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inky-duchess · 4 years

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History Bites: Best Royal Romances

In History Bites, I pick the best moments of history and the antics historical figures in order to give you inspiration for your WIP. Think of History Bites like prompts, only juicer and 90% accurate (results may vary).

Love is one of the greatest reasons to do anything. Love will make people act strangely, become better people and level empires. In a world of arranged marriages and terrible spouses, some royals found happiness.

Antony and Cleopatra were the Ancient World's power couple. After Caesar's death, who had been Antony's mentor and the father to Cleopatra's son, Antony was sent to govern the Eastern Provinces. At Tarsus in Turkey, Cleopatra paid a visit to Antony. During the visit, Antony and Cleopatra got to know each other better and quickly things got romantic. It was not exactly the best thing for a Roman senator to have an Egyptian mistress and an odd thing for a famously intellectual Queen to take a notorious foolish hothead as her lover but the two were incredibly fond of one another. The two of them had three children, who Antony left the Roman Empire to in his will. The will was the final straw for Rome so it went to war with the couple, which ended in defeat. Antony committed suicide and Cleopatra sometime afterward.

Queen Victoria's marriage was an issue from the get go, because she needed a husband who was not her subject (because women were meant to obey their menfolk and a Queen shouldn't obey a subject) and one who was suitable. Victoria didn't like her cousin Albert when they met as teens but feel head over heels in love with him after they met again after Victoria became Queen. The two were rather smitten with each other and managed to pop out 9 kids. Victoria was distraught when Albert died and rarely wore anything but black for most of her life and rarely went out in public.

Josephine de Beauharnais was a wealthy French woman during the French Revolution which claimed the life of her first husband. Josephine caught the eye of the young Corsican soldier, Napoleon and the two quickly wed despite him being 6 years younger. Josephine was the perfect consort for Napoleon, she was an able diplomat and learned. When Napoleon was away, he often sent her raunchy letters which Josephine hilariously replied with nonchalance. Napoleon divorced Josephine because she was barren and he needed a heir. I doubt he stopped loving Josephine.

Charles II was not exactly the most monogamous of monarchs. The Merry Monarch and one of the few English Kings I think fondly of, had one declared mistress about five others. A friend of Charles saw Nell Gwyn playing on the London stage and decided to introduce her to his royal master, a wingman if you will. Nell and the King hit it off well because Nell wasn't as grasping as the other mistresses and knew how to make him laugh. She once took him fishing and when the monarch caught nothing, she tied a fried piece of fish to his line. She bore him too sons but felt as if Charles was not awarding them the right honours. When he came to visit them, she called one son over by saying "Come hither, you little bastard." Charles was angry at that but Nell reminded him that she had little else to refer to him by so Charles created a Dukedom for his sons. When Charles died, Nell remained monogamous to him telling one admirer than she would not "lay a dog where a deer that once lain."

Louis XIV was Charles's cousin and they shared a similar taste for mistresses. Madame de Montespan was married as Louis was but the two started a relationship together. Montespan was rather spoilt by Louis, earning the nickname "How much" by courtiers. Montespan and the King were together for a long period of time, having many children. A scandal came to light which involved a supposed witch and black masses where Montespan bought love potions and cursed the Queen. Montespan was lucky to avoid execution but she was dealt a personal blow: the King fell out of love with her. Montespan haunted the court as Louis moved on, keeping a bedroom for him at all times just in case he wished to visit. He never did. Louis moved on to the nanny of his bastard children by Montespan, the religious Madame de Maintenon. The two were kindred spirits and when the Queen died, Louis married Madame de Maintenon and the two lived the rest of their lives together.

Henry IV of France was married when he began a relationship with Gabrielle d'Estrees, a Catholic noblewoman during the Wars of Religion in France. Henry was increasingly fond of her despite their religious differences, even more than his wife at the time Marguerite of Valois. Gabrielle was a successful diplomat, going between the Protestant King and his Catholic nobility, smoothing relations by convincing Henry to become a Catholic. Gabrielle went to war with Henry, caring for his clothes and cooking his meals while on campaign. Henry was worried about her safety, especially when he saw bullet holes in her tent but Gabrielle refused to leave his side. Gabrielle sold her jewels to fund Henry's wars and once left the middle of a ball to rush to Henry's side. Her devotion led to Henry deciding to marry and crown her as his Queen. Gabrielle died suddenly before her wedding/coronation leaving Henry heartbroken.

Catherine the Great is on my list for worst marriages bur she found love after her husband was murdered. During her coup when she was making an important speech to rally the troops to her, a young cavalry officer named Grigory Potemkin offered her his own sword knot, a missing detail on her uniform. The two met years later and quickly fell in love. Catherine and Potemkin kept up their touching relationship throughout the wars with Turkey and Catherine's other lovers. They were incredibly close, Catherine giving him every honour and Potemkin helping her realise her dream of a navy. Potemkin died on the roadside, collapsing in front of his soldiers leaving Catherine heartbroken. It is rumoured by historians that the pair had been secretly married.

Have you ever seen bibles with King James written on the cover? Though King James was married and had sired numerous children with his wife, James had a string of noble young men as favourites, his favourite being George Villiers. James was incredibly fond of George, calling him "Steenie" after St. Stephen who canonically (no pun intended) had the face of an angel. When asked by Parliament about the close relationship, James replied that George was as close to him as Jesus was to his disciples. Though historians dispute whether they were actually gay (citing the fact that James had a wife and a loving relationship with her), it is entirely possible that James was bisexual. The two sent numerous letters to one another over the years, each rather touching

Inez de Castro is probably Portugal's most interesting Queen Consort. She was exhumed for her own coronation. Inez was the mistress of Prince Pedro and mother to his children. The King, Pedro's father, really did not want his son marrying his mistress so he had Inez murdered. Pedro was distraught at her death and hunted down the men who had done it, having their hearts torn out in revenge. He would never marry again so to make his children legitimate he had Inez exhumed and crowned Queen, forcing the nobility to kiss her hand and hail her as Queen. Nobody bothered Pedro about his kids again.

Though the film The Favourite (2017) is a skewed version of the relationship between Anne of England and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, there is some proof to attest to the romantic relationship between the two. They knew each other from a young age and once escaped a house together to avoid the influence of Anne's father who at the time was embroiled in a battle to keep the throne against Anne's sister Mary. The two were incredibly close despite their rather differing personalities. Sarah did care for the Queen but had a habit of being quite abrasive and quick with cruel words which eventually ended the long lasting relationship between the two.

Peter I of Russia was an imposing man both in stature and in political policy. Peter dragged Russia toward Westernization and imposed radical reforms upon his country. Perhaps the greatest wave he made, was his marriage to Catherine, a laundress. Peter and Catherine were incredibly fond of each other, sharing an appetite of good living and each other. Peter did sleep about but Catherine joked about it in letters asking him whether he found any laundresses he liked. Peter fathered two daughters on Catherine but instead of handing control to them after he died he made his wife Empress Catherine I.

Perhaps my favourite royal romance story, is between Emperor Ai and his favourite Dong Xian. Emperor Ai and Dong Xian were chilling in bed together one day. Ai had to get up but Dong Xian was still asleep, laying on his sleeve. Rather than waking his lover, the Emperor cut off his own sleeve so he could get out of bed.

Emperor Hadrian is famous for his bitchin wall between Britannia and Caledonia. But Emperor Hadrian's greatest love would be the Greek Antinous. The emperor had Antonius come with him wherever he went and the two were fond of hunting and writing poetry. Antinous tragically drowned in the Nile, probably by accident but foul play cannot be ruled out.

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson or as you might know her Madame de Pompadour was told at nine years old that she would love a king. In her twenties it came true when she caught the eye of King Louis XV of France, earning her the title maîtresse-en-titre. Madame de Pompadour understood Louis in a way nobody else would. She knew how to read his emotions and knew how to keep him entertained. Though the two stopped sleeping together thanks to a medical condition Jeanne had, Louis kept her as his official mistress. Kings were not permitted to attend funerals so when Jeanne died, Louis couldn't go. He stood on his balcony in a downpour as her funeral carriage left Versailles, the only tribute he could pay the love of his life

Elizabeth Woodville's first husband was an early casualty in the Wars of the Roses, leaving her to care for two sons. Destitute, Elizabeth stood by the road to speak with the new York King of England. Edward IV was younger than her and was her enemy, yet the two fell in love and wed in secret. The court was furious at the marriage as Elizabeth was only the daughter of a baron. The marriage was extremely happy despite Edward's many mistresses and the unsettled times they lived in.

Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth Woodville's daughter, was a highly sought after bride in Europe. Henry Tudor, her uncle Richard's enemy, proposed to her from abroad declaring her would wed her in the Cathedral of Reims. Henry invaded England and won the crown at the Battle of Bosworth. He married Elizabeth and the two, despite being born enemies, lived a happy marriage together. Henry was distraught when Elizabeth died and never remarried.

Mary Tudor, the daughter of Elizabeth of York, was at one point Europe's most eligible and beautiful Princess. She was offered as a bride to the Prince of Spain and then the King of France, who she was married to. Mary was briefly Queen of France but her aged husband died soon after the wedding. Mary returned to England but she had a secret, she had hastily wed her brother's childhood friend, Charles Brandon. Henry VIII, her brother, got so cross that he fined and banished the two of them from court. But he quickly forgave them and the couple returned to court where they spent their short but happy marriage.

Elizabeth II & Prince Philip have been married for decades. The Queen was only eight when she met Philip and the two became friends, writing to each other during WWII. After WWII, Philip renounced his his Danish and Greek titles to marry Elizabeth, becoming Prince Consort and Duke of Edinburgh. Despite Philip's infamous faux pas and wild behavior, the two have a stable and loving relationship.

Edward III & Philippa of Hainault were only children when Edward's mother planned their marriage to gain the military might of Philippa's father. Their marriage was a happy one that produced 12 children. Philippa accompanied Edward to the battlefield many times.

Edward II is on my list for worst marriages but he was a romantic at heart. Edward was very close to a knight named Piers Gaveston. Edward's father didn't like this bond and sent Gaveston away. Edward's first act as king was to recall Piers and bestowed titles and land upon him like there was no tomorrow. Piers was seen as a bad influence and because of this he was killed by a group of rebelling nobles. Edward grieved for years and eventually went on a revenge war against the nobles who had killed his lover.

Despite being Nazi-Sympathizing assholes, no one could doubt that Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII did truly love one another. Edward was King and Wallis was an American divorcee (sound familiar?), and there were laws starting that he could not marry a divorcee. But Edward couldn't give her up do he gave up his throne for her and the two went off to live in France together.

Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra (then Princess Alix of Hesse) were never meant to be married. Alexandra's grandmother Queen Victoria did not approve of the autocracy of Russia and would have preferred that she marry into England. Alexandra herself dithered on whether to marry Nicholas as it meant a change in religion for her. In the end, the two decided to wed and they had a relatively close marriage. Some of their letters still survive.

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jazzistolkienfanfics · 3 years

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Scared - Eowyn x fem!reader

I’m in love with your writing and am a disaster of a bisexual, so when I saw your Arwen piece I was thrilled. Could I request an ÉowynxFem!Reader where she’s tending to Éowyns wounds post battle, so when Éowyn wakes up she sees the reader crying and they confess feelings??

sure thing @itgetsatadhazy! sorry if it got kinda long. SHE SO PRETTY-

Type: Imagine Pairing: Eowyn x fem!reader Summary: Y/N isn’t scared of much, but losing her best friend is the one thing that terrifies her. Warnings: non-canon parts?, ‘shit’ Word Count: 1114 words

The battle raged around Y/N, and for the first in her life, she was truly fighting for her life.

These Orcs were unlike any that she’d faced before - with such relentless rage and bloodlust in so many numbers that Y/N was very prepared for the possibility of death.

Dying didn’t scare her. Pain never had. Battle was too ordinary for fear. But the thought of leaving Eowyn, her beautiful best friend, behind if she did perish with a sword through her chest ... that scared Y/N more than anything.

Although, she supposed that if she was currently fighting a battle outside Gondor itself, surrounded by what seemed like millions of Orcs, pirates and Oliphaunts, there really wasn’t that much more to be scared of.

She glanced over at Eowyn, who rode her horse with a casual grace, and admired how beautiful her fellow Shieldmaiden was. Then, Y/N forced herself to snap out of it - Eowyn wasn’t actually meant to be here, and she was disguised. Y/N wasn’t about to be the reason that Eowyn got caught because everyone in Rohan knew the h/c-haired girl’s lovesick glances directed towards the blonde.

Y/N’s sword cut through another Orc with a squelch, and she grimaced as blood splattered across her armour. The battle wasn’t going exceptionally well, but, then again, they faced Sauron’s forces. It wasn’t exactly a play fight.

When Y/N looked to Eowyn again, she realised her mistake after a couple of seconds making sure that her friend was okay. The h/c warrior had gotten distracted, and some soldier slashed through her horse’s flesh, making her fall off with a scream.

As Y/N raised her head again, she saw Eowyn looking around.

She recognised my scream, Y/N thought warmly. She cares about me.

But that fuzzy feeling quickly turned to panic as Eowyn was yanked from her horse.

“Shit!” Y/N hissed, drawing a shorter sword and sprinting towards Eowyn.

The Shieldmaiden staggered to her feet just as Y/N reached her. Her blue-green eyes that Y/N found so beautiful were wide with shock, and they were no less stunning through the large helmet that obscured the rest of Eowyn’s face.

“You okay?” Y/N yelled, swinging her sword to intercept the attack of an Orc, stabbing it through the chest with a sickening gurgle.

“Fine!” Eowyn yelled from behind her - back-to-back was their favourite way to fight. “Merry!”

This next cry was directed at the Hobbit who’d been with her. “Stay close to us!”

The small Hobbit nodded furiously, and held his own impressively as the three of them fought their way towards Gondor.

---

In hindsight, Y/N was stupid to think they’d been winning. That was before the Nazgûl had showed up, wailing with such pure agony and force that Y/N almost dropped her sword to cover her ears.

The screams made her want to curl up and die, but she forced herself to keep fighting - she was in no hurry to die.

Then, the thing that Y/N least expected to happen did.

The Witch-King of Angmar himself flew down, and she acted before she could think. His steed, a fell beast, roared at Merry, who was frozen to the ground, and lunged forward, presumably to bite his head off. Y/N swept her sword upwards, and the leader of the Nazgûl was forced to slide off his beast as its head flopped around its detached body.

Before Y/N knew it, she’d been knocked to the floor, at least half a dozen of her ribs probably cracked or broken, and a rapidly swelling cut on her head that blurred her vision with tears and blood.

Y/N could barely raise her head, let alone help Eowyn, but she was glad to see that Eowyn held her own. She crawled quietly so the Witch-King didn’t notice, reaching for her sword, and looking up just as the Nazgûl had her crush in a chokehold.

With a swing of her weapon, he screeched, dropping Eowyn to the floor. Y/N felt an indescribable pain shudder up her shoulder, and she fell back to her knees.

“I am no man,” she faintly heard Eowyn declared before crying out, followed by an agonised death wail.

“Eowyn!” Y/N cried as the blonde fell to the ground. But she was barely keeping herself conscious.

Everything went black.

---

Y/N was beginning to worry.

She’d woken and recovered fairly quickly, finding herself in Gondor’s Houses of Healing. A fellow resident there, Prince Faramir, had befriended her and kept her company even when she was so upset at being confined to a bed that she felt like throwing something extremely valuable and preferably delicate at someone’s head.

But Eowyn still slumbered, her pink lips slightly parted as she breathed quietly, humming in her sleep. Her eyes were tightly closed and her forehead lined - even in dreams she could not escape worry or pain.

Y/N wanted to take it all from her so badly.

Why? she asked herself stupidly. She’s just your friend. Just as Eomer is. Then why are you so much more concerned about her?

Y/N berated herself for finally facing the truth as she sat by Eowyn’s side, stroking her long blonde hair out of her face with a s/c hand.

“Why do I care about you so much?” Y/N said aloud, wrapping a deep cut with a fresh, medicine-soaked bandage. “Well, maybe it’s because you make me smile like no one else can. Maybe it’s because you’re mor ebeautiful than anyone else I’ve ever laid eyes on. Maybe it’s because ...”

She took a shaky breath.

“Maybe it’s because I love you.”

Of course, Eowyn didn’t respond. Of course, Y/N was only greeted with silence.

The h/c girl couldn’t help it. She started to sob.

Ugly, fat tears, rolling off her cheeks and onto Eowyn’s bed as she bent her head to cry and cry and cry.

Hopelessness was as familiar as a breath. But never had it seized her like this.

“I love you!” Y/N said, her head still down. “I love my best friend, and she would never feel the same!”

“H-hey.”

A quiet whisper snapped Y/N out of it instantly.

Eowyn’s eyes were wide open, blinking away tears of sleep to reveal the beautiful blue-green depths.

“I feel the e-exact same way.” It was obviously paining her to say anything with the state she was in, but she said it anyway. “W-why did it take this?”

“I don’t know,” Y/N whispered, almost smiling. “But I want a happy ending. And I want it with you.”

“My Knight in shining armour,” Eowyn teased.

“Nah, I’m pretty sure that’s you.”

A laugh. “Goddamnit, Y/N, just kiss me, please.”

“Gladly.”

A/N - hope you enjoyed @itgetsatadhazy and everyone else reading this!

#eowyn #eowyn x reader #fem!reader #wlw #lord of the rings #lotr #lotr x reader #x reader #you

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recurring-polynya · 4 years

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I’m a huge RenRuki fan so I’m stoked to find this page of glorious work and active engagement relating to this topic I could go on about! I was wondering... during their separation, do you think Renji and Rukia slept with/dated other people? One more than the other? Just wanna know your insight since you put so much depth into their relationship. I love it. (I personally like to think that Renji had a bit of a “hoe phase” especially while he was in the 11th)

Tumblr is so great, I can’t believe people actually value my opinion on this stuff (this is absolutely one of my favorite topics). Thank you so much for your kind words, and I am ecstatic for the opportunity to pontificate on this topic.

Just to clarify, if you were asking for my opinion on the source material, and I had to “support my opinion” or “cite references”, my actual interpretation of canon is that no, they were absolutely celibate during this time. Rukia had a cute li’l crush on her vice-captain and Renji probably went on one very heterosexual date with a girl once and felt bad about it for a year.

When I am being generous and world-buildy, I like to consider the fact that shinigami are souls. They do not have bodies or hormones and so I can get behind the idea that bonds of family and friendship are far more important than sex and attraction, because those are fundamentally earthly concerns. In the hands of a thoughtful, talented, preferably ace writer, this could be an incredibly interesting setting but that is, uh, not consistent with any other aspect of Soul Society, including the fact that they sell sexy calendars of the captains, plus Kubo took the time out to canonically remind us that Soul Reapers poop and have babies.

So, instead, here is the horny Polynya headcanon version, which is what you probably wanted anyway. I’m putting it under a cut because it gets a little R-rated, and also it’s hella long, but the short answer is Renji absolutely had a slutty phase.

