#he IS the center of universe but also he wants to live out his lesbian cottagecore fantasy for the rest of his days

[oh-wow-im-still-here]

Im so sorry but I just cannot understand people that read the entirety of scum villain and then say they don't like binghe. He's awful, toxic, overbearing, ect. Like?? Yes, but also no??? Did you not read the book? Or even looked past the unreliable narration?

Like, I get it, you're reading it in the moment and sqq is a super fun and imaginative narrator, he easily traps you in the same mindset that he has. Trapping you in the world of genres, tropes, character archetypes, what makes a story a story. So it's easy to get clouded like sqq and just scratch your head and try to figure out what type of character archtype luo binghe will turn out to be. If he's not the stallion protagonist harem master anymore, than what is he? So you read book 2 and the start of book 3 and you think, "oh! If he's not gonna be the toxic male power fantasy anymore, than he's gonna be the toxic male love interest fantasy you see in BL!"

You know the ones. They're incredibly sexy, incredibly tall, needs an incredibly in depth course on the meaning of consent and boundaries, and the narrative never punishes them for doing weird and out of line shit, but actively romanticize it. Which fits binghe in some respects, but not all of them, same as the stallion protag box. So I can understand you and sqq's apprehension throughout the story. Waiting for the hat to drop already. Is binghe a cute wholesome wife or a possessive bloodthirsty demon lord?

But then you and shen qingqiu are supposed to learn the lesson near the end that binghe is a person!! With thoughts and feelings and grievances he wants addressed!!! That ultimately he is in the exact middle of the harem master protag to toxic yaoi male lead scale, but also not on the scale at all!!!

Because, ultimately, he is just a guy that desperately wants to be loved! To be wanted! That's it! And shen qingqiu realizes this and takes this complicated emotional wreck of a man and promises him that love and companionship. Shedding the notions of following some sort of thought out narrative and live out their happy ending. Because scum villain's story does end up happy. Messy, but happy. Shen Qingqiu is not suffering. He does not regret choosing Luo Binghe. They are both happy and in love and they both deserve each other. So like, what more do you want?

#conclusion: yeah hes toxic bingqiu is so toxic but also not but also yes in the sexy way but also not- #literally scum villain is not scum villain without binghe #hes sooo interesting!!! he is malewife demon emporer sweet maiden sheep disciple harem master bad at sex husband narrative power source ect #he IS the center of universe but also he wants to live out his lesbian cottagecore fantasy for the rest of his days #also ps i do absolutely believe binghe does understand bounderies and consent and is a gentlemen #xin mo the embodiment of toxic masculinity just had a grip on him for a lil bit but hes fine now hes a respectful boy #literally says he'd never do anything without complete consent in one of the extras #sorry my rambles arent very eloquent and dont make much sense lmao #luo binghe #bingqiu #shen qingqiu #svsss #scum villain #scum villains self saving system

[catholic-character-tournament]

Round 1 - Side B

Propaganda below ⬇️

Kristen

Once known as a Chosen of Helio, Kristen lost faith, found out she was gay, escaped the abusive church, and helps a lonely abused goddess return from the dead and continue the goddess of mystery. She also ends up creating her own god in the middle there, but decides it's kind of super annoying and eventually nopes out.

Kristen might be skirting a couple lines here so I'll provide my reasoning for why I think she might belong in the competition but feel free to choose as you wish. Kristen used to follow Helio, and her entire relationship with religion and Helio is meant to show a story of a queer teen leaving an abusive Christian church (I'm not sure if it's specifically Catholic or not, I'm Jewish and don't really understand the differences very well). Throughout the story Kristen meets Helio, finds out how much of a dick he is, finds out how terrible the Church has been and becomes more aware of how her family and the Church are racist/homophobic/abusive/etc., learns more about the world and breaks her ties with the Church, and then goes to find her own faith and a god worth worshipping.

girl is miserable for so much of the first season. girl is battling the brain demons. girl is battling the actual demons. and the actual angels. and the football coach who she knows from church. girl has brothers named bucky bricker and cork. girl invents a new god and cannot get people to convert to her faith apart from a singular dude named craig because she is so visibly annoyed by her own god. girl is gay and has a werewolf girlfriend. girl is so kinky. girl has a dexterity score of 4. not modifier. score. i'm kissing girl on the mouth i love her a lot.

She was a chosen prophet of Helio but oops she’s a very lesbian and so she has to battle with her faith hating gay people as she realizes she is gay people. Early on dies and goes to heaven and discovers Helio is a frat bro and doesn’t really vibe with that. Eventually dies again and fights past angels to get to Helios office and finds her old principal (who died to resurrect her the first time she died, it’s a long story, watch dimension 20, shits wild). And so he makes a deal to help her if she helps him break out of heaven. And also while she’s in heaven she makes a new god whole cloth out of her current beliefs. (She later finds that god annoying because it’s the embodiment of “YES! WOW! YOU CAN DO IT!!” The god turns from YES! Into Yes? In her changing faith. She later resurrects an old god of dreams who was corrupted). But yeah so she has religious trauma out the wazoo. She went to church camp that was actually a front for a cult within the Helioic faith. Idk if it’s Catholicism exactly cause I’m not catholic but it’s clearly parallel so some real world Christ based religion.

At one point they drop 10 stories because they thought they could use their ribbon to fly. They couldn’t.

her entire arc over fantasy high's first season is realizing she was gay and also that her church and the people in it were basically a cult which like SAMESIES and she does end up going to heaven after dying by slipping on corn and getting incredibly disappointed by the jesus equivalent of her universe (his name is helio and he is a frat boy) and after she's resurrected she makes her own god (not very catholic sorry) and preaches about it (pretty catholic of her tbh.) aside from the religious trauma some other kristen fun facts and highlights are that she once ribbon danced down the center of a spiral staircase and lived, she carried a bible around for a good chunk of her freshman year of high school, and her last name isn't a reference to anything because applebees does not exist in the world of fantasy high.

View more propaganda in her tag

SCP-166

Catholic deer girl. She’s just nature themed. Wants to have access to a Catholic phone line. But is not allowed to due to it risking the possibility of exposing SCPs to the world. But she has a rosary. Just unhinged.

She was just left in a convent and was raised catholic. But I love her because she has the most unhinged father and she's close to getting there istg

#kristen applebees #d20 fantasy high #scp 166 #just a teenage gaea #cct polls #tumblr tournament #tumblr bracket #tumblr polls #Youtube

[craetor]

Original character doodles!

I've had these ideas for a while but only now started drawing them after brooding the ideas a little more.

This story is called Evergarden (yeah, because Violet Evergarden is the best lesbian main character ever, even better hence all my characters are women/feminine/female, and also because-). It centers around a world that's inside the dream of a Lovecraftian god who has started to refuse to let things die, no matter how mangled or old they are.

Most of the characters I've created are the powerful weirdos who set out to kill this god in her dream to wake her, ready to give up the world they live in (by, yk, making this god stop dreaming) to finally allow the ones who are suffering to die.

Big, mossy goddess over here is Eureka The Bored. Her entourage even has a cute jester made from light and darkness itsef to keep her company as she wallows in her melancholy

Since this is a world where science and magic copulate, they will also through the protagonists. Say cheers to Hermes & Helena

O Negative is one of the three first god slayers who came up (technically four, counting Helena's mentor, but eh). After losing their team (they just split) to a grand but failed attempt at killing the god (the thing they'd been working hard towards for years, now realizing if they can't do it at their strongest, all would be fruitless), they're not seen again until they hear a team of crazy strong new youths have assembled to try again in earnest, resurfacing completely unannounced to lend their strength. They end up indeed offing one of the two guards of the god and drink her blood (it's a power up, obviously.)

It gets them a little high, which is the drawing on the top left.

Their attacks are long range. A vessel must be pierced by the needle attached to their nape. From there on their blood will be under O Negative's control.

Ester is one of three vessels for the universe bending experimental powers of a corporation called Martyr. They're like a sciene mafia who is looking to destroy the god's world from the inside out.

Ester's power is obviously summoning the symbolic representation of stars. Except, when xe does, actual lights from the night sky fall to be used by xir. The stars work kind of like shuriken, except xe can fluctuate their size. Xe uses this power quite recklessly, too, which is not an immediate problem to Martyr, but a phenomenon many around the world continue to observe and find displeasure in, making the organization (amongst other reasons) wildly controversial.

Rica is a capable spy, hired by a mafia to shadow Martyr and its projects. She is however caught and subsequently tortured (yet remains stubborn).

Having caused trouble again, Ester is caught up in not having met xir duties again and volunteers to do some company dirty work to appease the superiors. Of course when xe catches wind of a lady who needs to be tickled for information, it's all Ester's.

Xe're so intrigued by the free, vastly different life that Rica lives, that Ester soon dips the organization to pursue Rica (who is quite annoyed about being objectified for her lifestyle, yet can't deny how nice it is to have people clinging to her. When she finds out Ester is anatomically female during a bath in the river, though, it's all over for her barriers).

Project Inside Out

As mentioned, Martyr's goal is to destroy the world artificially. But this theory has been controversial within their world since nobody knows how the dreams of a god would work and if the world would truly end if the planet was swallowed by a black hole, along with the stars in the sky or the god's dream wasn't her own anymore.

Here's a seperate ref just of Echo just bc I wanted to draw him

They locked him up because of the radiation emanating from his brain coupled with his whimsical nature. The hallucinations they cause are dependent on its mood and vary in intensity. He can also tie a person to his power directly by a consentrated beam or touch, which'll last for an hour with long-term after effects.

Team Schrulle

They've got the vibes of a team of scientists who solely got together for the cause. After failing in the god's lair after half a decade of training they were just like "Oh well, that won't work" and went their separate paths.

Except Yumeko and Rho did go on to have Hermes (the former being a hermaphrodite), but she ended up on the steps of that convent, so yeah. They split.

Needless to say: the OST for this whole thing would be Antasma's battle theme from Mario & Luigi Dream Team Bros

#my art #original characters #digital art #lesbian oc #intersex oc #nonbinary oc #character themed playlist #sapphic art #genderqueer #trippy art #lovecraftian god

[griefabyss69]

gotta go with '07 nailbat for realsies'

Oooh this is an older one!!! From like the summer I think?

It's Stonathan, rated PG for now, and I'm posting the whole thing (it's not very long) because it was supposed to be for an event that I didn't have enough time to join! I'd like to finish it ~one day~ but it's also... a part of a bunch of WIPs that are going to be finished purely based on vibes mostly, like if I get the actual inspiration to finish it! It's not abandoned though because I do actually like the idea!!! I haven't gotten to the proper reason why I started writing it (something about Jonathan being the original maker of the nailbat and giving it to Steve when his life took a nosedive and Steve using it to protect them both and all of the symbolism etc), though it does start a little bit at the end Thanks for asking!!! <3 <3 <3

Honestly, living with Jonathan Byers should be like, fucking weird.

But it's not.

It's like, the guy wasn't necessary a thorn in his side but certainly was half of the center of some of the biggest hurt he's ever felt, but also, that was ages ago.

Years.

Steve hands him the joint, watching his lazy smile as their fingers brush. He's getting pretty high, the stuff that Argyle brings with him when he comes down from California is intense, but tonight he doesn't mind.

The thing is, he'd wanted to move in with Robin when she went off to university, but that didn't work out because she had gotten a girlfriend six months before she left and well. He wasn't about to third wheel or anything.

He wasn't gonna cockblock a couple of a lesbians after they'd spent their whole lives living in the heterosexual world of Hawkins.

So he and Robin had cried about it and then made different plans, something that would get Steve out from under his parent's thumb once and for all, but not leave him burdened with either the cost of living alone in a big new city or figuring out how to live with a complete stranger.

And here he is, smoking weed on his little balcony with Jonathan, who was attending the same school as Robin but apparently fucking hated living in the dorms.

He was of course worried about it all, about how fucking quickly he could tank this tentative friendship and blow up another home life, but so far it's been alright.

They even made it through their first fight about both of them being forgetful dickheads, and like, came to a solution and everything. Turns out you don't forget if it's your week for dishes or laundry if one guy does laundry and one guy does dishes. Groceries and garbage are less scheduled, but they're also easier to remember, and even if Steve forgets that Jonathan asked him to take out the garbage, he can do it in like two minutes tops.

They get along sober of course, had to have been through the whole getting an apartment and moving and driving around and going to school or work thing, but when they both have downtime in the evening and Jonathan's brain power isn't chained to any coursework, they smoke each other under the table.

Do they smoke too much weed?

Probably most definitely.

But it helps, with like everything they don't talk about. The shit that Jonathan tells him is because of trauma and the shit that the doctors tell him is because of brain injury. It's better than painkillers, and a world better than when he used alcohol to keep his head above water, so he's not worried for now.

Sometimes, though.

It's not enough.

--

There's a sound, he can't even remember what. A thud, or a crash, or a yell, maybe just a whisper, and he's up, on his feet, nailbat in hand before he even thinks to grab it.

He's silent, all of those years of sneaking past his parents and past other people's parents training him into memorizing the creaky places in the floor, how to open his door without disturbing the air too much.

The entrance to the kitchen is just out of reach, and he's ready to grab the archway there and pull himself in, swinging, when someone hisses out a curse.

"Shit."

It's Jonathan, his voice disembodied and in the dark.

Steve lurches forward before he gets scared, wanting to make sure he's not mistaken, and slaps his hand on the light switch, illuminating the kitchen.

Jonathan yells, flinching back into a fighting stance, eyes wide and round as he looks up where Steve is standing a few feet away.

"What're you doing?" Steve asks, squinting at the bright light. His eyes take too long to adjust these days.

"Uh, milk?" Jonathan asks, gesturing at the carton that lays on the floor, the milk spilled all over the tile. "Or, trying to?"

Steve sighs, forcing himself to put the bat down, leaning it against the wall.

"I'll get a towel."

--

They're at the kitchen table, Jonathan eating a bowl of cereal while Steve eats some cookies, even though it's like 4am, fuck it, because Steve's feeling restless and knows he won't sleep again tonight.

He assumes Jonathan is here for the same reason, since they've both cleaned up and he apologized for waking Steve even though like, he didn't have to be sorry.

It was kind of tense, Steve starting to feel less like he needed to square up with an invisible enemy but still on edge. He just watches Jonathan out of the corner of his eye, not wanting to fully look away because he wants to know he's safe.

#chats from the abyss #fun things #griefabyss69 writing

[tuiyla]

Can I just float the question of: was Finn homophobic?

