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rnelodyy · 1 year

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The Owl House And Restorative Justice

At the end of Season 1 of The Owl House, it is revealed that Lilith, the main overarching antagonist of that season, was the one to curse her sister Eda, one of the protagonists, to win a tournament when they were teenagers. This information causes Eda to fly into a screaming rage and attack Lilith, and understandably so.

Eda’s curse is essentially a chronic illness, one that, in Eda’s own words, has ruined her life, being the reason she’s considered a social outcast and why, before meeting King and Luz, she hadn’t gotten close to anyone in years. In season 2, it’s revealed that the curse is why she pushed away her partner Raine to the point that they broke it off with her, and that during a particularly bad flareup, she accidentally maimed her own father, leaving him half blind and with permanent nerve damage to his hands, making him unable to continue working as a Palisman carver. The curse has ruled Eda’s life for decades now, so to Eda, this is the ultimate betrayal.

In the first episode of Season 2, Lilith has defected from the Emperor’s Coven, split the curse between Eda and herself to mitigate the symptoms for her sister, and has moved in with Eda at the Owl House. While Lilith herself still feels guilty and feels she has to make it up to Eda, everyone else, Eda included, has seemingly either forgiven her or chosen to look past it. Eda even makes fun of her for feeling bad about cursing her, and Lilith’s guilt is seemingly absent for the rest of the series.

The response to this was… Less than stellar, shall we say. A lot of people were angry, saying Lilith got away with her crimes without even a slap on the wrist, and that Eda’s forgiveness of her was far too sudden.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of critique. Amity spent years bullying Willow after her parents forced her to break off their friendship, and when she began trying to mend that relationship, the response from fans was that Willow should have been a lot more angry at Amity, and that they went back to being besties far too soon. I’ve even seen this criticism leveled at Hunter for the things he did while working for Belos, at Vee for impersonating Luz for months to trick her mother, and at Luz for hiding the fact that she helped Philip find the Collector from her friends. And it does seem strange for the show to keep tripping on this same point again and again.

Except, it’s not really. Because I think that, when viewing this show from a different angle, those supposed flaws are actually symptoms of something very important to understand – The Owl House operates on a system of crime and punishment that is very different from our world’s.

More specifically, our world mostly utilizes retributive justice. The world of The Owl House utilizes restorative justice.

So first, what do those terms mean? Broadly, they’re two different forms of handling interpersonal disputes, or dealing with crime.

Retributive justice is the one our current justice system uses, where the focus is primarily on punishing the perpetrator. Retributive justice can mean detention, suspension, expulsion, jail time, monetary fines, some kinds of community service, exile, or in more severe cases, corporal punishment or the death penalty. It’s the lens most people view the world through, where if someone hurts you, hurting them back is the correct response.

Restorative justice is a very different approach, where you instead focus on helping the victim recover from what happened, and rehabilitating the perpetrator to prevent this from happening again. Restorative justice can look like verbal or written apologies, monetary compensation for costs and trauma, therapy for both victim and perpetrator, education for the perpetrator, mediation between victim and perpetrator, a restraining order, etc.

When viewed through a retributive lens, The Owl House lets its characters get away with a lot of shit. Lilith cursing Eda, Hunter rounding up Palismen knowing they’ll be killed, Amity tormenting Willow for years, it’s all stuff that, in a retributive environment, they should be punished for, and they’re just not. Eda is only genuinely angry at Lilith for two scenes, Amity and Willow fix their relationship very quickly once Amity starts making amends, and Hunter isn’t punished at all.

However, I believe the story of The Owl House is best viewed not through a retributive lens, but through a restorative lens.

Let’s look at the Lilith-example again. Lilith’s offense was cursing Eda, which she did because she wanted to win a spot in the Emperor’s Coven. Knowing Eda was better than her, she cast a curse on her, thinking it would only last for a day. But when the time came, Eda forfeited the match, soon after which she transformed into the Owl Beast and was pelted with rocks until she ran. The curse turned out to be very permanent, and Lilith spent the next 20 years trying to fix her mistake by working for Belos to try to capture Eda, since he promised to heal her curse.

However, when she finally succeeded, Belos went back on his promise. Instead of healing Eda, he ordered her to be publicly executed. When Lilith protested, Belos essentially told her to shut up, that it was the Titan’s will, and left her there.

So, having realized her method of fixing her mistake has gone real bad, Lilith sneaks down to the Conformatorium to free Eda herself, but arrives too late and finds Luz instead. After a brief fight they end up teaming up, and Lilith leads Luz to the elevator, but they are captured by Belos and Lilith is thrown into the cage with Eda. There, she restores Eda’s partially petrified body, and after fleeing with her, Luz and King, uses a spell to split Eda’s curse evenly between their two bodies.

From a restorative justice point of view, Lilith has done pretty much everything she reasonably could do to fix things. She’s denounced the Emperor’s Coven, returned Owlbert to Luz, helped Luz find the elevator to the execution platform, saved Eda from petrification, apologized to Eda, and while there’s no way for her to cure Eda’s curse entirely, she took on half of the curse at great expense to her own health, in order to ease Eda’s symptoms.

Eda isn’t angry anymore because in her eyes, Lilith has already fixed things with her. Punishing her more at this point is pointless. What more could Lilith do, really? What other lessons could she learn? The only thing that punishment would bring at this point would be more suffering.

Let’s look at another example: Amity and Willow.

Amity’s offense was breaking off her friendship with Willow because she was a late-bloomer, bullying her for years, and allowing her friends to do so too. Willow is left with horrible self-esteem issues because of this, and combined with her failing grades, turned her into a horribly shy and withdrawn wallflower (no pun intended). After she’s moved to the plant track she starts actually getting better, but Amity and Boscha especially continue to torment her. While Amity’s bullying of Willow does peter out over time, Willow is clearly still extremely resentful of her. In an attempt to make Willow forget their friendship, Amity accidentally sets most of Willow’s memories on fire, leaving her confused, amnesiac, and unable to grasp basic concepts like that chairs are for sitting in.

Luz pushed Amity into fixing Willow’s brain by going into her mind together and piecing her memories back together. There, the Inner Willow revealed what happened to Luz and the audience.

At this point, Amity shows her that her parents were actually the ones who forced her to end the friendship because they didn’t think Willow was a suitably powerful or influential friend, threatening to make sure Willow would never get accepted into Hexside if Amity didn’t force her to leave. Amity then apologizes to Willow for going along with it, and for the bullying, and vows to make sure her friends never mess with Willow again.

Willow accepts her apology, but also makes it clear that, while it’s a start, she’s not yet ready to accept Amity in her life again. Restorative justice has not been fully attained, because to Willow, Amity hasn’t fixed everything – Boscha and her squad are still bullying her, and still consider Amity one of them. This changes two episodes later, when Amity tells Boscha to grow the fuck up when she starts bullying Willow again, and joins her and Luz’s Grudgby team despite her personal issues to get Boscha to back off. Willow doesn’t make a grand gesture of forgiveness in this episode, but it is after this point where the two become comfortable around eachother again.

Did Willow forgive Amity too quickly for years of trauma? Maybe. If she had chosen to continue keeping Amity at a distance I certainly wouldn’t have blamed her. But in the end, Amity fixed the mess she caused as best she could, and has proven herself to want to be a better person, to want to be Willow’s friend again. She worked hard to prove herself to be a person worth trusting, and Willow decided to give that trust a chance again.

And while they did become friends again, that friendship was clearly still affected by what happened, which led to bumps that the two of them had to work through. Like in Labyrinth Runners, where Amity’s overprotectiveness over Willow makes Willow feel like Amity thinks she’s incompetent, and still only sees her as the helpless person she used to be.

Willow continuing to be mad at Amity and punishing her for what she did wouldn’t be an unreasonable reaction, but it wouldn’t have fixed anything. It would certainly have an impact on Amity, seeing her former best friend rejecting her attempts to make up for what she did, but the hurt on both sides would have continued festering, because deep down, Willow missed Amity too.

In Hunter’s case, there’s the question of whether he can even be held responsible for his actions. The Palisman-kidnapping in specific was explicitly done under duress – if he failed he would face verbal and physical abuse, and be threatened with his nightmare scenario: getting thrown out of the Emperor’s Coven.

And that’s not an empty threat either. Hunter has no magic, and Belos has drilled it into him that witches without magic have no future. Without the Emperor’s Coven, his only future prospects would be starving to death on the streets or wasting away in prison. Either way, Hunter would be alone, without family or friends, without a job or job prospects, without anyone to turn to for help. Any child would be terrified of that. Hunter wasn’t always acting on direct orders – in fact he defied direct orders to stay in his room in Eclipse Lake to go look for Titan’s Blood, and then again in Hollow Mind to arrest the rebels. But he made those choices based on the idea that Belos wouldn’t want him if he was a failure, and that he needed a chance to prove that he could still be useful.

And contrary to popular belief, Hunter does know right from wrong. He has a very strong moral compass, he’s just been forced to ignore it in favor of doing whatever the Emperor wants. To shut up that little voice telling him he’s doing the wrong thing, he uses what’s called a thought-terminating cliche, a statement that feels so fundamentally true that the argument need not continue. In Hunter’s case, that statement is “It’s for the greater good.” Sure, kidnapping his new friends and abducting Palismen to feed to the Emperor and threatening someone who’s been nothing but kind to him to take the portal key from her girlfriend and justifying terrorism makes his stomach feel like he swallowed a cactus and saying it out loud makes him sound like a horrible person – but it’s for the greater good. He’s doing it to serve Belos, and Belos knows what’s best.

So by the time Hunter is out of active danger and able to rest and recover from what happened to him… what would further punishment accomplish? He already knows that he did fucked up shit while working for the EC, and he’s proven time and time again that while he’s not fighting for Belos’s approval, he’s actually a genuinely kind-hearted kid. Punishing him now would likely cause him to react very poorly, because he’s been at the wrong end of that stick so often that he’s developed severe PTSD because of it.

And if you think restorative justice is still in order – Hunter is currently hyperfixated on making sure Belos can never hurt anyone again, and for the long term, he has expressed that he wants to become a Palisman carver when he grows up. While it won’t bring back the Palismen that were killed, it will help the current Palisman population recover and reintroduce Palismen to witches who may have had to give up theirs.

When viewed through this lens, the writing of The Owl House starts to make more sense. As a show, it is extremely forgiving towards its characters – they’re still held accountable for their actions, but as long as they’re willing to grow and learn and fix the damage they caused, they are very quickly forgiven.

However, I do understand why these writing choices can be… controversial, so to say. Because it doesn’t feel very satisfying, does it? When someone hurts you on purpose, your first impulse would be to try to hurt them back, that’s just how people work.

