#or at the very least working on most of those problems

[cosmicghoul99]

The Whole Watcher Debacle

Just giving my two cents on the whole Watcher situation. I've been following this since it started, and initially, I wasn't going to say anything, but honestly, why not? (lol)

I want to start off by saying that this was not a good business decision to make. By pulling this, they are essentially alienating their international and low-income fans. The world is going through a global economic crisis, and the fact is that creating a streaming subscription service when companies like Disney and Netflix themselves are struggling is not a sound financial decision. Saying $6/month is "affordable for everyone and anyone" is a tone-deaf statement. In this economy, that is the difference between getting to eat for a day or not. It's not just "two cups of coffee". It's quite literally life or death for some people.

Now, before I get hounded by people saying that "artists deserve to get paid for their works" and "it's all about paying artists until you have to pay them yourselves." I do support small artists and small business owners. I support smaller creatives whenever I can and whenever I have the means to. The problem is that Watcher is not a small artist. They are not even a small business. They are, and apparently always have been a company. In addition to that, they are getting paid. They profit from ad reads, views, Adsense, patreon, merch, and live shows.

Their patreon alone nets them at a minimum of $30k per month. This is on the lower side, mind you. I've heard some other content creators talk about this, and it's estimated that they make around $50k-$100k from AdSense and views. On top of that, they get paid $15k-$30k per sponsored video, and a vast majority of their videos are sponsored. They would make around 60k-120k from sponsorships alone. Add all this together, and they make at least $140k monthly. This is, again, the least, and this does not count in profit from their merch or live shows. Their merch sells for anywhere between $60-90 depending on the item, and they continuously sell out. I don't know how much their live shows are, but I imagine it's something along those lines. If even 100 people bought merch, although this is likely in the thousands, they would make 6,000 minimum from just merch. The current national minimum wage in the United States is around 7 dollars. Per month, if you worked for 40 hours per week, you would make around $1,120. They are making nearly 5 times that just from their merch. They make, on the low end, $150k per month. This is more money in one month than most people can make in 2 and a half years. Even the lower end of money on Patreon makes them more money than most people make in a year. Annually, they are making, and this is greatly underestimating the amount they make, at least $1 million. On the higher end, if we calculate that they are making around $100k per month via Patreon, and we estimate with their sponsorships, the range only increases, to around $320k, adding the higher end of sponsorship money and AdSense. Yearly, that's almost $4 million. Their range is $1million-$4million. I'm sorry, but if you are netting in this profit and still need more for your business, then you are doing something wrong.

Watcher are not struggling artists living paycheck to paycheck and barely making ends meet. They are a multi-million dollar company whose owners live very comfortable lives. This is fine, but they should not act like they are struggling when this business venture was because they were operating outside their means and want to go even further beyond that. YouTube is terrible regarding many things; I get it. There is nothing wrong with creatives wishing to expand, but if you financially cannot support that decision, you should not do so. I am not okay with people being hateful and bringing up unnecessary things. Still, the fact remains that all of their CEOs show their very lavish lives and spending online and constantly talk about it on their podcasts. They could not afford those things if they were truly struggling like they tried to make people believe. Some people are being rude online, yes, and that's not a good thing, but the vast majority are being rightfully upset and are giving valid criticism on why this is a bad idea.

Watcher is not worth a $6/month subscription. They do not have enough content to justify this decision, nor do they have enough followers. Youtubers with followings much larger than theirs have tried to do this and failed. Paywalling their content is not the right move. It essentially stagnates their growth. How are people going to find them, and how are they going to get attention for this? Posting one video on YouTube every time you make a new series -which we don't know how frequently they will update- will not push that content to people. Also, most people who see that initial trailer or episode will not pay $6 monthly to see the rest. The fact is that, like it or not, at $6, they are competing with some of the biggest companies in the industry. Companies like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime, and more all have standards ad supscriptions ranging from $ 5-8 dollars, and they have a catalog of thousands of shows, movies, and more. Yes, it sucks that there is a capitalistic monopoly on these services, but switching to it is not going to help them. Going from YouTube to Vimeo OTT will not net them the profit they think it will. They will struggle on this platform because it's arguably worse than YouTube, and eventually, it will raise the price to keep content up, so they will raise their streaming price.

That's another thing. They advertised this as their own service, unattached to anything else when it's not. It's still run by another company, and now they must pay that company. It feels disingenuous to say this when it is not true. It is not an app or something you can play on TV; it is a website, a fairly sketchy one at that.

There is, again, a cost of living crisis going on. Most people cannot afford to put food on the table, much less spend this money on a streaming service. And even if people wanted to pay, they've barred their international audience from doing so. If you are not in the US, you will have to pay for a VPN to use since the website is not available outside the US, and you will also have to pay a conversion fee since they did not include regional scaling of prices. $6/month is already a lot for people in the US but for people living in other countries with a weaker currency? That's anywhere from a week of groceries to a third of their rent. They did not consider how this would affect international fans, and that's not a good business practice.

And since I will get the inevitable, "You aren't entitled to free content," I'll say this. Yes, people are not entitled to content, but creators are not entitled to people's money. The truth is that if your audience does not like something or want something, then you will not get their support. As a content creator, you must cater to your audience; you can't expect them to pay for or be interested in other content or passion projects. Also, their content is clearly not free. They do get paid. In no world do they not get paid. I will reiterate that they are not small, struggling artists who can't afford to live. Watcher isn't a small indie company that barely gets by. It is a million-dollar company with around 25 employees who live lavishly in one of the most expensive cities in the world. They do not need more money. They want more money.

