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always-andromeda · 8 months

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·˚ ༘₊· ͟͟͞͞꒰➳ 𝐓𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐑’𝐒 𝐏𝐄𝐓

𝐃𝐀𝐘 𝐅𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐀��𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐇𝐎𝐄𝐃𝐎𝐖𝐍

𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 ✯ Professor!Sam Winchester x Fem!Reader

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 ✯ 3268

𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭 ✯ taboo au + dark academia + “I can see how badly you want this, so I'm going to make sure you get it.”

𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞 ✯ I’ve loved this man literally since I was thirteen…so it’s inevitable that I’d be writing something absolutely fucking filthy for him in my twenties…

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 ✯ smut (minors, do not interact), gaps in age and power, mutual masturbation, little bit of panty sniffing, a singular use of Y/N (I'm sorry, I hate it too but it was necessary), usage of pet names (sweetheart), general manipulation, slight praise kink, obvious disclaimer: the dynamic in this fic is just that, fictional, and should not be practiced in real life!! let me know if any other warnings are needed!!

(mdni banner template credit goes to @cafekitsune!!)

You’d rarely had luck receiving any sort of grace from your professors. Sure, there were a select few that only wanted to see you succeed. However, more often than not you seemed to encounter sadists who decided to take their kinks out on exhausted college students. But you were convinced that Professor Winchester wouldn’t be like that.

For starters, he’d always been challenging but never malicious. Despite the fact that you’d registered for his Norse Mythology course with the assumption that it would be easy college credits, you quickly learned that his assignments were difficult. Every week there seemed to be about a hundred pages worth of reading, frequent essays, and an emphasis on class discussion.

Oh, did he love those class discussions. While most were less than enthusiastic to contribute to lengthy examinations of Eddic poetry at eight in the morning, Professor Winchester seemed to be none the wiser of this.

He was always squinting over his thin wire framed glasses, surveying the class. He’d stand at his desk, brushing his long hair behind his ear while looking over papers. When he’d listen he’d purse his lips and tilt his head, expression rife with genuine interest. In all of these moments, he was the most gorgeous. But more than that, you were fascinated with his mind.

Professor Winchester knew this material like the back of his hand; was able to pull references and quotes from various pieces of literature at the drop of a hat. He was the only professor who could ever give notes that were actually helpful on essays and he’d always been generous with handing out extra credit assignments. Which is what you aimed to obtain on this visit to his office.

You looked through the glass of his office door and saw him inside, working diligently at a dark oak wood desk. Taking a deep breath, you turned the doorknob and entered.

The hinges squeezed but Winchester seemed so fixated on whatever was before him that he only raised a finger, indicating for you to wait. So you did. Awkwardly. You rocked slightly on your heels, your stomach starting to twist in time with the movement. God, he looked like a dream lit by the stained glass banker's lamp as he graded papers.

In another world you could see him coming home from a long day, his body warm behind you as he wrapped his arms around your waist. Smelling like black coffee and pencil shavings, you'd adoringly close your eyes, taking in his scent and ask him how his day went. He'd hum in contentment when resting his chin on your head; you're his rock, his soulmate, the reason he stays sane despite dealing with probably hundreds of students and the frustrating dance of academic bureaucracy.

It's a fantasy that broke the second Winchester glanced up and said with a hint of surprise, "Miss L/N! Come in, have a seat," he nodded towards the chair on the other side of his desk.

Relieved that he can pick you out among the sea of students from his classroom, you move forward until you reach the chair. You set your bag down on the floor and settle into the worn leather of the seat as Winchester eyes you expectantly.

"What can I do for you this afternoon?"

You chew on the inside of your cheek. "Actually, I was hoping that you could help me out with something."

"Oh, what might that be?" he furrowed his brow.

"Um..." you started. "I'm sure you noticed that I didn't do too hot on the last exam."

"Ah, I did," he said simply.

"You did?"

"Yeah, I was surprised, actually." Winchester opened up one of his desk drawers and sorted through some files before pulling out a packet you recognized as the exam you'd taken the week before. "You seem so engaged in class discussion and you've been doing well on everything else. This...this felt rushed. What happened?"

The soft expression of concern on his face only increased your shame. In all honesty, you'd wasted half the exam time away staring at him. He'd worn a red sweater over a cream colored button up that day. Then he'd rolled up the sleeves before handing out the exam papers. It felt stupid to admit that you'd been distracted by his goddamn forearms.

But you had been. You couldn't resist watching him as he'd circled the room, keeping an eye out for cheating. With his arms folded behind his back, you got the best look at the back of him. His long legs clad in khaki. Strong, tanned forearms corded with prominent veins. Shoulder blades pushed back confidently as he walked. Everything about his solid stature had your mind far, far away.

You'd been good at making sure your daydreams wouldn't get the better of you. But this time, before you knew it, Winchester was glancing down at his watch and announcing that you had fifteen minutes left for exam time. You had no choice but to rush through the rest of it, writing down answers that hardly even made sense just to fill in blanks.

Now those answers laid before you, condemning you to a low D– that dragged down your entire grade.

"I honestly couldn't tell you, Professor. I thought I studied enough but I guess not."

Though you'd attempted to laugh off his concern, Winchester obviously wasn't budging. "But these are rookie mistakes. Number fifteen for example. Where do the gods live?"

"Easy. Asgard."

"Right, but here you marked down the answer for Valhalla," he slid the paper around so you could look at the question.

Sure enough, there it was, your frantic pencil marks filling in the bubble for the incorrect answer. Damn.

"And that's just on the multiple choice questions," Winchester continued, flipping through the pages. "You barely followed any of the directions for the long answer questions. Your response to the short essay portion was a paragraph too short. And it was too unfocused."

Unfocused is right, Professor Winchester.

"I hate to say it...but I was a little disappointed."

The sting of tears threatened to spill down your cheeks. So you cleared your throat and blinked them back quickly. Voice trembling, you answered quickly, "I'm sorry, Professor. I wasn't on my game and I thought I'd pay you a visit so I could plead my case. I'm willing to do any kind of extra credit assignment. I don't care how much work it is. I'll do anything to fix my grade because I really want to do well in your class and–"

Winchester raised a hand, urging you to stop. Then he spoke, "Listen, I can see how badly you want this. So I'm going to make sure you get it. Just...let me think."

With that, Winchester rose from his seat and began to gather the papers that littered the surface of his desk. He stacked them neatly before opening a different drawer and laying them inside. After he closed the drawer, he made his way around the desk. You tried not to look at him as he made his way around the room, especially not when you felt his hand brush against the back of your chair. But you couldn't not notice when he drew the shade on his door's window and closed the blinds to his window, leaving the room dim save for the yellow light of his desk lamp.

Once he'd made his round, he returned to his chair and rolled back, leaving a massive gap between himself and the edge of his desk.

Then he did something else you didn't expect.

He patted the wood and said, "Come. Sit on my desk. Let me look at you."

You almost wavered on the direction when he cleared his throat expectantly. That brought you to your feet and compelled you to settle waveringly before him.

With his lips in a tight line, Winchester studied you. He tilted his head every few seconds, letting his eye flicker from your uncertain expression to your body. You sat up a little straighter in an attempt to satisfy his observation of you.

You weren't quite sure what he was doing, but it made you nervous; made you vulnerable in a way you weren't used to.

"I may have one extra credit opportunity that I can offer. Special. Just for you."

"Yeah? What do you want me to do?"

"Well, you can start by spreading your legs."

Your eyes went wide. "Professor Winchester, you're not–"

He cut you off quickly, "First, after office hours, you may call me Sam. Second, I'm not going to touch you. I'm simply asking you to give me a– a presentation," he decided.

"What kind of presentation?" you asked.

Your feigned innocence made the man chuckle softly. "The kind of presentation I'm sure you give in your dormitory bedroom every night."

There wasn't an ounce of jesting on his face, but still you played dumb. "I have no idea what you're referring to, Sam." His name felt foreign yet familiar on your tongue. Probably because you'd whispered it many times before in the exact scenario he'd described.

"I'd hoped you'd tell me the truth about why you were so distracted during your exam. But since you haven't been forthcoming, I guess I have to spell it out for you, haven't I?"

You swallowed hard and blinked nervously.

"You thought I wouldn't notice, did you?" he chuckles again. "It's hard not to notice when one of your students, especially one so beautiful, is practically drooling all over their table."

The scraps of flattery were evidently working on you as Sam smiled when you fiddled with your fingers in your lap as your skin got all warm and tingly. So he kept going.

"Besides, you're too intelligent to do this terribly on something you should've aced. Maybe you wanted to fail it. You wanted to get my attention, didn't you?"

"Oh, no, I wasn't trying to waste your time, I was just–"

"You weren't wasting my time. Wasting your time is continuing this pointless back and forth when you could instead be proving yourself."

"Proving myself?"

"Yes. Spread those legs...and earn your grade," he ordered.

Breathing in and out slowly, you did what you were asked. The knots in your stomach told you this was wrong. But the smile of approval that slowly grew on Sam's lips said that this was exactly what you both needed.

You'd never been more embarrassed to be wearing a skirt. One the fabric pooled around your hips, it only framed the damp patch on your underwear. Perhaps part of you had wanted something like this to happen. Because your pussy was already pulsing after simply being observed behind the cotton curtain that soaked up her anticipation.

"Very good," Sam breathed out.

"What do I do now?" you asked.

"Just...play with her. Show me what you like to do to make her happy."

You nodded, then pursed your lips as you thought. If you were going to present to him...you might as well go all out. So you shifted each of your thighs around, pulling down your underwear until your bare ass was planted on the desk and the garment was caught on one of your ankles. You lifted your left and held it out gently, the panty hanging in the air a little below Sam's face.

"Take them," you said. "Visual aid."

He smirked lazily at the offering before pulling them over your shoe, being careful not to actually touch you. Sam balled them up before bringing them to his nose and slowly breathing in the scent. You could tell he enjoyed it thoroughly as he let out a deep sigh from within his chest.

"With how wet these are...it's good to know you were prepared even for a surprise presentation. I knew there was a reason you're my favorite."

His words went straight to your cunt as a few drops of slick leaked from your hole and landed on the dark wood beneath you.

"Go on," Sam urged, gaze flickering to the drops of you on his desk. "She's waiting. And so am I."

You began to treat yourself with the same level of care as you did when you were alone. One of your hands reached up your shirt and you cupped one of your tits. You kneaded the flesh for a few seconds before focusing on the nipple, pinching it until it pebbled and poked through your shirt. The action made your breathing turn ragged.

You finally let your other hand travel south, bringing warmth to the soft skin of your thighs. Wanting better access to yourself, you pulled your leg up, resting a foot on the desk itself. Then you reclined back and let your fingers roam where they wanted.

Using two fingers, you spread your outer lips, only exposing yourself to Sam’s scrutiny even further. The cool air hitting your most vulnerable part, you shivered as goosebumps erupted across your skin. You looked up at him, gauging his approval of your performance.

“You’re doing so well already, keep going,” he encouraged, hardly concealing the arousal that clung thickly to his tone.

You took the praise with pride. It emboldened you enough to slip your two fingers between your folds to gather up some of the slick. You couldn’t help but feel mortified as you involuntarily gasped when your digits brushed slightly against your clit.

Sam let a quick puff of air out his nose. “Sensitive?”

“Mhmmm,” you whined.

“Bet you can’t even touch that pretty clit directly without crying, huh?”

You nodded.

“Then be gentle. I want you to last for me.”

You took that to mean that he didn’t want you touching yourself there yet. So instead you switched to focusing on your entrance. It wasn’t often that you went straight for penetration. Rarely did it bring the kind of relief you craved.

But you had the feeling that Sam would want to see it; to see your fingers filling yourself up and stretching you out.

With your fingers practically pruning already, you pushed one in ever so slowly. It took a second to adjust to the slight pressure, but still you began to carefully pump. The slick squelch only intensified when you slipped another one in and sped up your movements.

Though the pressure increased and built up tension in your belly, you could already tell it wasn’t going to go anywhere. You bucked your hips pathetically against your own hand, trying to get deep enough to hit your g-spot. But no matter how far you tried to probe, it was useless. Your fingers simply weren’t long enough.