Some people headcanon that Rukia and Renji were actually in a romantic relationship at the time of her adoption, and if that’s your reading of it, and you want to believe that they waited for each other out of loyalty, I suppose I can get behind that.

I don’t think they were together, though. I waver from time to time about how physical their affection got in Rukongai, but I think they fell in love and never admitted it. When their last friend died, they both became absolutely terrified of losing the other, so they came to the Seireitei in order to get strong and not die. I don’t think Rukia ever wanted to be Soul Reaper, to be honest. Given the strength of her principles and her particular moral code, I do think she is a great one, in the style of “I would never want to be in a club that would have me in it.” Consistent with Oetsu’s trial in the Royal Realm, I think Renji was born (died?) to be a Soul Reaper and Rukia knew this and also that he would never go unless she went with him. She absolutely regarded getting him into Shin’ou as saving his life and getting him where he belonged.

Once they were in school, I think they had to keep their distance socially if they wanted to succeed. The Gotei runs entirely on nepotism, and Rukongai kids who don’t adapt are looking at Squad 11 or 4, best case scenario. Even if they were aware of their feelings for each other, they had to play it cool for now. Renji is a long-term planner, and I think he set his sights on pass tests -> graduate -> get Gotei position -> live happily ever after with Rukia. Rukia is not so good at long term planning, and also not so good at formal education and I think she just got depressed and salty, especially because she was never sure if he actually returned her feelings or not. I absolutely think that when she accepted the adoption, she assumed she was leaving Renji to his live his best life, and at least going somewhere she was wanted.

Even though we, the reader, are presented this story as a tragedy, in many ways, this is exactly what they had hoped for. They lived. That’s it. That’s all they ever wanted. Renji got to have his perfect job and Rukia got to live in indescribable luxury. They are both so, so happy about this and have no idea why their faces are so wet right now.

The last thing either of them wants, to be honest, is the other one pining after them. They have each accepted trudging through their life in misery because they think they have made the other happy. There’s a scene were Byakuya shows up to the Squad 6 holding cells to announce to Rukia that he has no plans to save her, and Renji looks just devastated, not just because Rukia’s gonna die, but because he thought he was sending her to happiness.

Also, on a meta level, I am middle aged, and for me, the romance of only ever being with one person is boring as hell. The idea that they would get together and lose their virginity to each other just makes me indescribably tired. Childhood-friends-to-lovers isn’t actually that interesting to me-- it is the separation itself that makes it spicy-- that they went off and had other life experiences-- and sexual experiences, and came back found that they loved this person even more now.

I headcanon Rukia as very horny and pro-sex in theory, but has is a big problem of opportunity. On one hand, I think she and Byakuya have a firm don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, where as long as she stays out of the gossip columns, he doesn’t care what she does. On the other hand, though, I feel like secret affairs are kinda hard to manage, especially since she entered the noble network late in life. Anyway, I figure she’s had a number of casual affairs, mostly with other nobles who are invested in not getting caught, and also do not have any interest in any sort of emotional attachment. I think Rukia is absolutely bi, and mostly slept with ladies because they were more likely to be discreet, although there was probably a dude or two in there somewhere. Rukia only has two relatinship modes-- detached and ride-or-die, and she was very careful to keep everything in category 1, because she had no expectation of ever having a functional relationship that would go anywhere; no one she was actually interesting in being with would ever pass Kuchiki muster. I think she tried dating a nice boy from Squad 8 once, and everyone in Squad 13 thought it was the cutest thing they had ever seen. They went on three dates and never kissed and Rukia hated it and never did it again. She let herself have a huge crush on both Kaien and Miyako Shiba, because she was absolutely sure it could never go anywhere, and that definitely played into her devastation at their death. She may have had some Bad Decisions Sex in the wake of that, but I think for the most part, the affairs became more trouble than they were worth, and she’s been on a pretty long dry spell around the time we meet her.

That being said, I think Rukia is a lady who takes care of herself, if you get my drift. I think she has an extensive collection of erotic romance novels, a good imagination, and Kuchiki money worth of self-service sex toys. I think by the time she and Renji actually hook up, she has decades worth of pent up fantasies, and fortunately for her, he is intrigued by her ideas and would like to sign up for her newsletter, please and thank you.

Speaking of Renji, let’s talk about Renji! After Rukia left, I think Renji Made Some Plans and buckled down into a long, hard haul of Making Himself Worthy of Seeing Rukia Again. He made it through school, he went into Squad 5 with Izuru and Momo and... lost 90% of his momentum. This is exactly the scenario of the kid who busts ass through college to follow their dream, and then two years into their dream job, realizes that they are going to be formatting pivot tables in Excel for the next 15 years before they get to do anything remotely interesting. At this point, Renji is young, hot, bisexual, inked, and not very satisfied with his day job, and Thus Began the Ho Period.

Momo and Izuru hate this. They hate it so much. They have both had big crushes on Renji since school and they are right there. It wouldn’t be so bad if he would find a nice sweet partner that they like, but no, he just goes off on weeknights and comes home reeking of alcohol and covered in hickeys and ruining his career even though his job performance is actually fine. The fact is, even though he has always acted like he doesn’t know, of course he knows they like him, he’s not dumb, but Izuru and Momo are the type of people who mate for life, and Renji absolutely knows how badly he would break their hearts. He can’t even talk about it with them, all he can do it pretend like he doesn’t notice and hope they’ll realize what trash he is. He still loves Rukia and will always love Rukia and has made peace with the idea that he will likely never get to be with her-- he’s still working towards it because he must, because it would kill him to give up, but he knows that he’s only good for a fight or a fuck and not much else. Their friendship gets increasingly strained until Momo and Izuru can’t understand anything he does and he can’t stand them caring so damn much.

Anyway, this escalates in deciding to leave Nice, Respectable Squad 5 entirely, and joining the French Foreign Legion Squad 11. Squad 11 respects a man’s right to wallow, and Renji takes a swan dive to rock bottom. His only saving grace is his training with Ikkaku, which he takes absolutely seriously. Yumichika eventually takes interest in Renji, and teaches him how to take care of his hair and have standards. Yumichika and Ikkaku realize that if they can make him Functional, they can get him to do paperwork, so they help him beat the Sixth Seat and let him start hanging out with their friends.

Renji is still sleeping around at this point, but at least he’s sleeping around with a better class of people. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Polynya, has Matsumoto ever pegged Renji? (You probably weren’t actually thinking that) The answer is yes, Matsumoto has absolutely pegged Renji, and she was utterly delighted to give Rukia tips later on. Rukia does not begrudge Renji his slutty period in the least, because she knows that, given the opportunity, she probably would have been Worse, and also, he’s slept with 3/4 of the Gotei and picked her out of all of them, and also, he’s just incredible at oral.

The slutty phase tapered off when Renji had a bit of an actual relationship with Shuuhei. First of all, they are absolutely each other’s types, physically. Secondly, Shuuhei (whom I headcanon as significantly less pathetic and more bisexual than in canon) would be able to handle being in a relationship that is fun and supportive, even if it’s not destined to last. He is well aware that Renji is devoted to beating Captain Kuchiki and that he’s never going to truly be able to be in love with anyone until he gets some closure with Rukia, but that’s a long way off, and Shuuhei’s got his own baggage, who doesn’t have baggage? So they sleep together and go to the bar together and hold hands sometimes and tool around on the motorbike and wear a lot of leather and Hisagi cooks Renji food and Renji eats it and they’re pretty happy for a few years.

Eventually, around the time he gets serious about trying to make vice-captain, Renji starts to hang out with Izuru and Momo again, who have recently made vice-captain themselves, and are really happy to see that he’s gotten himself back on the wagon. He’s started thinking about Rukia a lot again, and he’s feeling a little bad because he loves Shuuhei, but he’s not in love with Shuuhei, and also, Shuuhei and Izuru have started looking at each other when they go out drinking, so Renji claims he needs to concentrate on the vice-captain’s exam and they have some nice breakup sex and then he sliiiiiides on outta there like a good bro and is very happy for his friends when they start hooking up.

Did that cover it? Boy, I had a lot of thoughts on that, huh? To summarize: They both saw other people. Renji had way more sex, just a tremendous amount of sex, but always carried a torch for Rukia (not really intentionally, I think he would have liked to be able to get over her, he just couldn’t), whereas I think she really did give up on him for a while.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, please read my fanfiction, where I am constantly hinting at all this stuff, I swear I will eventually finish that Squad 11 story.

#renruki #bleach headcanons #rukia kuchiki #renji abarai #i have at least 3 in-progress fanfics that tackle various aspects of this #maybe i should... finish one?#¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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deerfests · 3 years

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( 001. the young pope/the new pope || 002. lenny/brannox || 003. sir john brannox ) && ( 001. space force || 002. malloraird || 003. dr adrian mallory ) && ( 004. the new pope/space force )

just for the heck of it, and because i’m greedy ☺️

fandom ask

man wth that's a lot... 😂😂😂

Okay, off we go~

001 | Send me a fandom and I will tell you my: + The Young Pope/The New Pope

Favorite character:

Sir John Brannox, because I love the emo pope. He's got so many issues, and he's lovable for it.

Least Favorite character:

Um... I guess I don't know. I don't want to offend anyone.

5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon):

I only have 2-- Sofia Dubois/Sir John Brannox and Lenny Belardo/Sir John Brannox. Judge me if you must *shrugs*

Character I find most attractive:

Lenny and Brannox gotta fight over that one. I like how both of them look.

Character I would marry:

My hand in marriage is saved for Trench, exclusively, and he's not even a character in the show. Sorry. 🤠

Character I would be best friends with:

Gutiérrez but that's cuz he's a nice man and stuff. The dude would be swept away by me doing bs and just end up enduring it, not because he likes me. Let's be real. Nobody in the show would like me enough to befriend me! Unless I somehow weasel my way to Brannox, and we bond over being sad bastards but I don't think I have the energy to deal with his moping...

a random thought:

I feel like Adam's grave fucked up the timeline, nothing adds up. I'm sorry, but how old is Brannox supposed to be?? I am confused.

An unpopular opinion:

I don't obsess with some characters the rest of the fandom seems to, so I guess that's my unpopular opinion.

my canon OTP:

Sofia Dubois/Sir John Brannox

Non-canon OTP:

Lenny Belardo/Sir John Brannox, because imagine how fun that'd be!

most badass character:

Fck, I feel it's Lenny in The Young Pope. He's just out there destroying things.

pairing I am not a fan of:

I don't desire to put a bullseye on my back.

character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another):

Hmm, I feel like Adam is an easy pick cuz for real, they did fuck up the timeline with him.

favourite friendship:

Lenny and Gutiérrez

character I want to adopt or be adopted by:

Nobody!! AH, that would screw me up big time.

002 | send me a ship and I will tell you: + Lenny/Brannox

when of if I started shipping it.

Like love at first sight, I fell for that shit since I saw them doing the world's most awkward prom picture. I mean, look at it:

And then I was pissed off... I watched the whole season and while I enjoyed it, I didn't get nearly enough interactions! But what I got, I treasure... Even if it probably tricks you into thinking this ship's dynamic is different than what I actually headcanon for them.

my thoughts:

Lenny would fuck up Brannox so badly. Then probably feel guilty about it to some extent, and try to do something about his incredibly low self-esteem. :) This is the only sfw thought I have.

What makes me happy about them:

:)) wouldn't you like to know.

I love, love, love the energy they would have, ok!? Imagine, the constant contrast of Lenny and Brannox! Just...imagine.

What makes me sad about them:

Lenny's dead. :((

Also, Brannox has no self-esteem. :(

things done in fanfic that annoys me:

IF there was fanfic of them, which there is none of, I checked-- I would be annoyed if somebody thought Brannox had any power to hold over Lenny. Also, IF there was fanfic, I would not hesitate to read it even if it was garbage, but there's none.

things I look for in fanfic:

Actually existing fanfic. There's none. I gotta write that shit myself, and I'm trying, but it's hard!

My kinks:

:)) I can't. I'll get shadowbanned. Lenny fucks him up, let's just say.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other:

Sofia with Brannox, death with Lenny, I guess?? I'm quite happy how the show ended, but I've never been one to want my ships to be canon, most of the time.

My happily ever after for them:

They quit the clergy, I guess, and Lenny lives with Brannox in the estate and they slip into an awkward but working relationship? Brannox gets over his problems and so does Lenny.

003 | Give me a character & I will tell you + Sir John Brannox.

How I feel about this character:

I feel I got into it before, but I love him.

All the people I ship romantically with this character:

Ah, this is a repeat. Sofia and Lenny, both in their own verses, never together at the same time.

My non-romantic OTP for this character:

....Happiness/Brannox.

My unpopular opinion about this character:

Not in the mood to put a bullseye on myself~

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon:

We got to see him interact more with ghost!Lenny. Like the scene at Adam's grave, just replay it 100x more.

my het ship:

Sofia and him.

my fem/slash ship:

Lenny and him.

my OTP:

Lenny/Brannox. But that might be cuz I love suffering and pissing people off.

my OT3:

None~

my cross over ship:

None???

my kink:

He has a praise kink.Probably cries during it, too.

a head cannon fact:

*gently puts a hand on Brannox's head* This bastard can fit so many obsessive thoughts in himself!

Also, sorry tumblr user sirjohnbrannox, I am stealing all your headcanons about him.

His parents probably mainly hated him cuz he was a non-straight punk, then started drugs to deal with his problems, and genuinely I feel like he's a little bit...how do I put this, not stable cuz of that. Adam was a perfect son, John meanwhile ended up traumatized and soft and scared. He has no self-esteem cuz his parents fucking sucked and played favorites!! And also probably blamed him for Adam’s death, I guess. Fuck Brannox's parents!! I don't want to see them!!

my gender bend:

I don't have one, cuz I don't like them~

001 | Send me a fandom and I will tell you my: + Space Force

Favorite character:

Dr. Adrian Mallory, duh.

Least Favorite character:

RIP in PEPPERONI, KICK !! I HOPE YOU DIE.

5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon):

I literally only have one ship, Adrian/Mark.

Character I find most attractive:

In this episode of Dickie sets up ridiculous fights: Adrian Mallory vs Mark Naird. For whoever of the two, I actually find most attractive. Because I don't know, but boys are good.

Character I would marry:

HHHHH no

Character I would be best friends with:

Adrian, but only because we're both could be judgemental af... together!

a random thought:

Man, I hope they didn't make Malk shave for season 2. I'd hate that.

An unpopular opinion:

I don't care that much for Fuck Tony, I'm sorry. He's fine, I just-- don't really see the appeal of him. Maybe, just maybe, I'm too much into old men.

my canon OTP:

I...no? IDK!? Ali/Chan is cute, I guess and they're canon.

Non-canon OTP:

Adrian/Mark, which probably will never be actually canon and we'll keep getting ship baited.RIP. Good that I don't care about my ships being canon all that much.

most badass character:

???? IN SPACE FORCE????

pairing I am not a fan of:

I do not care for Ch*ntony. RIP. Not a NOTP but I just don't see it.

character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another):

Erin Naird. I understand where's she's coming from, but my god.... they really wrote it poorly.

favourite friendship:

Mark and Adrian in the canon lense I guess.

character I want to adopt or be adopted by:

Nope.

002 | send me a ship and I will tell you: + Malloraird

when of if I started shipping it.

When tumblr user sirjohnbrannox didn't shut up about it.

my thoughts:

It's cute, but my kinky hands will continue rubbing off on it.

What makes me happy about them:

Adrian being head over heels for a dense fool.

What makes me sad about them:

Nothing, cuz there's nothing sad in the show? Or at least nothing I am emotionally invested into enough to actually be upset about?

things done in fanfic that annoys me:

Y'all really think Adrian is vanilla? Y'all really think Adrian is anything but a brat?

things I look for in fanfic:

I am interested in a plot, that has a build-up for these two. So...my fic, In Need, which I am still working on. Cuz I literally stopped after my life fell apart and I couldn't handle the daunting comments. Anyways as I was saying. In Need-- except make it good.

My kinks:

:)) I don't want to get shadowbanned but Adrian is not vanilla, let's just say.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other:

Just keep Mark with his wife, I don't care. Adrian, anyone but Jerome. It was painful to witness Jerome. I'm sorry, but how do you write Adrian-- a fairly not too stereotypical gay man? And then write him to be with somebody like Jerome, which just comes off as "oh shit we need a character for this and we didn't establish anyone!"

Also-- Jerome/Adrian is, unfortunately, canon-- why does the wiki make it creepy and one-sided?!!?

My happily ever after for them:

Maggie gets out of prison, runs off with her guard lover (which I'm actually fairly certain will happen), and Mark slowly enters a relationship with Adrian which actually results in both of them widening their views on things and getting along.

003 | Give me a character & I will tell you + Dr Adrian Mallory

How I feel about this character:

He's pretty cool. Fun.

All the people I ship romantically with this character:

I literally only ship him with Mark, cuz Jerome gives me the worst vibes that make me actively partake in Jerome erasure.

My non-romantic OTP for this character:

404 BrOTP not found.

My unpopular opinion about this character:

The man's a brat.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon:

I wish he would have sung that song about Mark, and it would have actually been one side and nobody would have figured it out (so no photo kissing at the end) lmao cuz that'd -- now that'd be cursed and fun. >:3c

my het ship:

He's canonically gay so none. Unless season 2 decides to make him bisexual, this will continue.

my fem/slash ship:

Him with Mark.

my OTP:

Him and Mark. God, doing these memes is getting repetitve.

my OT3:

None.

my cross over ship:

Lmao none. I mean, c'mon I don't even like crossovers 99% of the time.

my kink:

:DD are you trying to get me shadowbanned, bud.

a head cannon fact:

I have none that I can share here, or at least none springing to mind... but can we all agree that people saying Adrian is a spy or he has intentions for Space Force's downfall, is so funny, because it's literally not that deep. He's just gay and in love with Mark, how much do the r*dditors gotta overthink the damn show? It's not even that good to overthink!

my gender bend:

NO, I don't like them.

004 | send me 2 fandoms and I will give yo my crossover OTP + The New Pope/Space Force

None of these, I am not answering this, cuz this is the worst crossover ever conceived by man and I don't even like crossovers enough to begin with and my laptop is dying from heat--

....;

no? ok.

Imagine poor ol' Brannox meeting Adrian. Goodbye.

#sirjohnbrannox #ask #aks meme answered #extremely long post under cut #long post cw

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loserslibrary · 4 years

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pairing: Stanley Uris/Richie Tozier [Stozier] warnings: illusions to major character death/canon compliant written by: Amy rating: Teen word count: 2,059 prompt: “may i get some stozier? maybe richie or Stan coming out to the other for the first time angsts with happy ending”

Richie wasn’t sure how, but at some point throughout his years growing up in Derry, Maine, he had acquired a habit of climbing in his friends bedroom windows instead of using the door. Maybe it was because of Eddie’s mother, and the fact that she hated his guts, so he had to use the window there, but he couldn’t be sure. This was how he found himself climbing into his best friend, Stan’s, bedroom which was thankfully on the first floor of his home.

