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technicallyhappyarcade · 7 months

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Tips for Maintaining Your Home Gym Flooring

Home Gym Flooring: We receive free products and commissions through our links. See the disclosures page.

Whether you're on the cusp of starting your home gym or worried about your equipment's lifespan due to your lack of proper flooring, you're not alone. And while aesthetics certainly play a part, the wrong flooring can be a severe hazard. It can damage your gym equipment or your floor or increase your risk of injury.

Before starting my home gym, I spent hours researching and sifting through several options. I tried to find the best home gym flooring to withstand heavy weights, high-intensity cardio workouts, and everything in between.

This article compiles exhaustive research and my experience training on different types of flooring in commercial gyms to guide you through the choices and help you invest in a flooring solution that's right for you.

How We Chose the Best Home Gym Flooring

We chose the best home gym flooring options by carefully analyzing various factors. We needed to give many options based on different exercise styles, including bodyweight training, yoga, CrossFit, and powerlifting.

We also wanted to ensure our choices reflected a range of budgets to accommodate those who wish for the best value. That said, we included some higher-end brands (like Second Skin) for those willing and able to pay more for higher quality and durability.

Finally, we included different types of flooring for the many home workout environments that home gym owners would have (concrete, carpet, and hardwood) to ensure the list represents the best options.

Our Top Picks for the Best Home Gym Flooring

Best Home Gym Flooring Overall: Rubber Flooring Inc. 8mm Strong Rubber Roll

Pros

Free custom-cutting to any length over 15 feet (rounded to the nearest foot) with 20 color-fleck variations is available

There is a five-year warranty on standard color options and a 25-year warranty on the Biggie SmallzTM colors

30-day money-back guarantee

USA-made

Eco-friendly and mainly made from recycled rubber materials

Cons

It may have a rubber odor when it first arrives

DIY installation may be challenging for some

The rolls may curl or shift slightly over time

When outfitting your space with the best home gym flooring, the Rubber Flooring Inc. 8mm Strong Rubber Roll is the ideal choice.

Unlike most flooring rolls that come in preset increments only (like 15, 50, or 100 feet), the 8mm Strong Rubber Roll can be ordered in one-foot increments starting at 15 feet. For example, if your space is precisely 17 feet long, you can request that exact amount. Rubber Flooring Inc. will even custom-cut it for free and give you a couple of extra inches on each roll, just in case.

This feature is underrated. With other companies, custom cuts aren't available, so you'd be forced to buy a single 15-foot roll and leave two feet of your floor incomplete or pay for two 15-foot rolls to cover the entire workout space just to be stuck with a bunch of leftover material.

The roll is available in 20 different color variations, from classic black to lipstick red, so that you can add some pizzazz to your rubber gym flooring.

The 8mm Strong Rubber Roll is made in the USA, which appeals to those who want to support the American economy and value the higher standards that American manufacturing must meet. Rubber Flooring Inc. offers a five-year warranty on standard colors and an impressive 25-year warranty on its Biggie Smallz™ colors, one of the best warranties I've ever encountered for rubber gym flooring. Plus, the company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for customers in the United States and Canada.

It will most likely emit a rubber odor at first since it's mostly made from recycled rubber. The smell can be unpleasant, but to reduce it, you can air out the rubber roll and clean it with a mild soap and water solution before installation.

The installation might be a hurdle if you have yet to DIY experience. I did find the video in the company's "Install Info" helpful. However, you'll still need a good understanding of essential tools (measuring tape, t-square, and utility knife) and fundamental construction principles. If you have no experience in this field, calling a professional would be brilliant.

Lastly, the rubber roll may curl or shift slightly with drastic temperature changes or if heavy things get dragged across it, like a fully loaded bumper plate tree. You can use double-sided tape to secure the rubber roll sticks to the floor to prevent this.

Best Rubber Flooring for Home Gyms: Second Skin Stomp Roll

Second Skin Stomp Roll

Material: Recycled rubber

Dimensions: 4' W x 15', 25', or 50' L

Thickness: ¼ inch, eight millimeters, ⅜ inch, ½ inch, or ¾ inch

Suitable for: General fitness, HIIT, powerlifting, and Olympic weightlifting

Check Price

Pros

Five thicknesses that are suitable for low- to high-impact activities

Includes noise-reducing technology

It has a mild odor

USA-made

Made from recycled rubber materials

Cons

Only available in black

Custom cuts cost extra

DIY installation may be difficult

Consider the Second Skin Stomp Roll if you are looking for rubber flooring that can reduce noise and vibration from your home gym equipment.

Second Skin was initially known for auto and audio soundproofing, but many of its products are also used in gyms due to their excellent noise and vibration dampening. This distinctive feature makes the Stomp Roll a solid choice for home gyms where quieter workouts are essential due to shared living spaces or the sleep schedules of young children.

With five different thicknesses, you're almost guaranteed to find one suitable for your exercise style. The quarter-inch thickness is excellent to place under any of the best treadmills or for bodyweight training, while the ¾-inch thickness is ideal for general weight training and HIIT. If powerlifting, CrossFit, or Olympic weightlifting is more your style, the ¾-inch thickness can provide enough protection for your floor when placed on top of plywood, like on a lifting platform.

Despite being made from old tires, Stomp Roll's product page claims an "extremely mild odor." I can't confirm the strength of its smell, but if true, this is a significant advantage over the many rubber flooring options that tend to off-gas unpleasant odors for weeks after installation. Having near-odorless flooring can make a difference for those with asthma or other respiratory conditions (even just a sensitivity to scents in general).

If adding flair to your rubber gym flooring is essential, you'll be disappointed that the Stomp Roll is only offered in black.

Furthermore, unlike the Rubber Flooring Inc. 8mm Strong Rubber Roll mentioned previously, custom cuts of the Stomp Roll cost extra. Custom lengths are "available on request," one customer even left a review saying, "I had a very custom project... They cut my pieces exactly as I requested at a fair price."

While it's great to know that you can get custom lengths other than the default 15-, 25-, and 50-foot lengths, I would be more impressed to see them offered at no extra charge.

The Stomp Roll installation process is simple but requires basic DIY skills and understanding. If you're uncomfortable with self-installation, a professional's help may be necessary but will add to the overall cost. Keep this in mind, especially if you prefer a hassle-free setup.

Best Home Gym Flooring Over Concrete: Rogue Power Platform

Rogue Power Platform

Material: Recycled rubber

Dimensions: 90” W x 72” L

Thickness: ¾ inch (19 millimeters)

Suitable for: General weight lifting, HIIT, CrossFit

Check Price

Pros

The diamond-pattern top gives a good grip even when slick

It can be used indoors or outdoors

The ¾-inch thickness and waffle-pattern impact zones minimize noise and vibrations

Easy installation due to the interlocking design

Made in the USA

Eco-friendly

Cons

The fixed size might not suit all gym spaces, and trimming it might damage the interlocking mat system

Expensive compared to budget-friendly alternatives

Potentially unstable with weighty weights

The Rogue Power Platform is an excellent flooring choice for anyone with a concrete floor because of its durable rubber construction and waffle-pattern impact zones. The diamond-pattern top layer also gives it a better grip even in slick conditions, which is excellent for those who prefer to have their home gym outside and work out in humid conditions.

RELATED: The Dangers of Outside Workouts

The ¾-inch thickness is durable, making it ideal for general weight lifting, HIIT, and CrossFit. The waffle-pattern impact zones dampen noise and vibrations, which helps keep your concrete floor protected and your neighbors happy.

While it might seem extra-wide, the 90-inch width ensures that every weight plate on your favorite Olympic barbell will be supported, with three inches on each side to account for occasional sideways movement. The default 72-inch length is surprisingly roomy and can accommodate two barbell setups for you and your workout partner when doing controlled exercises like deadlifts or rows.

The mats feature a modular, loose-lay interlocking system and sections with beveled edges. Installation is relatively straightforward, with no adhesive required. This is a significant relief for those who could be more DIY-knowledgeable.

However, its 72″ x 90″ footprint may not suit all spaces, and trimming it might damage the interlocking mat system.

If you're into Olympic lifting, there are better choices than the Power Platform. At 72" long, this is the minimal length you should accept for weightlifting. While it technically could work, your feet could land beyond the perimeter of the platform during a split jerk if you have long legs. In the event of a bailed lift, it's only a matter of time before a failed snatch or clean and jerk lands off the platform and damages your floor. The Rogue 8' x 8' Oly Platform is a better option for Oly lifting.

The Power Platform is also more costly at $399 compared to budget-friendly alternatives like 4' x 6' horse stall mats from Tractor Supply, where a single mat can be found for around $60. Two horse stall mats would total roughly $120 and, when joined together, would offer a bigger platform for less than half the cost.

Finally, the platform might need to be more stable with ultra-heavy weights due to the rubber material. After all, there's a reason why lifting platforms usually have a centerpiece made out of wood—it's more firm than a rubber surface. While this would probably be unnoticeable with light to moderate weights, it's worth pointing out for those who want to lift heavy.

Best Home Gym Flooring Over Carpet: Second Skin Stomp Mat

Second Skin Stomp Mat

Material: Recycled rubber

Dimensions: 4’ W x 6’ L

Thickness: ¼ or ½ inch

Suitable for: Bodyweight training, general weight lifting, HIIT

Check Price

Pros

Shock-absorbing properties protect your floor from damage, whether it's from a treadmill or barbell

Includes noise-reducing technology

Installation is a breeze

No adhesive needed

USA-made

Eco-friendly

Cons

No ¾-inch thickness

Costly

Even when weighed down by heavy equipment, these mats can shift slightly over time

The Stomp Mat offers several advantages, making it the most appealing choice and the best home gym flooring option to place over carpet. Its shock absorption capabilities safeguard your carpet fibers from getting torn up while protecting your existing subfloor from damage.

The ¼-inch mat weighs 30 pounds (13.6 kilograms) and provides excellent noise reduction, making it a great option for supporting standalone exercise equipment like a high-quality rowing machine or treadmill. The machine's weight on top of the mat keeps it in place. The ½-inch thick mat, on the other hand, weighs 60 pounds (27.3 kilograms) and offers even more sound isolation and flooring protection.

The Stomp Mat lacks a ¾-inch thickness option. This limits its suitability for powerlifting-style training because it may not be able to handle significantly heavier weights. It's also not an excellent choice for Olympic lifting or CrossFit because the thinner options won't withstand repeated weight drops from overhead.

Additionally, it's relatively costly compared to budget options. The ¼-inch mat is priced at around $99.99, and the ½-inch mat costs around $179.99. A ¾-inch horse stall mat from Tractor Supply Co. costs about $60, offering more thickness at a lower price.

Installation is a breeze because it's a mat instead of a roll. Lay it over your carpet and place your equipment on top, or get lifting.

Technically, you don't need adhesive, but double-sided flooring (carpet) tape or rubber adhesive applied around the edges of the mat is a wise choice. Even when weighed down by heavy-duty cardio machines, these mats can shift slightly over time. Using multiple mats, you can place mending plates under the mats where their seams join to keep them from separating over time.

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castle-dominion · 1 year

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c1x5 chill goes thru her veins

I feel bad for the stunt actor. Why are those lights turning on?

Beautiful intro <3 with her ring & gun & stuff. (but she just keeps it in a drawer...? No surely that drawer is locked... gun laws in the usa can't be THAT lax...) Beautiful red coat. We need more of that in later seasons. She should shave her head, but like in a sexy way. For the leabians.

JE: Why can't they find bodies between 9 and 5? KB: Well, early bird gets the collar. *castle running around before beckett can even drink her coffee* JE: He was here before I was.

Poor lanie, she's there just as early as anyone. XD cold case LP claims she's frozen solid, but let's just make a note of that. Captions say mid-40s & i'm assuming that means 40-50 f not negative 40? That's what like 12 degrees c? Nope, 40f is 4c. not quite cold enough to freeze, not solid, even with wind. Lol ruby slippers Ok but bodies float in concrete Maybe the killer is just really flaky like me. Or maybe they killed her & didn't know what to do so they froze her until they came up with a plan.

I'm watching s4 with my family rn & the technology is booming. Reminds me of s2 when the fbi came in. Legit made me laugh out loud when castle made that wilford warfstache face. This seems like a good time to remembe MMIWP; missing & murdered indigenous women/people. It is literally an ongoing genocide, idk much abt the USA but indigenous people are disproportionately represented in cases like this in canada. Indigenous men are actually more at-risk for murders than women, though women are more at-risk for disappearances & sexual abuse. They are even overturning things like ICWA, FNMI kids are already overrepresented in the foster care system, forced genocidal assimilation is happening under our noses Right Now. Everyone is an ally until it is time to do some ally shit.

KR: Sure they do. Quantum physics, alien abductions, Schrödinger's cat. One minute, you're getting a hot dog in the park, the next you're fighting off Sleestaks on the far side of a dimensional rift. BRUH??? Reminds me of the alien episode in s2 or s3. Oh woman I remember in Range class we had our turkeys out all weekend & they were still frozen

KB: Okay, I'm on my way KB: Lanie's got an ID. So u don't need to look thru missing persons anymore right? RC, to rysposito: You'll take care of these? *leaves* JE: Hey, Ryan, can you, uh… Thanks. *also leaves poor ryan to go through or put away the files* Poor Ryan, he's just staring at espt leave with such hurt, his eyes just moving all over the table & room, & his mouth slightly open. He's left to deal with this. They really are treating him like the new guy even tho he really is not he's been there long enough in canon.

WOAH FIVE YEARS IS A LONG TIME BABES

Steals his coffee Ofc he's a speedreader. I like how later they use that skill again. ok but she disappears often, she's gone for weeks at a time occasionally, the guy probably wouldn't have called in until seven days after she's gone Flirting with her lol. He probably thought she ran away for the first six months then figured she was gone for good or passed away.

R u using a 5yo file? Oh. Yeah five years. So new york "idc that the previous tenant was murdered, it keeps the rent low"

JE: Well, four years between murders? One's a popsicle, one just got popped? I love castle's shirt texture, I just want to feel it. KR: I don't believe it. RC: Give me 250 pages, I bet I could make you. KR: *chuckles* But he's right. "250 pages is 125 000 words single-spaced or 62 500 words double-spaced. Typical documents that are 250 pages or more include full-length novels."

CASTLE I could call it, "A Chill Runs Through Her Veins." ESPOSITO Ooh. I like that. [Castle and Esposito five-five.] CASTLE "Bam" said the lady, another best-seller for me.

(https://scriptline.livejournal.com/18916.html for my quotes, it's so much faster than typing them out. sometimes.)

You know, ppl ship caskett (obv, & then it eventually eventually finally becomes canon) & ppl ship rysposito (I can see why, plus if caskett is together obv rysposito would be together) but tbh I like castito or casposito or castlesito or estle or espostle or espositle or javick rickvier or whatever their ship name it. Probably casposito.

Hmmm. Homeless, White Plains. Homeless, White Plains. JE: both kinda creepy

I love him with his kids (possibly spoilers) I think I know how it ends, I feel like the parents will end up having done this & the kids will end up parentless & then grandparentless. Or maybe the husband did it & then the grandparents killed the husband bc screw you for robbing my daughter of her life & my grandkids of their mom & I'm not letting my grandbabies be raised by a murderer (unless they become murderers in which case.... you lost your point)

drinkin coffee in a bar. I mean he's right ig but at the same time screw you & acab. Oh war vet? Yeah no hun cops feel more brotherhood with soldiers than they feel responsibility to their jobs. The entire system is crap. I want to say "than they feel responsible for the ppl they are meant to protect" but... they aren't really "meant" to protect them. They are meant to police them.

That's why u like castle. He spins crazy theories instead of making things fit into a box. (except he still says "that's not how I would write it") Castle sherlock holmes moments.

JE: A couple of bucks jogged his memory. Yeah man Already have their little handshake uwu Reminds me of ochoa/herve doing the big handshake. I feel like castle wrote a cool handshake (made it up) for roach & then they put it in the movie but castle didn't actually know how to do the handshake.

Oh gosh this poor man. Only this time, all I find is a freezer plugged into a light outlet -- which, by the way, is totally illegal. So valid bestie. (I love him so much.) One time I had to make a mini model of a house for math class but it was my best friend & me & we were both disabled so we handed in the simplest project we could & got in trouble for it. Then our parents helped us out, they put in the water heater. Paul said "lets use this little pill bottle, we can glue it to the wall here" but then my dad chips in 'That's a Code Violation, man!' as if code violations matter in our little model. Both dads cracked up. It was funnier when it happened... (& whenever we go to tour dream homes dad points out the code violations. & ofc count how many secret rooms we can make. Not that we'd ever live there.) Oh fun fact, if you make a double male extension cord you can power your neighbour's apartment if they forgot to pay their electrical bill, JUST so they can like, keep their fridge running so their food doesn't spoil. Some anarchosocialist cyberpunk for ya. I mean the man's right. I see why he did what he did. People are really good at not seeing homeless people.

Man kept the freezer? ofc it's cash. every six months, plus three months of grace. Two months after the man is dead! So valid bestie, keep the footage of the last two weeks, but who has space for more than that?

If not x, then y. if not her, then him. If not sam, then whoM? Him=whom, he=who. Who did it? He did it. It was whom? It was him.

Mmm leftovers. That's a heck of an empty freezer. Hey self cleaning oven, sort of like that episode in s3! Did you know you can jerry your oven open during self clean mode to make it into a pizza oven? Don't do it tho. AC: Did I stop, or did something stop me? I love her RC: It's family moments like these I will never forget. AC: With a good therapist, hopefully, I will. DSAFHDSJHADSKJH

I like beckett's coat. This Wyler fellow seems neat. I like him. Man remembers the bf's name?

This boy looks like someone I've seen before. Maybe that actor/directer, gary sinus I like his shirt. Seems like a nice prison uniform. This fellow seems neat. Oh. I love & respect this man. I love him sm. This is tragic.

Sometimes I'm very "guy" but other times I am so obviously raised female, but I was also raised catholic. Nice pride flag lol B'y I think it's a bad idea to tell these children what happened to their mom, at least in any detail. They're kids. Or at most tweens.

What if GARY killed sam? He wasn't dead for four years or so, you could have come forward. he WAS dead for the past year, you could have come forward w/o fear.

Ooh this is the coolest & sweetest thing. I love their laser tag gear. RC: Mom! We are totally doing battle on the field of honor. MR: How old are you? RC: Old enough to afford the top-of-the line laser tag. You know that's what they tell addicts. The only fun you had was drinking & now you don't have that hobby? All your friends do drugs so you're out a community? Do what you wanted to do when you were a kid, now that you are an adult with adult money. Buy yourself an easy bake oven, go play laser tag, take that gymnastics class you wanted to do all throughout elementary. RC: I'm dead! MoOm!

I like how castle doesn't try to make himself look like a presentable adult, he opens the door & shoots his laser gun. Poor beckett. She knocks on his door & then gets laser shot by a novelist she was a fan of who is now shadowing her on crime cases, then his daughter comes out from behind him, also wearing all this laser gear (including the fact that she is a responsible adolescent), & then his mom comes in from the side with a towel on her head & a mask on her face. "Pehtikwe"

Is this the first time she has been in his house? Or did she arrest him here once? She is indeed a comic fan, remember the vampire episode? It's like a murder board. Lol jinx. I like castle's sweater here.

See? Most ppl don't own a car in a city like that. Point for the adhd castle headcanon. Goes on a tangent like that. Plus, he's very childish sometimes, very childlike /pos sometimes, he procrastinates a lot, then he hyperfocuses & bangs out a novel, he can think inside or outside the box but he threw the box away so he doesn't know if he's thinking in or out, he is not very good at following instructions lol (you know i was diagnosed with ODD & recently I found out & thought "that's just what they diagnose you with when you don't understand things & so you ask questions or refuse to do things or you don't like being a child treated like you are not a person; that's why so many ppl grow out of of" & I Was Right, BUT that's only the misdiagnoses, ODD is actually a mood disorder, which might be why I kind of got over it when I went on mood stabilizers. Fun fact for ya)

It's late at night they just went to his house? Or maybe it's the next day.

ROGER They told me he was shot in a mugging. And now you're telling me, he was killed here, in my apartment?

CASTLE Not him. His wife.

ROGER His wife? What kind of family was this?

CASTLE Alright. So, you and I are married.

BECKETT We are not married.

CASTLE Relax. It's just pretend.

BECKETT I don't want to pretend.

CASTLE Scared you'll like it?

BECKETT Okay. If we're married, I want a divorce.

ROGER Are you two like this all the time?

CASTLE and BECKETT Yes.

(usually they give opposing answers. JE: yes; KB: no; RC: I wish; KR: ...??? Ok!)

Castle puts down the pan but beckett still has the pot *closes door on roger* *hands the pot back to roger*

Need to go to the eco station? Call your buddy with a truck.

I still respect this guy to a degree. I love the way his voice is breaking. This poor fellow.

Cap's right. what goes around comes around.

I remember how it ends. Not five years ago. Plainclothes. Melanie's dad. He did his own detective work & I'm proud. I know what you mean castle but you kind of can't do that.

I feel really bad bc he's just trying to be a good grampa, he is raising his grandkids, he solved his daughter's murder & paid justice to sam. Tho he probs could have gone to the police. Also why do those kids look native? Melanie & her parents are white af. IG we've never seen sam's body/picture so maybe he was native or a poc.

Dad, they probs don't have the evidence to convict you. Don't confess & you can get away with it. Ah I see why he did it now. R u allowed to bring back a service weapon? Good on him, he said a father MIGHT be justified. Never said he did it.

Oh beckett sharing her story!

We were supposed to go to dinner together - my mom, my Dad, and I, and she was gonna meet us at the restaurant, but she never showed. Two hours later, we went home, and there was a detective waiting for us. Detective Raglin. They found her body. She had been stabbed. She still had her money and purse and jewelry. And it wasn't a sexual assault, either. They attributed it to gang violence. Random wayward event. So, just like in Melanie's case, they couldn't think outside the box. So, they just tries to package it up nicely. And the killer was never caught.

CASTLE Why do you wear the watch?

BECKETT My Dad took her death hard. He's sober now. Five years. So, this is for the life that I saved. And...

