attend her church. She hasn't reached out to anyone else from her life since her death. Most are starting to die off at this point anyways.

Harriet - She is still very much attached to her mortal life. She keeps in touch with those that she holds social gatherings with and pretend to be alive, she still is in touch with her mother, and she had no kids of her own (Frederick was already dead when they met thus they could not conceive). She is going to have a very hard time when she needs to break these contacts.

Cali - Mixed bag. A lot of those hew as close to in life in Glasgow are also dead now, so that does make it harder to stay human. Most of his mortal contacts now are business related, or he knows them second hand through Finlay. He has been in contact with his family, but that is very light and he is starting to realize he needs to break that kind of soon. He's a little hesitant because he worries how they'll handle his "death".

Jules - Jules still has a lot of contacts from life, specifically from the music scene. They weren't really that close to anyone beyond Lloyd, so they aren't too worried about how their mortal life pushes in on their Kindred life. They'll burn that bridge when they get there. Since they weren't close to their family at all, that was an easy one to toss.

3. What were their hobbies, skills, and interests?

Anabell - She likes music and collects vinyls that she likes to play in her apartment, but she also sews, she embroiders, she loves to read, she loves debate. Those are her kinds of things.

Harriet - She would love calligraphy if she had given it a shot, but she loves writing and making things look pretty in that regard. She loves the occult and would often participate in various seances and she would carry out her own investigations. This is also another one who was an avid reader.

Cali - Huge sci-fi nerd, but will never own up to it. Like he has a collection still, but keeps it hidden because he'd rather folks didn't know how much of a nerd he really is. He also liked video games and board games, but stopped playing them almost all together since he died.

Jules - Beyond music and going to concerts, Jules has a good mechanical sense. They like taking things apart and putting them back together. They do a lot of DIY as a result.

4. Did they have any vices, addictions, or mental illnesses? Which carried over into death?

Anabell - She is... better at lying than she likes and isn't above using it to help herself out. She wouldn't consider herself really dependent on anything, but her lying habits did follow into death. She also has a hyperfixation problem that definitely followed in.

Harriet - She obsesses and hyper fixates, and that definitely followed into death. She is also rather easily paranoid and all this vampire business has only validated those anxieties.

Cali - Given how I play him, he has ADHD for sure and his Toreador-ness has only made it worse. The man is prone to fixating on a project hard and not really stopping for anything or anyone. He also is fairly restless and lacks much of a filter.

Jules - Jules has honest to god depression and will not seek aid for this. This followed into death, but they have difficulties with motivation and finding the will to do a lot of things, but everyone gets like that - right?

5. What were they most afraid of in life? How has this changed?

Anabell - To be condemned and damned, and becoming Kindred has made this like 10x worse, so it became a central point to her character.

Harriet - She mostly feared an uncertain future and failing the expectations people have of her. This has not changed in death as she feels she still has to play the role of The Good Wife to Frederick.

Cali - Stagnation, death, finding out everyone was right about him being a failure. This is what drives him to aim higher and higher and higher. Icarus type character.

Jules - Isolation. Losing Lloyd is what pushed them to their death, and they fear it happening again, and now there are more Kindred they are attached to. It's getting scary for them!

6. What were their goals and ambitions in life? How has this changed?

Anabell - Simply put, Anabell wanted to help others and to ease their suffering. If she can make sure someone in her congregation doesn't go through the same hell she did growing up, she'll consider that a success. Now it has become saving others to saving herself as she gets older.

Harriet - She wanted to be a good wife, but she also wanted to know more about the supernatural world. Now that she's in, she can really start to dig deeper and deeper. She wants to be a scholar in her own right by the looks of things. I should get her into Noddism, truly.

Cali - He still has something to prove. He has his degree, he has put out works that people can recognize. Now he wants to be a name, he wants to be an artist people just know. Now in death, there is still that drive, but he wants to be someone in charge, someone calling the shots. He wants to be a big dog here.

Jules - Mostly, Jules didn't have a lot of ambition. They're kind of content where they were, running a shop with their partner, just surviving. In death, they're mostly concerned with protecting their coterie, but they also are starting to wonder what eternity looks like for them. What the fuck do they want to achieve? Is it enough to just live?

7. Did they follow any religion or spiritual paths in life? How did that change when they died, if at all?

Anabell - Anglican in life and death, though lost her True Faith ability because she views herself as being abandoned by God. She wants to get back and she wants to be redeemed, but is that possible for her? She doesn't know and the answer scares the shit out of her.

Harriet - She's Protestant, but doesn't really practice. She can talk the talk if anyone looks at her too closely, but is she really a good Christian? Ehhh... She goes to church sometimes - what more do you want?

Cali - Presbyterian in name only. Doesn't attend church, doesn't really follow any teachings, but if you asked, that's his best guess, otherwise he'd say that it really isn't for him.

Jules - Full on atheist. Not interested in religion in life, not about to start in death.

8. When they were Embraced, what was the aftermath like? Did they fake their death, do their loved ones think they went missing, etc.?

None have gone so far as to fake their death yet and many of them, as mentioned above, do have contact with friends and/or family prior to death. Some like Cali have claimed to develop a disease, so they cannot be in the sunlight anymore and work mostly in the nighttime.

Anabell would be the one closest to ending her mortal life and finding a way to either remake herself or start building a network so she can dodge the public. Cali realizes that he's going to have to do this soon, but he has time. Jules doesn't really see that mattering yet, and Harriet is quite frankly too young to even worry about it, Kindred wise.

III. DEATH

1. What have they spent most of their years as a Kindred doing?

Anabell - Mostly, she has been working at her church and trying to keep a low profile. In the Houston campaign, she was helping resolve an Infernalist issue, and for the Tucson one, she has been picked up by the Sabbat and is working on going more towards the Orthodoxy.

Harriet - She's joined a coterie against her husbands wishes because it has been demanded of her. She is looking into weird supernatural occurrences around London, primarily she is looking into a series of murders that have a primary suspect being a local Kindred.

Cali - Oh, you know, overthrowing the Camarilla in Glasgow. Normal things. Mostly he is part of the source of a lot of political instability in the area because he's trying to shape things the way he wants them to be. Alarmingly successful little brat at it too.

Jules - Mostly investigating a weird event in New Orleans that caused all the local Kindred and some Kine to frenzy. They also spend a lot of time working on that stolen Jeep for some reason. They really, really like that damn thing.

2. What’s the entire lineage of their bloodline, from them all the way back to their Clan’s Antediluvian? Is there anything in particular that they and their grandsires all had in common?

The only one that has anything interesting going on here is Cali. Frankie is currently looking into this, and since they have the same sire, what's true for them is true for Cali as well, so stay tuned. I just know that he has a fascinating Toreador line.

I don't know about his grandsires, but I do know that Cali has a weird theme of cycles around him as he was ghouled by Alex, was Embraced as a rush part, and his relationship soured and he defected. Lo and behold, his Childe Daniel has a very similar story going on.

3. How do they adapt to the changing times around them? Do they still uphold values, styles, or other things from the past?

Anabell - She is getting antiquated. Her mannerism, her slang, her fashion, it's all getting older and she finds herself out of place. It's what is making her really worry about what she'll be doing and where she'll be soon enough.

Harriet - Has not been dead long enough to even start thinking about this.

Cali - He's not really out of date, mercifully. Once that happens, he's going to be floored. To be fair though, Cali has always been something of a grandpa compared to his peers so he might adapt just fine, actually. He makes retro work.

Jules - They look like majority of their generation right now, so they aren't too worried. Once that population ages though, they might be in trouble. Still, they keep up with local metal scenes and they feel that they can adapt. Time will tell if they're right.

4. Do they have a coterie? What position do they take in that group, if so? Otherwise, do they have any notable Kindred (or other creatures) friends?

Anabell - She sure did! She was the political leader there and often lead the discussions with important figures. She did, however, sell them all out to hunters that promised they could turn her human and she got shot in the back of the head and killed for it! :D

As for the Tucson game, she is an SPC, but she is now tied to the actual pack of that game as one of the player characters, Penny, is shaping her up to be a Bishop.

Harriet - She is part of a coterie and plays more of a specialist role. She is their tie to high society and their in for more upper class places, but mostly she provides her knowledge on occult happenings in the city.

Cali - Cali is kind of the tactician of the group? I'd love to say he's the muscle, but to be frank, Finlay fills that role better. Cali does a lot of planning and takes a lot of hits for everyone. He's a somewhat smart punching-bag.

Jules - They're mostly the one who sneaks around and does some underhanded work. When it comes to it, though, they're one hell of a tank alongside Lloyd. They liked to make sure no one gets hurt.

5. Which of their Clan’s stereotypes apply to them? Which do they act against, or embody the opposite of?

Anabell - She is a very emotional character, and this makes her easier to rile up, falling in line with the typical image of a Brujah. She falls very well into the Idealist group of Brujah and has grand visions for herself, but not necessarily Kindred as a whole. Still, she is not the rebel punk that you imagine when you hear Brujah!

Harriet - She's high class, she is very well put together, she would probably do just fine in a board meeting, she likes things to be orderly. In that respect, she is a proper Ventrue. However, she is so invested in magic and mystery that she would have made a much better Tremere.

Cali - Insufferable artist, but he doesn't match the whole idea of the pretty flirt Toreador that the books like to present. He's rude, he doesn't keep up with his appearance as much as others in his clan, he is not going to mesh with the high class parties associated with the clan. Still, he would have made a fine Ventrue with his lust for power and desire to rule.

Jules - Caitiff so heyo.

6. How do they feel about the Antitribu of their Clan?

Non-applicable. None of them have met Antitribu.

7. Have they Embraced anyone? Ghouled anyone?

Anabell - Had a ghoul once to keep a character safe so he didn't get killed by the Camarilla. I don't consider this to really be a part of her canon anymore though. :0 No Embraces!

Harriet - She has considered ghouling Ellis, but decided against it as she would like to man to have an end to his days, he deserves that much.

Cali - YES. He had a Ghoul named Daniel who he kept to basically help promote his art and secure gallery deals, but he ate him and turned him into another Toreador. Oops!

Jules - No and frankly really hates the idea of ghouling, much less changing anyone.

8. Do they prowl, or is there a city they permanently reside in?

Anabell - Primarily was in Houston. For the Sabbat game, she moved to Tucson.

Harriet - Lives in London, unlikely to move any time soon.

Cali - Primarily lives in Glasgow, due to circumstances in a game, he might be moving Edinburgh, but he hopes that is not permanent.

Jules - Is from Portland, moved to New Orleans.

9. What’s their haven like?

Anabell - It is a small 1 bed, 1 bath. She has a cross wall like any good Texan that she likes to routinely shuffle around. Her furniture is mostly dated and definitely has a retro 80s kind of feel to them. She has a prized gramophone that she likes to use from time to time, but she does have a more modern record player as well. It feels very homely and welcoming.

Harriet - Shares an estate with her husband. It is nice and has plenty of decorations, but the estate feels very cold. Her mother usually stays, but she also has her own smaller home that she goes back to from time to time. Pretty much envision the most stereotypical posh Victorian home and you got it.

Cali - Used to live in an apartment that was referred to as Casa de Arse by Frankie and Callum (Cali refused the name for the longest time). It's nice enough and it is decently furnished, but it was rather clear a bunch of 20-somethings lived here with how spare it was decorated. Cali also sun-proofed the place, so the windows are a little sketchy.

Since then though, he moved into the Tower with Finlay. There he has a small apartment and helps run the pub there, mostly being a bouncer when there is trouble. One of the floors has been converted into a studio for him to work in, and that part looks like a bomb went off between his small-scale stone works and clay works. He doesn't do big-scale projects here as it would be impossible to move around.

Jules - They also have a small apartment that is mostly trashed as Jules is not very good at this whole "cleaning" business, but they do try. Since their death though, they find it is a lot easier to keep the place nice. Mostly full of clothes, CDs, a TV, some sheets on both a bed and a couch, things like that.

They also have a bunker under the record store in case him and Lloyd lose track of time. They made it the greatest 70s abomination possible complete with shitty shag carpet. There is a TV with a game console and a boombox down there along with a cot. It's hideous.

10. Do they believe they are descended from Caine, or do they follow a different path?

None of them really go down this path at all, but Anabell can certainly be convinced. She is the only one who is close to this ideology.

If Harriet knew it existed, she would certainly gobble this up as well...

11. How do they feel about Diablerie?

Anabell - For her Camarilla game, that is a solid no, you don't do this. For the Sabbat, you probably shouldn't, but really she is coming around to the idea... She could probably diablerize some folks and get away with it. Rather keen on the idea of having someone with you forever, but hates the fast that she could lose herself if they win.

Harriet - Not interested, and not super aware of it's existence either. Once she knows of it though, I can't see her being too keen on trying it.

Cali - On paper? He'd say that it's a shit idea. If it was presented to him and he knew it would probably up his chances to be stronger? He'd do it. He's tough, he'd win (probably not).

Jules - Hell no. They're technically in a Vaulderie (long story), but they won't do anything beyond that.

12. Regardless of whether or not they adhere to Camarilla rule, have they ever broken any of the Traditions?

Anabell - Actually, she's rather good at keeping to these. She kind of thrives with rules to play in. The only one I can see her committing is breaking the Rule of Destruction. If she felt someone was out of line and the Camarilla was too slow to act, then she'll be the hand of God here.

Harriet - Another one who is rather good at this. She would probably break the Rules of Hospitality by accident as she might feel it is more important that they come to her.

Cali - Ha. Smashed the rules of Domain and Progeny. Fuck your territory, and by the way, new Toreador in town.