Your eyes went wind, catching sight of something that most likely could reach that spot inside you. While you’d been fucking yourself, your professor had undone the button and the zipper on his pants and slipped himself out. There he sat, your panties in his hand and wrapped around the thick length of his cock. The angry red tip poked up and out of the fabric with each slow thrust. And you could already tell based on how long his strokes were that you’d most likely be able to feel him poking against your belly from inside you. The idea made you moan and throw your head back.

Sam swiftly reprimanded you, “Ah, remember your eye contact. I want you to look at me.”

Shame spread over your body. What the fuck was going on? Were you really fingering yourself on his desk right next to papers that he was surely going to return to students? Was Sam really fisting his own cock with your underwear? And were you actually enjoying this?

“Sweetheart,” Sam’s self control faltered slightly with the name. But it grabbed your attention nonetheless. “I need you to look at me. Let me look into your eyes when you make yourself come on my desk, alright?”

This was about more than fixing your grade. This was about pleasing him…by pleasing yourself. And as you returned his look, you were all in.

Under his watchful, half lidded, hazel eye you allowed yourself to focus on your aching clit which laid in wait like a pearl beneath the hood of skin covering it. Carefully, you pulled that hood back before lightly spreading some of your slick with a finger. You let the skin settle back in place over the sensitive nub before going straight to work.

You began to rub slow circles on the hood and finally properly moaned. It took only a few seconds for the muscle memory of your nightly ritual to kick in as the pleasure started to mount. Finally, all of that pressure in your core had some actual weight to it; a weight that was already beginning to roll in shallow waves over your whole being.

"There you go, sweetheart. Let me hear you loud and clear. Don't wanna miss a single sound from you," Sam groaned and you caught how the grip he had on himself tightened, how his pace quickened.

While rolling your hips against your hand, you pulled up a side of your shirt, exposing even more of yourself to him. Now he could easily see one of your tits rise and fall with your staggered breaths. He could see how the ball of fat dimpled under your fingertips as you squeezed and pulled at your hardened nipple.

Both sources of simulation had you whimpering breathlessly, "Sam, I-I'm so close– Let me come, please?"

Sam glared and asked through gritted teeth, "That's not my name. What do you call me in class?"

"Professor?"

Sam nodded darkly.

You took the cue quickly and begged helplessly, "Please, professor, please let me come–" you were cut off by the sound of your pleasure starting to push you over the edge.

Sam left you teetering, staring right over the border of this boundary. That boundary being an ethical nightmare that you had no clue how you'd navigate. But you wanted to be good for him; you craved his approval.

And thankfully, Sam gave it as he groaned, "There you go, good girl. You can come, you've got permission."

With that, you arched off the desk and burst with glorious clarity. A thin stream of your arousal drooled from your entrance as you rubbed yourself through the enormous implosions and the small aftershocks that followed. Your head was heavy with the fog of pleasure and you wanted to hang it back, give it a break.

But still, you were determined to keep your eyes on him, even as you pulled your fingers away from your trembling cunt and stuck them in your mouth. Your tongue swirled around the wrinkled digits, soaking up every bit of yourself that you could.

Any sort of professionalism Sam had been trying to maintain up until that point shattered completely when he rolled his chair forwards. Closer to you now, you looked down into his soft eyes and watched how his normally objective stare went personal; emotional. He looked at you with the kind of admiration that made your heart flutter with pride.

He took his hand, placed it on your knee, and spread your legs further. His touch was so light, so soft that you could help feeling electricity dance along your spine.

"I thought you said you wouldn't touch me?" you whispered, only a hint of a smug smile tugging at your lips.

Choosing his words as carefully as ever, he explained, "That was before I decided that you needed some of my...guidance."

#˚ʚ meda writes ɞ˚#hauntedhoedown #haunted hoedown #supernatural #sam winchester #sam winchester x reader #sam winchester x you #sam winchester x y/n #sam winchester smut #sam winchester fanfiction #sam winchester fic

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theresattrpgforthat · 4 months

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do you have any metafictional ttrpgs? or any ttrpgs about nothing (being about the concept of nothing or literally not having something they're "about")?

Theme: Metafictional TTRPGS / Games About Nothing.

Y’all are really pulling out the stops for these requests, huh? I’m not entirely sure if what I pulled up actually counts as metafiction, or as games about nothing, but I hope you find something close to what you’re looking for here.

Feedback, by Adira Slattery.

This is a drawing and survey taking game.

You will be expected to draw some chairs.

You will be expected to take some surveys

.Requires the use of a printer for the surveys.

And at the end you gotta email me.

So good luck...

This is a game about drawing a chair. And then taking a survey. And then drawing a chair. And taking a survey. And so on. It’s an exercise that’s meant to be both repetitive and reflective. It’s hard for me to determine what this game is about, because a) I haven’t played it and b) I suspect it’s going to mean something a little different for each person who plays it. It’s possible that for some people who look at this game, it might be about nothing.

Undeath of the Author, by quinntastic.

A meta mini-game designed for Troika.

This is a game in which the author is both dead and not dead - they are undead, and it is up to the group to kill them. The author is the author of the game, and the group is responsible for figuring out how to go about and kill them. (Of course, the author is willing to tell you, the GM how they can be killed, but they don’t want you to tell the players. You can keep a secret, right?)

Beach Episode, by Legendary Vermin.

BEACH EPISODE is a microgame mix-in for your regular table-top RPG group. Players take their current characters, quickly adapt them for a rules-light session, and commence to run an anime-inspired, beach-themed adventure. All you need to play is at least 3d6 and an established set of characters.

This is a game that is about nothing in the sense that it isn’t really about anything. It follows the style of the anime beach episode, asking you to take recognized characters, probably from an ongoing campaign, and giving them a moment of rest, relaxation, and (probably) nothing plot-relevant. It’s great for encouraging players to delve into who their characters are without feeling worried about the consequences.

Meta Society, by Small Stories.

Meta Society is a game about playing a game of Good Society created for the April Fool's Day Good Society game jam.

This is a game about playing a game - specifically a game of Good Society. When you play, you’ll describe fictional players interacting with a fictional setting, using safety tools and talking about what they did and didn’t like about each session. This requires a copy (as well as experienced knowledge) of how to play Good Society, but I think if you have had the experience of playing Good Society, this might also be something you could adapt to make it a metafictional game about playing a different ttrpg.

DIE: The Roleplaying Game, by Rowan, Rook & Decard.

You’re dragged into a treacherous fantasy world made from your own fears, doubts and desires. There’s only one way to escape - but with limitless adventure within your grasp, would you even want to?

In DIE: The Roleplaying Game, you play a group of authentically flawed people from the real world who gather together to play a game and are trapped in a magical realm. What are they prepared to sacrifice to escape? What are they prepared to sacrifice to stay? This is a TTRPG inspired by a comic book, about people who play games, finding themselves being drawn into a game. Your characters will be interacting with a fantasy world of their own creation, knowing that it is a game and yet being drawn into it deeper than they could have ever imagined. If you want to hear this game in action, My First Dungeon has an excellent season from Mar. 31 - May 26 of 2023.

The Waiting, by J.N. Butler.

A one page GM-less roleplaying game of suspense for 1 or more players.

The Waiting is inspired by the anxiety caused by waiting for the unknown.

In The Waiting you play as a character in a setting where it hasn’t happened yet. It is definitely going to happen, but no one knows when it will happen. Until it happens, there is only The Waiting.

What are you waiting for?

This feels like a game that could be about nothing because the thing that is going to happen will not happen while you play the game. The game is specifically about the time in which the thing has not yet happened - you just know that it will. The game occurs as a series of rounds, over which players describe what their characters are doing. When the event that the table creates happens, you have one final round of play and then the game is over.

This might also be a great tool for dropping into another game, if you’re like me and you like pairing your TTRPGs like cheeses and fine wines.

#tabletop games #indie ttrpgs #game recommendations #dnd #asks #indie ttrpg #metafiction #games about nothing

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she-wolf09231982 · 3 months

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Chapter 4- The Catch

Summary: Carentan was a harsh bloody battle. As you and Doc are tending to multiple wounded men, you eventually run into Liebgott while he’s comforting a severely wounded fellow soldier he was partnered with. After the Americans claimed the town, eventually the boys of Easy were pleasantly surprised when they had an evening at a pub when you arrived polished up like a lady with a song in your heart.

A/N: Mature audience, Joe LiebgottxFem!Medic, post D-Day, She/Her Pronouns, Y/F/N, Y/L/N, Cursing/Swearing, Derogatory Slurs, Womanizing Comments, Confrontation, Military Terminology, 1940’s slang, Inappropriate Nicknames, Band of Brothers References, Mentions of Weaponry, Descriptive Wounds/Injuries, Death, Blood/Gore, Smoking, Banter, Pining, Consensual Physical Contact/PDA, FOREVER FLUFF 💚

Chapter takes place Episode 1x4 Replacements

Song selection for this piece:

Good Night, My Love by Ella Fitzgerald

{Provided below at the end of the chapter}

*These stories may not fall entirely in accordance with the TV series timeline. I do not know the real soldiers the actors portray in this series, so please understand I show no disrespect. Some or most of historical events and character interactions in my fanfics are fabricated purely for the sake of the enjoyment of fiction*

~~~~~~~

As you come up on Carentan, you’re met with heavy fire from German snipers hiding inside some of the buildings. Most of you take cover in the ditches on either side of the road but are just made easy targets for the Germans since everyone was still out in the open.

Winters shouted at the troops to move forward to get cover and started to physically lift each soldier he passed to get them moving.

“Get yourselves out of those trenches!”

After finally making entry into the town, American soldiers scatter to wherever they can to get cover from all of the gunfire coming from every direction.

You and Doc on separate ends of the streets trying to keep low to tend to the wounded.

“MEDIC!!”

You race to two soldiers landing on your knees next to them, one on the ground with a trail of blood coming from his helmet, the other crouching over him.

“He’s still breathing, help me carry him!” You call out. You each grab an arm of the injured soldier and drag him behind a building.

While you’re working on the nameless soldier’s head wound, a drug store gets blasted by German artillery not far from where you were, the force from the explosion sending you sideways into the brick wall next to you.

Your ears intensely ringing, it’s all you can hear for a moment until you hear Liebgott’s voice.

“TIPPER! TIP! Answer me, Tip!” Joe calls out to his partner, Ed Tipper who sadly had been in the building when the blast occurred.

You shake your head vigorously in an attempt open your ears and regain your composure. When you finally snap out of it, you look up to see Tipper stumbling out of the destroyed storefront of the pharmacy, the left side of his face completely torn up from shrapnel, and his right thigh blown wide open, the artery clearly lacerated and bleeding out.

Liebgott running, stops dead in his tracks when he sees Tipper.

“Joe?? Is that you??” Tipper calls out trembling.

Liebgott stunned by Tipper’s bloody appearance, slowly approached him carefully setting down is rifle.

“Lookin’ good, Tip.” Joe says reassuringly placing his rifle on the ground, “-lookin’ real good.”

Liebgott gently took Tipper by the arm, leading him out of the building.

“Come here, buddy, you gotta sit down. Come here...Come on...” He slowly helped Tipper to the ground, “Easy, easy...There you go...there you go.”

Liebgott crouched next to Tipper and gently guided his head to rest in the crook of his neck.

Tipper’s breath became ragged and labored. As he started coughing up blood, Joe surveyed the rest of the damage on him. He discovers the right thigh wound, bleeding out and pulsating where the artery was hit, then the right foot exposed through the boot also drenched in red.

“Ah Jesus...” Liebgott whispered to himself stroking Tipper’s hair. “You hang in there, buddy. Okay, we're gonna get you fixed up. All right...okay. Guys, you wanna give me a hand here? Come on.”

He started to lift Tipper as you approached. Before the other two soldiers could help Liebgott pick him up, you push through them grabbing Tipper’s right arm to bring it across the back of your shoulders and assist carrying him to safety.

“Over here, Lieb.” You shout.

You both rest Tipper against the wall as you grab a large dressing from your med bag, putting it directly over his thigh to apply pressure. You knew it would be to no avail since the artery needed to be held closed to keep the blood in and he’s lost so much blood already. Without plasma, you couldn’t do much.

“Tip, I’m right here.” You comfort him, putting your face in his line of sight so he can see you.

Liebgott staring stood up slowly, waiting for you to work your healing magic, but you already knew Tipper’s fate was sealed. You look up apologetically at Joe and shake your head.