Plus, people are entitled to their content when that content is mostly based on fan-submission. A lot of Watchers shows rely heavily upon fan submissions and support. Are You Scared?, Too Many Spirits, Food Files, and Ghost Files happen because fans submit stories, places to go, evidence, and more. In fact, Are You Scared and Too Many Spirits are just stories and personal anecdotes that fans share and submit, or that Watcher finds online and read aloud in a backyard. (NOT what I would call TV quality, but okay...)

They posted a while ago that they were taking submissions for a new season of Are You Scared?, Too Many Spirits, and Ghost Files. They did this fully well-aware that they would soon release a paywall. Do they expect fans to pay 6 dollars to see their own submissions? Additionally, they could pass it off as free before this- even though they were getting paid- but now they are locking this service behind a paywall, meaning they make money directly from these stories and this content. People who submitted stories should be compensated since Watcher makes money from fan content.

This still does not acknowledge that they have not responded yet. It has been nearly three days since this blew up, and they have been almost silent. And it is deafening. The only things people have gotten are posts and statements from friends and spouses of the owners that are as out-of-touch and ridiculous as this decision. This shows people that they are doubling down. They had time in the initial 24 hours to respond, and the longer they took to respond, the worse it was getting. It's very telling and a slap in the face to people who have supported them for years, from Buzzfeed to this, through many different times, including the pandemic. Watcher relies so heavily on their audience, yet they do not have the respect for their audience to at least put out a small statement. That is why people are upset. They were helped and built up so much by their audience, then made a video saying, "Thanks for supporting us for years, but if you can't afford us anymore, get out," and maintained radio silence. At the same time, their close friends and family basically called people entitled for not wanting to pay for a service they did not ask for, during a global economic crisis. No one asked for "higher production value" or "TV quality." People were happy with normal, low-production content, like the kind that got them famous/popular in the first place. Yes, they can want to make more expensive content, but they cannot guilt-trip their fanbase into paying for it. I am a small creative. If I make a ridiculously expensive art piece or something with expensive materials, then hand it to someone and say, now you have to pay me for this, even though you didn't ask for this, they will not pay me. It's as simple as that.

Yes, artists should get paid. But Watcher already get paid generously. Not only have they done wrong to their fans, but they have also screwed over their patreon members by essentially saying that they have to pay double for their content. They suddenly switched the tiers on Patreon, removed most of the content, and left only the podcast, and their members do not even get the subscription for free. Most of their Patreon members pay between the $ 10 and $20 tiers, but many also pay around $100. They don't get the service for free even after paying Watcher that much and for so many years. That's spitting on the people who have financially supported you for years.

All in all, this is a very poor financial and business decision, and they are making it worse by remaining silent. They have alienated most of their audience, upset most paying supporters, and been trending for three days for all the wrong reasons. Massive YouTubers have made videos on this, and it has broken from fandom drama into the general internet. This is the beginning of the end, unfortunately. I don't wish any ill will, this is not hate at all. No one at Watcher is a bad person at all, they just made a bad business decision. Unless they apologize, I can't see this working out.

Sorry for the massively long post, I’m not an avid watcher (hehe) or fan of their content but I've had many thoughts bouncing around my head about this business decision since this started, and I wanted to share.

TLDR: Watcher made a seriously bad business decision that upset most of their audience, including paying supporters; claimed to be struggling even though they very clearly aren't and have not responded to their incensed fanbase yet, despite the urgent need to do so.

#watcher #watcher entertainment #do i think some people are being really insane racist and hateful? #yes #do NOT do that shit #but they aren't struggling THAT much #they don't need to do this #they just want more money tbh #most of the criticism is constructive and valid #Am I investing in this because I'm devastated by Ice Adolescence being cancelled and this distracts from it? #absolutely

[cy-cyborg]

Dealing with Healing and Disability in fantasy: Writing Disability

[ID: An image of the main character from Eragon, a white teenage boy with blond hair in silver armour as he sits, with his hand outstretched. On his hand is a glowing blue mark. He is visibly straining as he attempts to heal a large creature in front of him. /End ID]

I'm a massive fan of the fantasy genre, which is why it's so incredibly frustrating when I see so much resistance to adding disability representation to fantasy works. People's go-to reason for leaving us out is usually something to the effect of "But my setting has magic so disability wouldn't exist, it can just be healed!" so let's talk about magic, specifically healing magic, in these settings, and how you can use it without erasing disability from your story.

Ok, let's start with why you would even want to avoid erasing disability from a setting in the first place. I talked about this in a lot more detail in my post on The Miracle Cure. this line of thinking is another version of this trope, but applied to a whole setting (or at least, to the majority of people in the setting) instead of an individual, so it's going to run into the same issues I discussed there. To summarise the points that are relevant to this particular version of the trope though:

Not every disabled person wants or needs a cure - many of us see our disability as a part of our identity. Do difficulties come with being disabled? absolutely! It's literally part of the definition, but for some people in the disabled community, if you took our disabilities away, we would be entirely different people. While it is far from universal, there is a significant number of us who, if given a magical cure with no strings attached, would not take it. Saying no one in your setting would be disabled because these healing spells exists ignores this part of the community.