Jules - Would knowingly break the Rules of Hospitality. Fuck you, you don't need to know that they're in town. They don't care to play kiss ass to a Prince like that.

13. Do they believe in Gehenna? How do they feel about Thin-bloods, and do they believe they’re a sign of the end times?

None really believe in Gehenna and believe it all to be bullshit. None feel particularly strong about Thin-Bloods. If anything, Cali is rather warm to them due to Sorcha. He likes to give her grief, but he rather enjoys having her around.

14. Have they ever Frenzied? What happened?

Anabell - Has indeed had a fear frenzy and a hunger frenzy. The second is how she discovers her cool flaw Stigmata - so once she is hungry enough, she begins to show the wounds of Christ. Which. Did freak her out a lot.

Cali - Yes! The first time he met Finlay, Finlay ended up stabbing him in the throat. During the recovery of this incident, he went into a hunger frenzy and ate Daniel. :)

The other two have not had any notably frenzies.

IV. SECTS & NON-CAINITES

What do they think about…

1. …the Camarilla?

Anabell - It is order, it is the only thing that makes sense in this undead life as they are trying to make sure they don't rock the boat too much. When converting to the Sabbat, she thinks they are blind to the larger picture. They serve old Kindred instead of God and they cannot see that these old Kindred are trouble.

Harriet - It's all she knows so far, but she likes the order they provide. Surely without the Camarilla, all Kindred would be wild and they would be wiped out by Hunters and then what!? Her adventures and her exploration would be over!

Cali - Old farts that don't know how to change their ways even if they tried. He doesn't mind the Camarilla per se, but come on, you have to be older than everyone there to make decisions? Christ, no one needs to hold his hand and make his decisions for him, thanks.

Jules - It sucks, but they suppose it works. They are keeping an open mind to other possible routes though.

2. …the Anarch movement?

Anabell - She gets it, but she thinks they're unorganized and that their infighting is just going to cause larger issues. She doesn't ever really see herself joining their fight as she would much rather spend her time doing something more productive than arguing about structures and who should lead.

Harriet - The moment she meets them, I know she's just going to think they're a bunch of malcontents wailing about nothing because they aren't the ones in charge. She doesn't think they would even know what to do with themselves if they had the power they keep crying for. Pathetic in her eyes.

Cali - It's the only way to be. It's fluid, which allows them to adapt to the times and to keep up with the world. It allows for young Kindred to actually contribute something. Old Kindred might know a thing or two about survival, but what do they know about the modern age? He also sees it as an opportunity to get that power he wants.

Jules - They'd almost go for them, but damn, the ones that they met were just a bunch of wanna-be punks with no greater ideas other than "we gotta stick it to the man!" Is that really the best they can do? They're almost embarrassed to be seen with them.

3. …the Sabbat?

Anabell - She used to think they were a bunch of brainwashed idiots who was marching forward in a death cult, but since joining them, she found there is more structure and order than she originally gave them credit for. She rather likes their view on being vampires and finds herself agreeing with their theology.

Harriet - She won't like them when she meets them and would share the sentiments with Anabell about them being a death cult. Who cares if they have political leaders? Have you seen the way they treat the lowest rung? They're nothing more than fodder for the older Cainites to play with.

Cali - Has never actually encountered any Sabbat, but would find them to be insufferable.

Jules - They keep picking up young Kindred in New Orleans and turning them out to do stupid things to fuck with the Camarilla. So they find them annoying. Plus they wrecked their record shop at one point, so fuck them.

V. CLANS

What do they think about…

1. …Clan Banu Haqim?

Only Anabell has met anyone from the Banu Haqim. Her and her coterie rescued him from a Tzimisce home. She is rather impressed by the one she met and enjoyed talking with him since he was a very polite fellow. She would like to know more about the clan and what they do.

2. …Clan Brujah?

Anabell - Oh, some are just fine and are actually nice Kindred to speak with. They're a passionate lot and that can be used to do a lot of good, but some are nothing more than punks who want to be angry at everything. She doesn't care much for those Brujah.

Harriet - The ones she have seen seem to have a chip on their shoulder against her. She doesn't care much for their rebellious nature, but some are perfectly reasonable folks. As a whole though, she'd rather avoid them.

Cali - His only real encounter with the Brujah have been through a Scourge named Miss Drake that turned him into a CapriSun at one point. They're a rather scary, brutish lot to him.

Jules - Rather fond of the Brujah, given that Lloyd is one. They're a fun crowd that really knows how to party. They'd probably want to be a Brujah if they had the choice.

3. …Clan Gangrel?

Anabell - Doesn't know too many Gangrel, but the ones she know are quiet and reserved types. They're brutal, but they get the job done. She doesn't like nor dislike them, but she doesn't go out of her way to do much with the Clan.

Harriet - The man Gangrel she know is a coterie member named Selena. So far her impressions are they are a very removed sort, but they're really good at their jobs within the Camarilla. She can respect that.

Cali - He got intimidated to hell by a Gangrel. 0/10, doesn't like them much.

Jules - Eh, they're the wild clan right? The ones he knows don't really like to work with the Camarilla much and would much rather just lead their Kindred lives away from the political nonsense. They can dig it.

4. …Clan Hecata (or their predecessor clans, Giovanni and Cappadocian)?

The only one that has had any real contact with the Hecata is Cali and good god is he in love. Cali never cared for magical bullshit before, but seeing Finlay perform Necromancy changed his mind real quick. He likes working for the Hecata and, if he could, he would genuinely try to get in with them, even knowing all the family and political bullshit that goes on within the family.

5. …Clan Lasombra?

Anabell - After getting in with the Sabbat, she rather likes the Lasombra and finds that she has something in common with this clan. She doesn't care for the Social Darwinism that is the core part of the clan, but the strong contemplation on self and what they are is very in line with her.

Jules - Hates them simply because they know it was a Lasombra that's stalking them and fucking things up for them. They know their store was hit by a Lasombra and ooooh when they catch them...

6. …Clan Malkavian?

Anabell - A source of many headaches. She is used to wrangling Malkavians. It's not their fault that they are insane due to their Clan curse, but please stop giving her the most insane visions and making her go on goose chases. She's about to lose it.

Harriet - She rather likes them and would like to meet some more. Quincy, the main Malkavian she knows, is rather kind and seems to see the world better than she can. She wishes she could see the world through their eyes sometimes. What is it like to hear your other clanmates all the time? What's it like to know things you shouldn't?

Cali - Troublesome lot that have a knack for melting his friend's brains. There was a Malkavian Baron that they blew up because she melted Callum's brain. Chez is a new member of the Wild Roses who is a Malk, so his opinion may change because Chez is starting to both impress and scare Cali.

Jules - They're fine, they just are dealing with a really weird clan curse that they cannot even begin to understand how frustrating it is. Both of his Malkavian party members are under their wing at this point. Vala is young and inexperienced and doesn't know how to cope with being a Malk yet, Natalie is just fascinated by the dead, it's not like they can boast that they're in in a much better mental state. They honestly think everyone else is too hard on the Malks.

7. …Clan Ministry (Followers of Set)?

Cali doesn't trust them. The only one he knows if Felicia King and she is a very slimy character. She's honest, but she is still very manipulative. He keeps his contact with them to a minimum. He's very glad that Frankie did not join her cult...

8. …Clan Nosferatu?

Anabell - Firmly believes that the clan is full of tricksters at this point. Every Nosferatu she has ever met has been a complete and utter troll of some kind. Has a theory that they're doing this on purpose to fuck with her, and to be fair, she is partially right. They do think it is fun to work her up.

Harriet - Quick to judge them, really. They look repulsive, they don't like to play nice with other Kindred majority of the time. Still, they have their uses, so there is no sense in tossing them out...

Cali - The only one he knows is Foghat and he was a weird dude. Nothing inherently harmful about him, though. Just odd.

Jules - They're completely convinced that they have to be the most humane of all Kindred. This might be the nicest clan to them since they were uncovered to be Caitiff. Sure they're weird and rather eccentric, but that's not a bad thing. They rather enjoy working with the Nossies.

9. …Clan Ravnos?

Harriet only knows Riley so far and finds the clan to be troublesome, but dangerously fun. Every time she works with Riley, she finds herself on a new insane adventure that she is finding she... rather enjoys. That's trouble!

10. …Clan Toreador?

Anabell - No real opinion. She worked with Toreador in both campaigns and finds them to be a reasonable lot with a strong aesthetic sense, usually. She doesn't really think highly or poorly of them.

Harriet - Ah, a clan worth being around. Sure some are strange and off putting, but most are pleasant and have lots of interesting things to talk about! She rather likes the Toreador.

Cali - A pompous crowd, but the best of the Kindred around, really. Since Glasgow is dominated by Toreador, he has a lot of exposure to his own clan. He thinks that they're an adaptable lot and that they can fill whatever role is needed of them. I wouldn't say he's proud to be Toreador, but he can't see himself being much else.

Jules - Weirdos, said with all the affection that they can muster. All the Toreador in New Orleans are just as strange as the Malkavians, but some have a stick up their ass about it. Jules likes the more down-to-earth Toreador.

11. …Clan Tremere?

Anabell - She has no clue what to make of the clan. Their abilities are terrifying and amazing, and majority of the Tremere she met were very reasonable folks, but that blood magic... That can't be holy, that's an abomination of some kind.

Cali - To be fair, he only really knows Jamie and he thinks that Jamie is an arrogant klutz that has his uses. He's smart, he's the only one there that can do "Tremere bullshit", but Cali isn't his biggest fan.

Jules - Yeah, that's a bunch of arrogant pricks. As a whole, they don't like dealing with the Tremere. They're secretive, they don't like helping their coterie much. It's better to avoid them.

12. …Clan Tzimisce?

Anabell - Since joining the Sabbat, she is very unsettled by their abilities. What the Tremere do is unholy, but what the Tzimsice do... Listen, she can work with them just fine, but keep your hands to yourself.

Cali - Should not meet the Tzimisce. He would want Vicissitude after he got over his initial disgust.

Jules - Weirdos, derogatory. What they do and the way they act so polite and refined makes their stomach churn. They would liken the Tzimisce to like a B Movie monster with how cartoonishly grotesque and evil they are in Jules' eyes.

13. …Clan Ventrue?

Anabell - Doesn't care for how high and mighty some Ventrue act, but does recognize the clan as having produced a number of good leaders. Still, she wish they wouldn't talk down to her near as much as they do.

Harriet - They're the cream of the crop and they ought to act like it. She has her husband and Mithras as role models and as such, this makes her view the clan higher than she would if she knew more Ventrue.

Cali - An alright sort, but the only one he knows is Monty, and he's an outdated fellow. They seem like a nice clan to be in good with, but he doesn't really feel too strongly about them yet.

Jules - When asked, they only had this to say - "Ugh..." Their encounters with the Ventrue have not been nice as Caitiff...

#Vampire the Masquerade #Anabell Blaines #Nero 'Cali' Ramsay #Harriet Berkeley #Jules Guillory #Warnings for mention of abuse #Mostly spousal but also like parents abusing kids

[langernameohnebedeutung]

share ur well lore headcanons bro (via @crowdemon-boyo)

so this is actually something I already threatened to write about…a year ago: And I touched upon it a little (not required reading for this post but some more lore) but I didn’t really expand because it is one of my most unhinged izombie tangents.

As in, we're way down here, playing with the weird kids:

Before I get into this, I want to go on a VERY brief excursion about wells and their symbolic meaning(s). There is going to be a lot of talk about mythology and symbolism and parallels etc and if interrupt my later explanations every time to introduce one of these themes, it's probably going to feel a lot more hamfisted than it is AND be a lot harder to follow. Feel free to skip this part because I will keep the second part comprehensible for those who didn't read it - but also, I read up on wells for this and it's my post so I will talk about wells.

Wells

In short, wells had great importance for any civilisation throughout history – because wells were where people got water! And without water, there is no food, no drink, no livestock, no washing, no harvest - in short, no civlisation. So wells also found a way into many mythologies with a lot of different meanings. But wells can also hold dangers – like falling into them or the problems of wells turning bad or mosquitos and the diseases they spread (diseases that people likely didn't know were caused by mosquitos). And these dangers also found their way into myths and stories (especially because people couldn't explain many of these things).

Generally, the mythological symbolism of wells is very old and spread across many cultures - e.g., our tradition of throwing coins into fountains and wells likely stems from the tradition of giving sacrifices to the spirits/gods/nymphs looking after the well, keeping it clean and healthy and making sure the people have enough water. (One theory being that the biocidal qualities of copper and silver in the coin would help prevent bacterial infections - and that this effect would be attributed to the well-spirits accepting the sacrifices and creating healthier water!)

There are a few different core themes regarding wells:

health/fertility/long-levity/immortality/life/growth and transformation (I mention this one because it is a very important one, but off the bat: It’s also not really important for the purposes of this analysis. An example of this can be found in old Christian beliefs, where certain wells were believed to have sacred healing abilities and were the destination for pilgrims seeking relief from their ailments. One region where this is particularly relevant is the southwest of Ireland.)

wisdom/knowledge/prophecy/divination (this, e.g. can be found in Norse mythology very famously with the well of Mimir, where Odin pays with his eyes the price for all knowledge)

death/source of evil/connection to the underworld.In Greek mythology, wells and springs are associated with the Naiads, the nymphs. They personified the well and were worshipped for it - but they weren't always benevolent. For example, a very famous story is that of the lover of Hercules, Hylas, who dropped his pitcher into a well - and the Naiads fell in love with him and dragged him in. Another mythology where wells and magical ponds and fountains play a huge role is Irish mythology (which works nicely bc the McDonough family very likely have Gaelic roots, considering that Blaine and Angus both are Gaelic names and McDonough is also Gaelic). One example from Irish mythology are these stories from the Dindshenchas:

These themes also have had a big impact on literature and media staples and wells as a source of evil also appear often, like we see in The Ring.