[She reaches in her shirt and pulls out the necklace with the ring on it.]

BECKETT (CONT'D) this is for the life that I lost.

Oof, so good. So good. I love them.

CASTLE Until tomorrow, Detective.

BECKETT You can't just say "night?"

CASTLE I'm a writer. "Night" is boring. "Until tomorrow" is more hopeful.

The second cree word of this post: Wapaki. It means "tomorrow" but cree words are long. It means more like "if the sun rises tomorrow" & it implies that we have FAITH that the sun will rise tomorrow, we can't actually tell the future. We are just doing what we can. If, if the sun rises tomorrow.

& she doesn't lock her gun in her drawer.

Esposito & castle & getting the file & how did he convince espt to do this.

[41:50, INT. PRECINCT, RECORDS ROOM - NIGHT] Esposito enters, followed by Castle.

[Esposito leads him past rack after rack of file boxes, until he comes to one and opens it. He pulls out a file and hands it to Castle.]

ESPOSITO Remember, this never happened. I was never here.

CASTLE You have my word. Thanks.

[Esposito clears his throat]

ESPOSITO If you tell her I did this, I'll make you bleed.

CASTLE Understood.

ESPOSITO Good luck.

[The name on the file: Johanna Beckett. Castle takes a seat at a table and turns on the desk light as Esposito leaves, dousing the overheads. Lit by the light of the lamp, Castle looks down at the case file. He takes a breath, and opens it.]

I should do some chores.

#castle 1x5 #castle 1x5 spoilers #castle 1x5 quote #castle s1 spoilers #plot heavy

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justaradioguy · 1 year

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anonymous wants to peek into the past ->

"⏰ + meeting Mustang"

from the "memories" meme | accepting

It's a cold day in February, but unfortunately not quite cold enough to snow.

No, on this particular cold day in February, it is raining. Not in a fun way, where he can go stomp through a puddle a bit too aggressively, but in the kind of way that makes everything seem so dull and meaningless.

There's a cup of coffee in one hand and the other is positioned over a telegraph key when papers are put down in front of him, pushed forward as if they're important. He looks up, but the lieutenant who delivered them has already started to walk away.

He picks it up to skim over the front page and see what it is.

Orders to transfer.

With his name on them, spelled out plain as day - he is being moved effective immediately.

At least he doesn't have to move command centers entirely - as far as he's aware, Colonel Mustang is definitely in another part of East Command.

He's not quite sure why someone like that would ask specifically for a lowly nineteen-year-old communications officer, but he's not about to question the decisions of Roy Mustang.

No, he packs his things up, bids everyone else in that office goodbye, and heads on his way. He only has to ask for specific directions once, and after that he manages to find his new direct superior's location just fine.

What is not just fine is that he finds himself standing in a room full of people who drastically outrank him. Three lieutenants, a warrant officer, and a colonel.

Not a single other NCO in sight.

His body moves faster than his brain can think, arm snapping up into a perfect salute before he can even be addressed.

"Sergeant Fuery?" the Colonel asks.

"Yes sir?"

"At ease. Your workspace is right there."

"Yes sir."

"How long are we playin' the formal game for, chief?" one of the lieutenants - a tall man with blond hair - questions, not lifting his head from the stack of paperwork he's getting through.

"Long enough to watch him, probably," another replies. He also doesn't look up, so all Kain can really tell is that he's got reddish hair and a go-to-hell type posture. "Or scare him. I dunno, it's a 50/50 with Mustang, and I'm not playing."

He looks back at the man in question, trying to figure out what sort of situation he's been placed into.

And the Colonel at second glance looks almost nothing like anything Kain had in mind. He's... young for his rank, or at least looks to be that way, and he seems like he's examining everyone in the room (especially him) under a microscope. He isn't someone to be underestimated - Fuery can gather that much.

Finally, Kain manages to shuffle over to the empty space next to the taller lieutenant who'd spoken first, putting his bag down. Something keeps drawing his gaze back to Mustang, who has yet to take his eyes off the sergeant, and it finally clicks that maybe this is a test of some kind.

Maybe he's testing whether Kain can stand alongside everyone in this room. That's his best guess, so despite the sheer difficulty of the task and the urge to put his head down, he decides on staring right back. He can always correct an action much easier than an inaction.

"What would you like for me to do first, sir?"

#picking up the phone ;; asks #broadcasted ;; queue #there's so much worth fighting for – you'll see ;; pre separation arc

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diyeoracha · 4 years

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IwaOi Fanfiction Masterlist with 90+ Works

Hello! In celebration accumulating over 290 bookmarks on my AO3 account featuring IwaOi, Haikyuu S4 part 2, and @haikyuuweek2020 (Day 7 - Free Choice), I decided to create a masterlist of all of my favorite Iwaoi fics in order to keep myself organized as well as contributing to more traffic for those works! Works are split up into genres such as alternate universe (either not childhood friends or set on Earth), angst, canon compliant (post timeskip with spoilers), canon divergent (childhood friends but divergent timeline post timeskip), high school, and university au

Formatting update: Jan 13, 2021 (spacing is wonky on the mobile app!).

Fic update: Jan 7, 2021

This is incomplete as I got distracted while re-reading a lot of these and have only gone through half of my bookmarks, but feel free to check my own page here for the rest of them! I really do hope you guys enjoy reading these and leave comments and kudos! Please reblog and like so more people can enjoy

Titles marked with (♡) are my absolute favorites and there’s a chance I cried while reading them but otherwise they’re in alphabetical order

Alternate Universe

an allegory of all the things we could’ve been

Word count: 16k

Summary: “I don’t know anything about some red string,” Iwaizumi murmurs into the cracks of Oikawa’s skin, “or even about lifetimes or fate. But no matter where you are, I’ll find you. Gods or otherwise.” Reincarnation AU

And All the Prince’s Men

Word count: 65k

Summary: “Father only loves that which he owns, and I am the one thing that can never truly be his.” Royalty AU

Built a Temple in Me

Word count: 55k

Summary: Up the mossy mountain steps, past the komainu guardians and the faded red gate, and beyond the boundaries of the green shrine—that’s where the forest and the spirit world within it lies. That’s were Hajime met him, and where their story began.But intertwining of destinies can be ugly business, Hajime finds, when their first meeting begins with blood and the too-human eyes of a beast. God Oikawa AU

Quote: It fills his heart anyway, heals the hole in his chest that had been bleeding since he cut Tooru so forcibly from him.

Cotton Breathing

Word count: 13k

Summary: Long-distance and summer only but childhood friends AU

Conquering the Great King

Word count: 105k

Summary: Oikawa's lips twitched into a smirk and he brought them hovering just over Iwaizumi's, "One time thing, Two time thing, what's it matter as long as it's not a Relationship thing?"

Quote: Oikawa's eyes twitched wide for less than a second, his knee pressed in hard against Iwaizumi's thigh, "I may be gorgeous, but I'm not a doll."

dear diary, i met a boy

Word count: 15k

Summary: Iwaizumi's first impression of his upstairs neighbor involves getting woken up at two in the morning to the sound of Oikawa singing along to trashy pop music. He'd thought it would get better, but it all just goes downhill from there. Modern AU

Desperado

Word count: 82k

Summary: Clearly Iwaizumi had a checkered past. Kyoutani has never asked about it, nor has Iwaizumi ever brought it up. He knows it’s a sore spot for his mentor, just like the gorgeous Monte Carlo he keeps hidden away is, so he leaves it alone. Out on the streets, you learn a little something about when to turn a blind eye in order to survive; Kyoutani knows better than most to leave the past of men like Iwaizumi well alone. Heist AU

Even Heroes (have the right to dream)

Word count: 20k

Summary: Oikawa Tooru, ace reporter of the superhero beat of Asahi Shimbun, hates superheroes. Or maybe he just hasn’t met the knight one yet. Superhero AU

♡Infinite Risks

Word count: 8k

Summary: “It’s my fate,” Oikawa responds slowly. He’s crying. “It’s too lonely,” Iwaizumi’s heart sounded broken. “And I’m not there with you. Not really.” Edge of Tomorrow AU

In Defense of Reptiles

Word count: 9k

Summary: In their seventh year, Oikawa is chosen to be the Hogwarts champion in the Triwizard Tournament, and Iwaizumi suffers. Harry Potter AU

Quote: “You are so spoiled,” Iwaizumi tells him, but lets him shuffle down until Iwaizumi’s hand is now running through Oikawa’s hair instead of rubbing his shoulder.

In the Telling

Word count: 6k

Summary: Muggleborn Iwaizumi could not be less impressed with pureblood Oikawa Tooru. Harry Potter AU

♡Lockdown

Word count: 72k

Summary: Within the first few months of his stay, Oikawa gets caught up in a war between cellblocks, becomes a prime target, and must decide just how far he's willing to go to protect Iwaizumi Hajime. Prison AU

♡long nights, no peace

Word count: 18k

Summary: It's the steady knowledge that Iwaizumi Hajime will always be someone that he can rely on, that no matter what the world throws at the two of them, they share in a piece of each other's soul. Pacific Rim AU

Quote: Quiet settles between them softly, like the warm pressure of the blanket, or Iwaizumi's fingers curling to lightly hold the fabric of Oikawa's shirt.

The Long Light

Word count: 36k

Summary: Iwaizumi Hajime's seventh year at Hogwarts begins, and begins, and begins, and begins. Somehow, Oikawa Tooru is always there. Harry Potter AU

Magic Man

Word count: 12k

Summary: Oikawa is named the most desirable wizard in France. Iwaizumi is not impressed. Harry Potter AU

Quote: You keep saying partner or them. Is it rude of me to ask you to clarify?

Meet me in the grey area

Word count: 24k

Summary: Set in a hero/villain AU with Iwa as our trusty hero and Oikawa as our charming villain

Saw You at the Fish Market

Word count: 14k

Summary: In other words, Oikawa befriends hot part-time worker Iwaizumi and tries to impress him both off and on the court, in hopes of more.

♡♡ (sing with me) A Song of Conquest and Fate

Word count: 26k

Summary: When Seijou receives a missive from Aobajousai to discuss a potential peace, its emperor Oikawa Tooru could not have foreseen the series of events that would follow. Historical fantasy AU

Similar Creatures

Word count: 53k

Summary: "What's your name?" "Whatever you want it to be."(Or, Oikawa gets directions from an attractive stranger on a street corner.). Escort AU

♡Something Like Us

Word count: 28k

Summary: Friends since childhood, Oikawa and Iwaizumi now live together, both playing for the National Team. It's no secret that athletes who are bonded perform better. So if the two of them happen to bond...It'd be for the good of the team, right? A/B/O AU

Space

Word count: 44k

Summary: Tries not to think of his rooftop garden, or the apartment he used to inhabit, or Hajime’s broken expression on the night they whispered their goodbyes before Tooru’s launch, attempting to push it all to the back of his mind behind visions of this alien world terraformed. Astronaut AU

Stop the Time

Word count: 10k

Summary: Iwaizumi Hajime, 27, E.R. nurse at University of Tokyo Hospital. Hospital AU

♡♡The Loyalty of A Traitor

Word count: 76k

Summary: Iwaizumi Hajime was an undercover officer with a single objective: Infiltrate the Seijoh Syndicate of the Yakuza and tear them down from the inside out. His primary target was the boss, Oikawa Tooru. The job itself was simple enough, until Iwaizumi got in too deep and absconded not only from the mission, but from the city itself. Yakuza AU

These Flowers I Stole For You

Word count: 3k

Summary: ANBU don't cry. They tear themselves apart, bit by bit, and then they stitch themselves whole again. Naruto AU

on shipwreck shore

Word count: 8k

Summary: “I’m going to murder you in cold blood and feed you to the basilisks,” Iwaizumi says conversationally. “You can’t do that, I’m your boss,” Oikawa sings, positively sparkling. “Also we’re partners, which means,” he points at Iwaizumi and leans in, “you’re stuck with me.” Detective AU

Page 305 of 304

Word count: 53k

Summary: “…she called you ‘papa’,” iwaizumi managed. oikawa just stared for a moment longer before relaxing in a smile. “yeah. cute, right? but you can call me ‘daddy’ if you want.”

Temporary fix

Word count: 12k

Summary: “And you’ve shampooed his hair how many times now? Hmm. Yeah, that’s not technically a bromance.” A/B/O AU

Tokyo Boy

Word count: 16k

Summary: He has feelings for Iwaizumi Hajime, who probably has casual lovers just like him in every major city he visits on business. Oikawa is just his Tokyo Boy, just another pit-stop on Iwaizumi’s travels. Businessman AU

Trial by Fire

Word count: 78k

Summary: (lawyer!AU - in which Iwaizumi loves his objections, Oikawa is beautiful, and they have more chemistry than two opposing attorneys probably should.)

Watch Me

Word count: 32k

Summary: Oikawa's a cam model. It’s been a month since Iwaizumi first spoke in his chat. When they meet in person, things get complicated. Cam model AU

Angst

open when

Word count: 1k

Summary: Iwaizumi knew it was coming, but it still hurt. It still hurt when he opens one letter and drowns it in the tears he cannot keep at bay.

Chasing Paper Suns

Word count: 10k

Summary: Post-high school, Oikawa makes it to the national volleyball team but Iwaizumi doesn't. The next three years become an exercise in growing up without growing apart

Quote: “ ‘it’s just—I’m just trying so hard—’‘What, and I’m not?’

Timeless (We Have 30 Days)

Word count: 12k

Summary: Or AU where you're branded 50 days before you die. But Oikawa doesn't tell anyone so now there's only 30 days left.

the weight of water

Word count: 6k

Summary: “Again,” he says, the smallest tremor in his voice, and Oikawa blinks at him a moment before smiling, soft and sweet. “Iwa-chan,” he replies, and Iwaizumi closes his eyes. “Again.” “Iwa-chan.”

Canon Compliant

Are You Listening?

Word count: 4k

Summary: 30 times oikawa said i love you and 1 time he didn't have to

Quote: “Iwa-chan, watch out for the log—!” Oikawa looked on in horror as his best friend tripped and fell flat on his face.

Edge of the balcony

Word count: 8k

Summary: Iwaizumi looks older, he realizes. Oikawa knew he had aged as well, and so did everyone around him, but the thing was when you see people often, you don't notice the subtle changes in appearance. And Oikawa hadn't seen Iwaizumi in four years.

How can this loser ever win

Word count: 2k

Summary: everyone is in stupid love with Iwaizumi Hajime and he has no idea

♡♡♡Lost in Translation

Word count: 9k

Summary: Because misfortune come in threes, Iwaizumi Hajime starts his Thursday having a screaming fight with Shittykawa, spends his lunch break listening to the UCI women's volleyball team gossiping about how Ushijima Wakatoshi had gone public about his longtime love affair with Oikawa Tooru, and closes out the day by drunkenly dropping his phone into a sewer grate.

maybe we could be enough

Word count: 9k

Summary: iwaizumi hums in reply as the car goes silent, frank ocean crooning from the speakers. they stop at a red light when iwaizumi feels eyes at the side of his face, and turns to look at oikawa.

Most people never even get a single high school rival

Word count: 5k

Summary: Team Argentina gets to know Iwaizumi Hajime (27) Athletic Trainer.

Primavera

Word count: 8k

Summary: They say it takes twenty-six years, for certain breeds to fully bloom.

Quote: Did you know that distance is only me, growing towards you?

♡♡♡rest on your laurels

Word count: 4k

Summary: In Iwaizumi’s heart of hearts, untouched by time, they are young and alive, burning with the hearth of home and bright as winter light. Unbreakable. Invincible.

♡♡♡Something Borrowed

Word count: 16k

Summary: In which Oikawa and Iwaizumi have always been a foregone conclusion to everyone else, but a massive, unanswered question to one another.

‘Til Infinity

Word count: 2k

Summary: “Hey,” he says, “that cloud looks kind of like a dick.”

Quote: “I got you ladybug”

♡♡♡ You Set Off a Dream In Me

Word count: 15k

Summary: In which Oikawa is 41 and ready to retire. He's at the top of his game and ready to find a new challenge. Turns out his new challenge is pretty familiar. It's high school, round 2.

Quote: A past with an Iwaizumi that wasn’t on the opposite side of the net, monsters on all sides, guiding a setter that had lived the dream left behind in the ruins of Tooru’s past self.

Canon Divergent

a world alone

Word count: 60k

Summary: Iwaizumi has his medical books on the musculoskeletal system. Oikawa has his research papers on parallel universes. It isn't until much, much later that they realize they have each other.

♡Almost a Stranger

Word count: 16k

Summary: Iwa-chan's leaving Kapan. Tooru's not sure he can forgive him, but he's not going to admit his long-held feelings, either. A trip to Miyajima complicates everything.

Quote: There are only two things that have ever broken Oikawa Tooru’s heart. Iwa-chan would say Tooru has no heart to break, but that’s simply untrue.

Count your blessings, it goes 1,2,3, me

Word count: 7k

Summary: He's unsettled by the undefined boundaries of their relationship so it's all his luck that he accidentally wins three wishes to be granted just for him, and all that comes to mind is Iwaizumi.

Quote: Now, as an adult, past convenience of circumstance and the haze of hormonal lust, exactly none of his feelings have worn off

♡♡♡the courtship ritual of the hercules beetle

Word count: 66k

Summary: Tooru is pretty sure he could manage the mating habits of a mosquito. It’s the mating habits of people he can’t seem to get right.

♡days fall away

Word count:17k

Summary: Except now he’s back home, so close to his old haunts and to Oikawa himself, and it's—weird.

Quote: “You and Tooru,” he begins, and then shrugs. “I was just thinking, you look at each other a lot.” And he walks away, leaving Hajime winded, and sort of aching, somewhere deep in his chest. Whatever that means.

♡here comes your man

Word count: 8k

Summary: Iwa-chan, it reads, Have a good day today! Good luck! <3 <3 <3 Suga chokes. It’s hard to imagine anyone calling the scowling and fierce Doctor Iwaizumi “Iwa-chan.” But marriage probably comes with all sorts of liberties. Doctor AU

♡♡In damp earth my body

Word count: 15k

Summary: Onscreen, the nation’s favorite setter has arranged himself so that he’s bowing, forehead pressed to the court, like he’s thanking everyone for their kindness thus far, like he’s asking for forgiveness. Hajime thinks: shit, it’s really happening

In the Business of Love

Word count: 22k

Summary: Meet Oikawa Tooru: He's a best-selling shoujo manga artist, a hardcore romantic and you won't believe where he's getting his lovey dovey fodder from...Enter Iwaizumi Hajime: He's Oikawa's best friend, a realist who also happens to be a wedding magazine writer despite not believing in romance...

Quote: A flare of pride lit in Oikawa as he watched Iwaizumi's eyes crinkle with mirth and in that yawning second, it bloomed into a warmth that bordered on a burn, forcing a bittersweet inhale.

it's been so long (nobody knows me the way you do)

Word count: 8k

Summary: Tooru hums, only half-listening. Somewhere along the way, Hajime’s palm has settled itself over the curve of Tooru’s cheek, thumb tracing over the line of his jaw.

Quote: Iwaizumi blushes even more. “That you’re here, I mean. I’m happy that you’re here. With me.”

♡♡♡Mint

Word count: 19k

Summary: It's the December after Iwaizumi’s last year in university when Tokyo welcomes him with a new ad campaign for Bright Days toothpaste, and Oikawa Tooru—fresh off a run at the 2016 Summer Olympics—has decided to grace the city with his signature grin, a flip of his wayfarer sunglasses, and the most irrepressible tag line for the signboard above.

Quote: "To be able to tell him, in the new year." This comes under Oikawa's breath, so low that Matsukawa and Hanamaki can't hear, and the game continues.

Six-Month Lover

Word count: 89k

Summary: Iwaizumi barks out a laugh. “I’m still trying to get over the fact that you made a PowerPoint presentation about why we should date.” Oikawa doesn’t tell him the file has existed for the last twelve years, constantly receives updates, and that the original copy contained almost a hundred slides before he forced himself to get a grip.

Special Relativity

Word count: 22k

Summary: Time moves differently for people in different inertial reference frames. Oikawa goes on a two-year exploratory mission in space. Iwaizumi's been waiting for a lot longer than that.

♡♡sunset towns

Word count: 33k

Summary: In the summer of 2020, Oikawa Tooru returns home from his first successful stint as captain of Japan’s national volleyball team. In one hand, he holds the undisputed weight of an Olympic medal, and in the other, his unresolved feelings for a childhood best friend.

♡♡Thirty Years and Change (the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad)

Word count: 19k

Summary: It’s July 10th, 2024, and Oikawa Tooru is an Olympian. His smiling face airs on an NHK promo every 45 seconds. He’s captain of the national men’s volleyball team, reigning star of the professional leagues, and he hasn't spoken to Iwaizumi Hajime in two years.

Quote: Oikawa’s grin in the last set of the morning’s game. Oikawa’s grin as they sat on their asses on a golf course. Oikawa’s grin when they were in college. When they were in high school. When they were twenty-two, seventeen, fifteen, twelve, six.

High School

Bet On It

Word count: 13k

Summary: Hajime knows exactly how shitty Oikawa's personality is, and has no scruples whatsover about betting Oikawa six thousand yen that he can't be nice for an entire week.

Quote: The whole instant-compliance thing was seriously creeping him out. Oikawa from a week ago would have made a crack about how if he'd wanted something cold, he could have just put his face on Hajime's shoulder.

Betweens

Word count: 2k

Summary: Iwaizumi is asleep in the club room. Oikawa is blindingly awake in the club room. The sun moves slowly across the sky, and Iwaizumi’s skin is gold underneath it. Oikawa watches the changing shadows on Iwaizumi’s face and thinks about nothing in particular.

Don’t think too much

Word count: 6k

Summary: In which Oikawa and Iwaizumi have a confusing, drunken encounter and then deal with the (sticky) consequences.

Quote: As soon as that thought crossed his mind, though, Oikawa did what he always did: exactly the opposite of what Hajime wanted

Gates

Word count: 12k

Summary: The day after their graduation ceremony, they drive to the beach at Shirahama. Iwaizumi drives, because it’s his car, and as he has told Oikawa on multiple occasions, he’d rather die than let him touch the wheel.