• I mean he said the F word to Kurt. Which was really bad and he should have known better, especially since they were friends.

• He outed Santana and he didn't think it was that big of a deal. I mean no matter what, it is never someone's place to out another person. I know that it's not real, but in glee universe he had no idea what her situation was. Her parents could have disowned her, her abuela did. I'm saying this because if someone did that to me then my life would be over, I don't know where I would live and I wouldn't have any support.

• Also, when Santana was insulting Finn his reaction was to basically say "yea well you're gay." That is his idea of the biggest insult he could have thrown at Santana. In my mind being gay would never be seen as an insult or ammunition to use against someone but he did. What does that say about him??

I think even Glee itself doesn't shy away from Finn's homophobic tendencies, at least in season 1, which is a refreshing bit of self-awareness. It doesn't last. The self-awareness, that is. The homophobia does.

So here's the thing, I think Finn was meant to represent this more lowkey but just as sinister type of homophobia where you're cool with gay people in theory and are more progressive than your mates, until it's time to actually confront your own socialization and make a stand. That's season 1, imo. Where Glee has enough of a critical eye turned towards Finn where they can elevate him from ~other boys~ who are more hostile and actively homophobic but also explore that not standing up against a system is also perpetuating it. In non-pretentious terms, Glee doesn't shy away from Kurt's crossing of boundaries in season 1 but also 100% acknowledges that Finn is too comfortable in his privileged position and too ready to abuse it. The infamous slur scene is Finn resorting to homophobic language because it puts Kurt down and elevates him. And Finn throughout the series season is caving in to peer pressure from other jocks because his own image matters more to him than actually being anti-homophobic.

That story works in season 1, imo, because Finn learns his lesson but with much, much more space for growth. The correct continuation would have been not him having to learn the exact same lesson with Kurt again in 2x08 Furt and not him getting a free pass for every subsequent homophobic action. Alas, he lost all my sympathy when he was centered again and again in queer narratives without learning his lesson, without giving up his privilege to enact real change, without understanding how his actions continued hurting people, without examining his own messed up homophobia that came from his social context. Sure, he and Kurt became brothers but it felt like the show just absolved him of all sins. And proceeded to have him out a Latina lesbian to a homophobic high school/conservative town. With zero remorse or even sign that he knew how messed up what he did was. Because make no mistake, as much as Finn just wanted to hurt Santana in 3x06, he chose to do it by attacking her sexual identity and threatening her personal safety. That's homophobia and a particularly insidious act of it, at that, because everything in previous seasons tells us that Finn should know better than to do that. And he does it anyway. That's not just ignorance, that's cruelty.

So. Is Finn homophobic? Well, I think there's a distinction between being homophobic and doing/saying homophobic things. Finn was meant to belong to the latter category in Glee and meant to evolve into someone who genuinely learns to do better and stand up in the face of homophobia. Glee thinks that's what they did with the ch but I beg to differ. I think Finn is a person who just doesn't grasp the gravity of things and doesn't know how to apologize. See the Sue and baby Robin incident. So even though he does a genuinely great job later on with Unique's situation, I struggle to say he's not still homophobic because he just didn't demonstrate he was capable of that kind of growth. And that's on the writers and their treatment of Finn as a golden boy instead of the messed up kid who makes mistakes and has to learn bit by bit, not just be portrayed as this inherently "good" guy. By painting him as inherently, instinctively good even when he screwed up big time - bigger than anyone else on the show if you ask me - they halted that growth and he remained homophobic.

Mini-Finn analysis/glimpse at my personal frustrations with him aside, I'd say he has huge issues with homophobia, yeah. How can you not think so after everything that happened with both Kurt and Santana. But that's just it, most of the fandom (based on the reddit days, anyway) would vehemently deny this. The show tells us he got over his homophobia, so. When I say with 100% certainty that Finn Hudson has a nasty case of The Homophobia, I know that can be a controversial statement. To wrap up a long story concisely, that is what I'd say though, yeah. Not only was Finn homophobic but he never truly got over it like the show would have us pretend.

#idk if tagging people to chime in is annoying #but i bet dan has even more thoughts on this than i do #so by all means bestie if you see this jump in #i really restrained myself here as those who follow my anti finn rants will know #much to say about him and homophobia and most of the time i get too pissed to really get into it #tried to stay calm here tho because anon wasn't looking for a proper rant i don't think #i just find it funny how this can even be up for debate #by funny i mean it makes me wanna commit violent crimes #anon #glee asks #finn asks #anti finn hudson #implied

[mickgaydolenz]

ive been thinking a lot about how my next 3 profection years + this one is and will be total chaos and depression for the next several years of my life. im not ready to relive traumas or potentially hurt someone or have to isolate myself in order to succeed. i saw an astro tweet saying mutable signs (gemini, virgo, sagittarius, pisces) will essentially be entering their villain era for these next three years of Pisces’ journey within Saturn and im noooooot excited about this. im just an innocent and petite 5’2 lesbian who is peace & love and wants to live a sillay life :,(( <\3

but this is why i love astrology, because as i was studying, i took notice to Peter’s 3H. this house became active when he turned 26 in 1968. this has his asteroids Eros, Pallas, Vesta, and *drum roll* Pholus! the 3H is a house of communication, small social circles, documents, and the overall mentality. if we know anything in Monkees history via ‘68, it was essentially Peter’s high peak, but also his breaking point with, y’know, *gestures vaguely*. he didn’t hit this again until 1980 where, if my dates are correct, is when he started seeking out or at least considering sobriety; rehab and AA centers are pretty small & intimate, which is what the 3H is all about.

while me & Peter have our Eros here (i completely get it. wanting to ******* **** your friends. total solidarity, brother), everything else is different, but looking to this and knowing his history made me feel a little bit more relaxed about me approaching these crazy parts of my life. Peter has always been incredibly good at keeping strong but it’s moreso because his 3H is in Capricorn, and Capricorn can endure a lot. my 3H is in Scorpio so it’s where the core of my mental illness lies, as this sign rules the psyche and is often pessimistic in its outlook. but Scorpio is also capable of enduring a lot.

thankfully, me and Peter are similar in our ways we approach crisis. it doesn’t make me feel so alone in this, and i don’t feel as scared now as i was before. if i need advice during this time then i know exactly who i can turn to, most especially spiritually. bring on the chaos, universe 😤💪🏻

okay kale i absolutely love the fact that you are so fucking level headed when it comes to all of this, like man look at you making all these connections and finding solace in the things you can’t necessarily be fully in control of. it’s really awesome though that this discipline can give you some insight into what you could be going through, it’s nice to have something to work off of to prepare yourself mentally and even better when you can see someone else who went through the same thing and how they managed to handle it. i dunno man, i love reading what you send because it really just is heartening to know that some things might be out of our control, and that’s okay because we still have tools to anticipate what hardships we could be facing and we are never completely powerless 💖

#as always thank you kale i love this so so so so so much #rhubarb asks #also i am keeping my fingers crossed and sending good vibes your way to help you get through these challenges 💪

[jasper-the-menace]

Emily Zephyras

Emily Zephyras is a human planeswalker from the plane of Arcavios. Her prodigal magical specialty lies in plant and death magic both, making her a perfect fit for the college of Witherbloom, of which her historic family nearly always attended.

Her planeswalker spark was purposefully ignited by her mentor, the planeswalker Kasmina, under the watchful eye of her planeswalking grandmother, Flora. Her first planeswalk was guided to New Capenna, where she made a connection with a high-ranking Broker, before she was brought back to Arcavios to be brought by Flora to Chima.

Due to Flora previously working with Ewald during her own trips to Chima, she entrusted Emily’s care to him during her training. This led to Ewald, father of a planeswalking daughter himself who was around Emily’s age, realizing just how fucked up Emily’s family and mentor figures were, so he brought in Rawzom to teach her how to sneak and keep quiet so she could experience personal freedom. The visiting human planeswalker is a secret that the two Chimans share.

While there, Emily began studying Chi and tapping into it magic-enhancing abilities. She brought some of it back to Arcavios with her in secret, which she later shared with her older sibling Onyx and her girlfriend Dennari, along with an Eagle staff gifted to her by Ewald after finishing her training.

Emily draws on Chi to enhance her already-powerful magic, just to see how far she can go. Due to Onyx and Rawzom both being strong influences on her, she’s down for some shady shit, which leads to her being more than willing to make friends with villainous or antagonistic characters (or wannabe ones) such as Scorm and Razar.

Quick Facts

Species: human planeswalker

Color Alignment: Black-Green (center)

Pronouns: she/her (cisgender)

Sexuality: lesbian (dating Dennari)

Physical Traits: light-colored skin, red hair, green eyes, green arched facial tattoos, 5’6”

CAUTION: down for shady shit, has 3 warnings on her medical files

Relationships

FLORA: Flora is Emily’s human planeswalker grandmother who also attended Witherbloom in her youth. She chose Emily specifically out of all of her grandchildren to carry on the family legacy of power due to Emily’s spark and natural magical inclination towards Witherbloom-based magic. It’s a toxic and unhealthy relationship, with Emily trying to break away from her as much as she can.

KASMINA: Kasmina is Emily’s secondary mentor who runs a group of planeswalkers, of which Emily was inducted into. Emily doesn’t like her and does everything she can to avoid Kasmina’s attention.

EWALD: Ewald is Emily’s mentor on Chima, who took her in and kept her safe and hidden while Flora demanded that she learn about Chi. Because he is the father of a planeswalker daughter around Emily’s age, he intervened a little and brought in Rawzom to help her. Emily hasn’t seen him in a while, but remembers her lessons with him fondly.

RAWZOM: Rawzom is Emily’s secret other Chiman mentor, who was brought in by Ewald to help hear learn a more sneaky skillset. Rawzom had two reasons to accept this term and keep Emily’s existence a secret from Chima: the first was to have Ewald owe him, and the second was that he had a son around Emily’s age and didn’t want to think about someone treating his son like Emily’s grandmother and mentor treated her.

DENNARI: Dennari is Emily’s girlfriend who is a year ahead of her in Strixhaven University. The two are very much in love, and Emily is more than happy to help her girlfriend or tend to her after she gets into a fight.

ONYX: Onyx is Emily’s older sibling who is a third-year Prismari student. The two siblings are very stable parts of each other’s lives, with Onyx doing what they can to help Emily keep under the radar. Onyx finds Emily’s friendship with the transformed Chimans to be stress-inducing for them, but they do what they can to help anyway.

SCORM: Scorm is possibly the main Chiman that Emily considers a friend, much to the increasing stress of Onyx. The two have a similar shitty attitude and clash in a way that makes them get along more. Emily enjoys having someone who doesn’t just bow down to her thanks to her magic and lineage, and Scorm likes arguing.

ERIS: Eris and Emily clash – they’re both incredibly intelligent, but Emily’s more willing to do something shady than Eris is, and Eris is generally more concerned about the wellbeing of others than Emily is. There are certain, unspoken lines that they don’t cross with each other, and they’re more than willing to put their dislike of each other aside to help their shared friends.

CRAGGER: Cragger and Emily get along like a house on fire – in that they probably set it on fire themselves. They commiserate over having significant others who are way too willing to jump in the way of danger, and they work together to study to get into Witherbloom.

LAVAL: Laval reminds Emily strongly of Dennari, so she generally feels fondly towards him. Between that and her friendship with Cragger, she has no problem using her magic to patch Laval up or empower him in whatever fight he might pick.

RAZAR: Razar was the second of Chima’s displaced residents that Emily befriended. Razar reminds Emily of Rawzom (for obvious reasons, given that Rawzom is his father, though neither of them have mentioned Rawzom) and Emily is the exact kind of sketchy friend that Razar’s been looking for.

#jasper post #emily zephyras #chimahaven

[moonstruck-midnight]

guess who's FINALLY back

so ik i was dead for a long time. sorry about that, can't promise it won't happen again, but hey! i got some better outlines for my wips and new directions things are going in :> so while i might've been in a bit of a creative coma, i'm slowly clawing my way back to the surface lmao

anyway! since it's been a hell of a long time: what's up, name's moony (or lune, if you're feeling formal), pronouns he/him or ze/hir, and i'm a fantasy writer!

the wips i'm focusing on are, at the moment:

wrong side of legendary: an urban fantasy work about a keith, traumatized former prince, cross, the rat bastard keith summons when he tries to do something for his roommate, and saying fuck you to the world and the people they were supposed to be. mlm, just a teeny bit spooky

red rise: soft sci-fi fantasy that the outline is worrying me with the projected word count of, oh god that's centered around kyra, a girl with a sun living in her chest, trying to save the universe from an empire that can never really outrun the destruction it leaves in its wake, and silena, her best-friend-turned-desperate-enemy who's the golden girl of the empire and owes her life and more to it. there are so so so many sad lesbians in this. i am not immune to sad lesbians and neither are you.

dark eyes (name under construction): tragic fantasy. levi is the town witch, and it's her job to keep everyone safe from the magical forest that surrounds them and, should it come down to it, the fae that live in it. this... does not go very well. one day, levi wakes up to the entire town having been overrun by the forest, and the townspeople either turned to wood or vanished. as she sets out to right this, she encounters branwen, a forest fae who will help her in exchange for one thing: her heart. i love them dearly, your honor.

and of course, the backburner wips:

elle is waiting (by the bodies of your gods): retired apocalypse-ender yis'sika and her wife rhoze are called upon, once again, save the world from— huh. it seems no one can really tell them. no one except a girl who claims to be from another world, and a young woman made of flowers who claims to be yis'sika and rhoze's daughter. no one trusts each other, but the clock is ticking. the statues have eyes. and elle is always, always, waiting.

black lightning: nova and zenith are vigilante partners who know and trust each other with everything in their fight against the corrupt system—everything, except their identities. this becomes a problem when nova, civilian name estelle, is scouted to become an intelligent, a once-human, now-machine enforcer of the law, and is brought into the glass palace—which, despite its name, is impossible to get anything in or out of. zenith, civilian name zhen, realizes that something must've happened, and tries to save nova from whatever fate has befallen her; a course that takes her to the glass palace. it may be the lion's den, but with the two of them working together, they might be able to strike at the heart of the power that's hurt so many. also they're gay. they're really gay. fluffy wlw superhero action (with just a teeny touch of the body horror. TINY)

unnamed wip (time travel sapphics flavored): fellas, is it gay to time travel to save the world? no? fine. is it gay to time travel to save your really really hot dyke best friend? THERE WE GO. wlw and happy for once!!!

