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laebrumme · 12 days

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A Short Discussion on Fandom Culture

I’m going to admit: I’m very unfamiliar with fandom culture. I only really got into fandom in the past handful of years, and before that I observed from a distance. I always was one to enjoy media in a very insular way and my internet usage existed elsewhere. Because of that, coming across fandom discourse that seems to be run-of-the-mill to folks who have been in these circles for a long time has been a little jarring for me, especially because of how emotionally people engage with said talking points. It definitely does not help that these points are being discussed on twitter, a platform notorious for limiting your ability to communicate to the best of your ability, but even then I find it kind of fascinating how emotional fandom spaces are. As somebody who has problems with not approaching anything with her emotions and keeps things very analytical and logical, I kind of love it. Sometimes. Other times, it tends to make my brain bootloop trying to comprehend the kind of stuff people say.

For an example of this, I want to approach a particular twitter thread from my perspective as somebody who is new to this whole fandom thing and only started engaging in full capacity through fanfiction just under a year ago. I’m also just curious to see what happens when something like this is thrown into the ringer.

So the tweet goes as such: in a quote retweet asking for what amounts to Honkai: Star Rail related hot takes, a twitter user writes:

“Headcanoning a characters[sic] sexuality is the cheapest way to relate to a character. And many of you in this fandom who do so, only do so because that's all YOU are. No character, no life experience...just a bunch of robots who have nothing more to them than their sexuality.”

Rhetorically, the first tweet of this thread has holes more numerous than moldy cheese, but that’s something I’ve been trying to keep myself from picking at because, at the end of this day, this discourse doesn’t have much room for rhetoric or anything of the sort. Like I said in the opening, it’s almost all grounded in emotion, and it seemingly always has been if my many hours of watching fandom historians talk about the exploits of various characters on early fandom internet are to be believed. And it’s important to remember that’s really where fandom comes from: this entirely emotional and completely illogical connection we have with characters and stories that make us incredibly giddy and excited to even think about. It’s an excitement that leads us to draw, write stories, and create headcanons because the only thing better than the characters we like are versions of characters we like that we can relate to.

When I first read this tweet, one of my first thoughts was “what does ‘cheap’ mean in this context?” Because it really is kind of an empty word in this context since it’s assigning value to something that simply doesn’t. What constitutes a “cheap” way of relating to a character? Why is relating to headcanoned sexuality less valuable than relating to something like headcanoned race or gender or trauma? In fact, how is any of that less valuable than relating to canon race or canon gender or canon trauma?

Later in the thread, OP brings up an example with a web manga called She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat. I will admit first hand I have not read this, but the summary they gave talks about one of the characters having an upbringing which did not discuss any concepts of queerness and ends up having a discussion with another character about being gay, where she comes to the conclusion that she is gay. They then go on to say:

“THAT'S a real relatable story and that's what the story is about, so for me in comparison slapping a "she's lesbian" onto a character who's story is not about that In an attempt to relate to them feels cheap, when there are REAL relatable gay characters who's stories tackle these sorts of issues. Like make a Doujin/fanfic those[sic] never hurt anyone but all this fanon being canon stuff just feels kinda cheap from where I'm standing.”

I’m going to get out of the way the one single point out of this thread that I agree with: and that’s the fact that I’m not a huge fan of people asserting things that are very much not canon as being such. There is a difference between canon and implication, and a lot of people jump the gun rather quickly when they see something that softly implies queerness and call it canon. Now, will I admit that the line between canon and implication is rather fuzzy? Of course. At what point did Kavaithem become indisputably canon? I don’t know, and I don’t know if anybody could point it out. But as far as I’m concerned, even as somebody who isn’t into BL, it is as close to canon as something can get without there being an Azure Waters moment.

Aside from that, I think something that needs to be kept in mind is that why people want to relate to characters differs wildly. I would aline myself somewhere in the same realms as the OP in terms of why I relate to characters: I find a lot of value in headcanoning certain characters in certain ways and exploring those relationships. That’s why I love writing Arlefuri so much: there’s layers to it. It is a really fascinating ship to engage with on an intellectual and artistic level, because it is toxic if you choose to depict it that way. That’s also why I love headcanoning Hu Tao as ace, even though I am very much not ace. Hu Tao is such a fascinating character to me, and especially as a character that gets very sexualized all over the place online in a very specific way, giving her back sexual agency to me is very fascinating.

But there’s an entirely different side of the story: people headcanon characters as a certain sexuality because it makes them happy. And if you really want to be reductive, you can take the entire previous paragraph and translate it to “I headcanon Arlecchino as a lesbian and Hu Tao as asexual because it makes me happy.” Just because I can throw some intellectual reasoning behind it doesn’t mean that it’s automatically more valid than the person who headcanons Robin as a Lesbian purely because she’s pretty and has jewelry on her face with the colors of the lesbian flag. And again it goes back to that idea that this entire fandom thing to me is letting the emotions win over the logic and doing whatever makes you feel happy. And for some people, that’s headcanoning their favorite character to be their sexuality because they have no other way of expressing their sexuality, didn’t get to grow up expressing their sexuality, or because their sexuality isn’t expressed commonly in media and they want to feel represented.

“… Relating to a character has gotta be something deeper, so slapping a "She's lesbian" onto a character who's story isn't about that when there are stories that protray[sic] real and relatable struggles is cheap to me. A good amount of my favourite[sic] characters aren't my sexuality and I don't have to headcanon them as such, just for me to relate to them. So here's where it is, if you need to rely on some headcanon to make a character relatable then what does that say about you?”

I really don’t think there are people that headcanon a character as a sexuality purely in order to relate to them, and instead I think it’s the other way around. People will relate to a character and headcanon them to be their sexuality just to make relating that much easier and more enjoyable. (Again, the idea that this is all just for fun and people do it to make their time interacting with things more enjoyable.)

So no, I definitely don’t think that relating to a character has to amount to something “deeper,” because, putting aside the fact that “deeper” doesn’t really mean anything, it’s important more than ever to remember that maybe to me or you saying a character is a lesbian might not mean much, but to someone else, it might mean the world. And beyond that, there is nothing else anybody can say about the person behind the screen aside from that person themselves. Nobody can say how shallow or deep of a person they are, because we’re all people hiding behind screens and keyboards that only share very curated versions of ourselves to the people out there, even if reflexively, so the person that headcanons a random character as a lesbian for no other reason than they want to might have the most interesting life behind the screen, and they interact with such “simple” headcanoning because they want some normalcy or simplicity in their life.

To me, how somebody chooses to headcanon characters tells me nothing about who they are because there are an infinite number of reasons why they might do such a thing in such a way. And after watching toxic fandom for a while now, I really think that’s where things break down: people forget that the person on the other side of the screen isn’t them. They make the assumption that the person on the other side of the screen has their life or their belief system, but was led astray. That’s not true: even the OP of this thread lives in a completely different situation from my own, has entirely different life experiences from my own, and has a completely different belief system to my own, and when toxic fandom forgets that, they go into discussion with the belief that some strongly worded tweets will “set them straight” so to speak, when in reality even a two thousand word essay talking about a short tweet thread probably won’t sway the OP at all, and I accept that. That’s why my main purpose for this is to talk about toxic fandom culture I’ve seen at large, using OP’s tweet as a starting point. I want to share my opinion just as much as OP did.

And, for the record: as a person who likes to headcanon and relate to characters much the same as the OP of this thread, I can pretty confidently say that I have a lot less character and life experience compared to the people on my timeline that headcanon out of nothing but vibes. People that are willing to engage in pure and fanatical whimsy just because they feel like it are often the most interesting.

#fandom #fandom culture #honkai star rail #genshin impact

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our-neighbours-cat-is-a-menace · 2 years

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Ok ok ok I didn't really know who to send this ask to, but after reading your content. I knew it it had to be you.

What would the OM brothers do if they found out MC actually worshiped them back before they were brought to the devildom and before they ever got close?

Ooh this iz nice, but i was having a hard time coming up with their reactions, so i added a bit of assumption from MC's perspective as a leeway, hope that's ok

Before you became a part of the exchange program*

You had a knack for watching anime and reading manga, you're the typical closeted otaku and you somehow developed an obsession that involves the 7 deadly sins

You weren't entirely sure when it started but your guess is that your undying obsession started when you watched the seven mortal sins followed by the seven deadly sins

Posters, banners, figurines voice recordings of the actors who played the sins, doujins, body pillows, and even fanfics. Yes, you collected them all

So imagine the thrill when you dropped down to the devildom and came face to face with the actual avatars

You were reasonable enough to ask the basics, what happened , who are those people and what's the reason they brought you there but that didn't change the giddiness that you are feeling inside when you came to realize who are the people in front of you

8 months have passed and your obsession isn't dying anytime soon. You kept this to yourself but sometimes Luck can be so cruel who suddenly decided to screw you up today

Lucifer

He went to the human realm for some business Diavolo asked him to do

He suddenly remembered how one time you said, you missed your old room

He suddenly got the idea to visit your old home and take some stuff and surprise you with it

But it seems he was the one who was given a surprise

Cause the moment he stepped into your old room, walls full of posters and stickers and the cherry on top was the big lettering of his name above your beds headboard

The more he took a step inside, the more he saw

Should he be amused or frightened

When he went back to the devildom, and to the HOL, you were at the door, ready to welcome him back with a hug

But was stopped when lucifer held out a keychain that has his name and symbol on it

You were quick to realize he already know about everything

You quickly burst out an explanation

Lucifer just listened to you babble that was obviously laced with desperation

"Mc, that's enough" he said, completely cutting you off

"but luci pls, listen to me, i really love you, i didn't date you because i fangirled about the avatar of pride back in the human realm"

Yup

You jumped into the conclusion that lucifer was mad because he might think you just dated him because he was the avatar of pride in which you worshipped back at home

You couldn't be anymore wrong

He actually was quite flattered of how high your perspective of him was, it just gives him more pride

"Mc, i never said anything like that"

"but, isn't that why your angry"

"who said i was angry"

"your brows"

He just shut you up with a kiss, saying i miss you

He also explained his part that he was nowhere near angry, the total opposite really

Well, now that you didn't have to hide this part of you, your affection towards the demon just grew tenfold and you just shamelessly stopped being discreet about it

More stress for your boyfriend

Mammon

He did not expect for any kind of surprise today

But tadah

He is now face to face with your phone, scrolling through your gallery finding shit about your obsession with the avatar of greed, heck he even found edits that was undeniably sloppy

He just wanted to take pictures using your phone, with your permission of course, completely forgeting the possibility of him finding your secret stash

"MC"

"Yeah?" you answer to his call and stared at his direction

When you came face to face, you were quick to realize why he was having such an unreadable expression on his face

You dashed towards his side, cupping his face, making him look at you

"Mams, it's not what you think, i really love you" you blurted as fast as you could

"You love me?" he said, still dazed

"Yeah, even though your a tsundere who doesn't want to hold my hand in public and never gives me a kiss if your brothers are present, seriously why do you never kiss m-"

"Why did you start complaining"

".... Oh right.... anyways i love you, i really do, and yes i may have a little obsession about the avatar of greed but i really love you cause you're you"

"i-i luv y-you too" he stuttered, tomato faced, his face still in your hands "and i don't mind if you obsess about me, i mean I'm the great mammon after all of course you can't h-"

You cut him off by toppling him in a hug having the most stupidest grin that just screams "no take backs ok"

The avatar of greed was given a truckload worth of affection from that day forth.

The demon can't help but melt when your affection level become just as tall as dia's d*ck

Mammon thought that your affection would last for only a few days but boy he was so wrong

This was your chance to openly worship the actual avatar and you were certainly not dumb as to not take the opportunity

"MC"

"Yes"

"We're in public"

"Yeah so"

"Could you stop throwing flowers like a flower girl in a wedding to me" he said wanting to hide his whole being

Leviathan

It was a dumb mistake on your part

Levi was kicked out from the seven brothers group chat by lucifer because he decided to spam it with messages asking mammon to pay him back

The oldest kicked him out of the gc and asked him to calm down

After a good 30 mins, levi was calm and asked you to add him back to the gc

Your dumb ass accidentally added him to the wrong gc

You were rushing to add him not noticing your mistake since you were in a hurry to race beel in eating the burgers

While you were busy eating, leviathan is now face to face with a gc that is highly suspicious just by it's group name

" All Hail Leviathan, step on me ugh"

Whoever decided on that group name needs therapy

Levi was scared and curious, curiosity wins, so he opened the chat, scrolled up and saw every bit of your obsession

The chat had more than a hundred members, grouped together for one objective :Worshipping the avatar of envy

With a lot of scrolling, he came to know that you were already obsessed with the avatar of envy even before you came to the devildom

He was glancing between you who were struggling to take another bite and his phone, making a face that is borderline unreadable

You felt your boyfriend's stare, so you decided to ask him what's up though your full mouth

Levi not really able to come up with anything to say just opted to raise his phone and display his screen in front of you

Your eyes scanned what was on his screen and was quick to spit out the food when you red the group name

His phone was covered in chewed burgers and you were ready to babble an explanation when one of those pieces of burgers decided to choke you

Still choking, you were babbling an explanation, though you just sounded like a dying chicken

Beel and Levi quickly came to your rescue, making you cough out the burger piece and offered you a glass of water

After that ordeal, you dragged levi somewhere and started explaining

"MC, slow down"

"but levi, i really love you, it's fine if you find it weird and creepy but pls don't doubt my love for you"

"i-"

"LEVIATHAN, I REALLY REALLY LOVE YOU" you shouted, shaking the avatar vigorously

"MC calm down for a second" levi halted your actions and quickly said that he was just shocked, he also has an obsession with ruri chan so he understands

You quickly calmed down knowing your boyfriend was not gonna leave you anytime soon

"Also, whoever chose that group name needs therapy" levi stated

" Really? Then wanna go with me?"

"where to?"

"to therapy, hehe" you beamed

A/N: I need therapy😩, @irlswampy here's your request sorry this took way too long since exams just ended yesterday. I only did the older ones this time but I'll do the rest and I'll tag you.. Thank u for requesting mwahhh❤️

Masterlist🌻

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bokutoslittlebird · 3 years

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In Your Eyes

Bokuto Kōtarō x Chubby!Reader

Author’s Note : There are some dark things in here and if you feel suicidal please do not keep it bottled in. It’s not healthy and needs to be addressed. The really bad stuff isn’t until the middle (right before the smut, basically), so be warned! That’s where the suicidal stuff is and like I said, if you do any of this or feel suicidal please seek professional help because it’s not worth keeping unhealthy feelings inside ; If you are wondering why Bokuto’s obsessed with licking and biting in this, I have been rereading a doujin where Bokuto does that and, well, it’s hot ; I swear this would not have taken me so long if I didn’t keep crying while writing it omg I would be dead if I had a shot every time I had to stop writing so I could wipe my tears and snot. This is why I don’t like to read or write angst but wow was that therapeutic.

