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fuckyeahgoodomens · 2 months

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The Radio Times magazine from the 29 July-04 August 2023 :)

THE SECOND COMING

How did Terry Pratchett and Neil gaiman overcome the small matter of Pratchett's death to make another series of their acclaimed divine comedy?

For all the dead authors in the world,” legendary comedy producer John Lloyd once said, “Terry Pratchett is the most alive.” And he’s right. Sir Terry is having an extremely busy 2023… for someone who died in 2015.

This week sees the release of Good Omens 2, the second series of Amazon’s fantasy comedy drama based on the cult novel Pratchett co-wrote with Neil Gaiman in the late 1980s. This will be followed in the autumn by a new spin-off book from Pratchett’s Discworld series, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, co-written by Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna and children’s author Gabrielle Kent. The same month, we’ll also get A Stroke of the Pen, a collection of “lost” short stories written by Sir Terry for local newspapers in the 70s and 80s and recently rediscovered. Clearly, while there are no more books coming from Pratchett – a hard drive containing all drafts and unpublished work was crushed by a vintage steamroller shortly after the author’s death, as per his specific wishes – people still want to visit his vivid and addictive worlds in new ways.

Good Omens 2 will be the first test of how this can work. The original book started life as a 5,000-word short story by Gaiman, titled William the Antichrist and envisioned as a bit of a mashup of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books and the 70s horror classic The Omen. What would happen, Gaiman had mused, if the spawn of Satan had been raised, not by a powerful American diplomat, but by an extremely normal couple in an idyllic English village, far from the influence of hellish forces? He’d sent the first draft to bestselling fantasy author Pratchett, a friend of many years, and then forgotten about it as he busied himself with continuing to write his massively popular comic books, including Violent Cases, Black Orchid and The Sandman, which became a Netflix series last year.

Pratchett loved the idea, offering to either buy the concept from Gaiman or co-write it. It was, as Gaiman later said, “like Michelangelo phoning and asking if you want to paint a ceiling” The pair worked on the book together from that point on, rewriting each other as they went and communicating via long phone calls and mailed floppy discs. “The actual mechanics worked like this: I would do a bit, then Neil would take it away and do a bit more and give it back to me,” Pratchett told Locus magazine in 1991. “We’d mess about with each other’s bits and pieces.”

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – to give it its full title –was published in 1990 to huge acclaim. It was one of, astonishingly, five Terry Pratchett novels to be published that year (he averaged two a year, including 41 Discworld novels and many other standalone works and collaborations).

It was also, clearly, extremely filmable, and studios came knocking — though getting it made took a while. rnvo decades on from its writing, four years after Pratchett's death from Alzheimer's disease aged 66, and after several doomed attempts to get a movie version off the ground, Good Omens finally made it to TV screens in 2019, scripted and show-run by Gaiman himself. "Terry was egging me on to make it into television. He knew he was dying, and he knew that I wouldn't start it without him," Gaiman revealed in a 2019 Radio Times interview. Amazon and the BBC co-produced with Pratchett's company Narrativia and Gaiman's Blank Corporation production studios, with Michael Sheen and David Tennant cast in the central roles of Aziraphale the angel and Crowley the demon. The show was a hit, not just with fans of its two creators, but with a whole new young audience, many of whom had no interest in Discworld or Sandman. Social media networks like Tumblr and TikTok were soon awash with cosplay, artwork and fan fiction. The original novel became, for the first time, a New York Times bestseller.

A follow up was, on one level, a no-brainer. The world Pratchett and Gaiman had created was vivid, funny and accessible, and Tennant and Sheen had found an intriguing romantic spark in their chemistry not present in the novel.

There was, however, a huge problem. There wasn't a second Good Omens book to base it on. But there was the ghost of an idea.

In 1989, after the book had been sold but before it had come out, the two authors had laid on fivin beds in a hotel room at a convention in Seattle and, jet-lagged and unable to sleep, plotted out, in some detail, what would happen in a sequel, provisionally titled 668, The II Neighbour of the Beast.

"It was a good one, too" Gaiman wrote in a 2021 blog. "We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published, Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD(TM) and there wasn't a good time."

Back in 1991, Pratchett elaborated, "We even know some of the main characters in it. But there's a huge difference between sitting there chatting away, saying, 'Hey, we could do this, we could do that,' and actually physically getting down and doing it all again." In 2019, Gaiman pillaged some of those ideas for Good Omens series one (for example, its final episode wasn't in the book at all), and had left enough threads dangling to give him an opening for a sequel. This is the well he's returned to for Good Omens 2, co-writing with comic John Finnemore - drafted in, presumably, to plug the gap left Pratchett's unparalleled comedic mind. No small task.

Projects like Good Omens 2 are an important proving ground for Pratchett's legacy: can the universes he conjured endure without their creator? And can they stay true to his spirit? Sir Terry was famously protective of his creations, and there have been remarkably few adaptations of his work considering how prolific he was. "What would be in it for me?" he asked in 2003. "Money? I've got money."

He wanted his work treated reverently and not butchered for the screen. It's why Good Omens and projects like Tiffany Aching's Guide to Being a Witch are made with trusted members of the inner circle like Neil Gaiman and Rhianna Pratchett at the helm. It's also why the author's estate, run by Pratchett's former assistant and business manager Rob Wilkins, keeps a tight rein on any licensed Pratchett material — it's a multi-million dollar media empire still run like a cottage industry.

And that's heartening. Anyone who saw BBC America's panned 2021 Pratchett adaptation The Watch will know how badly these things can go when a studio is allowed to run amok with the material without oversight. These stories deserve to be told, and these worlds deserve to be explored — properly. And there are, apparently, many plans afoot for more Pratchett on the screen. You can only hope that, somewhere, he'll be proud of the results.

After all, as he wrote himself, "No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence."

While those ripples continue to spread, Sir Terry Pratchett remains very much alive. MARC BURROWS

DIVINE DUO

An angel and a demon walk into a pub... Michael Sheen and David Tennant on family, friendship and Morecambe & Wise

Outside it's cold winter's day and we're in a Scottish studio, somewhere between Edinburgh and Glasgow. But inside it's lunchtime in The Dirty Donkey pub in the heart of London, with both Michael Sheen and David Tennant surveying the scene appreciatively. "This is a great pub," says Sheen eagerly, while Tennant calls it "the best Soho there can be. A slightly heightened, immaculate, perfect, dreamy Soho."

Here, a painting of the absent landlord — the late Terry Pratchett, co-creator, with Neil Gaiman, of the series' source novel — looms over punters. Around the corner is AZ Fell and Co Antiquarian and Unusual Books. It's the bookshop owned by Sheen's character, the angel Aziraphale, and the place to where Tennant's demon Crowley is inevitably drawn.

It's day 74 of an 80-day shoot for a series that no one, least of all the leading actors, ever thought would happen, due to the fact that Pratchett and Gaiman hadn't ever published any sequel to their 1990 fantasy satire. Tennant explains, "What we didn't know was that Neil and Terry had had plots and plans..."

Still, lots of good things are in Good Omens 2, which expands on the millennia-spanning multiverse of the first series. These include a surprisingly naked side of John Hamm, and roles for both Tennant's father-in-law (Peter Davison) and 21-year-old son Ty. At its heart, though, remains the brilliant banter between the two leading men — as Sheen puts it, "very Eric and Ernie !" — whose chemistry on the first series led to one of the more surprising saviours of lockdown telly.

Good Omens is back — but you've worked together a lot in the meantime. Was there a connective tissue between series one of Good Omens and Staged, your lockdown sitcom?

David: Only in as much as the first series went out, then a few months later, we were all locked in our houses. And because of the work we'd done on Good Omens, it occurred that we might do something else. I mean, Neil Gaiman takes full responsibility for Staged. Which, to some extent, he's probably right to do!

Michael: We've got to know each other through doing this. Our lives have gotten more entwined in all kinds of ways — we have children who've now become friends, and our families know each other.

There have been hints of a romantic storyline between the two characters. How much of an undercurrent is that in this series.

David: Nothing's explicit.

Michael: I felt from the very beginning that part of what would be interesting to explore is that Aziraphale is a character, a being, who just loves. How does that manifest itself in a very specific relationship with another being? Inevitably, as there is with everything in this story, there's a grey area. The fact that people see potentially a "romantic relationship", I thought that was interesting and something to explore.

There was a petition to have the first series banned because of its irreverent take on Christian tropes. Series two digs even more deeply into the Bible with the story of Job. How much of a badge of honour is it that the show riles the people who like to ban things?

David: It's not an irreligious show at all. It's actually very respectful of the structure of that sort of religious belief. The idea that it promotes Satanism [is nonsense]. None of the characters from hell are to be aspired to at all! They're a dreadful bunch of non-entities. People are very keen to be offended, aren't they? They're often looking for something to glom on to without possibly really examining what they think they're complaining about.

Michael, you're known as an activist, and you're in the middle of Making BBC drama The Way, which "taps into the social and political chaos of today's world". Is it important for you to use your plaform to discuss causes you believe in?

Michael: The Way is not a political tract, it's just set in the area that I come from. But it has to matter to you, doesn't it? More and more as I get older, [I find] it can be a real slog doing this stuff. You've got to enjoy it. And if it doesn't matter to you, then it's just going to be depressing.

David, Michael has declared himself a "not-for-profit" actor. Has he tried to persuade you to give up all your money too?

David: What an extraordinary question! One is always aware that one has a certain responsibility if one is fortunate and gets to do a job that often doesn't feel like a job. You want to do your bit whenever you can. But at the same time, I'm an actor. I'm not about to give that up to go into politics or anything. But I'll do what I can from where I live.

Well, your son and your father-in-law are also starring in this series. How about that, jobs for the boys!

David: I know! It was a delight to get to be on set with them. And certainly an unexpected one for me. Neil, on two occasions, got to bowl up to me and say, "Guess who we've cast?!"

How do you feel about your US peers going on strike?

David: It's happening because there are issues that need to be addressed. Nobody's doing this lightly. These are important issues, and they've got to be sorted out for the future of our industry. There's this idea that writers and actors are all living high on the hog. For huge swathes of our industry, that's just not the case. These people have got to be protected.

Michael: We have to be really careful that things don't slide back to the way they were pre the 1950s, when the stories that we told were all coming from one point of view and the stories of certain people, or communities within our society, weren't represented. There's a sense that now that's changed for ever and it'll never go back. But you worry when people can't afford to have the opportunities that other people have. We don't want the story that we tell about ourselves to be myopic. You want it to be as inclusive as possible

Staged series 3 recently broadcast. It felt like the show's last hurrah — or is there more mileage? Sheen and Tennant go on holiday?

David: That's the Christmas special! One Foot in the Algarve! On the Buses Go to Spain!

Michael: I don't think we were thinking beyond three, were we?

So is it time for a conscious uncoupling for you two — Eric and Ernie say goodbye?

David: Oh, never say never, will we?

Michael: And it's more Hinge and Bracket.

David: Maybe that's what we do next — The Hinge and Bracket Story. CRAIG McLEAN

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watchmegetobsessed · 9 months

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THE FINAL SHOW

A/N: last night was a rollercoaster of emotions and i still can't believe love on tour is over, but it will always have a special place in my heart. one thing is for sure, im sill here and i will continue writing for this amazing human until he returns onto the stage where he belongs.

WORD COUNT: 2.6k

SUMMARY: You made a promise in the beginning of Love On Tour and now it's catching up with you and though your heart wants you to keep your word, you know it's not that easy, because it's about your boss, the person who matters the most to you.

MASTERLIST | SUPPORT ME!

You should have learned by now that Harry Styles never forgets.

He remembers every birthday, anniversary, every story anyone tells him, he remembers fans he has interacted with and he is extremely good with names. It’s definitely one thing you admire about him.

But know this tiny detail about him did not teach you to watch what you say around him, because he will recite your words even years later.

It’s been an on and off tango between the two of you for a long time. As his assistant, you’ve been dancing on the line of being professional and jumping into his bed whenever he does as so much as looking at you with those stupid, gorgeous eyes. He is your job, you keep telling that to yourself, but deep down you know he is more than just that.

He is… everything.

It would be easier if he only saw you as his assistant, but that’s not the case. Just how you caught those certain feelings, Harry has shown interest towards you, on several occasions, flirting with you bluntly, asking you out every possible chance.

And each time, when you turned down, a voice in your head screamed at you, but your rationality has been stronger so far and it hasn’t let you take that leap that would change everything forever.

Now, back to his immaculate memory.

You’d been working for him for over a year when the first European leg of Love On Tour was about to start, the residency shows were set to be announced and along with the South American, Australian and Asian dates and another full European leg was in the planning phase. Tour was looking endless and everyone on the team was joking that there won’t be a final show of Love On Tour.

Following another meeting in Harry’s LA home you were hanging out by his pool, something that happened quite often, because he liked to share what he had with the people around him. The sun was setting and you both had several glasses of wine, so the business talk has been long forgotten when you ordered food for the two of you.

You were in the shallow, lounge area of the pool where you could sit in the water and you were enjoying a hamburger while he was swimming around, watching you. You caught him looking right in the middle of a huge bite.

“What?” you asked, narrowing your eyes at him as he swam closer with a grin on his face.

“You look amazing.”

You snorted out loud, mouth full and probably smelling like onions.

“I’m sure I do,” you sarcastically said. “Is this what turns you on? Chewing and onion smell?”

“No. It’s you.”

You stopped and gave him a suspicious look. He moved over and sat beside you.

“You turn me on, Y/N,” he added, when you didn’t say anything, just leisurely staring back at you, as if he hadn’t just overstepped a major boundary between boss and employee.

“Harry, stop,” you mumbled, putting the remainder of your burger to the plate at the edge of the pool.

“What? You started it with guessing what turns me on.”

“It was just a joke!”

“Okay, and I told you the truth.”

“You definitely shouldn’t be saying shit like that to me.”

“Too late, already did, so I think we could take it even further,” he shrugged and you couldn’t hold back a laugh.

“Oh, you are something else, Harry Styles, you know that?”

“That didn’t sound like a no to me,” he grinned, moving just a tad bit closer, but still respecting your private space. “I really want to kiss you, Y/N,” he bluntly added and you knew it was the wine talking from him, sober Harry wouldn’t have said those words out loud, but it didn’t fail to make you feel dizzy and weak.

“That’s not gonna happen now,” you shook your head.

“Okay, if not now, then when?”

“You are so annoying,” you laughed again. “You know what? You can kiss me when Love On Tour officially ends,” you joked.

It was a genuine joke. Anyone would have known you didn’t mean it, but it was Harry you said it to and the moment the words left your mouth they burned into his memories forever.

“Alright then,” he simply said, splashed you and then swam away.

That was the beginning of 2022. You slept off the wine and though you never forgot you said it, you didn’t keep track of the promise you initially made.

Harry did, however.

Not one day went by without him thinking about those words and it was the only reason he was looking forward for the very last show of Love On Tour.

He’s been acting weird, probably since about Vienna. With two weeks until the end of tour and his break, your workload hasn’t gotten less so you couldn’t really care about his weirdness, but when you’re out for dinner in Barcelona with the band and some other crew members and two rounds of drinks have been consumed already, you finally acknowledge the change.

“Hey, you alright?” You poke your elbow into his side, stealing a fry from his plate. Shrugging, he pushes the plate closer to you.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?” you ask, snacking on his leftover fries.

“The end of tour.”

Freezing you instantly remember to that one conversation in his pool. You peek at him and find him already looking at you with a gaze that burns right into your heart. Clearing your throat you turn back to the fries and pretend like you don’t remember the promise you made.

“Just two more weeks and you’re free.”

“That’s not how I see it.”

“Mmm,” you hum, but don’t dare to look at him. You can feel his eyes on the side of your face, but luckily, before he could bring up anything specific Mitch call out his name from across the table and you’re relieved. For now.

It’s almost midnight when you all head back to the hotel and you and Harry somehow end up at the back of the group. The elevator is too full for the two of you to get in as well, so you wait for another round. While you’re still ignoring to look at him, he is very much only looking at you, it feels like.

The elevator returns and you get inside, but Harry pushes the button for the top floor.

“Hey, that’s—“

“I want to show you something,” he hold up a hand.

The top of the hotel has a rooftop bar with an amazing view of the city, the perfect grid of the streets, it’s breathtaking.

“I knew you would like it,” he smiles, leaning against the railing next to you, with his back towards the view, as if he was way more interested in seeing you than the city.

“Because you know me so well,” you chuckle softly.

“I do,” he answers quietly. “We have only four more shows.”

“Mhm,” you nod, eyes glued to the view in front of you.

“The final show of Love On Tour is in ten days.”

“I’m glad you keep track of the shows so well, I feel like I’m not even needed anymore,” you joke with a chuckle, but when you finally look at him you know why he is bringing all of these up.

“Do you remember what you promised would happen when the last show finally comes?”

“Harry…”

“You do,” he simply says. “I know you as someone who keeps her word.”

“It’s… Harry, that was never a promise, I was just joking!”

“None of it is a joke to me, Y/N.”

You roll your eyes, but hate the effect his words have on you. Like your whole inside is on fire, begging to just give in finally, to end this years long game and act on the feelings you’ve been pushing down so hard all this time.

Sighing you cross your arms over your chest. You want to make fun out of it again and say that it was all just about a kiss, but you know, you both know that it would never stop at one kiss, that it’s bigger than that and it would consume you fully if you let your walls down.

“This seems like a big mistake,” you tell him honestly. “What if it goes wrong and… I lose my job… and you.”

Your voice breaks at the end and you can’t look him in the eyes. You’ve spent endless nights thinking about what would happen if you gave in and it all went downhill. Your job might be the last thing on the list of worries, what really scares you is to imagine a version of your life without him because.

It would break you.

“Being scared of the wrong outcome will keep you away from the best things in your life, Y/N.”

“Did you just call yourself the best thing in my life?” you try to joke, but he just gives you a look.

“Don’t think about the what ifs, if you get there, you’ll figure it out. You always do. We always do.”

“This is not that simple,” you shake your head. “You know it’s not that simple.”

“But it is,” he chuckles, but you keep shaking your head. “Figuring out my feelings has never been this simple.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence when not even you know whether you’re about to give in or not and for a split second it actually feels like you’re breaking, but something pulls you back last minute.

“No. And we should be heading back, you have a show tomorrow. You need to get some rest.”

You step away from the railing and start walking back, but when you notice that he’s not coming you turn around and see him staring at the city this time. Opening your mouth you’re about to call out for him, but then change your mind and let him be, walking back to your room.

When you see him again in the morning he doesn’t bring it up again and you’re convinced he won’t bring your promise up again.

The last show has everyone all over the place, you’ve been running around since about six in the morning, picking up people, making sure the hotel check-ins go smoothly and everything is exactly how it should be. The day feels like a whole week, but the excitement and bittersweet sadness that’s been wrapped around everyone is what keeps you up on your feet still.

But the real weight of the last show hits the moment it finally starts.

This is the time when you have nothing to do so you watch Harry perform every night, meaning that this is the 169th time you’re seeing him take the stage and perform just as perfectly as he did at the first, the fiftieth and one hundredth show. He always gives his absolute most. Not just at his shows, but in his life as well. That’s one of the million reasons you fell for him.

Medicine has everyone dying, all 100 thousand people out there and then Harry starts giving his speech that’s extra long this time, talking about how grateful he is for everything, for his fans, his friends and family and it’s one big emotional mess and you can’t help but cry a bit as well, watching from the side.

“The last two years of my life, the last two years of this tour has been the greatest experience I could ever ask for…”

“I see it, the love, in how it’s affected all the people around me, continue to affect people. It does not end with this tour.”

“I love you, thank you so much.”

Screaming rolls over the crowd as an answer and you expect him to go on with starting As It Was, but then he starts talking again.

“There is one more thing I want to say tonight. I have learned and experienced so much in the past years. I will be forever thankful for the memories we’ve made.”

There. He said we, he switched up his narrative. That’s how you know he is not talking to the crowd. He is talking to you.

“If this is it, if it never goes beyond this, I would live a happy life. With you forever in my heart. But if we ever take it further, if we ever take the risk and reach for the stars and we might fall… just know that I will always be here for you. You can never lose me. No matter what. I love you.”

You suck on your breath, covering your mouth with your hand as you stare at him stand in the middle of the stage, staring out ahead of him, the crowd screaming for him, oblivious to the one sided conversation that just happened between you and him.

As It Was starts and the show carries on towards the end, but you’re still frozen in that moment and when the show ends and you watch Harry drop to his knees on the stage, you know things will never be the same.

Backstage is like a tornado once the show is over, the band walks off the stage and Harry is following right behind with Lloyd by his side, but when he sees you standing still in the middle of the madness, he drops out of the conversation right away and stops a few feet away from you, letting you decide where to go now.

“You promise?” you breathe out, your throat closing up. “You promise I will never lose you?”

“I thought that was clear by now, Y/N,” he replies, his chest still rapidly rising and falling. “But if you need me to actually say it, I will. You will never lose me, no matter what. It will always be you and me and I know you’re scared, but I’m—“

He doesn’t get to finish, because you’re already throwing yourself into his arms and kissing him.