“Staniel, thank goodness you’re awake!” Richie crowed as he pushed himself inside, closing the frame behind him and flopping down onto the bed next to Stan. A deep sigh came from his friend and Richie looked up to see him watching him over the top of the book he was reading. “Am I interrupting something?”

Stan shook his head, “Not necessarily, but I was in the middle of a really good part of the book so I suppose in a way, yes you are. What brings you here at...ten in the evening on a school night?” Stan was staring at him fully now, the book cast aside on the bed. He crossed his arms. “Everything okay?”

Richie chewed on his bottom lip, the reason for him barging in so late on his friend’s quiet time still fresh in his mind. He had been at the arcade, as he normally was when trying to avoid homework. The place still left a bitter taste in his mouth since the summer of 1989, but over time he had fallen back into his same old routine. That is, until that night, when the past came to bite him in the ass. He was so lost in his thoughts he didn’t even hear Stan repeat his name. “Huh?”

“What’s going on?” Stan asked, his expression a little softer this time as he moved closer to Richie, a hand settling on his knee. At the action, Richie jumped a little and groaned internally, and Stan’s frown deepened. “Rich?”

There were a few reasons that Richie had chosen Stan out of all the losers to confide in about his internal problem. Not only was Stan a fantastic listener, but he was also honest and honesty was something Richie really needed at that moment. There was also the fact that Richie had a little bit more of a connection with Stan than he did with the rest of his friends, even though he loved them all dearly.

“Henry’s cousin is back in town,” Richie finally muttered, looking down at his lap. Stan had removed his hand from his knee and it was sitting on the bed a few inches away. Richie tried to ignore the way he wanted it to be back on his leg, grounding him. “Connor.”

“Okay?” Stan prompted, waiting for Richie to continue. When it was clear that it was going to take a little more than that, he sighed. “What about him? Did he bother you or something?”

Richie looked up then, his eyes wide behind his large glasses and shook his head, “No- No he didn’t bother me or anything.” He ran a hand through his hair. “He uh- he kissed me actually. Out back when I was having a smoke.” He looked down after the confession and then back up at Stan’s somewhat shocked expression. Yet, Richie wasn’t done. “He kissed me and…and I liked it.”

As he spoke, his thoughts drifted back to that moment an hour ago outside the arcade. He had seen Connor come in to the arcade, but had focused on his round of Street Fighter instead, trying not to bring any unwanted attention to himself, especially after what happened the last time. However, fate hadn’t been on his side, as Connor had approached him, starting up a casual conversation, asking him how he had been. Not wanting to be rude, Richie had replied and they ended up talking about a lot of things.

Then Richie had excused himself to go for a smoke, and a few minutes later before he had even lit up his cigarette, Connor was outside with him and they were kissing. It wasn’t even a gentle kiss at that, it was tongue, teeth and rather dirty, the two of them grinding against one another in the back of the alleyway outside the arcade.

To Richie, it felt good.

The only reason they parted was because of the sound of voices coming from inside the arcade, and the last thing they wanted was to be caught in a tryst with each other as Richie already had a reputation of being a faggot. If this got back to Henry about Connor being with Richie, the reactions would not be most welcome.

“Say something, Stan…” Richie whispered as the silence became too much to ignore. “I need you to say something, or do something because this silence is killing me.”

Stan blinked and ran a hand through his hair, “Is this your way of telling me you like boys?” He asked. “Because if you are then, Richie, it’s completely fine. You know that neither I nor anyone else would judge you for being gay or even bisexual.”

At the second word, Richie tilted his head to the side in confusion, “Bisexual?”

“You know, when someone likes both girls and boys? Bisexual. Bill’s uncle is bisexual, even though he’s with a man right now.” Stan explained and Richie’s jaw dropped a little. Everyone knew about Bill’s uncle James and how he had chosen to settle down with another man even though they couldn’t legally get married. Richie had no idea that he liked women too. “You didn’t know that was a thing?”

Slowly, Richie shook his head negative, “I- I didn’t know that was a thing; but Stan…I don’t think I’m attracted to women. In fact, I am definitely not attracted to women. I am very much attracted to men and I feel, fuck I don’t know how I feel.”

“Scared?” Stan offered, this time placing his hand over the top of Richie’s and immediately Richie felt a calmness wash over him and he relaxed into the bed. He felt a little pathetic being a seventeen year old boy, soothed by the touch of his closest, best friend. At that, Richie’s brain came to a halt and his heart made a little jump in his chest.

Oh. Oh fuck. He liked Stan.

“Yeah,” Richie croaked eventually, the realisation settling in his brain, making his normal strong voice weak and small. “Yeah, I’m scared Stan. Absolutely terrified.”

And Richie was.

* * * * *

It had been a week since Richie had come out to Stan, and at the same time realised that he had feelings for his best friend. In that week, Richie had not only avoided Stan, but the rest of the losers as well, which left everyone talking. For the most part, Richie managed to ignore it, but even he had to admit that he missed his friends….he missed Stan.

So a week after his confession, Richie found himself alone at the kissing bridge, legs dangling over the edge as he rested his chin on the wood. He held his dad’s pocket knife in his hand as he debated on whether or not to do what he had come all the way out here for. Before he could think about it further though, there was a new presence next to him.

Richie turned his head to the side and smiled a little as he realised it was Stan. “Hey,” he whispered, breaking the silence and Stan turned his head to face Richie, his eyebrow raised.

“Why have you been avoiding us?” Stan asked. He mentioned the other losers in his question, but Richie was no fool, he knew that Stan really wanted to know why Richie was avoiding him. “Is it because of what you told me last week? Because I told you Richie, that I don’t care who you like, you’ll always be my friend.”

At the word, Richie winced a little but nodded his head. “It’s not because of that, Stan. I mean- it kind of is but I haven’t been avoiding you because I think you think any less of me. I know you would be honest with me, which is one of the reasons why I came to you in the first place. That, and you’re my best friend.”

Stan smiled at that and they fell into a somewhat comfortable silence. The kissing bridge was a little far from town, so only occasionally a car would drive past. No-one really batted an eyelid at them though, since everyone knew that Richie and Stan were the best of friends.

“You know, what you did last week, telling me about Connor? That was really mature and brave of you Richie,” Stan whispered after a few more moments of silence. “I never thought I’d say that to you, but I mean it. I’m glad you told me.” Richie turned to look at Stan, sensing that there was something else his friend had to say. “I wanted to say this last week, but I’m not as brave as you so I chickened out.”

Richie raised his eyebrows in surprise and curiosity, tilting his head to the side, “What is it Stan the Man? Open up, tell me all your woes.”

“I like boys too,” Stan spoke quietly, his cheeks a little red. “I have known for a while though, but I was too scared to tell anyone. Until now. I guess I’m feeding off of your new found courage to speak the truth.”

Out of all the things that Richie thought Stan would say, this was not one of them. His jaw dropped a little and he stared at him, trying to figure out how he hadn’t realised before now. “You- you do?”

Stan nodded his head once and in another unexpected move, he reached over and laced his fingers with Richie’s, a bashful smile on his lips. Richie felt his cheeks heat up and he turned his head to look down at the water flowing under the bridge, trying to will himself to calm down. “We can’t do anything about this now, not while we’re still in Derry. If anyone finds out, we’ll both be dead.” Stan stopped and cleared his throat. “After we leave though, if you still feel the same, then maybe we can try?”

All Richie could do was nod his head. If need be, he’d wait a lifetime for Stanley Uris.

* * * * *

A choked sob escaped forty-year old Richie Tozier’s lips as he approached the kissing bridge, his body now free of the blood and grime that had covered him when he was down in the Sewers. They had done it, they had finally defeated the evil clown that had hunted them as children. They had defeated it and saved so many lives…but at what cost?

The cost of both Eddie Kaspbrak and Stanley Uris’ lives. A big price to pay, Richie would add bitterly.

Now that he was back in the cursed town he had grown up in, all the memories that had been covered over with a veil were now back at the front of his mind, making his chest and heart ache more that it had ever done in his whole life. How he remembered telling Stan he was gay, and then how Stan had told him he had feelings for him- in a very Stan way, of course.

How they had promised they would try once they’d gotten the hell out of Derry. Yet the second they both crossed the town lines, in completely different directions, all the memories of that promise had gone with the wind, trapped in the town of Derry. Now Richie had nothing but the distant memory of his best friend, etched as best as he could in the back of his mind. Another bitter thought entered Richie’s mind right at that moment. He never got to see what Stan looked like as an adult.

It was then, for the first time since he had given up in 1996, that Richie Tozier needed a cigarette.

#stozier #stozier fic #stanley uris #richie tozier #ours #by amy #ours: stozier #canon compliant #angst #coming out

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citialiin · 4 years

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THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm. tagged by: @forseenclade thank you ! man i am so bad at doing memes. tagging: @blossomingbeelzebug @zhrets @lupichorous @dansiere yayayayayayayaya

My muse is: canon / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated [ z/iggy stardust is DEFINITELY not my original character, but 683 is, and every single part of how i rp ziggy from his backstory to his personality was made up by me. that being said, ziggy is still a character that exists in media. ]

Is your character popular in the fandom? YES / NO. [ im pretty sure ziggy is tied with the thin white duke as one of b*wie’s most famous fictional personas? ]

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom? YES ? / NO / IDK.

Is your character considered strong in the fandom? YES / NO / IDK.

Are they underrated? YES / NO / IDK. [ maybe a little overrated ]

Were they relevant for the main story? YES / NO.

Were they relevant for the main character? YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG.

Are they widely known in their world? YES / NO.

How’s their reputation? GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL. [ celebrity rock god of limitless talent vs inevitable overrated washup. most celebrities are polarizing anyways ]

How strictly do you follow canon? — there isnt much canon to go off of i think? the album barely even states if ziggy is an alien and b*wie himself got really wishy washy about it (sometimes saying z is a human who was contacted by aliens, he was an alien himself, etc). i dont think we know anything about him besides what he looks like (red hair / weird eyes / pale / “well hung” lmao) and he has a band called the spiders from mars, he plays the guitar left handed, he’s bisexual + androgynous, and he’s charming and popular with the teens but inevitably is a victim of his own ego. and he dies. that too. but that’s literally it! we know Nothing else about him. so i filled in all the gaps because my brain has worms. theres a little bit of the story that verges on fantasy (that he’s some sort of messiah messenger for “the infinites,” whatever the fuck THAT means, david) so i nix that because i prefer hard scifi. and theres one BIG part that i just ... deleted out of his canon, in that the world is ending in 5 years in his timeline, and he’s like ... aware of this ? but that’s dumb and confusing. i legit dont care anymore. my OC now.

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals. — im so embarrassed i know i could be genuine and actually try but i have brain blockajjolajlakala33lak33klak333ak3jka3akjj323j3 i guess it’s like ... ziggy is truly the ultimate expression OF humanity because he reveals everything both wrong and right about the human condition, he literally embodies the best of humanity and the worst at the same time, he’s a really interesting critique on the idea of genuineness/earnestness vs commercalism in art, the perils of fame, and also how humans are so inherently corrupting? a lot of thematic stuff i like exploring is like what is innate to humans vs what is learned behavior, what are things that humans do naturally that ziggy mimics out of his desire to be like us? i think he has a really good story arc -- he went from being a literal nameless CLONE in a society full of pragmatic forward thinking science-oriented people to a sell out rockstar celebrity in a society of people that value individualism and self expression and art, but in the process completely lost his mind and himself and gave into the worst that humanity has to offer like rampant selfishness, drug abuse, self destructive tendencies, etc. characters changing is always interesting and ziggy truly changes for the worse -- but he is never just black and white, he was never good and then suddenly evil, he just was always the same person putting on different facades and trying to be himself by constructing an identity that maybe was who he wanted to be versus who he actually is. i dont know what im talking about. hes just an alien trying to be too hard to be human in all the wrong ways. i just like how “gray” ziggy is. he isnt good or bad, he can be very nice and he can be very mean, he’s overtly showboating confident but at the same time deeply afflicted with self-consciousness (why tf else would anyone be So obsessed with how they present themselves?). hes an icon of individualism but also commercialism. he’s freakishly alien but is almost more human than humans themselves. he struggles as lot in his head -- which makes for interesting writing, i guess !! Im so emabrrased im not going to go back and read what i wrote so if i typoed dont look at me

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?). — i think ziggy comes across as really mean and nothing else. his horrible bitchy rudeness comes across as hee hee hoo hoo sassy isnt he a rascal when it’s supposed to be more like ... he’s so far gone into the celebrity delusion he’s conflated aggressive rudeness with charmingness because no one told him otherwise and everyone worships him to the point where he’s just given into the delusion that he can do no wrong. i think theres the general simplification problem that happens with a lot of fictional characters, it’s easy to see him as just a whacky sassy glittery quirky rockstar when i guess it avoids the inherent tragedy of like ... everything else about him. his totally fake and false sense of identity built up from superficial things like fame and labels and stardom. maybe my version of ziggy is just too weirdly depressing and sad when i know his original iteration wasn’t quite so ... grim. im not very sure tbh.

What inspired you to rp your muse? — hmmm ... a lot of things! i just really got into b*wie stuff in early 2019, i’ve ALWAYS loved aliens and sci-fi, and i was really shocked that db sets up such great visual storytelling potential but does it through music. i just really liked ziggys “story” and i like any chance to think about aliens so i just got invested into piecing together a little backstory for him using, like, the cumulative knowledge of literally every other piece of science fiction ive ever consumed in my life. this was summer 2019 when i was making initial pitches for my thesis film, and so i just randomly decided to pitch “animated version of ziggy stardust” as one of the potential ideas. shockingly everyone liked it a lot and so did my professor who thought it was really cool, and then i just ended up sticking with the character and working on him for an entire year. ziggy became my hobby but also my homework. he was such a fun character because everything about him was interesting to me and i had just enough source material to have a starting point but so much room to take him in any direction i wanted to.

What keeps your inspiration going? — honestly, yooooou guyssssss. i have some really amazing fwends that ive met thru here .... and some of our dumb stupid stories have literally become NOVEL length. it just self generates inspiration because you realize the limitless amount of stories you could tell with this one single character when your character enters his story or he enters their story and etc. etc. ive drawn endless amounts of comics and stuff for him ... ziggy is just so endlessly interesting ... cringe be cringed bro but recently (i know this sounds dumb bear with me or die.) ive kind of realized a lot of how i rp z comes as some metaphor for the experience of being an asian immigrant/being asian in the US -- his home “culture” is a lot stricter than the rampant selfish individualism of the usa (he only lives in the uk and usa, so he thinks the whole planet is like this), he’s dissuaded from standing out from his community and his selfishness becomes a community burden rather than a personal flaw, and when he does come to earth, he goes through such awful culture shock, literally nothing makes sense to him and everything is Different. and while some things are different in a Nice way, something things are different in an Awful way, and he’s given the option between losing his true personal identity as an atominan and giving it up to be a human. the allure of being a human is a little too much but losing yourself like this is traumatic, in a way. obvs like ... a little silly and definitely not something that i actively intended to put into his story arc, its just something that fell into place cuz i guess i worked so closely with my own personal experiences and feelings of “alienation” (pun intended) to try to understand how he would feel being a literal alien an shid. its cathartic to write about him. but he also has a lot of my own personal interests just thrown in -- 70s fashion, scifi, science, tryhard implications about human nature, art history, whatever dumb nonsense i get into

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice? YES / NO / SOMETIMES?

Do you frequently write headcanons? YES / NO [ i would prefer information to spring up organically in the story but cuz threads always get dropped i end up just telling people outright. i didnt want anyone to know his home planet/his old name but barely anyone writes enough with ziggy to get to that point to reveal it (i legit managed to do it organically Once) so i just had to write it in a post lmao orz ]

Do you sometimes write drabbles? YES / NO [ wrote a ton of drabbles ! drew a ton of comics! ]

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day? YES / NO

Are you confident in your portrayal? YES / NO / I DUNNO?

Are you confident in your writing? YES / HAHA NO.

Are you a sensitive person? YES / NO. / IDK ?

Do you accept criticism well about your portrayal? — definitely! like i said ... my version of ziggy ended up being the protag of my thesis film and for 1 yr straight his characterization, backstory, design, and even how i wanted to animate his fucking movements (ziggy stardust timing charts.) were beaten to death in a classroom environment, torn apart and rebuilt into something better. had i stayed with what i originally wanted to go with, ziggy would be so different than how i write him 2day. amazingly my pre production professor is a literal two time emmy award winning storyboard artist and animator so he definitely helped me design him (my version of ziggy is meant for ... a cartoon, obviously, not real life) and give him a better backstory? and my post production professor is a retired disney animator who worked on hercules and a bunch of old disney channel shows? had i gone wah wah wah i dont want to hear ur critiques i wouldnt have made him better. if you ever think ziggy seems inconsistent or poorly written ... tell me !! i literally major in ... animation. cartoons. entertainment. my job is to entertain you. if you are not entertained, there is a problem. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED ????

Do you like questions, which help you explore your character? — I LOVE QUESTIONS? i love ... answering questions ... if you ask me something ill come kiss you.

If someone disagrees to a headcanon of yours, do you want to know why? — sure! i dont know why that would happen, though, because i mean ... he’s an OC. but i gues someone could be like “i feel like this is incongruous to things you’ve previously established in his character” or somethin

If someone disagrees with your portrayal, how would you take it? — i feel like a lot of b*wie stans would find my version of ziggy weird but i mean thats fine! i guess my goal is to have a well written character, not necessarily an accurate version of ziggy

If someone really hates your character, how do you take it? — if you hate MY version of ziggy thats fine but if u hate ziggy stardust in general (like the bowie concept) then u need some taste what the fuck is cooler than a egomaniac genderless bisexual rockstar alien with red hair? nothing. go back to watching your CW shows you dirty filthy normie

Are you okay with people pointing out your grammatical errors? — yes! dm me though. dont clown me on the dash like that. i usually write your replies 12 AM - 4 AM so it’s expected.

