#i would say i definitely still have quite the strong moral compass ... it's complicated. not black and white | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sosu-morgue · 5 years

Note

Hi! I just read one of your reacts and it was brill! Could I request maybe the first time the companions knew they were in love with (a preferably female but if you’d rather keep it neutral im game) sole ? Especially hancock because im hancock trash lmao love that ghoul x

You got it! I’ll do F!SS, I truly do not mind any gender preferences of my asks. I love doing it all!I’m so glad you liked the last one, it was my very first so I was really nervous~(somewhat extra long Hancock romance part just for you) I just worked with whatever came to mind, trying to test what I can write off the top of my head.So I hope it’s good!

Please feel free to message anything was missing or you want to see something specific! I’m always happy to do “companion reactions” for a specific companion too.

Please forgive any grammatical errors, it took a good few hours to write this and I’m finishing at 2:00 AM. I will correct any I find later :)

Some companion story line spoilersAlso it’s LOOOONNNNNGGGG

Context:Sole, the pre-war survivor from Sanctuary, frozen in Vault 111. She came here to save her son, meeting colorful people along the way.All sorts of people flocked to her, but most of all she attracted…

Cait:Damn. She sighed, standing up from that awful chair. Cait felt horrible, trying to keep herself upright when she felt Sole’s hands helping her. It took a minute before Cait felt like she was able to even see straight.

Cait felt fresh, somehow she felt physically lighter. Everything seemed so… bright.

The first thing she saw with any clarity was Sole’s face. She looked worried, but hopeful. An kindness to Sole’s features entirely alien to Cait.

It’s as if Sole wasn’t even real; some kind of apparition designed to appease something Cait never thought existed.

A person who wanted to be there for their friend. A person who didn’t ask for their loyalty, caps, or anything else. She only wanted to care for her friend and hoped that friend wanted the same. Sole trusted Cait; something Cait wanted to resist.

There were so many rules of the world that Cait established. A hard earned understanding of people, of how everything functions in the commonwealth. Outside the commonwealth too, of course.

But… Sole was kind and gentle, but terrifyingly fierce when she wanted to be. She wanted to help her friends, defend innocent people, and Cait had heard Sole refuse payment for these acts of kindness many times.

There was no backstabbing plan in the end, no turn around for the people she helped. Sole did what they needed, so long as it was for a good cause, and wanted for nothing.

Generosity was not a word Cait believed in, yet she believed in Sole.

They left Vault 95, Cait pausing just behind Sole as she walked out into the sunlight. With a deep sigh of annoyance, Cait cursed under her breath.I fuckin’ love that idiot.

Curie:She didn’t really know when she did. It was only a feeling that slowly built up, then washed over her like rain. Pleasant, sweet - she liked it and didn’t understand why.

Sole would not push Curie to do anything until she figured it out. There was no need for pressure, Curie had to learn how to live in a new body. Things were complicated enough as it was without having to deal with a budding romance; something that was complicated even to humans.

As the days went by Sole and Curie spent most of their time together. Being so close to Sole made Curie feel tense, it was a good kind of tense, but she wanted to satisfy whatever that feeling was.

She narrowed it down to longing. A strange emotion that was difficult to explain and more difficult to understand. This happened when she was away from Sole for any period of time.

But when she was with Sole the feeling turned into this uncomfortable churning. Something she learned had many names. One of those names was passion.

Curie gazed over at the sleeping form of Sole, the soft rise of her chest.

Suddenly Curie felt a powerful want to be resting with her, touching her… sharing a private moment with her.

Though she was aware of the word she was cautious to use it. It meant so much to people, often a major focus of their lives. Curie wondered… perhaps she could be this focus for Sole.

Curie had learned, understood what it meant. This was more than just affection for the person who helped her become a synth, allowing her to experience so much more of life.

This was desire to be with Sole, to be able to hold her. Only her, no one else. Curie now only hoped Sole felt the same.

Danse:He never quite caught onto anything that was not Brotherhood related. He stuck to his loyalties and never strayed far, romance of a civilian was not something he deemed acceptable.

Now his world changed.

No longer was his life dedicated to the Brotherhood, to their cause. He didn’t share those plans anymore, he didn’t believe in them.Sole was the cause of that, convincing him that everything he had done for the Brotherhood was being repaid with cruelty.

Synth or not - Danse dedicated his life to the Brotherhood. He fought for them, risked his life for them, and he knew he followed Maxson unerringly. Though Danse agreed with the Brotherhood that he should die, Sole disagreed.

She was the most charismatic and persuasive person he knew. Danse believed that Maxson was with how he rallied his soldiers and gave them the passion to fight for the Brotherhood’s cause.

But Sole… she convinced him that he should live. That his years of service to the Brotherhood proved that he, even as a synth, did not deserve execution. That Maxson was acting out of hatred to people he didn’t know.

Danse knew Sole wanted him to understand the Brotherhood’s morals were… questionable at best… and somewhere in the back of his head he knew that.

It didn’t matter though, he didn’t care to exploring those thoughts. Fact or opinion changed nothing. He wanted to move on with his life, learn how to live as a synth and figure out who he really was.

He is a synth who hated synths, a prejudice towards a whole that he now grew closer to.

Danse had judged Sole’s other friends. Nick Valentine, the older synth that didn’t hide himself. John Hancock, the ghoul mayor of Goodneighbor, a town with many under the table dealings. Curie, a pre-war machine turned synth.He won’t even mention Strong. His feelings on Strong hadn’t changed that much.

He joined them as an equal forming a new brotherhood… in a sense.Danse needed a new purpose and Sole got him a role within the Minutemen, he was a soldier once again.

Still, the Minutemen did not replace the Brotherhood to Danse.Sole would brush passed him and guide him… She had replaced the betrayal of the Brotherhood.She was his new purpose.

Deacon:The man who could blend in anywhere, remaining undetected all around the commonwealth. He found a friend in Sole who showed up on the Railroad’s doorstep with a sarcastic attitude and a receipt for good karma a mile long.

Her help was invaluable to the Railroad, furthering their efforts to free enslaved synths more than anyone had before. She was critical to both the survival of the Railroad and the synths.

That wasn’t why he liked her so much. Well, not the only reason.

Deacon traveled with her on tasks with no connection to the Railroad or Institute. He got to see firsthand how she was in the remote parts of the commonwealth with no agenda.

Yes, he was with her, but it didn’t matter. She was so genuine to the people she helped, so compassionate.

He figured he shouldn’t be surprised, she wasn’t raised in this world. So the ‘for yourself, fuck everyone else’ mentality wasn’t natural to her like it was to everyone else.

Slowly but surely, she helped him too. Partly in ways she did not know about and some she did. Though he was unsure if he could ever return that favor or even want to tell her about it.Not that he didn’t want to trust her, open up to her. He did this because sometimes potentially losing a friendship is not worth admitting to an emotional connection like that.

He knew himself better than that though. He knew he would say something eventually, regardless of how.Deacon did not find a singular moment where he loved her, it was many things that built up until he came to this conclusion.

Here, watching her help a commonwealth settler restore their home after super mutants tore it apart, he decided on how he felt about Sole.

When he was ready, he would tell her.

Hancock:She restored everything, she gave everything to everyone no matter how bleak it seemed.

He watched her walking ahead of him, a ghoul child in her arms. His name is Billy and he was trapped in a pre-war fridge. She had broken open the fridge door in a flash, helping Billy out and on his feet.

He was in there so long, she insisted on helping him. So she lifted him in her arms and carried him on her hip. Billy was too old to be carried, considering he is a child not including the 200 odd years he was stuck in a fridge. But she was concerned for his well being.

Trapped for so long, pitch black, unable to really move - she thought he would have a hard time adjusting. It was so simple to her; carry him. She reassured him they would go to Quincy immediately, redirecting their course from another task deemed quite critical in order to find her own son.

Yet she still stopped everything to save someone else’s son. She didn’t do it for a reward or expecting to find something, it just came natural to her. To help all people she came across.

Hancock, upon seeing her dote on Billy as if she was his mother, definitely made him think of her in a different light. Not that he hadn’t been attracted to her before - she is a gorgeous woman no doubt. That made him interested.

He would be attracted to any attractive person. That’s not news to anyone. He is attracted to her because of things like this.

She was unreal, her moral compass never wavered for a second. She is fiercely loyal, honest, trustworthy, empathetic, and her charisma; oh, how he loved how confidently she carried herself. Both physically and otherwise.

The second that they came across the slaver, she snapped at him. Though her expletives were censored. She purposefully went around certain words to both enforce how offended she was at the offer while not cursing like a drunk in front of Billy.

In Quincy, they found his home. And in Quincy, they found his parents.

It was perfect, like a story book. She and Hancock both didn’t believe his parents were alive, it was so unlikely it was ridiculous. Yet there they stood, Matt and Carol Peabody, the parents of Billy. All ghouls.

Hancock watched the family reunion, the three holding each other close stunned that each other were still alive.But Hancock wanted to see the pride Sole felt having been the catalyst for Billy’s return. Surely she would be beyond thrilled, feeling the same he did having brought them together.He loved shit like this. People pulling through, surviving, and finding each other. It really was amazing.

He didn’t find Sole beaming as she would after doing a good deed. She was facing the family, but her head was tilted to the side, eyes downcast. There was a faint smile on her face, yet it was a sad one.

Hancock sighed, he didn’t think about it at first. He saw the family talking among themselves, talking about what happened 200 years ago.

Sole wanted that and she didn’t know if she ever would. While she was happy they were together again, she could not help thinking about her own family.

How Shaun would never meet his father. How Shaun had already grown a few years, he think she said he was about ten now? He had been staying with the man who killed his father.She had so much to do in order to find Shaun and there was no promise he was still alive at all.

Hancock didn’t know what to say. He did want her to know he got it, that it’s all going to be okay. They’d find Shaun, just like they found Billy.

Then came another threat and he saw the instantaneous change in her demeanor. The man who wanted to buy Billy returned and he came back in numbers.

The intense fury that woman had… a contempt only capable by experience.

She tore through the slavers like a nuke fired from a fat man. The Peabody’s stayed inside, protected by Hancock in case any of the slavers got through her. No surprise that not a single slaver survived.

When she returned, her rifle was steaming and she had hateful gleam in her eye. Hancock figured that was her killing Kellogg all over again - just for someone else.

The Peabody’s thanked them, insisted on a reward which she naturally turned down. Then offered them a place at any of her many settlements protected by the Minutemen. All human, ghoul, and synth friendly with a grand defense. She gave them a gun, ammo, and enough caps to feed their family for a long time.

They would consider the offer to the settlement; she did not force anything.

Billy returned to her, she kneeled down, and he gave her a hug which she happily returned. Telling him to take care, be smart, and listen to his parents.

Back on the road she returned to their purpose out here as if nothing phased her. Strong as ever.

Hancock ran a hand over the back of his neck, not quite sure how to start, but figuring it was better than letting it pass. She deserved some appreciation.

“Hey,” He patted her arm with the back of his hand, “You did good with them, Billy’s a good kid. I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

Sole nodded, “Yeah, I know.” Her tone was happy with a barely noticeable undertone.

Man… Hancock pulled her arm slightly, letting her know to stop a moment. She was confused, but didn’t mind chatting if he wanted to. He did, for sure, though he wanted to chat for her.

“It’s gonna’ be okay, y’know?” Hancock assured her. Poorly, perhaps, he didn’t like hitting the nail on the head too hard. It was better to be careful, allowing her to duck out if she wanted.

Sole gave him a lopsided smirk, “Well, course. They survived this long alone, I’m fairly sure they can continue. They’re smart, it’s no problem if they don’t go to a settlement.”

Again, he tried. “Look, I get it. With Billy and his parents.” Sole’s expression turned somber, finally understanding the point. “We’ll find him and we’ll bring him back, you know that, right?”

She didn’t respond for a moment, she thought to herself what to say. To her it wasn’t an option to express all the pent up stress and emotion she felt about Shaun. So she slid her arms over his shoulders, hugging him tightly to her.

Not what he expected and not unwelcome. Hancock returned the embrace, figuring it was comforting to her. To him too, but he wouldn’t say that.

He hadn’t actually touched her skin before, not really. Maybe during a fight he brushed passed her, but her skin… It was so smooth. Yes, she’s human. Hancock had been with smoothskin women before and it wasn’t even close.

This was the skin and warmth of a pre-war woman that didn’t grow up irradiated, burning in the hot sun, or suffering from some other affliction.Sole is perfect, inside and out. It was just how wonderful she felt skin to skin. It was like running his hands through down feathers. Impossibly soft.

He didn’t want to let go, he wanted this all the time. He wanted her.

When she released him, she continued their path. Hancock felt that telltale spark, feeling caught off guard. He liked her before, cared for her a lot… this wasn’t the affection two close friends have.

Hancock swallowed hard, his mouth dry. Watching her start walking ahead he really got it this time.

He was completely, helplessly in love with her.

And he had no idea if she would have a ghoul like him.

MacCready:He really didn’t think about falling for someone, especially not someone who employed him.

But she did what she could for him, with Daisy, to help Duncan. It was all so much for someone to do, someone who just up and hired him one day. He had no words to express himself properly.

She insisted it was nothing, that she would’ve done it even if she hadn’t been working with him all this time. Just like that, like it was nothing.

No caps, no trades, nothing. He believed in tough love for sure, though that didn’t mean there can’t be the occasional good deed here or there. To her those good deeds were her day to day life.

He was thankful, more than thankful, that she followed through with him. From the times she helped others for nothing to her haggling talents; he felt like he had it all.

She could be domineering to strangers and yet generous to others. He had no idea how she always seemed to know who needed what and when. Also how; she could just look at some random person and know.

Clairvoyant was the word for it. That’s just nonsense though, she was simply talented at understanding their perspective and empathize. It was uncanny how she settled into the life of everyone she came across with ease.

Provided they weren’t trying to kill her.

MacCready wanted to make caps in the commonwealth, to survive well, to keep his head above water. He believed in community being a mutually beneficial arrangement.

It wasn’t really her random acts of kindness that made him gravitate towards her. It was her unwavering loyalty to her companions, how she served them and did what they needed to keep them as well set up as she was.

She is kind too, she is beautiful. MacCready wiped the sweat off his forehead as they traveled through the heat. It was brutal and she tossed him a canteen of chilled water, purified.

He gave her a nod and drank. Relieved, he passed it back and watched her drink.It felt so normal to be out with her, like a part of him he didn’t know he wanted. He wasn’t sure if this really was love, he loved Lucy, but maybe… maybe he could do both?

Nick:There was a distinct moment he found himself loving this pre-war woman.

She tracked down the tapes, helped him find Winter and end him. It was revenge hidden under the guise of justice. Nick needed this, he truly needed it to be done so he could move on.

Maybe it was foolish, maybe he should admit the purpose of this whole thing. Aside from the obvious that he wanted Winter gone, he wanted to tie the last loose end left behind by the pre-war Nick Valentine. The man he carries the memories of and hid namesake.

He felt like he was pre-war detective Nick Valentine, but was aware of himself enough to recognize he is not that Nick. He’s his own person, sharing the memory of someone who died a long time ago.

She knew that too, it was clear as day to her. He didn’t know why he had such trouble understanding this. It was more complicated than he could put into words, yet when he tried she beat him to it. Always with the right thing to say at the moment, never too presumptuous, never invasive.

Aside from her interactions with him, she was openhanded all the time. Everything she had she was happy to give away to someone else if they asked of her.

She crossed the commonwealth over a dozen times, finding more people to save and more to settlements to build up. She established safe havens all over, none of them served her. She did not charge them fees like other landowners would. There was no tax or extortion.

If someone wanted to live there, she would do her best to accommodate them. If she could not, she would find an alternative.

What’s even more impressive is if she found a potential threat that needed her attention, she would handle it as soon as she could. Her willingness to risk her life for others was a trait he didn’t ask of anyone, but… he really didn’t know how to say he was honored to be at her side.

People began to recognize the two. They knew her first of course, but she traveled with Nick so often some people began to notice he was a part of all this.

For the first time he saw people uniting to the betterment of the commonwealth. He saw them change from hopeless wanderers, desperate families, and aimless vagrants into stand up people. They became hard workers. Some were farmers, others vendors in the settlements, some were taught engineering to maintain the generators and water pumps.

Together they became more. The world was safer with Sole in it.

And he got to be there with her through it all.He looked down to his metal hand, almost wincing when he saw it. He didn’t need reminding he is a synth - it’s just when he got lost in his own mind thinking about the woman that held his affections.

He is an old Gen 2 synth, damaged without any full repairs in sight. He wanted to believe her kindness extended to him in that way.That she could love a metal man… he doubted it. But that didn’t mean he loved her any less.

Piper:This sly reporter found so much to fill her papers with just by hanging out with Sole for a day. She was a walking story waiting to be told to the masses. Excitement, humor, romance, and it could tug on the ol’ heartstrings.

She knew it would be an easy week writing for Diamond City when she got to go out with Sole. She always wanted to go, to take on the commonwealth one mission at a time.

Not to say that she didn’t care about the people she wrote about. Piper thought that it was her compassion that allowed her to write better articles for Diamond City.

Sole was always a little embarrassed when she saw the papers or Piper ran a fresh print by Sole. It flattered her to hear the good things Piper wrote about her, even though now all Diamond City knew her name and she had a kind of celebrity status.

Sole always acted strange when Piper read the paper to her. She knew why and she just wanted to let Sole know people appreciated her.

She deserved the praise. Sole did so much for the people and Piper wanted to be the one to show her, prove to her, she is amazing. Her day was always better when Sole walked into Pulick Occurrences.

It never was enough for Sole to be kind, she wanted to care for them. When Sole was around she always managed to make everyone feel welcome. Approachable, humble - what wasn’t this woman capable of?

Nat eyed Piper when she watched Sole leave, a childish grin on her face.

“You like her.” Nat teased, dropping another paper onto the coffee table. That sly look the same one Piper would give to others.

Piper controlled herself, making sure she didn’t jump when Nat said that. “What? Yeah, she’s my friend.” She laughed, brushing it off.

Nat wasn’t done though. “You like like her.”

Piper felt her face slowly heating up, “She’s a good friend, she’s the protector of the commonwealth.”