It messes with the stakes of your story - Just like how resurrecting characters or showing that this is something that is indeed possible in the setting can leave your audience feeling cheated or like they don't have to worry about a character *actually* ever dying. healing a character's disability, or establishing that disability doesn't exist in your setting because "magic" runs into the same problem. It will leave your readers or viewers feeling like they don't have to worry about your characters getting seriously hurt because it will only be temporary, which means your hero's actions carry significantly less risk, which in turn, lowers the stakes and tension if not handled very, very carefully.

It's an over-used trope - quite plainly and simply, this trope shows up a lot in the fantasy genre, to the point where I'd say it's just overused and kind of boring.

So with the "why should you avoid it" covered, let's look at how you can actually handle the topic.

Limited Access and Expensive Costs

One of the most common ways to deal with healing and disability in a fantasy setting, is to make the healing magic available, but inaccessible to most of the population. The most popular way to do that is by making the services of a magical healer capable of curing a disability really expensive to the point that most people just can't afford it. If this is the approach you're going to use, you also typically have to make that type of magic quite rare. To use D&D terms, if every first level sorcerer, bard, cleric and druid can heal a spinal injury, it's going to result in a lot of people who are able to undercut those massive prices and the expense will drop as demand goes down. If that last sentence didn't give you a hint, this is really popular method in stories that are critiquing capitalistic mindsets and ideologies, and is most commonly used by authors from the USA and other countries with a similar medical system, since it mirrors a lot of the difficulties faced by disabled Americans. If done right, this approach can be very effective, but it does need to be thought through more carefully than I think people tend to do. Mainly because a lot of fantasy stories end with the main character becoming rich and/or powerful, and so these prohibitively expensive cure become attainable by the story's end, which a lot of authors and writer's just never address. Of course, another approach is to make the availability of the magic itself the barrier. Maybe there just aren't that many people around who know the magic required for that kind of healing, so even without a prohibitive price tag, it's just not something that's an option for most people. If we're looking at a D&D-type setting, maybe you need to be an exceptionally high level to cast the more powerful healing spell, or maybe the spell requires some rare or lost material component. I'd personally advise people to be careful using this approach, since it often leads to stories centred around finding a miracle cure, which then just falls back into that trope more often than not.

Just outright state that some characters don't want/need it

Another, admittedly more direct approach, is to make it that these "cures" exist and are easily attainable, but to just make it that your character or others they encounter don't want or need it. This approach works best for characters who are born with their disabilities or who already had them for a long time before a cure was made available to them. Even within those groups though, this method works better with some types of characters than others depending on many other traits (personality, cultural beliefs, etc), and isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution, but to be fair, that's kind of the point. Some people will want a cure for their disabilities, others are content with their body's the way they are. There's a few caveats I have with this kind of approach though:

you want to make sure you, as the author, understand why some people in real life don't want a cure, and not just in a "yeah I know these people exist but I don't really get it" kind of way. I'm not saying you have to have a deep, personal understanding or anything, but some degree of understanding is required unless you want to sound like one of those "inspirational" body positivity posts that used to show up on Instagram back in the day.

Be wary when using cultural beliefs as a reasoning. It can work, but when media uses cultural beliefs as a reason for turning down some kind of cure, it's often intending to critique extreme beliefs about medicine, such as the ones seen in some New Age Spirituality groups and particularly intense Christian churches. As a general rule of thumb, it's probably not a good idea to connect these kinds of beliefs to disabled people just being happy in their bodies. Alternatively, you also need to be mindful of the "stuck in time" trope - a trope about indigenous people who are depicted as primitive or, as the name suggests, stuck in an earlier time, for "spurning the ways of the white man" which usually includes medicine or the setting's equivalent magic. I'm not the best person to advise you on how to avoid this specific trope, but my partner (who's Taino) has informed me of how often it shows up in fantasy specifically and we both thought it was worth including a warning at least so creators who are interested in this method know to do some further research.

Give the "cures" long-lasting side effects

Often in the real world, when a "cure" for a disability does exist, it's not a perfect solution and comes with a lot of side effects. For example, if you loose part of your arm in an accident, but you're able to get to a hospital quickly with said severed arm, it can sometimes be reattached, but doing so comes at a cost. Most people I know who had this done had a lot of issues with nerve damage, reduced strength, reduced fine-motor control and often a great deal of pain with no clear source. Two of the people I know who's limbs were saved ended up having them optionally re-amputated only a few years later. Likewise, I know many people who are paraplegics and quadriplegics via spinal injuries, who were able to regain the use of their arms and/or legs. However, the process was not an easy one, and involved years of intense physiotherapy and strength training. For some of them, they need to continue to do this work permanently just to maintain use of the effected limbs, so much so that it impacts their ability to do things like work a full-time job and engage in their hobbies regularly, and even then, none of them will be able bodied again. Even with all that work, they all still experience reduced strength and reduced control of the limbs. depending on the type, place and severity of the injury, some people are able to get back to "almost able bodied" again - such was the case for my childhood best friend's dad, but they often still have to deal with chronic pain from the injury or chronic fatigue.

Even though we are talking about magic in a fantasy setting, we can still look to real-life examples of "cures" to get ideas. Perhaps the magic used has a similar side effect. Yes, your paraplegic character can be "cured" enough to walk again, but the magic maintaining the spell needs a power source to keep it going, so it draws on the person's innate energy within their body, using the very energy the body needs to function and do things like move their limbs. They are cured, but constantly exhausted unless they're very careful, and if the spell is especially strong, the body might struggle to move at all, resulting in something that looks and functions similar to the nerve damage folks with spinal injuries sometimes deal with that causes that muscle weakness and motor control issues. Your amputee might be able to have their leg regrown, but it will always be slightly off. The regrown leg is weaker and causes them to walk with a limp, maybe even requiring them to use a cane or other mobility aid.