That’s the hardest thing to come to terms with when you become an advocate for prison abolition for example – you’re not just arguing for freeing a guy who got 5 years because a cop found weed in his pockets, you’re arguing for the release, and most importantly, the humanity of some of the most vile, disgusting people this planet has ever produced. Even now, when someone commits a truly awful crime and gets sent to prison for life, my first thought is “Good, I hope they rot in there.” But that’s not justice. That’s just revenge. And revenge is not something we as a society should want to build our justice system on.

It’s not satisfying to see Lilith go from using Luz as a human shield in her fight against Eda to sleeping on the couch in Eda’s house within 2 episodes. It’s not satisfying to see Willow let Amity back into her life when Amity has hurt her so badly before, or to see Hunter become romantically involved with Willow after he literally abducted her the first time they met. But that satisfaction isn’t really the point. Revenge is satisfying in the moment, but an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and if someone shows a genuine willingness to change, it’s often better to give them a chance to.

However, my final point is about what happens when this approach fails. Because not everyone is willing to change. Some people, when faced with the consequences of their actions, decide to dig their heels in and refuse to admit fault, or blame the victim(s), or use those same thought-terminating cliches that Hunter used to justify their actions, “I was just following orders” being a big one.

And thus, we come to Belos.

If Belos showed a willingness to change, a genuine one, not an attempt at manipulation, should he be given the chance to? That vengeful part of me is VERY empathetically saying no. But logically, reasonably, he should be given that chance, if only because he’s a human being and no human being deserves to be mistreated. That doesn’t mean his victims are obligated to forgive him or be around him again, in fact I think that, for the sake of Hunter’s mental health, Belos should stay as far away from him as humanly possible. But he should be given the chance to start over, to truly better himself and do something good with the rest of his life.

But Belos isn’t willing to change.

Belos is a product of a bad environment and grew up with a cult-like mentality and hatred for witches that he had to adopt for his own safety. It’s hard to break out of that mentality, but not impossible. Case in point: Caleb. The tragedy of Belos’s character to me is that he had so many chances to change, so many people to help him make that leap, but all of the people who offered him that help ended up dead by his hands because he couldn’t handle the idea that he may have been wrong.

At this point, Belos is stuck. Changing would mean not only giving up on his life’s work, but acknowledging to himself that everything he’s done, mutilating his body, killing his brother, slaughtering thousands and installing himself as God-Emperor of a population he despises more than anything in order to facilitate a genocide, was completely pointless.

He can’t admit that to himself. Especially the thing about Caleb’s death. He’s sunk-cost-fallacied himself so far into a corner that all he can really do when faced with opposing viewpoints is dig his heels in even deeper and lash out in a rage at anyone who challenges him. Even now, when his body is literally falling apart at the seams, he’s still trying to commit witch-genocide, because it’s all he has.

Restorative justice doesn’t work in this case, because the perpetrator needs to be receptive to it. Logically you would assume the show would default to retributive justice, and characters like Willow and Camila do take a very vengeful glee in imagining themselves beating the snot out of Belos. But right now, the primary motivation of the Hexsquad and Hunter in particular when it comes to Belos is to end the threat he poses. As long as Belos is alive and free, he will continue to hurt and kill people, and if he can’t be talked down, he needs to be either contained or killed to prevent him from causing more harm.

The Owl House provides, in my opinion, a very nuanced take on restorative justice. It shows how it works in action, how different situations impact what it looks like, and what happens when it’s simply not an option. It’s not the most satisfying story to tell your audience, because when someone hurts our babies we want them to suffer, no matter how sorry they say they are. But in this case, I think that sacrificing that bit of audience comfort is worth it to tell the story like this.

#the owl house #the owl house meta #toh meta #toh lilith #toh amity #toh hunter #toh belos

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megumri · 1 year

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SOLUBLE - GOOD GOOD - PART II

ISAGI YOICHI X AFAB READER X ITOSHI RIN

↬ you’re careful to never sleep with your pro-footballer boyfriends at the same time; but, all that changes when rin comes home unexpectedly early…

wc: 4k | genre: porn with tiny plot

cw: established poly relationship; unprotected sex; isagi has a thigh fetish; rin has a spit kink; both have a dacryphilia kink; isagi calls reader “angel”; rin calls reader “sweetheart”; reader calls isagi “yochann”; reader is shorter than rin & isagi;

vaginal sex; handjob/masterbation (male receiving); double penetration: oral & vaginal, vaginal & anal; fingering (vaginal & anal, fem receiving); cum play; spitting; hickies; biting; overstimulation; squirting; creampie; tiny bit of pain play; tiny bit of aftercare; (super) minor spoilers; let me know if I missed something

All characters are +21. Minors don’t interact.

a/n: in the future updates will be on my ao3 first, and here later~

part one ⎸ series masterlist

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

“Second rate, huh?”

You feel like a dandelion devoid of its fluff: exposed, vulnerable.

They have an understanding—or at least you thought they did.

“I seem to remember scoring most this season.”

“Penalties don’t count!”

“You and I both know they do.”

So, why the hell is Rin here? Does this mean you aren’t getting your post-season—for lack of a better term—fuckfest? Will they ignore you and start one of their endless arguments?

A sobering thought vacuums the air from your lungs.

Will they make you choose one of them?

“Get lost.”

You clench around Yoichi’s cock still sitting inside you. He grunts, and you duck into the shadowy shell of his embrace to hide Rin’s face from view.

Rin stalks into the room, voice sharpening to a nasty point, “What was that, loser?”

Peeking out, you catch Rin’s eyes, aflame with a vehemence, fix on Yoichi.

They snap to you.

Air stalls in your lungs.

“Wha’s the matter sweetheart?” his voice is unexpectedly soft, bordering on tender, as if gently picking out the shells in the mess of your yolky confusion. Something catches in your throat. “You never need to hide when I’m around.”

Your lips part, the phantom of an apology lingers on the tip of your tongue. You strain your eyes, attempting to sift through his hawkish gaze for what lies underneath. He sees something you don’t, you’re sure of it. A path to ease the turbulence that threatens to dislodge everything.

Flipping through your mental archive, you scramble to extract a common denominator. A solution bursts forth like small sequins from a confetti popper: shiny, new, and dazzling. You marvel at its glittering allure as you stare into the cool blue-green oases of Rin’s eyes.

You are an additive to their immiscible natures. An answer to their solubility.

This… this is your opportunity, your turn to elevate the stakes—if you wish. The question is clear as day in his eyes: what are you going to do about it?

As if in a trance, your arm extends. Rin’s calloused hand closes around yours. A warm, unfettered premonition of ease washes away tensity in your shoulders. You emerge from the cavern of Yoichi’s arms, straighten out your spine, and dive headfirst.

“Yocchan,” fierce blue eyes snap to yours, “why doesn’t Rin join us?”

Owlishly, he blinks at you.

“Yeah, you wannabe hero,” Rin bends at the waist, lowering his face until a sliver of air separates them. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

A cocky smile curls the corners of Yoichi’s mouth.

“Shut up you wannabe villain, you’ll get your turn.”

In one smooth motion, Rin takes off his shirt and all thoughts vacate as you dumbly stare at him. He maneuvers above you on the bed and you swallow a half-formed joke about a spiderman kiss as his lips brush against yours.

“Tell us if it gets too much sweetheart.”

He kisses you. At this angle it’s sloppy. Teeth nicking, chin knocking, your mouths mish-mash into an alien, thrilling sluice. Immediately, you delve a hand into his inky copse of hair. He catches your upper lip in a gentle bite.

Rin pushes up your shirt and cups your bare breasts. His thumbs hone in on your nipples. They dance in tandem, rolling them to pert attention. Yoichi twitches inside you. A damp finger finds your clit and syncs with Rin’s. Pleasure seeps into your veins in a honeyed drizzle. Adrenaline buzzes under your skin like a hive of bees.

It’s happening, this is really happening.

Yoichi grinds. Rin tweaks and bites. Spit coats your chin, spreading to your jaw like a slow drip of molasses. The tip of Yoichi’s cock taps your cervix. You clench, and moan into Rin’s mouth.

You’ve seen this side of them before—them moving as one hyper-aware being on the field to lord over their opponents in devastating tandem. To apply this logic to you is consuming—no, wait, that’s not quite right… the thought sneaks away as Rin’s tongue flicks along the roof of your mouth. Saliva rushes forth in answer.

He pulls away, a string of spit connecting you like a sticky web. He kneads your breasts, tongue teasing your bottom lip before dipping it in your mouth. He angles his head, kissing you deeper.

The heel of Yoichi’s palm pushes just below your navel. You squeeze your legs around his waist and contract. The pressure combines with the prodding of his tip. Your mouth opens wide and Rin eagerly licks into it.

“That’s the spot,“ Yoichi coos, ”right angel?”

Warmth flushes through your body as you release with him. His palm eases away the pressure against your pelvis.

Yoichi’s hips slow to a standstill.

You relax into the bed as Rin’s tongue traces the side of your jaw. Pulling away, he takes your shirt with him. Content and completely naked, you sigh and watch as Rin levels Yoichi with his signature flat glare.

“Tepid.”

Rin’s hands sneak under your arms, and he hauls you into his lap. You shiver as Yoichi’s dick, coated with cum, slides out of you. Rin’s cock, rock hard, presses against the small of your back.

“Why don’t I show you how it’s done?”

The timbre of his voice tickles your spine. Heat prickles the back of your neck. His hands hook under your knees and spread your legs. He exposes you to Yoichi like an exhibition. A fever prickles your skin, your body aches with anticipation. Rin’s lips find your ear.

“Want to cum my cock?”

“Yes,” you promptly respond, head eagerly bobbing where it rests against his shoulder.

You feel more than hear his chuckle as he kisses down your neck. Slotting one of his elbows under your knee. His fingers ghost over your cum-filled folds. Your pussy throbs.

Moaning his name, you clench around what remains of Yoichi inside you, wanting—no needing Rin to hurry. You wiggle in his hold, place your hands on his knees, and dig your fingers into the meat of his thighs. His chin perches on your shoulder, cheek sliding against yours.

“How badly do you want it?”

You twist, attempting to catch his mouth in another kiss, but he doesn’t turn towards you as usual. Instead, your lips smush along his cheek as his eyes remain fixed on Yoichi. You turn to look at him too.

He kneels on the bed, fingers dancing lightly along the length of his shaft. Observant calculation shines behind his mask of desire. You lick your lips. Cum dribbles out of you and Rin’s fingers catch it. He smears it on your clit and pinches.

White-hot need overwrites every fiber of your being. You want them both to touch you. Both inside you. A hunger claws from the pit of your stomach and up your throat.

You open your mouth, ready to ask Yoichi to come closer, to add his tongue to Rin’s touch.

Two fingers plunge inside you.

You throw back your head. The request dies on your tongue, replaced with a moan of Rin’s name.