Turning to walk up the stairs to her bed, Nat just nodded. “You’re not that good of a liar.” The girl disappeared upstairs, leaving a flustered Piper behind.

“Oh what do you know.” Piper huffed to herself, “She doesn’t, that’s what- no, I mean, she-” She sighed, unable and far too frustrated to form the retort she wanted. Not that it mattered, Nat wasn’t listening.

Is it that obvious? Piper bit her nail, anxious to know. Did Sole know too?

Preston:His love for Sole was the love of two brothers in arms.

Well, brother and sister in arms? He didn’t know what to call her anymore really. Aside from General of course. He always addressed her properly, though she insisted on a more casual approach.

He didn’t think he could do that though. It was all he used to keep himself in check around her.

While Preston did keep the Minutemen alive during their lowest time, it was Sole that restored even greater than it was before. Now the Minutemen were strong enough to train more people, patrol the roads between settlements, and positively change people’s lives.

He never wanted to be a General, he didn’t want that responsibility. He was better on the ground, better being up close. Preston knew exactly where he was best at and it’s where he wanted to be.

It might be thanks to the accumulative effort of all the Minutemen that made them strong, but he still looked up to her.

A woman from the past, over 200 years his senior which made him feel strange, and somehow she came into this world in a blaze. She started making the world a better place as soon as she was able to stand on her own.

She was impressive to say the least. A power to be reckoned with and she used that power to defend the good people trying to survive. No matter how big she got, she was always so down to earth.

Not a single Minuteman had not met her at some point. She welcomed them all with open arms, thanking them for joining their cause, making sure they all felt like they were making a difference.

Approval from the famous 111 meant something in the commonwealth. It give people pride for what they do and bolstered morale.

He loved knowing the Minutemen loved her. Their General was the example they all followed.

She offered so much to the world, yet all Preston really wanted was her. He wanted to be by her side, not for the prestige, but for the way he saw her back when they met.

During the early days when she fought for the Minutemen without really knowing anything about them. All she knew is Preston wanted to do good and she wanted to help.

She told him that she followed his example of a Minutemen and that’s why she believes she managed this.

Preston had no idea how to respond so he just thanked her.

He really wanted to do something big, something to tell her how much he really wanted her. He thought it was his moment and he had no idea what to do with it. So it passed and he regretted it.

So he waited and planned for something new. He needed something special, just the two of them. He loved her and he was ready to take the chance that she might feel the same way.

#Fallout 4 Companion reactions #Fallout 4 Companions React #Companions React #Companion Reactions #FO4 #Cait #Curie #Danse #Deacon #Hancock #MacCready #Nick #Piper #Preston #Romance #Friends to Lovers

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icharchivist · 5 years

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I've come here before yacking about Chaoji and how dumb he is acting. But I do feel he's meant to be a tragic character in a relatable way. You either see or can be a Chaoji at least some points in life. Someone who stays bitter to the point of ignoring reality just because it inconveniences you or the emotions you want to hang on to. Someone who is less concerned w/thinking outside the box and would rather find foundation in a cause that feels inline w/justifying what you feel. I'm not looking-

2 on anything Chaoji has gone through and he does have reasons for his views. But just because one has reasons doesn't make their views the correct one. I feel like Chaoji and Allen are foils for a strong thematic story reasons. Chaoji hates akuma and the Noah for destroying his family/friends. Allen admitted to hating the Thirds because they destroyed the akuma he dearly loved w/giving them salvation. Allen's love for the Akuma is as deep and meaningful as his love for his friends and humanity-

3 in general (basically Allen's got A LOT of love. Too bad he can't pay off his debts w/feelings alone or he might be, sort of, free of debt). But Allen changed. Thanks to seeing the struggles of Tokusa and Link telling Allen their backstory. Allen realized he didn't know anything. He just hated them by seeing their actions alone. He never tried to understand their motivations or why they're doing what their doing pre Alma arc. Allen realized it was now too late. They were gone and he missed-

4 and he missed his chance. Allen wonders if he hadn't focused so much on his hatred alone for what they were then maybe he could have talked to them and things could have gotten between them. That's not to say Allen would ever be okay w/destroying Akuma w/o Innocence. But Allen realized people's hearts were complicated and more often then not even well meaning good people will do something another will hate. This is helping to walk Allen down the path of truth as he desires to know everything-

5 that is the root of so much sorrow behind the war. Why are people doing what they are doing? What action is there to take with who? Allen still sees the Noah Family as his enemies and he has just disgust for the Order's atrocious godless inhuman actions. But he's not letting hatred of either consume him. Allen wants to understand everyone in the hopes it can make some difference instead of confirming to the same rules set by the Earl and The Heart. Chaoji is the exact opposite. He hates Allen-

6 for what he did. Allen tried to save a Tyki that he thought wasn't a Noah anymore and later for abandoning the Order. It doesn't matter what reasons Allen had or any of the good he has done. Those 2 acts alone were enough for Chaoji to judge Allen. I'm not trying to say we gotta accept/like everyone's beliefs as if it's our own (we can't and don't). There are also definitely evil people that have to be fought and done away with. But in other situations it seems like things could be a little-

7 better if people would try to not be so gosh darn ignorant of everything instead of just assuming how something is based of emotions (which are a) not the same as feelings and b) are the worst). Because of his hatred, Chaoji is blinding him self to the truth, All the corruption around him and isolating himself from the best people to be near. Chaoji missed out on being Allen's friend and gaining wisdom from him (like Kanda ended up doing). Allen is learning. Which is good because Nea was his-

8 friend and the only reason they're sharing a head is because of Allen. Allen doesnt know this yet. But he is trying to learn about Nea instead of blindly hating him. Allen wants to know everything so that when he does go against some one they've earned it and it's for the best. I feel like Chaoji can go either way; being redeemed or getting a bad end. Either way he's going to be a cautionary tale on how ignorance can destroy you and others. You HAVE to know all the facts and motivations.

Agreeing about everything and thanks for sharing all of that! I don’t really know what to add though because you really made your point very concise and interesting on its own!

All I can add is that it’s very hard to see where Chaoji would be going from then on considering he just recently became set on fighting Allen. Up until now while he did let his anger get the best of him out of impulse in the ark, he has at least... let it in a corner of his mind for a long time without trying to challenge this hatred in any way. Now that he’s set on facing Allen for all that is happening, it is hard to say where it is going, like his arc is only just starting.

Like a lot of fans have said it seems likely that his loyalty to the Order will turn sour upon realization he had been a Noah spy due to the parasites and those are going to make Chaoji’s story even more conflictual. He would either realize Allen’s side upon feeling this Noah part people would distrust him for and it would be quite a selish way to finally turn your ways around, or he would lash out even more on Allen for thinking this part is in any way redeemable. So things are going to get messy.

But you’re right - this remains a cautionary tale of how his willingful ignorance had him lose track of what should be good or bad to do. In a time where Allen is slowly creating his own side because as you said, he doesn’t want to obey the rules of the Earl nor the Heart anymore, Chaoji is typically the one who base his moral compass on the Good Side’s morals - that by virtue of “being the good side” they are the good morals to follow, despite it being a very blind and flawed perspective (just because rules and laws are in places doesn’t mean it is just - it’s easier for some people to believe so however to not have to rethink all of their perspective on life)

So on that regard while everyone else seem to acknowledge to some extend the Order’s problems, and most exorcists close to Allen would have agreed to him saving Tyki for exemple because at that moment their humanity would be all about “well he turned back human so he’s not an enemy anymore” where Chaoji was more “once an enemy always an enemy”. So by that regard Chaoji believes and reinforces those rules and it is the complete opposite of Allen who is now making his own rules over his own morals, and by doing so, is deciding to at least get to know all the others aspects he has to face in order to have those moral being just. The exact opposite to Chaoji.

So yeah i think you were completely spot on on everything you said and it’s fantastic ;O

Thanks for sharing!

#ichafantalks dgm #Anonymous #ichareply

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izzyovercoffee · 7 years

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I'm sorry if you've already answered this, but what's the deal with Mandalorian society and sexuality? Would a larger portion of the population be of one sexuality than others? Would sexuality be the same as we know it since they don't recognize gender? etc

I’m sorry for the delay in answering this !! I haven’t actually answered / addressed this topic quite just yet, bc they’re both easy and difficult questions to answer, if that makes sense.

So I’m gonna do the short/long again.

The Short Answer to the three questions is this: Mandalorians don’t care about your sexuality inasmuch as, within mandalorian community and society, specifically, it’s not a big deal — or any deal, at all. And because there is no compulsive heteronormativity, and because mandalorians as a society have a heavy emphasis on adoption and sharing the burden of child rearing with the entire clan, the population’s sexuality should not skew in any specific way.

If I had to guess, I would suggest that the society leans more bi/pan, if only because there’s no stigmatization to be tied in with a gender binary that doesn’t exist to them. Ideally, though, I would think that there would be equal representation of every combination, and every iteration, of relationship under the sun — so long as everyone involved are consenting fully-grown adults.

The long answer is … it’s complicated.

The thing is … uniquely, as a society, mandalorians don’t recognize gender in the same way that we do. So, it’s safe to assume that sexuality is dependent entirely on each individual’s personal frame of attraction. Procreation via popping out babies (crude, I know but u kno) would not take such a strong focus or precedence or moral imperative because mandalorians don’t just accept adoption as an option — mandalorian society strictly enforces the legal equality of adoption.

That is, the negative attitudes surrounding adoption just don’t exist. And because they don’t exist, the societal pressures tied up in maintaining a blood line disappear.

Our society’s understanding of sexuality is, in part, highly contingent on the framework of the gender binary and the nuclear family. I would even go so far as to suggest that a heavy skew towards a cis-centric heterosexual population is, at least in part, due to the homophobia inherent in a heteronormative society. And none of these things exist in mandalorian society.

Thus it’s hard to say if sexuality would still resemble sexuality as we know it, or if it would take a completely different definition or range, or if it would be somewhere in-between. After all, mandalorian society is not one that is wholly isolated, as it’s hard to be so when so many societies are interconnected by necessity and diplomatic allegiances across the known galaxy — and the rest of the Galaxy Far Far Away seems to have the machinations of sexism and homophobia still in place (whether or not you want to chalk that up to writers imposing their internalized sexism / homophobia on the material, knowingly or otherwise, is up to you). So even if these terms and way of thinking aren’t natural to mandalorians, that doesn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t be present at all.

That said, I’m of the opinion that the general mandalorian society may actually skew in the direction of pansexual/bisexual.

Explanation going under the cut, because this got … very long.

So. Why Pansexual? Because pansexuality is generally defined as an attraction either in spite of or without consideration to gender. The distinction of gender does not actively exist in mandalorian thought (or language) and so attraction becomes something that does not actively consider gender.

Why Bisexual? Because bisexuality is defined as an attraction to same and other genders, and the logic that follows is that all mandalorians should accept all genders, aka all genders are recognized. In a society that doesn’t stigmatize any gender, everyone has their personhood recognized (heteronormativity has no place and thus little to no influence) and thus celebrated.

Either way both bisexuality and pansexuality encompasses the full field / range that would actually, actively, exist in mandalorian society.

Pan-normativity / Bi-normativity, I guess. Lmao.

I would also suggest that the nature of a population’s sexuality (and guessing at the population percentage of x sexuality) becomes difficult to discern, because it’s heavily dependent on the population and where they’re located, and how many are adoptees — and how many of those adoptees were adopted when they were children vs. already socialized adults.

How deeply has a mandalorian diaspora or ethnic enclave’s community participated in assimilation with whatever society they find themselves in? Communities that are located in, say, Coruscant under the Empire might skew towards a heterocentric human focus due to the pressures of the surrounding environment — or they might go in the complete opposite direction and raise a vibrantly rainbow one finger salute right up the Emperor’s nose.

It’s hard to say lmao.

TBH like … I want to backtrack a little bit to talk about the nuclear family.

So. Family is a HUGE part of what being a mandalorian is about. Raising children is being mandalorian — but we’ve seen that the children don’t always have to be “their’s” inasmuch as a parent to a child relation. They can be nieces/nephews, cousins’ cousins, even friends’ and friends’ family’s. The focus has always been on a community raising children together, rather than any conceptualization of a nuclear family.

Frankly, nuclear families have no place in mandalorian society anyway. Any society that engages war as a supposed common export would also have a high percentage of casualties — parents never coming home, parents severely injured in the line of their profession / duty, parents away for long periods of time. In the wake of absent parents, other members of the clan/community are expected to do their share and raise the children as if they are their own — and are ultimately treated and regarded as their own.

“Why are you so focused on children and child-raising when this is a question about sexuality?” Not that I think you would necessarily ask me that, but I think it’s an important question to be answered.

How we view sexuality, how we define it, how we see it expressed, how we criminalize that expression, how we victimize and marginalize people … is all tied up in other forces and expectations our society is built on. IMO, in order to understand what sexuality is to mandalorians, it bears repeating what mando society is not and does not have.

Example: I’ve noticed that people who are homophobic view homosexuality as a deviation from a perceived moral expectation — and it is a violently enforced moral compass that is hyper-focused on a “woman’s” (ciswoman’s) capacity to bear and raise children, and only devote her life to that one role.

Because mandalorian society is completely without that expectation, the foundations that would otherwise exist to enforce marginalization completely disappear. Can’t have children? Adopt, or help raise the kids in your clan. Don’t want / want to deal with children? Offer assistance to those who have / want to assist in raising children so they are free to do so more easily.

Because mandalorian society doesn’t recognize gender roles, the framework that misogyny and transphobia is built on ceases to exist and so anyone of any presentation is not someone to then be brutalized until they return to a gender binary, bc mandalorians don’t have a gender binary.

Because mandalorian society encourages communal raising of children, the capitalistic forces contingent on the survival of the nuclear family structure cannot be found here. There is no two parent household — everyone works and lives together, or works and lives in large groups, supporting each other.

Romance, in general, is built on an assumption of the nuclear family’s goal: two people to a household to raise children, alone. Complete co-dependency between two people for all romantic and platonic emotional and interpersonal support. You don’t need friends nor family when you have someone to share your bed — but specifically someone to share a bed and produce children with.

And tbh … because mandalorians don’t HAVE an arbitrary moral system built on a foundation of misogyny, homophobia, and capitalistic ideals of a nuclear family, I wonder if monogamy is something that would be as heavily tied with morality as it is in ours — would it really be so expected? Less so? Would polyamory be more acceptable (bc let’s face it, it’s still in unacceptable territory)? Would single-parenting also be more acceptable (bc, again, single parenting is still viewed as unacceptable, as if there’s something wrong with the parent)?

Identifying as anything not-hetero doesn’t come with a death sentence, however oblique or immediate or realized.

What I’m saying is this: there are inherent pressures in our society that we don’t think about that affect us on a personal level, every day. Being gay, being bi, being ace, being pan, being trans, being gender nonconforming — even if we don’t actively think about it, we know on some level that our status in our society is ostracized at some level, if not every level. The subtle ways in which society treats and regards us ultimately has an effect on us — and how we perceive others, and can affect how we structure sexuality and our sexual identities.

The absence of those pressures would lead to a radically different society and social understanding of gender and sexuality. Both on a micro level, and a macro level.

And that’s really interesting, imo. These are great questions to ask — it’s a great topic to address and to try to write about and build upon — and I have no idea if any of my answer is adequate, because of how difficult it is for me to conceptualize sexuality in a society that isn’t burdened by a heterocentric gender-conforming monogamous hegemony focused on procreation.

God I hope I answered your questions lmao. Sorry I’m so verbose !!

#mandalorevevo #mandalorians #izzy talks mandalorians #sexuality #mandalorians and sexuality #meta #meta: mandalorians #asks.txt

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mpoflarry · 5 years

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1 - Your Mess Is Mine

Louis is the father to the most brilliant little boy in the world who is all Louis really needs, or at least that’s what he tells himself. Harry is a gorgeous boybander fresh off a two year break and a massive scandal that’s left him a little broken and more than ready to move on.

They fall in love.

2 - To the Ends of the Earth

During a yearlong hiatus, Louis visits Harry at his cabin in Idaho, where long-buried feelings ignite like the fire keeping them warm.

3 - Escapade

In the grand scheme of things, finding a date for a wedding should be no problem for Louis Tomlinson. He’s rich. He’s handsome. He’s reasonably well behaved. But when the wedding is for his lifelong best friend (and former boyfriend), and is happening in under a month, finding a date for the ceremony and accompanying festivities becomes more of an adventure than he ever could have planned for.

4 - Lead by your beating heart

(Or: AU where Harry’s in One Direction, Louis isn’t, and they reconnect over a game of ‘Call or Delete’.)

5 - this house no longer feels like home

Harry and Louis have been together for 20 years. Harry cheats. Louis cries. Harry is given a year to fix their marriage.

6 - Like Candy In My Veins

“Um…” Harry said slowly after a moment. “Okay. That’s… this is… Let me get this straight.” He lifted up a hand and swallowed. “You told your family that you have a boyfriend… and my name was the first one you thought of?”

“Harry Potter was on TV, alright? It wasn’t that much of a stretch.” Louis pinched the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t believe he was explaining himself to Harry fucking Styles. He couldn’t believe he was stooping this low. “Forget it. I’m sorry I even thought about bringing you into this.”

Harry snorted. “What? Did you want me to pretend to be your boyfriend or something?” (Basically the A/B/O, enemies to lovers, fake relationship, Christmas AU that nobody asked for.)

7 - And Then A Bit

“We’d like to give the fans what they want.” Magee states, placing his hand on the table in front of him and leaning forward. “We want to give them Larry Stylinson.”

Or, take a parallel universe where Louis and Harry were never together, mix in a two year hiatus and an impending comeback, pour in a dash of lost fans, two tablespoons of strong friendship and a Modest! employee with a good idea. Add a squeeze of pretending to be a couple, lots of kisses and a tattoo or two. Stir. Serve: the mother of all publicity stunts.

(aka Harry and Louis fake a relationship for publicity. Eventually it becomes a lot less fake and a lot more real.)

8 - Fucking Animals

“Just, off the record,” she says, voice lower, eyes sharper, crook of her mouth quirking up a little, “don’t you ever miss it? A good knot? You must.”