~~~~~~~

After the dust finally settled, the town was now under American control. The time in Carentan was short lived, as orders came through for Easy to attack East towards the low ground. Easy went from the Western part of Carentan towards the South, near the village of Douville. You all are confronted with a major German resistance upon your arrival. The Germans launched a strong counter- attack with tanks and armored vehicles. Fortunately, Sherman tank reinforcements arrived, breaking the German lines of contact and shortly abandoned the hill.

A few days later, after a failed reconnaissance mission, Easy was removed from the front lines and sent back to Sainte-Mère-du-Monte to recover from the combat you all had endured. To Easy’s misfortune, Lipton announces you all are to return to combat in September. New orders state Easy is to drop into Holland to liberate the people from German tyranny.

But when Easy approaches Eindhoven, the locals commemorate your arrival with celebration in the streets with banners waving and cheers of appreciation. Women of the village kiss each soldier on the cheeks and mouths as they pass, while the men hug or shake their hands showing their gratitude.

It was chaotic. Everywhere you looked, people were dancing and shouting in the streets while music blared from a band off to the side. You were once again separated from Joe.

You hear Lipton yelling, “Keep moving!!” He repeated over and over amongst the crowd as he ushered the guys up the street.

This was an unusual change of pace for Easy Company. Instead of being met with gunshots and explosions, you’re welcomed with warm smiles and affection from the locals. Some of the guys took advantage of the situation getting in some extra kisses from the local women.

You wondered if Liebgott was kissing any of these women. Afterall, they seemed to be wearing some of their best dresses with make-up and here you were, having looked like a hag for nearly four months since you dropped on D-Day. Why wouldn’t he get his kisses in while he had the chance to get one from a lady looking like she had at least been bathing consistently?

This thought discouraged you. You hadn’t done yourself up since Toccoa. You release a sigh of frustration and continue pushing through the crowd.

~~~~~~~

That evening, Easy got together with some of the new Easy replacements in attendance at what seemed to be a barn made into an improvised pub. There was a dartboard on the wall, and multiple tables and chairs set up. A simple radio playing some popular tunes sat on the bar.

“Hey, Lieb, where’s Y/L/N?” Perconte asked.

Liebgott shrugged. “Last I heard she went to one of the local women’s houses to get cleaned up.”

“Betchya we won’t even recognize her.” Guarnere joked.

The guys all laughed collectively. Malarkey pushed through the crowd trying to get everyone’s attention.

“Hey, guys! Get a look at the bird that just came in!” Malarkey pointed towards the entrance with a wide eager smile.

Everyone redirected their attention to the front of the room. Most of the men of Easy caught sight of an almost familiar woman wearing the standard female Army dress uniform complete with skirt, simple heels, and clean white medic brassard displaying the Red Cross around the left bicep. Hair clean and perfumed pulled back into a neat fashionable bun and a face with fresh make-up and painted lips. You almost had the entire room at a complete standstill when you walked in.

Liebgott’s jaw dropped, (as did everyone’s).

“Who the hell is that?” Talbert asked.

“Floyd, you’re an idiot.” Guarnere asserted.

“It’s our little lady medic, boys.” Randleman pointed out affectionately.

Excited murmurs and whispers filtered across the room.

You start to make your way to Easy in the back. Of course, you’re approached by several other members from other companies there, but you kindly decline their advances so you can get to your own.

“Hey, fellas.” You greet as you near the group of Easy soldiers.

They all inaudibly respond with their own forms of welcome, then all fall silent leaving a heavy blanket of tension in the air between you and them. You look around suspiciously wondering why none of them were making eye contact with you or speaking. Some looked like they were even holding their breath.

“What’s wrong with you guys? It just Y/L/N! Quit acting like you never seen a woman before.” Nixon said addressing the men.

“Yeah, but that’s just it, sir, it’s Y/L/N...dolled up. She don’t normally look like this.” Guarnere explained.

Nixon laughed. “Then it would be gentlemanly of one of you to offer her a seat while I get her a drink. What will you have Y/L/N?” He called out to you.

“Thank you, sir, any beer will be just fine.” You replied with a relieved smile.

“You clean up nice, L/N!” Malarkey commended as he pulled you in for a one-armed hug.

“Thanks, Don.” You respond as your cheeks heat up.

The rest of the guys agree simultaneously, each voicing over the other how great you looked.

You laugh nervously, “Gee, guys, thanks.” Was all you could say.

You weren’t used to this kind of attention from the boys. As the awkwardness lifted and everyone started to resume socializing, your eyes eventually met Liebgott’s.

You each smile at eachother.

“Here you go, L/N.” Nixon handed you a bottle with a wink.

“Thanks, sir. Cheers!” You raise your beer clinking it against his highball glass of Vat 69 whiskey on the rocks.

You finally go to stand with Liebgott.

When you reached him, he gently pulled you in by your waist and leaned in to whisper in your ear.

“You’re a knockout, sweetheart.” He professed with that Joe Liebgott smirk.

You felt his warm breath dance along your neck, making your spine shiver and the butterflies rise in your stomach.

Your breath caught in your chest, and you smiled shyly at him.

“Lookin’ dapper yourself, Joe.” You reply as you readjust his tie.

Your little moment was interrupted abruptly by Guarnere.

“Hey Joe, if you ain’t gonna have a dance with her, how ‘bout letting one of us take her once around the room?” He teased.

An upoar of laughter erupted from the group.

Joe looked at you and raised his eyebrows, “How about it, doll?” He asked.

“Oh, I don’t think I can dance in these shoes, Joe. I tripped twice outside on the way over here.” You admitted.

Joe chuckled then Luz came up to you.

“Hey Y/F/N! Bull here says you got some pipes on ya? Can you sing us a little something?” He bid.

You direct a look of betrayal towards Randleman.

“You said you wouldn’t tell anyone, Bull.” You reminded him sharply.

“It would be a crime and shame to keep that voice a secret, lady.” Randleman declared.

Laughter fills the air.

“So, whaddya say? One song? For us?” Luz begged again.

You look around at all the eager faces of the men in Easy Company, and you smile.

“How about some Ella Fitzgerald?” You suggest.

The men cheered and ushered you over to the upright piano against the wall by the bar.

“Hey, we can’t see her!” One soldier shouted from the back.

“Give her something to stand on!” Another one called out.

Toye placed a chair next to the piano as Liebgott offered his hand to help you up.

When you came into view of the audience, all the men applauded, directing whistles and howls of admiration.

You grimace playfully shaking your head mouthing, “Knock it off!” as you wave them down.

A soldier from the crowd sat at the piano.

“You know, Goodnight, My Love?” You ask him.

The soldier nodded and began playing the selection from memory.

You serenade with all your heart and soul, immediately capturing the room. As you sing, you look from one awestruck face to another, making sure to smile as any good entertainer would do in the movies. You felt like a starlet.

The whole room leaning in listening intensively, some ogling at you from the tables, your eyes connect with Joe’s who’s standing along the front. He grins as he watches you admirably and you can’t help but return a smile.

At that moment on the last line of the song, you lost your balance.

🎶Sleep tight, my love, goodnight, my love

Remember that you’re my sweetheart--🎶

“GASP!”

All the air suddenly left your lungs as you feel your feet leaving the surface of the chair. It all seemed to happen in slow motion as Joe swiftly swooped in catching you bridal style before you can hit the floor. The room in unison choked with concern.

The world went still while Joe was holding you. Your faces so close, your cheeks reddened and once again your breath stuck in your throat somewhere.

“Nice grab, Liebgott!” You hear Guarnere shout. The room laughed and applauded as Joe turned still carrying you, smiling mischievously from ear to ear.

“What a finale!” Compton called out.

“No more booze for her!” Luz teased. More laughter.

Liebgott set you on your feet.

“You good?” He asked. You nod.

“Thanks to you.” You beamed. You leaned in and kissed his cheek to show your gratitude for the rescue.

You heard some of the guys mockingly whistle at you and Liebgott for this little show of affection.

His astonishment had left his mouth slightly agape and his eyes wide making you giggle. He leered playfully at you.

“You missed, sweetheart.” He eluded as he tapped his lips with his finger winking at you.

You raised an eyebrow at him skeptically. With your fore and middle fingers together, you press them to your red lips, kiss the pads, then place them onto Joe’s waiting lips which he gladly kissed. A devilish grin stretched across his face.

“Maybe next time we can have that dance?” He suggested.

“Sure, Joe. At least I know I can depend on you to catch me if I fall again.” You proclaim with a wink and a coy smile.

“I’ll always be there to save you, sweetheart.”

~~~~~~~

For your hearing pleasure,

Good Night, My Love by Ella Fitzgerald

youtube

{Provided by YouTube}

Chapter 5 👇🏼

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fanfictiondatascience · 7 months

Text

EDIT: Hey folks! Thanks for the feedback on our previous post. Our vague wording may have misled people as to our intentions, for which we apologize. We are currently taking a step back to rework how best to communicate our intentions in a way that is the most sensitive to the needs of the community. Thank you for your engagement! We have closed the survey link for now, but here's the survey description for future reference:

What is it about our human-human interactions that makes creatively writing together so compelling and unique? What about that is completely lost in human-AI writing interactions? Do you think ChatGPT is bad at creative writing? Do you have big feelings about any of the above topics? Then keep reading! We are conducting this study because we are interested in analyzing collaborative creativity methods among fanfiction writers. The goal is to criticize the current state of AI-assisted creative writing and offer suggestions from seasoned creative writers on how it could be improved and designed to actually help the people it affects.

First off: what does human-centered mean? The goal of human-centered research is to design technologies based off of HUMAN interactions, and these technologies should be for HELPING humans without replacing, displacing, or marginalizing them.

If you've tried interacting with AI tools like ChatGPT...you might notice they're unhelpful, and even outright bad, when it comes to writing creatively. The goal of this research is to find out: Do people even want them to be helpful? CAN they be helpful in any way? Is it impossible for AI to produce creative writing that can hold a candle to anything a human could write? Why might it be impossible?

There’s a lot of research being done in this area that is not very human-centered - it involves making AI tools for creative writing and then asking people how they feel about them, instead of the reverse. We believe that a better approach would be to ask people how they feel about AI tools and whether or not they can be helpful, and propose design guidelines based on that. We believe that this is particularly relevant to fanfiction authors: due to how AI tools are trained, a large proportion of the dataset for AI-based creative writing is likely comprised of fanfiction, due to how much of it there is on the internet.

We’re looking for fanfiction authors aged 18 and above who co-write fanfiction with one or more collaborative partner(s). This can be short-form (co-writing one-offs, single chapters) or long form (co-writing entire fics, long-term collaborations) - we’re essentially interested in the methods that you and your collaborators use together to produce works of creative fiction.

The provided survey will take approximately 15-20 minutes to complete. If you’re interested in telling us more, you can sign up for a 30-45 minute interview at the end of the survey. Ideally, you and your writing collaborator(s) would be able to attend this interview together. Every interview participant will be compensated with a $10 gift card.

All parts of this survey were approved by the University of Washington Human Subjects Division Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure the protection of your rights and welfare as you take this survey. Your responses will be kept confidential, although we may publish aggregated results. You may exit the survey at any time.

If you have questions, comments, or concerns, reach out to [email protected].

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello! We are researchers at the University of Washington Human-Centered Data Science Lab, and we are studying modes and methods of collaborative creating writing. We’d love to have you participate in our study!

Survey link: [now closed]

Thank you for your participation!