“Why don’t you show me?” Rin purrs.

He dips in and out, curving his fingers into a tender spot. Teeth sink into your shoulder. As if pulled by strings, your hips lift and grind against his hand. Plush lips find your pulse point and suck.

Soft fap, fap, faps, from Yoichi time with the wet squelches emanating from the building friction between your legs. A hot exhale fans your collarbone.

“You can do it sweetheart, show me.”

He picks up his pace, palm slapping your clit. Yoichi grunts with a quiet curse.

His wrist digs into where Yoichi’s did before. You jolt. Hips writhing, you clench down on his fingers in a fluttering vice. Panting, you anchor a hand at the back of his neck for support.

The wet swipes from Yoichi in front of you peters out.

“That good?” he curls and uncurls his fingers.

“Y-yeah,” you pant; and, it slips out before you have the sense to artfully compose your request: “but, why don’t… let’s include Yoichi this time.“

Rin’s body locks up.

"Now what could that mediocrity bring to the table?” He sneers. You crane your neck and cup the side of his face, turning it towards yours.

“Rin, if you both can make me feel this good, why can’t we all feel this good together?”

A muscle works in his jaw as he stares at a point on the wall. Your hand fidgets with the tips of his bangs.

“Rin?” He meets your gaze from the corner of his eye. You tamp down on the nervousness that threatens to color your voice, “I’ll take care of Yoichi, and I want you to fuck me.“

His cock twitches against your back. A familiar hunger delicately veils his face. He slides you off his lap.

You come onto all fours and turn your attention to Yoichi, who stands at the end of the bed, hand still wrapped around himself. You look up at him and smile.

"C'mere Yochann, lemme see that pretty cock of yours.”

Unceremoniously, he kneels on the bed and presents you with his cum-coated dick. You let out a small sigh. It really is pretty. It’s the perfect size, not too small and not too big, endearing really, with its slight curve to the right. You stick out your tongue, flatten it, scoop up the tip, and tilt up your chin.

A softness touches his eyes, the curve of his mouth. Your lips close around the head of his cock as Rin’s hands settle on your hips. Yoichi cradles your face, thumb skimming along your cheekbone.

“Tap on my thigh if it gets too much angel.”

You hum, and flick your tongue along his slit. A familiar, shy smile dawns on his face.

Rin prods your entrance. His fingers, still sticky with your cum, find your clit. He rubs it in small circles, his own silent supplication for you to relax. You curl your fingers into the sheets.

A syrupy giddiness buzzes through your system. Yoichi’s hand lands on your back, sliding along your skin. Pre-cum pools on your tastebuds, earthy and briny.

Rin rocks his hips, nudging a bit deeper. He stretches you so perfectly, sinking deeper and deeper. You swipe your tongue along the underside of Yoichi’s tip. Hips quivering, a mind-numbing tendril of ecstasy burrows into you as Rin kisses your cervix.

Thoughts of Yoichi’s cock resting patiently on your tongue abandons ship. Rin withdraws, pulling out almost completely. Your heart thunders.

He thrusts, plummeting as deep as before, shoving you forward until Yoichi’s tip knocks against the back of your throat. You gag and shudder, climaxing as you place a steadying hand on the thick muscle of Yoichi’s thigh. He curses under his breath, and his hand swallows your nape, squeezing it gently.

Cock now coated in your fresh orgasm, Rin sets a smooth, seamless pace. Each languid stroke laps against your cervix making you shiver and slurp. You wrap a hand around the base of Yoichi’s shaft, timing it with your movement. Together you build into a rhythm brimming with the promise of tangible fantasies. Wet squelches fill the air.

Rin’s fingers leave your clit and return slick with spit. He moves them in slow circles, groaning, hips rolling. You shut your eyes and picture him head thrown back, eyes shut. Hollowing your cheeks, Yoichi’s groan matches his. Delight in their shared satisfaction whips through you.

Your arm buckles, and Yoichi’s hands catch you as his dick falls from between your lips. Rin’s hand slithers around your stomach, drawing you up, and together they help you lean against Rin. The shift in angle drives Rin into a pocket of raw nerves. Electricity zaps your body.

“Trying to smother my dick sweetheart?” Rin grunts.

Blankly, you watch Yoichi’s hand drop. He flicks your clit.

A cord of tension snaps in your hips. Euphoria rolls your eyes shut and you transform into a boneless, dripping mess. A jumble of profanities and mispronunciations tumble out.

Neither let up. You shove your face into Yoichi’s neck, muffling a strangled shout. You cum again; hard, fast, and wet. It gushes out in an obscene deluge. Tears gather at the corners of your eyes threatening to spill over in a cascade of drunken pleasure.

Yoichi guides your face back to his, nibbling on your lips. Soothing words trickle into your mouth, a balm to the riot of sensations overloading your system.

Rin slows his pace and his fingers tweak your clit. Limbs buzzing, teetering on numbness, you slump into another orgasm.

Tears trickle down the curve of your cheek and your mouth conforms into a wobbly line. Yoichi loosely cradles your face and follows their salty trails with gentle kisses. Rin nuzzles your shoulder, his fingers draw light circles on your upper thigh.

“Might have been a bit too much hmm?” Yoichi’s voice filters into your sluggish brain, “take a deep breath for us now.”

You’re shaking, you realize, trembling from head to toe. When was the last time you came that hard?

You lean back into Rin and try to focus on Yoichi’s face, but your eyes wander. Hazily, you focus on a photo in a gold trimmed frame: you, Rin and Yoichi, arms linked together, wooden sticks licked clean of ice cream. You let out a lethargic sigh, a warm and fuzzy vibration hums through your limbs. You cast about for Yoichi. Concern lines the rims of his eyes.

“All good angel?” The pads of his thumbs skim the corners of your eyes.

“I… want to try something else, but you both, um, may not like it.” Yoichi’s brow wrinkles. “I want,” you audibly swallow, “I want both of you inside me—like, at the same time."

Yoichi processes your request, mind visibly conjuring and dismissing countless possibilities until it clicks.

He glances at Rin, a knowing glint in his eye. You twist, and wait for Rin’s reaction. His eyes slide to yours.

"Where do you want me sweetheart?” Your tongue darts out, wetting your lips. You intentionally clench around him. Rin nudges his hips upward and you inhale sharply.

“On top,” you rasp, “Yoichi, can you be on the bottom—I mean, underneath me? Like we did last time?”

“Of course.” Smugness radiates in a soft aura around him.

You roll your eyes and gently push him away. His dick, still coated with a light sheen of your spit, bobs in the air. He darts from the room.

Carefully, Rin pulls out and reaches for his bag on the floor. He extracts a teal water bottle and takes a swig. Wordlessly, he passes it to you.

Yoichi returns with a few towels and a glove on one of his hands. You hold back a smile, watching as he places them on the edge of the bed. He reaches over into the drawer and pulls out a tube of lube, applying a liberal amount to his hand. Laying down, he strokes himself, and adjusts the pillows under his shoulders.

You turn to Rin. Butterflies dance in your stomach and you gnaw on your lower lip as you place your hands on his waist.

“Can you help me as Yoichi preps?”

He nods, and loosely holds you as you walk backward toward the bed until your calves knock against Yoichi’s knees. You bend slightly letting your forehead rest against his chest, close your eyes, and do your best to relax.

A glob of cold lube lands on your ass, and Yoichi’s gloved finger guides it toward your anus. You take a deep breath, and on your exhale he circles your tight opening.

Opening your eyes, Rin’s cock, pert and sticky with your cum, hangs heavy in the air. Where Yoichi is slender and well-fitting, Rin is thicker, longer. A mischievous smile blooms on your face. You reach out a finger, delighting at his full body flinch as you trace a vein along his shaft.

Glancing up, you raise your eyebrows as you gently encircle his cock with your hand. Throat bobbing, mouth ajar, he nods. With a twist of your wrist, you begin a slow drag.

Yoichi dips a slick finger in. Inadvertently your grip tightens on Rin. He grunts as your free hand flies up to his shoulder. Rin shuffles closer. You rest your cheek against his chest as Yoichi slips further in.

You shiver at the welcome intrusion and time the pumps of your hand with Yoichi’s finger.

Saliva gathers, catching in the corner of your mouth, and trails down to Rin’s nipple. You follow, nibbling on its fleshy firmness as you squeeze his cock from base to tip in a smooth swipe. He releases a shaky breath.

Yoichi wiggles in another, glides them in and out, and slowly teases you open. Licking away your bite you breathily moan.

Slick with fluids, Yoichi’s dick slides against your thigh. His fingers jerk.

Reaching back, you grope until your hand lands on his shaft.

“Want it inside,” you whine.

“C'mere then,” Yoichi chuckles.

Loosening your grip on Rin, they help you lay down on top of Yoichi’s chest. You place a foot on either side of his waist, and lift your hips. His tip rests against your pulsing opening. A lukewarm dollop of lube splashes where you meet. Yoichi swirls it around, coating himself, and edges along your tight ring of muscle. He takes a handful of your thigh.

“Gonna guide you,” He mutters.

You nod. The head of his cock burrows its way inside as he pulls you down. You moan, hands flying up to Rin’s waist. You dig your fingers into his abs, smear saliva on his peck. His arm pulses around you.

“That’s it, deep breath now,” Yoichi murmurs.

You follow his instruction, and on your exhale, sink down with a squelch. The intrusion is familiar, erogenous.

Warm and wet, Rin’s finger draws along the slick heat between your legs. You constrict, legs quivering, and arch your back. Rin’s lips caress yours as Yoichi’s skim the sweat beading on the back of your neck. You melt into their touch, toes curling.

Yoichi moves past your tight ring of muscle.

“Right there Yocchan,” you moan into Rin’s mouth.

Rin bows over you, placing a hand against the bed for support and you wrap an arm around his neck. He parts your folds, the tips of his fingers groping your inner walls. Below, Yoichi grunts and presses his thumbs into a bruising spot on your inner thigh.

A whine stutters from your lips. Rin’s thumb applies a firm pressure to your clit as his fingers steep in your wetness. Legs quaking, your hand flies down to wrap around his wrist.

“Need you,” you pant, “inside.”

The corner of his mouth twitches.

“We’ll do it slow sweetheart.”

Heat licks through your body as you rest a hand over his heart, marveling at its thunder. He spits on your pussy and catches it with the head of his cock. He enters with a sodden push, resting at your entrance.

“Don’t stop,” you whisper.

He plunges deeper. A delicious pinch blooms along the thin membrane between them inside you. Your eyes roll back with your head. Yoichi’s breath huffs against your cheek. A shock skitters through your hips.

You feel impossibly full—stuffed in the most perfect way. A whimper crawls out from the back of your throat.