Personally, I would argue that these categories are not distinctly separate - and that not all appearances of wells fall into these three categories at all. They're just very common. Another personal leap I would like to make is that not all the deaths associated with wells are addressing the mysteries of disease or the dangers of accidents (like in the case of Hylas who dropped his pitcher) or dealing with them. I also think there might be an association with wells/rivers/waters and suicide. The reason I believe that is the attraction of the well (Narcissus) and the number of tales of people (especially women) being turned into wells as a means of protection from duress in the earthly realm - it's not just accidents:

According to Pausanias, Alpheius was a passionate hunter and fell in love with the nymph Arethusa, but she fled from him to the island of Ortygia near Syracuse, and metamorphosed herself into a well, whereupon Alpheius became a river, which flowing from Peloponnesus under the sea to Ortygia, there united its waters with those of the well Arethusa. This story is related somewhat differently by Ovid. Arethusa, a fair nymph, once while bathing in the river Alpheius in Arcadia, was surprised and pursued by the god; but Artemis took pity upon her and changed her into a well, which flowed under the earth to the island of Ortygia."[8]

This is something that appears in other stories too - and you will notice that it also happens in the stories of Sinann und Boand: The well is specifically sought out with lethal consequences.

There is another, very historical reason why myths about wells and the fae and mythological creatures associated with them have taken on a darker connotation: Christianisation. A lot of pagan traditions would later be villainised, usually by associating them with demons or devils and demons. An example of this is a tale like that of Melusine. Originally, the stories of Melusine (a nixie, a Germanic female water/well spirit who in this case is half-woman, half water-serpent) and her mother were about how a human men fell in love with them and they would set conditions and boundaries to being with them - that they wouldn't see them in their natural non-human states. Something that their male partners would ignore, meaning that they spied on them in vulnerable states such as when they were bathing or nursing or birthing - leading to the water-spirits abandoning them. This is another very common theme to all these kinds of fae-stories: The creatures of the other realm might give you something (in this case, marry the human suitor) but there are always conditions and contracts attached - and if you violate them, your situation will usually be worse than before.

But Christian interpretation changed these stories. For example, Martin Luther mentions a new version of the story (which he believed in) where Melusine was actually the devil or a succubus, taking on a seductive shape to corrupt me. In this version of the tale, "a young man meets a beautiful woman named Melusina who has the lower body of a snake. If he will kiss her three times on three consecutive days, she will be freed. However, on each day she becomes more and more monstrous until the young man flees in terror without giving her the final kisses. He later marries another girl, but the food at their wedding feast is mysteriously poisoned with serpent venom and everyone who eats it dies."

this is another huge aspect of well-related horror and symbolism, the idea of a slow-working, consuming poison that takes and takes and depletes you - another famous example of this is H.P. Lovecraft's where a poisoned well kills an entire family, farm and surroundings: "Nahum said somethin’ lived in the well that sucks your life out. [...] Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin’ an’ gits stronger all the time." (Actually, Lovecraft, who really liked lending from old myth, also writes this in the Case of Charles Dexter Ward which reminds me a lot of Blaine's final fate: "The torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see what manner of living creature might be immured there in the darkness of that unnatural well; left starving by young Ward through all the long month since the doctors had taken him away,"

I'm sure you can't wait to see how all of this is gonna be relevant in the context of the zombie-crime show.

The Well on iZombie

Time to subject you to the original point of this entire enterprise here:

The McDonough family

So I'm going to start with a quick re-cap of the canon well-lore on iZombie. We know the McDonough family is very rich and has a pretty big estate - which happens to have a well on it.

They are introduced with a very strong focus on the paternal line in three generations: The grandfather (I don't think he was named), Angus, and then Blaine himself. The original wealth of the family mostly seems to come from the business the grandfather built until he was finally usurped by Angus, who took over his business and whose main goal seems to be to accomplish even more and attain more wealth - but who, unlike his father, seems to have very little interest of actually being loved by his family.

There is also Angus' wife/Blaine's mother, who also goes unnamed and we never get a reliable account of her story, with most things about her being told from the point of view of Angus, often with the deliberate intent to attack Blaine, and sometimes by Blaine in order to confront his father. What we do know is that this relationship is very abusive and ended with Blaine's mother taking her own life when he was still a child. In a way, this also seems to be true of Blaine's grandfather, who we only know from Angus' and Blaine's accounts (with Angus being disgusted with his father for being fond of Blaine and treating him well ('babying him'), and Blaine clearly loving his grandfather a lot, even taking care of him all these years but finally sacrificing him for revenge against his father).

For the most part, Angus seems to be obsessed with attaining more power and more wealth - and believes cruelty, hardness, and remorselessness to be the only means to accomplish that. While he has some appreciation for the finer things in life (mostly wealth but also things that emphasise his own grandeur - Major once points out that Angus owns a bust of himself), one thing he resents about the rest of his family is their supposed 'softness' (in the case of his father and his wife) or in Blaine's case, his hedonism:

The key difference here being that Angus wants to attain money and power for the sake of having money and power (quoting "unlimited wealth! unlimited growth!" as the goal of everything he does) - while Blaine shows a far greater interest in the things money and power can get him - or that he thinks they can get him. (though I would argue that a lot of Blaine's story is about how Blaine eventually sheds a lot of that humanity, e.g. by killing his grandfather, turning back into a zombie when he used to prefer being human and even the way music seems to play a smaller role in his life in the last seasons - but we get to this in detail a lot, lot later).

Something that I think is very important for this entire analysis and that often goes unnoticed or underestimated about their dynamic (and why it is so destructive) is that as much as Blaine resents his father for all the abuse he inflicted on him, he also suffers from feelings of abandonment. Sometimes he actually seems more focused on the fact that his father took so little interest in him as a child and how little time his father spent with him (e.g. pointing out specifically that they shared 'seven meals together' in his entire lifetime) - feelings that make a lot of sense in the light of the fact that as a child, Blaine actually hoped he could appeal to his father to protect him from the abuse Frau Bader inflicted on him as well as the fact that he also lost the two other relevant adults in his life: His mother, who withdrew into depression and finally killed herself as well as his grandfather, who was hospitalised.

We also have to consider that as much as Blaine resents Angus' abuse of himself and his loved ones on a personal level (where it hurt him), he also internalised a lot of Angus' world-view in terms of cruelty and the drive for power on an impersonal level: He's also absolutely fine with hurting others to gain power. In fact, it is perfectly compatible for Blaine to accuse Angus of being a 'child-abusing son of a bitch' - while he himself murders homeless kids for profit. Which is another problem peculiar to abusive families or communities that also foster socialisation that is incompatible with the rest of society: Blaine didn't just grow up very lonely due to his family's very particular situation or his wealth, he also internalised a world-view that isolates him further into adulthood - the idea that absolute egotism and disregard for other's isn't merely acceptable, but also a position of strength, one of superiority, and that it is something an individual should strive for. That's Angus' ideology - and it is one that Blaine consistently displays throughout the show.

Because while Angus' abuse of Blaine is a product of this power-oriented worldview, Blaine never learns to reject that entire worldview on an actually meaningful level - he only ever learnt to resent his father's treatment of him. He still defines himself and his success and his world by those same standards. He hates Angus - but after a lifetime of watching Angus humiliate and mock and destroy everyone he perceived as weak, the only idea of value and safety Blaine has for himself is to define himself within the framework of Angus' approval.

The Well.

Back on it with the well!

We're first introduced to the well in this scene in season 3, ep. 8:

Without getting into the detailed immorality of what Blaine did surrounding his fake amnesia and Peyton, I think it is important to point out that this is happening on the tail-ends of Blaine's (failed) attempt to define himself outside of his father's ideology: He was willing to neglect his strive for power and his own values - in favour of being with another person. Which, apart from having been an absolutely horrendous thing to do another person, was kind of a big deal for Blaine (and I could already make some connections to the symbolism point I'm trying to make here. But I'm not sure if y'all out there are ready (unhinged) enough for that, at this point. We'll get there!)

We learnt that Blaine used this well for most of his childhood as a way to deal with his feelings, by using it as a wishing well to manifest his father's death - but also to count, very specifically, how often it happened. Blaine, it turns out, actually kept count of this, saying that it's 'about $1.40 in pennies down there'. Now, I was actually curious about this and it turns out that for victims in abuse situations, documenting and quantifying instances of abuse situations can be a way of keeping their sanity and trying to simulate some agency and control over the situation. (I also researched whether there is any meaning to the number 140 but I couldn't find one)

To make this very clear and explicit: What Blaine does is a very understandable, very human behaviour in response to the abuse he experienced. There is the big question what role we give Blaine's upbringing when we evaluate his actions as an adult. And personally, I think it plays a very big role. What I don't entertain is the notion that Blaine was simply always evil or so evil as a child that he deserved the abuse he experienced - that is something that the narrative very clearly identifies as the narrative of one of his abusers (Frau Bader), who thinks he was a monster, even as a child (very opposed to Angus' excuse, that Blaine was too soft and he was toughening him up). Blaine wishing for his father's death is not inherently evil, especially not for a child in an acute, multi-layered abuse situation. Using a wishing well to manifest the death of the man who abuses him, abuses his wife, is at least compliant with Frau Bader's abuse of him - and eventually even takes his grandfather from him, the only person still left - that is not 'evil' or immoral child behaviour. It's pretty balanced, all things considered. So what I'm going to say next has little to do with a moral evaluation or condemnation of actions - but a lot with the symbolism and being damnationed by the narrative.

Wishing Well

Earlier, I spoke of the origin of wishing wells as sacrifices to the well-gods, in exchange to which the spirits grant your wishes.

It's also in this context that I want to propose my first actually bold claim: The well does fulfil Blaine's wishes.

In fact, it probably grants the wishes of everyone who granted a sacrifice over the years. This is something I already once touched upon in the post I linked earlier and I'll link it again here where I listed every request Blaine has ever made of the well - and how they all came true. Every time Blaine is nearby that well and says that he wants something - it happens.

But: It also happens with a caveat. Some big drawbacks or logical loopholes. This is one of the most basic features in almost every kind of story, where you call on other-worldly forces: They give you what you want....except slightly to the left. It's the Monkey's Paw. Rumpelstilzchen. You find it with Djinni. The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Peter Schlemihl. King Midas. And very famously - the devil. While most of these stories are about warning you not to be cheap or not to get above yourself without doing the work or not to be haughty (e.g. The Sorcerer's Apprentice) - the deal with the devil is the Christian spin on it, warning you that sinful behaviour or a "literal" pact with the devil might give you what you want in this world, the devil is after your soul and wants to condemn you for the afterlife.

But that's another very important aspect: In most cases, you pay some sort of price. You make a 'deal'. There are exceptions to this - e.g. a magical artefact might grant you your wishes for free, even if get screwed over (Monkey's Paw) OR you already did the work to control the powers you're using (hence, you don't get 'punished' for "cheating" the natural order) and therefore get what you want - like in the case of the Golem, who only causes troubles if you did NOT do the work and make a mistake operating the Golem (like giving a faulty command or failing to remove the paper that animates the Golem. The Sorcerer's Apprentice was actually a gentile interpretation of a Golem story - and the mistake of the apprentice is that he didn't do ALL the work and overestimated himself and caused disaster/comeuppance.)

Based on the assumption that all the wishes uttered around the well on iZombie come true, let's examine the price of these wishes. I already went into this in the post I linked, but in short: These wishes are always accompanied by someone throwing something into the well. This is very literal while Angus is in there, because Blaine keeps throwing brains in there (not to mention threw his own father in there) and talking to his father (who in turn belives he's hearing the voice of God).

One example is in the first episode of season 4: Blaine talks to the well, complaining a) about how Chase has an army - and he doesn't. and b) that he wants to expand his business. He also complains about how much he hates working for Chase Graves.

Later in the same episode, Dino frees Angus from the well and this facilitates several things:

Another of Blaine's well-wishes comes true: In the previous season, Blaine talked at the well (while throwing brains in there) about how he wishes he had a father who loved him, the same way Baracus loves his own child and was willing to take a bullet for him. When Angus is freed from the well, he got re-wired into believing that he loves Blaine, that he has to make up for abusing him in the past and he wants to re-connect

Blaine gets his army: The cult of Brother Love who helps him stop the prison bus AND becomes his tool to carrying the zombie virus out of Seattle to help his real estate plan

He no longer has to work for Chase Graves after finding Renegade for him and on top of that, Chase Graves dies in the season finale (under the same guillotine that he showed Blaine in that first episode of the same season, in the Blaine-scene previous to the opening scene at the well. In many ways, his monologue at the well sets up Blaine's season arc for us.

He also gets his wish of expansion by the end of that season: Major makes him the number 1 brain supplier for New Seattle. He ends up rich.

So that's great, right? It's a wishing well! Post wrapped!

...

Except. If we entertain the notion that by some power of symbolism (and for the record, I'm w e l l aware that we're way past any writer intentions), the well actually does grant wishes, this raises one and a half big questions

how is Blaine being monkey-pawed?

and what about his original wish? What about Angus 'dropping dead'?

Well, let's first have a look at how all these wishes work out for Blaine:

his "army" meets the fate that many armies inevitably meet: Another army. They're destroyed spectacularly and his plan doesn't work out. Also his dad dies.