Louis blinks and then swallows, thickly. “No,” he exclaims, offended that she’d even ask, “I love my husband. And anyway, how could I miss something I’ve never had?”

—

Louis is the frontman of an equal rights-movement, author of a book about beta-omega marriage and the struggles of being born and boxed into a personality you don’t necessarily feel you fit. The notion that an omega must want to be with an alpha or else he or she’s just settling for less, is bullshit.

But, fucking hell.

9 - Temporary Tattoos, Hotel Hearts, Horizon Homes

Louis is just 18 and ends up in 2015 for one day at Harry’s request, one day to make sure his spirit is strong and hopeful enough to take him to the X Factor and end him up where he’s supposed to be. Aka, the one where Harry makes sure Louis knows how amazing he is.

10 - you can keep me inside the pocket of your ripped jeans

Louis Tomlinson is an English fashion designer. Harry Styles is an American football player. Their paths cross through twitter.

11 - Both Showing Hearts

Louis Tomlinson is, in fact, not straight.

Harry Styles isn’t sure what he is.

Together, they figure it out, and maybe fall in love along the way.

Or, the Uni AU where Louis helps Harry figure out his sexuality, Niall crashes a bachelorette party, Liam works in a printing centre, and Zayn happens to need lots of printing done.

12 - Here In The Afterglow

“If you hadn’t noticed, I don’t have many friends,” Louis whispers, the blossom of insecurity in his stomach unfurling and clawing its way into his throat.

Harry is silent for a long time, and then he speaks; a soft, slow uncurl that makes Louis’ stomach shake. “I’ll be your friend.”

1970’s AU. In a tiny town in Idaho, Louis’ life is changed forever by the arrival of a curious stranger.

13 - Every Arrow That I Aim Is True

“I can see you don’t believe me,” Harry says, pretending to be stern. Louis chuckles a little but doesn’t get out of the bed. “Anyway, I texted Liam and told him you’re with me. He said to stay here as long as you need, and he’ll deal with the show over there until you want to come back, all right?”

Louis doesn’t say anything again so Harry whispers, “Just stay here with me for a while, yeah? I’ll take care of you.”

Louis is quiet. He never picks his head up, but Harry can see the pillow move from where he’s nodding and his fingers tighten around Harry’s. “Yeah,” Louis says. “Yeah, all right.”

14 - A Taste of Desire

“As forward as I have been with you this evening, I am also aware this dinner party isn’t the place to conduct business.” Mr. Tomlinson chuckles quietly to himself, shooting a subtle glance across the table towards their hostess. “And besides, I am sure our hostess would be horribly disappointed to learn that we went away this evening with a business agreement and not a mating one.”

Harry, who had been sipping his wine, coughs harshly at this. He splutters, unaccustomed to such blatant statements about mating.

Mr. Tomlinson continues to laugh quietly, clearly pleased at Harry’s reaction.

“Mrs. Humphreys promised that there was an alpha attending the dinner tonight that I would certainly get on well with,” Mr. Tomlinson continues, voice teasing. “She assured me that we would have much in common since we both work with mills.” Mr. Tomlinson glances at Harry, eyes flashing with mirth. “Little did she know that would be where our mutual interests began and ended.”

Or, a Victorian ABO where Harry is the owner of the most successful cotton mill in Manchester, and Louis is an opinionated social activist about to disrupt Harry’s world.

15 - Wear It Like a Crown

AU. As part of a team of fixers hired to handle a gay scandal in Buckingham Palace, Louis expects Prince Harry to be a lot of things—most notably a royally spoilt brat. Never mind that the very same Prince Harry used to star in quite a number of Louis’ teenage fantasies.

16 - California Sold

Notoriously closeted boyband member Harry Styles is famous on a global scale, meanwhile Louis, as his best friend, is back home in Manchester, living the typical life of a 24 year old. When Harry needs Louis with him in LA, a publicity stunt gone wrong changes their friendship forever.

A fake-relationship AU between two lifelong best friends.

18 - Wild and Unruly

Harry is a cowboy sitting on the biggest oil reservoir in Wyoming, and Louis is the paralegal assigned to pressure him into selling his land.

19 - Where You Lay

When Louis’s upcoming heat threatens his success at his new dream job, he asks the best (and only) person he can think of to help him through it: his best mates’ best mate, Harry Styles. Harry reluctantly accepts, and together the two navigate a strange friends with benefits relationship that quickly turns complicated.

20 - Untangle Me

Louis finds himself out of place in LA, unable to get at an itch that’s been bothering him for years. He supposes back in the early days, home hadn’t been a place. It’d been a person. He’d etched it permanently into his skin for fucks sake. It was always him and Harry. Stuck to each other like super glue. Pulled together by some magnetic force, existing in their own bubble. Everyone could see it, but that was half the problem, wasn’t it?

It’s not like Louis can pinpoint the exact moment in time when him and Harry fell out of sync. There wasn’t really one at all. It had been a gradual slip, like the tide wearing away at a sandstone cliff. Chipping the solid foundations until there was nothing left to stop the structure falling to the waves below. It’s not like he spends all of his time sitting around moping over a lost friendship, he’s good at distractions. But LA only seems to accentuate the distance between them. Two separate planets, not even in the same solar system.

Or the one where Harry and Louis finally get it right.

21 - For As Long As I Can Remember (It’s Been December)

After recovering from a severe accident that causes Harry to lose his memory of three years, he moves to London to start his life over as a star chef. Little does he know that when he falls in love with Louis at first sight, it’s not the first time they meet.

Featuring an unintentional game of hot and cold, Harry chasing memories that won’t come back, Louis burying himself in work to try and forget what he can’t forget, Liam being torn between two of his best friends, Zayn as a moral compass and Niall saving the day with good music and brutal honesty.

22 - Can’t Fool Me

I hate frats,” Louis repeats for what feels like the millionth time.

“Yes, I’ve heard, once or twice or every day for the past three years,” Liam says. His careful tone reminds Louis of how his mom always sounds when one of his siblings is on the brink of a tantrum.

Louis glances speculatively at Liam’s frat brothers, who are still huddled together and chatting, with the exception of the one who’s looking in Louis’ direction. Maybe Louis shouldn’t rule out a tantrum. While making a scene wouldn’t actually free him from fraternity nonsense in the future, it would at least be entertaining.

AU where Louis hates fraternities and would never be into a frat boy. And one of these things is definitely not a lie.

23 - Bigger Than Life

Boybander Harry Styles spotted leaving West Hollywood joined hand in hand with new beau, Xander Ritz”

His heart drops in his chest as he scrolls down, ignoring the short irrelevant article and looking desperately for a picture. Sure enough, there’s pap shots of Harry and Xander, walking hand in hand, looking drunk and cheerful and together.

And that’s—that’s really not what Louis was expecting at all.

24 - Seeing Blind

Louis finally turns his head in Liam’s direction, knows his face is showing the longing he’s been aching with ever since it took root in his chest. “What the fuck do I do, Liam? He wouldn’t want me like that, but I want-” his voice cracks, and he turns his face back downwards. “What do you do when you’re not perfect for the person who’s perfect for you?”

OR the one where Harry’s an independent omega who likes to have his fun and Louis is the blind alpha that changes Harry’s priorities.

#fic rec #To read

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a879a4-blog · 7 years

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1, 14, and 29! :D

42 character development questions | accepting

ooohh boy i had to put this under a read more because it got ridiculously long, i even had to shorten it ( if only i could write this much for threads and drabbles sigh )…….. Here We Go

1. How do they move and carry themselves? Pace, rhythm, gestures, energy?

When it comes to body language, Kovir is… usually pretty expressive, as you might have already guessed. They are known to walk with a slow, provocative strutting gait; sometimes even adding a bit of hips swaying here and there — you could basically call it a model walk… But that is to say, assuming they can get away with it; they are able to tell when something is going to be way too inappropriate / unprofessional to do in a determinate situation, and they wouldn’t dare to behave like this in front of, say, motherfucking Zarkon ( they’d likely tone it down a bit even when around someone like Sendak, I suppose; better safe than sorry ), but yeah… pompous would be an accurate word to describe them. Kovir is essentially a peacock ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Strutting aside, they also tend to gesticulate a lot and dramatically. ( i.e: opening their arms wide when making a speech in front of their soldiers, putting their hand(s) to their chest, not to mention all the poses they’d make with their weapon… ) When it comes to the amount of energy they put in their movements, that kind of depends on the mood: generally speaking they tend to move somewhat slowly, some might even say languidly, as if trying to conserve their energy for the right time; but Kovir is actually quite easy to excite depending on the circumstances ( hint: their axe. give them a reason to use their axe and fuel their bloodlust ) or the people they are around with, and in that case… oh boy. It would be like watching a bunny doing the blinkies, ESPECIALLY if under the effect of their medication, which is… most of the time anyway…

This might not be surprising, but I guess it’s worth mentioning that when Kovir is genuinely angry — and I don’t mean it in the “Oh I’m so outraged now!!! >:(” way, you wouldn’t see any of these traits because their demeanor would change drastically: it’d be an uncommon sight, but if they do get to that point you can bet they’d throw whatever elegance and drama out of the window, and even if they didn’t express their rage verbally their body language, scowl and grip on their fuming axe shaking would be more than enough to get the message across. Being in the same room with a livid Kovir would be the kind of atmosphere that’d make most subordinates that know better go completely silent.

14. What do they care deeply about? What kind of loyalties, commitments, moral codes, life philosophies, passions, callings, or spirituality and faith do they have? How do these tend to be expressed?

As a Fleet Commander who has been part of the military since they could just barely be considered an adult, they do feel a certain loyalty towards the Empire… but it’s something more related to fear and resignation than like, genuine devotion. Had they complete freedom to do anything they wanted with their life, they would have likely pursued a dance career — that was one of their dreams when they were a teen — not join the army. Kovir has long since accepted their life as a soldier ( “ The Empire is absolute; how could you ever hope to make it out alive if you rebel against it? ” ), and in some way they are thankful that at least it has given them a purpose, a role in society. They know what their place is, even if it means they could die at any moment because of it.

…Now, things have gotten somewhat more complicated with the introduction of Commander Vetara. Before she stepped in, Kovir’s commitment was very simple: serve the Empire as best as you can and bear with it because that’s simply the kind of life that was given to you, something something Victory or Death™, make Lord Zarkon happy. But Vetara, in a few words, gave them the support and validation that they so desperately needed, and at the time the concept of showing genuine compassion to your low-ranked subordinates was entirely new to Kovir.

With the development of their relationship, Kovir’s loyalty for their superior became much, much greater than whatever allegiance they felt for the Empire ( which, again, was built on fear: it was either to be a follower or die ). All the effort they put in their work was and is ultimately because of her, not anybody else. She might have been missing for a long time by now, but she’s still a huge influence in Kovir’s life, to the point that they have selected bits and pieces of her character and philosophy, assimilated them and essentially turned them into part of their own identity. Granted, their research has gotten a bit more passive over the years due to their duties obviously not allowing them to dedicate their full time looking for her whereabouts, but they would spend their entire life looking for the truth — as long as they don’t die before then.

Over the course of their life, something Kovir has learned is that the weak are simply meant to be trampled over by the strong; stepping stones to be used to progress, nothing more, nothing less. The end justifies the means etc. etc. Kovir’s morality is pretty corrupted — there aren’t many things they wouldn’t do to fulfill an objective. But even then, they generally don’t feel any particular hate or animosity for whoever they deem as weak… annoyance at most, maybe, but mostly just disinterest. Which is why Kovir tends to be willing to engage in “friendly” conversations even with those who are supposed to be the enemies if they don’t have a reason to resort to violence right away, and has even spared innocent bystanders occasionally. The suffering of others, first of all, is a necessity for the sake of the “greater good”, although this doesn’t negate the fact that they do take pleasure in playing with their victims before killing them off sometimes; it’s just nothing personal ( usually ), as they would say.

Despite how messed up their morality is, there is one thing that they are definitely never going to do on their own volition, and that is to use lethal force on children. They’ll avoid harming kids as much as possible if they can help it, and they also don’t enjoy hurting pregnant people or new parents for personal reasons. The only case in which they would actually go through with something like killing a child would be if they got forced by a higher-up, and even then they would hesitate a lot in doing so… not to mention it would make them feel absolutely miserable afterwards.

tl;dr: kovir loves vetara and they might as well die after finding her, their philosophy is no hard feelings but if the weak are not to be exploited then what else do they exist for, get over it, killing children is BAD tho u piece of shit… also vetara is love, vetara is life

( i was gonna elaborate the ‘how do they express all this shit’ part but i don’t wanna make this any longer omg… long story short: kovir’s axe alone essentially symbolizes their loyalty, their commitment, their passion and their calling all in one, pretty much )

29. What kind of activities, interests, and hobbies do they have? What significance and impact do these have in their lives, both positive and negative?

The main activities Kovir carries out throughout the day involve training / working out, reading / writing reports, and anything else pertaining work really ( though they genuinely enjoy exercising as a hobby )… but responsibilities aside, socializing with others. There’s nothing new about this: Kovir is a social butterfly and not at all shy about interacting with complete strangers, but unfortunately also happens to have the bad habit of getting a bit too overfamiliar, resulting in them invading others’ personal space without giving a shit ( they have their limits thankfully… the most aggravating thing they’d do to an ally would probably be to pick them up without their consent ) — but that’s another story lmao

Basically, drinking, partying, dancing… these are all things you might get to see them do outside of their job. They also really enjoy taking care of their appearance and looking good at all times — if their flaunting didn’t make it any more obvious — to the point of getting somewhat fussy ( they hate getting dirty and messy ). Sex is, admittedly, another important aspect in Kovir’s life and has been for a long time, even before creating the persona they are making use of today. Another hobby of theirs that doesn’t involve the company of people is taking care of flowers and collecting gemstones and other pretty objects ( bonus points if they also shine and sparkle ), something you would definitely see if you ever had the chance to walk into their personal quarters.

Kovir’s extremely social behavior is essentially a façade and a form of escapism to disguise and distract themselves from all their negative feelings, as well as a means of giving other people a reason to like them; Kovir wants to be noticed and validated, they want to be praised and trusted, they want to be relied on and they want people to depend on them, both for their exploitatory purposes and their own personal pleasure. Recreational substances like alcohol are other unhealthy coping methods of theirs that unfortunately do little more than provide temporary relief, but hey, what is Kovir without all their self-destructive mechanisms. Nothigng . absolutley nothi

thought machine broke

#im dead #if i can write this much Why Cant I Write A Decent Drabble is what i wanna know #asks.#headcanons.#theflyingfoxy #i feel bad because some of this shit is either stuff that is already known or could have been deduced

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owl-eyed-woman · 7 years

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Attack on Titan Season 2 Episode Analysis - Episode 7 (Episode 32)

After last week’s thrilling cliff-hanger, it’s finally time for some ‘close combat’. Yes, this episode knows what it’s about, and that is action, action, action. To be honest, when I realised that this was going to be an action-heavy episode, I feared that there wouldn’t be much for me to analyse here – I mean, it’s thrilling action done well, what more is there to say? On rewatch though, it’s clear that there’s a lot going on beneath the surface, particularly in regards to who Eren is and how his style of fighting reflects his psychology. It’s been a while since we’ve had an Eren-focused episode, hasn’t it?

The episode starts with a brief flashback all the way back to episode 3 – those were the days! Usually, I wouldn’t deign to comment on an episode recap, but this recap isn’t just reminding us of a previous event. Instead, the audience is forced to re-contextualise this moment and actively reframe it within the context of Reiner and Bertholdt’s betrayal. This was once a beautiful scene about the formation of an unexpected bond and growing mutual respect between four people who had experienced the horrors of the titans firsthand. Tragically, this once genuine moment is now tainted by deceit and betrayal. Still, we absolutely can’t forget that Eren is fighting one of his closest comrades, someone he trusted with his life for 5 long years! And, to put it bluntly, Eren is pissed.

In the last episode, we experienced the immediate emotional fallout from Reiner’s duplicity, as Eren shifted from paralysed shock to grief. Now, as he begins comprehend the depth of Reiner’s betrayal, Eren is consumed by bitterness and rage. Everything he thought Reiner was - strong, loyal, steadfast, reliable - has been comprehensively and cruelly demolished.

This is so devastating for Eren not just because he loved Reiner dearly, but because Eren wanted to be Reiner. For Eren, Reiner was the perfect model of a soldier and everything Eren aspired to. In this way, Reiner’s betrayal, unlike Bertholdt’s, is a personal affront to Eren; he hasn’t just lost a friend, he’s lost his ideal. Poor Eren just can’t catch a break.

Reiner as the Armoured Titan is a striking, intimidating opponent, to say the least. It’s strange to think that even though we’re over 30 episodes in, this is only the third ‘Titan Eren vs Titan’ battle we’ve seen (and only the second ‘Titan Eren vs. Titan-shifter’ battle). So though the novelty definitely hasn’t worn off, AOT still makes sure that each iteration is compelling and fresh by introducing new challenges to overcome and seemingly unbeatable abilities. AOT knows that you don’t need to reinvent the proverbial wheel every time, but you do need to tweak it just a bit to keep the audience invested.

Thus, a pattern of escalation and complication is evident in every titan battle we’ve encountered so far. We can basically view Eren’s first transformation in Trost as a kind of tutorial level in titan shifting. Tasks like defeating normal titans or successfully moving the boulder all function to demonstrate Eren getting a handle on his powers and establishing the basic rules of this ability. So in the scheme of things, the challenges here are comparatively simple (OK, it wasn’t simple at the time).

With Annie as the Female Titan, the show started to add new obstacles to complicate this formula. Against the Female Titan, Eren had to contend with mental and emotional challenges in addition to a physical one. Annie was a formidable opponent combat-wise, but she was also highly intelligent and, even more importantly, a friend. Thus, the main conflict for Eren against Annie was learning how to overcome the emotionally devastating challenge of fighting someone you’ve trusted for years and psychologically move past this.

Now with Reiner, we see AOT continue to evolve Eren’s titan-shifter battles by further centring the main conflict in Eren’s psychology and emotional perspective (we’ll get to that in a bit).