Rin shifts. His tip rounds along Yoichi’s, pressing into your cervix. You cum, shuddering like an autumn leaf. Numbly you collapse onto Yoichi.

“Shhh,” from above.

“Breathe,” from below.

A cool breeze kisses the back of your neck. A prickle tickles your jaw.

You blink up at Rin, who levels you with his signature cool, calculated face.

“I can’t tell,” he mutters.

“But if it’s like this without us moving–”

“Shut up.” Rin’s expression softens. He kisses the corner of your mouth. You give him a dopey smile. “Still with us sweetheart? Want to keep going or stop?”

“Keep going,” you sigh.

He squints, disbelief plain on his face, and grinds his hips.

You moan a fuzzy combination of their names, muscles leaping into his movement. Yoichi shifts you on his chest, angling your head to rest against his shoulder. Rin lowers his face, lips hovering over yours.

“Relax a bit more.”

Yoichi massages the joints between your legs and hips. Syrupy warmth oozes out, coating you from head to toe. You look down at your shared juncture, involuntarily squeezing at the provocative picture before you.

Rin reaches outside your periphery, and returns with the bottle of lube. Uncapping it, he drizzles more along his shaft until it drips onto Yoichi below him.

“Keep going,” you plead.

Rin rolls his hips. Heavy and full, his balls drag along Yoichi’s shaft. Yoichi twitches inside you and shifts upward with a flex of his muscles. You palpitate around them both.

"So tight,” Yoichi grunts.

Rin grinds into you while Yoichi’s hands wander to your breasts. He fondles them while nibbling on the sensitive skin below your ear. Sweat beads along your hairline.

“’s so good,” you moan, “both, feels so good.”

Yoichi’s chuckle ripples along your neck. Rin bestows a spongy kiss. Heat rushes to your face, your heart thumps in your chest. Everything except their sensual touches fall away.

One of Yoichi’s hands drops to your clit.

He works it until you ache and your breath hitches. A quiver in your legs transforms into a quake. You spasm and contract letting it flood out of you in a messy drip of fluids.

“You’re drooling sweetheart,” satisfaction drips from every syllable, then morphs into cold authority: “Follow my lead loser.”

Rin withdraws, as if pulling out, but stops shy. Swiftly he glides back in, bottoming out. Your gut tightens, and your hand fists in the silky strands at his nape.

A rare, throaty moan vibrates Rin’s chest. Repeating his movement, he sets a languid pace. Yoichi syncs with him.

Hairs stand to attention along your arms, the back of your neck. Sweat gathers along your back and drips onto your chest from above. Your nails drag along Rin’s chest. Yoichi’s hands reach for your thighs. He eases your legs further open.

A spark ignites tinder in your abdomen. Yoichi coaxes it into a smoldering intensity. Rin grows it to a fire. A moan rips itself from your throat, tears spill from the corners of your eyes, curses fall from your lips.

They grunt as you vice around them and pour out your release. Yoichi bursts inside you, then Rin, their hips stuttering as you milk them dry.

Their hips slow to a standstill; and you, wrung like a wet rag, slump against Yoichi. You swallow, and blink away drops clinging to your lashes.

A chorus of pants fill the air. Rin’s breath mellows out first, followed by Yoichi, and you meander behind.

Rin pulls out with a lewd squelch. Yoichi’s hands find their way back to your hips, and with Rin’s help, they pull you from his lap and sit you on the bed.

Rin kneels down between your legs, eyes glued to your sticky lower lips. He drags the pad of his finger from bottom to top, and circles your clit. He massages it, waiting, watching.

You gush out in a lewd torrent, soaking the towel and sheets below. Feebly you swat at his hand.

“Fuck,” you sigh.

Lulling your head, you catch the quirk of his mouth before he sucks on his fingers.

Yoichi leans over, tapping your lip with the straw from his water bottle. Greedily you gulp. Cool and crisp, it carves a path down your throat and sloshes in your belly.

They cuddle around you on the bed: Rin stretching long to your left, Yoichi propping himself on an elbow to your right. You nuzzle into Rin and toss one of your legs over Yoichi’s.

You take turns sipping water until the sharp pitter-patter of the straw sounds like a buzzer.

Exhaustion settles over you like a weighted blanket.

Happy, you are so happy; and sleepy, so, so, sleepy.

Fingers brush your cheek as you close your eyes.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

disclaimer: I don’t own any of the characters or people mentioned in this piece & all characters are +21 plus regardless of published canon

please do not copy, translate, nor repost this work nor other work belonging to @megumri

part one ⎸ series masterlist

#itoshi rin #rin itoshi #itoshi rin x reader #rin itoshi x reader #itoshi rin smut #isagi yoichi #yoichi isagi #isagi yoichi x reader #yoichi isagi x reader #isagi yoichi smut #blue lock x reader #bllk x reader #if you interacted with the series masterlist post and didn't get tagged its cause you were a blank blog or i couldn't tell how old you are #no hard feelings !

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howlonomy · 1 month

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Here it is:

Alright, the Lore Shit: After killing Zenith Martlet and absorbing Asgore's SOUL, Clover decided to kill literally everyone in the Underground (minus the Ruins since they can't get back there) to make sure that any humans to fall in the future can't be killed by them (their ass was NOT listening to Flowey about how the Barrier works). So the constant release of ambient magic from the killed monsters plus them having Asgore's SOUL started to, slowly but surely, turn them into a Monster (and because of how slow it was, they didn't have any balance issues with the tail). Unknown to them, Asgore's SOUL had been collecting that magic, which is what caused them to change. They don't even realize that they've transformed since, as Sans states, they have distanced themself so much by having a LOVE of 20 that they don't even really seem to be there (also they have not looked in a mirror, no "It's you"s to be seen here)

For some reason I thought of this too, but their theme would either be straight up Enemy Retreating or a remixed All's Fair (which I have decided to call "Is It Fair?")

Stats: Same as always for the same reason, it just makes sense here.

Check: DOUBLE MEANING ALERT! DOUBLE MEANING ALERT! WEEWOO WEEWOO!

Sorry, but yeah. Traitor in the sense of "You killed everyone who cares for me" and "You killed all* the monsters while also being a monster" (a "You have become the very thing you swore to destroy" moment if ever there were). And "Justice" because killing people is never justice (unless it's the death penalty and ruled by a court of law but eh, semantics)

FLAVOR TEXT BECAUSE I HAVE THOUGHT THIS OUT WAY TOO MUCH:

Clover seems hesitant.

Clover can't seem to attack!

Are they... crying?

Because this fight is from the POV of a Pacifist Ending Clover (most likely in between exploring Ceroba's house and meeting up with Martlet on top off UG Apartments, again I have thought this out way too much) that means that nmm!Clover is fighting a human, which they really don't want to do, especially since that human is themself, so they hesitate and sometimes just straight up don't attack (I thought about including Familiarity again, but decided against it just so that I could have new material, it would absolutely fit, though)

Also, fun little fact I guess, but this is a complete inversion of the dt!Clover vs. nm!Clover fight! A murderous monster Clover fighting a pacifistic human Clover, and BOTH don't want to fight this time!

I realize that this may be a bit much considering this IS your au, but I can't help it when my brain starts thinking of this stuff, and it's so cool that I can't NOT draw it and share it.

ANYWAYS now I only have like one idea left. I am so close, but I will probably gain like seven others as soon as it's done, oh well. Enjoy!

WHAAAAATTT ALL OF THIS IS SO FUN???? the concept of slowly turning into the thing you swore to destroy is SOOO EVERYTHING…. and the play on alls fair??!??!? literally insane i am obsessed with it being called is it fair. because its not but i imagine nmm!clover being so distraught about being turned into a creature they hate and having to fight themselves. but its almost like penance for what they did.

AND THE INVERSE IS SO FUNNNN so many interesting new dynamics there; like if this fight took place before the final ceroba fight, clover wouldnt be nearly as close with everyone. sure, theyre angry at nmm!clover but also. they get it. im sure they would understand where they were coming from.

AARUGHHH THIS IS SO FUN I LOVE THIS LITTLE IDEA!!! ITS SO RICH IN CHARACTER AND LITTLE FLAVOR TEXTS

#asked and answered #monster clover au #mcau au #DIES. I LOVE THE LITTLE THINGS…. IT ALWAYS PULLS IT TOGETHER #the theme name. the flavor text. the stats. SIGHS!!!!!!

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loveyougoodbi · 5 months

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"something ive been thinking about today for sure" and then you leave us in SUSPENSE

Hahah I usually don't put my thoughts here as soon as they appear cos I don't want to make any statements in the heat of the moment since I know people on tumblr tend to grasp onto everything they read and take it as facts. BUT nevertheless here are my thoughts on Max pushing Charles off every time they start on the front row. This is gonna be a mess.

(I do not know how to write a short response)

I like everyone else was slightly surprised that Charles was so easy to forgive Max after he apologized in Vegas. I genuinely thought this time he would at least.. discuss it in a more heated manner (I'm thinking max and checo in Austria after the sprint). I wasn't sure about the state of their relationship after and I know it would not be austria 2019 but I did not expect charles to brush it off the way he did.

Thinking about it now after the race is over I kinda understand why he did brush it off. It did not affect his race that much, he was able to retake the lead, he was gunning for a win anyway, Max got the penalty, it was all fine. The safety car was the bigger issue so of course he's gonna focus on that instead of put his already new and fragile relationship with max in jeopardy over this.

That being said, I do not condone Max acting like this every time. It says something that when the race started before t1 even happened I was expecting Charles to be pushed. I think Max was genuinely scared in Austin but when Charles brushed that one off he is now more relaxed in trying riskier moves with Charles. And the thing is, Charles doesn't care now. He's car is shit, he rarely has a chance to win when Max does this so it's easy for Charles to say "it's okay this Max and Race Max are different, I want to maintain this friendship so I will forgive" now that he's p7 and essentially not fighting for anything in the championship.

But would Charles feel the same way if they were fighting for a championship? I don't think so. And it worries me because by that point they will be closer as friends probably and Max will try riskier moves and all of them will be brushed off by Charles but at one point I think it is bound to snap. And I'm scared that the more it goes on and the more times it happens its gonna be more serious on Charles' side. As in he's gonna be more hurt by it but also the strain in the relationship would be bigger.

I may be wrong and I may be reading them completely wrong. They may surprise me again and have a clean championship battle with no drama and there is nothing I would love more than that. And so far all I've been doing is praying for a championship battle and not thinking what that Entails but now that this has happened multiple times and now that Max has the impression that he can do what he wants on track as long as he says sorry and bats his eyelashes after, I think Max is not suddenly gonna start clean racing. He's gonna play even more dirty if they're fighting for a championship. I'm not saying Charles won't, I'm saying they both will but seeing this I do not think anymore that it's gonna be a clean battle. I'm still gonna enjoy and pray for it but with a hint of caution bc like I said what im seeing now (as cute as it is from a shipper perspective) worries me a little.