Blaine's own ill-gotten wealth and power go to his head and put him into a particularly vulnerable position: He loses everything and becomes the most hated person in all of New Seattle. After he was so proud of being a 'hero'

And ...did I mention that his dad dies? That was his biggest wish, right? Except...that first, original wish - that one took years of throwing in coins (and even even throwing in Angus himself) to fulfil - and that also came with a big fat caveat: By the time Angus finally 'drops dead', Angus was already Brother Love and made efforts to make (extremely toxic) amends in his relationship with Blaine. And not only that, despite having reservations at first, towards the end of the season and especially in the finale, Blaine actually built a sort of trust and opened up to having a relationship with this new version of his father for the first time (because that is the price of actually having the kind of relationship that Blaine wants with his dad: opening up. being vulnerable) - e.g. allowing him to talk about his mother and listening to him when Angus tells him he's proud. This is something I also wrote a long text about, but in short: By the time Angus dies, Blaine is, for the first time in his entire life, in a place where this would genuinely and first and foremost - hurt him.

So in short, that's how the well seems to work:

You feed it + you express a desire = you get what you want + eventually you get the opposite and get screwed over Monkey Paw style.

You will also find small examples of this. Like Blaine expressing that he would like to show his father his new car - and the first time Angus sees that car is in the scene in the finale, when Angus finds out that Blaine doesn't want to join the cult's suicidal escape from New Seattle and shatters the tentative relationship they had been building.

And I could count my eggs or whatever here, tell you that the well is a wishing well. Rest my case and go home. But...I promised you a little bit more. And we're in so deep now, there is no turning back. So.:

The Well is Hell (Hell is the Well)

Hades / Tartarus

Throughout his pre-Brother Love cycle on the show, Angus is often shown to have an avid interest in ancient history, especially ancient Greek history and mythology. This is already teased in his first appearance on the show:

Alexander the Great, himself the son of a Macedonian father and a Greek mother, traced his lineage back to the gods, even claiming Zeus his father. He also deeply valued Greek history and mythology,

The theme continues just a few lines later-

etc etc etc

Angus' interest in ancient greek culture makes several appearances, usually in the context of Angus a) being disappointed that Blaine either pretends to or really doesn't understand his references and b) Angus seemingly not noticing that he himself really likes to reference tales where a father is killed by his son - and like in the Oedipus discussion, he usually positions himself as that father and Blaine as that son.

Cronus, like Angus, rose to power by overthrowing his own father (and also castrating him). So it's really in tune with Angus' self-glorification that he would compare himself to Cronus. Except, he presents this tale as if Cronus lived happily ever after as the king of the universe eating his kids.

But as is the entire point of this essay, you can only trick the powers of fate for so long: Cronus' wife Rhea (notice how Rhea stayed unnamed in Angus' account of the story much like the name of his own wife/Blaine's mother is never mentioned throughout the show?) eventually had enough of her husband's baby-eating habits. She took her youngest son and hid him - giving Cronus a bundle full of rocks to eat instead. And that young boy's name? was Albert Einstein. Zeus. Zeus eventually grew up and became the prophecied child to overthrow Cronus and tossed him - along with the other Titans - into the dark abyss of Tartarus, in the cave of Nyx:

We have some mythical description of what Tartarus was understood as:

"as far beneath the earth as heaven is above earth; for so far is it from earth to Tartarus. For a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth: and again, a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days [725] would reach Tartarus upon the tenth" (Hes. Th. 724-725)

"murky Tartarus, far, far away, where is the deepest gulf beneath the earth, the gates whereof are of iron and the threshold of bronze, as far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth! (Hom. Il. 8.14-15)

In Tartarus, according to one telling, Cronus lies in chains in the cave of Nyx (goddess of the night) where he is "chained within, asleep and drunk on honey – dreams and prophesies."

I think you know where I'm going with this.

And if you know where I'm going with this, you might have a very valid objection:

Originally, I claimed that the well would be Hades. Not Tartarus. These are two different spaces. And you're right! In this analogy, the well is Tartarus, the prison of the wicked dead, not Hades, which is the realm for all the dead. But considering that this metaphor is happening so far, far, far in the periphery of the funny zombie crime show, I am willing to let it slide as slight metaphor-mixing in the service of overall story-telling functionality.

Not to mention, Hades also makes its appearance, indirectly:

A few episodes after speaking these words while dramatically sipping from a glass of water, this man was found tossed in a mysterious well where he forgot who he was when he was alive.

There generally is a pattern of Angus, before his time in the well, predicting the future - without ever realising it. Not just in terms of Greek mythology but -

This is literally the same episode where he gets tossed into the well - aka the future where the only thing will happen is occasional brains being thrown down to feed him. Yeah, your future is brains alright. Just not in the big business sense that you expected.

So much like we have a mysterious pattern of the well granting wishes, we have a pattern of Angus prophecising the future - without ever realising it.

And this is also reflected in the specific choice of Greek myths that he decides to reference - and his clear lack of understanding of what he himself is literally implying (despite his own canonically vast knowledge of ancient myths and tales.) On the surface, the Cronos myth and the Oedipus myth have very little to do with each other. The reign of the fall of Cronos is a primordial creation myth of gods and titans. Oedipus' tale is (mostly) that of mortals.

The only things they have in common is a) the theme of people trying and failing to cheat prophecies (and thereby: fate, the order of the universe) and b) an abandoned and alienated son overthrowing and replacing his father.

Both with the Oedipus comparison and the Cronos comparison, Angus is trying to put himself into a position of power over Blaine (both with comparison he's making - comparing himself to the powerful Titan Cronos, comparing Blaine to unhappy Oedipus - and by making them in the first place, because he's trying to flex on Blaine with his own education/his disappointment in Blaine's lack of this education.

In fact, Angus' blindness to the actual prophetic nature of the things he says is already lamp-shaded in his first appearance. It is not just that he made another unintended prophecy (comparing Blaine to Oedipus, who unintentionally causes the death of his estranged father) - he also fatally misrepresents the myth: He compares Blaine to Oedipus, insinuating that Blaine's mourning of the death of his mother is excessive and that Blaine is resenting and punishing him because he holds Angus responsible for her death. But...that's not how the tale of Oedipus goes. By the time Oedipus meets and marries his biological mother, he had already (accidentally) killed his biological father. It is only when the truth comes to light that Oedipus' mother commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself.

It is only after he 'drinks the waters of Lethe' - aka suffers ego death in the well - that Angus truly becomes a prophet and is aware of his making prophecies.

And I think it becomes even more damning when you realise that the fate of the Lethe strikes the entire paternal line of the McDonoughs (and no, I don't mean Blaine’s fake amnesia era. Though there was some real amnesia, for a while, let's not forget)

Grandpa McDonough suffered dementia after Angus overthrew him and eventually lost every connection to the world around him other than music. He finally dies at the hands of Blaine, who was planning to overthrow Angus by feeding him dementia brains.

Angus literally drank the waters of Lethe when Blaine threw him into the well. He died and became Brother Love.

Blaine tastes the waters of Lethe after the show ends - by turning Romero in the well.

Family legacy, honour, masculinity etc. are all values that are very important in Greek myth - and they are things that Angus is often shown to care about a lot (especially illustrated by the fact that he keeps attacking and humiliating others for not living up to those values). On the other hand, in Greek mythology, family dynasties tend to end in horrible tragedies - for many reasons and very often because of prophecy or hubris/arrogance. By the time we encounter the McDonough family, the inciting dishonourable act of hubris and disrespect has already been committed - Angus taking over his father's business by underhanded means and having him hospitalised. He had his father declared mentally unfit - and one after another, everyone in his family actually loses his mind and (more or less) eventually dies.)

Arguably, losing your mind and your identity is more relevant an ending to a person's life in this family than actual, physical death is. Only losing yourself mentally first facilitates physical death. Meanwhile, dying doesn't necessarily mean a final end - especially Blaine bounces back from the dead with impressive frequency. This is even true for Blaine's mother, who first withdrew herself and faded and removed herself from the rest of the family until she finally ended her life - losing all agency and independent identity in the process, to be only defined by and in Blaine's and Angus' narratives. (In fact, even though Blaine's grandfather's name is lost too, we get some pictures of him: We see him, we know what kind of art and music he liked, we see old photos of him on the wall of his hospice room.)

Blaine's mother isn't really given that same dignity. She is spoken of, but never really as an individual. She's mostly an idea. A ghost hanging around in the background of some of their conversation. She doesn't pass the lamp-test. (the test where you replace a female character with a fancy, expensive lamp - and then see how much this would impact the plot.)

The most important things to take away from this section:

Something that I think is very important here is that Greek mythology and especially Angus' fascination with it also serves as a visualisation of the rift between Angus and Blaine. Angus is frequently annoyed when Blaine doesn't understand his references to a subject that clearly means a lot to him. He clearly feels entitled to an heir with the same interests as him - a continuation of his legacy. We know he wants to be immortal and one way to live on is through your family and in a very patriarchal family, the way for a father to live on is through your son. But...Angus also never put in the work. He never gave Blaine any good reason to emulate him or to take an interest in his father's interests. He never gave Blaine any incentive to spend time with him and do anything together. He never even gave him any reason to love him. He just expects Blaine to function as his heir because he is his son. But he...never really tries to be a father beyond the biology of fatherhood (he literally calls Blaine a 'waste of his sperm' before he gets tossed into the well). The person Blaine actually emulates - is his grandfather. The person who, according to Blaine, actually loved him. Blaine specifically says he has his love for music from his grandfather and even (claims he) takes after him in looks.

If we do take that leap of faith and consider that most of Angus' Greek mythology analogies have a prophetic character on some level that he isn't aware of (and that the show also frequently identifies him as a prophet in season 4) - then in these prophecies, the well is positioned in the symbolic role of Hades or Tartarus or rather, a wellspring to Lethe, one of the 5 rivers of Hades.

Another (third?) thing is the disappearance of Greek mythology from the show. After Angus' time in the well, the references to Greek mythology stop - and Brother Love isn't exactly invoking the Greek pantheon. Instead, the Cult of Brother Love leans much more closely on Christianity - and it is even confirmed what a great change that is: In S04E10, he tells his congregation that Frau Bader was 'always concerned about his immortal soul' - and that it should be very surprising for her to see him now as a priest. There are some references to it, like the statuettes we see at the McDonough Estate but those are old, from pre-well times.

So this brings me to the next part of my little essay here:

(pls don't make me spell out the halo-thing) Christianity The Cult of Brother Love

Some brief disclaimer: I do not intend to talk about religion here. I AM going to look at Christian symbolism and the use of symbolic language on the show in order to decipher subtextual connotations in the same way as I did with Greek mythology earlier. My personal belief (or rather: lack thereof) does not enter in here.

First of, it's important to make a certain distinction: While the Cult of Brother Love is definitely inspired by Christianity and Christian imagery, it is not fulfilling many of the core tenets of Christianity. (e.g., I don't think there is literally any mention of Jesus other than Blaine asking once who the 'zombie-messiah' is going to be and Brother Love implying it would be him). I think there is a meta-reason for this (obviously, making it too Christian would piss a lot of people off). Also, since this entire cult grew out of Angus' delusions in the well and since Angus was canonically never particularly interested in Christianity, it makes sense that this would result in a very warped version of the original.

However, the change from the original ancient greek philosophies that Angus emulated vs the bastardised version of Christianity he practices in his cult does incorporate some of the core tenets of Christianity like the idea of universal morality which hellenic paganism didn't have (the cult actually looks down on 'heretics' and non-believers and thinks that every zombie needs to join the church and be baptised and that people who refuse are the enemy), repentance (Christianity has a much greater focus on the option of repenting for your former sins and being forgiven, while in ancient greek stories, usually actions -cause- the consequences - and while you can ask the gods for forgiveness, they are fickle and fallible rather than all-loving and all-forgiving, so whether they forgive or not can be mere coincidence), in fact: one, all-knowing, all-powerful god (Angus believes that the voice he heard in the well was the voice of god - and he is tricked again when Blaine has Don E throw brains into a wood-chipper to convince him that it is raining brains. He does this because he now expects a god who loves him and wouldn't mislead him and who knows everything and wants zombies to be safe.)

The well becomes an important aspect of the way Christian elements are used and turned on their head (!): Wells and waters play an important role in the symbolic language of Christianity, e.g. the idea of being cleansed by baptism and the powers of holy water cleaning and warding off evil and being used to bless sacred items and places in Catholicism.

There is a very important passage in one of the communal affirmations of the cult:

I believe this to be a vague meta-reference to a story from the New Testament, John 4:10-15, where Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well. He asks her for water because he is thirsty. During their conversation, Jesus shifts the conversation from the literal, physical water of the well to spiritual water e.g. he compares having faith to 'drinking living water' -

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

The reason I believe this to be a reference is that Brother Love also frequently makes the promise of 'feeding' - his cult, promising that by following him they will never be hungry again.

But it also gives us some idea about the relationship between the faith of the cult and the well:

The 'living water'/'water of life' in the analogy from the bible represents a relationship with god. But taking personal belief out of the equation, the Christian 'relationship with god' is simply - faith. It's believing in god. Just like the cult believes in their idea of god. Their idea of god is ...that god considers zombies the chosen people, that he wants them to destroy humans and eat them, that he loves zombies a lot. But this faith/water was given shape by the well: This 'God' was just Blaine talking to his father in the well and Angus who was slowly losing it trying to decipher meaning from his words.