#fanfiction research #fanfic

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gravestrain · 9 months

Text

as the seasons change (p.l. dubois)

@bqstqnbruin Christina! writing for you has been such an honor. I've been following you since I joined Tumblr almost three years ago and have always loved your fics. to write something for you this time is such a joy. 💖

I'm sorry to both you and Demi for the late post. I work 60 hours a week in summers and I'm taking a class that has taken up all of my time. But I promise my tardiness does not dim the amount of love I have for you both (and this fic).

as always: this is a work of fiction. it's hard to imagine why anyone would move from LA to Winnipeg after college, but I tried my best to make it as realistic as possible.

Christina, I hope you love this as much as I loved writing it. It has been such a joy to write this for you. And as always, Demi, thank you for hosting such a wonderful event for our community. @wyattjohnston

3k words. loosely edited, please excuse any mistakes. flashbacks that are not separated by a breaker are written in italics.

You never wanted to hate hockey. Growing up in Southern California, you had always tuned in with the Kings, even attending a few games. But in your mid 20s, you found yourself muting everything to do with hockey, trying to block it out of your head entirely.

It wasn't always like this. In fact, there was a time in your life where it was your entire life. Until it wasn't. You had met Pierre-Luc Dubois shortly after his arrival to Winnipeg. You were living in Winnipeg, fresh out of college working part time on the weekends at a bar. You picked up a part time job to help increase your funds from your starting salary. You truly did have your dream job, but it definitely isn't the dream pay. And moving from your hometown to Winnipeg caused a lot of additional funds.

As soon as you met him, you quickly became aware of his charm, charisma, and unfortunately, his impact on you. And how you could you forget him, with his silky accent always calling you "honey," no matter what the conversation entailed. Every greeting, every question, every conversation, was always started or ended with him addressing you as honey. His reasoning?

"You're as sweet as honey," his deep accented voice told you one day shortly after meeting him. He quickly looked around to survey his surroundings, and then whispered in your ear: "I'm sure you taste like it too."

Of course, your cheeks burned immediately at that. It was definitely not a conversation appropriate for your workplace, under the neon lights of the bar you worked at. Of course, Pierre was the one who was starting those interactions, but you never shut him down, and truthfully you bashed in the attention. It made you feel wanted, it made you feel beautiful. You had your share of guys in college and even a couple in Winnipeg before you met Pierre-Luc, but as soon as you met Pierre, you were done for. There had been no one once you met him, and there had been nothing after him. You had found yourself reminiscing on the times that you and Pierre shared. You were both in love, and you wondered how a connection so powerful, so addicting, had turned into heartbreak.

________

"Holy hell, who is that," your coworker Jess muttered out when the two of you were getting ready to get behind the bar for the night. It was a Saturday night, the Jets fresh off an afternoon victory. You had known that the Jets would frequent the bar you worked in after wins, hell you had met a lot of them, but you knew you had never met him. You would have remembered a face like his, a voice like his. A smile like his. Or a smirk, should you say.

"That's Pierre-Luc Dubois, newly acquired by the Jets and the most beautiful man to ever walk through our doors," another coworker, Anthony muttered as he tied his apron around his waist, causing you all to infer that he was familiar with the hockey player. You weren't surprised that he knew him. "Sports gay," the self proclaimed title that Anthony gave himself long before you met was incredibly correct. He had quickly become one of your best friends both at work and outside of work in the short year that you had worked at the bar.

Jess strategically decided to start at the other side of the bar from the players, causing you the responsibility to serve them. You never minded, you never had an issue with any of them. They always tipped well and were kind and friendly to you. They never complained about any service issues, and some of them even went as far to ask you about your personal life. The ones who did knew that this was an extra job for you and always threw in some extra money on top of the tip.

You made your way over to them, trying to pretend that you weren't just having a detailed conversation about one of them. Trying to pretend that you were unfazed by the eye contact that you made with him, by the way that his button up perfectly squeezed his muscular, tattooed arms.

"How's it going gentleman, wonderful to see you all again. Win today?" you asked as you placed coasters in front of them, never bothering with a menu. They always knew what they wanted. As they informed you of their win and made a few side comments, an accented voice that had become familiar quickly spoke up.

"Hi honey, I'm sorry I don't think I got your name. I'll have a jack and coke please. And I'll buy the first round for everybody while you're at it." The way the pet name flowed so easily off his lips should've been a bigger red flag, but you couldn't help but feel your cheeks burn at the comment. "It's Y/N," you informed him as you placed the drink in front of him, trying not to act like you had been extremely flustered by his words.

"Well Y/N, I haven't been here long but I can promise you you're the most beautiful woman in Winnipeg," he charmed, causing you to blush but also roll your eyes. "Don't mind Luc, apparently French men think they can say whatever they want to innocent bar workers," Adam joked, causing the rest of the guys to laugh. You had become very familiar with Adam in the time you'd worked at the bar. He was like a brother to you, and you appreciated the way he loosened the tension because you were incredibly flustered by his words.

But above all, it was the way that despite the teasing from his new teammates, Luc never flustered, his eyes still smoldering your own, and you knew you were in for some trouble.

--------

You were packing up your apartment, two years since that day that you met Luc. You had decided to move back home. Truth be told, Winnipeg never felt like home. It helped when you were with Pierre-Luc, but the homesickness was undeniable, and following your breakup from Pierre-Luc, it only got worse. There was nothing keeping you there anymore.

Although you were ready to leave, it was hard to ignore the memories of the apartment you were packing up, both good and bad. The joy of being with Pierre and the heartbreak. The giddiness of first meeting him and the emptiness of what you assumed would be the last time you ever saw him. All of those emotions existed inside of the four walls in your apartment.

As you wrapped up picture frames in packing paper, you wondered why you still had these up. It had been 6 weeks since your breakup with Luc, but the pain felt like it happened just yesterday. Your heart constricted at the picture that was looking back at you, a picture of you in the snow. It was the first time you had been alone with him.

"We're closed," you muttered out as you heard the doorbell chime from the front of the restaurant. You were cursing yourself for not locking the front door yet, but you also wondered why people couldn't just open their eyes and read the closing times that were so clearly printed on the very door that they had just opened.

"It's okay honey, I'm not looking for a drink tonight." the accented voice behind you made you tense up immediately. You had to have been dreaming. There was simply no way that he had come back for you. You had been thinking about him for days since he had first come in with the team. You truly did have a soft spot for the Jets team, but they never came in alone. They always came in a group, and never not on their unassigned assigned day: Saturdays. It was a few weeks later, and to your knowledge, there was no one else with him. You turned towards the voice and found that your suspicions were true.

"Hello again, Pierre. Nice to see you, but we really are closed and I'm really trying to get out of here before midnight. After midnight the streets get crazy," you explained to him as you finished up sweeping from behind the bar. "Yeah, I'm sure the streets are really crazy from the inside of your locked car," Pierre joked, causing you to raise your eyebrows. You hadn't known him long, really he had no reason to be protective of you, but you had a sneaking suspicion that he would not approve of the words that were about to come out of your mouth.

"Oh, I walk." you muttered as you broke eye contact in an almost embarrassment. You weren't embarrassed that you walked, it was truly impractical to drive when it was only a few blocks and the streets were always mobbed, the parking almost worse. But you knew deep down it really wasn't safe, and it was embarrassing to be under the microscope like this. You really weren't used to it. You hadn't encountered many men who cared enough about you walking home alone. "Any straight man," Anthony's voice was like the devil on your shoulder in the back of your mind.

"You what?" Pierre grumbled, his eyes lighting up in an almost anger. "There's no way you just said that." He mumbled and you nodded your head. "Yes, I'm pretty sure I did. Did you even listen?" You were growing frustrated. You barely knew this man other than what you had read on Google, what right does he have judging your life decisions? "Yes, unfortunately I did hear what you just said. I can't believe you put yourself in danger like that." You scoffed at him, wondering if this was genuine concern.

"What do you care? I'm just the girl who pours your drinks." You muttered stubbornly as you brushed past him to lock the front door, trying to get back to what you had been doing in the first place: trying to close this damn bar so you could start your apparently infamous walk home.

"I know I haven't known you for long, but I already care about you. You're more than just 'the girl who pours my drinks.' I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. That's why I came back over here in the first place, to hopefully get a chance to talk to you." He was standing his ground, and you felt yours crumbling at his tone of voice, the care in his eyes, the warmth that was somehow radiating off of his body despite it being mid February in Canada.

"I know, I have no right to come in here and judge your routine. But at least let me walk you home. I'll never come back here again if that's what you want, but I simply can not come in here to see you and then let you walk home in the dark. I can walk 6 feet behind you if you want, but I'm not letting you walk alone." He took a step closer to you, reaching out to touch your forearm and you fought the urge to jump back, his touch almost burning you.

You begrudgingly agreed and let Pierre walk you home after you finished closing the bar. The task was surprisingly short, only lengthened by the presence and words of Pierre. You walked closely to Pierre, unconsciously trying to catch some of his body heat as snow was now steadily falling from the sky. It made you miss the warmth of your home, the beating sun, the rise and fall of the waves as you walked home from work a much better scenery than this, although the beauty of the snow was hard to deny.

As you walked up to the front door of your apartment complex, you turned towards Pierre and saw him smiling goofily at you. "What's so funny?" you wondered and he shook his head. "Nothing. You just look adorable in this snow. It's obvious you aren't from here." he chuckled and lifted his phone quickly to take a picture of you, an amused look on your face.

He turned his phone to show you the photo and you smiled, immediately falling in love with the picture. It's true, it was glaringly obvious that you weren't from Winnipeg. "We don't get much snow in LA," you muttered and Pierre gave you a quizzical look. "What on earth are you doing all the way out here?" He asked and you smiled. "My college roommate is from here. I was ready for a change when I graduated so I moved back home with her. I've been here for a year now and I'm still not too sure." you admitted, being more honest with him than you had been with anyone about your living situation, which surprised you.

"I've only been here a month. I've liked it so far, but it doesn't feel like home yet." The vulnerability between the two of you was sobering, reminding you of the weather. "Well it's cold, I don't want you to freeze. I'll call you an Uber back to the bar. Thanks for walking me, truly. I appreciate your concern." You admitted and he smiled. "It's nothing, really. But one thing. Can I send you this picture? I think it's really perfect." he complimented, causing your cheeks to burn. "If you wanted my number, you could've just asked." You joked, now causing Pierre to blush. "That too," he rolled his eyes in faux annoyance.

"Goodnight, honey. I'll dream of you," he swooned, causing you to roll your eyes. "Goodnight Pierre." You hummed back. You would never admit that you dreamed of him too that night.

Tears streaming down your cheeks broke you out of your sorrowful flashback, the picture of you in the snow staring back at you. You kept it up at first to remind you that you could feel joy in Winnipeg, but as you packed it up, you realized that was obviously a failure.

You placed the picture frame in the now full box and sealed it with packing tape, grabbing a sharpie to label it clearly.

DO NOT OPEN.

-------------

That was March, and now this was September. Somedays the breakup felt like yesterday and somedays it felt like a lifetime ago. There was still an ache in your heart somedays and other days you found yourself looking at other people.

It was mid-September, but the sun was still beating down hard. You didn't miss much about Winnipeg, but somedays the sun beat down just a bit too hard and you found yourself thinking about how the four seasons were so prominent there. You closed the door to the bar you had found yourself in back in LA, feeling a sense of deja vu as you turned the lock and pulled on the handle to ensure it worked.

"I seriously hope you don't still walk home in the dark alone after work."

There was no way his voice was behind you. You had to have been imagining it. The deja vu must've been getting too real. You shook your head out and turned towards the street. But there was nothing imaginary about the figure in front of you. You had spent so much time memorizing his face, his body, his heart. You knew him like the back of your hand.

"What are you doing here?" came out before you could stop yourself, your palm coming up to cover your mouth in embarrassment. "You didn't hear the news? 8 years upcoming with the LA Kings." You found yourself laughing out loud. There was no way.

"Well that can't be a coincidence." It was true that you missed Luc, a piece of your heart missing when he left. But that's exactly what he did: broke your heart. "Of course you were in mind when I signed. You're the love of my life." He admitted and you shook your head. "It sure didn't feel that way when you broke up with me."

It was probably an unfair comment, but you didn't care in that moment. He had shattered your heart when he left. Giving you no reason other than "it's the wrong time for us."