Warnings: angst, fat shaming, use of the word “pig”, body dysmorphia (inability to look in a mirror), vomit, suicidal tendencies/intention (via overdose) + implied past actions alcohol, soft!dom Bokuto, choking, creampie(s), mating press+doggy style, licking and biting, facesitting

The cheers of the crowd erupted as the whistle blew. Once again, the MSBY Black Jackals had won. This match was against the Red Falcons, another team in the V.1 division. It was a close call, but Hinata managed to break the deuce with his monstrous quick attack and seal the set with their victory.

The team was jumping and bouncing, giving out high fives as they did. Of course, they had to shake hands with the Adlers, bowing to the audience and thanking them for their support. When Bokuto did his classic ‘Bokuto Beam’ move towards the audience, you could hear the girls squealing and giggling. It isn’t like they didn’t do the same when Atsumu or Hinata waved to them, but it hit you different. After all, they were beautiful in your eyes, slim and flawless.

Oh, yes. You’re the MSBY Black Jackal’s manager, being a classmate of Hinata in his second and third year (as in you tutored him and helped manage the volleyball club with Yachi). Hinata was your first friend, which kind of sounds pathetic. It was, if you were being honest with yourself. Being heavier than the average girl at your school subjected you to bullying and pranks that ended with you crying until you threw up. Hinata never made you feel like that, though. He always made sure you were comfortable and every member of the club at Karasuno treated you like an angel. You ended up applying to be the MSBY manager when Hinata asked, saying they needed a manager and wondered if you could apply. Well, it was either that or finding a job at the circus, as your family would sneer at you. Truly, Hinata was the first to accept you.

Once you got the job, it was like being back at Karasuno, honestly. Everyone was friendly and treated you no differently than they would treat others. However, you wished one of them would treat you differently.

Bokuto.

He was the ace of the team, a goofy fella that could make anyone smile. Including you. Aside from Hinata, he made you feel accepted and made you forget about any woes and horrid thoughts you were facing. He didn’t know about them like Hinata did, but you were sure he’d treat you different if he knew.

Once everything was packed up, you and the coach headed out, the team not too far behind you.

“Shōyō-kun, that was one of yer best sets yet!” Atsumu cheerily piped up, walking behind Hinata. Hinata was right beside you, as he always was.

“I’m glad you think so! I don’t know if we can surprise the Adlers next time, though. Kageyama still knows my tricks,” he huffed as he finished his statement, putting his hair down so he could mock Kageyama. You giggled at his antics.

“Alright, change up and meet at the bus in 10 minutes, let’s go!” Coach commanded. Each member voiced their acquiescence. You decided to use this opportunity to go to the bathroom. After all, their match lasted almost an hour, if not more.

In the restrooms, you were almost done when you heard a bunch of girls giggling as they entered. Instead of leaving, you stayed in place, waiting for them to go.

You wish you hadn’t.

“Gosh, those boys are so attractive!” One of them said. Two voices agreed.

“Have you seen Atsumu and Kageyama? They’re both so hot!”

“I was too focused on that number 12,” oh no, “Bokuto, I think? He’s a good looking man, bet he has the stamina of a god, too,”

“Yeah, it’s a shame their brand is ruined by that mascot of theirs.” What?

“Mascot? Oh! You mean the pig? Yeah, she does put a damper on everything, doesn’t she? Imagine being that attractive and having that thing follow you around!” The girl cackled, her friends following suit. You felt your stomach drop, tears springing in the corner of your eyes as you listened to them.

It was easy to forget you were different when you with the team since they made you feel normal, but that didn’t mean others wouldn’t notice you.

The girls eventually left, the door slamming shut behind them. Whether they came in there to do makeup or just talk shit about you knowing you were in there didn’t matter. Not when you were crumpled up on the floor as sobs wracked your frame. Life sucks.

It’s not like you didn’t try! That’s the other thing! You try to lose weight and nothing happens, exercising doesn’t do much and diets are practically useless. You used to go to the gym, but stopped when you kept getting stares. You also used to run with Hinata in the mornings, but since he was so much faster than you, you stopped. What’s the point if you’re panting and breathless after a minute while he’s still going strong after 30 minutes? It felt like nothing would ever help.

A buzzing interrupted your crying fest, you sniffling as you wipe away the tears and look at the screen. It’s from the groupchat, Hinata asking if you’re okay and they were all at the bus. You typed back a quick ‘K’ and got up. The best you could hope for was nobody would point out the red eyes and the sniffling.

Hinata knew of your troubles, being there for you when you broke down in school more often than not. When you confided that he was the first person you felt comfortable with, it broke him. Seeing you had bottled up your emotions because nobody bothered to listen or care, it made him want to include you in his life. He would invite you over for dinner and his sister would excitedly talk to you, never making you feel uncomfortable. When he heard that you were in Osaka, he immediately called you up about being the MSBY manager.

He also knew of your crush on Bokuto. It was obvious to him, with how you looked at the ace with longing. Hinata even encouraged you to confess, but that was quickly dismissed when you told Hinata how you felt like Bokuto deserved better than someone like you. Bokuto was muscular, attractive, and charming — in your eyes, he deserved to be with someone his equal. That did not mean you. Hinata knew of your troubles, but he also knew of Bokuto’s. Bokuto has a crush on you, too, finding himself more accepted with you around. Contrary to the ace’s personality, he was insecure in a lot of things. He wasn’t very smart, which was often pointed out by others. He knew when someone was upset, though, so he always knew he needed to make you feel better.

Once you arrived at the bus, Hinata greeted you as everyone else had boarded. “What’s wrong?”

“The same old thing, you know,” you sniffle, your voice cracking as you remember the hateful words. Hinata’s face soured as you said those words. Back in high school, he would sit down and cry with you. Now, he was tired of you still being picked on as an adult.

“Immature, that’s what they are. Come on, we’re gonna stop by that restaurant you love.” Oh great, food. You may have been starving when the match ended, but after the incident, you just wanted to go home and cry. You numbly nodded and followed Hinata onto the bus. The coach didn’t bother pointing out anything, but he sent you a sad look when he noticed the red eyes on you. You sadly smiled and continued to your seat, behind the coach as the bus started to move. Curling into your jacket, you tried to think of something else.

The restaurant was a disaster. Everyone had been excited and gotten off the bus when a bunch of fangirls came up to them. You had just smiled and shook your head, feeling better already. At least, you had been until the girls noticed you and gave you looks of disgust. It was short lived, their attention turning back to the boys, so you briskly walked off, into the restaurant, away from the crowd. It took almost 5 minutes for the girls to leave, but you refused to eat anything other than a salad and drink water. Even then, you excused yourself to the restroom to take a break, crying and attempting to force yourself to throw up. Once home, you locked the front door and let your emotions spill out. Crying and screaming was common, so that’s what you did. Then came the process — getting rid of any reflective surface. Turning off the lights, turning on the tv, covering the mirrors with sheets, closing the blinds, shutting out any possibility of looking at yourself. Even with nobody around, those words and looks stuck and struck deep, you eventually curling into yourself on your bed as you cried yourself to sleep.

The next day came, your alarm ringing and the sound bouncing off the walls. You turned it off, completely turning off your phone. Instead of dealing with alarms and people, you’d suffer alone behind the comfort of your home.

The team was worried, you were never late. Bokuto was more pouty than normal, your cheerful greeting missing from his morning and his bear hug. Atsumu also missed your cheerful greeting, asking Hinata if he knew of anything. When Hinata said he did not, he texted and called you, receiving no answer.

Okay, then he’d go to you.

Hinata had stayed at your apartment before, spending the night or just to hang out. Sometimes he brings you food and snacks when you need it, or he just checks on you. He has a spare key in case of anything and he’s glad he does when the door’s locked with no answer. He calls you once more time, knocking until he hears something. It’s faint, but it sounds like movement. So, you’re awake. But not answering the door. Sighing, he unlocks the door.

The apartment is not surprising to him, the windows covered and reflective surfaces covered. He was afraid of this, but he continues on. When he reaches your room, he hears more sniffling and crying. “[Y/N]?”

“Leave me be, Shōyō,”

“[Y/N], please. The team misses you,”

“Fuck off. I’m a charity case to them, I know it. Why else would they keep me around? I should just wallow away,” your voice sounds tired, the thought of the boys sticking with you out of pity a common thought you’ve had.

A thought that isn’t true, but breaks Hinata’s heart. “You know that’s not true. Everyone loves you! Even Bokuto,”

“Shōyō, shut up. Empty words do nothing. Maybe it’d be better if I just... stayed here. Maybe I should just end the misery,”

“Do not. Talk like that. Please.” Hinata’s voice cracks with each word. He knew you were bad, but you could pretend like everything was fine. He should’ve known the harsh treatment yesterday would affect you like this. He should’ve spent the night with you when you ordered a salad and a water. He should’ve told the coach or Meian when you went to the bathroom for 10 minutes that you were trying to throw up. Your lie of there being a line was obvious, a common excuse after a long time away. Hinata felt his chest tighten as he realized you didn’t answer him. “I’m getting Bokuto.”

“Shōyō! Don’t you dare!” Your screams do nothing as he basically runs out your apartment, you flinging the door open to see him gone. You start crying more, afraid that Bokuto will see just how pathetic you are. If he ever looked at you with disgust, the way everyone else does, you don’t know if you could continue on with your life.

Maybe it’d be better that way.

Bokuto doesn’t really know what’s going on, one moment he’s stretching and the next he’s running to the train station with Hinata’s words repeating over and over again.

‘[Y/N] needs you’

Bokuto’s first thought immediately went into the gutters, a blush coating his cheeks until Hinata continued.

‘I think she’s in trouble’

With those two sentences, Bokuto ran off, forgetting his bag and just taking his phone with him. He only needed his phone, really. Strange stares from the public didn’t bother him, he knows he’s still wearing his practice clothes and his knee pads, the material looking like leggings. He made it to the train station before it left, getting on and calling Hinata back.

“Bokuto?”

“I’m on the train, is everything okay?” He was panting, the train station being a bit away from the practice gym. He didn’t even bother sitting, just standing beside the doors.

“I don’t know. She’s.. She’s in a bad place. She won’t listen to me, but she’ll listen to you,” Hinata’s words are slightly muffled, sniffling accompanying his sentence. The words make Bokuto’s chest tighten.

“I don’t know what I can do, you’re her best friend. What could I do?”

“She’s in love with you. Has been for a while, actually. I know you can help her where I can’t. Just — I’ll give you her apartment key when you get to the station. Once I do, please go to her. Please,”

“I—“ Bokuto’s eyes are wide, his face definitely pink now. He’s still worried about you, but the idea of you actually liking him — no, loving him the same way he loves you, it makes him giddy. It gives him the push he needs to make it to you.

As soon as the doors open, there’s Hinata, holding a key ring for him to take. Bokuto doesn’t hesitate, a quick nod in Hinata’s direction before he rushes off to your apartment complex. All of the boys have been to your apartment before, but Bokuto and Hinata are the only ones who know the way to the place. Bokuto has gotten a bit drunk before and ended up crashing at your place, as well as just staying there when practices run late since his place is the farthest away from their practice gym.

Arriving at the apartment, he slides the key in and turns the knob, momentarily confused at the sheets covering your glass coffee table and the TV, but he continues in. He knocks on your bedroom door. “[Y/N]? Are you in here?” When he gets no response, he freaks out. Turning the knob, he notices you’re not in there, but there are more sheets covering things, as well as the blinds being shut. Even more confused, he turns back to the hallway and notices the bathroom door is closed. Fear strikes him as he thinks he knows why you’re not answering — he hopes he’s wrong.

When he opens the door, he realizes he was partially right. With a bottle of wine pressed to your lips, an empty pill bottle in one hand, your eyes wide as Bokuto’s golden eyes met yours. A brief moment of anger flashed across his face before you were forced over the toilet, his thick fingers going down your throat.

“Shtap!” Your muffled voice comes out, gagging around his fingers as he attempts to activate your gag reflex. He doesn’t stop, your squirming easily quelled against his strong grip on your arms pinning them back. You feel the bile rise and then you’re expelling the contents of your stomach into the toilet, coughing and sputtering as the painkillers you just took are now emptied into the porcelain bowl. Bokuto doesn’t let go of you as you cry, trying to get out of his hold.

He doesn’t know what he should bring up first, the fact Hinata called him over or the fact he caught you in the middle of a suicide attempt. You’re screaming and telling him to get off of you, but he instead holds you closer, your sobs fading as tears spill out of his own eyes, staining the hoodie you’re in. “Why would you do that?” He whispers.

You don’t know how to respond to that, instead choosing the phrase, “why not?” His face scrunches up and you don’t know if he’s in pain or angry as he shakes you.

“Why would you do that?! Don’t you know how many people would be distraught over you? Hinata would be inconsolable! Who would TsumTsum and I joke with? Did you even think about that? Did you think about me?” His voice is loud and it makes you cry harder, the weight of his words hitting deep. Bokuto’s been there for you through a lot and you’ve been facing all your problems on your own. “You can’t just do that! That’s selfish!”

“Why would it matter, Bo? What’s the point? I can’t face myself let alone face my feelings! Why not just stop hurting?” You’re both crying, him holding onto you tightly as you dry heave a bit, a stinging in the back of your throat and an arrow in your heart.

“Why can’t you face your feelings? You have Hinata and me!” Before you can tell him something else, he presses his lips to your forehead. You freeze. “I don’t know what I’d do if you left me. I don’t think I could live without you,” He dryly chuckles, tears still streaking down his face. You hiccup and look down, afraid to face him.

“You don’t mean that. You’re trying to make me feel better, I know. Just be honest with your feelings. I’m already low enough, no reason to keep up appearances,” more tears come out as you try to not break into another fit. Bokuto would never look at you the same you looked at him, especially not after seeing you like this. You couldn’t blame him, you look like a mess in your old sweatpants and the old hoodie that felt too tight even if it was one of the largest sizes you could find. Your hair is no better, hasn’t been brushed and you’ve been in bed for a while.

“Hinata said you loved me—“

“Stop,”

“So I came because he said he was worried—“

“You don’t need to say it,”

“If I had been a second later—“

“Stop it, please,”

“I wouldn’t have been able to tell you my feelings—“

“Please, don’t,” you cover your face, tears blurring your vision anyways. Bokuto removes your hands, looking into your eyes. His own are full of warmth and love, not disgust or regret. It makes you cry more, a horrible wail as you dive into his chest. He laughs as his arms wrap around you, comforting in these dark moments.

“I love you, you know? I have for a while,”

“Why? What do you see in me? What could I possibly have to attract you? I’m not—“

“Don’t say it. Don’t say ‘I’m not like other girls’, because everyone’s different. You make me want to be a better man, you make me excited for each new day. Nobody can compare to you,”

“I can’t.. I’m sorry, I can’t trust you. I’ve— I’ve been made fun of for too long, I want to trust you, I want to love you, I want to be with you, but I don’t know if my heart can take another one,”

“Another— what?”

“It’s a long story, I don’t want to bore you,”

“Baby, I’m not going anywhere,” he nuzzles your cheek, more tears spilling out as your chest tightens with love.