This is also symbolised by Angus often echoing Blaine's words in a slightly warped way.

One obvious example:

Basically, the well gave shape to their faith/the water by running interference between what Blaine said (wished) and what Angus heard and what Angus (driven insane by the well) is now parroting to his followers. And if we're still working under the assumption that the well is fulfilling the wishes of the people feeding it (coins, brains, people), then this interference, this 'giving shape' directly results in the well granting Blaine's wishes:

In fact, something that I find very important here is: Blaine never said the words 'I wish I had an army' - much less 'I need an army' or 'give me an army' like Angus cites it. While inside the well, Angus remembers hearing something entirely different from what we were shown was spoken into the well.

The reason why I think this is very important is tied back into the function of the well as a wish-fulfilling device: As I mentioned earlier, devices that fulfil wishes usually come with some sort of caveat. Sometimes, the wording is used against the person speaking the wish in an overly literal way (this is especially important in stories where a person has but a limited number of wishes because now they have wasted one). This, however, doesn't seem to be the case with our well here, because Blaine doesn't even need to express a wish - instead, through the interference of the well, his subconscious desires or the implications of his words are manifested into commands. That's how connected the well and he is at this point (I'll elaborate on this point later)

The well doesn't only give him what he says he wants - it gives him what he really wants. (In fiction there are usual different aspects of character intent. Usually, these are simplified into want vs need but personally I like to separate them even further:

What a character says they want (what they tell others)

What a character wants (what they think they want)

What a character really wants (the subconscious desire that is behind that conscious wish)

What a character needs (usually opposite of their actual wish/the thing they come to realise is missing from their lives and that they give up their wish for in the end)

For example, what Blaine says he 'wishes' when he's near the well is that his father would see his new car or he talks about what a brilliant businessman he is and how everyone in the city looks up to him - what he really wants is the satisfaction of proving his father wrong about what a failure he is as well as Angus' approval* because-

But what he actually needs is...to stop letting his father and his fucked up childhood have such an influence on the life he's living. What he needs is some actual human connection and self-actualisation.

*This is another very interesting aspect of their interactions: Angus again and again reiterates how successful Blaine is specifically as a businessman and how proud he is of Blaine for this. He says it at Romero's, he says it during his services, he says it to Liv even (showing that he genuinely believes this and doesn't just say it to prop up Blaine or get brains from him. He suddenly genuinely believes this) --- and the reason that this is interesting is that as Brother Love, Angus doesn't really care about money or riches anymore. He stopped caring about his own wealth, he gives donations to the poor. One of the first things he says, when he gets out of the well, is to call Dino a 'filthy lucre' (the word combination filthy + lucre is mostly originally used in the bible) when he tells his girlfriend that he wants a reward for freeing Angus. We know Angus didn't use to consider Blaine a real 'businessman before the well, we know he doesn't care about money after the well - and yet, he still feels somehow compelled to praise Blaine for exactly these things. The only thing that changed in this regard is that Blaine poured a lot of energy into that well, talking about how he's such a great businessman (and mentioning that it hurt him that his father doesn't think so.) This is another subconscious desire of Blaine's that the well fulfils - but it really isn't what Blaine needs or is good for him. What would be good for him would be to remove himself as far from this entire situation as possible. But instead he comes back and keeps coming back. The first thing he does when he finds out that he's a zombie is seek out his abusive father and infect him - out of all rich people he can and did infect later on. He was always waiting for that moment of revenge. And the thing is, Blaine probably felt like he was free after he grew up and cut ties with his father (or got cut off) - but really, he never has been free, or he wouldn't have come back after all this time.

Even more important in that regard and something that I rarely see anyone talk about: He never killed his father, as I mentioned, - and he never killed Frau Bader. Instead, he's upset by both of their deaths - despite all the people he literally murdered in cold blood, he was clearly not ready to see the two people die that he hated the most in the world.

The reason I think that this is interesting is that - the 'army' thing just showed us that the well doesn't need Blaine to (be able to) express what he wants for the well to make it happen. As long as he's throwing things inside the well (brains) and alluding enough, the well sets it into motion. And I feel like it's here that we encounter a problem: As a child, Blaine wished that his father would drop dead so that the abuse would stop. But he also wants a father who loves him. He wants to have a meaningful relationship with his father - throughout the show, he frequently seems at least as angry with Angus for abandoning him as he is with him for abusing him. Now, these are two very conflicting desires - but by turning Angus into 'Brother Love' and then eventually having him go on a suicide mission to be killed by the US army accomplished both - in the most painful fashion for Blaine, who finally was starting to develop some trust in this new relationship with his father, only to see it destroyed in the worst way possible.

There is something else I find very interesting in this regard. Now, if we follow the earlier assumption that the whole symbolism of Greek mythology functions as an illustration of the rift between Angus and Blaine and of Angus' feelings of patriarchal entitlement and ownership over Blaine as his heir as well as his feelings of anger and disappointment at Blaine's failure to live up to his expectations - then the disappearance of Greek mythology from Angus' repertoire when he becomes Brother Love also becomes significant. It shows a (seeming) change in his attitude. Which holds up bc in season 4, Angus (seemingly) has a very big change of mind, both about his own philosophies as well as his son.

So far, I've focused a lot on Angus' role in all of this - which makes sense. Because the Greek mythology stuff is mostly happening in Angus' side of the court. Blaine has very little interest in any of it.

In fact, there is a very obvious and very important fact that I frequently see neglected when people speculate about Blaine and his family: Blaine grew up with 1. a mother who checked out mentally, 2. a father whose entire care accumulated to 6 shared meals and 140 pennies worth of severe abuse incidences and 3. a grandfather who eventually also disappeared. As much as Blaine defines himself by his father's values - most of the time, he was raised by someone else. The person he probably spent most of his time with (at least further into his mother's decline) was Frau Bader.

This is a woman who had so much influence in the household, Angus was willing to let her inherit his fortune if Blaine killed him. Someone who could make a dog disappear without anyone asking any questions. Someone who could berate her own boss about his religion.

And that's one thing we learn about Frau Bader is that she is very religious. Specifically, she is very Christian. Blaine, throughout the show, is shown to have a lot of contempt and disinterest for religion and - especially (x) Christianity, something that especially becomes evident in his interactions with Gabriel and his first encounter with one of the cultists.

But there is one noteworthy relevant difference between Blaine's contempt for Christianity compared to his contempt for his father's obsession with Greek mythology: He also seems to know at least some things about it. In fact, he shows a quite detailed knowledge of it, beyond what is the natural osmosis in a culturally Christian society.

While he doesn't get understand his father's obscure references to Greek mythology, he understands - can even make - obscure references to the bible - e.g. comparing his own attempt to tempt Gabriel into giving him the tainted Utopium recipe to Jesus tempted by the Devil during his 40 Days in The Wilderness. This is not...something everyone knows. Considering that he seemingly didn't have a father who valued religious education (prior to being brainwashed by a well) and Blaine doesn't seem to have an inherent active interest in theology (rather, he dislikes it and I don't see him seeking out Sunday school or reading the bible at any point during his adult life - the most likely implication is that this was passed down by Frau Bader. The fact that Frau Bader also tried to proselytise to Angus might even be the (literal, non-symbolic, non-Lethe,) reason why Brother Love's particular insanity takes this shape. And if she proselytises to her boss, what are the odds that she wouldn't proselytise to the child in her care?

Blaine's seeming disinterest and contempt for Christianity also reflects his complicated relationship with his abusive nanny: On the surface, he doesn't care about Frau Bader one way or another. He never actually bothered killing her. He didn't even infect her in order to obtain power over her or humiliate her somehow (likely because she's not rich enough for him to exploit her in any meaningful fashion that would be worth the added emotional baggage of having to deal with her again). Much in the same way, his seeming disinterest and his dismissive attitude towards Christianity is belied by the fact that we learn that Frau Bader was a very religious person - and that her religious beliefs played a significant role in her abuse of Blaine: She believed that Blaine's transgressive and rule-breaking behaviours as a child made him a 'monster' that needed to be disciplined.

The word 'monster' is very important here imo because it is a word that speaks to a belief in inherent evil. Now, Christians believe that (all) humans are inherently sinners (not monsters). Human nature makes them imperfect and fallible - but they also believe that everyone can be saved through repentance and a relationship with God/Jesus. And here I think it is also very interesting that lack of belief doesn't seem to be what sets Frau Bader off: Clearly, she thought that Angus could be saved if he only started believing and going to church since we know that she was always 'worried for his immortal soul'. Now, we cannot know whether to her religious-nutjob-brain there was something about child-Blaine that set her off in particular or whether she's just an abusive person and inflicted his on the first best helpless person she had power over (or maybe even every child she had power over). What we do know is that for some reason, she thought that Blaine was abnormally evil or monstrous somehow. (we often hear some stories about how disruptive Blaine was as a child, but something that I think is important to point out is that most of these stories are implied to have taken place when he was no younger than 9 or 10 years old while Frau Bader was implied to have joined the household much earlier and Angus' abuse probably going on at least as long, likely longer than that. So it is very likely that the disruptive behaviour is a result of the abuse, and not vice-versa).

The reason I'm bringing this up is the following:

We know that Blaine is pretty obsessed with power - he's literally talking about how he's going to run the entire city. And I feel like this scene comes very close to touching on the origins of this: Power means safety. In his childhood, while Bader was the person who spent the most time out of all adults having power and authority over him (and abusing that authority), Angus was objectively the most powerful person in his life. That's why he asked his father to protect him from Bader. (btw, I also consider the fact that he quotes himself calling Angus 'daddy' when he asked him to help him another indication towards how long Bader was working in their household and how early all of this started.).

As far as we know, he never threw pennies in the well over Frau Bader - just like he never went after her the way he went after his father. Just like he represses his religious trauma by neglecting the issue and making light of religion and avoiding it, he deals with the Bader-situation by ignoring her and minimalising the impact she had on him. This is very different towards his attitude regarding Angus. And this makes sense considering Blaine's whole worldview: Family is one of the few things that actually matter to him. Bader isn't family and while he detests her as a horrible person, Angus, as his father, owed him much more - and therefore betrayed him far worse. That's why he can yell and shout at his father for being a 'child-abusing son of a bitch' while he himself killed dozens of homeless teenagers.

Another thing that stands out: This very scene is referenced again in Frau Bader's death scene:

Now, this line clearly exists primarily because we haven't seen or heard from Frau Bader since season 2. But out of all the things that Don E could have said (or Blaine could have said) to identify her for the audience, they chose to reference this scene - to which Don E wasn't witness. We never learn how Don E obtained this particular information about Blaine's childhood, so it would have been far easier to refer to her in other ways. For example, Don E walks in on them listening to Angus' video will.

The reason I bring this up is because they reference the scene where we learn that Blaine asked for Angus to help protect him from Frau Bader - in the very same scene in which Angus, now as Brother Love, kills Frau Bader. And even also acknowledges that he knew of the abuse and did nothing and that he specifically failed Blaine in his duties as a father.

And here is the thing about this:

If we assume that Blaine's resentment of his father is not just rooted in the abuse and not just rooted in the trauma of negligence but ALSO specifically in his refusal to protect Blaine from Frau Bader (pretty canon, based on the torture scene in The Whopper) AND if we assume that (based on the army-thing) that the well facilitates Blaine's wishes even when they're not explicitly stated, then Blaine's wish for Angus to 'drop dead' also entailed that particular grievance. Until eventually, in the same breath as fulfilling Blaine's wish for a father "who cares that much" (another wish that was subconsciously implied in Blaine's resentment of the father he was given), the well gives him a father who does defend him. And that's how Brother Love specifically ends up killing Frau Bader.

(which raises another issue for me: On the textual level, I attributed Blaine's ... disinterest? refusal? avoidance? to kill Bader for what she did to him to his refusal to seriously connect with his trauma and accept what has been done to him. But on the metaphysical whatever-level we're moving on, it makes me wonder whether Blaine was even ever able to kill Bader - or whether that role had always been assigned to Angus all along)

Hell Is The Well

I mentioned earlier that the cult has a pattern of turning things on their head. And some of that is simply because it's a cult and therefore engages in things like behaviour-control, information control, thought control, emotion control etc. and warp any actual Christian teachings to fit the cult-agenda.

But a lot of that also comes from the fact that Brother Love is working under a false assumption - one that as the audience we know to be false: Brother Love really believes that he received/receives signs and messages from god and is doing his bidding.

And it's not just that confused Blaine's voice with the voice of god - he completely conflates them:

He believes that god threw him in the well and spoke to him there and even when he's back out, he points out that Blaine's voice reminds him of the 'voice of god' and names him the 'zombie messiah'. (we also see a complete conflation of family relationships /identities here with Brother Love going back and forth between referring to zombies as his siblings and his children, casting Blaine in the role of god (the father) but also as his son. Just like we have the conflation between Blaine as a mortal (or zombie) with him being 'god' while on the other hand, he's also a character commonly likened to or compared to the devil throughout the show (which would change the implications of the well/hell and Blaine's role in brainwashing Angus and Angus' misreading of the situation entirely.) Basically, through the interference of the well, Angus doesn't really seem to know who Blaine is anymore. It seems to kind of splinter his identity.

This warped perception is also an evident in the 'poisoned chalice' aspect of Angus' 'cleansing' in the well (showing us that this is not a real cleansing or something 'good') and 'purifying' and Blaine's role in it are also illustrated by the fact that Angus does not become a good person - or the heaven-sent prophet he considers himself:

As Brother Love, Angus simply exchanges his extreme individualism and personal superiority complex for a new kind of chauvinism - with very similar results:

Angus believes that he is better than everyone else. Brother Love believes that zombies are better than everyone else.