unnamed wip (wild west flavored): an immortal necromancer wants to fulfill the natural order and die. a sunwraith cowboy, risen from the grave to have its justice—or is it revenge?—, wants to live the life stolen from it. i won't lie, i don't know much about this one, but it's gay and bittersweet.

postcard from the end times: this one's actually going to be a comic! fantasy story about a bunch of kids who go to trauma school and try really, really hard to win in a system that's trying to farm them for all the misery they can produce. spoiler alert: it doesn't work. so, new plan: kill the school and everyone behind it. salt and burn until the cancer's dead, and keep going until it can't claw itself out of its own grave. what's god to a shit ton of angry teenagers? killable.

woagh. that was a lot. anyway, love you all! good luck this year, hopefully it's better than the last ;;-;;

#writeblr intro #or #well #writeblr reintro

[tailsrevane]

[movie review] halloween horror nights 30-related movies (texas chain saw massacre, bride of frankenstein, beetlejuice)

before i fly to florida to go to halloween horror nights 31 with my partner, i thought i'd recap my experiences at the past two halloween horror nights! so that'll be the next post, but in this one i'm gonna review the three movies that tied into some of the haunted houses we experienced.

the texas chain saw massacre (1974)

yeah so i’m not rewatching this sorry. i’ve seen it twice i think and i just really kind of don’t like it? which makes me a little sad because a good friend of mine wrote an incredible review on letterboxd about what makes this such an amazing movie and frankly you should probably just read that instead because it’s easily one of the best movie reviews on letterboxd like it made me genuinely regret not liking this movie.

but yeah no it’s just kinda gross and it has great bondage in it but there’s just so much grizzly stuff around it it’s almost a house of 1000 corpses sort of situation but even as someone who really doesn’t like this movie i can admit that it’s way better than house of 1000 corpses don’t get me wrong.

i don’t know guys, i just really don’t like gross-out horror? it’s just super not my jam. if you do like gross-out horror i have to imagine this movie is super up your alley, i’m not trying to knock it, it just really isn’t the kind of thing that appeals to me. c-rank

the bride of frankenstein (1935)

i fully intended to rewatch this one because i love it, but i just ran out of time before my trip! i still fully agree with this earlier review i wrote, though.

frankenstein’s monster crying, “friend!” as he’s forced to flee the monk’s burning home is one of the most heart-wrenching moments you’ll ever see in a film. and it does a better job of accomplishing everything the film’s ending is supposed to accomplish but without distracting amounts of sexism.

though it’s arguably subverted by her reaction, the entire idea of creating a woman to be a companion for the monsters parallels the story of eve being created from adam’s rib because that fucker was lonely, and it bothers me kind of a lot. and even taking the ending into account, it feels like what the audience is “supposed” to get out of it is a sense of tragedy that this woman that was created “for” the monster rejects him, all of the pathos is all centered on him. (also, like, she literally gets blown to smithereens when the monster gets mad that she doesn’t want to go to prom with him and decides to blow up everyone but daddy frankenstein and his wife. side note: why was there even a switch for that???)

this is still one of my favorite universal monsters movies because it’s very distinct and a little goofy and definitely has a very strong identity compared to the repetitive slogs many of the later sequels turn into. it still comes complete with a fairly abrupt (some would say anticlimactic) ending, though i’m actually reminded less of later universal monsters outings and more of beneath the planet of the apes.

the titular bride (really wish we had something better to call her) is important to the narrative only insofar as her rejection of the monster, and it’s really a shame because she has an iconic look and elsa lanchester knocks her brief performance out of the ballpark. (definitely better than her rather uneven performance in the framing narrative.) if i had to headcanon a continuing story for her, let’s say she goes off and finds fellow confirmed lesbian countess zaleska from dracula’s daughter and they live happily ever after conquering the world and all of us fear and love them as they reign over us in gothic splendor. a-rank

beetlejuice (1988)

i think everyone but me was the most excited for the beetlejuice (oh crap that’s three! aaaaaa) house that year, and it was also kind of pretty clearly the biggest headliner aside from that netflix show i’m not watching, so that was neat i guess?

but yeah i realized part of why i wasn’t super excited for it was i hadn’t seen the movie in FOREVER, so as a sort of combination of celebrating our trip to horror nights and “hey i wanna refresh my memory of this one” we ended up watching it, and yeah! it totally holds up. not something i’m gonna be clamoring to rewatch on the regular, but still just as solid as i remember.

michael keaton’s performance in this RULES, and i’m also a big geena davis fan both in general and here specifically. and the entire conceit of the afterlife having an inefficient bureaucracy to deal with, while certainly not how i think things work, is still an inspired choice to form a movie around.

lastly on a personal note i cannot believe my childhood gifted me both lydia deetz and wednesday addams and i was too much of a fucking coward to follow their example and be the goth i was meant to be I’M SORRY i’m trying to make up for it now! b-rank

#halloween #halloween horror nights #halloween horror nights 30 #theme parks #universal studios #the texas chain saw massacre #texas chainsaw massacre #slasher movies #frankenstein #universal monsters #bride of frankenstein #bride of frankenstein 1935 #beetlejuice #beetlejuice movie #beetlejuice 1988 #oh no that's three #movies #movie review #reviews

[oceanics]

LGBT+ books by authors of color

For those of us tired of LGBT+ romance always being featured between white characters, or from the perspective of white characters, here’s a list of LGBT+ novels by authors of color centered on characters of color.

Thank you so much @percyannabcth​ for your recs! ♡

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz: a beautiful mlm coming of age story between two brown latino boys. Personally, one of my favorite books (young adult).

We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia: first of a series set in fantasy Latin America with a main couple compromised of brown wlw (young adult).

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: enemies-to-lovers time travel fantasy novel featuring wlwoc (adult).

Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan: I’ll admit, this one wasn’t my cup of tea, but I’m more the exception to the rule. Fantasy with main asian wlw. Heavy rape and abuse tw (young adult).

It’s Not Like It’s a Secret by Misa Sugiura: contemporary novel with a japanese protagonist that falls in love with a latina girl (young adult). 

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie Mclemore: not a mlm or wlw story, but one with a latina protagonist and a love interest that’s a Pakistani trans boy (young adult).

More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera: borrowing elements from both sci-fi and contemporary, this is a story about the hardships a Puerto Rican boy from the Bronx has with coming on his own. Suicide and homophobia tw (young adult)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong: beautiful novel that tackles a lot of themes, including coming to terms with being LGBT+, from the point of view of an Asian man (adult). 

Tell Me Again How A Crush Should Feel by Sara Farizan: coming of age contemporary novel about a persian girl that falls in love with one of her friends (young adult).

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender: contemporary novel in a high-school setting about a black trans boy learning to navigate the dificulties that are put in his path due to his identity. Transphobia tw (young adult).

Hurricane Child by Kacen Callender and Kheryn Callender: a tale of magical realism about a girl whose luck was sealed when she was born on the dreaded day of a hurricane (middle grade).

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera: Juliet, a Puerto Rican lesbian, moves out of her family’s home and leaves to explore what her identity means both for herself and for those around her (new adult).

Ash by Malinda Lo: a wlw retelling of Cinderella with a girl of color as a protagonist and a very quick, entertaining read (young adult).

A Line in the Dark by Malinda Lo: a contemporary novel where the main character, an asian girl called Jess Wong, used to being on the sidelines, becomes the protagonist of her own story as she falls in love with her best friend (young adult). 

Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann: Alice, an asexual black girl, learns to navigate her sexuality and how the perception of others affects her (or not) after a break up with her girlfriend and the start of adult life (adult).

Seven Tears at High Tide by C. B. Lee: Kevin Luong, an asian-american guy, asks the ocean for one summer where he can find love - and a selkie boy hears his pleading and seeks him out, willing to give him exactly that (young adult).

Not Your Sidekick by C. B. Lee: an intern girl with no powers at a superhero school starts getting notes from a mysterious person that goes by “M”. Bisexual main character, and the sequel includes a trans boy on the main cast, both people of color (young adult).

The Wicker King by K. Ancrum: prepare for your heart to be torn out by this not-quite psychological thriller about two boys in a codependent relationship that must learn to cope with their less-than-ideal circumstances, and their also less-than-ideal dynamic. Read the book’s description for potential trigger warnings (young adult).

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo: a series of short tales that tells the stories of british black women through different years, including the those of lgbt+ women (adult).

You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson: when a girl’s attempt to get a scolarship to the college of her dreams falls through, her only choice if she wants her life to keep going on the path she’s set for herself is to become prom queen. It’s just too bad that the competition is so cute (young adult).

Final Draft by Riley Redgate: an 18 year old writer, who happens to be a plus-size pansexual ecuatorian girl, learns the perils of adulthood and gains life experience in this extremely relatable contemporary novel (young adult).

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera: a heart-wrenching novel about two boys that meet up to live the entirety of their life in a day - a day which happens to be their last. (death tw) (young adult).

Adaptation by Malinda Lo: when strange events turn the American government into a paranoid mess, Reese wakes up with a month of her life gone from her memories. This time, as our main character finds herself pulled in two directions, the love triangle is bisexual (young adult).

The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum: a slow-burn, slow-paced romance between two women that will leave the reader bewildered and feeling like they have a new understanding of life, with a touch of sci-fi (young adult).

She of the Mountains by Vivek Shraya: an illustrated novel that touches on gender, sexuality and a re-imagining of Hindu mythology (adult).

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin: fantasy novel set in an apocalyptic world, with a cast made up mainly of black characters, that includes polyamory in the first book and wlw relationships on the latter ones (adult). Be wary of possible trigger warnings.

Note: all the links redirect to The Storygraph, a Black-owned site currently on Beta! Consider checking it out and giving it your support - it lets you import all of your books and shelves from Goodreads, but unlike Goodreads, it’s not owned and ran by Amazon.

#ania speaks #txt #to read #lit #also bc it's always tsoa rwrb tsoa rbwb #and its cool!! i adore both!! but let's support authors of color too #also most of these are own voices so they are from lgbt authors of color #also i either read all of those myself or they come from Trusted Sources #so in theory they should be qualitay

[gleekto]

Fic: Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You (5/?)

Short Summary: Blaine coming of age in 1969. Columbia University. Hippie!Kurt. Elliott and Sebastian as Blaine’s mentor-friends. Unironic use of ‘groovy’. Coming out and fitting in and falling in love.

Amazing Poster by @caramelcoffeeaddict

For @slayediest who gave an inspired prompt for this way back when.

Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four

Day Five: Friend

"Good evening, everyone." Elliott smiles out at the group of long haired, colorfully clothed, probably half stoned freshmen who are sitting sprawled out on the couches and the floor of their residence common room. "Thanks for having us tonight."

"Free love, man. Am I right?" Blaine can't help but smile at the slightly curly haired guy in the center of the room who stands up to welcome them. He has a short, dark brown haired girl on his arm, so he isn't one of the tribe, but he's supportive. And clearly wants people to know he is.

"For sure, brother," Elliott says warmly. He's a showman and Blaine can appreciate that. "I'm Elliott from the Student Homophile League. And this is my friend - " that's nice, Blaine thinks - "and co-leader, Blaine."

"Happy to be here," Blaine says to the room of about fifteen people.

...

Elliott finishes the intro about himself - He's from San Francisco, California. Fortunate that he was able to grow up somewhere where there was a gay and lesbian presence. Realized he was gay at 15, when he felt jealous when his best friend, Mike, got a girlfriend. But he wasn't jealous of Mike. He was jealous of the girlfriend - Everyone laughs. It's a pretty friendly audience and Blaine feels a sense of relief. Maybe even a freedom.

"Hi. I'm Blaine. I'm from Westerville, Ohio and I'm a homosexual." Just as he smiles widely at his own courage, another student quietly opens the door to sneak into the rap session, fashionably late.

Kurt. His musical theatre hippie. Lives in the hippie residence. Of course he does. And he's here.

"I'm umm, I'm-" Blaine bites his lower lip and quickly turns away from Kurt's eyes that are in the process of recognizing him. Hey Kurt, that guy who also laughs at Roger Smith, oh yeah, by the way, he's also one of those homos.

"I come from a big city, with other people like me," Elliott rescues him. "But Blaine comes from a much smaller, more conservative town. But he still made it to the big city, right Blaine?" Elliott senses his distraction. Bless him.

"Yeah," Blaine nods, regaining his composure. "I didn't know anyone like me growing up." Blaine takes a deep breath. So what if Kurt is unlikely to be interested in small talk with him anymore after this - soon to have more personal information about him than even his roommate Sam? This isn't about some fashionable hippie in his music history class. It's bigger than that.

Blaine continues, "But even when I knew I would never be able to reveal my crush on my best friend - I knew there were other guys like me out there in the world. And I knew deep down that two people loving each other, guys, girls or whatever - I knew that had to be a good thing. I mean, here we are fighting an endless war across the ocean, and we are worried about people loving each other?" Rule number one of presentations - know your audience.

"That's right, man," A pretty blonde girl in a long flowing dress stands up and speaks calmly but surely. "We wage a pointless war killing people in the name of freedom but we condemn people loving freely. This has got to stop."

"Amen Quinn," The curly haired guy says back. "And thanks for showing us the way, Blaine and Elliott. I'm Jesse St. James," Ahh the guy from the phone. Of course it's him. "I'm not gay but I support you. It's all about love, man."

...

With intros done, and a warm reception, Blaine and Elliott get to move on to the myth busting part of the dorm rap. They have an icebreaker list of ten myths for participants to read out loud to break the ice and encourage questions.

"I'll start," The dark haired girl on Jesse's arm eagerly puts up her hand. "Number one - Nobody is "the woman" in a gay male relationship. We're just two men." Everybody laughs. Again.

"Number two," Quinn reads. "Being gay isn't a lifestyle. Just like you, we set our alarms, brush our teeth, and eat three meals a day." Pretty basic.

"Number three, you can't tell someone is gay by the clothes they wear." A guy at the back of the room reads. Blaine looks down at his specifically chosen plain dark blue jeans and smart yellow button down. As ordinary as can be. But still stylish of course. He thinks he sees Kurt roll his eyes at that one. Whatever, if the guy wants to be a homophobe.

"Number four," Jesse pipes in. "Do not assume we're attracted to you."

"That's right, Jesse," Quinn pings back at him.

"Hey I can't help it if people notice me." Blaine leans against the wall behind him, arms crossed and amused. They are a fun group these hippies. Kurt's smirk notwithstanding.

"Please Jesse, don't flatter yourself." Kurt speaks for the first time, shaking his head in disapproval. "Ignore that guy," He says to the speakers and Blaine looks down. Too self conscious to make eye contact.