But on a more basic level, he is quite simply the most intimidating enemy physically that Eren has ever encountered– I mean, he’s a Titan with armour for god’s sake! Reiner’s ridiculous strength is made abundantly clear from the beginning with our first establishing shot of the fight showing Reiner’s punch literally sending Eren flying through the air. It’s practically comical! In addition to this, it’s quickly established that Reiner’s armour is impervious to Mikasa’s blades. For both titans and humans, Reiner is set up as a nigh invincible enemy and the greatest challenge combat-wise that Eren has ever encountered.

So with Eren as the clear underdog in this fight, the fun is in seeing how he can possibly even the odds. One thing is clear: this isn’t a fight Eren can punch his way through. He’s going to have to use more than brute strength to possibly stand a chance.

Facing this seemingly insurmountable challenge, something starts to shift within Eren. Fuelled by the memory of the destruction of Wall Maria and the death of his mother along with countless innocents, any regret, sadness, or confusion dissipates and is replaced by white hot rage. Only one things remains startlingly clear; Reiner is a monster and he must be destroyed. As Eren rises up from the ground, the camera sweeps over his weird, bumpy abs before showing Eren standing proudly, ready to fight. This shot communicates one idea; Eren is powerful enough to defeat Reiner.

And then he gets punched again, twirling through the air! It’s important to note that Eren’s impotence is purposefully comedic, with the sudden cut to the eyecatch heightening the absurdity of this moment. This entire scene then, with its powerful angles, empowering music and inspiring sentiments, functions as purposeful misdirection.

But we still need to ask, why doesn’t Eren succeed in this moment? Why isn’t his willpower, resolve and rage, which were so essential to defeating Annie, effective against Reiner?

On a basic level, we could say it’s just because Reiner is physically stronger than Annie. But I believe the reason for Eren’s failure goes much deeper than this. Ultimately, Eren’s success or failure in this fights comes down to his morality, his psychology and how he perceives his opponents. This came up in my analysis for last week’s episode, but essentially, this conflict with Reiner relates to Eren’s strict adherence to an extremely black and white view of morality and his almost compulsive need to clearly place people into this stark dichotomy of good or evil.

Eren’s done this exact thing several times throughout the show. It happened with Annie and, even more notably, when he first met Mikasa. It’s (surprisingly) easy to overlook, but Eren basically murdered two men when he was just a child. I’m not saying his actions weren’t justified, but realistically, any other child would have been traumatised by this experience, or simply unable to commit such an act in the first place. Eren, however, was able to remain completely unfazed precisely because, in his mind, they weren’t truly human. They were animals and thus he faced no ethical dilemma when killing them. It’s almost disturbing how easily Eren is able to compartmentalise complex moral situations and even people by reducing them to completely inhuman or monstrous forms.

As Eren prepares to fight, he starts to fall into this familiar pattern. He calls them ‘pests’, and declares that he’s going to ‘exterminate’ them, already starting to conceive of Reiner and Bertholdt in inhuman terms, as insects, animals or monsters. By doing this, Eren forces himself to repress his emotional turmoil and erase any feelings of friendship by reducing them to mindless monsters to be destroyed.

In the past, Eren’s ability to apply this dehumanising morality to the situation at hand has been essential for his survival and success. Quite simply, he wouldn’t have been able to defeat Annie if he hadn’t been able to conceive of her as a monster, not a human being who was once his friend.

Crucially though, the fact that Eren dehumanises his enemies so frequently and comprehensively has serious ramifications for his mental wellbeing. You see, in order to effectively utilise this ability, Eren has to rely on the worst parts of himself (his rage and his hate) and repress the best parts of himself (his compassion, his idealism and his loyalty). In the process of harnessing this monstrous side of himself, Eren literally loses his own humanity that he treasures so, so much. Ultimately, by dehumanising others so thoroughly, Eren essentially participates in his own dehumanisation as well.

So when he starts to dehumanise Reiner, Eren is essentially reverting to an emotionally unhealthy and psychologically damaging pattern. Fundamentally, on an emotional level, Eren can’t keep this up without self-destructing. But on a simple tactical level, the benefits of this method, specifically the monstrous determination and strength boost, aren’t enough to defeat the pure might of Reiner.

Faced with this conundrum, Eren suddenly recalls his cadet combat training with Annie. It’s an innocent, tranquil time, even though Annie is absolutely destroying Eren. Eren’s impulsive and angry fighting style is simply no match for the cold calculation and skilful timing of Annie. But more importantly, during this training match, Annie teaches Eren how to use opponent’s force against them, along with specific wrestling holds to incapacitate and defeat a much stronger opponent.

Then, Mikasa comes over and requests Annie try her technique out on her. Crucially, Annie admits that she is unsure if it will work, as her combat style was made to be used on humans, not beasts like Mikasa. Though Annie’s intention was to insult Mikasa, this point is absolutely crucial and will ultimately enable Eren to gain the upper hand against Reiner.

This flashback gives Eren a genuine breakthrough. Tactically, Eren learns to harness a new technique that is tailor-made for defeating brutish fighters like Reiner. But more importantly, this style is specifically intended to be used against ‘humans’, not ‘beasts’. Until now, Eren has been fighting ‘beasts’ like a beast himself. But he can’t do this with Reiner. This time, he has to fight Reiner on equal footing as a human. Basically, in order to use this technique effectively, he has to acknowledge Reiner’s inherent humanity.

This shift in perspective is immediately apparent as Eren battles Reiner. He no longer conceives of Reiner as a pest or vows to destroy or exterminate him. Instead, he gloats over the fact that because he fought with him as a cadet, he knows their weaknesses and how he can defeat them.

Before this moment, Eren has always needed to dehumanise his enemies, reducing them to inhuman monsters and repressing any emotional connection. But in this one episode, his friendship with Reiner and understanding of him as a human being is no longer an emotional hindrance for Eren. In fact, if he can remain conscious of Reiner as a human, he can use this knowledge to his advantage. Now, by no longer relying on dehumanisation and rage to win his battles, Eren must instead utilise planning, strategy and composure – essentially, he must retain his own humanity and rational control over the situation. This a huge breakthrough for Eren, both emotionally and mentally.

It’s also a huge step forward for Eren morally and ethically. What Reiner and Bertholdt did was despicable, monstrous even! But this is not necessarily at odds with their humanity. If there is one truth in AOT it’s this: humans have the potential to do monstrous, despicable things, but we still need to acknowledge this as a part of our humanity, rather than consigning this to the realm of monsters and beasts. Only then can we truly grow as people.

By acknowledging Reiner as a human during this battle, Eren is slowly incorporating moral nuance and understanding into his worldview. No, he’s probably not ready to see the virtues of his enemies or the vices of his friends. But still, it’s an important step towards recognising the monstrosity in humans and the humanity in monsters.

So with all this in mind, Eren is finally able to gain the upper hand against Reiner, incapacitating Reiner completely before TEARING ONE OF HIS ARMS OFF! I’ve rambled on far too long about the character implications, so let me just say that action-wise, it’s awesome seeing the addition of martial arts and dynamic strategies in a titan battle!

Additionally, while Armin, Mikasa and Hanji worry that Eren has lost control, Eren remains entirely lucid and rational throughout this entire episode. So here is yet another benefit to viewing one’s enemies as humans rather than monsters – Eren can retain his own humanity and control.

In this one episode, Eren has made so much progress with his titan powers, as well as substantial progress as a character! So, of course it’s disheartening when he is so soundly defeated at the hands of Reiner and Bertholdt.

I guess everything was going a bit too well for Eren, as everyone seems to forget their initial plan to escape in their desperation for just one success. Basically, they got cocky.

So while in the end, Eren failed abysmally, we mustn’t forget the significant breakthrough he’s had morally, emotionally and mentally. Let’s just hope it sticks!

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adorkablephil · 7 years

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Fic: Happily Ever After 6 (Healing)

Title: Happily Ever After Rating: Teen (for Dan’s language, as usual) Word Count for This Chapter: 7.5K (!) Summary: Dan proposes marriage, but Phil’s reaction isn’t quite what he’d been expecting or hoping for. Genre(s): Angst, Fluff, Established Relationship, Marriage Proposals, Gay Marriage, Commitment, Relationship Issues Author’s Note: This chapter again focuses on the topics of homophobia, biphobia, and the internalization of both/either of these. Again, I’ve tried to treat those topics with respect and hope that readers will forgive me if I’ve unintentionally written anything insensitive. Also, this chapter contains some spoilers for the tv series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but if you haven’t seen it yet then maybe these spoilers will convince you to watch it. :) Also available on AO3 here

[Masterlist of all “Happily Ever After” chapters on Tumblr]

They didn’t talk about it all at once, not right away, because Phil needed to think.

“I’m very confused right now,” he admitted hesitantly. “But I understand why you’re so upset—I really do. If I’d heard somebody else tell you that gay marriage was less valid than straight marriage, I would have expected you to kick their butts. Verbally, I mean.” He looked away, frowning unhappily. “And I know you’re right—I know that’s basically what I’m saying.” He shook his head, then looked back to meet Dan’s eyes. “But knowing it rationally, being able to recognize it … that doesn’t magically make the way I feel go away. I wish it did.” He looked genuinely, deeply upset.

Dan wasn’t touching him, just sitting near on the sofa and watching his face. He wasn’t sure exactly what Phil was trying to say, but it didn’t sound good. “So … what now?

Phil sighed and scrubbed his hands over his face, then looked at Dan again, and his eyes were tired and sad. “I need to think. Because … I need to figure out where those feelings are coming from if I ever want to get past them and have any chance of being with you. Because I know you won’t stay with me like this.”

This time Dan was the one who sighed. He was still feeling a little angry at Phil’s internalized homophobia—or biphobia, maybe?—but also felt bad for being angry when the stupid prejudice obviously hurt Phil more than anyone else.

Okay, so maybe right now it was hurting Dan just as much.

He didn’t know what to say, because Phil was right. Dan wouldn’t want to stay with him if things remained like this, now that he knew how Phil felt, how Phil saw not only their own future but also the social fabric of Dan’s reality. He couldn’t stay with someone who looked down on gay marriage—that attitude was just too diametrically opposed to everything he stood for, everything most important to him about his own moral compass.

Phil tentatively rested a hand on his arm, and Dan realized that he’d been staring off at nothing. He looked into Phil’s face again and saw a grim set to his mouth. “I…” Phil began, then stalled. He visibly braced himself, then started again. “I can’t promise anything about … us getting married. The proposal, and … well … my answer. I have so much to think about before I can make a decision like that, and I don’t think it would be fair to you for me to even consider that before figuring out the deeper stuff.” Dan nodded, agreeing wholeheartedly that Phil had a lot of other serious shit to work out before something like that was even an option. Phil took Dan’s hand in his, not holding it very tightly as if not sure of his welcome, and Dan squeezed gently, glad to feel Phil squeeze back. Phil continued then, as if Dan’s bit of physical reassurance had given him the courage. “I can’t promise anything about that, but I can promise that I will work to figure this all out, harder than I’ve ever worked on anything before. And we’ll talk about it all. Because…” Phil choked up on the word and paused, swallowing. He licked his lips, then said, “Because whatever happens with us in the long term, your respect matters to me more than anything, Dan. I couldn’t stand knowing that I’d lost that. Even if we weren’t together anymore, as long as I knew you weren’t ashamed to know me…”

Dan interrupted him, “I’m not ashamed to know you, Phil. I’m just … I’m upset, okay?”

Phil nodded. “I know. But I just want you to understand that I’m going to do everything I can to make myself into someone you can love again.”

Dan smiled gently and reached up to rest his hand against the side of Phil’s face. “You don’t have to change the person you are. I still love you, Phil.”

Phil ducked his head, escaping from Dan’s touch, and said quietly, “I think right now you just don’t like me very much. And I’m going to try everything I can to be someone you can like again.” Dan opened his mouth to speak, but Phil held up his hand and added quickly, “Not just for you, but because I know you’re right about this. I hadn’t even realized I was prejudiced about this, but I can see now that I am, and I don’t want to be. So I’m doing this as much for me as for you. Okay?”

Dan took Phil’s hand again and squeezed it a little tighter this time. “That sounds pretty brave, to face your own demons like that. Most people aren’t strong enough to do it. And I’ll be here for you. I promise I’ll never pressure you about your answer to my question on the beach, but I’m making no promises about making my feelings and opinions clear in other ways. I’m not very good at keeping quiet when I care about something.”

Phil chuckled. “I know. And that’s fine. I love you with your passionate opinions and philosophical rants. I think maybe sometimes they might even help. We do need to talk. And maybe sometimes I’ll need to just hide away to focus on my own thoughts. I don’t know. I guess … we’ll see how it goes.”

Dan nodded. He felt better, knowing that Phil was taking the issues seriously instead of defending his prejudiced position. There was no way of knowing what their future would hold, but it looked less hopeless than it had a day or two ago.

“You do believe me, don’t you? I was never looking for anybody else, not the entire time we’ve been together. I only ever wanted you. I still only want you. You believe me, right?”

“Yeah, I believe you, Phil.”

“I never want to marry anybody else. I just want to stay with you forever. You make me … so … so … happy.”

“Phil, it’s okay. Don’t cry. We’ll work this out.”

Phil asked if they could watch the musical episode of Buffy. It was his favorite thing to watch when he was feeling down, so Dan knew he’d been fretting again. To be honest, he seemed to be fretting most of the time lately. The flat was quiet these days. It had been about a week since Phil had said he needed time to think, and he seemed to be taking the task seriously. They still spent time together, still outwardly kept to the same patterns and habits, but Phil’s thoughts just seemed more inwardly directed. He was less bubbly and more contemplative.

So they were cuddled up together under a blanket on the sofa, watching Willow and Tara sing to each other about the magic of their love, when Dan felt a rant coming on. He paused the show and scowled.

“This has always bugged me. I mean, I think Willow’s storyline about her falling in love with Tara is really well done, and I think their relationship is deeper and more romantic than any other relationship Willow has had, but I have a lot of respect for Joss Whedon and I think he dropped the ball on this one.”

Dan was gesturing with his hands as he spoke, and he noticed that Phil wore that tolerant smile that always graced his face when Dan started expressing his passionate opinions about something. Dan knew that Phil accepted and maybe even appreciated this about him, so he knew it was okay to just rant until he was done, that Phil would listen to him patiently … and then they would unpause the show and finish watching it as if Dan’s verbal tempest hadn’t happened. He just had to let out the steam before he could settle down again.

“Sure, his decision to prominently feature a lesbian couple and show them kissing on a fairly mainstream show was revolutionary at the time, and he took a big risk there, but he treats Willow’s sexuality like it’s a switch that gets flipped. The entire first three seasons of the show, she’s presented as actively heterosexual, with no hints of same-sex attraction. She’s so attracted to Xander that she can’t keep her hands off him! And her relationship with Oz, while maybe not as intense as her later relationship with Tara, is still very real and loving and romantic. She was definitely in love with Oz, and he’s a guy! The fact that she later has a relationship with a woman doesn’t mean she ‘turned gay’! It just means she’s probably bisexual! Or pansexual or sapiosexual or whatever! But why didn’t Joss Whedon just present it that way? Why does Willow spend the rest of the series insisting that she’s ‘gay now’? It’s ridiculous. It’s like bisexuality doesn’t even exist! It’s like everyone has to be either straight or gay, and there are no other options, so Willow just switches teams! It pisses me off that the media presents the whole issue as so black-and-white, and I’m incredibly disappointed that someone as progressive as Joss Whedon did the same fucking thing!”

Phil was nodding amiably, but not interrupting Dan’s avalanche of words. When Dan didn’t say anything more, Phil asked, “Ready to go back to the show?”

Dan relaxed back into their cuddle, realizing that he had leaned forward tensely as he ranted, and grumbled quietly, “I’m just pissed that Joss Whedon didn’t have the balls to go somewhere a little more complicated instead of playing into the whole ‘bisexuals just need to choose a side’ stereotype. He’s invalidating you and me and thousands or maybe even millions of other people.”

Phil chuckled softly and whispered in Dan’s ear, “Thank you for defending my honor. My hero.”

Dan rolled his eyes, but turned for a quick kiss before reaching for the remote. “Okay. Rant over. Back to the lesbian love song. The clearly implied cunnilingus is about to happen. Gotta give Joss Whedon props for that.”

Phil burst out laughing and Dan grinned at him. He thought maybe Phil’s smile looked a little brighter than it had in a while. They unpaused the show and snuggled together to watch the rest of the episode.

“I think maybe my feelings about being bisexual are a major part of what’s going on with me.”

“My rant about Willow got you thinking?”

“I just … I realized that I have a lot of mixed feelings about it.”

“I’m here if you want to talk.”

“I know. I just … I need to think. But thanks.”

Dan had been hesitant to bring this up for the past couple weeks, but finally he decided to ask Phil about it so it would stop fucking eating at him.

“Can I ask you a serious question?”

Phil was sitting on his end of the couch, doing something on his laptop, but he closed it and turned to look at Dan. “Sure.” He looked nervous.

Dan paused, uncertain, then plowed forward. “What … what were you doing for those three weeks on the Isle of Man when you didn’t even … I mean, you didn’t even text me or anything, that whole time. I didn’t know what to think. I asked you to marry me, and you said you needed time, and then … you just dropped me.” He realized how hurt he was feeling as he said those last words. The hurt had lingered and perhaps even sharpened over time, so he was glad he’d finally gotten the nerve to bring it up before it got even worse.

Phil looked down at his lap, fingers worrying at the blanket that partially covered him. “Honest?” he queried tentatively.

Dan nodded, not sure if Phil would notice the motion, and said, “Honest. Always honest.”

Phil met his gaze, and his eyes were filled with pain. “I mostly just took long walks by myself and imagined what my life was going to be like without you.”

That hit Dan hard. “You were planning to leave me?”

Phil shook his head. “I was sure you were going to leave me. That’s why it took me so long to come back. I didn’t want to face you after I’d made such a mess of things. Everything you said on the beach was so beautiful, and then it just brought up all these feelings I hadn’t expected, and I was sure you wouldn’t want to be with me anymore.”

Neither of them said anything for a long time, then Phil added quietly, “It took me three weeks to work up the courage to face you after what I’d done.”

Dan moved to sit closer to him and pulled him into a hug. “I’m so glad you did.”

The situation was hard on Dan, because he was used to going to Phil whenever he was upset about something to get comfort … but in this case Phil was the thing that was upsetting him.