He takes himself out of the equation, even stating that he isn't sure that he will see all his prophecies come true - calling himself 'merely the Baptist John', while simultaneously being the driving central force behind the cult, literally controlling the members' minds and how they move and how they eat and that eventually, they go to certain death with him. At first glance, what he offers is charity, but he also demands complete obedience in return. And like any extremist, he also starts cannibalising the cause and the people he's allegedly defending - which means that any zombie that steps out of line or allies with the humans or doesn't support the cult is a heretic. Those zombies that bought the zombie cures? They're heretics deserving of death, in his eyes. Filmore Graves soldiers are all deserving of death in his eyes.

As Angus, he talked about 'unlimited growth, unlimited wealth' - something that is impossible to accomplish on a planet of unlimited resources (especially if your product is human brains and your customers need to eat them to survive). This kind of attitude of rich people is what is destroying the planet right now. And because he wasn't really changed or cleansed or "purified" in the well, he simply becomes the harbinger of the apocalypse in a much more literal fashion:

He eventually ends up riding out on horseback, about to bring the end of the world because Blaine told him he had a vision that they were supposed to turn 'half the population of the earth zombie, keep the other half for food', meaning that one half is going to wind up being eaten, the other half is going to starve as Romero's. (no, seriously, they HAD to include a horse for this. Which...makes him either War (it's a red horse) or Death (and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the Earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the Earth.)

Now, I don't want to dissect all of this, because this is supposed to be the well-post, not the brother-love-cult post - but I think it is fair to summarise that all of the misconceptions and the entire horrible development of this cult and the symbolism around it make a lot more sense if you take them by their world - the well is hell. And hell is where their 'living water' (aka faith) came from.

Blaine & Loss of Personhood

I mentioned earlier that we were going to talk about Blaine losing himself. Which is another big feature of well-stories - drowning, becoming the well, forgetting who you are...) There is one myth I didn't talk about so far that might come to mind. For one, it doesn't feature a well, specifically, but rather just a body of water. Also, the title is very loaded and might raise wrong expectations regarding where I want to go with this entire post. And lastly, I really only wanted to get there after I explained a lot of my reasoning already, especially the conflation of identities we encounter around the well and Blaine's person.

I know this is a step back towards Greek mythology but let's take a moment to talk about Narcissus.

To get this out of the way with, Narcissus is obviously most famously the guy who loved himself so much that he fell in love with his reflection in a pool of water. And...honestly, a conversation can be had about Blaine's degree of self-obsession and arrogance etc. but ...that's really don't where I want to go with this.

Because while Narcissus is obviously mostly associated with the character trait we named after him - and even the medical condition of "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" - an obsessive love of self is by far not the only theme or interpretation of the Narcissus myth. Important themes also include a loss of self, a yearning for something that isn't real, the rejection of others and the doomed attempt at complete independence.

To give you a brief summary of the full Narcissus myth: When Narcissus was born, his mother asked a prophet (here we are again) whether her son would live a long life and the prophet - Tiresias - prophecies that he would live a long life unless he gets to know himself. Narcissus eventually grows up to be quite the handsome guy and is courted by many men and women including the nymph Echo, another very tragic figure in Greek mythology. Narcissus rejects all of them - usually very haughtily - and especially Echo, who had her life ruined by a curse courtesy of Hera (yeah, one of those stories) and thought she had found love and companionship with Narcissus, is absolutely heartbroken. Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, steps up for the humiliation Echo has suffered and curses Narcissus to fall in love with his own reflection - which he does. Eventually, he just starves and withers away at that poolside, yearning for the elusive man in the water. (also, poor Echo has to watch all of that and eventually runs away into a cave to die there)

I mentioned some interpretations of this, other than the most famous one: For Narcissus to (rudely) reject all these proposals also meant a serious rejection and withdrawal from society at large. One interpretation of these rejections is a refusal of Narcissus to let anyone have power over him (Ledermann, R. (1988). Ovid’s Myth of Narcissus. British Journal of Psychotherapy) - There are different ways to translate Ovid here, but basically Narcissus says he'd rather die than give her what is his or let her have power over him (one translation being: ‘Away with these encircling hands! May I die before what’s mine is yours.') Narcissus rejects other people because being with someone means they have power over him and that thought terrifies him - he's scared of real intimacy. This makes even more sense when you know that Narcisuss is the product of his father's rape and abuse and imprisonment of his mother Liriope (another Blaine parallel).

Another big theme of the Narcissus myth is the longing for something unattainable to the point of delusion:

The feelings of familiarity that underpin recognition are often based on the perception of similarity. Ovid draws our attention to similarity when he shows us Narcissus struggling to come to terms with his love and its inaccessibility. All Narcissus can do is look and long, he cannot possess, and we see a mirroring of faces, arms, smiles, tears, and declarations of love: …Whenever I move to kiss The clear bright surface, his upturned face strains closer to mine. We all but touch! The paltriest barrier thwarts our pleasure. Come out to me here, whoever you are! Why keep eluding me, Peerless boy? When I seek you, where do you steal away? It can’t be my looks or my age which makes you want to avoid me; Even the nymphs have longed to possess me! Your looks of affection Offer a grain of hope. When my arms reach out to embrace you, You reach out too. I smile at you, and you smile at me back. I weep and your tears flow fast. You nod when I show my approval. When I read those exquisite lips, I can watch them gently repeating My words… Ov. Met. 3.451–62

TOMKINS, L. (2011). The Myth of Narcissus: Ovid and the Problem of Subjectivity in Psychology. Greece and Rome, 58(02), 224–239.

Narcissus longs for something he can never have. Whether it is his arrogance or a fear of intimacy and dependency, it does make Narcissus unable to experience the same kind of love and relationships other people can have. He clearly yearns for these things, but he can never have them (unless he were to make some real changes to his personality and priorities). As is, he can only look in from the outside - both on the kind of lives and intimacy that other people have as well as on his own reflection that he falls in love with. And even bigger than that: He falls in love with something that isn't real. While he does eventually come to realise his mistake and understands that it was his own reflection that he fell in love with, he originally thought that there was a real person, a real lover, real intimacy waiting for him, just separated from him by the surface of the water.

Another interpretation - one that I consider particularly important here - is the theme of loss of identity. On the one hand, Narcissus is obsessed with himself. He's in love with his reflection. But he also fundamentally neglects himself as a person. He loses himself. He is so preoccupied with the yearning for something that isn't real and dreaming of something that he cannot have that he literally starves to death and withers away. Even that what we most closely associate with Narcissus - his beauty - is gone in the end: "He no longer retains his colour, the white mingled with red, no longer has life and strength, and that form so pleasing to look at, nor has he that body which Echo loved."

And here's another very big hypothesis for his little essay:

Blaine also loses himself

(and it has a lot to do with his commitment to the well)

Blaine loses himself and his humanity. It's his arch that spans the entire show. It's a central part of his character development.

I noticed a lot of people saying that while they loved Blaine in previous seasons or 'loved to hate him' - they really lost all patience with him by season 5. That they could no longer muster up any sympathy and just found him detestable and insufferable at this point.

But the question still remains ... what changed so much about him that people feel that way? Because Blaine was literally always a horrible person, from the moment we meet him. Literally in the first two episodes we find out that he's manipulative, murderous, and he's willing to risk the zombie apocalypse for some quick profit - basically rendering all the sacrifices that Liv made to contain the disease ineffective. We learn that he uses sex to spread the virus intentionally, that he kills children and ruins lives left and right. In fact, season 1 Blaine seems particularly awful. But he was always a fan favourite.

People love Blaine, because aside from being an absolute monster, he was a fully-fledged person with many complexities and idiosyncrasies - especially from the beginning of season 2 onwards. We know about his backstory, his weaknesses, his personal flaws and feelings.

For example, we know that Blaine really likes the arts and music and sophisticated things. It's part of his characterisation as a hedonist, one of the traits that his father hates so much about him because it overrules his ambition. It only positions Blaine as an opposite to Liv, who was too busy to care much about art and music when she was alive - but when she died, she was forced to take a step back from her ambitions and this, in turn, taught her to enjoy life a little more and actually take in the world around her. She actually starts to liv(e) Liv Mo(o)re after she died. Her ambition didn't let her live her life - in fact, she wasn't even living her own life, she was following the dreams of her mother.

Meanwhile, this is one of the first deaths we see the original Blaine die: He only becomes ambitious after he becomes a zombie/dies. And while we know that he already did a lot of horrible and manipulative stuff in the past, he only gets worse after his 'death'./undeath?

But we also begin to learn other things about him like him being incredibly invested in music to the point of impracticality (leading to him being overly trusting with Lowell.) And this is especially interesting because it gives us a first insight into his youth:

I feel like the information we get from this is underrated because we learn quite a few things:

For one, we can at this point already make an educated guess that Blaine's childhood and/or youth was not a particularly happy one. He's not just saying that he liked Nirvana as a kid or even loved them - he's saying they were like a soundtrack to his youth. Nirvana gets deep into themes like mental illness, isolation, alienation, disillusionment, trauma, rebellion, homelessness, neglect etc. And while you don't need to have experienced these things to relate to Nirvana's music, we do happen to know (or learn later in the show) that many of these things are quite familiar to Blaine so it makes sense why he would specifically describe it as a soundtrack to his youth.

Additionally, we have Blaine stating that his childhood ended with Kurt Cobain's death. Obviously, even if everything is alright with a kid's life otherwise, the death of a star they looked up to (especially in such a horrible fashion) can be a traumatising event. But someone identifying it as the end of their childhood even 20 years later means ... this was really the last load-bearing pillar of something breaking away. It also tells us that something fundamentally changed in Blaine after that event. That he became a different person than he was before. Obviously, there are some positive interpretations to someone saying that their 'childhood ended' - if there is a focus on growing up and if this happens later rather than earlier, it is even an urgent thing, when someone finally grows. It means that someone has more freedom and more choices and is mature to start shaping and designing their own life. But it's pretty clear that this is meant in a negative sense. Growing up and becoming an adult also comes with a lot of sad truths - it means giving up a lot of illusions about he world, about goodness and fairness and hope and certainty. And whatever amount of these childhood notions Blaine had maintained up to this point died with Kurt Cobain. He took one step closer to the adult that we know he eventually would become: Someone who is very cold and callous and cynical and uncaring.

The rest of this statement also puts this into perspective: We learn here that Blaine - as a child - had friends. And not just that, apparently friends who considered him a source of comfort, someone they can share their pain with and not...expect the kind of dickishness that we associate with adult Blaine who would probably mock a person for being sad about something like this. In fact, we're talking about a person for whom the final culmination of their entire life story arc was him betraying his only friend and that friend telling him that 'no one could ever love you' and 'I was the only one who could even stand you'. That's adult Blaine. That's who he turned into. Meanwhile, as a child, there were people who loved him. Not just his friends but also his grandfather. I think that this is very important: As a child, Blaine is implied to have had a certain capacity to care for others and he was someone who was approachable and reliable and good enough to actually be friends with or to love. This is one first aspect of his identity that Blaine eventually sacrifices in order to be safe from pain like the death of his idol - and to be able to hurt people left and right if it means an advantage for him. (Which is basically adopting one of his father's values.) While there are people who care about Blaine and maybe even love him - there is usually only so much of real emotional intimacy that he's able or willing to give back. You have Jackie who forgave him for turning her into a zombie and even sided with him when his two henchmen wanted to usurp him and offered her cheaper brains - she was definitely loyal, but he still killed her. There was Peyton, who actually respected him because he was the only one in the city who was willing to stand up to Mr Boss - for all the wrong reasons obviously - but he still couldn't love her enough to be honest with her or to put her agency and wishes first (and I think it really shows the progress of Blaine losing even more of his humanity when he loses the basic decency of wanting to be with her on a consensual basis and of leaving her alone after she left him. (That is another stage of his undoing: Blaine's relationship with Peyton was barely consensual to begin with, it is happening under a pretence - but that pretence is for his benefit as well as hers. Back then, he still convinced himself he could have a relationship and a genuine connection to a human being. In the end, he doesn't even care about the pretence anymore)

I think another relevant example is Blaine's grandfather. His grandfather was one of the few ties Blaine actually had to the rest of humanity: When he was a child, his grandfather was one of the few people who actually loved him. We know the great impact his grandfather had on him because of how much he shaped the more human sides of Blaine (and that Blaine is aware of this). In the hospice scene, Blaine specifically calls attention to this: He points out his grandfather passed on his love for music to him. There are also small things like the Dutch paintings in the hospice room while Blaine is frequently associated with Dutch art (in his basement office, in his mansion later). Even Blaine's love for his grandfather itself is a result of that: Blaine's grandfather genuinely seemed to have cared about his grandson and loved him (something that Blaine even quite viciously snarls at his father at the beginning of season 2, when Angus just seems confused about his father 'babying' Blaine). In turn, Blaine - who seems to hold quite a bit of resentment for pretty much everyone and only maintains relationships that benefit him and always puts himself first, just like he learnt from his father - actually cares quite selflessly about his grandfather. He seems to pay for his hospice care and visit him regularly, There are books there implying that he reads to him, he plays music for him, even kisses him on the forehead. By killing his grandfather, Blaine also killed an important part of who he is as a person - the part of him that is a person. A part of him that is genuinely good and has the capacity to love other people in a selfless and authentic way. And the big question is - why did he kill his grandfather? - to get back at his father, the worst part of him. Basically, the murder of Blaine's grandfather in favour of revenge against his father is the start of a development: Blaine made the ultimate choice against breaking the cycle, against ever freeing himself. This is his Hamlet stabbing Polonius - by infecting his father, he turned from a passive to an active player in his family tragedy, and now, the tragedy is beginning to escalate. This becomes even more evident considering the immediate futility of it as he finds out that he cannot feed his father his grandfather's brain because, in the meantime, Angus was abducted by the Chaos Killer.