You decided to explain to him what happened in the past and how you trusted Hinata. Bokuto brought you to your room and made you some tea, brought a bottle of water, and also made you a snack. The thought of eating made you feel sick, but a pouty buff man had you slowly nibbling on the piece of toast. You hadn’t eaten since dinner the previous day, so you wanted to inhale it, but you didn’t think you could stomach it.

After explaining everything to Bokuto, you tried to laugh it off, saying it wasn’t a big deal, but he refused to accept that. A quick call to Hinata to let him know you were okay and that Bokuto would be taking a day off was the next step, letting Bokuto stay with you for the rest of the day. He didn’t want to leave you alone, the fear of almost losing you still making his heart race in a bad way. Even as you just scrolled through InstaGram on your phone, he worried if he left you’d go back to the dark headspace. He couldn’t stop it, but he figured he could prevent it.

The first thing to change your mood is get you in the shower.

When he bounced back into your room, you looked at him from your position. You looked exhausted, the toast only half eaten but the glass was empty. Bokuto shook his head and clicked his tongue. “You need to refresh yourself. Time to take a shower!”

“What are you, my dad? If you want me to do it then make me,” You muttered, snuggling back under the covers. Bokuto closed his eyes and sighed, trying to not say anything sexual.

“I will throw you over my shoulder and into the bathroom. Don’t underestimate me, [Y/N],” the bed dips as he sits on the edge. “I’ll strip you down and wash you if I have to,”

“Why are you so forceful? Damn,” you made it sound like a bad thing, but you were smiling. “Fine, I’ll shower. You don’t gotta wash me, I’m not a baby,”

“But you’re my baby?” He sounded so confused, you freezing half out of the bed. Clearing your throat, you continued.

“Uh, sure. Are you planning on leaving soon? Or..”

“Nope! I’m staying over. I’ll change the sheets while you shower, too!”

“Oh, okay,” you say, numbly getting up to get clothes. With the lack of clean clothes, you have a few shirts and some pajama pants, but your stomach twists as you realize why they’re clean. They don’t fit as nicely as the other clothes, so you face two options: reuse the hoodie you’re wearing or face the humiliation of putting on a tight shirt. Thinking of the restriction, you decide the hoodie would be best. A large pair of pajama pants and a pair of panties is all you take, but Bokuto notices the lack of clothes.

“Are you just changing your pants? You’re showering, right?” Hes rifling through his bag, planning on changing out his practice clothes while you’re in the shower. He doesn’t want to get your clean sheets dirty, after all.

“Um, I’m out of shirts, so.. I’ll just reuse the hoodie,” you shrug, not seeing a problem. His eyes light up as he holds a finger up, digging through his bag once more. Apparently, Hinata dropped it off while you were taking a nap, all that crying had exhausted you. Bokuto smiles brightly as he pulls out his own hoodie, the black hoodie with the golden MSBY brand and the Black Jackal claws. “I don’t think—“

“I’ve been dreaming of you in my hoodie for some time, so this is a perfect opportunity! I’d prefer you to wear this,”

“Uh, I’m pretty big, Bokuto. I don’t think it’ll fit, if I’m being honest,” you look down at the ground, the disgust from earlier rising in your chest. Bokuto just tilts his head to the side.

“I think it’ll fit. It’s pretty big on me, so it’ll fit. If it doesn’t, let me know. I’ll get you something else,” he just shrugs, holding out the hoodie. His name is on the back and in a way, it feels like he’s marking his territory. You take it, thanking him as you head towards the bathroom. If it didn’t fit, you didn’t know what you’d do.

When you finished washing up, you put on the clothes. As big as Bokuto was, you still didn’t expect the hoodie to fit. When it slid on easily, you were highly surprised, but also it took you a moment to collect yourself. Seeing you in his hoodie was something out of your wildest dreams, him even telling you he’s fantasized about it making your body hotter than it should be. You had to calm yourself down before exiting the bathroom, entering the bedroom to see him lying on the bed in sweatpants. That’s it.

“Where the hell are your clothes?!” You cover your face, spreading your fingers a bit to see him stand up excitedly.

“You look so good in my hoodie!” He hugged you tightly, lifting you up a bit.

“Don’t pick me up, put on a shirt!” The only thing separating your skin from his was the hoodie which, well, wasn’t very thick. The zipper itself was as high as it could go but still felt too low.

“Why? Don’t I look good? Are you uncomfortable?”

“Yes, you look good and I’m uncomfortable. This is just a weird situation,” you try to explain... as if you had a shred of dignity left. The laptop propped open with the opening of your favorite movie caught your attention. “Are you gonna watch a movie?”

“We’re gonna watch it! To make you feel better, of course!” He seemed so proud of himself, standing with his fists on his hips as he smiled. You shook your head, rolling your eyes.

“Okay, then. Do you want snacks?”

“Snacks?!”

After getting snacks for the movie, to which he fed you some while you fed him, you ended up falling asleep as you watched the movie. It was nice and warm under the covers and Bokuto’s body heat right next to you helped to lull you to sleep. He didn’t seem to notice you falling asleep until your head hit his shoulder, eyes closed as you peacefully slept. After pressing a kiss to your forehead, he closed to laptop and got comfortable under the sheets. The worry of him losing you was still there, but he kept his arms around you tightly in case it was a dream. Like you, he hoped it wasn’t.

Waking up wasn’t that bad, an urge to quench your dry throat a common thing to wake up to. What wasn’t common, however, was the thing poking your butt. Now fully awake, you tried to shoot up in bed to see what was going on but Bokuto’s arms held you down. It was then you realized what was poking you. Attempting to get his arms off of you was a hard feat, trying to squeeze out of the grip when he moaned. You froze and looked at his face, still asleep. Attempting to move again, he let out another one. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out.

He was having a wet dream. In your bed. Beside you.

Your immediate thought was who? Your next thought was me? You dismissed that idea, rolling your eyes as if that could happen. Well, until your name came past his lips. You were surprised to hear it, even if he showed and attempted to prove his feelings for you. Him dreaming of you subconsciously? It gave you confidence.

Enough confidence to wake him up and let him continue his dream in reality? No.

But, you didn’t think you’d have another dark episode anytime soon. He didn’t seem to relent his grip on your body, so you dealt with it, staring at the wall in the dark as he continued his noises. Well, at least until he bucked his hips. You gasped as he did, him waking up to your noise. “You ‘kay? Somethin’ wrong?”

Wide eyes looked at him, before glancing down and flickering back up. He follows your eyes and his face goes red. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but the moonlight coming in from the uncovered window illuminates enough. “I am so sorry, I’ll le—“

“Why?” You can’t stop yourself from asking, immediately smacking your forehead. He’s a bit confused from your actions, but you continue. “Um, I’d, uh- I’d like to know what you dreaming about.” Confidence? Yeah, right. You’re practically shaking from the fear of his answer. Of course, it was your name but you could’ve heard wrong, right? Yeah, you—

“My boner speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” Does he have shame? You just look at him so exasperated as he just stares at you, not too sure what you were expecting. “Or do you not know?”

“I— Okay. Was it me?”

“Who... who else would it be?”

“Oh, okay. Why?” You’re both so confused, you not understanding the appeal while he’s not understanding why it’s so weird. Or confusing.

“Why not? I’m in the bed with my girlfriend, longtime crush, who I find extremely attractive? Is this too much? Is it wrong for me to, um, wanna do that? Or dream about it?” No shame!

“I’m still having problems seeing things from your perspective, but okay. Still cannot see the appealing side of me, so it’s just... it’s weird for me to actually realize you like that. You actually,” you gulp, “like me,”

“I’ll say it as many times as I need to, [Y/N]. You’re perfect in my eyes. I want you to see that in your eyes, too,”

“I cannot, if ever, do that. Sorry,” you just shrug, going back to lay down. It isn’t long until he’s straddling you. “What are you doing?”

“I want to make you see things how I do. You gave me this,” he gestured to the bulge in his sweatpants. Looking at it too long scares you, the size scaring you more. “I want you,”

“Oh my god, I’m being dead serious now: you are not gonna like what you see. I’m not attractive, Bo,”

“Let me be the judge of that, hm?” It’s the only thing he says, but you hesitantly nod. He smiles and as much as you want to enjoy it, you’re still shaking. You have no idea what’s coming next, you don’t know what he’s gonna do once he sees what’s underneath and it scares you. So badly. His hands go underneath your—his hoodie, running over your skin. “If you’re scared, I can stop. I don’t want to push you into anything,”

“It’s not that, I just can’t see what you see. But I want to. I want to see myself in your eyes, if you can do that,”

“All you gotta do is give me a signal if you want me to stop. I’ll try my best but you’re gonna have to relax, baby,” he has no idea what his words are doing to you. You just nod as he smiles, leaning down to kiss your forehead. He isn’t rough and excited, but rather gentle and soothing. Hands running under the hoodie eventually go up to the zipper, slowly pulling it down. It’s a small thing, but you notice his eyes flickering to your face for any sign of distress. Evening your breathing, you let him completely pull the zipper down as your skin is completely bare to him. You hide your face in shame, ready to apologize and have a million excuses lined up, but he doesn’t let that happen when he starts licking your chest.

“Oh!” Your hands thread through his hair, softer than you expected as it barely brushes against your skin. His eyes are still on you, your fingers moving his strands away so he could clearly see you and you, him. The way his predatory gaze latches onto your face has heat pooling between your legs, rubbing them together to create some kind of friction. Keeping his tongue connected to your skin, his eyes on yours, he moves onto one of your breasts. Popping your nipple into his mouth, he swirls the perked nipple in his mouth as his hand tweaks your other nipple. You’re panting, your head is thrown back as he continues. Soon enough, just rolling your nipples in between his fingers is not enough.

Gathering spit in his mouth, he lets it dribble onto your skin. It’s warm and slick, when he smears it across your other breast as goes back to tweaking your nipples. You look down at what he’s doing only to find him grinning devilishly at you. He then goes down to your stomach, biting into the flesh there. “Bokuto!”

“What? I just wanna taste you,” he shrugs, before licking the area he bit. He has a lot of spit, too, sucking into your flesh and leaving behind a bite mark and his saliva. It’s.. kind of gross, but hot. When he comes back up to your face, he pushes his lips against yours so forcefully that you’re reeling back, mouth opening as he slips his tongue in. It’s a deep, passionate kiss as he runs his hands over your body, squeezing anything he can as he slips his fingers into your pants. “May I?”

“Of course.” Once he has the okay, he moves back down, occasionally leaving love bites as he does. Pulling down your pants, he finds himself face to face with your damp panties. You don’t have time to get embarrassed, however, when he sticks his nose into your crotch and licks the fabric. “What is up with you and licking?” You giggle, finding humor in it. He just pops back up, shrugging. You giggle again, throwing your head back in the pillows. He goes to pull down your panties, sliding them down your legs until they’re completely off. Except for his hoodie, you’re completely naked.

Now if only you could have his cum in you, then would his wet dream be complete. However, there was one more thing he’s always wanted to try, but he’s worried you’ll be against it. “Babe?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No! No! Nothing’s wrong!” He hates how your mind immediately goes negative. Your shoulders relax and your wide eyes slowly lessen as you realize nothing wrong, yet. “Um, can you sit on my face?”

“Bokuto, I don’t-“

“C’mon, please? I’ve always wanted to try it! Especially between them delicious thick thighs of yours,” he then licked his lips with a resounding moan. Although embarrassed, you roll your eyes.

“If I’m too heavy, let me know. I’ll— I’ll get off,” you prop yourself up on your hands, feeling his spit ooze down your body. “You have a lot of spit. Reminds me of how much you sweat,”

“I produce a lot of liquids, y’know?” If it wasn’t for his wiggling eyebrows as he widely grins, you would not know he meant it to be sexual.

“Lay down!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he excitedly gets on his back, his bulge much more prominent than before now that it’s just there. You can see it. You’re still hesitant, but eventually move to straddle his face. He helps you, easily maneuvering your dripping cunt over his mouth. With his strong hands, he forces you down on top of him to the point where your legs can’t keep you up. You attempt to get up, afraid you’re crushing him but he keeps you firmly planted on his face.

A growl erupts from his throat when he gets tired of your squirming, you halting your movements as you try to calm down. His thumbs run over the skin of your thighs to try and soothe you. And it works. You’re feeling lightheaded as he sucks and licks your cunt and probably makes it messier than it is. He brushes his teeth over your clit, sending shivers down your spine as you moan from the feeling. With a grin, you can tell, he gets to work on tongue fucking you as well as sucking on your clit. It isn’t long until your fingernails are digging into his abdomen as you let out a high moan as you come undone on his face. He moans himself, using his thick tongue to gather up every ounce you produced. He also makes a loud slurping noise as he cleans it up.

You move off of him, panting as you look at him. He looks absolutely blissed out, like he saw Nirvana and Heaven all at once. You smile at him, his own smile wide and proud. He immediately gets up, pushing hips lips against yours once more as he licks the corners of your mouth. He is quickly moving to pull down his sweatpants and boxers, but hesitates. “You sure you want this?”

“You aren’t allowed to stop now,” you giggle as he glows, pulling down his pants. Your eyes go wide as you realize how big he actually is. The bulge in his pants was nothing. It is scary, you wondering if it’ll fit.

“Everything okay? Do you— Do you not want it?” He sounds so sad, you immediately coo at him, forgetting the third leg he has.

“No, no, no baby! It’s just— you’re very big. I did not expect that. Just be gentle, yeah?”

“Of course!” Another kiss to your lips, this one more of a peck than a passionate open mouthed kiss. “Can you get on your hands and knees?” You listen to him, rolling over on your stomach before getting in position. This way, you don’t have to worry about seeing him and can focus on what he’s doing, so it’s better in a way. Really, Bokuto just wants to end the night with you on your back and he plans on having you shaking from multiple orgasms before it’s over. He guides his cock to your entrance, a shaky breath leave him as his tip brushes against your folds. You shiver yourself, feeling yourself about to cry, but you wait.

Once he pushes into you, the tears come out for a different reason. “I’m sorry, it’ll feel better in a moment,” he licks your cheek, nuzzling you. You nod as you try to relax, him continuing to push into you. It isn’t until he nudged against your cervix does he stop. Even then, he is still not completely in you. He focuses on evening his breathing, inhaling your shampooed hair. It’s hard to not blow his load so quickly, you squeezing him so tightly. You’re nice and snug, though, your walls eventually relaxing as he stays inside.

“You can— you can move, Bo,”

“Fuck yeah,” he grunts, pulling out only to roughly thrust into you. You lurch forward from the thrust, immediately dropping your mouth open to moan as he sets a steady pace. It’s not fast or slow, but he’s definitely rough with his thrusts. It’s the grunts that really do you in, the way his hands grab at your ass and hips, sounds of pleasure coming from his as sinks his cock into your cunt that has you tightening around him. With a mewl, you have another orgasm and he curses, a low “shit” coming out as he struggles to pull out. He leans down to put his mouth next to your ear, biting the shell as he continues. He doesn’t even break a sweat as he does, stilling himself deep inside you as he lets out a low groan, your eyes scrunch together as you whimper. His cum fills you up to the brim, his hips swiveling to make sure he’s all done.