So sometimes he would come into the lounge and just crawl into Phil's lap and not say anything, just press close and take comfort from the feel and smell of Phil, the man he loved, the man who had always been there for him. And he wouldn’t think about any of the mess they were in right now, but just breathe Phil in and soak Phil in and remember all the good things.

And Phil would hold him in his arms and kiss his hair and not say anything.

Phil had his bad days, too.

It was almost a month into Phil’s “thinking” when Dan woke up alone in the bed. That wasn’t an altogether unusual occurrence, since Phil usually woke earlier than he did, but it didn’t usually happen at 4 a.m.

He pulled on his track bottoms and walked shirtless to the lounge, where he found Phil sitting on the sofa, apparently deep in thought. He didn’t even have his phone or laptop—he was just sitting in the dim light, staring at nothing. He looked over when he heard Dan pad barefoot into the room and smiled softly but said nothing.

“I woke up and you were gone,” Dan explained, but there was no blame in his voice. “You okay?”

Phil nodded, his face falling back into troubled lines. He’d looked like that so much lately. It made him look older. It made him look weary. “Thinking,” he replied, glancing away.

Dan walked closer and stood right before him. He ran a hand gently through Phil’s soft hair and said, “Maybe you don’t have to think so hard right now. Maybe you can just … be.” He climbed onto the sofa and curled up against Phil, wrapping arms around him and pulling him so close that Phil was half in his lap.

Phil, too, was shirtless, clad only in pyjama bottoms, and so as they cuddled their bare skin pressed together and Dan tried to will his own warmth into this man he loved so much. “This is all my fault,” Phil mumbled, and he sounded absolutely desolated. “How can you be so nice to me when I’m doing this to you?”

Dan pulled him closer, pulled Phil all the way into his lap, lanky limbs and all, and squeezed him as if he could join their bodies together through pure force of will. “It’s because I love you, you moron. And so when you hurt, I hurt. And I know you’re hurting. I’ve never wanted that.” He stroked Phil’s hair again, pulling his head down to rest on Dan’s shoulder. “We’re in this together,” he said firmly. “No matter what, I’m with you. Always. Forever. Count on it.”

Phil put his arms around Dan and squeezed just as hard as Dan was. “I love you so much,” he whispered. “I’m sorry I’ve hurt you.”

Dan pulled Phil’s face up and kissed him slowly, softly, trying to show him the depth of his feelings through the pressure of his lips alone. They’d been together a long time. They knew the language of each other’s kisses.

When he pulled away, Phil’s body was more relaxed and the lines of worry had eased from his face. He lifted a hand to the side of Dan’s face and leaned in for another kiss. Dan could read regret in it, but also so much love that he almost couldn’t breathe.

“Together,” Phil whispered afterward. “We’ll get through this together. Because that’s what it means to really be in love for the long haul. Right?”

Dan nodded and smiled, darting in for another quick kiss. “Right. Now … come back to bed? Cuddling there is a lot more comfortable.” He shifted Phil off his lap and stood, holding out his hand. Phil took it, and they walked together back to the bedroom, where they crawled under the covers together and held each other close until they’d both fallen into a peaceful sleep.

The sex was intense during that first month. Phil consistently held his gaze, eyes tender and fervid, as they touched and moved together and were as close as it was possible for them to get. His hands moved over Dan’s skin as if he caressed the most precious thing in the world.

“How is it possible that we’ve been together for 7 years, and we’ve talked so often about our future, and you apparently never once thought about marriage?”

“Well, I mean, of course the topic crossed my mind. I mean, I may not stalk my Tumblr tag but it’s hard to miss the crazy stuff people write in the live show chat.”

“Crazy stuff?”

“Don’t look like that! I just meant that the fans make up all kinds of theories and write all kinds of stuff about us, and I just sort of … thought of it as part of that.”

“Just … over-the-top shipper fantasies? Nothing … real? Nothing that could ever really happen?”

“Dan … I’m sorry. I’m just trying my best to be completely honest.”

“Yeah. I get that.”

Sometimes Dan got angry and frustrated and went out to cafes for hours just to get away from the flat. To get away from Phil. Sometimes he wondered why he was putting himself through this, what the fuck he was waiting for.

Dan had been lost in the Google vortex—looking up one thing after another after another—for he wasn’t even sure how long when he realized he hadn’t seen Phil in a while. He walked down the hall to Phil’s bedroom to find the door open, but Phil just sitting on the bed, leaning back against the wicker headboard fully clothed, lost in thought.

“Hey,” Dan said. “What’s up?”

“Did you know … when I came out to my flatmates in uni, they laughed.” Phil had been blurting out these seemingly random non sequiturs for weeks now, so Dan didn’t blink an eye.

“Yeah?” He’d found that just listening and asking questions seemed to help the conversations along best when they popped up like this. He sat down on the edge of Phil’s bed.

“One of the guys was even gay. But they all thought I was joking at first, like being bisexual is so unimaginable that it’s obviously a prank.” His face was set in grim lines. “Over that first year, they all said various stuff. Like I was just confused, or not ready to admit that I was gay. That I just hadn’t met the right person yet.” He looked at Dan. “Not a single one of them took me seriously.”

Dan nodded. He’d heard this kind of stuff before, not about Phil but just generally about how bi people were often treated. He could hear the underlying anger in Phil’s voice, buried deep below the hurt.

“When I got a girlfriend, my friends said it was proof that I was straight. I tried to explain that I’d be just as interested in having a boyfriend, but nobody seemed interested in actually listening. And … I was so upset that nobody seemed to care … I went to this LGBT club at the university. I figured it was the one place where people might understand, you know?”

Phil paused as if remembering, then continued. “They were all friendly and everything, even when I said I was bisexual, but when I mentioned that I had a girlfriend, suddenly … well, they weren’t as friendly anymore. They acted like having a girlfriend made me straight, so I didn’t belong anymore.”

Phil stopped talking, and Dan saw a muscle in his jaw clench. His eyes were blazing when he looked at Dan again. “What part of ‘bisexual’ did they not understand? What part of ‘interested in both’ was so difficult to grasp? Having a girlfriend didn’t make me straight any more than having a boyfriend would have made me gay. But nobody seemed to understand that. Not even the fucking LGBT club.” Phil almost never swore, so the word told Dan how angry he was.

Phil looked away again, and the anger in his face slowly faded. Now he just looked tired. He shrugged dismissively, but Dan wasn’t fooled by the attempt at casualness. “I dated a few people in uni, not just that one girl. A couple girls, a couple guys. But all of them seemed to think that because I was bisexual I was going to cheat on them. Like I had such an insatiable desire for both that I wouldn’t be able to settle for just one in the long term. They just couldn’t seem to understand that what interested me was people, and that I was capable of committing to one—the only difference was that I didn’t care which gender they were. So none of the relationships lasted.”

He looked up at Dan again. “None of them lasted until I met you.” Dan reached out, and Phil took his hand, but the touch was light and hesitant.

“And even then I guess I was letting all that past stuff come between us … and I didn’t even realize it. Not until you asked me to marry you and it all came crashing down on me.” His grasp on Dan’s hand became a little firmer as he said, “I’m so sorry about that.”

Dan finally spoke up. “You’ve said you’re sorry about ten thousand times in the past couple months, Phil. I get it, and you��re forgiven. Just … try to let go of being sorry … and work on moving forward. Because being sorry is something you do by yourself, but moving forward is something we can do together.”

Sex had become more tentative between them. Dan looked for the same passion he’d seen in Phil’s eyes, but found a deep sadness, as if Phil had sunk so deep into his own grief, his own past, that he wasn’t fully present, as if some part of him was always stuck in those remembered wrongs.

Dan felt like he was making love with a ghost.

“I’m grateful to 22-year-old Phil every day for responding to your pesky tweets.”

“Really?”

“I’d never have gotten to know 25-year-old Dan otherwise, and 25-year-old Dan is my favorite person in the world.”

“Can I ask another potentially uncomfortable question?”

“I’m ready.”

“What does ‘marriage’ actually mean to you? What do you think of when you hear the word?”

“I don’t know. I guess … paperwork. Legal mumbo jumbo. Joint property. Making sure your kids are legitimate. Taxes. That sort of thing.”

“Yeah, you always did say it was just a piece of paper.”

“I can’t help it. That’s just the connotations it has for me.”

“What about your parents?”

“What about them?”

“Do you think that’s why they’re married? Joint property? Taxes?”

“Um…”

“Because I’ve always thought it seemed like they really love each other, and that’s why they’re still together after so many years. … That’s the kind of marriage I would want to have.”

Dan was in the middle of editing a video when Phil approached him and just hovered nearby, not saying anything. Dan saved his work and looked up expectantly, but reached out a hand when he saw the expression on Phil’s face. Phil took his hand and led him to their bed, where he made love to Dan as if he were precious again, as if Phil was whole again, and fully present. He looked into Dan’s eyes as he entered him, and it felt like they were truly one.

Everything wasn’t perfect, but it seemed to be getting better. Phil talked more, laughed more, made more jokes. But he was obviously still thinking.

“You’ve talked about how your uni friends acted when you came out, but how did your parents react?”

“Oh, they were pretty confused at first, but … I don’t know … they were just used to me being weird, and so this was just another weird Phil thing. They accepted it pretty easily.”

“No worries at all? Seriously?”

“Not really. Like I said, they’re used to me being weird. So I guess bisexuality didn’t seem any weirder to them than YouTube did.”

“Want to know what I’m most ashamed of, now that I’ve had the time to think about it?”

“Do you really want to talk about this right before we go to sleep?”

“I just … I haven’t had the guts to bring it up before this. And I’ve been wanting to. Because I want to be honest with you, even about the things I don’t like in myself.”

“Okay. You’ve got me scared as hell now. Go ahead.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking, and I thought about how I hate conflict. And how being bisexual is like a lifetime of coming out, a lifetime of defending myself against other people’s prejudices, and how exhausting that is, and how I don’t want to spend my life fighting this never-ending battle … and I realized that on some level, deep down, I kind of wish I could be straight, because it would make my life so much simpler.”

“Well, to be honest, it would. But you aren’t straight.”

“I know. But I think … when I thought about someday marrying a woman and settling down and having kids … it was like this idealized future where I wouldn’t have to fight anymore, you know? Where I wouldn’t have to always be explaining myself … and I could just … be. And it wouldn’t actually be dishonest, because I do like women, and I could easily have ended up with a woman … and that future could have happened. But instead I fell in love with you.”

“Phil … are you sorry?”

“God, Dan, I could never be sorry about that!”

“Okay! Okay! I believe you! Keep at me like that and we’ll never go to sleep, because I’ll have to ravish you all over again!”

“I just wanted you to know. I figured out where that idea came from. I think it came from wanting to avoid conflict, wanting to have my life be simple and easy and normal.”

“I once heard this wise saying: Normalness leads to sadness.”

“You know, I’ve heard that, too!”

“Sounds pretty smart to me.”

They were in the shower, of all places, and Phil was washing Dan’s back when he asked out of the blue—as all his questions seemed to be these past few months—“Why do you want to get married so badly?”

Dan turned to look at him, the black hair plastered to his head, wet fringe swept back and water droplets clinging to his eyelashes like impending tears. But his eyes were incredibly clear in the light of the bathroom, their unique combination of colors like a stream flowing over brightly colored pebbles, and the look in them was soft and fond.

“Well, the truth is that I don’t really want to get married all that badly.” He waited a beat for Phil’s incredulity and was not disappointed.

Phil sputtered. “But … I thought … what about … on the beach … all those things you said … and what’s all this been about, then … I mean…”

Dan lifted a finger and pressed it to Phil’s lips, silencing him. “I don’t particularly care about getting married, but I do want to marry you. It isn’t about getting married. It’s about marrying you.”

Phil apparently decided that the best way to wash Dan’s back was to pull him closer, pressing their chests together, and wrapping his arms around him so he could run his soapy hands over Dan’s back in an embrace. Dan put his arms around Phil’s neck and smiled at him.

“So why do you want to marry me so badly?” Phil asked, and his voice had gone a bit husky.

Dan had been waiting weeks for this question, so he was well prepared. He wove his fingers into the wet hair on the back of Phil’s head and looked directly into his eyes. “I want to marry you, Philip Lester, because I love you so much that I don’t want to keep it to myself. I want to stand in front of our friends and family and viewers and the Queen and the House of fucking Lords and declare that I adore you and want you by my side for the rest of our lives. I want to sign pieces of paper that tie us together, because I want to tie you to me in every way possible. No, not in a kinky way, you perv. We’re not talking about the bedroom right now. We’re talking about life. I’m talking about saying, ‘This person is half my life, and I want to declare it in every way possible. I would get his name tattooed on my forehead if it weren’t so aesthetically offensive, and instead I’d like to wear his ring on my finger and introduce him every day for the rest of our lives as my husband.’”

Phil looked a little shellshocked, and his hands had stilled on Dan’s back. They just stood there under the shower spray, looking into each other’s eyes.

“Does that answer your question?” Dan asked smugly, and Phil just nodded, apparently struck dumb.

“Okay then. It’s your turn. Let me wash your back.” They changed places and Dan ran soapy hands over the smooth skin of Phil’s pale back, pausing a moment to knead a bit at his shoulders. They weren’t particularly tense, and that discovery made Dan very happy.

Dan occasionally got texts from Phil’s mum. She never asked anything too nosy, but her extreme curiosity was evident in the questions she did ask.

How are you and my Philly doing?

Anything new with you boys?

I hope we’ll see you again soon under much happier circumstances, dear.

Dan always responded with affection and respect, but no actual information.

“What if I said no?”

“Said no to what?”

“What if I said no, I don’t want to get married? Would that end us?”

“I really don’t want to turn this into an ultimatum, Phil. That’s not fair to you.”

“Let me decide what’s fair to me. And what I think is fair is for you to be honest about what’s at stake here.”

“Phil … to be honest, I don’t know. I’ve been trying not to think about it. The important thing right now is for you to figure out how you feel, and we can deal with the rest later.”

“But all those things you said in the shower about wanting to marry me…”

“I do want to marry you. Very much. But if you don’t want to marry me, then I don’t want it either. Because getting married would be about us, Phil, about what we both want, not just about what I want.”

“So you’d be okay with not getting married?”

“Phil … I’d really rather not think about it right now. I’m sorry, but I don’t want this to turn into an ultimatum even in my own head. I love you. I want to marry you. If you decide that’s not what you want, then we’ll talk about it together, okay?”

“Okay.”

Dan was in the kitchen getting plates for their Indian takeaway when Phil lounged in the doorway and asked, “Did you tell my family that you proposed to me? I mean, before you left that day on the Isle of Man?”

Dan turned to look at him but couldn’t read Phil’s expression. He sighed. Hopefully this wouldn’t make Phil angry.

“To be honest … well … I actually sat them all down beforehand and … well … I sort of asked for their blessing.” He turned back to the cupboards to get the plates, not wanting to watch Phil’s face in case it did something he didn’t want to see.

Phil sounded shocked when he replied, “Before you even asked me?”

Dan’s voice squeaked embarrassingly when he said, “Yes?” It sounded like a question, even though it really wasn’t. He slowly turned with the plates in his hands and looked at Phil, his heart in his throat.

Phil’s face was a mask. “So … they’ve known this whole time? All of them?”

Dan put the plates on the counter and swallowed nervously. “Um. Yeah. Before I left, I asked them not to tell you, because I didn’t want them to pressure you.”

The blankness on Phil’s face turned to puzzlement. “Why would they have pressured me?”

Dan could feel himself blushing. He turned to open the food containers. “They all seemed … pretty keen on the idea.”

He couldn’t see Phil as he focused with unnecessary diligence on spooning rice and curry onto the plates, but the silence behind him was making him increasingly anxious.

“That would explain some of the texts I’ve gotten from my mum these past few months,” Phil said with a bit of amusement in his tone.

Dan turned to look at him nervously. “You aren’t mad?”

Phil looked thoughtful for a moment. “I guess not. I mean, it’s kind of weird to find out that they’ve known this whole time and never said anything … and it’s kind of weird that you talked to them about it before you talked to me … but … no, I guess I’m not mad.”

They took their plates into the lounge, but before he turned on the tv, Phil said, “I’m surprised my mum was so keen, though. She’s always really wanted grandchildren and … well … you know … that would have been easier if I were with a woman, so I would have expected her to be hesitant. I guess maybe she’s just hoping for Martyn and Cornelia.”

Dan put his plate down, feeling a bit offended. “You know it would be perfectly easy for us to have kids. There are loads of kids who need good homes, just waiting to be adopted. Or there are surrogates. There are options, Phil. Two men being married doesn’t mean not raising kids.” After a moment, he added more softly, “We could totally have kids.” He picked up his plate and took a self-righteous bite of food, not looking at Phil. He chewed, waiting, but Phil didn’t say anything. He still hadn’t turned the tv on, though.

“And maybe it’s also because my mum loves you and would rather see me raise kids with you than with some fictional woman I could have ended up with instead.”

Dan’s head whipped around. Phil was smiling softly. Then a silly grin grew on his face. “We could have kids,” he marveled in a near whisper.

Dan smiled back, wide and happy. “Yeah, we could.”

They sat there just beaming at each other until Dan remembered their food would be getting cold. “But for right now,” he said with a chuckle, “we can have curry. And Attack on Titan.”

Phil nodded, gave Dan one more smile, and then tucked into his dinner. Dan couldn’t help but let his hopes soar into the stratosphere.

Dan was shocked when Phil became more withdrawn after the conversation about children. He’d thought they’d really connected, that they’d shared a moment of dreams for their future, and now Phil seemed to be pulling away. He was spending more time in the bedroom instead of hanging out with Dan in the lounge, and when they did spend time together Phil seemed distracted and reserved.

One week passed like that, then two.

Dan went back to his occasional silent requests for cuddles, and Phil always complied, taking him into his arms and holding him just as he always had, but Dan couldn’t help feeling like Phil was doing him a favor. It made him a little angry … but, really, the anger was just hurt wearing a defensive mask. He’d thought they were growing closer, that Phil was figuring things out and moving toward Dan … but now he seemed to be moving further away instead.