Quote: ‘Yeah,’ he says, because they’re on a beach, and they’re supposed to be on a metaphorical journey, and they’re supposed to be growing up, and completing rites of passage, so it’s honesty, today - just for today, at least.

♡♡i sing the body electric

Word count: 8k

Summary: It was never part of the plan, falling in love with his best friend, but then again, most things in Iwaizumi’s life that involve Oikawa rarely unfold the way he thinks they will.

Quote: But Iwaizumi thinks about Oikawa laughing with that girl in the low light of the gym, a particular kind of quiet intimacy that Iwaizumi’s only ever read about in books hovering in the air, and all it makes him feel is small and petty and spiteful.

it’s better than words

Word count: 3k

Summary: [ or : oikawa makes iwaizumi participate in three bonding activities for new friends, and iwaizumi just wants to know why oikawa's being so weird about this]

Make sure you cross the line

Word count: 4k

Summary: With graduation just around the corner, Iwaizumi knows he has to gather the courage to really ask Oikawa out.

Quote: He’s been asking Iwaizumi to go out with him every single day this past week, increasingly panicked about getting his time and attention now that they’re nearing the end of this season of their lives.

Only the jellyfish know

Word count: 6k

Summary: Their third and final year at Aoba Jousai has come to an end, and the guys decide to go to the beach the day after graduation. That day, the ocean water is salty, the watermelon is sweet, and the people are sweeter.

static

Word count: 6k

Summary: Being snowed in with all of Seijou volleyball in his childhood home brings back a lot of memories for Iwaizumi, because it's kinda Oikawa's childhood home too.

Quote: It's fate that brought them together and choice that keeps them that way. The closest description in Hajime’s vocabulary is partners, but only because Oikawa taught him what its true definition is.

Told before and told again

Word count: 3k

Summary: This is how Hajime and Tooru fall in love, through the accounts of those around them.

Quote: When Oikawa lets out a long, heavy breath, Iwaizumi looks up at him and frowns, and flings a towel over Oikawa’s head to cover his face. Then, he tugs, once, on Oikawa’s fingers, and leads him down the hallway, Oikawa walking quietly in tow.

♡we can do better than that

Word count: 16k

Summary: Oikawa and Iwaizumi go on a road trip during the summer after their high school graduation. It doesn't go as expected, but maybe that's not such a bad thing after all.

Quote: Because Iwaizumi’s known Oikawa nearly all his life and never felt anything more than vague affection usually followed by intense irritation for him. But then suddenly at eighteen years old and nearly two weeks into a very badly planned road trip, it’s like someone flipped a switch somewhere inside Iwaizumi

♡when it starts to rain, they go inside

Word count: 33k

Summary: “Where?” starts Iwaizumi.“ My parent’s old lakehouse, silly, didn’t you hear me the first time?” OR: Oikawa takes Iwaizumi to his lakehouse for two weeks, post-graduation.

reassemble it

Word count: 15k

Summary: When Tooru was six years old, he discovered—unbeknownst to him at the time—two of the most important things in his life: volleyball and Iwaizumi Hajime. It was ironic that he had stumbled upon them hand in hand—quite literally, too.

♡things that change, things that stay the same

Word count: 8k

Summary: Oikawa realizes he's in love with his best friend; it sucks for a while. (But only a while.)

Quote: Iwaizumi’s expression right now is less terrified than it used to get back then, but he’s tight-lipped with concern, and his broad body blocks out other passengers as if their stares might be a danger to Tooru too.

University AU

An Archaeology of Affection

Word count: 23k

Summary: For Hajime, it is a riddle and simultaneously so evident. It fills his chest, surging like water, paints heat up his neck. In retrospect, it eats up his days, makes them its own until it feels like his heart has always been in his throat at the smile thrown over Oikawa’s shoulder, the stilling of his fingers on Hajime’s sleeve.

closure

Word count: 22k

Summary: In his first year of university, Oikawa builds a new friendship and upgrades an old one. Or: Ushijima is not a great wingman, but he tries his best.

Quote: “On the first day of his university career, Oikawa Tooru walks into his dorm, spots his assigned roommate, and turns one hundred and eighty degrees and walks right back out. He dials a familiar phone number - the first one he ever memorized - and starts complaining before Iwaizumi even gets the chance to say hello. “Iwa-chan,” he says, “tell me why Ushiwaka is in my dorm room.”

♡♡♡galaxies, within you

Word count: 21k

Summary: Hajime and Tooru move in together at the start of university. Too bad they’re stuck with the two gremlins that haunt their apartment.

Quote: I AM A HEADASS

Hands to yourself

Word count: 11k

Summary: He missed his parents, and he missed Takeru, and Takeru's badly behaved puppy. He missed Aoba Jousai, and he missed the volleyball team. He even missed Karasuno and Shiratorizawa, just a little.

Home, and how we made ours

Word count: 3k

Summary: “No, I like it here.” There’s a rustling as Iwaizumi shifts, inching closer. “I like it here, as in this crappy apartment—with you.”

Quote: “Do your fights end up being like—you know, about actual things and then extending into toddler days and suddenly you’re accusing Iwaizumi of kissing the girl you used to like in preschool?”

in progress to you

Word count: 6k

Summary: The eventuality of Oikawa and Iwaizumi falling toward each other is dramatically lackluster. Still, it's a process to go through.

Quote: “But what if you didn’t eat my pudding all the time?” Iwaizumi asks flatly, ignoring the way Oikawa is slapping his thigh to get out of his chokehold. “Do you think I buy them for you, huh? I buy them for me, you turd.”

Like we’re made of starlight

Word count: 6k

Summary: (a look into iwaizumi hajime’s journey of falling in love with oikawa tooru, from when they’re babies meeting for the first time to young adults moving in together.)

Ninety nine percent

Word count: 14k

Summary: more than anything, oikawa tooru wants to be with iwaizumi hajime, but he's only ninety nine percent of the way there.

Quote: Their ace was lining up for the ball, knees bent and arm pulled back, just as Tooru tosses the ball……to Hajime.

no sleep in the city

Word count: 7k

Summary: Along their journey to find Tokyo's best ramen, Iwaizumi finds himself asked again and again why Oikawa is still single.

Quote: “I was only telling Hanamaki literally yesterday that your personality isn’t as vile as before,” Iwaizumi informs, slightly stiff from the way Oikawa’s got an arm looped through his own. “Why do you make me such a liar to people I care about?”

Out of nowhere

Word count: 8k

Summary: They move in together after graduation and it's doing weird things to Iwaizumi's heart. He's a little in denial about it.

Quote: Oikawa excitedly ran up to him when Iwaizumi came home with groceries the other day. Not about the food but just to say how boring everything is when Iwaizumi's not there, eyes shining, and he couldn't meet his gaze after from blushing down to his neck. He doesn't know how much more he can take.

♡♡shiver

Word count: 16k

Summary: Oikawa was always the brave one. Hajime just followed two paces behind.

Quote: “I’m in love with you,” Oikawa tells him three days after they graduate junior high, head in his lap and hands gently folded over his chest and completely and totally unconcerned that he’d just shattered Hajime’s world.

Terpischore

Word count: 38k

Summary: They’d ended up going to different universities, Tooru and he. The distance was good for them. The confession Hajime dropped in both their laps wasn’t. That’s how it’d ended – a lifetime of friendship crumbled to dust in the space of five minutes. (Or, a lesson in learning to move on from things you can't have, in finding old loves in new ways and in understanding that life is never truly simple... till it is.)

terrarium

Word count: 11k

Summary: At this point, is he really happy with just staying best friends forever? Will he be writing journals and collecting rocks forever (he will, he knows, but that is aside from the point)?

these foolish things (remind me of you)

Word count: 3k

Summary: Oikawa helps Iwaizumi move into his new college dorm.

Quote: He’s desperate for something to happen. It must show on his face because Iwaizumi blushes and looks away. The thing is, Oikawa always looks at him like this when Iwaizumi isn’t paying attention.

They say it rains diamonds on Jupiter

Word count: 35k

Summary: "You're in love with him. "Hajime considers denying it. "Yeah," he says instead.

Quote: “Share the weight of your feelings with me, Hajime wants to beg when he hears Tooru's first hitched breath. Let me carry some of your burdens”

to be first, to be best

Word count: 26k

Summary: Hajime is apparently something of a masochist, and as he stares down at the tie-dyed AREA51 T-shirt in his hands, he thinks “I’m totally in love with this asshole, aren't I?”

Undecipherable

Word count: 4k

Summary: "Koi no yokan," he says. "The sense one can have upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall in love."

Quote: Because for all the bravado, for all the flaunting Oikawa does, he wants Hajime by his side, and no one else.

♡we shine like diamonds

Word count: 26k

Summary: "You know Abe-kun from class?" they snicker, hands cupped around their mouths like they're passing along a filthy secret. "I hear his older brother is... gay."

Where you are (I’ll be)

Word count: 6k

Summary: Theirs is a love that starts out like a seed and it takes two sets of hands tending it for a shoot to appear. There are no dramatic declarations of love, only a pair of hands that find each other again and again and again.

Quote: Oikawa broke off into giggles as Hajime slowed the descent of his hand from a slap to the back of Oikawa’s head to a gentle ruffle of the taller boy’s hair

♡♡with every second that you could give

Word count: 9k

Summary: The journey of Iwaizumi and Oikawa going for gold.

Quote: He knows they’re too close. Iwaizumi knows it too, and they both decided to move in together anyway.

Your love is sunlight

Word count: 6k

Summary: It's Iwaizumi's birthday, and they have a talk about the future.

Quote: But Hajime doesn’t think any present could top this: them, kissing in a sun-dappled bathroom, Oikawa’s skin warm under his hands, and the promise of a life together stretched out before them.

#haikyuuweek2020 #iwaoi #oikawa tooru #iwaizumi hajime #i spent more time on this than all of my edits combined pls appreciate this

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hearthandhomemagick · 3 years

Text

Food For Thought - Steven Universe

Hello there, I would like to tell you my story and journey with the amazingly beautiful, and wonderfully written TV Show...

Steven Universe.

I started watching this show when it first came out in High School. I mean, I was so excited to watch it that I anticipated the very first episode and sat down with snacks to observe it’s premier. I had become immediately enthralled not only with the art style, but also with the genuine wholesomeness and elucidations of processing emotions and life experiences. I was astounded that a kids show could express to me how to manage my emotions as well as connect with my moral standings. It’s a show I recommended to everyone, but often didn’t talk about because of it being a kids show, and me being almost being grown. It was my secret love until someone else brought it up.

This show stuck with me through the years, and helped me through some of my hardest moments in life.

I remember watching the episode, “Mindful Education” and melting into Garnet’s lesson of mindfulness and self-awareness. I had been going through a lot at the end of 2016, graduating and going through a rough election along with having to move states for college. My opinions were forming in the extreme area and I had a fire to protect my thoughts and opinions with no restrain or any form of control of my emotional reality. I was rambunctious as much as I was head-strong and, at times, hard-headed all together.

When this episode aired, I didn’t know why I loved Garnet and Stevonnie’s song, “Here Comes a Thought.” But I did, and it still carries with me into my life today.

I want to discuss a specific time, though, that this episode saved my sanity and opened my eyes to a concept I didn’t understand when I first watched it. I was on social media, and was defending my opinions against quite a few people by myself. Eventually, I was getting nasty comments from a bunch of millennials telling me,

“You’re too fucking stupid to understand, maybe you should go back to school, child.”

“You’re so emotional, and your emotions don’t matter here. Imagine being this dumb.”

“Imagine being a dumb bitch like Carly and saying you wanted to cut your penis off to look like a woman.” *NOTE I am not transgender, there is nothing wrong with being transgender and her insinuating such did not bother me. Her rhetoric insinuating trans was wrong is what irked me, this bitch was transphobic and had issues that she needs to repair in her own time. She wrote an entire post based around this context on her personal page using my real name, and she didn’t even know who I was.*

and my personal favorite, “Here’s the suicide hotline, I know your generation is prone to killing themselves and are overly emotional.”

Now, there were over 50, under 100, messages going back and forth where these people were just bullying me and I refused to back down. I wound up in a panic attack in my bedroom, literally wanting to kill myself because they were bullying me. The hotline would have come in handy if it were the actual hotline. I ended up going to my dad and older sister (my older sisters friend was the main one I was arguing with and her posy showed up on my post), because no one on the post was on my side.

Both told me, “If you can’t handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” My sister told her friend to stop, and threatened the other girl for her nasty posts and comments. My dad tried to mediate on the post itself, but the people wouldn’t stop. I eventually had to take it down.

My family didn’t calm me down in this moment. Not even a little bit. It felt like a back-handed helping hand. Like they wanted to protect me, but also somewhat agreed with the people on the post.

The only thing that calmed my nerves in this moment, ultimately, was the song, “Here Comes a Thought.”

I sat in my room, sobbing, hoping to myself that it would make sense as to why it was okay for these things to happen. The song soothed over my nerves, eventually releasing my muscles and giving me a sense ease. I was able to process and realized a few personal things as well. I didn’t realize it, but before long, I was meditating to the song on repeat. I kept telling myself, “I’m okay, this is a thought. A moment. I am not my thoughts. I am not this moment.”

This was simply one of the ways Steven Universe has helped me process and understand myself more. I bring this up because I came across and article today that disappointed me to the core.

The Steven Universe Fandom has toxic tendencies.

I was shook.

How could a child’s show be turned into something so negative? Something that was meant to promote self-awareness, self-love, acceptance of character, and understanding of others had been morphed into a gatekeepers safe haven.

Now I know this isn’t the majority, and before you get offended, hurt or start defending yourself, I want you to ask yourself if what you are defending is an action you would defend from anyone else. If it is, by all means defend your ground.

But the one concept that eludes me, and offers zero substance in terms of valid arguments, is that men can not watch this show. Let me explain why men NEED to watch this fucking show.

My boyfriend watched this entire show, episode for episode, and benefitted from it. This show offered him coping techniques, an understanding of why love should come before war, and mediating every situation so you see and understand every perspective. These are things children shows didn’t offer him growing up, he has often and openly verbalized his need for this show in his childhood because of certain traumas, and we often continue watching it even after seeing every single episode and movie.

This show was never meant for one or two groups of people, and if you feel that way then refer back to the writers themselves who were literally trying to teach the lesson in the show over and over again to NEVER EXCLUDE PEOPLE FROM YOUR GROUP. You exclude people, and you create a division, a war of sorts. You immediately have become the thing Steven Universe advocated against in the first place.

This also leads into the whole “art” situation in the fandom.

This show is anti-bully. There are commercials for it and everything. It is expressed in multiple episodes why bullying is never a good thing in any situation.

You simply cannot justify the hypocrisy in bullying someone out of self-expression that literally harms no one. You can’t justify it.

Think about it. You draw or sketch a piece of art that took you hours, or even a few minutes. It’s your favorite character, and maybe you yourself are going through some mental thoughts regarding your weight that lead you to draw the character thinner or bigger. Size shouldn’t matter in any capacity when relating a character to ones self.

If you’re skinny, you’re beautiful. If you are thick or curvy, you are beautiful. If you are obese or overweight, you are beautiful. Weight doesn’t matter, but representation of body types in different characters does matter.

Imagine a child falls in love with a bigger character, but is experiencing body challenges where she is being picked on for being too thin or scrawny (it happens, I’ve seen it with my nieces). Who are you to say that making her favorite character look like her own body is wrong? Especially if art is a coping mechanism they use for mental health reasons.

Like Malachite, a fusion that was devastating and abusive in every way, you are taking the choice and voice of an entire being to make your actions and opinions “right” or “okay”.

There is so much more I could say on this show, and so much more I could say about the fandom. And I know it is not the majority of the fandom, but I did want to make everyone in the fandom aware that we are human.

None of us are stoic and balanced like Garnet, and even Garnet had problems in her relationship. None of us are strong and laid back like Amethyst, and even she had self-love issues. None of us are as analytical and organized as Pearl, and yet she had problems throughout the series.

None of you are perfect, and to act as if you are is defeating the purpose of a show trying to teach you how to be responsible for yourself and your actions. I’m not perfect either, and preaching about a fandom I’m not a huge part of sounds counter-intuitive, I’m aware.

But my nieces want to watch this show. My nephew watches this show with me. My boyfriend’s niece is going to start watching the show.

Please do not make a toxic environment for kids who need this show to grow up. Kids who experience trauma, and learn from this show deserve a safe space without people trying to justify bullying or force them to think that because they are a boy or girl, they can or can’t watch the show. Without people making people feel bad for being themselves.

Why don’t we create a new space? A space where everyone is accepted as they are, and negative behavior is addressed the same way the gems or Steven would address them. With education, perception awareness, and PATIENCE.

I know some will say, “It’s not my job to raise your child.” and “It’s not my responsibility to make people aware of their tendencies.”

You’re right. It’s also not your responsibility to bully people into changing themselves to fit your dialogue. Simply put, you’re responsible for yourself alone. But you have no right to complain on someone's behavior, art or experiences if you are not willing to be patient with correcting said behavior in yourself first.

Who knows, maybe I’m in the wrong here for not knowing the full story. All I’m saying is, if you see someone being a bully, being mean or even being a hypocrite, call them out in the sweetest way possible. Let them know we are facilitating a safe space for people who need a community rather than a closed off club.

Be the change you want to see in this world.

Learn, grow and prosper.

I wish you all well and genuinely hope we can all expand our perspectives to fully understand each other in healthier and more communicative based ways. We deserve that sort of kindness from each other.

#steven #stevenuniverse #amethyst #pearl #garnet #malachite #cartoonshow #art #love #patience #understanding #herecomesathought #foodforthought

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Creative Real Estate Financing Post Covid - Mortgage Notes and Real Estate

Why Creative Financing so Important in Today’s World

What is Creative Financing Black Swan Events Why Creative Financing has Always Come to the Rescue

Landlords are burning out. Tenants are behind on rent payments. Toilets are backing up.

Is there an alternative?

Uncover Why Savvy Investors Use Proven Mortgage Note Strategies for Massive Monthly Profits In Today’s Ever-Changing Market… Risk-Free!

Discover more about Note School and profiting without Tenants, Toilets and by taking our FREE one day class:

https://new.noteschool.com/TV

Latest Class Information:

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Download a Brand-New eBook by Eddie Speed It’s A Whole New Ball Game With Creative Financing

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Brian Lauchner (00:00): All right. Welcome back everybody to NoteSchool TV. My name is Brian Lauchner. I'm on the teaching team here at NoteSchool, and today we have a very special episode, just like we do every single Wednesday when we go live at 11:00 AM central time. So make sure if you're wanting to get the latest and greatest content that's coming out, be sure to like, and subscribe this channel as well as turn on the notifications by hitting that bell notification. And it will tell you on your device, Hey, we're going live. And then you can jump in with your comments and we'd love to interact with you here while we're live on the show. So today here at NoteSchool TV, we've got a lot of great content. If you're wanting to learn more about the Note Business or NoteSchool in general, you could go to www.NoteSchool.com/TV to learn more, or you could actually attend an upcoming industry event called Note Expo.

Brian Lauchner (01:05): And you can learn more about that at www.NoteExpo.com. So today on our live show, we have some incredible content about the Creative Financing Space and really why is it so important that investors really know this information? And we've got the latest and greatest of people to talk about this as well. We've got Joe Varnadore and we've got the one and only Eddie Speed as well. Tons of experience to kind of bring the content into our homes and learn a little bit more. So joining me right now are going to be, and we're going to dig into, Hey Eddie, Hey Joe, why is creative financing so important in today's marketplace?

Joe Varnadore (01:44): You know, Eddie and I were talking back in March early March, when this whole thing started, right? The whole pandemic and Eddie says, Joe, he says, you know, I don't think there's ever been a better time for a couple of, you know, older, gray hair guys, to talk about the way to, you know, build your business, double your net worth during a period of time then right now. And that's because of Creative Financing. Eddie, why don't you share with us, you know, some of your experience from the past, right.

Eddie Speed (02:22): Well, you know, I started in the business. I started in the business in a market that was a black Swan Market. I started in 1980. And what's interesting guys is that when I started in 1980, I was calling on realtors, that their clients had created Seller Financing or Home Builders. They were creating Seller Financing for their clients to sell a house, a new house to them, right. A new home builder. And the truth of matter is I was calling on them. I was a rookie in the business, young didn't anything, you know, just, here I was walking into their office and they're like, it was like a morgue, right? I mean, they were just, Oh my God, we don't know what to do. And it's scary and stuff. And in this business, because I came into it from a different kind of a knowledge base, a different perspective, it was a Bonanza for me.

Eddie Speed (03:23): And I thought that through the years they'd been doing it for decades and I've been doing it for months yet, I was killing it and they thought they were getting killed. Right. They're the ones that should have been telling me how to solve the problem, not me telling them how to solve the problem. Right. So sometimes because somebody has been doing something a long time, doesn't mean they're thinking in a progressive way. So Joe and I spent a lot of time about, yeah, this gray hair does mean something, but this gray hair doesn't mean anything. If we're not looking on the market horizon and saying, what would be the most relevant changes we could make to our business that would affect our net worth and our income the most.

Joe Varnadore (04:08): And, you know.

Brian Lauchner (04:09): being that, Oh, go ahead Joe.

Joe Varnadore (04:12): No, I'm just going to say, and that, and you know that, so Eddie is, you know, he is our fearless leader, right? He's a, but he is our visionary as well. And you know, one of the sayings that, we say it NoteSchool, and Eddie nailed it is, don't have a crystal ball, but I do have a rear view mirror. And all of these events, these Black Swan events really has prepared us, right. For what's going on today in the marketplace, you know, you don't know what you don't know. So yeah.

Brian Lauchner (04:46): And before we dive into some of these things, like these terms, Black Swan events, Eddie, why don't you start off start us off by really getting everybody on the same page, because we really need to understand what is Creative Financing before we dive into it. Because kind of like you said, you know, you're going into your spot speaking to these realtors and they're supposed to be the ones with the solutions, but the solutions for what? and what that's supposed to look like. So tell us a little bit about what is Creative Financing. And then we'll dive into a little bit about the opportunity.