Well, for that round.

You’re panting heavily as he leaves you, leaning back as he watches your legs shake. His cum oozes out of you, your cunt clenching as it makes more pour out. It’s a beautiful reality, but he wants more. You’re soon flipped onto your back as he is over you again, his hands on the back of your knees, pushing them up. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s not a very comfortable position, either. Confusion is etched in your face as he does, but his lidded eyes as he licks his lips tell you he’s not done. You’re exhausted, but he’s not.

He wastes no time in sinking himself back into you, his eyes focused on your face as you moan. His grin is almost evil, the way his lips stretch as he bottoms out inside you before roughly thrusting into you. It didn’t take long for another orgasm to start to buildup in you, your head thrown back as your back arches, your head turned to the side as he leans down to lick and bite your collarbone, sinking his teeth into the soft flesh. His hands find yours, intertwining his fingers with yours as he brings them up to your head. You focus on the way his arms flex, the muscles bulging with each thrusts as he puts every ounce of effort into the action. It really shows to how much he loves you and your body.

Even with all the marks on your body, even with all the places he’s touched and licked, that gnawing thought of you worrying nags him. The thought that you’ll still not know just how much he loves you. The thought that you’ll think it was a one time thing. He needs to know you know. He needs to know you’re seeing things in his perspective now. One hand leaves yours, it finding itself around your throat.

“Say my name,” he grunts, alternating his gaze between your face and his cock disappearing inside you. It’s something he’ll never get over. Maybe next time, he can record you two.

“B-Bo—“

“No, my given name. I want you to scream it,” his grip on your neck gets tighter, your walls tightening at the same time. He groans as he throws his head back, his thrusts slowing down as he drags his cock against your walls. “I want your neighbors to know who’s fucking you,”

“You, Kōtarō!” You loudly moan, humming in pleasure as he picks up the pace.

“Who’s making you feel this good? Who does your little cunt belong to?”

“God, you! It belongs to Kōtarō!” You scream, your eyes rolling back as his hands go back to under your knees, pushing them up to your chest. It’s hard to breathe, but you’re clamping down on his cock as a sheen of white forms around it, your slick dripping down your ass and down his balls. The last urge he needed to fuck you like an animal was that, you screaming his name. Your ands wrap around his neck, the material of his jacket rubbing against his thick neck as your nails take down his back. Hissing, he fucks you faster and harder, determination set to get you to one more orgasm. It doesn’t take long, your mouth hanging open as you come undone for one last time, him burying himself as far as he can as he spills another load into you. It’s heavy and fulfilling, but it’s wonderful. A wonderful feeling of being loved.

As you both come down from your highs, he gives you another sloppy kiss. Instead of pulling out, he released your legs and lays on his side, taking you with him.

“Shouldn’t we clean up?”

“That can wait. I don’t wanna leave quite yet,” he pants out, another sloppy kiss. Like he can’t get enough.

Really though, he can’t. He loves you too much

#haikyuu x reader #bokuto x reader #Mr. Kōtarō #bokuto smut #BB.Kinky #BB.Angst #Bokuto.Angst #Bokuto.Spice #tw.alcohol #tw.suicide mention #tw.blood #cw.food #tw.fat shaming #cw.razors #body dysmorphia #body dysmorphic disorder #tw.overdose #haikyuu smut

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baragakiscans · 4 years

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Firstly, sorry for losing the post to your ask! Tumblr shitty UI stuff happened and I accidentally deleted the draft TvT (they should make an option for asks to reappear if the draft answer got deleted or sth smh)

Secondly, IM SO SORRY FOR THE EXTREMELY LONG POST AAAAA

I tried to keep the explanations short like I did for Saraba (even that was pretty long) but then the more I tried the longer it became, and in the end what was supposed to be my take on like 2 pages of this book became this extremely long in-depth analysis of the entire book _(´ཀ`」 ∠)_ But I mean, I’ve agonised over the translations for this book for almost half a year and I have Lots of Feelings about it because GOD I LOVE THIS BOOK

Anyway, Makkura is another one of those books with a lot of hidden layers that can be unpacked from the story with multiple rereads. Unlike Saraba where some things were intentionally left open to interpretation (I think), though, this book is slightly more straightforward, and I’d like to offer my take on the story.

Long post and Makkura spoilers below the cut!

At the beginning of the story, Gintoki and Hijikata were already dating (secretly-but-not-so-secretly). They’ve clearly been dating for a while now; Hijikata coming over to Gintoki’s place to stay the night (though he’d usually be gone by morning), mayonnaise in the Yorozuya fridge, etc… Though their displays of affection were rather subdued, to the onlooker (and everyone else around them) these two idiots were so obviously crazy in love with each other 💕💕 However, there is something that seems a little… off about their relationship, and this something would have continued lurking in the shadows…

The beginning of the end…?

…Had Gintoki not lost all of his memories of his relationship with Hijikata. Gone was the man who would become agitated at the mere thought of his beloved going into danger; the man before Hijikata now barely knew him, and the thought of dating the Demon Vice Commander would never have crossed his mind.

Imagine waking up to find out that your boyfriend has forgotten all about his relationship with you and makes THIS face at the mere thought of shacking up with you

What Hijikata did next may seem illogical at first (and don’t get me wrong, it really is), but it makes a bit more sense once you realise what exactly was off about their relationship.

You see, Hijikata didn’t think that he was good enough for Gintoki.

If you’re familiar with Syaku’s works, you may have noticed a particular trope being rather common: Hijikata and/or Gintoki falling in love with the other, yet not taking the step forward because they were afraid of getting in the way of the other’s creed—to protect.

Looks familiar? ;)

In Makkura, they did manage to take that step forward (regardless of who made that step first), but even so, there’s always been a niggling doubt somewhere in the back of Hijikata’s mind that maybe—just maybe—Gintoki would be better off without him. Hijikata would do everything in his power to protect the Shinsengumi, and he knows that Gintoki would do the same to protect those he holds dear. It just didn’t occur to him that he was one of them, too. Instead, he was afraid of Gintoki straying from his path because of him.

Gintoki losing his memories was like a wake-up call to Hijikata, that his relationship with Gintoki was too good to be true—and if it will all come to an end eventually anyway, then he should be the one to pull the plug first, especially since the perfect opportunity to reset everything to a clean state has presented itself. He pretended that nothing happened between the two of them. He told Gintoki to “Forget about all this. Everything.” He tried to convince himself that he should make a clean break and completely remove himself from Gintoki’s life, and be content with merely watching from afar.

Maybe Hijikata thought that since he and Gintoki never confirmed their relationship, the people around them will just shrug it off, or won’t notice the change in behaviour. But needless to say, everyone around them immediately noticed that something was wrong. And they even had Hijikata’s inner thoughts all figured out.

The Shinsengumi members know their vice commander too well XD

Even Gintoki himself had managed to put two and two together, but he just couldn’t figure out why he fell in love with the man with whom he always fights like cats and dogs. And since Hijikata himself was so adamant on nothing happening, all he could do was watch as the man-who-is-apparently-his-lover-but-he-somehow-forgot told him to stay out of his way. That’s why, it’s up to everyone else to restore Gintoki’s memories and get these two idiots back together.

While the Yorozuya kids were scrambling to find the antidote, Hijikata opted to go down the slippery slope of self-abandonment by meeting the pervert Bakufu official despite knowing full well what might happen to him. He thought it was all for the sake of the Shinsengumi, but seeing Gintoki down the hallway jolted him back to his senses and made him realise just how wrong he was. He realised the reason why he was actually doing this—to see if Gintoki would come to his aid, to see if Gintoki was still the man he knows and love. He realised that he doesn’t want to give his body to anyone anymore—anyone else, that is. He realised just how truly madly deeply in love he was with Gintoki.

What indeed…

By the time he realised this, though, it already seemed too late; it didn’t seem like Gintoki was going to save him. So, he resolved to keep his memories of Gintoki as a happy dream, and was ready to succumb to despair—when Gintoki finally comes to the rescue! (Not sure if Yamazaki didn’t press the button on purpose here) Of course, Gintoki was pissed off that Hijikata would do something this reckless. So he told Hijikata, “You should treasure yourself more…” (BTW, the original Japanese really only had “You should _______ more…”, I had to fill in the blanks) That’s when Hijikata realised that he was right all along; Gintoki hasn’t changed, even without Hijikata’s memories. And that’s all he needed to know.

And over in this exhibit we have the exact moment when Gintoki fell in love all over again

Right when Gintoki was about to profess his love say something to Hijikata, the kids finally arrive with the antidote! And Sougo even figured out that Gintoki doesn’t really need the antidote anymore since he’s in back in love with Hijikata XD But of course Gintoki wants to remember. Of course he wants to remember all about his time together with the man he now knows he loves. He drinks the antidote—

Ohhhh boy shit’s about to go DOWN

—And we arrive at the emotional climax of the story. Gintoki’s furious—Of course he would be; his lover just tried to erase himself from his life, thinking that it was for his sake! Gintoki thought that Hijikata had underestimated him—in a way, he’s right; Hijikata had underestimated just how much Gintoki needs him. He knew that Gintoki loves him, but he also thought that Gintoki should forsake him for the sake of those he wants to protect.

That’s why Gintoki let Hijikata know just how much he means to him. He has already come to know all of him, so he can’t ever bring himself to let him go. That’s when Hijikata started to realise that he was wrong about Gintoki, and wrong about himself. He meant much more to Gintoki than he ever thought he did.

This led to the one exchange that I wrote out this entire analysis for—

Did I really write 1800 words just for this? Yes. Yes I did.

If Hijikata really meant so much to him, then does that mean Gintoki would have tried to erase himself from Hijikata’s world for his sake, too? Gintoki doesn’t think so, but that’s after everything that has happened so far. Who’s to say he wouldn’t do it if their positions really were reversed at the beginning of the story? They both know that, because they both hold on so dearly to the same beliefs, the same pride.

That led to Gintoki throwing the question back at Hijikata—does that mean Hijikata would fall in love with Gintoki again even without his memories, just like Gintoki did? In asking this, Gintoki was telling Hijikata that, even if he were to do the same, deep down, he would still want Hijikata to fall in love with him again. And that’s when Hijikata realised—it was the same for him, too.

At that point, the two of them came to the same conclusion—neither of them can live without the other anymore. Yet, even if their positions were reversed, they would still have done the same. And even if that were to happen, they would still arrive at this same conclusion. They both love the other too much to let go; yet, they both love the other so much that they’d be willing to let go. Now that they both know this, their bond has become truly unbreakable.

Hijikata’s reply was therefore an affirmation—

“Even so, you’d have done the same. Even so, I’ll still fall in love with you.”

That’s just the way both of them are.

And so, at the end of the story, we now have Gintoki who wants Hijikata to know just how much he loves him (maybe becoming more possessive in the process?), and Hijikata who now knows just how much Gintoki loves him, and has come to forgive himself for loving him. Their relationship is one full of contradictions, yet no matter what happens, they will both find their way back to the place where they belong—in (or should I say on?) each other’s arms.

Look at the how much love there is in Hijikata’s eyes just LOOK AT IT AAAAA

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Makkura is one of my top Ginhiji doujins of all time! I really really hope that my translation managed to do it justice, and I hope my ramblings were coherent enough TvT

If you’ve managed to read this far, do give Makkura a reread and you just might see it in a different light ;) Of course, my interpretation might be different from what Syaku intended to present, so feel free to come up with your own interpretations as well!

Also, halfway through writing this I found an analysis by @mugimarumaru over in the MRM comments section, so do check it out as well :>

Thank you for coming to my TED talk and hope you have a nice day~

(I wish I’d put in this much effort in my college essays)

- JJ

(P.S. The REAL question here: if their roles were reversed would that make it a Hijigin book 🤔🤔🤔)

#ask #syaku #meta

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discoursecatharsis · 4 years

Text

Below is a submission from someone who wishes to stay anonymous:

i’m kind of just writing this on the fly but idk i think….i should request this to be anon because even tho i don’t use tumblr anymore i can feel that my submission would attract antis

i’m naturally incredibly solitary and drifted away from fandom and shipping content near the end of my teen years simply because fandom stuff lost my interest as depression and whatnot intensified, but now i’m back and consuming such content as life becomes a lot easier for me, and just…. i really enjoy problematic content as a teen (and still do at 23 years old) and was super chill, but i feet like i was nearly brainwashed by anti rhetoric over the years that i’ve seen on social media and what good friends have said. But something in me hung on for dear life and after taking some time away from all of my friends to finish up college during this pand//emic and i’m just consuming content on a private twitter and seeing the stuff that’s like “yo antis are bad” I finally….got why I felt so upset seeing stuff that said antis are bad. Like something in me just didn’t sit right. It’s because I was suffering from a massive case of cognitive dissonance. And when I allowed myself to recognize that, I felt geniune freedom. That I was chaining myself down in order to avoid conflict and ridicule according to the oddly pure standards suddenly set up by netizens. Even when I mentally complained about seeing such content about “antis are bad” and considering it a pain I’d still treat myself to a n//onc//on doujin or inc*st or gu///ro or body fluids or some heartbreaking shit because I love "problematic content", but was trying to divorce the fact it was problematic from the morals and ethics that were being beaten into my brain by friends and twitter because my friends are all like “inc*st? und*ra*e? ewww eletric chair” because I wanted to appease them. Because I’m super kind, supportive, and sugary when I interact with others because I’m naturally a supportive, kind person and that doesn’t reflect my tastes and I don’t want to deal with someone feeling like I “betrayed” them for hiding that stuff. I’m nervous about how I’m soft, aesthetic flower mom-vibe support main with everyone I interact with, and that IS me, but me is also a problematic content-loving bdsm fanatic and not many people know that lmao. And I get nervous that me being into s/m will be some sort of ammo for why I like the fiction I do and that I’m some sort of liar. Hell, I’m even scared to even admit to a few people I’m into s/m because of the odd anti-bdsm sentiment going on as of late. I thought being able to not be vanilla was in. Like I’d be like “yeah!! gross for inc*st and shit hahaha” with friends watching them dunk on users while watching Toilet-bound Hanako-kun in private and being like “fuck they’re all so cute oh God Hanako….” I was even nervous to mention to my best friend of eight years (!!!!) that I was watching it because it’s also visually a treat because it’s like…obvious sh*ta bait. And I fuckin love it. Meanwhile I find it literally impossible to be into people younger than me irl, even if they’re a year younger, as I see them as babies who need to be protected and educated but I still feel terrified of being considered a creep for liking und//erag///e content but will fight a predator on sight irl and was even nearly groomed at 16 by a 22 year old from tumblr whose name and url I will never, ever forget. Hell, I felt justice knowing that I wasn’t alone in him being a fuckin creeper and years later after blocking him found a callout post on tumblr for him being a predator. I understand how it can be irl and will never condone it irl, but even then my brain just fries because anxiety. Because someone will still insist I’m a fuckin creep. And as someone who grew up during the Wild Wild West of shipping and fandoms when “don’t like, don’t read,” crack ships, and pwp were still referred to with citrus terms, I miss it? I’ve always missed it. I miss the fact that we could enjoy problematic content and know that it’s nice to enjoy such content in a medium that will never affect reality as much as people says it will. That it was ok to enjoy wild shit because we knew at the end of the day that we shouldn’t be stupid and mirror it irl. I miss when having a crush on a fictional character was ok, no matter the age. I’ve been into Riku from Kingdom Hearts before I could even multiply and now I’m sitting here writing research papers on the reasons why Hollywood’s racist. I’ve been into that boy for a long ass time. But he’ll never age at an irl rate and it still stresses me out because I’m scared to be open with that crush because he’s fictional and I’m scared that some anti will go “you’re an adult, get over him” when he was my fuckin sexual awakening lmao. I remember talking to my best friend about me having to even justify my crush on Joker from P//ersona 5 because he ages, but I don’t. Why do I have to suffer like this over some pixels on a screen? Like I’m at a crossroads because idk if i should be upfront with my best friend or just…enjoy such content on my private twitter and see what happens with the few people I’m mutuals with on it. Like problematic fiction is soothing to me, no matter the degree of problematic. I don’t know why, it just is. But idk how to relay that to my friends and I feel like I should just deal with the inevitable fact that I’ll weaken my bonds because I’m not a fountain of vanilla ice cream with sprinkles on top. But I want to embrace that again because even my earliest fuckin desires weren’t vanilla. Romantic? Sure. But vanilla? As if. idk i’m just…i haven’t touched fandom like that in nearly a decade and now that i’m back i just have so many feelings. my apologies for the novella.