It doesn’t matter that the whole crew bursts out into screaming and whistling, that you’re giving a second show with the way you get lost in each other, because in your little bubble it’s just you and Harry and everything that’s been building between the two of you.

Every joke, every teasing comment, all the stolen looks and suppressed feeling that was never acted on is now free, they all burst out of your chest and into the electricity that’s snaking around you as you keep taking more and more of him, hungry to make up for the past years.

The clapping dies down when you finally pull back, forehead resting against his, his hands holding you so tight as if he was afraid you might run away any moment.

“You kept your promise. I knew you were trusty, Y/N Y/L/N,” he chuckles, pecking your lips softly again as you laugh at his words, finally opening your eyes to look at him.

“Actually I feel like I kissed you. I promised you could kiss me, so technically—“

“Shut up, you’re already getting on my nerves,” he laughs, kissing you over and over again, so your promise is actually fulfilled. “Can’t wait for you to do that every day for the rest of my life.”

“I thought that was part of my job too, have I not been doing that?” you tease, lips moving against his as you speak.

“You have, but you can take it to a whole new level now,” he laughs, pulling you against him before letting you go and popping the bubble, though his hand never lets go of yours, not while everyone congratulates him, not when the final show celebrations start and not when he pulls you into his hotel room to end this journey of Love On Tour with you by his side, but also start a new chapter.

Thank you for reading, please like and reblog if you enjoyed and buy me a coffee if you want to support me!

#harry #styles #harry styles #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fanfic #harry styles oneshot #harry styles one shot #harry styles fluff #harry styles x you #harry styles x y/n #harry styles x reader #harry styles blurb

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woso-dreamzzz · 3 months

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Ausenal II

Arsenal Women x Teen!Reader

Summary: You travel for an away game

It was a long drive up to Liverpool.

Like four plus hours kind of long.

Which meant you had plenty of time to do your homework.

Steph wandered around the house, picking up her bags and sorting through the last of the mail before turning to you.

"Have you packed your laptop?"

You nodded.

"And your calculator?"

You nodded.

"And your boots and your socks?"

You didn't stop nodding.

"Okay. Let's get this show on the road."

Steph drove you both to the training grounds. She looked at you in the backseat and adjusted her rear view mirror. "Did you pick up your lunch?"

You held up the little brown paper bag she'd packed for you.

Steph nodded. "Good. Right, onto the bus with you. I'm just going to pop in and grab some water from reception."

You nodded.

Away games like this were always the same. Steph let you have a little lie in as she double then triple checked your bag and made you your lunch. Then, she would wake you up where you would beg to just have something small for breakfast like a protein bar but she would make you eat a full meal. Next Steph would drive you to the bus where she would make you get on while she slipped inside to get you some extra water in case you got car sick.

Now came the next part of your routine.

"There she is!" Katie crowed from her spot next to Caitlin. "We've been saving you a seat."

She nodded to the seat opposite her and you sat.

This was normal as well. Leah and Alessia were set up at the table across the aisle, playing cards as Kyra kneeled on her seat so she could annoy Lotte and the new American signing, Emily.

No one would sit on your other side but Steph would definitely take up the seat in facing Kyra to make sure she behaved.

"What have you got today?" Katie asked as you got out your schoolwork.

You made a face. "Biology and Chemistry."

"Did you bring the funny calculator?" Caitlin asked, making grabby hands for it.

"I need it," You said.

"I only want it for a bit," Caitlin said," I'm going to send Macca and Lanni a picture of me writing boobs."

"You're so childish," Steph said in greeting as she arrived on the bus," Leave her alone. She has deadlines." She passed you over two bottles of water and looked at you sternly. "Drink one of them now."

"She means," Katie cut in," Make sure you finish it in the first half of the journey so when we get to the services, you can have a toilet break there."

That was part of the normal routine too and you just nodded.

You got to work quickly even as the bus turned into carnage the moment you set off.

At some point, Caitlin had grabbed your calculator and was amusing herself using the graph function after sending the boob picture to Macca and Lanni.

Kyra was still annoying Lotte and Emily even after Steph made her sit down and turn around.

Leah and Lessi's card game got progressively more aggressive as the time lagged on and you found yourself abandoning your schoolwork to watch.

"Cheater!"

"You can't cheat at Uno, Leah! You're being a bad loser!"

"I haven't lost yet and there's no way you had that many plus fours! You're such a cheater!"

"Just because you have bad luck doesn't mean that I do! Now pick up your cards or resign!"

"Hey."

You snapped out of your watching to look across from you. Katie raised a singular brow and looked down at your laptop.

"Didn't Steph say you had deadlines? Come on, get it done so you can relax on your way back."

You huffed and got back to work.

"And start drinking your water too! It helps with brain power!"

You diligently typed away, absentmindedly snacking on whatever Katie pushed your way and having to fight back you calculator from Caitlin.

When it came to the twenty minute break at the services, you were more than happy to escape into the fresh air.

"Hand," Leah said as she caught up with you, holding her own hand out expectantly.

"Leah," You began to whine but a firm look from her had you slipping your palm into hers.

Kyra snickered behind you and you felt your face go bright red. "Don't wander off," Kyra teased as she moved past," Wouldn't want to get lost, would you?"

"Kyra!" Steph snapped as she approached," No teasing! It's mean!"

You and Leah didn't stick around to hear anymore of the lecture because you were dragged to the toilet and then to the little store to pick up a new book.

You were distracted though and kept peering around Leah to look at the snacks.

"No," She said," That's not good for you. Come on, you're choosing a new book."

You picked up the next book in the series you were reading but made sure to take the long way back around to the checkout, purposely walking Leah through the snacks.

"No," She said again, waving a teasing finger in your face.

"Please?" You begged," I finished my schoolwork. And I ate the lunch Steph packed for me!"

Leah looked at you through narrowed eyes, studying you before sighing. "One snack. And not too big either. I mean it, this stuff isn't good for you."

You grinned and went to grab your favourite chocolate bar, dragging Leah with you when it was clear that she wasn't going to let go of your hand.

"Go on," She said, guiding you up onto the team bus again," You promise that you finished your work?"

You nodded.

"Okay. Go and sit with Lessi. Kyra can sit in your old seat."

Alessia was already waiting for you. At some point while you were away, she'd gotten out a blanket.

"Come on," She said softly, beckoning you closer," You look like you need a nap. You had to wake up early."

"I'm not a baby," You complained even though you were already taking your shoes off so you could curl up properly on the seat.

"Teenagers can nap too." Alessia wrapped an arm around your shoulders and pulled you a bit closer.

"I'm not tired," You said," I've got a new book."

"The book can wait. We need you fighting fit for the match later. Kyra's already asleep."

You turned your head to spot Kyra face down on the table, eyes shut and drooling. You huffed and looked back at Alessia.

She was giving you one of those looks that you were more accustomed to seeing from Steph or Kim so you blew out all your air in a big sigh and rested your head on her shoulder.

"Good," Lessi said," I'll wake you up when we get there."

#woso x reader #arsenal wfc x reader #arsenal x reader #arsenal wfc #woso community #woso fanfics #woso imagine #woso

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1shirt2shirtredshirtdeadshirt · 1 year

Text

Today on popping the corn and feeding the children, what do you folks think of this discussion? :)

I'm always curious to hear what other Trek fans, especially queer Trek fans, think about our place in Trek history and how we fare as the queer participants within our fandom. What have your experiences been like?

Overwhelmingly I've found a great reception and a welcoming attitude, but I admit that has increased considerably since the 90s. However, there are still some Trek fans who seem to be vehemently in denial about queer history in Star Trek, or the fact that anyone who has worked on Trek has pro-LGBT attitudes. This always surprises me considering some of the blatant queer content we have already seen in Star Trek such as the Jadzia Dax and Lenara Kahn kiss.

Anyway, I enjoyed the discussion that followed and seeing the overwhelming outpouring of support coming from Star Trek fans in response to this thread.

Here was my two cents contribution:

"No, what they said was factual.

Have you forgotten Nichelle Nichols was indeed an African American woman in the core seven bridge crew back in 1966?

Or the fact that Gene Roddenberry went out of his way to write The Motion Picture Novel, creating the term "T'hy'la: friend, brother, lover" so that fans could choose which interpretations of Kirk and Spock they saw fit? He also embraced K/S fans and hired a number of them to write the earliest Star Trek novels, including the very first official one (The New Voyages Vol. 1 & 2) which included slash fiction as well as Gene's approval/forward in the books.

In case anyone has forgotten, here's a little bit of background on Gene Roddenberry and his perspectives on queerness in Star Trek.

He admitted that in his early life he was very affected by how society and culture treated the LGBT community, and that he too found himself subjugating and judging others for that lifestyle because it was what people did at that time. As he got older and had more life experience, he began working with a number of queer artists in Hollywood -- and through TOS, a number of queer individuals began asking questions about Kirk and Spock.

Instead of vehemently shutting down this perspective, Roddenberry was intrigued, and saw potential to tap into a large audience (LGBT) that most others didn't want to go near or acknowledge publicity-wise. He saw it as an opportunity to expand the fanbase while also pushing yet another envelope.

But with the heat already on the show for what they'd already pushed, he found he was often stuck between what he'd like to do and what production would let him get away with. There are a number of Kirk and Spock scenes in scripts that got cut out for leaning a little too obviously romantic. Tiny trickles of that content still made it in were infamous moments like the backrub scene in Shore Leave. Even the 2009 movie had a K/S moment while Spock Prime and Kelvin Spock talked that was written and filmed that was cut out of the final product.

Queer subtext and coding has always been relentlessly weeded away at with an excuse ready to go for why they always try to cut us out, but we all know it's because they are scared of the homophobic backlash and ratings hits. Look how violently homophobes went after the gay romance episode of The Last of Us **just this year**. This has always been our reality, so for someone like Roddenberry to make efforts in the 70s? That was massive.

But Gene as well as the queer/slash Trek community managed to accomplish some things in the 70s which I'm surprised more folks don't talk about or give much credit.

In the same TMP novel which features "T'hy'la" and the famous footnote, Gene cleverly wrote Kirk with a bisexual/pansexual lens: Kirk describes himself as *preferring* women but being open to "physical love in **any** of its many Earthly, alien, and mixed forms." (Direct quote from Genes book). Basically, Captain Kirk was DTF with whoever if there was a connection, which was a very progressive take for a character in a novel written in 1979, but made sense for the future which would have a lot less hang ups about sex and love compared to our current rather puritan/conservative society.

I also prefer women, but I married a man. Shout out to Gene Roddenberry for giving us a seat at the table back in the 70's when folks *still* try to insist there is no place for K/S or queer concepts in Trek, because he made efforts -- however small -- to employ queer people and show queer perspectives. According to David Gerrold, LGBT+ representation was a big thing that Gene personally pushed for in TNG and wanted various depictions of love/couples in the Risa scenes, to name one example.

In the 70s, fanzines led to meetings and swapped fanmade magazines, which got so big that they needed hotel centers, then convention centers, then one day the TOS cast came to one and what we know as modern fan conventions were born -- inspiring even George Lucas who attended Trek conventions in the 70s and saw how popular Trek was in syndication; it was a great climate to launch his Space Opera. Star Wars then became so huge that we got TMP.

But none of that would have happened without the level of organization, passion, and creativity that those fans poured into Star Trek and their characters after it got cancelled and went into syndication.

Without queer folks we wouldn't have George Takei, Theodore Sturgeon who gave us Tribbles, Bill Theiss and his amazing TOS costumes, Mike Minor's art direction, Merritt Butrick, David Gerrold (writer for TOS, TAS, TNG) to name a few of many queer contributors to Trek that Roddenberry respected and tried to go to bat for wherever he could in a climate that was absolutely impossible to gain an inch in.

At a time during the 70s and 80s when so many people resented and feared the queer community and wanted us to disappear, especially in the 80s during the AIDS epidemic which many homophobes claimed was "God's punishment to the gay community" or "Gods's answer" to our "hedonism", thinking we'd gotten our just desserts and should just disappear . . .

During that time, Gene Roddenberry gave us queer folks a place to say: "You know what? Sure. Write your stories. TV says you guys shouldn't exist, they pull books with queer people off the shelves and burn them. Laws exist specifically to forbid you guys from loving each other, and call you mentally ill. You can't even hold hands in public. But I'm going to validate you guys and invite you to write novels or work for me, try to see what we can get by production, and allow you to see yourselves in my characters if you want to. There's a place for you in our fandom."

He gave us bi/pan Kirk, he gave us K/S is open to interpretation. In Phase 2 Kirk's surviving nephew Peter, son of his brother Sam from Operation: Annihilate!, was going to be written as gay and living on the Enterprise with his partner -- that also got chopped and reworked into a script that wouldn't get used until decades later. That was huge at a time that being queer was officially listed as a mental illness, and villainized due to the AIDS crisis.

So before you try to dismiss or tell K/S + queer Trek fans whether or not they deserve a seat at the table, remember that Gene Roddenberry was among the **first** to pull that seat out for us in a climate that was ruthlessly against LGBT+ folks." -- 1Shirt2ShirtRedShirtDeadShirt

P.S: Have some cute bisexual/pansexual K/S pride gifs. :) Pride month is a hop, skip and a jump away.

LLAP!🖖💚

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rainydayathogwarts · 1 month

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Open arms - Emily Prentiss

Smut - the way this fic has been sitting half written in my drafts forever. Go me for finally getting it done. Summary: Emily can't help but approach her ex in a dimly-lit bar wc: 2.1k

Emily thought that the night would be nice and relaxing for her and the team, celebrating another closed case at their favourite bar, their laughter drowning out the sounds of other people's conversations in the dim-lit restaurant. That was until her eyes locked in on a familiar figure standing near the bar, most definitely accompanied by someone. Emily froze, her hand tightly gripping her drink, and audibly gasped when you turned around, exposing your face to her.

"Y/n?" She whispered, catching Penelope and Derek's attention, who both turned to look at her. "You okay there Prentiss?" But she really wasn't. You were her only partner who ever stayed up waiting for her to come home from a case, genuinely concerned about her. You held her in your arms, letting her just sit there and open up if she wanted to. If she didn't, it didn't bother you, and you showered her with love nonetheless, always managing to pull a smile from her. And you were definitely the best in bed. Having you withering under her, relentlessly crying out her name was an image Emily would never forget.

She regretted leaving you every day, but it would keep you safe. After seeing what Hotch had to go through, she knew it was the smartest decision. Now that you were there though, in person after over a year of being apart, she wouldn't be able to stay away from you. If you would let her that was. She remembered your reaction, how you completely broke down, calling bullshit on her 'keeping you safe' excuse.

"I'm fine." She said, bringing herself out of her trance to take a long sip of her drink. "That an ex of yours?" Derek questioned, looking at you, now talking to a friend. You looked gorgeous, he thought. Your short black dress showed off your long legs and had a low cut to display your biggest weapon, the heels you wore flexing your calf muscles in the nicest way possible. Your stunning smile exposed your white teeth while a hand flipped your hair over your shoulder. He wondered how a dumbass like Emily was able to get you.

Emily's head shot back in your direction when she heard coughing, only to find out it was you, your face now going red as you choked on your drink, your friend, who Emily now realised she knew from when you dated, rubbing your back. Oh no... When the coughing stopped, you immediately looked back at her, confirming your suspicions. She returned your eye contact, awkwardly waving at you before you were suddenly facing away from her, refusing for the interaction to continue, earning a sympathetic look from your friend.

Emily heard a chorus of "Oof" and "Oh"s from the team, who were all cringing at the interaction. "Shut up." Emily groaned, stealing a shot from in front of Derek and downing it. She coughed twice, ignoring Derek's complaints, and turned to Spencer who was now telling them a statistic about exes. "It was actually found that 44% of Americans get back with their exes at some point after breaking up. And that only includes relationships post-break up instead of one night stands, so I'd say your chances are pretty high."

As much as Emily was unimpressed that Reid was giving her dating advice, she found herself walking up to you the minute your friend left, leaving you alone at the bar. Better me than anyone else shooting their shot, she thought. It was only when she stood right next to you that she realised she had no idea what to say and that the entire team was probably watching their interaction. She cleared her throat, muttering a small "Hey." You jumped slightly, rotating on the bar stool to face your ex-girlfriend. Emily expect you to frown, thrown your drink in her face even, but to her shock, you cracked a small smile at her. "Hey Em". "Can I sit?" She asked, shifting her weight from one leg to another.

You nodded, watching her as she sat. She looked different. She had cut her hair into bangs and wore her hair pin straight instead of the loose curls she'd put them in. She wore a low cut black top with black jeans as well as her go to combat boots. You assumed she came here straight from work. When you looked back up at her face, she was still staring at you, her gaze stuck on your thighs. "Um, can I get you a drink or something?" Her head shot up and she shook it "No, I've had enough to drink. Thanks." A long awkward silence followed and you looked over at the table she had come from, watching as all of her friends' heads shot in the opposite direction apart from one of them, still cluelessly observing you.

"I'm sorry - I shouldn't have-" "No!" You cut her off, cheeks going rosy. "Why don't we go for a walk or something?"

That walk led you both to the side of the road, waiting for a taxi as you made small talk, no discussion of going to either of your apartments until you were both sat in the back of the taxi on the way to your flat. Emily's hand rested on your thigh, both of your sides pressed against each other, faces mere inches apart as her free hand snaked around your waist, pulling you closer to her. You felt your desire for Emily grow, squeezing your thighs together to get any amount of friction.

Emily's eyes caught the movement, smiling slightly as she felt her own core heat up for you. She leaned towards you to look out of the window, pressing her tits up against you as she tried to see how far away you were from the apartment, making small talk while you waited. The second the taxi driver pulled the car over, she was tossing her money at him and following you out of the car, both her hands resting on your hips as you led her into your fancy building and towards the elevator. The second you were in the elevator, pressing the button to the right floor, her hands were wrapping around your waist and she was pressing her lips against the soft skin of your neck.

You grabbed her hand when the elevator doors opened, leading the way to your apartment and frantically opening and shutting the door before you turned around, throwing yourself into Emily's arms. You slammed your lips onto hers, wrapping your arms around her neck as you pressed your body against hers. Her hands were immediately under the skirt of your dress, groping the fat of your ass in her hands. You pulled away from the kiss, muttering "couch" to Emily, who complied, bending down slightly so she could wrap her arms around the back of your legs and picking you up.

You squealed as she walked you over to your big couch, having forgotten about her FBI agent strength. She dropped you on the couch, crawling over you but you pushed her back so she fell flat on her back on the large couch, throwing a leg over her hips to straddle her. She tried sitting up but you pushed her back, kissing her again so she would give in, letting you take control of the kiss. Her hands trailed up your body until they reached your tits and she tugged at the front of your dress, letting them spill out the front of it. You gasped, and she took your shock to her advantage, throwing her hips up into yours and rolling over so she was on top of you.

Her hands were instantly on your tits, pulling and twisting at your nipple, the other one in her mouth. "Em, Emily!" You begged, trying to grind your hips into hers but she wouldn't listen, taking her time kissing all over your body. When she couldn't reach any more skin due to the fabric of your dress, she fully separated from you, ordering you to turn around so she could undo the zipper. So you got up onto your knees, allowing Emily to undo your dress and pull it above your head, before her hands were wandering again, down your stomach and into the skimpy panties you wore.

She moaned into your ear, feeling how wet you were before both her hands were at your hips again and she was tugging you towards her as she fell backwards, landing you in her laps. She welcomed your kisses, tightly gripping your hips as you ground your cunt on her jean-clad skin. Eventually, you got desperate, tugging her shirt up so you could feel underneath it, hungrily reaching for her tits. At your whine, she finishes the job for you, tossing her shirt somewhere in the room before your hands were back behind her, unclasping her bra.

Before you manage to throw yourself onto Emily even further, you feel her hand under your panties, immediately searching for your clit, which she finds in mere seconds. You hear yourself begging for her, struggling to hold yourself above her. Emily's hands manhandle you so your back in pressed against hers, your legs spread in front of you. Her hands begin wandering once more, and she inserts two fingers into your warm core. You cry out, arching your back as Emily continues to suck hickeys onto your neck.

Her unoccupied hand plays with your tits, alternating which one she massages. Your head rests in the crook of her next, trying not to buck your hips into her hand as she continues fingering you. Your chest heaves with each breath you take, and you're too far into pleasure land to think of how much of a mistake you were making. You feel the familiar knot building up in your stomach and whimper, your hands reaching below you to grasp Emily's thigh. Moaning loudly with an arch of your back, you cum on Emily's hand. Emily, who is whispering praises in your ear and brushing your hair out of your face with her free hand.

With the effects of your orgasm now gone and you catching your breath, you begin to internally cringe. Why on earth did you think this was a good idea? You will yourself to turn around in Emily's arms, whispering "Your turn", fully aware that she wouldn't say yes. "No baby, it's okay. This is just about you." You nod, allowing yourself to fall onto the couch beside her. "I'm gonna go get cleaned up." Dragging yourself up from the couch, your legs still shaking, you shut the bathroom door before Emily gets the time to follow you.