Do you think you are easy going as a mun? — hmmm ... maybe! i do like to talk to people and i am VERY nice, trust me, if youre ever sad ill do everything i can to make you feel better. but im quiet! i dont really reach out to people and i tend to just keep to myself. im not very social or extroverted at all haha i barely can make ooc posts without feeling like god’s coming to beat my head in with a brick. im sitting here at 5:30 AM with this meme feeling like if i post it i will die (BUT I MUST)

#a lot of it is under the readmore because these always get so long and mine is long long long long long long long long long long long #ooc #KEEP YOUR 'LECTRIC EYE ON ME ; queue #and thakn you for tagging me ! i like to mkae Words

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soprone · 5 years

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Some notes on my characterisation of Teddie

retreading some old ground from previous blogs but hopefully it’s better than before because i’m always getting better grasps on my muses as time goes on so pwease read with an open mind .✫*ﾟ･ﾟ

So while my characterisation is mostly based on the english localisation of the games and anime because that’s what i’m most familiar with, i feel like teddie comes across differently than may have been intended due to dub changes. i kind of viewed him the way i do when i first played, learning about the dub changes mostly just confirmed some things about my interpretation. like of course i changed my mind about some things but so you know where I’m coming from

So something that didn’t translate very well was Teddie’s humor. He’s constantly making bad jokes that the rest of the Investigation Team doesn’t respond to. This isn’t because they’re uncomfortable with his jokes, even when they’re a bit perverted. He’s not a jerk who keeps making bad jokes that make people uncomfortable, and the Investigation Team aren’t jerks for not explaining to Teddie that it’s not okay or anything, since he’s new to human customs. It’s because he’s looking to bring others into his comedy routine with any kind of reaction, positive or negative, and the only way to discourage him is to not respond. When someone makes a bad pun, groaning and complaining about it is part of the humor they’re going for. It’s like that.

The reason this was translated poorly is because Teddie was specifically mimicking a Japanese comedy style. I kinda always saw it as dad jokes kind of humor, but learning about the original intentions made it click.

This isn’t to say Teddie never does anything perverted. Almost, honestly maybe every, Persona male acts like a pervert, contrives scenarios to provide fanservice to the player/viewer, sexually harrasses female characters for comedy or just because the writers think it’s normal. What I’m saying is, this isn’t a Teddie problem. It’s a Persona problem. I’m not excusing his actions but I don’t think he should be held to a different standard than other characters who do the exact same things. I also really hate when people call Chie (and/or the other girls) an abuser because she physically hurts the boys, because again that’s not a Chie (or other girl) problem, it’s a Persona problem with how the comedy tries to be this slapstick thing on occasion. Like I hope where I’m coming from makes sense when I say that?? No I’m not say it’s okay for Teddie to try to grope Rise, or for Chie to kick Yosuke, and similar moments. I’m acknowledging that these moments are part of the game’s humor, they’re anime characters engaging in anime nonsense in an 11 year old game. It’s bad faith criticism to judge a single piece of media or a single character by ignoring the tone of the work they’re in, holding them to the standards of the real world and also ignoring the same problems exist within similar works (for example w/ persona 4 you need to consider it within the context of other anime, other video games, all forms of media that may have directly influenced it, the state of the world (politically & pop culture wise) at the time (2008), etc., persona 4 does not exist in a vaccumn) and that exist in other characters within the same work. It’s not helpful in explaining why their behaviour and/or why making light of it/normalising it can be harmful because you aren’t examining why it’s written the way it is. Oof this bullet point got long sorry

Teddie’s character arc is not linear. He doesn’t consistently get better, and he is in fact at his most obnoxious in my opinion during the Yasogami High Culture Festival. Since his arc is about maturity, this is like his ‘rebellious stage’ where he’s a brat before growing up more, after having grown up a lot in the months before the festival. However, I can’t accept his characterisation in Persona Q. He’s pushed too far and ‘flanderized’ ike a lot of the Persona characters are in spinoffs. I adore his group date marriage event (&accept him believing he fell for the protag at first sight as a headcanon (it’s just a crush, not ‘true love’/’destiny’, though)), think the love potion quest where he downs some love potion believing it will make girls love him only to fall for Akihiko is hilarious, but that’s about it. I haven’t finished Persona Q2, but his characterization in that game is a lot better from what I’ve seen.

I believe that Teddie went through the events of Persona 4 believing that when the investigation was over, he was ‘supposed’ to go live in the midnight channel permenantly and say goodbye to his friends. A lot of his antics during the year are him pushing for some cliche high school fun experiences in order to make some memories to hold onto (he’s kind of like a player avatar in that way ?? this kind of thing is why the latest 3 Persona games are set during high school over just one year, right??). His perverted antics can be explained with the idea that he doesn’t actually expect any of these girls to fall in love with him, if he wants anything he wants a movie-style ‘summer romance’ so he doesn’t really take them / flirting with them seriously (I’m not justifying it, only providing a possible explanation). He may have just gotten lonely and came back to visit anyway, but his intention really was to leave the human world for good at the end of the game. It’s only when the IT laugh off the suggestion that he realises he was the only one who believed this, that they really think of him as part of the team and weren’t just humoring him this whole time.

I headcanon that his perception of his friends changes and he starts to respect them (+Yosuke’s wallet) better over time after this. It’s gradual (old habits die hard!) but noticable if you pay attention. Naoto notices his maturing during the game, she’d probably be the first to catch on.

He’s bisexual and nonbinary. Though, his feelings on gender maybe can’t be compared to a normal human, he takes on an androgynous male body because he wants to be loved rather than because he feels like a man, dresses as a girl because again he wants to feel pretty and loved rather than because he feels like a woman... In Persona Q2 he volunteers himself and Chie for the power team despite struggling to lift the weights that team needs to, because Chie is insecure about being the only girl on the team and he wants to comfort her. So he’s not exactly bigender or gender fluid, he’s nonbinary and presents whichever way feels right at the time, and what feels right is based less on his own feelings and more what will hopefully make him loved or sometimes help/comfort his friends? He did not grow up like a human in a society of binary gender, it honestly doesn’t mean much to him.

He believes Kanji is attracted to him (which I see as untrue aha I sort of ship it but if he’s got a crush it’s not in the way Teddie thinks), &mimics Yosuke’s attitude about it, not seriously scared of him being predatory or anything (not realising the problem w/ Yosuke’s homophobic comments, which Yosuke quietly gets over later &is probably embarrassed about his own behaviour so he’s not gonna explain), just thinking it’s a funny way of teasing him, seeing Kanji denying him (or not knowing what the fuck Tedd’s talking about) as being tsundere. I feel like this would die down as he gets older

His one-sided rivalry with Akihiko in the Q games (ahh I know they have a hostile relationship in the Arena games but I haven’t played them so don’t know if I wanna make that canon to my Tedd, it seems like they’re too hostile) is because Akihiko is hot, has lots of fangirls, but it’s not just jealousy, he’s swooning too

I think he flirts with Goro in PQ2 because he’s told Goro is a detective prince like Naoto, it’s kinda similar to Akihiko, he follows the crowd and fangirls too. But also, Goro is a Wildcard, he doesn’t know it at this point but he may subconsciously sense it? I’ve always headcanoned him having an attraction to Wildcards, of course the P4 protag is his #1 but he’s pretty flirty with the others in the Q games

that’s it for now because this has gotten SO long, if you made it this far I love you. if you didn’t i still love you because i love humanity as a whole but i’m a little disappointed because i crave attention not gonna lie.

#teddie—isms #headcanon #about

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sassysnowperson · 5 years

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Total Words Posted 2018: 269,752!

Total Works: 64 works in 3 fandoms (sorta, it was all Star Wars and then I wrote one crossover fic that was Not Star Wars At All and picked up the other two) with 40 different pairings.

As compared to last years: 253,511 words, 25 works, 3 fandoms, 8 different pairings.

Compare/Contrast between this year and the last: Roughly the same wordcount! SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT pairing and work count! I remain Mostly Stuck in Star Wars Land.

Major thing I learned this year: My range! This year I wrote fics from 500 words to over 50k, with wildly different genres, focuses, and narrative goals. In this, I feel like I have to talk about Stone and Sand, my first novel-length fic that is actually one coherent story. Knowing I can do that was...huge, and it’s also the fic I’ve done some of the most worldbuilding on. It’s made me grow as a writer, and I’m tremendously chuffed by it.

Also! I did my first exchange! Now that I’m more aware of exchange culture it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts things.

How I did on my Goals for Last Year: My goal was to write shorter pieces, and I DID! I wrote 27 works that were just around 500 words! I feel like I got better at distilling a scene.

Goals for the Coming Year: Go back to my ongoing series. I hope to update Bodhi Lives (I have...two stories I can tell before IX comes out and I need to figure out how much I’m going to stick to canon in the future universe). I also hope to work on a MASSIVE modern AU that I’ve been picking at, actually get that out into the universe. I’ve also discovered I really enjoy writing fic as gifts, so probably spacing out the longer series with shorter gift works. We shall see.

Under the readmore is a round-up of the fics I wrote in 2018, divided by fandom, then series, and if they’re not in a series, by event, and if none of the above apply, by ship or main characters.

l don’t have a good statistic to sum it up, but the widening and deepening of my fandom friendships has been a continuing joy. Thank you all for being a part of that!

If you’ve been reading my work, talk to me!

What’s been a favorite story? Most unexpected? What was the first thing of mine you read? What are you hoping I’ll write more of in 2019?

Note: Titles are links to the series and works.

Star Wars - New Series

Stone and Sand Verse (Bodhi and Luke’s relationship in a universe where both Bodhi and Jedha live, Bodhi/Luke - 69,410 words)

Stone and Sand - (Bodhi/Luke) (52,318 words) - Bodhi goes back to Jedha, Luke tags along, a love story between two people and a place.

Coming Flood - (Bodhi/Luke) (859 words) - Established Relationship fluff, with some political worldbuilding on the side.

Different Deserts - (Luke & Rey) (15022 words) - Luke goes to Jakku to find a Sith artifact, and he finds a bit more than he expected.

For Those that Read Stone and Sand - A meta for the series, explaining the setup I worked out for how the canon diverged, and some of Bodhi and Luke’s backstory.

Lyra Lives (An AU take on what would have happened if Lyra Erso had decided to stay with Jyn at the start of Rogue One - In Progress, 48,315 words at the end of 2018)

Troublesome as Ever - (Jyn & Lyra Erso, Lyra Erso/Galen Erso) (17189 words) - A retelling of Rogue One, with an alive Lyra Erso.

Traitors and Liars - (Galen Erso & Cassian Andor) (2515 words) - Galen and Cassian have a conversation about the whole ‘That one time I tried to kill you’ thing.

Critical Flaws - (Galen Erso/Lyra Erso/Bodhi Rook) (In progress - 28611 words as of the end of 2018)

Modern Pilots (Poe/Luke as airline pilots, good friends, casual lovers, and maybe something more? - 22,396 words)

Eight Hours to O’Hare - (Poe/Luke) (7335 words) - After eight solid hours of sass from his mouthy first officer, Captain Luke Skywalker takes Poe back to the hotel for a very thorough dressing-down.

Six Hours to La Guardia - (Poe/Luke) (15061 words) - The prequel to the above, showing the first time Poe and Luke spent some time together. You can honestly read these in either order, but this was the order they were written in.

Star Wars - Continuing Series (Started in Prior Years)

Merrick/Draven (Antoc Merrick, fighter pilot, and Davits Draven, spy, are fighting the same war in very different ways - 8,077 words in total)

Who Pays the Cost - (Merrick/Daven & Cassian) (500 words) - Merrick, Draven, and the problem of child soldiers. (Seriously, good Lord Star Wars, there are so many child soldiers in your universe!)

Time Enough for Mourning - (Merrick/Draven) (2191 words) - Sorrow, Joy, and what happens to Draven after Merrick meets his canonical fate during Rogue One.

And in the Morning, Joy - (Merrick/Draven) (1988 words) - I made myself sad so I had to go write a fix-it. Merrick, Draven, and what happens to them during ANH when Merrick does NOT meet his canonical fate.

What We Know - (Merrick/Draven) (2352 words) - The spy and the flyboy consider life after war, and when exactly a war ends.

Bodhi Lives Short Stories (technically two different series because I have DREAMS of expanding and discussing further, but I’m not there yet)

Impending Demise - (Bodhi & K-2SO) (832 words) - Bodhi and Kay play chess.

No Better Plans - (Bodhi & K-2SO) (497 words) - In another universe, Bodhi and Kay become pirates. This one has art because I fell in love with the image of Bodhi with gold and purple hair.

Choices and Changes (My sprawling Modern AU, featuring cops turned nurses and gangsters turned cops, in 2018 I wrote some short stories to better fill in the universe)

Impatience - (Bodhi/Cassian) (1742 words) - A lazy, suggestive morning in bed. There is no sex. This is the most overtly sexual thing I have written that does not actually include any sex.

Friends and Lovers - (Bodhi/Cassian, Background Ahsoka/Padme) (6846 words) - Cassian tells Bodhi a story about what happened during their years apart.

Favorite Cover - (Bodhi/Cassian) (490 words) - Bodhi and Cassian make out in a closet...to maintain their cover, of course.

Year after Year - (Ahsoka/Padme) (500 words) - I loved them so much I had to write their story too, framed through Christmases together.

Star Wars: Events

February Ficlet Challenge - write a different pairing for every day in February! (Note, where appropriate, I grouped the ficlets with their appropriate series, instead of here, though this link will take you to the entire series page)

Additional Note: Each of these ficlets is right about 500 words, so I will not be including a wordcount.

Nightmare Scenario - (Luke/Bodhi) - No power, no heat, Luke and Bodhi stuck in the black.

Good and Bright - (Cassian/Jyn) - Some nights, Cassian trusts Jyn to take control.

The Things You Miss - (Obi-Wan/Chirrut/Baze) - Masquerades are an interesting opportunity.

Knock-Off Jedi - (Cassian/Luke) - They’re about the same height, and Cassian has cause to regret this.

Strange Customs - (Kes/Shara) - What happens to an accidental marriage trope when the people are already married?

Kiss the Sky - (Antoc Merrick/Luke Skywalker) - Merrick, an innocent bystander, gets pulled into the younger pilot’s initiation rituals.

Easy Mark - (Bodhi/Jyn) - Bodhi’s still not sure if Jyn likes him or just thinks he’s an easy mark.

Pebble - (Lyra/Galen) - Superpowered / Fantasy AU, Krennic makes a play for Galen, and very much underestimates Lyra.

Out of Turn - (Leia/Bodhi) - The Death Star is a horrible thing thing to share, but they share it.

Kitchenette - (Wedge/Mon) - They find their peace with each other.

Gentle Grace - (Leia/Amilyn) - There’s not much room for softness in Leia’s life anymore.

Where Did You Get A Ring? - (Wedge/Cassian) - A fake engagement makes for a pretty good cover.

A Pilot First - (Wedge/Poe) - Wedge is a senator now, and there are precious few people in his life that see him as a pilot first.

Explain This to Me - (Obi-Wan/Owen/Beru) - There’s a bleeding man on Beru’s couch, and she would really like to know why.

A Fine Distraction - (Biggs/Bodhi) - After Scarif and the Battle of Yavin, Bodhi and Biggs carry similar scars.

Newest Muse - (Cassian/Poe/Bodhi) - Artist!AU, Bodhi tries his best to steal C. Andor’s newest muse.

Stranger while Slouching - (Wedge/Leia) - Wedge isn’t sure what Leia looks like when she’s actually relaxed.

A Gentle Man - (Bail/Obi-Wan) - Their time together is a fiction, but it’s a fiction they both enjoy tremendously.

To Better Memories - (Wedge/Bodhi) - They experienced the same Empire, very differently.

Teeth Aren't Supposed to Ache - (Bodhi/Galen) - Bodhi gets the flu.

Supposed to be Romantic - (Biggs/Luke) - Luke really doesn’t understand the concept of picnics.

Mine to Claim - (Cassian/Leia) - Fairytale AU, The Princess is in the tower, but nobody is expecting the spy.

Tell Me a Secret - (Wedge/Luke) - Wedge, Luke, and secrets shared through the years.

Star Wars Rare Pairs Exchange - a gift exchange for lesser-written Star Wars Pairings, aka a two-month BLITZ of writing A LOT OF FIC (October and November).

A Body of Unanswered Questions - (Davits Draven/Mon Mothma) (770 words) - Mostly featuring Draven’s existential crisis, also featuring smut.

A Series of Better Decisions - (Padmé Amidala/Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker) (9,211 words) - Revenge of the Sith is less tragedy and more comedy, because Anakin Skywalker is less evil and more of just…a disaster bisexual.

Beyond the Clouds - (Lando Calrissian/Biggs Darklighter/Luke Skywalker) (23277 words) - Luke and Lando are both reeling from the events of ESB, but are slowly building something with each other. The news that Biggs Darklighter, Luke’s childhood love, is alive is amazing news, but it does make their relationship more complicated.

Bury Your Heart - (Leia Organa/Han Solo/Wedge Antilles) (9051 words) - Leia’s heart is torn between her duty and her love, and agrees to an arranged marriage for the sake of Alderaan’s survivors. To her surprise, her old friend Wedge Antilles is on the list of acceptable candidates.

Decent Organics - (Cassian Andor/K-2SO, Lando Calrissian/L3-37) (2541 words) - Snarky droids, and the organics that love them. L3-37 is trying to get under Cassian’s skin, and Cassian enjoys it tremendously.

Hang With You for a Minute - (Bodhi Rook/Luke Skywalker) (3883 words) - Bodhi is trying to get away from a clingy ex-boyfriend, and asks a random adorable blond for help.

Heat Heals - (Finn/Luke Skywalker) (2002 words) - Two kind people find a bit of comfort in each other, and also discuss the cultural construction of the idea of attraction.

Reckless Idiot - (Wedge Antilles/Tycho Celchu) (1530 words) - Semi-Public sex with some Power Dynamics…and also a lot of emotions about pilot lifespans and the worthwhile but difficult reality of love during wartime.

The Survivor - (Cassian Andor/Shara Bey/Kes Dameron) (13,667 words) - Shara Bey drags Cassian off of Scarif, much to his chagrin. And then she and Kes decide to look after Cassian, as they don’t trust him to look after himself.

Waystation - (Poe Dameron/Bodhi Rook) (12,763 words) - Pre-TFA, Poe Dameron’s ship gets…a little bit damaged, and he has to pull into a space station. The mechanic there has a familiar name. It’s on the tip of his tongue. Maybe something out of the stories Mama told him - daring heroes up against impossible odds.

Star Wars - Standalone Fics By Pairing

Bodhi/Wedge

Not Too Much - (4625 words) - Wedge is convinced that he is probably not the best person to be in a relationship with.

Future on the Other Side - (1084 Words) - After Endor, Bodhi and Wedge find each other.

Bodhi/Luke

Kissing Strangers - (1662 words) - Modern AU, Luke regrets helping Leia with her art project.

Good Books and Goodbyes - (807 words) - Reading is distracting, much to Bodhi’s amusement.

Bodhi/Cassian

Force of Nature - (241 words) - Cassian was a force of nature when he kissed.

Bail/Breha/Obi-Wan

Wisdom of the Queen - (1123 words) - Breha decides to spend the day in bed.

Bodhi/Jyn

Alone and Otherwise - (3201 words) - Jyn isn’t sure how to let anyone in, anymore.

Luke/Wedge

Marriage, and Other Unorthodox Solutions - (29,541 words) - Luke is ready to give up on the college of his dreams, because his aunt and uncle couldn’t afford tuition. Wedge has a different, slightly unorthodox, solution...