Hope this manages to paint a picture of my thoughts a little. Cos they're mostly just jumbled together pieces of "what if this happens what if that happens". But this is the general direction I'm going in. What if Max continues doing this when the stakes are higher and what if Charles doesn't take it as well as he is now when he is actually fighting for something? That's a lot of what ifs 😂 but yeah..

#lestappen #charles leclerc #max verstappen #hope i managed to explain it well #nothing against max obv #for those who dont know im a max girl and i will not stand for max hate in my inbox #i am dicussing the state of the friendship od my 2 fav drivers here #f1 #f1 discussions by me

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sokkastyles · 2 months

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ATLA LA Ep 6 Thoughts:

I feel like Iroh is more defensive of Zuko than he should be. In the original, Iroh does explain Zuko's side to Jee, but I don't like the implication that Zuko understands sacrifice MORE. OG Iroh never felt like he was justifying Zuko's actions.

I do like the parallel with Zuko disrespecting a superior officer, which is got him banished in the first place, and Zuko disrespecting Zhao, while Zhao uses his past as a earning, and Zuko bullying his crew in the same way he was/is bullied. All because he thought war would be honorable.

Liked the fire sages and Roku but Aang going there to ask Roku for help in saving Katara and Sokka feels strange when he's supposed to be talking to Roku about the actual plot.

Aang: you can't always have been like this. *cue flashback*

BLUE SPIRIT BLUE SPIRIT

I can totally believe Zuko keeps exhaustive notes on everything Avatar related, but of course he never wrote about what happened to him.

The problem with Aang and Zuko having a prolonged conversation here is that it saps the tension out of their relationship.

"Compassion is a sign of weakness" / "I didn't mean to hurt you." The ways we hurt people when we've been hurt.

People talk too much in this show about what they're doing / going to do.

I get the feeling they were trying to make Iroh seem more proactive here, but it kinda has the opposite effect because instead of being paralyzed by shock/horror/guilt, he just like, makes one protest and then steps aside on cue.

"He's your son." "We'll see." It's a test.

It's a test but it's still not one Zuko can pass. Ozai accuses Zuko of holding back but the literal moment Zuko matches his ruthlessness, Ozai gets his excuse to hurt him.

And listen, I've seen some discourse about Zuko fighting back. But one, Zuko is not a skinny little kid here. I do wish they had cast a child actor but at the same time, Liu is so good that I can forgive that. So we have to accept a Zuko who is a little older and does not look as visibly like a child. Two, it doesn't matter whether Zuko fought back, nothing Ozai does to him is justified, but Ozai was absolutely looking for an excuse. The only thing that changes here is the excuse itself. The end result is the same, that Ozai deliberately hurt his son.

Azula's look of fascination is pretty perfect.

Aang's actor is good here. This is the scene between Aang and Zuko in the OG. Not sure why it was necessary for Zuko and Aang to have that talk before if they were also going to keep this scene. Again, this show has a problem with the pacing because characters keep stopping to give unnecessary exposition. I know we all want more Aang and Zuko but it doesn't quite work.

I still don't think Ozai's justification works.

The idea of Zuko's crew being the 41st is compelling. The idea that Ozai punished Zuko for having compassion by making him responsible for the people he refused to dehumanize, perhaps in the hope that he would eventually come to hate them. And it seemed like it was on its way to working. What I hate is the way the show frames things here by making it seem like it's the crew's responsibility to understand Zuko, and then suddenly they all worship him. The original showed us that Zuko still had compassion, and that was what earned the crew's respect, more than Iroh's story. It's also weird to have this happen after Zhao commandeers the crew, because Jee was right, that he, especially, knows the penalty for not following orders, and knowing Zuko's story only emphasizes how little autonomy the 41st actually have when up against someone like Zhao.

#atla live action

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darklinaforever · 2 months

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No because once again, you are just repeating like parrots the same arguments over and over again that have already been dismantled and I don't care. As one of these anonymous messages says, it must be tiring and boring to post the same thing 24/7...

I know the definition of grooming as well as the true meaning of what is implied in a historical context. And obviously not you. I already did an entire post explaining this book and show grooming bullshit :

But all you care about is appearing morally superior and you look like a bunch of ridiculous fanatics. Or some ridiculous bigot, because I'm pretty sure it's the same person sending these stupid messages over and over again.

What is your problem ? You're bored ? Why are you spying on my accounts like that ? Seriously, why are you so obsessed with me ? I imagine him on the lookout for the slightest post on Daemyra that I make ready to pounce like a predator on its prey. My god, this person(s) must not have a life. It's sad. 😂

What do you expect ? That between the insults and the repetitions of the same stupid arguments over and over again for a long time I actually delete my account to please you ? Or that I suddenly say : Oh but my god you are right ! You delivered me from evil ! Daemyra is such a groomer ! Daemon is a monster who doesn't love anyone ! 😱😂

By the way, here is again the little free quote from GRRM Martin's book on Daemon, his favorite character whom he considers to be a gray and complex character. So your Daemon is BAD BAD BAD, well the author himself tells you no :

Over the centuries, House Targaryen has produced both great men & monsters. Prince Daemon was both. In his day there was not a man so admired, so beloved, & so reviled in all Westeros. He was made of light & darkness. To some he was a hero, to others the blackest of villains.

You really look like a bunch of disillusioned idiots. It must be hard when the true creator himself doesn't agree with you on what the character is.

It must also piss you off that these interviews for the series exist, right ?

There's no point in booing me because I say something that has already been said by the directors and screenwriters themselves. I don't agree with everything they say or do in this stupid adaptation, but at least we can agree on some points.

Oh, and I have already said I don't know how many times that I recognized that Daemyra had toxic aspects in the series version, except that, so what ? This will prevent me from shipping the Daemyra version of the series maybe ?! No. Love is not necessarily something pure, we have to stop the bullshit, especially in fiction. On the other hand, I maintain that there is nothing toxic in the book version. There is no such thing as a brothel. It's an invention of Mushroom. There is no voluntary abandonment of Daemon for 10 years. In reality he was banished under penalty of death. There is no Daemon leaving Rhaenyra to deal with childbirth alone. He was by his side in the books. There is no strangulation either. And once again, the age difference and the incest aspect are not real arguments as to a possible toxicity in their relationship, due to placing the relationship in its fictional and historical context from which GRRM draws inspiration, namely the feudal era, where age differences and incest were included in the customs of the time for specific reasons. Especially if we are in a family where incest has no impact due to their MAGIC BLOOD ! These elements are not evidence of toxicity. Open a history book. An age difference and incestuous marriage in a historical context does not necessarily result in toxic abusive relationships. This is bullshit.

Also, I don't have the impression that you will understand that the show is not the book. I always distinguish between the two and obviously you don't. Because what exactly do you believe ? That if Daemon cheats on Rhaenyra in the series, my world will fall apart ? No. My posts on Daemyra will continue because the book will always exist. You know, the book that has a different canon from the show, therefore implying that the canon of the series cannot interfere with that of the book. But you didn't remember the difference between the two. You prefer to mix it up to fix your pathetic vision.

The series is already shit. Even for the Daemyra relationship they messed up on a lot of points. And I'm not even going to start with the greens, Alicent etc. It is a disaster. The series itself is full of inconsistencies.

I will add that in reality you do not care about the so-called abuse that Rhaenyra suffered from Daemon. Otherwise you would care what Alicent and the greens team did to her. But you don't care. You even expect the show to write scenes of stupid abuse between Daemyra over and over again. Because you don't actually care about Rhaenyra. The proof tells you that no one can love the whore of Dragonstone, a nickname literally coming from the greens team. Bunch of hypocrites.

Once again I recommend going to the tumblr of @la-pheacienne and of @horizon-verizon to educate you on what the character of Daemon and the Daemyra relationship really is. The posts of @stromuprisahat are also pretty good in general on Fire and Blood.

The antis are really crazy. The bitch who should close her account apparently well she tells you to go fuck yourself and buy a life.

@aleksanderscult

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gatheringbones · 7 months

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[“Time and again, sex workers watch as mainstream feminist intervention and commentary neglects workplace power relations and the need to earn a living. In these analyses, forced health examinations are nothing to worry about, and making sex workers carry an ID around that reveals their real name to potential predators is fine. Schwarzer, despite identifying as an ‘abolitionist’, supports forced health checks and compulsory registration, while leading feminist Julie Bindel criticises regulationism as a legal model but suggests that the promise of registering prostitutes is one of its few redeeming features.

Many anti-prostitution feminists envision state interference uncritically, as harmless for women or even as a form of protection. Writer Kat Banyard approvingly quotes a woman who tells her:

If it hadn’t been legal I wouldn’t have done it … as I wouldn’t rob an old lady or as I won’t steal at the shop or something like that. I wouldn’t have made this decision if it wouldn’t have been so easy and legal. I really had wished that it wasn’t legal and that the state – in Germany, you know we call the state ‘the father’ – and I really had the wish that the father had protected me from that with a good law.

Setting aside the implication that a prostitute should be criminalised in the same way as someone who robs an old lady (a strange implication to find in an ostensibly feminist text), for women to ask the ‘father state’ for protection from what we might perceive to be our own ‘bad decisions’ is about as explicit an appeal to patriarchy as you can get. The word patriarchy literally translates to ‘rule by the fathers’ – or the ‘father state’, one might say.

Though these politics are incredibly frustrating and harmful to sex workers, it isn’t hard to see how they happen. Regulationism represents an understandable nightmare: that we are headed for a hyper-capitalist sexual dystopia where men profiteering from women’s prostitution is a legitimised, unstoppable industry and women’s bodies are cogs in the machine. We don’t disagree that legalisation is bad. In fact, what we’d like very much to do is lead a more robust conversation with people like Bindel, Banyard, and Schwarzer about why and how exactly it is bad and what the alternatives are. To regulate and control sex workers – with the threat of punishment if they don’t comply – is to abandon the poorest and most vulnerable to the shadows. To these workers, legalisation is criminalisation, since the ability to work within the law is in practice beyond them. It’s tempting to imagine drunken, aggressive stag parties stumbling out of bars in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn or Amsterdam’s De Wallen red-light districts and think that only additional restrictions, penalties, and punishments will help. But penalties, however they manifest, only make the sex industry more dangerous for sex workers. Penalties mean taking power from workers and giving it to the police, employers, or clients.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

#molly smith #juno mac #history stuff #currently reading

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houndsofbalthazar · 1 year

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Been playing some Pathfinder: Kingmaker and it's got me thinking about how much I dislike the weapon proficiency system in D&D and its variations, adaptations, and derivatives. I'm not familiar with every single version of course so this is only speaking to broad trends, and only in the ones I've played!