"That's not fair. I didn't want to leave you. I didn't have a choice. I was losing myself in that city and I couldn't let you watch it happen." He admitted and you scoffed. "So was I! God, Luc. I didn't think your pride was too big to admit that you needed help. You should've known I would've supported you." You came back at him with force, causing people on the street to stare at you.

"Of course I knew. I was embarrassed. I have loved you enough for three lifetimes and I couldn't even admit to you that I was struggling." You felt your heart crack. You knew that the toxic masculinity in hockey culture was unfair. You felt for him, that he felt he couldn't come to you with that. And while he loved you enough for three lifetimes, you loved him just the same. You felt tears brimming in your eyes, once again your self control leaving you.

"I missed you, Luc. So much," you told him tearily, causing him to bring you into a tight embrace.

"This time, I'm not going anywhere. I promise." And truly, you should've had more self control. You should've had more questions, more doubts. But in front of you was the man who walked you home the second time you met in a blizzard just to make sure you were safe. The man who helped you break down your walls and stood by you while you both fell and flourished. The man who would do anything to make you smile, make you feel loved. He was yours. He always would be.

You weren't sure how the universe aligned to bring you two back together, but as you held each other on the sidewalk, swaying back and forth under the street light, you knew you would be thankful for it everyday.

#elle’s writing #nhl imagine #la kings imagine #pierre luc Dubois imagine #pierre luc Dubois x reader #la kings #the summer fic exchange 2k23

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olderthannetfic · 10 months

Note

https://newrepublic.com/article/120689/babdook-what-it-says-about-you-if-you-enjoy-horror-movies

This is from years ago but I had to go dig it up for the "cozy horror" conversation.

The article claims that horror fans are more likely to lack empathy. But the study they mention didn't survey horror fans, it surveyed people who watch horror movies on dates. Maybe choosing a movie for a date without regard to your partner's tastes demonstrates a lack of empathy, and the genre or content of the movie itself doesn't have much to do with it?

It claims that horror fans are more like to "be aggressive and thrill-seeking". That one I'll give a pass. Horror movies themselves are a specific kind of thrill. Anecdotally I wouldn't say that I or any other horror fan is more aggressive than the general population, but if a study lumped aggression and thrills together as one metric it'd be impossible to sort out (horror authors and other creatives, in my experience, tend to be fluffy bundles of joy IRL. Jungi Ito is Tumblr's favourite example)

And horror fans are more likely to be men. The article straight up admits that its data there is outdated. Moving on.

And lastly, the one that ticked me off so much that I remembered this article for ten years. People who watch horror movies are more like to "be a man accompanied by a frightened woman". This one is based on a study from the 1980s (so outdated even ten years ago) and looked specifically at college kids watching horror movies in m/f pairs. This tells us absolutely nothing about people who enjoy horror, and a lot about college boys in the 1980s. I like to think that college boys in the 2010s and 2020s are a little different, since gendered expectations have shifted a little over the last 30-40 years. But even without that, I cannot stress hard enough that this study did not look at people who like horror movies, not to mention that adults of all genders are usually more mature than college kids in their interactions with fiction and with their movie-going partners.

And also, since this is Tumblr specifically and fandom in general, we have to mention that when gender comes up, the article is talking exclusively about studies that did not account for queerness.

If we want to talk about horror movies in a fannish context, we have to understand that a large portion of the audience will be queer in some way or another. It's simply not fair to say "college boys like it when their girlfriends are scared of horror movies, therefore horror fans are doing some sort of macho endurance posturing" when you've got an audience full 35 year old pensexuals without genders going "actually, I just think it's neat when monsters eat people".

When I was younger, I thought I didn't like horror...

And this was because I grew up in an era of particularly boring-to-me slasher movies that were usually also pretty misogynist.

Turns out I like gialli fine. It's just 1980s US horror of the most mainstream type that I hate.

I am singularly unsurprised that women on dates in the 1980s were unimpressed with this choice of movie.

I'll take articles about horror seriously only if they start by going to one of those Lovecraft conventions or something and actually dealing with the Horror Fandom as it exists today.

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hunxi-after-hours · 1 year

Note

i want to astral project into your house and steal your danmei academic paper collection damn

hah, I'd be down to mail these booklets around like library copies if I didn't reference them so often, but I can provide a table of contents!

Bai, M. (2021), “Regulation of pornography and criminalization of BL readers and authors in contemporary China”

Chao, S. (2016), “Grotesque eroticism in the Danmei genre: the case of Lucifers Club in Chinese cyberspace”

Jin, F. (2009), “Addicted to Beauty: Consuming and Producing Web-based Chinese ‘Danmei’ Fiction at Jinjiang”

Martin, F. (2012), “Girls who love boys’ love: Japanese homoerotic manga as transnational Taiwan culture”

Ni Z. (2018), Steampunk, Zombie Apocalypse, and Homoerotic Romance: Rewriting Revolution-Plus-Love in Contemporary China”

Ng, E. and Li, X. (2020), “A queer socialist brotherhood: the Guardian web series, boys love fandom, and the Chinese state”

Tian, X. (2015), “Slashing Three Kingdoms: A Case Study in Fan Production on the Chinese Web.”

Tian, X. (2020), “Homosexualizing Boys Love in China: Reflexivity, Genre Transformation, and Cultural Interaction”

Tian, X. (2021), “More than Conformity or Resistance: Chinese “Boys’ Love” Fandom in the Age of Internet Censorship”

Williams, E. (2020), “BL and Danmei The Similarities and Differences Between Male x Male Content and its Fans in Japan and China”

Yan, Y., “From Online Danmei Literature to Web Series: A Study of Chinese Internet-based Adaptations Under Censorship”

Yang, L. and Xu, Y. (2016), “Danmei, Xianqing, and the making of a queer online public sphere in China”

Yang, L. and Xu, Y. (2017), “The love that dare not speak its name: The fate of Chinese danmei communities in the 2014 anti-porn campaign”

Yang, L. and Xu, Y. (2013), “Forbidden love: incest, generational conflict, and the erotics of power in Chinese BL fiction”

Zhang, C. (2016), “Loving Boys Twice as Much: Chinese Women’s Paradoxical Fandom of “Boys’ Love” Fiction”

Zhao, Y. and Madill, A. (2018), “The heteronormative frame in Chinese Yaoi: integrating female Chinese fan interviews with Sinophone and Anglophone survey data”

Zheng, X. (2019), “Survival and migration patterns of Chinese online media fandoms”

I found a few of these on JSTOR just looking up danmei; most of these are from @dulharpa, who kindly pointed me in the direction of the rest of these!

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midnightponderingsblog · 29 days

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What we once were. Part 2

Sirius walked downstairs towards the glowing light coming from the front sitting room. Inside, Sirius was hit with the warmth of the room created by the small log burner nestled in the left corner.

In the worn arm chair, sat Remus cross legged reading a novel Padfoot did not recognise. On the small side table sat a scrunched up chocolate frog packet, the chocolate long since devoured. Looking up timidly from his book, blushing a deep rosy hue Remus stated “sorry Pads, I was going to share half, really I was…I’m not sure what happened.”

The comfort of the cluttered sitting room, the surroundings so typically Rem it hurt, and the events prior to this night Sirius was overcome with a deep sense of grief. Grief for time lost and moments he himself would never be able to experience. Tears welled, threatening to spill onto his cheeks before large sobs overtook his frame. Two strong arms wrapped themselves around his frame, cradling the raven-haired man and whispering sweet nothings as tears continued to spill over his cheeks.

Carefully, Remus guided Sirius onto the soft, brown leather sofa of the room before wrapping a red knitted blanket around the man and holding him once again. Before long, dawn began to rise and both men fell into a deep slumber surrounded by the warmth of the fire and the security of each others arms.

At 11:30am Remus awoke with a start. Glancing to the spot Sirius had sat in only a few hours earlier he confirmed his absence. With purpose, Remus walked to the kitchen only to be filled with a sense of panic when he realised Sirius was not there. “Not again, please not again, no no no …” he muttered to himself as he ran up the stairs. Once at the top step Remus could hear the shower running and mortified by his own sudden burst of emotions, he decided to go back downstairs to prepare breakfast.

Coffee using the modern filter Molly had gifted him only last Christmas, neatly sliced bread toasting on the grill, scrambled eggs in the pan with herbs from his windowsill to season. As Remus used his wand to send forks, knives, plates and mugs onto the table Sirius appeared wearing the same pyjamas as the previous night and a large toothy smile. Remus made a mental note to find him some suitable clothes to wear in the day.

“This smells heavenly Remmy, you always did know that the way to my heart was through my stomach” Sirius exclaimed, taking a seat in the chair throwing a quick smirk in Remus’ direction.

“Have you always been thus much of a prat Pads, or has the lack of human interaction for the last decade led you to have zero social skill?”

Late morning turned to early afternoon, the men continued to discuss news, important events that Sirius had missed during his time in Azkaban and continued to surround themselves with fond memories. Neither man discussed Sirius’ tears, for which he was relieved. His Rem always knew where the social boundary was and more importantly, how not to cross that invisible line-something he himself had always struggled with.

Eventually, Remus stood up and flicked his wand once more to clear away the mess created by breakfast. Once the kitchen was in order, he walked upstairs and grabbed some worn jeans, a forest green jumper and underwear for Sirius before disappearing in the bathroom to freshen up for the day.

Sirius quickly changed into the clothes in the sitting room. The soft wool felt heavenly against his skin, in these moments alone he took the time to smell the wool breathing in a scent that was purely Remus, is made his heart ache to hold the freckled man again but he knew he no longer had the right to ask for such a thing.

Slowly, he looked around the room taking in the bookshelves crammed with both fiction and non-fiction texts alike, muggle and wizarding literature. He surveyed the photographs on the pinboard not recognising half the individual who occupied them. Finally, he turned back to the sitting room door as Remus approached, black leather jacket in hand.

“Do you remember this?” Remus quizzed looking at the garment in in left hand.

“Of course I bloody do,” Sirius grinned back before taking the jacket and pulling it on, “I’ve been in Azkaban Moony, not had my memory wiped!”

Remus looked down once again, an emotion Sirius could not quite place was plastered across his face. “I couldn’t part with it, everyone said you were guilty but I couldn’t part with it, it was your…” Remus trailed off before looking up quickly and announcing “right, now you have a jacket, let’s shove a glamour charm on you and get some fresh air.�� Startled by the sudden change in topic, Sirius decided to follow along.

Remus pulled his large coat with the elbow patches and shoes on, before throwing Sirius some boots “they are a size too big, but should do for now if you tie them up tight.”

Sirius grinned back, was ready in no time, finally Remus cast the glamour charm on him to make him unrecognisable to anyone they come across. No matter how unlikely that was in the empty hills surrounding Remus’ cottage.

Once out the door, Sirius asked Remus the question that had been burning on his mind for over a decade, “Rem, what have you been doing for the full moon?”

#remus and sirius #wolfstar #remus x sirius #remus lupin #sirius black

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yamayuandadu · 3 months

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regarding the sogdians and foxes. do you know if the sogdians themselves practiced a fox cult of some kind? also an unrelated question but i was wondering. was Taoism practiced westwards in the sogdian heartland?

I am not aware of that. I don't really think there was much in the way of animal cults in Sogdia in general. While many deities were associated with specifica animals and in fact in art some can only be identified by their animal attribute (a mount, a throne with animal decorations, or an accessory), foxes aren't among them. Comparative evidence from other contemporary or slightly more recent sources pertaining to other Iranian peoples doesn't really hint at anything similar to the Chinese fox cults either. In Zoroastrian tradition some favorable description can be found but this reflects the fact Avesta considers the fox a type of dog and by extension presents it as one of the animals created to counter malign influence (source), there's no fox yazata or anything of that sort. Al-Biruni might be describing depictions of the simurg as "flying foxes" (ﺧﺮﺳﺎنخﺮ, hurasan-xvarra) but that's an isolated example. The only information about Sogdian or at least Sogdian-adjacent perception of the matter of foxes in Cult of the Fox is that we at the very least know An Lushan and his contemporary Geshu Han were aware of the derogatory implications. Doubtlessly there were more foregners who had opinions on that since there's a fair share of evidence the fox comparisons were employed casually in everyday speech, but so far I failed to find any first hand accounts. Individual Chinese stories might portray foreigners as well versed in fox affairs - for example in Shen Jiji's Tale of Miss Ren a foreign food vendor living next to the eponymous character is well aware she is a fox and doesn't really seem to be bothered - but there are ultimately just literary fiction. I do think it would be interesting to wonder how the matter was seen by "naturalized citizens" so to speak - whether they saw a mirror of own struggles in fox tales, whether they took part in domestic fox cults in areas where they were prevalent etc. - but I don't think there's any material evidence which would make it possible to explore that.