Dan didn’t understand it. But he didn’t ask, because he was afraid of what Phil would say. He was afraid that Phil was making up his mind, or that he already had, and that his decision was resulting in this slow and silent withdrawal.

When they made love, Dan found himself grasping at Phil with desperate hands, trying to hold him tightly as if to prevent him from slipping away. Because it felt like he was.

“Can we talk?”

Dan heard the words from Phil’s lips, but they seemed to set his ears to ringing and he felt like he might actually faint. Phil sounded serious, and so Dan knew there was only one topic that could be on his mind.

Phil had decided. Sure, Dan had said that they could talk about it afterward, but in these past few weeks of feeling so alone even with Phil drifting around the house in a haze, Dan had realized that Phil could really truly break his heart. He kept imagining Phil’s face saying, “I don’t want to marry you,” and trying to imagine how they could bounce back from that, what kind of relationship they could have once Phil had decided that he didn’t want to stand in front of the House of fucking Lords and declare his eternal love and commitment. Would it create an inequality in the relationship, with both of them knowing Dan wanted more than Phil did? Or would they be able to make it work somehow? Maybe even still be able to find a way to spend their lives together, just … not married.

He realized he’d been standing there, frozen, not responding to Phil’s question. He had just entered the lounge and Phil was sitting in his usual spot at the far end of the sofa. Dan walked like a man to the gallows and took his own usual seat in the sofa crease at the opposite end. The space between them seemed infinite. But then Phil unexpectedly scooted closer.

“I’ve thought about all of this a lot,” Phil began.

Dan couldn’t help interrupting. “I noticed.”

Phil smiled. Dan didn’t.

“Dan, I owe you an apology. I owe you lots of apologies, actually. The biggest one, though, is that I’m sorry my feelings about my own sexuality ended up messing things up so badly between us.” Dan looked down at his hands, but Phil reached out and took them in his. Dan hadn’t been expecting that. Phil continued, “I never wanted to hurt you, and I know that I did. I know that I’ve been hurting you all along these past few months, making you wait for me to make up my stupid mind.”

Phil paused then asked nervously, “Could you look at me? Please?” Dan looked up and met Phil’s gaze. He still looked so serious, but he tried to smile again. “I wanted to tell you that … I’ve thought a lot … and I realized that the idea I had when I was younger, that stupid thought that someday I might marry some unknown woman and settle down … that idea was all about having a normal life, an easier life … but you helped him realize that getting married isn’t just about making your life easier or even better … it’s about choosing a particular person, and making your life better with that specific, special person.”

Dan was listening very closely now, because he was getting the feeling that this wasn’t going where he’d thought it would. He was trying not to make assumptions, but…

Phil raised Dan’s hands and kissed each one softly, then said, “When I thought about that ‘normal’ marriage when I was young, it was just a fantasy … but the love you and I have is better than any fantasy. It’s real and strong and it’s forever. I want it to be forever, and I want everyone to know that.”

Phil got down on one knee on the floor at Dan’s feet and Dan gasped. He was embarrassed that he’d gasped like a girl in a cliché rom-com, but he had to admit that he did. Phil shrugged a little, looking self-conscious but adorable. “You didn’t get on one knee because you said you wanted to ask me to marry you face-to-face like equals, but I’m coming to you on bended knee because I’m asking you to forgive me for all the stupid ways I’ve hurt you. I always said marriage was just a piece of paper, but the fact that I got so worked up about it … well, I realized that was proof that it did really matter to me.”

He looked up into Dan’s face, still holding Dan’s hands in his, and took a deep breath. He looked really nervous now, and Dan just wanted to kiss him. Wanted to kiss him so very badly, but also couldn’t wait to hear what he was going to say next. “So, Dan Howell, if you can find it in your heart to forgive me for how I let my past get in our way … and if you can find it in your heart to forgive me for how long I kept you waiting … and if you can find it in your heart to still love me like you did on that beach on the Isle of Man all those months ago … then would you please do me the honor of becoming my husband, declaring our love before Queen and country, sharing the rest of your life with me, and maybe even helping me give my mum some grand-kids to fawn over?” Phil pretended to look around him as if searching for something, then added, “I don’t have a box of rings to offer, but I think there’s probably one in the flat somewhere.”

Dan laughed with relief and joy, then released Phil’s hands to shove at his shoulder. “I thought you were pulling me aside to tell me no, you berk! You’ve barely spoken to me for weeks! I was a nervous wreck!”

Phil beamed at him. “That makes two of us! So … is this a yes, then?”

Dan pulled Phil up and into his lap and kissed him as he’d been longing to do, then pulled away to say, “Yes! Marry me, you fool!”

Phil whooped, then landed a proper passionate kiss on Dan. It went on for a while, but Dan was in no hurry to end it. Finally, when Phil reluctantly pulled away, he said, “I’m sorry if I’ve seemed distant lately. I just … when everything started coming together in my head, it was a little overwhelming … and I needed time to figure out if this was really what I wanted.”

“And it is?” Dan hated himself for still needing reassurance, but he had to ask the question anyway.

“How can you doubt it after that whole speech?” Phil exclaimed. “I worked so hard on that!”

Dan leaned his head on Phil’s shoulder and said quietly, “It was a beautiful speech.”

He felt Phil press a kiss to his hair, then Phil admitted hesitantly, “I should be honest … I’m still a little nervous about coming out. It hasn’t always gone so well for me in the past, you know.”

Dan raised his head and met Phil’s eyes. “But this time we’ll be doing it together.”

[Continue to Chapter 7]

Author’s Note: And so the angsty part of this story comes to an end! One more chapter, then a short epilogue, and we’re done!

#phanfiction #phanfic #phan #dan and phil #phan angst #phan fluff #angsty phan #fluffy phan #myphanfic

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ohnookc · 7 years

Text

Dating Within Your Own Race

“But why is it wrong to have a strong preference to date someone of your own race? How is it different from having a preference for gender, body type, religious background, and so forth?” These are really good questions, y’all, and since quite a few of you have posited them, here is my best response. First, let’s talk about the things we agree on: sexual orientations and preferences aren’t particularly under our control. The more the scientific community has studied them, the clearer that has become. And, if those preferences aren’t under our control, making moralistic or ethical arguments about them (whether anti-racist or anti-homophobic or anti-classist) is at best a complicated task. How can you hold it against someone to have a strong preference to date someone with the same religious background, or of the same gender, or of the same race? Are they a bad person for that preference? Short answer: no. They aren’t a bad person. There are a lot of cultural contexts at play when it comes to differences in religious, class, and racial backgrounds that can make relationships a lot more complicated. The first is tied strongly to a lot of ethical and moral values that ought to line up for a relationship to be successful. The latter two are tied into a lot of power dynamics that are patently difficult to navigate within the context of a romantic relationship. I’ll also admit this freely: I do not have a strong preference to date within my own race, but in practice, 70% of the romantic relationships I’ve been in or seriously pursued have been with white, cisgender men. Since I’m a white, cisgender woman, that means the majority of my relationships by a good margin have been heterosexual ones within my own race. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Generally, I spend my time in places populated by primarily white people. My immediate circle of friends is mostly white. I have more in common culturally with other white people than brown and black people. The majority black and brown people I am friends with have intimated to me that it’s hard for them to date white people because the racial dynamics can create a lot of tension and frustration, which is definitely not a romantic thing. Put simply: i have a lot more opportunities to date people who are also white. So, if someone said to me, “I’m open to dating people who aren’t my race, but it’s really hard and I don’t really do it in practice,” of course I wouldn’t tell them they’re racist for that. I think there’s a difference between the de facto practice of generally dating within your race and openly declaring that you have a “strong preference to date people of [your] own race,” though. It’s not the practice of usually dating your own race that bothers me about that sentiment. It’s the strong negative attitude towards dating outside of your own race that is expressed by that specific phrasing that bothers me. First of all, if you are a white person and you say you actively want to date within your own race because you just don’t find people who aren’t white attractive physically, that suggests to me that you aren’t willing to give other races the chance to be attractive to you. It suggests to me that you haven’t taken the time to critically evaluate your own preferences and ask yourself to what extent they might be shaped by a culture that particularly celebrates white beauty by actively excluding nonwhite beauty. That devaluation of nonwhite beauty is itself a facet of racism, and even if at the end of the day you aren’t attracted to people who don’t look like you, if you are unwilling to give someone who doesn’t look like you an earnest chance to become physically attractive in your eyes, you’re most likely perpetuating that facet of racism. If you say you have a strong preference to date within your own race because of cultural differences, that suggests to me that you lack the compassion and empathy to embrace the cultural differences that could, if they were allowed to, make the melting pot of American culture stronger and more rich. Our society devalues nonwhite culture, especially Black culture (except when we’re appropriating it to make ourselves seem cooler or more edgy). The only time white culture seems to be okay with Black culture is after it’s been taken and repurposed as useful to our own. And so long as white culture is seen as the default culture as opposed to one culture among many, refusing to engage with nonwhite cultures perpetuates white supremacy. So while I understand and empathize with the practical difficulty of dating someone from a different cultural background, and I can see why a person would, in practice, not do a lot of it, I still think that shutting out the possibility of it like that is another extension of racism. Finally, as specifically relates to the guy from the post that started this conversation, the most damning evidence that he in particular is racist comes from his reaction to me suggesting his strong preference came from racist origins. When I said it was racist, he didn’t come back with a thoughtful, level response explaining why he answered that question that way. He went on a batshit insane, frothing-at-the-mouth tirade against me as a person. He even used “libtard,” which is basically code for “I call people cuck on the Internet and think President Trump is doing a great job” It seems pretty fucking unlikely to me that someone who is that irate at the mere suggestion that their attitude is racist has ever really considered why they believe the things they do or what the impact of their attitude is on other people. So even if some of you might have answered that survey prompt the same way he did for more thoughtful reasons than his, that doesn’t mean he in particular is not racist. I’m never going to tell any of you that you have an obligation to date outside of your own race, gender preferences, class, or physical preferences. But I do think anyone who is coming from a dominant cultural background has an obligation to at the bare minimum reflect on their preferences and interrogate their own beliefs. You need to have a better reason than “that’s just how I feel” when it comes to racism, or sexism, or classism, because people who are negatively impacted by those things aren’t just uncomfortable. They are dying because of it. They are being raped because of it. They are SUFFERING because of it, and it is never morally acceptable to ignore someone’s suffering. Thank you, truly, to those of you who used my post as an opportunity to engage in meaningful discourse. Even if at the end of the day we still disagree, your effort to have a conversation about it matters and I hope you will continue to do so. And yes, I’ll admit, I also hope that eventually you will see why I believe what I do and come around to agreeing with me. But even if you don’t, I thank you for participating and being willing to reflect anyway.

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amorremanet · 7 years

Note

Seb: 07, 43, 48; Pete: 02, 29, 38; Margot: 22, 35; Lucy: 08, 40?

“get to know my characters” meme — and after a day that got unexpectedly stressful, I fell asleep on my keyboard while finishing this last night, but here we are.

02. What is one of your character’s biggest insecurities? Are they able to hide it easily or can others easily exploit this weakness?

Long story short: Pete’s biggest insecurity changes constantly, but the underlying fear is whether or not he’s completely unlovable, or if he’s only going to be loved if he changes literally everything about himself or massively censors his entire personality and spends the rest of his life pretending to be someone he’s not, the way he’s done for most of his life, in all kinds of contexts, from, “Playing up certain parts of his personality to the point of borderline distortion because it made people like him in high school”

…to, “Developing a problem with substance abuse for several reasons, many of which are at best complicated and messy, but one of them was that faking for other people’s benefit/approval felt a lot less awful and soul-destroying when he was sufficiently intoxicated, and if he got into what he called the, ‘Golden Zone’ of intoxication, then he could effectively pretend that some other, ‘better’ Pete who everybody likes better had come in and taken his place”

From, “Faking for his abusive shit paternal Grandmother because she was one of the few family members who didn’t compare Pete to his older brother constantly, so if he had to lie about everything and hate himself to keep her love, then so be it”

…to, “Lying to his parents about most things as a kid, because his dad was a nasty piece of work who berated his children for most of their interests and passions, berated them when they didn’t do well enough by his impossible, unreachable standards, punished them for some of their interests (meaning that he did things like destroying Salt n Pepa CDs that Pete had saved money for himself because Dad Arden didn’t approve of rap music), and punished them for lying but at least you could buy a bit of a lull in everything by faking like you were the model child he thought he wanted”

All of which can zero in on all kinds of different parts of Pete’s overall being, from his hair to his low tolerance for frustration to his dislike of being emotionally vulnerable to his weight or how his body looks

The mutability of his insecurities is actually one of the biggest things that gives Pete some protection here, which is a good thing because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he totally does care what people think of him. It takes paying more attention than his brother does, but even that isn’t especially hard because Jimmy and Pete are both guilty of taking each other at face-value. But have fun trying to pick out which specific part of himself Pete doesn’t like today.

07. Is there a catchphrase or sound that they tend to make a lot (likely without being aware of it)?

I don’t know that I’d call it a catchphrase exactly, but Sebastian says, “I don’t know” an awful lot. Which is sometimes fair enough, because he often doesn’t know things, but at the same time, he also says it by way of devaluing his own feelings on a not-irregular basis, so. There’s that.

He also says, “What’s the point?” and, “What’s the use of [fill in the blank]?” rather often, which is equally reflective of his problems, just different ones. In this case, the pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness that he hasn’t pegged as a symptom of depression until mid-morning of the day when he first turns into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man because of, tl;dr, internalized ableism.

08. What is, perhaps, their biggest flaw? Are they aware of this or oblivious to it?

Lucy’s biggest flaw is probably her habit of putting her ideas, ideals, and desires before those of other people, even when she’s trying to help.

Like, when I said that her Deadly Sin would be Gluttony, I had to clarify that I don’t mean Gluttony solely in the sense of eating all the things (which is a reductive understanding of the Deadly Sin that completely misses why it’s supposed to be a Deadly Sin, from a theological standpoint, and is pretty fucked up, from a humanistic standpoint, because it tries to make blanket statements about what all people should or shouldn’t eat, based on presumptions that can’t and don’t apply to everyone, which isn’t fair to anyone or actually going to help).

(Plus, historically speaking, the Catholic Church and some of the different Protestant denominations have used that definition of Gluttony to essentially shame poor people for wanting to eat because ~lmao if u were meant to have food, God would have given you food, duh doi!!~)

So, yeah, Lucy’s Deadly Sin is Gluttony because of how she willfully doesn’t listen in situations where she should, because she has such a strong moral compass and such strong commitment to her ideals that it can overwhelm her better judgment and lead to her doing shit that might work out in the short-term but that could create more of a mess down the line (and sometimes only doesn’t create that mess because she doesn’t get caught breaking the rules, or she manages to contain the mess before it spreads, or similar), because she goes, “DON’T WORRY, I TOTALLY GOT THIS!!” when she totally does not have this because she’s so determined to save everyone on her own or to at least play a major role in the saving people thing, because she wants to be a hero and doesn’t usually stop to think about what that means until after she’s already done something, because she’s doesn’t usually interrogate her ideas about The Greater Good or ask the right kinds of questions about what that means, and so on.

TL;DR: a lot of the less-than-positive aspects of why she’s such a little Gryffindor are why her Deadly Sin is Gluttony, and collectively, they make up her biggest flaw. She could stand to be more aware of this, but she’s also 23 and relatively sheltered, so she has a lot to learn in general

22. What kind of tattoos, piercings, birthmarks, freckles, and other such unique physical features do they have?

Piercings: Two in each ear, a “snakebite” set of lip piercings (option number four on this chart, the “two rings in the lower lip, around the locations of your canine teeth” one), and one in her left nipple.

She used to have nose ring and a septum piercing for a while, but she got sick of turning her septum ring up into her nostrils while at work and didn’t like any of the, “more professional” options for the side-of-the-nose piercing, so those holes closed up a while ago.

Strictly speaking, Margot isn’t entirely fond of the, “more professional” options for her lip piercings, either, but she’s a bit happier with wearing small, classy-looking studs on her lips than she was with wearing them in the fold of her nose, where it gets hard for people to tell if you have something on your nose or just a piercing.

Tattoos: She’s not quite as inked up as Sebastian, but yes, she does have tattoos.

Around her right ear and dropping onto her neck, she has a noose where the loop in the rope is shaped like a heart

On her left bicep, she has a Winnie the Pooh (Disney version, as opposed to the version from EH Shepard illustrations) that matches Seb’s tattoo of Tigger

“The two of you do quote-unquote, ‘extralegal imports’ — read: playing middleman to various smuggling operations — because you [*pointing at Margot*] won’t just let him (or really his parents) pay your tuition, and you [*pointing at Seb*] just nearly died six weeks ago because you took PCP and decided to fight five fucking skinheads at once — yes! I know you intervened to save the kids they jumped outside the bar but you got shot and you’ll understand why I might be a bit upset about that still! — and you just…… Neither of you notices any kind of oddity or disconnect here? Like, both of you can just shift, without missing a beat, from all that to making Todd take dorky pictures of you so you can show off your matching Winnie the Pooh and Tigger tattoos on Myspace and Facebook?” — Pete, right after Seb and Margot did that thing exactly, c. mid-September 2006.

She has a lower back tattoo of Judith beheading Holofernes, based on Artemesia Gentileschi’s painting of that scene

She has a clutch of violets on the inside of her left wrist (she’s thought about adding a line or two from Sappho to it, to make it more obvious why she has this tattoo, but she hasn’t been able to pick which lines, and as Pete’s pointed out, it might not be more obvious to most people)

And on her left ankle, she has the, “Darwin fish” variant of the Ichthys symbol (but without the word, “Darwin” in the center of it), with the subtitle, “this is not a ghoti” (the idea for which she totally and knowingly ripped off from René Magritte’s La Trahison des Images — the, “this is not a pipe” painting — and mashed it up with an alternate spelling of, “fish” that is only possible because English is a bullshit language)

Freckles, etc.: She does freckle in the sun, but they’re mostly faded at present because she doesn’t get a lot of sunlight. More noticeable is the mole on her left cheek, and the mole on her back, by her right shoulderblade.