"Oh I will," Elliott says. "How about you take the next one, I didn't catch your name-"

"Kurt and sure." Kurt takes the poster from Jesse and promptly turns bright red. Blaine can't not look. "Do not assume that we're not attracted to you." Kurt looks up and Blaine is sure they make eye contact for the slightest moment before Blaine quickly turns away. This is dangerous and a recipe for a very awkward class tomorrow. God, could he be more obvious?

"There you go, Jesse. I'm sure some guy somewhere is noticing." Elliott is so good at casual banter.

Before they leave, Elliott passes out their flyers - The Student Homophile League, Tuesday evenings at 7pm. Earl Hall. Homosexual, heterosexual, ALL are welcome. "You guys were a great audience. Maybe even the best we've ever had." Blaine sees that girl with Jesse preening at the compliment. She and Jesse share a knowing smile like they know they're the best. "We'd love to have any of you at our meetings - not just for gay people like us but for anyone who wants to show their support for love and tolerance."

Blaine could actually imagine Jesse or his girlfriend coming for support, though he muses that they might end up taking over the meeting. The rap was definitely a success.

As Elliott and Blaine exit John Jay Hall and part ways, Blaine feels light, made even better by Elliott's profuse appreciation that he joined the League this year. Blaine actually finds himself looking forward to next Tuesday - a meeting that a few weeks ago made him feel slightly nauseous. Truthfully, only one thing is making Blaine nervous right now and that's his music history class tomorrow. Facing Kurt is not going to be fun. Ugh. Coming out is so complicated.

#klaine spring fling #klaine spring fling: friends #can't take my eyes off of you #gleekto writes

[hellomynameisbisexual]

Travis has had both boyfriends and girlfriends since high school. But when his coworkers discovered his dating history at a board game night, they told him he couldn’t be bisexual. “Bi men don’t exist,” they said. “You’re just a confused gay guy.” Travis, 34, had brought his girlfriend with him that night, but they started calling her his “roommate” after they found out he was bi.

Santiago got an even harsher reaction when he came out to his family. “‘Bisexual’ is just code for insincere gay man” is how he said one of his relatives reacted. “He didn’t use the term ‘gay man,’” 24-year-old Santiago told me, “but I won’t repeat slurs.”

In the past couple of months, I’ve heard dozens of stories like these from bisexual men who have had their sexual orientations invalidated by family members, friends, partners, and even strangers. Thomas was called a “fence-sitter” by a group of gay men at a bar. Shirodj was told that he was “just gay but not ready to come out of the closet.” Alexis had his bisexuality questioned by a lesbian teacher who he thought would be an ally. Many of these same men have been told that women are “all a little bi” or “secretly bi” but that men can only be gay or straight, nothing else.

In other words, bisexual men are like climate change: real but constantly denied.

A full 2% of men identified themselves as bisexual on a 2016 survey from the Centers for Disease Control, which means that there are at least three million bi guys in the United States alone—a number roughly equivalent to the population of Iowa. (On the same survey, 5.5% of women self-identified as bisexual, which comes out to roughly the same number of people as live in New Jersey.) The probability that an entire state’s worth of people would lie about being attracted to more than one gender is about as close to zero as you can get.

But the idea that only women can be bisexual is a persistent myth, one that has been decades in the making. And prejudice with such deep historical roots won’t disappear overnight.

👬👫👬👫

To understand why bisexual men are still being told that their sexual orientation doesn’t exist, we have to go back to the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s. That’s when Dr. H. Sharif “Herukhuti” Williams, a cultural studies scholar and co-editor of the anthology Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men, told me that male sexual fluidity got thrown under the bus in the name of gay rights—specifically white, upper-class gay rights.

“One of the byproducts of the gay liberation movement is this…solidifying of the [sexual] binary,” Herukhuti told me, citing the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s as a pre-Stonewall period of relatively unstigmatized sexual fluidity.

Four decades later, the gay liberation movement created a new type of man—the “modern gay man,” Herukhuti calls him—who was both “different from and similar to” the straight man. As Jillian Weiss, now the executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense Fund, wrote in a 2003 review of this same history, “gays and lesbians campaigned for acceptance by suggesting that they were ‘just like you,’ but with the single (but extremely significant exception) of [having] partners of the same sex.” Under this framework, attraction to a single gender was the unifying glue between gay men, lesbians, and straight people—bisexual people were just “confused.”

Bisexual people realized that they would have to form groups and coalitions of their own if they wanted cultural acceptance. But just as bisexual activism was gaining a foothold in the 1980s, the AIDS crisis hit, and everything changed—especially for bisexual men.

“AIDS forced certain bisexual men out [of the closet], it forced a lot of bisexual men back in, and then it killed off a number of them,” longtime bisexual activist and author Ron Suresha told me.Those deaths hindered the development of male bisexual activism at a particularly critical moment. “A number of men who would have been involved and were involved in the early years of the bi movement died—and they died early and they died quickly,” bisexual writer Mike Syzmanski recalled.

The AIDS crisis also gave rise to one of the most pernicious and persistent stereotypes about bisexual men, namely that they are the “bridge” for HIV transmission between gay men and heterosexual women. As Brian Dodge, a public health researcher at Indiana University, told me, this is a “warped notion” that has “never been substantiated by any real data.” The CDC, too, has debunked the same myth in the specific context of U.S. black communities: No, black men on the “down low” are not primarily responsible for high rates of HIV among black women.

For decades, bisexual men have been portrayed—even within the LGBT community—as secretly gay, sexually confused vectors of disease.

In 2016, bisexual men are still feeling the effects of the virus and the misperceptions around it.

“We’re still underrepresented on the boards of almost all of the national bisexual organizations,” Suresha told me, referring to the fact that women occupy most of the key leadership positions in bisexual activism. And in a new, nationally representative study of attitudes toward bisexual people, Dodge and his research team found that 43% of respondents agreed —at least somewhat—with the statement: “People should be afraid to have sex with bisexual men because of HIV/STD risks.”

For decades, bisexual men have been portrayed—even within the LGBT community—as secretly gay, sexually confused vectors of disease. Is it any wonder that they are still fighting to shed that false image today? It’s hard to convince people that you exist when they barely see you as human.

👬👫👬👫

It’s not that bisexual women have it easy. Both bisexual men and women are much less likely than gay men and lesbians to be out of the closet, with only 28% telling Pew that most of the important people in their life know about their orientation. Collectively, bisexual people also have some of the worst mental health outcomes in the LGBT community and their risk of intimate partner violence is disturbingly high. Bisexual people also face discrimination within the LGBT community while fending off accusations that their orientation excludes non-binary genders. (In response, bisexual educator Robyn Ochs defines “bisexuality” as attraction to “people of more than one sex and/or gender” rather than just to “men and women.”)

And on top of these general problems, bisexual women are routinely hypersexualized, stereotyped as “sluts,” dismissed as “experimenting,” and harassed on dating apps. Their bisexuality is reduced to a spectacle or waved away as a “phase.”

But it is still bisexual men who seem to have their very existence questioned more often.

Suresha pointed me to a 2005 New York Times article with the headline “Straight, Gay, Or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited,” the fallout of which he saw as “a disaster for bi people.” The article reported on a new study “cast[ing] doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men.” The study in question measured the genital arousal of a small sample of men and found, as the Times summarized, that “three-quarters of the [bisexual male] group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.”

“It got repeated and repeated in all sorts of media,” Suresha recalled. “People reported it in news briefs on the radio, in print, in magazines, all over the place.”

As the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force noted in its response to the article, the original study had some clear methodological limitations—only 33 self-identified bisexual men were included and participants were recruited through “gay-oriented magazines”—but the Times went ahead and reported that the research “lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation.”

“Show me the quest for scientific proof that heterosexuality exists. It begins and ends with even just one person saying, ‘I’m straight.’” — Amy Andre, Huffington Post

The article fueled the devious narrative that male bisexuality was just homosexuality in disguise. The lived experiences of bisexual men don’t support that narrative—and neither does science—but its power comes from prejudice, not from solid evidence.

And unsurprisingly, the 2005 study’s conclusions did not survive the test of time. In fact, one of the co-authors of that study went on to co-author a 2011 study which found that “bisexual patterns of both subjective and genital arousal” did indeed occur among men. The New York Times Magazine later devoted a feature to the push for the 2011 study, briefly acknowledging the paper’s previous poor coverage. But many in the bisexual community were unimpressed that the scientific community was still being positioned as the authority on the existence of bisexual men.

“Show me the quest for scientific proof that heterosexuality exists,” Amy Andre wrote on the Huffington Post in response to the feature. “It begins and ends with even just one person saying, ‘I’m straight.’”

👬👫👬👫

One of the most tragic things about society’s refusal to accept bisexual men is that we don’t even know why it is still so vehement. Dodge believes that his new study offers some hints—the persistent and widespread endorsement of the HIV “bridge” myth is alarming—but he told me that he would need “more qualitative and more focused research” before he could definitively state that HIV stigma is the primary factor driving negative attitudes toward bisexual men. (Research in this area is indeed sorely lacking. The last major study on the subject prior to the survey Dodge’s team conducted was published in 2002.)

In the meantime, bisexual advocates have developed plenty of compelling theories, many of them focused on the dominance of traditional masculinity. For example, Herukhuti explained that “we live in a society in which boundaries between men are policed because of patriarchy and sexism.” Men are expected to be “kings of their kingdom”—not to share their domain.

“For men to bridge those boundaries with each other—the only way that we can conceive of that is in the sense that these are ‘non-men,’” Herukhuti told me, adding that, in a patriarchal society, gay men are indeed seen as “non-men.” The refusal to accept that men can be bisexual, then, is partly a refusal to accept that someone who is bisexual can even be a man.

Many of the bisexual men I interviewed endorsed this same hypothesis. Kevin, 25, told me that “it’s seen as really unmanly to be attracted to men.” Another Kevin, 26, added that “the core concept of masculinity doesn’t leave room for anything besides extremes.” Justin, in his mid 20s, said that “men are one way and gay men are another way [but] bisexual men are this weird middle ground.”

Our society doesn’t seem to do well with more than two—especially when so many still believe that there’s only one right way to be a man.

And Michael, 28, added that bisexual men are “symbolically dangerous”—a “big interior threat to hetero masculinity” because of a shared attraction to women. It’s easy for a straight guy to differentiate himself from the modern gay man, but how can he reassure himself that he is nothing like his bisexual counterpart?

The answer is obvious: He can equate male bisexuality with homosexuality.

The logic needed to balance that equation, Herukhuti explained to me, is disturbingly close to the racist, Jim Crow-era “one-drop rule,” which designated anyone with the slightest bit of African ancestry as black for legal purposes.

“For a male to have had any kind of same-sex sexual experience, they are automatically designated as gay, based on that one-drop rule,” Herukhuti said. “And that taints them.”

To see that logic at work, look no further than the state of HIV research, much of which still groups gay and bisexual men together as MSM, or men who have sex with men. Dodge, who specializes in the area of HIV/AIDS, explained that “when a man reports sexual activity with another man, that becomes the recorded mode of transmission and there’s no data reporting about female or other partners.” Bisexual men have their identities erased—literally—from the resulting data.

“A really easy way to fix this,” Dodge added, “would be to just create a separate surveillance category.”

But when it comes to categories, our society doesn’t seem to do well with more than two—especially when so many still believe that there’s only one right way to be a man.

👬👫👬👫

The situation of bisexual men is not hopeless. Slowly but surely, they are expanding the horizons of masculinity. The silver lining in Dodge’s study, for example, is that there has been a decided “‘shift’ in attitudes toward bisexual men and women from negative to more neutral in the general population” over the last decade or so, although negative attitudes toward bisexual men were still “significantly greater” than the negativity directed at their female peers.

“Put the champagne on the ice,” Dodge joked. “We’re no longer at the very bottom of the barrel but we’ve still got a ways to go.”

That distance will likely be shortened by a rising generation that is far more tolerant of sexual fluidity than their predecessors. Respondents to Dodge’s survey who were under age 25 had more positive attitudes toward bisexuality, perhaps because so many of them openly identify as LGBTQ themselves—some as bisexual, some as pansexual, and some refusing labels altogether.

That growing acceptance is starting to be reflected in movies and on television, once forms of media that were, and still often are, notoriously hostile to bisexual men. A character named Darryl came out as bisexual with a myth-busting song on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and, as GLAAD recently noted, other shows like Shadowhunters and Black Sails are starting to do bi male representation right. The HBO comedy Insecure even made biphobia into a powerful storyline when one straight female character, Molly, shunned her love interest when he told her that he once had oral sex with a guy in a college. But other shows, like House of Cards, are still using a male character’s bisexuality as a way to accentuate his villainy.

Ultimately, bisexual men themselves will continue to be the most powerful force for changing hearts and minds. I asked each bisexual man I interviewed what he would want the world to know about his sexual orientation. Some wanted to clear up specific misconceptions but so many of them simply wanted people to acknowledge that male bisexuality is not fake.

“It’s important that bisexuality be acknowledged as real,” said Martyn, 30, adding that “there’s only so long someone can hold on to a part of themselves that seems invisible before it starts to make them doubt their own sense of self.”

“I am happy being bisexual and I’m not looking for an answer,” said Dan, 19. “I’m not trying things out, I’m not using this as a placeholder to discover my identity. This is who I am. And I love it.”

Samantha Allen is a reporter for Fusion’s Sex+Life vertical. She has a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and was the 2013 John Money Fellow at the Kinsey Institute. Before joining Fusion, she was a tech and health reporter for The Daily Beast.

#bisexuality #bi #bi tumblr #support bisexuality #bisexuality is valid #bi pride #lgbtq community #lgbtq #lgbtq pride #pride #bisexual #bisexual community #bisexual men are valid #respect bisexual men #bisexual men #bisexual nation #bisexual education #support bisexual men #bisexual men exist #biphobic gay people #end biphobia #biphopia #biphobic #bisexual pride #bisexual erasure #bisexual men allies

[uwmadarchives]

Those “Confrontational Days”: Remembering Madison’s LBGTQ+ Early Activists through Oral Histories*

By Jack Styler (he/him)

*Be advised that the clip above contains sexual language. Also, the clip above and oral histories referenced below are part of the University Archives’ LGBTQ+ Archives.

Today it’s hard to imagine any psychologist getting up before the city of Madison’s Equal Opportunity Commission and testifying that discrimination against gay people ought to be legalized because of the inherent sexuality of young boys and girls. However, as Barbara Lightner said, they lived in “the confrontational days” when the LBGTQ people of Madison had to march, organize, and band together to ward off attempts from anti-gay activists who tried to deprive them of their right not to be discriminated against. 