As for the second question, I am not aware of Taoism spreading that far westwards. It also doesn't come up in any publications I read which deal with religions present in Sogdia - and most of these do highlight plurality. An indigenous set of beliefs (whether it can be considered a form of Zoroastrianism or merely something vaguely related remains a matter of debate), Buddhism, (Nestorian) Christianity and Manichaeism are all well attested. I read a few surveys of Sogdian theophoric names too, and no Taoist figures come up (while Buddha and Jesus are comparably well attested as local variants of Mithra and Nanaya). For the most part I'm only aware of Taoism spreading in some capacity to Vietnam, Korea and Japan in the first millennium - in other words, eastwards, not westwards. However, there is some evidence of Xuanzang being provided with Sanskrit translations of Taoist classics before embarking on his journey to India (see Daoism in the Tang (618-907) in the Brill Daoism Handbook), so it does seem fair to say attempts must have been made.

The possible attempts at westward transfer of Taoism were seemingly generally tied to interactions between this religion and Buddhism. This is highlighted in particular by the rise of a popular legend according to which Laozi was also the source of many other teachings because he was identical with the historical Buddha (or vice versa; see here for full context).

#sogdian miscellanea #daoist miscellanea #fox miscellanea

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bangtantiny · 2 years

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𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚏𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚍! | 𝚓𝚓𝚔 𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚝

This kookie for reference okay!!? 😭😭

summary: jungkook is your driving teacher and you end up failing the driving test, however he offers to pass you in exchange for your mouth.

warnings: very slight non-con, he pulls the reader’s hair, he’s slightly yandereishh, oral sex (m. receiving), deep-throating, face fucking, age gap (reader is 18 and jungkook is 24), jungkook is a little manipulative, reader is low key a masochist, he calls reader baby, sub/dom themes, dom jungkook, sub reader, big dick jk (yes this is a warning) 🥴

A/N: this is my first yandere AND my first smut fic so i truly don’t know how i did! 💕 please do let me know if you like this fic!!! your comments are always appreciated! also i don’t know much about how obtaining a drivers license works as i currently do not have a license, however i still attempted to make the fic make as much sense as possible to the best of my ability lol

word count: 1113 words

disclaimer: PLEASE DO NOT PERFORM ANY OF THE ACTIONS EXCECUTED IN THIS FIC WHILE DRIVING AS IT CAN BE EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, IF NOT LIFE THREATENING. Also, this is a work of pure fiction and should not be taken seriously as it is ONLY for entertainment purposes. I do not support or condone any of this behavior shown in real life. Must be 18+ to interact with this fic. Lastly, Be sure to read the warnings before reading the actual fic.

Today’s the day. The day where you shall finally get your long awaited drivers license. For the past month, you’ve been constantly studying the rules of the road, making sure you’ve memorized every single word in the book. You are ready for this test.

Turns out, you are not ready for this test. Well, you were until you saw what your driving teacher looked like. He was stunning! He had beautiful lips which made you wonder what they tasted like or what his lip ring would feel like in your mouth as you kissed him.

Your mind began to wander even more as he adjusted his seat, which weirdly made you think how he would fuck you in the car? In what positions? Front seat or back?

You were completely zoned out thinking of endless raunchy scenarios about him when he finally spoke up, “you ready?” he says, startling you a little which in return, earns you a small laugh from him. Did he know what you were thinking about? With the way he was looking at you, he probably did.

You take a moment to regain your lewd thoughts and finally reply to his question, “yeah i’m ready,” you say smiling at him. “Okay, let’s get started then, shall we?” You shake your head yes.

The vehicle safety check concludes and it’s finally time for you to begin driving.

During the test, you notice that he’s carefully analyzing your driving and your face, which makes you nervous. “Don’t be nervous,” he says sternly, then proceeds to put his hand on your thigh. You flinch a little at the contact and shake your head okay, avoiding his gaze. You wonder how he knew you were nervous? Was it the faint blush on your cheeks or the way you were slightly rocking back and forth in your seat? You didn’t know what gave it away but the realization that he’s watching you made you even more nervous.

Throughout the drive, he does things like squeeze your thigh, touch your shoulders, and sometimes he even plays with your hair. But the thing that distracted you the most was when he put his hands in his pants. You could see him in your peripheral but you wanted to get a better gaze, so you shifted your eyes to towards his lap to get a better look at where his hands were.

Your eyes widen at the sight and he notices you looking and proceeds to grab a fistful of your hair, to which he gently yanks it to where you’re eyes and face is facing the road again. “Keep you’re eyes on the road,” he says, in a cold tone.

The test has finished and you’re back in the DMV parking lot. Jungkook begins surveying his clipboard and you attempt to get a glimpse, but to no avail. After what seems like hours of him looking through the papers on his clipboard he finally speaks. “Okay, so you failed,” he says looking at you straight in the eye in a nonchalant manner. You’re stunned at what he just told you and are on the verge of tears. “But how? I mean I studied so hard for this. I- I- I don’t understand.”

He faintly shrugs, “if you really need this license, there is one way that i’d give it to you.” As he says that, you notice that his eyes grow darker. You sniff, “how?” He smiles at your question and with no hesitation says, “you could suck my dick.”

You’re even more shocked at what he just said than when he told you that you failed the driving test. You don’t notice your mouth is open until he closes it for you, tapping your chin. When you don’t answer, he speaks, “or.. you don’t have to and i’ll just fail you.” His tone is assertive. “Your choice baby.”

“No- no- I don’t wanna fail, sir.” you say, tripping over your words a little. “Then get that cute little mouth over here,” he says as he unbuckles your seatbelt and drags your face over the dashboard, towards his crotch.

He glares at you with his inky brown eyes, as if he’s waiting for you to begin. His gaze low key intimidates you and forces you to hastily unzip his pants. You immediately free his cock. It’s long, thick, and extremely hard. Like he’s been waiting for this moment since he first saw you. You blush at the sight.

You lick a long strip from the base to the tip of his cock. He quietly moans as he strokes your hair. “Baby, I don’t have all day,” as he says this, he slowly pushes your head down on his cock until you can’t take any more of his dick in your mouth. He moans and you choke a little at the sensation of his tip in the back of your throat.

“Oh fuck yes..” he moans. He continues to push your face down until your nose is just brushing his pelvis. You choke a little more and attempt to breathe out of your nose. “Ah yeah, take it!” He moans as he holds your head down, despite you choking and gagging. He continues holding you down for about three more seconds then pulls you up roughly by your hair, smiling as he looks at you. “Your mouth is a fucking sin, baby,” he says laughing.

“Lemme fuck your face,” he asserts. You shake your head yes. With that, he grabs grabs your hair and roughly forces it down on his dick again. He then proceeds to bob your head up and down faster than the speed of light. “You’re mine,” he moans.

You can’t really manage to get air into your lungs and you start to tear up, but surprisingly you absolutely love it. Just the way he’s being so rough with you brings butterflies into your stomach. He’s now moaning incredibly loud, hand on the back of your head, guiding you.

“Fucking hell baby, you’re gonna make me cum.” You moan at his words and the vibration from your voice makes him lose it all. “I’m cumming, oh my fucking god, shit!” His voice is shaky, almost like he’s gonna cry and his grip on your hair is so tight, you swear you saw some strands fall out. He fills your mouth with his hot load. You quickly swallow it and open your mouth, making an “Aaah” sound like you’re at the dentist.

“Good girl.” He says, lifting your head to face him. You wipe the drool from your mouth, “did I pass?” Jungkook laughs and kisses your forehead. “Yes, you definitely passed.”

#yandere bts #jeon jungkook #jungkook #yandere jungkook #bts smut #bts one shot #jeon jeongguk #bts drabble #bts imagines #yandere bts reactions #bts jung jungkook #bts jungguk #bts jungkook #bts x y/n #bts x reader

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lingthusiasm · 11 months

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Transcript Episode 80: Word Magic

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Word Magic’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about word magic. But first, people often ask us to recommend books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books plus a few bonuses, including both nonfiction as well as some fiction books with some linguistically interesting elements.

Gretchen: Social media’s in an interesting state of flux these days, which, as someone who studies online interaction, I find very interesting. However, not unrelated to that, we like to encourage people to sign up for emails from us in case everything else just melts down.

Lauren: You can get this list of 12 of our favourite linguistics books by signing up for our free email list by following the link in the show notes or going to lingthusiasm.com.

Gretchen: Our email subscribers also regularly get an email once a month when there’s a new episode of Lingthusiasm. This month you will see a link to our linguistics books list if you’re an existing subscriber. Otherwise, you will get the books list in the confirmation email after you sign up at any time even if you’re listening to this way in the future. Technology is very useful for things like this.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was the 2022 listener survey results. If you’d like to know whether being aware of the kiki-bouba meme affects how people respond to the blobby shape and the pointy shape, as well as other results from our survey, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Speaking of books, I’ve read some linguistically interesting books lately!

Lauren: We realised that a common thread between some of the books we’ve been reading was this link of magic.

Gretchen: Specifically, I love the way that books about magic are also often really linguistically interesting because saying the word and casting the magic spell are so intertwined when it comes to our conception of how magic works. Actually, “magic spell” and “spelling a word” – etymologically, I’ve just look this up, and these have a common root.

Lauren: I have never thought about it, but that is, I guess, not surprising because spells are words.

Gretchen: Yeah, they’re both from Middle English “spel,” from Old English “spell,” which is a story, a saying, a tale, a history, a narrative, and related to other Germanic languages. By around the 1500s, there’s this magical link as well. Interestingly, and this is why it always pays to look up your etymologies, neither of them is related to “spell” as in “to work for a spell” or “to rest for a spell.” That is a totally different “spell.”

Lauren: Okay. This is why it’s good to check because I would’ve just assumed they were related. I am delighted that the writing-down-words “spell,” the language is older than the magic.

Gretchen: Well, reading and writing is also a kind of magic. It’s a way of preserving words as they’re written down.

Lauren: I also seem to remember that “grammar” and “glamour” are related etymologically as well.

Gretchen: That is true. “Glamour” comes through Scottish. I first encountered this in another book, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising where you have this magical “Book of Gramarye,” which you read and learn about all of these interesting things, some of which is where the stars are, which is this very rooted kind of magic, and some of which is how to make things blow up or go on fire or these other types of magical things.

Lauren: Definitely a very interesting grammar book. Maybe slightly different to the grammar books that we read in the non-magical world.

Gretchen: It does give me an over-inflated idea of what my copy of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is gonna teach me how to do.

Lauren: But this relationship between language and spell casting and magic and fantasy means that it’s not that surprising that, as well as a link between language and magic and spells in the three books that we’re looking at today, there’s also a link of educational settings – people at school or university learning how to do magic through language.

Gretchen: The first book that we wanna talk about is Babel by R. F. Kuang, which is this really interesting book that’s set in a fantasy Oxford setting where the characters are going to school, learning how to do this type of magic. The magic there is embedded on silver bars. The premise is, is that on either side of the silver bar, you engrave a word, and those two words are in different languages. They mean something very, very, very similar but not identical. It’s the slight difference in the meaning, the impossibility of translation – this book has so much translation theory that’s just very cool.

Lauren: There’re parts of this book where the professor is teaching them translation theory, and I’m like, “This is a lecture that I would have sat through,” maybe with slightly less 18th-19th Century, like, professor, but actually not that different.