Eddie Speed (05:17): Well, let's define Creative Financing is some kind of financial structure that's different than just to normal traditional bank financing, right? Or traditionally how people generally focus on doing something. Now I started out in the Note Buying Business, meaning that people would sell or finance a property. They would not only be the seller of the property, but they would be the bank and they would carry payments over time. Right. They would collect payments and then they'd wake up one day and decide they wanted to cash in early. Right? Now we've come up with Creative Financing structures even to buy their notes. Right. So, Creative Financing could be a Note Buying Strategy, right. Because there's more than just one way to buy note. Right. But we also want to make sure that people don't see us as just, we teach people how to buy notes because I've taught thousands of real estate investors, how to creatively structure buying a property and reselling a property, Creative Financing when they buy it Creative Financing when they sell it.

Eddie Speed (06:28): Right. So, that's kind of, that's , when we say Creative Financing is like, what does that apply to? Anything related to what NoteSchool does it could be buying a note. It could be buying a property and getting the seller to carry terms, maybe using a private lender for part of the terms, all these different ways. And then the other side is Creative Financing. When we sell it, I like seller financing property in this market, right. Now, people say, well, don't you ever believe in rentals? Well, I mean, you'd be crazy not to believe in rentals when you could buy a rental property, Brian, in 2013 and 14 at the discounted price you could buy that, right? Because you had a high potential of its lift in value. But if you've reached a market condition that says that you pretty much have peaked out the top of the market, we can argue that debate. But wait a minute right now, if I could sell it and get a giant down payment, I could put some money in my pocket, reduce my investment costs in the property. And then I could carry owner finance paper over time, a wrap note. And and so those are all things that would relate to Creative Financing. It's not just to buy, It's not just the sale, It's not just notes, and it's not just property. It's, this is why it's so valuable is because you learn to intertwine these ideas. I call them puzzle pieces. If you understand the concept of this puzzle piece, you can apply it to the story.

Joe Varnadore (08:09): And, you know, Eddie, we know that sellers will agree to terms that banks would never, ever, ever agree to. Right. We know that there are things like, the ability to be able to buy the note that we created, we're the borrower on, but being able to buy our own note at sometime in the future to discount and things like that. So we've got, you know, we teach 50 plus deal points that you can add into that. So it's that whole process of knowing and how to structure a deal, right?

Eddie Speed (08:43): Yeah. The concept is this, we're in a hype at the moment. We're in a hyper competitive real estate market, whatever happens next year. Okay. We can argue about shadow inventory and why there's going to be a lot of distress properties on the market. We can do all that, but at the moment, Brian, as you well know a real estate investor at the moment, he feels like he's having to essentially overpay. So he's buying a property at what he thinks is, man, this ain't much of a discount, but on the other hand, there's all these people wanting to buy the property from him. And so he can, it's hard to buy, easy to sell, but the problem is the hard to buy, how many people does he make a discounted price to a cash offer? And now all of a sudden they won't accept it now, what's he going to do with that deal? If they won't accept his price, what does he end up doing with that lead? It's in the garbage?

Joe Varnadore (09:46): That's right.

Eddie Speed (09:46): How do you dig that deal out of the garbage and go make an offer? That is a higher price, but it's how you pay them back.

Joe Varnadore (09:55): We lovingly refer to paying somebody in the future, structuring a seller finance deal, or buying with Creative Financing is buying with monopoly money. And everybody kind of looks at us like we have four heads, right? It's not really buying monopoly money. What we're doing is we're paying the seller, their equity over time. And the reason we can do that, you know, people, you know, you could buy it at a discount being a wholesale deal, or if we can pay them almost, you know, full price for it. And because we are structuring the deal and paying them over time, we can pay them more money. Therefore, if it falls out of the deal hopper, because we can't buy it for for a discount, then obviously it we can buy it with terms and give them closure to what they're asking for.

Eddie Speed (10:47): Yeah. It's another option. It's another option that lets us close a piece of business that we couldn't close. If a guy is training at NoteSchool and he's a high volume real estate investor, or maybe Brian he's as low volume guy, right? Maybe he only buys five deals a year, whether he does five or 500, the issue is, he may, he spends X amount of money on marketing and energy and effort. And he closes X amount of deals essentially to put it under contract and flip it to somebody else. Right. That's a, that's a wholesale deal. Right? Brian.

Brian Lauchner (11:23): Yeah. That's it. And the other piece of this too, is that it's not just people who have it doesn't matter what your marketing budget is, right? If you were talking to sellers, the thing that you almost always have in common is the fact that there's going to be competition as well. So there's also this variable of if the seller always wants retail or some high price and all the wholesalers are kind of in this lower price, how do I start to separate myself so that the seller just talks to me? So then I can kind of transition, you know, how do I, if everyone's at a a hundred thousand price point or in that range, how do I start to say, Hey, I'll give you 135,000 or 125,000 to where now I'm just in such a completely different ball game that they're willing to have the conversation.

Brian Lauchner (12:05): And then I get the opportunity since they've given me some time now to hear me out, and now I have the opportunity to say, look, I can give you that money over time. And here's even why some, you know, here's some reasons why would be in your best financial interest. So from an acquisition standpoint, now I'm monetizing more leads, right? Because that one was going to go in the trash can if I didn't get it, but I'm also separating myself from the competition. And especially in times like this, where the seller sentiment in the market, which is what the seller believes, right? Whether it's true or not, doesn't really matter. It's when they believe. And when they believe that their house is worth this much, you know, it's my house. I will only sell it for a million dollars, Brian, because that helps down there.

Brian Lauchner (12:48): So for a million dollars and it's like, you try to use logic, you tried to explain to them, but that house is 7,000 square feet and your house is 2000 square feet. They're not the same thing. Right. They're stuck on that. And so how do we start to get closer to the fact that, okay, if you have to have that price, I can give you that price, but here's how it's going to look. Right? And so, again, it just, it gives me more opportunity. And as we know, when we start to bring creative solutions to complicated problems, that's where we start to, to make a lot of money.

Eddie Speed (13:23): Brian, and just the audience make sure that you know this, you were right down in where the rubber meets the road, right? You did this every day for a living. This was your full-time gig. You made your mortgage payment, your car payment, you've sent your kids to school based on your success of buying these houses at a discount. Now you weren't the note NoteSchool a few years ago. Right. And you heard these other concepts, but you said, I don't know. It's, I'm not sure this really applies. And then all of a sudden, as it progressed, the market got tighter and tighter. What did you have to go do?

Brian Lauchner (13:58): Yeah, I needed some sort of new result, right? I can't keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result because the market shifted. Right. And when we look at you know, a lot of wholesalers and people who are talking to sellers, whether you're wholesale or not, maybe you're talking to sellers to acquire your own rental properties. The bottom line is the market has shifted. And chances are, especially since March of 2020, you've seen that maybe your marketing isn't performing, or maybe the sellers are demanding something different. And at the end of the day, nobody's telling you to stop making cash offers. That's not what Eddie's saying. Just to be very clear, definitely go make your cash offer. There's nothing wrong with that. That's going to help you get to your goal. But what do you do with those leads that you make your cash offer?

Brian Lauchner (14:40): And they say, Hmm, can't really do anything about it. Right? And so, you've got to be able to have another tool in the tool bag. And what Eddie's referring to is in 2016, when I met Eddie, he was like, you really need to add Creative Financing to your acquisitions. It will change your entire business in 2016. I didn't need a change. Like things were fine. I could go make a cash offer to a seller and they'd be like, okay. Yeah, it's probably worth that. You're right. You know what I mean? There wasn't any, there wasn't that hesitancy, there wasn't that resistance to get the deal done. But by 2018, at least in my market, things did start to shift and I did have to make a change and call up uncle Eddie and say, I need help. What am I doing wrong? And he lovingly of course said, look, it's what I told you two years ago, we just let's get to work. Right.

Brian Lauchner (15:30): So it's just about implementing it into what I was already doing. And because of that too, it was a very smooth and quick transition, which again, kind of bringing it back to why it's so important. You know it today, is look, the market has shifted. Everybody's aware of that. Well, I say everyone is aware of this. Some people think that it's just going to keep going like this for the next couple of years. Right. But the reality is if you're in a spot where maybe I need a little something different, I need a little something new. I need to start monetizing some of these leads that I used to, but I don't anymore. This creative financing element and the words of Eddie speed in 2016, if you'll add creative financing to your acquisitions model, it can start to get you a lot of leads and a lot of deals, which ultimately lead to money in your pocket, even in a market like this after what Eddie calls a Black Swan event.

Joe Varnadore (16:22): And, you know, we see that over and over people that were, you know, they were listening like you were in 2016, but they weren't forced to take that next step. Right. They weren't forced to say, okay, something isn't working. So now I've got a look at what else I can do to keep my business growing. And that's what it was. Eddie. Why don't you talk just a minute about, you know, for the folks that are wholesales about the three reasons that a wholesale deal or that cash offer deal just doesn't or can't work well all the time.

Joe Varnadore (17:08): All right. We can't so Eddie, let me jump in there. You've got a little sound problem there. So maybe we can get that worked out.

Eddie Speed (17:17): I don't know. How about a little.

Joe Varnadore (17:21): There you go. perfect!

Eddie Speed (17:21): A little munchkin jumped up there on my computer, Joe, and muted me. One of those gremlins,

Joe Varnadore (17:28): We know about those gremlins. Every time we would go do a live event, we would have everything set up perfectly, And.

Brian Lauchner (17:33): That's the beauty of live TV.

Joe Varnadore (17:37): Amen.

Eddie Speed (17:39): A real estate investor. The other thing that they can do is you, if you're not a giant operator, right? You're just a small guy doing the business. What you have to remember is there so many people doing the business today in the trashcan is getting full, fuller and fuller of people that just won't accept the discounted price, make a go, make a deal with them. And we can show you how to do this, by the way, very clearly go make a deal with them to go dig through their trashcan leads and go work the leads that they, that the cash price ended up in the trash. And there's, you know, there's some filtering to that, you can't go work every lead, but here's some simple filtering processes that could be put together. And then all of a sudden, Joe, I might go work part of my business or maybe all of my business and just going and working my competition's leads and letting them make something if I'm able to close it.

Joe Varnadore (18:40): That's. Right. Yeah.

Eddie Speed (18:43): That's an example of you know, we call it getting the juice out of the lemon, right guys.

Brian Lauchner (18:50): Yeah. But there's three main reasons that they even had that bucket of leads to begin with. Right? And every wholesaler, every rehab or anybody who's ever talked to a seller ever understands that the reason you're not getting the deal is number one, it's too far. You're too far apart on price. Right? You're here, and they just won't accept that price because they're way up here. And you're way down here, they just won't accept the price. So the second reason is just they can't accept it, right? They owe $87,000 on the mortgage and you're offering them 65,000. They'd have to write a huge check to do that and that's not an option. Another, the third reason is just you don't have the right buyer. Right? And that could be because you don't have a buyers list yet. And that could be because it's a really obscure property out in the middle of nowhere, or it's just a really weird house that nobody really wants, you know, to kind of mess with.

Brian Lauchner (19:40): There are those. But when you look at those, you could either talk to another investor and work a deal with them. Or if you're already in a situation where you're talking to sellers, kind of, like I said, before, you now have a secondary option, Hey, we can't make it work because you can't accept the price or you won't accept the price. What if we go about doing this a little bit differently? And and we buy it on terms, which is you taking the same equity, but you taking it over time, right? You want this much money. I'll give you this much money in chunks over time. And if that's a solution for you, because it's going to allow you to accomplish whatever that goal is. Well, now we can start heading down the path of how do we make that happen? What do those terms need to look like for this to be kind of a win-win solution.

Joe Varnadore (20:22): And you know, it's not only what you say, it's how you say it. You know, Eddie calls it the talk off, right? It's knowing how to present this terms offer this creative finance offer. Eddie. You can talk about that for just a minute.

Eddie Speed (20:40): Yeah. I think that's one of the key things that I've learned in whether I'm coaching somebody, that's a Ninja real investor and did 300 deals last year, or I'm helping somebody that did three deals last year. There's an interview process that we try to teach, not we try to teach, we definitely teach. There's an interview process of asking them the right questions. So let me give you one simple example to kind of wrap it up as we do this today. So Brian, let's pretend that you have a property and that you have, you've demanded a price that my cash offer won't meet. And so I've said, Brian, I can pay you your price if you take your equity over time. Right? And Brian goes, okay, that might work. And we can work around that. And then the second thing is, you're saying, well, because essentially what I'm saying to you is you're going to sell or finance it to me. Right. Brian, I'm not exactly saying it that way, but that's what the end result is going to equal.

Brian Lauchner (21:48): Right. And the interest to me is that I'm okay with taking my payments over time. I'm not okay with taking a discount or maybe it's paying real estate fees or something like that. That's why this would be a potential solution to continue talking about it from the seller's perspective.

Eddie Speed (22:02): So real estate investors regularly set this up. They regularly say that, but here's a mistake. I believe they make, they say, well, Brian, if I were talking to you, Brian, I would say, well, Brian, how much down payment do you want? You see, I'm inviting a conversation that is not going to be good for me. Right? Instead, Brian, here's what I must say. What are your immediate cash needs? Right. So now all of a sudden, if you say, well, I need 20% of the price of the property as my immediate cash need. Then I'm just going to go get a private money first and get you to carry a second lien for the 80%. There's the hundred 20 private money, 80% second. So wait a minute, I bought the property for nothing down, but it's because I ask it in the right manner.

Brian Lauchner (23:03): And the thing about this, what Eddie calls the talk off is there is such a logical rational way to have this conversation. And I think one of the reasons people fail with pitching terms or pitching Creative Financing solutions is they use a slick salesy type of approach. Like they're trying to just kind of work around the, you know, work around the problem to kind of get them to agree to these little weird things when it's like, you can just be direct and it's a more logical approach. And Eddie has just nailed this. And it's something I think NoteSchool teaches really well, is that when you come in from a standpoint of look, let me show you the most logical rational way to do this. And then on top of that, Mr. Seller, I'm going to explain why this is in your best interest. Look, what the money is going to turn into. If I'm, especially if I'm paying interest, like that's the most common way. And if not look how you can get the money that you're wanting, right. To be able to meet your immediate needs.

Joe Varnadore (23:55): So we have a question there, So, does it guys, can we do this? We can do this on a hundred thousand dollar house, or we can do it on a $800,000 house, right?

Eddie Speed (24:09): Yeah. You can do it on luxury properties. You know, I would say that you're going to need a really tighten up some things to go do it on luxury properties, but financing for luxury properties has been very drastically affected by this mortgage credit availability. So it can work. This is probably a deeper conversation of things to tighten up. But, yes, I think it can work even on luxury properties.

Brian Lauchner (24:42): And I think when you, if you looked at a hundred different assets that were seller finance or a thousand, you would see they're all over the price point, right? There's a common misconception that seller financing, Creative Financing is for these cheap crappy houses that you can't sell anyway, so you might as well play the role of the bank so you can potentially get rid of it. Right? Whereas so many small businesses are sold with Creative Financing, so many apartments, so many, you know, whatever, small commercial tthey are sold with seller financing and any price point it applies to. And I think that if you were to go and look at a lot of these I have a great story of a motel that I teach in a one day class that, you know, motels are not commonly known for getting bank financing the old fashioned way, right?

Brian Lauchner (25:30): It's going to have a little bit more creativity to it, because that motel owner was exercising their full legal right to write off all the things they need to write off. So they pay less taxes, but a bank looks at the valuation of that and they say, wait a minute, you want to sell this for a million bucks, your books, don't say it's worth a million dollars, but me as an investor can be like, don't worry. I see the valuation and I can play the same game. So I'm interested. I just need you to sell me the property with seller financing. So every price point would definitely work. It's just a matter of the nuances of that specific deal.

Joe Varnadore (26:03): That's correct.

Eddie Speed (26:05): That's it.

Joe Varnadore (26:05): Yep. Absolutely.

Brian Lauchner (26:08): What about sellers who want cash to buy their next home? Would that that's kind of to Eddie's point, right? Is how much cash are they really needed in the immediate term? So the conversation will be something along the lines of, you need a new house, you're getting are you getting a mortgage? Okay, what kind of money are you meaning to put down in that property? And then starting to have that conversation, even if it's $50,000 to Eddie's point, I can borrow that 50,000. And if you have to have that 50,000, I can do that, but you're going to have to give up some other things in order to get that 50,000, if it's truly what's most important to you, I can make it happen. I just need these other things over here to be in my favor, to make those things work.

Eddie Speed (26:50): Remember this, the guy that was paying cash for the house, solved a problem one out of 20 times, 19 times, he did not solve the problem. They did not, the seller did not get their problem solved. Are we saying that we can solve all 19 problems? Of course not. Let me tell you what would be amazing. Brian, if I could solve one out of 19 problems, right? Just one in 19 where the seller was accepted in my terms, and I could structure the way that was really good for me. I just doubled my conversion rate. Now I close two out of 20 instead of one out of 20. So this is part of the filtering process, right? And by the way, I will tell you this, this interview process and going through the deal with the customer is under start understanding that when people say they need cash, you start investigating why they actually say they need cash. So some people say they need cash, they don't need cash. They just cash relates to the price to them. Right?

Joe Varnadore (27:56): That's right.

Eddie Speed (27:56): So kind of the customer that that's where we, that's a part of a filtering process that we develop. Excellent question. But the answer is no, I can't solve everybody's problem, but I can solve a lot.

Brian Lauchner (28:07): Yeah. And on those 19 examples, right? If you're getting one out of every 20, those 19 leads, you're chasing down, you already made a cash offer. You weren't going to get the deal anyway. So what, if you could add something to your acquisitions model, the way you buy houses in order to convert another deal and ultimately double the number of deals you're doing, which would basically be free money because you've already made your marketing money back on that first deal. So a lot of really, really great stuff today. Unfortunately, it's not a show we could talk for two days on. And so I want to just, I'm so glad we can at least talk about what Creative Financing is. These Black Swan events, these cyclical events that happen. They just happen over time because real estate has cycles. When the market shifts Creative Financing will always fill the gap in the marketplace where the conventional traditional money does it. Right.

Brian Lauchner (28:58): And that's really what we're seeing right now is there's a huge need for creative financing in the marketplace right now, in my opinion, if you are an active real estate investor, you can't afford to not know this stuff. And as you learn more about it, you're going to start to find out this actually is the more profitable way to do a lot of different types of strategies. And so, again, thanks for joining us today. On NoteSchool TV, it is a live every Wednesday at 11:00 AM central time. I'm so glad you came again. Make sure you're liking it, subscribing to this channel, turn on the notifications so that you know, when we're live so you can engage like some of these others did and bring your questions to the table. If you're wanting more information, definitely go to NoteSchool.TV, I'm sorry. www.NoteSchool.com/TV to get engaged with us there and be sure to attend the upcoming industry event. Note Expo, go to www.NoteExpo.com to register. It's going to be an absolute killer event. Thanks so much for joining us this week. And we will see you next week on NoteSchool TV.

#NoteSchool #EddieSpeed #RealEstate #MortgageNotes #notes

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fremedon · 3 years

Text

Brickclub Retrobricking: 1.7.3, “A Tempest in a Skull” and 1.7.4, “Forms That Suffering Takes in Sleep”

Between con planning and fic writing, I fell way off the brickclub wagon. Hoping to get back on it day-to-day with Waterloo, starting next week; meanwhile, this is the start of an extremely scattershot writeup of my margin notes from the last 70-odd pages, organized more thematically than anything else.

(All quotes from Donougher, except for a bunch of the chapter titles because the FMA ones are just engraved in my brain. Also, can I say how excited I am to look ahead and see just how many notes Donougher has for Waterloo? SO MANY NOTES. SO EXCITE. Also excited for CONVENT NOTES.)

Firstly—the entire sequence of the Tempest in a Skull, the trip to Arras, and the trial is just so *good*. Every time through I forget just how good, but it’s some of the most suspenseful writing I’ve ever read, even knowing what’s going to happen next—almost by heart at this point.

Ecce Homo: The chapter starts out by finally telling us, “The reader has no doubt guessed that Monsieur Madeleine is none other than Jean Valjean.” And then, having given him that name, it doesn’t use it for him again until he uses it himself, in the courtroom. For the next 50 pages, he’s just going to be called “the man.” (Or occasionally “the traveller,” which comes to the same thing.) And partly this is a nice piece of identity porn, withholding a name from the protagonist until he decides who he is going to be. But it’s also underscoring from the start the decision he’s going to make—to be *The* Man, Behold The Man, Voila Jean.

He’ll finally shed his name on his tombstone, in another parallel to Napoleon, whose monument has no name because of a protocol disagreement over whether to use his last name. Valjean tries to shed it here—to just be *a* man—and he can’t; he can still be Madeleine, but the moment he drops that specific alias, anonymity just makes him Voila Jean again.

It feels appropriate to that—as well as very believable as a character note—that he keeps making his preparations to go to Arras, to drop his life as Madeleine, automatically, in a sort of fugue state. When he does stop and think, we get the recurring insistence to himself that Champmathieu was probably guilty, that he probably deserved to go to the galleys for something. It’s awful, though believable.

—In the opening paragraphs, there are two Dante references which mostly don’t seem to be followed up on, but which do make me look twice at his remembering, in the courtroom, that his previous trial was 27 years ago. Valjean is 54; his first descent into hell came exactly in the middle of his life to that point, which does call back to Dante’s *media vita.*

—We also get an aside about how noble it would have been had Valjean not hesitated in walking “toward that yawning precipice at the bottom of which lay heaven.” Hugo really, really likes that inverted abyss image; it keeps coming up over and over.

And wow Hugo’s just stopped being subtle at all about the Christ thing. (Okay, the brief mention of his burning the credit notes for money owed to him by small shopkeepers—literally forgiving his debtors—is a little subtle.) But early on, we get the explicit comparison to “another condemned man 2000 years ago,” on the off chance that we hadn’t picked it up yet, and the chapter ends with a longer and quite lovely Gethsemane comparison that also picks up on that inverted abyss image:

“Thus did this poor soul struggle in its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this ill-fated man, the mysterious being in whom are concentrated all the saintliness and all the sufferings of humanity had also refused for a long time the terrible chalice, streaming with darkness and brimming with shadows, that appeared to him in the star-filled depths, while the olive trees shook in the fierce blast of the infinite.”