For all intents and purposes, not having proficiency in a weapon means you can't use it. Different implementations manage it differently, video games tend to straight up not let you equip a weapon you're not proficient in, while sometimes it's just a penalty (or lack of a bonus). In 3.5e iirc, it was -4 to hit with a weapon you're not proficient in. That's a reduction of 20 percentage points to hit rate! IMO unless the DM or game leans very hard into this, it's essentially the same as saying you can't wield them. (Leaning into it would be for example playing a game in which you face a lot of monsters with invulnerability/ damage reduction with specific weaknesses to different materials and damage types and are specifically very limited in weapons of those various damage types, then you start to get the choice of a weapon that will be more effective, but you are worse at using, and even then it's tricky to pull off without it becoming a maths puzzle)

Most versions of this system let you gain proficiency in a weapon or weapon group, but you usually spend a feat to do so. Feats are huge, big rewards for levelling up and you don't get many. The bump in mechanical power from "upgrading" a category is usually negligible, and sometimes literally nonexistent. For example, one thing that set me off thinking about this again is that in pf: kingmaker I found a magical sling staff. That's a cool weapon I thought! But it requires exotic proficiency, you have to spend a whole feat just to use it. Or I could keep using a light crossbow which is almost identical (the only difference is slightly different crit stats, one crits more often, the other does more damage on a crit). So I could have enjoyed finding a cool unusual weapon for my character to use and further flesh out the fantasy of having a unique character, or I could -- and did -- just sell it immediately because I'm not spending a whole feat on it, and I'd need to level up multiple times to even get a feat to spend, and then if another cool weapon came up that would just be a waste. It might as well have just been a pile of gold.

You can, I think, get some mileage from finding a cool piece of equipment that you can't use yet. The trouble is in video games the gear treadmill is often such that by the time you can use it you've found something better anyway. There's more potential on the tabletop, but again I think you need to lean into it and it does have to be an especially cool piece of equipment.

Aesthetically, I also really dislike it. Because the mechanical differences between weapons are so small it often feels like I'm being pushed towards someone else's idea of the character I should play. I made a post a while back comparing Morrowind & Oblivion's approaches to armoured spellcasting (in the latter wearing any armour will always decrease your spell power - the game's telling you that you can wear armour but real wizards don't). If Martial & Exotic weapons were so much stronger than the lower tiers I'd understand it, it'd be a game balance reason. But the categories aren't really consistent enough about it. It's not going to be gamebreaking if I want my wizard to use a trident instead of a spear (literally identical stats!) But the aesthetic is prevented by the rules. I think when part of the appeal of the game is to play the fantasy of your character as a unique cool hero.

As an aside, a similar reason is why I will probably never play a Rogue in D&D 5e. The aesthetic I want to play is your traditional thug, you know, the burly bash your kneecaps in kind of thug. Rogue would be the perfect class to represent that, except sneak attack can only be done with finesse weapons which are all knives and swords. No clubs, maces, or other thwacky objects allowed because someone had a specific idea of what a rogue should be and limited it without any real mechanical reason for it.

Ok rant over. Maybe I'll reblog this one with thoughts on how I'd handle it some time because I do like the idea of weapon types all being slightly different, and it does make sense to me that a fighter would be able to use more weapons than a sorcerer (most of the time).

#my text

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yuwumeniji · 1 year

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Luxiem & A Trace Of Wonder

WARNING: Please remember that I am writing about Luxiem based on their characters online and not of the people behind their vtuber avatars, thank you!

EXTRA NOTES: wuwuywuwywuw did i finally start writing again??? yes . do i have a new fixation on a bl novel???also yes so now im mashing these two interests of mine together... just like how i started this blog

GENERAL

a luxiem au based on 해의 흔적 (a trace of wonder)

for the sake of this au, they are from the same jp guild - Luxiem (the guild from the original is an sk guild, so since anycolor is jp, luxiem will fall under jp.... plus en is a very broad area... bear with me LMAO)

Luxiem are considered the top JP Guild and one of the top guilds worldwide

the source material IS from a BL novel, but there will be no mentions of romance for this post

i went a little chuuni to name the abilities ok i dont think the novel had that - im just cringe like that

dear god i did not proofread this but something definitely possessed me in order to write this out instead of whatever college essay i got due soon

BRIEF ATOW UNIVERSE EXPLANATION

ok so think of it as like a modern era rpg game - the awakened class of people refers to those with supernatural abilities and dungeons are areas in the world where treasure and strong monsters spawn (sometimes these dungeons are based on parts of history as well)

the awakened class makes up about 10% of the population

those who are awakened have access to these dungeons in order to beat them within a certain time frame with Class S dungeons being the most deadly

those who are awakened also form guilds in order to enter such dungeons and have jurisdiction over ones that spawned with the guild's country - no other country is allowed to interfere with another

those who are awakened have two abilities - one main and one hidden ; the hidden ability also comes with a penalty and should be used with caution as the power may interfere with every day life outside of combat/cause hindrance when dungeon crawling

for the powerscalling in the universe, it is from Class E (lowest) to Class S (highest) ; this works for both the classification of awakened people and dungeon ranking

the main abilities that are at least mentioned here are restorers, hunters, mages and healers ; 2/4 classes are combative while the others are non-combative, but still useful when dungeon crawling

i hope my shitty explanation gets you to read the novel/manwha so that you can understand it better LMAO

MORE UNDER THE CUT

❀•°•═════ஓ๑♡๑ஓ═════•°•❀

IKE EVELAND

CLASSIFICATION: Class A Healer

MAIN ABILITY: Priest's Waterfall

ike has the ability to heal using his staff without using too much mana. however, he is restricted to water - by using other elements, he runs the risk of depleting too much mana before entering the boss' room in a dungeon.

his staff has the appearance of a large quill. no one knows the reasoning behind it as most staffs on the guild markets are stick-like

HIDDEN ABILITY: Darkness of the Deep

ike has the hidden ability to summon a powerful tentacle-like creature of nightmares. with this, ike switches classes - from non-combative to combative. however, the tentacle-like creature is sentient and moves on its own, ike has no control over what it hits. the creature is also considered to be a glass canon ; while it is powerful, it can only withstand attacks for so long and is on a time limit.

ike can only use his hidden ability when threatened ; he and mysta are the only non-combative members of the guild and this is his only way of protecting them both if no one else could not help.

PENALTY: everything he touches becomes an inky water

without mysta around, most solid objects around ike become an inky liquid that is as viscous as water if he touches it - it's strange, but definitely an inconvenience to his everyday life.

fortunately, his penalty does not harm humans

his strength lies in his durability and mana. he is also quite knowledgable of different types of potions and strengthening spells that help out with dungeon crawling

in fact, ike naturally houses the most mana within the guild followed by shu, mysta, vox and luca.

he originally came from a swedish guild overseas before his meeting with vox, who recruited ike with the promise of hatsune miku figures if he joined Luxiem (this is my attempt at humor)

ike is usually the one who gathers intel on their next dungeon - thanks to his quick reading speed and familiarity with mythos, ike predicts what would the location and boss of the dungeon with 99.99% accuracy

LUCA KANESHIRO

CLASSIFICATION: Class A Hunter

MAIN ABILITY: Heightened Strength

despite not wielding any kind of weapon, luca is proud of his brute strength - just one tap from him could reduce skyscrapers into dust clouds.

HIDDEN ABILITY: Shapeshifting

luca's hidden ability can only be activated if he has ingested a specific kind of gemstone - however with his hidden ability, he can only turn into a lion that possesses supernatural qualities for a short period of time

the lion is big btw ... just letting you know haha

PENALTY: Lion's Mane

with the penalty in place, luca essentially walks around with a huge lion's mane. he complains about how heavy it is and how the hair gets everywhere

unlike the other members, luca does not possess any magical strength - arguably he could just be a regular civilian who happens to possess superhuman strength; most of luxiem thought he was a civilian until they found out about his penalty

he also is proficient with long range weapons such as guns and arrows, but he is mainly the brawler of the group

while luca was originally scouted by vox to join, luca is actually the one who has the leadership role - the demon said that he prefers a more 'in the shadows' kind of role anyways and handed the position to luca; the guild members aren't sure if luca is actually aware of that, but they all appreciate the work and effort he gives towards the guild.

the guild luca was in has a partnership with luxiem and is currently being led by his older brother

MYSTA RIAS

CLASSIFICATION: Class A(?) Restorer

MAIN ABILITY: Restoration

after seeing a structure, mysta has the ability to 'restore' it to it's original state - for instance, if ike had turned a wardrobe into ink, mysta has the ability to restore the wardrobe's appearance and functionality before it was turned into ink.

mysta's true abilities is unknown - if anything, he has enough magical strength to bring life back

however, there are some ethical issues involving the restoration of life and is considered taboo for a restorer to interfere with the death of a living thing.

generally, mysta has the strength to restore even stadiums after an earthquake to its original form and functionality - it is possible that he may be a Class S, but no further assessment has been made yet

HIDDEN ABILITY: Medusa's Petrification.

this is the only ability mysta has that is allowed to be used on living creatures - he essentially turns things into stone rather than restoring them to its original state

the only way this ability is activated is when mysta experiences a very strong emotion such as fear or despair

he only has to look at the object or creature in front of him in order for it to turn into stone - fortunately, even with the hidden ability activated, he could still undo the process if he accidentally petrifies a guild member

PENALTY: Floating

for some odd reason, mysta's penalty is that he has no control over gravity - his body becomes weightless and therefore starts to float. he essentially becomes a balloon and many of the guild members just walk him around with a string attached to his belt so he doesn't fly off to who knows where before his penalty wanes off.

mysta was actually not part of a guild when he was scouted - in fact, he was working as an odd-jobs repair man who did small gigs in order to get by.

mysta also has the least amount of dungeon experience as he is of a non-combative class ; surprisingly enough, not many guilds seek restorers to join.

despite that, mysta is a highly sought out restorer due to his efficiency - buildings turned into rubble could be restored within a matter of seconds

he is also the only one in the guild who is responsible for the loot they earned and items each member brings into the dungeons

SHU YAMINO

CLASSIFICATION: Class S Mage

MAIN ABILITY: Summoner

as his main ability states, shu is a summoner who could gather up to Class A monsters to listen to him.

he also has the ability to call upon 'yokai'-classed monsters through the usage of shikigami ; this aspect of his ability is dependent on the amount of shikigamis he brings with him into dungeons.

HIDDEN ABILITY: God's Messenger

when activated, shu has the ability to call down one of japan's seven lucky gods to battle. this is randomized and he doesn't have the ability to choose which one will come help.

luckily for him, he doesn't have to worry about the gods not responding to him; no matter the call, they will answer.

depending on who is summoned, shu takes on the form of one of the seven lucky gods and uses their abilities in combat.

essentially, shu becomes possessed by the god he has summoned but does run the risk of being permanently possessed by them even though his combat ability is on a timer

the only problem with this ability is that this can only be activated if he senses that the danger is too high ; ideally in Class S dungeons where the survival rate is essentially 0%.