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Thank you so much for sharing and submitting this. I sympathize with you reminiscing on how fandom was. I hope whatever decision you decide to make at your crossroads, that it’ll be a good, positive outcome! <3

#submission #anonymous #ask

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ryqoshay · 4 years

Text

How to Handle a Nico - Even Under a Love Curse, There’s No Way I Would Be Like This

Primary Pairing: NicoMaki Words: ~1.5k Rating: T Time Frame: Maki is in med school. Nico is working as an idol producer. They are living together as a couple, but not married yet. Story Arc: Stand Alone

Author’s Note: I must thank VNVdarkangel for help in giving a title to this chapter; I was honestly stumped. But this title gives it un certain anime’esque je ne sais quoi, if you will.

“Manga?” Maki asked, glancing over at the tablet her girlfriend was holding. “Haven’t seen you read that kind of stuff in a while.”

“Doujin.” Nico corrected, swiping to advance the page.

“Same difference?”

“In art style, sure, but not in publication.”

“Hrm… Hey, that girl looks like… me?”

Nico giggled.

“And why is she… What the heck?”

Nico laughed heartily.

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s my doujin, Maki-chan.”

“You drew a doujin?”

“Well, no, I actually commissioned it.” Nico amended. “And this is really just a proof of concept, not her finished product.”

“Her?”

“The artist I commissioned. She’s a former school idol, which is how I came across her work.” Nico explained. “One of her friends from that group works with Egao now.”

“Hrm…”

“She’s been drawing her own doujin for a little while now but hit a snag and decided to take a small hiatus. During that time, she opened commissions and I liked her work, so I got one. Uhm…” She scrolled through a folder. “Here it is.”

“You had her draw us from one of our old photoshoots?”

“Uh huh. Cute, isn’t it?” Nico grinned. “Brings back memories.”

“Yeah…” Maki studied the drawing on display. “I remember liking that set.”

“Anyway, the picture gave me some ideas, so I reached out to her again and asked if she’d be willing to work a bigger project.” Nico switched back to the doujin. “And this is what we came up with. Wanna read it?”

“Sure.” Maki accepted the tablet. It felt odd reading a story about a fanciful version of herself, but the artwork immediately pulled her in. “What the heck? ‘How to Handle a Maki’? I don’t get it. What kind of title is that?”

“A fitting one. Nico is left trying to figure out how to deal with Maki’s curse, after all.”

“Curse?”

“Sorry, spoilers…” Nico held up her hands apologetically.

Maki pursed her lips. For some reason, the name bugged her more than it probably should. Perhaps it was because it sounded familiar? But why would it be familiar? Odd…

“And Nozomi is in this too?” She asked after a few pages.

“Yup.” Nico confirmed. “And Eli. And Kotori. Umi, Rin and Hanayo have only been mentioned in name thus far, but they’ll probably appear later. I forget what her girlfriend had planned for Honoka.”

“Girlfriend?”

“The artist’s girlfriend is really into fantasy games and whatnot. She’s been a big help in coming up with ideas for worldbuilding, character design and plot points. There are a couple Easter egg jokes and references to gaming that were her suggestions.”

“I see.” Maki continued to read. “Wait, do I still think you’re younger than me?”

“Maybe?” Nico shrugged. “Not really sure how to take care of that just yet. Maybe it can just happen off panel at some point.”

“And one meal is all it took for me to become obsessed with your cooking?”

“Are you gonna deny that’s what happened in real life?”

Maki deadpanned at her girlfriend, earning a laugh.

“Well, maybe not just one…” The redhead tried to save face.

“Then definitely by the second.” The raven-haired girl decided.

“… Maybe…” Maki conceded.

“Nico knows how much Maki-chan loves her cooking.”

Well, there really was no denying that fact.

“Did they have coffee in medieval times?” Maki inquired a moment later.

“No idea.” Nico admitted. “But I know Maki-chan can’t face the day without it, I figured just alluding to it without naming it might work.”

“I suppose…” Maki furrowed her brow. “Are you trying to scam or cheat me?”

Nico blinked in confusion until she saw the page. “Nico is a professional saleswoman!” She huffed. “She would never cheat a customer. She knows Maki-chan can afford better gear than your average novice adventurer and she knows what upgrades will be most beneficial.”

“Also, what’s a grue?”

“An excuse to force players to bring light sources, I guess.” Nico shrugged. “That’s one of those gamer jokes I mentioned.”

“And the gazebo?”

“Another joke.”

“I see. And why does Kotori have a lion?”

“She’s a Beastmaster.”

“Ok, but again, why a lion?”

“Because she had one in the original photoshoot.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right, she did.” Maki’s memory was jogged a bit. “She was part of the focus pair, with Eli, right?”

Nico nodded. “And you were paired with Rin as the secondary.”

“Is that why I’m friends with her here?”

“Rin? Not really, I don’t think.” Nico shook her head. “I mean, yeah, you two are friends, but through Hanayo. I think they’ll appear in the next chapter and we’ll get to explore how you know each other better.”

Maki nodded and continued to read. “Say, why don’t you call the harpy what it is?”

“Because you don’t know what it is.”

“Yes, I do.” Maki furrowed her brow.

“I mean your character doesn’t”

“Why wouldn’t my fantasy character know what a harpy is when she lives in a fantasy world where they actually exist?”

“Because she was raised in the city and is only now becoming an adventurer.” Nico explained. “She’s not ignorant, she just knows stuff better suited for an urban life as opposed to someone out in the rural areas. Not much different than real life, right?”

“I suppose…” Maki reached the part she had seen earlier and frowned. Her girlfriend noticed and giggled. But upon seeing the next page, she sighed. “Ok, the glomping was one thing, but climbing into bed with you? After having barely known you a day?”

“Two days, I believe.” Nico pointed out, ignoring the deadpan stare directed at her. “And it’s because of the curse.”

“Yeah, but even under a love curse, there’s no way I would be like this.”

Nico smirked.

“What?”

“I should really record you drunk sometime.”

“I still…”

“Oh, c’mon, Maki-chan, I’ve even told you about your drunken clinginess before.”

“Mmm…”

“And your half-asleep clinginess.”

“…”

“And your…”

“Alright, alright, I get it…” Maki didn’t want to admit the memories that were swirling around in her head.

“I’ve always found it cute, by the way.” Nico pointed out.

“You’re not finding it cute here.”

Nico chuckled. “That’s because it isn’t real, it’s because you’re under an idol curse.”

“You mean a love curse.”

“An idol curse.”

Maki rolled her eyes. “Are you intentionally baiting me into making a snarky comment about idols?”

“Maybe.” Nico stuck out her tongue.

Maki sighed. “And let me guess, you’re going to have me be all embarrassed about it later.”

“Well that’s how Maki-chan is in real life. And a flustered Maki-chan is an adorable Maki-chan.”

As if on cue, Maki could feel heat in her cheeks. She really should be used to Nico’s teasing by now, but the older girl rarely failed to get a reaction out of her. And though she wasn’t fond of how predictable her reactions were, she couldn’t really fault Nico for seeking them. After all, Maki also loved Nico’s own flustered expressions.

“So,” Nico asked as the last page was reached “what did you think?”

“It was entertaining.” Maki admitted. “Was this posted online?”

“Not yet.” Nico shook her head. “She just sent this to me for approval. She hasn’t even posted it on her own site yet.”

“Hrm…”

Nico chuckled. “Don’t worry, anyone at the hospital who reads this kind of stuff will like it and won’t think you’re weird or anything.”

It never ceased to amaze Maki how well her girlfriend could read her.

“But we can keep it private if we want.” Nico added.

“No, it’s fine, I guess…” Maki decided. “And you said there was going to be another chapter?”

“Or Two. Or more. Depends on how many ideas we have.” Nico grinned. “Because you know we can’t leave things like this. We can’t let Maki-chan only love Nico because of a curse! It needs to be natural! Just like in real life.” She leaned over to nuzzle into her girlfriend’s side. “Although even if we’re trying to keep things realistic, we also can’t keep the readers waiting for years…”

Maki furrowed her brow as she realized what Nico meant. “I didn’t mean…”

“I know. I know” Nico interrupted, making dismissive motions with her free hand. “Maki-chan’s just a little romantically dense is all. And we figured things out eventually and got together and we’re all good now.” She turned her head and pushed herself up so she could plant a kiss on the redhead’s cheek.

“Uhm… You know it’s getting kind of late…” Maki said softly.

“Hmm?”

“Well, I have class in the morning and…”

Nico grinned. “Is Maki-chan hinting that she wants to climb into bed with Nico?”

“Maybe…”

Nico laughed. “Maki-chan is being unusually shy tonight. She has no trouble seducing Nico but is embarrassed to request a snuggle session?”

Maki pouted, earning more laughter.

“So, to bed it is.” Nico said, pushing herself up and off the couch. “But how about a bath first?” She turned to offer a hand to her girlfriend.

“Alright.” Maki agreed, accepting the help up before following Nico down the hall.

Author’s Notes Continued in Followup Post

#NicoMaki #Nishikino Maki #Yazawa Nico #How to Handle a Nico #Love Live #fanfic

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flyswhumpcenter · 5 years

Text

Bad Things Happen Bingo! The event where you send me requests according to this marvelous card! (Red cross is the completed prompt, character headshots are prompts I’ve already filled. I don’t have any request left, so feel free to send in suggestions for this card!).

Arma mulieremque cano.

I've been in a mood for heavy angst, so keep that in mind. Reader discretion is advised here. This was inspired by a two-page doujin my good friend Azure linked in our Discord server. I got intoigued, then got in a mood to make people suffer, and boom! this was born. hell yeah. Also my deathfics are shorter than my usual stuff, so I guess my heavy angst is to be consumed in a concentrated form? It felt weird to write and feels weird to backread, so I'm posting it now for the sake of gaining experience and showing a more daring side of my writing.

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An Oath is an Oath

Summary: ...so you should know better than swear two that contradict each other, especially during a war.

Fandom: Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Post-Timeskip) Ship: Ingrid/Sylvain (implied)

Wordcount: 1.5K words

Content Warnings: Depictions of violence, major character death

Event hosted by @badthingshappenbingo

AO3 version available here.

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I’ll never lose someone again, Ingrid had promised herself when she had gotten over most of her grief. I won’t let anyone kill someone dear to me ever again. I’ll stop them before they can.

Back then, she hadn’t had the powers to stop Glenn from meeting his undeserved demise. Years later, she had that power she had once lacked, hands strong enough to act on her will. She wouldn’t let herself taste powerlessness again she thought and swore, not now that she had become the warrior she wanted herself to turn into as she’d grow up.

But war is war. It tears people apart with no mercy, disregarding affections and feelings, until soldiers fighting for their life and their nation’s honour had their minds numbed and hearts changed into stone, having become soulless killing machines. No matter how many fairy tales of brave knights saving whom and what they loved she read and inserted herself into, it couldn’t change war into anything prettier than men and women killing each other for a greater cause.

And, no matter how much she tried to be the ideal warrior she had imagined Glenn to have been when he was still alive, Ingrid couldn’t deny the horrors of it as, firmly armed with her lance, she faced a very familiar face, wearing different colours and branding a different animal, the dreadful realization making itself known too quickly for her brain to even attempt ignoring.

She’d have to break her promise with her own two hands.

A bittersweet long time no see, huh graced her as she arrived to face the next unit in the war. She almost went mute as she realized she’d be fighting one of the people closest to her right at this instant; but she shook her head and made his smirk disappear.

“This is war,” she replied, “and you know what this means, don’t you?”

“Oh, I sure do.” His expression put on a coat of seriousness unlike anything she had quite seen from him. “I’m afraid this will be the last time we see each other.”

The pressure on his axe strengthened.

“I wish it wouldn’t have ended this way, Ingrid. We were friends.”

“I could say the same of you, Sylvain. I’m disappointed by the choices you’ve made in this conflict, yet wish we’d have fought for the same cause.”

“When haven’t I disappointed you anyway, huh?” He scoffed. “That was yesterday, though, and today is something else. We’re not friends anymore, are we? To say that I’ve missed you…”

His chit-chat was annoying to hear, nagging at her loyalty and sense of morale. He had always tried to escape inconvenient situations with not-so-beautiful words and purple prose she had only seen through.

“We’re merely soldiers fighting on different sides, now. Shall we begin? I don’t want to lose more time speaking to the enemy.”

The harsh tone in her voice sounded fake to her but seemed to have sounded convincing to him, as she could theorize from the way he rose his axe at her. She could read conflict on his face too, the dilemma neither of them wanted to face, yet had to in order to make their side win. That was war, after all, and they were only the tiniest part of it.

Ingrid’s heart wanted to fight against her lance and the way her wrist moved itself in swift moves to brandish her weapon of choice against the face of a man that, five years ago, she’d have protected from himself; but her mind was stronger, it had always been, and her mind was loyal to King Dimitri and the Blue Lions. Not her fault if Sylvain thought the grass was greener elsewhere.

Not her fault, not her fault if he was dumb, not her fault if he wasn’t loyal, not her fault if he was running after Goddess-knew-what, not her fault if he was going to die by her hands.