Petit-Gervais: The shade of Petit-Gervais is all over these chapters—reasonably so, since that is the second offense that has been on Valjean’s record all this time, and that would still send him to the galleys or the guillotine without even needing to consider, say, all the fraud he’s been doing as a matter of course to maintain his identity as Madeleine. (Including the passport he used TO VOTE IN THE ELECTIONS. Because Madeleine is that wealthy.)

And that made me stop and think about how weird it seems, honestly, that an itinerant child chimney sweep would have reported the theft—would have trusted authorities enough not just to think it was worth reporting, but to trust that he wouldn’t draw any hostility, or risk arrest for vagrancy or be accused of any local petty crimes.

And then I wondered whether he reported it because he knew you could trust the authorities in Digne to take it seriously, because the bishop would hear about it. And then I had a sad.

The Dream: The beginning of the dream in 1.7.4 recalls the Petit-Gervais incident, of course, with its empty dust-colored plain and lone rider. But I was also reminded of it by the brief waking dream in 1.7.3: “He felt as if he had just woken from some sort of dream and had found himself sliding down a slope in the middle of the night, standing, shivering, backing away in vain, on the very brink of an abyss. He distinctly perceived in the gloom a man he did not know, a stranger that destiny mistook for him and was pushing into the chasm in his place.” It feels like the missing piece that ties all those abysses and inverted abysses into the P-G scene, with its terrible open space under the sky.

The brother has them take a sunken road, where nothing grows and everything is the color of earth. It’s clearly the grave, and now we know to be afraid when we first read about the sunken road in Waterloo.

Beyond that—I just always love how realistically weird this dream is. It feels like an actual dream—in some places transparent, in some just random (“Why Romainville?”), but mostly very clearly significant in ways that don’t obviously map onto any single reading. Why does Valjean keep walking into empty houses, rooms, streets, and only finding a man in the second one he enters? I would say it’s because the first place is Madeleine, where he is now, and he doesn’t have a self there, but honestly hell if I know. It’s a dream.

Fursona Watch: Valjean himself thinks of Javert as a hunting-dog, possibly for the first time. (Also, I really want to come back to the voice, of God or conscience, that tells Valjean to burn the candlesticks when we get to Derailed; their diction is so similar.)

#brickclub #lm 1.7.3 #lm 1.7.4

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troop-scoop · 4 years

Text

Mistakes & Regrets XI

Summary: When a trip to your Dad’s hometown of Hawkins goes wrong, you end up in the year 1983, and have to learn how to cope with being stuck in the past.

Pairing: Steve Harrington / Future!Reader (like, a really slow burn)

Warnings: Idfk probably swearing?

• • •

“How are you feeling?”

There wasn’t really an answer ready to be shot out at Owens when he asked that. It was the usual question asked by doctors when they wanted to get in your head, see what they needed to see to know if you were mentally alright. This felt like a mental evaluation after all.

You shrugged a bit and Joyce gently elbowed your arm that was against the wooden armrest. Looking at her you saw the worried look on her face. It was just a few days before Christmas, and none of you wanted to be here, let alone you.

No, the depression den that had become of the single bedroom apartment you’d been moved into was calling your name. The two liters of soda that contained more caffeine than necessary were also calling you.

The fear of falling asleep was overwhelming, and you knew that the cheap concealer you’d bought wasn’t completely hiding the dark bags under your eyes.

“It’s perfectly okay to not know how you feel. I don’t I think I would either-”

“When I was younger, my favorite movie was ‘Back to the Future,’ has that come out yet?” You doubted it, having not seen any posters or seen the VHS tape in the video store the last time you were there with Steve.

Owens mimicked your shrug from just seconds before. “I haven’t heard of it.”

“Right. Well, Marty McFly is the main character. And is forced into the past. . . 1955, I’m pretty sure. He’s from 85.’ But his parents are teenagers, his age in 55.’ When I was like four, I’d sprained my ankle at a park. We had gotten back from the ER, I was in a brace and Dad went to put my little brother down for a nap. Pa put on ‘Back to the Future.’ After that I always thought time travel was cool.”

Joyce’s hand grabbed yours in a comforting manner, her thumb rubbing gentle circles into your knuckles while you continued speaking.

“But in every movie and tv show they could go back. It could be difficult to do it. But they always did. They went back home. ‘Hot Tub Time Machine,’ ‘Avengers,’ ‘Doctor Who!’ They could go back. But I can’t, I’m stuck in the past and you’ve all said that I can’t go home.”

“You also said you didn’t want to go back to the ‘Upside Down’”

“You also didn’t offer any alternatives. Or even try to find them.”

Owens was quiet now, his face unreadable, blank of any expression while the two of you held eye contact and Joyce awkwardly sat and watched the two of you have an unspoken staring contest.

“I’m sad, and I’m angry. But mostly, sad. Because my dad and my pa said they wanted to raise my brother and I. And now they can’t finish raising me, cause I’m here. And I won’t see them for another 36 years. Maybe not even then. I’ll be like, 50. I could be dead by then.”

“Y/n,” Joyce spoke softly. “Don’t say that, you’ll be alright.”

“We don’t know that.” You looked at Joyce, and while her eyes were soft and full of sympathy while she continued holding your hand while you let her. “You asked how I’m feeling?” You looked back at Owens whose own face seemed to offer sympathy as well. “I’m always sad and angry. And I feel like I’m going crazy because I can hear Danny’s voice and a woman’s and I’m sleep deprived because everytime I do sleep I have these awful nightmares-”

“Voices?”

The moment he interrupted you, you wanted to run. But instead, you froze up. And the first thing, or rather person you wanted, was Steve. But why? You thought. Maybe it’s because he’d been there for you even though you called him in the very early morning, before the sun was even up.

“Y/n?” Joyce questioned while you looked down at your own lap, as though the details in your high waisted jeans were suddenly very interesting.

•••

The thing on your head pressed almost painfully into the nape of your neck and into your temples, Owens seemed to not be the biggest fan of even bringing you into this room and seemed put off when a nurse put the thing on your head.

It was freaking you out, making you feel like you were crazy. But then again, everything and everyone made you feel crazy, or different, or like you could break in a single second. It had you wishing that you could go back to a few nights ago, where you and Steve had driven two counties over and back. This isn’t the place you wanted to be a few days before Christmas.

“They’re going to turn on something, It could trigger the things you see, or hear, okay?” You looked up at the woman who adjusted the headpiece and nodded a bit before she left the room.

You looked over at Owens before down at the table in front of you. The sound turned on. It was a simple white noise, with a bit of a background to it. You blinked once and heard another voice you recognized.

“Just try, that’s all I need you to do.” Looking up you saw Brenner, a hand on a little girl’s shoulder. She wasn’t much older than three, and seemed to be in distress. You looked at the girl who then looked up at you, making eye contact from the other side of the table. She slowly turned her wrists over and on her right wrist you could see the numbers ‘012’ tattooed into the skin.

You blinked again, and it was gone, as well as the sound. “Owens, we got something.” He left the room, leaving you to your own thoughts.

If Eleven was ‘011’ and then that little girl was ‘012,’ were there others? And if so, how many got out alive? How did she see you? They were running through your mind at lightning speed that you didn’t notice when the sound came back on, but you did notice the little girl again, this time, maybe a bit older, staring at you intently, as if she was waiting for you.

She looked familiar. And for a moment you could have sworn that she reminded you of your little brother. “Hi.” You greeted quietly.

‘012’ tilted her head a bit before repeating your word back. “Hi.” Eleven had done the same thing when something like this happened. She repeated your word back.

“Like me.” She mumbled looking at you. Now you tilted your head in confusion but she grabbed your hand from across the table and pointed to the cheap watch you’d bought after you no longer had a phone to carry around, and then to her eyes. “Like me.”

“I don’t understand?”

“You see,” She pointed to her eyes again before pointing to your watch.

“Time?”

She nodded.

She was gone when the white noise was, leaving you in silence, and alone in the white clinical room, with the headpiece still on.

12, You thought. Who is she?

•••

Joyce stood by the windows of the office, looking out to see you and Will sitting in the chairs down the hall. Will was reading a comic and you were listening to your walkman, which Joyce noticed you had begun to carry with you everywhere.

She was worried. How could she not be? You were her granddaughter who wouldn’t be born for a long time, whose mental health seemed to be spiraling down the drain. She’d noticed the amount of caffeine you drank, how your concealer couldn’t hide the bags under your eyes. It was impossible to not notice how awkward you acted around Will.

Joyce and Hopper were just waiting for Owens to come back with whatever the test results to say. They’d taken you away for hours, and since you’d gotten back, you hadn’t spoken to anyone. You just listened to your music and stared off into space.

“I’m sure she’s fine.” Hopper spoke up from his seat in front of Owens’ desk, where you’d previously been sitting. He’d been out in the hall with Will until they took you for testing, not allowing either of them back with you.

Joyce looked back at Hopper and gave an unsure nod. Looking back to the hall where the two of you sat, she saw Will showing you the pages of his comic. She could see the similarities between you two. The way your brows furrowed when listening to something and concentrating were the same, and the little nervous tick that Will had of picking at his jeans while sitting down, also seemed to be your own nervous tick. She’d noticed how’d you been doing it when Hopper opened the car door for you when they got to the lab, and when you’d been in the office.

“What do you thinks wrong?”

“What?”

“Joyce,” Hopper started. “It’s obvious that you think something’s wrong.”

She sighed and crossed her arms, walking away from the window and sitting in the seat next to him. “I don’t know. I just have a weird feeling whenever I look at her. Like she- she’s my family, she’s my granddaughter, technically. But there’s something else to her. . . She reminds me a bit of Eleven.” She admitted.

Something about you reminded her of the girl. But it was only until recently when she was able to place it. Over a month after the events of early November. Something about the air surrounding you made it hard not to be reminded of the twelve year old.

Before Hopper can say anything, the door opened and Owens walked in, a confused look on his face while he walked the short distance from the door to his seat on the other side of the desk.

“There’s nothing wrong with her.” is what he started with, looking confused while he opened the folder he’d carried in. “Brain scan came back normal, her psych evaluation was normal, everything about her, except for the situation she’s in, is normal.”

Hopper tilted his head a bit, not quite understanding. They pulled you away for hours, leaving the three of them completely in the dark, only to say that you were fine? Even though you said you heard voices, and saw things in your sleep.

“I’m sorry?” Hopper questioned.

“The most we can say is that she has PTSD, and with what little we know about it, she can have flashbacks, and auditory flashbacks aren’t out of the picture. She might just be hearing things she’s heard before.”

“Yeah, but she said she heard a woman she’s never heard before?” Joyce looked to Hopper before back at Owens who shrugged a bit.

“Probably a teacher she mostly forgot about. It could be a repressed memory. Or it could be the voice of a babysitter she just doesn’t remember.”

While that would make sense, considering you said the woman would sometimes sing, Joyce didn’t buy it. You said that Will stayed home while you were growing up. Working from home so he could keep an eye on you, and so you always had someone. It wouldn’t make sense for you to have had a babysitter.

Hopper thought it was suspicious, with the confused look Owens had on his face before giving an answer he seemed sure about. It didn’t settle right with him. He was sure Owens was just giving an answer they’d want to hear.

“Just be patient with her. I’m going have someone prescribe her sleeping pills so she can get some sleep-”

Hopper blocked out what he was saying, because the truth was, he had the same thoughts on you as Joyce. You oddly reminded him of Eleven as well and he didn’t believe a single thing that Owens was saying

•••

@disneyprincessbuffyannesummers @jxnehxpper @yllwtaxi @songofcosplay @potatopooper05 @cheesecakeisapie @robinsdolan @yall-wildin-like-siriusly @the_passionate_freak @bisexualpears @ilovebucketbarnes @random-thoughts-003

#I still don't know how I feel about this chapter #but whatever #steve harrington #steve x reader #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington x you #Steve Harrington slow burn

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papermoonloveslucy · 3 years

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LUCY vs TIME

June 22, 1973

The publicity photos, from the movie set of Mame were unrecognizable. Unrecognizable! Why, they were unbelievable. Either somebody had shot them through six layers of soft-focus gauze - or a time machine.

Who was this frisky redhead hoofer kicking up her heels on the distant reaches of some resplendent soundstage, cannily avoiding a camera close-up?

Who was this svelte eyed lady fluttering from beneath a fringed rug of false lashes, not a wrinkle, sag or bag, not to mention even an expression line, sporting her famous face?

Well, clearly the lady was a star. And as star of Warner Brothers' new $8 million musical version of Mame, Lucille Ball had veto rights over all still photographs.

The trouble was that obviously nobody had had the nerve to tell her that if she could order reality rubbed out of a picture with a wave of the retoucher's brush, she couldn't pull the gauze over the eyes of an interviewer ushered into the Mame set to confront the living flesh, unretouched.

Time has not been unkind to Lucille Ball. No, beneath a billowing wine velvet and cream satin lounge suit, the svelte one-time chorus-girl's curves are still obvious. Despite a badly broken right leg from a skiing accident that had left the shooting of Mame stalled and the star in a cast for nearly a year, the shapely former showgirl's gams had now already carried her through a dozen dance routines up on top of pianos and down banisters that would have taxed a tap-dancer half her age.

At 61, Lucille Ball could pass for a dozen years younger. But only a dozen years.

The outrageous, outsize eyelashes now stick like pine spikes out of a swamp of tucks, puckers and bags etched around her shrewd big baby-blues. Her plastic face is a relief map of over-made-up wrinkles, the big bright red Cupid's-bow mouth lipsticked in a smile outside her own spidery upline.

But you don't survive 22 years on TV in the top ratings, get renewed once again this season when all about Bridgets and Bernies and Dean Martins (1) are falling to the network's chop, practically bear a baby and outlast a broken real-life marriage on the TV tube, take over a foundering corporation and build it into the single most powerful independent TV production house, without it showing in your face.

One look at Lucille Ball's face and you don't doubt it for a minute when Hal, her make-up man for 32 years, says she used to limp on to the Mame set in excruciating pain. Then, the minute the cameras clicked on, burst into a dazzling and seemingly effortless song-and-dance.

Not that the lady would admit it for a minute. "It was excruciating pain," she dismisses the subject airily.

But then these days she's not admitting much. It was a lesson learned the hard way. One recent fateful February day, over perhaps one too many Pouilly-Fuisses on the rocks, she was admitting so much so freely to the New York Times that the story read like a Hedda Hopper monologue.

On Desi Arnaz Sr., the Cuban bongo (2) player-bandleader she met and married out of a chorus line in 1940 and divorced 22 years later after a marriage that was even stormier off -screen than on: "He drank too much and he couldn't stand success."

On Desi Arnaz Jr., their 20-year-old son and his much-publicized romance with actress Patty Duke: "I had my doubts if the baby was Desi's at all. I said to him, "You feel responsible? Boy, you're all of 16 1/2 years old and you want to spend the rest of your life with this neurotic person?'"

On Liza Minnelli, then Desi's current fiancée: "They took her for over a million and a quarter more than her mother's debt. Just for beginners..."

One mention of the story now is enough to send sparks flying. "Why, that man should be..." she sputters over the reporter, "...spanked!"

It's a first burst of spontaneity from a lady who, once burned, is now so careful that she sounds at times as if he's dictating to the Library of Congress.

"I never thought I'd get this far, do so much, have such beautiful children," she says, chain-smoking in her dressing-room, all the wide-eyed telephone lineman's daughter from upstate New York. She knocks on wood.

"All I ever wanted was to get to vaudeville and I never made it."

When she hit New York to take acting classes at 16, the school sent back her mother's money, saying. "No talent." And now, refund in hand, 81-year-old DeeDee Ball, as the whole family calls her, sits in a front-row seat for every “Here's Lucy” show, just as she has done non-stop for the last 22 years.

Still it wasn't till 1951, when the Amazes dreamed up the “I Love Lucy” show, patterned after their own lives, as a way of keeping their marriage together and bandleader Desi home from the road, that success came.

But when it came, it was she who stole the show.

By two years later, 68 per cent of TV viewers in America were tuned in to see her show-by-show birth to Desi Arnaz Jr., whose arrival vied with the U.S. presidential election results for front-page space under the headline, "Lucy's $50 million baby."

Everybody, it seemed, loved Lucy except perhaps Desi Arnaz. Despite her insistence that "the series was happy there was no fighting. It was the greatest time of my life," she admits, "the trouble came much later. Only the last five years were hard."

Which means that the greatest time of her life lasted only a scant six years. When their marriage broke up officially in 1962 (3), friends introduced her to a stand-up comic named Gary Morton, now her producer, vice-president of Lucille Ball Productions, Inc., official show warm-up man and for 11 years now, Mr. Lucille Ball.

As her daughter Lucie, 22, and still a performer on the show, puts it. "She may be the king of stage 12, but at home she's queen Gary's the king!"

She indulges his passion for golf and a garage full of classic cars, but with the warning: "If he ever looks at another woman, I'll kill him."

She says she never makes a business move without him, but when she was left to head up the giant Desilu Corporation after her marriage break-up, it was she who was known as the woman shrewd enough to snap up “Mannix”, “Mission Impossible” and “Star Trek” when they were apparently doomed pilots, a comedienne who was not so comical in the executive suite.

But as for her much-vaunted business acumen, she is all denials and femininity.

"Me? No way. Desi did the whole thing. He was a fantastic businessman. I only took it over to build it up and sell it. I mean, there was a certain amount of building up to do."

When she took it over from Arnaz in 1961, Desilu had lost over $600,000. When she sold it seven years later, for $17 million in Gulf and Western stock, making her the conglomerate's largest stockholder and, some say, the wealthiest woman in Hollywood, the company had grossed $30-million and made a profit of ever $800,000.

"But everyone in the know knew I wasn't tough," she says. "No, the men I surrounded myself with were."

Still there a flinty glint behind the false lashes, a shrewd imperious purse to the painted lips, a ring to the wise-cracking whisky voice that's used to being heard. She moves around the Mame soundstage in queenly command, dispensing Norman Vincent Peal-doms, part star, part super-mother.

When it comes time for a scene featuring co-star Bea Arthur, she practically takes over directing from Gene Saks, Miss Arthur's husband. "Now did you tell her what side of the camera to be on?" she asks Saks, who looks like he might explode. "Now honey, toe your mark," she fusses over Bea, who grows quiet, explaining later:

"Lucy's really a dear. But sometimes it can get a little overpowering."

She doesn't talk to people without picking lint off their clothes, and straightening their collars, a habit that comes naturally enough to a woman who has her whole retinue, hairdresser, secretary, make-up man and driver of the last two decades - even her little picket-fenced French-provincial dressing-room trailer, with its false shutters and plastic ivy - picked up and transplanted wherever she strays from Lucy Lane where she presides at Universal Studios, year after year.

With her kids, she was, as daughter Lucie says, "Strict - and you want to believe it. We were the only kids we knew who had to work around the house for whatever money we'd get." Lucie still gets paid only scale for her mother's show.

But Desi Jr. wasn't exactly a natural. "He'd be asleep on the sidelines and I'd be ready to smack him," Lucy says, "When he said he was interested in serious acting, I said, 'Oh, really?' But he got out and worked. He surprised me. He surprised everybody. He even surprised himself."

Still, for all her talk about the joys of getting away to her Colorado ski lodge where she does "the cooking, the washing, the socks, the things I miss - not to mention the leg breaking - there's not much chance that Lucille Ball is going to be sitting the next round out, wallowing in domesticity, In the old rocking chair.

# # #

FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) “Bridget Loves Bernie” was a 1972 sitcom about a mixed marriage between a Jewish man and a Catholic woman. Like Lucy and Desi, stars Meredith Baxter and David Birney were also married in real life. Despite excellent ratings (it was the highest-rated new show of the 1972-73 season) the show was cancelled after only one season. The official reason for its cancellation was that it was scheduled between two mega-hits, “All in the Family” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, and its ratings weren't strong enough considering its choice position in the line-up.

Also, that same season, the long-running “The Dean Martin Show” (1965-1974) was cancelled. Lucille Ball had made three appearances on the show, and he also appeared on hers.

(2) Conga drums, not bongos. It is slightly dismissive to call Desi Arnaz a bongo player.

(3) The editor makes the error of assuming that Lucy divorced Desi and Married Gary Morton the same year. She divorced Desi in April 1960, and married Gary in November 1961, a year and a half later.

This article was published in the Leisure section of The Vancouver (BC) Sun on June 22, 1973. The article was written by Marci McDonald and illustrated by David Annesley.

#Lucille Ball #Mame #Vancouver Sun #Marci McDonald #David Annesley #Bridget Loves Bernie

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tcheschirewrites · 4 years

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Hey, are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Have you ever? And what was your experience like? I'm considering it but I feel so intimidated because I know I won't be able to commit to it wholeheartedly. Lowering my expectations and pacing myself would seem like the perfect solution but work kills my creative brain cells by the seconds. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of November I've only written half of page of alien language. Any advice? Also does Nano have to be a new project?

Oh man, Nano. I’m well familiar with Nano, and I’ve participated a few times (to varying degrees of success). This got very long, so I’m putting a cut.

The first time I attempted Nano was in 2006 for my novel Seerking. I had heard about it from a friend who was in an LJRP I was in, and she encouraged me to try it. I was still in high school at the time, and very frankly I did not have the dedication necessary to complete it. I got a lot of worldbuilding complete, but very little writing. I got about two pages of prose, and three notebooks of character and setting history, as well as a fairly detailed outline. I still have all of this.

The second time I attempted was in 2009, for a story that is based heavily on the Iron&Wine song ‘Boy With a Coin’. I got a little bit further, but I got stuck in a few places. I think it’s because my idea was bigger than my life experience, and I also got stuck in a lot of small details. Additionally, my first Word document (where I got about two chapters in?) was destroyed when my laptop’s hard drive just straight gave up on life - I did buck up and rewrite quite a bit, though it didn’t sing quite the same notes, and I have this handwritten copy still. (It’s possible I tried again with this same project the year after? I don’t remember tbvh)

My third attempt was in 2011, about a goverment operative and a faun. This one I got the furthest, and I still have the original handwritten draft and the typed copy. I pantsed this one, 100%. To this day, I still don’t know how this story ends, but I’d love to attempt a rewrite someday.

