#let me be so clear here if this allegations are true then i am absolutely disgusted and cannot even fathom what the fuck is happening

[lebrookestore]

oh girl what the fuck

#so....i have investigated to the best of my abilities and i am still thoroughly lost so thats that #but what?? literally so much transpired ok so firstly soobin flipped seunghan off with his toes like what.... #SEUNGHAN WAS KICKED OUT OF RIIZE FOR SMOKING..... R U KIDDING ME LMFAO THATS SO????? #PLEASE he was doing normal dumb teenager things u should see the people in my college and literally every other college here #why do people drag any sort of celebrity for making normal human decisions #like yes it isn't good for you no shit it isn't but im sure he's mentally sane enough to know that #people who smoke are AWARE of the fact its not good for them trust me i have friends who are well aware #the consequences are on every single pack like they know #bro got kicked out for something literally millions of other people do like what kpoppies are insane and sm is stupid #secondly....i don't even know how to address the made in abyss scandal like it seems so messy what even #let me be so clear here if this allegations are true then i am absolutely disgusted and cannot even fathom what the fuck is happening #like woozi taeyong everyone what #but from what i have seen... and PLEASE DO NOT MISTAKE THIS AS ME DEFENDING ANYONE I AM SIMPLY STATING WHAT I HAVE SEEN ON TWITTER DOT COM #the copy that taeyong had of that manga was the censored version #does this help no not really but i don't really know enough about this situation i will look into it as much as i can i just have no TIME #ive also seen that all of them have been cleared??? so thats also something we should take into consideration i suppose #and the manga/anime is advertised as gore/horror etc ofc this does not excuse its contents literally what the fuck is that author on #but i have to state how entirely hypocritical it is to judge someone based off the media they consume because i know damn well #that a lot of people consume very fucked up content like dark fiction is a thing have yall seen the ya novels nowadays #that does not make the person who consumes it condone it...bc its fiction #at the end of the day these are men i dont trust them as delusional as i may portray myself on this hellsite #also i saw a tweet ab someone on twitter saying bc taeyong reads beserk and that is also a manga with incredibly dark themes he must be #fucked up #firstly a lot of manga/anime have dark themes but thats not the point #a LOT of people around the world have read that manga (im literally not talking ab taeyong here i promise) #literally people i know have #they KNOW how fucked up it is they dont recommend it to anyone and literally say read it at your own risk its fucked up #it does not mean they directly condone the shit that goes on in the manga they have quite the opposite stance actually #(beserk is also the nunber 1 rated manga of all time i know this my ex doesn't shut up ab it and neither does one of my best friends) #anyway i dont know much about this yet so i will look into it more; had no idea what was happening until five mins ago but literally wtf ma

[emilywhere]

i think what’s most stunning to me about a league of their own is that i’ve never seen these stories - my story, our beautiful queer stories - in media like this before. it’s an indictment of our media ecosystem (and yes, a consequence of choices i make in what i read or watch or listen to) and something that has absolutely rocked me to my core. 

i turn 30 this year, and i’ve never seen characters more closely capture my own lived experience with gender and sexuality. the pressures of the world the wishes we didn’t exist. the joy of being a part of a team and a part of a community that understands you. the pain of being rejected by family and society. the challenges of not having a “possibility model” and needing to chart my own path with little to no guidance from those who came before me because they were forced into invisibility, or worse. the incredible reality that just 80 years after these people were living their lives, the “entirely different world” greta mentions is here -- i’m queer, genderqueer, and have an almost 2 year old -- but still so far away -- my family was heckled and called “fucking f*****s” by a group of angry men down the street from our home in this alleged bucolic gay haven of suburban vermont just a few months ago.

i heard an interview where co-creator will graham talked about this show holding up mirrors (plural) for us to see elements of our own story in, and it could not be a more accurate description. while no one character matches my story, i think it’s better because of that. because pieces of our story are universal, but there is no single truth of what it means to be queer. i am amazed that a show about an era so far away can feel so true to my life today, but it is also so clear to me how it’s possible. not because it was made with the benefit of modernity and hindsight, but because to be queer is to grow in more beautiful ways because of and despite the pressure we face at every turn when we try to be a more true version of ourselves. and every time you think the show is done introducing queer people, queer lives, queer stories, queer spaces -- they drop another incredible set of nuanced, complex, beautiful, pure queerness, not just in the gender or sexuality way but in the post-modern queer theory kind of way. it’s genuinely stunning to bear witness to.

and then there is the absolute resistance to let this be a story of white saviorship. because white women and queer folks absolutely did not show up for Black women and queer folks then, and rarely do now. certainly not in the kind of genuinely impactful systemic ways that we need to. and i am glad that the writers never took the easy path when creating this show, instead pushing white viewers to reflect on what allyship actually means, and how often we fail communities of color and Black communities especially.

i am so grateful for this show. i have so many thoughts that i cannot begin to capture. but those are some thoughts for tonight.

#aloto #aloto 2022 #a league of their own #a league of their own series #a league of their own 2022

[linklethehistorian]

Total Eclipse (1995) — A Movie Review by linklethehistorian (Post 3/4)

(Continuation of review placed under the cut for length and spoilers; proceed at your own risk.)

The Bad

Casting & Acting

I honestly can’t think of anything much ‘bad’ to say in this section that isn’t completely nitpicking; as I mentioned in the previous section, I actually think that on the whole, the cast was very well chosen and the skill level of the main actors is stellar. Even in regards to more minor and background characters, I can still only find a few of their performances to be subpar at absolute worst, and I don’t think that’s really anything worth talking about.

I guess if you asked me to go over the entire ensemble with a fine-toothed comb and find something I thought was genuinely off about one of them in any way, I would have to say that, based on the only existing glimpses we have at Mathilde Maute’s true visage through surviving photos, I think Romane Bohringer is far too conventionally attractive by the modern standard to really make for a convincing close physical approximation of the woman she is portraying, but that is truly me splitting straws because she’s too good of an actor to find any major flaws in her performance and I can’t come up with a problem among any of the others, either.

There is one moment I can bring to mind in scene 39 — during which Rimbaud and Verlaine are on a ship headed towards England — that I feel a single line of DiCaprio’s acting felt extraordinarily weak (particularly the moment in which he says “Oh…my God”), but I’m unsure if this is actually the actor’s fault, or that of the director’s for not trying to get another take and just going with that particular cut anyway.

Writing & Script

Alright, well…this section is probably going to be a bit of a difficult and messy one to tackle, unfortunately; you see, the problem I find as I finally sit down to write this section is that much of what really ought to be discussed in this subsection also happens to belong to another — given that a great deal of this film’s issues lie with things intrinsically tied to its notable lack of historical accuracy.

After a great deal of painstaking debating and procrastination by writing out literally every other subsection within “The Bad” except these two, though, I have finally come to what I believe is a reasonable solution: I will use this subsection to talk only about those issues which are the more broad and/or narrative and technical ones, and which are not intrinsically tied to the authenticity of the events and natures being portrayed, and I will use the “Overall Historical Accuracy” subsection to discuss those issues which are inherently bound to how genuine the ‘facts’ and characterizations within Total Eclipse tend to be.

So, with that settled, I guess let’s get started with my first topic of interest for this area: the script’s occasional inconsistency with its own chosen narrative.

Numerous times within this movie, the writing will initially state a certain ‘fact’ that it seems it would earnestly like its audience to believe, only to sooner or later completely contradict itself through another statement or action — and no, I am not talking about the times where it is intentionally using some form of disconnect between a character’s words and their actions to point out their hypocrisy; that definitely is something that is done throughout Total Eclipse and done very well, but those instances are always very clear in their purpose and in no way similar to the obvious slip-ups and oversights to which I refer here.

For instance, in the very first scene ever shown to us, there is a voiceover from Paul Verlaine quoting a certain part of A Season in Hell’s ‘The Infernal Spouse’ — a poem which, I remind you, was widely believed to be written from the perspective of Paul about Rimbaud — in order to tell us of the alleged reasoning behind his fascination with the young poet that we see on screen; even as we see the teen take a huge, obnoxious bite of an apple as he stares out a window, and then eventually strangely decides to leap mid-trip from the train he had boarded into a river far below, Verlaine assures us through his monologue of all of Arthur’s best and most redeemable qualities: his gentleness, his grace, his kindness and innocence — something that we essentially never get to actually see, whether in this scene itself, or the entire movie as a whole.

Yep, that’s right; if you thought that this line of dialogue would have any value whatsoever to the rest of the contents of this cinematic ‘masterpiece’, or even come into play at any point at all, you’d be wrong, because there is absolutely no part of Total Eclipse where we see this side of Rimbaud ever — or are even given any reason to believe that it exists, for that matter. (Unless, of course, you intend to count the two few-second long, dialogue-less moments in which he silently drops a few coins into the hand of a man on crutches in an alleyway, emotionlessly, to which the man barely reacts (in the third scene), or the time in which he briefly embraces and kisses Paul when they reach the ocean (in the thirty-first scene), but I would personally consider that to be something of a stretch.)

Indeed, if this movie was attempting to try out the inversion of the saying ‘show, don’t tell’, and prove to its viewers in doing so that such tactics really can work effectively in storytelling, then the results of that experiment backfired spectacularly in everyone’s faces, and only served to prove precisely why moves like that are generally considered a terrible choice in the first place. 

…And if it wasn’t meaning to do anything of the sort, then I would strongly suggest to the creator(s) of the script that from now on they either learn to refrain from choosing quotes that directly conflict with their preferred narrative, or actually include some form of meaningful content that backs up the statement within the material they decided to use.

As for other examples of general writing and plot inconsistencies besides this, we can most certainly take a look at one particular line in scene 40, where Arthur says to Paul that he had chosen him as a partner in his creative endeavors for a reason, for although Rimbaud himself always knew what he wanted to say, Verlaine knew how to say it — and as such, he was able to learn a lot from him during their time together. 

This line in and of itself would be all well and good, if it didn’t directly contradict another line of dialogue from much earlier in the film (scene 5, to be exact), where it is established firmly into this movie’s interpretation of Rimbaud’s character that he does not believe that poets can learn from each other unless they are bad poets, and that he does not think himself to be a bad poet.

If, as a matter of fact, this somehow is meant to be an attempt at pointing out some form of hypocrisy in the younger poet like they have done with his elder lover countless times before, then it is, quite frankly, a piss-poor one; after all, unlike in all of the other cases surrounding Paul, where the blunt teenager lost no time in calling out his lies and stating things for what they really were, Rimbaud is strangely never confronted about or even looked at a teeny bit differently by his partner for this conflicting statement at all — and this has nothing to do with their natures simply being different, as the Parisian author is much more than willing to accuse him of other things later on with far less proof, so the only truly logical conclusion one can come to about this scene is that the writers merely forgot they had ever established differently in the first place, and never checked back thoroughly enough to find out.

Likewise, in what feels like potentially a similar — yet also somehow nearly opposite — moment of incompetence, some of Verlaine’s dialogue in one of the final scenes of the movie (scene 62, specifically) references Arthur being at fault for Paul’s arrest, which, although very historically accurate, is neither established nor even remotely implied by this film at any point throughout it; as a matter of fact, given that the actual event that lead to Verlaine’s apprehension by the police was entirely omitted by Total Eclipse (more on this later) and replaced with someone barging into their hotel room shortly after Paul shot Rimbaud’s hand, anyone not already familiar with their true life story would be made to believe quite the opposite.

As such, the only way that this statement can possibly not be taken as a complete contradiction to the plot is if you choose to ignore all of the context surrounding it and twist the meaning to something less literal — such as that the older poet is saying it is his paramour’s fault that he ended up in jail because the boy tried to leave in the first place, thus “forcing” Verlaine into shooting him, or because he for some reason sees Arthur as the sole one to blame for the fact they were ever romantically involved to begin with, and their involvement was what indirectly lead to the arrest. Granted, although these may be absurd claims for anyone to try to make in his position, I suppose it really wouldn’t be beyond someone like Paul to do it anyway, but I do think that working this hard to wave off what is very clearly a major inconsistency in the writing and intended flow of the story is a little bit more pardoning than the writers deserve to be given.

Sadly, this apparent indecision with the tale’s direction and failure to clean up the loose ends of the abandoned plot elements is something that does not end with this one fumble alone, either, as throughout scenes 29, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 58, and 62, we are constantly presented with what appears to be many different leftover scraps of potential paths they considered taking in regards to the reason why Arthur eventually loses his ability and will to write; the most logical and close to historical accuracy of these — that the teen very simply became more and more jaded, disillusioned, frustrated and depressed throughout the course of his and Paul’s stressful, on-and-off again relationship and gave up completely in the aftermath of the end of it — is unfortunately the one which, although almost seeming to be set up now and again, is pushed down the most in favor of the more abstract and absurd “explanations” that are hinted at, such as Rimbaud constantly forseeing the near-end of his own life in Africa in the far future and having it start to consume him after he sees the boat to said continent while in London, and the most boring of all excuses, that it was something inexplicable that “just happened” for no particular rhyme or reason despite any of these other surrounding factors giving us every reason to believe that there was, in fact, a cause behind his fading inspiration and change of behavior.

Perhaps my ‘favorite’ scene of all in regards to this is the ridiculous one in which, shortly after having stated that he considered putting his affair partner in a position where he would literally be sent to jail just so that he himself could possibly eventually re-unite with Mathilde, Verlaine, in a moment of utter obliviousness to his own bullshit, comments that Arthur is no longer acting the same way that he used to, and asks him what’s wrong, and the script then chooses in spite of the obvious and most likely answer to have the young poet respond that it’s “the writing” that has changed him. Yeah — try and make sense of that one.

The ultimate reason for Rimbaud’s death, too, almost seems to have been something they considered at one point changing in some manner, as I find it odd that they thought it relevant to show and emphasize him getting an injury on his knee while exploring in Africa, coincidentally in the exact same place where he later developed the tumor that would take his life — unless, of course, they somehow mean to imply that the wound lead to it forming, which is, to my admittedly limited understanding of medical knowledge, a pretty farfetched claim, to be honest.

Barring that bizarre logic, I can only really assume that perhaps they may have originally considered having him simply die of some sort of infection, for whatever reason, before they eventually changed their minds and decided to be more historically accurate — or, who knows, maybe they never had any other sorts of plans at all, and rather than being a leftover bit they decided to keep from an earlier version of the script, the injury was just some unrelated sub-plot they intended to have all along; whatever the case, though, I personally think that it was a terrible decision to include it, as it just makes the entire situation a whole lot more confusing, considering the extremely convenient placing of the wound.

Something else that I find rather annoying and disappointing about this film is the way in which it handles Arthur’s brilliance as a creative; yes, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed from some of what I’ve said in previous sections and subsections, if for any reason you approached this film with the hope that it would not lean into the horridly overused “geniuses are all extremely quirky and raving mad” cliché, rest assured that you will be severely disappointed in every way imaginable.

From spending three scenes making sounds like and mimicking dogs and goats, to unzipping and pissing on someone from atop a table with a sword-cane in his hand, there are many wild, out-of-left-field, historically unbacked ‘antics’ which happen throughout Total Eclipse for seemingly no other reason than to paint the teen as a thousand times more insane and over-the-top than he truly was.

Unfortunately, this tendency towards theatrics over truth most often results in not only the dehumanization of Rimbaud (which I will discuss further in the Historical Accuracy section), but also just some very weird, awkward, inhuman, and/or incomprehensible moments as a whole.

I sincerely appreciated the attempt at showing genuine, heartfelt frustration from him in scene 32, after he wakes up to find Paul sneaking out of their shared bed to reunite with his wife, for example, but the way that they have him quickly kind of punch his own hand once in anger somehow honestly feels to me less like a sincere display of strong emotion and more an almost cartoonish moment where one would expect a villain to be saying, “Blast! Foiled again!”

Many of the attempts at quoting his poetry as directly as possible within the character dialogue, too, although perhaps noble in intention, falls to this same fatal issue of creating some very robotic, unnatural-feeling exchanges.

Scene six, for instance, where Arthur and his much older companion debate the general topic and existence of love, quickly becomes very inhuman, as the youth monologues the entirety of his famous “Love…no such thing” quote, pausing to allow Verlaine to speak his rebuttal partway through, but then completely and utterly ignoring what he says to finish the rest in a way that feels very awkward and out of place for any real human interaction — never to address his words for the whole remainder of the scene.

Now, I don’t dislike the inclusion of this quote or the overall concept behind this scene by any means, but it — like many other ‘reference’ scenes and lines throughout the film — would be much better off if the dialogue was instead written in such a manner that the characters were more paraphrasing the things they were giving a strong nod to than directly quoting them nearly word for word, thus leaving a lot more room for the special homages they wished to pay to actually fit and flow with the rest of the conversations around them naturally and comfortably.

Trying to overambitiously cram as many tiny bits and pieces of Arthur’s actual works and sayings into the film even where it does not make sense or is clearly being forced purely for the sake of it — such as distastefully making said poet deliriously ramble off random quotes from the Infernal Spouse on his deathbed, or having him go through an entire cringeworthy interaction with a random dog statue in Mathilde’s family’s home just so he can later say the “dogs are all liberals” line to her father — is just plain embarrassing to watch more than it is pleasing as an Easter Egg within the dialogue.

Perhaps my least favorite example of this is the way that after stabbing Paul’s hand in scene 27, the script then has Arthur state in a dull, cold, monotone voice that “the only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable”, which, although one of my favorite Rimbaud quotes, here just seems to come out of nowhere, and appears to have absolutely no real significance to the rest of the scene, besides that the writers apparently thought it would sound ‘cool’ and ‘edgy’ (and although I will grant them that it does sound edgy, I would sooner consider it terribly cringe-inducing than I would ever call it ‘cool’).

And speaking of their poetry, I sure would like to know what the creators’ obsession was with the Infernal Spouse; I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s actually one of my most beloved Rimbaud pieces that exist, but I think that quoting it — what? — three or four times throughout the movie when so many others don’t get even a single homage (there are really only four or five referenced pieces that I counted in total) does seem a bit like overkill. I do have a theory on why that might be the case, but…well, we’ll get to that later.

It should also probably be noted that, although I am by no means an expert on Verlaine’s poetry (I know a good deal about his life story, even if not quite as much as I do Rimbaud’s, but I have primarily only ever read Rimbaud’s works thus far), I could not spot even one single reference to any of his works in the same vein as is done for his lover — though again, I could be mistaken.

While not necessarily related to much of the above, or even anything else I will be talking about here —  besides perhaps just fitting into the ‘strange’ and ‘unnatural’ interaction theme in general — I also would simply like to say that I find it incredibly awkward that despite Verlaine and Rimbaud’s romantic and intimate involvement throughout pretty much this entire film, only Arthur is ever seen calling Paul by his first name, and never the other way around; in fact, Verlaine never even calls him by his last name at any point, either — an extremely strange writing choice for a film that centers itself around their affair and typically tries to present Paul as the more clingy, familiar, lovey-dovey and sentimental partner, but I suppose at this point we’ve already established that the lead creators of Total Eclipse rather suck at making anything that feels remotely sane or natural.

Even the cuts between scenes and the arrangement of them — all historical inaccuracies completely aside for the time being — often feel very whiplash-inducing, and while some of that is likely the editors to blame (as I explain in greater detail in a later subsection), the fault cannot be placed solely upon their shoulders, for the writers are very clearly a large part of the problem on this front, too.

The editors can certainly make things even worse, yes, through inconsistency and an overall poor exercise of their skills in the precise placement and style of cuts used, as well as sound-mixing and other audio and visual matters, but the authors of a script are ultimately the ones who most typically decide and control how a scene ends and which one comes next, as well as what takes place within it.

As I later state in the Filming & Editing section, there are many moments in this which are extremely hard to follow thanks to the placement of the scenes every bit as much as the editing later done to them; massive leaps in time are made on multiple occasions from one scene to the next, and all with little explanation other than the rare helping of a poorly placed title card of the year and location and, if you’re extremely lucky, a few throwaway, poorly explained lines indicating a vague idea of what had happened in between the two scenes to lead the characters to where they are now — usually not, though.

And some of these larger jumps in time aren’t just extremely hard to keep up with or unclarified in their events, they’re sometimes also emotionally jarring due to the complete, instantaneous mood change that happens between scenes — perhaps the most bizarre and unintentionally, morbidly hilarious of these being the time when the movie cuts from Arthur violently stabbing Paul in the hand in a bar and coldly watching him scream in pain to them being in the middle of having very intense sex in Arthur’s room and then fairly peacefully cuddling up in bed; that was definitely a very…interesting decision to make for the script, to put it politely. Truly, it was a…choice — perhaps even one of the choices ever made.

Additionally, there are many other scenes here that just probably shouldn’t have been included to begin with — not even necessarily because there is any deeply offensive content in any of them, but rather, purely because they don’t seem to serve any logical purpose other than taking up space as a bunch of mindless filler that mostly isn’t even that much fun to watch.

A lot of them are really just quite short, pointless, and (at least in terms of what constitutes the baseline for ‘normal’ content in this film, which isn’t always saying very much) mundane in nature, and leave you feeling as if you’ve walked away with absolutely nothing particularly gained from seeing them, but even the two main examples I can think of that seemed like maybe they were at least trying to establish something vaguely important just…fell completely flat on their faces and left me feeling extremely confused, which is why they ended up in this ‘meaningless’ category from the start.

One of these is scene 41, in which Paul and Arthur have a brief discussion about their greatest fears; one would think, given most of the focus of this scene being placed solely on this part of the conversation, that this little exchange was meant to be something profound and deeply important to their characters, but the reality sadly ends up being much more shallow and befuddling. I mean, perhaps in the eyes of the writer, this was meant to be some grand reveal that deepened both of their characterizations greatly, but the audio is so soft and poor-quality here when it comes to Thewlis’ lines that Verlaine’s answer to his lover’s question is difficult to truly make out, and the only thing that one can seem to make of it (which I discussed earlier in the “Writing & Script” subsection of the previous section) is completely absurd and impossible to take seriously, and as for Rimbaud’s revealed fear — “That other people will see me as I see them” — setting aside the apparent contradiction with the fact that Arthur has never really expressed much care of how others perceive him, although it at first does seem like an interesting statement with a lot of potential for depth if expanded upon and explored, it is unfortunately very quickly thrown away for a subject change the moment it is said, and then never brought up again. 

It is almost as if the script considered for a moment that it might like to explore its characters and add a deeper layer of humanity to them, but then realized that it would require too much care and effort and just decided to toss out some surface level, throwaway lines that people can interpret however they want and leave it at that.

The deeply overdramatic scene 47 is the only other one out of this bunch that I found to maybe have been intended to have some deeper purpose beyond just showing that he had developed writer’s block, given the enigmatic nature of the scene and the apparent ties to that whole strange “foresight into one’s own death” subplot for Arthur, but at the end of the day, I just find it too confusing to make a lot of sense of the rest of the strange elements within it; what exactly is that spillage that suddenly appears out of nowhere to ruin the page he is working on — is it ink? If it is, I don’t know where it came from, and it’s awfully red for that to be the case. Is it blood? That doesn’t really make sense; he doesn’t seem to be visibly injured in the scene. Are they suggesting he’s hallucinating? Is it supposed to be in some way tied to his vision of Africa and the end of his life? Is it meant to be his blood? He didn’t die from anything relating to blood loss, really — although I guess some bone cancers are technically tied to blood. I don’t know. I really just found the whole thing extremely confusing and honestly unnecessary to have as some sort of barely addressed supernatural sub-plot in general.

Maybe the feelings about that last scene is just me, though; maybe some people enjoyed it. All I know is I think it detracts and distracts from the real issues that were actually going on in his life at this point in time.

And lastly for this subsection, while we’re on the subject of things that are way out of touch with reality even within the rest of its own narrative, I’m not at all fond of the way that this movie’s ending was written. Don’t get me wrong — having Arthur’s spirit (which presents itself at the same age as when he and Verlaine were having their affair) visit Paul every night after his death and even come and kiss his hand in broad daylight at the bar after Isabelle leaves is an extremely romantic and happy ending, all things considered, but that is exactly why it is terrible; part of the more intricate details of this I will be saving to discuss in the Overall Historical Accuracy subsection, but even with that and all of the lies thrown into this film to make things look more romantic and forgivable aside for now, the bottom line is that this story should by no means have a happy ending. It absolutely should not end with the implication that because Paul did one decent thing to preserve Arthur’s legacy, then that suddenly erases years of terrible, horridly selfish actions towards both him and Mathilde and means that now he deserves to be loved and respected by — and even find everlasting happiness with — the teenager that he literally tried to murder.

There are a lot of things I would love to say right now in regards to this completely wild and vomit-inducing decision, but since I’m setting all of that aside for the Historical Accuracy subsection, for now I will just have it suffice to say that I think it is absolutely batshit insane.

Costumes & Scenery

Much like with what I stated in the “Casting & Acting” subsection, I don’t really have a lot to say in this category that isn’t praise; the only thing I can truly think of at the moment that I took any issue with in regards to any of this was very simply that I saw no moment throughout any part of this two hour film in which Rimbaud wears his signature bowtie — you know, the unique style he literally invented? 

Yeah, it’s a minor thing, but I’m still kind of peeved about it, to be honest; surely, it wouldn’t have been that hard to achieve.

Music & Sound Effects

My sole complaint here is something that only genuinely happens twice: there’s this particular sharp, brief swell in the music that happens both in the library while Arthur is struggling to write in scene 43 and later when Paul purchases a gun and is loading it at a table along the streets of London in scene 53, which almost mimics what one would expect to hear in a horror film, and thus induces the same expectation of an upcoming jumpscare or something truly horrifying about to happen.

You could perhaps try to make the argument that this is at least fitting for the latter moment, given that Verlaine is about to return to the hotel and shoot his partner, but the prior usage of it in an otherwise relatively uneventful scene and the lack of clearly established pre-meditation (since they imply the drunken Parisian only intended it for himself originally), coupled together with the scene change and the rather long conversation between the loading of the weapon and the actual shooting, just makes it all feel very overdone, deeply anti-climactic, and just plain awkward, cringeworthy, and out of place.

Other than that, everything is honestly fine in this department.

Editing & Filming

I really don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh on the camera crew involved in this endeavor, as I don’t know how many of the decisions for what to do with the different scenes were actually theirs to make, if any at all; yes, there were a few moments here or there where I thought things could have been done a little bit better than they were, and a handful of times when I thought the recently acquired film maybe should have been rewatched enough to realize that the actors should have been directed to speak a little bit louder, but on the whole I don’t really want to place blame on people who were clearly doing their best to capture what they were told to capture, quite possibly the way they were told to capture it.

As far as I’m concerned, however, the same excuse cannot really be made for the editors and those who were tasked with overseeing the editing process — and this, apart from the writing and the historical accuracy, is unfortunately where Total Eclipse tends to fail the most.

As I mentioned very briefly before, there are some instances in the supposedly ‘finished’ product where the editors seem to have decided to give up halfway and awkwardly transition or just outright cut to the next scene when the main characters are clearly still mid-dialogue. Not only that, but the scene changes in general — comprised of a very strange mix of ordinary scene cuts, unexpectedly abrupt jump cuts, and extremely awkward fade transitions — are often deeply confusing to follow, if not entirely jarring to experience; thanks in part to the writing just as much as the editing, scenes often feel very incomplete and/or short enough to leave the viewer either wondering what their point was or give them a sense of whiplash as the location or emotions of characters change vastly and without much explanation from one moment to the next, and even the occasional — and devastatingly sparse, for a movie that features a lot of travel across many cities and countries — title card to tell one where and when a scene takes place sometimes only seems to appear when one is already halfway through a scene, rendering its usefulness in clearing up any shock or confusion almost moot.

Even for someone as intimately knowledgeable about the true events this film is based on as myself, Total Eclipse at times proved to be extremely hard to follow and keep up with just what exactly was going on — and although this is partly due to the many historical inaccuracies involved and the creative liberties taken within the script, the editing crew and their overseers absolutely did not help by any measure with the bizarre choices they made when putting all of the material they had together into a complete movie.

All in all, I genuinely believe I could have gotten a better job done with the editing just from spending an hour playing around in the iMovie app, with no professional degrees to my name, than the actual editors were able to manage in God knows how long.

‘Mature’ Content

Listen, I know this movie is apparently categorized as an “erotic historic drama”, and I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with that; in fact, I’ve already stated before that I genuinely do think that a few of the more sexually charged scenes legitimately contribute something of value to the film, in terms of establishing character motivation and personality, and sometimes even historical accuracy (we know that Rimbaud did, in fact, briefly streak one time as depicted in scene 15, more or less).

…Even so, do the main three characters — especially Rimbaud and Verlaine — really have to be in some state of undress as often as they are? 

Seriously, the amount of times the characters are either half-naked or just completely nude in this film is venturing way out of the realm of just uncensored honesty or even an attempt to be ‘sexy’ and into just plain absurdity; there are many times where Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis are very clearly just shirtless purely for the sake of being shirtless — even in scenarios and conditions which, quite frankly, would not lend themselves well to one having such few layers of clothing on their body, given the supposed location and time of year in which these scenes are taking place. 

There are also a few times in which the characters are in completely compromising positions or situations for reasons which are completely inexplicable, other than that the film creators were obviously just trying to find any reason or opportunity under the sun for which to disrobe someone; for example, there is one particularly telling instance in scene 52, where Arthur arrives at a hotel in Brussels to reunite with Paul, and is guided to his room by a staff member who, upon knocking for him, is told to “come in” by Verlaine, yet when the door is opened, said older Parisian poet is standing almost right in front of the hotel room’s door, stark naked, pouring water over his head as if to take a bath — making absolutely zero efforts to cover himself for what very well could just have been the staff alone coming to talk to him about something. 

The entire rest of the scene also takes place with the elder man making no efforts to even grab a towel after getting out of the bath, and then getting into a physical brawl to the point of wrestling in the buff with a fully clothed Rimbaud along the floor even in an entirely non-sexual context, because of course it does.

Perhaps it is absurd, from your point of view, to complain about these sorts of things in a film that places itself under such a category as “erotic” anything, and if that’s the case, then sure, that’s a completely fair way of looking at it; still, at least for me, pointless nudity and sex scenes that add nothing to the plot even from an emotional perspective — especially in a film that is supposed to be telling a real life tale about people who actually existed in this world — equals an automatic detraction of points from the movie in question, as a truly good film would not have to resort to such cheap tactics to keep a viewer interested and entertained.

I suppose some watchers might find it refreshing that it is actually the male characters who are primarily getting treated this way this time around, as it is typically the female ones to whom this is done in most cinema, but as for myself, I personally find it just as ridiculous, awkward, and unnecessary regardless — whether it calls itself an erotic drama or otherwise.

Overall Historical Accuracy

Alright, before we get into the very biggest issue with the movie’s script and all of the little historical inaccuracies that are connected to it, I first want to take the time to address just a few small ones scattered here and there throughout the film that are entirely disconnected from the main subject we’ll be talking about afterwards.

Unlike the more major problems we’re saving for a little bit later, most of these things I’m going to be mentioning don’t have any extreme plot-altering powers, in terms of the bigger picture that viewers are going to take away with them when the credits roll; they’re merely factual fallacies and omissions that, although minor in impact, I still thought were kind of unhelpful for anyone who might be tuning in to Total Eclipse with the hope of actually learning something.

You’d think with a movie so incredibly bold and confident about having its facts straight that it doesn’t even just claim to be “based on a true story” as most do, but actually outright states over text before the film opens that “what follows is [Verlaine and Rimbaud’s] story directly taken from their letters and poetry”, the actual contents of the film, then, would have to be something phenomenally well-researched and extremely close to the real events — even if a little bit of extra dramatization might be sprinkled here or there; that’s really not the case, though.

Despite the much braver and frankly somewhat lawsuit-inviting statement, the vast majority of even the most basic points about their lives and the time the two poets spent together are greatly misrepresented by the writers — let alone the finer and more intricate details of it all.

Even the facts surrounding Rimbaud’s death towards the end of the movie are…murky at best, in the way that they are presented there; I have already explained some of this — mostly in regards to the potential for audience confusion, thanks to an unusual decision to write in an injury to Arthur’s knee, in the exact same spot as the tumor that will later develop and take his life — in the “Writing and Script” section, but there is far more to it than just what was spoken of back then.

Yes, while we are admittedly told that Rimbaud developed ‘a tumor’ in his knee, that his leg was amputated, and that regardless of the operation, he became even sicker and eventually died, what the film fails to mention in any capacity is that this so-called ‘tumor’ was actually bone cancer (presumed osteosarcoma), and that the reason the amputation did not save his life is that neither he nor anyone else was even aware it was cancer until after the surgery was over; in the beginning, he had honestly assumed it to be nothing more than arthritis, and this is why he didn’t think to seek any help until it had become rather unlivable — then, once he did, he was misdiagnosed by two separate doctors before he was finally operated on under the assumption it was actually tubercular synovitis. By the time that any truth in the matter had actually come to light, the damage had already been done, and no amount of amputating or rest would have saved him.

I’ll make mention here, as well, that I’ve seen another person once bring forth a complaint that Arthur never had a point in which he returned home to the family farm in Roche between the amputation and his death, but I cannot personally find anything which definitively supports this claim within any of my own resources that I’ve acquired over the years; as far as I can see, the order of those events in particular as they are presented in the film actually seem quite accurate to reality, so take that information as you will. If you, yourself, wish to do further research to see if it is indeed the case, then feel free; either way, I thought it was at least worth a single note.

Another, topically similar head-scratcher for me which I cannot recall being factually supported in anything I’ve ever read thus far is this purported ‘tumor’ that Verlaine claims to have in his own knee in Total Eclipse, when he is told of how Arthur died; either I am just forgetting something and have not looked thoroughly enough into things (which I grant is entirely possible, seeing as that Paul is someone I have researched admittedly a tiny bit less than Rimbaud), or this is a completely made-up issue they added purely to mirror the last physical condition of his lover for some reason.

Some other befuddling omissions and inaccuracies include entirely failing to ever make even so much as a passing reference to the fact that Verlaine actually took up teaching professionally during the time that he and Arthur lived in London — choosing instead to have him sit around and bemoan the dwindling of their personal funds as he continues to rely solely upon the money he had claim to through his fractured marriage with Mathilde — and making Paul claim to Arthur that he converted to Catholicism after the divorce with his wife was finalized, rather than in prison as was genuinely the case (and which, perplexingly, was sort of previously established in an earlier line of dialogue to begin with).

I would also like to have seen Mathilde’s father express a bit more sweetness and protectiveness over his daughter, for, although his character is mostly serviceable enough in this movie for the part he holds, it was a well-known fact that Mathilde’s parents were both very loving, and especially that her dad was a good man who was greatly concerned with her personal happiness, wishes, and well-being, in a time where that was admittedly rather exceptional and extraordinarily uncommon on its own.

And while we’re speaking of parents, while, again, I don’t want to dive into another massive history lesson here, I would like to say that I don’t think Rimbaud’s mother is portrayed accurately here at all, compared to how she was said to be in real life — both by Arthur himself and by basically anyone who had ever even briefly met her; by all historical record, Marie Rimbaud was a cold, humorless, unsympathetic person whose husband (supposedly described to be her exact opposite) could not even stand to be in the home with her for more than a few days per year — if that — after their first few months of marriage, and permanently left her after six years, never to see her or their children again.

To her children — and especially Arthur, whom had an extra burden placed upon him when, as a young child, he had already been labeled a genius by his teachers — Marie was callous, cold, strict, controlling, and (especially physically) abusive, sometimes even forcing them to go for days without food as punishment if they did not perform well enough in school.

She did not, by any means, approve of Arthur’s career of choice and absolutely did not feel even as mildly sympathetic to him and his plights or feelings as this film seems to want you to believe; in fact, given that on his deathbed she actively chose to forcefully pull his sister away from visiting him at one point, and even went so far as to go against his final wishes for his burial, I hesitate to think that she would’ve cared to follow him out and watch him leave the family farm on his final days, either.

Anyone who had ever met her — including some of Arthur’s teachers and interviewers later on in her own life — tended to fear her and either considered her a terrifying, violent, or just plain unenjoyable individual, if not all of the above.

Now, I believe that just about covers all I have to say in relation to the smaller things, so, without further ado, let’s sit down and have a nice little chat about the real trouble with Total Eclipse and its very poorly written plot.

Considering how little I know them, I truly don’t want to assume the worst when it comes to Agnieszka Holland and Christopher Hampton’s intentions for the script — and, by extension, the film that was built upon it; nevertheless, there are some things in this film that it is just very hard to give them the full benefit of the doubt on, when they so boastfully proclaim that they have been perfectly faithful to the true story and that everything that happens in their adaptation of it is taken directly from Rimbaud and Verlaine’s poetry and letters, yet so much of it is either completely made-up nonsense with absolutely no basis or majorly re-arranges events in a way that it completely changes the narrative with which an uninformed audience is going to walk away.

(And granted, the original screenplay that this movie was made from was written in the late 1960s, so information then was likely not as widely available as it is today, and thus, it does leave a little bit more slack for any of Hampton’s personal failures at that time (although some are still very inexcusable basic facts that definitely would have been out there within reach), but the same cannot truly be said for the movie itself — as, even if some details perhaps still weren’t available in the same way that they are today, at least the vast majority were out there in some capacity, and they had more than enough money and means to hire actual historical experts to do research and seek the truth out for them.)

I can’t — and thus won’t, as I don’t want to place words in their mouths or make any unsavory assumptions on this matter that may be untrue — begin to guess what possessed the creators to make Verlaine the true protagonist and narrator of this story, but regardless of what their reasons may have been, I can say with the utmost confidence that it is almost certainly what caused all of the greatest downfalls of this film, plot and accuracy-wise.

You see, the big challenge that always comes with telling a story from one particular character’s point of view is two-fold: 1) that that character you chose is always going to be biased in the way they tell their tale and how they view other characters, and 2) that, at least typically speaking, once you make your character the narrator and the main protagonist, it becomes tempting to want to paint them in a better or more forgivable, sympathetic light so that the audience will be at least a little more likely to root for them.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a problem when it comes to fiction, because in fiction, the writer is free to present a story from whatever perspective they want and make their characters — however either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ they may actually be based on their actions — as likable as they desire, and that is perfectly fine, as at the end of the day it is no one but the author’s invented story to tell; however, when it is a story about real people and their actual lives, the situation becomes a bit hairier.

Not only is it very difficult to tell a factual story from a factual person’s point of view and represent their thoughts fairly and accurately, unless their feelings on the matter are exceedingly well documented, but it will also inevitably do some form of disservice to someone else involved in that tale every time.

There is a famous saying that there are two sides to every story, but I disagree; there are not just two sides to every story, but at least three — even if there are only two people involved; after all, there is the perspective of Person A, the perspective of Person B, and then also the perspective of anyone else who might be on the outside of the situation looking in — the person who probably has neither of the biases that the involved parties have, but whom, at the same time, might also be lacking in some key information that the other two both possess, depending on the circumstances.

Naturally, when telling a true story, the ultimate goal is usually to be able to present a little bit of all three — that is to say, to show things largely from the unbiased outside position, but also use the information we have been given of both sides’ thoughts and motivations, if available, as well, to establish and represent those feelings and ideas and do justice to them as much as we can. 

Total Eclipse does not care about any of this, though; rather, it seems to be under the impression that simply because Verlaine was the longer-living of the two men and he did the one simple courtesy of preserving and publishing whatever poetry his late former paramour had left in his care, this means that it is acceptable to tell the story of their relationship entirely from his perspective and that no harm could possibly be done in doing so.

However, that is a logical fallacy, and a very harmful one, at that, to the actual victims of the real life happenings that went on during those years — especially if you intend to make Paul look at all like the ‘good guy’ within the dynamics of either of his relationships, or even only ‘equally as guilty’ as Rimbaud.

Of course, I won’t say that presenting Verlaine in such lights from his own point of view would be in any way an inaccurate depiction of his thoughts, because from everything we do know about him, this was his point of view; based on many of his actions and letters and other recorded bits of information, he did appear to have a massive victim complex in every situation that he himself had caused, constantly jumping back and forth from blaming either his wife or his extramarital partner for all of his bad behavior — often dependant on whomever he happened to be with and/or wanted to appease at the time — throughout the affair. 

Even further supporting this already clear observation is Rimbaud’s famous The Infernal Spouse, from his work A Season in Hell, which, as stated before, is widely believed to be written from the perspective of Paul about Arthur himself; in it, the speaker (whom would be Paul) ultimately paints himself as the poor, helpless, ‘once-respectable’ victim of a demon who came to him in the guise of a youth (whom would be Arthur) and seduced him, making his life a living hell where the speaker has “no choice” but to continue down the terrible path of ruin.

If I didn’t know any better, I would almost assume that this movie was, for whatever reason, written not just to be told from the Parisian poet’s perspective, but specifically and solely through the lens of this one particular poem, if the narrative of said work was taken entirely at face value — yet, this is clearly not true, as even that piece (including some excerpts from it I discussed before, which were used within this very movie) leaves more room for charity towards Rimbaud and his overall portrayal than this film does.

Whereas The Infernal Spouse still speaks at times to his kindness, charity, grace, and goodness — among other not strictly negative human qualities present within him — in spite of itself, Total Eclipse’s version of Rimbaud is, as I’ve said in prior sections, a jaded, sadistic, rude and relatively heartless edgelord who may or may not be a complete sociopath, not to mention the ultimate source of all conflict in everyone’s lives.

Meanwhile, Verlaine is presented as, yes, a violent drunk who abuses his wife and child during his moments of insobriety, but one who is genuinely remorseful after every action and who, no matter how thoroughly unlikable his actions may make him at present for most of the film, is heavily implied to have only become a drunkard thanks to Rimbaud’s influence and presence in his life, and ever before that — and any time the teen was out of his life at all, for that matter — was a good, kind, and loving person who merely didn’t know how to exist without someone by his side and just couldn’t help falling in love with multiple people.

Oh, but those might seem rather broad-sweeping and loaded claims without getting into any details, so let’s go through the film bit by bit and talk about all the big and little changes and omissions that make it turn out that way, hm?

Aside from the dichotomy already mentioned twice earlier of the quoting of an excerpt from The Infernal Spouse in the opening scene — which speaks of some redeeming qualities in Rimbaud that we will never even truly get to see throughout this entire film — the first major mistake made within the script is the decision to include so much of the second scene so early on within the movie.

Now, of course, I’m not talking about from a narrative perspective; naturally, it does make sense that if one is telling a story from the point of view of Paul, then starting the movie out with a glimpse into the time after Rimbaud’s death when he meets with the young poet’s sister not only is a great way to attempt to generate intrigue right away, but also provides an excellent way to transition back into the past by having Verlaine begin to reminisce on the things they had once done together, but in regards to trying to present an unbiased story that will allow the audience to form their own conclusions at the end based on actual facts, I do feel it is a little bit manipulative — whether intentionally so or not.

After all, if from the moment we are first introduced to this older Parisian poet, we instantly see him establish himself as this selfless hero of a man who helped Rimbaud along in his ambitions as a poet even to the complete detriment of his own once-greater notoriety and career, it will from that moment forward already be seeded in our minds that we are intended to see him as such and remember it above all else, despite any of what we might see in the scenes that will follow; it makes it much harder to be unbiased towards him when the film is immediately waving it in our collective faces how much he sacrificed and suffered for the man that now isn’t even around to enjoy his own success.

Skipping past all the pre-established discussion surrounding the writers’ decision to add in all of the unfounded, extremely awkward, and cringeworthy animal imitating and how that is a poor portrayal of Rimbaud’s genius, we next arrive at the dinner scene between Arthur, Paul, Mathilde, and her mother.

There are quite a few strange and, as far as I could tell, unbacked claims that are made here — not least of all the statement from the teenage poet himself that his mother was “quite happy” that he had joined Verlaine in Paris to do writing work with him, when as far as we are aware, she was actually quite opposed to her son’s job of choice; I suppose the intended implication, then, was that she was just happy to get rid of him in any way she could so long as she didn’t have to pay for it, because he was nothing but trouble — and while that may not necessarily be inaccurate to her actual personality or thoughts towards Arthur in real life, regardless of whether it is or isn’t, it is still a bit confusing within the context of the movie, as this attitude is not really well expressed in any scene where she appears.

On the flip side, when the boy’s father is mentioned, he dryly makes a response saying that his father’s primary occupation is drinking and that they (the Rimbaud family) haven’t seen him in ten years; the latter part of this is absolutely true, as Captain Frederic Rimbaud left after the last of the children was born, and it does somewhat make sense to show Rimbaud having a relative disinterest in getting back in touch with him given that we know neither the children nor the father himself ever seemed to care much about reconnecting, but the claim about him being a drunkard is, to my knowledge, mostly unfounded, and I find it particularly unusual that they go so far out of their way to include this comment and have Arthur show a cold disdain and strong sense of negativity behind his words when talking about drinking — as though it were a bad thing in his eyes — when he is henceforth after this scene portrayed as someone who himself enjoys drinking and is not only happy to start a relationship with a man whom, after meeting him, remains almost perpetually drunk, but even later tries to talk said man out of quitting.