29. What is one of the most courageous things your character has ever done for a loved one?

If asked, Pete would probably tell you that he is a grade-A selfish bitch who has never done a single courageous thing for anybody ever in his entire life and he is offended that you would even suggest such a thing

This is absolute nonsense, and the general response that he gets to it (at least from Seb, Stephen, and Margot) is, “*nods* Of course not, honey. Do you want your eggs sunny-side up today or something else?” or, “*nods* Of course, Pete. I’m sure that the people you’ve ever helped just imagined that” — so, deadpan at him and let him get it out of his system until he’s calmed down

Because he’ll be fine if you just let him get this shit out of his system and calm down, instead of trying to argue with him like Todd does

In fairness to Pete, though, this isn’t entirely coming out of him trying to overcompensate for his messy feelings re: self-worth. Part of this comes out of how his particular approach to being courageous isn’t always one that’s easily understood as such, because of how people tend to devalue things like emotional labor and more understated visions of bravery and being there for someone. So, it’s not right, but he’s working based on the ideas he’s been raised around

But some examples of Pete’s brand of courageousness for his loved ones include, but are not limited to:

Deliberately breaking one of his Dad’s old trophies in order to draw attention off of his big sister Cora, because she was sixteen and she’d just gotten dumped and the last thing that she needed was Dad Arden digging at her about everyone, and Pete was willing to be the scapegoat instead

Standing by Seb during the fiasco that ensued after he took the fall, outed himself at Catholic school, and made it sound like he’d seduced an unwilling Damian, rather than how they were actually dating on the sly — and more than just giving up most of his own popularity to stand by his friend, Pete did it without outing Damian, which was a lot of effort for him because he really wanted to do the “spiteful but satisfying” thing instead of the, “probably less wrong” thing

(Granted, Pete doing the right thing in this situation was less out of any moral or ethical objections to outing people, because he’s generally against it, yeah, and these days, he would probably smack his 18-year-old self for even thinking about it doing it.

But if you’d asked Pete for his opinion at the time, Damian threw his right to ask for consideration out the window when he decided to help spread it around the grapevine that he’d been totally unwilling in all of this when he’d usually been the one going, “Oh, who cares that we could get caught, just kiss me already” while they dated.

Really, Pete didn’t out Damian mostly out of loyalty to Seb — because it was important to him not to out Damian, since his parents were bad enough and his uncle was their school’s priest — and knowing that he wouldn’t want to get outed at Catholic school either)

Going with Margot during the one incident where Seb dropped off the radar and Todd eventually found him in the vicinity of a gutter, because she was enough of a mess that she really shouldn’t have been out looking on her own. After Todd found Seb and middle brother Ambrose dragged him up to their parents’ place, Pete then went to Seb’s place with Margot, again so she wouldn’t need to be alone.

Granted, he was high himself, and drinking from a hip flask while talking about how Seb had a problem, and she eventually kind of lost it and chewed him out for that, but:

1. Pete still tried to be there for her during a Really Bad stretch, when he really needed someone to be there for him too and unfortunately, the person he most wanted to be there for him was Seb, so…… that was a mess;

and 2. high and drinking though he was, Pete was also trying to moderate it and only get intoxicated enough to not start detoxing or be non-functional, which was a hard balance to find and something he only would’ve done for a handful of people

and going to rehab. Also, admitting that he needed help more generally, but going to an inpatient rehab took a lot of courage for Pete because there were a lot of reasons why it sounded like Hell on Earth to him.

35. Is your character afraid of death? If they got to choose how to die, how would they want to go?

Margot…… has a messy relationship with her fear of death. Like, she is afraid of death, and when she tries to sound tough, she says that her only fears are fear itself, “the crushing inevitability of death,” hypothetically being rejected by any of Seb’s dogs, and the possibility that the Loch Ness Monster might be real.

Which are, in order: a lie (Margot thinks fear is useful and valuable, its entire purpose is to help keep you from dying, so shut up and be grateful that your ancestral beings developed the capacity to feel fear) (which, context, she says as someone with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder); messy; a true fear for her, but none of Seb’s dogs has ever disliked her and Angel, his incredibly skittish “mutt with strong shades of Labrador Retriever and German Shepherd,” likes Margot better than she likes most other people, which is a big deal; and a straight up lie because Margot thinks Nessie being real would be cool.

If pressed to be honest, she would claim that that her fear of death doesn’t count as, “a real fear” because she allegedly only fears it in an abstract and primal way that she shares with most other animal organisms on the planet, because on a very deep level, right down to our genes, living things generally want to continue being alive and generally fight tooth-and-nail against death.

The biggest linchpin in her argument here is, “Well, but I haven’t been confronted with the reality of my own potential death” — which is a big lie. Margot has definitely been confronted with that. She just hasn’t had any experiences that ended in her nearly dying herself, in part because some of her confrontations with it were not actually that dangerous but they seemed to be at the moment, and largely because most of these experiences, for her, have involved her 6’3” best friend, who dives into harm’s way for her, gets her out of the way with the full intent to take a literal bullet, and otherwise lets the harm fall on him so it won’t fall on Margot.

So, ultimately, Margot’s, “I only fear death in a primal, instinctual way that is shared by most if not all living things” nonsense is something she tells herself to try and distance herself from how visceral the fear actually is here, and to try and get out of dealing with the fact that her fear of death applies more to someone else than to herself

(which, in fairness, it probably wouldn’t if her best friend had fewer near-death experiences and fewer self-destructive tendencies, but as it stands, Seb has racked up sixteen brushes with death, two of which did involve him briefly dying, and has a habit of putting his fingers in his ears and going, “La la la, I can’t hear you, this is normal and fine” when confronted with how this is neither fine nor normal)

If given the choice in how she dies, Margot would pick, “I don’t want to die, fuck you”

If she had to pick, then…… Nah, she’s fine dying at an advanced age, while asleep in bed but not after a prolonged painful struggle with cancer or something. You can keep your cool, heroic deaths, she wants to live and accomplish shit before she kicks it, thanks

38. What kind of weather does your character like? Cloudy skies, rainy days, sunshine, etc?

Sunshine, but not too warm. Pete likes spring, basically. He doesn’t actually mind the heat as much as he says he does, but he does mind that summer makes it harder for him to wear some of his most favorite pieces of clothing, like the longer and heavier and more dramatic pieces, and his, “totally not a hipster scarf because Cora made it for him, it’s not some fake pashmina bullshit like Todd wore for way too long a few years back” scarf

He won’t argue with a free excuse to wear some of his hot pants or booty shorts, though, even if he can usually only do that on the weekends because if he wore them to the theatre: A. he might end up getting hurt; and B. his boss, Mitch, would object because he could get hurt

40. Does your OC have any guilty pleasures they enjoy? Hobbies, past times, music, etc that they wouldn’t want known by others?

Long story short: yes, she does, but she also insists to most people that she doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures, and she also doesn’t really have any semblance of secrecy about any of these things

Like, she may not appreciate you finding out that she likes to binge watch Scooby Doo cartoons when she feels stressed out and sad, because she doesn’t want to be teased about it like her big brother sometimes does, but Lucy also doesn’t go out of her way to hide any of this

She’s way more likely to #Nope out of a situation where she really just can’t with this anymore by going, “Okay, I can’t do this right now, I’m gonna go play Final Fantasy 7 for a few hours until I either finish the game again or regain my ability to do this”

43. Does your character have a switch that changes aspects of their personality whether they are around friends, family, etc. Is there someone who gets to see their true self?

Eh, it’s less that Seb changes anything about his personality for the benefit of other people, and more that he emphasizes some parts of it with some folks while downplaying others, which makes him about as out of the ordinary as oxygen (which is to say, “Not at all”)

—I mean, think about it: do most people act the same around their parents as they do around their friends? their coworkers? friends of their friends whom they don’t know very well? random strangers on the bus? etc.

Like, I’m not trying to be an edgy mcedgelord and say that all people are lying bastards, or trying to channel Holden fucking Caulfield to call everyone ever a phony.

I’m just saying, as a human person who likes to make up stories about other human persons and write them down, that most people have different patterns of behavior around the different people in their lives, and it doesn’t make them fakes or liars or whatever. It means that people are, in general, affected by their environments and choose how to behave based on who they’re with, what’s going on, etc.

Someone doesn’t become a wholly different person just because they try not to cuss around their younger cousins or because they’re more comfortable with their friends so they can be less high-strung — but as I was saying.

This behavior on Seb’s part only gets to be any different from most people’s habit of doing the exact same thing because some of the contexts in his life make his patterns of doing this more unhealthy — not because the underlying behavior is inherently unhealthy, but because of how he uses these behaviors to hide things from people, including himself

One of the worst ways in which this comes out is with regard to Seb’s extroversion. Strictly speaking, he’s an extrovert less because he’s super-social and wants to be where the people are (though those things are also true), and more because he’s more attuned to the world outside of himself than to his inner life. This can be a problem because he ends up being hypersensitive to other people’s feelings (hyper-empathy, if not to the same extent as genuine mutant superpowered empaths like Josie and Julian), and he misconstrues a lot of things as potential rejections.

Between that, how much he does genuinely want to be where the people are and wants for people to like him, and how much he wants to make people feel better and avoid hurting them, he gets super high-strung when he’s talking to people. He used to be even worse about that, like back in high school, when it was easier for him to try and escape his undiagnosed depression

—and it led into one of the biggest reasons why he started drinking in earnest and liked it so much. Namely: when he was drunk, he was less high-strung and other people thought that he was fun to have around, instead of regarding him as, like, “well, he’s in the theatre club so we have to tolerate him, and he got matched up with Pete in Sister Mary Ignatius’s weird ass peer mentorship thing, and Pete kinda likes him, so we have to be nice”

—and because Seb was fourteen and already pretty down on himself as a general rule, and prone to assuming that there is nothing good or worthwhile about him, he concluded not that people liked him because he loosened up and stopped trying so hard to fit in and be just like them and doing a really bad job of it because, in that situation, he WAS legitimately trying to be someone he wasn’t (and he wasn’t as good at it as Pete)

Instead, he concluded that alcohol was a magical potion that made him cool and made people like him

(In retrospect, he is definitely ashamed of how he did exactly what he was warned not to do in all of the, “drink responsibly, here is how you do that, here is what alcohol is and isn’t, here is what it does and doesn’t, ffs don’t drink to make people like you, it doesn’t really work, etc.” talks he got from his parents, but he would also rather not talk about it, please and thanks)

Likewise, Seb doesn’t mean to be a manipulative little shit and often doesn’t even notice that he’s doing it, or think he’s manipulating any of his loved ones, but his attitude toward a lot of this is, “Well, okay, I didn’t tell the whole truth, but I didn’t lie” or, “Maybe I stretched the truth a little bit, but it’s still technically true, right” or, “Okay, I left out a lot of shit just now, but I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, so it’s not the same as lying”

Unfortunately, he usually justifies that behavior with rationale like, “But I only told them what they wanted to hear and what would make them happy. Telling them the whole truth wouldn’t make them happy; it’d just make them get upset and worried about things that aren’t their problems and that they can’t help with. Isn’t it better to let them be happy? Isn’t that what they deserve?”

Which makes it really hard for him to break this habit, for a lot of reasons, which include but are not limited to:

1. His rationale largely lets him get out of acknowledging and dealing with the “understandable but still selfish and potentially very Not Good” aspects of his behaviors (e.g., how his habit of letting people believe things are better than they are lets him off the hook for dealing with things that actually need to be dealt with; how he wants to connect with people, so he tells them what he thinks they want to hear, which doesn’t always reflect reality or allow a genuine connection to develop, so if and/or when things fall apart, he takes it as confirmation that he was right about being broken and unlovable, etc.)

—Like, there are a lot of reasons why he didn’t forge that many meaningful connections with anyone during the years that he would call his, “downward spiral” period (which ranges from either age 15 to age 28, or age 18 to age 28, depending on who’s asking and how Seb feels about it today).

Some of them are due to circumstances beyond his control and/or can’t really be termed, “his fault” without getting into victim-blaming territory.

For example, Seb didn’t make a lot of friends in his last two years of high school because he spent them at his Dad’s, Max’s, and Addie’s old boarding school, where he almost immediately got outed (thanks to some other students overhearing the faculty talking about it, because Seb was from a legacy family and his abrupt transfer at the start of junior year was a big deal)

……and where he spent a lot of time getting bullied for being gay and “imperfectly” masculine (not that his bullies used that term, but they also had a hard time trying to accuse him of being exactly feminine, and usually went more for the insults like, “sissy,” “queer,” and the homophobic slur that starts with F), accused of being a predator for not outing himself (which he really wasn’t keen on doing because he came to Saxon fresh off of getting outed at Catholic school), and most looking forward to the weekends when he could get on a train and fuck off down to Pete’s campus and spend time with someone who actually liked him

Or for another example: while Seb hasn’t handled the fallout from some of his abusive relationships well (which is to say that he largely hasn’t handled it and would rather act like these relationships had no lasting effects on him whatsoever), you can’t exactly fault him for not keeping in touch with any of those guys after the respective breakups (or after three of them wound up in prison for various reasons)

But otoh, some of the reasons why Seb didn’t forge a lot of lasting and meaningful connections go back to his bad habit of telling people what they want to hear in order to make them like him, not because he’s consciously being a manipulative little shit but because he wants to connect with people and feel like he belongs somewhere and have friends

Seriously, that is the biggest difference between him and Jeff, “I would say anything to get what I want and I want you to like me” Winger, when it comes to telling people what they want to hear. Both of them do it on purpose. Both of them do it because they care an inordinate amount about what people think of them.

But Jeff wants to control what people think of him so he can use it to his advantage, and even after being with the Study Group starts to open him up, he has a habit of devaluing interpersonal connections (largely because he’s terrified of them, yes, but still) and kind of continuing to see them as tools, rather than as relationships.

For Seb, those interpersonal connections are pretty much everything. He loves love, he loves friendship, he loves community and connecting with people and making people feel good by being friendly and kind, he just loves people in general. At heart, he is a big sap, a hopeless romantic, a marshmallow made of affection and rainbows, and a kids TV show platitude about the power of friendship given human form.

But because he hates himself and loves all of those things and probably venerates all of them more than is good for him, he feels like he doesn’t deserve any of them and like he has to constantly tailor how he presents himself until it perfectly fits what he thinks everybody else wants from him

Which makes it sort of hard to form connections with someone, especially when Seb was pretty good at deflecting suspicion, distracting people, and caring about them, but less than good at sharing himself enough to make the connections last, which often works for a little bit, but ultimately runs afoul of that Perks of Being A Wallflower, “you can’t just just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love” problem

Like, you have to at least share something with other people so they feel like they’re getting something out of the relationship (aside from you always catering to them and to their needs, expecting them to be open when they have little to no reason to feel like you’re reciprocating)

You can even share something that is some kind of untrue, like Conrad (who mostly shares lies but doesn’t see them as lies because they have some basis in reality, they’re just ““enhanced reality””), Pete (who’s spent a lot of his life playing different versions of himself to get people’s approval, which is different from Seb’s approach because when Pete does this, it has the appearance of being open and sharing, rather than a lot of deflecting and hiding)

But Seb’s approach was more, “bury everything and pretend it isn’t there and try to make it look like I am exactly what these people think I am”

It doesn’t help that he has a lot of trouble knowing who he is without someone helping him, and easily slips into a way of thinking where he feels like he’s a blank slate and nothing more so why is it a bad thing for him to just let people project what they want him to be onto him

which is partly a depression thing for him, and partly the result of how Seb has spent most of his life denying, repressing, refusing, and trying to erase or ignore huge parts of his own identity and his own sense of personhood because he feels like he’d be better and everyone would like him more if he were someone else

which…… is a mess. Like, he figured out early enough that he’s not very good at being other people outside the context of the theatre club — the classic example for him is how much he’s hurt himself by trying to be Max and fit the exact same standards as Max, which has never worked because they’re different people, and they can do and need very different things

—but Seb’s still wound up with very little stable sense of his own identity and who he is, and a lot of his questioning tends to end up back at, “I’m a broken mess, I’m kinda like God spilled a person but considering how many things I’ve lived though, I’m too amusing for Him to let me die, I guess”

He’s working on it. But it’s still a mess.