PENALTY: Inability to feel pain

this penalty could be proven fatal to shu as he would be numb to all kinds of pain - from the tiniest scratch to getting his heart ripped out ; it would be too late for shu to notice if anything bad happens to him.

this penalty is activated the minute he uses his hidden ability, thus putting his own life at an even higher risk of possession and even death

similarly to mysta, shu was not a part of a guild when he was scouted, in fact, he had been staying at his family's temple as one of the priests who carried out sacred rituals to protect his town from dungeons spawning nearby.

tragically, shu is one of the few guild members to experience loss through the dungeons.

when vox found him, he was surround by the rubble of what was originally his home town - the Class A dungeon wiped the town off the map. with no where else to go, shu decided to follow vox and the rest of luxiem.

shu often helps ike with intelligence and is often in charge of dungeons that originate in japanese mythos

he was the last member to be recruited - words of a powerful sorcerer had reached vox's ears, but he didn't expect to find him in that state.

despite the tragedy, shu is thankful for having met the boys of luxiem - he's glad to call them home

VOX AKUMA

CLASSIFICATION: Class S Hunter

MAIN ABILITY: Shadow Swordsman

vox is quite proficient with the sword, combined with the demon-like energy that festers within the shadows, he becomes an unstoppable killing machine

not only can he infuse the dark energy into whatever blade he is holding, he also has the ability to create a clone who wields the sword the same way he does

HIDDEN ABILITY: Divine Judgement

he has the ability to strike a mighty light into his opponents - it is a devastating ability that clashes with his already dark main ability

it can strike through the thickest material and destroy what is wicked ; often destroying the dungeon completely and automatically clearing it in order to avoid any more casualties.

it is another ability that can only be activated during dire situations, similarly to shu's hidden ability.

PENALTY: Temporary Blindness

as the light he summons is from the almighty, it does temporarily blind vox for a little while as punishment for using god's ability for his quest to find out what causes dungeons to spawn

the first and last time vox had his penalty in place, shu was the one who helps guide him around with the usage of his shikigami - on the other hand, luca was the one to pull pranks on vox while he's blind (vox can tell it's luca because of his laugh)

vox has the most dungeon crawling experience out of all the members of luxiem and is the one who recruited all of them to join his guild - he's happy to find such like minded people he could call home.

while his physical or magical strength doesn't exceed all members of luxiem, he is the most proficient and stable in terms of combat ; he has used his hidden ability only once in his entire career as a hunter

luxiem's leader in the shadows, while he doesn't take a direct leadership role, vox usually is the one who approves of or disapproves of luca's wild antics.

ok a lot of the times, vox does approve of luca's antics because "he's just being silly your honour" - only when the situation is that dire will he take matters into his own hands.

he's usually the one calling strategy meetings before going into dungeons

#yuwrote #holy shit yuwu content is real and its just a bl novel brainrot LMAO #do you guys want ship content because i could do that too if requested lol #i need to go through my inbox... ill get to you guys soon TT #nijisanji en luxiem #luxiem imagine #luxiem drabble #luxiem x reader #luxiem #shu yamino #ike eveland #ike eveland x reader #luca kaneshiro #mysta rias #shu yamino x reader #vox akuma x reader #vox akuma #mysta rias x reader #luca kaneshiro x reader

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nebmia · 25 days

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Reviewing every rpg book on my shelf: 7, Wolves of God

Wolves of God by Kevin Crawford is a game about adventuring in early anglo-saxon england and its prime virtue is in how thoroughly (and for the most part accurately) it develops that time period and attempts to place players in the outlook of those people. I happen to have a particular love for the early middle ages and for the anglo-saxons in particular, which places me directly in the target demographic for this game, and as far as I am concerned it delivers.

Mechanically Wolves of God is built on the same fundamental system as Kevin Crawfords other ‘without number’ games: So an osr type game with a greater than usual quantity of character build options and a particular focus on sandbox play.

The first thing you notice when you read the book is the framing device. The book is treated as if it was a manuscript written by a monk in 710AD (the rather opinionated Brother Cornix) documenting anglo-saxon gaming practice that has been unearthed and edited by Kevin Crawford. This lends the whole book a very unique and (to me) entertaining voice. For illustration here is a section from character creation:

The rules in these pages will show you how to make your bold adventurer, but do not be a thrall to man-marked ink on pale parchment. If your band of gamesmen has their own thought to the right way to manage a matter, then let it be done as you and your companions think best. Listen, then, and I will tell you how to make an English hero. From the first strong sinews of the mortal body to the crown of reason and high ambition, you will learn what makes a mighty champion of our people.

The styling as a medieval manuscript does, however, mean that many standard features of modern layout are absent, such as bullet points being replaced by paragraphs starting ‘primus’, ‘secundus’, ‘Tertius’, etc and that overall the text is much wordier than most contemporary rpgs. However, there are footnotes and sidebars from ‘the editor’ which summarise important rules or discuss some of Brother Cornix’s biases, and I find that, overall, the writing style is worth it for the level of immersion in the culture that it provides.

There are three classes you can use to create your ‘English Hero’ (plus an option for multiclassing): the warrior, the saint, and the galdorman. These are broadly analogous to the original D&D fighting man, cleric, magic user line up but each has twists to place it in the setting. The big point is that each classes has a set of ‘glories’ and ‘shames, which determine how they gain (or lose!) xp. These do a lot to place your character within the outlook and value system of the early middle ages. For instance the saints shames tie them to follow the law of the church, while a warriors shames relate to oath breaking or betraying your lord or friends. An interesting feature is that, while warriors or galdormen can escape shame if no one knows what they did, a saint always suffers the penalty as ‘God knows all things.’

Which is a good segue for talking about christianity and how deeply enmeshed it is in the setting. The book spends almost as many pages detailing the essentials of early medieval christianity as it does describing the rules for combat, and then goes on to spend twice as many pages describing monasteries and giving rules for generating them. Basically, religion was really important then and also quite unlike how we as modern people understand it.

Among the other things that were important to people then but unfamiliar to a modern audience are: Cattle Raids, Feasting etiquette, a gift economy, and the weight placed on fate. All of which Wolves of god sets out rules and procedures to guide you though. Outside of what is rendered in the rules to book also lays out an expansive description of anglo-saxon england covering the legal system, customs, farming practice, history and the main kingdoms. In contrast to games (D&D) where you play as essentially modern people in an essentially modern world wrapped in medieval aesthetics, Wolves of God is a game where you simply must inhabit the alien world that is the past.

Apart from the areas where is does deviate from history, which is primarily in the transformation of old roman ruins into portals to pocket dimensions (or ‘arxes’) created with ancient roman magic into which the romano-british retreated. What with it being, at its root, a dungeon crawling game I can see why there was a need to add magical dungeons and a treatment of roman ruins is definetly appropriate as the remnants of roman civilisation is deeply important to this time period (see the old english poem ‘the ruin’) but there is still fundamentally something about the inclusion of arxes that does not work for me. I think it is, perhaps, that the existence of dungeons and the delving off them is too big a thing to add without it dramatically changing the setting. A world with dungeon delving adventures is inevitably drawn into the sphere of classical D&D fantasy and away from the early middle ages. Fortunately, I can simply choose not to have any arxes and instead focus on more historical adventures with the odd mythical creature or barrow delve thrown in (don’t ask me why a barrow feels different to an arxe. It just does, ok)

A final note: My copy is the deluxe edition, which is unfortunately no longer available. I think the only difference with the print on demand version will be a less premium binding and printing and not having the red cover with gold

#Reviewing every rpg book on my shelf #ttrpg #my stuff #osr #Wolves of god

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papirouge · 3 months

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Is there a biblical reason why christians believe life starts at conception (sperm attaching to egg)? cuz i've heard some muslims say the fetus doesnt have a soul until 3 months so abortion is *special* circumstances would be allowed but generally abortion is discouraged n frowned upon.

It comes from the fact that several prophets in the Bible refer to God knowing them *before* they were ever born, which implies that at fertilization, the personhood of the human to come is already acknowledged by God and that he has a plan for them.

Jeremiah 1:5

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.

Isaiah 49:5

And now the LORD says— he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the LORD and my God has been my strength —

If you're Muslim, you have to understand that the entire Bible has been written under the inspiration of the holy spirit. The books have different authors (Moses, David, Paul, Salomon, Jeremiah, etc.) but their writings are united by the unity of the Spirit that inspired to put the Lord's mind on paper. So it's not Isaiah or Jeremiah just staying stuff about their conception, it's God making a statement through their pens. I know that Muslim have a hard time to grasp the concept of God made flesh, or understanding the difference between the father, Jesus (the son) and the holy spirit and say it's "association" = polytheism, but to give you an idea, it's like ice, vapor and water, and God is the H²O molecule that's inside all of these physical forms. WeChristians worship "H²O" (God) while acknowledging this molecule can have several physical forms, each with its own assets and purpose🩵✝️ it's not worshipping different molecules (= other gods) just different forms of the same "molecule" (God). There's no wonder water has such a significant symbolism in Christianity 👀 (baptism, the flood/Noah's ark, Jesus walking on water, water flowing out of Jesus rib after his crucifixion, etc)

That's why abortion is an abomination: because in the eyes of God, the fetus has already personhood, value, a destiny (like Isaiah he destined to be his servant). IDK about you, but trying to grasp God already having planned the unique life & destiny of the past/present/future humanity makes my head twirl 😵‍💫 but that's how awesome he is. Our life matters!!

Oh and one last thing : be very wary of those "Christians" who takes the example of Adam as evidence that Christianity says that life starts at birth :

1) Adam was never incubed in a womb or got "birthed" in the biological sense. God formed him out of clay, shaping him by hand. His creation cannot be compared to a human fetus who's made in the womb and delivered by the uterus.

2) as previously stated, God has a plan for every single human BEFORE their conception. So arguing whether they're alive when breathing their first breath is ridiculous because it's obvious the personhood and reality of that new being has been acknowledged by God way before

3) WE.ARE.NOT.GOD. Only God has the right of life or death on humans (that's one of the reasons I'm anti death penalty btw). Regardless of when life begins, we humans are not entitled to kill or harm anyone. Arguing that life at first breath is allegedly biblical, doesn't suddenly prove that it's "biblical" to kill a fetus.