Bodhi/Han

Sit Down and Buckle Up - (2538 words) - When Han Solo finds himself hit over the head with a blackjack he's got no choice but to turn the piloting of his precious Falcon over to one Bodhi Rook. Bodhi, it turns out, is a very good pilot. Han, it turns out, is really into that.

Gen/Humor Fics

The Glorious Ascension of Emperor Solo - (2170 words) - Han Solo agrees to use the Falcon as prisoner transport, and everything goes horribly wrong...or right, depending on your point of view.

The Definitive Guide to Galactic Wildlife - (1345 words) - K-2SO, who is Clearly an Expert on Organic Creatures, provides the definitive guide to wildlife in the Galaxy Far Far Away.

Shout out to My ONE AND ONLY Non-Star Wars Fic!

Diana Prince (Wonder Woman) / Evey Carnahan (The Mummy)

Set and Osiris - (3313 words) - Evy Carnahan and Diana Prince meet in an abandoned Egyptian temple. It is most unexpected.

OH MY GOODNESS THAT WAS SO MANY LINKS. My hands ache. My eyes are blurry.

If you actually read this far, know that I appreciate you, so much, and wish you all the best. *blows kisses*

#fanfiction year in review #fanfiction year in review 2018 #long post #long post for ts #fic talk #my fic #I always appreciate looking back and seeing what I've done #It's good to take a moment of reflection

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vintagegeekculture · 7 years

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Dead Fandoms, Part 3

Read Part One of Dead Fandoms here.

Read Part Two of Dead Fandoms here.

Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.

Mists of Avalon

Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out.

Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it. Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.

Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr is at it again.”

Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.” It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women, who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and Morrigan.

This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.

Robotech

I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away. Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older, teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different world.

Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans: there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz.

However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60 episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.” The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes, and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.

The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.

Legion of Super-Heroes

Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as “Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.”

I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera for nerds. The book is about attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay. The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time, where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.

Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for weird sex...and not much else.”

LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny. This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiest fandom of all time. You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.

For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.

Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller, but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in comics history.

If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.

It helped that the boundary between fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were running the asylum.

Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board...but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling rewards a long term reader.

This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This is amazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It’s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie.

Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men. Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan” comic.

The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties, but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.

Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and minutiae (and to jack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea. You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property, the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over and over and over until there was nothing at all left.

E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels

The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of.

I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this. Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the 30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from different alien species, and space marines in power armor.

My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:

The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer, Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.

Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way, he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor, Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like planet of selfish cowards.

The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned into a vacuum tube.

It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance. While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series never recovered from the spirit of that decade.

Prisoner of Zenda

Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller.

The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.

Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.”

One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.

A. Merritt

Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s?

If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong - it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.

Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that...” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality.

That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?

#fandom history #lensman #robotech #prisoner of zenda #mists of avalon

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fy-soukoku · 7 years

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hiiiii!! i was wondering... why exactly do u love soukoku so much??? i love them too! and when i see ur posts they make me feel rlly happy! but i recently read someone's post saying they thought soukoku's partnership was toxic & unbalanced & i was just ???? like ?? ??? i mean i can get why they think that (we've gotten like,, 0 canon information on them when they were partners) but what about how well they work together? the amount of trust we've seen? idk man it just made me feel a bit ://

I am so sorry you saw that! Honestly, I don’t understand why people feel the need to post ship hate?? Like, it makes other people happy, do you really need to be that petty? Some people are just… stupid. And annoying. And very immature. I am so sorry :(

Here’s why I love Soukoku, my friends.

Well, I loved Chuuya at first sight. And when he showed the audience that he could one-up Dazai like that if he wanted to, I knew that there was some good chemistry there. Maybe not shippy, at least not for me, but it was getting there.

And then Dazai responds in turn, countering Chuuya’s quips and attacks with such familiarity that you have to wonder how well they know each other. Even fighting, they work fluidly, guessing the other’s attack before it can even start. I love that dynamic, because it shows how well they know each other. Inside and out, even if they deny it.

But I suppose that I really fell in love with it at about this point:

More specifically, the smile that Dazai has on when Chuuya passes out.

I know everyone screams over the fact that he finds his clothes and folds them all up, but there’s something so tender about this moment that gets me every time.

More so because he acts so… I don’t, disgusted by Chuuya for most of the time. From what we’ve seen of Dazai, if he approves of you, you’re going to know. I mean, Atsushi knows when Dazai approves. Hell, Akutagawa knows that Dazai doesn’t hate him.

But he continues to tell Chuuya that he dislikes him, is tired of him, doesn’t want to work with him, when we all know very well that if Dazai doesn’t want to do anything, he doesn’t want to do it.

And I think that just shows he really does care about Chuuya? Because just… the way he acts around him. When Chuuya doesn’t really seem to notice, Dazai looks so fond of him, like he’s something to be treasured. And when Chuuya does notice, you have moments like this:

and this:

Which looks less like purposefully being an ass just to hurt Chuuya and more of a, “Wow, you look cute when you’re angry or when you make that face so I’m going to provoke you in the only way I know how because I don’t want you to know I still care about you.”

And then on Chuuya’s side, we have moments like this:

You can’t see Chuuya’s face in this gif, but just how… terrified he looks? Like losing Dazai is more than losing a partner. Like losing a lover almost.

Because the absolute trust and respect that Chuuya obviously has for Dazai still remains, even if Dazai is a supposed traitor. Which gets me thinking, even if he is sour about Dazai leaving the Port Mafia, maybe it hit a little closer to home than that?

Whether they were close friends, (I doubt it) or actually lovers, it would hurt for someone as close to you as Dazai to not only abandon you, but blow up your car, as if it’s all a joke.

Which explains why Chuuya is so mad at Dazai. Why he wants to kill him. Because Dazai broke his heart. He ripped him up, but Chuuya would still trust him with his life. He is still everything to Chuuya. He’s his partner, his childhood friend, and maybe even his lover. (Side note: I headcanon both Chuuya and Dazai as bisexual.)

Which leaves a messy history behind. One where Dazai has hurt Chuuya more than anyone. Where Chuuya is trying to move on, but he can’t. That’s what gets me hooked on Soukoku - they’re both trying to pull away, but they’re so obviously drawn to each other. This has an opportunity to portray how healthy communication and overcoming your own personal boundaries can improve your relationships. For example, Dazai choosing Chuuya over death. Or me choosing this blog, my writing, over my mental disorders.

And writing them trying to repair their relationship? I’m telling you, I have a 11k WIP fic about them repairing their relationship, and I have to stop and cry because the raw emotion that can be so portrayed in their relationship is heartbreaking.

Plus, you’re right, we didn’t get a lot of canon content for their relationship. So their previous dynamic is totally up to your interpretation. And the tension that boils between them feels like a little more than just friendship. (Don’t even get me started on how Chuuya knows full well when Dazai is manipulating him, can read his thoughts and intentions, but lets him go through with it anyway.

My favourite interpretation of soukoku is Friends With Benefits, but both with deeper feeling they’re in denial of, and eventually overcoming their own personal barriers to be able to love each other in a kind and supportive way. A logical, but meaningful, relationship between two people. One of whom needs to find his true value in this world, and the other who wants to be that value, but isn’t sure where to start.

So, speaking as someone who uses BSD ships and characters as a way to cope myself: Screw those haters! Soukoku is a wonderful ship! All ships are amazing! You keep loving what you want to love!

#bungou stray dogs #soukoku #nakahara chuuya #osamu dazai #bsd #meta

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thestuckylibrary-bigbang · 7 years

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Part Two

This post contains works from sbb2017 that are alternate universe rather than canon compliant. It has the following categories:

Historical AU

Kid Fic

Magical Realism

Misc. No Powers AU

Modern Veteran AU

Neighbours AU

Sci-Fi

Take a look at the amazing works contributors have made!

Also check out Canon ‘Verse | AU Part One | AU Part Three | Masterpost

Historical AU

A Kiss Through A Veil by princeofprinces (tumblr)

Rating: E

Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death

Words: 27K

Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers

Tags: Alternate Universe - Renaissance, Alternate Universe - Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Romani Bucky, Trans Male Character, Anal Sex, Oral Sex, Torture, Abusive Parents, Racism

Summary: “Don’t be afraid.” The performer knelt next to the pillory and removed his red shawl from his shoulders, using it to wipe away the tomato and egg mixture that had dried on Estienne’s cheek. “I’m sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Art by rancorousrocker

Art by juliabizarre

Anatomy of a Scandal by Rena (AO3 | Tumblr)

Artists: @theprinceofprinces Art Post

@king-of-moose Art Post

Rating: E

No Archive Warnings Apply

Pairings: Steve Rogers/James “Bucky” Barnes

Characters: Steve Rogers, James “Bucky” Barnes, Sam Wilson, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Peggy Carter, Angie Martinelli, Arnim Zola

Tags: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Alternate Universe - Regency, Mutual Pining, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers

Summary: When Steve Rogers returns to Brooklyn, the marriage arranged for him having proven to be a sham, he is desperate; desperate to regain his footing in Society, desperate to secure a wealthy spouse capable of paying the costly treatments that keep his mother alive and settling his family’s debts. But how is he to do that when people view him as nothing more than damaged goods, someone to be sneered at, ridiculed, looked down upon, or pitied at best?

An opportunity presents itself when Lord Barnes, the renowned carefree Casanova of Brooklyn, forgets himself during one night of drunken stupor, sending Steve a letter that flouts all laws of common decency. An agreement is soon made: in return for Steve’s discretion, Lord Barnes will pretend to court him, taking him to the most fancy events of the season where Steve can be introduced to potential suitors. It all works out perfectly, until Steve comes to understand that Lord Barnes is not as pompous and self-absorbed as he believed….

“I won’t let go (at any price)” by @fuckyfarnes

Rating: M

Words:32k

Archive Warnings: None Apply

Tags:Alternate Universe - 1980s, Drag Queens ball culture HIV/AIDS, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence, Gay Bashing, Gay Rights, Original Character Death(s, )Major Original Character(s), Eventual Romance, Slow Burn, Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Self-Acceptance, Implied Sexual Content, Self-Discovery, references to the get down

Summary:

It's the summer of 1981 in New York and Bucky is trying, really trying. He's working hard as a line cook to support himself and struggling to stay in contact with his sister in L.A., all while fighting to suppress his sexuality. He meets Stevie that summer and falls into the world he's been hiding from his entire life; enter ball culture, new wave music, and Aqua Net. Through music, self expression, and Stevie, Bucky finds the freedom that comes with self acceptance. In the midst of it all, the AIDS epidemic breaks out and with it comes a surge in the persecution of the LGBT community. Nothing is easy, and the cost of being yourself is high.

Art by @stuckypocketguide

swallows still sing by icoulddothisallday

Rating: M

Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Words: 54k

Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes

Tags: Holocaust, Period Typical Attitudes, Religious Themes, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Medical Experimentation, Loss of Limb, Family Separation, Death of a Family Member, PTSD

Summary:

They move through the doorway and the sun hits Bucky’s face. His eyes flinch closed involuntarily, but the warmth on his face is more than enough. There’s a breeze too, the freshest air Bucky has breathed in months. It’s chaos outside, a clamor of voices in languages both familiar and foreign. Bucky is glad to ignore it, glad to trust that the Captain will take him to safety. He dares to open his eyes. Everything is fuzzy around the edges, like a waking dream.

On April 29th, 1945, US forces liberate the concentration camp Dachau. But Captain Steve Rogers and his Howling Commandos have a more specific mission - the rescue and rehabilitation of prisoners experimented on by Arnim Zola, among them, a man named Bucky.

In light of recent events in Charlottesville and the political climate of the US right now, I want to quote Elie Weisel, a Holocaust survivor who told us, “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Art abd banner by @stuckypocketguide and Art by ewburnthatshit

The North Star by littleblackfox @thelittleblackfox

Rating: E Warning: Graphic Depiction of Violence Words: 60k Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanov & Clint Barton Tags: Alternate Universe - Pirate, Romani Bucky, Swashbuckling, Historical AU, Because I didn’t suffer enough last time, Adventure on the High Seas, Mutual Pining, Fluff, Smut, Angst, Slow Burn, I will quite literally go down with this ship, Brief mentions of torture, Swordfighting, Brock Rumlow gets stabbed, It’s Pirates okay there’s going to be blood and guts, But also whales and manta rays, and beach sex

Summary:

“I heard rumour that William Fly is swinging from a gibbet in Boston harbour. They say the age of piracy is ending,” Steve utters softly, rubbing the tip of his thumb across his lower lip. Sam glances at him. “You got plans to retire, Cap? Find a nice little beach in the Indies and a good supply of rum? Couple of pretty girls in grass skirts to dance for you.” “Sam,” Steve mumbles, covering his face with his hand. “I’m sorry, a couple of pretty boys?” Sam grins wickedly. “Sam!” Steve looks scandalised, which gets him nothing but laughter from his Quartermaster. “You’re fired. Go throw yourself overboard this instant.”

Art by @brooklyn-bisexual

Art by @rohkeutta

Art by @frau-argh

The Scottish Boy by Bette Noire

Rating: E

Warnings: Graphic Violence

Words: 120K

Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes

Tags: Medieval AU, Alternate Universe – No Powers, knights, angst, enemies to lovers, slow build, Hundred Years War, thriller, bamf!steve, bamf!bucky

Summary: The year is 1333. The English are at war with Scotland. 19-year-old West Country knight Sir Steven excels at jousting, but yearns to prove himself in real action. So he jumps when his sponsor, Baron Alexander Pierce, invites him on a secret mission with a dozen elite knights. They ride north to a crumbling Scottish keep, capturing the feral, half-starved boy within and putting the other inhabitants to the sword. And nobody knows, or nobody is saying, why the flower of English knighthood snuck over the border to capture a savage, dirty teenage boy. Pierce gives the boy to Steve as his squire, with only two rules: don’t let the boy escape, and convert him to the English cause.

At first, it’s hopeless. The Scottish boy is surly, violent, hoards sharp objects, and eats anything that isn’t nailed down. Then Steve begins to notice things: that, as well as Gaelic, the boy speaks flawless French, far better than Steve’s own. That he can read it – Latin, too. That he isn’t small so much as desperately under-fed. That when Steve finally convinces the boy – James Buchanan, Bucky – to cut his filthy, matted curtain of hair, the face revealed is the most beautiful thing Steve has ever seen.

Art by maichan | Art by tsumi | Playlist by Penny

Kid Fic

Blurry by MonalisaMontauk Tumblr

Rating: M

Archive Warnings: None

Words: 27k

Relationships: Steve Rogers/James “Bucky” Barnes

Tags: Implied reference Child abuse, Implied reference Domestic Violence, Alternate Universe-Modern Setting, Use of Homophobic slur, Police Officer Steve, Minor Angst, Fluff, Minor Smut, Domestic Fluff, first dates

Summary: Bucky, a single father who only gets to see his son on weekends, finds out his ex’s new boyfriend is abusing him. Fueled with rage Bucky sets out on a mission to track him down. Finding him at a sleazy bar leads to a showdown with terrible consequences for Bucky. The police are called and it just so happens that the cop arresting him is a former one night stand. Awkward doesn’t even begin to describe the situation.

Art by Kay Maeryn @kaym-art

Pas de Deux by rhysiana

Rating: T

Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 20,767

Relationships: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes, (past Steve/Peggy, background Clint/Natasha)

Tags: single dad!Steve, artist!Steve, ballet!Bucky, ballet!Natasha, Badly Healed Shoulder Injury, The Realization That Life in One’s 30s Doesn’t Always Look Like One Expected in One’s 20s

Summary: Steve was pretty sure he fell in love with Peggy Carter the first time she called him a “jumped-up colonial” after a surprisingly heated debate on the first day of their shared history seminar during his semester abroad. He never really stopped. Which was really kind of the main problem he was having now, as he stood there next to her grave under gray skies full of ominous clouds that nonetheless refused to actually rain, as if they, too, knew this was fake. *** In which Steve is a newly single father indulging his daughter’s new obsession with ballet, Bucky and Nat are former stars of the Bolshoi now teaching at a DC ballet school, and no one is really quite as normal as they appear.

Art by @barnessergeant (Please go admire her cute art for this story!)

Banner by @dizzy-redhead, who volunteered to make it out of sheer awesomeness!

Seahorses by Tinzelda (AO3) and Poppyfields13fic (AO3)

Rating: E

Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 31k

Relationships: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes

Tags: Post-Captain America Civil War - Freeform, BuckyCap - Freeform, Kidfic, Dad Steve, Fluff, Domestic

Summary: Now that Bucky’s taken over the role of Captain America, Steve feels like it’s finally the time to start a family. Bucky doesn’t know what to feel when Steve breaks the news he’s going to adopt a baby. He wants Steve to be happy, but he’s worried it will affect their friendship. Once Steve becomes a dad though, Bucky can’t help falling in love with the baby. And maybe Steve will finally see Bucky in a different light.

Art by CapCarterandSarge (AO3)

Magical Realism

Deep as the Ocean by themirrordarkly (starmaki)

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Words: 20k

Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers Tags: AU Modern and AU Magical Realism, Fisherman Steve and Merman Bucky, Magic and Fairytale elements, Sexual Content, Soulbond, Touch-Starved, Memory loss, Serious Injury and Trauma, Angst, Depression

Summary:

The newly established charter boat business is booming for ex-military man, Steve Rogers. Being the captain of the charter boat ‘End Of The Line’ is a dream come true–but he doesn’t have anyone to share in his success and good fortune. Everything changes when he finds a sexy, mysterious stranger washed up on the beach. The chemistry is undeniable, like two old souls connecting. But Bucky Barnes isn’t the man he claims to be, having only three months to achieve his goal or suffer the terrible consequences. Can he succeed and claim what he lost? Steve and Bucky’s worlds will collide, changing both their lives forever. A modern retelling of a fairytale, with a twist!

Story by @starmaki (themirrordarkly)

Art by @elendrien

Fourth Floor by @dirtybinary, art by @cbolle & @mithborien

Rating: T

Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 41,805

Relationships: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes, minor Sharon Carter/Natasha Romanoff

Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Shrinkyclinks, Magical Realism, Tentacle Monsters

Summary:

Steve has his life in order, okay. He goes to wizard college, even if he can’t technically do magic. He has his own apartment, even though it’s small and dinky and kind of gross, and forgets to exist sometimes, and might also be alive? Plus, he has a crush on the hot cyborg in unit 404 who cooks fiendishly good breakfast foods, and may or may not have some kind of weird connection to the sentient building they live in. He’s not sure.

He’s dealing, all right, his life is in tip-top condition, or it was until an eldritch monstrosity called the Hydra started posing as a real estate company to try and buy over his new home.

He’s really pissed about that.

(The one where Steve is an angry millennial wizard, Sam is a Disney prince, Natasha is a shapeshifter, and Bucky is a spoiler.)

Illustrations

[x] by @cbolle [x] and above banner by @mithborien

Freshwater Memories by @resinonao3 (Ao3)

A collaboration for the Stucky Big Bang 2017!