That was war and she couldn’t do anything about it, that was how things were and had always been; yet her eyes still squeezed shut as she made her mount delve down in his direction, white feathers blowing in the wind, her lance’s tip heading down, metal shining against the light of the sun, fingers trembling, hands clammy, eyes wet and will wavering with the wind blowing through her hair.

Forgive me, Goddess.

Her lance plunged with her horse.

Forgive me, Glenn.

A noise of flesh rupturing, of metal meeting metal, of hooves crushing the dirt and the leaves.

Forgive me, Sylvain.

She had to feel something warm splatter over her face and gliding down her armour to open them again, to dare face her deeds, face the feelings she hadn’t wanted to cultivate and scythe away without harvesting any fruit like you’d pick up rotting apples on the ground of the perishing acre.

I beg of you, please forgive me.

Her lance had slipped through a hole in his own armour, drippling in red as she got it out of his body, blood painting the grass behind them. He fell from his wyvern, who escaped the field as its knight had disappeared from its back, black wings vanishing away from her sight and under the sun.

Even as her fellow warriors pursued the fight, their cries echoing in the distance, she instructed her mount to land, getting down of it in a rush and kneeling next to whom had been more than just a foe to vanquish in a war that had almost numbed her sense of empathy, steel boots clinking against the ground, red and green printing onto it and dirtying its shine.

Without thinking more than a moment about it, Ingrid picked Sylvain in her arms, a quick glance examining the wound: right in the lung, most likely in-between the ribs, a fatal wound if left untreated properly. But she was no healer, no ally of him, merely a former friend who had had to kill her enemy in battle if she wanted to win and keep her life. It was expected of her not to do anything about it, to just let the course of things be, so why was she so reluctant to watch this, to do this?

There was nothing she could about it, so why was she on the verge of crying, of weeping like the young girl who had never had to kill someone with her two hands? Was her heart still this tender, this naïve? What had made her so sensitive, so emotional over doing what she had done countless times by now, in the span of five years? Was it the memories of their playing time, the bond they had previously shared, the promise she had made under the stars on one calm but sorrowful night?

“Should’ve seen it comin’…” He coughed out, blood dripping down from his mouth, lungs congesting. “You’ve always been better at fighting than me…”

“I trained while you were busy skirt-chasing,” she replied, calmly, trying to keep it together. It’d be a disgrace to her king and comrades if she started bawling in the middle of the battlefield for the fallen enemy.

“Still… I’m almost glad it’s you who killed me… At least, you were a worthy opponent…”

“I could say the same about you, I suppose.”

He tried to laugh, but all that came from it was red almost splashing on her.

“I’ll finally stop causing you problems,” he finally said, eyes closing on themselves. “That’s a good thing, no…?”

Ingrid didn’t reply, her mind unable to come out with anything satisfactory. Teasing the enemy seemed fine, until she remembered that, in death, allies and enemies barely made sense. Her sense of allegiance had left the premise for a moment, the notion of picking a side suddenly stopping to beat with her heart.

He seemed to notice her lack of reply with this smirk giving stead to a serious expression.

“Y’know, Ingrid… Even like that… I don’t hate you...”

There was no right answer to give him, obviously, as words were already an act of treason to her cause. Honour before feelings and all that. Proverbs stopped making sense, but she was still following their principles anyway.

“In the end, I realize that… neither do I.”

“Good… ’d’ve been a shame if you did…” His lips reached an all-time low. “It’s all messed up anyway… World’s mess’d up…”

His eyes shut never to open again, his warmth already slipping between his armour’s holes, pouring from his wound, joining the sky above.

“See ya on the other side, Ing… ’t was nice knowing you, even if it ended like that…”

“Farewell, Sylvain.”

I’m sorry; so, so sorry. I couldn’t keep my word.

In this battle of a name that escaped from her memory, sorrowful Ingrid had broken the promise she had made to herself as she cradled next to her sob-rattled chest the still-warm, smirking, lifeless body of her dearest friend, knowing the battle would rage on with or without her, with or without him. As she resolved herself to either let what was left behind there or bury the remains, one question came to her mind, burning her tongue, scorching her throat, singing her chest from the inside:

When had she become a gravedigger?

#fire emblem #fire emblem three houses #ingrid brandl galatea #sylvain jose gautier #sylvgrid #angst #heavy angst #oh boy so much angst #hurt no comfort #post-timeskip (fe3h)#cw character death #cw blood #otp: never would and never have #bad things happen bingo #bthb 2

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drink-n-watch · 5 years

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Hello boys and girls. I hope you are having a great day. Healthy, happy and well rested. For my part, I’m still struggling to get that last one under control after that wonderful horrible thing that happened at the convention. What thing you ask? Well I’m so very glad you did ask! It would have been a really short post otherwise. Sit back, relax: let me paint you a mind picture.

do I have your attention now?

A little while ago, I dragged Mel out of Anime land where she’s been… Well… You’ve read the fanfics… To attend Otakuthon with me. It worked. Yay! I’m generally ambivalent about conventions but I’m glad I went. It was fun. And exhausting. Funny how those two things so often go together. Like most conventions, Otakuthon has a large amount of artists from all over coming together to sell goods. The special part is that unlike in US cons, you can hear them talk in French which is entertaining… I’m not a very nice person. I must say though, most did a wonderful job no matter what they may think!

Mel and I decided to do a tour in the artists’ alley (that’s how it’s called but it’s more like an artists’ gymnasium), on Friday evening after work. No big thing, I had been up since 5 and I really just wanted to scout out the place before going back the next day. I was successful! In one of the back rows, a pleasant and clearly very talented young lady was displaying her prints for sale (side note: there were so so many prints guys, it made me consider putting in more walls….) which caught our eye and we went in for a closer look.

This sounds like a casual venture but you need to fight your way through hordes of fans, occasionally in pointy and dangerous looking cosplay, to get anywhere near the booths, let alone buy something. Moreover with my vertically challenged state I really need to have a front row view. As I try to avoid touching strangers, this closer look involved a series of acrobatics, getting on my tippytoes and trying to figure out how to stretch my neck like a rokurokubi while working hard on giving off an intimidating aura to make people part before me. I’d like to think it’s the aura that did the trick.

there’s no way this can go wrong

When we finally reached the booth, victorious, Mel bought some stuff and I admired the images on display. Off to one side there were a few BL and Yuri prints that caught my eye. The images were lighthearted and loving. I didn’t recognize any characters but the BL one’s were labelled 19 days while the ladies sported a neat little tag with the words “their story”. I made a mental note, hoping it wasn’t original art work and moved on.

Friday evenings are busy for me. No no, not with social outings and tons of friends, you silly! Friday evenings are when I finish up the Given collabs with Karandi and put the gallery post together to go out on Saturdays. It’s also when I watch DanMachi, Dr. Stone, Granbelm and Fire Force and review them all (or as many as I can before passing out). Coming home late means it was around 11 when I was done watching and had to start on writing. Keeping in mind that I had been up since 5 and had a full Saturday planned. I got through 2 reviews before giving up and calling it a night.

That’s when I got the bright idea to read a little something before bed. I remembered the prints and got to googling! 19 days is indeed a rather popular Chinese you series. It’s artistic and a lot of it has no dialogue. It’s in my to read pile. Their story is also a Chinese webtoon (alternate or original title: Tamen De Gushi) about two girls finding each other and it devoured me.

I had to force myself to close my computer early Saturday morning when I got to chapter 130. I finished up the remaining 63 chapters when I got up a few hours later. It’s an ongoing series and believe you me that I will be keeping up with it!

anytime, anywhere

I read a lot of webtoons, doujin and even more traditional manga but I rarely talk about them on my blog. I also rarely give up my sleep on the one weekend I actually have to stick to a schedule in order to read something I could finish anytime. So why is Their Story different?

That’s an impossible question to answer. The short and most accurate response is : I like it. I really like it. The longer one is that it has great pacing and a good sense of humour. The narrative respects the characters which are all well crafted and complex while remaining realistic and consistent. They are recognizable as people you may be friends with but just a bit more fun since you only hear about the adventures. The discovery of sexuality and social pressure is modernizes, told from a contemporary setting where a lot has changed and the stigmas aren’t the same but some things are still painfully old fashioned. Their Story is a coming of age from the point of view of modern young women and we don’t get enough of those. And it is also absolutely heartwarming. Not everything needs to be tragic and sometimes we can manage to cut ourselves on the softest things.

I didn’t do a good job. I’m still trying to get back those lost sleep hours. Ok, let me just give you this one random chapter as an example:

This chapter isn’t directly related to the story so there are no spoilers here, but the general theme has a connection with an earlier arc. It’s obviously feminist and if that annoys you…well you probably have given up on my blog a long time ago cause I am way more annoying than Their Story. I don’t see that many webtoons trying to make these points. Their story is fairly innocent and could easily be targeted at a younger audience. An audience that might not have completely acknowledged these realities. It made me so happy to think that somewhere a 13 year old saw this and thought, I never thought about it nut that’s sort of true…it kinda sucks. I also don’t think this story is particularly targeted to girls, as such the more personal perspective is even more interesting.

And a chapter like this works only because the author spend 180 chapters before it making us laugh and worry and fall in love with the characters. It’s not a message manga it’s a story that occasionally has something to say beyond it’s own fiction. Have I mentioned it’s adorable. Ok. Let me try again, here is one of the early chapters…..

I hope this has wetted (yes, this one time the error is on purpose) your appetite enough. It really is a great webtoon. Unless you are opposed to Yuri for some reason, I recommend you give it a try.

For my part, I scrapped myself together best I could, trying to make myself look somewhat presentable for the con and went right back to spend an entire day walking in heels on a few hours sleep. When I got back to that booth I told this entire tale of woe to the poor confused artist and openly blamed her for my sleep deprivation. Then I bought the Their Story print. here it is. I love it. Thank you..

I Ruin My Sleep Schedule Again, This Time With Yuri! Hello boys and girls. I hope you are having a great day. Healthy, happy and well rested.

#love #manga #romance #Their Story #wow #Yuri

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rabbiteclair · 5 years

Text

So, a whole lot of notes on Flatscreen. This is, like, halfway my attempt to analyze what I was doing for myself, so I can't guarantee they'll be informative or interesting to anyone else, but hey. It should go without saying that there are tons of spoilers in here.

Mysteries And Stuff

I guess the big thing on my end was that I deliberately went out of my way to avoid establishing a definite answer about What's Actually Going On with big facets of the story. Like, I didn't come up with them at all. Some of them don't strictly need answers. Some of them I felt were best left mysteries. Overall, though, subjectivity was kinda a theme for the story as a whole, so it felt appropriate to leave as much as possible open to interpretation. Most of these have apparent explanations within the story that work, because I still wanted a coherent narrative, but here's a short list of things I deliberately kept a bit vague: Does Gensokyo exist in this timeline? Compare the list of occult goodies Renko inherited from Sumireko in Flatscreen:

There are a handful of keepsakes, passed down from your grandma, that have managed to keep your faith in the supernatural alive. A photo of a gate in the Netherworld, with cherry blossoms on one side and a mundane graveyard on the other. A series of videos from her long-archived blog where she's bending spoons and levitating balls with her mind. A rock she brought back from 'some pyramid or another' that does, in fact, sharpen any razors you leave near it.

to Eyes in the Dark:

It had been a large box full of stuff, and practically the only mundane thing in it was a pack of Zener cards.

There was also a photo of a gate in the Netherworld, with cherry blossoms on one side and a mundane graveyard on the other. I know it's the Netherworld, because Maribel and I investigated it once. (Case File #6) There was a series of selfies that my grandma had taken with people she swore were youkai. (A few of them did have remarkably realistic costumes if not.) A recording of an unearthly song that did strange things to the listener's mood, that was supposedly from a youkai night sparrow. A heavily-warded jar with what could only be a ghost of some sort bound inside.

Flatscreen Renko... really didn't get anything impressive, apart from maybe the Netherworld photo from Ghostly Field Club. Maybe Sumireko just didn't leave her much--Renko doesn't really seem to know anything substantial about Gensokyo in the canon stories, after all. Maybe the Sealing Club stories are an alternative timeline from the main Touhou canon, and Maribel is traveling between worlds when she visits Gensokyo (we already know she's ended up in current-Gensokyo's past before, so it wouldn't really be much weirder.) Plus, Fantasy wasn't in very good state when Renko visited it. I think that's probably the case either way--Gensokyo would be a pretty crowded place if every single forgotten god, myth, or youkai ended up there. But, you can definitely point to it as evidence that Gensokyo isn't out there making things better, if you want. Is Renko the real Renko? What even counts as 'real' in this particular case? Whether or not this all happens in the same world or timeline as Gensokyo, Renko might not be The Renko that Maribel remembers. She raises the possibility herself in chapter 3--she has a past that she remembers, with no Maribel in it. It's entirely possible that by erasing Maribel, the monster changed the past and made a new timeline with a whole new Renko. Or maybe she's from a pre-existing timeline and was out there all along. Or, hell, if we're considering alternative timelines anyway, maybe this isn't the same Renko or Maribel from the Sealing Club stories. Or maybe Maribel is right, it's all one tidy timeline, and the monster didn't do much except alter some of Renko's memories. I did kinda wimp out on this one a little, by letting Renko regain memories of Maribel. It undermines some of these possibilities, but I couldn't stand the thought of having Renko go through all of that and only remember a single week with her. What is the monster? I really wanted Renko to make some kind of Black Hole Information Paradox comparison here, but never found a way to shoehorn it in. Regardless, it kinda fits. Whether the monster was a god, or a youkai, or whatever, almost by definition, there's no way of knowing what it used to be. All that information was lost when it got completely forgotten. Or maybe Maribel's theory is completely wrong, and these things aren't gods. She was guessing on pretty thin evidence. Renko thought she saw claws on some of them, and the main monster had some kind of weird features at times too. Stealing existence might be a bit much for an undead myth. If you want to interpret it as some kind of minor elder horror or an especially unstylish Excrucian or something, it doesn't change much about the story except maybe some of the implications. This is part of the reason I avoided giving it a name. The other half was for horror purposes--having Renko give it a snappy nickname like she did in Eyes in the Dark would make it feel a little less scary, I think. For what it's worth, in my notes, I referred to it as the Static.

History and connection with Eyes in the Dark

I really gave most of the relevant bits in the notes at the beginning of the story on AO3. The short version is, the story didn't originally have a monster, and when I decided to add one, a few rounds of expansion later, I had the outline for Eyes in the Dark. There are a few tracts of text that I originally copied over verbatim, and any differences in the section between the two stories evolved over time. The stuff about fake fish is one of them. Renko's big list of stuff Sumireko left for her is another. The monster from Flatscreen is fairly similar to the first iteration of what became the Watcher. When I went to add monster(s) to the first partial draft of Flatscreen, I thought it would be best if it was something that could threaten Maribel, even with her TV-dwelling nature, so a TV-filling monster was one of my first ideas. Obviously the monsters in both stories evolved quite a bit from that point, so it'd be incorrect to say that it's an earlier evolution of the Watcher. This is probably why both stories pretty heavily revolve around televisions, though. The lack of a monster to add some opposition was one of the two things that made me shelve the first draft of Flatscreen.