#answered #Christian

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mcl38 · 1 month

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they haven't quite turned on vcarb the way they did mclaren but from what i've read that seems to be bc daniel keeps saying "it's not the same problem as mclaren" when like idk dude if the only time you've finished a race ahead of yuki was bc you got put on softs at the end of the race it is smelling very shades of mexico '22 to me. just without the having to make up a time penalty bc u punted yuki off the track.

i can say yuki is already getting the lando treatment though. "hOW MANY RACES HAS HE WON AND YOU DARE SAY HES PERFORMING BETTER THAN AN 8 TIME GP WINNER?" (ya i'll go to the top floor of my apartment and shout it into the void through a megaphone too what are you going to do about it) only this time there's a heavy dose of racism added in. the amount of people i have seen calling yuki a "pokémon" derogatorily and refusing to admit the racist connotations there are wild. not to mention the ableist terms i've seen be used to refer to his height. it's all very gross and yet again daniel says nothing to even try to prevent it. it's wild how someone always has to get harassed by his fans regardless of if he fails or succeeds.

ok so like first of all yikes. i rly rate yuki but im v selective w my online (especially my tumblr)

experience so i rly almost never venture out of my mclaren-centred bubble, which means i never rly see what ppl say abt him. 'pokemon' is actually vile like thats so clearly racist bc its not even a pun of his name at all or any sort of reference to his personality?? AND the fact that its a cartoon w the infantilising implications of that... ku's essay on the infantilisation of east asian drivers u will always be famous.... like u guys ever noticed how nyck is also rly short and has a youthful face and nobody ever talked abt him in the way they talk abt yuki? much to think abt

now. permission to be mean here but even if its 'not the same problem as mclaren' is the problem not STILL the fact that daniel in his 10+ year career hasnt bothered to understand the way the engineering of f1 cars works in like any material way and thats the reason he always struggles to identify his driving issues / has a disconnect with his chassis unless its tailored exactly to what he already likes and knows how to drive? i saw that bit from newey's book about how max and checo give rly good feedback and so did webber and vettel and it was kind of subtly implying that during the bit in between (the daniel era) he designed less effective cars be he wasnt getting enough precise feedback.... i genuinely havent been able to sleep at night since. like it felt like smth slotted in my head like aaaah this has been the problem all along. if only daniel wasnt so busy going on podcasts making fun of the idea of women in motorsport and actually spent some time to do some way overdue physics homework... lol. Imao even

the truth of the situation is yuki is in the best form of his career and also wiping the floor w daniel. like factually so. EVEN with team orders favouring daniel so his fans cant say its bc of that like they did with mclaren. i genuinely think its quite sad the amount of personal stock daniel fans have clearly invested in this mans career and how much it bothers them when he doesnt perform to their expectations - like he's ur driver, swallow it and accept it, because thats what he's been doing to try to move on. doing all this intense online hate bullshit only makes him look bad bc it highlights how badly and for how long he rly has been embarrassingly underperforming. but by this point it feels like they WANT him to underperform bc they crave that martyr underdog victimised figure to root for and fight for - which is why ur totally right anon, that someone always inevitably gets harrassed regardless of if daniel is failing or succeeding.

i will say one thing which is that i rly dont think daniel is at all aware of whatever the fuck his fans do on twitter and instagram (and deffo not tumblr lmao). so i dont think this is an issue of like him telling his fans to chill out - and it doesnt work anyways, bc lando literally has made talking abt how much cyberbullying sucks a part of his personality and theres still some rly mean and hateful lando fans (not in a fun way like me<3 lol) (i hate on my own blog and in discord groupchats). so like thats not necessarily on him, its more on netflix for making him the lowest common denominator guy to like, ykwim? also the unfortunate reality is that despite the tshirts and the kneeling (or no kneeling) no one rly seems to stand up to defend the drivers of colour who literally constantly get SUCH vitriol thrown towards them w any occasion. im not expecting daniel of all ppl to say anything abt it ngl

#i still think we just have to wait another couple months and we'll start seeing the vcarb is mistreating daniel discourse #ive been on f1blr long enough to see the patterns #anon #ask #daniel #meta #yuki

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tweetsongs · 1 year

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sss-class revival hunter altered my brain chemistry (and why you should read it too)

now that it's the holiday season, may i suggest that you spend your downtime not enjoying festivities, spending time with loved ones, or relaxing your body, but instead choose to treat yourself to a good cathartic mental breakdown via the power of narrative? that's right, today i'm going to tell you why you, yes you, should read sss-class revival hunter.

what is sss-class revival hunter?

sss-class revival hunter (previously translated as sss-class suicide hunter) is a webnovel by shin noah, and is completed at 400 chapters, though translations are in-progress at 238 chapters. there is a manhwa of the same name that is also in-progress, having just completed its second season.

what is sss-class revival hunter about?

kim gongja (name literally translates as confucius) is a young hunter in a world occupied by the 'tower', a large series of dungeons that people can enter if they forsake all earthly connections in order to challenge the monsters within. in this world, he is a failure, a f-class hunter with no special abilities, capable only of bitterly envying the #1 hunter: flame emperor yoo sooha.

one day, his envy manifests into an sss-class skill, the highest possible level skill- unfortunately, there's a catch. the skill stipulates that he can steal a skill from someone, but only if they kill him. despondent, gongja gets drunk and wanders the city, only to accidentally witness a crime perpetuated by yoo sooha, who immediately murders him to ensure his silence. in death, gongja is given a choice to steal sooha's abilities, and accidentally but fortuitously chooses an ability that allows him to wake up 24 hours earlier every time he dies, allowing him to make use of the combination of his abilities. he proceeds to hatch a plan to gain revenge and challenge the tower, discovering the secrets that lie behind its seemingly random challenges along the way.

huh...this sounds pretty grimdark and edgy, i'm not sure i'll enjoy something like that...

LET ME TELL YOU MY SWEET CHILD...i ALSO thought, when first reading, that this would be an incredibly boring revenge power fantasy featuring a grimdark edgelord protagonist. however!! the entire point of sss-class revival hunter is to subvert that character trope, and it does it MASTERFULLY.

let me explain.

while, at first glance, the plot of ssscrh seems to be setting up kim gongja as your typical edgelord protagonist who doesn't need any friends or emotions, the reality is...quite the opposite. in fact, despite his initial motivations, gongja's motivations are to gain recognition through authenticity, and to help people in ways that yoo sooha never did. fundamentally, sss-class revival hunter is a story about human connection and empathy, and more often than not chooses to showcase the best of humanity through having its protagonist giving people a chance to be good.

so it's about the power of friendship?

it's more accurate to say it's about the power of understanding, but yes, friendship factors heavily into it! gongja's skill allows him to steal abilities from those who've killed him, but there's a penalty - he has to witness the 'trauma' of those people, and understand why they've come to be the way they are. as his ability grows stronger, so does his immersion, and his ability to understand his opponents.

as you might expect, this leads to a lot of rumination on the ways that people are hurt by and become twisted from the world around them, and the book goes out of its way to point out societal and structural issues that cause suffering, rather than blaming individual events. the story isn't so sappy as to excuse every person who murders him, or every villain, but does make sure to show us how multifaceted they are.

not only that, but this book also has some of the most refreshingly reasonable character dynamics i've read in a while. everyone…is reasonable? unlike in other dungeoncrawler works, most people is ssscrh actually act in believable, human ways according to their characterization. the guild alliances, in particular, are refreshing in how reasonable and willing to cooperate they are - if you're sick of random people being made into incompetent scapegoats so that the mc can make an obvious point as if it's gospel, then this book will be a breath of fresh air.

how dark does it get?

i'm not gonna lie - very dark! this book touches on not only the titular theme of suicide and death, but also other incredibly heavy themes around oppression and trauma.

in my opinion, the author is never too heavy-handed or overwrought with the heaviness of its subjects, and handles them with an impressive delicacy that shows compassion towards its subjects without making them caricatures of victimization.

above its darkness, though, ssscrh is fundamentally a story about hope in despair, and holding joy in the same hand that you hold sorrow. the dark themes are not here to titillate, but to make readers understand how difficult and profound it is that there are people in this world that have chosen happiness, despite everything. this book truly has every kind of catharsis you can imagine, and will yeet you through the equivalent of years of therapy in every volume.

okay, that sounds painful, but are there any lighter moments in the story?

oh, plenty. ssscrh is not one to wallow, and for every moment it makes you weep with the tragedy and beauty of the world, it will also make you scream with laughter at how ridiculous the characters are. i've made a post with a scene that made me cackle, and the story delights in the absurdity of the world as much as it cares for everything within it.

more than that, this story also has one of the most hilarious and incredibly strong and stable romantic relationships you will ever read about. i'm not going to spoil things, because i truly believe that this is something to be Experienced, but trust me when i say that gongja and his eventual partner made me scream with laughter and say 'oh my god you guys are INSANE' every time they have dialogue together. if you like malewife/girlboss dynamics, or time travel shenanigans, or overwrought battle couple proclamations of romance, you will ADORE this pairing.

why SHOULDN'T i read this book, then?

good question! as much as i'm obsessed with this book, i can't say that it's going to be everyone's cup of tea. some caveats are about the incredibly heavy themes being touched on, including:

child abuse

bullying

poverty

famine

religious oppression

racial discrimination

cultural genocide

mental illness

slavery

...and more!

also of note that volume 4 of the webnovel centers around the development of an ancient society of various races aided by hunters having the deeply unfortunate name of 'race war'. i will say that it's not as bad as you're imagining, and handled with, if not grace, then clear thought, but yeah. yeah that made me wince too.

is there anything else that makes sss-class revival hunter worth reading?

if you're not convinced yet, here are a few notable quotes from the book that live rent-free in my head (no context or explicit spoilers but skip if don't want anything spoiled!):

People don't just decide who they leave scars on. They also decide whose scars to wear. The common people you are trying to save will never be good. The crowd you have saved will never be honorable. The one you love will never be perfect. Even so, if you want to be hurt by everyone. If you are willing to give them your bare skin- think about how they scratch you with their fingernails, how they will hurt you even if they hug you too tightly. Life is pain, but that is only human suffering.

If you mourn so much over accidental tragedies, you should celebrate accidental blessings just as much. The depth of one's sadness should be equal to the height of one's happiness.

There's a 99% probability that the lover you meet will be a bitch [...] Similarly, you are also highly likely to be a bitch.

Cynicism isn't childish in itself, [but] people who live while being cynical are childish. Fairness is childish, but the people who live fairly are not childish.

Congratulations on becoming Cinderella, bro

anyways, please consider dedicating your holiday season to another stupid long book. you can find translations here and the manhwa here. please let me know if you've read/enjoyed it i'm losing my mind over here.

#rain's menagerie of unhinged webnovel recs #sss-class revival hunter #sss-class suicide hunter #ssscrh #ssscsh #every character is so good i didn't know where to add this but the cringefail women in this...peak #anyways as always here is an incoherent love letter to a webnovel that made me cry #webnovels #webnovel recs

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