You wrap a free towel around your torso, mentally cussing yourself out, thinking of a way to get Emily out of your house. The clock on the wall reads 3:28. It's late. You should go home. Repeating the words to yourself, you open the bathroom door to be met with the tall brunette. She smiles widely, a hand coming to your hip to bring you close and kiss you softly. You return her kiss but can't bring yourself to do the same with a smile. She senses the change in your behaviour and you take that as your chance to tell her: "It's late. You should go." You look down and away from her face so you can't see the way her smile drops. "Right. Um, this was fun." Your hum is enough of an answer to her and you practically chase her to the door once she's fully clothed.

Once the door is shut behind her, you peek through the peep hole to see her bring a hand up to her forehead, squeezing her eyes shut. She calls someone on the phone, someone you can only imagine was at the table with her at the bar. Listening closely through the door, you hear "No Derek, I did not win her heart back. She's really done with me."

But it's late. You should go sleep.

#emily prentiss #emily prentiss x you #emily prentiss x female reader #emily prentiss x reader #rainydayathogwarts #emily prentiss smut #emily prentiss angst #angst #female reader #smut #criminal minds #criminalmindsfandom #criminal minds fanfic #criminalminds #criminal minds fics #criminal minds fic #derek morgan #criminal minds smut #spencer reid

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the-bar-sinister · 12 days

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There's lots of gay subtext in Ace Attorney.

But when looking specifically at subtext that might be intentionally put in the narrative by the creators with the intention that the character in question is actually gay, I think the main character with the most evidence behind this is actually Apollo Justice.

Our other main characters, Phoenix Wright and Athena Cykes both have obvious subtextually heteronormative romantic partners. To an adult, straight, culturally normative audience, Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey read normatively as an obvious romantic pairing. This is also the case for Athena Cykes and Simon Blackquill. In Great Ace Attorney the same can be said for Ryuunosuke and Susato.

I repeat– to an adult, straight culturally normative audience, the romantic subtext between these characters is clear. If you showed these games to an American movie going public, that would be the obvious read by the audience.

Yes, each of these characters, Phoenix, Athena, and Ryuunosuke also have strong queer romantic subtext with another character. (Miles, Juniper, and Kazuma respectively).

However, that's not my point. It's not significant that each of the other three characters has homosexual relationship subtext.

It is significant that Apollo Justice does not have a character with whom he has heteronormative romantic subtext.

The closest thing Apollo Justice has to a "heteronormative romantic subtext" is Trucy Wright– whom we, the audience know is his sister.

And yes, you can make the argument that there is deliberate incestuous subtext between them– a kind of Luke/Leia style relationship with which the audience is teased by the narrative. Dhurke brings it up directly in Spirit of Justice.

However, this is still not a heterenormative subtext, because of its taboo nature. More taboo, culturally at this point, than homosexuality.

On top of the lack of heteronormative romantic subtext, Apollo also is on the receiving end some of the strongest and most overt of the homosexual subtext in the series.

There is of course the famous "meet cute" introduction between Apollo and Klavier–

“I must say, I'm used to being inspected by the ladies... but this is the first time I've felt this way with another man.”

This is without question overt homosexual subtext.

However, there is another, even more subtextually clearly defined moment in Dual Destinies. Honestly, the subtext is all over Dual Destinies in the way Apollo reacts to Clay Terran's death (basically completely losing it) but there's one particular moment that deliberately draws your attention to the relationship in a queer way.

In one of the last cases of the game, everyone is delicately trying to explain to the judge that Aura Blackquill was in love with Metis Cykes (who was murdered) in a queer way. It's a big “they’re lesbians, harold” moment.

And then the conversation immediately turns to Apollo Justice and how he’s just had someone who was “important to him” murdered, too.

The narrative specifically draws you attention to the relationship that Aura and Metis had, and compares it to the relationship between Apollo and Clay.

You are specifically invited to speculate about what kind of important relationship Clay and Apollo had, and why Apollo has been affected so incredibly deeply.

So yeah. Between Clay, Klavier, and the lack of anything resembling a heteronormative romantic relationship for Apollo in the games, I think he has the strongest narrative evidence that he's actually being written deliberately as gay.

#apollo justice #klapollo #claypollo #ace attorney #ace attorney meta #queer subtext #queer reading #queer media #media analysis #media literacy #🔍⚔️

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alexsoenomel · 8 months

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Rise and Shine (Dean Winchester x Reader fluff)

Requests: May I please request a Dean x reader where he finds out how ticklish she is one morning while snuggled up in bed together. He makes it his mission to find all her ticklish spots and finds her laughter absolutely adorable 🥰

Summary: Dean trying to wake up the reader from a coma.

Pairing: Dean x Reader

Warnings: Just fluff and I guess American Gods spoilers??

Word count: 1k+

Note: Wrote this because I was sad. Enjoy!

Like/ reblog or both if you like it :)

“What are you reading?” Dean asked as he snuggled against you, placing a kiss on your shoulder.

“American Gods,” You said, showing him the cover. It had two guys aka the main characters standing next to a black Chevy impala and two crows watching them.

“Is that…Baby?” He asked, all excited. At heart he was still a kid – one of the many reasons why you loved him. He was sometimes insufferable, with his silly jokes and teasing, but you wouldn’t trade him for the world.

“Hmmm, good eye.”

“What is it about?”

You knew he wasn’t going to leave you alone, so you took your reading glasses off, placed a book marker on the page you were currently reading and put it on your lap.

“You know how we sometimes kill Gods?” You sometimes didn’t believe your own voice when you would say shit like this. Killing Gods, vamps, demons…you name it. Sometimes it all sounded too far-fetched to be true. “And it all seems too crazy to be true?”

“Yeah, sounds like you took too many happy pills when you say it like that.”

“Yeah, well this is worse. Mythology on crack basically.”

“It can’t be that bad?”

“In the first chapter you learn about vaginal vore, Dean.” You said, putting the book on your night stand, along with glasses.

“The what now?”

“Exactly.”

It was a Friday, and since being a haunter wasn’t exactly working 9 til 5, you decided to go to bed early. You were planning to catch the sunrise and hit the road the next day. A new case, a new town – same old, same old.

As you turned the lights, Dean was already snuggled up against you, pulling you closer by your waist. His nose was in your freshly washed hair, as he placed a gentle kiss just under your ear, making you shiver. You rubbed your ass against his boxers and as a result he exhaled deeply.

“Don't!” He whispered. You bit your lower lip, trying to swallow a chuckle. “Sleep, or you’re driving tomorrow!”

“Not a chance!” You said. Even though Dean was overly protective of his Baby he would still let you drive from time to time. You just hated driving, especially driving in the morning. You hated mornings.

“Then good night, sweetheart!” He said, pulling you closer like that was even possible. You naturally had lower body temperature than Dean, so his body warmth would always make you sleepy. His scent in your nose, skin to skin – he was home.

“Good night, handsome.”

***

Dean woke up before you, like always. After showering and getting dressed he went to the kitchen and saw that Sam was already up, drinking coffee. It was almost 6am.

“Mornin’.”

“Mornin’” Sam said. “Are you driving?”

“Yeah.” Dean said, filling two mugs with coffee black as the night. “Give me 30 minutes, she is still asleep.”

“Okay.”

He tasted the bitterness of the semi-warm coffee, feeling every nerve in his brain activating. Nothing could beat the taste of black coffee in the morning for him. He felt like he was human again. When he went back to his room, you were still in a coma, only your hair was peeking from the covers. He placed the mugs on the nightstand.

“Rise and shine, princess!” He whispered, moving your hair from your face. You didn’t budge. He knew you were a heavy sleeper and the only way he was able to actually wake you up was with physical contact. He went under the covers and snuggled against you.

"Wake up, beautiful!"

You were half awake, feeling his warmth against you. You didn't want to wake up, your body was heavy and you could feel how tired you were. You've always said you will get proper sleep once you are dead and it was true. The life you were living wasn't for people who had a normal sleep schedule. A sign left your lips and your eyes refuse to open.

"Sam, made coffee!"

Nothing.

His fingers started to draw small circles on your belly as you squirmed. The sensation was strange, enough to pull you back to the Earth, finally.

"Mmm no!" You mumbled, snuggling your head under his chin. He smelled fresh like pines and you could feel the fabric on his body; he was already dressed. It hit you. It was already time to get up. Dean's hand was resting on your side.

"Mmm yes!" He said and kissed the top of your head.

"Five minutes!"

"It's never five minutes with you!"

He started doing the same thing again, brushing his fingers against your skin making you squirm. You mumbled something under your breath and moved his hand from your naked body.

"What is it?"

"That tickles."

Dean made an "oh" sound when he realized what you were talking about. Maybe that will wake you up?

"You ticklish?" He asked.

Still groggy you mumbled no but he didn't believe you.

Instead his hand went on your thigh and again he started drawing small circles as lightly as he possibly could.

"Stop!" You mumbled again, growing annoyed by the second.

"YOU ARE!" He said.

This time he went in with full force. He wanted to discover your weak spots as his fingers touched any naked surface he could find, and since you slept in only your underwear it was easy.

"NO, DEAN!" Your eyes were fully open now and you were awake. Your instinct kicked in and you tried to get him off you, kicking your feet, but he was holding you with his other hand.

"Oh yes!"

Your still sleepy body was now awake and spasming, feeling rather uncomfortable. You hated that feeling. You didn't want to laugh and yet you couldn't stop.

"STOP IT!"

He took both of your hands and put them above your head, now on top of you inches away from your face. The smell of coffee in his breath on your face and a silly little smirk watching you as you were finally fully awake and aware of your own existence.

"Good morning sunshine," his voice was deep as the Pacific and raspy enough to make you shiver.

His lips met yours in a light kiss.

"From now on I'm waking you up like this."

"Please don't!"

"You laugh like a house, it's adorable!"

You frowned and lightly punched him in the shoulder.

"Eat me,Winchester!"

"I'll when we finish the case!" He winked.

#supernatural #supernatural fanfiction #spn #supernatural fic #spn drabble #spn fanfic #spn fluff #supernatural fluff #dean winchester #spn fic #dean Winchester fluff #dean x reader fluff #dean x y/n #dean x you #dean x reader #dean winchester x reader fluff #dean Winchester x reader

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jewishvitya · 4 months

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Saw an interview with the Israeli ambassador in the UK where she openly rejects the idea of a Palestinian state at all. Including in a two-states scenario. Which, I knew this is the position of our government, Netanyahu was recently trying to push the "I'm the only one who can prevent a Palestinian state," but she was unusually open and explicit about it for an international interview.

And I didn't realize it at first (because I'm awful with faces... and names) but that's Tzipi Hotoveli. She's so right-wing that she was a popular name in the settlements when I lived there. And this is something I can say about many politicians currently running the government, they are the names that aligned politically with the most extremist community. And this is why she's so bad at being diplomatic about it - the people with that mentality rarely care about watering down their goals.

A mutual of mine on a different platform, an American anti-zionist Jew, talked about a trip they took to the West Bank. It was organized to show the occupation, the checkpoints, etc. Someone asked in response if they visited settlements too, and said that he was glad they enjoyed the trip, but it seems to be all one color.

This was a weird comment. What can you see in the settlements to change your mind, if you care about human rights. What can you see that would erase the suffering of Palestinians there, or give context to justify it. Even if settlers knew to say all the right words, this shouldn't be enough to make you forget what Palestinians are living through.

But they don't say the right words. Especially there, the people openly dehumanize Palestinians. And if you talk to them for a while, they will do it to your face. And they will be open about wanting no Palestinians living on any part of the land. Israeli Arabs are often seen as a different story, as long as they accept Israeli sovereignty. Still not fully trusted, though.

I saw someone confusing the electric fence I mentioned in a few posts, with the separation fence, which is the wall around the West Bank. Not the same thing.

The separation fence is built within the territory of the West Bank, but it's a large wall all around that cuts them off from other areas of the land.

The electric fence is smaller, and it's specific. The one I'm referring to is in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron. That's the settlement I grew up in. It's one of the more established settlements, and it's basically a small town. Right behind the apartment building I lived in, there was the electric fence. And in a distance of maybe a couple of traffic lanes past the fence, were Palestinian homes. They could see us, we could see them.

The fence was there for our sake, not for the Palestinians. But sometimes the settlers would tear it down, forcing the border police and the military to guard that spot and rebuild it. I wondered why, because a hole in the fence near my home scared me. And then I learned they were protesting against the feeling that they're being contained. The settlers, with how they're constantly expanding, felt that they're not given enough. Settlers treat "we can't expand as fast as we'd like" as if that's oppression.

They would regularly get into conflicts with border police and with the military over this. They'd go out to claim another hill, and their temporary homes would get torn down. Individuals from the West Bank settlements would have the Shin Bet keeping track of them in case they'll do something that could provoke an escalation of violence. And this isn't to claim that Israel was being fair to Palestinians or protecting their interests. It just means that Israel tried to be strategic to an extent, and the settlers are inflammatory. Their stated goal, openly talked about, is to establish a presence on the ground, so that any agreement that gives land to Palestinians won't be possible. I kept hearing sentences like "not even a square centimeter." Meaning that they want to leave nothing for Palestinians. They aren't trying to think about what Israel can get away with, they feel entitled to everything.

And these are the people that the current Israeli government aligns with. Which puts a lot of things out in the open, and pushes a lot of other things into further extremes.

#I'm not trying to pretend other Israreli governments were GOOD #I'm just trying to illustrate the current mentality #riki babbles

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jesncin · 4 months

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A Failure of Asian Lois Lane: Pt 2: My Adventures with Superman, an honest discussion

If I had to pinpoint the fundamental problem with My Adventures with Superman's depiction of Asian Lois Lane it's in their attempt to subvert the classic two person love triangle: Lois loves Superman but is indifferent to Clark Kent. In MAWS, Lois insta-crushes on Clark Kent and hates Superman. In the show's attempt to make sense of this dynamic, Lois' Asian identity becomes at odds with a story meant to touch on xenophobia and immigrant themes.

Let's have an honest discussion about a show that made fandom cheer as an Asian character removed the one thing that made her most visibly Asian.

Disclaimer: While I am of East Asian descent, I am not Korean. I'll be discussing general Asian diasporic experiences but the specifics of Korean culture are outside of my knowledge (as usual I can't and don't speak for every Asian person ever, I am 1 opinion). Secondly, I'll be pulling from my personal experiences every now and then particularly pertaining to being a butch Asian person watching this show. It'll be a mix of formal analysis and personal anecdotes. Thirdly, this isn't an exhaustive analysis of MAWS Lois' character. We'll be sticking to what I consider is relevant to themes of Asian identity and immigration. Lastly once more, I do not believe the MAWS crew had malicious intent in any (of what I consider) poor writing decisions. We're here to analyze and challenge these writing decisions.

Please read Pt 1 of Asian Lois analysis that covers the comics, as it provides the groundwork for the ideas expanded on in this essay.

We need to talk about Lois' design. In the follow up to MAWS' release, people have been speculating on Lois' ethnicity. CBR writes that the show has "some fans believing that she's at least part Asian" and other articles have the show crew confirm Lois Korean heritage via her hanbok outfit in episode 4. The existence of these articles, my own anecdotal experience of streaming MAWS with Asian friends, and comments I receive from people asserting Lois' Asian identity was never explored in the show ("you'd only know she was Asian if you searched up articles about it"), tells me we have a case of an ambiguously designed Asian woman. Tangentially many people had no idea Livewire, the white haired and blue eyed woman, was meant to be South Asian.

There's a lot to be said about art styles that don't properly stylize ethnic features, but for the purposes of our analysis that means the writing has to deliver the heavy lifting where the design fails. This is the opposite case of American Alien: a comic that relied on the art to portray Asian Lois.

Let's start at episode 3. In it, Lois finally manages to conduct a private interview with the elusive Superman. When she asks where Superman comes from, how his powers work, etc- Superman comes up empty. In this version, Superman can't talk to his Kryptonian father (Jor-El)'s hologram because of a language barrier, so he knows very little about his alien heritage. He leaves Lois, assuring her he's here to help the people of Metropolis. When Clark Kent congratulates her for interviewing Superman, Lois rebuffs him. "Oh, he's [Superman's] a liar." smirking as she says it. This is the start of the Lois Hates Superman For Being a Liar arc.

I'd like you to consider the optics of an Asian American woman interviewing an alien immigrant who honestly told her he doesn't know where he comes from and is still figuring out who he is, only for her to think he's lying. Because she didn't get the answers she wanted. I can't help but think about my own experiences, where I was asked "but where do you really come from?" or "okay but what's your real name?" I think of my Asian American peers who would honestly say they're from Texas or Atlanta and get a vindictive "you're lying" as a response. People want to hear you're from China. They want their biases confirmed. I think about how I honestly can't tell you where my elders hailed from, because of cultural genocide and language barriers. This scene makes me uncomfortable, but let's press on.

Episode 4 is where Lois is most visibly Korean. In this episode the trio of Lois, Clark, and Jimmy are tasked with interviewing rich techbro Prof. Ivo of Amazo tech at an investor event. It's a prom episode. Lois wears a "hanbok inspired gala outfit" designed by Dou Hong and Jane Bak in a deliberate move to showcase Lois' Korean heritage. Bak comments "I remember feeling strongly about wanting to inject some aspect of her Korean heritage without disrupting her characteristic as a spunky and resourceful intern/reporter." while the wording poorly implies that Korean heritage is at odds with Lois' spunky personality- I do want to challenge a couple of the decisions that went into this design.

I want to acknowledge as an Asian butch that there are many ways to sport traditional garments and it's okay to mix and match to figure out what reclaiming culture (and your comfort) mean to you. However we're talking about the opportunity to showcase culture in an episode of a fictional animated show. I also encourage cultural gender expression that thinks outside of western white people's idea of gender (in both fiction and real life).

Whenever artists try to do a non-conforming spin on a cultural outfit, I always have to ask: "what standard of masculinity are we basing this on?" It's clear that MAWS is pushing for a "tomboy" Lois, and this gala outfit is an extension of that. But what's the standards of masculinity in a Korean lens? Men wear hanbok too, so why can't Lois imitate how Korean men wear hanbok, by traditionally accompanying her look with baji (baggy and loose pants)? This design notably has tight pants that hug the form, instead. I know the hanbok look has been modernized in and out of Korea in many ways, but in a show where you have the opportunity to showcase cultural non-conformity, I feel more thought should be put into the outfit outside of a potentially western lens- or the idea that cultural heritage of any sort "disrupts" a character's personality.

Now that we've discussed the design of the outfit, let's look into the narrative role it plays in episode 4. While we can celebrate cultural representation in media, I consider it important to ask "what is this media's relationship with the cultures it represents?" and the answer for Lois' hanbok in this episode is: nothing! It's an aesthetic acknowledgement of culture. "Hanbok" or "Korea" are not terms explicitly mentioned in the show. When Prof Ivo offers beautiful women as compensation for Clark to keep quiet about his company's corruption, Ivo looks over to Lois- who spills food on her clothes, and remarks that she's unclassy. She's not judged for wearing othering cultural clothes- which would have tied nicely into Clark choosing to be silent on issues of Ivo displacing a neighborhood, making Clark realize his complacency actively hurts marginalized people. Despite wearing cultural outfits being a political statement in America, nobody reacts to it. It's clear what the actual goal of this scene is: Clark looks cool for defending his "tomboy" crush.

In a scene blatantly made for fanservice, Lois offers to sew up Clark's ripped tuxedo by undressing her hanbok so she can reach her little sewing kit. Lois never wears her hanbok again afterwards. This scene haunts me. It's a scene that tells you that fanservice is more important than cultural representation. It's a scene meant to set up that Clark gives his tuxedo to Lois later on for warmth. Lois removing her hanbok is meant for not one, but two fanservice scenes.

Lois talks to Clark at the stairwell. She opens up about her estranged relationship with her father, how her mom has passed away, and how she's been an intern at the Daily Planet for a year with no sign of being hired. This makes the narrative decision for Lois to lose her hanbok far more tragic. Lois being a diasporic child with so few familial ties to her culture would mean garments like her hanbok would hold a lot of sentimental value! It's hard enough finding a cultural outfit that fits with your butchess (many of my cultural outfits are hand made to fit my form and gender expression), and yet Lois unceremoniously loses her hanbok. You would think in Lois opening up about being distant from her parents that Clark would be able to culturally relate with the distance he has with his Kryptonian parents. But the narrative opportunity to link their immigrant experiences is not taken, because the show simply doesn't recognize the parallel between the two.

Instead MAWS pushes for the Lois Thinks Superman is A Liar thing again. A far less narratively substantial and fundamentally flawed arc. This episode starts with Lois calling Superman a liar and has Lois ranting about him "dodging her questions" (remember, he was honest with her about not knowing his heritage) thereby rendering her interview unpublishable. She resorts to conspiracy tabloids giddily provided by Jimmy for information. She rather cruelly says "nobody normal believes in aliens". We are uncomfortably seeing the build up of Lois being allegorically xenophobic towards alien immigrants- a Lois on a quest to out an alien before he's ready. This is their justification for flipping the love triangle. Lois loves cuteboy Clark from work, and hates Superman for not confirming her biases that would help her publish an interview that would promote her at work. What a love story.