This mess of shit is one of aspect of the bag of emotional and psychological wet cats that makes up, “La Bête” — i.e., the part of his mind that is vaguely analogous to the Hulk, except that La Bête isn’t really a separate personality inside of Seb like the Hulk is often portrayed with Bruce Banner, and superpowered though she is, La Bête isn’t fueled by anger and destruction so much as protective impulses, the desire to live, love and the desire to form connections and defend those connections, the pack-building impulse

Basically, La Bête is more like actual irl wolves than most ideas of how wolves are that you find in werewolf or werewolf-themed fiction. Destruction isn’t really her endgame goal or a thing she particularly enjoys, so much as a side-effect of some of her other impulses since, once she decides to go and do something, she is admittedly not quite so good at being 100% careful

If she ever seems to be fueled by anger (which, in fairness, she is going to do, early on), it’s less about actual anger and more about either that protective impulse again (such as when Seb’s first full transformation gets triggered by one of Conrad’s lackeys inducing three simultaneous heart attacks, which would manage to kill him if La Bête didn’t take over, so she wanted to save him, and then their immediate impulse was to run and get Margot out of harm’s way)

……or it’s like the story of St. Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio, where the titular wolf only looks angry and violent and dangerous to the villagers he’s been in conflict with because he is starving and they’ve been treating him like a monster

Or, in other words, the whole, “hey, maybe your superpowered transformation is triggered by anger and fear, so maybe you need to do more work on controlling that” idea leads to Seb trying to muzzle La Bête, which goes Not Well, largely because it means he’s not learning how to control his transformations, while also being a complete dick to himself and her, which makes her feel threatened and then makes her lash out

Not that I have any particular issues with the literal millennia of misrepresentation that wolves have had to suffer in Western literature, art, and culture, or with how all of those gross caricatures have affected werewolf fiction, or with how different layers of sociopolitical nuance, usually involving shades of misogyny, homophobia, and/or ableism, have been more explicitly woven into the figure of the werewolf in recent decades, only to come up with deeply mixed messages, like JKR casting lycanthropy as an HIV/AIDS metaphor and making Remus Lupin a sympathetic character but also keeping up this idea that the thing that subtextually ties him GBQ men… has an uncontrollable appetite for destruction, makes him a complete monster one night a month and must be repressed and controlled, and otherwise perpetuating a bunch of homophobic bullshit (to say nothing of how she did that even worse with Fenrir Greyback)

……Except, y’know. I totally have issues with all of that stuff I just said, and a big part of the struggle in working out La Bête and writing her has been trying to keep it from getting too preachy and pedantic, whoops

(also, for the record: La Bête gets called, “she” and “her” because:

1. the French noun is feminine, and Seb starts calling her, “La Bête” because he decides to take, “Gévaudan” as his nom de spandex, so he figures, “La Bête” would be a thematically consistent name;

2. Josie gets assigned to help guide Seb through the, “how to have mutant superpowers and not kill people or break the law or anything” stuff, and they try to approach the issue of how to understand and control Seb’s transformation with a bit of a Jungian-influenced approach, so they try to examine La Bête through the lens of the Shadow and the Anima

—which Josie does admit is sort of a mess with regard to gender roles and ideas about how gender even works, since Jung was a product of his culture and his time period like that, but since the Anima is talked about in she/her terms, Josie slips into doing the same to La Bête, and neither Seb nor La Bête particularly object to this;

(personally, Seb doesn’t see it as being any different from Pete’s nickname for him being, “[my] Princess,” and to him, it’s all like…… okay, La Bête is a part of his mind and psyche that’s been rather abruptly crystallized into a more cohesive entity by sudden onset superpowers — though she hasn’t been rendered separate from him, the way that a lot of depictions of Bruce Banner like to imagine the Hulk being more or less entirely separate from him, just cursed to inhabit the same body — and we’re apparently going to call La Bête with she/her pronouns now, okay cool)

3. “I don’t know? She-wolves usually get a bit more sympathy when you look at how they’re depicted in art and stories, like? Yeah, okay, you can easily find them being just as maligned as he-wolves, if not more so, but you also have stories like the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, or stories of she-wolves adopting abandoned babies of other species, so like? I don’t know, it just feels nicer to call La Bête a she-wolf?” — Seb, before he’s completely put it together how his transformations work, but when he’s at the middling point of realizing that the overwhelming emotion that La Bête brings with her is never anger)

But anyway, I was saying something about him and his patterns of connecting with others

Like, seriously, here are the meaningful and lasting connections he’s made from ages 15 to 28(ish): Margot, Todd, Fr. Teddy (one of the priests at Seb’s cool, socially progressive LGBTQ church, who technically isn’t a priest in the Vatican’s eyes because he dropped out of seminary and hasn’t actually gone through the ordination process, but he serves at a church that the Vatican kinda doesn’t acknowledge anyway, so… yeah, that’s a thing), and Julian kinda (if you stretch your definition of “meaningful and lasting” a bit)

If you expand a bit, you could add Pete (though they got to be friends before Seb’s “downward spiral” period, i.e. most of his adult life and all of his late adolescence), Nick (his and Pete’s sponsor, who Seb technically met after the “downward spiral” period), Stephen (who Seb met after he met Nick, so…… yeah), and Genevieve (his and Pete’s therapist, who they didn’t start seeing until after both of them had been to rehab, so hey)

—apparently, before I went off on that tangent about how La Bête fits into all of this, I was working on a better organized list of reasons why it’s hard for Seb to break his habit of playing up the parts of situations that he thinks people want to hear while hiding all the stuff that actually needs to get dealt with

The other reasons I was going to go into sort of got danced around in that huge tirade, but to make them a bit more explicit here: despite the selfish parts of this behavior, Seb genuinely does want to protect the people who he loves and make them happy, and getting him to understand that it would make them happy for him to be well, which means he needs to stop hiding things like he does…… well, that’s been an uphill struggle for a lot of reasons, including Seb’s assumption that he’s too broken to ever be well and he’s probably never going to get better so the best he can do is keep the people he loves from realizing it and blaming themselves for his problems;

(which he has decent enough reason to be afraid of them doing, since everyone he loves has had at least one big moment of what I call, “acknowledging how they might have shaped circumstances here and didn’t exactly help, but are still not actually responsible for shit anything in this because Sebastian made his own choices” but Seb feels like it’s more, “blaming themselves for his problems, and unfairly so because he made his own choices and the burden of responsibility shouldn’t fall on them”

—the major difference between the two approaches here being that Seb wants to blame himself for everything, and feels like it’s justified because of the, “he made his own bad choices and now he’s accepting responsibility” thing, but he doesn’t entirely get the difference between, “really accepting responsibility” and, “using acknowledgment of his fuck-ups as an excuse to be an overly self-punishing dick to himself and cut himself off from most things”

and there are some circumstances that he legitimately can’t take responsibility for.

They’re largely situations that had problems but that aren’t anyone’s “fault” — like, how his parents tried their best with him and were unconditionally loving, supportive, and accepting, but they’re still only human and didn’t always know what the best approach was. So, they did things like overly praise him so he wouldn’t feel overshadowed by his three older siblings, or like he was terrible and they were all awesome — but instead of feeling reassured and self-confident, Seb noticed the disparity and felt like his parents were lying to spare his feelings because he was actually terrible, and then felt like he couldn’t tell them so because they loved him enough to try and make him feel better about being probably worthless, and it’d be super ungrateful of him to

Or they had situations where Abe and Marceline didn’t know that some of the things they accepted as, “just odd little Sebastian things” were really how depression can manifest in children — and frankly, given that it was the late 1980’s to early/mid 1990’s, they couldn’t have known this. Hell, juvenile/adolescent depression is still not understood very well and still faced with a lot of nonsense about how it’s not possible for kids to have depression because we don’t want that to happen to kids. (The same goes for pretty much all juvenile/adolescent presentations of mental illnesses, too.)

All of this was even less understood when Seb was a kid, and it would have taken a lot of ridiculously implausible shit for Abe and Marceline to even think that, “Maybe our youngest has a mental illness” was on the table as a potential explanation for some of Seb’s behaviors, most of which seemed different from other kids but nothing to call a doctor about.

Like, okay, he was very emotionally sensitive and he cried easily and did things like insist that they could only adopt dogs from the ASPCA anymore because he saw different news specials about how shitty puppy mills are and how some people abuse their dogs, who end up getting put up for adoption — big deal, some kids are just more sensitive than others, shaming him for having emotions would be a bad idea, and shaming him for caring about the welfare of other living beings just doesn’t make sense, doesn’t that mean they’re doing a good job of raising a kid who cares about others

(Well, yes, but the problem there wasn’t actually the caring so much as how distressed Seb got about this, but unfortunately, by that point in his early life, Abe and Marceline were already pretty used to him being sensitive and maybe a little bit dramatic, and his level of distress about abused animals who really needed loving homes didn’t actually register as odd by his standards)

So, yeah. Ultimately, Abe and Marceline could have done a lot of things differently while raising Seb, and they could have put his depression together sooner, and so on — but nobody can be faulted for the situation because based on the circumstances and the knowledge that they actually had available to him at the time, they tried to make what they thought were the best choices in raising their son, like not shaming him for having emotions or putting him in therapy that they weren’t sure he needed — since, to be fair, any of his early self-destructive patterns of behavior looked either like he was a curious, energetic kid who was just being a curious, energetic kid, or like he was a good kid who, being more sensitive than his siblings, needed a bit more approval, and worked hard at school because he wanted his Mom and Dad to be proud of him — which, if he hadn’t needed it, might have made him feel like having feelings was some kind of pathology, which would also be pretty bad

Either way, they can’t be blamed for that situation, and Seb can’t be blamed for it either, but this does not stop him from trying to blame himself for, “being ungrateful” or, “being too broken,” when the actual problem is that no one has gotten to the root cause of a lot of his issues until recently, so they’ve been throwing different solutions at all of this and cobbling together different ideas for how to help that don’t fully address the cause and will, as such, always end up being incomplete)

—also, there is the problem of how Seb doesn’t really have the best idea of who he actually is, and trying to make him reflect on that… has a history of ending badly.

Like, if he doesn’t end up going down a rabbit hole wherein he starts feeling like he might not be anybody and might not even be real, and then goes and does something self-destructive in the name of remembering if he’s real or not

……then he’s liable to hit the point of going like, “Do I like this thing because I really do enjoy it or because everybody else does? Do I act this way because it’s true to being me or is it because I’m trying to fit into this or that idea about how gay men [or any other identity marker he might apply to himself; it’s usually either gay men or, something like, “the best friend Pete deserves,” “the uncle Marie deserves,” “the son my parents deserve,” etc.] act, or because I realize that I can’t ever be that for them and do the exact opposite? How much of me is really me and how much of it is dictated by culture and other people’s expectations of me? Who?? Am??? I, really???? Who are ANY of us????? Are any of us real or are we all just ideas of each other interacting in a void onto which we project meaning that might not actually mean fuck anything??????”

And if he gets there, he is going to short-circuit

Personally, Pete doesn’t like it when Seb goes and does any of his old self-destructive shit, but in a way, it’s preferable to the latter option, because trying to talk Seb down or trying to clean it up if he punched out a window or cut himself? Sucks. And Pete isn’t going to deny that it sucks. Arguing about whether or not he should go to the ER sucks, picking glass out of his hand with tweezers sucks, all of it really fucking sucks.

But trying to get Seb out of an existential crisis that usually ends with him flopped out on his sofa, or in his bed, staring at the ceiling in abject terror, probably with music or the TV on but not really listening to it, and where any answer could potentially have really unpleasant effects, either now or at some point down the line, because this has gone beyond the realm of Seb’s own issues and his own demons, and while it is still really about those things, it’s gotten into debates about very the nature of existence, and before you can do literally anything else, you first have to drag him out of the ontological and/or metaphysical rabbit hole?

………Yeah, that’s way more stressful, if you ask Pete. Not that he feels he can really talk, considering how many times Seb’s ever talked him down from something, or pulled him out of one of his own rabbit holes, or at least come with Pete while he was doing something stupid and self-destructive so he wouldn’t be alone — and at least these existential crises have been getting much less frequent and less severe since Seb started going to therapy — but still.

Okay, I’ve lost the plot of this way too many times, I’m going to shut up now

TL;DR: Yes, Seb does kind of do the personality switching thing with the people he loves, but at the same time: 1. If not for all of the other pieces of context here about why him doing this is really Not Good, it would be no different from the typical amount of switching that most people do based on who they’re with and what situations they find themselves in;

2. In a way, it’s even less of a complete personality-switch thing — e.g., acting reserved and polite around your parents, but then being rowdy and snarky and party-happy with your friends — and more of a situation where he shows more or less the same behaviors and personality traits to everyone he loves, including the same pattern of “I’m not technically lying, I’m just not being 100% truthful either and that’s different,” and the variance comes from what he chooses to hide or not (e.g., he’s more willing to admit to his friends than to his parents that he’d really like to have a drink instead of dealing with any given stressful situation)

And even given that variance, very few people will hear him say something like, “Is, ‘I want to down six shots of tequila at once and go 90 MPH down an open stretch of highway’ a feeling? Because I think I feel that.”

A large part of why he does that is to make other people happy, but an equally large part of why he does it is so he can get out of dealing with shit that is scary and complicated and ew, how about no, why can’t he just repress it and fake a smile and act like everything is fine

and 3. He’s trying to hide his behaviors, feelings, and impulses, yes, but it would technically be inaccurate to say that Seb is trying to hide his true self from people, because in order to deliberately hide his true self, he would need to know who the fuck that is, and he is not entirely sure (which is one of the many bones that La Bête has to pick with him, but that’s another rant entirely)

Either way, Pete is consistently the best at getting Seb to be honest with himself and, consequentially, with everyone else.

True, Max, Adelaide, Ambrose, and their parents have known Seb longest and arguably seen his more of his tricks than Pete has…… but the funny thing about that idea is how it assumes that blood family will always trump found family, and how it assumes that, “We’ve known him for longer” is automatically going to mean they know him better when… uh, no.

Max and Seb prove that pretty well, given that they’ve spent most of their lives not knowing how to best communicate and deal with each other, which totally spilled over into Max kinda developing a resentment toward cousin Jeremy for a while, because Jeremy was between Max and Adelaide, age-wise, and he got on Seb’s level better than Max ever did, apparently without even trying, so from Max’s perspective, it felt a lot like he was getting stuck with all the crappy parts of being Seb’s big brother while Jeremy got promoted to Replacement Max and got all of the good parts

Bad parts meaning, like, having to take him to the ER because he didn’t listen about being told not to climb one of the trellises at their grandparents’ place and he fell off, and getting the, “why didn’t you keep a closer eye on him” talk when Abe got there — to which the appropriate answer was apparently not, “Have you EVER tried to tell Sebastian NOT to do something? Has he EVER listened to you when you did?” — until Seb backed him up and agreed that Max had done everything he was supposed to do and Seb climbed the trellis anyway

While good parts meant, like, having Seb confide in you. Having him trust you. Having him look up to you, but not in a way that turns you into some unreachable ideal that he uses to be a jerk to himself (though at the time, Max would’ve just said, “Having him look up to you” because he didn’t really get that Seb did look up to him, just… not in a good way).

And yeah, Seb was a weirdly honest teenager who asked permission to take some of his parents’ booze to theatre club cast parties, and who knew he was loved and supported enough at home to come out when he was twelve, but he also didn’t tell his parents about the shit that fell on him after he outed himself to spare Damian because he didn’t want them to think he couldn’t handle it on his own, and had it not been for Pete and Ambrose telling them some of it (though not all of it, out of respect for Seb’s wishes), Abe and Marceline might have remained ignorant of what was going on, beyond, “He says that he’s stressed about final exams, and for some reason, he doesn’t talk about Damian or Allison anymore, but won’t talk about why”

So, it’s not for nothing, because Pete does realize that Seb’s family is actually pretty tight with each other and that, for all they’re a bunch of human beings and thus messy by nature and prone to screwing up, they all actually love each other and try to more or less do right by each other — which he is totally jealous of, by the way, though he would be more so if not for how Seb considers him basically a brother and he’s pretty much always invited to Moncrieff family gatherings or parties, since the family inexplicably (in Pete’s mind) likes him

—but at the same time, he’s pretty sure that he knows more about his Princess and in more contexts than the blood family does.

And he’s right.

Not that this means Pete’s awareness and his powers of Seb-related deduction are literally ever perfect, but…… y’know. He’s working with a more comprehensive playbook than Seb’s blood family.

This was a really pathetic excuse for, “I’m going to shut up now, TL;DR summary time”

Whoops

48. Is there anything in particular that would ignite your character’s jealousy? Or does your character not get envious?

Yes, but also no?

I mean, I feel like saying that any character never gets envious is at best disingenuous, though I’m biased because I’ve literally never met anyone who doesn’t experience jealousy, whether it dominates them like it does with Todd or not, and like…… The fact that Seb isn’t as overwhelmed by jealousy as Todd doesn’t mean much

He definitely experiences jealousy; it’s just that he doesn’t really focus on it or do that much with it beyond let it simmer and possibly use it as an excuse to be a jerk to himself

(—which is also a bit because he usually doesn’t feel it strongly enough to do much with it, but that’s not really a, “Seb is a good person who doesn’t let his jealousy consume him” thing; it’s a, “Seb is seriously depressed and doesn’t feel most things strongly enough to do much with them, which is going to change somewhat when he gets medicated and his brain chemistry starts getting evened out, but that’s another matter”)

His biggest envy buttons tend to be things like:

“Pete and Todd have had it easier than I have at staying sober, why can’t I do that, what is wrong with me that makes it so much harder for me than it is them”

(To answer his question: neither Pete nor Todd has actually had it easy with their sobriety — which Seb does know and he feels bad about even remotely feeling like they’ve had it, “easier,” but asking emotions to be rational is a losing game for everybody — but they’ve had more success than he has because they haven’t been doing the psychological equivalent of trying to fight Ganondorf with a butter knife)

“My dumb older brother has a good relationship with his wife, who is a good person and loves him, and I’m never going to have anything like that”

“My sponsor and his husband are so in love with each other even after so long together and it’s so beautiful and I wish I could have something like that, but it’s never going to happen for me because why would it”

and so on.

And here we see one of the reasons why he’s spent the past year and a half doing the psychological equivalent of fighting Ganondorf with a butter knife: he looks at these patterns of thought and doesn’t see them as indicative of anything beyond him being, “broken,” so he hasn’t been entirely open with them, and his loved ones and therapist haven’t had all the knowledge that they need to figure out how to help him

Some of them have put it together that all involved parties have been missing something that means all of their approaches aren’t working as well as they could do, but most of them don’t know what that is. Pete has the best idea (because Seb’s too attached to all his denial to have an accurate idea and he pretty much stops at, “I am broken, that explains everything”), and even he isn’t entirely right

Right about Seb being a mutant, right about thinking like, “Maybe he’s depressed? I mean, we keep overlooking that option for all kinds of reasons, but maybe that’s part of it all,” right about thinking that Seb is more affected by some of the shit he’s been through than he wants to be, right about Seb needing to try something new since a lot of his previously attempted ideas haven’t helped in the ways he needs, right about going, “You’re flatbacked on the sofa, staring at the ceiling like it just threatened to kill your dogs, and listening to ‘Last Christmas’ in the middle of June. It’s not hard to figure out that something’s wrong”

—but Pete is somewhat less than right about, for example: Seb’s emotional trigger for kicking into Beast Mode probably being fear and/or anger (but in fairness to Pete, he hears, “my best friend can hulk out into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man” and concludes that it’s most likely going to work like the Incredible Hulk or in-universe heroes like The Myrmidon of the All-Stars and Dr. Lydia “Promethia” Yates of the Wardens); reacting to sudden-onset superpowers by going, “HI OMG I’M YOUR SIDEKICK NOW FUCK YEAH LET’S ROCK THIS BITCH”; Seb’s confused feelings after his date with Stephen (because Seb ends up genuinely unsure what he wants to do about his situation with Todd vs. starting something new with Stephen, and Pete’s initial reaction is, “Oh, bullshit, you’re just trying to chicken out on this because you’re actually interested someone NICE for once, you just learned that he likes you back, and now, you’re SCARED”)

……Granted, he’s also not entirely wrong on that last point, but Seb being scared doesn’t negate the fact that he’s also confused about his feelings

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