Some characters might decide these trade-offs are worth it, and while this cures their initial disability, it leaves them with another. Others might simply decide the initial disability is less trouble than these side effects, and choose to stay as they are.

Consider if these are actually cures

Speaking of looking to the real world for ideas, you might also want to consider whether these cures are doing what the people peddling them are claiming they do. Let's look at the so-called autism cures that spring up every couple of months as an example.

Without getting into the… hotly debated specifics, there are many therapies that are often labelled as "cures" for autism, but in reality, all they are doing is teaching autistic people how to make their autistic traits less noticeable to others. This is called masking, and it's a skill that often comes at great cost to an autistic person's mental health, especially when it's a behaviour that is forced on them. Many of these therapies give the appearance of being a cure, but the disability is still there, as are the needs and difficulties that come with it, they're just hidden away. From an outside perspective though, it often does look like a success, at least in the short-term. Then there are the entirely fake cures with no basis in reality, the things you'll find from your classic snake-oil salesmen. Even in a fantasy setting where real magic exists, these kinds of scams and misleading treatments can still exist. In fact, I think it would make them even more common than they are in the real world, since there's less suspension of disbelief required for people to fall for them. "What do you mean this miracle tonic is a scam? Phil next door can conjure flames in his hand and make the plants grow with a snap of his fingers, why is it so hard to believe this tonic could regrow my missing limb?"

I think the only example of this approach I've seen, at least recently, is from The Owl House. The magic in this world can do incredible things, but it works in very specific and defined ways. Eda's curse (which can be viewed as an allegory for many disabilities and chronic illnesses) is seemingly an exception to this, and as such, nothing is able to cure it. Treat it, yes, but not cure it. Eda's mother doesn't accept this though, and seeks out a cure anyway and ends up falling for a scam who's "treatments" just make things worse.

In your own stories, you can either have these scams just not work, or kind of work, but in ways that are harmful and just not worth it, like worse versions of the examples in the previous point. Alternatively, like Eda, it's entirely reasonable that a character who's been the target of these scams before might just not want to bother anymore. Eda is a really good example of this approach handled in a way that doesn't make her sad and depressed about it either. She's tried her mum's methods, they didn't work, and now she's found her own way of dealing with it that she's happy with. She only gets upset when her boundaries are ignored by Luz and her mother.

Think about how the healing magic is actually working

If you have a magic system that leans more on the "hard magic" side of things, a great way to get around the issue of healing magic erasing disability is to stop and think about how your healing magic actually works.

My favourite way of doing this is to make healing magic work by accelerating the natural processes of your body. Your body will, given enough time (assuming it remains infection-free) close a slash from a sword and mend a broken bone, but it will never regrow it's own limbs. It will never heal damage to it's own spinal cord. It will never undo whatever causes autism or fix it's own irregularities. Not without help. Likewise, healing magic alone won't do any of these things either, it's just accelerating the existing process and usually, by extension making it safer, since a wound staying open for an hour before you get to a healer is much less likely to get infected than one that slowly and naturally heals over a few weeks. In one of my own works, I take this even further by making it that the healing magic is only accelerating cell growth and repair, but the healer has to direct it. In order to actually heal, the healer needs to know the anatomy of what they're fixing to the finest detail. A spell can reconnect a torn muscle to a bone, but if you don't understand the structures that allow that to happen in the first place, you're likely going to make things worse. For this reason, you won't really see people using this kind of magic to, say, regrow limbs, even though it technically is possible. A limb is a complicated thing. The healer needs to be able to perfectly envision all the bones, the cartilage, the tendons and ligaments, the muscles (including the little ones, like those found in your skin that make your hair stand on end and give you goose bumps), the fat and skin tissues, all the nerves, all the blood vessels, all the structures within the bone that create your blood. Everything, and they need to know how it all connects, how it is supposed to move and be able to keep that clearly in their mind simultaneously while casting. Their mental image also has to match with the patient's internal "map" of the body and the lost limb, or they'll continue to experience phantom limb sensation even if the healing is successful. It's technically possible, but the chances they'll mess something up is too high, and so it's just not worth the risk to most people, including my main character.

Put Restrictions on the magic

This is mostly just the same advice as above, but for softer magic systems. put limits and restrictions on your healing magic. These can be innate (so things the magic itself is just incapable of doing) or external (things like laws that put limitations on certain types of magic and spells).

An example of internal restriction can be seen in how some people interpret D&D's higher level healing spells like regenerate (a 7th level spell-something most characters won't have access to for quite some time). The rules as written specify that disabilities like lost limbs can be healed using this spell, but some players take this to mean that if a character was born with the disability in question, say, born without a limb, regenerate would only heal them back to their body's natural state, which for them, is still disabled.

An external restriction would be that your setting has outlawed healing magic, perhaps because healing magic carries a lot of risks for some reason, eithe to the caster or the person being healed, or maybe because the healing magic here works by selectively reviving and altering the function of cells, which makes it a form of necromancy, just on a smaller scale. Of course, you can also use the tried and true, "all magic is outlawed" approach too. In either case, it's something that will prevent some people from being able to access it, despite it being technically possible. Other external restrictions could look like not being illegal, per say, but culturally frowned upon or taboo where your character is from.