To wrap this episode up: Prof Ivo ends up challenging Superman to a fight so he can flex his Parasite suit to investors, only for it to backfire, destroy his reputation, and greatly damage the Amazo building (remember this it'll come back later). The episode ends with Lois discovering Superman is Clark Kent. Anecdotally, I was so frustrated with the treatment of Lois' hanbok in this episode, that I went online to search if anyone else felt similarly. All I was met with was fandom thirsting over the stairwell scene where Clark and Lois were undressing. Consider the optics of an Asian character who removed the most visible signifier of her heritage (the outfit far more culturally specific where her character design was racially ambiguous) and how people cheered because that meant they could see her in her undergarments. They can happily thirst over the body they desired now that the othering cultural garment was out of the way. It's just clothes after all. Diversity clothes. This show continues to be very uncomfortable, and a little too real.

In episode 5 Lois is passive aggressive to Clark and Superman, trying to get Clark to admit he's Superman and vice versa. She eventually confronts Clark by jumping off the roof of the Daily Planet, causing Clark to fly down and save her. She proclaims she doesn't want to be friends with him anymore for "lying" to her. This episode caused a huge ruckus online as people were divisive over Lois' actions. Some defended Lois, saying that "women should be messy" and "it's not Lois Lane if she doesn't do something crazy for journalism!". Ignoring that opinion's very flandarized view of Lois' character for a second, let's thoroughly discuss how this relates to themes of immigration and Asian identity.

By this episode, Lois had known Clark for 5 days. In that time she's entitled and angry to the point of friend-breaking-up with him because he wouldn't disclose his marginalized identity to her within less than a week. "A secret is another type of lie!" Lois says, regardless of her lying on sight to both Jimmy and Clark upon meeting them at work, and continued to lie in episode 3 (after promising not to in ep 1) about her intentions to interview Superman. Only Lois gets to lie in this relationship. The hypocrisy of her character is never recognized. Clark calls out Lois for having previously admitted to him that she wanted to dox Superman and "publish all his secrets. MY secrets!". Keep in mind that when Clark brings up Superman feeling uncomfortable about his secrets being published by Lois in episode 3, Lois' response was "yeah, but HE doesn't know that's my plan!". She explicitly admits that she would publish private information about Superman without his permission. But when she's confronted by Clark in episode 5 about that, her response is "I would never do that to you, I didn't know it was you until after the gala. How could you think that?" It's only through conflict of interest that Lois spares Superman of being doxed. He's supposed to magically know this. Extremely cool of Asian American Lois to be entitled to an alien immigrant's identity within four business days.

Episode 6 wraps up the Lois Hates Superman For Being A Liar arc, so let's quickly summarize what happens. Lois and Clark set aside their fight to find Jimmy in an abandoned scientific facility (he's being cared for by Mallah and the Brain). Jimmy admits (very smugly) to having known Clark was Superman all along because he kept breaking stuff. As the trio are chased by killer robots, they emotionally confront Clark for not trusting them with his alien secret- despite neither Lois or Jimmy creating a safe environment for Clark to come out to either of them (Jimmy outed Superman as an alien on his video channel). The moral of the story is Clark should have trusted his friends anyway, because lying is bad. Not once does the narrative hold Jimmy or Lois accountable.

We have Black Jimmy Olsen and Asian American Lois Lane being entitled to their white passing friend Clark Kent's marginalized alien identity. A joke is made at Jimmy's expense that he doesn't understand bigotry, and Lois clearly doesn't understand why an immigrant wouldn't be forthcoming about his identity to his hostile friends at work. This is how that arc ends.

I'd like to quickly compare this Lois Hates Superman For Being A Liar arc to my favorite scene in Superman Smashes the Klan. In this story, Superman debuts as a strongman superhero instead of an alien, suppressing his more othering powers to pass as human. He jumps instead of flying. Roberta, the Chinese American girl targeted by the Klan, calls Superman out for not using his full abilities to save people who could've gotten hurt. Yet, as she's calling him out, Roberta understands Superman's fear of not wanting to be othered. She sees the way her father dresses up to pass as an accomplished scientist, how he tells her mom to speak in English, how her brother makes racist jokes at their family's expense to fit in. She's not mad at Superman, she's mad at the world that would be scared of Superman if he flew.

"I wish it were okay for you to fly!" Roberta yells. This is a beautifully empathetic scene that shows a marginalized person frustrated at a systemic problem, instead of blaming the marginalized for being marginalized. It's the empathy and perspective we're missing from MAWS.

Episode 7 is a metatextual episode where MAWS addresses how their Lois isn't like the other Loises you've seen before. Lois and Jimmy are brought on to a team of alternate dimension Loises to find interdimensional troublemaker Mxy. In seeing the other more accomplished Loises in the multiverses, Lois ends up feeling inadequate about her self worth...in connection to being Superman's girlfriend, of course. Because Superman only loves Lois Lane after she wins a couple of Pulitzers, right?

I'm open to a version of Lois Lane that isn't as accomplished as she's historically known to be. I can like a Lois that's young and idealistic, like in Girl Taking Over. It's hard not to compare this episode to 2022's Everything Everywhere All At Once, another multiverse story about an Asian American woman who is the "greatest failure" version of all the parallel iterations of herself. But while that movie talks in depth about themes of generational trauma, expectations, and self potential within Asian immigrant families, MAWS uses the multiverse to say that while their Lois is less accomplished, she's still a good girlfriend to Superman! Why should I bother giving grace to a different take on Lois only to get such a superficial story out of it. This is metatextual-ly frustrating.

Why is it, the minute we get an adaptation of an Asian Lois in something as prominent as an animated show, we get "the worst Lois in the multiverse"? Lois is historically depicted as excelling in her field. She's an award winning journalist, jaded and mean from having to work her way to the top. She owns her sexuality, she's the experienced city girl. Instead of taking the opportunity to inform Lois' jadedness and excellence with her Asian American identity like in Girl Taking Over, instead we have an Asian Lois that's simply incompetent at her job. Why are we now adapting historically accomplished women into adorkable quirky screw ups? She went from being sexually confident to being insecure over sending a text to Clark. Is it more relateable to see an Asian woman that way? Is it too intimidating to see a butch Asian woman who excels at her job? Who's romantically confident? This is what MAWS would rather do than humanize her excellence or her failures.

Are you tired of an ambiguously designed Asian American woman reporter being xenophobic to Superman in MAWS? Well too bad because episode 8 introduces us to Vicki Vale, voiced by Andromeda Dunker (an Asian actress), with explicit notes in leaked concept art to design this character as "Indian American or Asian American" (as if those are mutually exclusive...) inspired off of real Asian reporter Connie Chung. Vicki wants to write a hit piece on Superman and interviews Prof Ivo's assistant, Alex, for a negative biased opinion on Superman (to Lois and Jimmy's dismay).

This episode is where it's abundantly clear the writers don't know how to talk about xenophobia. They'll make nods to xenophobic rhetoric, but they don't know what the rhetoric means. In response to Alex's derisive opinion on Superman destroying Amazo tower thereby bankrupting the company and putting "thousands out of work", Vicki responds "Superman wiped out good American jobs". This is a misplaced nod to Replacement Theory: the fear white people have over people of color, but particularly immigrants, coming to "their" country to "steal" jobs they're entitled to, ultimately becoming demographically replaced by non-white cultures and people. This rhetoric is also commonly applied to Jewish people.

The problem is, that's not what Superman did in the show. Amazo tech was going to go bankrupt because of Prof Ivo's poor business decisions. Prof Ivo made the mistake of antagonizing Superman and ruining his own image. Superman damaging the building came from his fight with Prof Ivo, not a deliberate attempt to get hired (if anything don't the building repair people have new jobs now?). No one's job is tangibly being taken by Superman. None of this is called out by Lois or Jimmy, who know the full story and were even the ones to attack Alex for helping Prof Ivo (let's be real the writers forgot this happened). In fact, Lois and Jimmy don't react to Vicki's Replacement Theory remark at all! It's like they don't even recognize she said something with racist implications!

Jimmy and Lois meet up with Superman who learns the people of Metropolis are becoming scared of him (from causing some recent property damage in an attempt to hunt a criminal down) and writing mean comments on social media. A user writes "he should go back to where he came from." This is a transparently xenophobic comment. It doesn't work in the context of the show because of a huge plot hole: Superman never publicly came out as an alien to Metropolis. No verified newspaper has explicitly made this fact known. The only source that mentions this is Jimmy's conspiracy channel, which the citizens of Metropolis are apparently treating as fact- therefore (if we're to believe this is how people knew) this means Jimmy absolutely outed Superman as an alien without Clark's consent.

So how does Asian American Lois respond to seeing her alien boyfriend go through xenophobia? She says "Take a break from being Superman and just try being normal." To be fair, the narrative does portray Lois saying the word "normal" as charged (only here at least, not in episode 4), and when she tells Superman to "take a break" it's because he had been overworking himself after suddenly unlocking the ability to hear when someone's in trouble. But was this really the response Asian American Lois thought to say? To her boyfriend going through such explicit xenophobia? At this point it's abundantly clear that racism doesn't exist in the world of MAWS. Being "normal" is to be human. And to be marginalized- or as the show likes to call it "different" is only reserved for white passing alien man Clark (along with gorilla and robot that was once a white man). Any hope of an immigrant parallel between Asian American Lois and Superman should be fully discarded at this point.

After the events of the previous episode where Superman is kidnapped by Task Force X, in episode 9 Lois regrets being allegorically xenophobic to Clark. At least I think that's what's happening. I often describe MAWS as a show that's extremely squeamish with getting political- and I believe the vagueness of Lois' Dark Night of the Soul moment reflects that. "I said awful things to Clark. I doubted him when he needed us most. I was wrong and now he's gone..." Lois says as she cries to Jimmy. Is this dialogue implying she shouldn't have told a sleep deprived Superman to take a break? What did she doubt about him? This dialogue is purposefully vague about Lois being xenophobic. They've universalized Clark's immigrant identity to such a point that they can't keep their argument consistent. Was Lois in the wrong for telling her overworked superhero boyfriend to take a break? Or was she being xenophobic for telling him to lay low for a while? Or is she regretful for hating Superman for Being A Liar? How is that possible when the narrative sided with her and Jimmy in episode 6? It's woefully non-committal. Regardless, the intent of this scene is to pay off in the climax of the episode.

In the end Superman has a showdown with Prof Ivo Parasite, who has grown into a large godzilla-esque kaiju creature. In typical MAWS fashion, the show is more interested in a surface level nod to Asian media instead of engaging with the specific themes of nature and post-war trauma kaijus and godzilla serve in Japanese culture. I digress. Using Jimmy's massive social media platform, Lois delivers a hope speech that instantly heals Metropolis of its xenophobia towards Superman.

Lois says to the people of Metropolis.: "People have told you to fear Superman because he's different from us. But we humans are capable of causing hurt and pain too. [...] Because we want to punish those who don't look or act like us." I mean this in the most polite way possible, but who on Earth thought this line was a good idea for Asian American Lois Lane to deliver when talking about white passing man Superman?? Why did the writers feel the need to specify Superman not looking like us. I simply don't understand how nobody considered the terrible optics of this.

After Superman defeats Parasite, episode 10 is about Clark, Lois, and Jimmy celebrating Thanksgiving at the Kents' house. At the Daily Planet, the trio of interns are promoted to finally being reporters. It only took Clark and Jimmy a few weeks while it took Lois a whole year! Now feels like a good time to remind you that Lois as a character was historically frustrated at sexism in the industry and despised how men were treated better than her (including Clark Kent). Well in MAWS episode 4, Lois has no idea why she isn't getting picked up to be a reporter. According to the narrative, and Perry White's dialogue ("you're terrible interns, so the only thing to do was to make you reporters")- she simply didn't break enough rules yet! Thank goodness she had the help of two men to show her how it's done! This is a pretty clear case of character regression. Keep in mind that in American Alien, at the very least that Asian Lois still underwent sexism, and I gave it the grace that the story could eventually expand to talking about both sexism and racism if it were to continue. But in MAWS? I don't think even sexism exists, let alone racism. Somehow Thanksgiving does, though.

Half the final episode is spent on Thanksgiving shenanigans where everyone's trying to be polite but they dislike Lois' stoic dad (Sam Lane)- who Clark recognizes as the Asian American xenophobic man who tortured him in Task Force X's government bunkers. A parallel is pulled between Sam and Jor-El, two fathers with different ideals when it comes to protecting their kids. There's a huge missed opportunity to have Lois and Sam speak in Korean with each other, to create a parallel in the language barrier between Clark and Jor-El. Maybe Lois isn't as fluent in Korean as Sam is depending on how culturally connected she is. Oh, but the existence of non-English human languages would imply some sort of minority, who would be marginalized, and we can't have anyone outside of aliens and a gorilla be marginalized in MAWS. Non-English languages in America are political, after all. Oh, but they also got a Filipino actor to voice Sam. Generously Lois could be Filipino-Korean but if we're being truly honest it's clear the MAWS crew think Asians are interchangeable.

Let's talk about Sam. In terms of optics, it's already not great that the main villains who represent the face of America's secret government xenophobia are Amanda Waller and Sam Lane- a Black woman and an Asian man. What's doubly notable is that of the antagonistic villains, Sam and Vicki are the most xenophobic. When Sam tortures Superman, he shouts "When is the invasion? How many of your kind will come through this time?" without a hint of irony. Reminder that historically, Asian immigrants were (and still are) considered invaders in America. They are the perpetual foreigner. MAWS loves making nods to Superman being an immigrant allegory, and yet they can't fathom the human beings that allegory is inspired by.

It's not impossible to portray people of color or even Asian American characters specifically being xenophobic. In Superman Smashes the Klan, Dr. Lee is initially antagonistic towards Superman but we understand why. We see him trying desperately to assimilate into whiteness, to the point he rejects assistance from his Black neighbors who help put out a fire in their backyard (that the Klan started as a threat). We understand why he's a character who would turn on fellow people of color, or fellow immigrants, in order to fit in. For MAWS, if we had a flashback scene where Sam was serving in the military and fought against Asian soldiers, showcasing his loyalty to America over his own people- that would narratively explain why an Asian American character would be xenophobic. Writing bigotry from within marginalized communities requires specificity. Otherwise, you've just got a diverse villain. In the end, Lois defends her immigrant alien boyfriend from her xenophobic Asian American dad.

Whenever I bring up how MAWS fails its characters of color but especially Asian Lois, I'm met with people telling me that "hopefully they'll make Lois more Asian in S2" or "they'll just retcon the bad writing in S1" and I hope this thorough analysis on the treatment of Lois' Asian American identity can help enlighten why I personally think that's impossible. The entire concept is flawed from the very beginning. The story MAWS wants to tell is at odds with Lois' Asian identity. In trying to justify an Asian Lois that loves Clark but hates Superman, they never considered what it means to hate Superman. To hate the alien immigrant. The alien other. What it means for an Asian American character to do all that. MAWS is a show that wants to have its cake and eat it too, they want a diverse world without racism or sexism but still want to reap the clout of lightly portraying Superman as "different".

They'll make the most surface level nods to Lois' Korean heritage- but remove all of the cultural context from them. They can't be bothered to acknowledge the inherit political identity being a person of color means in America, they're too busy doing that with Clark. I'm told "MAWS didn't have the time to go over Lois' Asian identity, it's a 10-episode series that focuses on Clark's alienation", and to that I say the potential of an immigrant love story and time frame was there, they simply chose to go another direction.

When I bring up things like Superman Smashes the Klan, Girl Taking Over, and Everything Everywhere All At Once, it's not to say MAWS should have used those stories as reference when crafting their allegory. All of those specific media were released while MAWS was deep in production already. Girl Taking Over was released the same year MAWS premiered. What I am saying is that we, as the audience, should have higher standards. Because better media portraying Asian American characters already exist. Better media portraying Asian characters relating to Superman mythos already exists. What we're doing when we celebrate the breadcrumbs of representation that is MAWS, is allowing mediocrity to exist uncritically.

Shows like Wednesday are known in the discourse for their portrayal of Black characters as being functionally white, yet that kind of scrutiny doesn't seem known for MAWS. The diverse reimagining of Lois and Jimmy is so poorly handled in MAWS that it would honestly make more sense if Jimmy and Lois were white here. The joke made at Jimmy's expense that he doesn't understand bigotry would be actually funny if it was calling out his white privilege. If, for whatever reason, the writers are compelled to write a xenophobic Lois that unlearns her bigotry and falls for Superman, I'd rather she be white for that kind of story. I wouldn't personally root for that kind of couple, but at least it'd make sense. It's a common joke among DCAU fans of color that we like to headcanon Lex Luthor as Black, or Lois Lane and Terry Mcginnis as Asian. It's a cruel irony that the one time we finally have a canonized Asian Lois in an animated show, she honestly feels and acts whiter than actual white Lois ever was.

I mentioned in Pt 1 of my essay that Asian Lois and Superman has the potential to be a definitive love story. One that considers both their backgrounds as immigrants, othered in different ways by American society. The story of a jaded but accomplished Asian city girl who finds hope to be herself again in an alien immigrant superhero. One where she gets the courage to wear traditional clothes again, to practice languages she once suppressed. The story of Superman, an alien immigrant, finding hope in someone with a painfully similar experience.

As of writing, we have yet to see this dynamic in any canon DC media. A second season of MAWS will not give us that story.

#ramblings #media criticism #jesncin talks maws #lois lane #warning LONG LONG POST #this is a 30 minute read for reference. read it in chunks if u like but this is a big lad fellas #as always please be kind!#jesncin dc meta

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gimmeurtmi · 1 year

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you’ve got mail — i.n (lover #1)

pairing: yang jeongin x fem!reader

tags: secret admirer mini series, best friends to lovers, uni!au, ot8 inclusive, smut!!!🔞

warnings: swearing, frat boys, first time, virgin!jeongin, mentions of alcohol, slight angst, protected sex,

inspo: just pure valentine’s day fluff <3

notes: this doesn’t mention innie’s birthday because i was gonna do something separate for that and that didn’t work out kjhjjhh so to make up for that here’s a gift for pinky princess day! banner by @sluttywonwoo

🤍📮💌 this letter contains 5678 words 💌📮🤍

Being the youngest of the group was not something Jeongin was used to. In school, considering he had to repeat a year, he was the oldest. All his friends acting like he was the wisest, too—when everyone knew that wasn’t exactly the case.

So when he moved to university, and followed everyone’s advice to join a fraternity, he was surprised to find he was the youngest pledge there.

It meant the brothers all babied him, telling him how cute he was and how much they loved his squishy cheeks and his smile and his dimples.

This wasn’t exactly what Jeongin envisioned when he thought about a frat. He imagined things being a bit more like those rude movies him and his friends sneaked into the house to watch late at night. American Pie was not what Jeongin was met with—and as much as the brothers wanted him to be sweet and innocent, his mind was anything but.

He wanted a party with people dancing on tables and girls throwing themselves at him. In all honesty, he just wanted to lose his virginity already. But he doubted any of the brothers would even help him with something like that considering he was the baby.

Besides, since he wasn’t actually part of the fraternity just yet, President Bang made him work at most of the parties—so when was he supposed to try and make a move on someone?

That wasn’t the only problem of course. There was also the small issue of Jeongin being very good friends with Y/N, one of the girls from the sorority on campus. And because you were such good friends, best friends even, Jeongin spent a lot of time eating lunch with you and your other girl friends. And somehow, the cute sweet innocent image followed Jeongin to the sorority, too.

Instant friendzone.

The girls all confide in him, and take him out to movies, and take OOTD pictures with him. As a friend.

How was Jeongin ever gonna get a girlfriend—let alone finally take the last step he had left to take and have sex?

Of course, he wasn’t ever actually upset by it, being surrounded by friends. And the friendzone didn’t matter all too much to him considering he didn’t have a crush on anyone. He just wanted some action already.

It was the second term of school, and Chan had called a frat meeting—something so important even the pledges were asked to come.

All the brothers were there, gathered in the living room of the frat house. And as expected, everybody cood cutely when Jeongin walked in.

“Look at your hair!” Changbin grinned, walking all the way over and wrapping his big arm around Jeongin’s shoulder. For someone as big as him, it always surprised Jeongin just how delicate he was.

They all complimented him for his new bleached look, something Jeongin did on a whim during the winter break.

The girls said he looked very handsome, which was friendly enough of them. But he was glad the brothers liked it too.

As more and more of them walked in, exchanging half hugs and hands clapped together, President Chan finally called everyone to attention.

“So! As you know, our Christmas party was very successful and everyone on campus is already excited for our next event!” Everyone cheered. “The president of the sorority and I came up with the next thing.”

“Please not another talent show,” Jisung stage whispered, remembering the incredibly embarrassing routine the girls forced him to do last time.

“It’s not another talent show,” Chan laughed, his dimples wide. “Valentine’s Day is coming soon.”

The room hummed and nodded.

“We’re doing a Secret Admirer Party.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing,” Seungmin whispered into Jeongin’s ear, rolling his eyes softly at the younger boy. Jeongin snickered.

“Did you make that up?” one of the other brother’s Jeongin didn’t know too well asked.

“Maybe,” Chan shrugged. “Think of it like secret santa, but for couples.”