And lastly, the claims that Arthur lied about his age to Paul in his letters by saying that he was 21 is, to my knowledge, completely speculative and entirely invented by this film; granted, given that the vast majority of all correspondence between Paul and Arthur prior to their first meeting — save for one or two paraphrased lines of one letter that Verlaine claims to remember existing — was lost forever to history, there’s nothing to say that it didn’t happen, but there’s also no real reason that I know of to believe that it did. 

So, why, then, was the decision made to add this line? Well, I think it may have been for the sake of audience comfort, in a way — just as was the choice to reinforce that Mathilde was 18 (stated in scene 14) when Arthur arrived at their home, and the creative decision to have Rimbaud be the one to make the first physical move on Paul (shown in scene 21) when in reality that sort of thing is completely undocumented and therefore anything shown of it will always be speculative; if we’re assured that Verlaine is married to an eighteen-year-old woman and it’s never stated when they married, if he thinks Arthur is an adult man when he invites him into his home, and if even after knowing better, Rimbaud — the sixteen-year-old — is at least the first one to make a physical move on the adult, well, it’s probably a little bit less creepy in the eyes of the audience, right? Especially if their ages are really only brought up once or twice — or, in the case of Verlaine, not at all (he was 27 historically when Arthur came to live with him) — and then never mentioned again for the rest of the two-hour film.

I know that there will be people who will likely want to use the “it was a different time” argument here to push away the disturbing factor in all of this, but not only do I believe that this argument is absurd — as if you truly believe something is wrong according to your personal moral compass, that should not change based solely upon what may or may not have been considered “acceptable” at the time — the simple fact of the matter is that things weren’t as ‘different’ back then as you might think, anyway; the age of majority was actually much higher back in the late nineteenth century (hence even Total Eclipse itself having Paul call Mathilde, his wife, “still just a child” and Arthur reply “so am I” in scene six), and most people did not marry until both parties were fairly late into, or at best halfway through, their 20s.

Any way you want to slice it, Paul Verlaine’s only dating history throughout his adult life (a 16 year old girl at 25, a 16 year old boy at 27, and purportedly a 17 year old boy at 32) was disturbing according to most people’s moral compasses, even from the perspective of someone from back then. It is a matter of historical record that when the poet’s mother started pushing in fear for her own life and desperation to have him gone (more on this later) for the at-the-time 24-year-old Paul to find someone to marry and her first suggestion happened to be that of a 14-year-old Mathilde, the courtship that eventually ensued when Mathilde was 16 and the proposal for marriage 8 days later heavily concerned the girl’s father, and he did all that he could to prevent it, as she was much too young for such a thing; it was only because Verlaine was friends with the girl’s brother that he eventually managed to worm his way into the rest of the family’s confidence and approval, and perpetually forced the father’s hand through continuous pressure from them and Verlaine’s mother that he eventually caved and gave consent to both a relationship and then later a marriage under the belief that this was what his daughter wanted, who she loved, and who would make her happiest — which, based on Verlaine’s wishes, would have occurred fairly soon after had several events not taken place to postpone it.

As for Verlaine, just as I stated earlier, there are very few times when he is shown to have been cruel to anyone outside of a very clearly drunken state — and in those two moments that he is, it is still rather ambiguous whether or not he has perhaps had a little bit to drink beforehand; we can, of course, assume that he has not by the very coherent way that he is speaking and his much steadier and more refined mannerisms, but at least as far as scene 10 goes — in which, after Mathilde suggests possibly finding somewhere else for Rimbaud to stay, her now rather angry husband goes on a rant about unfairness and how if it wasn’t for the war and everything he’d been through because of it, they wouldn’t even be living in her parents house to begin with, then throws a book across a room — the situation is made a little hazy by the fact that we saw the two poets drinking in a bar not too many scenes prior. Without anything to indicate whether or not these scenes take place during the same day, I find it rather impossible to say for certain.

Regarding the other scene, well…we’ll talk about it when we get there, but I do find it ironic that despite him having been historically recorded as drunk at that time, it is the only one in the film besides scene 10 where he is probably written not to be.

Immediately after scene 10, we once more jump back into the absolute absurdity of his teenage affair partner’s portrayal; instead of being honest that Arthur had only ever been brought into the home on a temporary stay while Mathilde’s father was out on a hunting trip and that by this point in the genuine reality, at least by all accounts of anything that I could find, he had already been moved out of the house and into a small apartment paid for by Paul and their other literary friends, Total Eclipse chooses to make it so that Mathilde’s father comes home in the middle of the boy’s stay without warning and there is a confrontation in which Rimbaud is quite rude to the man, until he is unceremoniously thrown out of the house — at which point Verlaine chases after him in the rain and hurriedly finds him a place to stay.

Of course, I am not saying the youth was actually a perfect house guest, or that he didn’t cause any amount of trouble ever or garner some form of disdain from his hosts in the house de Fleurville — far from it; certainly, Mathilde and her mother took a strong disliking to Arthur which only grew the longer he stayed there — not just because they deemed him unrefined and more trouble than they cared to handle, but also out of jealousy of the fact that Verlaine would spend almost all day every day at his side out in the city — and thus, hoping to be rid of him and make Paul dedicate less time to him, they arranged for Mr. Theodore Maute de Fleurville to come home sooner, so that Paul would feel obligated to put him up elsewhere before he arrived. 

The point I am trying to make, though, is that things did not happen in the way, order, or even entirely for the exact reasons that this movie presents it — for, by all known sources that I could uncover, Arthur was never meant to stay there permanently, he stayed a bit longer than was properly communicated through the scenes we were shown and a lot happened that was not discussed regarding him and his now-mentor (some of which we will be talking about later), it was absolutely not by random chance or without warning that Mathilde’s father arrived home, and Rimbaud and Mr. Maute de Fleurville never even really met at all.

Scene 16 itself is actually fairly true to historical fact, minus the exchanging of Mathilde’s then actually-visiting brother for her parents as the ones who noticed the ruckus upstairs and came to her rescue during the abuse, but it is missing a lot of context and clues as to the passage of time due to the rushing of — and changes made to — the main plot.

In reality, this fight had occurred quite a while after Arthur had been moved to his new apartment, and while she had never looked kindly or understandingly upon the teen’s poverty, the harsh comment she made which sent Verlaine over the edge was likely more fueled by resentment and jealousy than anything else — as, despite her expectation and hope that removing the boy from the household would lead to her husband spending less time with him and more time with her, it had actually just backfired into the older man deciding that he would rather start spending nights over with him and often not even come home at all for days or weeks at a time.

In regards to what the argument was about, they also fail to leave in the context that although Rimbaud did feel the need to steal books back in his hometown in order to be able to read them because he could not afford differently, he also did try as a general rule to return them after he was done, and it was only if he felt there was no way to do so without getting caught in certain situations that he would choose to sell them instead for money — thereby making him look infinitely worse than he actually was in this situation.

They also have Arthur explain to Paul in Scene 17 that after a somewhat dubious but not altogether unlikely life event, he had “decided to be a genius”, but this is something of a misquoting, as the actual letter to a friend that they are referencing through this scene did not say he desired to be a ‘genius’ — which he had already been dubbed for better or worse since childhood by his teachers, as we will discuss later — but rather, a ‘seer’.

Some might say that these two words could be more or less synonymous with each other, but I disagree; being a visionary is not necessarily the same as being a genius or vice versa, and furthermore, Rimbaud himself has described in his own words what he believes it means to be a true ‘genius’ (essentially being able to recover a child-like sense of wonder and heart at will), and it does not match up at all with the context of any of what this movie purports — nor even with the standard definition of those who had given it to him in the first place, so using it here just feels strange and deeply out of place within his actual philosophy, and seemingly only exists to sound overly conceited.

Scene 19 is just…completely off the rails with its insanity.

Yes, I will grant that Rimbaud did eventually drunkenly injure someone from Verlaine’s literary circle with a sword-cane, and that will be something I will discuss when the time actually comes, but that event that is, for some reason, shown here did not happen until many months into his stay in Paris, and it most certainly did not happen in the same absurdist, heavily over-dramatized fashion in which it was presented here — nor did he ever unzip and take a piss on Theodore de Banville(?), from atop a table, or anyone anywhere for that matter.

Something I desperately need everyone to understand and which Total Eclipse did Rimbaud a huge disservice in never showing is that, despite what this scene’s dishonest placement on the timeline would imply, and like I had alluded to previously, the aforementioned writer group was, for the longest time and especially still at the juncture in question, actually fairly fond of him on the whole, and that was why they had worked with Paul when Mathilde’s father was returning home to find Arthur a place to live there in Paris.

Outside of the obvious growing resentment from Mathilde and her mother, the time during which this scene is incorrectly claimed to have taken place was genuinely a time of relative peace and happiness — at least, as far as Rimbaud’s happiness, reputation, and overall well-being was concerned; every day, Verlaine was helping him move up in the literary world, writing poems with him, and proudly walking around Paris with the boy lovingly clinging on his arm, taking him to theatres and showing him all sorts of grand places that the city had to offer, even as their obviously romantic and sexual relationship became a thing that started to be mockingly reported about in the papers. 

Because, at the time, he was — to the best of anyone’s knowledge — still saving all of his rage and abuse for his young wife, he and his paramour were thus able to enjoy this sort of honeymoon phase whilst his infatuation with Arthur was still pretty new.

Now, scene 21’s creative liberties aside, realistically speaking, we honestly don’t know when or how their relationship there turned physical; like I’ve said, any attempt to nail down a specific time for that would really just be engaging in rampant speculation, but for the sake of determining historical accuracy, I think it’s pretty fair to say that it’s probably more realistic if one assumes it was roughly around the time that the boy moved into his own apartment, given that was when Verlaine actively started staying the night with him instead of with his spouse. Thus, no, I really don’t think the timing here is anywhere close to accurate.

Scene 22 is…something that also needs addressing. 

Please don’t get me wrong here; it is 100% a historical fact that while Arthur may have been overall very emotionally well-off during this time period in his affair, Mathilde, on the other hand, suffered greatly at the hands of her husband. During this very painful stretch of her marriage to Verlaine, she was often forced to endure a never-ending back and forth of being neglected some days and then emotionally, physically, and yes, most presumably sexually abused the others; it was a living hell for her, and I am certainly in no way attempting to take away from that or make excuses for her abuser.

That being said, the day that their son, Georges Verlaine, was born into the world, this was absolutely not the case — and although I appreciate their willingness to so explicitly show the dark side of their relationship, lying about this one time when things actually seemed to be improving, even if ever so briefly, really only serves to prevent the audience from being able to understand why it is that she remained so devoted to him for so long, caught up in this shitty situation.

Exactly as I said back in the “Writing & Script” subsection of “The Good”, the vast majority of abusive relationships — the one between Mathilde and Paul absolutely included — do not exist entirely devoid of ‘good’ or ‘happy’ moments; as a matter of fact, a good deal of them actually start out as quite wonderful and unsuspecting, but this is just precisely what can make them all the more dangerous — as once the honeymoon phase wears off (and/or the abuser realizes they have their significant other hooked and can relax) and things take a darker turn, these good moments that existed in the past and sometimes still might happen now and again in the present can often keep the victim from leaving, trapped by the vague hope that if they only give their abuser enough chances for improvement, things will be happy once more.

I will not be discussing the ins and outs of their situation in detail for a little while yet (though we will get to that eventually), but trust me when I say that there was no doubt Mathilde’s situation was exactly this sort of problem.

Because Paul reacted well to the birth of their child when he returned home late that one particular night, acting joyful and proud and kissing his wife and son, Mathilde’s heart was set enough at ease that she started thinking things would improve and he would naturally want to be around more to spend time with the family he had created; she was, of course, wrong in her belief, for the sweetness died not too long after this brief respite, and the cycle of absence and abuse, followed by tearful apologies, became the normal thing for their daily lives once more. 

As a matter of fact, things escalated even from what they already were before — so much so that it reached a point where he would begin to threaten his wife and son’s lives on several occasions, attempting to kill them in various ways and repeatedly having to be dragged out or stopped by the threat of violence from other people in their lives.

…And yet, despite all of this being entirely true, he was nevertheless forgiven by her almost every single time, even after multiple transgressions. Why? Well, exactly because there were those few good moments she remembered sharing not even so long ago, and because each and every time he hurt her, he would literally get down on his hands and knees and cry, blaming it all on his drinking and begging for forgiveness in such sad and pathetic ways that she — so desperately clinging onto the happiness she believed they’d had before and wanting to believe that what he said was true — could not help being moved to pardon him and give him “just one more chance”.

The above outlook being her historically documented attitude and thought process throughout it all is why it is so crucial to establish that there were some rare good moments between him and Mathilde, even in the midst of all the horrible treatment she endured, as it presents her own personal experiences as a victim of abuse fairly and accurately and allows others who perhaps have not gone through such things to more easily relate and understand why she — and for that matter, so many other victims like her throughout the world — often ends up caught in this terrible, seemingly unending cycle of mistreatment; to fail to present this in any better way than “he suddenly started beating her and was never, ever kind to her at all anymore for months or years, but she still stayed because…reasons” even when all of the information is right there in front of you, is to do a deep injustice to all victims of abuse of any era who may have a similar story to Mathilde — not simply her alone.

As I have said before, when it comes to situations like this, it is almost never anywhere near that black and white.

And speaking of times in which this movie attempts to oversimplify very complex matters and issues with no concern for the consequences, what this next scene and a ridiculously good many after it attempt to set up is yet another perfect example of that.

Total Eclipse would like you to believe that immediately after the baby is born and Verlaine allegedly mistreats his wife yet again on that very same night, Rimbaud is quickly sent back home to Charleville to return to his family due to Mathilde “making trouble” over the poets spending too much time together; it then appears to proclaim to us that some time later, after being terribly bored with life on the farm, Arthur just up and decides seemingly out of nowhere to return to Paris, and it is only after this self-re-insertion of the teenager into his mentor’s life that Paul becomes abusive to his spouse once more. 

Unfortunately, absolutely none of this is the truth, and before I can explain to you just how much injustice this narrative does to the people involved in it, I need to first explain to you what actually happened.

In reality, as I might have alluded to prior when talking of the suffering Mathilde and her child endured continuously after that brief respite of the day of Georges’ birth, it was actually a few months before things finally came to a head between the couple, and even then it was only truly because Verlaine’s actions on that day became so traumatizingly extreme — ripping his son from Mathilde’s arms and throwing him against the wall, and then proceeding to pin his wife to the floor and strangle her until her father found them and intervened — that she could no longer bear to hide it from her family anymore out of fear for herself and, above all, her little one.

After this, the couple ended up splitting for a little while — with Paul already having hurried off to his own mother’s house to seek refuge from his own actions for a time, and Mathilde leaving with her father and child for Périgueux for six weeks of rest, under her doctor’s orders. 

From day two onward, the drunkard poet would, of course, make several attempts to reach out to his estranged wife and try to make amends, but to little to no avail, as, even after he managed to convince her mother to forward his letters to her, he was still forbidden any knowledge of her current location and although Mathilde did admit to still loving him, her one condition for taking him back was that he first had to get rid of Rimbaud — whom, seeking someone other than her husband to blame, she blindly pinned all of her suffering and Verlaine’s horrible actions on.

And you might think, “Okay, but this has to be the point when Arthur actually gets sent home, right? That’s not really that big of an omission, is it?” But no, you’d be wrong about that, too — immensely wrong, on both accounts.

See, Paul thought that if he refused and waited it out long enough, Mathilde would just have to come around about the whole thing and forget about her ultimatums in favor of being with him again.

In the meantime, he had Rimbaud to still focus all of his attention on — both positive, and now also likely negative, given that not only did Verlaine just no longer have anyone else to store up and take out his cruelty and abuse on, but it was also only after this point in time that there was a noticeable and historically documented decline in his teenage affair partner’s general physical and mental health. 

Suddenly gone was that honeymoon period I had spoken of before, where life was nothing but sunshine and roses and rainbows for the relationship between the two poets and the rapport they shared with their writing circle, as Rimbaud would soon begin to show up drunk and in disarray among their mutual author and poet friends more and more, and — although he had always been less refined in his behavior and fairly brash and frank about his disagreements on things — started to act out more amongst them, as well. In the end, this unexpected descent of Arthur’s into someone they could no longer bring themselves to respect as they once had, coupled with Paul’s increasingly brazen behavior surrounding their relationship, began to drive a wedge between them and the rest of the group, which reached its final straw when Arthur, thoroughly wasted and frustrated over (if I remember correctly) a debate about poetry and morality, got into a fight one night with another man, injuring him with his sword-cane and ensuring the total downfall of his reputation.

It was in response to both this particular event causing potential disgrace for Paul and pressure from Mathilde’s father — who was now contacting a lawyer and threatening his son-in-law with separation of property and a full investigation into his abusive behavior if he did not comply — that the older poet finally decided all that time later to send Arthur home and supposedly try to make amends with his wife.

And yes, Mathilde did (regrettably) take him back after Arthur was gone, and yes, he did genuinely make an effort to be better and live a stable life working a stable job — but only for all of a few days, and then he immediately went right back to drinking and abusing and kidnapping and threatening death upon his wife and child many times over, until he eventually just disappeared one day without a trace, unable to be found, and went off to Brussels, where he wrote to Arthur to essentially tell him that he was done with his wife and that they could run away together, and sent for him to join him — and join him the boy did.

…So, now that we’ve been over what really occurred in the space of time supposedly covered by scenes 22 through 32, let’s talk about all of the reasons why Total Eclipse’s interpretation of those events is a major problem (besides the obvious aforementioned portrayal of Mathilde’s personal motivations and reasonings for staying with Paul).

Starting off with the small stuff, and definitely on a more positive note, I don’t really have a lot of bad things to say about scenes 23 and 24, where we see Arthur return back home to the farm and spend time amongst his family; the most major complaint I have about this section is that the youth’s mother seems, although somewhat strict, noticeably more pleasant and lenient than how she was described to be in real life, and far more willing to take Arthur’s side and be understanding in her own way when the teen explains why he was forced to come home, but this topic is something I will go into greater detail about much later down the line, as it is something of a repeating theme within this movie.

Other than that, circling back to that aforementioned discussion between the boy and his mother, the script has him state that Mathilde was the one who was making trouble and threatening consequences if he was not sent away, but this is not exactly true, for although the poor woman did state that condition to her reunion with Paul in her desperation to hopefully fix her tragic marriage, it was actually her father who escalated things into any sort of serious threat; this change doesn’t really have that big of an impact on anything, admittedly, but it does knock a minor point off for historical accuracy.

The montage in scenes 30 and 31, where the two are traveling together, obviously did not happen at all — or at least, definitely not in the way that they were presented — given that there actually was no time prior to Brussels in which they had reunited, but as I will get around to talking about later, it does sort of serve to fill a space of happiness and relative stability that did occur after that reunion and before the time that Paul sneaks off to see Mathilde again, so it’s not really anything directly in the contents of that set of scenes that is a problem, but rather, what the narrative that they had met prior to Brussels implies as a whole.

…Which brings us to the major (and final) elephant in the room about all of these changes to, and rearrangements of, events for this section of the movie: the constant, continued push — even against all logic and proven, historically documented reality — towards the aforementioned idea that Verlaine was a relatively good man prior to Rimbaud’s arrival at their home, and that it was only while said teenager was present in his life that he ever showed any signs of abusive tendencies or other negative behavior. 

Now, you can chalk nearly everything else up to lazy writing, poor fact-checking, blind negligence and lack of information all you want, but you cannot possibly convince me that there is not at least a little bit of deliberate deception in the fact that the event which was originally the actual temporary breaking point for Verlaine and his wife, ended up being removed from its rightful place before Rimbaud’s departure for the farm and instead adapted in its own right into scene 22 — just after Arthur’s supposed return.

You cannot convince me that it is a mere coincidence and accident that in this same breath, the script manages not only to somewhat tone-down the abuse that Paul dishes out to his family — at least in regards to the fact that, in real life, Paul threw the actual baby against the wall and not just shoved the bed that Georges was for some reason shown to be sleeping in — but also makes Mathilde react to this event by saying, “[Rimbaud]’s back, isn’t he?”, after Paul apologizes and breaks down, as if until this point everything had been peaceful and there was no other possible explanation for her husband to be acting this way.

Likewise, it is surely no mere mishap that the movie completely fails to mention that it was the older poet who sent for his young illicit partner to rejoin him and not just some whim of a bored Arthur, nor can it be easily seen as just a mistake that it insists that there was ever a point where the two poets were still in Paris and Verlaine was still with his wife after his and Arthur’s reunion at all, despite that no such thing ever genuinely happened to begin with; literally the only purpose that any of this serves within the film is simply to perpetuate this myth of Rimbaud being this absolute demon’s spawn who, although brilliant in his ideas, was the source of everyone’s problems and misery. In scene 27, they even go so sickeningly far as to portray Rimbaud — who, in many of his real life writings, actually sympathized and empathized greatly with battered, oppressed, and controlled women — as someone who laughed uncontrollably with amusement when Verlaine made jokes about his actual, horribly violent acts of abuse towards his wife.

Even if you really want to somehow give them the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe they are just doing this for the sake of creating added melodrama and shock value and didn’t realize at all the picture that it was painting, it doesn’t change the fact that this narrative which is supposedly about real, living, breathing people who existed in the world once is made horribly untruthful and demonizing as a result, and thereby spreads way too much misinformation to anyone who doesn’t know any better but to take it at face value.

No matter how much Total Eclipse purports otherwise, Rimbaud was not the reason why Paul became the way he did — not him being a drunkard, not him being indecisive, and not him being abusive, or even homicidal; he was already all of that long before they ever met. Without delving too much into giving out another long history lesson, what you need to understand is that Paul had had a drinking problem before he even met Mathilde, and despite both of his parents being frankly very good people as far as we are able to know, he disliked his mother and had even tried to murder her on several occasions; yes, he temporarily put up a facade for the sake of wooing Mathilde and avoided drinking for a brief period in their marriage as well, but he had already broken character and begun to verbally and physically abuse her before Arthur was ever involved in their lives. Mathilde blaming the boy for their troubles (which she genuinely did and continued to claim even long after their marriage was over) was simply her way of coping with the terrible situation she had found herself in and giving herself a way to believe that the person she thought she had known during those good times was real and could be made to come back if someone else was only removed from his life. Paul played into this fairytale because it benefited him to do so when he was trying to get back into her good graces, just as he would play into Mathilde being the source of their grief when he was trying to earn Arthur’s favor.

Though unfortunate, Mathilde, for her part, cannot be totally blamed for trying to cope with her trauma in this way, but Paul absolutely can be blamed for using it as a scapegoat for his problems — and so can Total Eclipse for taking that false scenario and going to such absurd lengths to make it seem as though it was true. I wish I could say that this was the last time that the movie did something like this, but…well, we’ll get to that when we get to it; for now, let’s step away from this topic for awhile and move on to the next scene. 

To be honest, aside from one minor thing I’ve already said in a previous section, I wouldn’t really say that there is anything wrong with scene 32 or 33 in any way. It is a fact that at some point after their reunion, while they were still in Brussels, Paul did arrange behind Arthur’s back for his wife to meet him at a hotel, and he did sneak out to see her as is depicted; I just wish once more that they had been honest about the timeline of things prior to this moment, and that it was made clear that for at least a short while after the two writers re-connected, things were actually very peaceful and happy again between them — to the point where Paul was (probably unadvisedly) openly waving his relationship with Rimbaud in front of the faces of Belgium authorities for fun, and as far as we know there had been no indication of any fights between the two, which makes him turning back to Mathilde an even better example of just how undecided and unpromptedly unfaithful of a person he was to both of his lovers. Scenes 30 and 31, as I said, do sort of fill that quota of peaceful times I suppose, but…not exactly in an honest way.

As for the next part, where Paul reunites with Mathilde and makes love with her before promising to leave with her for New Caledonia and abandon Arthur, there’s not a whole lot of negative things for me to criticize about it, as it’s pretty accurate to reality, overall, other than one small nitpick about the fact they have Paul deny that his paramour had ever been involved with the Commune, but I understand that at the time the movie was made, this was a much bigger point of contention than it is nowadays with the surfacing of new proof and information, so I can’t really hold the writers at fault for this.

What I can hold them at fault for, though, is the very unusual decision in the next scene to not only have Arthur run into Mathilde as she is leaving the hotel — which never happened, as she was long gone from the area before he arrived looking for Paul — but also to taunt her and then attempt to kiss her out of nowhere, against her will, despite the fact that a) Rimbaud had never shown any signs of being attracted to her and most importantly, b) this behavior would once again go against everything we know about how he genuinely viewed women and the way that they should be treated (with absolute freedom and respect, equal to that of any man).

Here, again, we also see yet another repeat of the insinuation that he is entirely at fault for everything that has happened, as Mathilde asks him bluntly, “Why are you doing this to us?”, making it clear to the audience even further that we should feel that both she and Paul are equally victims in this scenario, rather than that her abusive, cheating husband is ultimately the one to blame for being a two-timing asshole who can’t decide which person he wants to sleep with and treat like shit more. Granted, as has been established prior, this isn’t necessarily inaccurate to how the poor woman viewed matters, but with the movie never distinguishing her thoughts from the reality of the situation, this line really does not do anyone’s portrayal other than hers any legitimate favors.

Other than these few glaring issues, the rest of the scene is fairly accurate to how things went down in real life; I especially appreciated the partial, sarcastic reading aloud from Arthur of one of the genuine letters from Paul to Mathilde during this point in time, and the argument had between them following this was, on the whole, quite well-characterized and raw in emotion.

There is one particular bit of dialogue — where Paul asks, “You don’t care about my happiness, do you?” and Arthur answers “No, and neither should you” —  I will say, that I can’t exactly make heads or tails of if they’re trying to portray the teen as heartless and manipulative, or just genuinely fed up and trying to insinuate that Paul should start thinking of others more than himself for once in his life, but given that I’m trying to be as generous as possible in my interpretations of these scenes whenever I can, we will just go under the assumption that it is the latter.

Ah, but then we reach the scene where Verlaine is leaving with his wife on the train; you know, this movie sometimes makes it very hard for me to be generous towards their intentions with things, and this is yet another one of those times, because…look, Arthur Rimbaud did not follow them to the next train station and then convince Paul to join him and go back; he wasn’t even there. Yes, Verlaine did ditch his spouse and her mother at the last minute as they were switching trains, but that was entirely his own decision, and as a matter of fact, based on the letters he sent to Mathilde shortly thereafter, insulting and berating her for trying to ‘trick’ him into leaving ‘his friend’, he wasn’t even certain that Rimbaud would take him back at the time — he just intended to try, so no, the younger poet had absolutely no part in that decision, much less was present at the station and mocked his partner’s wife from the other train as they left like how the film attempts to portray it. The entire thing is utter nonsense and a complete and total exaggeration of reality.

Moving on all the way to scenes 42 through 47, which supposedly depicts a good deal of their time living in London, the very first thing that I would like to address is this…insanely ‘creative’ liberty that was taken when they decided to create whatever absurd, borderline supernatural sub-plot they had going on to seemingly ‘explain’ Rimbaud losing his ability to write.

I don’t know who exactly on the writing team decided that it was an excellent idea to have him start dreaming of the moments in Africa not too long preceding his death, and to have these visions and senses of déjà vu when he sees what is presumably a boat to Africa consume him and his entire being to the point where his creativity nearly completely dies, but as I have said in a previous section, there is, to my knowledge, absolutely no basis to this, and it really only serves to take away from the importance of the things that were actually going on in his life at this point in time.

Indeed, things between the two lovers in general — and especially for Arthur — did eventually take a turn for the worse, but it was not because of some hallucinations of a future event plaguing the younger writer’s mind and destroying his sanity; it was actually due to far more ‘ordinary’ and sadly very predictable reasons.

As I think pretty much anyone could guess by now based on Verlaine’s previously set and established pattern of behavior whenever he has to be even remotely committed to one of his partners for any length of time, the older poet didn’t really take all that long after they settled in London to start trying to reach out to and make amends with his wife again, attempting all sorts of approaches in winning her back — including some utterly absurd ones like offering to share Arthur with her. And, it was in failing to receive a response from her time and time again that he became increasingly more frustrated, angry, restless, and reliant on drinking to comfort himself, leading to the same old cycle of violent outbursts, tearful apologies and pleading for forgiveness, and even threats of desertion or suicide aimed towards his current partner.

Just as with the time when he had been temporarily estranged from Mathilde due to his abuse and had only Rimbaud at his side to focus all of his moods on, this constant strain of fights and overall tension between the two men and obvious discontent on Paul’s part with not being able to reconnect with his spouse resulted in that same visible decline in the boy’s behavior and mood all over again, and unsurprisingly it became almost a perfect repeat of the past: friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who were once respectful of the two distanced themselves from them, and rumors flew about their unsubtle connection, leading only to further isolation and stigma — and when the going got rough, well…I think you can take a guess what happened: after a particularly brief quarrel one day, Verlaine essentially decided he’d had enough of the problem he’d gotten himself into and then jumped ship in the hope that he would be able to come crawling to Mathilde and ply her into taking him back with tears and threats of suicide if she didn’t.

But…let’s not get ahead of ourselves talking about the abandonment of Rimbaud in London and the accuracy of that matter just yet; we still need to finish addressing the topic that we’re already on.

See, the truth is, there are actually a few brief moments and lines of dialogue in this movie where we genuinely come close to almost addressing any of the above as having happened and been the cause of the deterioration of their relationship and life together, but the point I had been trying to make before is that pretty much every time this truly starts to seem like it is being set up and established even in some small minuscule way, it gets slapped away with some manner of absurd swerve into either a complete denial or omission of the facts, or this weird and unnecessary subplot about precognition.

The fact that Paul was repeatedly trying to reconnect with Mathilde on a romantic level, even while things really weren’t going all that terribly or unhappily for them in London, is never truly established; it is almost hinted at in Scene 42 by having the older poet seem unhappy about the possibility of a separation, and his willingness to submit both himself and his affair partner for a damning medical examination that could land them both in jail and the indifference he shows towards his partner’s fears and feelings about that does speak to an extent about his own selfishness and indecision in what he wants, but this subject is quickly dropped and swept to the side by the younger of the two suddenly spotting the ship which assumedly leads to Africa — at which the story shifts its narrative to focus on the apparent effects of that.

When the perfect opportunity comes up to address that they had actually been living a fairly steady — even if poor — life in London for some time before things went to shit and that Paul had been working a teaching job of his own to support them both, they instead heavily imply that all they were living off of was I guess previous funds from while he was with his wife, and this was the only apparent reason why he had been trying to reconnect with her or her family, which is greatly untrue and horribly misleading, at best.

And likewise, while we are given the constant impression that there is conflict and unrest between the two poets and their relationship, and there is one single, verbal line about Verlaine supposedly still being a drunkard, we are not ever shown any visual or verbal evidence of his drunkenness from the man himself — much less receive any display of the actual, sincerely violent altercations that occurred as a result of it; rather, we are simply shown one very clearly playful and obviously unserious little slapping fight in scene 40, which is quite obviously supposed to be viewed as ‘cute’ or ‘touching’ within its proper context, and then just the one serious argument in scene 48 that plays out just before Paul leaves to go back to his spouse.

There is a singular moment in scene 45 where Total Eclipse nearly appears to attempt an addressing of the underlying issues between the more seasoned author and his partner, by having the older man ask, “I don’t know what — what is it? You seem different.”, but instead of using this opportunity to do so and go into the actually most logical and truthful reason why his lover might have a more exasperated and less enabling attitude of his entitled and indecisive behavior (especially given that there is already a scene in this where Paul expressed that he was willing to send Rimbaud to jail for his own selfish desires), as has been said before, the script instead returns to its strange sub-plot and has Arthur respond that it’s the writing that’s changed him. No, not the exhausting back and forth of this on-again-off-again relationship with an indecisive man who can’t decide what he wants in life, not the constant emotional, physical, and mental turmoil — just the writing; that’s definitely all that’s wrong here.

Strangely, though, this almost seems to be contradicted by the later fight scene, as the greater frustration expressed by the youth there revolves primarily not around the writer’s block he is experiencing, but with the fact that he feels Verlaine is only still there with him because his wife won’t take him back and he doesn’t want to be alone, whereas Rimbaud himself is there because he genuinely wants to be. Really, with all of the contradictions and half-baked sub-plots, I don’t think this movie knows what it wants the motivations of its main characters to be, sometimes.

Even when it comes to the semi-final little quarrel between them — the one that was the apparent breaking point to make Paul decide to suddenly leave the country without his protégé and try to return to Mathilde — despite extremely evidently loving and looking for any and all possible excuses to add drama and shock value everywhere else but this section of the film, the writers for some reason decide not to address the fact that the older man made it a point to indulge himself in one final, direct slap to Arthur’s face with a fish he had just bought at the market.

I do find it incredibly odd just how devoid of any remotely violent, extreme, shocking, or even just plain absurd (beyond that one strange future-vision sub-plot) content that entire section of the movie is; it is almost as if the movie is just now intentionally going out of its way to avoid showing anything of the sort, but only in this one specific section, and although I can theorize some semi-logical reasons why this might be the case, I really can’t say for certain what their angle is here. It’s just…bizarre.

Moving onwards to scenes 52 through 54, we finally reach the…well, what I assume should be the climax of this film, considering it supposedly depicts the last days of their relationship and the famous moment when Verlaine fires his pistol on Rimbaud, but I’m not quite sure that’s how the script itself views the event — given that there’s still somehow roughly thirty minutes left in the movie by the time this happens.

Either way, there’s a lot that could be said about historical inaccuracies here — such as the fact that, despite showing the two fighting almost immediately upon their reunion in Brussels in scene 52, the true reason why things remained so tumultuous between them for those last few days they were together is never shared, and even outright lied about; it wasn’t just that Arthur was angry and distraught over having been abandoned in a foreign country with no money to his name, it was that despite sending for the boy to rejoin him out of guilt and thus giving him hope that they would live together again, Paul was still insistent about going back to his long since estranged wife, even after ages of having no contact with her, and very firmly stating that he would sooner choose killing himself than any other option if she should refuse to take him back.

That’s right — that dialogue they make Paul say about not planning to walk out on him again and that they’ll go back to London? Entirely fake. Never happened according to what any of the facts tell us. …And yet, it’s clear that he didn’t want Rimbaud to leave him, either; he wanted both of his partners, even though neither of them were willing to settle for being just an ‘option’ to him at this point — much less one that he would manipulate and abuse whenever he was bored and feeling like going back to the other.

Although the exact words exchanged during the argument were less than entirely accurate, at least that much of scene 54 was true: Verlaine escalated the situation on the final day and turned his gun on his paramour because the young poet was over all of the games and indecision and just wanted to get away from him, and the older man wasn’t going to have that; he would much sooner have seen him dead than watched him walk away.

Before we get into the finer, more inaccurate details of the movie’s interpretation of that event, though, I first want to talk about something else that this scene vaguely references in the dialogue, and why I feel it was a very unfortunate decision to omit any further inclusion of it into the film as a brief scene, or at least allow us to hear a little bit more about it.

At one point, while aiming the gun at the back of Arthur’s head, Paul essentially insists that Arthur must still want to be with him deep down, because of what he had said before in his letter and the fact that his tears were visible on the paper, to which the teen coolly responds, “That was before I thought of pawning your clothes”.

The thing about this line is that, in reality, pawning the clothes was always a feasible option to him from the beginning, in terms of technicality — Arthur knew that, but he specifically chose not to pawn his lover’s clothes because he could not bear to give them up, even if it was a matter of his own survival; it was the only thing that he had remaining of Verlaine, and he refused to let go of it.

To omit this information from the movie once again just sadly lends to the narrative being pushed that Rimbaud was a cold-hearted person who was pretty much only using ‘poor’, desperately lonely Paul for his own gain, and took pleasure in intentionally destroying his life in the process, and the fact that he is shown as taking even the supposedly final threat on his life and all of the emotional intensity going on around him with either amusement and a smile or a stone cold attitude does not help matters in such a case — even if ordinarily it could possibly be taken as disbelief or simply exhaustion and disgust as he’s reaching his wit’s end with his partner’s erratic, extreme and violent behavior.

Now, with all of that said and at last out of our way, let’s get into one of the biggest and strangest inaccuracies of them all: the fact that somehow, despite this being easily one of the biggest — if not the single most — publicized moments of their entire histories, either together or individually, Total Eclipse still manages to get numerous details, and even the bigger picture of the whole incident, wrong.

What Rimbaud was feeling in that moment just before being shot in the hand, yes, is truthfully anyone’s guess; he could have been terrified, or he could’ve been numb from emotional exhaustion, indignant over all he’d been put through, and in total disbelief that his lover would necessarily follow through on his threat, as the movie could easily be interpreted to have shown us — it is mostly hearsay in regards to that event. It is understandable that the film is going to have to fill in some of those gaps in whatever way the writers personally feel best fits the facts; there is leeway wherever there is no blatant contradiction.

…However, there are also many times in this scene and the next several to follow where there is a contradiction, and yet, rather than choosing to use the information that already exists to give a very plain and clear picture of what genuinely happened, they instead trample directly over the facts in favor of their own re-imagining of two people’s actual lives.

One of the less serious examples of this is in having Verlaine say and do nothing but cry on his knees on the floor at the time of firing upon his affair partner, when in reality we are told that in this moment, he had seemed to have taken a much more openly violent and vindictive approach, shouting something akin to “I’ll teach you how to leave!” (roughly translated from the original, “Je t'apprendrai a vouloir partir!”).

Setting aside petty dialogue choices, however, there are also much, much bigger matters — such as the fact that this movie implies that, immediately after the shooting, some random people within the hotel find Verlaine and Rimbaud from the sound of the gunshots, arrest Verlaine for his crime, and then take the teenager off for surgery as the older man is still being tried, but this is in no way anywhere remotely close to the truth.

No charges were initially pressed against Verlaine at all for his actions — not from anyone at the hotel, and not from Arthur, who not only dismissed his injury as being superficial at the time, but also forgave Paul for it under the understanding that he would be leaving him still. The elder poet agreed to this, but insisted — allegedly along with his own mother, whom was there visiting Verlaine at the time — upon walking him to the station personally that night to see him off.

The arrest of Paris’ once-esteemed poet only came to pass when, during the course of that final trip, Verlaine allegedly started acting quite suspicious and concerning; it was at that time that the much younger man noticed that he was still carrying the revolver in his pocket, and, sincerely believing that Paul intended to murder him rather than let him leave, immediately went into a panic and ran to the nearest policeman, frantically begging for Verlaine’s apprehension.

After the removal of the bullet from his hand, the teen would eventually come to have guilt and attempt to withdraw the charges, but by then the investigation — including Mathilde’s request for a thorough physical examination of her husband and an interrogation of the man into the nature of his relationship with Rimbaud — had already run its course, and he was found guilty of both wounding with a firearm and sodomy/pederasty (which was considered an aggravating element), and was sentenced to prison for two years.

I have sat and thought about this particular chunk of information for the longest time, trying to figure out why in the world Total Eclipse — this movie which is so incredibly bent on maximum drama and shock value — would possibly choose to omit all of it when it could so easily use it as fuel to ramp up the angst of this relationship tenfold, and, apart from perhaps some strange sort of budget issue which somehow led them to prioritize much less important scenes over the literal climax of the film, I can only ever come back to one conclusion: plausible deniability.

Yes, Paul Verlaine is very decidedly an asshole even within this film; he is a liar, he is  a cheater, he abuses his wife in numerous terrible ways, and he even attempted to kill his affair partner, but as I’ve said countless times before, all of this is always framed within the context of it being an alcohol-fueled, spur-of-the-moment and instantly, deeply regretted action brought on only by Rimbaud’s dark influence on his once-perfect and happy life.

Going out one morning and buying a gun for nondescript reasons while drunk and depressed, completely as-of-yet unaware that his partner is really serious about leaving him, that’s one thing; with the way that even after finding out for certain, he talks of having threatened to his wife that he’d commit suicide if she didn’t take him back, then eventually moves on to stating in random succession he was going to shoot himself, then Arthur, then everybody, it’s presented as a completely unmeditated thing — and it probably was, at the time, as far as anyone can say.

But to present the rest of the situation to us accurately — to have him actually make the conscious, premeditated choice to put the gun in his pocket before meeting up with his own Mom and walking Arthur to the station, that is no longer just some drunken, angry or devastated spur-of-the-moment pulling of a trigger; it’s a planned-out murder that he actively thought about ahead of time and decided to carry out anyway. It — just like making any mention of him having tried to murder other people multiple times before — would completely shatter the facade that he was technically not to blame by reason of having just acted without any forethought due to intoxication.

…And if they’ve established him as any of that, well…then they can’t make this movie out to  the bittersweet and tumultuous story of the man who, even after being put through hell and back, still heroically saved and preserved his crazy genius ex-lover’s poems against his prudish family’s wishes and put them out into the world so they could be remembered and appreciated and change the course of the literary world, even at the cost of his own career — and given all of this and especially the very ending of the film, as I said near the beginning of this subsection, that’s clearly the narrative that they want to push here.

As for their final, brief reunion in Black Forest, Germany, after Verlaine served his two-year sentence, yes, that did happen, but once more not anywhere close to the way it was depicted; it was only after trying to make amends one last time with his estranged and soon-to-be ex-wife and failing that he once more met up with his former lover, planning to take his poetry and try to help get it published. By this time, having lost his spark after the end of their relationship and burned out into nothingness, Arthur had given up writing in favor of working a steady job, his creative energy evidently defeated by the world.

When all was said and done, despite supposedly having converted to Catholicism while in prison, the older man ended up nevertheless briefly reigniting their relationship within only a few hours of being in Rimbaud’s presence, only to later pedal backwards and reject him again in the name of his faith, leading to one final argument and spelling the very end of their time together — marking the very last time they would ever see each other.

Strangely, as I’ve mentioned before, this scene does seem to make an apparent one-off reference to the fact that Arthur was the one who got him arrested — which contradicts completely with the film’s plot, but…at this point, I’ve kind of stopped trying to make sense of their contradictory writing.

What bothers me far more is, as I’ve alluded to before and inevitably comes with this “Paul was overall a good person before and after Rimbaud” narrative, how undeservingly and frankly revoltingly romantic they tried to make the ending — and now that we’ve at last reached the very end of this lengthy mess of a subsection and I’ve hopefully convinced you that there’s more than enough evidence to support what I am saying, I can finally speak on that.

At the end of Total Eclipse, the script tries its very hardest to sell us the idea that despite allegedly losing his career and presumably also his wife thanks to his “great and radiant sin” of an affair partner whom he has not seen in nearly two decades, Verlaine regardless remains madly in love only with and faithful to Arthur by choosing to remain in loneliness ever since their parting, whilst Rimbaud himself had eventually moved on, but most of this is just so horribly untrue.

While there is at least some extremely vague room for speculation on if Arthur had ever found another potential partner, it is clear at the very least from his very last letter to Paul near the end of his life that he still held strong feelings for him; meanwhile, it is widely known and understood that within a mere two years of their final in-person parting, and while his divorce with his wife was still being finalized, Paul had already met and gotten with another 17 year old boy who was one of his students — a relationship which he maintained for a full six years before the young man tragically passed away due to an illness, leaving him utterly devastated.

Not only this, but whatever the effects of the rise in popularity of Rimbaud’s revolutionary writing may or may not have speculatively had on Verlaine’s literary career, it is beyond deceptive to frame Paul as having not benefited in any way socially or financially from publishing his ex-partner’s poetry entirely without his knowledge while he was still alive, much less posthumously, without ever involving any of his living relatives in the matter; furthermore, all their speculation aside, we are actually given no genuine reason by any known reputable historical record I could find to suspect that it even was his former lover’s writings that caused his reputation or popularity to ever take a dip to begin with. 

Certainly, there was a point in time where he struggled financially to the point of becoming practically homeless and resorting to living in the slums and hospitals and spending most of his time in cafés, but this had absolutely nothing to do with Arthur whatsoever; rather, it was because, after getting out of prison for attempting to strangle and murder his own mother yet again, shortly after the death of his most recent partner, he had ended up jobless and on the streets without her to run to, and rather than trying to clean himself up and start over again, he instead continued to drink his life away, only making scraps of money from the very occasional conference or written text — at least, until the rediscovery of his older works and the outrageousness of his strange behavior eventually led to him regaining an income, as people even began referring to him as the “Prince of Poets”.