But what if I don't want to do any of this?

Well you don't have to. These are just suggestions to get you thinking about how to make a world where healing magic and disability exist, but they aren't the only ways. Just the ones I thought of.

Of course, if you'd still rather make a setting where all disability is cured because magic and you just don't want to think about it any deeper, I can't stop you. I do however, want to ask you to at least consider where you are going to draw the line. Disability, in essence, is what happens when the body stops (or never started) functioning "normally". Sometimes that happens because of an injury, sometimes it's just bad luck, but the boundary between disabled and not disabled is not as solid as I think a lot of people expect it to be, and we as a society have a lot of weird ideas about what is and isn't a disability that just, quite plainly and simply, aren't consistent. You have to remember, a magic system won't pick and choose the way we humans do, it will apply universally, regardless of our societal hang-ups about disability.

What do I mean about this?

Well, consider for a moment, what causes aging? it's the result of our body not being able to repair itself as effectively as it used to. It's the body not being able to perform that function "normally". So in a setting where all disability is cured, there would be no aging. No elderly people. No death from old age. If you erase disability, you also erase natural processes like aging. magic won't pick and choose like that, not if you want it to be consistent.

Ok, ok, maybe that's too much of a stretch, so instead, let's look at our stereotypical buff hero covered in scars because he's a badass warrior. but in a world where you can heal anything, why would anything scar? Even if it did, could another healing spell not correct that too? Scars are part of the body's natural healing process, but if no natural healing occurred, why would a scar form? Scars are also considered disabling in and of themselves too, especially large ones, since they aren't as flexible or durable as normal skin and can even restrict growth and movement.

Even common things like needing glasses are, using this definition of disability at least, a disability. glasses are a socially accepted disability aid used to correct your eyes when they do not function "normally".

Now to be fair, in reality, there are several definitions of disability, most of which include something about the impact of society. For example, in Australia (according to the Disability Royal Commission), we define disability as "An evolving concept that results from the interaction between a person with impairment(s) and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others." - or in laymen's terms, the interaction between a person's impairment and societal barriers like people not making things accessible or holding misinformed beliefs about your impairment (e.g. people in wheelchairs are weaker than people who walk). Under a definition like this, things like scars and needing glasses aren't necessarily disabilities (most of the time) but that's because of how our modern society sees them. The problem with using a definition like this though to guide what your magic system will get rid of, is that something like a magic system won't differentiate between an "impairment" that has social impacts that and one that doesn't. It will still probably get rid of anything that is technically an example of your body functioning imperfectly, which all three of these things are. The society in your setting might apply these criteria indirectly, but really, why would they? Very few people like the side effects of aging on the body (and most people typically don't want to die), the issues that come with scars or glasses are annoying (speaking as someone with both) and I can see a lot of people getting rid of them when possible too. If they don't then it's just using the "not everyone wants it approach" I mentioned earlier. If there's some law or some kind of external pressure to push people away from fixing these more normalised issues, then it's using the "restrictions" method I mentioned earlier too.

Once again, you can do whatever you like with your fantasy setting, but it's something I think that would be worth thinking about at least.

#Writing disability with Cy Cyborg #Long Post #Disability #Disabled #Disability Representation #Writing Disability #Writing #Writeblr #Authors #Creators #Writing Advice #Disabled Characters #On Writing #Disability in Media #Tropes #Disability Tropes #magic #fantasy #worldbuilding #magic systems

[levyfiles]

re it being bad for international fans (sorry i was just backreading your blog), credit cards aren't very widespread outside of north america and a lotta people aren't gonna pay for a credit card just for watcher! debit cards are more common in most places but watcher doesnt seem to accept those. i have a dropout subscription but i pay for that through youtuber memberships for that exact reason!

also the exchange rate can be very bad depending on where you live (piratesoftware on yt/twitch makes a rlly good point abt this re: his game, where he made his game 80% cheaper in brazil bc ppl in brazil have less money on average, which has now led to less piracy and at least a quarter of his game's profits coming from brazil)

anyway all that to say that it's just less sustainable for a lot of international fans. the current backlash isn't okay, i fully agree, but ppl do have a point when they complain about this! i think adding a paypal option would at least somewhat mitigate the first problem, but i'm not knowledgeable enough re: business to know what the ramifications of that would be.

This does hold hands with my belief that a soft launch to just their observers would have had this all sorted by the time it went public. On the patreon discord, one of their staff said they're working on instituting PayPal and other payment methods in time for the beta test period to end.

This goes the same with subtitles, a TV and mobile, as well as a few other issues discussed by their patrons.

Just believe me when I say I'm exasperated about the sloppy way they launched this, frustrated that they didn't listen to fans before when we said the secrecy and spoiler culture communication pattern is not just embarrassing, it's detrimental from a marketing standpoint. So if anyone has decided to give up on them due to this, I understand. I'm just not a fan of collective bullying to try to get what you want when the stakes are very very low.