Header Art by @koreanrage (Tumblr) Papercraft Art by @milollita (Tumblr)

Artwork rating: G Fic rating: Explicit Word count: 50,903 Relationship: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes

Archive Warnings: None

Summary:

Steve hasn’t been back to his family’s cottage for years, ever since the car accident took both his parents and his childhood memories. His therapist seems to think it’s a good idea for him to get out of the city for a while, so Steve decides it’s time to fix it up. He remembers a lot of things when he’s finally arrives, smells the fresh grass, hears the whisper of the trees, and the familiar warmth of a home away from home. The river outside is familiar too, only Steve can’t quite remember the imaginary friend he invented from it, when he needed one the most.

The river remembers him though, and will be damned if it watches his old friend sulk in loneliness instead of play with him, like he used to.

Check out @resinonao3‘s amazing fic on AO3!

From Dirty Paws and Creatures of Snow by goldenraeofsun

Rating: Teen and up

Words: 106k

Archive Warnings: Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings

Tags: Modern AU, Magic AU, Witch Steve Rogers, Familiar Bucky Barnes, Temporary Character Death

Summary

Bullies had mocked Steve's lack of magic for years, emboldened as Steve cast spell after spell that fizzled and died.

Steve didn't believe a word out of Bucky's mouth when he said that Steve was the most powerful witch he'd ever seen, but at least Bucky had until they reached Bonding age to convince him of the truth.

Amazing art by lunalittlelunatic is available here!

I See Fire by MooseKing, samwise_baggins, Steve-Bucky-Stucky (Chemical30)

Rating: E

Words:72k

Archive Warnings: Rape/Noncon

Tags: Hydra Agents, Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Mpreg, Rape/Non-con Elements, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Graphic Sex, Minor Character Death, Illegal Activities

Summary:

Steve, an elf, has always wanted to see the fabled dragons, rumored to have been hunted into extinction. He dares enter their domain where he meets Bucky, an actual dragon. But this isn’t all fairy tales and happy endings. Hydra, a group of humans bent on genetic control and manipulation, threaten the existence of all creatures, and it is up to an elf, a dragon, and a handful of other magically inclined creatures to put an end to the kidnapping, abuse, experimentation, and murder . . . if they can.

Repaid, by @waffilicious,

Rating: T

Archive warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 20k

Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers

Tags: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Identity Issues, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Recovery, Mind Manipulation, Emotional Manipulation, Hurt/Comfort

Summary: Bucky, having been freed from his captivity in Faerie, finds it difficult to readjust to life on Earth. Steve and Sam do their best to help, but it’s not until Bucky meets Wanda and she tells him about the Wakandan Magical Rehabilitation Program that progress is made. Meanwhile, a hidden threat may get in the way of Bucky’s recovery.

Art by @alishawinky

Art by @samthebirdbae

Saying Your Name by brideofquiet Art by @sorrowingsoldier

Rated E

Archive Warnings No Archive Warnings Apply Word Count 43k Relationships Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes Tags Surreality, Magic realism, Religous imagery & symbolism, Homesickness, Pre- and post-serum everybody, suicide ideation, medical trauma, Post-TWS, Not CW compliant

Glancing back up, Steve realizes that there’s something off about what he’s seeing. It takes him a moment to place it, overcome as he is with seeing his home—and it is his home, the Brooklyn he grew up in.

But the longer he stares, the more the image starts to distort. His own memories layer over top, a perfect duplication, but it’s like a layer of paint. He scrubs a hand over his eyes, stares harder and—there! The colors flicker out like cheap lights, fading away into grayscale till the sky is off-white, the East River churning charcoal below him.It’s eerie, uncanny, the not-quite-rightness of it all. If he doesn’t focus on anything in particular, the image snaps back into place, right again.

It unsettles him, making him nervous and flighty in place of the warm familiarity he’d felt only moments before.

Then he remembers: Hadn’t Bucky called to him, from just this spot?

Read the story here, and see the art here!

Misc. No Powers AU

Brave Boy by rooonil_waazlib with art by kissuru

37663 words Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers Characters: James “Bucky” Barnes, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanov, Sam Wilson (Marvel), Sarah Rogers, Clint Barton, Riley (Captain America movies) Additional Tags: Witness Protection AU, Stucky Big Bang 2017 Summary:

“CHORUS: Brave girl. KASSANDRA: People never say that to a lucky person, do they?” -“Agamemnon”, Aeschylus (trans. Anne Carson)

Steve’s always wanted to see Madrid: to have the chance to wander through Retiro Park; to explore the Museo del Prado and the Royal Palace and the Reina Sofía; maybe to light a candle at the Almudena Cathedral; to drink wine and eat tapas at all hours of the night and go dancing until the sun comes up, just once or twice.

Never in his entire life had he expected it might happen this way, though: a terrible memory ground into his brain; a scar the size of his fist knotted over his shoulder; his friends convinced he’s dead; his hair dyed dark; and a bodyguard next to him that’s pretending to be his new husband.

COFFEE AND COMICS by @mmouse15

Rating: Teen and up Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Words: 23k Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Tags: coffee shop AU, modern AU, pre-serum Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes needs a hug Summary: A coffee shop AU that’s not about coffee, but about writing and life, and how a person’s value system influences the choices they make. It just so happens to (mostly) take place in a coffee shop.

ART by @izulkowa

Dreaming of Him by Loneliness_of_Evening

Rating: M

Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 36K

Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes

Tags: Recreational Drug Use, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Mobster Bucky, Nanny Steve, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Modern AU

Summary: New York City hosts millions of different people living vastly different lives. Some people are nannies who dream of being artists, and some are mobsters who dream of being more than the big guys’ drivers. A chance meeting—rather a chance game of nose goes—brings these two people together, and a simple knock at the door becomes fate. But can fate avoid disaster? Or will they both be left alone with only dreams?

Art by @sundaecherries (NSFW)

Art by @happylaune

I Do (please say you want me) by ceeainthereforthat Ao3 / tumblr

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warnings: None

Words: 84k

Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes

Tags: No Powers Modern AU, Fake Engagement/Marriage, BDSM, RACK, CBT, TopDom Steve Rogers, BottomSub Bucky Barnes

Summary: Steve Rogers wants to be President of the United States. That’s why Bucky should tell him no when Steve asks him out on a date…but he doesn’t, and the story about the son of former Vice President Joe Rogers and a high ticket BDSM dominant going out on the town is in the media days later. When Steve won’t throw Bucky under the bus to save his reputation–and his popularity ratings–they’re offered Plan B: Love at First Sight. A Whirlwind Courtship. A Fairytale Wedding, and an amicable divorce five years later.

Sure. That’s gonna work

.Say Goodnight and Go by gingertintedglasses

Rating: T

Archive Warnings: Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings

Words: 26,586

Relationships: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes

Tags: Boston snowpocalypse 2015, fluff, copywriter!Bucky, graphic designer!steve, panic attacks and past self-harm mentions, unexpectedly sharing space, pining, bisexual bucky barnes, sarah rogers and rebecca barnes are treasures, super background natasha/sharon that I want to expand in some one-shot follow ups at some point

Summary: Bucky and Steve work for SSR Marketing in Boston. It’s January 2015 and it’s starting to snow in Boston, faster than can be kept up with. Bucky ends up with few transport options to get home and Steve offers to let Bucky crash on his couch until the MBTA is running reliably again. Mutual pining, close quarters, some weather-related mishaps, and some well-timed meddling from a mischievous, well-meaning Sarah Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, and Rebecca Barnes, do their level best to help Steve and Bucky own up to their feelings. Lots of awkward flirting, second-guessing, coffee, snow, and a puppy.

Art by @whatasaur

Art by @comedicdrama

The Greatest Show on Earth by youngavengersfeels

Rating: M

Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 25K

Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes

Tags: Circus AU

Summary: When Steve’s mother dies he runs away to join a circus to escape the debt left behind. He finds himself part of something much larger than himself as he falls for an acrobat known only as the Winter Solider.

Art by Brooklyn-bisexual

Art by @buckybarnesbutt

That Would Be Enough by MarcellaBianca Tumblr

Rating: E

Archive Warnings: Chose not to Use Archive Warnings

Words: 62K

Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes

Tags: AU: private school, AU: Teachers, Pining, Angst with a happy ending, Fluff and Smut, These Two Are Idiots, Brunch, Gym, Bucky Barnes Needs A Hug CW: Eating disorders, references to emotional and psychological abuse, and attempted dub-con sex

Summary: Bucky Barnes, a Columbia University graduate with a Masters Degree in Education, is in his fourth year of teaching AP US History at Shield Academy, a private school in the very heart of the Connecticut valley in the bucolic town of Barkstead. He also helps run the Russian Club with his colleague and best friend, Natasha Romanov. He’s got amazing friends, three nephews he adores, and a beautiful little apartment. The only thing Bucky would change about his life? His luck in love. It’s been two years since Bucky ended an emotionally abusive relationship and he’s just now starting to feel that his heart has healed enough to try dating again. Then, a new Art History and English teacher arrives with tattoos he doesn’t like talking about, a body like a Greek god, and some secrets of his own, and Bucky knows he’s done for. Cue pining, sass, and a TON of geeking out over Hamilton.

Art by alienswearsunglasses

Political Submissive by Samwise_baggins & Steve-Bucky-Stucky

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Rape/Non-con

Word Count: 87,963

Relationships: Steve Rogers/James “Bucky” Barnes, Johnny Storm/ Thomas ‘TJ’ Hammond, Jack Benjamin/David Shepherd

Tags: BDSM, Graphic Sex, Prostitution, PTSD, Rape/Non-con, Abuse, Pre-Serum, Post-Serum

Summary: Steve’s always struggled with owning a Submissive because of his size, and Bucky with his missing arm doesn’t have a lot of Dominant buyers/suitors. TJ, Bucky’s twin, would be a popular Submissive, though he’s never settled down, mostly one night stands. One night when attending an art show, the twins meet Steve and the world changes!

Artist: Colbaltmoony ( tumblr)

The Selection by worrisomeme

Rating: Mature Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Words: 20k Tags: Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage (kind of), panic attacks, PTSD, disabled Bucky, disabled Steve, tattoo artist Steve, writer Bucky

Summary:

The Department of Spousal Selection. Anyone not married by age 25 gets a spouse assigned to them by the government. And it’s fine, really. The matches are almost always a perfect fit. Steve Rogers is a successful tattoo artist who’s about to have his world turned upside down when he’s matched with a one Bucky Barnes. As they navigate their new life together and learn to deal with each other’s baggage, will their match prove successful, or will their inner demons tear them apart?

[art] by @lasenbyphoenix

Modern Veteran AU

All or Nothing Days by Lacanthrope

Rating: M

Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Words: 20K

Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/ Steve Rogers, James “Bucky” Barnes & Wanda Maximoff

Tags: Amputee Bucky Barnes, War Vetran Bucky Barnes, Pre-serum Steve, Alternate Universe- No powers

Summary: Sleeping rough in a big city was a shitty way to live, but Bucky knew it was better than he deserved after what he had done. What he had been asked to do and then did. He didn’t deserve the neatly-packaged leftovers from Wanda, the girl who lived in the apartment building he slept outside of, or the smokes she always shared with him. Most of all, he definitely didn’t deserve Steve, the completely fearless volunteer at St. Benedict’s, looking at Bucky the way he did. But when Wanda goes missing and the cops don’t seem to be doing anything about it, Bucky goes stumbling into the dark underbelly of the city to find her. He also happens to stumble right into Steve, who sticks his nose right where it shouldn’t go and insists on helping Bucky get to the bottom of Wanda’s disappearance. All they have to do is survive stirring up the largest criminal organization in the city and all of the unsavoury characters who come with it.

Art by dire-situations

Getting to the Groot of the Problem by Werewolfinthetardis

Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Words: 32,798 Relationships: Bobby Drake/Steve Rogers, James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers Tags: Friends to Lovers, kid fic (kinda), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Depression, Angst, Explicit Language, Mentions/Depictions of various types of sex and foreplay, Modern Setting- No Powers AU, Amputee Veteran Bucky Barnes, Post-Serum Steve With life winding down new problems pop up, and Steve and Bucky are left struggling with their own personal demons. Steve is trying to figure out what being bisexual really means, while Bucky deals with depression, PTSD, and life with only one arm. Their friendship on the verge of collapse, their lives only get weirder when everyone’s favorite Guardian of the Galaxy, Baby Groot, ends up living in Steve’s apartment. Will the little hell-raiser help fix the problems or will he just create new ones? Amazing Art done by the incredible cancerousmonkey

Shelter from the Storm by ironmanspanties

Rating: T

Archive Warnings: Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Words: 63k

Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers

Tags: Depression, Self-Esteem Issues, Minor Character Death, minor description of violence, PTSD, Slow Burn, Mention of infidelity (not Steve/Bucky), Alternate Universe - No Powers, Bucky’s arm Sucks, Mention of Child Abuse, Past Sharon Carter/Steve Rogers, Past Bucky Barnes/Jake Jensen

Summary: To lessen the pain from his wife’s betrayal, Steve Rogers is headed as far from his problems as he can get. Though he’d reached the Oregon coast, he still felt broken, empty, and alone. When circumstances leave him stranded on the coast during a summer storm, he sought refuge with the local War vet, who was no haggard old man, but rather a handsome recluse with stormy past of his own. What was it about James Barnes that kept Steve from returning to wandering?

Art by laufcysons

You Belong in a Gallery by gr8escap tumblr

Archive Warnings: Chose not to Use Archive Warnings

Relationship: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes

Word count: 55K

Tags: Modern AU, Artist Steve Rogers, skinny Steve, veteran amputee Bucky, PTSD, mention of past suicide ideation, mention of past drunken non-con, partial deafness/hoh steve

Summary: Brooklyn gallery owner and successful comic artist Skinny!Steve Rogers has overcome a lot in his life. He just hasn’t figured out the dating scene. Veteran!Bucky Barnes returned home from Afghanistan minus an arm, but after a rough patch, he has goals to become a graphic designer and even a video game developer. He just has to get through his temporary work as a construction worker so he can get back to school. The pair meets and works to overcome their personal struggles at the same time exploring whatever this is between them that’s moving so fast.

Art 1; Art 2; (& header) by @linguastrata

Neighbours AU

i wish i knew you when i was young by bagels-and-seagulls AO3

Rating: G

Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 21k

Relationships: Steve Rogers / Bucky Barnes

Tags: Art History Professor Steve Rogers, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, Kebab the therapy dog, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Slow Build

Summary:

“You can pet her. I mean, if you want to that is. I’m not, like, demanding that you pet my dog or anything. I’m just saying that you can, if you want. I know that the, uh, vest says not to, but, like, it’s okay, if I say it’s okay. Which I do, so you can, if you want…” What the fuck, Steve? Does your brain to mouth filter really suck that much?

Bucky blinked at him slightly before scrunching his nose up slightly. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

or the one where Steve doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut around his new neighbor and his dog thinks it’s hilarious

Art by starlingzinc

To Have or Have Not by blue_pointer on ao3

Rating: E

Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 56k

Relationships: Steve/Bucky, Bucky/Falsworth, Steve/Peggy, Steve/Bucky/Falsworth, Steve/Bucky/Peggy, Peggy/Falsworth, Bucky/Tony (poly)

Tags: Boy Next Door, Infidelity, Romance, Fluff and Smut, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Pregnancy, threesomes, Stucky dads, First Times

Summary: Having a little crush on your hunky new neighbor is totally harmless…unless that hunk has set his sights on you. Fidelity is easy when Steve Rogers isn’t doing his best to seduce you.The second Steve sets eyes on Bucky, he knows he’s the one. Peggy’s left it up to him to choose the father of their child. Now how to break it to him…Bucky believes that cheating is wrong. When he discovers love isn’t limited to the confines of a single relationship, can he accept what his heart is telling him?

Art #1 by @drowningbydegrees (NSFW)

Art #2 by @drowningbydegrees (NSFW)

Sci-Fi

Anything But Circumstance by Crave

Rating: M

Archive Warnings: Graphic Descriptions of Violence

Words: 20k

Relationships: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers/Other Character(s) (minor)

Tags: Science Fiction, Action, Space Opera, Alternate Universe - Space, Original Character(s), Implied/Referenced Suicide, Humor, Aliens, Identity Porn, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Implied/Referenced Torture, Panic Attacks, Nightmares, so much sass, IN SPACE!

Summary:

“You are talking to me,” the voice said.

“And who are you?”

There was a pause. “It is probably best if I show you,” the voice said.

One of the walls, the one Steve had been inspecting, began to slide up and up into the ceiling. Steve dashed forward, only to collide with the solid sheet of glass behind the wall. The glass didn’t break, even when Steve pounded it with his fists.

“No need to get hysterical,” the voice said. “Why not step back and admire the view?”

Art by shutupimcreating

The Saughteling by Claudia_flies and zilia

Rating: E

Archive Warnings: Graphic Violence

Important Tags: Star Wars AU, explicit sexual content, past-trauma, references to torture, action adventure, psychic connections, dream sharing, epic lightsaber battles, angst, internalized homophobia, violating the Jedi code, accidental voyeurism, MCU Star Wars AU, Old Republic

Summary: James Buchanan Barnes and Steve Grant Rogers arrive at the Jedi Temple just over twelve months apart.

Many years later, a disillusioned Jedi Knight Steve Rogers returns to the Core Worlds at the summoning of the Jedi Council. Instead of following the will of the Council, Steve chooses a different path. His quest will lead Steve to confront a specter from his past and finally open himself up to the will of the Force

The most amazing art by @hopeless–geek here and @this-simple-mind here (NSFW) and here

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out by OktaviaMiki (pandasubaru)

Rating:M

Archive Warnings: Choose Not To Use Warnings

Words: 39k

Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes (minor Sam Wilson & Natasha Romanoff)

Tags: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Robot/Human Relationships, Hurt/Comfort, Falling In Love, Slow Burn, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Implied/Referenced Torture, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, AvertedNonCon

Summary: Two years have passed since Bucky was honorably discharged from the army, and still he’s plagued by the scars and memories. While coping by means of drinking, he orders a persocom, a popular humanoid computer, who arrives (naked) the following morning and he names “Steve”. Bucky wants nothing to do with Steve at first, but because of Steve’s kind influence he begins to open up and his outlook on life changes for the better. Lines are blurred when Bucky realizes his feelings for Steve go beyond that of an owner and machine, feelings Steve might return

Art by @frau-argh

Art by @comedicdrama

Art by @10ftalice

Warhawk by Unicornologist

Rating: T

Archive Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Words: 43k

Relationships: Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes

Tags: Space AU, Stark Strek AU, canon typical violence, war of 1812 au, slow burn, swearing, enemies to lovers

Summary: Twelve years ago, the Terran Revolution ended. Nicky Fury swore an oath to himself and the known universe that he would never return to the empty void of space again. He vowed that he would rather be tried for treason than set foot on another warship. Yet somehow, all these years later, here he stands in front of his captain’s chair watching the endless black surge past his ship. He watched his crew readying for the battle to come; he could hear Rogers and Barnes bickering over strategy while Romanov and Stark readied the long range blaster cannons and checked the shields. “The universe has a sick sense of humor.” He muttered to himself with a sigh.