By the time that Rimbaud had died, he had already become a very recognized and respected poet again in the eyes of many, despite his perpetual alcoholism, so the fact that the film attempts to paint him as having suffered greatly for his support of the young visionary is nothing short of insidious.

Perhaps almost the worst of all in my eyes, though, is the fact that this film has the absolute gall to even take it so far as to imply that, even after all Arthur had been put through mentally, physically, and emotionally time and time again — just like Mathilde — the one halfway-decent thing that Verlaine, his abuser and attempted murderer, did for him after his death by preserving and making any works not already possessed by the rest of the Rimbaud family known to the world was apparently enough for him to have earned the younger man’s eternal love and respect from the grave, as the writers make him return from the spirit realm to not only appear before Paul in the bar and kiss his hand, but also apparently visit him every night for the rest of the aging poet’s life and live with him in eternal happiness.

Now, don’t misread me here: I’m in no way trying to imply that Arthur was a perfect saint — quite the contrary, actually; throughout the course of their relationship and even for a short time prior in his life in general, he certainly made his fair share of mistakes, a good number of bad or otherwise just plain inadvisable decisions, and partook in a few behaviors that were deeply unhealthy at best and more than a bit toxic at worst, but his and Verlaine’s situations and action are by no means comparable.

Having grown up in a poor, single-parent household with a mother who was extremely cold, strict, controlling and abusive to the point of not only physical violence but also starving her children for days on end — not to mention having additionally been the victim of a gang-rape in his teens, in a situation that furthermore left him scarred as one of the sole, if not the only, survivor amongst a large number of communards — Rimbaud, still only a mere 16 years old when he met Paul, was most certainly not in any sort of state to be capable of comprehending or engaging in any sort of normal, healthy romantic or even platonic relationship with anyone due to the horridly unhealthy evironment he had grown up in.

Verlaine, on the other hand, was in a complete and total position of power over him from the very start, considering that throughout their entire affair, he was the one who possessed all of the money (financial power and control), provided the boy a place to stay and held all of the social status required for Rimbaud to gain any standing in the life path of his choosing (social and workplace power and control, and complete reign over whether or not his lover would have to return to the home he’d worked so hard to escape from in the first place), was older, bigger, and probably much stronger than him — not to mention definitely more prone to physical violence, and homicidal thoughts and actions — (seniority, physical advantage and power) and by entering into a romantic relationship with him after taking him in, was able to establish an emotional hold over him as well, with which he could manipulate and/or blame him over any trouble that arised out of it.

And yes, there’s no overlooking the fact that Arthur was, himself, also partly responsible for the fact that the affair took place — at least insofar as that he also had to make the decision to be with Verlaine, despite knowing all too well that he was married — but the one with whom the blame ultimately lies, above all, was the man who was already married, for actively choosing to cheat on his wife when he could have just practiced self-restraint. 

Furthermore, I think it also bears mentioning that, while this was fairly clearly not the case for Verlaine in hindsight and it does not in any way lessen or excuse the suffering that Mathilde endured over the matter, considering that it was quite common in those days for any remotely queer folk to marry into loveless marriages and even raise families with people to whom they were not even physically or romantically attracted purely for the sake of maintaining a good image and/or social and financial status, it is more than entirely plausible that Rimbaud may have interpreted Paul’s interest in him and his self-proclaimed emotional and intellectual incompatibility with his wife as having been a result of such a scenario when they met — thus leading him to think that their extramarital relationship would be freeing him from a lifetime of unhappiness due to societal obligation.

There is no doubting that Mathilde was every bit as much of a victim to her husband and his affair in real life as she was in the film, if not more, but no matter how much Total Eclipse rearranges or omits real life events so that it can imply otherwise, Verlaine was not some hapless victim to a devilish Rimbaud who lured him in and destroyed his once perfectly innocent, happy and respectable life and marriage; Paul Verlaine was, by all accounts of genuine history, a manipulative, indecisive, unhealthily clingy, physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive drunkard with a strong tendency towards homicidal urges and a penchant for only dating teenagers who were always at least a decade younger than his mature adult self — both long before, during, and after Arthur was a part of his life, until basically his dying day.

Rimbaud — who, incidentally, turned out an overall normal, healthy, and respectable, if fairly withdrawn, human being after his relationship with Paul was over and he had gotten away from his mother — apart not being his original partner, was just about as much of a victim in this whole scenario as Mathilde, just with even less of a support system to turn to, given the nature of his relationship with his family (especially his only parent) and the fact that the only vaguely friendly acquaintances he really had while living with Paul were those that were inherently said lover’s friends first. (To say nothing of the fact that even openly talking about the true nature of their relationship would have been utterly forbidden and met with complete hostility or mockery at best, if he had chosen to open up about it to anyone.)

So yes, in light of all of the above, I honestly find it extremely out-of-touch at best and absolutely vile at worst that Total Eclipse) seems to have taken the stance it has in all of this, much less that it would choose to make either of the two victims — whether living or dead — return to him to give him the love, happiness, and devotion he supposedly ‘deserves’ and has ‘earned’ through doing one sort of good and allegedly selfless thing at the end of the film.

Other

Have I mentioned that this movie is nearly two hours long, and that at least more than half of that runtime is spent being completely disingenuine about the events that it openly and explicitly claims at the beginning are all being represented 100% truthfully? 

Oh, I have? Okay then, moving on.

After all that I’ve said in this whole section, I honestly don’t think that there’s anything much more to say for this part. I guess one unfortunate but not at all surprising fact is that, adjusting for inflation, this movie cost about £12,778,266.00 to make in today’s money, but only made back £641,059.97 — which is only a little over 4% of the cost.

[Click here for Part 0: Preamble]

[Click here for Part 1: The Good]

[Click here for Part 3: The Takeaway]

#linklethehistorian #my thoughts #thoughts #meta #movie review #Total Eclipse 1995 movie review #total eclipse 1995 #arthur rimbaud #paul verlaine #leonardo dicaprio #david thewlis

[stevensaus]

When The Protest Sign Reveals A Lot More Than Intended

The news coverage of the protests outside a local (to me) YMCA yesterday missed the most important sign the TERFs (trans-exclusive radical feminists) were holding. The one that really revealed how they felt.Quick side note: While I am aware that "TERF" might not be the most accurate term -- I really doubt most of those folks were feminists in any meaningful way -- they were attempting to employ feminist language, so I'm going to run with that label for the moment.The background: The City of Xenia -- not the YMCA, to be clear -- decided to prosecute a transgender woman for utilizing the female changing room. To recap the Dayton Daily News coverage, a Fairborn, Ohio woman "was charged in Xenia Municipal Court with three counts of public indecency, for incidents in September, November, and a third incident between November 2021 and 2022." Xenia council president Will Urschel, in a video posted to YouTube in January 2023, "told a meeting of the Greene County Tea Party that if the city is able to successfully prosecute the person involved, they may bring legal action against the YMCA for aiding and abetting the alleged crime." The YMCA, in response, "has said that state non-discrimination laws require it to allow transgender individuals to use locker rooms, changing rooms and bathrooms that align with their gender identity." The organization also says "posted locker room guidelines ask patrons to 'remain properly covered while in public areas of the locker room.'" The court date has been pushed back due to publicity.Yesterday, 25 Feb 2023, three to five times as many pro-trans protesters showed up to show support for human rights (across the street in this photo), while a dozen or so TERFs protested against the policy, something you can pretty clearly see in some of the video from the news coverage. For quite some time, there were only four folks protesting against the YMCA - the guy with his cross-on-wheels, one man who kept letting the American flag he was holding hit the ground, one guy who seemed to think he was "owning" people by taking their pictures, and a single woman holding their anti-trans signs. That 3:1 ratio seemed to hold true for the anti-trans protesters, while it was easily the reverse for those protesting for human rights. There's a lot I could talk about and unpack there, but specifically, I want to focus on one sign that the anti-trans woman held. The read, "The YMCA cannot give consent for all women." (The sign is just barely visible below the flag in the photo linked here.)The assumptions embedded in that one sentence really reveal a lot. - Using "consent" here inherently brings in an implication of prurient (or sexual) interest to a non-sexual action. This was reinforced by the "keep our women safe" sign another TERF was holding. - It absolutely ignores the actual data about who commits sexual assault. - It ignores the YMCA's own policy of being "properly covered while in public areas of the locker room." - It ignores that gender expression is not -- and does not necessarily correlate to -- sexual orientation. The folks I know were all confused by the sign. Because to us, changing in the locker room or using the restroom is an individual act. The idea of "consent" is utterly misused here, and makes no sense whatsoever. I have never asked "consent" before going in the public restroom at, say, a truck stop, and I've never seen or heard of someone doing so. Even if you were thinking about knocking on the door before using an individual restroom or stall... well, your gender doesn't matter, you don't use the same stall (or individual restroom, or individual changing room) as someone else when they're using it. Problem solved.The anti-trans panic does not actually keep anyone safer. If anything, it distracts us from the actual perpetrators of sexual assault. Transgender people are overwhelmingly survivors of sexual assault. On the other hand, it is shockingly easy to find recent cases involving a church leader in Florida, a youth pastor in Mississippi, a youth pastor in Massachusetts, a pastor in North Carolina, a youth pastor in Arkansas, and a youth pastor in Virginia, and, of course, the Southern Baptist Convention's own released list of "about 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced credible accusations of sexual misconduct. Of those, roughly 220 were convicted of sex crimes or received plea deals."If actual "indecent exposure" happens, then it is actually a violation of the YMCA's rules already, and has nothing to do with a person's gender expression. Problem solved.The last point is the most telling to me, though... because these TERFs have already signaled that this is just part of their campaign against LGBTQIA+ people as a whole. The concept of people whose sexual orientation -- including asexuality! -- is not the same as their own simply did not occur to them. They were utterly unable to think beyond their own motivations and experiences.And if you put all that together, that brings us back to something I said at the beginning of the month. Their actions, their signs, make no sense when measured against observable data. At first glance, it seems nonsensical, even hypocritical.Then you look at who is assaulting women, is stripping away rights, is denying the existence of others for their identities.And then you realize.It is not hypocrisy.It is projection. Featured Photo by Lena Balk on Unsplash Read the full article

#bigot #ohio #protest #terf #xenia #ymca

[egcdeath]

ways to say i love you without saying “i love you”

pairing: steve rogers x reader

summary: you and steve explore love languages

word count: 5.1k

warnings: fluff, a little angst because of miscommunications, reader & steve being idiots, good intentions but terrible delivery, mentions of other characters

author’s note: this fic has been sitting unfinished in my drafts for so long. this fic is like, ancient. this fic was almost destroyed because it was briefly in the library of alexandria. when i reopened the document with this fic, there were mold spores growing on it. (p.s. steve’s love langauge is acts of service, and the reader’s is quality time)

you can find my masterlist and taglist here

Prologue

Steve was a multitasker. You knew this well. Perhaps too well.

That never seemed to bother you before, but if the man who was supposed to be taking a serene nature walk with you checked his goddamn flip phone one more time, you were completely sure that you’d lose it. 

You paused your story about your obnoxious coworkers for a moment, stopping in the middle of the gravelly trail you two were making your way down. 

“Steve, seriously, are you even listening?” you griped, ushering him towards the side of the pavement as a man on a bike flew by. 

He guffawed a bit at this, “of course I am. You just said something about…” he paused, and you gestured with your hands for him to continue. “Okay, sorry,” the blush on his face was becoming more and more apparent.

You involuntarily scoffed, rolling your eyes as you did so, “I’m glad to know that whatever you’re waiting for on there,” you gestured to his pocket, “is more important than spending quality time with your girlfriend, who, must I remind you, took time off to be here with you.”

“Nothing is more important to me than you, I’m just on call. I’m probably going to get called to go on a mission any moment now.”

“Steve!” you huffed, “you literally just got back, like, two hours ago. Can’t someone else go? Tony? Vision? Anyone?”

“I might’ve volunteered myself-“

“You’re unbelievable, Steve. Are you getting tired of me or something? You’ve been avoiding me like the plague ever since I moved in with you. If I upset you, or you’re gonna propose to me or something, can you just tell me?”

“I promise you it’s not personal at all,” he reached for your hand and gently held it. “Everything’s just been crazy. I mean, these Hydra bases have been popping up left and right. Just give me a little grace, okay? I don’t get upset with you when SHIELD starts making you work those ungodly hours.”

You opened your mouth to debate him, but surely enough, the canny and familiar ringtone of Steve’s work phone interrupted you before you could even begin. 

“Okay… Yeah. I’ll be there in thirty.”

You frowned at Steve as he spoke on the phone and shook your head disapprovingly, “unbelievable,” you muttered, storming in the direction of your home. 

——

Steve was no fool, he knew when he messed up, and he was more than willing to take responsibility for such. Now was one of those times. He knew that he should’ve been making more time for you. He was well aware that he shouldn’t have gotten defensive when you pointed this out. 

He just had no idea how to apologize.

You weren’t exactly making it easy for him either, taking much longer hours in an attempt to avoid him. While he could understand your frustrations, it became a little more difficult everyday for him to properly apologize to you in a way he felt was meaningful.

Eventually figuring to use your avoidance as a tool, Steve devised a plot to make an apology for you so considerate, so superb, that you could never be angry with him again. A plot that included a several course meal, all concocted by himself. 

He could imagine the look on your face as you came home from work, shocked, but the good kind of shock. Pleasantly surprised that your sweet boyfriend had put in such a huge amount of effort to say sorry. 

He couldn’t help but imagine the scenario: you would relax into your seat at the table after Steve pulled out the chair for you, hum in content as he poured your favorite wine. Moan happily at the taste of a homemade and rarely prepared salad dressing, before complimenting the melt-in-your-mouth entree he had spent an unknown amount of time laboring over. Finally, you’d gush over the dessert that Steve hadn’t had the chance to cook in years, tell him that he worked far too hard putting everything together, especially for a little argument. Steve would scoff, tell you you’re being too kind, and you would pull him in for a red wine and dark chocolate flavored kiss. 

The thought of you, your genuine and warm smile after a long day at work, and an even longer week worth of unspoken tension between you both, was enough to keep Steve motivated through the hours he spent preparing your meal.

He greeted you at the door like an excited puppy as soon as he heard your keys jingle. Sure, work had kept you a bit longer than he’d expected, and your food was likely a little cool by now, but he was excited to make amends. 

However, you did not seem to share the same enthusiasm as Steve. 

“Welcome home, gorgeous. Come sit,” Steve nudged you into the dining area, and you sluggishly followed, exhausted from a tiring day of training new agents.

“What’s wrong?” he inquired, pulling out a chair that you didn’t even attempt to sit down on. 

“I had a really long day. I kinda just wanna get to bed,” you shrugged before rubbing your creased temple.

Steve internally cringed at the thought of all of his hard work going to waste. For some reason, he’d not envisioned this less pleasant outcome before. “Sweetheart,” he began in a nearly whiny tone, but you weren’t in much of a mood to be persuaded.

“I’m sorry. Weird things were happening at work that I don’t care to get into now, and honestly, I’m not even that hungry,” you reached out and gave Steve’s hand a little squeeze. “But it all looks and smells so good! I Promise I’ll warm some up tomorrow for lunch.”

“I-,” he paused, “please. Maybe you could just take a few bites of everything. It took me a really long time to get everything prepped and ready.”

You frowned at the plea, feeling a bit guilty but almost… satisfied at the same time. Steve struggled to make time for you because of his work, and now he was getting a little taste of his own medicine. 

“I really am sorry. But hey, now we’re even?” you offered with a playful wink, slipping away before you gave your partner a chance to respond. You truly didn’t have the energy for a four course meal that night, let alone another argument. 

——

Wanda was silent for a moment as she sipped from a mug of coffee, watching you with a suspiciously focused look on her face. 

“Wanda?” you prompted, seemingly snapping her out of whatever trance she had found herself in. 

“Oh my God, I know exactly what you guys need,” she just about blurted, reaching across the café table to grab your hand. 

“Were you reading my mind?”

Your friend didn’t respond, but the devious smirk on her face was enough of an answer. 

“What happened to telling me before reading me?”

“You just looked like there was a lot on your mind. And absolutely no way that you’d tell me,” she shrugged nonchalantly.

“Of course I was gonna tell you! Why else would I ask my friend in a cute relationship to meet me for coffee?”

“Because you like me?”

“No, never that. I just needed advice,” the two of you shared a laugh for a moment.

“Well don’t waste your breath. When Vis and I had a rough patch, we just had to learn each other’s love languages. You’d be surprised just how much that synthezoid values those acts of services.”

“And you?”

“I’m a words of affirmation girl myself,” she shrugged. “You should find out yours, and try to figure out Steve’s. I guarantee it’ll be helpful in the long run. I can send you guys a test, if you want?”

“Oh god no, please don’t tell him that I told you about us. Actually, I didn’t even tell you! You were digging around in my brain, and I don’t appreciate that. Just do me a favor, and don’t share this with anyone, okay?” You paused dramatically, then leaned in to speak to your friend in a whisper, “but send me that test when you get the chance.”

Gift Giving

“A little reality-warping birdie told me you’ve been having some relationship problems,” Tony said teasingly once Bruce left the conference room, leaving him and Steve alone. 

Steve paused for a moment, trying to decide whether he should lie or fess up to the allegation. “How did she know?” Steve finally responded, standing up and pushing the chair he was sitting on behind him. 

Tony shrugged dismissively, “I don’t ask these kinds of things. I just hear in passing that the geriatric is having a hard time and tune in.”

Steve shook his head slightly, rolling his eyes to mask his clear embarrassment. 

“Well, is it true?”

“We’ve just been having the occasional… rift. A little more than occasionally.”

Tony nodded, fake pondering the situation, “well, I always know what I do for Pep, at least after I tell her I’m getting rid of the suit. Go buy her something nice. Really nice, like jewelry, or a purse if she’s into that kind of thing. I would say a car, but I know that Social Security check isn’t getting you too far. You know what? Put it on the company card. My treat.”

Steve wanted to scoff, turn his nose up at the offer like it was a terrible idea, but it really wasn’t. Maybe a material surprise was the way to win you back. He made a soft ‘hmph,’ noise as he mulled it over. “That’s definitely not your worst idea. Thanks,” he gave his teammate a soft smile before collecting himself and heading out of the conference room. 

His first stop after work was some local jeweler. Steve threw on a (not very) inconspicuous outfit before entering the building, where he browsed for a good hour, searching for something that he believed you’d like. After looking at more jewelry than he had ever cared to see in his life, he decided on a necklace with a thin golden chain with a decent sized diamond hanging off of it. It was a little pricier, and you’d be able to tell— but he hoped it would help the gift mean more to you. 

——

When you arrived home late that night, Steve was sitting in the living room waiting for you. It was almost daunting, the sight of him sitting alone on the couch mostly in the dark, only the television illuminating his face. He kind of reminded you of a parent waiting to confront their child who just snuck out, or a concerned friend seconds away from staging an intervention with you. 

Walking past the room, you peeked your head through the doorway, and observed the flat, small box in front of him on the coffee table. 

“Hey, Sweetheart,” he greeted, standing up so he could greet you with a hug and grabbing the little box as he did so.

“Is everything okay?” you probed, speaking into Steve’s shoulder.

“Of course. I just wanted you to know how much I love you, and that I’m sorry for not having as much time for you as I should,” he pulled away before holding the box out for you. 

You hesitantly took the box and opened it, letting out a gasp when you viewed the delicate looking gold necklace. 

You were having mixed emotions, because it was clearly beautiful and you were grateful to the gesture. But you knew that this must’ve been expensive, and that it was so unlike Steve to have done something like this. Your frugal, Great Depression era guy wasn’t exactly the most material. 

“I love it,” you gushed, admiring the jewelry. 

“Can I put it on you?” Steve asked, and received a nod in return.

Steve set the box down on the table and lifted up the necklace, bringing it up to your neck and focusing on clasping it in the back.

“Babe, how much was this?” you blurted, not even being able to filter the words before they left your mouth. 

“Hmm? That doesn’t matter,” he dismissed, then stepped away from you to admire your clavicle. 

“It just feels weird letting you spend so much on me.”

“It’s a gift, though. You’re not supposed to think about those things,” he hummed, pressing a chaste peck to your nose. 

“Steve, I got you a Nespresso for Christmas and you wouldn’t stop complaining about how expensive it was. I love it, I really do. It’s beautiful and I’ll always think of you when I wear it. I just think that maybe we should have the same standards for each other,” you stood up from your seat and sidestepped him. “I need a shower.”

Steve watched you walk off, letting your words simmer in his thoughts.

That was the last time he would take relationship advice from Tony. 

Words of Affirmation

This conclusion probably shouldn’t have taken you this long, but you were almost completely sure that this would be the love language to win Steve back over. You felt bad for some of the occurrences between the two of you lately, with sour exchanges and sweet moments that turned bitter on a whim.

In all honesty, you were concerned that Steve doubted your love for him. And if his love language really was words of affirmation, this would certainly convince him otherwise. 

You sat at your desk the night before Steve departed for a two-week mission, trying to write a nice message for him. You tapped your pen on the stock paper in deep thought as you tried to figure out the best thing to say. 

I’m sorry for arguing so much with you lately. You and everything that you do mean the world to me, even when you get on my nerves. I love you more than anything and that will never change. 

The words looked cramped and unkempt on the little note. Your handwriting got messier as you went. You groaned at it, crumpled the paper, and tossed it in your trash bin. Time to start over again.

I’m sorry for arguing with you. I love you a lot. Can you stop picking up your phone when we’re spending time together?

You groaned at the passive aggressive tone of your message. That certainly wasn’t going to get you anywhere. Straight to the bin it goes.

I love you so much so don’t die on your mission or I’ll be pretty upset. Be safe out there xx.

The tone was even more off now. You needed to think of something that would really make Steve remember you while he was gone. For a second, you considered snapping a nude with a polaroid and attaching it to the letter.

I’m sorry that things have been so bad nasty for us lately. I promise that I love you, despite our ups and downs. Nothing will ever change that. I’ll miss you more than you know while you’re gone. Make sure you call me every day, my love. 

A little cheesy, but you signed off with your name regardless, and contentedly looked at your work. The spacing looked correct, the tone wasn’t harsh, and you knew for a fact that Steve would appreciate it.

You stayed up a little later than normal, waiting for Steve to get home and change out of his ‘work clothes’ so that you could slip the note into his utility belt. 

You folded the note to a small little square and set it beside an granola bar in a pocket you’d assumed he frequently used. Content with your work, you laid back in bed until your partner slipped in bed beside you, and sleepily cuddled into you until you were both unconscious. 

—

Around two weeks had passed since Steve had seen you last, and he had decided to stop by the office and finish up paperwork before coming to see you. It had been radio silence on his end, despite the note in his clothing that clearly requested daily contact. Part of you wondered if Steve had seen it at all.

Steve had just finished signing the documents when he finally noticed it, reaching into a sparsely used part of his belt to have a quick snack. His hand landed on a folded piece of paper, and he cringed as he unfolded it, the letter becoming clearer and clearer as he did so. He wondered just how long the message had been waiting for him. 

He read your sweet words with a frown on his face, the guilt from not opening it sooner overriding the sweet feelings that he would otherwise have. He grabbed his phone and considered texting you, but abandoned that thought altogether. 

“FRIDAY, any idea where Y/N is right now?”

“I was told not to share any information about Ms. L/N, Captain Rogers.”

“Whose orders?” Steve pressed.

“Hers,” the bot quipped back. 

Steve groaned aloud. He was really in for it tonight.

Physical Touch

“Have you tried touching her more?” Thor casually queried. The water that Steve had just consumed nearly flew out of his nose, and his cheeks reddened instantly. 

“Pardon?” he asked, looking away from his friend instantly. 

“I understand that you and Y/N have been having troubles lately. Perhaps she does not feel held by you. Maybe she wants you to show her off in public, to hold her hand, hug her,” he suggested. 

Could Steve even be blamed for going there? He was having a chat with a god of fertility. Who wouldn’t think the same? 

“Stark’s gala tonight. Show the world that she’s yours, and I guarantee that she’ll love every moment of it.”

——

You were confused. Really confused.

The night began with some simple touches, hand holding as you entered the building, a casual arm around your waist as you chatted with donors and politicians you hadn’t seen in months, a playful match of footsie under the table while waiting for food. But it came to a head when Steve had decided to rest his hand on your ass and grope you in the midst of a conversation.

Now, in any other situation, you would welcome this affection. But both you and Steve had never been a fan of PDA, and this was a bit too far. 

As subtle as you could manage, you pushed his hand away, offering him a sour look as you did so. 

“Excuse us,” you told some rich old man in an artificially sweet tone before ushering Steve off to his office for a bit more privacy.

“What was that about?” you questioned, sitting down in the padded chair behind Steve’s desk, and running your fingers over your necklace in a bit of a nervous tick. 

“What do you mean?” he retorted, standing across from you at the desk and setting his hands on top of the clear table.

“Why were you groping me in front of people? That’s really... unlike you. And it made me uncomfortable.”

Steve frowned genuinely, looking down at the table in embarrassment. “I’m really sorry. For making you uncomfortable. It sounds ridiculous but I was just trying something new.”

“Apology accepted, but are you sure? You weren’t like, jealous of those guys or something? You know you’re the only hundred year old I have eyes for,” you set your hands atop of his and squeezed.

Steve chuckled at this, the flush of his cheeks only highlighted more by the laughter, “it’s just that, uh, Thor told me I should try showing you off more. Or something like that.”

“So you groped me in front of our guests? That’s silly. And a little unprofessional,” you glanced over at the cork board on his desk sitting next to his desktop, and amongst the neatly arranged scratched out to-do lists and random reminders, you couldn’t help but notice the creased paper of the note you’d left for his mission. Your chest warmed when your eyes fell upon it. 

“When did you find this thing?” you asked, pointing to the note. 

“I meant to say something, but when I found it, FRIDAY said you didn’t want to talk to me. SO I was going to bring it up when I got home, but you were still working. After that, I kinda… you know-”

“Forgot?” you finished with a hearty laugh, “It’s fine. You’re such a dork. C’mere so I can get my own groping in,” you chided, grinning to yourself when Steve wrapped his arms around you in a tight embrace. 

Acts of Service

Steve was quietly folding your laundry in your bedroom when it finally occurred to you, but when it did, it hit like a ton of bricks.

Steve’s love language was acts of service!

Things suddenly began to make sense to you, the way that he initially attempted to apologize by spending hours cooking one meal, how he consistently worked to make your life as comfortable as possible, and his great insistence to do house chores, despite you being more than capable.

Steve set down a stack of folded sweatshirts by your calf, snapping you away from your brief retrospective daze. If that really was the case, and Steve’s love language truly was acts of kindness, you had to come up with some sort of plan to communicate to him just how much you cared about him in a way that he really appreciated.

Luckily for you, you were a quick thinker. Before you even knew it, a week filled with random acts of kindness before he was off on yet another mission was quickly hatched.

——

You were up at the ass-crack of dawn. Really. Steve liked to get up earlier than the sun in order to run, or train, or whatever the hell it was that superheroes did. You were seriously regretting your decision to wake up around the same time as him in order to do some favors for him in the morning. 

By the time Steve was back from his run, his favorite coffee was brewed and cooling, and you were in the laundry room at the dryer, preparing to give Steve a warm towel after his shower.

Despite the three mugs of coffee you’d just downed, it was becoming more and more difficult to keep your eyes open. It didn’t help that your eyelids felt like they weighed fifty pounds each, and the warmth of the dryer next to you was providing you with just enough comfort to drift off.

And drift you did. In fact, half an hour later, you’d missed the frantic calling out for you from your boyfriend as he searched for you around the apartment. 

You finally awoke when he shook your shoulders, his amused voice bringing you back to consciousness. 

“What’s going on here?” Steve grinned, pushing some hair out of your face. 

“Mmm,” you began, “Iwantedtogetawarmtowel,” you slurred sleepily and incoherently.

“Even with super hearing I couldn’t decipher that. Let’s get you a mattress, okay?” Steve hoisted you up like you were nothing, and carried your half asleep body all the way up to your bedroom. 

The next thing you knew, you were buried under your favorite comforter and propped against a mountain of feathery pillows. A gentle forehead kiss and an incomprehensible sentence about calling off of work for you later, you were back in a deep sleep. 

So much for warm towels.

—

You were going to do better this time. That’s what you told yourself as you strolled through the grocery store, the same store that you hadn’t shopped in since moving in with Steve, as he preferred to do the shopping himself.

Equipped with a short paper list and sheer determination to make the trip as short and accurate as possible, you gathered all of the groceries that you believed were necessary— just enough to restock the fridge, and fill some gaps left in the cupboard. 

Your time at the store was indeed brief, as you found yourself in the checkout lane after just twenty minutes (you definitely weren’t going to brag about that to Steve later. Definitely not), and back home with just enough time to unload the groceries, and further prep yourself to go to work. 

You’d honestly forgotten about your trip to the store by the time that you arrived home, up until you found your boyfriend arm deep in your pantry, hellbent on finding… something.

“Can I help you?” you poked with a laugh, coming up beside Steve and peeking over his shoulder.

“I’m just… Did you happen to grab any protein bars while you were at the store?” he asked, pausing his search to look back at you.

“I don’t think so. Why? It’s not like you need any more protein,” you teased, squeezing a bicep to demonstrate your words.

“They’re pretty convenient when I’m out in the field. Don’t worry about it, though. I’ll just swing by the store and grab some before my mission tomorrow. Actually, I should probably go now. Y’know, before I forget,” Steve was already grabbing his car keys from the counter by the time his sentence was finished, leaving you to fight off your disappointment at your minor grocery store failure.

You looked at what you now knew was an insufficiently filled pantry and pinched the bridge of your nose. You had seriously underestimated the ins and outs of shopping for a super soldier. 

Well, third time’s the charm?

—

After this week, you would never complain about waking up early again. You were now up at an absolutely ungodly hour, scrambling eggs, flipping pancakes, and spreading jam on toast for a sleeping, unsuspecting Steve.

You placed the plate on a sturdy wooden tray, poured orange juice and an extra glass of water, and set a nicely folded napkin, along with utensils, next to the items.

You hoped that the scent of bacon wafting up to your bedroom would eventually pull him out of his slumber, and seeing how bacon was the only thing left to finish cooking, you took a little break. 

A round of Candy Crush turned into two, then three, and goddamnit, why can’t you beat this fourth level! You got so wrapped up in your mobile game that you didn’t even notice when the scent from your kitchen became slightly rancid, and when you rushed over to the oven to check on your now extremely burnt bacon, the smoke detector wailed.

You grabbed a kitchen towel and waved your arms like a madwoman near the smoke detector, the shrieking eventually stopping, but not before Steve was halfway down the stairs.

“Y/N, where are you? Is everything okay?” he nearly shouted, racing down the stairs and barreling through the smoky kitchen to find you. When he reached you, he wrapped his arms around your waist and began to pull you out of the kitchen. 

“Steve, relax. Everything is okay. Except those pieces of bacon,” you rubbed your now sweaty palms on your pajama pants before breaking away from him to crack open the kitchen window. 

“Christ, what happened? And why are you up so early?”

“I was trying to make you breakfast in bed,” you admitted, rather embarrassed by the dramatic scene you’d accidentally created. “Sorry,” you muttered.

Steve wrapped his arms around you once more, this time in a reassuring bear hug that left your cheeks pressed to his chest. “Don’t be. I really appreciate this, and everything else you’ve done this week. It’s the thought that counts, right?”

“I guess,” you mumbled into his shirt. 

“Besides, everything else looks delicious. And you tried your best for me while trying something new. I think that’s really sweet of you.”

“Really?” you pried, looking up at him.

“Really,” Steve confirmed.

“Well, I think it would be really sweet of you if you went back to bed and got all cozy so I can take care of you.”

Steve chuckled softly, pressed a little kiss to your nose, then nodded, “yes ma’am.”

Quality Time

Steve had been in a bubbly mood since getting back from his mission, and for no particular reason. It wasn’t like you weren’t happy that your partner was happy, but feeling like you were out of the loop was slightly concerning.

Before you could let your thoughts run too wild, you decided to pop the question during one of your evening walks. 

“Okay Steve, what is going on with you?” you asked, veering to the side of the trail when a biker rode past you. 

“Nothing big. Nothing too important. I’m just out of service for the next three months,” Steve said casually, playing it cool. 

“What?!” you paused, your brows raising and eyes widening in surprise as you searched his face for sincerity. “You’re serious?”

“Serious as a heart attack.”

“Steve!” you gasped happily, nearly roaring out his name in excitement. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“I was going to tell you before wining and dining you, but you beat me to it. So…?”

“…So I’m happy to have you back. I may need you to negotiate some time away from work for me in the next few months, then. I don’t wanna miss this preview of stay-at-home-dad-Steve.”

“Hey, don’t push it.”

“Oh, I’m planning on pushing it.” 

Epilogue

The sun was beating down on you, but the soothing breeze that flowed past your checked blanket every so often provided a pleasant antidote to the summer heat.

You’d truly picked the best day for a picnic.

Despite spending a good amount of time with your partner, the last month and a half had truly felt like a whirlwind. You casually started looking for a forever home, found yourselves making plans for an early retirement, and you had a new, sneaking suspicion that a proposal was on the horizon.

In the midst of it all, Steve had suggested that the two of you take a midday tryst at your local park and throw yourselves a little picnic. Of course you obliged, because when your greek god of a boyfriend suggests going on a spur of the moment date, you agree.

You now watched the nearly cloudless sky with pure, unadulterated feelings of content and joy while Steve set a slice of cheese on a cracker, leaning over your body to feed you. As you opened your mouth, Steve paused abruptly at the soft vibration coming from his pocket. 

Steve resumed as if nothing had changed, popping the cracker into your open mouth and letting his phone continue to ring.

“Don’t you wanna get that?” you questioned.

“It can wait,” Steve stated nonchalantly, slipping his phone out of his pocket and pressing decline with absolutely no hesitation before tossing the device to the edge of your blanket.

You didn’t realize how long you’d been waiting to hear those three words.

-------

a/n: this could’ve been solved in like 20 minutes by sitting down and taking a love language quiz together

#steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x you #steve rogers x y/n #chris evans x reader #chris evans x you #avengers fanfiction #steve rogers fluff #steve rogers fanfiction #captain america x reader #captain america x you

[danswank]

I stuck around after the initial allegations because they contradicted themselves, they were anonymous, and it was very unclear what was actually happening. Then, their statement came out, and they said they supported victims, but they didn't apologize for anything; they should have said sorry for ever making people uncomfortable with their behavior, on and off stage. I think the scene culture at the time was just like that in a lot of ways, crass and unsupervised, and they started so young, but that does not excuse their behavior. They needed to take responsibility for their actions. Simply acting like they had never done any wrong ever when we know otherwise was the wrong move. And the lawsuit was the nail in that coffin: they essentially said that not only did they never made mistakes, but that anyone who said otherwise would face legal consequences, ensuring that no one would ever speak up again. Their statement said they stood with victims, but their actions have showed the opposite.

I understand how music is lifesaving. I have deep emotional connections to so much music, some of which I have had to let go of because of things like this. It is your responsibility as a listener and lover of music to know who you are supporting. There are so many artists who have never been bigoted or sexually assaulted anyone. I know it sucks to let go, but some things are more important than a band. ATL were my top artist of 2021 by a large margin. I have only recently cut down my listening to one or two very old songs that I am essentially weaning myself off of.

Again, it is more about their response to the accusations, not the accusations themselves or even any bad behavior; we know the scene was rampant with sexism. What matters is how those bands respond to what we know happened, even if they have grown and matured since then. People deserve apologies. At this point, if you do not explicitly stand with victims, you are against them. Actions matter more than words or intentions, and their actions say that they do not care who they may have harmed, and that money matters more than the safety and wellbeing of their former fans.

i respect that you’ve made your decision and i’m not trying to change your mind. here’s what i’d say. if jack is innocent, of the big twitter accusation, imo the most important part of all this, i can’t blame them for wanting to prove their innocence. i know false allegations are rare, but i can’t imagine what it would feel like to have thousands of people harassing you and calling you a pedophile for something you didn’t do. i would want to clear my name too.

continuing under the guise of him being innocent, if they knew they wanted to press charges at the beginning, they legally never could’ve admitted to any wrongdoings in the past at that point. we deserved a tweet or something a few years ago about how their behavior has changed, but we didn’t get it, and now you just have to decide if you’re comfortable seeing that growth (few examples being changing the name of the hustler club, deleting old tweets, changing the way they interact on stage and with fans) or if you need it spelled out.

i dont think the lawsuit is saying “we’ve never made a mistake” in fact it’s literally just saying “these 3 people made statements about us that are untrue.” i see what you’re saying and the way people have taken it to seem like they’re silencing victims but once again, if the allegations are untrue, i really can’t find it in me to blame them for wanting to prove their innocence. if the allegations are true (and i’m not sure we’ll ever have an answer either way, even though the twitter statement said she had proof which she had plenty of time to provide before this escalated), i’ll eat my words.

i have a problem with needing to know the accusations of every artist you listen to. absolutely not. sorry. i’m not googling every new artist that appears on my discover weekly. i don’t believe we should put that burden on people. also, even if you do all your research, there could just be people who haven’t come forward yet, who have been assaulted by these artists, or the artists made bigoted comments to their friends that you’ll just never know about. what we need to stop doing is putting people on a pedestal and expecting everyone to be perfect. people make mistakes. i feel very strongly that we need to allow that.

i don’t think you can say “money matters more than the safety of their fans.” they’re donating any money from the lawsuit to charity. it doesn’t excuse everything but it’s not nothing. i just hate this blanket statement that if you try to prove your innocence suddenly you don’t stand with any victims. you should be concerned with these false statements invalidating actual victims. you should want them to realize that everyone can’t just go around saying what they want on the internet. the people making false allegations are the ones who invalidate real victims. and i shouldn’t have to believe every anonymous stranger on the internet.

#sorry this got long but i don’t agree with this take and tried to lay my points out even if we just agree to disagree #it’s the expectation that everyone must be perfect and their reactions to these messy painful situations must be perfect too #let’s give people some empathy and compassion huh? #atllegations #answered ask #if you want to step away from fandom and stop listening to their music ok! #but you’re the only person that’s affecting

[adventuresinwonderlust]

Title: Intermingle: part 2

Pairing: dom! yoongi x inexperienced reader ft. Taehyung

Warnings: co-workers to lovers, angst, smut, public sex, dry humping, thigh riding, oral (f) receiving, oral (m) receiving, cum swallowing, fingering, daddy kink, fluff, teasing, protected/ unprotected sex (stay safe always)

Rating: 18 and over

“Fuck daddy yes. Please, just like that!” You yank at Yoongi’s hair, shamelessly grinding against his erection while he tugs and sucks on your nipples. He growls against your soft flesh, the sounds of you reaching your climax seemingly driving him wild. “God, I need you inside of me daddy, please!” You beg. He releases your nipple from his lips, looking up at you with lust in his eyes. He licks his lips, opening his mouth to speak. “Meow! Meow! Meow!” You look at him in confusion. “What?”

*Meow! Meooorrrrwww! *

You stretch your entire body, rolling over to see you have 15 minutes left on your alarm, too bad your cat hadn’t picked up on that notion. “No Frenchie! Go back to bed!” You grumble. She leaps up onto your bed now, kneading into your belly. You whine from under the covers. “I’m gonna give you away you pest.” You threaten, jumping up from the bed causing her to leap to the ground. You stamp into the kitchen and prep her breakfast. She happily noms away allowing you to pet her as she does. You head back to your room to turn off your alarm and get ready for a shower when an idea pops into your head. You grab you phone from the side table and sit down on your bed, removing your pajama top. You pull your hair forward, making sure to cover your breasts so just a bit of nipple shows through, and you snap a couple of selfies. You review them, choosing your favorite and send it to Yoongi with the caption ‘I woke up so wet thinking of you daddy.’ You sit for a moment, biting your lip, waiting for a response and then wonder to yourself if he would even be awake this early, seeing as how he is always late for work. With no response you hop in the shower, emerging fresh and clean. You dress in black dress pants, a white button-down shirt, and black cardigan, keeping it open instead of buttoned up. After applying some makeup and straightening your hair you head out the door. Your phone finally buzzes, and excitement fills your belly only to be crushed by a text from Becca, informing you she will be out the rest of the week. You frown and shove your phone in your bag.

A loud honk startles you, “Excuse me miss, I heard someone was in need of a cleanup crew?” You turn to the voice and smile wide at Yoongi driving slowly beside you as you walk. “Get in beautiful.” You wait for him to stop and hop in. “You missed more than a few buttons today.” He teases. “Oh shush.” He laughs leaning towards you to plant a soft kiss on your lips. “You didn’t answer my text!” You shove him away. “Of course, I did. Surprise!” He waves his hands in the air. “So, you came all the way over here, because of my photo?” You give him a suspicious look. He nods. “Uh, yeah, I did. Do you think I wake this early cause I like to? When I saw the picture, I had to make sure you hadn’t lost you mind completely after last night. Can’t have you revolting you know. First, it’s the shoulders, a little bit of thigh, and then it’s free the nipple.” You laugh out loud at his comment. “I love you,” You giggle, covering your mouth quickly, “I mean, like your humor. Not that I actually love you. It's just an expression that I use. I’m sorry, I’m over explaining.” He gives you a sly smile but says nothing. Your heart races in your chest and you begin to shake your leg nervously. “Wanna grab some coffee before we get to the office?” He asks, resting his hand gently on your shaking leg and giving it a comforting squeeze. You look at him and he winks at you. “Calm down kitten. Daddy’s got you.” You immediately stop shaking your leg, swallowing slowly. “Yeah, sure, coffee sounds nice.” He nods and focuses back on the road. You arrive at the office garage and your nerves kick in. “Maybe we should go up separately, so people don’t think anything.” Yoongi looks over at you puzzled. “What would people think? That one coworker gave another a ride to work?” “You know what I mean Yoongi.” “No, I don’t. Do you not want to be seen with me because that’s the vibe I’m getting?” You scoff at his accusation. “That’s not true.” “Good, so let’s get up there. I think this will be the first time I’m on time in like a year.”

You both arrive upstairs to find the boss standing by your desk. “Ah, Y/N, Yoongi! Good morning. Y/N, I need you to come with me and meet the new guy. He is just a temp tester we will have here until Rebecca comes back; he will be working on the other games we have launching. I’ll need you to show him the ropes, lend him your expertise, show him some of the cool things we’ve been working on with the new game. I’m counting on you.” You nod, following behind the boss to the conference room, Yoongi not far behind. “Taehyung, this is Y/N, and this is Yoongi, he’s in graphics. They are actually on a team together working on the new game.” Your face drops as Taehyung greets you with a smile. “What the fuck?” Yoongi whispers under his breath. “Hello, it’s nice to meet you both. I’m excited to help out.” “Taehyung here is my soon to be son in law.” You and Yoongi both look at each other and then to Taehyung. “Now I trust you will take good care of him Y/N. Yoongi, you can get to work. Have a good day everyone.” Your boss walks out, leaving the three of you to stare at one another. “Hello Jagi.” “Don’t call her that.” Yoongi all but growls. “Min Yoongi, right? Nice to see you again. I thought I heard him say you could get to work, no?” Taehyung smirks at Yoongi. You turn to face Yoongi, who is staring daggers into Taehyung. “Please, just go. Its ok. I’m fine.” He shrugs and pulls you towards him. Your body tenses. “You know I don’t trust that guy.” He whispers. “I know but let’s not draw unneeded attention to ourselves. You can trust me. Come on Yoongi, don’t tell me your jealous?” You giggle, trying to lighten the mood but soon stop once you notice Yoongi’s stern face. “You have absolutely no reason to be jealous Yoongi.” He nods, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Well, I’ll see you at lunch yeah?” He looks you over. “Uh, I don’t know. I have to train him and show him what Becca has been working on.” You tell him. “Yeah, and you have to eat.” Yoongi snaps. The jealousy in Yoongi causes you alarm, he always seems so confident, you couldn’t imagine him being threatened by another man. You give him a smile, hoping it will help him feel more comfortable. “Don’t smile at me like that. This isn’t a game. I’ll see you at lunch.” Yoongi declares, giving Taehyung a dirty look before walking off.  