Gretchen: This idea that true translation is always gonna be a tiny bit different means that when you have two words on either side of the silver bar, the tension between the meanings and the little bit of meaning that escapes translation is the part that creates the magic, which is such a cool idea.

Lauren: I like that R. F. Kuang really takes the time to tease out what those translational differences are.

Gretchen: The first example in the book is a bar that has on one side “triacle,” which is from French but I think got borrowed into Old English, and on the other side, the Modern English word “treacle,” which is not as familiar to North Americans, but it’s a sort of a molasses-like thing that’s very common in British fantasy novels and also real-life Brits.

Lauren: I always think of it as an ingredient in a baked sweet pudding.

Gretchen: I dunno if I have the baked sweet pudding category of item, but I think of a treacle tart. But the meaning of “triacle” in French is an antidote for a poison or venom, or a medicine for drawing out or neutralising a poison. In English, of course, it’s just like, “Here’s this nice, sweet syrup,” and the antidote is also supposed to be quite sweet, I guess, but it’s the tension between these meanings where one of them means “antidote” and the other one doesn’t that makes this bar able to neutralise poisons or infections. Of course, thinking of examples like this and the possibility of translation made me think, “What would I do if I was trying to come up with a bar that had an interesting translation pair on it?” Do you have one that you’d do, Lauren?

Lauren: I have been thinking about this ever since I read Babel, and I think, to throw back to our scales and implicature episode, that I would have a silver bar that had the English word “hot” and the Nepali word “tato” because Nepali has two different words for “hot,” and one is specifically for hot liquids or beverages. So, outside when it’s warm, it’s “garmi,” but when my tea is hot, it’s “tato.” Hopefully, having the silver bar means that my tea will never cool down when I put it down and forget about it for 30 minutes.

Gretchen: I mean, all of these connections seem very obvious when they were in the pages of the book, but this makes me wonder if the difference between the Nepali word and the English word is that it applies to a liquid specifically. Maybe it would make things into liquids? I feel like I’d like to test this magical system out a little bit empirically.

Lauren: I do remember there were some very funny situations – or highly dangerous situations – where an attempted friction in the translation has led to not quite the intended consequences.

Gretchen: From a linguistic world building perspective, something else that’s very important in Babel is that the characters need to have deep knowledge of the language in order to have the feeling of this translation tension that’s held in their minds which makes the magic work.

Lauren: So, I couldn’t get away with using or creating that “treacle/triacle” combination because I’m not a French speaker.

Gretchen: I speak French relatively well, but I’ve just read the definition of “triacle” in a dictionary and been like, “Oh, okay, that makes sense,” but I don’t actually know that intimately through my own experience, so I wouldn’t be able to hold that in mind.

Lauren: There’s a really, I think, quite distressing plot point – and I should say, this book’s subtitle is “Babe

Lauren: Or the Necessity of Violence,” so it does give you a sense that this is quite a dark and heavy book about the realities of colonisation and the British Empire. There is one character who, to me, is a really tragic figure who’s taken away from one of the languages he speaks very early on in his life. He still speaks it, but he doesn’t speak it really in a way that he feels really confident and immersed in that knowledge. That affects his ability to do this translation magic.

Gretchen: The whole theme of the book itself is, okay, well, these English-speaking magicians have mined through French and Latin and some of the more readily available languages to them and come up with most of the spells that are possible from those. They’ve gone out searching through the rest of empire to basically plunder children who speak other languages and say, “Hey, you, you can come up with some cool magic based on Chinese” or based on another language that we don’t have access to. This, you know, has some predictably complicated, violent consequences.

Lauren: This need to have deep knowledge of and really lived the words that you’re using in doing your magic reminds me of Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, which has a slightly different magic system and is part of a set of three books: Carry On, Wayward Son, and Any Way the Wind Blows.

Gretchen: In these, all the magic is in English, but there’s still this connection to having the deep, intimate knowledge of the language and, particularly, the language as it exists in community. Some of the phrases that are used as magical phrases are things like, “Out, out damned spot,” which can clean things, or “Into thin air,” which can make something disappear, or “Some like it hot,” which can melt something. At one point, the headmaster in the book explains that the magical students need to keep living in regular society because the idioms that these spells are formed of lose their power if people stop knowing what they mean.

Lauren: You have to be really up with your pop culture references and your pithy one-liners to be able to do magic in this world.

Gretchen: You can get new spells out of a new pop culture reference that people start recognising or a new song lyric, things like “Carry on” and “Any way the wind blows” are from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and this can create new phrases that can accomplish magic based on other people being able to recognise them. That’s language as embodied in a whole community of people not just in the mind of one person, which is the different vision for where language is.

Lauren: I like to think that the reason that people love to crack out “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the end of a night of karaoke is because the magical witches and wizards of this world have created this as a thing we do to keep “Bohemian Rhapsody” alive so that they can still keep making spells like “Carry on” or “Any way the wind blows.”

Gretchen: Head canon accepted. I buy this. But I think there is a certain magic to everyone knowing the words to a song because you have this connection with people that you might not otherwise know very well that, like, here’s this thing that you can all participate in.

Lauren: In some ways, memes really do feel like magic, whether it’s a spoken meme like a phrase or a picture meme. When you get it and someone else gets it, it just feels really satisfying.

Gretchen: Yeah. Rather than magic coming from this point of tension between two meanings, it’s also magic coming from this point of connection of someone else knowing what something means. That’s very different to the third book or series that’s on our list, which is A Deadly Education and its sequels in the Scholomance series: The Last Graduate and the Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik.

Lauren: “School” here is a little less stay-in-the-real-world than Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On books in that the school is automated. There are no teachers. The students are just trapped in this magic school that has some Hunger Games vibes sometimes.

Gretchen: The premise of this series is that the world is very dangerous. There are terrifying magical creatures all over the world, and they especially go after young, magical humans between the ages of I think it’s around 11 and 17, sort of teenagers.

Lauren: “Mmm, magically tasty.”

Gretchen: “Mmm, yummy, yummy, young magical humans.” For their own protection, they’re put behind the walls of this school, and yet, occasionally, magical beings will still get into the school and try to attack the students. Hopefully, the students will manage to defend themselves against these beasts but, you know, who knows. It’s sort of terrifying. The school themself – or the school “itself,” I dunno –

Lauren: The school definitely has a personality.

Gretchen: The school itself is trying to teach them by recommending books and throwing books at them and doing other types of – they do a language lab thing where they have recorders, and they put headphones on, and they try to learn bits of languages so they can understand these spell books which are in all sorts of languages.

Lauren: You have to be careful because as soon as you start looking at a French book or maybe glance at a French poem, the school will be like, “You are gonna learn French.” It may just serve you French classes for a semester.

Gretchen: More dangerously, it may just send you spell books in French, and you’re like, “Uh, oh, excuse me, I’ve really just read one verb, and you now think I can just do spells in French. I can’t even say these words yet.”

Lauren: It’s definitely very dangerous for those of us who have a habit of browsing the grammars of different languages for fun.

Gretchen: Oh, no. Yeah, I saw this, and I was like, “This would be very dangerous for me personally.” But the fun thing from a linguistic perspective is that it’s also not just constrained to contemporary languages. Our point of view character, whose name is “El Higgins” – “El” short for “Galadriel” – is learning Old English and even wanders into the shelves of Proto-Indo-European spells, which definitely made me perk up linguistically.

Lauren: I got very excited about this because there was no world in which a shelf of Proto-Indo-European books exists because this is a language that is the common ancestor language of most of the languages of Europe all the way through to Southeast Asia. Nepali is also part of this family. Proto-Indo-European was spoken thousands of years ago by a nomadic group. We have somewhat pieced it together through our best guesses going backwards through time, but there are no records of Proto-Indo-European.

Gretchen: We’ve pieced together a couple hundred words, out of which you can construct a paragraph or two as long as you wanna talk about sheep. It’s not something where we have a lot of knowledge to be able to write entire books but, you know, if this magical school has existed for thousands and thousands of years, then maybe it does have some books that are in this language that we don’t know actually know anything about.

Lauren: Unfortunately, El just wanders straight past that shelf, and we never find out.

Gretchen: Sigh. But there’s also something that’s very different about the conception of language from this book – and it’s part of the themes of the book – which is the idea of language as trap or language as sufficiency where you don’t need to know the language in any great degree of fluency as long as you can perform the literal bits of the spell itself and put enough effort into doing so, that’s what’s gonna create the magical effect, which is, again, a third conception of how language is.

Lauren: I had a real throwback to a high school Italian poetry recital competition that my school made us do where most of the students had no idea what they were reciting, but some of them could recite it very impressively.

Gretchen: You see this with singers sometimes, too. Like, opera singers will sometimes learn a song in a particular language they don’t necessarily speak and just learn, okay, here’s how to pronounce it, and here’s the general vibe of this is a love song, or this is tragic, or this is angry, and I’m just gonna perform this very beautifully but not necessarily have any ability to carry on a conversation or even say, “Hello/Goodbye,” in that language.

Lauren: I feel like having a knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet could potentially give you an edge in the Scholomance school world.

Gretchen: Something that I find really interesting when considering all three of these series, all three of these worlds as a whole, is that each of them has to have a theory of what it means to know a language in order for their system of magic, what it means to cast a spell, to work.

Lauren: In all three of these series, there’re times where spells do not work in ways that are catastrophic for our heroes.

Gretchen: And having those constraints and limitations on what language can do and what magic can do is also part of what makes the plots interesting. I guess it’s also funny to me that given that “spell” and “spell” – you know, “spell” as in writing and “spell” as in magic – have the same root that writing down the words in none of these cases is the power. It’s speaking it out loud that’s the thing that ignites them working.

Lauren: This makes me very pleased because there’re so many languages in our world that don’t have a writing system whether that’s because they’re one of the many languages that just have an oral tradition or signed languages don’t have a stable writing system that’s generally used by the whole population of signers.

Gretchen: Right. But they could still be performed and enacted and presumably made spells of, although we don’t see it in any of these particular books what that would actually look like to be able to sign a spell.

Lauren: There’s no reason based on the mechanisms that are used that they couldn’t be used to make spells.

Gretchen: There are ways of performing and embodying words in real life that also let real words have certain types of magic, at least, or I guess effects on the situation that exists in a world.

Lauren: Gretchen, words can change reality.

Gretchen: That’s not just like, “Oh, if I describe the beauty of the sky, that makes me notice it more,” although that’s true, too, but there’s a specific type of phrases or of utterances that saying them changes something about the word. If I say, “I promise that I will give you $5.00,” the world is now different from before I made that promise.

Lauren: Yeah. Because I’m gonna get $5.00.

Gretchen: You’re welcome.

Lauren: I think the canonical example that gets rolled out when we talk about performatives a lot is if you go to a wedding – and this is one of my favourite reasons to go to a wedding – is that moment where the two people are asked, “Do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded wife,” they will say, “I do.” You have to say that. It is a legal part of a Western marriage ceremony. Different marriage traditions have different traditions, but in a Western marriage ceremony, you have to say, “I do,” to make that legally binding.

Gretchen: In front of witnesses.

Lauren: In front of witnesses.

Gretchen: And you sign some sort of marriage contract afterwards, which is the written part of that performance, but it’s the saying it out loud in front of witnesses that also makes that thing the case.

Lauren: It’s the person officiating the ceremony that says, “I declare you wife and wife,” or “I declare you husband and wife,” that makes the ceremony entirely legally bond. And again, they have to say these very specific words in a very specific way depending on the legal jurisdiction in which you’re getting married.

Gretchen: This gets us to something which is part of the saying the words. It’s not enough for you to just say on the podcast like, “I declare these two people wife and wife” because you are not currently officiating a wedding. The power is not granted to you. You don’t have two people standing in front of you saying, “I do.” That’s not a power that you have right now even though you can say the little phrase. Or if you’re in a movie of a wedding, you have not necessarily legally married the two people who are getting married in the movie.

Lauren: Oops, those two actors are now accidentally married irl because they got married in a movie.

Gretchen: I feel like this has maybe happened at some point. Part of the saying a particular phrase is also saying that phrase in particular contexts or under a particular set of conditions, which makes it possible for that to happen.