Then, unfortunately, from around 2012 until Fall of last year, I stopped writing period. I was in a real bad situation, and just didn’t have the energy for anything, let alone a novel. My most recent experience with Nano as an organization was Camp Nano, which is a much looser structure, and it is in May and July. Rather than the hard and fast 50k, you set your own goal when you announce your project.

I can understand your hesitance to participate, honestly. Nano is a beast of a project – to reach the minimum goal of 50k in the 30 allotted days, you have to produce 1667 words of new content every single day. This is approximately 3 pages, maybe a little more – which is a lot when you’re already stressed! And if you miss a day you have to adjust your daily totals for every following day, and the pressure starts to mount! It’s a lot, even if it is only meant to be a neat little challenge (mostly, I’ll cover benefits a bit later).

Now, my recommendations are going to follow two paths: planning, and pantsing. If you are naturally a planner – that is, you like having rough outlines, refined outlines, you like having character data, history, etc – then I recommend you have as much of your novel planned ahead of time before November 1st hits. Whatever notes or files you need to have set aside before you begin writing those first words, have them ready – read over them, refine them, and have them memorized front to back so that you know what your story is meant to be. If you are a natural planner, and you have not done this by today’s date (it’s 30 October where I am), then I do not recommend participating this year because it will stress you the fuck out and you might even make yourself sick.

The other popular option is called pantsing – essentially, you have a rough idea, and you’re flying by the seat of your pants. (This is literally what it is called on the Nano website, by the by – there are badges for it and everything.) If you are a pantser, then I still recommend a little preparation, but of a wildly different degree and type: find your story’s ambiance. If you are a pantser, think about what sparked the idea for your story? Try to put yourself back in the place (emotionally or physically) where you had the most intense version of the idea, and hang onto that feeling with both hands. This is incredibly important, because it will allow you to harken back to that feeling without chasing the high of first being hit by that feeling. If you are a pantser, focus heavily on the feelings you want to evoke with your story, and let your heart guide you.

Now the third option (I know what I said, I lied all right) is if you are a combination planner-pantser; you don’t want to have the rigidity of the outline, but you also like having a little bit of structure, or at least a direction to go in. If you are a combination planner-pantser, I recommend doing very soft preparation for yourself in the week leading up to Nano. So things like building yourself a playlist, maybe doodle what your main looks like in your head, or small details like character names and short dossiers. If you’re able, I recommend coming up with an ending, so you know what the end-goal looks like and you are able to track your story’s completion in your head.

For all three, I would recommend deciding ahead of time how you want to write your novel – are you going to type it up in a word processor (please make so many backups, do not live the heartache that I had to)? Are you going old school and hand writing it? Are you feeling like a boss that day and maybe want to dictate it into an app on your phone? Pick one, and make a dedicated space for your novel. You can mix them up, certainly, but make sure that you are able to consolidate effectively or you’re going to stress yourself out.

Now, you asked whether or not it has to be a “new” project. There are actually a few answers to this, depending on what you mean. Now, if we are to assume that “new” strictly means a brand new, fresh idea that you have just come up with specifically for National Novel Writer’s Month 2020, then the answer is no; it does not. Back in the day, there were a few purists that insisted you had to have a designated project every year, but like most purists, they’re just being assholes about it.

As a matter of fact, it does not even have to be a brand new project that you have not written any words for at all – however, if you do have an idea that you have already written for, you are not permitted to use any of your previous word count toward your goal. This is definitely a no-no. Personally, I’ve tried this, and I found it rough – I liked having the designated project, and I liked the buildup to it.

If you have, though, an idea that you’ve worked over and you are simply ready to start putting words on a page, this, I think, is Nano’s sweet spot.

Now, I know most of this 1000+ answer has been cautioning and reminders that Nano is tough – because, well, it is. It is a huge undertaking, and I feel like every participant has their horror stories to tell about their experience. But I want to reassure you that it isn’t 100% a hard slog to a dreary end; there are so many tools that Nano themselves provide you, as well as user-run communities and workshops, and even some benefits after the fact. These are the things I want to wrap this post up with.

Firstly, no matter how tired or stressed you are, if you register for nanowrimo.org, you’ll begin receiving daily emails from published authors and past participants. These range from silly and tedious, to incredibly comforting. My favorite one, which I cannot remember a lot of specifics from, was from a man who detailed his experience and reassured everyone that the work doesn’t have to be good – it just has to be 50k words. That’s it. You can have typos and errors all over the place, plot holes of all shapes and sizes, and a main character who doesn’t make any sense at all; it doesn’t matter, because the point of the event is simply to finish. Neil Gaiman has also said a time or two that your first draft’s only purpose is to exist. Just get the words out; you can fix them later.

Additionally, when you are completing your profile, you can enter in your location and there are designated forums for participants in your area. In the past, there have been meetups for group-writes and workshops as well, though I imagine they will be more along the lines of Discord calls this year. If you are a social person who needs a pair of eyes to help you work through a scene, Nano’s got your back. They will also send you statistics for your area for the average word count, daily word count, past winners, etcetera. It can sometimes feel like you are very alone during this difficult project, but a lot of these things bring a very human element to the event.

Finally, what comes after you have completed. A lot of these benefits are newer than my time, but I browsed through them when I did my Camp Project. When you complete the goal in the allotted time, you get a neat little badge for your webpage and a printable certificate for the immediate boost of dopamine. But you will also get discounts to some neat shit, like different word processing applications (I got 50% off of Scrivener when I finished Camp), as well as things like The Great Courses, discounts in the swag store, etc. But more than that, there are partnering websites who want to help you on the road to being published. Wattpad is in this group, but I believe also big name publishers (I might have seen Penguin on there at one point) are willing to work with winners to get their works distributed.

All that said, I recommend every writer attempt Nano at least once in their writing career. Even if I personally have not done so stellar in the past, it is a fantastic learning experience for all of the work that goes into producing a novel from start to finish – it forces you to know your limits, and sometimes to overcome them. I don’t think I will be participating this year – I have so many side projects that I want to get done, but I will very likely drop everything to do it next year. I have two novels that are real roughly built up that I could do for this, though, and I would love the dedicated time to spend on them.

#asked and answered jim #red-write-district #writeblr #writing advice #nanowrimo #i'm actually really fond of every nano project i've ever done #even if i didn't finish any of them #i still go back and read them sometimes #and i still have a lot of like plot details in my head for them

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fanfictionaries · 4 years

Text

A Fine Line Between Lust and Hate - jbbuckybarnes Birthday Challenge

Thank you to @jbbuckybarnes for this fun writing challenge! Congratulations on over 900 followers and also happy 21st birthday! It’s a fun age, enjoy it!

Prompt 1: Bookstore AU

Prompt 2: “Just gimme the book and fuck off!”

Pairing: AU Bookstore!Bucky Barnes X female reader

Summary: If there was one person you hated more than anyone else in the world it was James Buchanan “Call Me Bucky” Barnes. Or at least, you thought you did. As Bucky continues to press your patience, it becomes unclear as to whether it’s hate you feel, or lust.

Words: 3.5k

Warnings: Swearing, smut, doggy style, oral (male receiving), NSFW/18+ only

Author’s Note: Man, I do love a good rousing debate over literature.

***

You stood in one of the long aisles as you worked on putting the store’s most recent influx of donations on the shelves. The endless rows of historical memories stretched high above your head and all around you. However, the large stack in front of you currently sat untouched, a copy of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel held tightly in your grasp, as you watched the events occurring at the front desk. Your coworker, James, was leant casually against the counter, once again ignoring his work duties as he openly and obnoxiously flirted with the woman in front of him.

God, you hated him. You hated his stupid long hair that he pulled up into a stupid bun. You hated his stupid tight jeans that hugged his thick thighs and his stupid red Henley that accentuated his muscular shoulders and arms. You hated his stupid handsome face that only fueled his overall cocky attitude. God, you absolutely hated James Buchanan ‘Call Me Bucky’ Barnes.

You hadn’t set out to hate him of course. Quite the opposite in fact. When your boss informed you of a new employee who wasn’t a billion-year-old woman, you had been ecstatic. Not to say you didn’t love Lucille, but to finally meet a person close to your age that loved books so much they were willing to work at the musty, expansive bookstore was a dream come true. For years now, you’d found yourself spending more time alone, tucked into the rows of books than you did with anyone your own age. You’d think that the kitschy bookstore would be a draw to the younger individuals in town, with the rise of intellectualism or at least the guise of intellectualism within today’s youth. Not to mention, the fact that it was nestled in between the cutest antique store and 50’s style diner. But, alas, it didn’t seem to be on trend for your town. Instead, you got the odd stragglers of older individuals who still enjoyed reading physical books, and local community college students looking to either sell or buy books for classes. That’s why the idea of coming into work every day to a coworker you could relate to was beyond wonderful. However, it hadn’t taken long for James to get so far under your skin, you practically wore him like a pair of itchy long johns.

It had started with his complete disregard for the books and their safety. As a self-proclaimed bibliophile, you took great pride in the care and safety of the books in the store. They were a mix of new and used, the older ones coming into your protective arms the moment you clocked the torn corners and dog-eared pages. You spent hours restoring them before putting them out to be appreciated by the next reader. That’s why, on his third day there when you’d spotted him using his copy of Catcher in the Rye as a coaster for his iced coffee, you’d nearly had an aneurysm. You wished that the situation was a one-time thing, but every time you turned a corner, he was bending spines, creasing pages, WRITING in the margins. He was a book sadist.

Then of course, there was the lackadaisical way in which he approached his job. Not once, not twice, but ten times in the last three months you had stayed late finishing work that had been assigned to him. Why did you do it, instead of letting him take the fall for shoddy work? Well, because it was always things that needed to be done either before the shop could close or before the shop could open. Closing out the till, turning off all the lights, locking the back door, fixing the displays, picking up the giant stack of books that had fallen near the back, changing a burnt-out light using the very old and very rickety ladder.

And lastly, the one thing you absolutely hated the most about him was just how incredibly flirty he was! From the very beginning, he took every opportunity to hit on you. At first it had been flattering, but incredibly jarring and confusing. What could he possibly want with you? He looked like that and you looked like, well people didn’t really want to date the weird bookstore girl that always smelled faintly of old books. Then, it had all come into focus. James flirted with everyone. Not just you. Everyone. The moment a woman under the age of forty walked through those front doors, James was there with his stupid charming ways; “Can I help you with anything today?” “What’s a beautiful woman like you doing in here today?” “I knew a woman of your caliber would have good taste in books.” All the while, he’d chance little glances your way, smirking at you and raising his eyebrows slightly. It was all a game to him. Prick.

“Now, see, that is a fantastic choice. I knew the moment you walked in you had good taste,” stated James pointing down at the copy of The God of Small Things that was currently clutched to the woman’s chest in her perfectly manicured hands. You rolled your eyes. Ridiculous. You glanced over again to see James smirking in your direction before he walked the woman to the front door and waved her goodbye, shutting and locking the door behind her. Last customer of the day. You sighed, turning back to the stacks in front of you and swiftly putting the books back into place. The quicker you got this done, the quicker you would be out of there and away from James’ mocking face and overall itchy personality. You continued to put the books away, probably harsher than you should have, as you listened to the faint sounds of James closing out the till. Well, at least he was doing that today. I knew the moment you walked in you had good taste, you mocked him in your head, huffing and puffing at just how infuriating he was. You winced at a particularly harsh shove of a book into the shelve. Quickly, you pulled it out and inspect the corners and sides of the hard cover.

“Careful there—” a pair of large hands came into your line of site, snatching the book from your hands “—What did Michael Herr ever do to you?”

“Nothing,” you huffed, turning to grab the book back, but coming up unsuccessful. “Although, I really would prefer it if you didn’t allow customers to stay so late past closing.”

“Why? Got somewhere to be? Hot date?” James asked, circling around you to lean against the bookshelves to your right.

You snorted, “As if that’s any of your business.”

“Come on. Lighten up a little bit (Y/N). She needed help finding a good book for her English class,” said James, pulling the book out of reach as you attempted to grab it back from him once again.

“Okay,” you scoffed, rolling your eyes and reaching back down to the stack of books remaining on the cart to your left.

“What? You got something against Indian authors writing about caste relations and cultural tensions?”

“No, but I think if Roy tried to squeeze one more literary device into the text, the book would literally explode. Nobody genuinely enjoys a work where the author is intentionally trying to be clever. It’s obnoxious,” you said as you continued to put the books into their correct spaces as quickly as possible.

“Oh, so I guess you don’t care for Shakespeare then? What about Vonnegut, Anne Rice, Tolkien? Every author thinks they’re clever (Y/N). If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be writers,” said James, crossing his arms and leaning towards you condescendingly.

“That’s-that’s just ridiculous,” you responded lamely, placing the last book in your pile away.

“Oh really? Then please, oh smart one, name a single author who didn’t take themselves so seriously that it didn’t bleed through their work in some way,” James challenged, once again pulling the book in his hands away from your reaching hands.

You stood there, glowering at the man in front of you as you tried to come up with some king of answer. “C. S. Lewis,” you blurted out, wanting to kick yourself at the obviously stupid answer.

A barking laugh left James, “Oh come on. The man spent most of his career preaching Christian values and what it means to be moral. He even went so far as to write a short story on what the afterlife looks like and how to get into heaven. Or are we just going to pretend like The Great Divorce didn’t happen? Just because he wrote a bunch of entertaining children’s stories bathed in Christian symbolism with little effort does not mean that he didn’t take himself seriously.”

His astute criticism caught you off guard and peaked your anger, mainly because to a certain extent he was right. That didn’t mean you were going to let him know that though, “Excuse you! I’ll have you know he wrote The Great Divorce after the death of his wife. What else was he supposed to write about? You know what James—”

“How many times do I have to tell you to call me Bucky?”

“Just gimme the book and fuck off!”

Your eyes widened at your outburst. You’d never spoken to anyone like that before in your life. Opening your mouth to apologize, you quickly closed it when James sighed heavily and pushed himself off of the bookshelf. He stared at you, his eyes calculating as he closed the space between you, slamming the good on the shelf behind your head. You jumped, turning so that you faced him head on, your back to the endless rows of books. James placed an intimidatingly large arm on either side of you, bracing himself against oak shelves. You swallowed thickly at the sheer size of him. Your pulse quickened. He had never been this close to you.

“You know what (Y/N)? I think you’re just jealous,” James murmured, tilting his head dangerously low to yours.

“Jealous? Of what?” you asked, your voice embarrassingly breathy, as your head began to swim. He was so close. So close you could smell his cologne, a musky warm scent mixed with the fresh scent of soap and…old books? Subtly, you tried to inhale more of the tantalizing smell without James noticing. But one glance up and you could see that familiar smirk and cocky gleam in his eye.

“Me, and every woman that walks in here ready to fuck me in the encyclopedia section.”

You gasped at his words, “That’s ridiculous. Why would I be jealous of that?”

“Because you want to fuck me in the encyclopedia section.”

“I—I do not—I do not want to—I hate you!”

James leaned closer, his nose brushing against yours, “Doesn’t mean you don’t want to fuck me—” His head titled, his lips brushing across your cheek, your jawline, and then to the shell of your ear. “—Just say the word and I’ll take you right there. Right then. Any time. Any day.”

You shivered at the offer. Never had his flirting gone this far. Sure, James had given you a flirtatious smile and charming little comment here and there, but never had he come close to propositioning you. You should say no. You hate him. He’s everything you despise and yet…

“Fuck it.” Rising up on the tips of your toes, you wrap your arms around his neck and press your lips to his in a searing kiss. James’ lips claim yours, never hesitating for a second, as if expecting it. The soft skin of his plush lips a stark contrast to the harsh way in which you both battled for dominance. Every ounce of anger, frustration, and tension that you held towards him fought its way through your body as you nipped, bit, and tugged. James’ hands moved from the bookshelf to your body, gripping your hips and tugging you harshly against him, revealing the same level of pent up aggression. His hands traveled upwards, cupping your breasts through your sweater, roughly massaging them as he slipped his tongue into your mouth. Threading your fingers into his hair, you tugged harshly earning you a growl from James. Breaking away from the kiss just long enough to pull your sweater up and over your head, your bodies reconnected, the feel of your bare torso against him feeling oh so right. You continued to hang onto him for dear life, as his kisses left you breathless and needy. Bringing a leg up around his hip, your pelvis rocked against him, searching for any kind of friction as you climbed him like a tree.

“Eager, aren’t we?” James teased, hands moving down to harshly grasp your ass and lift you up. Wrapping your legs around his hips, you allowed him to carry you the brief distance away from the bookshelves and lower you onto the rough carpet floor. Trailing kisses down your neck and towards your breasts, he roughly yanked the cups of your bra down before taking a nipple between his teeth. You arched into his mouth, loving the sting as he bit down.

“God, I knew you’d be a fucking little minx,” panted James, sitting up on his knees. “Look at you all sexy and needy. Just had to get you to let go.”

Pushing up onto your elbows, you stared up at him, “Shut the fuck up and take your shirt off James.”

Swinging his hand down, he swatted the inside of your thigh, “The name’s Bucky, babe.”

Your head fell backwards at the contact and your pussy clenched as you moaned low. Sitting up, you ripped his shirt from his torso and threw it behind you before pushing him down onto the ground. You made quick work of removing your bra, shoes, and pants before reaching for his belt buckle. This time it was his turn to push up onto his elbows as he watched your near naked form, undo his belt and then his pants. You tugged at his pants and then his boxers in a desperate manner, James kicking off his shoes and socks to held aid in their removal. Finally, when he was naked before you, you took a moment to admire the lean curves of his muscular form and the thick cock that sat just below his belly button, nestled in a patch of short brown curls.

Running your nails lightly up and down his thighs, you smirked as he writhed below you, sucking in a harsh breath through his teeth. Lowering yourself slowly, you positioned yourself between his thick thighs and grasped the base of his cock in your hand, wasting no time in wrapping your lips around the head and swirling your tongue around him. Bucky cursed, low and sexy as you took him in your mouth. You worked him with your lips and tongue as your moved lower and lower. Spit gathered in your mouth as you breathed through your nose, giving your all into pleasuring the man below you. You wanted to once and for all wipe the smirk off of James “Bucky” Barnes’ face. When you made it almost all the way to the base, you hollowed your cheeks, sucking as you massaged the vein on the underside of his cock with your tongue. His hands flew to the back of your head, fingers lacing in your hair and gripping tight. He held onto you for dear life as you attempted to suck the soul out of him through his dick alone.

“Jesus Christ! Fuck! (Y/N),” he yelled, his body shuddering. When you slipped down the last few inches, allowing his cock to slip easily down your throat, he stilled, body rigid before he pulled you off of him with a curse.

You fell backwards onto your hands, spit coating your lips and drool falling down your chin as you breathed in deeply. A low growl escaped James’ throat as he launched himself at you, flipping you onto your stomach, and ripping your panties down your legs. His hands found your center in no time, his fingers delving deep into your core easily, aided by the embarrassing amount of arousal there. James fingered you, curving and finding that special spot inside of you that made your see stars. You yelped, bucking your hips back against him. His teeth sunk into the supple flesh of your ass.

“You’re god damn dripping down my arm (Y/N). Did sucking my cock turn you on that much?”

“Yes!” you admitted, continuing to rock your hips against him. Pulling his fingers from you, you whimpered at the loss of contact. The loss was only temporary though, as soon James was pulling your hips up, placing you back on your knees, face still pressed against the carpet as he lined his cock up with your entrance. There was no slow and delicate start. No, in one swift thrust, he was seated fully inside of you, hands firmly grasping your ass as he began to fuck you at a punishing pace.

“Fucking hell baby. Your pussy is like a vice-grip. I don’t think I’m going to last long,” he admitted, continuing to pound into you, his balls slapping against your clit with every thrust. He reached down, finding your clit and rubbing light, fast circles around it until you began to feel the familiar pressure building in your lower abdomen.

“Yes! Bucky! Fuck. Just like that, don’t stop!” you cried, desperate to reach your climax. The carpet scraped against your skin, sure to leave burns after. But you didn’t care. The only thing you cared about was the delicious stretch of your cunt around Bucky’s cock and your imminent orgasm.

“That’s it, baby. Say my fucking name again. Say my name as you cum all around me.”

You chanted his name over and over again, Bucky, Bucky, Bucky, until finally you were approaching the edge and falling over. Your body shuddered and hips bucked as you came, loving the feeling of every hard ridge of Bucky’s thick cock inside of you. A few seconds late, he was pulling out of you and then you felt the warm streams of cum splashing across your ass. You collapsed fully onto the carpet below you, Bucky falling after you and rolling to lay beside you. You laid there, in post-orgasmic bliss. The feeling of Bucky’s fingertips trailing up and down your spine soothing you down from your high. After a little while, the two of your stood up and began to redress. Bucky, ever the gentleman, told you to wait as he ran to the front counter and came back with some tissues before wiping up the mess he had made on your ass.

Once you were both dressed, you finished closing up the store. Neither of you spoke, instead choosing to spare the other furtive little glances as you turned out the lights and locked the door behind you both.

“Looks like the diner is still open. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Bucky asked, looking down at you giving you a small, shy smile that you’d never seen on him before.

His question caught you off guard. He wanted to buy you coffee. “Oh, Bucky. You don’t have to feel obligated to—”

“—I don’t feel obligated. I, um, I want to.” He swallowed thickly, almost as if he was nervous. Was he nervous? “I know we just, well, I know we skipped a few steps, but I actually do want to take you out. I’ve been trying to hint it to you for the past three months.”

“So, all the flirting with the customers…?”

“Was me stupidly trying to make you jealous,” laughed Bucky, stuffing his hands in his coat pockets.

“Ah,” you said, a smiling spreading across your face, “How about you buy me a coffee and tell me all your thoughts on Brontë.”

“How much time do you have?” asked Bucky with an exaggerated groan.

Holding your hand out to him, you reveled in the feel of his warm palm connecting with yours, “All the time in the world.”