Chan pulled out a box and shook it, small pieces of paper moving around inside it.

“Whoever wants to participate will take a slip of paper that has a name of one of the sorority girls on it. And that makes you their secret admirer. So, just put a smile on their face in the lead up to Valentine’s Day and on the 14th we’ll have a big party and the girls will have to figure out who their admirer is.”

“Chan,” one of the brothers raised his hand, “isn’t this all just a little too heteronormative?”

“No,” Chan said quickly, “this is about having good relationships with the sorority. I didn’t say you need to be romantic or marry them.”

“And if I wanna bring a guy to be my Valentine’s?”

“Then do that,” Chan shrugged, “but we still wanna make sure the girl you pick has a good night.”

Everyone nodded, happy with Chan’s explanations.

“Or you don’t have to participate,” he reminded, “if you don’t then you’re doing the car wash though.”

“I’ll participate!” He quickly said.

Everyone laughed.

A few questions were asked, Chan making sure to answer them thoroughly. The pledges were also participating, you weren’t allowed to reveal yourself before the party, crossing boundaries would get you punched by Chan, and pulling a name to then not participate would get you a warning and a discussion about your future with the frat. Everyone swallowed at that last one.

After that, Chan excitedly pulled up the box again, shaking it around.

“I think Felix should go first,” he said, walking towards the boy.

Felix’s face morphed into shock, looking around the room to try and understand why he was singled out. Until he realised everyone was going to pick one anyway.

“Shouldn’t it go by age?” Minho asked from where he was slumped in the corner. He’s been sulking since him and his girlfriend broke up, Jeongin realised it was the first time he said anything—a big contrast to how excited all the other brothers were for the romantic event.

“Felix raised the most money in our last baked goods sale—so he goes first,” Chan confirmed, nodding at the freckled boy.

Felix cautiously dipped his hand into the box, hissing softly before picking up one of the slips.

He opened it close to his face, but he couldn’t hide the smile glued on his features, freckles all but shining in response to the contents of the slip.

Jeongin would have to ask him who’s name was written on there.

Chan then decided the rest of the order would follow the sitting arrangement, which was pretty random, each of the boys looking over their slip and reacting silently. Except for Jisung, who yelled out a “no!”

“You pick who you pick,” Chan reminded him.

“But, hyung—“

“—enough.” Chan leaned over Jisung’s shoulder, reading the name and giggling. “It’s in the hands of fate, Han, nothing I can do.”

When the box reached Seungmin’s hand there were only another couple dozen slips left. He took one out and remained stoic. Jeongin never saw him reacting too loudly to anything anyway.

Then it was Jeongin’s turn.

He let out a sigh of relief when he read over the name. Y/N.

He was imagining every horror scenario possible, but this was the best case scenario. This would be easy; and as a pledge, Jeongin knew Chan would check up on him often. He could do this, easily! He knew you so well. The only objective was to make your winter a little bit nicer, light up your January blues. That was Jeongin’s task as the best friend anyway. It was basically a free pass.

He let himself smile as he nodded at Chan’s raised eyebrow.

Jeongin finished his day of studying, worked on his assignment and then sat down in front of his pile of empty letters. He went out and bought the nicest looking cards—pink flowers and hearts doting the outside of them. He thought you would like that.

Then he took out a pen, scribbling your name.

As soon as he saw it he realised you would recognise his handwriting in a heartbeat—and so he opened his laptop instead. He’d have to print them all out and stick them on the cards.

His first letter consisted of introducing himself to you, in the most casual and definitely not giving his identity away kind of way.

He hid it in your bag after your first class and watched as you blushed when you found it.

He wrote a silly joke down at the end of letter hoping to bring your mood up. He felt a swirl of pride in his chest when he heard you laughing at the card.

The next letter had another joke in it, and a reminder to eat your food well that day. He even wrote down a recipe for an easy and cost-effective pie that you could try and make.

Jeongin knew you got that letter when you sent him a snapchat with your dinner, the pie being a great success.

Then he wrote down a dream he had, just because he had no idea what else to write that day, and made sure to tell you he hopes your dreams are all pleasant and that you have something to cuddle with. Jeongin knew you left your plushies at home because your roommate was making fun of you for them, and decided to add a question at the end of that letter.

“Hey, Innie,” you smiled at him as he dropped you off at your dorm after your study date, “you know who has me for those letter things, right?”

“I can’t say anything about it—“ he avoided your gaze, heart sinking. If he was caught already Chan might kill him.

“No, no, don’t say anything to me. It’s just.. he asked me something and I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond to him.”

Shit. Jeongin was an idiot. These letters weren’t him texting you—of course you wouldn’t be able to answer his question. As he was scolding himself, neck growing incredibly warm under his thick scarf, he noticed the smile you were trying to suppress. He’s never seen that kind of look in your eyes before.

“Can you just say to him I said yes?”

“Yes?” He grinned, before quickly coughing it away. “Y-yes to what?”

“That’s between me and him,” you smiled, swaying from side to side. “Anyway, see you at lunch tomorrow!”

The next day Jeongin tries his hardest to hide the box he brought with him on your desk before you see it—and luckily, only one of the other frat boys saw him doing it. His secret is still safe.

You squeal when you open it, a soft fox plushie sitting in the box. Jeongin watches in awe as you hug it close to your chest, rocking back and forth before you run up to him.

“Innie, look!!” You shake the toy in his face, giggling wildly, as you start petting it. Jeongin’s heart skips a beat at the sight. He’s not too sure why.

“Thank you so much!” You pout, hugging him.

“No, it’s not, w-why are you than—“

“Can you give him another message from me?”

Oh. That’s why you’re thanking him.

Jeongin nods, trying to hide the sigh he has to let out.

“Tell him that, um,” you look away, eyes locked on the fox in your hands, “just tell him I’m really looking forward to the party.”

You’re blushing. Your eyes are sparkling and you’re giggling and you’re blushing.

All Jeongin can bring himself to do is nod.

He isn’t sure why, but his next letter is a bit more…. romantic. Jeongin tells you he’s looking forward to the party too, that he’s happy you liked his gift, that he’s excited to find an outfit that could match yours for the night. That maybe you two could dance together. That you wouldn’t have to worry about anything that night because he’ll keep you safe and walk you home when it’s over, even if you’re as drunk as you were at the Christmas party. Don’t be shy, he writes, it wasn’t as embarrassing as you think it was. He actually thought you looked beautiful even after Hyunjin spilled that beer on you. It’s not that you aren’t always beautiful, of course. Hopefully this isn’t too forward—but when you have fun like you did that night, with your loud laugh and your stupid dance moves, well, you’re the most beautiful person in the room.

Jeongin’s hands shake when he hides the letter in your lecture notes that day. He can’t even bring himself to look at you once you’ve read it.

“Innie, you know who he is?” You asked, more like stated, as the pair of you sit down to eat.

“Do you want Chan to kill me?” Jeongin glared at you.

“I just need to know who it is,” you whine, pouting at him.

Jeongin shakes his leg under the table, deciding that’s what’s making his stomach flip.

“You’ll find out at the party, it’s just another week,” Jeongin reminds you, trying his best to sound casual about it, as if it wasn’t consuming his thoughts.

What’ll happen when you find out who’s actually writing these notes to you? What’ll happen when you realise it was your best friend—someone who definitely shouldn’t have called you the prettiest girl on campus. Jeongin couldn’t help but feel like some sort of catfish.

“I’m going to kiss him,” you say, determination heavy on your brows.

Jeongin practically spits out his drink.

“Wh-what?” He squeaks. “You can’t do that!”

“He’s single, right?”

“I think so,” Jeongin stutters.

“Then I can,” you nod firmly. “I know I don’t know who he is, but he’s so thoughtful. And he remembers random details about me, so I know he cares about me, too. And he’s funny. Like, super funny.”

You’re gushing now, smile so wide it reaches your eyes. You’re even resting your chin in your hands, as cliche as it is. If Jeongin didn’t know any better he’d say you have a crush on this person. On him.

“Y/N, do you have a crush on your secret admirer?”

You giggle, hiding your face with your hands. “No.”

“Oh, sure, I believe that,” he scoffs at you.

“Innie, you know who it is. And you’re my best friend in the whole entire world.” Jeongin swallows. “And as my best friend—do you think I have a shot with him? Like, if I ask him out would he say yes?”

Jeongin gasps, his face growing incredibly warm.

“Wait, you want to date m—him? Genuinely?”

“Yeah,” you admit with a sigh. “He’s the perfect man.”

“You have no idea what he looks like,” Jeongin argues.

“I’m not that shallow!” You defend. “Besides, I know the frat boys and they’re all super hot.”

“He could be a pledge,” Jeongin shrugs, casually.

“Oh my god! He’s one of the pledges?” You gasp, eyes sparkling at this new piece of information about the man of your dreams, apparently.

Jeongin cringes at himself, obviously unable to undo that slip up. He should just stay quiet from now on.

“Please, best friend, please,” you bring your hands together, begging Jeongin. He knows you’re gonna ask for something crazy when you call him best friend like that.

“What?” He sighs, knocking your hands down.

“Can you please find out if he’d kiss me back?”

Jeongin couldn’t sleep. He kept replaying your conversation in his head, kept wondering if he would kiss you back. He’s known you most of his life, you were his closest friend in the world, and kissing you was certainly not something he thought of before. It wasn’t appropriate, it wasn’t right, but your lips were really beautiful now that he thinks about it.

Really quite beautiful.

And they were probably soft.

Jeongin thought about kissing you, wondered if you’d sigh into his lips once you touched them. He wondered if you��d even want to kiss him when you found out.

He wondered why the thought of you rejecting him pricked at his heart.

bestie: are you walking with us to the party?

innie: obvs, seung and i will be there in thirty

When Jeongin arrived he had to remind himself that you weren’t his date, at least, you didn’t know about it yet. You were his best friend and it was common for him to walk you to parties. Sometimes he’d do it even when he wasn’t planning on staying at the event at all—but he wanted to make sure you got there safely. And yes, when you’d call at three in the morning Jeongin would come over and walk you back to your room.

But that didn’t mean that he had feelings for you. Right?

That was just his best friend duties, just like it was his duty now to tell you how great you looked.

“Thank you!” You smiled brightly. “I was told to wear something blue.”

Jeongin knows this because he’s the one who told you to wear blue. Your deep blue dress matches his blazer (and the flowers he hid in the house for later) but you don’t comment on it yet.

You and a few of the other girls ask Jeongin to take pictures of them, and he of course obeys, while Seungmin just stands there and waits.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about taking pictures, he’s just as vain as the rest of you, but Jeongin knows he’s nervous. He’s been acting weird since the weekend—so Jeongin doesn’t push him to participate any more than he already is. At least he’s actually showing up to the party.

When everyone has had enough of the pictures, the group starts making their way to the frat house where the party is taking place.

You wrap an arm around Jeongin’s bicep in familiar ease—but the skip of his heart is new. It’s the nerves of the party, probably. Jeongin has a feeling Chan might make him take pictures again or even worse, he might be on picking drunk people off the floor duty.

Jeongin can’t wait for his initiation.

“Innie, if you’re working the party will you be drinking?” You ask, as the group slowly strolls behind the pair of you.

“Probably not, maybe just a shot or two,”

“So you have to save one with me!” You insist, and Jeongin’s smile widens on his face.

“Obviously.”

“I’ll have to go find my admirer first,” Jeongin’s stomach flips violently, “and then I can introduce you two.”

“I know him,” Jeongin rolls his eyes.

“I know,” you sigh, almost dreamily, “but I need my best friend and my future boyfriend to get along.”

Jeongin trips over a dent in the pavement, but your grip on his bicep stops him from falling flat on his face.

His heart is pumping inside his ears but this time he’s sure it’s not from his near death experience. You want him to be your future boyfriend.

“In-ah!” Changbin yells over the music, “take our picture!”

Jeongin complies happily, snapping a picture of Changbin and a few of the brothers.

They thank him quickly before someone else is tapping his shoulder and asking for their own picture.

This isn’t the first time he’s been put on camera duty, and frankly, Jeongin actually enjoys it a lot. He knows what to expect.

And there’s another benefit to being behind the camera for most of the night and that is the distance between him and you.

The more Jeongin thought about it, the more his heart raced and he wasn’t too sure it was the good kind of racing either. He was terrified.

Writing you letters and brightening your day was one thing, letting you go this whole time fantasising about kissing your admirer, kissing Jeongin was wrong. He should’ve told you the truth; he should’ve warned you or made a comment about the platonic nature of his letters. He should’ve been a good friend.

And he shouldn’t have let himself get carried away and write that last letter. The one telling you he can’t wait to kiss you tonight.

He couldn’t go through with it, no. It would be much better to let you leave the party disappointed in your admirer than for him to lose his best friend. Jeongin had to be selfish in that way, because the real selfish thing to do would be kiss you like he wanted.

You wanted the person in the letters. You didn’t want him.

Jeongin had to remind himself that.

A little later, when most of the frat boys’ shirts were off, one of the sorority girls tapped Jeongin’s shoulder. Instinctively he brought the camera up to his eyes, but all he saw through the monitor was a shake of the head.

“You need to go find Y/N!” She yelled over the music, the smell of alcohol sinking into Jeongin’s nose.

“Why? Is she okay?!”

“She figured it out,” was her answer.

Jeongin didn’t need to know any more details. Couples have been pairing off into the night by the dozen, much more than any other party he’s been to before, and he knew all the girls were going around and guessing who their admirer was. Considering Seungmin was found out already and that one pledge who takes Business was making out with his Valentine’s behind the bar—the process of elimination wasn’t very long.

He never should’ve told you it was one of the pledges.

“Where is she?”

“Locked herself in one of the bathrooms,” she said, a pitiful look in her eyes.

Well, shit.

“I,” Jeongin looked around, trying to spot Chan in the crowd. He saw him a few minutes ago prying Jisung away from a tower of empty bottles, but now he wasn’t too sure where he was. Jeongin couldn’t just leave his post.

The girl in front of him grabbed the camera strap around his neck and pulled it away from him.

“I’ll cover for you,” she smiled. Jeongin remembered now that she took a media class. Maybe she knew what she was doing.

“But Chris—“

“—just go find your best friend before she drowns herself in the toilet or something.”

Well. Major shit.

Jeongin nodded at the girl, smiling widely, before he ran up the stairs and knocked on all the bathroom doors.

Eventually, your voice answered him.

“Occupied!” It was your sad voice.

“Let me in!” He demanded.

“Go away,” you replied.

“I promised you a great night and you’ve locked yourself in a toilet instead. In a frat house. Do you want to die of communal diseases?”

“I hate you,” you mumbled back, but it was loud enough that Jeongin could still hear it through the door. He wondered if you were sat on the floor, pressed against the door like a real pity party.

“I don’t think you do,” he tried to convince you, and himself, as he sat down on the floor. He brought his knees up to his chest, curling up into a ball as he rested his head on the door. “Why?”

“Why would you lie to me like that?”

“When did I lie?”

There was a pause, Jeongin could practically see you biting at your bottom lip as you prepared yourself for the rest of the conversation. He wished you’d just open up the door already.

“You said I was the most beautiful girl in the room,” you started, “and you said my laugh brings you peace.”

“Those weren’t lies!” Jeongin defended.

“You said you think about kissing me a lot, that you think about it during class or when you should be sleeping.”

Jeongin didn’t reply.

“I can’t believe you’d throw away our friendship over a stupid frat thing,” you said softly. Jeongin almost didn’t hear you, but then you opened the door.

You stood above him, Jeongin was too scared to stand, so he let you tower over him while you slowly broke his heart.

“You could’ve just said nice things and made jokes like you did at first. Why did you have to act like a Valentine’s?”

“The whole point of this was—“

“—I can’t believe you’d do this, In.”

“Y/N, it’s not that I—“

“—and the worst part is I wanted it to be you.”

Jeongin gasps softly, watching you intently as you crouch down to his height. You tuck your dress under your knees and grab his hand.

Jeongin blinks.

“The fox was a massive giveaway, but then I kept thinking there’s just no way it would be you. So I tried freaking you out a bit with that kiss talk, but then you wrote back saying you think about it. So it was either not you or you were playing with me. I just really hoped you wouldn’t be playing with me but our outfits match so it has to be you.”

“It is me,” is all he manages, “I’m your admirer.”

You sigh heavily, shaking your head as you aimlessly play with the tips of Jeongin’s fingers.

“But I wasn’t playing with you. At all!”

“You think about kissing your best friend?”

“And other stuff…” Jeongin sighs, moving the pile of hands further up your lap.

“Yang Jeongin,” you glare at him, “I fucking hate you.”

“Please don’t hate me,” he sighs. Jeongin takes one of his hands away from your lap, burying it in your hair instead. He drags your face closer to his, resting his forehead on yours.

“It’s not my fault those letters made me fall for you.”

“You wrote them, Innie, who’s fault is it then?”

“Yours,” he chuckled softly, the air tickling your cheek lightly. “The way your eyes would light up every time you found one.”

“Jeongin, please stop playing with me. It’s cruel. Just walk away now and we’ll write this off as a drunk night.”

“And if I don’t walk away?” He pulled away slightly, eyes melting into yours. You felt your heart clench tightly.

“Then our friendship is over.”

“What’s the third option?” He licked his lips.

“I can’t tell you.”

Jeongin stays quiet for a few moments, your heart beat getting louder and louder in your ears the more time passes. You try focusing on something else, and oddly, find comfort in the small circles Jeongin’s rubbing into your cheek.

“I don’t want our friendship to be over,” he says, seriously.

“Then whatever you do,” your eyes flutter shut, “don’t turn me into a one night stand.”

“Y/N,” he chuckled, causing you to open your eyes quickly, “I’m not letting my first time be on the floor of a frat house bathroom. Do you know how many undiscovered diseases—“

“—okay, okay!” You laugh. “You’re not going to have sex with me and then dip?”

“Dip where?” He laughs, “you’re my bestest closest friend. My life involves you in so many ways and it’s been that way since I can remember.”

“All the more reason to use me for your first time and then—“

Jeongin rolls his eyes before he grabs your chin, pulling your face to his and kissing you. He’s kissing you.

But before anything else can register in your brain he’s pulled away. Smirking at you.

“Huh?”

“You were talking too much.”

“I-I—Was, talking, um—“

“Did a kiss from me make you speechless?” His smirk takes over his whole face, his dimples so big you wonder what it would feel like to poke at them.

Your eyebrows fold in determination before you pull him by his neck, crashing your lips together.

The kiss is longer this time, much longer, the pair of you frozen against each other before Jeongin carefully starts moving, fingers wrapping around your jaw to keep you close.

You sigh into his lips and he wastes no time in pushing his tongue against yours. Breaths heavy and mixing together, his blonde hair between your fingers, his tiny moans so close to you you can feel them against your skin.

And now you’re making out with your best friend on the bathroom floor of a frat house.

The cold tile beneath your knees makes you aware of it, somehow, and you snap out of whatever spell Jeongin put you under with those letters.

You shoot up in your spot, cover your mouth as if it was an undo button, then run down the stairs.

Jeongin doesn’t follow you.

A week passed and neither one of you reaches out to the other. You’re both helplessly stubborn, and equally embarrassed, and it’s only after Seungmin kicks Jeongin out of their dorm for being an idiot that he makes his way down to your room.

He knocks on the door before stuffing his hands in his pocket and rocking on his heels.

You hate him now, don’t you?

Jeongin’s heart breaks when you open the door. Your hair is messy and unkept, old mascara is still on your left lash line, and you’re wearing your pyjamas even though it’s almost dinner time.

The worst part is you’re clutching the fox plushie he gave you.

Jeongin doesn’t think, pulling you into a bone crushing hug instead.

“Why did you pick the second option?” You mumble into his shoulder. He gasps as he pulls away from you.

“No! No, I didn’t! You ran away from me and I didn’t know what to do!”

“Innie…”

Jeongin grabs your shoulders and pulls you towards him, lips inches away from yours, but then you gasp and push him away. His eyes gap at you.

“I haven’t brushed my teeth in three days,” you confess shyly, covering your mouth.

He nods at you, understandingly, before he slowly guides you to the bathroom.

He takes the fox away from you, ignoring your painfully adorable whine, and hands you your toothbrush.

He patiently sits on top of the closed toilet seat and waits.

“What was the third option?” He asks after you dry off your face.

You look away from him, leaning against the dusty countertop. You need to clean the bathroom, you think to yourself.

You don’t answer, instead taking the plushie from his grip. He doesn’t let you.

“Jeongin, let go.”

“No.”

“The fox is mine,” you pout at him.

“You’re mine,” he says instead. His words are so unexpected you let go of the plushie. “When did you last eat?”

Jeongin reminds you of a troubled grandmother when you tell him it’s been at least a day since you last ate, and so he guides you to your bed while he orders your favourite takeout.

They won’t deliver it past the campus gate, so Jeongin braces the now almost freezing February night air to collect it.

When he’s back you’re under the covers completely, only your face and the fox’s ears visible under the blanket.

He feeds you silently while you watch one of your favourite movies, and he says nothing as he climbs under the covers with you when the food is done.