You turn to face Taehyung, “Did I hear that right? Did he say soon to be SON in law?” Taehyung nods. “So, all this time the woman you were fucking behind my back was my boss’ daughter?” “I didn’t know that then Jagi. I only just realized,” You laugh at his words, “You have to believe me.” He urges, moving towards you. “I don’t have to do anything.” “Tell me Jagi, is that Min Yoongi your boyfriend now?” “And if he is?” You cross your arms. “Has he told you then?” “Told me what?” “That he slept with my fiancé?” You heart drops to the pit of your stomach. “He mentioned that he had a one-night stand with the boss’ daughter.” “Yeah, well, imagine my surprise when she threw it my face that she too had an affair. We had a terrible fight, and she says to me that I’m not the only one with prospects. Then she gives me a name, Min Yoongi, and at first, I’m trying to figure out where I know the name from. Well, when it hit me, I was shocked to say the least Jagi.” “Hurts doesn’t it? Getting cheated on?” You spew. “It does. What hurts more though is doubting whether the child your fiancé is carrying is yours. Tell me Jagi, how well do you really know him? I told you I had a bad feeling about him. You shouldn’t trust him.” Tears burn at the back of your eyes and you begin to stutter. “No, you're wrong. It’s your baby.” You say shakily. Taehyung says nothing, instead just shrugs, seemingly unbothered. “Excuse me. I have to go to the restroom.” You run out of the conference room and straight to the bathroom. Once locked in you begin to quietly sob. Surely Yoongi would’ve mentioned impregnating some girl, wouldn’t he? You keep your hand over your mouth to hold back your cries. You soon gather yourself, checking your makeup in the mirror. “I won’t let him do this to me. Not anymore.” You say to yourself in the mirror. You escape the restroom and head to your desk to find Taehyung already seated at Rebecca’s desk. “I didn't mean to upset you. Look, he doesn’t know about us, my father-in-law I mean. I’d like to keep it that way.” You nod. “Sure. I'll keep my mouth shut if you keep yours shut, about Yoongi and I.” He eyes you suspiciously. “So, he is your boyfriend?” “I never said that. Now, Let’s focus on your training.” You clear your throat and turn to your computer, an alert popping up on the screen.

Minyoon93: How’s it going? I figure we go out for lunch today. BBQ place? I'll grill you a nice steak.

You sniffle a bit reading Yoongi's message. Your heart pounding thinking of what Taehyung alleged. “I could definitely go for some BBQ.” Taehyung says, reading over your shoulder. You close the window off. “What are you doing? You are not coming to lunch with us. Go back to your station.” You suck your teeth at him. “Oh, Jagi but I am, you didn’t think I took this position because of you, did you? No, it’s because I intend to make Min Yoongi’s life a living hell. I’m going to make things so bad for him, he won’t make it to launch. So,” He leans in close, hate in his eyes, “write him back and tell him you’d love to join him for lunch. Let’s say around noon.” He smiles, moving back towards Rebecca’s desk. “And if I don’t?” He snorts at your attempt to boldness. “Then I tell your boss all about you and Yoongi and we both know how bad he’s been itching to fire his ass.” “Who are you Kim Taehyung? I feel like I never knew you at all.” Taehyung gives you a thin smile. “I’m sorry Jagi. I wish you weren’t involved but since you are all I can ask is that you stay out of my way.” You immediately feel sick to your stomach, had you truly not known Taehyung at all? You needed to warn Yoongi without potentially ruining his position here at work.

Noon rolls around and Yoongi arrives promptly to pick you up. “Lunch time already? Time flies when you have an amazing teacher training you all day.” Taehyung stretches, smiling brightly at Yoongi. “Sorry friend, you're not invited.” He informs Taehyung, reaching out his hand for you to grab. “Oh, Jagi invited me. Didn't want me to feel left out. This wasn't a date was it?” He chuckles. Yoongi shoots you an annoyed look and starts for the elevator without you. You roll your eyes at Taehyung who wiggles his brows at you, following you to the elevator. “BBQ, right?” Taehyung asks. No one responds but you watch as Yoongi white knuckles the grab bar in the elevator. You all exit, you and Yoongi walking ahead. “It's not what you think, he’s got this vendetta against you. We need to find time to talk alone.” You whisper to Yoongi. “You ruined any chance of that by inviting him.” Yoongi whispers back. “Secrets?” Taehyung asks, shoving between the two of you. “Just asking Yoongi if he's finished with my notes on the new levels.” You offer. Taehyung nods, opening the door to the restaurant. “So, how long have you two been dating?” Taehyung asks once you've been seated. Yoongi chuckles, clearly pissed off. “We aren't dating.” You cut in, getting a look of disdain from Yoongi. You realize your mistaken and go to reach for his hand, but he pulls it under the table. “How long are you temping for?” Yoongi asks Taehyung. “Through launch. Rebecca being out throws a wrench in things for my father-in-law, so I was asked to help out.” “I didn't know you gamed. You look like one of those stock guys.” Taehyung laughs at Yoongi’s assumption. “Yeah, I get that a lot. You, on the other hand, look like a gamer. Shaggy hair, rocker clothes, you look like you don't really put much effort into anything but sleeping and gaming. I, on the other hand, love gaming, gaming is how I met Y/N. I guess we have that in common.” “We do have that in common. Although don't let my look fool you. I put all my effort into everything I do. Right kitten?” You look up at Yoongi and can feel your face turn red. You clear your throat and begin to stutter. You tuck your hair behind your ear, happy to see the waitress arrive. Taehyung does the honor of ordering, while Yoongi starts the grill. “So, tell me friend, what's the real reason you took this position? I know it isn't because you wanted to be helpful to your father-in-law.” Yoongi leans back in his seat.

Taehyung gives Yoongi a wide smile. “You’re right. I could care less about this stupid launch. I'm here because of you.” Yoongi scoffs, “Because of me? And why exactly is that?” “Did you know?” Yoongi's brow furrows and he can't help but stifle a chuckle. “Know what exactly?” “Did you know she was pregnant when you fucked her?” Your eyes shoot open as Taehyung stares pure hatred at Yoongi. You look between both men, waiting nervously for an answer. Yoongi sighs, crossing his arms, looking over to you then back to Taehyung. “Yes.” He says plainly. You gag on your own saliva, covering your gasp with your hand. “You fucking asshole!” Taehyung jumps over the table to grab at Yoongi. You shout as he knocks over the beverages. Yoongi shoves Taehyung back into his seat. “She knew you were cheating,” Yoongi shouts, “She slept me with to get back at you.” “I should kill you.” Taehyung seethes. “Yoongi, how could you? She was pregnant with another man's child.” You whimper, tears forming. “She wasn't far along and anyway she told me after we were done. Look, I never said I was Saint ok. I didn't know Taehyung was her fiancé or your ex. I don't owe any of you anything.” You let a tear fall. “You're right. You don't owe me anything.” “I told you he was no good Jagi.” Taehyung comforts you by taking your hand. “That's rich coming from the cheating ex.” “You may not owe her anything Yoongi, but you owe me everything and everything I will have. It's going to bring me such pleasure watching you lose it all. Come Jagi, let’s get out of here.” You stand with Taehyung, Yoongi jumping up. “You’re not leaving with him, Y/N.” “Will you stop her? Please, I dare you to try.” Taehyung taunts. “I don't owe you anything Yoongi.” You spat, leaving the restaurant with Taehyung, not looking back when you hear a fist collide with a wall.

You hadn't bothered to talk to Taehyung since lunch and he didn't bother you, instead working quietly at Rebecca’s desk. You hadn't noticed either, if Yoongi walked in, too immersed in your levels to pay attention, your heart still breaking over his words at lunch. ‘I don't owe any of you anything.’ Sure, you guys weren't anything official, but his lack of empathy was what truly hurt you. How could he be so cold?

Minyoon93: We need to talk kitten. Please.

You look over your shoulder to find Taehyung focused on his computer screen, happy your headphones were on to keep the alert from sounding out loud in the small space you both shared.

Y/L/N/Birth year: I’m not interested honestly, besides what happened to not owing anyone anything?

Minyoon93: I felt cornered, I’m sorry, please, please let's talk.

Y/L/N/Birth year: I can't right now but I’ll stop by later with my notes.

Minyoon93: I'll be waiting.

“Jagi.” Taehyung's voice causes you to jump. “What?” You spin around after closing the chat window quickly. “I'm done with these levels you gave me if you want me to move on I can.” You simply nod, having gave Taehyung other games to work on. “Hey,” He rolls towards you, “I'm sorry about lunch. I know you liked that guy but it's better to find out early that he's a scum bag. Just between us, you didn't sleep with him, did you?” “That's none of your business. Just focus on your work.” You snap. Taehyung smirks at you causing your blood to boil, knowing he knows the answer to his question simply from your body language. After all these years he could still read you like a book. “I’m glad Jagi. He doesn’t deserve to know you intimately.” You snarl at him with anger in your eyes. “I never said we weren’t intimate. We just haven’t slept together. Did you think you’d be the only man in my life forever Kim Taehyung?” You stand grabbing your notes from your desk. “I’m going to drop these off. I’ll be back.” Taehyung stands with you. “I’ll come along.” He offers. “No! Thank you.” You throw your hand up causing him to take his seat. You release a proud huff and walk off towards Yoongi’s desk. You stand behind him for a moment and chuckle to yourself as you watch his leg shake frantically whilst he chews at his fingernails. “Nervous?” You whisper. He looks over towards you, dropping his hand from his mouth, and standing. He goes to reach for you but stops himself, looking around instead. “I’m sorry about lunch. I shouldn’t have said what I said. You deserve an explanation. I don’t want us to start things off on a bad foundation. I’m not a bad guy. If you just give me a chance to show you.” You lift your hand, pressing a finger to his lips to quiet him. “Now isn’t a good time for this. There’s too much going on and too many people around. Let’s talk later. You can drive me home.” He nods at you, pressing his lips into your finger. You hand him your notepad. “Levels 11 through 20 are done.” You say with a large grin. “You’re awesome. I’ll go over these now.” He takes the notepad and drops it on his desk. You turn to walk off but Yoongi grabs your hand, tugging you back. “No one's looking, kiss me, please. I want to feel your lips against mine.” You feel your face flush, darting your head around to see if indeed no one was looking. “I’m still mad at you.” You whisper, leaning towards him. “I know kitten, I know.” You gently press your lips to his, instantly swept up in his commanding mouth. You moan softly causing him to bite on your lip as you part. “I have to go. We’ll talk later.” You lick your lips, walking off.

At 5pm Yoongi arrives at your desk with notes in hand, “All done.” You look up at him with a small grin. “Wow. That was fast! I think one quick look at everything, and we may be ready to present to the boss for review week.” Yoongi nods, looking over at Taehyung who is clearly immersed in your conversation. “You guys make a great team!” Taehyung chimes in after a moment of silence. “Yeah well, it's time to go so, are you ready?” Yoongi asks you cautiously, side eyeing Taehyung. You nod, straightening out your desk before standing to leave. “Have a goodnight you two.” Taehyung smiles, waving you both off. You both get into the elevator and you can feel the tension building between you and Yoongi. “That was odd, no?” You ask. “It was. I don’t trust him. He’s up to something. I don’t think we should touch or talk much until we are out of the building.” Yoongi whispers. You nod, following behind him to his car. You both sit in silence for a while as he drives you home. “So, you wanted the chance to explain yourself.” You start. Yoongi sighs. “What I did with Taehyung’s fiancé, that was stupid. I truly had no clue who she was to him or you or any of this. She was beautiful and she flirted with me. I had already taken her to my place when she told me she had a boyfriend. I wanted to stop everything right then and there, but she was adamant about getting him back for cheating on her. She said she found things in his phone and she was really hurt. I guess I felt bad which is horrible to say and so I slept with her. It was after we, well you know, that she told me she was pregnant. She was only a few weeks then. She had just found out, she was emotional, embarrassed. I was so angry at her for not telling me before, not truly giving me an opportunity to say no in the matter. She said she knew I wouldn’t sleep with her if I knew. Look, I’m sorry. I get it if you don’t want to continue to see me or whatever. Just know my feelings for you haven’t changed.” You swallow hard, thinking about everything he just said. You wanted to be mad, hell you couldn’t help the fact that you were jealous, but in this moment, you could tell he was being honest, and you wanted nothing more than to forgive him. However, you had questions, so many questions. “You can ask me whatever you want kitten. I’m an open book for you.” He replies as if reading your mind. “Did you use protection?” He smirks at the question. “Of course, I did. I always use protection.” You nod. “Did you like it?” You immediately slap your forehead the minute the question leaves your mouth. He full on laughs now. “It's ok, don’t be embarrassed. Its normal to feel jealous. I’d be lying if I said Taehyung being around didn’t make me jealous.” You look over at him in confusion. “Really?” “Hell yeah really. He’s extremely handsome, and he’s literally the only man to have made love to you. Of course, I’m jealous.” You smile to yourself. “You don’t need to be jealous. I think your handsome, sexy even.” He smirks. “Thank you, kitten. To answer your question, full disclosure, yes, I enjoyed it but what man doesn’t really enjoy sleeping with a beautiful girl? Besides, it’s not how I enjoy being with you. It's different being with you. You make me feel like I can love again you know. Like there is more out there for me. Anyway, you don’t have to be jealous of anyone from my past. None of that matters for me. All I can think about is you, us.”

He pulls into your parking garage and parks, looking over at you. “Any other questions? Anything you want to just know?” “Do you want to come up? We can make up.” You lick your lips suggestively with a shrug. He chuckles, pressing his folded hands into his crotch. “I do but I won’t. Not yet kitten. It's not right just yet.” You reach your hand over, under his linked fingers, and palm his growing erection. He groans quietly and you feel your pussy moisten. “I want to make you feel good. What’s not right about that? I want to suck your cock daddy, please.” He sucks in a breath at your brazen comment. “Damn kitten, you shouldn’t tease me like that.” “I’m not teasing. God you don’t know how often I dream about you; how bad I want you? Do you wanna know what I dreamt about just last night?” You whisper, cupping Yoongi’s balls and giving them a good squeeze. You lean in and kiss his open pout softly, “Do you want me to show you daddy?” You moan into his mouth. He raises his hand into your hair and grips tightly, shoving his tongue into your mouth. You mewl at his desperation, reaching to undo his belt. He stops you, causing you to whimper. “Not yet baby but soon I promise. I want all of you, but it has to be right. When you’re ready to be mine completely.” You sit back in your seat and pout. “Don’t do that baby. You know how I find it irresistible.” He leans over and kisses you again, the same thought passing through your head; Be BRAVE.

You spring forward, sure not to break the kiss, climbing over the gear shift and into Yoongi’s lap. He moans as you dig your hands into his hair, tugging on his soft shaggy locks. He grips your waist tightly, dragging you along his erection. “This time we’re both gonna cum.” You tease, catching his bottom lip in your teeth and tugging. He groans at your sudden rough behavior, even you are surprised at yourself, but you needed him so badly. The thought of him leaving right now, jealously over another woman, and all the stress of having Taehyung around was slowly building up inside you and all you wanted was this man and the sweet release you knew he could bring you. You grind down shamelessly over and over in his lap, moaning out like a true kitten in heat. You feel yourself moisten under his heated gaze, his cheeks flushed, his hands only gripping tighter and tighter on your hips. “You need to know now; I’m not going to cum Kitten.” He pants. You smirk, unbuttoning your shirt to reveal your sheer bra. He looks over your breast, licking his lips at the sight of your hardened nipples pressing against their soft barrier. “You sure about that daddy?” You mewl, releasing one of your tits, tugging and twirling your bud in your hand. “Fuck.” He whispers, tossing his head back against the headrest. You feel his cock twitch beneath you and it only motivates you to grind harder against him. “You’re going to cum!” You almost threaten. He gives you a slick smile, leaning forward to plant kisses along your neck. Once he reaches your ear, he whispers softly to you, “Don’t test me kitten. You’re not in charge here.” You whimper at the feel of him bite down on your earlobe, slowly making his way back down your neck, collar bone, and to your exposed breast. He bites the bare flesh hard causing you to cry out. He soon suckles at the spot, creating a dark purple mark. “Yoongiiii, don’t.” You pout. “Mm, but you look so sexy with my mark on you. I’m going to have so much fun leaving marks all over you.” He teases, licking at your nipple through hooded eye lids. You groan at the sight, gasping at the feel of Yoongi shifting below you to press his thigh between your legs. “How about instead of stopping this all together, daddy lets you fuck yourself on his thigh? Let me see your gorgeous fucked out face.” He pants from between your cleavage, slowly rubbing his button nose between your mounds.

You lean back slightly, shoving your breast further into his face, feeling safe wrapped in his arms as you grind against his clenched thigh. Your clit burns with need as you press her firmly against him, grinding unabashedly once again. He soon begins panting with you, watching you closely as you bring yourself closer and closer to climax. Your core soon burns with your impending orgasm. You rock harder against him, feeling the car shake with your every motion. You notice the windows have fogged over, your belly tightening and your skin goosing. “That’s it baby, cum for daddy.” You throw your head back, hit with the hot waves of your climax. Your cunt trembles with every gasp and you can feel you’ve soaked through your dress pants. You slowly stop your movements and lower your head to meet Yoongi’s gaze. “You. Are. So. Fucking. Beautiful.” He declares, taking you by the mouth into a powerful kiss. “I want more. I want you.” You whisper into his mouth, tugging at his belt. He smirks. “Soon kitten. Very soon. I promise.” He kisses you on the cheek softly when a hard knock on the window causes you both to jump. You yank your shirt closed, leaping towards the passenger seat. “It’s ok kitten. Calm down.” You nod, frantically buttoning your shirt. Yoongi rolls down the window to find the parking attendant standing beside him. “Sir, do you live here?” “Uh, no, I was just dropping off my girlfriend who does live here.” “Alright well, there’s no loitering. So, I have to ask you to leave.” Yoongi nods, hitting the button to pull the window back up. “Girlfriend huh?” You smile. “Didn’t know what else to say. No pressure. I should get going though. I can pick you up in the morning. We can drive in to work together.” “I’d like that.” You nod, leaning over to kiss him again. “I’ll see you in the morning.” You go to leave but turn to Yoongi again. “We have to be careful at work. I’m afraid for you, for us. Taehyung isn’t going to let things go quietly. We should try to keep the peace.” He nods. “I know baby and I agree but let’s not worry about that. Let’s just get through this launch and soon he will be out of our hair. It's going to be ok. I promise.” You nod at Yoongi’s confidence, leaning in to kiss him goodbye once more. He rubs his fingers along your cheek gently and you exit the car and head up to your apartment.

The following morning, you’re beaming as you head downstairs to meet Yoongi. He’s parked out front, patiently waiting for you. “Morning.” You greet, hopping into the car. “Morning kitten!” He beams, leaning over to kiss you. He points to the cup holders between you and you smile wide at the sight of fresh coffee. “You’re too sweet but I think it was my turn to get the coffee this morning.” He shakes his head. “I'll never let you pay for anything again.” You blush a bit at his comment, hiding behind your coffee cup as you sip. “You look great by the way.” You take note of his dangling earrings, ripped blue jeans, black button down, and red and black bomber. He looks down at himself and shrugs. “You look better baby. God, I love those fucking cardigans.” You roll your eyes at him, yanking at the collar of your bright yellow buttoned up cardigan to reveal you’re not wearing a shirt underneath. He sucks in a breath before licking his lips. “Every day is a surprise with you Kitten. I gotta say I am enjoying discovering all your pretty layers. Never a dull moment.” You giggle now. “So, how was your evening? You know after you left me?” He smiles wide at your question, revealing his gums. “Didn't I tell you if you want to ask me something, you’re just going to have to come right out and ask it?” He gives you a sinful smile now. You feel your cheeks flush and you shrug. “Say what you need to say kitten.” You take a deep breath and release a slow sigh. “Did you make yourself cum thinking of me last night?” You whisper. “Did you want me to?” “You can't answer my question with a question.” You whine. He looks you over and you do your best to avoid eye contact. He grabs your chin now, forcing you to make eye contact with him. “I didn't,” He smirks, leaning to whisper in your ear, “I'm saving it all for your greedy cunt.” He straightens up, checking his mirrors before driving while you sit in shock, your pussy tightening with need. You begin to stutter but can't find the words. “Let's get going before we end up being late.” You swallow hard and just nod, collecting your thoughts. “We should maybe do something this weekend. I mean, outside the office, like normal people.” You clear your throat, nervously awaiting his response. “So, like a date?” He looks at you briefly, to wink and then back at the road. “Yeah, like a date. You can meet my cat.” “Oh, I’ve met your cat baby.” You suck your teeth, swatting at his arm, soliciting a cute chuckle from him. “I’m kidding baby, of course we can do something this weekend. Anything you want.” “Good, I’ll look into some things and let you know over lunch.” “You got it kitten.”

“Good morning you two.” Taehyung greets from Rebecca’s desk as you both approach. “I’ll see you at noon.” Yoongi whispers, tugging at your pinky before walking off to his desk. “Morning Tae. How was your evening?” You inquire, taking your seat. “Informative and yours?” You look at him now with suspicion in your eyes. “What’s going on Taehyung? You’ve been, I don’t know, too nice.” He purses his lips slightly and shrugs. “I don’t know what you mean Jagi. I’m sorry you feel that way.” “Don't bullshit me ok! You came in all guns blazing about how you were going to ruin Yoongi’s life and now suddenly, its great teamwork and good mornings? What's going on?” He chuckles and shakes his head. “You really need to calm down Jagi. You’re too wound up. I don’t ever recall you being this way when we were together.” He runs his fingers down your arm and you quickly swat his hand away. “Don't touch me.” He nods. “We should get to work. Lot’s to do today.” He turns to his computer, covering his ears with his headphones.

Y/L/N/Birth year: Taehyung is definitely up to something. In other news, I looked up and reserved a slot for us at the art museum. Not sure if you're into that stuff but I figure it would be fun. Saturday at noon, I know you're not an early bird. Let me know what you think.

Minyoon93: Hold onto your seat Kitten cause I have a huge surprise for you...I love art!! Ha-ha, I can't wait to spend the day with you. Sounds great to me! In other news (imagining your cute voice saying this), don’t stress the ex!! We can worry about him another time. He isn't significant. Lunch on me today. ;-*

Your heart beamed reading Yoongi’s message and you tried to remember the last time it was that you felt this enamored with someone. “Jagi,” Taehyung’s voice crawled up your spine like a snake, “I am all done with these levels also. What would you like me to start on next?” You turn to him and rummage through the items on Rebecca’s desk. “Peter is the graphics guy working with Rebecca on these levels, you can walk over your notes to him and then start on this next.” You hand him another thumb drive with a different game. He nods with a smile. “Is it ok to wait till the end of the day to drop it off? I want to give everything to him all at once.” “Sure. Whatever you’d like.” You smile and turn back to your desk, unable to shake the nagging feeling that something is wrong.

At just about 10am, you receive an email from the boss about a ‘Launch Team Lunch’ at noon. “There go my lunch plans.” You whisper to yourself. At just before noon, you make your way to the conference room, where there is a huge spread of sushi and salad for the team. “Hey there gorgeous.” Yoongi whispers in your ear. You turn to face him, and he winks at you. “Guess we will have to settle for seeing each other after work.” You whisper to him. He nods, grabbing some food and following you to the table to sit down. Your boss soon enters. “Welcome team! I am happy to announce that many of you have finished the levels that you have been working on and I am beyond proud of the work we have all come together to accomplish. With that being said, please take this lunch as just a token of my appreciation. Monday is final review, Wednesday is submission day, and Friday will be a fabulous launch party. Everyone is invited!” Everyone in the conference room erupts into applause at the news. “I am very excited to get this game out to the public and the higher ups are excited to close this deal! Y/N! Yoongi! Amazing teamwork, you two were the first two to get everything done so I am most proud of the two of you. I expected nothing less. Yoongi, please stay after work today for your annual review. That’s all people, enjoy lunch and let's get this game to launch!” Everyone claps again as the boss exits the room. “Should I be concerned about this review?” You lean over and ask Yoongi. He shakes his head, shoving a roll in his mouth. “Same thing every year. Work on your lateness, be more respectful of your workplace, keep up the good work. Its fine kitten. Don’t worry.” He swallows with a nod. You nod with him but again can't shake this feeling. “How will you get home?” He breaks through your thoughts, wiping his mouth. You chuckle, “Uh, public transportation, same way I did before you started driving me.” “Alright, well, I’ll call you later after I’m done here and pick you up tomorrow for our date.” “Sounds like a plan.” “Wanna sneak out? Go to my car? We have some time left and I can go for some dessert.” He licks his lips, looking up at you from under his bangs. “What are you thinking? The coffee shop.” You say brightly, sitting up. He smiles at you and shakes his head. “Come. Let’s go.” He gets up and walks out, you following behind him. You both move quickly out of the office and to the elevators, making your way through the garage to Yoongi’s car. You walk over to passenger side and furrow your brow at Yoongi who makes his way behind you. “What are you doing?” He raises his eyebrows, opening the back door and taking you by the hand to lead you to the back seat. You can’t help but laugh as he helps you take a seat, looking around before he climbs in beside you. “Yoongi, what are we doing? I thought you wanted to grab dessert.” He tilts his head at you as realization crosses your face. “Lie back baby.” He whispers. You slide back slightly and lie across the back seat. Yoongi looks over your body, turning to lean on his knees, grabbing your right leg and crossing it to the other side of his body. “Yoongi.” You swallow hard, feeling yourself clench around nothing. “Shh, I got you baby.” He says, gripping your thigh to pull your body down towards his. You squeal a bit as he covers your body with his, wrapping his lips around yours.

You moan wrapping your arms around his neck while shoving your tongue in his mouth. He slides his hand up and gently squeezes your breast before making his way back down your body, his hands playfully exploring your body, landing on the button of your dress pants. He unbuttons them with ease, tugging down the zipper, and pushing his hand into them to squeeze your thick mound. You groan, thrusting forward, desperate for friction. He soon lifts his hand up slightly to tuck his hand into your panties, gliding his middle finger along your slit. “Damn kitten. I haven’t even touched you yet and already you’re soaked.” He licks at your earlobe. “God, you don’t know how bad I want you.” You tremble under his touch. He chuckles against your ear, making his way to your neck, using his slender fingers to part your lips to coat his tips in your arousal. He pulls his fingers from your pants and shoves them in his mouth. “Delicious.” He pants, lifting off you to tug your pants and panties off. You gasp at the cold seat touching your ass. He continues to yank until the garments are off completely, sinking between your legs. “Oh, fuck, Yoongi! People will see us.” You try lifting your head until you feel Yoongi glide his tongue through your slit. “Oh fuck!” You cry out. Yoongi grips your thighs, latching on to your needy clit and slurping luridly on it. You cry out curses amazed at how quickly you can foresee this ending. He soon wiggles his head, using his nose to dig deeper into your cunt. You moan and groan as he bobs his head up and down your inner and outer folds, nibbling and suckling until he finds your entrance.

Your back arches as he growls, quickly entering you with his tongue, fucking you with rapid thrusts. You slowly begin to grind against his face, spreading your legs wide with the desperate need to have your clit massaged. Yoongi picks up on your cues and begins to suck your labia into his mouth, slowly making his way back up to your swollen bud. He looks up at you as he wraps his mouth around your clit again. You cry out under his gaze, the sweet feeling of figure eights activating all your nerve ending. He pants against your sex switching now between figure eights and suckling, sending your senses to over drive as you feel your walls clench and your belly tighten. “I’m gonna cum soon daddy. It feels so fucking good.” He smirks against your pussy, bringing a hand over to slowly dip his first two fingers in and out of your entrance while still servicing your clit. Your thighs begin to shake with the feeling of that coil deep inside you twisting tightly. “Daddy.” You pant over and over, your eyes rolling back when you feel him enter you fully with his fingers, curling them to meet your g-spot. Your coil soon shatters, a scream escaping your throat, your body trembling uncontrollably with the most intense orgasm coursing through you. Yoongi continues to rub and kiss your cunt until your body stops trembling, only lifting his head when you’ve seemed to calm. “How’s that for more?” He smiles, licking your arousal from his face. “That was amazing.” You lull, giggling with your hands over your face. He grabs your pants and assist you in putting them on in the tight space. You soon lean over to kiss him, tasting yourself on his lips.

“When do I get to repay the favor?” You ask, reaching down between his thighs. He catches your hand and brings it to his lips for a kiss. “Soon baby.” He says, looking to his watch. “Why won't you let me do anything to you?” He looks at you confused. “You do so much to me baby.” “I mean fuck you. Suck you off. Jerk you off anything.” He laughs wide, his face dropping when he realizes you’re not joking around. “Oh kitten, come on. I just want to enjoy you. Besides, why do we need to rush? You really do, do so much to me and for me that’s enough.” You scoff. Exiting the car. Yoongi soon follows behind you. “Kitten, please, don’t be upset.” “You don’t want me to touch you. Why?” You poke his chest now. “I do, believe me I do. I want all of you. Do you think I don’t want to be inside of you already? I just want it to be right.” “You’re hiding something, and I am sick to death of people hiding things from me.” You start to stomp off, stopping for a minute when you hear something clatter in the distance. “What was that?” You whisper. “What,” Yoongi asks, looking around, “I didn’t hear anything.” You roll your eyes and continue to the elevators. “Kitten, I promise, it’s not what you think. Please, trust me ok. I would never hurt you or hide anything from you on purpose.” You shrug and look him over. “Whatever.” He sighs, pinching his nose as the elevator doors open and you both enter. He swallows hard, looking up at the cameras, “I promise kitten. It's nothing bad. I really like you. Please, don’t be upset with me. Say you’re not mad or else I’m going to kiss you right here and now in this elevator and I don’t care who sees.” You look at him with narrowed eyes. He lifts his head to the cameras again then to you, raising his brows. You sigh. “That’s blackmail you know.” He shrugs. “Fine. I’m not mad. I do trust you. It's just…waiting sucks.” He nods and smiles just as the elevator opens on your floor. “The wait is almost over. I’ll call you tonight kitten.” You nod at him, heading to your desk.

You sigh to yourself, noticing Taehyung missing from his desk, wondering if he is in the conference room grabbing food for himself. You look over your cubicle to see if you catch a glimpse of him down the hall. “What are we looking for?” His voice creeps from behind you. You yelp at his unexpected pop up. “Where were you?” You question, holding your chest. “Grabbing lunch.” He smiles, holding up a delivery bag. He walks past you and plops down in Rebecca’s seat, unloading his lunch. You eye him suspiciously before taking your own seat and continuing your last minute projects.

Minyoon93: Get home safe Kitten.

Y/L/N/Birth year: You too. Can’t wait to have naughty phone sex later. LOL.

Minyoon93: O_O I’ll be sure to make this thing brief.

You log off soon after and head home. By 7:30pm you’ve showered, ate, fed Frenchie, and are on your bed waiting for Yoongi’s call.

*8:00pm*

*8:45pm*

*10:20pm*

“Alright, what the hell?” You mumble, picking up the phone and calling Yoongi instead. It rings and ring until, “You have reached the voice-mail box of Min Yoongi…” *BEEP* “Hey its me. Um, I guess your meeting ran late or something and I’m sure you’re exhausted. Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow morning. I guess around 10ish. We can grab coffee. My treat! Um, have a goodnight and I’ll see you tomorrow. Oh, sorry, I said that already. Hope you’re OK. I’m sure you are. OK. Goodnight. Bye.” You sigh deeply, hanging up the phone, lying back in bed with a heavy feeling in your chest. Would he really not call if he said he was going to? Oh well, he would surely explain in the morning.

*BEEP BEEP BEEP *

You rise early to get in a shower and get pretty for your first date in forever. After checking your phone, you see no missed calls but either way its no big deal to you. By 10am, with no call or sign of Yoongi you decide to call again. “You have reached the voice-mail box of Min Yoongi….” *BEEP* “Hey sleepy head! I hope you set an alarm. I don’t want to miss our time slot so I think I’ll just head over to the museum and just meet you there. When you get this just go straight to the museum. See you soon. Bye.”

11:45am and still no sign of Yoongi, you clear your throat of the giant lump forming as you make one final attempt at reaching out. “You have reached the voice-mail box of Min Yoongi…” *BEEP* “You know if you didn’t want to come on the date you could’ve just told me instead of standing me up. Anyway, sorry to, I don’t know why I’m apologizing. Goodbye Yoongi.” You hang up and walk up to a couple making their way towards the entrance. “Excuse me! Did you guys get tickets yet?” “Not yet.” The young lady says. “Well, you’re in luck. I won’t make it in. Enjoy.” You hand over your tickets and smile wide as they thank you and walk off.

*Mreooowwwwww*

Frenchie greets you as you walk through your front door, tears streaming down your face. You plop down on your couch unable to stop the sobs that escape your throat. Frenchie hops up on the couch beside you, rubbing her body against your side to comfort you. Soon your phone buzzes and you shoot forward, yanking it out of your pocket. You suck your teeth as it lights up with the name Kim Taehyung. “What do you want?” You seethe into the phone. “Hello to you too! I just wanted to check in and see if you wanted to grab lunch.” You rub fresh tears from your eyes, silent on your end. “Jagi? You there?” “Where’s your wife?” You hear Taehyung chuckle. “Fiancé and she is at her parents' home. I told you we fought. She’s been taking time away. Anyway, it's just a lunch among friends. What do you say?” “I’m not in the mood but thank you.” *MREOOWWW* “Is that Frenchie? I’d love to see her. I could come by, bring mandu. What do you say?” You take a deep breath, mulling the idea over in your head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good idea.” “Oh, come on. What do you have other plans? I’ll be by in about an hour. See you soon Jagi!” He hangs up before you can continue to protest.

In exactly one hour, he arrives with food in hand.  “Hi Jagi. You look nice. Did you go out?” He observes you in one glance as he enters. “I went for a walk this morning.” He drops the bag on the table and slides out of his coat, looking around the apartment, his eyes lighting up when he sees Frenchie hop up on the counter. “Hello my love.” He mews, walking over to her. Her eyes shrink as she hops on her hind legs, front paws in the air.... *HISSSSSSSSS*…. She drops down to the ground and scurries off to your bedroom. “What on earth was that?” He looks over at your bedroom in confusion. “You know she's temperamental. Besides, it's been a while since she last saw you. Just come eat.” You grumble, already helping yourself to a mouthful. Taehyung takes a seat across from you and reaches down to grab your foot from the ground. You flinch instinctively but he holds on tightly, slowly beginning to rub your foot. “Don't,” You whine, “It's inappropriate.” “Because of Yoongi?” He asks causing your heart to jump at the sound of Yoongi’s name. “Because of your soon to be wife!” You shout, yanking your foot from his grasp. “Its never stopped us before.” He smirks suggestively. You scoff, sitting up straighter in your seat. “What happened to wanting to do right by her?” He shakes his head. “You really know how to ruin a moment.” He says, focusing on his plate. You stand and head into the kitchen to grab water, taking a moment to calm your nerves, when you feel Taehyung press his chest against your back. He nuzzles into your hair, running his hand down your arm, slowly trailing kisses down your neck. You release a low sigh, exposing more of your neck for him, losing yourself in the moment. “Yoongi.” You whisper, feeling Taehyung’s body stiffen, his kisses stopping. He spins you to face him and you swallow hard reality hitting you. “He’s never going to touch you again Jagi. Not while I’m around. He doesn’t know you like I do. You’re caught under his spell, his ridiculous charm, but it’s all a façade. Let me show you that I can be all you want and need.” He kisses your lips softly, moving to your earlobe and placing a soft kiss there. “I can be your daddy.” You heart seizes in your chest. “What did you say?” You pull away from him. “What,” He replies puzzled, “Is something wrong?” You shove him away fully. “You need to leave Taehyung. I’m sorry but you have to go.” He shoves his hands in his pocket looking you over, giving a small nod. As he pulls on his jacket, he smiles at you, moving toward you to run his thumb along your bottom lip. “Your mine Jagi. Always and forever. I’ll see you Monday.” He turns and leaves not waiting for you to walk him out.

“Hello! Where have you been? I've been worried sick about you. Why didn't you call?” “I'm so sorry kitten…. I…. We…. just….” “What? I can't hear you. You're coming in and out. Yoongi? Hello?”

*BEEP BEEP BEEP *

You wake to your alarm with a gasp, snatching your phone from your side table to see no missed calls. You hop out of bed with a fire under your ass so great that you are showered and ready to go in 45 minutes. You opt for a skirt today with a low-cut tank top assisted by your best push up bra and a cardigan on top, open for dramatics. You arrive at work promptly at 9am and head straight to the conference room for your final submission to the boss. Your palms are sweaty as you anticipate Yoongi’s arrival. The door opens behind you and your boss walks in, assistant in tow. “Good morning Y/N, I see Yoongi is late but what's new?” You give a tight smile, your leg shaking frantically. At 9:15am, Yoongi strolls in and your cunt nearly bursts at the sight of him. He's wearing skintight black jeans and a white button down that's clinging to his damp chest, even his hair is damp, and you can't help noticing the bags under his eyes. He walks past you, sure to not make eye contact and takes a seat. “Yoongi, we just spoke about lateness.” Your boss scolds. “I apologize.” Yoongi grumbles. You suck your teeth and chuckle at his apology causing both Yoongi and your boss to look at you. “Something funny?” Yoongi snaps. “Just your blatant disregard for the people around you. Other than that, nope nothing.” You snarl. “You missed some buttons on that cardigan mother Teresa.” He clips, turning to face your boss. “Alright enough you two! Now, I’ve reviewed your work and it's amazing. All the kinks are out, and it's been approved by upper management. You guys have been greenlighted. So, you no longer have to work together. I am sure that makes you both happy. Great job to you both! I was very impressed by your dynamic so I may call on you two again to team up in the future. Now, get to work on the other projects you were working on and I will see you both at the launch party. Have a great day!” Your boss applauds you both as he walks out of the room, his assistant in tow. Yoongi sighs, standing to leave, as he walks toward the door you jump up and block his way. “Excuse me." He says dryly, eyeing your cleavage before looking away.

Your eyes shoot open at his disregard for your feelings. “You bastard!” You watch him swallow hard, but he says nothing. “I called you! I waited for you! I went to the museum like an idiot thinking you’d show! I was worried sick about you, and you come in today like what, like you don’t even know me? You owe me an explanation Min Yoongi!” You shout. His eye sink and cheeks flush. “I’m sorry but I shouldn’t have agreed to the date. Its better this way. Clean break.” Your breathing quickens and you begin to stutter. “I, clean break for who? I… I don’t understand. We, the car, and you, all those things you said. How could you do this to me? I let you touch me in ways no man has ever!” “Yeah well, there was a reason I never let you touch me ok and I just think it's better if we end things now before they get out of hand. Don’t make things harder than they need to be.” He snaps. You stutter, stumbling back a bit, reaching for a chair to steady yourself. His face softens and he moves toward you, taking you by the arm. “Hey, ok, wait. Take a deep breath, just relax ok.” You can’t help yourself; you lean towards him and fall into his arms. He tenses at first but slowly hugs you tightly, stroking your hair. “I don’t understand. Why are you doing this? I know you don’t mean this Yoongi. I know you care about me, about us.” You whisper into his chest.

“I’m sorry kitten but I don’t. I lied to you ok. I, I just wanted to fuck you.” You jump back, staring at what feels like a stranger. “Liar! If that was true, we would've fucked that first day, but we never did.” You cry, not bothering to stop the tears from falling. “Why do I need to lie? You practically threw yourself at me that day and I mean I’m a man. Why would I say no? Things were moving slow and I wanted to respect that, besides we had to make the most of working together but once I saw how caught up you got on me, well, honestly, I didn’t really want to get caught up in a relationship if you catch my drift. It was fun while it lasted kitten.” He scratches at the back of his neck, looking down at the ground to avoid eye contact. ‘Perfect,’ you think to yourself as you cock your hand back and slap him hard across the face. Shock spreads across his face quickly as your handprint forms on his fair complexion. His rubs his cheek, nodding, and looking up at you with tears burning in his eyes. “Feel better now?” “I’d feel better to kick you right in the balls you piece of shit! I should've never let you touch me! You’re a pig Min Yoongi. You took advantage of me when you knew all along you had no intention of moving things further. I opened myself up to you. You should be ashamed of yourself! You’re just the same as Kim Taehyung. Lying snakes, the both of you.” You shout. “One day you'll know that's not true.” He responds, walking past you now, leaving you to cry alone.

“Morning Jagi. You ok? You look, drab?” You stare daggers at Taehyung as you enter your cubicle. You sit down at your desk, putting on your headphones and drowning him out. You spend the rest of the day this way. At the end of the night, you hop into the elevator to go home, sighing with relief as the doors begin to close. A hand catches the door before it can close completely and Yoongi walks in. He nods at you briefly and focuses on his phone. The elevator goes to close once more as another hand catches it. Taehyung enters and the two men give each other hateful looks. This time the elevator makes its way down. “So, Jagi, maybe I can stop by again to see you and Frenchie. I had fun this weekend with you. I missed spending time with you.” You cringe at his remark as you catch Yoongi look over at you both from the corner of his eye. You swallow nervously not sure how to respond. “Maybe.” You reply weakly. Yoongi scoffs, scrolling through his phone again. Taehyung looks over at Yoongi and stares at him suspiciously. “Can I help you?” Yoongi asks, never looking up from his phone. “Why are you leaving so early? Hot date?” Taehyung inquires and you feel your heart thrash in your chest. “No why? You offering,” Yoongi looks up now at Taehyung and then over at you, “Or is this a thing again?” Your eyes pop open. “No way! Taehyung is married.” You reply in shock. Yoongi nods, not breaking his gaze. “This is us Jagi.” Taehyung interjects as the elevator reaches the lobby. You nod, still looking at Yoongi as you exit.

“You should really stay away from that guy. Besides I hear he’s fooling around with a woman in graphics.” Taehyung says while opening the lobby door. “Who told you that?” “My father in law. He says he saw them canoodling at his desk, all giggles and whispers. I told he’s no good Jagi.” “You know your father in law is a liar. I wouldn’t go believing all the things he says. I have to go. Have a goodnight.” You hurry off down the street, pulling your phone out and dialing Yoongi’s phone. It rings and your heart pounds. “You have reached the voicemail box of Min Yoongi.” *BEEP* “You know if you were fooling around with someone else you could’ve told me. What’s her name? Did she know about me? I wish I never did those things with you. I hate you Min Yoongi!” You hang up and release an anguished shout.

The following day Taehyung convinces you to go to lunch with him. As he goes on and on about work and the launch and how much he is going to miss working with you, you feel your mind wander. You sit silently trying to recall all your moments with Yoongi, wondering what you missed, had it all been a lie? “Jagi.” You turn to face Taehyung with a hum and he leans in and plants a kiss on your lips. Your eyes pop open and you shove him away. “What are you doing?” “Were you even listening? I said I miss you and I still love you.” You begin to stutter, feeling your face flush, looking around for a waitress to come save you from this moment. As you scan the room you lock eyes with Yoongi, who’s staring at you from the register, food in hand. He looks almost defeated as he turns and walks out of the restaurant. “I... I don’t feel the same Taehyung. How can you even say these things, you’re getting married!” “I know but that doesn’t mean we have to stop seeing each other does it?” You cover your mouth to keep from gagging. “Oh, Taehyung. You are so pathetic for thinking that I could ever be someone’s second choice. This is done, for good. We can keep things professional but that’s it.” He shakes his head hard. “That’s not how this works Jagi. You are mine! Forever!” Your brow furrows at his reaction. “I belong to no one! Goodbye Kim Taehyung. I will see you back at the office.” You get up to leave and Taehyung jumps up shouting, “Hey! I’ll give you time to cool off, but I’d steer clear of pissing me off Jagi. I promise you’ll regret it.” You look around at the patrons all staring at you and leave.

Thursday: POV: MIN YOONGI:

Yoongi shuffles in his seat, staring over the conference room table at Y/N. He groans under his breath staring at her soft mounds poke out the top of her tank top with every deep breath she pulls in. Every day this week she’s worn less and less. He rests his interlocked hands in his lap to hide his growing cock as it twitches in his jeans. She looks over at him through her peripheral vision and Yoongi can’t help but sit taller. She sits forward a bit and peels her cardigan off, exposing her lean arms. Yoongi sighs, unsure of how much more of this he can take. He knows she’s teasing him, wanting a reaction and boy if she only knew how he truly felt. How badly he just wanted to hop over this table and claim her mouth, just the thought of her gagging on his cock sent shivers down his spine, he was so tired of waiting. He had planned to make Saturday so special, it killed him to watch her cry on Monday as he lied about his feelings. Crushed him to know she was spending time with Taehyung.  Taehyung, that bastard, the one who started all this trouble, the reason for all this grief. Yoongi’s eyes scanned the room, stopping on Taehyung who lingered in the back of the conference room. He growled to himself, wishing his looks could kill right now as he stared pure death at Taehyung. Taehyung immediately feels Yoongi’s hatred, looking over and locking eyes with him. He gives Yoongi a smug grin before turning away. The same grin he gave Yoongi that night that changed it all for Him and Y/N. If only he could tell her the truth. He was doing this all for her.