Marvel Taglist:

@caffiend-queen

@hidden-behind-the-fourth-wall

#jbbuckybarnesBirthdayChallenge #fanfic #fanfiction #bookstoreau #smut #bucky x you #bucky x female reader #bucky x y/n #marvel

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urkingbby · 4 years

Photo

Hey, lovelies. We wanted to make this admin note to let everyone know that we will be disabling the OOC discord server until Wednesday, October 7th. In the meantime, you are welcome to make occasional OOC posts using the hashtag #luxorooc to give group updates. We are going to ask that everyone please read this post thoroughly, as there are a lot of important things we want everyone to know.

To Start...

We have been running this RP for nearly 16 months and much like we said in our 1 year anniversary post, we are so grateful and excited to have had so many of you with us for so long. I have always taken an interest in groups with dynamic plots that actually progress as a real storyline and because of this, I have always felt so passionate about creating a fun space for everyone that has exciting plot drops, secret reveals and general plot progressions for you all to write and develop your characters within.

With that being said, within the past couple months, we have felt that there has been a shift in energy among the OOC interactions that we want to address. Please send an IM to the main saying, “completed ‘to start’” once you have completed this section.

Our Intention

We want this to be a safe space. We want everyone here to enjoy each other, each others characters, and we want everyone to feel involved and welcome. It is our responsibility to keep this group welcoming and safe. When issues are brought to us (off anon), it is up to us to resolve them and make sure that we can move forward better and happier than before. Please send an IM to the main saying, “understand your intention” once you have completed this section.

Help Us Help You

At the same time, it is also up to our members (you guys) to make sure to let us know when you are unhappy with something so that we can try our best to get to the bottom of the issue and resolve it. When something is upsetting you, and it is causing you to feel negatively toward the RP or other members in the group, it is also upsetting to us. I, personally, take on way too much responsibility. I’m aware of this, and I’m trying to get better with that but what I don’t think will change is my desire to fix issues that arise.

If something is bothering you and you think it is going to effect the way you feel coming onto the dash every day or effect the way you treat other members, PLEASE bring it to us.

I feel so restless when I get hearsay messages from members about other people feeling uncomfortable but not wanting to tell us about it directly. I want to make sure every single one of you is happy and that you’re enjoying your time here. As a friend, I understand wanting to bring your friend’s concern to us but if they feel uncomfortable with us knowing, then there is nothing we can do. When something is brought to us (off anon), it is up to us to talk it out with everyone involved and make sure we’re all on the same page and can move on happily, but if we do not know about the issue or if we are being told through someone else as a result of the person involved not wanting to “make a thing out of it,” there is nothing we can do to fix that problem.

With that being said, you are more than welcome to keep your discomfort to yourself. What is your business is your business, but if you are deciding not to address and resolve something, you are also deciding that regardless of how it affects you moving forward, you will continue to act respectfully toward other members, as stated by our rules. Please send an IM to the main saying, “done ‘help us help you’” once you have completed this section.

The reason we are making this post

Within the past couple months, we think there has been a lack of respect amongst the members within this group, and it has been very upsetting to see unfold.

In order for this group to survive, in order for new members to feel welcome, older members to feel wanted and appreciated and for everyone to have a good time, we need everyone in this group to not only respect other's feelings, but also other's freedoms to express their opinions. We need everyone to remember that tone can be carried through text, and can sometimes be misunderstood, so please be cautious with your words, and please be slow to assume or find offense in things being said, as it isn’t always someone’s intention to upset others. 50% of online messages are misinterpreted [1][2][3]. And it’s important that if a message rubs you the wrong way or if something comes off as harsh to remember that it may not be meant in the way you are reading it.

Where I work, our management team has a system which is meant to create more understanding, safety, respect and encouragement among the employees. That system is the assumption that everyone who comes to work is trying their best and that everyone at work means well. So, when something arises, (not doing their job thoroughly, an argument arising between staff members, etc.) our managers assume that there might be something upsetting that staff member and extend empathy to them. They make sure that they’re okay, if they need time to step away, they ask what they, as management, can do to help them do their job, and most importantly, provide enough empathy to understand that these issues may very well have come up because there is something wrong that they are unaware of. I want everyone here to consider this with other members.

It isn’t anyone’s responsibility to uphold anyone else’s emotional, mental or physical wellbeing, other than their own, but it is everyone’s responsibility to extend empathy to one another and see everyone as a human being.

It’s dangerously easy to forget, when we’re upset with something, that the people behind the screens aren’t monsters, but multi-dimensional people. Please, please remember that.

With that being said, of course, this isn’t an excuse to fly under the radar, say whatever you want, however you want and expect that everyone just assume the best of you.

It goes without saying that everyone is dealing with something. Things are especially stressful this year. Please remember that when speaking with one another. You truly have no idea how your words can effect someone.

RP is a means to escape our lives for a bit, to take a break from stress, a means to a creative outlet, and to find a way to be happy and have fun for a little while. It’s beautiful that every single one of you have chosen this group and have stayed with us for so long. We are all working together to create interesting and fun storylines with our characters, and we are all a part of each other’s escape. There is a reason each of us chose this group and are here together. Let’s ensure that we keep each other’s escape as easy as it should be, and extend that same empathy and respect back to each other, so that others can keep our escape easy as well. Please send an IM to the main saying, “I’ve read the ‘reason’” once you have completed this section.

The Admins

We also want to ask that when bringing issues up with the admin team, to please be respectful and patient with us. We all have family/friends, work and personal endeavors we have outside of this RP. Nora, Yo and I have made this RP a priority for over a year. That means that through all of the real life events that we have faced within the last 16 months, this RP has been in our mind and near the top of our to-do list. We have always tried our absolute best to meet event deadlines, quickly write up plot drops, working through our own stress from real life, and actively work together as a team to keep this RP thriving even at times when we don’t agree.

This is something that we decide to do. And with that comes the responsibility of having to resolve any issues that arise. For me, it is so important for people to have that space. It matters so much to me. But I will not deny that it is hard, and it does take a toll on each of us at times when our real lives are also hard, so please remember that yes, we are responsible for the group, but we are also people and sometimes we are going to need more time to resolve the issues that arise. Please send an IM to the main saying, “we see the admins’” once you have completed this section.

The Rules

The rules we have chosen for this group are ones we believe need to be maintained in order for the group’s long-lasting success.

We have recently added the rule that if you are uncomfortable with another member, to bring it to the admins to resolve it, as opposed to bringing it directly to that member. We implemented this rule in the hopes that if tension arises, the admins can act as a buffer to the tension, to prevent it from getting any worse. When we hear that matters are being handled between members without mention of the concerns with us, it brings us a lot of stress, worrying that the issue will escalate (as we have, of course, seen this happen far too many times).

Our intention in talking things out is to nip the problem in the bud right away and prevent it from progressing any further, and to hopefully make amends between people. We aren’t going to ask that you be friends with every other member, but everyone here is a mature adult and we expect that if you disagree with each other, that it can be overlooked for the sake of us, the admins, and for the sake of the group. Please send an IM to the main saying, “completed ‘the rules’” once you have completed this section.

If Any Tension or Concerns Arise

If you have any issues with other members, and think it will cause you to treat them poorly or be disgruntled coming onto the dash every day, we are going to ask that you bring it to us (off anon) so we can resolve it and bring us back to the safe RP we know and love. Please send an IM to the main saying, “I will do that if tension arises” once you have completed this section.

Going Forward

From now on, if OOC drama arises; if there is a general disrespect toward us or other members, we will no longer be lenient about this. We have given warnings for strikes before but from now on, we will be giving out strikes right away. Everyone is aware of the OOC rules. If you’re feeling frustrated, and feel the need to say something as a result of those feelings of frustration, and if those words would bring you some sort of relief from that frustration, we encourage you not to say them, especially directly to the people involved. Journal about it.

If any OOC tension exists between you or another member that you have decided can never be resolved, that tension is to always be left at the door. It has no place in this group. Please send an IM to the main saying, “ready to go forward” once you have completed this section.

With all of this being said

For the next week, we are going to remove the group chat feature in hopes of everyone taking a deep breath and remembering the fun aspects and other benefits that come with a group chat.

In the meantime, we want everyone to remember that inclusivity is a rule in this group. Please remember to plot with other people, welcome every new member that we get (message them directly, offer to plot with them).

When the group chat re-opens, we hope that we will be rejuvenated and feel relief in the new beginning.

Please remember that if you want this group to last, we have to maintain its foundation, which is the safety, respect and inclusivity among members. When you are disrespectful to each other, remember that you are in turn, being disrespectful to the admins.

Please remember that online RP is about creating fictional stories together, and that everyone involved is just trying to enjoy themselves. Please remember that we are all human, we will have foot in mouth moments, we will say things based on emotion and we will make mistakes. We’re really all here for a common purpose, guys. Not just in RP but in life. The more we can see people as being alike to us, the more empathy and understanding we can offer to people, even when they upset us, the better the world is.

We love you guys. All we have ever wanted is to create a fun, dynamic group for everyone’s creative outlet.

I LOVE coming on to see your characters every single day. I am so freaking thankful that I have the pleasure of knowing them and seeing them navigate their lives. I want to keep them here so I can see them continue to develop and grow.

They feel like friends to me. And maybe not everyone feels that way, but for me, I will still remember and recall them even long after this RP closes.

I also think of all of you as friends. And I will continue to remember and recall all of you even long after this RP closes.

Please send an IM to the main saying, “completed the post” once you have completed this section.

I just want all of us to get along and be happy together. That’s really all I want.

-- Mimi, Nora, Yo.

#luxoradmin

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diyeoracha · 4 years

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IwaOi Master Fic Rec List (50+ Fics)

Hello! In celebration accumulating over 190+ bookmarks on my AO3 account featuring IwaOi and Iwaizumi coming back into the manga (and for his (almost) birthday), I decided to create a masterlist of all of my favorite fanfictions in order to keep myself organized as well as contributing to more traffic on those works! I decided to split the works up by my own self-imposed genres, such as angst, coming-of-age (or the childhood-friends-to-lovers trope that we all love which depicts how their relationship changes as they grow up and will mostly be canon-compliant), and alternate universe. With the revival of Iwaizumi in the manga, alternate universes will be broken down into adulting AU where he and Oikawa’s diverge differs from in canon and actual, legit AU where there’s basically no volleyball.

I’ll include the title, link, word count, fic summary, and my own commentary (mostly for my own personal entertainment). While the AO3 fandom has been going strong since 2014, I personally have only been reading IwaOi fics for about 3 months, so I will most likely be recommending some cult-favorites, especially since I’ve been reading my fics by sorting through the tag with the most kudos.

My absolute favorites (or the ones where I personally push onto my IRL haikyuu friends) will be denoted with ♡ in increments of 1-3 with 3 ♡ being an absolute must-read. Fics marked with a * indicate that Iwaizumi or Oikawa or both are professional athletes because that’s honestly my Favorite Trope. This is incomplete as I got distracted while re-reading a lot of these and have only gone through half of my bookmarks, but feel free to check my own page here for the rest of them! This took me about 9 days to compile (aka this was in my drafts for about 9 days) but I do hope you guys enjoy reading these and leave comments and kudos!

Adulting AU

*♡♡Thirty Years and Change (the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad)

Word count: 19k

Thoughts: THIS IS IT. THIS FIC IS GOD TIER. They’ve been separated but now are falling back into old habits and there’s a confession on the line? Akaashi is in here and he’s pretty funny. I reread this all the time.

*♡♡♡the courtship ritual of the hercules beetle

Word count: 66k

Summary: Tooru is pretty sure he could manage the mating habits of a mosquito. It’s the mating habits of people he can’t seem to get right.

Thoughts: Absolutely the best IwaOi fic I’ve ever read. I’ve reread this about 4x and I always pay attention to a new sentence or detail that leaves me breathless. The characterization is pretty spot on, and I have to admit that this fic made me appreciate IwaOi a little more. I’ve cried countless times too. A cult-favorite but it doesn’t have nearly as many hits as it deserves.

♡days fall away

Word count: 17k

Summary: Except now he’s back home, so close to his old haunts and to Oikawa himself, and it's—weird.

Thoughts: They’ve separated for a bit but now they’re back in the same city and learning to be around each other again. Cue teasing from the biological and Seijoh family

it's been so long (nobody knows me the way you do)

Word count: 8k

Summary: Tooru hums, only half-listening. Somewhere along the way, Hajime’s palm has settled itself over the curve of Tooru’s cheek, thumb tracing over the line of his jaw.

Thoughts: They’re living together post-college feat. snapshots from their lives before getting together and their Seijoh team! It’s really soft but it manages a humorous tone as well.

Time

Word count: 5k

Summary: When they're twenty-three, their story only begins.

Thoughts: A piecewise fic told from Oikawa’s point of view. The tone is almost chatty but it really fits the pacing of the work as you get snippets and sentences of their relationship throughout the years

♡Almost a Stranger

Word count: 16k

Summary: Iwa-chan's leaving Japan. Tooru's not sure he can forgive him, but he's not going to admit his long-held feelings, either. A trip to Miyajima complicates everything.

Thoughts: They go on vacation right before Iwaizumi leaves Oikawa for a year. Oikawa ponders their relationship.

where fireflies never die

Word count: 4k

Summary: >>Oikawa: Hey Iwa-chan >>Oikawa: Did I ruin it?

Thoughts: Oikawa is a mangaka and basically writes his best selling series based off of him and Iwaizumi. This was pretty angsty ngl with a lot of introspection and second-guessing.

In the Business of Love

Word count: 22k

Thoughts: Mangaka Oikawa but this is basically a rom-com lmao

Alternate Universe

Even Heroes (have the right to dream)

Word count: 20k

Summary: Oikawa Tooru, ace reporter of the superhero beat of Asahi Shimbun, hates superheroes. Or maybe he just hasn’t met the knight one yet.

Thoughts: Superhero-hiding-his-identity-Iwaizumi and begrudging Oikawa? Sign me up. This fic spent a little more time on worldbuilding than eventual romance, but it is still absolutely unique and entertaining

The secret omega

Word count: 17k

Summary: Iwaizumi’s annoying as fuck best friend. Who absolutely, definitely, no matter what, cannot find out that Iwaizumi is an omega.

Thoughts: A/B/O dynamics where Iwa is the omega and Oikawa is the alpha. 90% plot building which is pretty nice.

Conquering the Great King

Word count: 105k

Summary: Oikawa's lips twitched into a smirk and he brought them hovering just over Iwaizumi's, "One time thing, Two time thing, what's it matter as long as it's not a Relationship thing?"

Thoughts: Malicious and flirtatious Oikawa meet immovable object Iwaizumi. They’re businessmen trying to navigate friends-with-benefits and love all at the same time. A+ sex scenes tbh.

♡Infinite Risks

Word count: 8k

Summary: “It’s my fate,” Oikawa responds slowly. He’s crying.“It’s too lonely,” Iwaizumi’s heart sounded broken. “And I’m not there with you. Not really.”

Thoughts: Edge of Tomorrow AU!!!!! Please watch Edge of Tomorrow first because it’s truly a brilliant movie that I wholly enjoyed and this fic reflects that. This also made me really sad so Beware

*♡Something Like Us

Word count: 28k

Thoughts: ABO dynamics (and somewhat canon-compliant) as they’re roommates, on the national team, and try to navigate being “fake” mated while harboring feelings

And All the Prince’s Men

Word count: 65k

Summary: “Father only loves that which he owns, and I am the one thing that can never truly be his.”

Thoughts: Royal bastard son Oikawa and his servant Iwaizumi. An enthralling read and universe. The romance takes a secondary seat here as it focuses more on plot and world-building.

♡long nights, no peace

Word count: 18k

Thoughts: Pacific Rim! AU. Otherwise known as my favorite types of AUs because they’re basically soulmates (platonic or not,, but they’re not platonic here)

♡(sing with me) A Song of Conquest and Fate

Word count: 26k

Summary: When Seijou receives a missive from Aobajousai to discuss a potential peace, its emperor Oikawa Tooru could not have foreseen the series of events that would follow.

Thoughts: Warring states/historical fantasy AU. The world building is amazing and this author has great control over her language use

Cotton Breathing

Word count: 13k

Summary:

Thoughts: Long-distance and summer only but childhood friends Iwaoi!!! A dreamy summer piece and reading it almost makes me feel like I’m in a Studio Ghibli movie because of the mood it puts me in

Similar Creatures

Word count: 53k

Summary: "What's your name?" "Whatever you want it to be."(Or, Oikawa gets directions from an attractive stranger on a street corner.)

Thoughts: Iwaizumi is an escort and Oikawa needs a fancy date

Space

Word count: 44k

Thoughts: Oikawa’s in outerspace. They’re separated. This left me feeling pretty empty ngl.

♡here comes your man

Word count: 8k

Summary: Iwa-chan, it reads, Have a good day today! Good luck! <3 <3 <3Suga chokes. It’s hard to imagine anyone calling the scowling and fierce Doctor Iwaizumi “Iwa-chan.” But marriage probably comes with all sorts of liberties.

Thoughts: Doctor AU where Iwaizumi and Oikawa’s relationship is pondered by Suga

In the Telling

Word count: 6k

Summary: Muggleborn Iwaizumi could not be less impressed with pureblood Oikawa Tooru.

Thoughts: Harry Potter AU where they’re in the same year and aren’t really friends but are also friends

♡♡The Loyalty of A Traitor

Word count: 76k

Thoughts: Oh fuck this was Good. Yakuza boss Oikawa???? Disgraced Iwaizumi??? Do they fall in love (again)?

and suddenly, we were traitors

Word count: 17k

Summary: "sorry, it's just... you’ve been amazingly kind to me these past few days. ...but i'm still not sure who you are.”

Thoughts: The amnesia fic this fandom needed

Trial by Fire

Word count: 78k

Summary: (lawyer!AU - in which Iwaizumi loves his objections, Oikawa is beautiful, and they have more chemistry than two opposing attorneys probably should.)

Thoughts: Hot

dear diary, i met a boy

Word count: 15k

Thoughts: Model Oikawa and salaryman Iwaizumi meet and try to make it work

on shipwreck shore

Word count: 8k

Summary: “I’m going to murder you in cold blood and feed you to the basilisks,” Iwaizumi says conversationally.“You can’t do that, I’m your boss,” Oikawa sings, positively sparkling. “Also we’re partners, which means,” he points at Iwaizumi and leans in, “you’re stuck with me.”

Thoughts: Detectives but they’re actually funny

♡Lockdown

Word count: 72k

Thoughts: Orange is the New Black AU!!! Im a sl*t for tatted Iwaizumi

an allegory of all the things we could’ve been

Word count: 16k

Thoughts: Reincarnation AU throughout the timelines. A good soft read that leaves you sort of empty

Angst

Timeless (We Have 30 Days)

Word count: 12k

Summary: Or AU where you're branded 50 days before you die. But Oikawa doesn't tell anyone so now there's only 30 days left.

Thoughts: Ahhhhhhhhh tears

the weight of water

Word count: 6k

Thoughts: Death fic

open when

Word count: 1k

Summary: Iwaizumi knew it was coming, but it still hurt. It still hurt when he opens one letter and drowns it in the tears he cannot keep at bay.

Thoughts: It takes only 1.6k words to make me cry

Canon Compliant/Coming-Of-Age

♡♡i sing the body electric

Word count: 8k

Summary: It was never part of the plan, falling in love with his best friend, but then again, most things in Iwaizumi’s life that involve Oikawa rarely unfold the way he thinks they will.

Thoughts: A beautifully introspective piece told from Iwaizumi’s point of view. It’s wholly intimate and it toes along the lines of pining and soft angst. It’s told in snippets from their lives growing up together.

♡we can do better than that

Word count: 16k

Summary: Oikawa and Iwaizumi go on a road trip during the summer after their high school graduation. It doesn't go as expected, but maybe that's not such a bad thing after all.

Thoughts: There’s a lot of character analysis and it takes a step away from the casual banter they’re always portrayed to have and focuses on the intricacies of their relationship. The tone is almost a little more melancholy. (also they have to share a bed! trope)

♡when it starts to rain, they go inside

Word count: 33k

Summary: “Where?” starts Iwaizumi.“My parent’s old lakehouse, silly, didn’t you hear me the first time?”OR: Oikawa takes Iwaizumi to his lakehouse for two weeks, post-graduation.

Thoughts: Oh This Is It IwaOi stans. This fic really solidified my own headcanon for Oikawa (spoiler alert, OP isn’t too fond of Oikawa but she fleshes out his character and his idiosyncrasies so well that you can’t help but be drawn into all of his imperfection) and this fic respects Iwaizumi as well. It has absolutely great characterization and the fic ends on an ambiguous note.

to be first, to be best

Word count: 26k

Summary: Hajime is apparently something of a masochist, and as he stares down at the tie-dyed AREA51 T-shirt in his hands, he thinks “I’m totally in love with this asshole, aren't I?”

Thoughts: College roommates trying to navigate having feelings for each other while also dating others and not realizing that they’re jealous? A cult favorite.

♡things that change, things that stay the same

Word count: 8k

Summary: Oikawa realizes he's in love with his best friend; it sucks for a while. (But only a while.)

Thoughts: Ahh a slow burn featuring daily moments between Oikawa and Iwaizumi, and Oikawa starts to notice the little things. This was a cute read because Oikawa just comes off as wonderfully earnest. My first Iwaoi fic! And a great one because it really set the standard to how I interpreted their relationship.

it’s better than words

Word count: 3k

Summary: [ or : oikawa makes iwaizumi participate in three bonding activities for new friends, and iwaizumi just wants to know why oikawa's being so weird about this]

Thoughts: Soft pining, fluff, banter, and whispered confessions. This fic really nailed the banter of high school students really well.

♡shiver

Word count: 16k

Summary: Oikawa was always the brave one. Hajime just followed two paces behind.

Thoughts: Oikawa falls first and but Iwaizumi realizes his feelings later on! So soft, so slow burn, so much pining. We get to see their relationship through Iwaizumi’s eyes and actually read him analyze his own feelings.

♡we shine like diamonds

Word count: 26k

Summary: "You know Abe-kun from class?" they snicker, hands cupped around their mouths like they're passing along a filthy secret. "I hear his older brother is... gay."