#watcher

[vulpinesaint]

throws a book at the wall i'm SO fucking tired of putting emotional effort into relationships only for it not to be reciprocated

#trying so fucking hard not to resent someone i really like rn. #they're going through a hard time and obvi i'm glad they feel comfortable coming to me for support. #but also... :( to have that be the only thing we really talk ab anymore... #miss them i guess. wanna talk like we used to. #nd to send support and an expression of how i rlly empathize bc i'm going through smth similar and get no response... #idk. sadbad. working on not letting those feelings fester #i just cannot be therapistfriend. i am Not therapist friend in most situations!!! #the problem is that i am a very good listener but not super approachable in that way to most people? #so i end up with one or two people with really big constant problems every year or so who put All of that onto me. #and i try SO fucking hard in my relationships with people i care about. #and that's SO much energy and emotional investment into their problems and it just isn't sustainable. #especially when i'm not getting it in return. #idk i probably just need to tell them what i'm feeling about. open and honest communication ftw #i'm sure they'll get it if i say 'i've had a lot of relationships in the past that devolved into me being the vessel for people's issues... #...and it's turned into me resenting them over time and i really don't want that to happen with us.' #'just need you to talk w/ me about other things sometimes' y'know? #i'm already drawing a lot of boundaries so that i don't throw myself into comforting and placating and facilitating someone's feelings #which DOES make me a good listener. but i can't be sacrificing myself for that. not rn anyway. #god but also i just want to have a fucking conversation sometimes is that too much to ask #i get that ur having a hard time emotionally but you could at least respond to the easy upbeat messages that i send you #specifically TO facilitate easy upbeat conversation that doesn't require emotional effort from you #or like. initiate conversation Ever when it's not around the negative situation u want to talk to me about. you know. #it's okay. i'll talk to them. just feeling frustrated. #i'm going to get bled fucking dry if i keep putting so much of myself into relationships without receiving anything in return #valentine notes

[hella1975]

ok you’ve convinced me to watch bsd so where can I watch it? and do I need to read the comics? if so, in what order and where can I read them?

EEK OMG YAY! okay so one thing about me im a little student girlie #ihaventboughtmilkinaweek so i will always consume media the free way lmao. the site i read the bsd manga on is 'bsdmanga.com' which seems very legit but does also do pop ups a lot for me so just make sure you've got an adblock going. if you want to properly buy them though ive seen bsd being sold in almost every waterstones! as for the anime, the sub and dub were both free on crunchyroll AND funimation back when i first started watching it, but not anymore bc everything is awful. the main less-legit site i use for anime is 'animesuge' and that has it there :)

#animesuge has literally never let me down i swear by it but like i said im p sure it's not as official #so again just be sure you've got an adblock! #okay okay back to bsd SO there's 4 seasons (the 4th currently airing!) as well as a spin-off called bsd wan that's more silly/lighthearted #and also two films in the form of dead apple (my favourite anime film of all time) and the beast live action #that i havent watched yet bc my go-to piraters are LETTING ME DOWN #as for the manga it's a tad confusing at first glance so i'll give u a quick rundown bc i promise it's not as intimidating as it seems #like it's a GOOD things that bsd has sooooooo much content like even i havent consumed it all yet im not strong enough #so there's the main manga that's now on chapter 105.5 (a VERY good chapter) #but i started reading where the anime ended (a good halfway through) and havent felt any problem with that #so if u dont want to tackle the entire thing you could do that! #there's also a bunch of light novels that act as prequels and/or is just asagiri writing fanfiction for his own story lmao #like what was beast if not fanfiction come ON #so yeah those are very good also #there's a lot online about what order to watch/read it all in if that bothers you #but honestly you should be fine sticking to the main content (the anime and main manga) and if you like it you can branch out #i watched all the animated content first before i even touched the manga/novels and that worked well for me #i will say i personally found the anime really slow for a while so my rule with reccing bsd is to tell people to at least wait for chuuya #lmfao like once it gets going it GETS GOING and also he is the most character of any media EVER #so just give it a chance! #okay ill stop talking now <3 #bsd #ask

[badbadbuddy]

ok so what if. hear me out on this one. midoteto suicide pact.

#ok so maybe i saw some translations from the current event #and i mean. i think constantly about how in motor show he joked that he 'wasnt any good at being depressed' #i feel like tetora doesnt really know about this kinda stuff and has a very narrow view of what depression is #like hes the type to think depression and being suicidal are the same thing. that you cannot be depressed if you dont wanna die. #which is why hes 'not good' at it #he DOESNT wanna die #at least he doesnt think he does #but he says in this event that if hes not loved or even liked he has no reason to exist. #and with everything rst has been thru with chiaki making everything a chiaki problem and not a rst problem and tetora #taking the fall for it more often than not as the leader of the yumenosaki division who is probably the most affected by those decisions #his help being constantly shrugged off by someone whos supposed to value teamwork above all else #that GETS to a guy #it gives the impression that he ISNT cared for. that he ISNT loved or liked or important to people. #and thats one of the worst side effects of chiakis stubbornness. #and with midori nothing ever seems to go in his favor #he was unwillingly put in the idol course because of his looks which hes super self conscious about #dude skips meals and avoids certain food groups in hopes he'll stunt his growth and probably has ever since he started growing like this #his genes failed him and now hes stuck in a position he never wanted to be in. he gets a lot of modeling work #which he hates bc it brings more attention to his looks #he was pulled into rst bc he had to go somewhere by a man with a hero complex as tall as midori #he stayed more out of convenience than anything. he stayed so chiaki wouldn't make a fuss about it #and while he did come to genuinely enjoy being an idol and came to love his unitmates #he still feels that inferiority constantly #and i think #in an emo way #it would be poetic if they felt they were the only people who would miss them if they died #so they die in each others company alone so that they arent without the one person who cares for them #ensemble stars #enstars #tetora nagumo