Art by @sundaecherries (Hannah)

#sbb2017

69 notes · View notes

holdenmgrudges · 7 years

Text

Chapter 3 - Helpsies

I know, I’m a couple of days late. I’ve been busy. And I had a bit of trouble writing this for a few reasons. The first was coming up with a reason for Crutchie’s messed up leg. I know he’s canonically supposed to have polio, but since it was pretty much eradicated in the US back in the 90s, I felt that it wouldn’t be a good enough reason. So the reason I came up with is a bit simpler than that, and it opens up a plot point I might use in the future. Second, was coming up with a math problem for the Sprace part of the chapter. I’ve never taken statistics and probability, but seeing as how the problem I used is a probability problem, I felt it worked. Anyway, here’s chapter 3! Enjoy!

Or read on AO3 if you prefer.

The next day, David couldn’t help but feel he was doing a great job of adjusting to his new school. In PE, the kid Crutchie had called Race, completed his usual lap, but just before overlapping him, slowed down next to David to say, “Hi Davey…” with a smile. And then, “Bye Davey…” as he sped off again. In his English class, Katherine gave him a quick smile before taking a seat and huddling with two other boys. Despite ignoring him for the rest of the class, David was satisfied. It was safe to say joining the LGBTQ+ Club was the best decision he could’ve made.

Lunch came around and after waiting in line for a calzone, he headed to the Little Theatre. Inside, he quickly spotted Jack and Crutchie, sitting at two desks that had been pushed together. He also saw a few other kids he didn’t know playing some trading card game he didn’t know, and a few others either reading or doodling. No one else he’d seen yesterday. Even Miss Medda wasn’t there.

“Hey Davey, grab a desk and sit with us,” Jack said, as David approached him and Crutchie. David did as he was told and Jack moved his desk so the three of them were in a sort of triangle. “We were just talking about what kind of trust exercises we could do for the club.”

“He’s been trying to convince me physical activities, like a trust fall, wouldn’t work,” Crutchie chimed in. He grabbed his crutch and tossed it to David. David held out an arm and was able to catch it right before it hit the floor. He looked a bit startled, but Crutchie laughed. “See, I’m good with the physical stuff. I don’t need the crutch to stand and catch someone.”

David let out a small chuckle as he handed the crutch back. “I’d think a trust fall would be too obvious. But I don’t think we should rule out anything physical.” Crutchie stuck his tongue out at Jack. “If Crutchie says he can handle it, I think we should trust him.”

Crutchie laughed again, saying, “I like you, Davey. You got some great ideas.”

Jack crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Alright then, Davey with the great ideas, what do you suggest?”

“Hmm...lemme think…” David took a bite out of his calzone and then put it back down on the paper plate it had come on. He scanned his brain for ideas as he chewed, thinking about anything he’d ever done at camp or his family reunions.

While David was thinking, Jack took a second to give David a discreet once-over. Crutchie, however, noticed and gave Jack a light kick in the shin with his good leg. David, in turn noticed this and looked back and forth between the two of them, trying to figure out what was happening. Crutchie was giving Jack and accusatory look and Jack was staring at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Uh...what’s going on?” David asked, feeling out of the loop. He thought that he could really benefit from a trust exercise right about now.

“I’m just punishing Jack,” Crutchie answered quickly, “for trying to use my disability against me. As if I don’t get that enough from everyone.”

“I’m just very overprotective of you, Crutch,” Jack replied. “Someone’s gotta be.”

“If I fall, I fall. It’s not a deadly stunt.”

“But it’ll hurt like shit…”

“You’re a shit…”

“You’d be the one eating shit…”

“We’ll see who eats shit when we’re doing the trust fall…”

“Not me, ‘cause I’m not doin-”

“What is your disability?” David interrupted. “Like, what happened to your leg?” The other two fell silent and David felt like he’d messed up. He needed to learn to keep his mouth shut.

But then Crutchie smiled. “People don’t usually ask,” he said. “They just see that I have a crutch and move out of my way.”

“Even I didn’t know until his foster mom mentioned it while I was sleeping over,” Jack contributed.

“Yeah, ‘cause you’re a shit.” Crutchie kicked Jack again before turning back to David. “But to answer your question, I was in an accident. Got hit by a car. I mostly recovered but my leg didn’t. But I’m still alive and other people have it worse. So I don’t let it define me.”

David nodded in understanding. “But you still call yourself Crutchie.”

“I didn’t start that shit,” he responded with a laugh.

Jack covered his face with his hand and mumbled, “Kick me again.” Crutchie did so, but not as hard. “I thought it’d be a cute nickname. Better than ‘Crutch Boy’ or ‘He-Who-Must-Have-The-Crutch.’”

“You could’ve called me by my actual name. But of course, Crutchie stuck. I wear it as a badge of honor. And it makes people wonder if it’s my real name.”

The three laughed and then David asked, “What is your real name?”

Crutchie smirked and shook his head, “That’s something you’ll have to figure out on your own, Davey..”

David nodded and then remembered he was supposed to be thinking of ideas for the club. He continued eating his calzone.

“What about you, Davey? What’s your story?” Jack asked.

David shrugged with a nervous smile. “I don’t know...I’m just Davey.”

“But what makes you special?” This came from Crutchie.

“Oh uh…” Whenever he was asked this question, he always went to his go-to list of interesting David facts. “I can play the piano...I’m a Ravenclaw...but House Lannister...I’m a twin, but not identical-”

“You’re a twin?” the other two boys asked in unison, curious to learn more.

“Yeah, figures that’s the most interesting thing about me,” David replied with a snort.

“That’s not true,” Jack said, as if he knew something about David that he didn’t. “You’re in our LGBTQ+ Club which is interesting on its own.” David nodded in agreement. “Which uh...letter do you belong to?”

David raised an eyebrow in confusion while Crutchie rolled his eyes. “He means, are you gay, bi, trans, queer...plus?”

“Oh,” David responded and then thought for a few seconds. “I guess queer. I know I’m not straight, that’s all I know.”

“Cool,” Jack said with a smile. “I’m a proud bisexual.”

“And I’m straight...up guh-guh-gayyyyy.”

The three laughed again and continued talking until the end of lunch, when David remembered, “Oh, shoot, I forgot we were supposed to be thinking of trust activities for the club.”

“We can brainstorm some more in art class, but…” Jack took out his notebook, wrote something, and ripped the page out, handing it to David. It was a phone number. “You can also text me with ideas.”

“Oh okay, cool,” David replied. The three got up and headed out of the Little Theatre. Before Crutchie could walk off to his class, David called out to him. “Hey, do you wanna...maybe...give me your number too? Wouldn’t wanna keep you out of the loop.”

Crutchie grinned widely and nodded. He wrote his number down on the piece of paper and then they went their separate ways. David smiled. Now he had two friends.

Spot wasn’t bad at math. In fact, he’d been the first kid in his third grade class to learn all his timetables. But he wasn’t in third grade anymore, and he wasn’t learning his timetables. Statistics and probability was much harder than he thought it was going to be. He thought it was all about percentages and fractions, but what he got was so much more confusing than that.

He was in class, scratching at his chin, trying to figure out the problem the class had been given. It didn’t seem hard but as he looked around the class, everyone seemed to have a different answer. But he couldn’t ask for help. He was Spot Conlon. He was never helpless. He looked over the problem again but still didn’t understand how some people were arriving at a different solution than the obvious one.

“You need help there, Spot?” came the friendly voice of Jojo. Jojo was pretty special to Spot because he was another one of the few people that wasn’t afraid of him. Not that Spot had ever threatened to hurt Jojo. The kid was too sweet to ever want to harm. He was funny too, which didn’t hurt. And he was a great teammate to have, cheering people on at not just every match, but every practice as well.

So when Jojo asked him if he needed help, he knew he was in good hands. He trusted Jojo. “Yeah, man. I don’t get it. I mean, the answer’s one-half, right?”

“Actually, it’s two-thirds.” Jojo took a second to double check his paper. “Yeah, two-thirds.”

“But how?” Now that he’d gotten confirmation that his answer was wrong, Spot needed to know how. He wasn’t satisfied with just the answer.

“Uh...I forgot. Hold up.” Jojo turned around to the desk behind him to ask his friend. Spot had seen him before, running around the school track like he was Usain Bolt. He’d been impressed, but didn’t think more about him. Now, he had to because the guy had turned his head to stare at Spot. Jojo turned back to Spot as well, and said, “Race here is gonna show you how you get the right answer.”

Spot waited while Race hesitated. He’d obviously heard about Spot’s reputation. But after a few seconds, he began to talk, trying to explain to Spot why the answer was two-thirds using mathematical terms. Suffice it to say that Spot still wasn’t understanding.

“Okay, so you have three boxes, right?” Race spoke. “And each box has two drawers, right? And each drawer has a coin.”

Maybe it was the way Race was talking to him, or maybe it was the fact that he was fed up with the problem, but Spot was not having it. “Yeah, I’m not stupid. You don’t have to talk down to me like I don’t know what the scenario is. I know what the scenario is.” He ran his fingers through his hair, getting a good grip.

Race went silent and looked down at his piece of paper. He hadn’t meant to offend Spot. In fact, he was aiming for the opposite. Sure, in class he was safe, but who knew what Spot could do to him after school. His only hope was running fast enough, but he didn’t know how fast Spot could run.

Jojo looked back and forth between Race and Spot and then giggled. “Go on, Race. Don’t mind Spot. He’s like this all the time.”

The other two boys made eye contact and Spot nodded. Race straightened up and continued. “Alright, so you pick a box and open up a drawer at random. It has a gold coin inside.”

Spot knew each box was different. One had two gold coins, another had two silver coins, and the last one had one gold and one silver. The question was, what was the probability of the second drawer also having a gold coin?

Race went on. “So you’d think, it could only be one of two options, right? The box you picked can’t be the one with two silver coins, so it must be one of the other two. Which means that the second drawer will either have a gold coin or a silver coin, making the probability of the second coin being gold one-half. Well that’s wrong.”

Spot took a deep breath, making a conscious decision not to bang his fist on his desk. This kid was telling him what he already knew.

“Okay, okay. So let’s start with the first coin instead of going directly to the second one. Out of the six coins, how many are gold?”

Spot glanced at Jojo, who looked like he was enjoying himself. “Three,” Jojo replied, and Spot rolled his eyes.

“Right. So the first coin you pick will be any of those three coins. Which means for the second coin there will be three possibilities.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Spot interrupted. “How?”

Race paused for a second as he thought. He took a pencil and placed it into his mouth, holding it as if it were a cigar. After a few seconds, he took a piece of paper and drew three boxes. In each box he drew two circles and then labeled each of them with either G for gold or S for silver. He then crossed out the box with the two S circles.

“So,” Race started again, pointing to the box with one gold coin and one silver. “If you picked this gold coin, then the second coin would be silver. That’s one possibility.” He then pointed at the first G in the other box. “If you pick this gold coin first, then the second one would be gold. That’s your second possibility.” He moved his finger to the second G in the box. “But let’s say you picked this gold coin first instead. Then your second coin would still be gold, but you’d have a third possibility.”

Spot’s eyebrows raised in understanding.

“Therefore, the probability of your second coin being gold would be two out of three possibilities.”

“Two-thirds,” Spot stated as his lip curled into a smile. He didn’t notice Race perk up at this, but Jojo did.

“That’s right!” Jojo pat Race on the back. “Now I remember. See, Spot, I told you it was two-thirds.”

Spot was too distracted writing down the explanation to say anything. Race gave Jojo a quick smile before going back to his own work.

“Isn’t Race a genius?”

“I wouldn’t call me a genius. You can google the answer and get a better explanation.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t need to ‘cause we have you.”

Spot finally finished and looked up. His smile was gone, but he gave Race a nod of gratitude. Race would’ve been satisfied with that, but then Spot followed through verbally. “Thanks, man.”

Race relaxed a little, realizing Spot wasn’t the bully he’d been led to believe he was. He’d been afraid to talk to him all year long because of the stories he’d heard about him. But now maybe Spot Conlon could be his friend. Or at least someone who wouldn’t beat him up. “Mhm,” he replied, giving Spot a nod right back, and then one to Jojo.

Jojo was all smiles. He lived not only for making friends, but for making his friends become friends with his other friends. He was like a friendship wingman. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he said, “We should start a study group.”

Immediately, Spot and Race looked at Jojo and then at each other. It was really up to Spot to decide. “Yeah, maybe,” he decided. It might as well have been a no. He already had a lot to worry about with wrestling, and he didn’t want to add a whole study group to his list of responsibilities.

The other two nodded and went back to their work. It wasn’t until near the end of class, when their teacher was passing back their latest test results, that they spoke again. Race had gotten an A, as he always did. Jojo got a B, which he was proud of. And Spot got a D, the last grade he wanted. He might as well have gotten an F.

“Alright,” he said, turning to face Jojo and Race. “Let’s start a study group.” Jojo did a little victory fist pump while Race looked up in surprise.

“We can meet at my place,” Jojo said. “I can have snacks ready and all that.”

“Sounds good,” Spot replied. “Text me your address.”

The three made arrangements to meet that weekend, and thus the Stats and Probs Study Group was born.

Sarah had collected as much as she could the night before. Old essays, class assignments, and even some diary entries that she felt were really good pieces of writing. She put them all in a folder, thinking Katherine would take it home and read each piece in her free time.

She was so nervous about what Katherine would think, that she was barely paying attention in her last class. Her usual thoughts about Jack were nowhere to be seen, though he didn’t seem to mind. He seemed giddily distracted.

When Sarah got to the computer lab after school and handed her folder to Katherine, she surprisingly began reading then and there. Skimming, more like. She’d move on to the next piece after a few seconds, giving a few nods of approval and even some quick chuckles at the diary entries. About halfway through the stack, she handed it back.

“You didn’t read everything.”

“I don’t need to. You’re qualified. Some of that stuff was actually pretty good.” Katherine went back to her computer where she was editing an article. “Also, I have more important things to do.”

"What can I do to help?" The day before she'd been shown around and explained most of what they do. Everyone wrote at least one article with at least one picture, though from one of the sample newspapers Sarah had seen, it was clear Katherine wrote most articles. She was also in charge of editing every article. Darcy and Bill helped print out the papers and distribute them every Friday morning, which happened to be the next day. And Mr. Denton looked over everything to make sure it was PG and PC. So far, Sarah didn't have any job in the club, so she was just there to help in any way she could.

"Nothing right now," Katherine responded, brushing her off. "Go see if Darcy and Bill need anything."

Sarah was a little disappointed but she knew the girl didn't need any distractions. Darcy and Bill were sitting together talking with Mr. Denton. As she approached, the teacher saw the folder in her hand and gave her an amused smile. "You know, you didn't actually need to bring in any writing samples. You're in the club no matter what Katherine has to say about it."

"She's just so in charge," Sarah said, putting the folder in her backpack. "She's inspiring. I wanted to impress her."

"And was she impressed?" Denton asked. Darcy and Bill looked at her in anticipation.

"She said some of my stuff was pretty good." The boys nodded as if they'd expected that.

Mr. Denton just smiled. "That's a good sign. Katherine likes to go on rants when she reads bad writing."

"I wonder what she'd say about great writing. If I was pretty good, my brother would probably be amazing."

"You should have him join then," Denton said. "We're always looking for writers."

"I'll ask him, but he's not really the joining type."

Denton soon went back to his desk to do some of his own work and Sarah stayed with the two boys. "So what are we up to right now?"

"Waiting for Katherine to finish editing, basically," answered one of the boys. Sarah didn't think she'd be able to remember which was which, but as she saw that each was wearing similar clothes to what they'd been wearing the day before, she deduced that the one who had just spoken was Darcy. He had on a dress shirt tucked into his khaki pants and his hair was neatly combed. The other boy had on a superhero shirt.

"When she's done," Bill said, "we arrange everything on the template, print out a bunch of copies, and tomorrow morning we release it."

"She lets you arrange the paper?" She would've figured Katherine would be in charge of everything.

Darcy replied, "Mr. Denton felt she had too many responsibilities and we not enough, so we do it now."

"But we still ask Katherine for help with it," Bill whispered. "When Denton's not around."

"Of course," Sarah said, nodding. "So you guys hang out with her outside of the club?"

Darcy shook his head, but Bill nodded. They looked at each other and then Darcy explained. "We have English class with her, but we only ever talk about the paper. If it's not about that, she's not really interested."

"We've never hung out with her outside of school," Bill added.

"Well, except that one time she asked me to walk her home because the Delancey brothers were being creeps. But that was only one time."

"Does she have any friends outside of the paper?" Sarah couldn't imagine anyone being so obsessed with one thing.

Bill responded, "Not sure. At school she spends her free time either writing or interviewing people for articles. I know she wants to be a journalist someday."

Katherine seemed almost as antisocial as David, but Darcy and Bill didn't seem to know anything about her outside of school. And just like that, Sarah's curiosity grew. She was gonna make it her own personal assignment to find out as much as she could about the girl. And if she couldn't find information from other people, she'd go directly to the source. After all, Denton had told her yesterday that she would grow on Katherine.

It didn't take long for Katherine to finish editing. She sent the articles and photos for each to Darcy and Bill and they started copying and pasting all over the news template they used. Sarah was bored out of her mind watching the two boys try to figure out where everything should go. She could see Katherine out of the corner of her eye, just fidgeting, probably wishing she could do it all herself. Mr. Denton seemed to notice it too because he sent her home soon after. Sarah was slightly disappointed with that, but then Mr. Denton came to the three of them and requested for her to take the reigns.

"What?" She knew she was new and didn't want to risk ruining all the hard work that was already put into the paper. She would hate for Katherine to come in the next day and absolutely abhor anything she did.

"Don't worry," Denton replied. "We’ll help you out. I just want to see what you can do. Besides, how else are you going to learn if not by doing?"

She supposed he was right, but she was still nervous about it. Luckily, she had no reason to be.

#newsies #newsies high #newsies fanfic #javid #newsbians #sprace #jackcrutchie #holdenmgrudges #fanfiction #au fanfiction #jack kelly #david jacobs #sarah jacobs #katherine plumber #crutchie morris #spot conlon #racetrack higgins #jojo de la guerra

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indigozeal · 7 years

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Recently, Giant Bomb East went through Tender Loving Care, an interactive movie featuring John Hurt (yes, that John Hurt) and produced by some of the folks behind The 7th Guest. I've long found this game just a fascinating fiasco, one that could have only been made in the FMV era (and the story of its creation is just as headache-inducing). I highly recommend the Giant Bomb playthrough, if you have premium.