Thoughts: Character analysis, homophobia, and coming of age makes a good and angsty iwaoi fic

terrarium

Word count: 11k

Summary: At this point, is he really happy with just staying best friends forever? Will he be writing journals and collecting rocks forever (he will, he knows, but that is aside from the point)?

Thoughts: Oikawa has a terrarium and names all of the rocks he puts in (that Iwaizumi gave him) “Iwa-chan #_”

Chasing Paper Suns

Word count: 10k

Summary: Post-high school, Oikawa makes it to the national volleyball team but Iwaizumi doesn't. The next three years become an exercise in growing up without growing apart.

Thoughts: This was pretty sad tbh. Of what it means to grow up together and then suddenly having to adjust to living without each other’s presence.

with every second that you could give

Word count: 9k

Summary: The journey of Iwaizumi and Oikawa going for gold.

Thoughts: Of growing up together, making decisions for each other, and wanting to be together

Only the jellyfish know

Word count: 6k

Summary: Their third and final year at Aoba Jousai has come to an end, and the guys decide to go to the beach the day after graduation.That day, the ocean water is salty, the watermelon is sweet, and the people are sweeter.

Thoughts: Established relationship

Smut

strange.

Word count: 1k

Summary: "god, i fucking hate you."oikawa smiles, cause he knows it's not true. he knows iwaizumi loves him, knows iwaizumi adores him. but he plays along."i hate you too,"

Thoughts: It’s hot

Say My Name

Word count: 2k

Summary: “Hey, have you ever tried saying my first name?” Iwaizumi blurts, and the thought jumps out of his subconscious only after he's posed the question.

Thoughts:

No Touching Allowed

Word count: 10k

Summary: “You’ve got one rule,” Iwaizumi winks at him.

Thoughts: ExoticDancer!Iwaizumi and stressed out/repressed businessman Oikawa also an AU.

Honorable Mentions

things wikipedia doesn’t tell you

pillow

Phone Home

Share my life, it’s yours to keep

in progress to you

no sleep in the city

The PDA jar

Kissmarked

#iwaoi #oikawa tooru #oikawa #iwaizumi #iwaizumi hajime #haikyuu!!#haikyuu #hq!!#hq fic rec #haikyuu fic #haikyuu fanfiction #id ask that u guys pls reblog if u can so more people can enjoy :') rly there are some Underrated works #and im surprised bc it looks like iwaoi is the most popular pairing in hq rn with the most fics #and there are iwaoi fics being uploaded like everyday #some of my favs were published in 2020 too

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spookyboogie3 · 4 years

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MY FAVORITE AH MOMENTS W/O R*an H*yw**d

Also keep in mind some of these moments i picked Bitch Face r*an may have been present for but this aint about his stupid ass.

The straw bit on Off Topic

Fiona and Trevor’s “Look at us” “Look at us” “Look at us” in TTT

Drunk Jeremy inhaling helium, followed by Jack and Trevor on Off Topic

“Krusty KrAYAYAB!!!” TTT

Jeremy trying to slam his face through a table, followed by Michael doing the same thing

“my god…… the munchdew” “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” Minecraft: Skyfactory

Actually all of Simple Farmer Geoff from Skyfactory

Whatever those sounds were that Jack was making in the beginning of GTA video

Alfredo screaming as he continues to fall down a steep tube in a GTA race

DESTROYING THEIR OFFICE DEAR LORD

“How did he drown though?” “UNDERWATER, MATT!”

Anytime Fiona starts to RAGE in TTT (bonus if others join in)

The time Gav was the phantom in TTT and he kept dying and being brought back and Jack spitting water and then trying to catch it

Alfredo’s Magoo moments in Minecraft

Geoff laughing in the background of a video hes not in

Lindsay fucking around with Chef Mike on Harecore Minigolf

Lindsay fucking around in general

Gavin and Fiona playing Animal Crossing and laughing at the stupidest shit

The Fish Tempura incident on Wheel of Fortune

Lindsay’s reasoning for why her and Michael should have 4 kids

Geoff’s fucking ad reads (my favorite is 23&Me)

The whole thing during Push the Button where everyone especially Michael gets mad at Fiona because she said the best candy to get while trick or treating was lollipops

Matt’s fucking desk in the corner of the room

Anytime Millie is in a video

Everyone falling off the pink ladder during TTT and dying repeatedly because of it

Alfredo “the two-time champ” Diaz dying very early in YDYD 3

Gavin and Michael fucking up almost every game they play on Play Pals

RAY OR NO and then RAY OR NAY on Off Topic

Reddit Roasts Geoff

Gavin asking if someone could kill 20 cows with their bare hands and the proceeding so say he could rip out a cow’s veins by reaching into its neck

Ify’s narration during Let’s Roll Ave Caesar

The internet losing its shit when Jeremy shaved his head years ago

“We need a knife” Gavin comes back with a hammer

Griffin chain sawing the Off Topic table up

“How do I put the boat in the water??” “Right click you animal”

As of 2020, 8 years of playing Minecraft, certain people still do not know how to play the basics of this fucking game.

Honestly it took over 200 episodes for some of them to figure out how the compass worked. You know after they decided that the sun was setting in the wrong direction. (this was in 2016??)

Flynt coal still is a joke they make

So is Day 2

Whatever happened in that GTA lets play where someone called a mugger or a hit on someone and the game glitched and 50 guys showed up and lined up on the street below from where they were playing

Anytime Gavin gets mugged, it’s an old running gag but it’s a classic

The time a mugger fucking started driving the fire truck away after mugging Gavin with Michael and Jeremy still in the truck thinking the other is driving and it takes them like 2 minutes to realize what happened while Gavin’s yelling “come back”

They got a water jug and immediately started water boarding each other

“It pinged and went dingle”

“Hey Trey-Boi” “Hey Gay-Boi” Immediately realizes what he has said

Jeremy’s website puns

(OLD) Ray jerking off in the corner during a let’s play

(OLD) the world in Minecraft never loading and everyone screaming about as Geoff says its fine for him

Jeremy’s “I AM MONSTER TRUCK”

Jack taking AH to Disney……in Minecraft

On Twitter, Gavin asked about recommendations for a computer mouse and Fiona starts sending him pictures of actual mice.

“Its not ghey, if its on the moon”

Literally anything Fiona does as Po

Jeremy saying the heterosexual flag is boring

UNO THE MOVIE!

Geoff fucking cackling the whole time.

“here’s looking at you kid”

the video was almost 3 hours long

“you know what my favorite color is? blue” “oh really? You know what my favorite hand is? Yours

They all want it to end but no one wants to lose and so they fuck each other and that prolongs the game. Also they put on more rules, so they just keep getting more cards if they don’t have a card to match the previous

Alfredo saying he won’t participate in ghost hunter because he knows what happens to people of color in horror movies

Fiona walking in on Off Topic with a protein shake and Gavin asks if shes drinking milk and she says without missing a beat “ah no that’s cum” and everyone laughed not expecting the answer

(OLD) “SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER” *falls in hole*

(OLD) Ray and Gav running in a panel dressed as X-Ray and Vav and Ray running the whole way around the room before he got to the stage

Duck taping Jeremy to the wall

(OLD) All of Minecraft Episode 3 Plan G (This was the very first AH video I watch and why I know who they are)

Geoff and Gav creating Achievement City and giving everyone houses just to prank Jack into burning house down with lava.

Ray’s house is a dirt block with no furniture and single torch

Geoff’s giant ass house next to Ray’s tiny house

Jack tries to destroy everything with lava throughout the episode

“lets be honest, I realistically didn’t lose anything”

Michael stealing art from Gav’s house “NOO! I want nice things”

The sign to Michael’s says “Awaiting Approval, Awaiting Approval, Awaiting Approval” he runs into house and say “I’m home”

Ray also steals this sign at some point

Plan G – The failsafe.

“Oh whats this? Is this a button? Whats this? (pushes button) Yeah it was a button”

“Did you push the button?”

“Yeah”

“okay”

“wh-what does it do?”

“uh…”

Cue Achievement City beginning to explode as Michael starts screaming

Rays reaction “NO, MY SHITTY HOUSE JUST GOT EVEN SHITTIER!”

Not something funny but something VERY IMPORTANT. AH admitting that they all fucked up and how shitty their behavior was when dealing with harassment in the fanbase. People were racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic, and just downright horrible to a lot of the employees at RT and AH. This came up after Mica Burton left the company and talked about it publicly and how nothing was done about it. Fiona who also experiences these same things, along with Lindsay and other employees, but Fiona took the charge on the Off Topic talking about people can’t continue to get away with that behavior. She got to sound off her feelings to a group of white men who all respected her and LISTENED to what was saying and how she felt. She cried; Geoff cried. They all want to do more, so this doesn’t happen in the future and they’re not tolerating the racist and horrible comments. AH taking a mature moment to talk about how they failed to stop these comments and Geoff was right when he said the company has a long way to go.

Outside of AH each member has more to them than just all of the comedy and laughs and dumb shit they do

Geoff helped found Roosterteeth and Achievement Hunter. He has a beautiful daughter in Millie who is awesome in her own right. He’s a recovering alcoholic. Currently doing F**k Face podcasts. Was in the fucking army. Takes accountability for every mistake he makes.

Jack also helped start Achievement Hunter. He does so much work for charity. His twitter is full of things to help people go vote. He’s like the dad to AH, especially Fiona. He’s happily married to his wife Caiti.

Michael was an electrician and has a lot of handy man experience. He made a few videos online about him raging at games and that got the attention of RT. He’s currently married to Lindsay who he met because of RT. They have two kids together.

Gavin is an expert at high speed filmmaking and know how use and edit footage from a slow-motion camera. He has worked on actual films. One of the creators of the Slow Mo Guys. Worked his ass off to get to work for RT. Currently dating model and cosplayer Meg Turney

Lindsay flips between being the mom of the group and a complete chaos queen and we all love her for it. She started as an editor for the RT podcast and then AH stuff. She is an incredible voice actor, most known for Ruby Rose (RWBY), Space Kid (Camp Camp), Hilda (Xray & Vav) just to name a few. She also has a degree in finance

Jeremy started as a fan who made videos on the community page. He took over Ray’s place after Ray left to do Twitch full time. He is a self-published author and a skilled rapper and singer. He’s currently married to his wife, Kat.

Matt also started as a fan making videos on the community page. He actually interacted and made stuff for the guys in really early Minecraft episodes. Seriously this guy is like king of Minecraft. He has a degree in electrical engineering. He also has pretty decent singing voice.

Trevor is THE BOSS. Has a degree in aero-space engineering and is getting paid to babysit AH. Currently dating Barbara Dunkelman, RTs queen of puns.

Alfredo worked at IGN before RT and is a well-known streamer. He is the best when it comes to first person shooter games. He and Trevor look so similar.

Fiona. Po. Her majesty. Host of This Just Internet. A Twitch streamer. Baby of the bunch. Grew up in Europe. Her and Gav act like a pair of siblings. She has stated and showed time and time again she will fight for people to have safe spaces for anyone who needs them.

Ify, our new guy. He is wonderful and I want to stay forever. He’s a comedian, a writer, and an actor. Co hosts F-ing Around with Fiona. Has his own film podcast, Who Shot Ya? I look forward to more content with him in it, cause everything he’s been in so far has been great.

Were all hurting but well make it through this

We have all these wonderful moments and a lot more that I didn’t list and this incredible team of personalities with their own accomplishments and achievements. Not to mention old team members who were also great additions and the entire crew behind the scenes editing and making videos look the best that they can.

Here’s to Achievement Hunter and to this community. We need to be here for each other in times like these.

@theonyxranger gave me the idea for this based on their own post they made about the fans giving their favorite moments without bitch face and there were just too many. Oop.

#Achievement Hunter #Jack Pattillo #Gavin Free #geoff ramsey #michael jones #lindsay jones #alfredo diaz #trevor collins #fiona nova #jeremy dooley #matt bragg #ify nwadiwe #roosterteeth #yes im calling him bitch face now

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x--daughters-of-darkness--x · 3 years

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Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante: "Men have been taught by society that they are superior to us"

Named after a paranormal device used to contact ghosts, Canadian post-metalcore trio Spiritbox have been hailed by fans and critics alike as one of the best new bands to watch in 2021. Arriving on the scene back in 2017, Spiritbox found themselves spiralling into greater success following the release of their 2020 single Holy Roller – its Midsommar-style music video has over 2 million views and counting.

Now signed to Rise Records, Spiritbox are in the midst of recording their highly-anticipated debut album, and vocalist Courtney LaPlante has started a brand new podcast Good For A Girl. The podcast is an inside look at the realities and challenges of being a woman in the music industry, with a sharp focus on the male-dominated world that is the metal scene. LaPlante was in metal band Iwrestledabearonce before starting Spiritbox, and on the podcast she speaks to other women who are claiming their space within the business, like musicians, Radio DJs, record executives and more.

In conversation with the Spiritbox leader, we learn about her industry life lessons, her experience with ultra-sexist record labels, and the state of the band's upcoming new record.

When and why did you come up with the idea for the Good For A Girl podcast?

“I came up with it because I was trying to figure out something to offer our patrons on our Patreon page. It’s also an excuse for me to hang out with other women, as I live on an island in Canada so I haven’t really come across many women in the industry, and I haven’t on my travels either. It was a way for me to learn from them and I got such a great reaction from our patrons too. Plus, every musician in the industry during the pandemic has made a podcast. I didn’t even think of doing it as I didn’t wanna clog up the radio waves, but then I thought about it more, and realised that one like this was missing.

“It’s an escapism thing, too. I thought that it would be important for other people, not just women, to listen to us and humanise us. I think people forget that women are 50 percent of the population of the world, so there’s not really an excuse to be so out of touch with us being actual, real, multi-faceted people.”

Is this why Good For A Girl is important to you?

“Yes because that’s all of us. It’s a thing [as women] we all hear. Like, ‘Yeah you’re good...for a girl.’ The only people that we put in a different class are children. Like, ‘He’s a really good guitar player for a 5 year old’.”

Working in the music industry, what would you say has been the most important thing you’ve learnt and what has been the biggest surprise?

“I’ve biggest thing I’ve learnt is to really advocate for yourself and to not be so caught up in being worried about pleasing people. Because honestly when it comes down to it, if it’s not an authentic thing and you’re just trying to make sure everyone’s getting along, it always bites you in the ass in the end. I’d much rather someone think I’m a bitch and not want to work with me, rather than me work with them under a condition that I’m not really doing what I want to do.

“And a big surprise for me has been the amount of amazing women behind the scenes. That there’s all these women working out there that are there for me, that I didn’t even know existed.”

In metal especially, there usually seems to be a community of individuals who tend to react negatively to anything they define as “woke”, like women-led, political, etc. What has been the reaction to the podcast so far, and have you experienced any of this backlash?

“A little bit, but that’s what is so interesting about it. Sometimes you get so worked up about people being negative towards what you’re doing, or being frustrated because they’re clearly not understanding what you’re saying. Then you look at it and it’s the same people that are the loudest, so it’s really not that many people. I’ll go through and think, ‘Look at these mean comments’, and then I’ll be like, wait a second, this the same three guys, commenting the same stuff over and over.

“And then the day before International Women’s Day, I wrote a piece for Kerrang!, and it’s so ironic if you read it, because the article is basically me just explaining some of my negative experiences. The article is not really speaking to men, it's speaking to other women, specifically white women about how we need to actually hold ourselves accountable to have all women to be a part of feminism, and not just post infographics on our Instagram to make us feel woke and superior. We have to actually protect each other and have some intersectionality in our feminism. But the comments are literally just guys saying that I’m making up my experiences. They are there to invalidate my experiences, and it’s so ironic because there are no women in there going, ‘Wait a second, don’t paint all women the same way, we aren’t all a bunch of performative-wokeness ladies!'"

Would you say it's similar to being classed as a “female-fronted” band, as opposed to being known for your genre?

“Yeah, it’s so bizarre. And also, there’s the other side to it, the swing of the pendulum is that guys will think they are complimenting you by saying, ‘I hate all female metal vocalists they are all horrible and they suck, but you’re good. All the other ones are all slutty whores, but I like that you wear a turtleneck.’ I’m literally butt naked in three of our music videos. Just because you chose not to sexualise me in that capacity, doesn’t mean that I’m not a sexual being.

“And it’s so interesting because if I am doing what I want, and maybe another time I dress more revealing because I think that’s fucking awesome, then those people are gonna feel betrayed in some way because through seeing you like a flat one-dimensional being, they think you can’t be both.

“But I think we can all be both professional and sexy. Just like a guy can be very responsible and non-sexual and then when he chooses to be objectified he can take his shirt off and choose whether to be objectified or not, where he feels comfortable.”

What are you aiming to change through your work on your podcast, if anything?

“I want to change the music industry and hold all these people accountable that have been gatekeeping it. Every success that a metal band has helps the rest of us. The women, or those who identify as women, or even non-binary people who are moving forward and succeeding helps all of us because it makes our voice bigger. I just want to keep growing and dominating so I can start to make a change from the inside.

“Like when we were going around to labels, there were so many labels that were so sexist, and they didn't even realise they were being sexist because they don’t understand it. So it feels so great to prove all those record labels wrong, and then actually get to revisit working with them and tell them why I chose not to work with them. Because worse case scenario it’ll make me feel I got to be like ‘fuck you’, and then best case scenario it helps change their behaviour."

What happened at those record labels?

“One time when we were shopping the band around two years ago, this label felt completely comfortable in saying, ‘Oh you know what, this band is cool but we already signed a girl metal band and it didn’t do very well.’ And I was like, ‘You also signed a 100 shitty guy metal bands that didn’t do very well, are you gonna not sign any more bands with men in them?’

“My manager said to me, ‘You know this is great, these people are making themselves loud and clear to us, and we know that we never need to entertain working with them. I’m happy they are being vocally misogynistic and sexist because we don’t have to waste our time.’”

In your first episode of the podcast you said men usually look at women in bands as “gimmicks”. What needs to change to get men to stop viewing women in this way?

“I think one of the things that need to change is that we just need metal to become a more diverse group of listeners. I was watching an old Metallica concert, and I looked out, it was during the Black album phase, and half the crowd was women. And if you look at heavy music, if you look at Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, half the crowd is women. And I feel like metal, if I’m just going off my own listenership, the 50 percent has really moved away from women and metal has become a very monolithic group of listeners. It’s straight white men. And there’s nothing wrong with those people listening to it, but I always feel that when a music genre has a very narrow scope of listeners, it usually has lasting problems on the genre for its staying power, because I don’t think you can really succeed in making lasting music if you’re not creating it for all different types of people.

“But I think it’s changing. I think metal is becoming more diverse and therefore the genre itself will become better and stronger, because I think that diversity creates better art. I really truly believe that, so I think that the pendulum is swinging back. Because that was the heyday of metal music; there were more people that listened to it. I feel now it's lost its way sometimes, but I think it's finding it again. I think metal really is becoming more powerful and good.

“That’s a long winded way of explaining why we’re looked at as a gimmick, but basically it’s because there's not a lot of us. And for some reason a lot of people only see the identity first when they see someone who looks different to them.”

You also mention that there’s a pattern of men or “haters” putting women down through belittling them or patronising them, etc. What do you think is the intention behind this?

“I think the reason why they do that is because men have been taught by society that they are superior to us, and they don’t really have a lot of evidence to dispute that because that's what most of us have been brought up thinking. And I think that as a musician, especially as a lead singer, you are like the ringleader, you are the commander in chief of the whole show, and that's generally a masculine trait, at least that’s what we’re taught.

“My experiences are just like everyone’s else's, and when people are like, ‘What's it like? [being a woman]’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t know, it’s the same as your job or any job, there’s a lot of stuff that's annoying and some stuff that's actually physically dangerous, and you’re actually in danger. And it frustrates me so much when people are surprised at that like, ‘Oh really? I didn’t know that you had been assaulted by a guy?’ and I’m like, ‘Have you ever met a human woman? Literally all of us have been.’ The math isn’t added up guys, all of us have had something bad happen to us but somehow none of you have done it.

“If I found that my whole demographic was doing some horrible thing, my first thought would not be, ‘Well, I don’t do it’, I’d be like, ‘Yeah, we gotta figure this shit out.’ I think it’s getting better though, I think not my generation but the next one, Gen Z, they are more humanist, I think they don’t see categories of people as much, they see you as human and then your sub category.”

So what can we expect in your later episodes of the podcast?

“Well in my first couple of episodes I’m talking to people that are more like myself, frontwomen, such as Caity [Babbs from SiriusXM] who is an amazing radio host and like a leader. I talked to Booka [Nile] from Make Them Suffer, who’s very much in front of the scene. And soon I’ll be talking to my friend Chaney [Crabb] from the band Entheos.

“The last couple episodes of what I’ll be putting out from this season will feature the people behind the scenes who are actually running everything. Those are the people that I’m the most fascinated by because it’s not really my experience. I think of them as the faceless puppet masters controlling everything. I’m learning so much from these women who are so badass, they’re like who I want to be someday with the power that they have and the integrity. They trust their intuition so much because that's their job.”

And lastly, can you give any hints on what the new Spiritbox record sounds like, what state it’s in and what people should expect?

“We’ve done our album, we’re done physically tracking it. Now we’re about to get into the monotony of mixing it, but I can’t believe it. This is the first time I’ve said it out loud. I’ve only listened to it fully a couple times as of now, but at least till we have all the track placement, you can expect to get pummelled with full anger and sadness. Like over and over.

“I’ve got to figure out the tracklisting because it's too much, it's too intense, you need breathing room in an album. This is a product of something that we didn’t want to have two years to develop, but we got about a good year almost 2 years, so the songs feel very lived in. They feel very familiar because we’ve been working on them for so long. So Constance and Holy Roller are the two singles that we put out in 2020, which we consider the outliers of the album, and the rest is everything in between that. I told someone else it’ll be like you’re in the mosh pit but crying. Crying in the mosh pit.”

Spiritbox’s debut album is due for release this year via Rise Records. The first three episodes of the Good For A Girl podcast are available now.

#Courtney LaPlante #Spiritbox #2021 interviews

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