Lauren: There’s a technical term for this that doesn’t require you to remember it for this to work, but I think it’s just worth talking about. These conditions are known as “felicity conditions.” I just think this is a very excellent drag name. If you’re looking for a drag name, can I recommend “Felicity Conditions.”

Gretchen: New, good linguistics drag name. I think it’s certainly better than “Grammaticality Judgement,” which doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Lauren: I just imagine Felicity Conditions walking around looking fabulous trying to get everyone married.

Gretchen: Other types of things that you can say that have an effect on the world are things like naming things. “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.”

Lauren: I can’t. I have tried to. I have tried to walk up to so many ships with so many bottles of champaign, and the felicity conditions are never met because I do not have this power.

Gretchen: But you do have the power to name two children.

Lauren: Yes, I have named children. You don’t always have to say out loud. We did have to sign some paperwork. Writing has taken over from speaking in some legal domains.

Gretchen: But if you name a pet, still, that’s something that’s just sort of your say so that’s generally not – you know, you go to the vet, and they say, “What’s the name of this pet?”, and you just say like, “Max” or “Fido” or something.

Lauren: “Felicity Conditions.”

Gretchen: “My cat, Felicity Conditions.”

Lauren: “It’s Felix the cat – short for ‘Felicity Conditions.’”

Gretchen: [Laughs] Oh my god. And nicknames are an example where the nickname exists because people use it. It’s not anywhere on a written document, but you can say, “This is what I wanna be called.” Many online names are names because people just call you that. It’s you saying, “This is my name,” and other people saying, “Yeah, we’ll call you that,” that makes the name exist more so than the paperwork.

Lauren: Bets are also a form of performative language. Any time you make a wager and say, “I bet that.”

Gretchen: I am going to bet you that someone will actually name their cat “Felicity Conditions” and tell us about it as a result of this episode.

Lauren: Okay. And if they don’t, that is how I’m gonna get my $5.00 out of you.

Gretchen: If they do, then you have to buy me ice cream. If they don’t, then I buy you ice cream.

Lauren: Okay. It seems like we all win in this situation. We’ve now created a condition in the world that did not exist before this conversation, which is that we have an ice cream-based bet between us.

Gretchen: It is up to you, the listeners, as to who has to buy who ice cream.

Lauren: In this situation, the conditions are that both of us have the authority to speak for ourselves. Both of us have the authority to purchase ice cream should be bet be completed satisfactorily. We’ve met the conditions for this to be a proper performative interaction. We’ve changed the world.

Gretchen: If only we knew it was so easy to change the world. These types of statements that change the world are known as “performative utterances.” They were first described by a linguist, a philosopher, named J. L. Austin in 1962. Some of the examples are also a little bit 1962. One of them is “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.” You’re like, “Oh, sixpence, all right.”

Lauren: I don’t think we can meet that because I don’t think I have access to sixpence.

Gretchen: I don’t know if sixpences exist anymore because when British currency underwent decimalisation, now they have six new pennies, but it’s not a sixpence coin.

Lauren: I could probably find a sixpence coin, but it wouldn’t mean a lot to transact that bet.

Gretchen: You could buy it on eBay or something, but yeah, it wouldn’t necessarily have that effect on the world.

Lauren: “I give and bequeath my watch to my brother,” as though watches are the kind of things that are very important to keep in a will and testament.

Gretchen: Another fun example of these types of performative utterances – voting. You can say, “I vote for so-and-so,” “I vote for Felicity Conditions as the winner of this drag race.” Before the secret ballot was invented, you actually voted by going up to somebody who was recording the votes and saying, “Here’s who I vote for,” and declaring it.

Lauren: Hmm. Again, this interesting transition between a spoken performative utterance and moving to performing your intention through writing.

Gretchen: Another really fun – well, another less-fun type of performative utterance is “declare war.”

Lauren: Yes, less fun.

Gretchen: But it’s still a type of performative. One country has to officially declare themselves to be in a state of war. It’s not enough to merely do some fighting. There’s a legal state that countries are in when they say, “This is officially war.”

Lauren: In terms of felicity conditions, there are a whole set of international regulations and conditions and contexts around how one does that. Since I’m not the leader of a nation state, that is not available to me, which is fine. I have no intention of declaring war on anyone.

Gretchen: I cannot simply declare war on Australia. That’s not how any of this works, thank goodness.

Lauren: No, thankfully.

Gretchen: In more innocuous kinds, you can say, “I would like to announce that this episode of Lingthusiasm is about performatives,” or “I hereby demonstrate a performative utterance.”

Lauren: That is nice. I also like that you’ve used the word “hereby” because in English that’s a pretty good little test for whether something is a performative or not.

Gretchen: Right. If you can put “hereby” into the sentence, you know, “I hereby promise,” or “I hereby name,” “I hereby vote for so-and-so.”

Lauren: “I hereby bet you.”

Gretchen: Right. Then it’s a type of performance because you’re doing it by saying it.

Lauren: Another context in which performatives and performativity is often discussed is around how people do gender, which is not necessarily just language.

Gretchen: This comes from Judith butler’s book Gender Trouble. They were actually inspired by the linguistics concept of performativity. It’s not just a stage or theatrical performance, but it’s because Butler had read Austin and was like, “Yeah, actually, gender is something that you do and that you make more gendered by continuing to do.”

Lauren: In some ways, every time a person reinforces a way of doing gender by doing something within that culture with gender, you are continuing to shape reality as well. That’s also part of how it’s inspired by performative utterances.

Gretchen: If you give someone a complement for being beautiful, and that person is a woman, then you are reassociating that link between “beautiful” as a gendered type of compliment. If you are complimenting someone who’s a woman, and you’re seeing them as a man, then that’s performing gender in a slightly different way of saying, “I wanna try to delink these things.”

Lauren: Every time you choose pink for a girl and blue for a boy, you’re continuing this Western focus on these colours being representative of these genders for babies even though these are relatively new ways of doing that. Those colours were flipped only a century or two ago.

Gretchen: It’s interesting to see how gender is something that we receive from other peoples’ performances, but it’s also something we participate in and keep reinforcing by ourselves doing it, and so it’s performed.

Lauren: So, a slightly different sense of performativity but one that was really inspired by this earlier work from linguistics. The way that words, specifically, have power as performatives is something we can kind of see in the way we communicate with words and language and the way we communicate with gestures have slightly different weights in terms of their ability to be meaningful and powerful for people. My colleague, Kensy Cooperrider, has this really neat example of when you’re sitting in the emergency row of an aircraft, and the airstaff come and talk to you about how to operate the doors and whether you feel comfortable doing this in the case of an emergency, which I always take very seriously, and they tell you to take it very seriously, and at the end of this, they say, “Do you agree to do this? If you don’t, we can move you.” You have to say, “Yes.” A nod is not sufficiently performative of your acceptance of this role in case of the emergency that statistically almost never manifests but you have to take very seriously as a possibility every time you fly.

Gretchen: They need specifically to say this particular thing because you’re entering into a type of contract with them.

Lauren: In the context of at home, “Would you like a coffee,” a nod is a sufficient consent to consuming coffee. In this context, it’s a much more serious context, and the seriousness promotes this need to have words rather than just a gesture or nod to confirm your agreement.

Gretchen: I sometimes think about this in terms of how technology has also shaped how we perform certain types of things because there’s a thing that people often do in texting where you’re performing a particular type of action. Let’s say your friend is having a hard day, and you send them a text about it, whether you say something like, “I wish I could give you a hug right now,” or “Giving you a hug,” or just sort of like, “*hugs you*” as narrating the action that you’re doing, all of these are not quite the same as doing a physical hug, but they’re ways of making it more like a real hug or not or making it more vivid or more, yeah, closer to the physical thing.

Lauren: One of the things we’ve been coming back to is this tension between spoken language having a lot of power and written language not necessarily always having that same power to create whether it’s fictional-world magic or real-world magic. It’s really interesting. In some cultures, different emphasis is put on writing. Increasingly in Western culture with the centrality of writing and the prevalence of literacy, you see that signatures are increasingly more important than a verbal agreement. It’s not the saying, “I give my brother my watch,” that’s important, it’s the writing it down in a will and signing it in a way that meets the conditions, which comes from that older verbal tradition but has moved into writing returning to dominance as the central way of making it happen.

Gretchen: Before writing was the dominant technology, you would say something out loud in front of witnesses, and then those witnesses would be the people who were instantiating the contract of “Okay, these people have agreed. I’ve seen it.” And then you have the witnesses signing it to say, “I have seen this person do this. This has been witnessed.” As technology continues, you also have this phenomenon of a “wet signature.”

Lauren: What’s a “wet signature”?

Gretchen: It sounds kind of gross.

Lauren: I don’t want one.

Gretchen: This is a retronym for the conventional kind of signature where the ink of the pen is wet compared to a digital signature.

Lauren: Which is not wet because it’s digital ink not real ink. Oh, so I do have a wet signature. It’s when I sign something with a pen as opposed to signing a PDF.

Gretchen: Right. The original idea behind signing something with a pen is that your signature is related to your handwriting, and no one else should be able to write exactly the same way as you and you can compare the signature that purports to be from you with your actual signature and be like, “Look, this person doesn’t know how I sign my name.” But in the digital context, if you have an image of someone’s signature, you could just put it on another digital document, and it’s just sort of there as part of this artefact of things that we have agreed to accept is the form of a contract but no longer actually requires the person who’s signing it to be the person who has that. I have a copy of my digital signature that I just keep using. I don’t create it new each time.

Lauren: But each time you are putting it on a document, that becomes the performance of agreeing to the terms of the document.

Gretchen: Exactly. And an oath – swearing an oath – you know, “I solemnly swear to tell the truth,” or “I swear that this is, in fact, what I have seen,” or “This is what I saw,” that’s also related to a performative. You know, “I hereby swear that this is what happened last night,” and that’s part of this contract thing that’s a performative.

Lauren: Oaths are also related to curses in the non-magical sense. If you curse someone or if you curse using swear language, you are creating a sentiment about whatever you’re talking about.

Gretchen: Swearing or using other types of taboo language, those are words that change the state of the world because, compared to using a more neutral equivalent, they are a way of saying, “I am the type of person who uses this highly emotively charged language compared to a more neutral synonym that I could be using.”

Lauren: This is the reason that we don’t swear on main episodes of the podcast because we know the effect that it can have.

Gretchen: Although, if you do want to hear us swear, we have done a couple bonus episodes about swearing that are locked up nice and safe where kids can’t get them. It’s something that does exist, which is an interesting pragmatic choice that we made when we started Lingthusiasm, which was we want this podcast to be something that people could feel comfortable assigning to high school students or playing around their children and not feeling like they have to pre-screen episodes to see what we’re talking about, but also, swearing is part of language, and it’s interesting to analyse. That’s why we put those as bonus episodes.

Lauren: Knowing the real-world effect that language can have on people is why we’re very happy to use swears in a bonus episode, but we do draw the line at using slur words.

Gretchen: Right. Because a swear word is emotionally charged but ultimately refers to things that are relatively neutral or egalitarian, whereas a slur that refers to a particular person and their membership of a group and denigrates them for that is something that, you know, is still linguistically interesting but is something that we don’t want to take on the pragmatic connotations of we’re the kind of people who say that about people. Something that’s interesting for me is the way that some words have become more taboo and some words have become less taboo. The F-word has become less taboo even in my lifespan, whereas slurs that refer to particular groups of people, when I was young, some of them weren’t as taboo as they are now. That’s also us as collective humans changing what these particular words mean when they’re performed. It’s not something that exists in a vacuum.

Lauren: Even though I can’t make a teacup that keeps my tea permanently hot, thinking about performatives, thinking about oaths and curses and bets, is a really good way to remember that language does have the magic to change the world.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA posters, “Not Judging Your Grammar” stickers, and baby clothes with “Not Judging Your Language, Just Acquiring it,” as well as other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk with about it? Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include the results of our listener survey, our liveshow about language and gender with Kirby Conrod, and our whole list of older bonus episodes about swearing. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Also, remember to sign up for our free email newsletter if you wanna get our list of linguistics-related books – both fiction and nonfiction.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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