Both of you notice how you’ve cuddled endless times before today, but this was the first time your heartbeats were both so loud.

Jeongin presses soft kisses on your shoulder until you fall asleep.

Another month passed, and it’s the fourth time you’re making out completely naked on Jeongin’s bed.

“I want you so bad,” he mumbled against your lips, rolling his hips against yours to prove it.

“I want you too, Innie,” you sighed, rolling your hips in answer.

“I’ll try my best to do it right,” he blushed, tracing his fingers up your arm. “I’ll do whatever feels good.”

“You feel good,” you run your hand over his stomach, lower and lower until you wrap your hand around his dick.

“And you’re sure this isn’t gonna mess up our friendship?” He asks, eyes bright. Jeongin leans closer to your head, his weight on his forearm by your shoulder. You kiss his bicep as you chuckle.

He watches as you push him away slightly, leaning down to his bedside table and grabbing a condom.

He stays motionless as you unwrap it and secure it on his dick—the feeling of the latex against his warm skin is unfamiliar. But you kiss his cheek when you’re done and it isn’t too scary.

You distract him from the nerves by rubbing your hand up and down his back, and after a few misguided pokes, Jeongin slowly sinks into you.

His gasp is embarrassingly high pitched, but you brush the hair out of his face without laughing at him.

“You’re doing good, baby,” you smile at him.

You grab his hips and push him in deeper. This time, Jeongin can’t think about the sound of his own moans since yours drown him out.

His lips collide with yours, and you can both tell he doesn’t actually have enough coordination to do all this just yet. With your guidance, he starts thrusting in harder and a little bit faster—and Jeongin wants to die when he cums just when you start enjoying yourself.

“Fuck, I hate myself,” he groaned, sitting up on the bed after disposing of the condom.

“Luckily we’re gonna do that again,” you say, even though Jeongin catches a hint of a question in your eyes, “so you can make it up to me.”

“So this isn’t a one night stand?”

“You picked the third option, no?” You smile up at him, pressing a kiss to his sweaty forehead.

“You never actually told me what it was,” he chuckled before pulling the blanket over the pair of you.

Jeongin hummed as you settled on top of his chest, lacing your fingers together.

“Date.”

“Wait,” Jeongin scrunched his face at you, “we weren’t dating this whole time? I’ve been paying for your food for a month.”

“Yeah,” you slap the side of his head lightly, “because we’re dating.”

“Oh, we have been dating this whole time,” Jeongin confirms to himself. You roll your eyes.

“You’re lucky you pulled my name out of that box, Yang Jeongin.”

“I know,” he smiles down at you before planting a soft kiss on your lips. “So lucky.”

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This is why I hate it when MRAs whine about the courts “favoring” the mothers

How the 'junk science' of parental alienation infiltrated American family courts and allowed accused child abusers to win custody of their kids.

This story was reported in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.

In the summer of 2020, when he was 12, the boy told his therapist something he'd never told anyone else.

For years, Robert claimed, his stepdad had sexually abused him.

The therapist alerted the San Diego County child welfare agency, which launched an investigation. The county sheriff opened an inquiry, too. Thomas Winenger, the only father figure Robert had ever known, began assaulting him when he was only 7, Robert told a forensic social worker in October 2020. Winenger would pin him down, cover his mouth, and force him into acts he found "disgusting," he said. Sometimes, he said, Winenger recited Bible verses during the attacks, claiming the devil was in Robert's heart.

Robert, whom Insider is identifying by only his middle name, said that as he struggled to breathe, he fought back by hitting, punching, and kneeing his stepfather. But he said Winenger overpowered him.

By the time Robert came forward, Winenger had been named his legal father and was divorced from Robert's mother, Jill Montes, with whom he also shared two young daughters. Robert confronted Winenger with the allegations that November, and within weeks Winenger denied the claims in family court. "This NEVER HAPPENED," he asserted in a filing.

He offered an alternative explanation for Robert's disturbing claims, one that shifted the blame to Robert's mother.

Montes, Winenger contended, had engaged in a pattern of manipulation known as "parental alienation." Robert's accusations weren't evidence that he'd abused the boy, Winenger claimed. They were evidence that Montes had poisoned the children against him. The delayed timing of Robert's allegations, Winenger argued, only made them more suspicious. Montes was causing the children such grave psychological harm, he claimed in the filing, that the children should be transferred to his custody right away.

That December, Child Welfare Services substantiated Robert's allegations, calling them "credible, clear, and concise." But the family-court judge, Commissioner Patti Ratekin, withheld judgment until the following October, when the psychologist she'd appointed as a custody evaluator submitted his own report.

That report, which has been sealed by the court, appears to have convinced Ratekin that Winenger was correct.

“Ma'am, you didn't show very well in the report. You are toxic. You're poisonous. You're an alienator," Ratekin told Montes at a hearing on October 28, 2021. "I don't believe for a second" that Robert's father molested him. "Not for a second," she repeated. "I think you've put it in his head."

Ratekin acted swiftly, granting Winenger's bid for custody and ordering him to enroll Robert and his sisters in Family Bridges, a program that claims to help "alienated" children reconnect with a parent they've rejected. She barred Montes, a stay-at-home mom and home schooler, from all contact with her children for at least 90 days, a standard prerequisite for admission to the program.

"I just wanted to crumble," Montes said.

Rejected as a psychiatric disorder

Parental alienation is a fairly recent idea, conceived in the 1980s by a psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Gardner, who argued that divorcing mothers, desperate to win custody suits, were brainwashing children against their fathers. In "severe" cases, Gardner wrote, children with "parental alienation syndrome" must be removed from their mothers, transferred to the care of their fathers, and reeducated through what he called "threat therapy."

Alienation has never been accepted as a psychiatric disorder by the medical establishment. Yet today, mental-health practitioners across the United States assess and treat it, particularly those who specialize in custody cases. Many of them collaborate closely, attending the same conferences, following the same protocols, and citing the same papers. Some run reunification programs like Family Bridges; others offer family therapy or produce custody evaluations for family courts.

Influenced by these experts, many judges have given the unproven concept the force of law.

Though most custody cases settle out of court, in a small fraction parents don't come to terms. In some of these contested cases, one parent accuses the other of alienating the children. The most intense disputes arise in cases where one parent alleges spousal or child abuse and the other responds with a claim of alienation.

But alienation claims are highly gendered. Men level the accusation against women nearly six times as often as women level it against men, one study suggests. That landmark study, published in 2020, found that in cases when mothers alleged abuse and fathers responded by claiming alienation, the mothers stood a startlingly high chance of losing custody.

Occasionally, parents accused of alienation are cut off from their children altogether. Since 2000, judges have sent at least 600 children to reunification programs that recommend the temporary exile of the trusted parent, a collaborative investigation by Insider and Type Investigations revealed. While the programs suggest a "no-contact period" of 90 days, this term is routinely extended and may last years, according to an analysis of tens of thousands of pages of court papers and program records.

The treatment typically starts with a four-day workshop for children and the parent they've rejected; aftercare can add months or years. Children may be seized for the workshop by force, with no opportunity for goodbyes.

Former participants at Family Bridges and a similar program, Turning Points for Families, said they were taught that their memories were unreliable, the parent they preferred was harmful, and the parent they'd rejected was loving and safe. In some cases, participants who resisted these lessons said they were verbally threatened; at Family Bridges, a few were threatened with institutionalization. Some participants said they ended up depressed and suicidal.

Program officials say they are helping children. Lynn Steinberg, a therapist who runs a program called One Family at a Time, said in an interview that virtually all the kids she's enrolled have falsely accused a parent of abuse and that she does not accept children into her program whose abuse claims have been substantiated. Without treatment, she said, alienated children would risk being plagued by guilt, and the relationship they wrongly spurned might never heal.

In Steinberg's view, the only child abusers in the families she sees are the "alienators," who have "annihilated" a devoted parent from their children's lives.

Recently, alienation theory has faced rising criticism. Efforts to legitimize the diagnosis have been rebuffed by the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. And the reunification programs burst into public view last fall, when a video documented two terrified children in Santa Cruz, California, being seized for One Family at a Time. In the clip, which went viral on TikTok, a 15-year-old girl named Maya pleads and shrieks as she's picked up by the arms and legs and forced into a black SUV.

Since then, bills that would restrict reunification programs have been introduced in Sacramento and four other state capitols.

An idea takes off

When a law professor named Joan Meier founded a nonprofit to help victims of domestic violence two decades ago, she didn't expect to focus on custody disputes. But day after day, she heard from mothers with similar, troubling stories. They'd finally escaped their abusive marriages, but their exes had fought them for custody — and won. The mothers had been accused of something Meier knew little about: parental alienation.

Meier, who taught at George Washington University, ordered a stack of books by the child psychiatrist who coined the term.

Richard Gardner began writing about children of divorce in the 1970s, when a dramatic transformation was underway in family court. Under the "tender years presumption," judges had long favored women in divorce cases, typically assigning children to their mother's sole custody. But as more women entered the workforce, more men participated in child-rearing, and more couples divorced, a nascent "fathers' rights" movement emerged, demanding gender neutrality in custody proceedings. The idea appealed to many feminists, too. By the 1980s, most states had recognized joint custody in their statutes.

This left judges in a quandary when couples failed to settle. Now, aside from a vague mandate to advance the "best interest" of children, courts lacked a clear paradigm for resolving disputes. Overwhelmed, judges turned to mental-health professionals, asking them to assess each parent's fitness and recommend an optimal arrangement. Gardner, then an associate clinical professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University, was an early custody evaluator, and in 1982 he published a how-to manual.

By 1985, Gardner was arguing that some mothers, seeking to regain their advantage in court, were inducing a mental illness in their children, a condition he dubbed parental alienation syndrome. Children afflicted with the syndrome, he said, could be identified by the "campaign of denigration" they waged against their fathers, which was accompanied by "weak, frivolous, or absurd" rationalizations and a disquieting "lack of ambivalence."

Some "fanatic" mothers even manipulated children into claiming their fathers had sexually abused them, Gardner contended. When other maneuvers against a father fail, he wrote, "the sex-abuse accusation emerges as a final attempt to remove him entirely from the children's lives." Child sexual-abuse claims made during custody disputes, he claimed, "have a high likelihood of being false." To prove children are suggestible, he often invoked the wave of 1980s cases in which preschool teachers were charged with sexual abuse but later exonerated.

Gardner's theory sidestepped what Joan Meier saw as a glaring truth: Many children accused their fathers of abuse because their fathers were actually abusive. In fact, by the early 2000s a large-scale study had found that contrary to Gardner's writings, neither children nor mothers were likely to fabricate claims during custody disputes.

The remedies Gardner proposed for parental alienation syndrome were harsh. "Insight, tenderness, sympathy, empathy have no place in the treatment of PAS," he said in a 1998 address. "Here you need a therapist who is hard-nosed, who is comfortable with authoritarian, dictatorial procedures."

In a 2001 documentary, Gardner told a journalist how a mother might respond to a child reporting sexual abuse: "I don't believe you. I'm going to beat you for saying it. Don't you ever talk that way again about your father."

Juvenile detention could cure children who refused to visit their fathers, Gardner said. But the main remedy he advanced in severe cases was "the removal of the children from the mother's home and placement in the home of the father, the allegedly-hated parent." This would break what he called a "sick psychological bond."

After introducing his theory, Gardner began using it in expert testimony and promoting it to other evaluators and fathers'-rights activists. By the early 2000s, family-court judges were regularly citing parental alienation.

To address this, Meier said, she undertook a series of academic articles examining the scholarship on parental alienation. She found that the theory was based on circular reasoning and anchored almost entirely in anecdotal data.

"I still believed in that day that if you did careful, thoughtful analytic scholarship, people would read it and be persuaded by it," she said.

The scarlet 'A'

Jill Montes had always wanted a big family. In 2008, she already had a 5-year-old daughter, Paige, with a man she'd divorced, and she was finding regular work as an actor in Los Angeles. She decided to adopt an infant son, Robert.

The next year, she met Thomas Winenger, who had master's degrees in engineering and business, on eHarmony. "He wanted to talk a lot about faith and God, and that wooed me," she said. She also welcomed his interest in Robert, whom she was insecure about raising alone.

In 2011, the couple married and settled near San Diego, and Montes quit acting. Soon, she later said in a court filing, Winenger was shoving, insulting, and threatening her, often in front of the kids. He promised to change, and she hoped he could. In 2012, their first child, Claire, was born, and Eden followed in 2015. Insider is identifying Montes' children by only their middle names.

Later that year, Montes accused Winenger of dragging Paige across a room. Montes sought a restraining order, which was ultimately denied, and kicked him out. He rented a room in a house nearby, where he regularly hosted the three younger kids. Sometimes, Robert went there by himself.

Montes filed for divorce in February 2018. Under an informal agreement, the kids continued spending time at Winenger's place. But at a hearing that fall, a 10-year-old Robert testified that during an argument over his math homework, Winenger had repeatedly grabbed, shoved, and spanked him.

Montes filed a petition for a domestic-violence restraining order, which Winenger fought, saying he hadn't mistreated Robert. In the end, Ratekin, the judge presiding over the divorce, signed a "stay away" order prohibiting Winenger from contact with Robert. But it didn't address the allegation of violence. Weeks later, Winenger asked Ratekin to name him Robert's legal father, arguing that he'd helped raise the boy from toddlerhood. Ratekin ruled in his favor and ordered the custody evaluation.

In court papers he filed on July 19, 2019, the day after the evaluator was appointed, Winenger accused Montes of parental alienation.

Often, according to Meier, the dynamic of a custody case shifts radically once alienation is raised. "It's like the table turns 180 degrees and now the only bad parent in the room is the alleged alienator," she said. An abuse allegation "fades out of view," she said, and any attempts by the mother to limit the father's access are seen as suspicious. It's almost as if, like Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter," she's been branded with a flaming red "A," Meier said.

Indeed, Montes soon lost ground in court.

In January 2020, Ratekin ordered Robert into the care of a therapist, Mitra Sarkhosh, who has since provided aftercare for at least one reunification program. Sarkhosh saw Robert and his father together about 20 times, charging $200 an hour. But by summer, she had halted the sessions, saying Robert's anger was "not improving."

In a report filed in court, Sarkhosh appeared to blame Montes. Living with her, Robert was "saturated with negativity about his father," she wrote. There may be a need for "new interventions." (Citing patient-confidentiality laws, Sarkhosh declined an interview request.)

Robert was relieved to be finished with Sarkhosh, Montes said. He started seeing a new therapist, and, during the first session, he told the therapist he'd been sexually abused.

On November 18, 2020, at the direction of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, Robert called Winenger to try to elicit a confession. When that failed, the department paused its investigation, but the child welfare inquiry proceeded. On December 1, the California Health and Welfare Agency issued a report substantiating Robert's claims.

"The Agency is worried that if given the opportunity, Tom Winenger will sexually abuse [Robert] again," the report says.

Neither Winenger nor his divorce attorney, Tamatha Clemens, responded to requests for interviews or to a list of detailed questions. In a motion for custody he filed on December 8, 2020, Winenger argued that Robert's allegations had been "orchestrated" by Montes and that her alienation "will not stop until she is restrained by the court."

The welfare agency sent Ratekin its report on January 4, 2021, according to a cover sheet reviewed by Insider. But Ratekin was still awaiting the custody evaluation, which she'd assigned to a psychologist, Miguel Alvarez. In 2009, Alvarez coauthored a handbook for parents in custody disputes. While the manual spells out in detail how to prove an alienation claim, it offers no specific guidance on how to prove a claim of abuse.

According to the report, part of which Insider reviewed at a San Diego County courthouse, a personality test Alvarez administered suggested that Montes suffered from "extreme hyper-vigilance" and "persecutory fears." People with these traits, Alvarez wrote, "are often quick to anger and overreact to perceived or imagined threats."

Winenger's scores on the same test were "normal," Alvarez wrote, and his performance on psychosexual and polygraph tests was "inconsistent" with Robert's allegations of sexual abuse.

The 136-page evaluation cost Robert's parents more than $90,000, according to bills reviewed by Insider. Alvarez didn't respond to requests for comment.

Ratekin reviewed the evaluation just before the October 28, 2021 hearing. Alvarez's findings were "exactly" what she'd expected, she said. In her view, the situation called for immediate action.

She put Claire, 8, and Eden, 6, in their father's custody that day, and she sent Robert, 13, to stay with his football coach. That was for Winenger's protection, she said. Until Robert was "detoxified," she said, he'd be prone to false claims of abuse.

Ratekin suggested Family Bridges as a solution. She'd had "really good success" with the program in another case, she said, and she thought it would ease Robert's transition. Without it, the boy wouldn't "get better," she said, and his sisters stood to benefit, too.

Winenger agreed. Under an order Ratekin signed on January 3, 2022, the children would attend a Family Bridges workshop with their father from January 11 to 14 and then return to his home. Montes was barred from contact with the children for at least 90 more days. Ratekin also prohibited the children from communicating with their older sister, their maternal grandmother, and anyone else who might "interfere" with their healing.

Contact would resume at Ratekin's discretion, depending upon how well everyone was cooperating.

Insider and Type reviewed 35 cases from the past two decades in which judges removed children from their preferred parent and sent them to a reunification program. In most of these cases, the children had resisted court-ordered visits with their fathers, and judges had held mothers responsible. Many of the judges framed the no-contact period as salutary: Children would be freed from the overbearing influence of their mothers, and their mothers would be motivated to change.

A case from New Castle County, Delaware is typical.

In 2016, Judge Janell Ostroski transferred two brothers to their father's custody and ordered them into treatment at Turning Points for Families, a program in upstate New York run by a social worker, Linda Gottlieb. Both boys had told Ostroski that their father, Michael D., yelled at them frequently, court records show, though neither had alleged physical abuse. The 9-year-old, O., told Ostroski he felt unsafe at his dad's house. Ashton, 14, was refusing to go there. Insider is not using the family's full last name in order to protect O.'s identity.

Michael had pleaded guilty several years earlier to public intoxication and indecent exposure for an incident in a public park with Ashton. A court-ordered psychological evaluation found that he had alcohol dependence and narcissistic personality disorder "with antisocial features." In 2013, the state's child welfare agency found that he'd emotionally abused Ashton, then 10 years old. The report, including any denials Michael presented, is sealed. This history was all cited in court three years later, in a custody dispute between Michael and his ex-wife, Kelly D.

During that dispute, Michael accused Kelly of alienation, and a custody evaluator backed him up. The evaluator, a psychologist, determined that Michael had become "a more positively functional person" and that Kelly, a preschool teacher, was the problematic parent. Kelly "distorts the reality of events" and "conveys to others an inaccurate and menacing perception of Mr. [D.]," the psychologist wrote in a May 2016 report. (Michael did not respond to detailed requests for comment. Neither did the psychologist.)

In written rulings that barred Kelly from contact with both children, Ostroski said the boys were "well cared for" in Kelly's home but blamed her for Ashton's refusal to see Michael. "Mother has done nothing in the past year to promote the Father/son relationship," Ostroski wrote, adding, "the court is hopeful that, with the appropriate interventions, Mother can recognize her role in helping the children have a healthy relationship with their Father."

Insider and Type sent questions about parental alienation and its remedies to Ostroski, Ratekin, and 19 other judges who've ordered the programs. Only Ratekin responded, and she declined to speak about the Winenger case because it is still pending. Nor would she answer general questions. "I am definitely not an expert in this area," she wrote, "nor do I feel qualified to answer questions about the issue or programs."

'A moratorium on the past'

In her January 2022 ruling, Ratekin authorized Winenger to hire a transport company to drive Robert and his sisters to the Family Bridges workshop, which would take place at a hotel a few hours outside San Diego. There, the children and Winenger met Randy Rand, who founded Family Bridges in the early 2000s, and a woman the children knew only as "Chris."

In 2009, Rand deactivated his psychology license after the California Board of Psychology found he'd committed professional violations including "dishonesty," "repeated negligent acts," and "gross negligence." Since then, he's accompanied at workshops by at least one other clinician. Rand isn't the only alienation expert to face sanctions from a state licensing board. Two other psychologists who've led Family Bridges workshops, Jane Shatz of California and Joann Murphey of Texas, have been sanctioned — Shatz after an allegation of negligence and Murphey after a finding that she failed to respond promptly to a subpoena. Both Alvarez, the custody evaluator in Robert's case, and Steinberg, who runs the program where a judge sent the girl in the viral TikTok, have been cited by California regulators for improper recordkeeping. Steinberg said her citation was the result of a series of meritless complaints by an "alienating parent."

Family Bridges workshops are held at hotels around the country and tend to cost parents more than $25,000, receipts show. In 2016, for example, one family from Seattle paid more than $27,000 to Family Bridges and another $3,500 to spend three nights at a Sheraton in Southern California. Since the children had opposed the intervention, a company was hired to transport them for an additional $8,300.

Once they arrive at Family Bridges, children quickly learn the rules, program documents show, including a policy called "a moratorium on the past." As Murphey, the Texas psychologist, testified in 2018, "There's no talking about 'You did this back when.'" Instead, she explained, "this is a new family, this is a new paradigm, we are starting off in a healthy way."