Last Friday: POV: MIN YOONGI:

“Yoongi as you know you are an integral part of the team and we are happy to have you working here at the company! I have no real complaints about your work. I just need you to work on your lateness. As a part of said team you need to show up on time, all the time. The people who are here on time don’t like watching you stroll in like you own the place, got it? So, if you do me any favors this year, let that be it. Other than that, I have been speaking with upper management and we want to offer you a new position here, head of graphics, an increase in pay of 25%. I know it's a lot to ask but I hope you’ll say yes.” Yoongi’s eyes shoot open and he leans forward, clearing his throat. “Wow, I am in shock sir. I honestly didn’t think you liked me.” The boss laughs loudly, slamming his hand on the table. “This isn't personal Yoongi. I like that you make me money and you're one of the best graphics guys around. You think I'd let you go off to some other company over petty nonsense or rumors? Look, take some time to mull it over. We can talk about it at launch. I have nothing else to cover. Do you have any questions for me?” “Uh no sir. Thank you.” Yoongi nods. “Alright then, have a great weekend!” The boss stands, tapping Yoongi on the shoulder on the way out. Yoongi sits for a moment alone, smiling wide at the offer he’s been given. He can't wait to call Y/N and tell her. He pulls his phone out of his pocket just as the conference room door opens.

“Good news?” Taehyung asks, walking in and taking a seat across from Yoongi. Yoongi sighs, shoving his phone back in his pocket. “As a matter of fact, it was.” Yoongi replies, standing now to leave. “Uh, before you go. I think we should talk.” Taehyung kicks his feet up on the conference room table. “And what would we ever need to talk about?” “Y/N.” Taehyung replies plainly. Yoongi scoffs, leaning on his hip and scratching his forehead. “When are you going to get it through your head? She doesn’t want to be with you. She’s moved on. Get over it, don’t you have someone to go home to?” Yoongi shakes his head in annoyance and turns to walk out again. “I hacked your computer. You wouldn’t believe what I found on there.” Yoongi freezes at Taehyung’s statement, turning to face him. “You're talking shit.” Yoongi drawls. “You sure about that.... daddy?” Yoongi’s face drops and he leans over the table. “Don't fuck with me Taehyung.” “On the contrary, don’t fuck with ME,” Taehyung drops his feet down off the table and sits upright, “Even better don’t fuck with my girl.” Yoongi laughs out loud. “Your girl? You're delusional and I'm done entertaining you.” Yoongi walks off, only stopping dead at the sound of Y/N’s soft moans, “I need your hands on me, right here, in my tight hole. I want to cum on your fingers. Please.... daddy.” Yoongi feels his blood boil. “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.” Yoongi warns, racing to reach Taehyung who scurries to the other side. “It's intriguing to me that you would remove these from the main interface but keep them on your personal hard drive. I mean, I understand why of course. Even I rubbed one out a few times watching her come undone.” He laughs, running away from Yoongi as he tries to reach for Taehyung again, “I know what you’re going to say, it was your personal computer and I had no right, but you had it right there on your desk for any ole body to just grab. I couldn’t resist. Tell me friend how does she taste? It's been a while. Is she still as sweet as I remember?”

Yoongi growls, running at full speed, catching Taehyung by the throat. “I dare you to talk about her like that again.” He says through clenched teeth. Taehyung laughs, straining to speak “I don’t think you understand your position in this situation friend. I’m the one with the power here not you. Now, if you don’t want me to release that video or anything else to everyone in this office, including my father-in-law, you best let me go.” Yoongi squeezes harder before releasing Taehyung, who drops to the ground coughing. “What do you want for them? Money?” Yoongi asks. “No, I don’t want your money. I want her. So, what I want from you Yoongi, is to stop seeing her.” “Not gonna happen.” “Then I release everything, including your hot and heavy backseat session this afternoon.” Yoongi cocks back to punch Taehyung, who ducks down, walking backwards while speaking once more, “Or, you can break her heart now, walk away, and never see her again. It’s your choice.” “How could you ever say you love her and be willing to do this to her?” Yoongi asks, dropping his fist. “I’m doing this because I love her and because you don’t deserve her. So, do we have a deal?” Taehyung ask, putting his hand out for Yoongi to shake. Yoongi could feel the sting of tears in the back of his eyes. He didn’t want to give her up, but he cared about her too much to allow her life to be ruined because of his carelessness. “Promise not to hurt her or release the videos and we have a deal.” He whispers, shaking Taehyungs hand, sealing his fate.

Thursday: POV: MIN YOONGI:

The meeting was over, and everyone was filing out one by one. Yoongi sprung up quickly to follow behind Y/N like a loyal puppy as she made her way over to the employee lounge. Yoongi popped a K-cup into the Keurig to make it seem as if he had reason to be in the lounge as well, watching her out the corner of his eye as she heated her morning coffee in the microwave. “What?” She snaps causing Yoongi to freeze in his spot. His brows shoot up towards the sky as he cautiously turns with a shrug. “What?” He throws back. “You keep staring at me. Why? What is it? If you have something to say just say it.” She spat at him. He had a million things to say, he just couldn’t say them. She shook her head at him as the microwave beeped. “Coward.” She says under her breath. “Tease.” He replies under his, unable to help himself. “Excuse me?” “You heard me. I know what you’re doing. Taehyung would be really upset to know you’re dressing like this to get a rise out of me.” She laughs out loud and it’s the sweetest thing Yoongi thinks he’s ever heard. “Fuck Taehyung and fuck you too.” She says with a sip of her coffee, heading for the exit. “Promise.” Yoongi grumbles. She scoffs, walking straight over to Yoongi, pressing her full breast into his chest. He bites down on his lip, gripping the counter behind him to keep himself from ravaging her right there. “You had your chance Min Yoongi and you ruined it. To think I was ready to lay it out for you raw in the back seat of your car. Silly me.” She whispers, pressing her body into his harder. Yoongi groans, leaning forward, so turned on by her, so desperately in need of her lips around his. She pouts at him, a sly smile creeping across her face before she licks his bottom lip. She soon digs her hands in his hair pulling him into a deep kiss, taking command of his mouth. She bites and sucks at his lips before suckling and swirling her tongue around his like a woman mad. When she breaks the kiss he leans forward, mouth open desperately trying to catch her tongue against his again, but she simply walks away with a giggle. “Enjoy your blue balls…. Daddy.” Yoongi can’t help but chuckle, feeling his pants tighten around his cock. She was going to be the end of him but if it meant he could have her then he was more than eager for his demise.

*LAUNCH DAY*

You stood before your mirror dressed in the skimpiest outfit you could find, a red mini dress with drape neck front. You unfortunately couldn’t wear a bra because the dress had your entire back exposed, but it didn’t bother you much. It was the exact look you were going for. You put on black strappy heels and to add just an extra bit of fuck you to your look you put on Yoongi’s diamond crusted choker. You look yourself over once more, nodding at the way the dress hugs your curves. “This is it.” You say to Frenchie, who is lapping at her nether regions with no shame. You add a bit of lip gloss and hail a cab.

You arrive at the event space, heading inside quickly to avoid the camera’s snapping photos outside. You grab a glass of champagne from one of the waiters walking about and move about the party in search of a familiar face. Your heart begins slamming against its cage at the sight of Yoongi leaning against the windows, drinking you in. How long had he been there, you wondered, watching you? He looked amazing in all black with gold and silver designs glittering from his bomber jacket. You moaned to yourself, wishing you could walk over and latch onto his pout. You release a sigh and turn so your back side is facing him, looking over your shoulder briefly to see his sly smile. You bite your lip to keep from laughing out loud and walk off. “Y/N,” Your boss shouts greeting you with a smile, “My goodness, you are quite the sight tonight! Come we are all gathering in the back for a quick huddle.” “Sure.” You walk towards the back and light up at the sight of Rebecca in full on mermaid dress. She squeals when she sees you. “Oh my god! You look fabulous! I said be brave not shameful!” She laughs hugging you. “How are the kids? Is everything ok?” “Yes, thank goodness! How are you? I need to know everything. I saw Taehyung hanging about. What the hell is that about?” You roll your eyes. “Girl it is a long story to say the least. We need a weekend to fill in the blanks. I am just happy you're back. I missed you so much!” She hugs you again tightly. “And what about Hades over there?” She giggles. You look over to see Yoongi staring at you again. “I don't know,” You shrug, “It was good until it wasn’t. I am terrible at dating and picking guys it seems.” “Oh shush. It's not you, its them! It's too bad it didn’t work out with him. He looks like he eats pussy well.” Your eyes pop open and you both burst out laughing. “Be quiet! I'm sure he can hear you!” “Who cares?”

“Alright! Gather around everyone! I just want to take a moment to say how happy and proud I am that we were all able to come together and make this launch happen on such short notice! It truly speaks to the type of team we are and how well we all work together. Of all the gaming companies in all the world, I’ve got the best one! So, enjoy tonight, get drunk, get laid, just don’t let me hear about on Monday! Hear, Hear!” Your boss finishes his speech with a raise of his glass, and everyone hoots and hollers in response taking sips from their cups. You excuse yourself and tell Rebecca you are heading to the restroom, feeling a grab on the back of your arm. You turn to face Yoongi. “You look amazing.” “Thanks. You look good too.” He smiles and gives a nod before looking around. “Looking for someone?” You chime in, bringing his focus back to you. “No, you, always you. Tell me, did you dress like this for me or Taehyung?” He lifts his hand up to run his fingertips along the choker around your neck. “For myself.” You say with attitude, slapping his hand away. He nods. “So, you're over me then huh? Are you and Taehyung back together?” Your heart drops watching the sadness spread across his face. “You are truly an enigma Min Yoongi. You dumped me remember? What even is this? Guilt? Ego? I honestly can't do this with you. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the restroom.” You turn and walk off. You push the door for the restroom and feel someone shove you in. “What the hell?” You spin and are met by Yoongi’s desperate lips. You melt into him, moaning into the kiss. He pulls away, looking you over, “What if I could fix everything? What if I had a solution to all our problems? All I need is to know that you still have feelings for me, that things haven't changed between us. Tell me kitten, do you still want me?” “Yoongi, you hurt me. All those things you said, they were awful....” “Do you? Yes or no?” He demands, cutting you off. You stutter a bit, feeling his arms tighten around you in the safest hug you’ve ever felt. “Yoongi. Of course, I still have feelings for you. I don’t think I ever stopped.” A small smile spreads across his face. “I’m gonna fix it baby. I’ll make it right. I promise. I’m so sorry I hurt you. I can make it better.” He kisses you again and you swear you feel all his emotion in this one kiss. He pulls away and hurries out of the bathroom. “Wait! What do you mean?” You yell but he is already gone.

You do your business and exit the restroom in search of Yoongi. “Have you seen Yoongi?” You ask passersby, making your way through the party. You finally catch up to Rebecca “Have you seen Yoongi?” You ask her. “Yeah, for a minute,” she looks around, “He grabbed the boss and walked off. Not sure where though. Is everything ok?” “Yeah, just something he said to me about fixing things. I just wanted to know what he meant.” She hums in contemplation. “Well don’t just stand here girl get your man.” You blink at her for a moment until she snaps her fingers in front of your face, urging you to go. You hurry along and bump right into the boss who looks lost in thought. “Oh, Y/N, sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.” “That’s alright. Have you seen Yoongi?” “Unfortunately, I have, he just quit.” “What?” You shout. “Yes, and I am very unhappy. If you’ll excuse me. I have to go find Taehyung.” He walks off like a man on a mission. “Taehyung?” You whisper to yourself, quietly following behind your boss. He spots Taehyung in the crowd, grabbing him by the back of the arm and leading him into the kitchen area. You sneak in behind a waiter, crouching down behind a counter, to snoop in on your boss and Taehyung. “Is it true? Are you blackmailing Yoongi?” The boss growls.

Taehyung’s brow furrows as he searches your bosses face for a bluff. “I’m not sure of what he told you sir, but he’s been breaking company policy by having interoffice relations with…” “I don’t give a fuck what he’s doing, and you shouldn’t either!” Your boss shouts, a gasp escaping your lips. “Do you have any idea what blackmail can do to a company like ours? You think people give a fuck about two consenting adults fucking after hours? Have you lost your mind? Your concern should be my daughter who has been staying with me and my wife for over a month while you worry yourself with Y/N and Min Yoongi! Is it true she is your ex?” He questions now, pacing a bit. Your heart slams heavily in your chest. “Is it? Answer me goddammit!” He shouts causing Taehyungs jaw to clench. “Yes.” Your boss growls into the space, his voice echoing back. “So, lets add conflict of interest to the list of shit you’ve dropped in my lap. You’re fired do you hear me. Your only concern from here on out is my daughter and the child she carries. If I ever hear about you or Y/N or Min Yoongi I swear to god, I’ll end you. Now delete any content you have pertaining to the two of them and put this thing to bed. Do you understand me?” “I don’t love her anymore, your daughter, or maybe I never did.” Taehyung responds lifting his head high. Your boss nods, running his hand through his hair before grabbing Taehyung by the collar tightly, pulling him close to his face. “I don’t give a shit if you love her or not. You will marry my daughter and be a good and loyal husband. My grandchild will not be a bastard nor my daughter a harlot. You were in love enough to do the deed, now seal the deal you coward. I expect my daughter home by Monday. Am I understood?” Taehyung nods and your boss releases him, marching off.

“Did you enjoy the show Jagi?” Taehyung says, fixing his suit, looking over in the direction of where you are hiding. You pop up quickly and just stare at him. “You left your wife? And what did he mean content? Were you keeping things on me?” You feel your face flush at the thought of what he could have. “I told you we had a fight and she left. I also told you I loved you still. I thought I was over you but seeing you with him, well, it drove me mad. How could you let him touch you like that? Keep videos of what you two do together. Let him taint you like some whore.” “How dare you,” You say, moving towards him, “You are a horrible excuse for a man. I would rather be his whore than your dirty little secret.” You turn to leave but he grabs your arm, yanking you back. “Let me go.” You shout. “I won’t let him have you. You’re mine or no ones.” He warns, gripping your arm tightly. “Hey asshole!” Rebecca shouts, causing you and Taehyung to look up. She clocks him dead in the nose, breaking it. The blood immediately begins to stream down his face. He pinches his bridge trying to stop it. “You fucking bitch.” He shouts. “Touch my friend again and I’ll have my ex arrest you for assault and stalking. You can expect a restraining order from her lawyer bitch!” She spits at him, wrapping her arm around you and leading you out of the kitchen area. “Thanks for that,” You sniffle, “but I don’t think he is ever going to leave me alone.” “Don’t worry about him. He has a family and reputation to think about. I’ll call my ex and have him file a restraining order. We’ll take care of Kim Taefuckface! For now, go home, take some time off, you need to rest! I'll call you a cab.” You nod and lean your head on her shoulder while she waits with you.

You sit in the cab and allow the emotions of the night to hit you, tears streaming down your face. “You alright?” The cab driver asks. “Yeah, I’m fine thanks. Stress.” You reply, wiping your tears. You enter your building, greeting the doorman quickly as you pass to hop in the elevator. You sigh deeply thinking of how your life got so twisted. “Maybe I will take the week off.” You whisper to yourself staring at the ascending numbers in the elevator. The doors open on your floor and you get off turning the corner on your floor to find Yoongi sitting on the floor outside your apartment. He looks so tiny sitting there, chewing his thumb, not noticing you until you clear your throat. He turns to face you thumb still on his lips. “How did you?” He springs to his feet, swallowing, wiping his hands on his thighs. “I quit.” “I heard, about everything. You kept the videos? Taehyung tried to blackmail you. How could you keep this from me?” He sighs. “It was the only way to keep Taehyung from hurting you. With me out of the way, out of the company, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. Little did I know that I’d be so fired up when I spoke with the boss that I would tell him everything. Turns out he was on my side, practically begged me to stay. I’m sorry I kept the videos, that was selfish of me. It was plain stupid.” “Videos aside Yoongi, why didn’t you just tell me what was going on? I could’ve helped you; we could’ve managed this together.” “Come on kitten, would you have really been able to handle it if Taehyung leaked our sex tapes to the office? It was better if you didn’t know. Maybe I didn’t handle it the right way, but I knew I would do anything to protect you.” “Even if it means not having a job anymore?” You snap. He shrugs. “I can get a job anywhere. You, you’re one of a kind. You make me feel rich kitten, not what lines my pocket.” Your face flushes and you stutter over your words. Yoongi chuckles, moving closer to you. “It's just you and me now baby,” He whispers in your ear, pulling you into his body, “Just say you’ll be mine.” “Are you asking me to be your girlfriend Min Yoongi? I thought you didn’t do girlfriends.” He smiles against your ear. “You make me better. I’d do anything for you.” He kisses your neck softly, rubbing his fingertips up and down your bare back. “Do you wanna come in?” You whisper. “Only if I can spend the night.” He whispers, kissing you hard. “Of course, my boyfriend can spend the night.” He growls, biting your shoulder before scooping you up by the ass and carrying you to your door. You giggle loudly, trying to cover your exposed ass with your hand. “Where are your keys kitten?” “In my purse.” You dangle your purse in front of him. He pouts, dropping you to your feet so you can unlock the door.

You both enter the apartment and Frenchie jumps onto the counter immediately. “Meow!” She wails. Yoongi smiles, walking towards her. “Careful, she’s testy.” You warn, dropping your bag and keys on the table. You turn to find Yoongi scratching Frenchie under her chin, soft purrs escaping from her chest. You chuckle at the sight. “She hates everyone. She never lets people touch her.” “Well, she has good taste, like her mother.” He tells you, leaning down now to plant tiny kisses on her nose. You full on laugh now, covering your mouth in shock. “If she bites your face off, I am not liable.” He laughs at your comment, whispering sweet nothings to Frenchie. “Do you want a drink? I have water, beer, or juice.” You offer. “I’m good.” You nod, grabbing a water for yourself and heading over to the couch to remove your heels. “Make yourself comfortable.” You say, unhooking the straps. He plants a heavy kiss on Frenchie’s head before turning to slide out of his jacket. He plops down next to you on the couch, tapping his lap for you to give him your foot. You oblige and he unhooks your shoes for you. “Thank you.” You smile at him, wiggling your toes. Frenchie jumps up on the couch beside him. “Looks like you got competition kitten.” He smiles towards you.

“Don’t worry she will tire of you eventually. Even I bore her at times, and I’m the one that feeds her.” He nods, rubbing your feet gently. “Maybe we should go to the other room.” He suggests. You laugh. “Why?” “I don’t want her to see all the naughty things I’m about to do to her mother.” His explains, standing up and reaching for your hand. “Oh, um.” You stutter. “Fuck it turns me on when you do that.” He almost growls, pulling you up from the couch. He plants a soft kiss on your lips, taking your ass in his large hands. He lifts you off your feet and begins walking you towards your bedroom, sure to never break your locked lips. You begin to wriggle free once in the bedroom, feeling him try to lower you onto the bed. “Something wrong kitten.” He whispers over your lips. “It's my turn to make you feel good.” He chuckles softly, lowering you to your feet. “Ok baby. What do you have in mind?” He gives you a sly grin, cocking his head to the side. You feel your face flush. Your belly tingling with your need, excitement overcoming you. He had usually denied you the chance to please him but now he stood before you, eyes lit up, waiting for you to make a move. You swallow hard, pushing him back towards the bed until he’s seated. You grab the thin straps of your dress and slowly bring them down, exposing your bare breast, your nipples standing at attention when the cold air hits them. Yoongi swallows hard watching your dress drop to the floor; You stand before him in nothing but your thong, tugging at your aching nipples. “You’re so sexy kitten, do you know that?” He praises, palming himself through his pants. You move toward him, capturing his lips with yours. He grips your ass tightly with one hand, kneading at the tender flesh of your breast with the other. He releases a deep moan at the feel of you dig your fingers into his hair and tug his head back. You trail kisses along his jaw and down his long neck, suckling on the smooth skin until small red marks form.

He sucks in a breath, bringing one of his large hands down onto your ass with a loud slap. You gasp at the sting that burns through your body, clenching around nothing. “Does my little kitten like that?” He asks breathlessly, rubbing the area softly. You nod quickly, licking your lips, watching desire spread across his face. “Tell me what you want baby. I want you so bad, my cock is so hard for you.” He pants, palming at his erection once again. You moan lustfully, dropping your hand to take over rubbing at his trapped member. He leans back on his arms, watching you tug at his belt, unzipping his pants. He smiles seductively, lifting his hips off the bed just enough for you to pull his pants and underwear down to free his cock. You gasp at the sight of his large member, taking a moment to drink it in. It’s the fattest, longest dick you’ve ever seen, curling up to rest above his belly button. The prominent veins bulging with every breath he takes, his fat swollen tip spilling pre-cum onto his belly. You bite your lip wondering if it’ll fit in your mouth let alone your cunt. “You don’t have to do anything baby. I know it can be intimidating and I don’t want to overwhelm you. We can just take care of you tonight.” He replies at the sight of your apprehension. “No, I want to. It’s just…. big.” He laughs at your comment, grabbing his cock tightly, pumping it up and down, in long languid strokes. Your mouth waters at the sight. You watch him carefully before moving your hands up to take his cock from him, taking over the painfully slow strokes. He moans softly, thrusting up into your closed fist, causing more and more of his lustful pre-cum to spill from his tip. He soon yanks off his button down with ease, pulling at your nipple to illicit a yelp from your lips.

You lower one of your hands, looking up at Yoongi for a sign that its ok. He nods, sucking in a breath as you cup his balls, kneading them in your palm. The sight of his swollen tip dripping down your hand has your pussy gushing. “Can I...” You lick your lips as you continue to caress his heavy sack. Yoongi watches you under hooded lids as you drop your head, capturing one of his balls in your mouth. “Oh, fuck!” He cries out. You feel your thong stick to your folds as you rub your thighs together, taking the other ball into your mouth and moaning around it. Yoongi pants desperately into the room, head back as you slurp and tongue at his scrotum. Completely turned on by Yoongi’s lustful display, you move up and begin to lap at the precum that has made its way down your fingers. Yoongi drops his head down to look at you, a small growl escaping as you take his entire head into your mouth, swirling your tongue around his engorged tip. He releases a relived sigh when you push up on your knees, taking more of him into your throat. “Fuck kitten. You don’t know how good this feels.” You hum around his cock, bobbing up and down, hollowing out your cheeks as you arrive back up to his tip. You slowly lower your head onto his thick length again, this time trying to swallow back more of him causing yourself to gag. “Yeah baby, just like that.” He encourages, gripping the sheets. You drop down lower almost reaching his pubic area, gagging freely on his cock, tears forming at your eyes. Yoongi’s eyes roll back, his pants filling the room. You soon come up for air, wiping at your swollen mouth quickly before swallowing him down again. You bob up and down again, not taking him as deep this time, instead using your hands to pump the area not in your mouth. You moan around him, feeling his hands grip your hair, curses quietly escaping his lips. “Fuck kitten, you should stop now or else I’m gonna cum down your tight little throat.” You lift your head off his cock, looking up at him, “Do it daddy, gag me with your cock, fuck my throat, cum for me please. Treat me like your sexy little slut.” You beg lustfully. “You don’t know what you're saying.” He pants. “I’m saying I want daddy to take control of me, all of me. I don’t want to be your little kitten tonight but your sexy. Little. Whore.” He curses under his breath, grabbing a fist full of your hair and guiding you back to his throbbing member.

You moan in approval, relaxing your jaw. He groans deeply, gripping your hair tighter as he works you up and down his length. He begins to hitch his hips upward, your uncontrollable drool aiding the tip of his cock past your uvula and into your throat with ease. You grip his thighs tightly gagging freely on his cock, drool dripping down his balls. “Such a good cock sleeve for daddy.” He praises, fucking into your mouth faster. He grips your hair super tight now, to keep your head from moving as he lunges his cock in and out of your mouth, fucking your face with ease. “Oh kitten, oh fuck, such a good girl for daddy. Uh, fuck baby, I’m cumming. I'm cumming.” Your eyes widen as his warm seed shoots down your throat, filling your mouth to the brim. You gag a bit, attempting to swallow back his load, feeling a bit of it seep past your lips. He growls quietly, thrusting through his high. He soon pulls you off his still rock-hard cock and into a sloppy kiss. “That was so fucking hot baby. Let me repay the favor.” “No, I’m so wet. I need you inside of me.” You stand now, peeling off your thong, reaching out for Yoongi’s body to mount him. He digs in his pocket and pulls out a condom. You whine watching him stick the wrapper in his mouth to tear it open, his reddened cock rubbing at your hovering folds. He rolls the condom down his member slowly and you know now he’s teasing you. “Please, hurry up.” You mewl. He smirks when he’s done and you grunt loudly, grabbing his cock tightly and spreading your legs wide, lowering yourself onto his cock. “Such a greedy cock whore.” Your mouths drop open as his tip pushes into your entrance.

You suck in a breath, feeling the sting of his shaft stretch your cunt. “Ah, fuck,” You whimper, biting your lip trying to push down further onto his thick length, “I can’t, it won’t fit. You’re too big.” He chuckles softly, kneading the flesh of your breast. He kisses the juncture between your neck and shoulder gently, moving up to your ear. “Lie back baby. Daddy’s got you.” You pout dismounting him, lying back on the bed as you’re told. He lowers himself between your thighs, gliding his tongue along your slit before twirling it around your sensitive bud. You cry out at the feeling. He rolls his tongue ever so slowly along your clit, building your climax. You feel your coil twisting and begin to grind against his face. He smirks into your cunt, lowering himself down further to enter you with his tongue. You gasp, gripping his hair, to guide him. He thrust in and out of your entrance with ease as your slick soon trails down to the bed. Seemingly satisfied, Yoongi brings his lips back up to your clit, rolling his tongue once again. You widen your legs, moaning loudly into the room, yanking on his dark messy locks. He brings up his hand and enters you with two fingers, spreading his fingers in a wide scissor motion to prep you for his cock. You gasp at the sensation, feeling your body tremble with your oncoming orgasm. “Daddy, please don't stop, please.” You cry out, focused on his meticulous scissor motion and slow roll of the tongue. “God, Yoongi, feels so fucking good.” Yoongi curls his fingers up, rubbing at the soft flesh deep inside you, your eyes roll back as your back arches, your orgasm washing over you in hot waves. Yoongi groans, still lapping at your core until your body plops down onto the bed, dropping down from your high. He raises his head, your slick glistening on his lips and nose. He crawls up your body, hovering above you, eyes blown with lust. “Clean your mess off my face whore.” He demands. “Yes daddy.” You reply meekly, picking your head up off the mattress to lick your cum from his lips. You moan lustfully with each lap, swallowing down your sweet nectar.

“That’s enough.” He growls, catching your lips in a hard kiss. You melt back into the mattress, spreading your legs wide enough for Yoongi to watch himself rub his tip through your folds, your body trembling uncontrollably. “Just relax baby. Deep breath.” You nod at his comforting tone. He takes you by the hips, lining up his cock with your entrance. You nod at him, feeling your pussy drench itself in anticipation of his large member. Your mouth falls open as his tip breaches your cunt, this time with ease. He continues to roll his hips forward, gliding in with the help of your slickness and stretching you to the brim. He hisses at the feel of your walls clamp around him, massaging and clenching with every thrust. “You’re so tight baby, so fucking amazing. You feel so good around my cock. Take me so well. You’re made for me.” He groans in your ear, the sound of both of your moans filling the room. You grip tightly on his ass, pulling him deeper inside of you, wondering why you were ever nervous in the first place. This was perfect, he was perfect. He smiles seductively, looking down at you, wrapping his large hands around yours, “And you thought I wasn’t gonna fit?” You giggle at his comment, leaning up to kiss him gently. “Fuck me,” You pant, “please, like those other girls. I want to be everything you want and more.” He shakes his head, “You’re more than I could ever want. I don’t deserve you, I’m just happy you chose me.” “Don’t go easy on me because you think I can’t handle it. I want you, all of you.” “Oh, I know kitten, I’m quite enjoying you fucking yourself on my cock.” You look down, realizing Yoongi had stopped moving, that you were the one keeping the pace. “Oh kitten, don’t stop, it feels good when you milk my cock.” You moan lustfully, rolling your hips again. Yoongi watches the show more intently this time, adjusting his hips so your clit is gliding along his shaft. “Fuck me daddy. Fuck me hard. Make me scream.” Yoongi moans from deep within his chest. “Oh baby, you really don’t know what you’re asking.” “Don’t treat me like some porcelain doll. I may, as you say, dress like one but I’m no nun. Now fuck me! Show me what this fat cock can do.” You shout, dropping your hand down between your bodies to tug on his full balls. “Shit kitten, you have no idea what you’re in for.” “All talk and no action.” You tease, licking up his face. He scoffs briefly, pulling out of you and flipping you over in one fell swoop, knocking the wind out of you. He uses his knees to part your legs, pulling your hips so your ass is high in the air. He drops his large open hand down on the thick flesh of your bottom, the sting burning through your body. You cry out as he comes down two more times. “Yoongi.” You pant. He grabs a handful of your hair, tugging your head back to whisper in your ear. “No no whore. Its daddy from here on out. Call me by my name again and I’ll paint this gorgeous ass red, understand?” You nod frantically, feeling your core heat, you juices flowing freely. “Good girl. No warning this time baby.” He whispers into your ear, taking both of your arms behind your back before slamming his cock into your soaked cunt. You scream out into your bedroom. Yoongi holds wrist together in one hand, gripping your hip in the other, fucking into your pussy like a madman. Your body shivers beneath him, your cunt clenching, juices leaking and coating his cock, aiding him further into you. “Oh, god! Yes. Fuck me daddy, fuck me so good.” Yoongi groans, slamming into you harder, his breathing becoming labored. He pulls out if you with a growl, pushing you down onto your left side. “Hold your leg up.” He pants, pushing your right leg up into your chest. Yoongi slaps your full ass before pushing the flesh of your right cheek up to expose your battered cunt to him. He effortlessly enters you, gripping and caressing at your plump glute while rotating his hips upwards, fucking into your pussy gently. He drops his head back, cursing quietly to himself. You watch him carefully, drinking in his lean body, how his hair sticks to his sweaty forehead. You moan at the sight of him bite his lip when you clench down on his cock. He’s never been hotter than in this moment.

“I want to ride you.” You whimper, breaking his focus, he tilts his head down to look at you. His dark eyes flooded with lust. “Beg me.” “What?” “Beg daddy to let you ride his cock.” You smile slightly, gripping your own ass cheek now to spread yourself further apart for him. “Please daddy, please, may I ride your cock?” He bites his lip, still fucking into you. “Please daddy, I want to make you cum. Cum in my pussy.” You mewl. He hums, leaning forward to take your mouth in a sloppy kiss before pulling out of you. You move over so he can lie back on the bed. You mount him, hovering over his erection. “Can we take this off?” Yoongi eyes you suspiciously, watching you tug at the base of the condom. “I want to feel all of you. I want you to have all of me, like no one ever has. Not even Taehyung. I want you to coat my walls full of your desire for me.” Yoongi pants hard, his cheeks flushed. He swallows hard, “I’ve never done that before. It isn’t something I do.” He replies. “I understand.” You grasp him at the root and begin to lower yourself onto him slowly. “Wait,” He stops you, “It’s me and you baby. I trust you.” He drops his hand between you both and removes the latex from his member. You descend again, dropping your head back at the newfound closeness. He digs his fingers into your hips, mouth agape as you descend to the root. You start with a slow steady pace, savoring every ridge of Yoongi’s glorious cock, that is, until Yoongi leans forward, wrapping his arm around your waist, thrusting upwards, fucking into you with a rapid pace. He whimpers a bit, biting his lip to hold back any further cries from falling from his lips. He rests his forehead against your collar bone, thrusting up harder and faster, his breath hitching in his throat. You moan out loud, a cry escaping, when his tip hits your cervix, jumping up a bit. Yoongi pulls you back down to meet his thrust, not wanting to separate from you in this moment. You feel your body ignite and your pussy clench hard around him. “Fuck baby, do that again, feels so fucking good. You feel so amazing. Fucking heaven. I can feel your fucking walls trembling. Cum on my cock baby.” “My god.” You wail, your eyes rolling as you feel a great warmth start at the top of your head and burn down to your toes. Your whole-body tingles and you lean forward, pushing Yoongi onto his back, resting your hands on his chest, lifting your hips ravenously to continue to chase this high. The sounds of your ass slapping against Yoongi's thighs fill your ears right before your animal like groan. “Fuck kitten, don’t stop, I’m cumming. God, I’m fucking cumming.” Your breath quickens and you grip Yoongi's chest harder, riding him faster. He cries out unabashedly, gripping your ass to aid your body up and down his length. Your climax slowly pours over your whole body at the feeling of Yoongi’s cock twitching inside you, his release warming your walls, filling you to the brim. Tears form in your eyes at the euphoric feeling that washes over you. Yoongi sits up slowly and plants kisses over the tears that fall. “I love you Yoongi,” You cry into the nape of his neck, “I know its too soon but I know what love feels like and this is it.” He wraps your legs around his waist, pulling you closer to him. “I love you too Y/N. Its never too soon or too late. What’s meant to be will be. I knew the moment I was ready to give up everything for you.” You pull away from him to look in his eyes. “Really?” He nods, kissing you softly. “What now? I got you fired.” You look away, wiping your tears. “I quit baby. I did NOT get fired. Now we move forward. You and me, everything else is just background noise. I've never been happier.” You wrap your arms around his neck, kissing him deeply.

The following morning, you wake to an empty room. You look around wondering if it was all a dream. Fortunately for you, the deep throb between your legs tells you it wasn't. Not to mention the smell of bacon in the air. You get up and wrap your robe around your body, walking out to the kitchen. You smile to see Yoongi on the phone cooking while Frenchie sits counter top watching him. “Yes sir. Thank you sir. Of course, I completely understand. Not a problem. OK. Take care, see you Monday.” Your brow furrows watching Yoongi toss his phone on the counter. “Good morning kitten.” “Good morning. Did I just hear you say, ‘See you Monday?’” He nods, putting a piece of bacon in his mouth. “The boss called, told me my offer still stands, apologized for all the nonsense. Head of graphics. Has a nice ring to it huh?” You squeal, running into his arms and kissing him firmly. “That's amazing. I thought I was going to have to support your ass.” He laughs out loud, kissing you again. “One condition, you and I cant work on projects together anymore.” You shrug at the news. “As long as I have you in my bed at night, I don't care about any office intermingling.” His brows shoot up and he turns the stove off, sliding his hands up your thighs. “Yoongi, I have to feed Frenchie.” He kisses into the crook of your neck. “Daddy took care of that already. Daddy is going to take care of everything from now on,” You giggle now as Yoongi lifts you off your feet, walking you to the bedroom, “that means we skip to the part where we get to intermingle.”

Tag List: 

@thatbish27 @thatoneweirdgurl17 @140503at-dawn @agooddeedinawearyworld @xduygu-arsx​

#bts smut #suga x reader #suga x you #yoongi smut

[borea-liss]

Chapter Two

⇨ Dragonborn!Todoroki x Tribe Chief Descendant!Reader

⇨ An AU in which Reader is apart of a tribe that lives to fight against a mythical group they call the Ice Dragons. One day, the Reader’s tribe fellows bring in a young man - an alleged Dragonborn, descended from their worst enemy. The young chief in line, whose heart is too compassionate to kill an innocent, convinces the raging tribe to keep him alive for research purposes, while they set out to free the captive, but the story turns out to be much more complicated than what they thought it would be...

⇨ Reader’s Quirk: Groundbreaker - the ability to bend and manipulate earth and rock in all of their varieties (think Earthbending). The Quirk’s drawback is incredible soreness and temporary muscle paralysis after prolonged usage.

Previous

Disclaimer: Characters are all aged up. The story doesn't follow the exact plot of the manga/anime, although it has some elements incorporated (ofc, it's fanfiction)

Taglist: @fukyouthink @midnighttflowers

Thank you for showing interest in my story!

Your pulse thumps inside your skull, drowning out the shouting of your tribe members. You were looking at a living, breathing descendant of your ultimate fascination.

"Kill him!"

"NO!" you shrieked, instinctively activating your Quirk to create a separation between the Dragonborn and the rest of the tribe.

His chains clattered as he tried to crawl away from the rising rocks, but if you were him, you'd choose that over a feral horde.

You had to think fast and effectively. The status of Chief in producing was going to buy you some time, for you believed your fellows would at least wait out the Council Members and their pupils' decision. You glanced around, looking for the faces of your fellows. To your relief, Midoriya and another representative Iida were already approaching you, with no signs of hostility towards the secured Dragonborn behind you. In the crowd, Yaoyorozu and Bakugou were trying to lessen the commotion.

"Deku, you were part of the hunting team," your voice was barely loud enough to be heard. "How and where did you find him??"

"It happened so fast, (Name). We were tracking down a few deer and ended up near a cave. We found him inside, and the entire cave was frozen." Izuku pointed somewhere behind himself. "Uraraka and I thought he needed help, but he tried to knock me out when we came closer. So she shackled him. What's with the whole ordeal of killing him??"

You couldn't avoid giving him a brief explanation of your discovery. It felt like you were a bad omen - it hadn't been over an hour since you told the tribe about the fruit your studies bore and a Dragonborn popped up in your village, in the flesh and bone. And scales.

The moment the thought circulated inside your head, the candle of realization lit up. Pushing past Izuku and Iida, you knocked yourself up on a platform.

"Attention, please!" the murmurs slowly died down, hundreds of eyes glancing up. "I know you are scared, and I do not condemn you for that. But please, be rational! The Dragonborn was found by accident and by himself. Although not many Ice Dragons have survived our fervent pursuit, I'm sure plenty of them have at least produced offsprings."

You stopped for a second, contemplating your next few sentences.

"I propose we keep him alive. We are an entire tribe, maybe the strongest of all known, and what strength do we hold if we cower under the threat of one single Dragonborn? We know little of them, and if they were to come to avenge their fallen parents, we'd be at a disadvantage until we come to know their nature. Let's keep this one as a source of information. I will personally conduct research and carry responsibility for the Dragonborn."

People nodded their heads in approval. Bakugou and Yaoyorozu stared at you as if you'd grown a third head, but you couldn't care less, relief blossoming in your chest. Midoriya placed his hand on your shoulder to offer comfort and you smiled weakly at the gesture.

You didn't allow yourself to rest for too long, immediately dissolving your makeshift platform and the wall separating your newest tribe addition and you. A pair of mismatched eyes glared up at you as you took ahold of his chains. Did he understand your speech at all?

Well, that was one of many things you were yet to find out. For now, you'd have to gather with the Tribe Chiefs and discuss the situation.

The uncomfortable silence was driving you crazy. As if having to watch over the Dragonborn while he bathed, then giving him clothing and cutting his hair wasn't awkward enough already. You couldn't blame him for looking like he despised you.

"Um, hey?"

Nothing was your answer. You cleared your throat and poured tea in two cups.

"Can you understand me?"

This time it was rustling of clothes and pulling his chains against the ground.

"Look, I'm sorry I put it out like that, but they were going to vote for killing you!" you couldn't keep the desperate tone down. "I know you probably hate me, but I just wanted to help and-"

"I can understand your speech, human."

You whirled around at the quiet, deep voice. He was staring right at your eyes, unflinching. "Remove these in an instant."

You shook your head, instead handing him one of the steaming cups, "I cannot do that. They're going to harm you if I do."

"They can try." your hand remained outstretched and he made no movement to approach your offering.

"Listen, I am not your enemy. But I'm not the one in charge here, so the decision about letting you go is not up to me. If not tea, would you like some food?"

"Don't act friendly. We're not friends," he spat through gritted teeth and you couldn't help but sigh.

Slamming down the teacup on the ground seemed to startle him. You deadpanned.

"Listen here, I know this situation is absolute shit for you, but kindly cooperate with me. At least I have good intents regarding your presence here," you chuckled. "What were you gonna do, fight the tribe? Our strongest men have pushed your ancestors ten lands away. Chief Yagi would've singlehandedly punched you into oblivion and Chief Todoroki would've deep-fried you had you attempted to use your ice powers on him. He's a walking campfire."

The Dragonborn seemed shocked that you knew about his ice powers. At least your short temper one-upped his hostility this time. You rose to your feet, ready to retire to your corner of the shared tent.

"But I have fire powers as well."

You weren't sure if you had heard him correctly. Now it was your turn to look shocked.

The rising sun found you at your desk, not having slept a bit.

"I don't know if that can be true," you muttered. "The sources say they have ice powers and fire is their weakness. Is he some abnormality?"

You should be documenting this. You should be reporting to your tribe leaders now. It's your duty to them and yet you hesitate. Would they kill him if you tell them?

A drop of ink splatters onto the parchment, shaking you out of the daze. You put away your quill and discard all the materials on the table. For now, just now, you decide to keep the Dragonborn's secret safe.

You can spot him in the corner of the tent, breathing steady as he sleeps. Maybe you should sleep too, even if for a bit, then grab some black tea from your tribe healer.

"Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do," you mutter under your breath and flop against the furs on your bed.

You're out like a light as soon as your head hits the pillow.

"(Name), daily report about the Dragonborn," five pairs of eyes were staring you down. "Go."

You inhale deeply and try to ignore the heart hammering against your ribcage.

"He understands our language completely and can speak it. Strong ice powers that barely sit within his body. The chains have been covered in frost for as long as I've been with him. He didn't try to fight or hurt me. He's harmless."

Your senior and fatherly figure, Aizawa Shota, nods his head at the words. You glance to the left, swallowing thickly as traitorous guilt burns inside your throat like bile.

"Very well, then. Do you have any requests or additional reports to make?" the head of the council, Chief Yagi, asks you with a kind smile stretched across his face.

"May I have some healing ointment?" you blurt out, startling the whole council.

"What for?"

"The chains are rubbing the scales on his wrists which causes them to fall out. It looks painful and leaves wounds."

"You seem to be quite sensible, (Name)," Chief Nemuri* remarks, smirking. "Very well. Come with me to the healer once we're done here."

You nod and bow before exiting the tent. The five tribe chiefs exchange looks between each other, then wordlessly get up and go back to their duties.

"Stop squirming, boy,"

The Dragonborn sneers at your words. "I am sure we're the same age."

You stare at him and sigh, "Okay, same-age-boy, stay still. The ointment is going to sting a lot, but at least your wrists won't hurt too much."

His right wrist is cold to the touch but his left one feels like he has a fever. For a second your fingers linger on the skin as you think. If he has Ice powers and a fire quirk, were they distributed on the opposing sides of his body? Before you could conclude, he shakes off your hands.

"Better now?" you ask while wiping your hands over your trousers.

Silence, but you'd guess he's good to go.

"Do you have a name?"

"A name?" he replies, mismatched eyes squinting.

You nod and he speaks again, "What do you need it for?"

"I'm tired of referring to you or calling you by 'Dragonborn', 'uhm', makeshift nicknames and 'oi'," you shudder. "The 'oi' makes me feel like Bakugou and that's weird."

Silence again, which makes you sigh. If he kept it up with the silent treatment, your cover of a devoted researcher will be blown before you figure out what to do with him. Maybe you should simply leave him alone, you think, and get up to move away.

"Shōto. That's my name." you smile weakly and tell him your own.

The conversation dies after and you're alone with your thoughts again. Shōto. It reminded you of someone you knew a long, long time ago. The beloved wife of Chief Todoroki, who passed away during a particularly hard winter. You're warm with loving memories of her and your mom knitting together while you told them new stories you had learned that day.

Then you freeze on the spot, terrified. The dead wife of you Tribe leader, a woman with snow-white hair and piercing gray eyes, specific physical traits your kind was incapable of possessing, at least not both at the same time. But now you could think of one that could, a half-offspring of theirs quietly eating right behind you.

Well, shit.

Word count: 1,034. I seem to like the number 1,030.

first few chapters will be shorter until I get the setting right. I hope you enjoyed.

- b

#todoroki shouto #todoroki x reader #shoto x reader #todoroki x you #todoroki x y/n #todoroki shoto x reader #todoroki shoto #bnha imagines #bnha shoto todoroki #bnha shoto x reader #mha todoroki #bnha x reader #mha fic #todoroki shouto x reader #mha au #bnha au #boku no hero academia

[robotslenderman]

Ewww getting big privileged homophobe vibes from you. Blocking now.

Thank God.

I doubt you'll ever read this, but just in case hate-reading is your thing - I don't know why you bothered with anon. You're obviously not a follower because I talk about how queer I am here ALL THE TIME. I saw many queerphobes on that queer post, and even visited a few of their blogs. (Most of them were TERFs, except one - you, who claimed to be a trans dude. Maybe you are! Maybe you're not a TERF posing as a trans dude and you really are okay with being part of a movement absolutely dominated by TERFs!)