[sanstropfremir]

honestly i also think that groups arent going to award's shows anymore is also because its not only rigged but you also already know whos gonna win. like if they have 10 awards you already know b'ts is gonna get at least 3 whether they deserve it or not because otherwise fans will eat them alive, thats 7 awards left then you have male and female rookie which, well it excludes anyone who isnt a rookie, 1 award for best male (excludes women) 1 award for best female (excludes men), an award for solo artists, and then like performance of the year or something. so you basically have 50 groups sitting there ineligible for half the awards and not being able to get the other half because the same 5 groups always get them so like..... why even go at that point

yea i agree, awards shows across genre have been losing their sway for a couple of years. i think kpop ones are a particularly acute microcosm bc there are not very many types of awards, and there are really stark differences between the 'top tier' of groups and the rest of the ones that make up the majority of the industry, despite the industry being relatively small. even though there's numerically less groups debuting in the last twoish years (i did a quick survey of the wikipedia list of debuts by year to check numbers and it was about 30ish per year in the 2010s but so far it's been about 20ish for the 2020s. however this does include subunits and project groups so it's not a totally accurate figure), all those numbers compound on each other since there aren't the same amount leaving the industry as entering. so overall, these awards shows continue to be stacked towards the groups with the biggest companies and fanbases, even though there's better art that deserves that recognition being made by increasingly more and more groups that go completely unnoticed and have no chances of being noticed.

#the thing is that you cant really like.......diversify kpop awards in the same way you can for film/tv/music #you cant divide idol music by genre bc it IS the genre. unless you started giving out awards for 'best (x) concept' #which......doesn't really work #like this is the same problem as hollywood has with the oscars etc but there's still some kind of pretense that they care about 'art' #for those at least. like superhero movies dont usually get noms for best picture #whereas with kpop its like. if the lastest marvel movie won every award bc the most people watched it and it made the most money #its all very transparently capitalistic #and not at all a recognition of artistry #its also at a place where these awards are losing value to fans bc a handful of groups who dont deserve them are constantly winning them #but to groups from small companies who get nommed its still a HUGE deal. its become this weird dichotomy #i'm sure its very frustrating for idols #text #answers #kpop questions #awards shows 2022

[eelhound]

"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

#kurt schiller #ursula k. le guin #quote #quotations #the ones who walk away from omelas #trolley problem #activism #introspection #discomfort #reform #revolution #suffering #ethics #morality

[sistertotheknowitall]

Danny is Some Guy with a not so secret admirer.

Part four? Post #four? I don’t know, none of these are exactly in order. Post one, post two, post three.

——

By the time Tim opened the door, Danny had his coffee made and handed to Mia at the register. He resolutely ignored her smug face and went back to making the other orders.

Tim had been a regular long before Danny had started at the coffee shop but it was three days into Danny’s third week when Tim had stumbled in at eight a.m. and did a double take upon seeing Danny. A very obvious double take followed by intense staring before Mia had cleared her throat. The blush that lit up Tim’s face was only rivaled by the one on Danny’s.

He had never had anyone openly stare at him before.

Mia had been insufferable ever since.

It also didn’t help that shortly after their first meeting Tim had started taking his breaks at the little coffee shop. It’s been three weeks, nearly a month and Wayne Enterprise’s CEO went from a bi-weekly regular to an everyday one. (Danny wondered if he should be concerned for the man’s caffeine intake but he only had the one cup every time so probably not.)

Originally, Danny had no plans to talk to Tim. It seemed obvious the guy had a crush on Danny if the constant looks over his laptop were anything to go by and Danny didn’t want to encourage it. Danny barely had time to make new friends let alone start a relationship.

There was also the added problem of what was quickly becoming his bat stalkers. How do you explain to someone that you were being watched by Gotham’s vigilante’s for no reason? (Or worse because he had made a poorly timed sleep-deprived comment.) Danny didn’t think you could without seeming suspicious.

Incidentally though, Danny’s plan went out the window when on a slow afternoon as he was cleaning tables and passed behind Tim. Once he saw the article the other man was reading he snorted.

Bruce Wayne and The Batman? Could This Be A New Romance For Gothams Most Beloved Billionaire?

It was one of those gossip rags that printed things like: Elvis: alive and well and Superman: a mild mannered farm boy? It was all nonsense.

Danny asked Tim why he bothered with the site and Tim responded that he found it amusing to read and that his family had a group chat where they sent the articles to each other.

“Okay. But Batman? Really? Your dad could do so much better.”

“You don’t like Batman?” Tim asked. Danny had slid into the chair next to him and shrugged. “I respect what he does but for as intimidating as he is, he also seems a little silly.”

Tim had given him an incredulous look and Danny hadn’t given him time to ask for an explanation, “and his kids can be just as rude. Like that flying monkey one.” Tim choked on air and Danny politely waited for him to calm down. “Kids? Wait - flying monkey one? Which one -?”

“The one always doing back flips with the blue bird symbol. He’s also a dick that gives hypocritical lectures about fighting.” Danny wouldn’t say he hated the guy but he wasn’t sure how many more lectures he could endure before going ghost and fighting him.

Tim had turned to Danny completely and was watching him with a look of disbelief, “you mean Nightwing?”

“Is that his name? Imma call him Dickwing.”

Tim had started choking again, this time Danny patted his back hoping to help. Yet it was all for not once he kept talking, “I think I’ve only had positive interactions with the one who looks like a walking red flag.”

“Red flag? Do you men hood-?”

“No, although he is definitely a red flag, I mean the other Red one. I’m sorry, I don’t know all these peoples names yet.”