Ally Toyos was a 16-year-old in Kansas when she was taken from her mother five years ago. In an interview, she said she and her then 14-year-old sister tried defying the Family Bridges moratorium, telling Rand and his colleagues that their dad had abused them. (Toyos' mother said a court order prevented her from speaking with the press; Toyos' father didn't reply to interview requests.) Threats ensued, Toyos said. The girls were told that if they didn't comply, they could be separated, sent to wilderness camps, committed to psychiatric facilities, and cut off from their mom for the rest of their childhoods, according to Toyos.

Much of the Family Bridges workshop involves watching and discussing videos, program documents show. One of them, "Welcome Back, Pluto," tells the fictional story of a petulant teen who scorns her father. "If you're alienated, like Emily, you might get mad when others don't take your complaints seriously," a female narrator says. In time, however, Emily "learned to see things more clearly." She realized her complaints were "exaggerated," the narrator explains, and "sounded just like her mother's."

According to the video, which was scripted by Richard Warshak, a psychologist who helped develop Family Bridges, some children who steadfastly reject a parent "suffer for the rest of their lives."

Other materials warn children against trusting their memories. Toyos, whose workshop took place at the C'mon Inn in Bozeman, Montana, said she was shown a 2013 TED Talk by Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who developed the idea that memory is malleable and who has served as a defense witness in high-profile trials, including Harvey Weinstein's. Memories are often contaminated by outside influences, Loftus warns in the talk, which leads to false accusations that can ruin lives.

Insider and Type spoke with or reviewed statements by 17 youths ordered into Family Bridges, Turning Points, or other reunification programs. Their accounts of the workshops were broadly similar. Hannah Rodriguez, then a 16-year-old living in Tampa, Florida, said her workshop, in 2016, was held at Linda Gottlieb's home in New York's Hudson Valley. Gottlieb, the author of a book on parental alienation syndrome, had founded Turning Points about two years earlier. Rodriguez said Gottlieb's office was right off the living room, where her husband spent his time in a recliner. Every day, Rodriguez could see him and hear his TV shows, she said.

Rodriguez, Toyos, and several other former participants said the workshops plunged them into depression.

In spring 2022, one 13-year-old girl got so distressed during a session with Gottlieb at a hotel that she banged on a wall and screamed for help, court papers show. Someone called the police, who brought her to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. "I just want my mom," the girl said, according to hospital records, but under the court order she couldn't call her. She was held at the hospital for three days.

In a written statement that Montes said he later dictated to her, Robert said he became suicidal. "The only thing that stopped me from throwing myself off the balcony was the 24/7 surveillance," the statement reads. "I never thought so many people would be that horrible, controlling, and manipulative towards little kids."

At the end of the workshop, Robert went home with Winenger and had "horrible, weird depressive anxiety episodes," according to the statement. In early February, he was admitted to the psychiatric ward of a children's hospital, according to court records.

Repeated emails to Rand were met with an auto-response saying he was "on sabbatical." The psychologist managing Family Bridges in his absence, Yvonne Parnell, declined interview requests, as did Gottlieb. Gottlieb forwarded Insider's queries to a lawyer, Brian Ludmer, but Ludmer said he couldn't speak for her. Neither Parnell nor Gottlieb replied to detailed written questions.

Lynn Steinberg said her program One Family at a Time, based in Los Angeles, has treated some 50 families over the past eight years. A family therapist, she's the author of "You're Not Crazy: Overcoming Parent/Child Alienation." She was the only program director who agreed to talk.

She said she begins each workshop by listening to the children and taking down every accusation they make; she then works to achieve "an agreement between parent and child." After those conversations, she said, the children are dramatically transformed. They apologize and cry, she said; they kiss and embrace the parent they'd rejected, even sitting in the parent's lap. They're eager to make up for lost time, she said, and can't wait to see long-lost kin.

Daniel Barrozo, of Chino, California, said Steinberg's workshop was a "tremendous help" to him and his daughter in 2021. Steinberg successfully challenged his daughter's misperceptions about him, he said. When Steinberg asked her what he'd done wrong and what she hated about him, his daughter simply looked down and cried, he said. "The whole time, she had nothing to say, because Mom was the one speaking for her," he said. Now, he said, his relationship with his daughter is stronger than ever.

Steinberg said her own mother alienated her from her father, a realization she reached only after his death. She called her ex-husband an alienator, too, saying her adult daughters reject her to this day. She regrets that they didn't get help from a program like hers.

Left untreated, alienated children "fail at relationships" and risk developing eating disorders, drug addiction, depression, gender dysphoria, and other ills, Steinberg said, citing her clinical experience.

But an increasing number of scholars are criticizing the programs. Jean Mercer, an emeritus professor of psychology at Stockton University, is the author of recent papers on parental alienation. One examined six reunification programs, including Family Bridges and Turning Points, and found that the research evidence supporting the effectiveness of the programs "has few strengths and many weaknesses." For another paper, Mercer reviewed the scholarship on the programs and statements from five youths who'd attended them. She found that the programs "may contain elements of psychological abuse."

Another study, by Michael Saini of the University of Toronto, examined 58 empirical papers on alienation and its treatments and found the body of research "methodologically weak." While some divorcing parents exhibited "alienating behaviors" and some children rejected a parent, the nexus between those phenomena hadn't been proved, Saini found. Moreover, he found the studies hadn't shown that interventions worked.

Following the workshop, the programs commonly assign children to a specially trained aftercare therapist. Meanwhile, the exiled parent undergoes reeducation.

Insider obtained audio of a call last year between Gottlieb and the mother of a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy in Turning Points. "I think what you did is criminal," says Gottlieb, who, like Steinberg, has publicly stated that her own mother alienated her from her father. There was "no reason" the children shouldn't have a relationship with their father, Gottlieb says in the recording, and "you have failed miserably to require it."

"That's alienation," she says. "That is what you are guilty of, and it's child abuse." For the children's sake, the woman must "make amends," Gottlieb says. Otherwise, "I will recommend extending the no-contact period until they're 18."

Insider and Type interviewed 12 mothers whose children were sent to Turning Points, many of whom said Gottlieb rebuked them over the phone and in emails. Most said they were required to write letters to the kids praising their fathers and submit them to Gottlieb for approval.

In early November 2016, Gottlieb told Kelly D. — Ashton and O.'s mother — that her letters contained superfluous details and secret messages and needed to be redone. In the end, Kelly submitted several drafts for each of her sons, all of which Gottlieb rejected.

"She sets a bar," Kelly said. "You try to reach the bar. She sets the bar higher."

Judge Ostroski had ordered Kelly to find a therapist "acceptable to Ms. Gottlieb" who would help her support Michael's relationship with the children. From a list provided by the Delaware Family Court, Kelly chose a psychologist, William Northey. But Gottlieb warned in an email, "I cannot approve him before I speak with him about his specialized knowledge of alienation."

The conversation went poorly. Gottlieb considered Northey unacceptable, she later testified, and Northey found fault with Gottlieb, too. He sent her a letter, reviewed by Insider, criticizing her for calling Kelly a "sociopath" and for using the phrase "parental alienation syndrome," which, he wrote, "is not a recognized diagnostic term."

Meanwhile, Gottlieb was making demands of Ashton and O. Shortly after they returned from New York, according to an email to both parents obtained by Insider, Gottlieb determined that they needed to transfer schools immediately, as their current schools had "actively undermined" their relationship with their dad.

She sought custody of O., too. But in September 2020, Ostroski found that Kelly still hadn't been properly treated for her alienating tendencies and denied her petition.

For now, even visits were too risky, Ostroski concluded.

"Ashton's behavior of running away from Father and refusing to now see Father supports Gottlieb's prediction that, if the children are returned to Mother before she addresses her alienating behavior, they will revert to their prior behaviors when they were refusing to see Father and all of the work that has been done over the past 4 years will be wasted," Ostroski wrote in the ruling.

'Junk science'

In June 2010, more than a thousand mental-health practitioners, lawyers, and judges gathered at the Sheraton in downtown Denver for the annual conference of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, which unites players in the child-custody field from around the world. The theme that year was "Traversing the Trail of Alienation," and over four days the condition was discussed in more than 30 sessions. Participants could learn how to spot an alienating parent, when it was best to defy a child's wishes, and what might help an alienated child heal.

The event signified a remarkable embrace of an idea whose author had been consumed by scandal and tragedy just a short time earlier.

In the late 1990s, critics of Gardner's dealt a powerful blow to his credibility by unearthing writings in which he'd defended pedophilia.

"Sexual activities between an adult and a child are an ancient tradition," he wrote in a 1992 book.

As a product of Western culture, he viewed pedophilia as reprehensible, he wrote, but it may not be "psychologically detrimental" in other cultures. The following year, in a journal article, Gardner argued that from an evolutionary standpoint, children benefited from being "drawn into sexual encounters," since these experiences steered them toward early reproduction. "The Draconian punishments meted out to pedophilics go far beyond what I consider to be the gravity of the crime," he wrote in 1991 in "Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited."

In May 2003, at age 72, Gardner dosed himself with painkillers and stabbed himself to death. His son told reporters he was driven to suicide by chronic pain that had recently worsened.

In the assessments of his life that followed, Gardner's work was lambasted by prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. Paul Fink, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association. "This is junk science," Fink told Newsday in July 2003. "He invented a concept and talked about it as if it were proven science. It's not."

The theory could have died with Gardner. Instead, it gained ground.

In 2001, Richard Warshak, a clinical professor of psychology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, published "Divorce Poison: Protecting the Parent/Child Bond From a Vindictive Ex." The book, released by HarperCollins, brought parental alienation theory to a wider audience — and made it more palatable. Unlike Gardner, Warshak spoke of alienation in gender-neutral terms, saying many fathers were programmers, too, and he likened the no-contact period between children and their preferred parent to study abroad.

Warshak started leading workshops for Family Bridges around 2005 and eventually became its unofficial spokesman, a role in which he excelled. In 2010, he appeared in "Welcome Back, Pluto" and published an influential article about Family Bridges in the AFCC journal.

In that study, Warshak reported on outcomes for the 23 children he'd worked with in the program so far. During the four-day workshop, 22 of them recovered a "positive relationship" with their rejected parent, he observed, including recalcitrant teens.

After the workshop, however, four children regressed, Warshak wrote, following what he called "premature" contact with their preferred parent. The program worked best, he said, when this contact was blocked "for an extended period of time." Warshak didn't respond to interview requests.

Meanwhile, another Gardner successor, Dr. William Bernet, a professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, was working to push alienation theory forward. He submitted a proposal to the American Psychiatric Association to include "parental alienation disorder" in the next version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, and authored a scholarly article making the case for inclusion. He submitted a similar application to the World Health Organization, which was revising its International Classification of Diseases.

Bernet declined a request for an interview. But in a 2010 book, he wrote that since alienation scholarship had advanced in the wake of Gardner's death, "there is no need now to dwell on the details of what Richard Gardner did or said or wrote."

At the AFCC's conference in Denver in June 2010, Warshak was given a platform to discuss his Family Bridges paper, as was Bernet, to describe his DSM bid. Other presenters staked out a more moderate stance, arguing that while alienation was a pervasive problem, there was insufficient research to support construing it as a mental illness or ordering extreme interventions.

A few alienation opponents presented, including Joan Meier. But she said she flew home to Washington in tears.

"Everywhere I turned, alienation was the coin of the realm," she said.

She set out to design a study that would document how women who alleged abuse were treated in family courts nationwide — especially when alienation was raised. The Justice Department supported the project with a grant of $500,000.

In 2013, the new edition of the DSM was released with no mention of parental alienation. And in 2020, the World Health Organization ruled that parental alienation was "not a health care term" and lacked "evidence-based" treatments.

Bernet and his colleagues simply regrouped. In court, they started calling alienation a "dynamic" or a "phenomenon" rather than an illness, which appeared to satisfy some judges. And Bernet incorporated the nonprofit Parental Alienation Study Group, a coalition of parents, lawyers, and therapists who collaborated on cases and research. Rand, Gottlieb, and Steinberg joined, along with hundreds of other mental-health practitioners involved in custody work. Many, like Steinberg and Gottlieb, claimed to have experienced alienation themselves.

Meier assembled her own research team, comprising a statistician, three social scientists, and two assistants, to conduct her large-scale study. In January 2020, just weeks before the WHO decision, the results were published in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law.

The stark findings shocked even her.

Most trial-court rulings in custody cases are unpublished, but Meier's team identified 15,000 rulings involving abuse or alienation that were published electronically from 2005 to 2014. After winnowing that dataset to cases in which the only parties were two warring parents — not, for example, a child welfare agency — the team was left with 4,300 rulings. There were nearly 2,200 cases in which a mother had accused her ex of spousal or child abuse, and in 10% of these, the father had fought back with an alienation claim.

In general, judges were hesitant to credit mothers' abuse claims. When alienation wasn't raised, judges credited these claims 41% of the time, Meier found, and 26% of the time, mothers lost primary custody.

For the 222 mothers whose spouses accused them of alienation, the picture was even grimmer. Women who alleged abuse and whose husbands accused them of alienation lost custody half the time — twice as often as women who weren't accused of alienation.

To Meier, one of the study's most staggering findings was how rarely mothers branded with the scarlet "A" were believed. In cases where mothers alleged child physical abuse and fathers cross-claimed alienation, judges credited mothers a mere 18% of the time, she found. And in the 51 cases where mothers alleged child sexual abuse and fathers claimed alienation, all but one mother was disbelieved.

For a father accused of child molestation, Meier concluded, "alienation is a complete trump card."

'The whole world is watching'

In January 2022, three months after losing her children, Montes chanced upon a sickening discovery.

In a cloud storage account she'd once shared with Winenger, she said, she found thousands of his photos and videos, including explicit images of their three shared children. She loaded them onto a thumb drive for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, whose investigation into Winenger had never closed.

Within days, Winenger was arrested. He was soon charged with 19 felonies, including possession of child pornography and 14 counts of committing forcible lewd acts against a child, Robert.

He pleaded not guilty and was released on bail, his access to the children suspended. Because of the no-contact order he'd previously obtained against Montes, the children landed in a county shelter. Winenger's defense attorney, Patrick Clancy, declined to comment on Winenger's behalf, saying he doesn't try his cases in the press.

Suddenly, the custody dispute was transferred to juvenile dependency court, which meant Ratekin was no longer presiding. The new judge ordered the kids into their mother's care while the case was pending. On February 18, they came home.

At first, Montes said, the two youngest children were so scared of being taken again that they couldn't sleep in their rooms. She set up a big mattress on her bedroom floor.

Meanwhile, Joan Meier was using her research to make inroads with policymakers.

She'd worked with colleagues to draft a federal law that would incentivize states to protect children from abusers during custody disputes. They named the bill Kayden's Law, after a girl in Pennsylvania whose father murdered her during a court-ordered visit. During negotiations over reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, the child's congressional representative, Brian Fitzpatrick, got Kayden's Law in.

The legislation, signed into law on March 15, 2022, sets aside up to $5 million a year for grants to states if, among other measures, they mandate training for custody judges on abuse and trauma and prohibit them from ordering treatments that cut children off from a parent to whom they are attached. If enough states comply, the law could spell the end of the reunification programs.

Last summer, California was the first state to consider such a bill. It was introduced by state Sen. Susan Rubio of Los Angeles County, a survivor of domestic violence herself, after she heard from mothers who'd been accused of alienation and children who'd been sent to reunification programs.

Rubio's bill set off a battle that has since spread to statehouses around the country. Steinberg, the alienation therapist from Los Angeles, was a vocal opponent, arguing that men would be rendered powerless against false accusations. She was joined by fathers' rights groups and by the Parental Alienation Study Group, which was simultaneously pushing hard to discredit Meier's study. (Two prominent members of the group authored a studyconcluding that her findings could not be replicated, which Meier then rebutted.) After Rubio's bill passed the assembly unanimously last August, she was forced to withdraw it in the face of intense opposition from state judges over the training mandate.

Then, last October, the momentum shifted. That's when Maya, the 15-year-old from Santa Cruz, told a custody judge that her mother had abused her and her brother. The judge, Rebecca Connolly, didn't believe her and ordered the children into Steinberg's program, cutting off contact with their father. The graphic video of the children being seized on October 20 was quickly viewed millions of times.

In response to an interview request, an officer of the Santa Cruz County Superior Court said Connolly could not speak about pending cases. Maya's mother has denied the abuse claims in court. Her lawyer, Heidi Simonson, declined an interview, citing court orders pertaining to "privacy and confidentiality."

On the heels of the viral video, a coalition of activists — many of them mothers accused of alienation — organized protests around the country. The first took place October 28 outside the courthouse where Maya had just testified. Standing on concrete risers and facing the building, a pack of Maya's friends demanded her return. "The whole world is watching!" they shouted. Protests also erupted in Michigan, Kansas, and Utah.

Rubio introduced a new bill, with modified judicial training requirements, in February. A similar bill passed both chambers of the Colorado legislature in April. One in Montana died in committee; its sponsor, Sen. Theresa Manzella, said she was up against a "deliberate distribution of misinformation" by opponents, including attorneys who use parental alienation as a legal tactic.

Montes said she's "cautiously optimistic" about Winenger's criminal trial, set to begin in June, and she hopes for an imminent victory in her custody case. Five years of legal bills have left her in debt and on food stamps, she said, but she considers herself lucky all the same. Almost every day, she talks to mothers who remain severed from their children.

Mothers like Kelly D., whose children were sent to Linda Gottlieb's reunification program in New York.

Kelly last saw her younger son, O., early on a Monday morning. It was a warm, sunny day, and she dropped him off at his best friend's house so they could shoot baskets before school. She hugged him, told him she loved him, and said she'd pick him up in the afternoon. Then she drove to court for a hearing.

That was six years, six months, and 24 days ago.

The reporting for this story is part of a forthcoming documentary from Insider, Retro Report, and Type Investigations.

If you are experiencing domestic abuse, you can call the National Domestic Violence hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

Read the original article on Insider

#USA #family courts #Child custody #abusers making themselves the victims #Parental alienation #Children being abused after the courts removed them from their mothers #Family Bridges #Dr. Richard Gardner #Reeducating children #Threat therapy #Long article #State sponsored gaslighting of children #Lynn Steinberg #One Family At A Time #Pathologizing abuse victims

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stinkfacestories · 3 months

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The day you found out you had won Jason Kelces Beard Challenge was the best day of your life. The challenge was simple: put together a snap or tiktok video of how to get a beard as good as Jason and the top winner would win a day with Jason. Your video was a long shot: you made a tiktok showing how if you mixed essence of dwarf, with a bit of neanderthal, and just a splash of viking inside Abraham Lincoln's hat and applied it to your face, you'd look as good as Jason. It did t get very many views but Jason loved it. The next thing you knew you were in Philadelphia meeting the man himself at the airport.

The tour of Philadelphia through Jason Kelces eyes was a lot of stops at places he loved to eat. Steak sandwich, sausage, pizza, ice cream. The man just loved to eat. As the day dragged on just as Afternoon turned to evening he took you to Lincoln Field, his home turf. There was no game and the place was locked down, but that was nothing a few signed balls couldn't handle.

He took you to the locker room, the place where he told you he feels most free to be himself. You both sat down on the bench in front of his locker. He took out a case of bud light and cracked one open. The man drank so much bud lite you swore he was sponsored by them.

He told you to be quiet. To just listen to the sound of the room. To drink it in and become one with the soul of real American football.

The only thing you heard was the bench breaking as Kelce leaned forward and let out a fart with a satisfied grunt.

"Oh, sorry," he said, not sounding very sorry.

"Really? " you said. You looked at him, almost appalled that he would do that with you right next to him.

Jason turned and gave you a wink. "Dont tell me you don't find farts funny. Your a guy. All guys love farts."

You rolled your eyes. "Not really."

"What about this one," he said and let loose a loud bassy fart.

"God stop it, it's so gross," you said as you slid away, but suddenly found yourself pressed against the wall of the locker room. "Seriously dude. What the fuck?"

"C'mon," Jason said as he moved over towards you. “I warned you. Remember when I ate that large sausage with pickled garlic ave said ‘were in trouble later’? What do you think I meant.” and placed a hand on your chest, giving you a bit of a push. "Don't be a prude."

You were caught between a wall, and a wall of beef holding you in place. "Seriously, stop it".

"Can't stop. Won't stop," he said still pressing you in the wall. His eyes were the kind of dull that only cheap low quality beer can make the."You know I bet you never had an older brother. Between me, my dad and Travis we learned to appreciate farts. My dad told me that the best cure is exposure. So to get you up to speed I think I need to gas you more"

He pressed into you and lifted up his keg and let loose with a fart so powerful it echied through the empty locker room.. You struggled to get away from the horrible stench, but couldn't escape.

"No, don't do this," you said as it overwhelmed you.

He turned around and pressed his huge soft center lineman ass in your face, the soft fabric of his shorts spreading across your face like warm dough. It was too much, and you were powerless to stop it. His asshole flexed and relaxed as it sent out a long drawn out series of wet sounding farts. You gagged as the air around you filled with the horrid odor.

"Fuck that was a good one," he said, not budging an inch. “Three point stance just rips these farts out of me.”