But there was only one that I left a comment on. You'd posted about how queer people are so horrible to call ourselves queer. Like the anthropomorphic personification of class and tact that I am, I trolled you by asking if my queer presence made you uncomfortable.

Clearly, it did. :)

So go ahead. Call me the first mean name that comes to your head, as if it bothered me what a random totally-not-anon thinks I am. I'm totally fine with queerphobes thinking my existence is homophobic, because the only way they'd understand otherwise is if I pretended I wasn't queer. My alleged homophobia is latched on to my identity as a queer person. The only way you would not accuse me of being homophobic is if I stopped calling myself queer.

So you use my very identity as a weapon against me. I am queer, and I am attached to not being a homophobe. You know that queer people do not want to be perceived as something they hate completely by anyone, strangers included, especially on a website where people harass first and listen later (if at all). So you hold us hostage - deny our queerness, and you'll drop your weapon. You'll drop the word "homophobic" and stop pointing it at me.

I'm not gonna cave to this.

Nor am I going to write an outraged essay about how I'm not homophobic. You know perfectly fucking well that not a SINGLE queer person is straight. You know perfectly fucking well that most queer people are same sex attracted or attracted to enbies. You know perfectly fucking well that queer people have accepted that part of us and aren't dealing with internalised homophobia or inflicting it on other people because we ACKNOWLEDGE our queerness and you can see this, otherwise you wouldn't be getting mad about it. In a homophobic society everyone has a degree of it, but by being what we are we have less of it than the great majority.

You know this perfectly well. Don't fucking pretend otherwise, I would have to believe that you are well and truly and sincerely STUPID to think for one second that you think I'm a straight person or a closeted gay person who's lashing out with malicious homophobia. Real homophobia, not "this person is part of a minority I am bigoted against, so I will claim they are inherently homophobic unless they get back in the closet or categorise themself in a way that allows me to fine tune my bigotry appropriately."

Because let's be real. Queer hasn't been used as a slur in decades and was reclaimed before I was even born. "Gay" was the slur of the time when I was growing up, but people like you never had a problem with that. Why? Because gay is clear cut and well defined. The problem people like you have with queers like me - the REAL problem, not the faux outraged you have made up about my label - is that queer means I have declined your insistence to more accurately categorise myself.

I mean, how else would you know specifically how to treat me? I could be bi and you might hate bi people, but if I'm a gay queer you don't want to aim the wrong type of bigotry at me by mistake - not because you care about gay people (you don't, because many gay people are also queer), but because you don't want to make yourself look silly by aiming the wrong type of bigotry at me. I could be queer because I'm an enby, and maybe you're truescum that would despise me for it, but you don't KNOW whether or not I'm an enby and that drives you mad! You don't want to risk alienating people who care about you by shitting on someone they might not agree is an acceptable target, so you target every queer and claim it's about a word when really, many queer people seek refugee under that term to hide from people like you, and you don't like that we can hide from you, so you try to strip our shelter away from us.

(And let's be honest. You probably don't even actually hate us. You're probably just afraid. Afraid of some identity you don't really understand because you've never taken the time to get to know us, or afraid that society will accept you less if we're "competing" for acceptance and so take some of the spotlight... I won't shit on you for fear, anon. We are all afraid of something. But I absolutely have a problem with how you're choosing to knowingly hurt people to cope with it. You called me "homophobe" to hurt me. There was no other way to possibly interpret the context of what you were saying. You meant to do this.)

So take away queer. Take away the shelter of queer. Force every queer person to divulge, upfront, who they are that makes them friends with queer. Force them out of the closet and pretend THAT'S not homophobic.

Send the gay queers back to the L and G of LGBT, let the TERFs flush out the trans people who are queer because they're trans* and shoo them away from LGBTQ spaces. Or maybe you really are trans, but you want to kick out straight trans people, or enbies, or pan people, or bi people, or ace people, or, one of the many populations that make up the true queer community.

* Not all trans people are queer, but many are BECAUSE they're trans. I would say "many are queer because they identify as queer" because that makes it sound like queerness isn't an inherent part of who we are and gives people like you ammo I have no interest in supplying you with. "Aha! So you CHOOSE to be a slur!" I just know you'd completely ignore everything I said to the contrary and say that.

Yes. The true queer community.

We've told you again and again that we're not calling you queer. We've told you again and again, if you're not queer, you're not part of the queer community. You're LGBT+, not queer. I'm not part of the LGBT+ community, I'm part of the queer community.

The queer community is not the true community of people who aren't straight and cis, that's not what I'm saying. We're not any more or less LGBT+ than you. I'm not invalidating the identities of people who aren't straight and/or cis, because they are who they are, and you don't need to be queer to be LGBT+. But we are the true queer community in that we are queer, and people who are LGBT+ but are not queer are not queer. Only queer people are queer.

("But people use queer community as an umbrella term to mean people who aren't queer, but are still LGBT+!" Buddy, if I have to deal with being called LGBT all the time even though it's not true, while having the people who use LGBT obviously mean me too because I'm not straight, then you can live with it too. That's mostly straights doing that, in which case you have no reason to get mad at US, or people who are are making something for a straight audience or a questioning audience, in which case they're making it accessible because not everyone knows the nuance of queer and LGBTALPHABETSOUP discourse. Or even - and I know this thought is incomprehensible to you, as the centre of the universe - it's actually referring to queer people and queer people only, not LGBT+ who aren't queer. Actually, I love that idea! Queer history is now history of queer people, no non-queer LGBT+ allowed :D)

I've never felt LGBT+ even when I thought I was one of the main four letters. But I've always felt queer, even as my understanding of my specific brand of queerness changed. Queer is an umbrella term that is opt in, that covers any and all LGBT+ people who know they are queer too, who know they're one of us, or who simply choose to call themselves queer for whatever fucking reason they want. Some of us are intrinsically queer, some choose to be queer because of the inclusiveness or relative opacity of the term, and you don't know which one a queer person is unless you have earned our trust enough for us to tell you.

And people like you fucking hate that.

So you know what?

I'm totally fine with you calling me a homophobe because the people who actually know more about me than the few sentences I've given you know that that's a joke, and their good opinion matters more to me than yours.

I'm totally fine with you calling me a homophobe because because it means I've won. I've gotten under your skin, just as your bigotry got right under mine. You're furious you can't categorise me. You're pissed off that I could be one of the LGBT+ people you actively dislike and want out of the LGBT+ community, but are finding a hell of a lot harder to flush out of the queer community because we all look the same at first glance and refuse to give you information you feel entitled to. Because it's easy to force people out of the closet in the LGBT+ community, but much fucking harder in a meritocracy like the queer community. To get into the LGBT+ community, you have to tell them which one you are. Queer? No questions asked, cause you already told us all we needed to know! Welcome home!

But let's say this is all a strawman.

That you really are some well meaning person who has nothing against the more obscure queer identities and that you really do just have a problem with the word. That you truly do think that queer people, the great majority of which experience same sex attraction, are... somehow... homophobic just for using the word despite their advocacy against homophobia and total acceptance of that aspect of themselves and others. That our fight for marriage equality and employment and housing protections and human rights is rendered COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY IRRELEVANT because we used a word that Boomers and even some of gen X hurled at each other because a guy was a little bit girly, or a girl refused to grow her hair long, or because men were scared that a man would treat them the way they treated women. (Because queer as an archaic slur, ultimately, comes from misogyny as much as homophobia.)

Let's say you really do mean well and really do know people who were called queers instead of fags, or you really did grow up hearing "that is so queer" to describe things people didn't like, or you really did have "queer" hurled at you by straight people as if there was something wrong with you for not being cis and straight.

(Notice something, there? You probably haven't actually experienced any of that, nor anyone you know. This wank about who I am as a queer person - it's always aimed at us. Never the straights that used it against us. Nobody uses the word queer except queer people any more, I am 99% certain that you don't know ANYBODY who has had it thrown at them AS a slur, so that means that the only people you can target on your crusade are... gender and sexual minorities. Not cis/straight people. Because they're not calling us queers and haven't in decades.

That means you are knowingly targeting minorities over this EXCLUSIVELY, I am completely fucking certain..

... but I'M the homophobe?)

In which case all I can say is: I hope that the well-meaningness that's made you put this hateful thing into my inbox, that's made you say such hateful things to a minority because of their identity (there's a word for treating people differently because they're a minority, especially hostile treatment..), will outshine the hatefulness of what you're saying and lead you to a better way to express your desire to protect people.

If you truly are coming from a misplaced belief that we're somehow deprecating ourselves by being queer, and not a desire to force us out of the closet or to run off any gender or sexual minority, then I apologise for my hostility, acknowledge that learning takes time (and patience that I am unable to give, for I am tired of bad actors pretending they're not and cannot do it), and wish you the best in learning to be inclusive and loving so we can count you one day, at least, as a friend of us queer folk. Maybe one day we'll even welcome you as one of us. I'd love to do that more than I'd like to deal with THIS crap. I can't imagine me going off on you will have helped at all, but from in my experience people who want to protect gender and sexual minorities protect them. They don't target them. That's why I am writing this post under the assumption that you wrote this because you have bad intentions towards me as a queer person, and not out of a well meaning desire to protect anyone you think I've somehow hurt by being me.

In which case? Get fucked.

#long post #queer #queer queer queer #you know how I just said that I often come across as aggressive without intending to? #Disregard that this post is 100% aggressively intended #do not pick on my fellow queer folk or I will Go Off on you #also I don't get using privileged as an insult #that's like insulting me by calling me white #it's a descriptor #some people are privileged #I am privileged in some ways and not so in others #my queerness tho? definitely not

[mxupdate]

[ARTICLE] Wonho (Monsta X) opens up about his dark past and apologizes to fans

'Actually, I'm always feeling unsettled''

We asked why he felt like that,

Wonho opened up about his past.

"Because I know my mistake..."

"No matter what I say, it's just a fallacy. It's because I was wrong."

He continued.

"Therefore, I tried my best, so that I would not make the same mistake again."

Above all, he said that thanks to his fans, he was determined to change.

"I have got what is called love. I don't want to let them down, even just a little."

In February, Dispatch had a meeting with Wonho, Monsta X's former member. At that time, he was reviewing himself for his past controversies when the police were investigating his allegations of drug use in 2013.

"Yes, that's right. I acknowledge my past. I was too stupid. I have tried my best not to live like that again. I only think about the members, the group and my fans."

He added that he was misunderstood.

"I don't use drugs. The police are investigating it. When my innocence is proven, please write an article about my story. I want to apologize and clear up the misunderstanding. I also want to be forgiven by everyone."

On March 10, the police ruled Wonho not guilty. After the investigation on allegations of drug use, the police closed the case because no suspicious points were found. Therefore, we would like to write about Wonho's story.

◆ "It was unfortunate in those days"

An apartment for rent located in Sanbon Ward, Gunpo City, Gyeonggi Province. This apartment has a living room (small size) and a room. Wonho lived there with his grandmother, parents, and younger brother. A miserable period of his life.

"I lived in a small rental apartment until I was 20 years old. My grandmother used the only room. My father, mother, younger brother and I all ate and slept in the living room. At that time I didn't know it was poverty."

In elementary school, he didn't get along well with his peers. He was always teased. The torment went on repeatedly. Wonho was a shy and timid child.

"Sometimes my friends teased me by saying I'm dirty, sometimes bullied me just because they felt bored. My friends didn't like me at all. In fact, there are many more memories I don't want to remember. In short, I was alienated by my friends."

Certainly, he got troubled at his home as well. Wonho's parents fought every day for money. Wonho spent most of his time outside. Then, he knew a stranger in the neighborhood.

"At home, I was not at ease because my parents argued all the time. I had to kill the time outside every day. Just like that, I happened to know a brother in the ward, then I started to follow him."

◆ "I was once interested in bad things"

Since then, Wonho wasn't bullied anymore. No, rather, others started to avoid him. Wonho said he felt fun seeing his friends being dissatisfied.

"One day, I went downstairs and bumped into a friend who had bullied me. I unconsciously cowered. However, that guy opened up first, "Ho Seok, I'm sorry." I suddenly became arrogant. That's not good, but..."

Wonho escaped from being an outcast. But he did not feel happy. The situation was still the same, the discord did not end yet. Eventually, he became more and more pessimistic. This happened when Wonho was in high school.

"My parents argued on that day. Suddenly, I felt choked in my heart. I saw no hope in this house. I walked out of the house unconsciously. At that time, I did not realize the importance of families."

Outside the family's shelter, it was even more dangerous. Wonho hung out with new friends, then was caught up in something he shouldn't have done. Some of his friends went to juvie on suspicion of special theft. Wonho got milder punishment, he was placed under probation.

"I don't want to blame my friends. Because that was also my choice. It sounds like an excuse, but at that time, I was not mature. It was my fault. My fault only. I apologize."

◆ "I had a dream"

Wonho ran into a lot of difficulties in his teens. It's literally a stormy period with intense highs and downs. Then, he met Jung Dae Eun. He remembered that it was when he was in the 2nd year of high school.

"We immediately became closer. We also did modeling jobs together. Da Eun helped me a lot. She even supported my dream of becoming a singer."

Before the age of 20, Wonho, called Lee Ho Seok at that time, was a rebellious boy. He went astray and resented reality. However, after the age of 20, Wonho changed. He moved forward and tried his utmost to overcome the reality of life. That is the epiphany.

"I saw my friends practice like crazy. They were all dreaming of their own dreams. I was jealous of them. So I could only live in resentment... At that time, I promised myself that I won't waste my life anymore."

Wonho practiced day and night. Whenever he had free time, he ran to the stair corridor because he needed a place to practice alone. There, he constantly danced, rested, and danced again.

"I joined the trainees who entered the company at the same time with me to dance and sing all night. I didn't feel tired. Because there was a ray of hope in me that 'I have a future too'. I was happy. Activities with the group were also very delightful. In those 4 years, I learned a lot."

◆ "The past gets in the way"

In 2015, Wonho debuted as a member of Monsta X. The group has released 12 albums in Korea as well as taking Asia, Europe, and the United States by storm. Monsta X also achieved significant success as they landed at No.39 on Billboard's Pop Songs Chart (in 2019) and became the third K-pop artist to accomplish this.

In 2019, when Wonho was on the rise, his murky past caught up with him. He, in turn, entangled in the controversy related to the Me Too movement and the fact that he was once under house arrest was also exposed. In 2013, he was even placed under investigation in suspicion of drug use.

"It's true that I made a mistake, but there are some misunderstandings about me as well. Of course, I'm aware that these are irreversible. Because not everyone goes down the wrong way and falls into such a situation. I reflected on myself a lot at the time I was under house arrest."

Wonho didn't give more explanations. He admitted his past wrongdoings and apologized many times. However, he resolutely denied suspicion of drug use. He said that he absolutely never touched that illegal substance.

"I acknowledge my past deeds. But what I didn't do, I would say no. I absolutely do not use drugs. I have explained it clearly to the police."

After more than 5 months of investigation, the police have concluded that Wonho was innocent. They did not find evidence related to drug use. The police also investigated whether Wonho used drugs in the form of tablets. However, they did not discover any drugs.

◆ "I don't want to hurt anyone"

Wonho quit Monsta X. In October 2019, before officially departing from the group, he left a message that reads, "The members have been hurt by someone like me. All of them have no relation to me at all. I hope that you guys will be Monsta X's pillar of strength.

"The group made lots of efforts to prepare a new album. I hate to see Monsta X collapse (just because of me). I think I should leave the group as soon as possible so Monsta X can continue their activities. I'd like to prevent the damage to them as much as I could."

One more thing, the reason for his determination is MonBeBes.

"I can confidently say that I have completely changed after meeting MonBeBes. I understood what it is like to be loved. I want to live a good life every day."

According to Wonho, he has never lost his concentration on work. Most of his daily tasks are making music, exercises, and fan communication. In fact, Wonho often chatted with fans through live broadcasts, each of which lasted for around 3~4 hours, during his overseas tour.

"Actually, this is the first time I feel such warmth. So, I don't want to let everyone down. I just want to do the things that the fans like. I want to repay that love. But..."

◆ "Anyway, I'm sorry"

The past has been exposed. He wondered what he could do. It was concluded that he could do nothing but withdraw from the group. He thought it was a way to ease the fans' pain (even just a little).

"I promised the fans many things. I also said I would always stay by their side. Although I only lived and thought of fans, I apologize for leaving this way..."

However, he explained that he was forced to do so

"In the past, I lived as Lee Ho Seok, and now as Wonho. Is it possible that Wonho is not responsible for what Lee Ho Seok did? I have to shoulder that responsibility. In the end, I have hurt everyone with my past. I want to relieve that pain."

Wonho hasn't left his house for a while. He lived in silence, to avoid causing damage to those around him. During that time, he was cleanly acquitted of drug-related allegations. Wonho shared that it was fortunate enough.

"Even up to now, I can't forget the fans. On the contrary, I am just so regretful. I feel regret, I should have done a little better. I do this interview with one reason only, which is to apologize to everyone."

See article here.

#monsta x #wonho #200316 #t: interview #p: news

[klaineharmony]

300x3 (Repost+)

I managed to write some more after my earlier post, and rearranged some of what I already had for David and Kath’s conversation. So I wrote about 1,080 words today, and with the rearranging, here’s about 1,713 of this scene.

As I said in the earlier post, I’ll put this under a cut because it’s about sex and marriage and consummation and complicated emotions, though it’s not sex per se. Ziseh neshomeh means, roughly, “sweet soul” in English, and, as if these two don’t destroy my emotions enough, this is the first time Katherine actually says it to David, after asking Sarah to help her find a Yiddish term of endearment for him.

@whatstheproblembaby, as you requested. Thank you for always being so enthusiastic. :)

“Well, and it’s -” Katherine flushed, stammering as she tried to finish her thought. “I know it’s not - not the same for us, as it is for you and Jack - but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want children - want them with me, even. I think - I think I want them too, but maybe - maybe not yet,” she whispered, and David was even more shocked to see tears shimmering in her eyes, threatening to fall as she took a shuddering breath. “I just - my work is so important to me, David, and I can’t do that and be a mother - or if I can, I haven’t figured out how, yet.” 

“I don’t know if I would be any kind of good mother,” Kath continued, her voice still shaking. “My mother certainly isn’t the world’s best example. I always wanted to be a reporter too much to want children, and it was abundantly clear to me from very early on that I couldn't have both, not unless I was extraordinarily lucky. If - if you’re me, David, and you are a woman who wants an education, and a career, and to be your own person, marriage can be the worst thing imaginable. It legally compromises your autonomy, and then children physically compromise your autonomy, and anything you ever wanted for yourself becomes a dream. The system we have doesn’t allow you to have both.”

It was true. David knew it was true; he had certainly seen it in plenty of their neighbors. Women were expected to shoulder the entire burden of housework and childrearing, and most men simply expected that they would. Most bosses, come to that, didn’t want married women working for them, and married women literally became non-persons in the eyes of the law. It was unthinkable to him that Kath would give up her career, but she was clearly assuming the worst about several things (or if she wasn’t, she was still afraid of the answers he might give), and it hurt him terribly to see her so fearful and conflicted.

“Katherine, sweetheart, come here,” he said. He sat back against the pillows and then pulled her toward him, wrapping his arms around her and letting her head rest on his chest. She curled into him, seeking reassurance, but she was tense, and David ran his fingers through her hair, trying to help her relax.

“Listen to me, Katherine Plumber,” he said softly. “I do not and will not ‘expect’ anything from you, when it comes to this. I would never, ever ask you to give up your work; it’s such a part of who you are. I would love to have children someday - your children,” he added, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “I can’t think of anything more amazing than little curly-haired versions of you.” 

Katherine gave a little laugh that was half a sob, tightening a hand into the material of his shirt. “The curls would be just as much your fault as mine.”

David chuckled. “But before anything else, that has to be something you want. If you decide that it isn’t, that’s fine. I will be married to the best reporter in all of New York, and I will celebrate every victory with you until we are old and gray, just the two of us. If and when you decide that it is something you want, I would be honored to father children with you. But I will never ask you to give up your profession or your autonomy, tei-yerinkeh. I will never give you orders; I promise you that. We decide these things together.”

“Thank you, darling,” Katherine whispered. She turned her head and placed a kiss on his breastbone, and he felt a few warm tears land on his shirt. “I am so glad that you exist, and that I found you.”

David was quiet for a minute, still finger-combing her hair, for he could feel the stress and tension leaving Katherine as he did. There was one difficult point of contention, here, and he had no idea if Katherine had thought of it or not.

“We will have to . . . be together, after the wedding,” he said, a blush rising to his cheeks. It was a horribly indelicate thing to say, even to one’s fiancée, but his relationship with Katherine was built on nothing if not trust - and they had just been talking about having children, for heaven’s sake, and if and whether and how much they should do this very thing, even if neither of them had named the act. The former was a result of the latter, but saying it directly still felt strange. And bold. And uncomfortable.   

Katherine sat up abruptly, her face stricken, and David was taken aback. Was she really so terrified of being with him, or was it the risk involved? (Which was absolutely there, and he knew that, too. Katherine had so much more to lose than he did, taking that chance, even the first time.)

“David,” she said tremulously. “I hope you know that I didn’t mean I don’t trust you, or wouldn’t . . . be with you, if you want that. I do trust you, and I absolutely would. I just - “

“You’re worried,” David filled in for her, kissing her softly. “I know, tei-yerinkeh. Believe me, I never thought you didn’t trust me - the fact that we’re having this conversation tells me that you do, more than you know. And if I could give you the choice even about our wedding night, I would. But - our marriage could be challenged, Kath,” he said intently. “Both legally and religiously.”

His cheeks were hot again, but Katherine’s cheeks also turned red as she took in what he had said, though he wasn’t sure if it was from embarrassment or anger. It was slightly easier to know that both of them were finding this awkward - but they were still talking, and David found himself immeasurably grateful, all over again, for the woman in his arms. They didn’t stop talking even when talking was difficult, and he loved that about them. Several of their conversations in the past few days had been about things that could have threatened their entire relationship, completely destroyed what they were to each other - but they were both still here, confiding in each other even about the hard things.

“Oh,” Katherine said, her eyes wide. “I see. Not that anyone would know, necessarily - but they could allege - especially my father - and it might - “

“It might be enough,” David finished gravely. “Just the accusation might be enough. A marriage has to be consummated to be legally and religiously binding. Of course, we could just as well not, I suppose - and if we both said we had, how would anyone prove otherwise?”

“But he would try,” Katherine said, as much to herself as to David. “My father would try. And it would be easier to argue if we had, and it was actually the truth.” 

“It would,” David said, stroking her cheek. 

Katherine’s lips tightened, and she got a look on her face that David knew all too well: the one that meant she had decided something, and woe to anyone who got in her way.

“Well, then, we will,” she said firmly. “I’m not letting anyone - not my father, or a judge, or anyone else - take you away from me, David Jacobs, or vice versa. And if being together on our wedding night is one way to ensure that, then that’s what we’ll do. It’s what should happen, anyway,” she said, her voice turning softer, and she leaned her forehead against David’s. “Were we just slightly different than we are, it would, without question, and yet you are still letting me question all of it, willing to have things be different, and I - I can’t tell you how much that means to me, David. It’s - everything, and I love you for it.” 

Her voice was just a whisper by the end, and tears slipped from her eyes. David gently wiped them away.

“We can try to minimize the risk, dear one,” he murmured. “I’m sure Mama will help, if you ask. And I love you for being willing to take the chance, both for your own sake and for mine. I want you safe, Kath - I don’t want you to ever find yourself under your father’s thumb or in his house, ever again. I want to know that you are my wife, that you are part of our family now, and that you and I have done everything we can to make sure it will stay that way. It’s not only because of your father; it matters when it comes to being recognized by the Jewish community, too. Someone could try to say that we weren’t properly married, and go to the rabbi.”

Katherine nodded. “I know.” Her voice was thick with tears, but she swallowed hard and held David’s face in her hands, lifting her head so that she could look him in the eyes. There was so much love there that David felt his own throat tighten. “I want to be absolutely clear about something, David Jacobs. It will be an honor and a blessing to share this with you, and be your wife in every way. There is no one else I would choose, ziseh neshomeh.” She pressed a kiss to both of his cheeks, and then to his lips, each one full of tenderness. “And as for the risk - you are taking it with me, as we always have done, and so I know we’ll be all right, whatever happens.”

David’s eyes stung, both at the sentiments and the endearment Katherine had said so carefully, and he gathered Kath against him, holding her close. “You are amazing, Katherine Plumber,” he murmured brokenly into her hair, kissing her temple. “I don’t know where you find all of your courage, I really don’t. And you always have so much faith in me. I’ll keep trying to be worthy of it.” 

He felt Katherine smile. “You already are.”

He lifted his head and turned her face toward him, kissing her softly. “So are you. And . . . afterward, dear one, we don’t have to do anything. Whatever feels right and comfortable for us both, that’s what we’ll do.”

#300x3 #Newsies #Newsies 1992 #Defend #Klaineharmony writes

[satanherfuckingself]

Hayley Atwell. Publicly Adored Psychopath.

Before I begin, I feel it's imperative to mention that this was not created to cause harm. Do not send anyone hatred or harassment despite what you may read. You are not a monster. Do not stoop to that level. Verbal abuse is still abuse, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether someone 'deserves' it or not.

Please, do not do that. Do not become an abuser. If you feel the need to do something, I will provide solutions for that fact, but hatred and harm will not solve anything.

Keep that in mind. And please stay tuned and read this thoroughly because it's more than just a social call out. It's more than just 'cancel culture' or someone making a big whoop over something nonsensical or even holding someone accountable for their actions. I promise there is a point to this, and it is probably far more important than the title even suggests.

Please, stick with it, and read to the end.

I also feel the need to mention that some of the behaviors discussed in this piece will undoubtedly be quite... disturbing. Proceed with caution if you find it necessary.

And. Let it be known that any claims made here are in fact alleged. Evidence and sources will be provided of course, that's simply a friendly reminder for the... legality of it.

Forgive me if you enjoy this ending because if you have any sense of a decent moral compass, this will probably shatter that enjoyment of it, and forgive me if you do not because this will only make you hate it more.

So I found this blog:

Hydra Support Blog

Really, it's a blog centered entirely around hating Sharon Carter, the very real person that was her actress, Emily VanCamp, encouraging hatred towards this same very real person and her fans for any scrounged up nonexistent reason they can find, without proof, as well as fans of the comics.

They also insult her acting, despite the fact that Emily actually has won awards for her performances while the idol they are so devoted to has not.

All for the sake of the very real bully who actively encouraged, manipulated, and even to some degree, promoted the behavior. Under the guise of promoting her own character.

Why did I call them a Hydra support blog?

Well, quite clearly, they support the Creepy Uncle Theory that Endgame made a point to reward them with, which certainly does require the support of Hydra among other things, but I won't dive into that just yet. It's also because they sound exactly like Zola. Don't worry, we'll come back to it. But they are also quite clearly overjoyed at the idea of someone losing a job for their personal enjoyment.

This is also terrible.

Allow me to remind that this harassment and hatred was not limited to these fans, or fans of Peggy or Steggy. It also existed, to some degree among Romanogers fans, Stucky fans, and Stony fans. You know who you are. And you are certainly not excused from this behavior if you in any way participated in spreading hatred or contempt for the Staron and Sharon fanbase, or actively harassing those fans.

You don't have to like it, you can even rant against it all you like in your personal spaces. But being respectful and understanding should be the common fucking courteousy here. People are allowed to like different things from you. And they are not obligated to agree with you.

Your personal enjoyment is not worth more than someone's job or life. And it never should be.

However, the only actress who encouraged this particular behavior in full, among her fans... was Atwell.

Not Emily, not Chris, not Scarlett, not Sebastian, and not Robert Downey Jr. Some may have made tasteless jokes or even gone along with the situation, encouraging 'teams' among fans for publicity. I wouldn't label complete blamelessness in this case, but it is important to recognize ignorance over malicious behavior, which is the difference here. Because it was nothing to the extent of the tantrum that Atwell threw the moment the spotlight was no longer on her.

So let's talk about Hayley Atwell, and her involvement in all of this, the alleged actions and their implications. Let's take a deep dive into the psychology of it all, and why what she did was actually very wrong. I'll touch on the lack of etiquette and class as well as blatant unprofessionalism needed to consciously do what she did.

Because her behavior is disturbing, it is disgusting, and it has gone unnoticed for far too long. Her portrayal of Peggy makes the relationship canonically abusive. And no one noticed.

People are still defending her, and respecting her, despite what she's done. She is welcome to have a life and live it how she pleases, but not at the expense of other people. We cannot simply reward this type of behavior when it is unquestionably wrong. We cannot leave her with the power to do worse.

A good starting point in understanding what she's done would be here:

Receipts

Who one lovely sweetheart of a blogger decided to compile and I am ever so grateful for, as I'm a lazy shit~. My only regret is that this wasn't seen and still hasn't been seen by enough people, especially by those that rewarded or are even promoting the behavior still. This blogger is a very good person and that is abundantly clear, send her some love and reblog that post if you can. It's necessary more people see it. Thank you, love, you are truly a blessing. So I'm a little bias, I tend to be for good people.

Allow me to expand on it though, as I do have to mention, I have just a few minor additions and concerns. However, sources are provided perfectly, along with plenty of evidence to stand on it's own for what Atwell did. That this was active, deliberate, and intentional to hurt someone's career that wasn't herself. Allegedly.

But, let's also debunk some of Atwell's claims and mention a few other things, starting with all her claims about the relationship between Sharon and Steve. Between being 'disrespectful' and 'incestuous'.

Claims easily found in these articles:

https://ew.com/article/2016/06/06/captain-america-civil-war-hayley-atwell-steve-sharon/

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/peggy-carter-does-not-approve-899860

https://www.hypable.com/captain-america-civil-war-hayley-atwell-steve-and-sharon-were-disrespectful/

https://www.thewrap.com/hayley-atwell-agent-carter-captain-america-civil-war-kiss-sharon-carter-marvel-incestuous-disrespectful/

https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Hayley-Atwell-Issue-With-Captain-America-Agent-13-Kiss-Civil-War-135197.html

https://www.bustle.com/articles/165038-hayley-atwell-reveals-peggys-feelings-about-steve-sharon-which-are-just-what-youd-expect

https://www.bustle.com/articles/165194-why-captain-america-sharon-carters-relationship-does-a-disservice-to-both-fans-steve-rogers

https://www.themarysue.com/peggy-carter-does-not-approve/

Oh, and look at that last one, including a gif of the psychotic rage it takes to shoot at someone who doesn't belong to you, because you're jealous... And of course, we love a good afterthought in which a real person is less important than a fictional story.

https://screenrant.com/captain-america-mcu-ending-problem-sharon-carter-endgame/

Did I need to include all of those sources? Of course not. Are they mostly along the same lines? Absolutely. But does it make a point of how positively this was covered as the media ran with her words to give her as much press and coverage as she wanted and promote her and only her ideas?

Absolutely...

To put it all very bluntly, I disagree with her. Why?

Well, for starters, we know that 'Peggy' had initially moved on from Steve. She'd married, had a family, supposedly loved this family and even had grandchildren. The character had always, comics alike but even in the MCU, been meant to signify and aid in Steve moving on, just as she did, from the past. It was a minor role, but still vital, and quite endearing when done this way.

But according to this, these articles and Atwell herself.

Peggy never loved the husband she'd initially married, or the family she'd made.

They were only placeholders for Steve.

According to her, Steve wasn't allowed to move on from her. Wasn't permitted to find happiness, beyond her, even though her character had blatantly stated she wanted him to in 'CA:TWS'. As proven even by Atwell's feelings towards Romanogers. Seemingly any woman that wasn't Peggy was an absolute 'no' for her. Because he belonged to 'Peggy'. I didn't know... slavery was a thing for her, but as far as I know, people cannot and should not be ownable.

Under no circumstances, even with married couples, should the people involved be considered property. They are individuals and human beings. Point blank. Period.

But let's make an exception in her case and say that this is true. Well, apparently this controlled permission and ownership extends to Sharon as well?

Now I'll ask, why is Peggy's opinion, a woman Steve had previously only shared one kiss with, had never even managed to share that one date with, relevant at all?

A woman who, need I remind you is well into her 90s by the time we see her again, is Steve still supposedly all she thinks about? All she thought about all those years? Why was a picture of... him on her desk in the 70s, as portrayed in Endgame, when she should have been married, with children, well into her 50s mind you but somehow still young, and apparently, none of her family is as important as Steve?

How is that healthy?

She was tantamount to an ex-lover at that point. Even if they had slept together, as Atwell claimed, and Evans and the writers disproved. Are people supposed to consult ex-lovers before they start dating someone else? Especially ones that get married and live their lives? Is there some unspoken rule I don't know about? Or in another sense, I wasn't aware she was also his mother and could decide for him, a grown man with a right to his own decisions and autonomy, who had initiated the romance with Sharon, what he could and could not do.

Ideally, Peggy would have cared more about Sharon, a niece she had supported in her endeavors and helped raise, rather than a man she admired symbolically and had shared one kiss with, and never managed to date. Just because she didn't get dick from him. Ideally, she would have cared more about the family she'd allegedly made after moving on from this man's death. A family, Sharon would have been a part of.

Her concerns shouldn't have been cockblocking Steve and saying he couldn't have Sharon and vice versa, they should have been whether or not he's treating Sharon right. And far more protective over Sharon, than possessive over Steve.

In fact, a good great aunt who'd truly loved both of them, faced with this situation, I would have even imagined trying to set them up, and being that scandalous older woman~, who's lived her life, had fun, loved her family, and wants to see him happy with someone else.

Because that's what true love is.

Wanting to see the person you love, happy, even if it's without you, even if it can't be you that gives them that happiness, especially if you've had to move on in your own life and can't be with them.

I fail to see how Steve moving on after she has too, qualifies as 'disrespectful'. Even if you find it tasteless that he kissed Sharon after her death. Could he have asked for her permission and blessing for the relationship? Of course! Maybe he should have, I think this would have even made it better. The difference being, a Peggy who truly cared about him would have given her blessing, not withheld it.

But what about the 'incestuous' aspect?

Well, that's also a no. At least... not technically, and certainly not before Peggy was forced back into the relationship, before Steve willingly and knowing became Sharon's uncle. And Peggy's placeholders were set aside like chopped liver. Steve was certainly in a peculiar situation that maybe doesn't look the best from the exterior, and in the original version of the comics, Sharon was merely Peggy's younger sister. However, the comparison of his situation is easily explained and understood in much better lighting with some simple imagination.

Take for example, and let's even make Sharon a more direct descendant just to drive the point home, if Steve were an ancient vampire.

Let's say... this vampire Steve has a brief romantic fling with a young and beautiful Peggy. They do not sleep together. But share some feelings, some sweet passings, and a single kiss. However, Steve goes dormant, for years and years and years on end. However vampires do. Peggy is understandably sad for the moment, perhaps upset. But she moves on. She understands, she falls in love with someone new, she has children, and her children have children, and so on and so forth. She lives a normal human life.

Steve wakes up.

And he meets Sharon. A however many greats granddaughter of the woman he was once infatuated with. But he may not necessarily know this. They look nothing alike. But maybe there's something special in the bloodline that draws them together, that draws him to her.

Oh, and by the way, this is starting to sound familiar. Ever heard of the 'Vampire Diaries'? Except Elena and Katherine do in fact look exactly alike.

Yet no one bats an eye at this or calls it incestuous.

The point being, he falls in love. And she does too. And maybe this time, he decides he wants someone to be with, to hold, wholly and completely. And he turns Sharon into his immortal lover. (There's a fic idea for anyone that wants it~!)

Perhaps this was even something that under circumstance, he couldn't offer to Peggy, or she had even rejected.

This is not incest, in any way, shape, or form. This is a man, faced with a circumstance, in which he moves on. And is happy to do so. There is nothing wrong with that.

Could it be a little strange that he happens to fall for someone in Peggy's bloodline? Sure. But it's still not incest.

Unless~, he falls in love with Sharon... before deciding on takebacksies and finding a way to go back in time just to be with her however many greats grandmother. Possibly even ensuring that his own blood is part of Sharon's, or erasing her from existence along with any of the other family that Peggy had allegedly loved.

The first one is perfectly understandable. The second one is disgusting.

Peggy makes it incestuous.

But I suppose, according to Atwell, Peggy was also incapable of love.

Not just loving other people besides Steve, but love in general. Because this is called obsession, and it's sick. It's disturbing. Can't tell the difference? Here, that should help. This one too, very informative and does a good job of simplifying this concept for the average person. And what a coincidence. Oh, and look, another. And another.

Seriously, this is what Marvel, and Disney, a modern day company that should be responsible with it's messages and stories, glorified and normalized for the public.

If you're going to write a horror story, at least say it's a fucking horror story. Or take the goddamn criticism when someone tells you it is objectively bad.

So, not only did this woman completely fabricate and romanticize a crush, an unhealthy one, and blow it up to be a real relationship along with convincing everyone of the lie, she put others down to do so in order to get what she wanted, regardless of the price that others had to pay for it. Lovely. I think her claims completely undermine and disregard the legacy Peggy had left behind, and the love she would have otherwise had for her family. I think it's a gross mischaracterization of her that misses the mark on who 'Peggy Carter' was and what she represents.

Did you know that in the comics she has a relationship with Gabe Jones? One of Steve's own Howlies no less, and a wonderful representation of an interracial love fighting for what's right, together, especially for the time period?

Where's that love story, that doesn't require Steve to be a creepy uncle for her sake and is more than just an obsessive crush and single kiss?

Why does Sharon not matter to her? Why did her husband not matter? Why did her kids not matter?

And if you're under the assumption that Steve was this person the entire time, why did Hydra not matter growing within S.H.I.E.L.D.? Why did Steve's own principles and who he was not matter to her anymore, as long as she was getting dick? Why did Bucky not matter, being tortured by Hydra for the 70 years she got to get off?

Nevermind, I guess she treated him like shit anyway, even if ideally, the flirtatious little shit Bucky was would have been the best man at Steve's wedding to her, an uncle to her kids, and the best friend that Steve had in his life with her.

Why did Sharon still not matter to her? Nor her other family which she apparently lied to? Why did young Steve not matter enough to tell the truth to? And lie about Alzheimer's no less. Why did she seem to find it fitting to lie to everyone?

Let's continue.

If that's not enough, let's talk about the cry that Steve somehow 'wasn't good enough' for or 'didn't deserve' Peggy when the kiss of Civil War happened.

Okay...

How?

Because if your reasoning for the logic of putting someone down, telling them they are lesser, and 'not good enough' or undeserving of you, is because they choose to 'move on' and not be with you, or choose someone else over you?

You are a terrible person. And I would not want to be the object of your affection.

That is deliberate psychological abuse. And if you tell anyone that sort of thing, just because they don't or can't return your feelings, you are a fucked up person. Fuck you. That is disgusting.

Do not ever tell someone this just because they can't or choose not to love you. Apologize if you ever have, especially to someone you do love. Love is not always an active choice. And this is guilt tripping, manipulating, gaslighting someone into a situation where you put them down for your personal benefit, and that is nasty, unacceptable behavior that no one should tolerate.

Call out someone's own terrible behavior if they are doing something wrong, do not jump to the conclusion that this means the person is worthless. There is a difference. Harmful behaviors can be changed. People can change and get better. We should strive to be better.

However, the aforementioned? That is what psychopaths do to ensure their control over a relationship, run if someone is doing this to you. Find a way to get out of there if you can, because that is fucked up, and no, you deserve better than that. Do not let them belittle you.

And yet, this was... completely glorified by the media, even rewarding someone who committed to this type of behavior. Especially after the fact.

How many articles are there out there that critique Endgame versus those that promote this ending and actively defend it? Giving Disney good press?

But luckily, Atwell only did it with the characters, right? It's only fictional, right?

Yeah, that's why we didn't see Emily in Infinity Wars or Endgame... That's why, even though she'd been hired for a job she had earned, they kept kicking her down the road like a bent, empty can. Worthless and usable, and not a real person at all. Why did they hire her if this had 'always been the plan' as they claimed? To disgust everyone? To make the ending as fucking shitty as it is and have people praise them for it? To publicly embarrass and humiliate her, just because?

The lack of class and just... human decency necessary to commit this kind of behavior is easily seen with a hypothetical comparison, simply with another well beloved actress I will admit might not be a fully fair comparison. But that's because this actress is amazing and not many people compare to her.

But let's take a pause and also consider the actions of Atwell's coworkers, since none of them did quite what she did. None of them... did quite what she did.

You know who else would never do this, even if she'd been playing Peggy Carter and got her show cancelled? Who realistically, wouldn't have gotten her show cancelled because she actually is amazing and would be worth watching, hands down, no complaints.

Sandra Bullock.

And I'd hate to name drop like that or put her on the spot, but just consider it for a moment. Sandy B. as Peggy Carter. Already, beautiful, elegant, amazing, maybe a bit funnier, compassionate, kind, and playing the part of the loving aunt for Sharon perfectly. Even more comic accurate probably! Sandra Bullock would never take time out of her day for any reason, to put down one of her costar's characters and talk trash about this character and the relationship she's in with another character... Ever. Period.

She has class, grace. And she's a truly, genuinely good human being. In fact, I would wager to say, she'd make jokes about it to promote the relationship. As the crazy aunt who's constantly trying to set Steve up with someone new, probably her niece, and embarrassing the shit out of him. And that image is just fucking adorable.

Can you picture it? It's pretty amazing, right?

Now can you really defend Atwell's actions knowing they could have been avoided and a real person, real people, not hurt with them?

I guarantee this ending would have never happened had someone at least like Sandra Bullock been cast as Peggy Carter. Even if she did happen to 'ship' Peggy and Steve more than she did Sharon and Steve. Even if she did 'joke' about it. Especially when there's a point the jokes go too far. And I'd wager to say, she'd even focus more on helping Emily VanCamp, than putting down her character and sicking her pack or rabid bullies on her to try and get her to kill herself.

What the actual fuck has to be wrong with someone to do something like that. Even without giving the direct order.

And sure, maybe fans do ride the crazy train a bit to much. But the least we could expect from Bullock would be a public statement regarding the behavior, and letting fans know that she doesn't condone it and would want them to stop.

I challenge you to find anything along those lines that Atwell could have done. I tried.

And there was nothing.

Let's continue with the character analysis and talk a bit about the implications of this ending.

So far, we know Peggy hated Sharon, her own niece, that she 'owns' Steve and has all rights to his autonomy and decisions, doesn't care about her husband or family if Steve isn't somehow part of it, and would label Steve 'unworthy' of her if he somehow decided he loved someone else. Not just Sharon, but anyone.

Let's also not forget this is a woman who shot at him for having kissed someone else in front of her. When they weren't together. Would you want and choose to date someone who shot at you for doing that?

I mean, I suppose I don't personally know you, maybe you're into some kinky shit. But that doesn't really seem to healthy to me.

Let's talk about little Steve and Erskine, and the promise Steve made to him as well as himself. His character development over the movies and what this ending requires not just of him, but of Peggy too.

From the first movie, we know that even when Steve wasn't capable of doing more, when his body didn't permit him to, he always wanted to do more. Erskine in his dying moment asked him not to forget his heart. The man that would choose to do good above all else. To help those around him that maybe couldn't help themselves. This is an invaluable lesson I think we could all learn from, within our capacities of course.

Bucky even tried to stop Steve from hurting himself, because he worried about him. And then followed him because he admired what the little guy... had always stood for. And against.

“I don't want to hurt anyone. I don't like bullies, I don't care where they're from.”

By the end of the film, Steve has lost someone incredibly dear to him that he grew up with, Bucky, and makes the decision to save thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost over his own personal enjoyment. Because it's the right decision. And he tells Peggy it's his choice. He doesn't hesitate. He doesn't expect to survive, but he keeps his promise to Erskine above all else, and stops Hydra, or so we think.

We later discover Hydra has survived all those years through Zola. Growing in S.H.I.E.L.D., under Peggy's watchful eyes... holding Bucky for all that time.

With the addition of Endgame's Creepy Uncle Theory, that little tidbit of the story, we've been given two interpretations. There's also a lot of lines that lose all meaning, from Steve, Peggy, and Sharon.

“When I see a situation pointed south, I can't ignore it.”

“Sometimes, all we can do is our best, and sometimes the best is the start over.”

“She kept so many secrets, I didn't want her to have one from you.”

“I don't know, the guy who wanted all of that went into the ice 70 years ago, I think someone else came out.”

But let's go back to those interpretations, both of which require someone to suffer on Steve and Peggy's behalf for a minimum of 70 years. Apart from becoming a creepy uncle who apparently had been only using Sharon as a replacement for her. And of course abandoning everyone who loved him just to get laid. This may not be easily seen or understood at first glance. But it is easily explained and should be painfully obvious.