Anyhow: I learned during the playthrough that the game was based on a novel by the guy who wrote The Devil's Advocate - so, curious, I read it. I don't recommend anyone else do so. I did, however, jot down a few notes on the differences (and similarities) between the book and the game for those interested. The notes contain spoilers and assume you're familiar with the plot of the game, so watch out. (They also get a little NSFW.)

I actually think the game is better than the book, because the game doesn't have Michael (who is the inarguable protagonist) and his inner voice constantly narrating his stupid inner thoughts. Or stupid inner thought, since, like the game, he has only one: "oh, if only I were a manly man who could face up to this threat to my household - but breasts!" The book is as horny as the game: Michael can't take his mind off how the outline of Kathryn's bra is visible through her blouse on their first meeting and is obsessed with having sex with her from that moment. Every other page, there's a status report on the female characters' breasts: their position and degree of apparent firmness, what the clothing is doing to them, if their owners are touching them, if the nipples are visible in any way and, if so, their positions and degree of perkiness. Both Kathryn and Allison are breasting boobily everywhere they go, constantly fiddling with and adjusting their racks; it's like the author thinks breasts will wander off by themselves if you don't pay attention to them every damn second.

The game script and plot is very faithful to the book - most of the dialogue is taken verbatim, and details like Kathryn's herbal shampoo, the "sweet-potato red" hair of John Hurt's character, and "soya milk, for Christ's sake!" are present. There is no bisexuality plot thread, though, or Kathryn being motivated by Allison's resemblance to an old girlfriend. Book Michael is also specified as being small-statured and slightly built, to underline his one (1) character trait of emasculation. Kathryn has a huge evil Fallacy of the Talking Killer speech at the end, which follows the "main" ending from the game (Mike sledgehammers Kathryn and is arrested). Weirdly, I found myself missing Kathryn's audio diaries and supplemental stuff from the game, as they at least serve to humanize her a bit; book Kathryn is very two-dimensional, solely an incarnation of the author's obsessive assertion that sexy women are evil and put on Earth just to torture men. On the plus side, there is no tale of crow torture. (Michael does beat the dog with a stick, though.)

Other things: - Allison's name was originally Miriam; Jody was originally Lillian. Their family name was Oberman, not Overton. They lived in the Catskills, not Oregon. - Book Mike works as a teller in a bank. No word on how a teller was allowed to take a six-month leave of absence from his job. (Book Allison had no profession.) - Michael does a huge Darth Vader NOOOOOOOOOOO when he discovers the doll (as opposed to, er, throwing himself down the stairs). - There's a metaphor that likens a vagina to a "moist pocket." - Typical breast line: "Her breasts pointed at me accusingly, defiantly." - Michael after seeing Kathryn at the window: "The sight made me tremble, and I came to my senses quickly. What if she had seen me standing there looking up? The thought drove me back to the porch so quickly I tripped and fell. Fortunately, it was on the grass so I did no damage to my clothing or hands. I got up and went back to my seat. My heart was beating so hard I thought I might go into some kind of cardiac arrest. I wiped the sweat from my face and straightened my clothes." So, “That was a BOOB! A real, live boob!” is canon. - “Now I’ve gotta go get a FUCKIN’ PIZZA!!” (the line, at least) is unique to the game, though. - Michael actually does get to a bit of "meditating" during his session with Kathryn - which, in the author's mind, consists of having an LSD trip-like hallucinatory experience where you're fellating a huge doorknob. - I think the sounds of "ghost children" in Jody's room are supposed to be modeled on book Michael's observation that the raccoons in the nearby forest sound like "little lost children crying for their mothers." - The weird breakdown Michael has at the end is an ill-advised transplant from the book's end, where Michael is regretting not being able to tell Jody how, as a child on the family property, he would "press my ear against a large maple or oak and listen for the earth's heartbeat." (The book goes on in places about how Michael's father was a dairy farmer and the connection Michael feels to his family homestead, etc.)

In summary: the game, amazingly, is an improvement on the novel, because at least it offers a variety of head-scratching things instead of just one monotonous whiny thing. And its characters are more nuanced. I can't believe I wrote that.

#tender loving care

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qualapec · 7 years

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Favorite characters meme

@myheartgoesswimming tagged me in this!

“Post 10 of your favorite characters from different fandoms, in no particular order, and tag 10 people [if you want!] “

I’m a JERK who can’t help but rank my favorite characters,

Favorite male characters:

1. Jacob Frye Jacob had an absolutely unprecedented climb up my favorite characters list. He went from being this butch asshole in the trailers for AC:S to...I LOVE MY BI SON??? I don’t think I’ve purely identified with a character so much since Marian Hawke in DAII when I was a closeted 18 year old who didn’t think I’d ever come out. Like, I’m ultimately not too protective of my favorite dudes--I look at my list and I’m like, yeah, this is mostly garbage. Jacob is the one dude character who I have actually cried over people saying shit about him (I casually call Jacob garbage a lot, but not too long ago a good friend said “yeah, he fucks up everything. really everyone would be better off without him” and I cried harder than I thought I would).

I identify with Jacob because he’s a giant ADHD bisexual who messes up literally everything he does but still tries the best he can to be a good person and he’s someone who still legitimately cares about people who have hurt him deeply. At the same time, he’s not a queer character that wants to fully integrate with society either. He’s funny and loves his sister and she’s a better Assassin than he is. He’s a good person but his queerness isn’t clean--it’s rough and it hurts and it damages his relationships and it’s so real to me.

I’ve never felt happier about being bi and not totally good at things than the months after AC:S came out and Jacob was announced as canonically bisexual. Before that I’d been struggling a lot with the lesbians v. bi women thing, and Jacob just made me feel so good about myself and so hopeful. I love Jacob Frye.

2. Johannes Cabal I have never been more right about a character’s ultimate arc than I was with Cabal. He’s been on my list of faves for years, but the fifth book jettisoned him into second place among the guys. If he were canonically queer he and Jacob would probably be tied tbqh. I love this horrible man. I love his arc. Anyone who wants to write villains with a redemption should read these books. SPOILERS but I love how his arc isn’t about accepting things the way they are re: death. He never accepts the Bible, never goes to confession and gets his sins forgiven. He never gives up his desire for things to be changed and for the unfairness/injustice of death to be righted and his disbelief in religion as a savior. He never gives up his arrogance. He’s still really smart.

But by the end, he becomes a human who is worthy of having friends and is capable of doing the right thing and that means so much to me. I expected a giant Thing at the end where he did something truly villainous to show that he was Always That Way and Always Would Be, but it never happened. He slowly defeated evil within himself without even knowing it, and that matters to me.

END SPOILERS. The second trash wizard I ever fell in love with.

3. Loki (MCU). Oh, Loki. My queer rage analogue.

Some context: I saw Thor (2011) when my family was falling apart. I was mad, so mad. That scene when Loki confronts Odin was so profound to me--I read it as a coming out scene, and I know a lot of other queer folks did, too.

I’ve known I was bi since Dragon Age II, as dumb as that sounds. When I wanted nothing more than to romance both a dude and a lady. BUT I had planned to bury it. It was easier to just date men, so why not? When Loki was revealed as Canonically Bisexual, that was really when the word clicked for me. That was the moment I think I knew that word was truly inescapable for me.

Whoo boy. That scene in the Avengers when he shows up after creating a portal with the Tesseract and intends to tear the world apart...that’s the moment I realized how queer and angry I was. I was closeted and wanted to burn it ALL down. He would either win or be destroyed, and the fantasy of burning as I was was so satisfying to me--either way he was going to die as himself. I was sitting in the theatre and that was when I knew I had no choice but to come out. I was afraid. Anger was an easier feeling to have.

Loki. My reminder that I’ll take a queer villain over a Perfect Queer (TM) every day of the week and also for the rest of my life--I will never, ever care about a Perfect Queer, because that’s not what I am, that’s not the family I come from, that’s not the reality of my health or what I aspire to be. That rage gave me the courage to come out, and tbqh it gives me strength now.

4. Harry Dresden Harry is Trash Wizard Prime. I discovered him during a time when men were an absolute mystery to me--I didn’t grow up with many (any) good male role models. As a bi teenager, I started to notice men because that’s the thing girls attracted to men were socially supposed to do, and I realized I didn’t understand them.

I saw the cover for Dead Beat in a Barnes & Noble and I picked it up. He looked so dashing, so rogueish. And this chaotic good motherfucker is that. He cares about people and wants to do the best he can with his gift, even if he is imperfect, and that spoke to me as a teenager so much.

He was a male character who I felt safe with. Society hated him for his gift, and sometimes did its best to destroy him even while he was trying to be good (which, in retrospect, is one reason why I associate mages/wizards/witches with queerness). I felt like he was a man who would protect me as a girl who, at that time, thought of myself as het but who was very afraid of men (L O L. LOL. L O L. Biggest joke ever) and who had experienced trauma at male hands.

I felt deeply betrayed when, after Changes, he had intrusive thoughts about raping the women around him.

I don’t quite have words for how much that hurt. Cabal was never misogynist in quite that way, and Loki is a virulent misogynist, but in a way that strikes me as very real for some queer men (not okay, but A Thing That Actually Happens). And as someone with OCD who experiences damaging intrusive thoughts myself, I feel like should have understood.

I felt really betrayed when Harry’s character took that direction. It caught me by surprise. It was actually triggering for me--the message I got was “every man will hurt you” and I’ve spent years trying to unlearn that. I remember shaking after a certain chapter of the book after Changes. I remember thinking that Men Will Always Hurt Me if Harry would.

Recent books revealed it was the result of a demon in his head...but it still hurt a lot. I discovered those books when I needed a man to look up to, and I still feel like that trust was betrayed.

I wouldn’t really recommend The Dresden Files to any of my friends now--I still want them to read them to understand a very formative text for me. I love Harry Dresden. He is part of what made me, of what defined my morality. I love him. I want him to be part of a better story.

Also I will be 100% honest and say that his super cis straight dude descriptions of wanting to sleep with women really spoke to me as a young queer chick. I was really into “vagazzled” btw.

5. Cullen Rutherford WE HAVE ARRIVED AT THE OUTLIER.

Cullen has that Captain America vibe I usually can’t stand. He’s super lawful good and even upholds laws that he shouldn’t.

He’s also a drug addict who was deeply traumatized and needs his girlfriend to function (an ongoing theme with me). Even his very oppressive anger makes sense to me. It sucks, but I get it. That’s valid.

Also, I really hate it when people say his character arc made no sense. I’m sorry, those people flat out don’t understand narrative or think characters can escape their original packaging. Spoiler; that’s not an ‘arc’. Characters change, deal with it.

I think one thing I love about Cullen is that he was really, really tailored for women who are interested in men (note: not just Straight Women).

I think one of the biggest things for me is that he’ll do anything for the Inquisitor (his girlfriend). He was SUPPOSED to be bi via leaks from the company that made the game (if that was canon he’d be much higher on this list). But it does ultimately matter a lot to me that he was so specifically tailored to be a fantasy for women who are interested in men. He loves her. He will do almost anything for her. She helps him get over a serious addiction. Cullen taught (my bi/poly ass) about m/f narratives that I needed.

I guess I have a Thing for men who really need the women in their lives. Cullen gets the girlfriend role, and all the trauma that only men are usually allowed to have.

Honorable mentions:

Victor and Yuuri from Yuri on Ice. (If they had more canonical trauma, they would have lettered, and they may in the future. I love that Literally Wearing a Bi Flag Victor is a garbage human being who doesn’t understand feelings but still loves is boyfriend and doesn’t want that relationship to end. I love how Yuuri is an anxious gay baby.) Albert Wesker, a truly fine villain who was not done justice by those movies. Ned Wynert, who taught me a lot about writing characters from marginalized groups I am not a part of.

Favorite lady characters: 1. Marian Hawke. I almost don’t have words for how deeply formative Hawke is to me. She changed my life. I know she can be a different person no matter who plays her, but I think the things I fundamentally love about her are somehow universal.

For context on Marian Hawke--I was 18 and deeply closeted when I played DAII for the first time. I had committed to “never coming out” because I thought it would make my mom sad. I remember sitting in the uni library and thinking about Hawke and how bi aka queer (ADDITIONALLY poly) I was and I regret how that was the moment I decided I would only date men because it would be easier. That didn’t last. I didn’t know how much that would tear me up inside.

Hawke was the first gateway to my sexuality, but I thought I could avoid her message. I knew I wanted to date both men and women.

Hawke herself is...me. Granted, you can control some of her actions as the player, but she still fucks up in a lot of the same ways no matter which version of her you play. She still tries to do the best she can (sometimes that’s a lot, sometimes not a lot, sometimes it’s oppressive). She cares. I can’t remember if she or Cabal came into the Trash Wizard (or trash mage) #2 slot, but she’s right up there on my fave trash magician list.

Because she’s so deeply formative, she’s another character I can’t be rational about. I HATE with every fiber of my being that she’s not static/unchangeable. I partly hate dude!Hawke so much because there are no female characters like my take on Marian that even EXIST. Soft butch, bi, diplomatic, kinda funny, kinda mad.

She tries her best, just like I think I do. She fails a lot, even when she means well. My Marian is bi as fuck. She changed my life. I don’t know who I would be without her (I mean, probably still bi as fuck, but still). I love Marian Hawke.

2. Evie Frye. I’ll just say it: Evie Frye fixed my ability to write female characters.

I was feeling a lot of pressure from other female writers (sadly, even particularly other queer women) to write WOMEN’S NARRATIVES. I felt like those had to be about rape and weakness and strength in spite of that. THAT IS A NARRATIVE THAT MATTERS, however I either struggle to identify with it, or I over-identify with it and I’m afraid to walk to my car.

Evie isn’t that.

She’s perhaps the greatest Assassin in history, short of Altair or Ezio, who made the brotherhood what it is. She lives and breathes that tradition. She’s most powerful when she is unseen, and in that way, I always feel safe with her. She’s the rightful heir to the entire series, so I feel like she will always be safe.

I learned so much about how to write myself and what I wanted and what I think a lot of other women want even if it’s not part of The Discourse, through Evie Frye. She defies stereotypes about what it means to be “woman”. She’s treated no worse than Jacob by the narrative, and she’s arguably treated as the inheritor of the Assassin tradition and like her skills matter just a bit more. The narrative could do without Jacob (as much as I love him) but it couldn’t do without Evie. She’s just as powerful as he is.

That we get to see her as both a new adult and a middle aged women is extra important. The fact that she spends her later narrative hunting one of the most virulent men in history (Jack the Ripper) means a lot to me. She is most powerful in her prime, while Jacob burns out later on, and that ALSO matters a lot to me. Shitty men are afraid of her, not the other way around. There’s no narrative where she lets the think they could rape her to win; she just wins. (Again, nothing wrong with female characters who use their femininity that way, but Evie just kills those fuckers, and that’s what I need in my life of believing in self defense).

I love her. She loves her husband, she loves her brother. She’s prim and proper and perfectly tailors her outfits and knows how to strike a killing blow. Evie is about a different kind of resistance than Jacob, but she’s still about resistance. She’s the first female character I’ve seen, in literal years, who is allowed to exist beyond her own femininity. She’s just allowed to exist and be really cool. Evie also means a lot to me.

3. Leonie Barrow This song really sums up Leonie Barrow for me. /They see you as small and helpless, they see you as just a child/ Surprise when they find out that a warrior will soon run wild/. She starts out as so?? Small?? compared to the overall narrative of the Cabal books, which are steeped in angels and gods and Lovecraftian abominations from whom the very foundations of the universe were forged. She’s the Innocent Girl at first. Her femininity, her innocence, does matter, but it’s not what I thought it would be. And by the end, she’s a shotgun wielding master detective, who Cabal CANONICALLY trusts to make the same logical decisions he would.

She is willing to kill to defend her friends even if she doesn’t like it. She will stand against the darkness and be afraid but she will smile.

She’s also almost /definitely/ canonically bi at the end of the fifth book, short of the actual word being used. It’s not a plot spoiler, but it gives me life either way. She’s not the girlfriend, she’s not the Woman, she’s something else and she matters in her own way. Her potential is limitless, and I’m inspired by her every single day. People talk about Stever Rogers as their human ideal, but I guess Leonie Barrow is my comfortable alternative.

Leonie Barrow saves people by her empathy--and she’s also willing to wield a shotgun. Outside of a magical girl narrative, she and Elizabeth DeWitt are the purest versions of the ‘weaponized femininity’ narrative I can think of.

4. Elizabeth DeWitt Oh, Elizabeth. I love her. I love her fucked up history. I love her fucked up present and her implied fucked up future. I wish she had a better ending. If I ever write fic, it will be to correct what has been done to her by canon.

Elizabeth is trying to escape her fate. Her ultimate arc may be about accepting a shitty end, but I don’t think that has to be the case, since I think so much of her story is about denying her future. Like her, I will always hope and strive for something better. She’s femme and hard and powerful and will break the world and make it whole again all with one wishing <3 .

She has the power of a god and the writers/developers/designers didn’t know how to handle that in an interesting way. I love her.

5. Talia (from Arrows of the Queen) SO

When you are reading about a clinically depressed character and you think, “I IDENTIFY WITH HER SO MUCH” that’s probably a sign. So many times, Talia tried to tell me how I was feeling, and it took me a very long time to listen.

I was easily clinically depressed when I read the Arrows of the Queen books. My uncle had just died without me coming out to him. I felt like a disappointment to my mom. My bachelors degree was on fire and it wasn’t totally my fault. There was nothing about myself that I didn’t deeply despise when I read these books, nothing that I didn’t feel the world would be better without. I didn’t want to die, since I have a very particular attachment to my mortality and no matter what, I’m attached to my life for my mom, but I felt so fundamentally worthless that it still hurts to think about. I haven’t been that low since then, and I hope to never be that low again.

I was depressed and I didn’t know it. I don’t think I was truly suicidal even then, even if I was experiencing almost daily suicidal ideation. I don’t think I would have died, but I still think Talia saved my life a little bit--she at least taught me that it’s okay to acknowledge my illness and seek treatment and that it’s okay to want to be happy. I’m so deeply grateful for that I don’t even have words for it, partly because, while I think I would have survived, I wouldn’t be happy.

Talia also got to fuck the most desirable male characters in the Arrows of the Queen trilogy. Even though she was quiet and was shy and was depressed. The message was this: I could have love even if I was mentally ill. I specify ‘male’ characters because Talia was straight, and also because a part of me feels less desirable to men than women, so that fantasy means a lot to me.

Talia is me at my most vulnerable. Talia is me when I want to reach into my own chest and tear myself apart. I love her. She matters. <3

Honorable mentions:

Pearl from Steven Universe (my favorite anxious lesbian, who got a great character arc that I never expected to be validating to both the lesbian-bi women dilemma and to her mental illness. I <3 Pearl). All the women in Overwatch. Sailor Moon and her soldiers. Tamora Pierce’s heroines. Lara Croft.

Tagging @swimthroughthefires @fakeandroid @doomquasar @amandaironic @strawberrylaugh @ghostofthemotif

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