In a post-Obergefell v. Hodges time and in a liberal bubble like the city of Madison, the fight for gay rights can sometimes seem like an afterthought. Of course, virulent anti-gay sentiments, de facto discrimination, conscious and unconscious bias against LGBTQ people still exist across the United States. However, in the city of Madison, the hometown of Tammy Baldwin, the first openly LGBTQ US Representative and Senator, which also elected its first openly LGBTQ mayor, Satya Rhodes-Conway, in 2019, it can be easy to forget those who fought to make Madison the place it is today. 

The University of Wisconsin’s Oral History Program is lucky enough to house the oral histories of two such individuals: Barbara Lightner and Jess Anderson. Between Lightner’s and Anderson’s interviews, the pieces of the larger mosaic of gay life in Madison in the second half of the twentieth century come into focus. From the lesbian softball leagues to the “party hardy” crowd, who populated the earliest gay bars in Madison, Lightner’s and Anderson’s oral histories convey the vibrant, revolutionary, and sometimes dangerous nature of living as an out-LGBTQ person in Madison.

Born in 1939, Barbara Lightner came to Madison for graduate school in English Literature. But after completing her degree, she soon realized that she wanted to leave the “ivory tower” of academia for the grittier life of a community organizer. By 1980, she had become the coordinator of Madison Community United, which eventually merged with the Gay and Lesbian Center (now known as OutReach). As coordinator, Lightner led grassroots organizing campaigns and worked behind the scenes with politicians in the City of Madison and in the State Legislature to pass monumental pieces of legislation, namely the 1982 statewide anti-discrimination law and the 1983 “consenting adults” law, which legalized sex between any two consenting adults. While today the legal basis and moral reasoning behind these laws are rarely questioned, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, organizers from the right-wing “moral majority” specifically targeted liberal cities like Madison that passed the earliest legal protections of LBGTQ people. 

In 1975, Madison became part of the first wave of communities around the United States to pass an ordinance that outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. However, in the years after, inspired by Anita Bryant’s national efforts to attack laws protecting the rights of LGBTQ people in the 1970s and 1980s, Reverend Wayne Dillabaugh, the minister of Madison’s Northport Baptist Church, began an effort from the right to repeal Madison’s anti-discrimination ordinance. For community organizers in Madison focused on gay rights like Barbara Lightner, Dillabaugh’s efforts threatened to undo the progress they had been fighting to achieve. So, they dug in. In her oral history, Barbara Lightner goes into detail explaining how Dillabaugh and the LBGTQ community pushed for control over the city of Madison. He would organize his own events, such as a God and Decency Rally including “Skydiving for Christ,” an event where born-again Christians jumped out of planes to signal their devotion to Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, the LBGTQ community began to organize at the ground level. At St. Francis House, 240 members of the LBGTQ community came together to form the United, which spearheaded the organizing efforts that eventually stopped the repeal of the anti-discrimination ordinance. As historian R. Richard Wagner notes, Madison was the first targeted city in the country to successfully stop the moral majority’s efforts to repeal anti-discrimination laws. 

Roughly a decade earlier, Jess Anderson had sat in the same basement room of St. Francis House. In 1969, a group composed of exclusively gay men, including Anderson, formed the Madison Alliance for Homosexual Equality (MAHE). The group would go on to organize around Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus. As Anderson discusses in his oral history, the group’s efforts culminated in the first national conference of gay people at Memorial Union on Thanksgiving weekend of 1971. The “Thanksgiving Conference” included workshops on strategies for coming out, sex, and a variety of other subjects, but it also became a stark illustration of the myopic view of the gay community at the time. In his oral history, Anderson talks about how all women and people of color who attended the conference boycotted the main plenary session of the conference in protest of the conference overlooking their place in the LBGTQ community. In doing so, Anderson’s story of early LBGTQ organizing gives us modern day listeners a look into how the notion of intersectionality became such a key issue within queer and gender studies. 

While both Lightner and Anderson include their experiences with community organizing, their oral histories include so much more. They paint a picture of LBGTQ life in Madison, which often included fun, rowdy times. Anderson, who took part in the “party hardy” gay bar scene, talks about their importance in Madison. He says that Rodney Scheel’s bar, The Back Door, became one of the first places where LBGTQ people and allies could drink, dance, and have a good time without any awkward stares or threats of violence. 

In Brittingham Park, Lightner and Anderson both recall attending Rodney Scheel’s other claim to fame, his MAGIC— Madison Area Gay Interim Committee — picnics. Lightner talks about how Brittingham Park would fill with hundreds of members of Madison’s LGBTQ community where people would meet, dance, collect signatures for petitions, listen to speeches, and drink— there was a five-dollar cover charge for unlimited beer. Perhaps more than any other stories in their oral histories, it was the days of the MAGIC picnics that Anderson and Lightner recall with the most joy. 

There are many other stories in Anderson and Lightner’s oral histories that could be useful for future researchers or anyone looking to learn more about LGBTQ life in Madison, but I have found that hearing both of their personalities through their stories to be the most memorable part of listening to their oral histories. Jess Anderson speaks about his life as if he is reliving each memory in real time. His voice goes up when talks about the first time he fell in love as a working-class boy in Peoria, Illinois. His voice almost cracks when he remembers all his friends who have died from AIDS. He goes on a diatribe about the future of the soul of the United States. On the other hand, Barbara Lightner does not hold back her disgust about Reverend Dillabaugh and other anti-gay activists. She almost whispers her “hot takes” about the faults of notable Madison politicians. She recalls her days with the United with such passion that you can almost picture how persuasive and unrelenting a community organizer she was. 

By listening to their histories and by hearing their personalities, Lightner and Anderson truly helped change the world. Their names may not be written in national history books like other more famous LBGTQ organizers or politicians, but they made Madison the city we all know today a reality. If not for Barbara Lightner’s efforts as a part of the United, it’s not clear that the anti-discrimination and consenting adult bills would have become law in Wisconsin. If not for Jess Anderson’s bravery and unshakable belief in himself, it’s not clear where the gay bar scene or University of Wisconsin-Madison’s gay community would be. For all that, I thank them. I encourage anyone else to check out their oral histories as a part of the University of Wisconsin’s Oral History Program. 

For this article, in addition to the oral histories of Lightner and Anderson, I depended on R. Richard Wagner’s book Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History.

To listen to the oral histories in their entirety:

Oral History Interview, Barbara Lightner (0997)

Oral History Interview, Jess Anderson (1095)

#lgbtqiia+ #oralhistory #discrimination #madison wisconsin #wisconsin

[acesydneysage]

My thoughts on how an Alchemist revolution could go

I turned some of the initial points into a one-shot, but I'm very unlikely to actually write anything that sees all of it through to the end, so I'm laying out what I imagine would happen. I could follow the initial fic's format and just write cutesy domestic fluff with hints of what is going on in the Alchemist revolution in the background, but who knows

In The Golden Lily, Sonya thought Sydney's blood might be key to a vaccine, since it was undrinkable to Strigoi. Later, in The Fiery Heart, in their visit to Inez, we find out that it's because her blood is coated in human magic. That makes it taste foul to undead vampires, and also broke her Alchemist tattoo, by countering the compulsion of Moroi magic with human magic.

She eventually uses a similar principle to make the tattoo breaking ink she gives to Marcus, and that she uses to help the other re-education inmates in Silver Shadows.

So, with that in mind:

My initial idea was that one of Marcus' operatives, who got tattooed with Sydney's ink, would suffer a Strigoi attack. Their blood would turn out to be undrinkable. Since Sydney's ink breaks the Alchemist tattoo, the receivers blood would get coated with human magic, like a witch's.

I would like it if that person was one of the people Sydney helped in re-education, because I'd like to think those people stayed loyal to her, and maybe see her as a leader. Just because it's really touching to me how she was still worried about others, and risking herself to help, while she was going through her worst nightmare.

In my fic I went with Sydney's roommate Emma, "the Sydney Sage of re-education", because I really love her. She really did turn out to be the Sydney of re-education, at least in part, because while she was repeating the party line and trying to seem cooperative, she was actually a badass rebel who fights back. There are other reasons, I'll get to that in the end.

Sydney's ink potentially working as a Strigoi vaccine is something important enough that she would risk her truce with the Alchemists to investigate. And since the ink also makes people immune to their mind control, the Alchemists wouldn't work with them like they did for the spirit vaccine. I truly believe that they value their control more than human souls.

I'm sure Declan’s blood will be important to the spirit vaccine. They couldn't mass produce it since it required a recent Strigoi restoration, trapping the spirit before it left the blood, while his blood is described as brimming with spirit. But Sydney and Adrian don't want their son to be experimented on, so that's just more incentive to seek an alternative.

I think Sydney’s ink wouldn't work on Moroi, going by the logic of the magic described in the books (human magic wins out in humans), but helping humans is already a big deal, and it could maybe work on dhampirs.

Meanwhile, the Alchemists have been getting polarized. When it's revealed that some of them were helping the Warriors of Light in the end of the series, while Warriors were keeping Moroi captive, that causes controversy. They eventually start to get divided into factions.

After the US re-education center burns down, those who oppose re-education try to defend that it not be rebuilt, and that other centers be shut down. There are symbolic concessions, but they eventually get basically re-education by another name. Similar things happen when it comes to demands for more transparency, and less authoritarianism in general.

And of course there's a reaction to progressive demands. A hardcore anti-Moroi faction is amenable to teaming up with the Warriors. They're tired of "fighting evil by cataloguing it."

If this faction wins out, they won't actually care that Sydney is blackmailing them into letting her live with proof that they worked with the Warriors, since they openly want that, and they consider her continued existence a humiliation. So Sydney and Adrian wouldn't be able to sit out this fight.

There are more and more defectors who simply leave and join Marcus (or go into hiding and try to stay away from that whole mess). But out of those who stay Alchemists, as things start to devolve into an actual civil war, the moderate faction has a lot of infighting about joining up with the rebels.

That's at least in part because Sydney is one of their most notorious members, and while they might not want to see all the Moroi exterminated, marrying one of them is still going way too far to a lot of them.

So, let's talk allies. Sydney definitely put Marcus in touch with more witches and taught them how to make the ink. And I think besides kidnapping Moroi and dhampirs, the Warriors could be capturing witches too, which would turn them against each other.

In re-education, when it's revealed that Sydney has magic they say that has happened before, and I imagine they handled it with the same amount of compassion. I think maybe Chantal is a witch too and that's why she was fown in the punishment level with Sydney.

Alicia definitely showed that some witches might be willing to work with them for their personal gain, but I think as a community they would protect their own. They wouldn't look kindly on Alchemists torturing witches. And even if they were born into the Alchemists, they chose to be witches, so their allegiance to them would take precedence in their minds. Sydney's coven and Ms. Terwilliger are definitely on board.

I think the rebels might be able to get the Keepers on their side, since they have a complicated relationship with the Alchemists, where they seemto deliberately keepthem dependent. Marcus' stated goal for a long time was helping Moroi on their own terms, that's what he did for a long while. He definitely didn't have any plans to topple the Alchemists in the Bloodlines era, he didn't thinkthat was possible. So they occasionally helped them get better technology and resources that the Alchemists don't want them to have, and they promise to help them further in the future. That gets them the Keepers sympathy.

The Moroi government obviously isn't gonna side with the anti-Moroi faction, but I think they'd try to stay out of the conflict and not be dragged into the fighting for as long as possible. But they've come to depend on the Alchemists too much to keep them hidden, and they're now in chaos.

With the Alchemists weakened by a civil war they aren't really doing a great job of keeping up the masquerade, Moroi secrecy gets very precarious.

Now. While Alchemists claim to be very worried about human souls, absolutely no one in the VA universe seems that worried about regular humans' lives. They don't even know about the existence of Strigoi so they could protect themselves. And yes, there are humans who'd work with Strigoi. Strigoi seem to have zero issue finding those humans as is, they simply tell them about vampires themselves when they wanna get servants.

Now there's a vaccine that could help protect humans, and really reduce Strigoi's capacity to feed, but you have to actually apply them to humans. And more and more supernatural events are being sloppily covered up since the Alchemists are otherwise preoccupied.

I'm sure there are some valid reasons for the masquerade, and humans might not behave amazingly towards supernatural creatures, but leaving them completely helpless to this threat isn't very ethical, and certainly not when you have a vaccine that could help them.

And honestly, as cliche as that argument is in discussions of monster hunting, humans could potentially take the Strigoi out, we have some pretty amazing weapons. Or we could be massively incompetent about a problem that we are fully capable of solving. You know...

So the supernatural world gets revealed, and that makes the Alchemists pretty obsolete. Of course, although they have been weakened by the decade(s) of infighting, that doesn't mean they lose all of their resources and connections all at once, but it would be a huge blow their relevance.

They get splintered into a lot of different groups that can still cause trouble, but they're no longer the omnipresent shadow organization they used to be.

And if this whole process took about 15 years, Declan and his buddies would be neatly protagonist aged in time to deal with the huge upheaval and the new mess of problems brought on by the integration of the Moroi and human world. And he'd more capable of thinking about his own relationship to the spirit vaccine and making his own decisions.

So most of this post was written to be understood whether or not you read Silver Stars, but this final bit is more about what could directly follow. When it comes to the fic I was more worried about the characters and their feelings, and excuses for domestic fluff and hurt/confort. So here's the fic on AO3 and on Tumblr.

In the end of The Ruby Circle, there's indication that Zoe Sage and Stanton, with the incentive of Sydney's blackmail, will be trying to reform the Alchemists. I don't really think they're reformable, attempts to extinguish re-education would basically result in rebranding. @sydneysageivashkov has some lesbian!Zoe head that I think are pretty compatible with my headcanons for an Alchemist revolution, and what Zoe would be doing during that initial period.

I think it could take a few more years, 3 or 4, for Sydney to actually have to leave her home and go into hiding. Declan foes actually get a little bit of a normal school experience. I imagine this whole process going very slowly, as the situation gradually deteriorates. And the witches would now claim Sydney as one of their own, making it a bigger problem for the Alchemists to attack her directly, lest they make enemies of the whole magical community.

By the time Sydney has to go into hiding I imagine Zoe is gonna have to leave the Alchemists as well. The other reason why I chose Emma for the first fic, is that she was in re-education in part for her sister's actions, so it shows that the Alchemists wouldn't be above hurting Zoe for Sydney's actions.