The other one was the lack of an ending. 'And then Maribel became Yukari' is practically a stock ending for Sealing Club stories, but somehow it didn't occur to me for about two and a half years.

Chapters 1-3 are pretty similar to what the original draft had, minus the monster. In the original draft, Maribel’s plan was to take Renko on a tour of various places they’d visited together, to try jogging her memory, which might hopefully help Maribel become real again. The plan was for Renko to get more and more absorbed in the fantasy world with Maribel in it, while Maribel just kept getting weaker and weaker. Eventually, Maribel would get too weak to even show up outside of Renko’s dreams, and Renko would decide it was better to float off into nonexistence with her than stick around on Earth alone.

... this was the plan for about thirty seconds before I realized it kinda sucks, at least. The lack of a satisfying ending was the main thing that made me drop the story and move on to other ideas.

Yukari!!!

Anybody who’s talked to me on the topic much (this is a list that has like two people on it, so in retrospect this was a bad way to introduce this paragraph) knows that I’m actually not all that fond of ‘Yukari is older Maribel’ as an interpretation of their relationship, in general. For one thing, whenever canon has a big open question and everyone just kind of decides it has to be answered the same way, I wanna go the opposite direction just to spite them. (See also: the idea of the previous shrine maiden being Reimu’s mom.) For another, I feel like it produces a lot of kinda crappy stories. I’ve read a ton of doujin and stuff where Maribel isn’t a character, she’s a macguffin for Renko to chase after, or a placeholder to stand around until Yukari pops up.

... but it isn’t an inherently bad idea, so I was able to convince myself to end the story like this after a while.

If I had to guess (and I do, since it’s another thing where I didn’t come up with a strict Objectively True Answer), it was just kinda the first step. That talk she gave about ending up somewhere else eventually was pretty open-ended. It definitely made her a bit weirder and more... eldritch. Probably, she drifted around in there for a while, ended up way in the past, and came back to find Renko again once she was able to. Could’ve been decades or centuries on her end.

I did definitely mean to drop some hints about how this all led to her becoming Yukari, though. Between the abandoned tanuki house and the really horrible state of Fantasy in the last chapter, it isn’t hard to see where she might get interested in something like Gensokyo. She’s literally playing around with the boundary between fantasy and reality before the story starts. And her walled-off fantasy bubble in the last chapter is basically a mini-Gensokyo, if you wanna think about it that way.

... I think that’s all the stuff I intended to cover? If I missed anything, feel free to shoot me a question, I guess.

#rabbit does fanfiction

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oumiyuki · 5 years

Text

I Want To Bridal Carry You, Is That Okay?

Summary: Taking a page or two from Riko’s literature texts on yuri, Chika decides she’s going to bridal carry her girlfriend and make said girlfriend fall further in love with her. It’s just not as simple as Chika thought it’d be.

Pairing: ChikaYou

Genre: Romance, Fluff, Humour

Words: 1774

Read me at fanfiction.net or AO3 too~ :D

Author Notes

ChikaYou~ ChikaYou~ I love me more ChikaYou~ hehe~ >w<

Do you love you more ChikaYou~? ^w^/

May you enjoy~ XD

“So...I've been studying.”

Riko drops her textbooks, pencil case, everything she had on hand as she gave Chika an amazing mix of disbelief and happiness.

“Okay, that's just rude.” Chika squints with a frown.

Riko chuckles, waved the orangehead off half-heartedly as she bends down to pick up all her fallen items. “So...studying what?”

Chika brightens again as she remembers what she wanted to say. “Your literature texts on yu-“

Riko drops all her stuff again - expression one of horror. “WHAT!?”

“What what?” The orangehead blinks confused.

“What what what?” Riko was flailing her arms in what Chika thinks might be anger at this point.

“What, you said what first!” The Leader of Aqours puts her hands up in defence as she took a safe two steps back.

“Wha- Why? Why were you reading my books? Without permission!” Riko questioned from head to toe – bulging eyes, perpetual frown, gesturing hands, and one foot forward.

Chika swallows her nerves. “You gave me permission to...”

Riko was nowhere near convinced as she crossed her arms, waiting for Chika to explain every last detail as to how reading her doujin- her literature texts on love even transpired.

“I was stressing out the other day to you about what can I do to make You-chan swoon... Remember?” Chika looks hopeful at the enraged redhead.

The enraged redhead remained enraged as she shook her head to indicate ‘No, I have no such recollection. Plus you always stress about wanting to make sure You-chan stays in love with you when we talk. Even though You-chan’s love for you can be seen even by the blind.’

Chika worries her fingertips against each other as she thinks of what to say next. “We were at your house…and you were in a good mood…and…and…you said ‘My books know it best’ while patting those books… So I took it as ‘Read them and learn’...?”

Riko stares coldly at Chika for a good minute just to subject the orangehead to guiltiness for a bit longer, then she sighs, giving in. “What’s done is done…”

“Sorry…” Chika lowers her head apologetically.

The pianist shakes her head lightly, a small smile forming as she picks up all her items from the floor once more. “So what did you learn?”

Chika beams once again at the idea. “To bridal carry You-chan! That’s sure to make her swoon!”

Riko’s items tumble to the ground for the third time this morning as her eyes grew in excitement, cheeks flushed at the slightest from imagining the scenario. “I’m…sure it will…”

Riko can’t wipe the grin off her face now as she anticipated the actual event. “I look forward to it.”

Chika laughs then asks insecurely. “You think it will work, Riko-chan?”

The auburn haired girl rolls her eyes. “Where did your confidence a second ago disappear to? Yes. It will.”

Chika smiles, reassured from the Yuri Master. “Alright! You-chan won’t even know what hit her when it does. Hehe~”

Chika steals various glances You’s way. She knows what she wants to do, but now that her best friend was in the same room as her, she wasn’t quite certain about how she’s going to do it. And every time the ash-brunette turns to look at her, perhaps feeling her stare, Chika looks away hurriedly, blinking rapidly, hoping You does not notice that she was indeed staring.

Was it supposed to be this hard? Sheesh…

The orangehead breathes out; tired just from all the longing stares keeps giving You, thinking how nice it would be if You would just walk over and settle into her arms. Not that that could ever happen…

Uu…

Chika blushes at the idea of such a day.

Focus, Takami Chika. If I want You-chan sitting on my lap in the future, I first gotta carry her in my arms today!

The Leader of Aqours huffs out her nose with her fist pumped discreetly under the table, not realizing that You was looking at her wondering if everything is okay, and finding that little action rather cute.

Making You-chan fall will give me the perfect reason to carry her, no? Alrighty, time to execute plan A! Make You-chan fall~

Chika turns back to see You walking away and most probably out of the classroom. “Eh? Ah, You-chan-”

Where is You-chan going? I can’t bridal carry her if she’s not here!

Chika rushes behind You and holds her breath as she puts a foot in front of You - effectively causing You to trip. But seeing her best friend falling face first to the floor, Chika realizes You was falling the wrong direction she wanted.

“WAH- EH-UWAA-”

You lets out a series of surprised sounds as Chika grabs her right hand in the nick of time, pulls her best friend back up as her left arm wrapped itself in front of You, around the girl’s waist to keep her secured. “Chika-chan!? T-Thanks…”

Chika nods, her face right beside You’s and glad that her girlfriend was safe.

This is somehow different from what I imagined…

“Um…Chika-chan..?” You’s ears were all red as she wonders when Chika will let go of her right hand and move out of this back-hug that was happening to her; if they weren’t in school and people were starting to stare, You wouldn’t mind letting it continue for hours.

“Eh?” Chika takes in the sight of You staring the floor embarrassed, then the murmur of her classmates clued her into why her girlfriend was being so adorably blushy. “Ahh! Er, sorry! I- Mm.” Chika lets go, stands there awkwardly before robot-walking back to her seat.

WHAT WAS I DOING???

Chika sighs after a necessary cool down period.

How did those bridal carries occur in Riko-chan’s doujins..?

Various scenes of already unconscious girls lying on the floor before the other girl appears to scoop the unconscious one up and away flash through Chika’s mind, and she hums in consideration.

Maybe I could get Riko-chan to throw her textbook at You-chan’s head…

Chika tries imagining that and her face changed to that of an unamused smile.

Ah, no…that wouldn’t be quite right either…Imagine telling You-chan – “You fell unconscious because Riko-chan threw her textbook at you… Are you feeling better now?”

Chika shakes her head at that.

How uncool…

“Guess I could try this instead…” Chika mumbles under her breath as she arches her back, curling into herself to avoid being caught by the teacher and turns to secretly look at You again. She smiles when You yawns, clearly bored of the lesson Chika wasn’t paying attention to either.

Chika tears a bit of her notebook page and writes “Stay back after school.” And she throws the folded paper to You’s desk.

I hope this goes well…I’m gonna bridal carry you, You-chan!

The bell signalling the end of all classes for the day rings and Chika’s scarlet eyes lights up; excited and nervous for her plan to be carried through, and hopefully, successfully getting her girlfriend’s heart to skip beats and fall a little more in love with her.

You waves goodbye to her classmates and Riko who said she has important things to see to. Gentle blue eyes rest on the orangehead who was taking in deep breathes to calm her own racing heart; You grins at that. She could not come to a conclusion about what Chika might be up to, but seeing Chika taking the initiative to hang out with her alone makes You happy any day.

“Chika-chan?”

“Ah. Er. It’s after school huh?” Chika stands abruptly, the chair screeching as it was forced backwards and she chuckles nervously.

Ahhh, why is this so nerve-wracking?? Think cool thoughts, Chika. Think cool thoughts. I gotta make You-chan swoon. Not the other way around.

You raises her eyebrows before giggling at Chika’s antics. “I’m sure you knew that the moment the school bell rang and you went “Yes! School’s out!”

Chika’s cheeks flush pink as the ash-brunette winked at her. “Uu…I…Just taken notice once more… Don’t point that out, baka You-chan…”

I can do this. I can do this.

“So what’s up?” You stands too, pushing in her chair before smiling patiently at her girlfriend.

Chika nods to herself and to You. She takes You’s hand in hers and pulls her to the back of the classroom which was more spacious than the in-between of their tables. “I want you to do everything I tell you to do…Is that okay?”

And I’ll give you instructions to get into a bridal carry by me! Perfect plan.

You takes a moment to access the situation, blinking slowly and watching Chika’s serious expression, You does not find a reason to say no. The ash-brunette nods. “Okay.”

Chika smiles widely and takes a step closer to You.

Alright! Part one of Plan B – Ok!

Chika puts her hand behind You’s back. “Lean back, You-chan.”

“Eh? Um…Like this..?” You does as told, leaning backwards as though she might be doing a limbo.

Chika nods, her smile never fading as her hand on You’s back follows You. “Okay…” Chika deems that You has lowered her back enough for Chika to safely and easily scoop the girl up, so she puts her right hand under You’s knees and lifts.

I did it-

“Chi- WA- Chika-chan!?” You panics from being lifted off the ground without warning and was flailing about.

Ah. You-chan. Wai- If you move around so much- Don’t-

“Don’t move!” Chika makes her next request.

You freezes; ever the obedient partner, though her face grows hotter with each passing second of being carried by Chika bridal style.

Chika herself was a bright red as she stared at You in her arms, hands in front of her chest and staring at her with those innocent, round, azure eyes. Chika could tell her palms were sweaty and she willed herself to sweat less and not drop her girlfriend.

“How long..?” You asks shyly, averting her gaze for a second before staring back at Chika. Her heart was drumming crazily, her mind was racing endlessly. The situation they were in made You happy and absolutely embarrassed at the same time.

Chika breathes in deeply through her nose and adjusted her hold on the ash-brunette. “H-However long I want…”

I don’t want to put you down even when hands get tired if I could…

“Is that okay?”

You nods and nestles her head closer to Chika’s shoulder. “Mmph…”

They both fell further in love with each other this warm evening.

Riko stands outside the classroom windows with her phone camera rolling and a pleased smile on her face, holding back her nosebleed. “It’s good to be alive.”

Author Notes

Well, as how every ChikaYou story goes. It got longer than expected! XD

-chuckles- ahh~ =w=

I hope y’all enjoyed this as much as I fantasized and wrote, fantasized and then wrote again~ nyahaha~ XD

Leave me a comment if you like! :D (Chika will be adamantly bridal carrying You until someone tells them they gotta leave the school premises~ Because Chika probably would walk to a chair and sit in it so she don’t really have to use her arm strength to keep You up, but still refuses to let You be more than 2 centimetres away from her.

Oh. P.S. Chika loves the back of You’s thighs. ;D nante ne~)

#chikayou #youchika #takami chika #watanabe you #sakurauchi riko #love live!#fanfiction #fanfic #writing #love live! sunshine!!#yuri #fluff #romance #humour #bridal carry #princess carry

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babyybitchhh · 5 years

Text

@spirit-of-science

I hope you don’t mind me capping this (and if you want me to I can delete) but it was on a post that I really didn’t want to derail and I’d like to chime in with my own two cents because this is the goddamn truth.

A bit of preface: I was (for all intents and purposes) groomed then eventually raped by my stepfather from around the time I was 11 until I was 18. For a really, really long time I was convinced that it was consensual and thus nothing was wrong with the arrangement because I technically approached him first by asking questions about sex. I asked him to kiss me and I also asked him to touch me. Whether or not this was the result of some deeply, deeply repressed trauma when I was even younger than that is really hard to say because I honestly don’t remember anything happening before this stuff with my stepdad - but to be fair my childhood memories are choppy at best and just plain nonexistent at worse so it is possible. Anyway, I never applied “CSA victim/survivor” or “rape survivor” or any sort of “victim” label to myself because, and I still feel this way to a certain extant, I actually DID ask for it. No amount of woke posts on tumblr or even PSA’s in school were enough to convince me that something was wrong here.

I’d also like to point out that all this happened before we even had a computer in the house, let alone did I have any kind of unsupervised net access, and my stepdad couldn’t have been any further away from fandom spaces. He actually lacked any real interest in genuine hobbies to the point where it’s now deeply worrisome to me in retrospect.

The thing that stands out to me the most, which of course I didn’t even think anything of at the time, was a day he came home when my mom was still at work and he said he’d “borrowed a porno from a guy he worked with” and asked if I wanted to watch it. He stood over me the whole time it was playing, just over my shoulder, arms crossed and dead silent. I remember being anxious and nervous and embarrassed, but I chalked it up to excited jitters. It just seemed so innocuous to me that I never actually stopped to consider how wrong that whole situation was or how strange it is for a 30 something year old man to come to me like that.

So long story short I went through my entire adolescence believing that this was normal and fine without realizing the affect it was having on me and my relationship with my peers. I went through my early 20’s thinking “I asked for it, so he didn’t do anything wrong”. It was not until literally last year, at the age of 28, did I suddenly have the epiphany that ... I was raped by a pedophile.

What was the catalyst you ask?