"I think I'm going to puke," you said, trying not to vomit.

"If your gonna puke, aim that way, I like these shorts." he said pointing. "Do you think it's funny yet?"

"No!" You coughed.

"Alright you asked for it" he presses his ass harder, wedging your nose on his cheeks. He let loose with a rapid fire volley of farts that left you breathless and coughing. He backed away, chuckling at you.

"God, fuck, that's rank!" You coughed. You tried to breathe fresh air but the locker room had been total polluted by Kelces ass.

"Come on. You don't have to love them, but you gotta at least admit they are funny and manly now. How can you like football and not think farts are funny." he let you stew and come up with an answer.

"Fuck...no," you say.

He shrugged. "Ok. Your loss," he said and pressed his ass in your face again.

"No! Please. God. No. Fuck!"

"What's it going to take? Do I need to pull my shorts down and give you a bare ass stinkface?" He said, pressing even harder.

"No! No more. Fine. They're fucking funny," you cried.

"What?" He said. "I couldn't hear you"

"They're funny!"

"Now are you just saying that to make me stop?"

"No, I mean it. They are funny and they are manly."

"Well, if it's funny you won't have a problem asking me to do it a few more times so you can properly laugh. Right?"

"Uh...fine. Sure. Just, please, no more, I can't take it."

He turned and farted once. "Laugh. Laugh hard and long and deep." He was getting frustrated that you weren't laughing. "Seriously come on guy. This is just as bad for me as it is for you. It's hard to hold this position and if I keep farting I'm going to have to take a dump soon"

"Oh god no!"

"Laugh dammit!" He yelled.

"No, no, I can't."

"Fine then," he said. He pulled you down and set you face up on the bench. He loomed over you. "Ok big fucking guns time" he pulled down his shorts and hovered his raw hairy bear ass over your face.

"Oh shit, dude please don't!" His as was a beast. This close you could make out the rough skin. His ass had taken a pounding over the years and looked like a hefty bag overfilled with cottage cheese. The hair on his crack was dense and black.

"Do you think this is funny?"

"Yes, yes, fuck, yes!" You were sobbing, your body convulsing.

“Good. Then you'll find this hilarious.” he sat down. He sat down hard. He rocked back and forth, the wiry hair of his ass crack scouring your face. He dug deep like he has an itch he was trying to scratch.

"Laugh. C'mon. Laugh, laugh like a big boy." He said, simultaneously belching and farting.

"Ahahaha!" You started crying and laughing.

"Oh fuck. What a fucking cry baby. Laughing at farts is supposed to be funny. Not sad."

"I'm sorry," you sobbed.

"Just...fucking stop," he said, standing and pulling up his shorts as he got off you. "Baby can't handle a grown man's ass. Jesus fuck"

He sat down next to you. You were still shaking a little, tears coming from your eyes. "I'm sorry," you said.

"It's fine, it's not the first time I've gassed someone like that," he said. "your not the only one who cried either "

You sniffed, still wiping tears away. "It was just so...overwhelming. The smell, and the sound, and the pressure..."

"It was a lot. It was," he said.

He drained his bud light and crushed the can. "Ok second chance to get it right." He leaves forward and farted, then looked to you to see your reaction.

You laughed. A genuine laugh. "Fuck, dude."

He smiled and farted again. You kept laughing. "It's funny, isn't it?"

"Yeah. It is," you said, laughing some more.

"Now you" he said

You panicked. You didn't have to fart. You were to nervous.

"What the hell. Do it"

"I don't know if I can," you said.

"Come on. Do it. Do it" he chanted.

"I can't."

"You trying to make me mad? You're a guy. You should always be ready to let rip"

"But I'm not drunk like you are. And I'm not a fucking monster with an ass like yours."

"Fine, then, let's fix that." He reached down and ripped a huge one. He reached for his phone and placed a call "Trav. Yeah we got an emergency. Yeah get that chili defrosted and get some real cheap beer. Ooooh and some gas station food. Yeah he's a wimp. Didn't laugh. No he did. Fuck no she can't come to. Alright. Love you. No homo" he hung up the phone.

"Your brother's coming over?"

"Yup. And he's gonna be pissed if you don't laugh when he cuts one. He loves farts. And he's got an ass that could kill a guy."

"Wait..."

"We're going to our man cave. It's a cabin in the woods. Just guys. Strict no pants policy. You better hope Trav remembered his boxers. You are gonna learn to love being a man like us and become the third Kelce brother, or you ain't leaving that shack."

"What's it going to be like," you said, afraid, but also excited.

"Oh, you're gonna hate every minute, and you're gonna love every minute."

"Fuck. I'm going to get wrecked, aren't I?"

"Oh definitely. We will probably fuck up your head so much. You're going to end up with a fetish for this."

You laughed.

All you could do was laugh.

#stinkface #farting #face farting #face sittting #gassy hunks #jason kelce #stinkface stories

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cinnajun · 10 months

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ᵕ̈ ೫˚∗: keep it quiet | ktr

summary | after an encounter with your best friend’s brother in the middle of the night, you can’t help but falling in love with him—and, perhaps he can’t help falling in love with you, too.

genre | kim taerae x fem!reader, university!au (but over the summer), best friend’s brother!au, y/n is an international student from the united states (sorry for all non usa people)

warnings | alcohol, i plagiarized business proposal, mentions of sex but not explicit

wc | 3.6k

a/n: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TAERAE!!!!! i’ve always felt like he was so best friend’s brother (+ hanbin is brother’s best friend in case u were wondering) so here’s my best friend’s brother taerae manifesto (@taerrrrrae asked to be tagged)

ft. kep1 members (dayeon is taerae’s sister), billlie members, lsfm members

i. silencieux

The moment you wake up, your head is spinning and you know you’re not drunk enough to throw up, but you sure feel like you’re going to. Kazuha is asleep with her head on your stomach, and you don’t remember when she ended up there (when you fell asleep, you know she was still playing Monopoly in the living room). To your right, Dayeon is asleep face down on the floor, snoring loudly, and to your left, Sheon and Tsuki had made it up to Dayeon’s bed.

The room is dark, which is disorienting, given you fell asleep when the fluorescent overhead light was still on. As best as you could, you removed Kazuha’s head from your stomach, trying to push yourself up off the floor. A glance at Dayeon’s Hello Kitty-themed, digital clock tells you that it’s 4:34 in the morning, which means you slept for around five-and-a-half hours.

During that time, you’d slept off a lot of the alcohol, but you were still feeling slightly buzzed—the buzz wasn’t enough to keep the hangover away, though. You must’ve drank your weight in vodka, which was not good for you, but Kazuha had insisted on you showing them what an American college kid party was like. And, since you’d been to a single frat party during your senior year of high school, you’d been able to pull it off to an extent (you ordered red solo cups and called it a day).

Deciding you needed to drink some water, you stumbled over Dayeon and emerged out into the hallway, nearly knocking into the wall as you did so. The house was empty as far as you were aware—her parents had gone on vacation, which was why you’d been able to drink all day in the first place. According to Dayeon, though, her older brother was supposedly getting home that night.

You assumed he would probably be asleep by now, so you continued on your conquest to the kitchen, practically falling down the stairs because you didn’t turn the light on. But, once you made it to the bottom, there was nothing in between you and getting your water.

Except for a boy sitting at the island in the kitchen, a mug in one hand and a phone in the other. He’d dimmed the lights in the room, which you didn’t know could happen, and he was blissfully unaware of your presence. At that moment, you registered the quiet sound of bossa nova playing as well, which meant he probably hadn’t heard you stumbling down the stairs.

You froze the moment you saw him, immediately weighing your options—you could either go back upstairs and search for water in Dayeon’s room (or just drink from the tap, which you didn’t want to do but would sacrifice if need be) or you sucked up the anxiety and got a huge cup of ice water.

You didn’t have time to decide, because he turned his head towards you, seemingly confused as to why you’d stopped. “Oh, I thought you were Dayeon,” he said, and you practically swooned.

You didn’t know Dayeon’s brother was point-blank beautiful. His voice was deep too, and you briefly wondered if he’d somehow stepped straight out from a k-drama. He was dressed like he was in a k-drama, too, wearing a black t-shirt and baggy, red sweatpants with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose.

“Um, sorry,” you replied, feeling a bit stupid. Your voice sounded foreign in your ears, and you were praying to the gods above that you didn’t sound drunk still. Taerae shook his head, offering you a reassuring smile. You nearly passed out as a dimple bloomed on his cheek, and you began to wonder how Dayeon had never told you that her brother was perfect.

“No, go ahead and do whatever you need to do. I don’t think you were expecting me to be here.”

You nodded haphazardly, taking a few steps toward the cabinets. Taerae went back to scrolling on his phone, where you quickly realized he was reading a book. You picked up the pace, rushing past him and towards the cups that were on the counter. Grabbing one, you quickly filled it with ice and water, suddenly forgetting who was sitting behind you.

Hurriedly, you chugged the glass, practically rejoicing as the ice-cold water flowed down your throat. With a content sigh, you let one of the ice cubes fall into your mouth, and you began crunching on it.

“Are you the one that’s going to be staying with us this summer?”

You choked on the ice, panic flowing through your entire body. You practically swallowed the rest of the cube whole, spinning on the ball of your foot to face him. In your drunkenness, you’d forgotten that you were going to be living at this guy’s house for the rest of your summer and hadn’t even tried to make a good impression.

“Oh, yeah, right. That would be me, yes. I’m [First].”

“Taerae,” he replied. “If you ever need anything, let me know. I have a car.”

It took everything in you to keep your jaw from dropping. The more you learned about this guy, the more insane you felt—whenever Dayeon talked about him, she spoke like he was the biggest loser on the planet. But, right now, he seemed like the farthest thing from a loser.

“Well,” you said, clearing your throat. “I’m going to go back to sleep.”

He smiled at you again, nodding. “Sleep well. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. If you’re up before me, the hangover medicine is in the mirror cabinet.”

You felt the warmth rush to your cheeks when he said that, and you rushed to put your glass in the sink and disappear from the room. “Thank you,” you mumbled, speed-walking around the island. Then, as if he was a psychic, he put his hand on the edge right as you walked into it, protecting you from the stabbing pain of a rock-hard corner. With much more fervor than the last time, you choked out another “Thank you!” before practically running up the stairs and back into the sweet escape of Dayeon’s bedroom.

ii. silencio

A couple of days into your stay at Dayeon’s house, you and Taerae found out that you both went to bed late and woke up early. As a result, your most active times were around the same time; so, the both of you often found yourselves sitting with one another.

Every night, it would be the same set-up: Taerae reading a book and drinking tea, which you found out was chamomile, while you sat across from him, working on the homework for your summer class. Then, at around 3 in the morning, you would pack up for the night. You’d then wake up before him and much before Dayeon, make your breakfast, and while you were eating, he would emerge in the morning.

You also quickly learned that Taerae had, quite literally, no flaws. Once, he sat next to you at the dining table, and he smelled like fresh laundry. On top of that, his breakfast of choice had been a piece of toast with raspberry jam which, for some reason, made you even more enamored with him.

During the day, Taerae didn’t go out much. If he did, he was going to see friends, and Dayeon seemed to be in love with one of his friends (his name was Gyuvin, and he was younger than her, which she didn’t like). She often told him to bring his friends over, but Taerae would just laugh at her and leave with car keys dangling from his hand.

He also restated his offer to take you anywhere you needed to go several times, though it was often directed to both you and Dayeon. You found that very sweet, especially for an older brother—a lot of things about his relationship with Dayeon were picturesque. If you’d had a sibling relationship like theirs, you figured you’d be a very different person.

All in all, he was very kind, which was fatal to anybody with a conscience (especially paired with his face). If the word “beautiful” was a person, you were half convinced that Taerae would be him.

You’d be, quite frankly, utterly stupid if you didn’t try and grow closer to him. So, that’s exactly what you did—at night, when Dayeon was fast asleep and you two were the only ones left alive in the house, you would emerge from the guest bedroom and sit with him. You never spoke unless he spoke first, and generally left him to his own devices, hoping somehow that just sitting in the same room as him would make him fall madly in love with you.

Soon enough, the two of you fell into a routine. You’d sit at the kitchen counter on one of their high stools, either studying or playing random games on your computer while you listened to a podcast. Taerae would read and drink tea, listening to various types of music (from jazz to trot, which you found entertaining).

Then, you made a bold move—instead of sitting at the kitchen counter, you sat yourself down at the table, in the opposite corner. Taerae looked at you for a brief moment but didn’t say anything, which made you feel decently impressed with yourself. In your delusion, you were convinced your plan was “working,” even though you had no proof that he viewed you as anything but Dayeon’s friend.

And then, it happened. One night, Taerae was out with his friends later than usual, and you’d felt a little discouraged in pulling your little scheme to hang out with him. But, you figured that, if you didn’t go sit down there at least for the hours you usually did, you’d look suspicious (and fall behind on your schoolwork). So, you set up shop, spreading out your books and papers across the table while you compiled them into your notes.

When he got home, it was around 1 in the morning, and you could tell he was drunk from the way his cheeks were flushed (and the fact that he didn’t hang his car keys—in fact, his keys were nowhere to be found). He nodded at you as he walked to his room, shuffling his feet and yawning. You nodded back, suppressing the smile you felt itching at your lips. A moment later, he came out, wearing the same red sweatpants and black sweatshirt that he loved so much.

You then realized that you’d never been able to watch him make his tea, so you found yourself staring at him the entire time he did—from getting out the tea bags from the cabinet to him adding a plethora of little ingredients, like honey and a single drop of cream.

Then, he turned, and you immediately averted your eyes, staring at your computer screen. Taerae sat next to you instead of sitting on the opposite side, still leaving a chair in between you two. You felt yourself tense up but tried to give the illusion of being as relaxed as possible in hopes of keeping your silly crush a secret.

This time around, Taerae didn’t read a book and sat drinking his tea. He put his music on as usual, settling on the same samba jazz he’d been listening to the night you first met. He leaned back into his chair, and you continued to fight the urge to stare at him from the corner of your eye.

“You want to know something?” he asked, a little slur to his words. You looked at him, raising an eyebrow.

“Depends on what ‘something’ is.”

“We barely talk,” he began, laughing at himself. “But I think about you all the time. When we’re not sitting here together, I almost feel miserable. You live in my house and I still feel like we don’t spend enough time together.”

“Woah,” you said, eyes wide. “Are you sure you want to be saying this when you’re drunk?”

“When else would I say it?” he snorted, brushing his hair out of his face. He took another sip of his tea. “I’ll probably regret it in the morning, but at least it’s off my chest. Don’t tell me how you feel. Just go back to your work.”

You cleared your throat, buffering for a moment. Then, you did as he asked, and went back to furiously typing away at your study guide. About fifteen minutes later, Taerae got up and put his mug in the sink, disappearing deeper into the house—but he left the music playing.

iii. silentium

You didn’t see Taerae until the next night. He didn’t come down in the morning, and you noticed his shoes were gone from the rack next to the door. When you asked Dayeon when she emerged from her bedroom at nearly 1 pm, she said she’d gone to get his car and ended up deciding to spend the day with his friend Matthew.

You found it hard to keep a straight face in front of Dayeon for the rest of the day, wanting nothing more than to spill out all of your feelings to her, as she was your best friend. You also knew that she would likely be less than pleased that your stupid plan to get her brother to fall in love with you worked, so you kept your mouth shut.

It was also out of respect for Taerae, too, as he was probably dying of embarrassment while he was out with his friend. And, as you expected, he arrived back to the house well after Dayeon had passed out, eyebags prominent under his eyes.

You were sitting at the dining table playing Tetris, listening to a random podcast that talked about random items and events that piqued the hosts’ interest. He didn’t go into his room or make his tea this time, just sitting down next to you (with one seat in between, of course).

You took your AirPods out and paused your game, leaning back into your chair. “Sorry,” he said, drumming his fingers on the table. “If I made things weird, that’s not cool for you, ‘cause you don’t have anywhere else to go. I’ll probably be out and about more when my parents come back.”

You stayed quiet, devising a plan in your head. Part of you was exasperated that your stupid sit-in-the-same-room tactic worked, and the other part of you was screaming in your head, banging on the walls, and giggling maniacally.

You slid into the chair that separated you two, feeling your heart pounding in your chest. Then, before he could turn to look at you, you planted a quick kiss on his cheek. You felt like a middle schooler doing that, but it was the only thing you could come up with before Taerae gave up and left you alone.

He turned to face you, eyes wide and cheeks red, like they’d been last night. For a moment, you stared at each other, not saying a word. Then, you got an idea that made your head spin at just the thought of it—it was cliche and straight out of a movie scene, but you couldn’t help but want to actualize it.

Taerae seemed to have the same idea, as he leaned over and kissed you with a sort of fervor that you weren’t expecting. You couldn’t help but return the kiss, putting your hands on the sides of his face and pulling him closer to you. He pulled away for a second, tugging his glasses off his face and practically throwing them on the table.

Taerae’s lips were soft against your own, plump and perfect to kiss. You were close enough now that you could smell his cologne, which was light and airy, and you felt like a thousand flowers were blooming in your chest. Taerae ran a hand through your hair, which nearly made you swoon (if you weren’t already swooning.

You must’ve made out for a good ten minutes (at least that’s what it felt like), hugging him close to you like if you were to let go he would disappear in a second. The only thing that managed to draw you apart was the loud sound of Dayeon’s bedroom door opening, which caused you to practically shove him away from you. You nearly fell out of your chair as you rushed to get back to your original seat, patting your hair down and shoving your AirPods into your ear.

Taerae grabbed his glasses, pushing them on carelessly while he stood from his chair and nearly ran to where he kept his tea mugs. He began making his nightly tea, although you could see his hands shaking as he filled his electric kettle with water.

Dayeon skipped down the stairs and over to you, wrapping her arms around your shoulders and leaning down to hover her head above your shoulder. Then, she plucked out your earbud, putting her phone in front of your computer screen.

You prayed to every god that she couldn’t smell Taerae’s cologne on you, trying to focus on her screen. It was a wall of texts, the contact being easily identifiable as Taerae’s friend, Gyuvin. You scanned every word, bringing your hand up to scroll through them.

“He asked you out?” you blurted out, not thinking about the implications of saying that right behind her older brother. It was a panic reaction, a last-ditch attempt to get her away from you so she wouldn’t find out that you’d made out with her brother in her living room. Taerae spun around, and Dayeon detached herself from you immediately, staring at you with betrayal in her eyes. Taerae looked at her with betrayal in his eyes, too, and you suddenly realized that he knew that she had a thing for his friend.

“I knew Matthew wasn’t telling me something,” Taerae scoffed, causing Dayeon to shrink into herself. “How dare you date one of my friends? In what world is that legal?”

“Do you want a free pass to date one of mine?” Dayeon argued back, which caused you to look away with guilt filling your veins. “I’ve had a crush on him for years, I deserve this!”

You hoped that she never found out about you and Taerae.

iv. quiet

It was the night before Dayeon’s parents got home, two weeks before your dorms opened back up, and Dayeon had gone out with Gyuvin, one of his friends, and a couple of your friends. You’d been invited, but you lied and said you weren’t feeling well, thinking of the opportunity to spend the entire night, alone, with your now boyfriend.

Then, he went and ruined it. You stared at your neck in the mirror in absolute horror, looking at the red mark that was blooming on your skin. Taerae sat on the counter, watching you search through your plethora of makeup bags for the green concealer you’d bought back home.

“I can’t believe you did this to me,” you said, finally finding it in your bag of eyeliners. You immediately began dabbing it onto your neck, picking up your beauty blender and trying your best to blend it out.

“This is not my fault,” he shot back, frowning. “I barely even sucked that hard. This is on you. If you didn’t bruise so easily, we wouldn’t be here.”

You shivered, picking up your normal concealer and beginning to spread that out on the green blob you’d created. “Never phrase it like that again. And, for the record, you bit me. I felt it.”

He huffed, hopping off the counter and walking behind you, wrapping his hands around your waist. You blended out the normal concealer as well, letting out a sigh as it (mostly) disappeared. “The night before your parents come home and you do this to me. How cruel is that?”

“Maybe it’s a good thing. Then we won’t have to sneak around for two weeks, right?”

“I would rather die than have your parents assume that I’m having sex with their son, but okay,” you replied, sighing. You stared at him in the mirror, now, putting your hands on his arms. He stared back at you, putting his head on your shoulder. “Either way, I don’t like hickeys. My friends used to show up to school with them all the time, and sometimes they’d end the day with one they didn’t have at the beginning. It always grossed me out.”

“Then it’ll never happen again,” he replied, squeezing your middle. “Promise.”

Taerae kissed your shoulder, humming. “Dayeon’s getting home soon. We should go to bed.”

“Is she coming home?”

“Gyuvin texted me that he and Kazuha are bringing her back. He said she doesn’t feel well, and that she thinks you got her sick.”

“Awkward,” you giggled, nearly frowning when he let go of you. You turned to face him, and he put his hands on the counter, trapping you in between him and the ledge.

“Good night, my love,” he said, pecking you on the lips. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Be ready for our two weeks of hell.”

“I wouldn’t dream of anything else.”

thank you for reading !

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