Sydney has very important reasons to join the revolution, and in fact she might eventually not have a choice, but she knows that once she officially breaks her truce with the Alchemists her whole family and even her fellow re-education inmates that she got amnesty for.

I imagine Sydney, Adrian, Eddie and Declan could spend a while hiding in a ranch very out of the way that Chantal and Duncan got themselves. Insert Adrian joke about that escape plan where cute blonde girls had to wear cow girl outfits.

Duncan has been shown to be pretty hesitant to risk going against authority, and Chantal is even more psychologically messed up than Sydney and the rest of them. Sydney feels pretty awful about placing them in danger, but they're both very grateful to her for helping them escape. Also Chantal is a really badass witch, although a bit unstable, I'll eventually find something to do with that, revolution wise.

But Sydney and Adrian would eventually leave and get more active roles in the revolution. I would very much like it to be an actual collective movement and not one special girl bringing down the Alchemists by herself, but I think Sydney would have a pretty prominent role after everything she went through.

This is way too long, but I had fun with it, and if you got this far, thank you for reading 😀

#Rapha's Bloodlines Tag #sydney sage #adrian ivashkov #declan ivashkov #zoe sage #bloodlines series #bloodlines #Alchemist revolution #headcanons #sydrian

[tivadelavida]

Is that TIVA DE LA VIDA ? 

Wow, they do look a lot like KHADIJHA RED THUNDER. I hear SHE/HER is/are a TWENTY year old FRESHMEN who are studying ENGINEERING at Luxor University. Word is they are a(n) ARISTOCRAT student who is AGAINST The Unhinged. You should watch out because they can be GUARDED and VENGEFUL, but on the bright side they can also be CONFIDENT and WITTY. Ultimately, you’ll get to see it all for yourself. 

~ B A S I C S 

NAME: Tiva Luz Okwi de la Vida Jones GOES BY: Tiva, Tee AGE: 20 BIRTHDAY: October 28th, 2001 ZODIAC: Scorpio HOMETOWN: Madrid, Spain and Manhattan, NY GENDER/PRONOUNS: Female, She/Her SEXUALITY: Lesbian MAJOR: Engineering EXTRAS: Events Committee POSITIVE TRAITS: Confident, Witty NEGATIVE TRAITS: Guarded, Vengeful

~ P H Y S I C A L I T Y 

FACECLAIM: Khadijha Red Thunder HEIGHT: 5′9″  BUILD: Tall and slender HAIR COLOR: Dark brown, naturally - usually dyed a honey blonde EYE COLOR: Brown GLASSES: No PIERCINGS: Septum + one in each ear lobe TATTOOS: A tiny sun and crescent moon behind her right ear STYLE: Wears a lot of jewelry - multiple necklaces, big earrings, lots of rings, and usually has on chunky doc martens to give her even more of a height advantage

~ F A M I L Y 

Mother: Luciana de la Vida Rosario Dawson FC Father: Mikom Jones Michael Greyeyes FC

~ B A C K G R O U N D 

Luciana de la Vida and Mikom Jones met at Luxor when they were in high school, and pretty much fell in love at first sight. The two were young, but they decided to keep dating after high school, doing long distance until Luciana found out she was pregnant. Her conservative parents were livid, but they came to an agreement for her to keep the baby, though it was under the stipulation that the de la Vida’s raised her, and Mikom was no longer in touch. So Tiva de la Vida was born, raised by her mother and grandparents. Mikom eventually showed back up in Luciana’s life, horrified that his daughter had been kept from him for years, but his relationship with Luciana hadn’t changed. After repairing that bond, and falling back in love, they got married when Tiva was five years old, staying in Spain, close to Luciana’s family, though they traveled back and forth between Spain and the US a lot. 

After about five years of a happy marriage, when Tiva was sixteen, they moved back stateside - Manhattan, to be exact - closer to the Jones’ family, and allowing Tiva to learn about the other side of her family. Tiva was doted on by her maternal grandparents for her entire childhood, their over the top care for her only increasing after the move, and she is still the absolute light of their lives. Despite not caring (to put it lightly) for Mikom, they couldn’t love Tiva anymore. Likewise, she is utterly adored by her parents, especially her father, who has never felt like he made up for missing the first few years of her life, even though Tiva couldn’t remember any of that if she tried. Regardless, she has never wanted for anything, and as soon as she could desire something, someone in her family made sure to hand it over. 

Tiva, much like her parents, went to Luxor for high school, but decided to take a gap year after graduating in 2020. She spent the year traveling - spent some time in Spain, but spent most of the year exploring the rest of the world, before deciding to return to Luxor. The travel program, of course, so she could continue traveling while going back to her studies. 

~ P E R S O N A L I T Y

Tiva is a true diva, fitting for her name. She grew up the center of attention, and her parents and grand-parents all absolutely worshipped her, so she is used to that utter adoration. She likes to be the focus of whatever conversation she partakes in, while still staying quite guarded and not sharing much about herself. 

She’s a partier, for sure. Wild child through and through. She likes to go out and dance, and while she doesn’t mind being sober to do so, she definitely likes to partake in drinking and various drugs. Prefers it, to be honest. She also very much loves attention, and has a moderately sized following on Tik Tok - where she posts videos of herself dancing, mostly (she’s a hip hop dancer) - and Instagram.

On the other hand, she’s very intelligent, and if she bothers to show up for class, she’s almost guaranteed to get a good grade, just because of how smart she is. Most people wouldn’t know it, so her brains tend to take people by surprise. Not that she’s actively trying to hide them, it’s just one of the last things she cares about. 

If you like this, I will come to you to plot, or feel free to come into my DMs! Tiva wouldn’t have been around last year, but she went to Luxor for HS before that. So if she hadn’t taken a year off, she would be a sophomore this year, and those would be the Luxor HS students she graduated with.

~ W A N T E D    C O N N E C T I O N S 

#sorry i ended up falling asleep last night #but here she is! #like this if you'd like to plot :) #luxintro #*about

[yellowocaballero]

Hey wouldn’t it be funny if I wrote a crossover between canon and the roleswap AU.

So I did <3. There’s no reason for this to exist, I was just bored and self-indulgent and amused myself by thinking about how fucking insane the Space Cadet team has to be in comparison to canon. This takes place at S4 Canon!Jon’s time, and basically between chapters 2 and 3 of solitaire. It is not canon. Do not think too hard about it. Enjoy. Story under the cut. 

“Yes, in almost every way.” Jon wiped his mouth with a napkin, balling it up and dropping it on the table. “Jonathan Sims, thirty one years old, Aquarius. Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute. The Archivist.” He paused a beat, uncertain of how to broach this. “I think Helen may have deposited me in an alternate dimension? Best case scenario.”

Everybody stared at him blankly. 

“Well,” Basira said finally, “sounds like the kind of bullshit you get yourself wrapped up in, Jon.”

“I knew it!” Sasha cried, before deflating. “I mean, I didn’t, really, not at all, but that’s fascinating! Will you answer some questions? Who’s the Queen in your universe?”

“I’m back from the dead for a week and my life’s already stupid again,” Tim said blankly. 

“Two Jons?” Martin asked, far too excitedly. 

“Can I leave you alone,” Melanie gritted out, between clenched teeth, “for five minutes?”

Jon woke up at his desk, which was so common that it was somewhat pathetic. 

Not that a lot of things weren’t pathetic about Jon, but seeing as he no longer technically had anywhere to live he’d give himself a pass. Or was it pathetic to be homeless too? Jon felt strongly as if it was, but he was working on the judgemental thing. Martin had always -

Martin. Jon blinked blearily at his empty desk, scrubbing a little at the sleep that had accumulated in the corner of his eyes. Right. Speaking of pathetic. Jon didn’t like admitting that Martin was the first thing he thought about when he woke up and the last thing he thought about before he went to bed, but he was working on being more honest with himself. Denial about the situation didn’t do anyone any favors. Denial was what made him start stalking and hunting people like - like some sort of awful predator. No more denial. Jon knew who he was, and he knew what he was, and he was going to try and be as good a person as he can be despite it. It was the least he could do. 

Wait. Why was his desk empty?

It wasn’t completely empty. There was a laptop on the center of it, and some assorted papers stuck haphazardly underneath. The usual recorder was tucked into the corner, clicked off. He swiped his hand over the trackpad of his laptop, quickly logging in, and instead of seeing his usual research or theory maps, he saw...a video game?

Jon squinted at the video game. What was The Sims?

He looked around his office, well-lit with the harsh fluorescent lights. It was his office, complete with the couch on the far wall that Daisy had taken to napping on and the two walls of metal shelving that held filling boxes and collections of tapes. Several filing cabinets were lined up behind Jon, holding his favorite statements. Organized by Entity. He was quite proud of it. 

But the Statements seemed to be gone. Some loose papers were always scattered around, slipping out of boxes or sitting in haphazard piles weighed down by tape recorders. None of them were there. Basira must have taken them. Jon stood up, moving around the desk to pull out a box and peer inside. Empty. 

Some part of Jon’s brain, growing louder every day, wailed and gnashed its teeth that someone had stolen his Statements, his knowledge. Most of Jon was just worried over what Basira could possibly be doing with them. 

Unconsciously, Jon’s hand drifted down to his stomach. It was purely a habit, of course - the hunger never gave him stomach pains. He was so hungry all the time, he could barely feel it anymore. 

The Statements were all gone.

Was Basira trying to starve him out…?

Jon shook himself. She wouldn’t - well, she wouldn’t go behind his back to do it. She knew that he’d just start preying on people -

His life had gotten so pathetic. 

A loud crash and a yell echoed from the other side of the door, and Jon recognized Melanie’s voice. He winced, and decided to stay in his office for the time being. Best to stay out of her way. She always reacted somewhat explosively to him -

Then the faint, muffled tones of Martin’s voice echoed through the door, and Jon forgot all hesitation as he burst out of his office. 

The bullpen was just slightly different from where Jon had seen it last - the desks arranged differently, different detritus scattered around, no sleeping bags or hair dryers - but he wasn’t paying attention to any of that. He was only paying attention to Martin, who was sitting at his desk as easy as you please. He was smiling. 

Jon hadn’t seen Martin smile in so long.

He also hadn’t seen Martin wear those adorable little sweatervests in so long, but that wasn’t important right now. Jon cried out softly, like he had been punched - he did feel as if he had been punched, it wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation - and Martin turned slightly in his chair to look at him. He smiled when he saw Jon, so kind and happy and Martin, and Jon felt like he was dying at the sight of Martin just smiling, just looking at him. 

“Look, you don’t need to worry about me,” Martin was saying, to an unamused and remarkably composed Melanie. He held up a large combat knife, the metal glinting off the fluorescent lights. “Jon likes it.”

“See, it’s not you I’m worried about,” Melanie said, arms crossed. She was dressed - in her jeans and green flannel, like she used to. Her hair looked clean. The crop top, cut-off shorts, and fishnets, that Jon hadn’t seen her take off in the last month, where - “It’s poor Jon. He’s too desperate for affection to stand up for himself.”

“Jon, you okay?” Tim asked, sitting behind Martin and sipping a margarita. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

That was when Jon - hungry, tired, hallucinating - felt his legs give out. It was just in time, too. He collapsed to the ground just as Martin threw the knife, sending it whistling where his head had been half a second ago. 

Then he hit his head on the floor, and blissfully fainted. 

****

“ - she’s not his mother, it’s not Georgie’s job to make sure he eats.”

“It’s because Daisy isn’t here.” That was Basira’s voice, almost mournful. “Daisy always used to remind him to eat.”

“How did this guy make it to thirty again?” An unfamiliar voice asked. 

“If it wasn’t for this ragtag bunch of lesbians, I would have killed him months ago,” Tim said, then paused a beat. “What? I’m owning up to my mistakes.”

“Remind me to give you a sticker later,” Melanie said dryly. 

Jon opened his eyes, to see five faces crowded in front of him. They were all bending over him, identical expressions of mild intrigue on their faces as they bickered with each other. Martin looked very, very mildly concerned, as Melanie and Basira just looked exasperated. Tim - and the woman - who was the woman?

Instinctually, Jon reached out with his mind and sought the answer. But it was as if he was reaching with a limb that had been cut off. No, a limb that had never existed. Dazed, Jon lifted his real hand, if only to make sure that he could still move - and found himself staring at an unmarred, smooth, healthy hand. 

“Martin didn’t cut it off,” the woman said helpfully. She had a thick mane of curly brown hair, and brown skin a similar shade to his. She was holding a granola bar, and she easily stuffed it in his outstretched hand. “If that was a concern or anything. When’s the last time you ate, Jon?”

The question spent a spike of anxiety through him, Jon instantly interpreting it as an accusation. The granola bar wasn’t going to do anything. Of course he was hungry, he’s always hungry - 

Jon wasn’t hungry. 

Jon sat up, letting the assorted people, both alive and dead, step away. He mechanically unwrapped the granola bar and stuffed it in his mouth, chewing lethargically. It didn’t taste like sawdust and cement. It tasted like salt, and nuts. 

He swallowed the granola bar, forming a hypothesis. He looked at Basira, who at least was the most familiar here. It galled him even having to ask, not just knowing, but -  “What year is it?”

She stared at him, unimpressed. “If you hit your head we’re taking you to C&E. We can’t afford for you to get any stupider, Jon.”

“Your concern is noted,” Jon said, strained. 

“Don’t make fun of him, he’s a concussion victim,” Melanie scolded. She smiled at Jon - hideously novel. “It’s 2018. I’m calling Georgie and getting you home, you’re useless to us with a brain injury.”

He no longer had a hypothesis. Jon shook his head mutely. The last person Jon wanted to field questions from was Georgie. “I’m fine,” Jon said hoarsely. “I think I just need to - lie down a bit.” And not look at Tim. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and was still slurping his margarita obnoxiously. He was leaning against a desk, somewhat heavily. “I’ll be fine.”

Everybody looked at each other, then shrugged. Melanie reached down and helped him up, gently pushing him towards the couch set up in the corner of the bullpen, and he found himself stumbling towards it and lying down. Martin loudly offered to nurse him back to health, which incentivized Basira and Melanie to quickly push him inside the recording room and lock the door for...some reason. Jon wanted to go talk to Martin, figure everything out with him. But he didn’t - paralyzed, or maybe just frightened, or maybe just very tired. 

The knife he had thrown was still lying on the floor, somehow innocently. The woman picked it up, inspecting it closely, and sighed. 

“There is something off about that guy.”