(I have officially run out of characters, continuation here (x)

#izombie #fandom #blaine debeers

[spaceorphan18]

fic writer 20 questions - ask game

Thank you @bitbybitwrites for letting me self indulge more.

i still have issues with tagging, but -- @wowbright or @redheadgleek or @coffeegleek wanna try - go for it!

1. how many works do you have on ao3?

Right now - 59. But there are some I think I'm going to take down, mostly the MCU related WIPs I started and have no intention of finishing.

2. whats your ao3 word count?

899,883

3. what fandoms do you write for?

Right now - only Glee. But I started with The Office, and have written MCU related things, too.

4. top 5 fics by kudos

1. 99 Perspectives on a Single Love Story 417 2. The Accident 336 3. Chasing Pavements 312 4. Faking It 303 5. How I Met My Soul Mate - A Drunken Kurt Story 275

5. do you respond to comments? why or why not?

I do! But I get so behind. I'm finally caught up again, but I'll go months without responding (and I always feel bad). I feel like - if you've taken the time to write, I should take the time and thank you for acknowledging my work.

6. what is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

I don't really have any that have angsty endings - I'm not big on that. I do have bittersweet and sad endings, though -- such as Things We Say in the Shadows, Scenes from December, and The End of the Story

7. whats the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Ooh, I don't know - maybe Chasing Pavements?

8. do you get hate on fics?

Not really. I think I had one comment once that said they thought I needed more editing. (which, fair) and one that didn't like how I did vampires in Things We Say in the Shadows -- but since I know nothing about Vampire lore - I wasn't too worried about it.

9. do you write smut? if so, what kind?

Clearly, I do. But here's the thing about smut. I feel like - when you start writing, it can be like this scary thing, and then the more you do it, the more almost... routine it starts becoming? It's been an interesting journey...

10. do you write crossovers? whats the craziest one youve ever written?

Not really? Only when it's kind of done in a cracky way. I wrote Scam School as a joke, which is a Glee/MCU crossover. And Blurring Lines is a RPF crack fic about Kurt and Blaine's reaction to Darren and Mia getting engaged.

11. have you ever had a fic stolen?

God, I hope not. Please let me know if someone has!

12. have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes! I had someone ask if they could translate my works into German! So they are!

13. have you ever cowritten a fic before?

I have! @ckerouac and I wrote a silly MCU fic about fake dating and @darriness and I wrote a cute one-shot together.

14. fave all time ship?

Hmmm, I don't know! I'm still having fun writing Klaine. I will always have a special place in my heart for Jim and Pam - and sometimes think about writing more of them. And there are lots out there that I enjoy - but I wouldn't necessarily write fic about.

15. wip you want to finish but doubt you will?

Idk about doubt completely, but I'd love to finish writing The CrossRhodes Saga -- it's a 40s noir mystery, and it's so fun.

16. what are your writing strengths?

Probably conversation -- also, the ability to weave in canon elements. Plus, I think I'm funny - I don't know if other people think I am though.

17. what are your writing weaknesses?

Details and descriptions. Also transitions. And probably mechanical things like where to use a comma. Plus, my inability to just proofread and clean it up before posting.

18. thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in a fic?

Make sure you know what you're doing? Or have someone proofread it? Idk - I've never done it.

19. first fandom you wrote for?

I mean, if you want to get technical, it'd be The Mighty Ducks when I was ten... but the first thing anyone read was for The Office.

20. fave fic youve written?

It's really a toss up between With Every Broken Bone -- which, was really a fic written for me and how to reconcile between seasons 5 and 6. I still will go back and reread that one. The month of June still manages to be one of my favorite things I've ever written. And 99 Perspectives on a Single Love Story which may have been a long, tedious journey to write, but it ended up being just exactly what I wanted it to be. I also have hopes for my current project: Head Over Feet but we'll have to see how that works out when I finish it.

#thanks dear - what a fun thing to write

[itissadbutitsmy-artblog]

This might sound a bit dumb, but I have an AU idea where Pepper Mint somehow manages to retain control of his Pepperminteppi form & escape with Cadebra. Cadebra: "So my friend is now an immortal Primordial being that can use massive amounts of black magic. Nice." The Cult has to deal with their God not wanting anything to them (& also being in Wizard Jail for, y'know, murdering children).

OK HIIIIIIIIIIIIII

absolute delight and excitement and beige comics under the cut let's go insane

first off this is such a fun idea but i kept getting stuck because how did they get out if he didnt get at least a little violent? they were in a Situation. thats why he started blasting in the first place in the movie! he kills everyone holding cadebra and then kills everyone else who is looking at the two of them funny, and he tells her to get out before he starts hurting her too. but anyways i digress. au! my polite little boy uou (transcipts in image descs to save on space. i realize i should be doing this in the first place to be more accessible but i dont do it. ay. someday ill get over that brain hurdle)

the profs are so. blank eyed about being Stopped. that’s their GOD. they want him to do the prophesied deeds! but he’s not. “aren’t you our god now” no I’m just that kid but I have this primordial god deity chilling giving me horrible advice now in my head. awful. thanks. i just learned real fast real hard how to love and trust myself

and then also i was like. well like. w. what is everyone gonna say. not nice things. thats a scary insect boy (WHY HE INSECT? IVE NEVER DRAWN PEPPERMINTEPPI PROPERLY BEFORE AND ITS KILLING ME WHY IS HE A BEETLLEEEEE).

and also also. also. ???? drinking the ichor SUCCESSFULLY, is quite literally what og peps just,, keeps saying will Recreate Him, OG Peps, so i guess he did that (?? HELLO) or something similar when he was little but as you can tell he did not uh. keep the scary beetle body. maybe he didnt have a bestie to protect

anyways. so. pep likes being big. :)

also have this

poor pep trying to mediate between the gay idiot he used to be in his head (not the gay idiot he still is) and the giant scary monster from the before-nothingtimes he just willingly added to the vr chat

and his poor fuckin teachers

(ron james is too old and anxious for this shit and life giving magus has a thing about not letting people feel sad :( hes an Emotions Wizard being sad makes him do Evil Magic did you watch the episode Little Dude? gotta keep his students feeling loved and safe or else. especially when they’re um. imbued with massive amounts of dark magic. sorry I like the them)

i also have this from discord

I don’t know how to end this post this au is fun. none of the kids and few of the adults know the significance of this guy. pep is like hnnnnn just wanna be a normal kid but also scarypowerfulbig. enough. to protect. blaines over here like we are not letting him in the school like that are we and weaponhead is like well. the important thing is we aren’t letting the murderers back in. Blaine.

Maybe larry (cousin got fucking murdered by the teachers) and pep (reached level 100,000 just by drinking juice and now kinda scares everyone) drop out together. just chill quiet together. what do wizards even DOOOOOO, get COFFEE??? make up entirely new schools of magic kinda like those jerky secret societies but less jerky (ron James s6e13 “thanks for the crabapples giussepe”)????? just sit around and wait for Blaine (RULES GUY) and Deb (needs structure in her life and thinks school is fun) to get out of class so they can go do things?

also also I was gonna be Sad tm that you said pep was immortal now, but I insist on believing that wizards have long lifespans. so it’s not like Deb and blaine and larry just fucking DIE ten seconds into pep’s infinite life. they’re there. for a while. (:

#i turned into a swirling vortex of delight and wizards over this #adventure time #distant lands #au #asks #traditional #zoomerinaboomercostume #I don’t wanna tag everyone wehhhh #i do need to draw the evil teachers 🔘_🔘 I just love rj and life giving magus so much #brb making Ron James Drinking into my avatar #what do we call him. pepi 🥺

[cheemken]

KNIGHT ‼️‼️‼️

YOU ARE SO BIG FUCKING BRAIN

I DIDNT EVEN THINK ABOUT THE HOUNDOOMS. YOU ARE SO SMART HOLY SHIT I FEEL BAD FOR DIANTHA NOW. SHE DIED THE WAY HER MOM ALWAYS THREATENED HER WITH

But yeah, all the Champions families can’t even bring themselves to watch the live feed because who wants to see their daughter and granddaughter get mauled to death? Or see their son being slowly burnt alive while he pleads for mercy? Or watch as their uncle struggles while his head is held underneath water. Or even their sister who’s being skinned alive from her feet to her head. Even their big bro who’s being tossed around like a rag doll between two large Pokémon fighting over him

Giovanni is a BITCH for bringing Clair and Silver into this. Like they weren’t even given a chance to live just for the sole reason they’re important to Lance. And Gio wants to see Lance break even more after he had to witness his daughter and wife die

Also, which of the Elite Four members and Gym Leaders do you think would join Team RR? Either out of fear or just because they think they can benefit from it?

OUGHFHFFH RIGHT CHSMBXNS

Your honour that's so fucked up I can only imagine Drasna really going through it but also still trying to comfort Augustine, but they're both really so out of it man, especially how Drasna knew of the threats Dia's mother said to her; Drayden's there on the hunt for Plasma, just letting his rage out on all the grunts he sees, the sages, until he gets to Ghetsis himself; Joseph couldn't handle it man, he already lost his wife now he lost his son, the sound of Steven's screams haunts him; god Lisia too, the only family she had left and now he's being drowned, and she cursed the irony of it, of Wallace being so drawn to the waters but it's also one of the reasons for his death; Cyn's sister and grandparents tho chdmdb like Cyn's sis knew Cyrus was her friend, and she couldn't believe Cyrus would do that to Cynthia; and then there's Hop, crying his poor little heart out, screaming for his brother, the once great champion of Galar reduced to nothing but a chew toy for those pokemon.

Ough that's fucked up, but also where the fuck is Geeta in all this— imagine tho in the au of an au where she's evil, imagine she's the one to tell Lysandre what would really break Diantha, bc Diantha confided in her y'know, told her everything, her best friend, her platonic soulmate, then suddenly Geeta looks at her with cold and calculating eyes, suddenly she wasn't the friend Diantha knew, and god that fucking broke her man, how Geeta used Dia's vulnerabilities, how she knew each and every one of em, and used that to her advantage chsnnd

But for the not evil Geeta thing imagine if she did hid herself tho, and everyone else called her a coward. But that was the last thing Diantha told her, Dia made her promise to hide, like what she said to Iris, to just hide, to not let Giovanni find her. But that backfired on Geeta tho, and now everyone, especially the family of the other Champions, called her cowardly, how she couldn't even try to help her fellow champions, how she couldn't even try to save them. But man that would haunt her too, having to watch Diantha die, having to watch her friends die, it fucked her up so so much and she hated herself so much that she didn't defy Diantha and went to her side to help her

As for the league members thatd join Team RR

For Kanto idk, since in the manga majority of em was associated w Rocket,, well let's go w that. Sabrina, Surge, and Blaine are my top three for that, tho I wanna say Blaine was blackmailed into joining bc he was one of the people who made Mewtwo. Green would be against them tho, I know the Kanto trio would team up w the rest of the Gym Leaders to stop them.

For the Johto leaders, I really can't see any of them joining Team RR, even if they're threatened I think some or most would rather go down w a fight than to join em. For the Indigo E4, low-key I think Koga and Will would join em.

For Hoenn's league, Norman. And for Sinnoh to Unova none of em they'd be against RR, Unova especially man they really fought tooth and nail to stop Plasma only for Plasma to be part of RR and is now more threatening than before. For Kalos, I honestly think Lysandre would threaten and blackmail Malva to joining again, idk if she'd cave in or not bc holy shit™. Alola to Paldea, none too, idk, bc Alola didn't want to be part of it ofc, their league is still fairly new, most of their members are children, if anything I wanna say they'd try to fight them off if they do get to their region. The Galarian people got Rose Tower demolished man they're so fucking pissed at Rose, no one's ever seen Raihan and Sonia that pissed before too like these two especially want to hunt down Rose. And for Paldea, well, not only are they mourning the other Champions but also mourning and kinda hating on their own Champion too, my guy, Geeta's really going through it, she doesn't wanna lose anyone else, so she keeps an eye on her league members within the shadows, to make sure none of them ever join RR

#yknow wheres hau in this too— #or is he not champion in this au? hahah #anyways does this make sense cause like chmdnd im info dumping hahahah #and whenever i do that i tend to not make much sense bc of alk the stuff i wanna write that they kinda overlap w each other hahah #but hey anwyays #the more i think abt this au the more i think that hey what if this is actually the au in that rebellion au where the champs got killed #cause like?? they all died here and its like the same in the rebellion au hahah #and like.. trying to make it make sense iris still failing the bond phenomena thing before plasma kidnapped her and killed her #idk its fun to think abt it ig hahaha #pokemon au #pokemon champions #an ask and an answer #jerseyk112

[forabeatofadrum]

Hello and happy Sunday to you all. Thank you @confused-bi-queer, @cutestkilla, @you-remind-me-of-the-babe for the tags, and a tag back to @aroace-genderfluid-sheep.