If Steve is present in the main universe that entire time, choosing to do nothing, he has:

Abandoned Sharon.

Abandoned his family, the Avengers.

Abandoned Bucky.

Abandoned the principles he lived by and thrown away promises to all those he held dear. Including his promise to Erskine, who gave him that power to do more to begin with.

Left Hydra undisturbed and even prospering under his beloved wife's organization, allowing people to die and suffer, including Bucky who we know is tortured and in and out of ice for those years.

Be perfectly happy with the sexism, racism, and just general bigotry of the time period. Something that at least comics Steve Rogers has been proven to hate so much, he actively made himself go forward in time permanently, after only saving Bucky, because he couldn't stand it. No amount of Peggy to fix the situation for him. She's also never mattered as much as any other love interest to him. Not even Blind Al, that one's obscure~.

Be perfectly happy to do nothing while a situation is pointed south, even though he has previously stated incapable of doing so? While he knows what will happen or that people are suffering and dying for him and Peggy, what he will do to Sharon, and just completely and utterly not giving a shit.

Huh... Well, none of that sounds 'good'. I guess it also means he completely regrets his decision to save all those lives and sacrifice himself. A decision... I assumed he was the type of person to be able to make more than once if necessary. Because it was who he was. And supposedly, what Peggy even respected him for. I assumed Peggy would have also respected this decision, not backtracked to make him actively do the opposite of this very thing for 70 years. Possibly even... if we're to believe Hydra is allowed to run rampant all those years, potentially thousands of lives to be killed on his behalf instead.

Huh, I guess it was a pointless decision.

“We don't trade lives.”

Right?

And we're supposed to believe Mjolnir, a tool essentially measuring 'selflessness' and humility, purity of heart, 'worthiness', would be perfectly fine with labeling this behavior as 'good' as well.

That just seems like a pipe dream for every sod who can't get laid and has a backwards moral compass, but let's not dive into that.

Despite the fact that he's also abandoning all sense of self and is nothing more than a mindless puppet at this point. Through 'Steve Rogers' choosing this ending... he is actively doing wrong, and knows it. He is actively allowing Hydra to prosper, and... essentially...

Proving Zola right.

“We won, Captain. Your life amounts to your death, a zero sum!”

Familiar now, isn't it? But I guess every message we learned about Steve, in light of everything, in light of Peggy, is meaningless so long as he's... getting laid. Or 'happy'.

That doesn't sound fucked up at all, being perfectly okay with people suffering on your behalf. But I suppose it's no surprise that the people who love Atwell so much and are perfectly okay with her behavior feel the same way...

And here's the thing, I don't think 'Steve Rogers'... the real one in context of his story anyway, would be happy in a setting he needs to let others suffer on his behalf, and ignore their suffering, in order for him to be happy. Looking at his character just over the previous movies, I'd say this would in actuality be literal torment for him.

Spidey gave a perfect rendition that completely embodied everything Steve Rogers stands for and had stood for in those movies.

“When you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen... They happen because of you...”

What a coincidence. And another important message.

If you actually think a man like Steve, a first responder by nature, who always seeks out the goodness in others and wants to help people, would suddenly sit on his ass and allow people to suffer for him? When he couldn't even do this while too small to make any real impact?

You are delusional. And it is disturbing that you would somehow label that as 'good', as 'cute', as 'healthy', as 'right', as 'true love'. As 'happy' for him.

This is a man, forced into retirement, under the 'guise' of a 'choice', when in reality, it is atrociously horrible writing that disregards anything about who he was and what he stood for. That had he been real, this would have been a disservice to him and is certainly one to every important message the character has, and the history behind him. He would have been stuck in this world. Trapped, and held back from doing anything. By someone who supposedly 'loves' him?

Love doesn't hold people back or hold on possessively like a fucking parasite, it sets people free.

Why would she do that to him? Why would she sit back and assume all of those things are 'okay'? How? Why would anyone want her to??? I thought Peggy was supposed to be a good character inspired by upholding his message. Did she break the vial? Did she keep him in her basement? Did she tell him to sit on his ass and 'look pretty' while she did all the work? A fucking horrible job I might add, if she just lets Hydra run rampant and kill Howard for her sake. How is someone like that admired as a 'good' person?

Nothing about this is 'good'.

This ending is not 'beautiful'. It is a horror story masquerading as something 'pretty'. It is an abuse story being normalized to a vast and unknowing public. At best, a horribly irresponsible message to send the public... and at worst... a reflection of what's wrong with society as a whole. Possibly with ulterior and deliberate intentions.

In order for this ending to happen, Steve Rogers must cut ties with his family and abandon all he loved, loves, lives for, all sense of self... all for Peggy, and solely Peggy's, satisfaction. Seems oddly... familiar to a certain situation his best friend, who seemingly means nothing to him, happened to be in... for 70 years.

Let's reverse the roles. If Steve had been a female to do this for a man's sake? The first thing people would notice is how unhealthy the relationship is. How obsessive it is. How harmful it is. And how disgusting the normalization of it is. In a media that has a far reach and should be so much more fucking responsible with the messages they send their viewers.

Knowing that there are so many sacrifices, ones that shouldn't be made, and that every sacrifice comes from Steve's end, would you willingly call this relationship healthy? Beautiful? 'True love'?

When in reality, they'd only shared one kiss, and never dated?

Yeah. Seems legit.

On the flip side, you have that other interpretation, right? The one where he's in an alternate universe and lets his Peggy live her life with another man, but steals this Peggy both from her future husband and himself.

You'd think it gets better, right? I mean he can fix this universe in full, he might fuck something up and we might consider it a bit irresponsible to play with timelines like that, but he can always just go back if it goes too bad. He's earned it, his shot at this life, still disregarding Sharon and now... a version of himself. A Steve still trapped in the ice. Still suffering on his behalf. While he lives out his life with supposedly this Steve's girl, this Steve's Bucky, and this Steve's entire potential life.

Oh, and apparently this Peggy really doesn't care about the Steve trapped in the ice, since she's also fine with a replacement that's totally different from the one she knew~! That's not weird or fucked up at all.

Leaving him to wake up, alone, in the future having known the life he wanted was knowingly taken by someone else. Someone selfish enough to leave him in the ice. Bucky's alive and safe from Hydra, yay! Apparently... no version from this alternate universe is worth giving the shield to though. So I guess Steve ultimately didn't love these replacements as much. And of course, this is assuming Steve doesn't also just leave this universe as is for everything else terrible to happen.

This is assuming he gives a shit at all. Because if he had?

Tell me why... defrosting the alternate Steve to live out a life with his own Peggy, to at least make sure one of them got that 'happy ending', could still do good, without abandoning anyone, could kick ass, could fix everything in this alternate timeline, maybe even with a few tips from this time traveling Steve, somehow wasn't acceptable compared to 'Steve Rogers' actively and willingly doing, and allowing terrible things to happen, and abandoning everyone else who loved him.

Once again, cut off from his family and replacing them all with clones.

This is supposed to be better?

Did he ever really love Peggy, or just the way she looked since any identical twin happened to work just fine?

Tell me why, if Chris Evans just wanted to stop playing the role, Steve going back for just the dance and asking for Peggy's blessing to marry Sharon, presumably after they'd actually made an effort to develop the relationship, presumably after Peggy has made her peace with loving someone else, and then coming back to not abandon his family or any of his principles or promises he made, or just who he is in general, and proposing to Sharon with Peggy's blessing and understanding, wouldn't have been better and more respectful in all ways?

With the characters, with their history, with their messages. Tell me how it wouldn't have been better to simply have him out of the spotlight and training recruits, but still actively being who he was and doing good somehow couldn't have been acceptable?

There, I can write a better ending than those quack professionals Marvel hired. Simple, easy, done. Where's my fucking job~?

Instead of demolishing every part of who he was, using an anti-bullying character... to reward bullying no less?

Even if Evans wanted to retire or would have made a decision like this, doesn't mean Cap would have ever even remotely done something similar. At least not a good version of him. Upholding the symbolic moral message the character presents would have been easy, but they were too stupid to even try.

Tell me how this ending doesn't disrespect a previous almost 60 years of an established comic relationship, a relationship need I remind in which Sharon was pregnant with Steve's child, one sadly lost, and later shared an adopted son with him. A relationship, that should they disrespect and retcon for Peggy's sake, will only serve to make Steve Rogers seem like a terrible person with no sense of loyalty to a woman he supposedly loved and has spent a good chunk of his life with. As opposed to sharing one kiss or brief romance with. For all intents and purposes, Sharon being his common law wife.

Ironically, the very thing Atwell claimed this relationship did in the MCU, despite the fact that her character only shared a single kiss with Steve, canonically. And she lied and actively manipulated fans into believing it was so much more. When... watch the movies, it wasn't.

Tell me how this ending doesn't disrespect the characters, including Peggy, and the messages they have conveyed, the convictions they've held over the years of their history, and the symbolism which I would argue is much more important, that they represent. Tell me how it doesn't somehow disrespect and belittle Bucky, Erskine, the idea that Howard was Steve's friend, or that any of the people Steve loved actually mattered to him, beyond Peggy.

Beyond getting laid. Because deny it all you want, that is what this ending boils down to. That is the only reason it exists.

Or, actually, I'd wager it also exists to actively squash the importance of the messages the characters convey.

Here's an idea. Johann Schmidt and comics Hydra Cap both have more conviction and loyalty to their cause than EG Cap. And Schmidt post IW/EG arguably causes less harm than EG Cap actively allows to happen right beside himself, because Schmidt is incapable of doing much as the stone's guardian.

And at least Hydra Cap made sense within the context of his storyline.

Prove me wrong.

That's the sort of Cap you have to support to like this ending. Hydra complacent, bigotry complacent, and completely castrated, or at the very least, willing to replace everyone he loves with clones while he takes an alternate Steve's life. Frankly, that's not a Cap I think anyone should support. And I don't think any fans, especially Peggy or Steggy fans should be somehow proud of the fact that this is the sort of 'Steve' that Peggy gets.

I mean... I suppose it is in fact the kind of Steve that sort of Peggy, equally complacent and horrible, would deserve? But that doesn't really stop it from being gross, does it?

Is that really what you'd want as a fan?

I've mentioned that Atwell's alleged behavior is inappropriate, excessive, disturbing. And I'll also mention, this kind of obsession for fictional characters is unhealthy. So why did she do this? Why the behavior at all, why did she go out of her way to essentially hurt Emily, discreetly of course, without people noticing? Why all the manipulation?

Well... it gets worse. And this is certainly where that allegedly becomes very important.

Take a moment to think for a minute about who benefited from this ending and how.

Atwell, most certainly, at Emily's expense of course. At the expense of fans. And an actual well written product we wouldn't get immediate buyer's remorse from. And of course maybe one that doesn't insult our intelligence?

You could assume she simply wanted money. Though somehow... that doesn't really fit. Maybe spotlight? That makes a little more sense, though just as bad. It's seedy, it's spiteful, it's uncomfortably close to a bad Harlequin manga villain. If you've ever read one of those.

They're based off old trashy romance novels if that gives any reference.

Except... what if you replaced every instance of 'Steve, Sharon, and Peggy', with instances of herself and Chris? With the names, 'Chris, Emily, and Hayley'.

Except Emily is happily married now, and can easily identify the difference between a romantic interest in her work, and in real life. Can easily discern a job from her private life. Because that's what a good, stable, actress or actor can easily do.

Suddenly, the situation takes on a very different meaning.

How creepy would that have been for her to do? Along with easily dismissed by the public.

Keep in mind, this is a woman who publicly admitted to, and even in plain view, groping this man, multiple times, without his explicit consent because she 'couldn't help herself'. Okay. Big deal, right? So she touched his 'man boobs' a couple times. He laughed it off, it was all good fun. Why would he complain, it's different, men shouldn't be complaining about being touched without their permission by beautiful women. Despite the fact that they're not, nor have they ever been, in a romantic relationship together.

It's perfectly appropriate for a woman to grope a man as she pleases, whether he is in a relationship with her or even other people, or not. He can't feel uncomfortable because of this, only woman can. Why would he ever be uncomfortable about it, and if he was, he would have said so. He loves her, they're friends!

Let me know if the hypocrisy needed for that logic is falling through the cracks here, because that seems like a dangerous double standard to set.

You shouldn't be allegedly or otherwise, touching or really molesting, in her own words 'groping', anyone publicly and suddenly, especially without their consent. But let's assume he was okay with every single time it had happened. Okay. Sure. Fine. It's his body to decide with who can touch him like that, who can invade his personal space and how, right? And besides, he loves the attention and being objectified by women.

That's clearly why he'll make an effort to actually call out and put people on the spot who pretend to talk to him through a faked photoshopped encounter, right? Clearly why he absolutely hates that.

Now let's assume he wasn't.

Why would he ever admit to that if the response we can expect is that 'he's a man, so he should be okay with it'? As if men somehow don't have a right to their own bodies or can't be sexually harassed and molested, abused, raped, you name it. Objectified maybe? Why would we be suspicious of the behavior or tell someone that it's wrong, without the full story even though it's happening in our plain view?

Playfulness and comfort between friends is one thing, boundaries between them is another, and friends can still cross boundaries they shouldn't. Sometimes they do. Consider the fact of a known straight man and a woman who is attracted to him, and suddenly the implications change. The man, so far, has not shown even remotely the same attraction.

But why would we suspect her behavior would entail anything other than support for her own character that she played, and the ship she was a part of, which had been respectfully written out of the story and made to move on? It's not like she was actively dragging down a woman, a real person, another actress that essentially got in her way, and the part she wanted to play. Kissing Chris Evans.

It's not like she claimed she'd be the best choice for Sharon's actress in blonde wig before Emily was cast. Oh wait...

Was that in that little blog sourcing everything she did and claimed? I can't remember.

And this is all speculation of course. But I think it's very important speculation. And especially, is a reason to be suspicious of everything she did. But I of course can't read her mind, only look at what she did do and what there's proof of. Allegedly.

Seems like an extreme extant to go to to to get an extra kiss from an actor, right? An actor who, mind you, dated other people, not her, and seemed to ultimately choose his dog over anyone. And of course, since we're speculating.

Under the pretense that 'Peggy' gets 'Steve', 'she' got the 'man' that everyone else wanted, right? She lived that fantasy, married him, and had kids with him, and everyone else is just jealous of her. The characters are meant for each other, she can take no blame in what's done with the characters.

Except when encouraging hatred among her fans and negative press for the company and story so long as it doesn't revolve around her.

In this light, looking at the facts, her alleged behavior is extremely creepy.

When you consider the fact that Evans suddenly, and I mean suddenly wanted to quit playing the character, seemingly out of nowhere when just a year before still wanting to do so, and at the same time, he admitted to loving the idea of continuing to play Cap, and even the prospect of doing a movie with Deadpool and Wolverine. Something that would have been brilliant by the way, and I lament that it apparently won't happen every day.

Source

Yes, there is a very special relationship there, read a fucking comic~.

Let's consider the fact that Evans said this about his 'final scene of Endgame'. To sow just a little bit of discord. Of course, there's no guarantee that this scene had anything to do with that one he shared with 'Peggy'. Speculation.

Let's assume it did. Let's go beyond and say, Hayley was the entire reason Evans wanted to quit. The entire reason he wouldn't fight this, and was done playing the character. Let's assume this was the last straw for him, and that he quit just to get away from her.

Allegedly.

Let's assume for just a moment, he was no longer comfortable or happy around this woman. And she was breaking him down. Let's assume he was just tired of all the bullshit, had maybe even seen it for what it really was, was even creeped out. And decided, sure. 'I'll keep my mouth shut... as long as I don't have to deal with her'.

We can also assume he's being... strongarmed into silence somehow, either by the company or by her. Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but that man hasn't looked the slightest bit happy as of late, and it's noticeable in his interviews. Maybe there's a reason for that. But maybe this idea is pushing it a tad too far, let's take a step back for a moment and remember the simple fact that this is speculation.

Based on alleged actions and circumstantial evidence.

I could absolutely be wrong and I am willing to admit that.

If Chris Evans wanted to call me out on this, correct me about Atwell and her behavior specifically towards him in this regard, I would welcome it. Even if he managed to prove me wrong about the bullying, provide an article or interview of some kind that does in fact prove her innocence, I would be more than happy to take a look at it and retract everything I've mentioned here regarding her, and her behavior. Even delete this post, and publicly apologize to her.

I want to be wrong about this, because it is fucked up, it is creepy, it is something he should not have had to, or have to ever deal with. It is not something Emily should have ever had to deal with, let alone the fans.

Nor is it something that we should simply tolerate and accept from Hayley Atwell. From or towards anyone.

Chris Evans is a human being. Emily VanCamp is a human being. Both of them deserved the utmost respect from Atwell, along with everyone else, neither of them received this from her. Allegedly.

The messages conveyed by that rottenly horrific ending can't even begin to compare to how important this simple fact is.

Real people were hurt. Bullies were rewarded. This should not have happened. We cannot simply allow it to happen now, or in the future. We cannot simply allow more harm to be done, with the continued bullying from that Hydra Support Group I mentioned, and their continued attempts to get Emily fired and Sharon removed from the comics.

That they quite clearly don't give a shit to buy or even read.

Why is this important now, of all times, during a pandemic that is keeping us all indoors with nothing better to do?

Well for one, I'm indoors with nothing better to do than come across bullshit like this. There's also something to be publicly said about female abusers and how important it is that we start to recognize when these situations might be happening. Whether from a man or a woman. And whether to a man, or another woman. If she didn't hurt Chris, she certainly didn't hesitate to hurt Emily.

I have friends... that were living their lives off of the messages Cap taught and inspired in people. Good friends, good people. And maybe it seems silly to linger on something like that, but I can say first hand it is heartbreaking to watch those people get that same inspiration, those same moral messages ripped away, and stolen from them.

And be left struggling with trying to hold on to those messages, but try as they may, not being able to. And then come a few epiphanies, a few discoveries.

This shit. The bullying. The behavior, the fact that we as fans were given a normalized abusive relationship, and told it was somehow good, somehow just, somehow right. That that's the message we are being given in place of everything else...

I had a friend have a panic attack because of this ending, after she tried to rationalize that it was okay, that it was 'sweet', and 'cute', and understandable. Because it hit a little too fucking close to home for her, and now she just relives that, remembers it with almost any part of what her favorite thing in the world was. And that is horrifying to know...

“I helped support this. I gave them money. I dedicated years of my life to following this.”

And it goes so much more beyond regretting that decision. It goes so much more beyond being able to simply move on and somehow keep those symbols, or at least the core messages beyond them and disassociate them from the characters when you can't escape reminders of it. When you can see so incredibly clearly what it really means, what really happened, and everyone else around you just accepts that something so fundamentally wrong is something right.

Here's a question, can you sue a company that's so profoundly built an empire, so embedded itself into your day to day life that you can't escape a personal trauma being reminded of it in something you paid for and actively support for years from this company? Does that count as some form of being publicly irresponsible and projecting harmful ideologies?

Is that something someone can do, or is it just something a 'Karen' would do? Would the sheer evil it takes to become that type of person, to dawn that haircut and demand to speak to a manager be worth it in the end?

“What did it cost?”

“Everything...”

Yeah, it really fucking did.

Oh hey, by the way. Hayley Atwell is definitely a Karen. Just thought I might point that out. Why else would she throw a massive tantrum to get someone bullied out of a franchise because she's not getting her way or the spotlight on her? She's just an evolved one.

Allegedly.

I am all for people policing their own content and being respectful of creators, and understanding that fiction is different from reality. Not every concept will be stomachable or enjoyable by absolutely everyone. Horror in itself is a perfect example of that, especially psychological horror.

I can also say without a doubt that I hate knowing that the people I care about are so heavily affected by something they had initially used to make themselves a better person, that should remain fictional and symbolic but just somehow forces itself to go beyond that.

I hate knowing a corporation could be so irresponsible that this is the message they get billions of dollars for, that this is what they give to the public, that this lack of care or even noticing what they've done and who they've rewarded, and the continued behavior...

The bullying, and despite every piece of criticism screaming at them just how fucked up this is.

But no, they can't take two fucking seconds, to think 'maybe we made a bad move and shouldn't stick by this considering what it's done or is doing to fans'. 'Maybe we should be more responsible with the power and influence we happen to have'...

Except they knew.

“It might end the whole franchise.”

What kind of context am I supposed to imagine for those words. Especially in light of a franchise that had a multitude of plans to continue.

What the fuck does that mean?

And isn't that the most piss soaked cherry on top of this shit cake?

Hayley's words in the interview represent how little she cared about the character, about the franchise, about the fans, or the messages conveyed, as long as she got what she wanted.

And she did.

Publicly... adored... psychopath.

Allegedly.

Cap's core message is something so incredibly vital, I believe, to this world. Especially in these times. Especially when it comes to making progress.

“Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world –"No, you move."”

Especially in a world that will actively tell and show us that human lives aren't worth a dime a fucking dozen to the people we let control our world. Especially when we should be telling these same people.

“No, fuck you, that's wrong.”

And yeah, that fucking sucks. It fucking sucks to have family that is vulnerable to something potentially deadly, to be vulnerable to it, and have no control over that. It fucking sucks to know people you may trust will not even give a shit. And it is fucking hard to keep hope when everything around you just seems to be falling apart.

And you can't do a damn thing.

But this message teaches us just that. To not lose hope. To not lose faith. To keep fighting for what we believe in, and make things better. Isn't that the whole point of criticism? Challenging ideas, beliefs, so that we can discern right from wrong and have a better understanding of what that might be? So that we can improve? What a hell of time it would be to have this message with us. What a hell of a time for us to need this message, now more than anything... and not have it.

What a hell of a time for someone to willingly quit portraying and sending that message... Though I can't say I'd blame him, he's only human, it's a heavy burden to bear, and if Atwell really did do all of this just to kiss him... Allegedly.

Well, I'd wanna get away from her too. Provided it was willing at all. I get mixed signals from that guy. And trust him about as far as I can throw him. I am a weak bitch, so that is not very far... But... professional liar, so.

He could also be the world's biggest troll, cause I don't believe for a second he didn't know how fans would react to this. Which... biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch. But also, RESPECT.

And also, BITCH! Be serious for a goddamn second, this is fucking important!

But this message also teaches rebellion.

What a hell of a message to publicly squander in order to keep people complacent, for the sake of pretending someone gets a 'happy' horrific ending, finally getting laid. Like neither of those things were something that couldn't be found in the future while still preserving the legacy of the character.

Right?

Ironically, it was a message they had helped to represent with Sharon, and still there's the issue of her and fans being publicly bullied and disrespected, once again, a real person, people, for Atwell's sake.

If we only surround ourselves by those that tell us what we want to hear, rather than the truth, we can only stagnate our growth.

If we only care when we are finally forced to face the problems evident, can we really call ourselves virtuous?

If we do nothing knowing something is wrong, what does this say about us?

I'm just as guilty in not noticing these sorts of things as they happen until it's too late, but I'd like to hope I'm getting better and paying more attention, and that we can still do better.

What's the point of all this, and what can we do?

As I said before, I do not want to cause harm. I do not want people to go and harass anyone for alleged wrong doings or behavior of any sort. I do not want people to lose entire jobs or livelihoods over this. But it is clear something is wrong, and we certainly need to right it. I also don't believe any of the parties involved are somehow beyond redemption. Even Hayley.

If Marvel had any sense, especially now, they would retcon this, however necessary, first off. They don't even need Evans to do that, they can do something as simple as making a comic that undoes this nasty ending and saves Cap, and the other characters, from being made into an empty shell and castrated version of himself. Or at least make a solid plan to and very publicly apologize to Emily for the situation and discourage such behavior among their fandom. Hayley would do the same, not just to fans but especially to Emily, and maybe even Chris.

If you ever participated in this behavior and now understand that it was wrong, I would encourage you to go give Emily your love and support and apologize to her for this mess and what she had to deal with on behalf of fans. She deserved far better. She still deserves better.

If Hayley refused to acknowledge or even publicly address this? Or Marvel, Disney for that matter, well it would just go to show that they'd want it all swept under the rug instead of being held accountable for what happened. Something that's certainly a disrespect to Walt Disney , as he was able to make amends and admit to his mistakes publicly, and it's a stain on the legacy he left behind that the current Disney can hardly be bothered to.

And yes, believe it or not, there's a way to not let them do this without aggressive harassment.

My first suggestion is meme the shit out of it. Be an absolute troll and make a joke of this giant fucking joke of a company that can't even put two and two together for basic story elements. To an extant that will publicly embarrass them for sure, be relentless, but don't send hate.

Just show everyone the clowns they are~.

I've been told this can also be a bit mean though. And clearly, we can't simply let them forget it or forget it ourselves.

The second, ask questions. Simply ask for this to be addressed, try to get it noticed as best you can. Send them this across as many platforms as you can to as many people as you can. Or even just the smaller blogs I linked. Repost, reblog, and share this as much as you can and make it something they can't ignore without sending them direct hate and harassment. Copy and paste or just send a link to this in a concerned email to the corporation. Make sure their offices are absolutely buzzing with the news. Ask, don't demand, your favorite MCU actors to publicly speak out about this, please. Keep asking until you get some sort of response.

Without being rude.

Because it may take time, it may take effort, but it is important, and it certainly should be addressed. And never allowed to happen again.

As for Atwell and her bullies?

Well, first let me congratulate her.

She played herself. All those jokes about turning Peggy into a supervillain and that's exactly what she did. With her own wants and desires, not Peggy's.

But otherwise be kind, be courteous, and hold your grace and elegance. Treat her with the same respect you would want for yourself and do not stoop to her or their level. Do not insult her. Ask her, 'what's wrong'? Ask her why she did this, if she's okay. Ask her to stop, to speak out about it, to address the situation and to understand why she didn't do it sooner. Ask her if she's seeking help for whatever psychological issues she may have that would push her to do something like this, wish her well, and tell her you hope she finds the help she needs and learns that what she did was wrong. Let her know you're disappointed if you're a fan.

She definitely shouldn't be allowed to keep relishing in the reward and aftermath of what she did, and she definitely owes Emily, and possibly Chris, an apology for all the bullshit she encouraged and did. Her behavior, allegedly, is fucking creepy.

But she's still a human being, behaviors are correctable.

Simply address the fact that it was wrong and ask her if she understands that. Also maybe that... public molestation isn't okay? Allegedly.

Do the same for her bullies, if they are rude to you, simply tell them:

'Oh... you support Hydra... you're entitled to your opinion, but I'll have to disagree.'

And leave it at that. Just take comfort in the fact that you can recognize an abusive relationship and don't support it. You cannot force them to change their minds if they don't want to, do not antagonize them or potentially bring harm to yourself by doing so. And yes, that is admittedly a bit mean, a bit trollish~, and the reality is they probably don't support Hydra... But they also kinda have to to support this ending somehow.

The writers 'confirmed' Hydra Trash Party as canon while the directors 'confirmed' everyone in Steve's life being replaceable.

And he still becomes a creepy uncle while someone needs to suffer on his behalf for 70 years.

Fantastic~! I'm accepting neither and I give you no money until it's fixed! Because it's gross~!

If this situation is addressed by everyone involved, and any allegations and speculations I've made are in fact proven true, but let's say Atwell still publicly refuses to admit to anything she did or apologize to Emily. Even if Disney does. Well, she'll be proving exactly what type of person we suspect her to be. And only then would I consider it acceptable for the company to completely erase her from the franchise in turn and blacklist her from what they produce. Some people might consider that too nice, I think it's reasonable, you're free to disagree.

Not necessarily her character though, Peggy has actually done nothing wrong on her own, she's a fictional character best represented by good writers, and malleable according to that. And I would certainly even encourage much better character explorations and portrayals of her. But Hayley herself, who would then become pretty much a poster child for harassment and bullying, and defending psychopathic behaviors...

Allegedly.

If people try to silence you, ignore you, keep trying, keep spreading the message, keep going as much as you can, until we manage to get this addressed and the situation finally corrected.

Do not support the company, or actress that refuses to address this. Do not support people that do terrible things without holding them accountable. Do not allow them to simply get away with it, but do not lose your own humanity for their sake.

I know first hand how fucking hard it is not to lose your shit when shit like this happens. And nobody notices. But I guarantee, throwing a fit of rage will get nothing done, and they will try to use it against you.

If they manage to prove me wrong in any regards? Great! I will be fucking overjoyed! I hate the idea that evil is actively happening in the world and people do nothing about it, don't you?

And a friendly reminder.

You are not in anyway required to purchase anything from Marvel, any of the actual bullshit content and harmful ideas they refuse to take any criticism or responsibility for. You are not obligated to them just because you are a fan, and you do not owe them anything. If they want our money, they can earn it, but you can definitely get your fixes of good creative content elsewhere, and even support other artists. If this is what they provide, you do not have to support them. You can make your own. For free. And enjoy what others make for free. For any and all people part of an intricate creative community, fan fiction does not just have to be trashy romance or gay ass ships. That is a huge chunk of it, I won't even bother lying about that, I'm under no illusions otherwise.

But it can also be just simple storylines based off what canons you like, simple fan comics that maybe present a different sort of story arc you aren't seeing developed and wonder where you might go with it. It can be action, scifi, fantasy, horror. It can be any sort of fusion that you would enjoy. It can even be insanely good or horrendously bad! It can even be original fiction! And yes, you're more than allowed to publicly critique and parody the work these companies sell you, go write ahead~, and make a point of making something better. Because you can.

Or it can be shipping wars and nonsensical shit and trashy romance and smut. Again, no illusions that there's not a whole lot of that shit.

Or crack. Lots of crack fic.

But the beauty of it is that it's up to you. And you don't owe anyone anything because everything you get to make is free. But keep in mind that goes both ways in this aspect. For you and others, and I'd wager to say there are a lot of writers out there that can definitely do these characters and their messages a much better justice than the disservice and disrespect Marvel has given them and the fans. Especially as of late.

Lastly, especially in these times... do not lose hope.

Do not lose faith in the message Steve Rogers stands for, or in the hopes things may get better. For all of us. And for the character? That he may just yet be saved from quite plainly, all the bullshit. That any of your favorite characters might be given better treatment down the line. And if not?

Save 'em yourself. Make it better yourself. And make it known, no matter what happens, no matter what they do, these messages can't be squandered or destroyed. Hold them dear, and don't accept anything less than them being upheld, no matter how it's represented.

Particularly when you're paying for it. Don't harass small time writers that write self indulgent bullshit for free. Just police your content accordingly, please.

But the message?

That's what's important.

In conclusion?

'Logan' was the better movie. Hayley turned Peggy into 'Monika' of Doki Doki Literature Club. And Chris Evans chose his dog.

“I don't like bullies... I don't care where they're from.”

;)

#notmysteve #MCU Steggy is abusive #saving steve rogers #steverogersdeservedbetter #savingbuckybarnes #buckybarnesdeservedbetter #sharoncarterdeservedbetter #sharonisthebettercarter #creepyunclesteve #sharoncarterdefensesquad #hayleyatwell #whydidmarvellethergetawaywiththis #leaveemilyvancampalone #emilyvancamp #chrisevans #endgameisdisgusting #stopglorifyingunhealthyrelationships #stopnormalizingabuse #beresponsiblemarvel #beresponsibledisney #don'trewardbullying #obsessionisnotlove #psa #gettinglaidisnotworthmorethanhumanlives #howcananyonebethatstupid #moral compass #peggycarterdeservedbetter #nomoretoxicpeggycarter #steggy #staron

[lightcomingthroughthedarkness]

Do u think it was a mistake for Bob to not address the allegations right after the ex's statement came out? No point in addressing it now after the shitty response E got after denying the cheating. Not saying that he owed explanation to random assholes on the internet, but wonder if harassment wouldn't have been as severe if he had. What do u think? This just breaks my heart and affirms my decision not to join Twitter.

You are right, he doesn't owe anyone an explanation. People on social media are not entitled to information about their personal lives. I know some people say A made it public, therefor he should have responded publicly. I disagree. He can still choose to deal with this privately. Personally I don't know how else to tell people that actors aren't obligated to share their live with fans. They aren't elected officials, they weren't voted into office by us to speak for us, they did not make promises to fans. They're just actors. Which is why there's so much wrong with the celebrity culture we live in. We project onto famous people and WILL them into being what we want them to be or we idealize them in our head and then are utterly shocked when they turn out to be very flawed and very human. Just like you and me. They just happened to be on TV. We make it their responsibility to live up to the person we think they are and when they fall from that picture in our head, we blame the actor. Instead of looking within ourselves and asking ourselves why we let strangers on TV control so much of our emotional well being.

Because I have a lot of asks about this that I have left unanswered, I will answer this one only. I will not be answering any asks about A. I will just delete them. I'll answer this ask in two parts (Bob and Fandom) and then hopefully maybe the timeline can just move on.

Bob.

I don't know if he should have addressed the allegations or not. I'm left wondering.. would it have mattered if he did? If we break it down, it all comes down to the same thing to me. I will not say that A lied in her statement. Lets say Bob disagreed with her on some of the allegations. Maybe he had his own interpretation of events. What would have happened if he responded to it? It would have created a "she said/he said" situation. How would that have helped any of them? It still would have made people harass him and call him a liar and suppressing a woman's voice. And it would have cause a very private matter to be blasted on social media where it absolutely does not need to be.

Lets say Bob had acknowledged any wrongdoings and apologized if indeed there had been any cause for an apology. Would he not have been harassed? If anything, people would have felt their harassment would have been justified since he'd be "guilty". I'm not saying acknowledging wrongdoings is a bad thing but it also comes back to the same point I made earlier. A private matter would have been blasted on social media for strangers to judge. And it would not have stopped the harassment either.

So how should Bob had handled the situation at all? He chose not to handle it in public. He chose to remove himself from fandom's expectations of him and deal with this privately. How, we don't know. It's not our information to know. Like I said, he is a famous actor, but we are not entitled to his person.

Fandom.

At the end of the day, I don't think whether or not Bob addressing the allegation is the problem here. I think it's about fans. Fandom was presented with information that shook us all deeply. It causes a whiplash of emotions for all of us because we had built this actor up in our minds, we had a clear picture of who we thought he was or wasn't, we made this stranger an idealized version of a man we wanted him to be. Then someone poked a hole in that and it caused a crisis.

I think fandom wants Bob to address the allegations so fandom can process what is or isn't true so we can react and feel accordingly. A lot of fans don't know how to feel about this and we feel like there's a puzzle piece we aren't getting, so fans don't know how to identify feelings. Fans don't know in which box to place Bob. Fans don't know which parts are true, which aren't, which can be explained etc and most of all, fans don't know what to do to restore the mental picture of someone they looked up to and it is causing a lot of stress and emotional pressure. Fandom wants Bob to give us the puzzle piece we think will help get our emotions in line and restore, rebuild or change the picture in our minds. Bob not dealing with this in public leaves people feeling like this is unfinished. And we desperately can't stay here so we need answers, right?

The tricky thing here is, we are not entitled to those answers. They are real people, living real lives. Fandom just has to find a way to deal with this and to support them or not support them without any answers other than the ones we've gotten. It's our responsibility to look within. It is not famous people's responsibility to be a role model, they never asked for that. It's not their responsibility to be our safe place, they are human too. It's not their responsibility to fix what we need fixing. They are not beholden to us just because we crossed emotional and mental boundries to them.

I personally am doing well. I still like Bob and Eliza. I've seen the statments from A, from Eliza, from Eliza's mother and everything that's been happening online for weeks and I'm comfortable supporting Bob and Eliza's professional work while simultaneously acknowledging the fact that I do not know these people privately. And therefor, whenever I want to, I can choose to step aside and know, this is not my life. I will not project onto Bob and Eliza but rather support their professional work from the (sort of) comfort of my lumpy couch. They are not beholden to me because I am fan. That's on me. It's my responsibility to be the kind of fan/supporter that fits me. And I have no intention of condemning anyone or taking part in "cancel culture" of people I don't even know and about lives I have not been invited into. And I have absolutely no intention whatsoever to allow 19 year olds on stan twitter to tell me who I am, what I should feel or what is wrong or right. I can do that for myself, thank you very much.

Life does not happen in and around stan twitter. Acknowledge your insignificance and act accordingly. And hopefully the timeline will move on.

#beliza #fandom wank #ask answered

[firebrands]

the mind-body problem | steve/tony

Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, M (for later parts), 4.5k | Stony Bingo Prompt: Off the Record | on ao3

Steve stares at the card in his hands. It's just a little lighter than cream, almost white; dark letters embossed, sans-serif. PEPPER POTTS.

He'd met Ms. Potts a month or so ago, in a conference that was supposed to be attended by the famous Tony Stark. Steve's been in the energy beat long enough not to expect attendance, but he does know to take notice when she appears. Potts is the only direct line to Stark, and he needs to speak to him, at least if the mountain of research he’s done is true. Steve’s done his fair share of investigative reporting—but it’s never been related to what this could be, and this could be… Steve takes a deep breath, steadying himself and stopping his train of thought.

“This should probably be lodged under the nation beat, Pete,” he’d said, earlier that day when the editorial team had met to discuss their longer-form stories.

“They’re full up with the Stern inquiry,” Pete, Steve’s editor, said. He didn’t even look up from his notebook as he spoke. “We’re short on hands for this. And you’ve covered Stark long enough.”

“I’ve barely covered Stark, I haven’t even met him,” Steve said.

“Do you not want the story?” Pete’s tone was sharp. Annoyed.

“Of course I want the story!” Steve huffed. “But I don’t want any of those guys taking it from me midway just because the senate hearing ends early. So.”

“Yeah, okay. Fine.” Pete waved Steve off. “Good luck.”

Steve had never intended to end up in the energy beat—he barely knew enough about science on the get- go. But as it was in newsrooms, when one team was short staffed, the most junior staff had to fill in. That was almost three years ago, when Steve had started in the New York Bulletin, writing about culture, art. Next thing he knew he was given a press pass for a two-day green energy summit, then that was it. Steve Rogers, senior reporter for the Energy and Environment section of the New York Bulletin.

Steve taps the card on the table, bites his lip, then pulls out his phone to type out a message.

Steve stares down at his phone.

Then stares some more.

He wasn’t expecting a reply, at least not any time soon; he was ready to go to their office and set up an appointment with her assistant’s assistant’s assistant, but instead, he’s here. In direct communication with the closest line to Tony Stark.

Steve doesn’t even bother checking his schedule before accepting the appointment. He lets out a shaky breath. This seems too good to be true. Just like that—he checks the timestamps of their messages—in the span of 2 minutes, he’s secured an interview with one of the richest and most powerful men in the country.

He needs to find something to wear.

***

Steve sucks on his bottom lip as the elevator begins its ascent. Steve checks his bag for his recorder, notebook, and pen. He checked it twice before leaving the office, once again in the cab, and lastly once more as he pulled out his wallet to hand over his ID for a security pass.

He’s not usually nervous; he’s met his fair share of C-suite executives before. But he’s heard about Stark, about how he behaves during interviews in the few time he grants them. Flippant, wilfully obtuse, and too wildly charismatic for you to do anything about it at the moment. Disarming, his friend from other papers had said simply. Another suggested that Steve check his questions before agreeing to end the interview, because Stark had the talent to take you for a ride you never asked to go on, and make you happy to be on it all the while.

The elevator doors slide open to an office bathed in the afternoon light. Pepper Potts is standing at the entrance, and reaches out to shake Steve’s hand.

“It’s nice to see you again, Mr. Rogers,” she says, smiling down at him.

“You too,” Steve says, shifting his bag on his shoulder. “Thanks for setting this up. We’re really happy to be able to interview Mr. Stark.”

Ms. Potts nods, and gestures towards large double doors at the end of the carpeted hallway. “Let’s go,” she says, and Steve follows, fighting the urge to rifle through his bag again, just once more.

Ms. Potts knocks on the door and peeks her head in. “It’s Steve Rogers from the New York Bulletin.”

The beat, then the door swings wide open to reveal Tony Stark. “Hey Steve, nice to meet you.” He extends his hand, and Steve shakes it.

Here’s the thing about Steve, he realizes glumly: he’s always been very good at recognizing things that are aesthetically pleasing. It’s why he initially chose to focus on art and culture. It’s why he can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed by how absolutely gorgeous Tony Stark actually is. Sure, he’s seen photos, and seen Stark from a distance in the few times he’d deigned to make an appearance at events. But seeing him here now, dressed in a crisp white dress shirt—top three buttons undone and sleeves rolled up—Steve can’t help but feel a little helpless when faced with such immediate beauty.

Stark directs him to a sitting area. “Coffee? Tea?” he asks, taking a seat directly across Steve.

“Tea is fine,” Steve says, and Stark nods at Pepper, who nods back. Steve sets down his bag and pulls out the tools of the trade: his recorder, his notebook, his pen.

“Your office looks lovely,” Steve says, hazarding small talk.

“Thank you. It was all Pepper,” Stark says, leaning back on the couch, relaxing.

Without thinking, Steve inches forward—then he catches himself and tries to settle into his chair nonchalantly.

“Is that a Newman?” Steve asks, nodding at the black and white painting behind Stark.

“Hm?” Stark furrows his brow, then follows Steve’s line of sight. “Ah, is it?” He smiles a little to himself, then looks up when the door opens, and a man walks in with two steaming cups.

They remain silent as their drinks are placed in front of them. Tony takes a sip of what Steve assumes to be an espresso.

Steve clears his throat. “So, Mr. Stark. I’ll begin recording now, if you don’t mind?”

“I don’t,” Stark says, placing his cup carefully back on its saucer. It doesn’t make a sound.

Steve doesn’t want to face why he’s cataloging all of this. Instead, he nods, turns on his recorder, and asks Tony: “Let’s start with when you first launched the energy arm of SI. Can you tell me about the thought process and rationale for it?”

Stark nods, leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees.

Steve catches a whiff of Stark’s perfume. He swallows, and focuses on his pen poised on top of his notebook, ready to write.

“What are the real questions you want to ask, Steve?” Stark tilts his head a little, clearly assessing Steve.

Steve frowns. “These are the questions I’d like to ask, Mr. Stark.”

Stark sighs. “It was in ‘99 when we first began investing in R&D for more sustainable industries.”

As the interview goes on, Steve feels less and less inclined to be on his guard; Stark responds to his questions directly and completely. It’s likely because he’d been prepared by his team, but it’s nice to know that Stark isn’t the asshole everyone paints him to be. But then again, it could also just be something Steve’s gotten used to at this point: Stark doesn’t see him as a threat. No one ever does. That’s why Steve’s so good at getting scoops over other reporters, overzealous and loud and brash, always angling for an interesting story. No one ever expects Steve, quiet and small, to go straight for the jugular.

When Steve gets to his last question, he pauses to take a breath.

There have been allegations that SI’s energy business is just a front. I’d like to know what you think of those allegations.

Steve asks the question.

If he hadn’t been watching Stark so closely, he would’ve missed the barely perceptible tightening of Stark’s jaw, or the way he pushes his glasses up his nose, fully covering his eyes, now.

“Allegations are just that,” Stark says, and Steve finally sees the flippancy everyone had warned him about. “If there’s any basis to them, then whoever’s saying this should be talking to my lawyers.”

Steve nods, scratching Stark’s words onto his pad. “Anything else?” Steve asks, because Stark’s been much more verbose than that in the past half-hour they’d been speaking.

“So this is what the song and dance has been about,” Stark says, smirking.

Steve feels his hackles rise, and he shakes his head. “I am doing a story on SI’s energy business. It’ll be celebrating a decade at the start of next year,” he says, keeping his voice level. “But in the course of my research, I came across these sentiments. I think it’s only fair that I ask your opinion on them,”

The smirk on Stark’s face stays in place. “Fair,” he says, arching his eyebrow. “Sure,” he says, his tone a touch condescending.

Worry pools in Steve’s belly; he can’t afford to be on Stark’s bad side, not if he wants to still cover SI events. “Have you heard these allegations before?”

“Can’t say that I have,” Stark responds, shrugging. “But I figure Hammer’s got something to say about it.”

The thought had crossed Steve’s mind, but it seemed baseless to bring up. He thinks back on the massive Excel sheet he had worked on, cross-referencing numbers and seeing how they didn’t add up. Maybe Stark doesn’t know—and that hypothesis, well. It tracks.

“He doesn’t,” Steve says. “Not about your energy arm, at least,” he adds, smiling at Stark and hoping that he gets the joke.

Stark snorts, and that seems to put him in better spirits. “Yeah, and now you’re going to ask what I’m working on, huh?”

Steve bites back a grin. “Well, Mr. Stark, I wasn’t. But now that you bring it up…”

Stark chuckles, then motions to Steve’s recorder.