“None of them are ever going to believe you, Sash,” Tim said dully, flipping through a brightly colored magazine on his desk. Jon’s breath caught in his throat. “Melanie thinks it’s freakier if you haven’t stabbed anyone.”

This was it. This was when Tim would say, ‘Everybody wants to stab Jon’, or something. It’d be fair. If this was a dream, a fantasy of dead friends, then that’s what he would say. But he didn’t. Tim - strangely small, strangely gaunt, with hollow cheeks that reminded Jon a little of Daisy - didn’t look up at Sasha, flipping through his magazine, and Sasha avoided eye contact with him. She looked at Jon instead, from where he was lying on the couch, and gave him a strained smile. 

Jon found the courage to speak to her. It should have felt familiar, like Sasha, but nothing about her was familiar. He had listened to her tapes a dozen times, any scrap of her voice he could find, but - well, everybody sounded different on the tapes. “Sasha. Can you get me my phone? And a...Statement?”

Sasha brightened enthusiastically. “You want a Statement? Say no more, Jon, I’ll hook you up. Nice to see somebody taking an interest. Let’s keep this between you and me, okay?”

“What…?”

But she had already disappeared into his office, and the faint sounds of banging echoed throughout the room. Melanie and Basira were standing in the kitchenette, chatting lowly, Basira occasionally laughing at something Melanie said. 

Jon wondered where Daisy was, and instinctively tried to reach again before hitting that wall. He gritted his teeth, head still swimming. 

The most important thing was figuring out if this place was dangerous or not. Wherever he was, whatever was going on, he had to discern if it was a danger. Could this have anything to do with an unknown ritual? No, how could it? Elias? He wouldn’t put any of this past Elias. 

With a twist in his gut Jon remembered the cannibal priest’s Statement. Any suspicion of unreality, any feeling as if things were not as they should be...or was this a pleasant, Lotus Eater’s dream instead? If that was true, would Martin be throwing knives at him?

“Here you go! First one I saw on your desk.”

Jon sat up, mutely taking the paper and phone Sasha held out to him. It wasn’t his mobile - it was much nicer and sleeker than his own battered thing - but he had to assume it was Jon’s. He took the Statement too, scanning it quickly. 

Of course, of course. It was Anya Villete’s. Jon thought about this one frequently, captured by the prospect of multiple realities. Not worth the danger of exploring, but there was an intoxicating element of danger. Maybe the Jon that these people thought they were talking to had been reading it, and accidentally triggered something - 

“What did I say!”

Before Jon could react, the paper was unceremoniously ripped from his hands. Jon cried out helplessly, only to see Melanie standing in front of him with an unamused expression and his lifeline in her uncaring fists. 

“We’ve been over this,” Melanie scolded - scolded? “No statements, they’re bad for your tummy.” She frowned at Sasha, who didn’t seem very guilty. “And I told you to stop enabling him. He’s already sick, and you know these things upset him.”

“I’m gathering data,” Sasha said cheerfully. “Something weird was happening in his eyes when he was reading that Statement. Give it back, I need to record it.”

“Can I have that back, please?” Jon asked planatively. “I need it.”

“You do not.” Melanie folded up the statement tightly, shoving it in her jeans and ignoring Jon’s cry of despair. “If you’re feeling under-stimulated, go play knife monopoly with Martin. Otherwise relax and make sure you aren’t going to faint again.”

“I’m not going to -”

“I will call Georgie,” Melanie threatened, and Jon clicked his mouth shut. Melanie nodded, satisfied in having won the argument. If it was even an argument. “Sasha, if you let Jon find another Statement I will be locking the library and giving the key to Martin.”

“Yes, boss,” Sasha said, depressed. 

“Tim, you’re with me, we need to design our plan of attack for chasing down Daisy,” Melanie barked, and Tim straightened in his seat. Jon saw for the first time that there was a folded up cane on his desk. “I need your dumb fear demon powers.”

“That’s not how they -” Tim started, but at Melanie’s look he quailed. “Yeah, boss.”

“Great.” Melanie folded her arms, frowning down at Jon, and at the receiving end of the look Jon found himself quailing too. “If you leave the Archives to do anything other than go to the bathroom the rest of the day, I will tell Georgie that you were exerting yourself while sick again. And she will call you a poor little dear and give you lots of hugs and lots of soup. You will hate it. Is that clear?”

“Yes, boss,” Jon said, depressed. 

“Good. I need to go psychologically torment more people, I’ll be in the library. Tim!” She snapped her fingers, and strode off to the library as Tim scrambled up and limped after her. 

Jon watched her go dazedly as the library door clicked shut behind her. Sasha sighed and went back to her desk, cracking open the thick books on the top and relaxing. They weren’t even research books, just nonfiction about the Mayflower. Basira was back at her desk too, this time with her chin resting on her arms folded on the desk as she watched a...movie. Was that a romcom? 

This was dangerous. The situation was dangerous, doubtless the plot of some force or another that hated Jon personally and wanted him to suffer. He had to do some research, find out what was going on, track down Elias and find his power and dig into that source of infinite knowledge lying dormant in his mind, uproot every terrifying thing that hated him and shake them down for answers.

But he was more scared of Melanie. Just because she didn’t seem to have any knives on her didn’t mean that it was the case. Unless Martin had them all. So Jon lay back on the couch, rotely pressed in the passcode to his phone, and idly opened up the internet browser in complete comfort and relaxation. 

The couch was so comfortable and soft, in fact, that Jon soon fell asleep. Easy and smooth, as if he really was still a human, who needed sleep at all.

And when Jon dreamed, he dreamed of blissful and restful nothing. 

******

He woke up to someone shaking his shoulder, and Jon screamed himself awake as his eyes flew open. 

But it wasn’t anybody dangerous, or anything willing to hurt him. It was just - Basira. Just Basira. Jon exhaled in relief, ignoring Basira’s incredulous expression. 

“It’s five, we’re heading out. You feeling well enough for pub night, mate?”

They were going home. The strangeness registered first, the fact that Sasha was shrugging on a jacket and Melanie was stuffing a laptop in a backpack, before Jon remembered where he was. Or where he wasn’t. He mustered a faint smile for Basira, but judging from her frown it came out closer to a grimace. 

Pub night. They were going out for drinks, then going to their own flats. Eating dinner. Sleeping. Waking up the next morning, then heading off to work. The mundanity boggled. 

Maybe it was a Lotus Eater, Jon thought, dazed. A world where there were no Entities, no fears or harm. Where everybody was human, and happy. 

Maybe. He hadn’t actually been allowed to look at any of the Statements, so he didn’t actually know. He couldn’t imagine that this group would be so casual if the Statements really were true. 

Part of him wanted to beg off, curl up and sleep in document storage so he wouldn’t have to interact with these people for any longer. He was out of practice: these days he rarely had long conversations with anybody who wasn’t Daisy, and he hadn’t seen Daisy all day. Basira exchanged a few curt sentences with him each day. Melanie...cried and screamed, a lot. Not exactly conducive to social skills. 

  Sasha’s face was buried in a book, not even looking up as she navigated the desks. Tim was talking a patient Melanie’s ear off about Nietzche. 

“I think I can make it,” Jon found himself saying. “Just a pint.”

Besides, he had the feeling that if he curled up in document storage Georgie would...be mad at him. Or something. They were flatmates? Or something?

They walked out the door in a herd, talking and laughing. Jon found himself hanging in the back of the group, next to Sasha. She wasn’t looking up from her book, so Jon felt safe in staring unabashedly at Tim. He was using a cane, just like Daisy had for two or so weeks right out of the coffin. He even used it in the same way: not favoring one leg or the other, using it for strength instead of balance. Muscle weakness. He was just as emancipated as Daisy had been too, in that particular corpse-like way that made him look like a zombie. His hair was long and lanky, brittle strands reaching to his chin instead of his normal lush and gelled look. 

The faces in the lobby were the same - Sabrina behind the desk, Roy playing security guard - even as the decorations were different. No portrait of Jonah Magnus, or of the other directors. They broke out into the London street, as smoggy and crowded as ever, and Jon found himself trailing behind the others in a direct route to their usual pub. The same one he, Basira, Melanie, and Daisy go drinking at sometimes. Only sometimes. They went without him more often, but Jon didn’t blame them, really -

“Something on my face, mate?”

Tim’s wry voice startled Jon out of his reverie, and he flushed. Tim smiled at him, thinly and without humor, and gestured him forward as he dropped behind Melanie. Jon stepped forward, tucking his hands into his jacket, fighting the rising swell in his throat. 

“You’ve been staring. I’m not that much uglier, am I?” Tim asked lightly, a parody of his old good humor. That, at least, was familiar - Tim’s fragile and brittle humor, tightly leashing rage. 

“You...you look good,” Jon said. He buried his hands deeper in his jacket pockets, fighting the lump in his throat. He couldn’t stop himself from adding, “It’s good to see you again.”

It was probably a strange thing for Jon to say - but Tim just smiled, even more bitter than the last. “You’ve always been too nice for your own good, Sims.” First time that’s been said about him. “You forgive too easy.”

“Grudges...aren’t worth it, in my experience.” Jon exhaled slowly, watching Melanie’s red hair glint in the sunlight in front of him. “Life’s too short and all.”

“Really? Thought you people loved grudges.” Tim blinked a second, before clearly remembering something. “We love grudges, right. Still, Jon, I never really…” He trailed off awkwardly. “You know.”

He did not. “Right,” Jon said. 

“Apologized,” Tim said hurriedly, when it became clear that Jon wasn’t about to say anything committal. “For trying to kill you all those times. Uh, and trying to get you arrested. And helping frame you for murder. And that whole kidnapping incident -”

Something began to occur to Jon. A rational thought seeped into his brain. 

“In the woods,” Jon said slowly. “Because you thought I was a monster.”

Tim winced, confirming Jon’s suspicion. “Right. Trust me, I’ve had a lot of time to think, and I know I was wrong. I’ve turned over a new leaf and everything.” He brightened. “Did you hear I’m bisexual now?”

“Everybody heard you were bisexual now,” Basira said, bored. “Ten times.”

“Good for you,” Jon said, as sincerely as he could. “That’s...great. Bi rights.”

Tim beamed. “Bi rights!” He clapped Jon’s shoulder supportively with his other hand as Melanie held open the door to the pub for them, ducking inside. “Man, I never thought I’d see the inside of a pub again. I only got to go a few times with you guys before everything. Can Martin still hustle the room at pool?”

“One way to find out,” Martin said serenely. 

“Please don’t start a pub brawl,” Melanie said, pained. “We’ve been kicked out of three places already, I don’t fancy making it a fourth.”

But when Jon looked backwards, he saw Sasha looking up from her book, staring directly at him, blinking owlishly. 

They crowded into a corner booth, squishing up against each other and all talking at once. Jon wanted to drift towards Martin, get him alone and ask what was going on, but after one look at him eyeing up the pool cues speculatively he changed his mind. Only Basira was acting even remotely normal, so he settled for sliding in between her and Sasha. He was dizzy with the noise and the clamor of the familiar pub, overwhelmed by the familiar-unfamiliar tide of voices, and it was taking all of his energy not to spend hours just staring at Sasha, memorizing every line and crease of her face.

The first thing he did was order every single crummy, greasy, soggy serving of pub food he found on the menu, ignoring the way his Assistants laughed at him, before settling in the corner of the booth and pulling out his phone. Jon wasn’t even hungry - he wasn’t hungry - but he was shoving every soggy chip into his mouth until he puked. A human body was a drastically underrated thing. 

Out of curiosity, Jon turned on the front camera of his phone and scrutinized his reflection. He had noticed that his hair was shorter, tied back in a puffed bun instead of his customary ragged ponytail, but beyond that he hadn’t checked. 

He looked...good. No longer gaunt and malnourished, he was a healthy weight. No bags under his eyes. Well kept fade and modest, well trimmed facial hair. No scar over his throat, no circular worm scars.  That was less of a surprise - Tim, Martin, and Sasha were all missing the worm scars. 

His eyes were brown. Just brown. No electrifying green, no spinning iris, no churning wheel of knowledge. Just his normal, boring brown. 

He hadn’t known how much he missed it. 

As the others started arguing passionately about...vlogs? Or something?...Jon pulled out his wallet. Money had the same old Queen on it, along with his old collection of take-out receipts that had all started disappearing when he stopped eating. A photocopy of a picture of his parents, heavily worn and creased. Still an orphan, then. Jon missed the days when that was his biggest problem. 

His driver’s license was the same as ever too. Same name - Jonathan Andrew Sims. Same birthday - February 14th, which he had always considered life’s practical joke on him. The United Kingdom still existed, which was either a good or a bad thing. 

He replaced his wallet, ignoring Sasha’s curious stare, and pulled out his phone. He had only gone so far as making sure that major world events were the same before passing out. This time, he pressed his text messages, and scrolled down his most recents. As usual, it was only a few people - almost all of which were at this table - but there were a few other people too. 

Georgie was the obvious one, and the most recent. He clicked on that conversation, unsurprised to see an immediate photograph of the Admiral looking angelic as he rolled around in some grass in a patch of sun. 

Georgie: Baby at the park soaking in some rays!!! <3 <3 <3. I caught him terrorizing a stray dog. Naughty baby!!

Jon blinked at the message. The Admiral did seem a little...more evil, than he once did. Why were his eyes green? Underneath was Jon’s own text, sent twenty minutes before he had woken up that afternoon. 

Jon: He’s committing atrocities and you’re laughing. You’re laughing. 

Jon couldn’t fight a smile. He missed Georgie. 

He switched over to the text conversation just underneath. He squinted at the contact name. That couldn’t be right. 

Gerry: can u pick up milk from aldis? and scented candles

Gerry: for necromancy reasons

Jon: Can you raise the dead tomorrow? Helen said she wants to talk to me so I may be home late. If you don’t hear from me in five hours she’s likely kidnapped me. As a heads up. 

Gerry: OH, SO LONG AS I HAVE THE HEADS UP?

Gerry: I’m making Georgie give Melanie the money to buy that toddler leash she’s always threatening to get for u. If u die im not resurrecting u. 

Jon: Have fun with one less person to share the rent

Gerry: we dont PAY RENT

Gerard Keay. Jon blinked at the phone. That conversation raised as many questions as it answered. Gerard Keay was alive? He was Jon’s flatmate? He practiced necromancy? None of it seemed very relevant right now, but it made Jon wonder who else was resurrected from the dead. Was necromancy common in this universe, like knitting?

Still, Helen explained quite a bit. It also suggested what Jon was already wondering: that the supernatural was far from foreign. If Helen was supernatural, and not just...a jerk. 