An incest fanfic.

Or rather, a full blown series of fanfics that have the incest thread connecting them and a fucked up family together in perfect disharmony.

I’m not gonna post a link or anything, as I believe the author was venting their own traumas through these works, but basically it detailed the whole sordid affair from the grooming, to the rape, to the abuse and to the long reaching aftermath effects and how it can manifest itself in extremely unhealthy ways. It was an emotionally draining read but I literally could not stop.

And the real kicker here? It was never presented as being bad. The author never said “please note that I don’t condone this in real life”. In fact it was porn, through and through, written with the explicit intent of arousing the reader in the most fucked up ways possible.

I started off reading it because I was desperate for ANY content of a specific character, who just so happened to be the main perpetrator of abuse in these fics, and I never once applied myself to the situation. I thought I was different. That this didn’t apply to me. That I wasn’t abused or raped, and this is the best written porn for my favorite character so I’ll take what I can get. Doesn’t matter that it’s incest, I can self insert into anything.

Then I got to the chapter where the son, the main victim of abuse, had an encounter with his teacher who explained in detail that no matter what the boy thought he wanted, asked or begged for, it was NEVER okay for an adult to engage with a minor sexually. That adults know better, or should know better, and that it was rape whether the boy wanted to believe it or not. That he was a victim. That he wasn’t mentally or physically capable of making an informed decision regardless of how he might think differently.

When I say this shook me to my core, I’m not exaggerating. Never in my life have I looked at the situation from that angle, that mindset. Suddenly everything was clicking into place and I spiraled hard for a few good months. I was suddenly looking at everything that had happened to me in a different light and for the first time ever I acknowledged that, yes, I was a victim. That what he did was wrong, whether or not Id asked him to do it or not. He should’ve known better. He shouldn’t have taken my innocent away like that. I deserved better. And with that new outlook on things, I’m realizing how deeply and how negatively the entire thing fucked with me.

Depression, anxiety, terribly low self esteem, poor decision making habits, no real clue how regular relationships work or even HOW to initiate them. I see myself as nothing but a sex object, good for nothing else and desiring nothing else, because that’s all I was treated as from preadolescence straight through to adulthood. Like, shits fucked up and I’m honestly glad I read that incest fic because I would have never been able to acknowledge any of this without that specific discussion between those two characters because it wasn’t actually directed at me, nor was I a part of the conversation. Being removed from the situation as the reader was what made the lightbulb go off for me.

All that being said I’m a big proponent for letting people ship whatever they want. I’m not triggered by any sort of problematic content, not even now, and I still reread those fics from time to time because they’re honestly just that good but they also help me wade through my past a little bit more each time. I don’t see anything wrong with age gap ships, adult/minor ships or even lolicon/shotacon. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t like those things, as I understand it’s upsetting, but from MY perspective as a victim fiction can never, ever compare to the horror and moral bankruptcy of the real deal.

Honestly? I wish my stepdad had busied himself with jerking it to lolicon doujins instead of taking advantage of me. If I have to choose between real victims and fictional victims, I know which side I’d take. The reality is just so, so much more worse than anything a fic writer or a hentai artist can ever produce.

And I think it’s worth noting at this point that my stepdad was a victim himself. He didn’t watch some piece of media featuring incest or rape or pedophilia and decided to give it a shot. I literally don’t think I can stress enough how much it doesn’t work like that. No amount of media can make someone do these things. He was raped when he was a child and the cycle of abuse merely continued. There was no outside push from problematic fiction. There was no normalization making him think it was okay. He KNEW it wasn’t okay, that’s why he let me come to him and never forced himself on me. This sort of stuff is insidious, rest assured, but the only people who are going to use fiction to groom a child are the people who were going to rape a child anyway, regardless of what tool they use to achieve that goal. Antis are fighting the wrong fight and if they actually cared about victims (like me) they’d focus their efforts on the real world and the living breathing humans who are suffering right this moment but they won’t. They just fucking won’t.

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shipping-isnt-morality · 6 years

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The bizarre thing about fujoshi discourse is that I remember the fujoshi community calling out and moving past the things it’s being accused of now.

I remember the posts and blogs in the fujoshi community in 2008-2009 that were like “if you love gay shipping but are grossed out by wlw you’re not an ally” and “hey seme/uke tropes are pretty homophobic” and “reading BL comics isn’t activism.” I remember pulling aside a friend, almost - oh my god, 12 years ago now - and talking to her about her behavior towards a gay guy we were friends with, because she’d been making him uncomfortable. I remember having to have a painful conversation with my best friend about her own homophobia after I came out, even though we both loved mlm ships. I remember these conversations happening, largely before and in the early days of tumblr; I remember cons like yaoicon beginning to do more to support real-world lgbt+ tights activism, until it became what it is today - essentially a giant fundraiser for charity with a theme (seriously, check out the numbers, it’s insane).

I met fujoshi a few years younger than me in college, and remember being proud - proud that their interest was leading them to activism, that they were pushing even further than we had, to entirely remove the stigma from gay romance stories, to have them be considered just romance. And the fujoshi I met in japan, who put me in touch with lgbt resources; who enthusiastically created fan communities that welcomed everyone; who pushed to remove the section divides in some bookstores between “shoujo” (m/f) and “BL” (m/m) manga and doujin; and even the artists who called themselves fujoshi but were trying to make WL comics into a larger demographic, largely branching off the Madoka fandom in 2011.

Which is why it’s so goddamn bizarre to come on tumblr for the first time in a few years and have people talking like all that growth didn’t happen and never could. Like, if there are still fujoshi harassing gay men, send them to me. I will talk to them, because I don’t want that in the community. But I don’t see it openly in the community, and the community worked hard from 10-15 years ago to move past that much faster than society at large.

I don’t really consider myself a fujoshi anymore, both because I hardly ever read manga or doujin these days and because everything I’m known for creating is wlw. But like - the community grew. It worked hard at it. I was one of the ones working hard at it, and everyone is waving examples that are 10, 15, 20 years old to show that all the growth that’s happened is irrelevant. Like, I go in fujoshi tags now, or on blogs or on YouTube or twitter or whatever, and I just don’t see any of the stuff that people on tumblr claim is inherent to fujoshi culture.

And - what?

It’s just so confusing.

#fujoshi discourse #does this make sense???? im so tired lmao

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s2he-gamewalkthrough · 6 years

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Part 12: In the Clouds

The part of the game where Tensho has to complete some finicky and very specific game requirements to progress the story.

If you don’t know what this is about, please refer to this previous post.

[Any new comments by me will be designated by brackets.]

[Oof, this chapter’s one of the messier ones... I’ve cleaned it up a lot from the original LiveJournal post, but it still jumps around a lot in places. Apologies for that.]

Before I get on with the plot of the game, I found some upgrades!

Tensho:

Lv 2 --> 3:

Tenka:

Second listed item, Lv 1 --> 2

Youzen's:

First listed item, Lv 1 --> 2

First listed item, Lv 2 --> 3

Second item listed, Lv 1 --> 2

Second item listed, Lv 2 --> 3

[I uh. Really hope these combinations are still correct as I am unable to test them out in the old saved game I have. I highly recommend upgrading paopei/weapons whenever you can because it helps to make all future battles significantly easier.]

Oh, I forgot to mention before, but you should have gotten a few equipable items by now. Those are marked with stars (in the item description) in the inventory menu:

You can equip them to characters by selecting the third “word” in the menu screen:

Some equipment items affect certain stats, while some I guess negate status ailments. If you don't know Japanese, then finding out the effects pretty much comes down to trial and error. (I won't be listing the specific effects of all the equipable items--Sorry!)

Cavechan was nice enough to translate the character stat screen for us in part 1, so that should be a big help when you're messing around with equipment. (Thank you again to Cavechan!)

In the end, I had to equip Tenka with an item to boost his attack because it was pathetically weak.

Also, I've recently found out that you can't use HP-restoring potions on doushi/senin. I have no idea why this happens. This means that if you want to heal these characters while in a dungeon, you have to use a character that has a healing move. Man, that's going to be annoying in a pinch.

Anyway, time for more level grinding in the Houshindai!

I will only be unlocking two senins in the Houshindai today because the monsters on the lower floor are getting harder and harder to beat.

Another of the Juunisen, and In Hon's master. His name's Seki Seishi. (Also, he apparently talks A LOT.)

I also unlocked In Cho's master! (Kou Seishi)

Their bonus is:

They both sell things for something other than cash. One seems to sell potions while the other just sells combo upgrades. I suppose it’s decently useful?

While training in the Houshindai, I messed around with some of Youzen’s new moves.

After having beaten Chou Koumei (yet again), Youzen can now transform into him (4th move, second option.)

Sadly, you only have one attack Chou Koumei (a whip-like attack) and it frankly sucks because it does such a small amount of damage. I think this form is balanced out with all the supporting moves you have at your disposal, though I admittedly never utilized Chou Koumei’s form much.

And oooh, the 60 EP move (unlocked from the cutscene between Youzen and Gyokutei) allows Youzen to go into yokai form!

His ultimate attack (costing 40 EP) does A TON of damage.

(For reference, I was only doing about 1000 points of damage with Tensho and Tenka at this stage in the game.)

Anyway, time to head to the new location, finally. It looks to be someplace up in the clouds?

Hmm, that kid looks familiar...

Hey, it's kid-Tensho!

...Wait, what?

Yeah, this is actually all just an illusion. Those treasure chests scattered about are actually real, but you’ll have to find a way to get to them yourself because... Well, you’ll see why soon enough.

After the short convo, kid-Tensho beckons you to follow him, and he’ll move a few steps along some kind of invisible path. You have to follow kid-Tensho’s steps EXACTLY. Otherwise you'll fall off the clouds (Hitou saves you from falling to your death) and have to re-do the path all over again. This “invisible path” is ridiculously long, which is why they included a guide in the form of kid-Tensho. You have to follow him about six times. You can save at any time in this area; so if you're the type that has trouble following an exact path, then you might want to save in the middle so you don’t have to keep restarting all the way at the beginning if you make a mistake.

Also, don't follow too closely behind kid-Tensho, otherwise you might accidentally walk ahead too far when he turns. This happened to me many, many times. [I’m not going to give a guide on how to grab any of the treasure chests in this area, because honestly; I haven’t been able to figure out how to grab most of the chests myself.]

After all of that trouble, Tensho finds himself in a quant little village in the clouds. (It's actually a small village on top of a very high mountain, if you've read the manga.)

I'm going to just say this now for lack of a better place to bring it up: when you exit, you'll immediately leave the place. (You won't have to go through the invisble path in reverse or anything.) But you'll have to do the walkway “puzzle” again every time you try to visit the village. Really quite annoying. The next time you arrive, you'll be given three options on how to do the puzzle--slow, medium, or fast. This refers to how quickly kid-Tensho walks along the path. If you have amazing memory and want to save time, then you can choose the medium or fast option. I always go with slow, because it's the turns that get me...

The cameos in this village include:

The Village Chief guy with a strong aura.

And surprisingly, an un-possessed Chuu Ou. I have no idea how he got here or even what he’s doing here, but I get the feeling Shinkyohyo had a hand in this somehow.

And of course, there’s Taijou Roukun (a.k.a. Roushi) sleeping amongst the sheep.

[Alright, this part... You’re supposed to talk to Taijou Roukun but he’s not an easy guy to get in contact with, as he’s almost always asleep. Even now I still don’t know the EXACT requirements on how you activate the next part of the game’s plot, but I have figured out a rough guideline... sorta.

Talk to EVERYONE in this location ONCE.

Yes, even the sheep. But ONLY once. If you talk to the same sheep twice by accident, the next cutscene won’t activate. This is an extremely specific set of requirements, I know.]

After having talked to everyone and every sheep ONCE, go up to Taikou Roukun and try talking to him. After the usual sleeping noises Roushi makes, Tensho will say something.

I "think" after doing EVERYTHING you possibly can do, Tensho figures it out and does the same thing Taikoubou did to talk to Roushi... Sleep.

No BGM plays in this mini-cutscene. That means important stuff. Too bad I can't read Japanese. You're given two different dialogue choices in a row. I don't think it really has much effect on the storyline, but I don’t have any real way of confirming that (due to my lack of Japanese language knowledge).

[I have no idea what this says but it’s probably important.]

In case you're wondering, I just went with the first choices for both “choose your dialogue” moment in the convo with Roushi. In this game, the first choice tends to be the better one, it seems.

After that mini-cutscene...

Hey, you're--!

Nentou Doujin! (By the way, his BGM is AWESOME.) Talk to him, and you’ll get treated to a loooong conversation. After that, leave Taijou Roukun’s place. The dot over Mount Kongrong’s location should be flashing, and all your party members will be gone. Don’t worry--this is only a temporary thing.

To continue the plot of the game, you'll have to bring Soushou along to the village in the clouds. (His room is the back right one, on the first floor.) Then head back to talk to Nentou. I can’t remember if it was ever officially confirmed (or if I’ve already mentioned it in this guide), but Nentou is Soushou’s master.

After another long convo, Soushou stays behind, I guess to train under Nentou. You get the rest of your party members back here.

Like master, like disciple.

BONUS MATERIAL TIME (a.k.a. some extra stuff that I didn’t know where to put so it’s going in this post whoop whoop)

At this point in the game, some locations on the overworld have changed a bit. If you go back to the water cave area (the one with all the arrows), you'll find Sengyoku and Dokouson there now.

I have NO idea why they're even standing here. Maybe to guard the place? Maybe because Sengyoku thinks that it's a romantic spot?

Anyway, if you want to initiate a rather humorous scene; first have youzen transform into this:

Second, talk to Dokouson.

In case you're wondering who Youzen just transformed into, it's Hekiun, one of Ryuukitsu's disciples.

Dokouson starts drooling over her and his wifey gets mad.

There’s some pounding noises and the screen shakes.

You can also now find Mokutaku and Kintaku at the old battlefield area.

It took me a long time to figure this out, but Tenka’s “action button” allows him to bust through certain walls:

Apparently the one-off “Tenka as a construction worker” joke from the manga was so funny to the game creators that they included a special face portrait of Tenka in a hardhat.

Anyway, if you head back to Tensho’s hometown after finishing the Taijou Roukun cutscene, you’ll be given a lot of dialogue choices if you talk to the villagers. This doesn’t seem to do anything too important.

But if you choose the second dialogue option on one of the old men, he begins frantically running around the whole town. It's... somewhat amusing in a morbid kind of way.

The old dude freaking runs at the speed of light. I had to block him like this to get a screenshot of him.

Going back to Genshitenson's place briefly...

A grave has been built for him. I think Hakutsuru built it?

Inside Geishitenson's hut, if you look at the right pot at the back of the room, Hitou will say something. THIS IS IMPORTANT. He doesn't do it when you look at the other pot (on the left) so you know something's up. We will return here later.

[That’s all for this post. I hope you guys enjoyed it, despite it being a bit of a mess.]

To be continued.

#Houshin Engi #Hoshin Engi #senkaiden 2 walkthrough

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