“Off the record, then,” Steve agrees, and someone in Stark’s PR department definitely dropped the ball on this, because off the record isn’t real. It’s not as if people can just pretend they didn’t hear something, and sure, Steve isn’t going to include this in the story, but he’ll know, and sometimes, that’s all it takes.

“We’re in the testing phases for a new missile,” Stark says, and then there seems to be a real spark in Stark’s eyes, as if finally he’s awake.

“What’s new about it?” Steve asks, tucking his pen into the binding of his notebook. He’s half-afraid to look up at Stark again, luminous with excitement and impossibly more gorgeous. Now that the interview is truly done, it seems like his traitorous brain lets go over its tight grip of professionalism.

“Oh, Steve, it’s magnificent. I developed this new repulsor technology that—” Stark catches himself. “You’re sure you work for the Bulletin, right?” he asks, scrutinizing Steve closely.

Steve holds up his press ID. “No corporate espionage here,” he says.

Stark laughs, eyes crinkling up, and Steve wants to reach out and touch him, wants to make him laugh again like that. Instead, he grips his notebook just a little bit tighter.

***

Two weeks later, Steve is at a Stark Industries event. It’s about something called “Intelli-Crops” which Steve hates the name of, but he can’t help but feel impressed by the science behind it.

Steve is even more impressed (so much so that he nearly drops his drink) when Tony Stark walks out on stage to explain the product himself. Stark is singular in the way he immediately draws all the attention in the room; he walks across the stage and gestures as the presentation flows behind him. Only after a few seconds of watching Stark does Steve realize with a jolt that he isn’t recording Stark’s speech. He pulls out his notebook and takes notes, eyes fixed on Stark’s muscular form all the while.

 Steve is still standing by the bar, going through his notes and double checking the press release included in the media packet when he feels a presence beside him.

“Steve Rogers. Fancy seeing you here.”

Steve’s head snaps up at the voice he’d gotten very familiar with as he’d spent hours transcribing their conversation. Then he’d listened again for good measure, just to make sure he didn’t miss anything. And if he listened to Stark’s voice sometimes in the privacy of his apartment then that’s nobody’s business but his own.

“Mr. Stark,” Steve says, turning to him. “I can’t help but say the same to you.”

“Well it is a Stark Industries event,” Stark answers, eyebrow cocked.

“That didn’t seem to matter much in all the other events I’d attended,” Steve says, snorting a little.

“You wound me,” Stark says.

“I’m sure you can afford the treatment,” Steve says, downing the last of his whiskey. It’s his second of the night, which means he’s had enough. He’s already pretty loose at it is, palling around with Stark like he isn’t Tony Stark, Billionaire Genius Extraordinaire. He sets down his glass and nods at Stark. “It was nice seeing you, Mr. Stark,” he says, extending his hand.

Stark pouts. “What, no follow up questions for me?”

Steve very nearly says, how about I follow you up to your room instead but he still has a grasp on reality. Instead, he shakes his head. “Thank you for the excellent presentation, booze, and dinner, Mr. Stark.”

“Call me Tony, Steve,” Stark huffs. “The program’s done, doesn’t that mean you’re off the clock?”

Steve levels Stark with a look. “How do you think reporters work?”

“Dunno, really,” Stark says, and Steve has a feeling that this isn’t Stark’s first drink of the night. Somehow, that makes him feel a bit braver. He shifts his gaze and looks around the room, worried that Stark will notice that he’s staring.

“But I’d like to learn, if you’ll tell me.”

Steve’s gaze snaps back to Stark, cheeks heating up at the comment and the way Stark’s tone is just a little shy of innuendo.

“I—” Steve stammers. He doesn’t know what to do with that, with flirting, has never known what to do, really, and Bucky is too far away for him to ask.

Steve’s immediate reaction when in this position is run. “Well, Mr. Stark,” he says, trying again to keep his voice even.

“It’s Tony,” Stark frowns. “Seriously, it kills me every time you call me that.”

Steve scrunches up his face. “Okay, Tony. It was nice chatting with you, but I need to send this story in so it makes tomorrow’s paper.”

Stark sighs, then immediately brightens like he has an idea. He turns to Steve with a smile. “How about,” he pauses, resting his hand on Steve’s arm, just above his elbow. “How about you type up your story in my office, and we keep drinking there?”

There are many thoughts that spring to Steve’s mind. First, is that this is a great way to build a relationship with a source. Second, Stark’s hand is warm against the thick fabric of Steve’s shirt. Third, and this is (un)fortunately what spills out of his mouth: “Why me? There are so many other people you could drink with here.”

Stark snorts, as if Steve has said something stupid, which is annoying. “Other people are boring. You’re interesting,” Stark says, like that explains everything. “Let’s go.”

So they go.

Stark’s office floor is dark when they arrive, but lights turn on as they walk towards his office. Steve looks around, wondering who’s flipping the switches, then sees Stark’s fingers dancing along his keyboard, which is answer enough.

Stark motions to the couch, and a strange sense of deja vu floats into Steve’s mind as he settles in, pulling out his laptop.

Stark busies himself by making drinks: “Neat or on the rocks?”

“Neat,” Steve answers, not looking up from his laptop as he types. Nervous energy is beginning to build in his belly, and he won’t admit to himself why he’s so intent on immediately finishing this story. Thankfully he’d gotten to start it midway through the program.

“A man after my own heart,” Stark says before plopping down jovially beside Steve on the couch, handing Steve a drink before taking a sip of his own.

“That’s your laptop?” Stark asks, frowning down at Steve’s beat up ThinkPad.

“Office-issued,” Steve answers. “And I like the red button.”

“He likes the red button,” Stark murmurs to himself, disbelief clear in his tone.

They’re silent for a while, the only sounds of the room are Steve’s fingers on the keyboard. Beside him, Stark scrolls through his phone.

“So walk me through your process,” Stark says, setting his phone down and turning to look at Steve.

Steve takes a drink to steady himself. “Well,” he says, still not looking up as he types. “Right now I’m just plugging in some quotes from your presentation.”

Stark hums in response. “You memorized what I said?”

“What? No,” Steve holds up his notebook. “I wrote it down.”

Stark puts down his drink and peers closely at the page. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, but you have awful handwriting.”

A laugh bursts out of Steve, unbidden, and Tony smiles in response. “Seriously though, shorthand?”

Steve can’t help but feel a little buzz go through him, but of course Stark knows what shorthand is, he’s a genius.

“Yeah, I taught myself in college,” Steve answers.

“That’s really cool,” Stark says. “Can I see more?”

Steve shrugs and hands his notebook over. “I’m almost done,” he says.

“No rush,” Stark replies, but he’s not looking at Steve anymore. He flips through Steve’s notebook, and Steve focuses on finishing his story instead of getting jealous over pieces of paper.

Another drink later and Steve triumphantly shuts his laptop. “Sent!” he crows, and downs the rest of his whiskey.

Stark grins at him. “Congratulations!” He says. “I hope you wrote something nice about me.”

“Of course I did. You let me use your WiFi,” Steve says, matching Stark’s grin with his own.

“If only your colleagues were so easily swayed,” Stark says, sighing dramatically.

Steve huffs out a laugh, putting away his laptop. “Well, it’s hard to write badly about you when it comes to what you’re doing for sustainability,” he admits.

“Is that so?”

Steve shrugs. “I follow the story. So far what you’ve been telling good ones.” The whiskey is getting to his head, but he still has control over himself not to say more, not to pry and allude to what he’d been uncovering.

Besides, just like Stark said earlier: he’s off the clock, now. Or at least, that’s what he tells himself, trying to focus instead on the heat radiating off Stark, flushed pink from the alcohol. He’s strikingly gorgeous, no matter the setting, but to know that only Steve is seeing him like this, in this moment—it makes Steve feel reckless. It’s a good feeling.

Stark nods, trying to look sage. It makes Steve laugh, again. It’s ridiculous, really.

“So, Steve Rogers,” Stark says.

A beat passes.

“So, Tony Stark,” Steve prompts, teasing.

Stark’s gaze snaps to his. “Cheeky,” he accuses.

“Drunk,” Steve says just as quickly.

Stark laughs. “God, who are you? Walking in here and sassing me like this,” Stark says, more to himself.

Steve’s thankful that the desk light is the only thing illuminating the room; he hopes it hides the heat in his cheeks.

“Well, I have been writing about energy and the environment for the Bulletin for the past three years,” he ventures.

Stark turns to him, a pleasant quirk to his lips. He nods. “And before that?”

Steve snorts. “I don’t know, why does it matter?”

“I just want to get to know you, is all,” Stark says airily, before finishing the rest of his drink.

Stark may be relaxed about this, but Steve can’t help but feel that tension has settled in the air. He knows better to sit any closer to Stark—he’s heard those stories, too. The man’s just as much a philanthropist as he is a philanderer, and Steve would never be stupid enough to get in bed with someone like him. Not that Steve has indicted Stark on his ways, but that—he’s one of the most important men in America. Steve can’t afford to get wrapped up in all that and manage to uphold journalistic integrity.

Still, it’s not like he has to get wrapped up in that, he reasons with himself. It could be a one-off, and neither of them would ever speak about it again, and he could go on to cover events that Stark would never show up for anyway.

Of course, that’s all to say that Stark is attracted to him, too. Which is impossible, of course, but then again—why else would he have invited Steve up to his office, made him drinks? Why else is his knee pressed against Steve’s thigh, legs spread open tantalizingly?

Steve swallows.

“Maybe another time,” he says, motioning to get up. Stark grabs his wrist, sending a jolt through Steve. His hand is warm, and his fingers fit perfectly around Steve’s wrist.

“Look, Steve,” Stark says, looking away for a moment and then up to meet Steve’s gaze. “Tell me if i’m reading this wrong, but…”

Stark shifts a little closer and Steve can smell his cologne, rich and heady mixed with the smell of whiskey. His hand slides up Steve’s arm and gently cups Steve’s jaw.

Steve reminds himself to breathe.

Stark’s thumb strokes his cheek.

The world is magnificently silent. Steve isn’t imagining it when he hears the soft rustle of Stark’s clothes as he moves even closer, and Steve’s eyes flutter shut when their lips finally meet.

Stark’s lips are soft, and the kiss is gentle, almost tentative. It ends too quickly, and Steve chases after Stark as he pulls away, crashing their lips together, parting his mouth open, swiping his tongue along Stark’s. It’s electric, the slide of Stark’s lips against his, the hard press of Stark’s body as Stark leans over him, pushes him down onto the couch.

But Steve has another idea in mind, shifting and swinging a leg over Stark’s lap to straddle him.

“Fucking hell, Steve,” Stark moans when he pulls away.

Steve blushes, and kisses him again before he can say anything else that could be embarrassing.

Stark runs his hand through Steve’s hair, then tugs his head back sharply so he can kiss down Steve’s throat.

“Ah, Mr. St—”

Stark tuts, and bites on Steve’s neck just for good measure. “What did I say you should call me?” He licks the swath of skin, soothing it, and making Steve’s hips buck in pleasure.

“Tony,” Steve breathes out, his vision blurring as Tony’s other hand slides around his waist and under his shirt. “Tony, Tony, Tony.”

Tony’s hand slides through Steve’s hair again, resting just above the base of his neck, “I like the way you say my name,” he murmurs, just before pulling Steve into another searing kiss. His other hand reaches up to grasp at the knot of Steve’s tie, then—Steve pulls away hastily.

“Oh my god,” he breathes out. “Tony—Mr. Stark. I—” Steve clambers off Tony’s lap, uncoordinated and clumsy. “I can’t, we shouldn’t,” he continues to blabber, bending down to pick up his bag. “I’m sorry I shouldn’t have,” he says, looking everywhere but Tony, frantically trying to get his bearings. He’s impulsive at best, and Tony’s lips were so soft, and he looked so beautiful under the dim glow of the lamplight, and Steve was more than two drinks in. He nearly stumbles over himself in his hurry to get to the door. Only then does he register through the din of alarm bells ringing in his head that Tony was speaking to him.

“Steve, Steve, wait,” Tony says, and Steve walks briskly down the unlit hallway towards the elevator.

Unfortunately, Tony catches up to him before the doors slide open.

“Sorry for coming on to you like that, I thought,” Tony says, scratching the back of his neck.

Steve curses himself for noticing how rumpled he looks, how his tie is askew. Steve very badly wants to kiss him again, wants to run his hands through Tony’s hair, see him messed up. Wants to hear Tony panting under him, wants to taste his skin, all of it—but he can’t.

He’s a reporter. If he does this, if word gets out—and even if word didn’t get out, how could he maintain any sort of professionalism?

“It’s not your fault,” Steve stammers, pressing the button for the elevator again. “I’m sorry for… all of it. I shouldn’t have come. I hope we can just put this past us and maintain our professional relationship.”

“Our professional relationship,” Tony parrots back.

The door to the elevator slides open.

“Good night, Mr. Stark,” Steve says, stepping in.

Tony is standing frozen in front of him, looking at Steve like a puzzle he can’t make out. It gives Steve some relief.

“Good night, Mr. Rogers,” he says, and with those two words, the relief is wiped from Steve. Still, it’s a small price to pay if it means he can just continue to do his work.

“It’s fine,” Steve says into the empty elevator cabin. “I’m fine.”

#stevetony #stony #stony fic #steve rogers x tony stark #steve x tony #steve rogers #tony stark #things i love #!!!!! please let me know what you think! #i am also once again putting myself through the mortifying ordeal of writing as i post #so i'd love to hear your thoughts on how this could go lmao #things i write

[tinyshe]

Pure, Unalloyed Evil Masked as a Pandemic Analysis by Mike Whitney

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Mike Yeadon is a soft-spoken microbiologist and a former vice-president of allergy and respiratory research at Pfizer. He spent 32 years working for large pharmaceutical companies and is a leading expert on viral respiratory infections.

He is also a man on a mission, and his mission is to inform as many people as possible about the elite powerbrokers that are using the pandemic as a smokescreen to conceal their real objectives. Here’s Yeadon in a recent interview:1

“If you wanted to depopulate a significant portion of the world, and to do it in a way that wouldn’t require destruction of the environment with nuclear weapons, or poisoning everyone with anthrax or something, and you wanted plausible deniability, whilst you had a multi-year infectious disease crisis; I don’t think you could come up with a better plan of work than what seems to be in front of me.

I can’t say that’s what they’re going to do, but I cannot think of a benign explanation for why they are doing it.”

“Depopulation?” Who said anything about depopulation? Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to go from a mass vaccination campaign to allegations of a conspiracy to “depopulate a significant portion of the world?” Indeed, it is, but Yeadon has done extensive research on the matter and provides compelling evidence that such a diabolical objective may, in fact, be the goal.

Humans Are Capable of Unimaginable Viciousness and Cruelty

Moreover, it is not for lack of proof that people are not persuaded that Yeadon is right, but something more fundamental; the inability to grasp that men are capable of almost-unimaginable viciousness and cruelty. Here’s Yeadon again:2

“It’s become absolutely clear to me, even when I talk to intelligent people, friends, acquaintances … and they can tell I’m telling them something important, but they get to the point [where I say] ‘your government is lying to you in a way that could lead to your death and that of your children,’ and they can’t begin to engage with it.

And I think maybe 10% of them understand what I said, and 90% of those blank their understanding of it because it is too difficult. And my concern is, we are going to lose this, because people will not deal with the possibility that anyone is so evil …

But I remind you of what happened in Russia in the 20th century, what happened in 1933 to 1945, what happened in, you know, Southeast Asia in some of the most awful times in the post-war era. And, what happened in China with Mao and so on … We’ve only got to look back two or three generations. All around us there are people who are as bad as the people doing this.

They’re all around us. So, I say to folks, the only thing that really marks this one out, is its scale. But actually, this is probably less bloody, it’s less personal, isn’t it? The people who are steering this … it’s going to be much easier for them. They don’t have to shoot anyone in the face.

They don’t have to beat someone to death with a baseball bat, or freeze them, starve them, make them work until they die. All of those things did happen two or three generations back … That’s how close we are. And all I’m saying is, some shifts like that are happening again, but now they are using molecular biology.”

People ‘Cannot Imagine Anything so Demonic’

He’s right, isn’t he? Whereas, a great many people know that the government, the media and the public health officials have been lying to them about everything from the efficacy of masks, social distancing and lockdowns, to the life-threatening dangers of experimental vaccines, they still refuse to believe that the people orchestrating this operation might be pushing them inexorably toward infertility or an early death.

They cannot imagine anything so demonic, so they stick their heads in the sand and pretend not to see what is going on right beneath their noses. It’s called “denial” and it is only strengthening the position of the puppet masters that are operating behind the scenes. Here’s more from Yeadon:3

“… In the last year I have realized that my government and its advisers are lying in the faces of the British people about everything to do with this coronavirus. Absolutely everything. It’s a fallacy this idea of asymptomatic transmission and that you don’t have symptoms, but you are a source of a virus.

That lockdowns work, that masks have a protective value obviously for you or someone else, and that variants are scary things and we even need to close international borders in case some of these nasty foreign variants get in.”

Many readers may have noticed that this interview appeared on a small Christian website called Lifesite News. Why is that? Shouldn’t the informed observations of a former Pfizer vice president appear on the front pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post? Wouldn’t you expect the big cable news channels to run a hot-button interview like this as their headline story?

Of course not. No one expects that, because everyone knows that the media honchos reflexively quash any story that doesn’t support the “official narrative,” that is, that COVID is the most contagious and lethal virus of all time, which requires a new authoritarian political structure and the wholesale evisceration of civil liberties.

No One Is Allowed to Refute the Official Propaganda

Isn’t that the underlying storyline of the last year? COVID skeptics and naysayers, like Yeadon, are not allowed to refute the official propaganda or debate the issue on a public forum. They’re effectively banned from the MSM and consigned to the outer reaches of the Internet where only a scattered few will read what they have to say. Here’s more:4

“Everything I have told you, every single one of those things is demonstrably false. But our entire national policy is based on these all being broadly right, but they are all wrong. But what I would like to do is talk about immune escape because I think that’s probably going to be the end game for this whole event, which I think is probably a conspiracy.

Last year I thought it was what I called ‘convergent opportunism.’ That is, a bunch of different stakeholder groups have managed to pounce on a world in chaos to push us in a particular direction. So, it looked like it was kind of linked, but I was prepared to say it was just convergence.

I [now] think that’s naïve. There is no question in my mind that very significant powerbrokers around the world have either planned to take advantage of the next pandemic or created the pandemic. One of those two things is true because the reason it must be true is that dozens and dozens of governments are all saying the same lies and doing the same inefficacious things that demonstrably cost lives.”

Let’s pause for a minute, and ask ourselves why a modest, self-effacing microbiologist who operated in the shadows for his entire professional career has thrust himself into the limelight when he knows, for certain, he will either be ridiculed, smeared, discredited, dragged through the mud or killed.

In fact, he openly admits that he fears for his safety and assumes that he could be “removed” (“assassinated”) by his enemies. So, why is he doing this? Why is he risking life and limb to get the word out about vaccines?

A Moral Obligation to Warn People

It’s because he feels a moral obligation to warn people about the danger they face. Yeadon is not an attention-seeking narcissist. In fact, he’d rather vanish from public life altogether.

But he’s not going to do that because he’s selflessly committed to doing his duty by sounding the alarm about a malign strategy that may well lead to the suffering and death of literally tens of millions of people. That’s why he’s doing it, because he’s an honorable man with a strong sense of decency. Remember decency? Here’s more:5

“You can see that I am desperately trying not to say that it is a conspiracy, because I have no direct evidence that it is a conspiracy. Personally, all my instincts are shouting that it’s a conspiracy as a human being, but as a scientist, I can’t point to the smoking gun that says they made this up on purpose.”

Many of us who have followed events closely for the last year and have searched the internet for alternate points of view are equally convinced that it is a conspiracy, just as Russiagate was a conspiracy. And while we might not have conclusive, rock-solid proof of criminal activity, there is voluminous circumstantial evidence to support the claim.

By definition, a “conspiracy” is “an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons.”6 What is taking place presently across the western world meets that basic definition.

Just as the contents of this article meet the basic definition of a “conspiracy theory,” which is “an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small powerful group. Such explanations reject the accepted narrative surrounding those events; indeed, the official version may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy.”7

We make no attempt to deny that this is a conspiracy theory, any more than we deny that senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA, DOJ and U.S. State Department were involved in a covert operation aimed at convincing the American people that Donald Trump was a Russian agent.

That was a conspiracy theory that was later proven to be a fact. We expect that the facts about the COVID operation will eventually emerge, acquitting us on that account as well. Here’s more from Yeadon:8

“I think the end game is going to be, ‘everyone receives a vaccine’ … Everyone on the planet is going to find themselves persuaded, cajoled, not quite mandated, hemmed-in to take a jab.

When they do that every single individual on the planet will have a name, or unique digital ID and a health status flag which will be ‘vaccinated,’ or not … and whoever possesses that, sort of single database, operable centrally, applicable everywhere to control, to provide as it were, a privilege, you can either cross this particular threshold or conduct this particular transaction or not depending on [what] the controllers of that one human population database decide.

And I think that’s what this is all about because once you’ve got that, we become playthings and the world can be as the controllers of that database want it.”

Mass Vaccination a Pathway to Absolute Social Control

So mass vaccination is actually the pathway to absolute social control by technocratic elites accountable to no one? Are we there yet? Pretty close, I’d say. Here’s more:9

“And they are talking the same sort of future script which is, ‘We don’t want you to move around because of these pesky ‘variants’ — (but) ‘don’t worry, there will be ‘top-up’ vaccines that will cope with the potential escapees.’ They’re all saying this when it is obviously nonsense.”

Is he right? Is the variant hobgoblin now being invoked to prolong the restrictions, intensify the paranoia and pave the way for endless rounds of mass vaccination? Judge for yourself, but here’s a sampling of articles that appeared in recent news that will help you decide:

1. Reuters — South African Variant Can ‘Break Through’ Pfizer Vaccine, Israeli study says10

“The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can ‘break through’ Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is low and the research has not been peer reviewed …

We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccine’s protection,” said Tel Aviv University’s Adi Stern. (So, according to the article — the vaccine doesn’t work.)

2. The New York Times — Rise of Variants in Europe Shows How Dangerous the Virus Can Be11

“Europe, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic last spring, has once again swelled with new cases, which are inundating some local hospitals and driving a worrisome global surge of Covid-19.

But this time, the threat is different: The rise in new cases is being propelled by a coronavirus variant first seen in Britain and known as B.1.1.7. The variant is not only more contagious than last year’s virus, but also deadlier.

The variant is now spreading in at least 114 countries. Nowhere, though, are its devastating effects as visible as in Europe, where thousands are dying each day and countries’ already-battered economies are once again being hit by new restrictions on daily life …

Vaccines will eventually defeat the variants, scientists say. [So, they don’t work now??] And stringent restrictions can drive down cases of B.1.1.7. [So, don’t leave your home.] …

‘We’ve seen in so many countries how quickly it can become dominant,’ said Lone Simonsen, a professor and director of the PandemiX Center at Roskilde University in Denmark.

‘And when it dominates, it takes so much more effort to maintain epidemic control than was needed with the old variant.’” [In other words, we are effectively dealing with a different pathogen that requires a different antidote. It’s an admission that the current crop of vaccines doesn’t work.]

3. Cell — SARS-CoV-2 Variants B.1.351 and P.1 Escape From Neutralizing Antibodies12

“… our findings indicate that the B.1.351 and P.1 variants might be able to spread in convalescent patients or BNT162b2-vaccinated individuals and thus constitute an elevated threat to human health.

Containment of these variants by non-pharmaceutic interventions is an important task.” [Note — In other words, the new vaccines don’t work against the new COVID strains, so we might need to preserve the onerous lockdown restrictions forever.]

How can people read this fearmongering bunkum and not see that it is designed to terrify and manipulate the masses into sheeplike compliance?

Variant Being Used to Fuel COVID Hysteria

There’s no denying that the variant is being used to fuel the COVID hysteria and perpetuate the repressive social restrictions. So, the question we should be asking ourselves is whether we can trust what we are being told by the media and the public health officials?

And the answer is “No,” we cannot trust them. They have repeatedly misled the public on all manner of topics including masks, asymptomatic transmission, immunity, infection fatality rate, social distancing and now variants. According to Sunetra Gupta, who is professor of theoretical epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow:13

“… some of these variants could be more transmissible, but the truth is … even with a marginal increase in transmissibility … that does not have much of a material effect or difference in how we deal with the virus. In other words, the surge of the virus cannot be ascribed to a new variant …

The other question is are these variants more virulent, and the truth is we don’t know, but it is unlikely because the data don’t seem to say so despite the scary headlines … Pathogens tend to evolve toward lower virulence … because that maximizes their transmissibility … It is much more probable that these strains will not be materially so different that we would have to alter our policies.”

So, according to Gupta, even if the new strains of COVID are more transmissible, it is highly unlikely that they are more lethal. Here’s more on the topic from diagnostic pathologist Dr. Clare Craig, who provides a more technical explanation:14

“SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence has ~30,000 letters. Alterations in a handful of letters will not change it’s shape much — if it did it wouldn’t function properly anyway. Fear mongering about immune escape is not needed and is irresponsible especially when no evidence to support the claims.”

In essence, Craig is saying the same thing we said earlier, that the slight mutations to the infection will not impact the immune reaction of people who already had the virus. Thus, the current crop of “variants” should not be a cause for alarm. If you have already had COVID or if you already have prior immunity due to previous exposure to similar infections, (SARS, for example) the new strain should not be a problem.

It should also not be a problem if the new vaccines provide the type of broad-based immunity that one should expect of them. Again, the mutations represent only the slightest change in the composition of the pathogen (less than 1%), which means that — if the vaccines don’t work — they are, in effect, useless.

Media Misstating Science to Terrify the Public

Here’s a longer explanation that some readers might find overly technical and perhaps tedious, but it’s worth wading through in order to see that the media is deliberately misstating the science to terrify the public. This excerpt is from an article by Yeadon. Here’s what he said:15

“The idea is planted in people’s mind that this virus is mutating in such a way as to evade prior immunity. This is completely unfounded, certainly as regards immunity … (that is) gained naturally, after repelling the virus … It’s important to appreciate that upon infection, the human immune system cuts up an infectious agent into short pieces.

Each of these short pieces of protein are presented to other cells in the immune system, like an identity parade … These have a range of functions. Some make antibodies & others are programmed to kill cells infected by the virus, recognized by displaying on their surface signals that tell the body that they’ve been invaded.

In almost all cases … this smart adaptive system overcomes the infection. Crucially … this event leaves you with many different kinds of long-lived ‘memory’ cells which, if you’re infected again, rapidly wipe out any attempt at reinfection.

So, you won’t again be made ill by the same virus, and because the virus is simply not permitted to replicate, you are also no longer able to participate in transmission … The general ‘direction of travel’ (for viruses) is to become less injurious but easier to transmit, eventually joining the other 40 or so viruses which cause what we collectively term ‘the common cold.’

What generally doesn’t happen is for mutants to become more lethal to the hosts (us). But the key point I wanted to get across is just how large SARS-COV-2 is. I recall it’s of the order of 30,000 letters of genetic code which, when translated, make around 10,000 amino acids in several viral proteins.

Now you can see that the kinds of numbers of changes in the letters of the genetic code are truly tiny in comparison with the whole. 30 letter changes might be roughly 0.1% of the virus’s code. In other words, 99.9% of that code is not different from the so-called Wuhan strain.

Similarly, the changes in the protein translated from those letter code alterations are overwhelmed by the vast majority of the unchanged protein sequences. So your immune system, recognizing as it does perhaps dozens of short pieces … will not be fooled by a couple of small changes to a tiny fraction of these.

No: your immune system knows immediately that this is an invader it’s seen before, and has no difficulty whatsoever in dealing with it swiftly & without symptoms. So, it’s a scientifically invalid …

… even if mutations did change a couple of these, the majority of the pieces … of the mutated virus will still be unchanged & recognized by the vaccine-immune system or the virus-infected immune system & a prompt, vigorous response will still protect you.”

Why Are Public Health Officials and the Media Lying?

Let’s summarize: We have presented the informed views of three reputable scientists all of who explicitly refute the idea that the so called “variants:”

Are more lethal

Have the potential to reinfect people who have already had COVID

Have mutated enough to reinfect people who have already been vaccinated (unless, of course) the vaccine does not provide broad-based immunity to begin with (which is possible since Phase 3 long-term trials were never conducted).

So, why are the public health officials and the media lying about this matter, which is fairly clear-cut and uncontroversial? That is the question.

Yeadon concludes that there is something flagrantly diabolical about their denial. He thinks they are lying in order to dupe more people into getting injected with a substance that will either render them infertile, cause them great bodily harm or kill them outright. Take your pick. Here’s more:16

“The eugenicists have got hold of the levers of power and this is a really artful way of getting you to line-up and receive some unspecified thing that will damage you. I have no idea what it will actually be, but it won’t be a vaccine because you don’t need one. And it won’t kill you on the end of the needle because you would spot that.

It could be something that will produce normal pathology, it will be at various times between vaccination and the event, it will be plausibly deniable because there will be something else going on in the world at that time, in the context of which your demise, or that of your children will look normal.

That’s what I would do if I wanted to get rid of 90 or 95% of the world’s population. And I think that’s what they’re doing.”

“The eugenicists have got hold of the levers of power?” Has Yeadon gone mad?

Has the pressure of the global pandemic pushed him off the deep end or is he “on to something” big, something that no one even dares to even think about; a plan so dark and sinister that its implementation would constitute the most grievous and coldblooded crime against humanity of all time; the injection of billions of people with a toxic elixir whose spike protein dramatically compromises their immune systems clearing the way for agonizing widespread suffering followed by mountains of carnage?

There are others, however, who see a connection between the current vaccination campaign and “the eugenicists.” In fact, Dr. Joseph Mercola points to the link between the lead developer of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Adrian Hill, and the Eugenics movement. According to Mercola:

“Hill gave a lecture at the Galton Institute (which was known as the U.K. Eugenics Society) in 2008 for its 100-year anniversary. As noted in Webb’s article:17

‘Arguably most troubling of all is the direct link of the vaccine’s lead developers to the Wellcome Trust and, in the case of Adrian Hill, the Galton Institute, two groups with longstanding ties to the UK eugenics movement.

The latter organization, named for the ‘father of eugenics’ Francis Galton, is the renamed U.K. Eugenics Society, a group notorious for over a century for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to ‘improve racial stock’ by reducing the population of those deemed inferior.

The ties of Adrian Hill to the Galton Institute should raise obvious concerns given the push to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine he developed with [Sarah] Gilbert the vaccine of choice for the developing world, particularly countries in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, the very areas where the Galton Institute’s past members have called for reducing population growth …

Emeritus professor of molecular genetics at the Galton Institute and one of its officers is none other than David J. Galton, whose work includes ‘Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century.’

David Galton has written that the Human Genome Mapping Project… had ‘enormously increased … the scope for eugenics … because of the development of a very powerful technology for the manipulation of DNA.’

This new ‘wider definition of eugenics,’ Galton has said, ‘would cover methods of regulating population numbers as well as improving genome quality by selective artificial insemination by donor, gene therapy or gene manipulation of germ-line cells.’ In expanding on this new definition, Galton is neutral as to ‘whether some methods should be made compulsory by the state, or left entirely to the personal choice of the individual.

… The Wellcome Centre regularly cofunds the research and development of vaccines and birth control methods with … a foundation (name withheld) that actively and admittedly engages in population and reproductive control in Africa and South Asia by, among other things, prioritizing the widespread distribution of injectable long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs).

The Wellcome Trust has also directly funded studies that sought to develop methods to ‘improve uptake’ of LARCs in places such as rural Rwanda…’ LARCs afford women in the Global South ‘the least choice possible short of actual sterilization.’

Some LARCs can render women infertile for as long as five years, and, as Levich argues, they ‘leave far more control in the hands of providers, and less in the hands of women, than condoms, oral contraceptives, or traditional methods.’

… Slightly modified and rebranded as Jadelle, the dangerous drug was promoted in Africa … Formerly named the Sterilization League for Human Betterment, EngenderHealth’s original mission, inspired by racial eugenics, was to ‘improve the biological stock of the human race.’”

Does Eugenics Factor Into the mRNA Vaccine?

So, how does “eugenics” factor into the creation and distribution of the mRNA vaccine? Is there a link or are we grasping at straws? We can’t answer that question, but a recent article by Mathew Ehret at Off-Guardian provides a few interesting clues. Here’s what he said:18

“The fact that the organizations promoting the rise of this eugenics policy throughout Nazi Germany and North America included such powerhouses as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Human Sterilization League for Human Betterment … which have all taken leading roles in the World Health Organization over recent decades is more than a little concerning.

The fact that these eugenics organizations simply re-branded themselves after WWII and are now implicated in modern RNA vaccine development alongside the Galton Institute (formerly British Eugenics Association), Oxford’s AstraZeneca, Pfizer and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation should give any serious thinker pause as we consider what patterns of history we are willing to tolerate repeating in our presently precarious age.”

We’ll end this piece with an excerpt from a 2010 article by Andrew Gavin Marshall at Global Research, who presciently noted that:19

“Eugenics is about the social organization and control of humanity … (particularly) population control …

The ideas of Malthus, and later Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin were remolded into branding an elite ideology of ‘Social Darwinism,’ which was ‘the notion that in the struggle to survive in a harsh world, many humans were not only less worthy, many were actually destined to wither away as a rite of progress. To preserve the weak and the needy was, in essence, an unnatural act.’

This theory simply justified the immense wealth, power and domination of a small elite over the rest of humanity, as that elite saw themselves as the only truly intelligent beings worthy of holding such power and privilege.

Francis Galton later coined the term “eugenics” to describe this emerging field. His followers believed that the ‘genetically unfit’ ‘would have to be wiped away,’ using tactics such as ‘segregation, deportation, castration, marriage prohibition, compulsory sterilization, passive euthanasia — and ultimately extermination’ …

Sir Julian Huxley was also a life trustee of the British Eugenics Society from 1925, and its President from 1959-62 … ‘Huxley believed that eugenics would one day be seen as the way forward for the human race,’ and that, ‘A catastrophic event may be needed for evolution to move at an accelerated pace’ … It is much the same with ideas whose time has not yet come; they must survive periods when they are not generally welcome.

The 21st-century technologies are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups.

They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them … I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

… Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system.

If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite …

A horrifying vision indeed; but one which builds upon the ideas of Huxley, Russell and Brzezinski, who envisioned a people who — through biological and psychological means – are made to love their own servitude. Huxley saw the emergence of a world in which humanity, still a wild animal, is domesticated; where only the elite remain wild and have freedom to make decisions, while the masses are domesticated like pets.

Huxley opined that, ‘Men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.’”

We must ask ourselves whether the current mass vaccination campaign is a science-based effort to relieve sickness and disease or a fast-track to a dark and frightening dystopia conjured up by evil men seeking to tighten their grip on all humanity?

SOURCE

[kiss-my-freckle]

“Each factor taken separately is not conclusive, but put them together and it's clear - you haven't found your man because he's a woman.”

I see it too often - factors being argued separately against the mother theory. A popular thing for fans who can’t see it or simply don’t like it. I’ve decided to dish up an entire scene. Argue them separately all you like. Better if you can dish up another theory that fits all factors like Rederina does.  

The Freelancer, dinner in Montreal (1x2) ...

Liz: Before we do this, let me be clear. I’m not here to socialize. I have no interest in having dinner with you, nor do we have the time. We meet your contact, we get the name of the Freelancer’s next victim, and we go. Understood? Red: I agree with you completely. But it is a restaurant, and it is dinnertime.

Whether characters in television or people in real life, you'll notice it's women more often than men that offer food. Gender roles in the household since the beginning of time. The strength of a man hunts while the woman prepares dinner. Mothers feeding their children. If you don't believe me, note what you see when you hit Ressler's mother's house. Whether it drink or snacks, women typically offer it. Recipes, cookbooks... more often kept by women.

Liz: So, what does this liaison look like? Red: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Anyone asks, you’re my girlfriend from Ann Arbor.

A woman’s female friend. Like Ellie, shown throughout the first season and even in the second when she saves Tom Keen from his gunshot wounds. 

Liz: If you’re looking for a realtor, my girlfriend Ellie is awesome.

Liz Absolutely not. Red: Fine. You can be my daughter.

Confirmed in 5x22 that Liz killed Raymond Reddington in 1990. 

Liz: I know now that those bones in that bag are Raymond Reddington's... the real Raymond Reddington. My father.

Speaking French. 

Waiter: Bonsoir. Red: What would you like to drink? Liz: I’ll have wine. Chardonnay? Red: S’il vous plaít, pour madame, un cocktail de I’aviation.

Necessary if you’re dining in a Paris cafe with Ivan Stepanov.

Ivan: We know about Keen. What she's saying. That you're N-13. Red: An allegation no one believes. Ivan: A fact no one knows is true. We must do whatever we can to keep it that way.

Ivan: Katarina Rostova was N-13. And Katarina Rostova is dead.

Just as good, an imposter who claims to be Katarina spending an entire episode wanting Red to believe he's in a hospital in Paris.

Aram: I know we think he's in Paris, but maybe that's just another illusion.

Red is never identified with facial recognition.

Ressler: This one. Here. Bring that up. Tech: Running facial recognition now. No hits off the database yet.

This takes us to Rassvet.

Liz: He'd need doctors, like Koehler - someone who could change his face.

Red toasts to the future. 

Red: Ahh. Liz: Oh, this isn’t what I ordered. Red: Mercí. To the future.

This takes us back to the womens shelter in Rassvet. 

Shelter Worker: Most importantly, I think the woman who stepped into that ocean is dead. The one who emerged has new choices, a new future...

She pulls in the concept of death and rebirth. Flowers emerge. 

Simple concept, symbolism. Winter is death, spring is rebirth.

Red: Aviation cocktail. It’s from the ’20s. Tastes like spring, doesn’t it?

Toss Katarina into Cape May waters, watch her be reborn. Death (Cape May) and rebirth (Rassvet). That's why I like watching them back-to-back.

Dom: For most people, baptism comes early. My daughter had to wait half her life to be reborn.

The whole truth.

Red: Tell me about your job. The profiling. I’m fascinated. How close to the truth do you think you can really get? Liz: Where’s your contact?

What Kate wanted Liz to learn. 

Kate: Masha, I can show you the truth. Liz: What truth? Kate: If you want to know why he came into your life Liz: You're scaring me. Kate: I can take you. We can go together. But it has to be your choice.

Same truth Liz questioned in Berlin: Conclusion. 

Red: I killed Sam because he was in pain and he wanted to die and because I had to protect you from the truth. Liz: What truth? The only memory I have of my real father... is from the night of the fire. I remember him pulling me out of the flames... saving me. Red: Yes. And knowing his identity would put you in grave danger.

This is all about sight. How Liz SEES things.

Red: Tell me my profile. Liz: Why would I do that? Red: You’ve heard the debriefs. You’ve read Ressler’s book reports. I so want to know how you see things.

Magic tricks fool the senses. Sight is commonly used in this series.

Red: You won’t find the girl until you learn to LOOK at this differently. ("You'll never find Rostova.")

Red: Two months later, she went to Cape May and left her clothes on the beach, walked into the ocean and was never SEEN again.

Dom: You know what I did. You have no idea how I feel - surrounded by nothing but memories - every Christmas, every time it rains. Red: The car. Dom: Yes. Red: The last time you SAW Katarina was in the rearview mirror.

Dom: Last time I SAW my daughter was in this rearview mirror nearly 30 years ago. If my Katarina was still here, she would have let me know.

Red: I know what you SAW, and it wasn’t everything you thought you SAW.

At least five dialogues, and there are plenty more where they came from.

Liz profiles the ghost of her mother. “A ghost. Life’s full of ’em.”

Liz: You’re a loner. You keep your distance. You travel freely through foreign lands. You’re rootless. You’re very comfortable here with your glass of Scotch, but you’re just as comfortable sleeping in a cave with rebels or sharing dinner in some hole-in-the-wall noodle shop. Your closest friends are strangers. You understand that tight bonds can make you vulnerable, so you’re careful not to have any. 

Which follows the voiceover at the end of Ruin.

Agent McKenna: I don’t know how to explain any of this -  The carnage, the death. I mean, what happened up there at that house - It’s bizarre. We have bodies, men murdered - drugged, burned alive - all known criminals with extensive records. And the woman, the one we believe is responsible - You have no idea who she was? Early: Grace. Nice woman, kind of quiet. Kept to herself. Paid cash. Agent McKenna: Did this Grace have a last name? Postal Worker: Talbot. At least that’s how it said it on the side of the packages. Agent Hobbs: Which she picked up here? Postal Worker: Sure. One every few weeks. Now and then, off and on. I mean, she didn’t get none too excited about it, but she got them all eventually. Agent McKenna: And you have no idea where those packages went? Postal Worker: At the house, I suppose. Are they not there? Agent McKenna: Let’s pivot. I’d like to talk about Mr. Elroy. Local Officer: The federal witness? Agent Hobbs: He said he was dropped off at the ER “like a Christmas gift.” Local Officer: That’s right. I mean, that’s what the head nurse said. Left him there on the doorstep of the medical center in Delta Junction. Said she saved his life. Local Officer: She knew he was someone important. I don’t know how, but - Agent McKenna: You know this woman didn’t just wander off. She made sure not to leave any trace evidence behind. Agent Hobbs: Not a Kleenex in the trash or a fingerprint in the barn or a hair in a drain. Not one. Agent McKenna: Place was wiped clean. Agent Hobbs: So clean, in fact, that we believe she may have learned how to clean a crime scene from a professional. Early: I don’t understand the question. Agent Hobbs: You saw her. You spoke to her. You tell me who you think she was. Postal Worker: I don’t know. Local Officer: I wish I could say. Local Officer: I think, uh, she was - Early: A ghost. Life’s full of ’em. ("Elizabeth. You raised an old ghost.")

No Roots = Rootless. Same things would’ve been said of Katarina in 1990. 

Red being sarcastic. He knows Liz doesn't know her husband. He wants to know what Tom knows of the mark and the scar.

Liz: And that’s why you’re so conflicted about me. You need me. And you hate that about yourself, because it makes you vulnerable. Red: Tell me about your husband. Does he know you as well as you know him? Liz: Your contact is late. Red: Does he know about you as a child? Liz: It’s been 35 minutes. Red: Does he know about the fire?

Known since Liz’s Braxton recall, 2x10. Katarina was at the fire and knows about Liz’s scar. “Elements from Katarina’s past” are elements from Masha’s past (4x17 pre-pilot scene). 

Katarina: There was a fire. Too many people. There was shouting and fighting. And Masha...

Red refuses to answer Liz's questions because he realizes Cooper placed agents inside the diner. He didn't even want wires. 

Liz: Why am I so important to you? Did you know my parents? I asked you a question. Waiter: Oui, monsieur? Red: S’il vous plait, apportez–nous une bouteille quatre vingt deux chateau latour. Waiter: Bonsoir. Liz: Are you gonna keep trying to impress me with your knowledge of French wine, or are you gonna answer my question?

He wanted it to be just him and Liz.

Red: You should come. Just the two of us - no wires, no clumsy agents in the bushes. You want me to make an introduction, you need to trust me with my source. Ah! What fun! You’ll need a dress.

His final line is a push back to the pilot. Red: What if I were to tell you that all the things you’ve come to believe about yourself are a lie? Please excuse me for a moment.

It's all about who they are and who they were. Liz was Masha Rostova.

Worded differently for Red because he’s no longer a woman.

Red: Everything about me is a lie.

Katarina Rostova, now Raymond Reddington. 

We then have Liz's profile of Red pushing her to run a DNA test. She's right on her profile, but she SAW a man sitting before her.

Liz: I ran his DNA two weeks after we met. We were undercover in Montreal having dinner, and he said that everything I thought I knew about myself was a lie. It was intimate and weird. And when we thought we were made, he snuck out the back and I palmed his scotch glass. But when the envelope came back, I was scared it would confirm the devil was my father. I didn’t look at it. Threw it away.

Raymond Reddington, just as much a ghost. Masha, Katarina, Dom, all of them... ghosts.

"Elizabeth. You raised an old ghost."

"Apparently, Reddington died 30 years ago. He rose from the grave once. I’m pretty sure he will again."

She threw away the results for the same reason Ressler wasn't supposed to look at Red's medical file. Their endgame, Rederina. And people wonder why I follow this theory. A single scene in a single episode full of Katarina. Everyone assumes Reddington is a fake death because of the way they ran the suitcase arc in S5. He's not a fake death. He's a fake life.

“A mother who died of weakness and shame.”

Red: What do you want me to say? Yes… Is that what you want me to say? Yes, Elizabeth is my daughter.

Weakness and shame. 

Katarina Rostova. “The two of us have overcome so much.”

#Rederina