If Tim was an Avatar of the Hunt...if he had been in the coffin...and Daisy’s been hard to track down…

Jon was interrupted in his increasingly coherent train of thought by his food arriving, and all thoughts were thrown out the window. His basket of fish and chips slid in front of him, and he wasted absolutely no time in cramming the fries into his mouth three at a time, not wasting time salting or putting vinegar on them. They were dripping with crease, soggy and burning his tongue. 

They were perfect.

The waiter, looking somewhat intimidated, slid his bacon butty on the table too, and Jon took barely a moment to swallow before stuffing that in his face too. Bacon, butter, brown sauce - it exploded on his tongue, a cavalcade of salt and seasoning. Increasingly terrified, the waiter put his pie and mash on the table and quickly fled, as Jon finished cramming the sandwich into his mouth before moving back to the fish. It was hot, crackling on his tongue, strong and fishy and perfect.

Jon looked up from his food long enough to grab a glass of water and gulp half of it down. It wasn’t until he put his glass down that he saw the looks on the faces of his Assistants. All of whom ranged from frightened to terrified.

  Everybody except Martin, whose chin was propped on his hand and was sighing dreamily. “It’s really hot how you can pack it all away, Jon. Do you want to come over to my flat and let me cook for you? I’d make a lot of food. ”

Jon choked on his fish.

That was it for Sasha. She slammed her book down, expression intent, and jabbed a finger at a now wheezing Jon. “Jon would never choke at Martin’s creepy flirting! That isn’t Jonathan Sims!”

Jon stole Tim’s glass of water, ignoring his squawk, and downed that too. 

Now everybody really was staring at him, and Jon felt heat rise to his cheeks. As the kids say, busted. He should probably stop eating and make his escape while he still could, before Tim decided to change his mind on his ‘murdering Jon’ stance. 

But outside did not have pub food. Inside had pub food. Jon made his decision with the knowledge that, if his Assistants reacted from a reasonable place of Imposter-based trauma and killed him for pretending to be Jonathan Sims, he’d deserve it. He was not moving from this spot until his food was gone or his Assistants killed him. 

Jon finished off Tim’s water, dropping it back on the lacquered table, and hoarsely said, “I’ve been having a very strange day.”

Nobody leaped for his throat or pointed a gun at him, which was always nice. It was more than Jon had been expecting. Instead, everybody looked at Melanie, who narrowed her eyes. Jon realized, a second too late, that they were waiting for her. Whatever happened to him, Melanie would decide. 

...why Melanie? 

Melanie rested her elbows on the table, steepling her fingers in front of her mouth. She locked eyes with Jon, breaking him down like a judge at a dog show, and Jon tried to shovel mash in his mouth as innocently as possible. 

“Sasha. What’s your evidence?”

“He’s been acting weird all day,” Sasha said promptly, as if she’d been expecting the question. She shifted her arm purposefully, and Jon realized with a start that she was concealed carrying. Was that legal? “Jon never asks me for Statements outright, he always just sneaks them behind Melanie’s back. If he really fainted because he was hungry, he would have eaten his lunch too, instead of just my granola bar. And he hasn’t talked to Martin since he fainted - he isn’t even sitting next to him.” Sasha drew herself up triumphantly. “And, he looked actually scared when Martin threw that knife at him. He’s never scared of Martin. He normally just role-plays the fear bit.”

“Which I appreciate,” Martin said supportively, making Jon blanch. That elicited more suspicious looks from everyone, which Jon couldn’t even begin to parse. “But he has been acting strange today, hasn’t he?”

“Tim?” Melanie asked sharply. 

Tim sniffed loudly, wrinkling his nose a little. “Smells like him.” At Melanie’s intense look, he grudgingly added, “No sawdust or plastic. Flesh and blood, boss.”

Jon began stuffing forkfuls of pastry and meat crumb from the pie in his mouth as Melanie went back to squinting at Jon. Not glaring - just an intense, sidelong look, fingers steepled in front of her. “You aren’t denying it, Jon.”

Jon mumbled something. 

“Swallow your food.”

Jon carefully swallowed his mouthful of dough. “I have not eaten human food,” Jon said delicately, “in five months. I will answer your questions momentarily.”

And then Jon cleaned all three of his plates, to the dumbfounded looks of his Assistants. 

Finally, after everybody else’s drinks had arrived - including Jon’s pint, which he reached for so quickly that Martin stole it away from him and refused to give it back - and Jon had cleaned all three of his plates, he felt ready to talk. He thumped on his chest, burping a little, and leaned back in his plush seat. Melanie was nursing her pint, sipping from it slowly, as Basira gave him her usual ‘I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you’ look. 

“Okay,” Jon said finally. “I apologize for not - ah, clarifying before. I thought I was dreaming. To be honest, I worry that I’m still dreaming.” He looked down at his empty basket and plates. “I dearly hope that wasn’t human flesh or something horrid like that.”

Sasha perked up. “Like in the cannibal priest statement? That’s fascinating -”

“Shut up about cannibal priests,” Melanie groaned, and Sasha guiltily shut up. Oddly rude, but nobody seemed surprised. “You are Jon, right?”

“Yes, in almost every way.” Jon wiped his mouth with a napkin, balling it up and dropping it on the table. “Jonathan Sims, thirty one years old, Aquarius. Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute. The Archivist.” He paused a beat, uncertain of how to broach this. “I think Helen may have deposited me in an alternate dimension? Best case scenario.”

Everybody stared at him blankly. 

“Well,” Basira said finally, “sounds like the kind of bullshit you get yourself wrapped up in, Jon.”

“I knew it!” Sasha cried, before deflating. “I mean, I didn’t, really, not at all, but that’s fascinating! Will you answer some questions? Who’s the Queen in your universe?”

“I’m back from the dead for a week and my life’s already stupid again,” Tim said blankly. 

“Two Jons?” Martin asked, far too excitedly. 

“Can I leave you alone,” Melanie gritted out, between clenched teeth, “for five minutes?”

Then everybody was talking over each other, arguing and exclaiming and yelling, and Jon frantically drank his pint. They were so loud. 

Finally, Melanie chopped a hand through the buzz, and everyone quieted. She pursed her lips, looking Jon up and down, and he anxiously let himself get looked at. “How did you know it was an alternate universe? What’s the difference?”

“Martin threw a knife at me and Tim and Sasha are alive,” Jon said instantly. 

“I’m not actually dead in your universe,” Tim said quickly, “just trapped in an infernal demon hell coffin. If you can get me out, I’d be really thankful -”

“No, you’re quite dead,” Jon said apologetically. “That happened to Daisy in my universe, though. A - a lot of what you did here, I think, Daisy did.” He looked at Basira, frowning. “Where is Daisy? She’s not…”

“She’s fine,” Basira said curtly, folding her arms and leaning back. “Having lots of fun ditching us and having fun at her little secretary desk. It’s fine. I don’t care. She can do what she wants, she’s an adult.”

“Basira’s been pining tragically ever since Daisy ran off to go work for Peter Lukas,” Melanie said sympathetically. 

Jon felt a little called out. “Ah. That’s - that’s very unfortunate.” He slowly turned to Martin, who still seemed caught up in the ‘two Jons’ aspect of this. “And you’re...you would define yourself as full of rage?”

“At all times, all the time, without cessation,” Martin agreed affably. “Why? That’s not weird to you, is it?”

“Uh huh.” Jon slowly turned to Sasha. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to insult you, but...did you happen to once work as a Constable for the Met?”

Everybody winced. Sasha sighed. “I regret all of my actions and I’m very sorry that I was once a pig and I’ll never do it again because I value due process now.”

“Word, sister,” Tim said, raising his pint. 

“Hm,” Jon said, far too much coming together.  But that left a big question, one thing that didn’t make sense. “What about me? Do I - eat trauma?”

Basira stared at him blankly. “You try, sometimes, but we usually just spray water at you until you stop.”

“That explains it,” said Jon, despite the fact that it didn’t explain anything. 

“Your questions are pointless, and this is a waste of time.” Melanie clapped her hands sharply, making everyone straighten to attention. She stood up from her seat, everybody scrambling to protect their glasses as Melanie clambered on top of the table. “Helen! Get out here!”

“She’s not - she’s not Beetlejuice, you can’t just call her name and make her appear,” Jon said blankly. “How’s she even supposed to hear -”

“She can hear me just fine,” Melanie called, “because she’s been sitting at the bar this whole time.”

Everybody’s heads craned around to look at the bar. Through the stream of people, carrying drinks and laughing, Jon could faintly make out a tall, willowy figure with a large afro sitting on a barstool at the bar, tapping the rim of one elegant martini with a long, manicured fingernail. 

Then she swiveled around, and Helen grinned broadly at all of them. She waved cheekily with one hand, fingers waving and rippling strangely in the dim pub lights. “Hello! You rang?”

Melanie jabbed a finger at the table pointedly. “Michael’s too young to be here too, Helen!”

“They’re eighteen, they’re a big non-Euclidean concept!” Helen tittered, as she hopped of the stool. Jon’s draw dropped as a much smaller, slight figure next to her hopped off too. They were a teenager, with a curly mop of blonde hair and big, watery blue eyes that seemed just a little strange. Everything about them was on the edge of familiar, and not in the usual way of the Spiral. 

“She was waiting for us to figure it out,” Basira murmured, catching Jon’s attention. “It’s definitely funny to her.”

“Helen defined schadenfreude, I’m afraid,” Jon said, depressed, as Helen and her tagalong popped up at the edge of their table. Melanie had said Michael - and the kid did look like Michael, younger and alive and wide-eyed. Their watery eyes caught on Jon, and they tilted their head curiously. The sight of them hurt Jon’s head more than the Spiral usually did - a testament to the human body he was borrowing. 

Human. That was no defense. He was vulnerable, and judging from the angle of Helen’s smile she knew it. 

“Enjoying your vacation, Archivist?” Helen tittered, folding her hands girlishly as Melanie hopped off the table and back in her seat. “I’ve been having so much fun in this universe I thought I ought to bring a friend! Buy one plane ticket get one free, you know. I have this coupon for a great spa around here -”

“Helen,” Melanie intoned dangerously.

Helen tittered a nervous laugh. Was she...scared of Melanie? “Don’t worry! Your darling little Jon’s perfectly safe. He’s having a great time in one of my favorite dimensions, this wonderful post-apocalyptic adventure with a werewolf -

“Helen,” Melanie said slowly, danger building with every word, “we talked about what happens when you remove Jons from their native ecosystems.”

“They get sick,” Michael said somberly, nodding their head. “An’ wilt.”

“It is very stressful for the Jon, Helen. You know what we don’t like?”

“A stressed Jon?” Michael volunteered. 

“Yes, Michael.” Melanie smiled pleasantly at Helen, who blanched. “A stressed Jon. Because when Jon gets stressed, my girlfriend gets stressed. And when my girlfriend gets stressed, I get stressed. And when I get stressed, everybody is about to have a very bad time. Get it? Helen?”

“Completely understood, very sympathetic, I see your point completely,” Helen said hurriedly. “Really, you can say that I did my dear Archivist a favor! He hasn’t had a human body in almost half a year, the poor dear was so sad about it. It’s a break, really!”

Tim squinted at Jon. “You’re really full on fear demon, then?”

Jon squirmed guiltily, ashamed.  “I prefer the term Avatar. But...yes, I’m an amoral monster distant from humanity, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Melanie said impatiently. “You’re about as far from humanity as I am. Having stupid superpowers or cramming shitty food into your mouth doesn’t make you inhuman, it just means you hang out with the wrong crowd. Go back to your own universe and get some rest, I bet you’re stressing out all your friends.”

“I’m really not,” Jon said weakly. “I - I really only have one friend.”

“No wonder you look so tragic all the time,” Sasha said thoughtfully. “Jon gets all mopey without affection. Like an unwatered plant.”

“I eat trauma,” Jon said, bewildered at the perception of harmlessness. 

“You and half of the YouTube vlogging community.” Melanie clapped her hands again sharply, pulling everyone to attention. “Helen. Put Jon back where he came from or so help me.”

“Ruining all my fun,” Helen pouted, but at Melanie’s glare she sighed. She held up one hand, and static rippled through the air. The hand elongated, twisted, and turned into Helen’s signature lengthy claw. Michael eyed it with interest, before holding up their own hand and doing the same. “Fun while it lasted, Archivist! Now hold still. I wouldn’t want to lobotomize the wrong lobe.”

“Nice meeting you,” Sasha said politely, to a very freaked out Jon. “Don’t come back, though.”

“Come back if you want,” Basira yawned. “My life’s boring, spice it up a little.”

“Sorry I’m dead in your universe or whatever,” Tim said, waving a hand. “Life and death is meaningless anyway, so I’m sure it’s for the best.”

“I want my Jon back,” Martin complained. “Go on and get out, then.”

“Tell your friends what we told you,” Melanie said. “Don’t they know that you get all tragic when you’re lonely?”

And Jon didn’t know how to say it - that they didn’t know, or if they did then they didn’t care, because they had so many bigger problems than if Jon was sad or not. With Elias’ strange plans, with Jon’s encroaching monsterhood and his slow and steady starvation, with Martin’s loneliness and Basira’s desperation and Melanie’s instability, Jon’s feelings were the least important thing in the world. 

Did it matter, to anybody but Jon, that he thought of Martin first thing in the morning and last thing as he went to bed at night? 

“Hold still and look straight at me!” Helen said, and Jon had to be thankful - because that let him look at Sasha and Tim, eyes wide and intrigued, as Helen speared her finger through Jon’s forehead. 

Jon blacked out, but the images of Sasha and Tim stayed burned behind his eyelids. He dreamed calm dreams, of him and Martin and Sasha and Tim, laughing together, as the world faded away.

****

When Jon woke up, it was with a crick in his neck, and he knew immediately he had fallen asleep on the battered old couch in his office again. 

There was a heavy weight on his chest, and when he pried his eyes open he saw the top of Daisy’s head in front of him. Dusty blonde hair pooled on his chest as Daisy snored, deep asleep, arm stretched over his torso. 

The taste of salt and grease was on his tongue, and Jon let himself go back to sleep. The dreams would be terrifying and desolate, but at least in them he was never hungry. 

#my writing #tma #the magnus archives #tma fanfic #the magnus archives fanfic #im also doing an UNBELIEVABLY self-indulgent tim character study but im not sure if i should post it because tim's not funny #melanie king #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #slaughter!martin #basira hussain #sasha james #helen richardson #michael shelley