My Klaine fic is still being written. Toffee the hamster has been found, but it's taking a while to finish it. An anon did give me a title idea, namely The Class Menagerie, and anon, I love you for it,

In other fic related news, I started posting Dancin' on that bamboo ceiling, the fic series that explores Asian identity and racism through Glee, while also trying to find a way to place glee's own racism towards its Asian characters. I was quite nervous to post it and a bit stressed. So stressed that I straight up confused Mike and Wes in one of my summaries and in the series' summary I accidentally wrote that Mike moved to China, not from China. Oops. It's been fixed. Five fics are posted and I am not at all surprised that the Klaine-centric one has the most hits, since people still prefer shippy fics over gen fics. I just hope these Klainers (hi!!) are encouraged to also read the others.

I am also nervous because I don't want to come off as if I am speaking for everyone yada yada. I did add the disclaimer that I am one sole person writing this and I am also alway open for more feedback, but it feels so nerve wracking. I usually write for me and me alone, but not this time, I guess. And even so, I am one Chinese person and damnit China is big. Catch me frantically googling whether people in Hubei speak Mandarin or something else etc. (Which I knew the answer to, cause my sister is from Hubei, but I'm just so nervous!!!) (This is also why I remember that Mike's family is from Hubei.)

Also some things in Glee are so fucking stupid. I am already thinking about changing something in Blaine's chapter so it lines up with canon, but I am still trying to explain why Tina's last name is Cohen-Chang.

Writing this fic is uhhhh A Lot, since I am delving deep into the racism that I have experienced and also the stories of other Asian people who I have spoken to about this. (JY, Todd, I haven't seen y'all in literal years, but you're in this fic.) (I do still talk to Cilla regularly.) (And a shout-out to my sister who constantly has to deal with people saying "she is too pretty to be Chinese"!). I am excited to explore this and I keep thinking about things I can add, but it is heavy, as you might expect. I do try to keep some humour and joy in it, because unlike Glee, I also want to show that being Asian can be fun and can lead to connection. I am looking forward to Mike, Tina, Wes, Blaine and Yu-Jin being friends! Here's a more upbeat part of the sad shit that I shared recently:

"Yes, yes, yes!" Yu-Jin cheers when Mike and Wes step inside the bedroom, both wearing a tangzhuang. "God, if only my grandparents could see me now," Wes says as he studies himself in the mirror. "Tina's making photo's," Blaine says. Tina's new phone has the best camera of them all and she'll send the photos to the others later. She definitely wants to save the mirror selfies that she made with Yu-Jin. Tina's hanbok has become to small and it's straining her in places, but she loves the way she looks and that's what matters.

And now, the weather: @quizasvivamos @blurglesmurfklaine @coffeegleek @esperantoauthor @otherworldsivelivedin @caramelcoffeeaddict @sillyunicorn @bazzybelle @dragoneggos @raenestee @tectonicduck @nightimedreamersworld @urban-sith @thnxforknowingme @captain-aralias @justgleekout @cerriddwenluna @tea-brigade @ivelovedhimthroughworse @moodandmist @whogaveyoupermission @bookish-bogwitch @ionlydrinkhotwater @1908jmd @special-bc-ur-part-of-it @larkral @chen-chen-chen-again-chen ​ @artsyunderstudy ​ @martsonmars ​ @facewithoutheart ​ @shrekgogurt @boyinjeans @rockitmans @bitbybitwrites @blackberrysummerblog @whatevertheweather

#six sentence sunday #tagged in

[kwaj115]

Ina Kingsley x MC: I’m not needed, never will I be - Part 2

Summary: A simple question that makes Raven crack under pressure. 

Warnings: ANGST, negative thoughts, swearing, maybe a sprinkle of fluff, hurt Raven, angsty flashback

Tags: @kulaykape @ikingsley @domakir @loyalshrimpfan @barnibumblr @loyalshrimp @alleycat97 @blaine-hayes @swimmingshoebakerydreamer

Author’s Notes: It mentions some of Raven’s flashbacks and negative thoughts. If you are uncomfortable with it, I advise you not to read it. This does not affect the other stories, think of it as an alternate universe or something-) It mentions some characters from previous fics. For the ones who do read it, I hope you enjoy it. It has not been proofread, although, feedback is appreciated if you message me in private. I will edit it later. This series may be discontinued.

“Lillian?”

“How dare you walk away, why did you leave? How can you say you were bored?!”

Raven looks around and lets Lillian in to avoid waking up the neighbours. 

“Come in.”

She sensed Lillian’s reluctance.

“Please.”

Raven sat Lillian down and offered some tea but decided to make it herself after her glare.

“What changed in you to say you were bored?”

Raven sighed. 

“I lied.”

******A few months back******

“Ina, why can’t I come along?”

The older woman gave an amused look as Raven followed her around while she was packing her bag with a pout and her arms crossed.

“It’s only a week.”

“A week without you, Ina.”

Ina sighs and settles on the bed, she pats the space next to her so Raven can sit. 

“Rae, we can video call and text, we’ll be fine.”

*****

Raven sulked to the airport, following Ina. 

“Raven, I promise I will call when I land.”

Placing a kiss on Raven’s forehead, she held her. Raven took her time taking in Ina’s scent before letting her go and walking to the gate. She waved until Ina disappeared into the crowd before trudging her way home. 

*****

Continuing with her usual daily routine, without Ina, she texted her. 

Queen of my Heart

Ina: What are we having for dinner?

Raven: I can cook ;)

Raven: And clean

Ina: 👀

Today at 7:48 PM

Raven: I miss you.

Raven: It doesn’t feel the same in the apartment when you’re not here. 

Delivered 7:49 PM

Waiting for her reply, minutes turned into hours. She fell into a slumber, letting go. A vibration filled the room from the device, light blaring from the screen. 

Queen of my Heart

Raven: I miss you.

Raven: It doesn’t feel the same in the apartment when you’re not here. 

Read 10:30 PM

Ina: I know, I’m sorry. I’ll be back soon, Rae..

It was difficult for Raven to get up in the morning. Upon seeing Ina’s message, she felt at ease. She decided to visit Rudra and spend time at the gym so she doesn’t feel alone. 

“Hey, Rud!”

“Raven! You’re here today, any problem?”

“Ina’s out on a work trip so I thought I can check up on you.”

“Jesse is in the office too, I just need to step out right now.”

The woman went to check up on her cousin, excited to spend time with her after they hadn’t had much time together. 

“JESSE! OH MY GOD, I MISSED YOU! You doctors are so hard to catch for bonding time.”

“Well, Lillian and I have been spending quite a bit of time soooo”

“Ahhh, I see. I see heart eyes”, Raven smirked. 

Jesse rolls her eyes and they began sorting out the office. Raven decided to fill the air with some casual talk to avoid the silence she already has at home.

“Where’s Ina? Aren’t you supposed to be clinging to her legs like the big baby koala you are?”

“I do not!-”

But Jesse silenced her with a single look. 

“Okay, fine. Maybe I am-”

“Exactly.”

“So Jesse, I have a question. If you don’t mind?”

Jesse nods before giving Raven a curious look.

“How do you manage to have a strong relationship when you and Lillian spend much time apart? I’m surprised Charlotte is holding on considering how her mom is away from home often.”

Jesse puts away binders before she gives her full attention to Raven.

“Why do you ask?”

Raven shrugged and mumbled.

“Because why not, I’m just curious.”

Silence blanketed the room as Jesse observed Raven busying herself with papers. 

“It’s communication and being vulnerable with each other. You inform the other person of how you’re feeling like they’re your diary.”

Raven thought for a moment before turning to the older woman. Giving a nod, they both continued to work in silence before Raven returned home. 

“Ina, who is this?”

“Oh, it’s just a friend from the group. We’re meeting up for a reunion after a long time of not seeing each other.”

Ina kept on moving around. 

“I’m glad you’re going out.”

“Thank you, Rae. I’ll be back.”

With Ina leaving, Raven can’t help but feel left out. Yet, she was still cheerful. As the night went on, she received pictures of them together with the last one of her friend giving her a peck on her cheek. Raven couldn’t help but feel hurt and jealous. She felt jealous of them being close in that way but hurt that they could be together since they are closer in age and established in their career paths. 

Later that night, Raven tossed and turned. Unable to sleep with her racing thoughts. She read the time as 2:00 am and concerned for Ina, she decided to read her messages again. 

Queen of my Heart

Ina: What are we having for dinner?

Raven: I can cook ;)

Raven: And clean

Ina: 👀

Yesterday at 7:48 PM

Raven: I miss you.

Raven: It doesn’t feel the same in the apartment when you’re not here. 

Delivered 7:49 PM

Yesterday at 11:07 PM

Ina: *sent 21 attachments*

Raven: Baby?

You okay?

How long will you be until you come back?

Delivered 11:52 PM

She waited for a response, even an accidental message, but there was nothing. She decided to wait it out only for her to knock out before she received a message.

Today at 2:48 AM

Ina: heyy babbyy, im just gonna crasshh at my friends placee, sleeep welll

Delivered 2:48 AM

Raven woke up and the first thing she checked was her messages. She read Ina’s text which resulted in a little pinch to her heart. She wasn’t sure if she should be jealous or if she should be glad that she had a trustable place to stay while drunk. Before she could begin her morning routine, there was a knock at the door. 

#playchoices #ina kingsley #queen b #ina x mc #professor ina kingsley #professor kingsley #queen b ina #ina kingsley x mc #ina x raven #raven wardin

[smythewmu]

43: How many people have you had real, strong feelings for since high school ended? - Puck

...Not that many. If I'm being honest. Though I didn't exactly have that many strong feelings for boys even in high school. You know- not always a strong feelings guy at the best of times. You wanna fuck? I'm down to fuck. You wanna be friends with benefits. I'm so in. You want intimacy without the rules? I'm double in.

But if you're asking about genuine- real, proper feelings for someone. I think anyone with eyes can see that I might be my usual, slutty, whoring self but I do have some very, very strong feelings for two boys in partiular.

And my face would kind proves that at this point. I think.

@wmublaine has this utter light about him that you can't deny. You know? It attracts you in this way thats almost impossible to escape from. You know? He's sexy as hell, he's cute and has this soul that I adore. I'm not big into the whole mystical souls thing but god if Blaine doesn't have this power in this smile of his. Like, the way he fits in my arms is like he was made to fit there. So. You know- I want him there. I think he belongs there. Also he's the perfect size to pick up and hold against the wall mid-fuck? So- you know, gonna do that. He's talented, sexy, brillant and literally get me to do whatever he wanted if he just asked. So.

@wmuhummel is a force of nature annd god, do I think is that a fucking wonderful thing. Kurt has me wrapped around his his finger in and he knows it. You know? He's never gonna ask but I'd crawl over broken glass for him. There are this moments when it's just the two of that take my breath away. It can be as simple as a look my way, or a coy little smile. Or more the way he shoves me up against wall. His mind works in this way I just cannot get enough of. He's my match sexually, and intellectually and yet he challanges me every time we spend time together. It's addictive. I can't get enough of it or him.

So...

Yeah. I've got some feelings on that.

#answered q's

[dystopiandramaqueen]

Nick Blaine is a very simple man.

He has one (1) threshold for violence. June Osborne's PHYSICAL safety.

When he learned that she was not ok. He went immediately to her bedside. To confirm for himself, and to offer what support he could. I think that's a deep human instinct. Go. When there's big trouble like a death or hospitalization. Go, check it out for yourself, see how you can help. Stabilize June. Before anything else.

He doesn't want to DE-stabilize June's support network in Canada.

Nick knows that Luke is a jealous man. He doesn't want to call June's loyalty to Luke into question by being present unbidden. So he leaves. Not even needing June to know he came. Like he didn't need credit for saving, smuggling and releasing the letters from Jezebel's.

Nick Blaine does not act for glory, but bc its the right thing to do.

Punching Lawrence was NOT impulsive.

An Impulse occurs in seconds.

Nick Blaine calmly crossed back into a warzone.

Drove himself for hours to Lawrence's house. Lots of calm time to think and plan.

Arrives. Sees that EVERYONE is watching. Whole social scene present to watch you administer your justice. This does NOT, in any way, change his decision.

HE LEFT THE FUCKING DOOR OPEN. (disrespect and disregard for LAWRENCE's safety. Even the illusion of giving a shit about decorum and manners is out the window)

Calmly found his target, and delivered his statement. A judgment. Not a question, not a conversation, but violence.

Not really caring if Lawrence's lips issued the order.

Punishing him, calling Lawrence out for LETTING JUNE GET HURT ON HIS WATCH. Lawrence is higher up than Nick, now that he's remarried. It could have just been a Canadian domestic terrorist unrelated to Gilead. But even the POSSIBILITY needs to be dealt with. Again, IN PERSON.

Nick's priorities:

Physically show up to help protect June. If the best way to do that is to leave, so be it. June was physically stable, safe, with Luke, her protector in the building. She was physically safe, and ok for now.

Whoop Ass. As much as necessary. So that this never happens again. Physical Violence now. To protect June's future. Like- I see this in !dad Nick if the guy who took his daughter out on a date got in a car wreck. Nick would roll into the hospital and do the exact same thing. "You said you'd keep her SAFE." Like- endanger my girl and YOU are in danger. Everyone needs to act as if her safety is THEIR safety. And Nick is the enforcer. It's so masculine and primal and POWERFUL and we KNEW that was his nature. GOD it feels good to finally see it!!!!!

And Nick couldn't turn these instincts off. It was personal. This reminds me SO MUCH of Tarantino characters. Heros driven by an internal code of honor, like oldschool knights and samurai.

I hope he has a HUGE invisible network of helpers to get him out of jail relatively quickly.

I hope Lawrence pays back Nick's saving from jail move from S3. Pay back his "You Owe Me."

#nick blaine #osblaine #nick x june #big pic thoughts #meta