“Danny!” Mia called.

Danny stood and patted Tim, who looked a little shell-shocked, on the shoulder. “Well work calls, see you later Mr. Drake-Wayne.” As he walked away he heard Tim mutter “it’s just Tim.”

(Tim for his part, placed his head in his hands and thought, well at least I have his name now.)

After that first interaction Tim stopped playing the lurker and started to actually talk to Danny and vise versa. Danny never asked if he still had a crush on him, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

Unfortunately, their growing friendship had only encoraged Mia as she happily sang “your boyfriend’s here!”

Danny, very maturely, did not stick his tongue out at her. He did however flip her off under the counter like an adult.

#danny is just some guy #I’m still on Danny’s pov #it’s just sillier from his perspective #batman #batfamily #batboys #batman fandom #dick grayson #batman wayne family adventures #danny phantom #dp x dc #dpxdc #dc x dp crossover #dp dc crossover #dp x dc crossover #dp crossover #dc x dp #dcxdp #tim drake #tim drake wayne #danny fenton #I added a little OC #Mia the OC

[ickadori]

Damn, that unwanted images fic? I can imagine sukuna constantly trying to trick Yuuji into giving Sukuna his body just for a bit so he can go seduce reader. Maybe even pop out and whisper filthy nothings whenever she passes by cause she has to know about what he wants to do to her.

[cws] fem reader. sukuna being a pervert. groping. minor scent kink activities. oral. i think this is dubcon… one big unedited ramble tbh. writing sukuna is hard!

Being around Yuji could sometimes be… tiring, to say the least.

He’s a nice guy, very nice, funny too - he’s made you laugh to tears on quite a few occasions, and he’s cute to top it all off. Everyone you spoke to always have good things to say about him, and you have to admit that you do, too—even if his preference in partners had made you raise your eyebrows when you first heard it.

So, with this in mind, you always try to ignore Sukuna and his ‘antics’, although it was getting increasingly more difficult to ignore the curse’s brazen words when they were blurted out in the midst of a silent classroom, or whenever you happened to pass by Yuji in the hallway, or even when he had managed to pin you in an innocent enough position during training.

You couldn’t count how many times you had been left with your mouth gaping and hot in the face due to the comments Sukuna threw your way. They were always crude, brash, lewd, and left you with a strange twisting feeling deep in your gut — it was weird. The words were Sukuna’s, obviously, but if you didn’t look at the mouth sprouted on Yuji’s cheek, or pay too much heed to the deep, rough drawl of the voice speaking, you could pretend that it was Yuji saying those words, and for some reason that made it all seem a tad bit better…but not by much.

You had spoken with Gojo about it, as much as you hadn’t wanted to. Talking with your past teacher about the strange obsession that the curse inhabiting your friend’s body had with you was at the very top of your list of things you absolutely never wanted to fucking do, but you had to do something.

Sukuna’s comments were getting out of hand, his most recent having kept you from venturing to the training field — you had been engaged in a spar against Maki, attempting to work on your hand to hand combat, when you had heard that unmistakeable voice, his attention fully piqued by the presence of you - and while you never liked to be full of yourself, it was common knowledge that he only made his presence so obnoxiously obvious either when you were in sight of Yuji was banging on death’s door.

At first, you had thought he was rudely critiquing you like he usually did, commenting on your speed and how you were just so slow, you’d be dead in a fight against someone who was actually strong, or one of the many other things he liked to say to get your spirits low, but no, he was in a different mood that day.

Maki had just tossed you onto the ground for the umpteenth time, and you had decided to call it quits then, desperately wanting to submerge yourself in a hot bath to try and soothe your aching body.

Yuji, who had been observing from the side and having a somewhat one-sided conversation with Inumaki, had sensed your beaten to smithereens will and hauled you up off the ground, a smile on his face as he tapped you on the shoulder and gave you a bit of encouragement, only for the good deed to immediately be overshadowed when Sukuna spoke.

You hadn’t caught it at first, or rather, you had tried to pretend that you didn’t actually hear what he had said, because there was no way in hell that you wanted to acknowledge that he, in front of all of these people, had made a comment about how your shorts were just ‘so damned snug that he could practically see your clit—do you even have on any panties?’.

He had no problem repeating himself, even throwing some new things in, things that made your ears burn and the hairs at the back of your neck raise and your stomach flutter when you took on Yuji’s sheepish expression coupled with the way his eyes kept flitting down to between your legs and off to the side.

Recounting the many tales to Gojo had been humiliating, and his amazed ooh’s and ahh’s hadn’t made it any better, but you had desperately wanted some kind of resolution to all of this. He was the strongest, after all, so surely he could do something? Muzzle him at the very least?

“I’m afraid that’s out of my capabilities—aww, don’t look at me like that, I want to help you, but there’s not much of anything I can do.” He had been wearing his blindfold as he usually did, but you were certain that had been a hint of amusement in his eyes as he spoke, as if this was some funny story and not a serious matter that required a serious resolution. “I can’t control who Sukuna takes a liking, too, even if it is one of my beloved students. As it stands, he can’t do much of anything but talk. Yuji has him under control in that aspect, so you’ll just have to grin and bear unfortunately.”

There was only so much grinning and bearing you could take — Sukuna was unrelenting. While the comments had been sparse before, they were now frequent. You couldn’t go a single day without some part of your body being commented on.

Wearing skirts earned you comments on your thighs of how soft they looked, of how they’d feel wrapped around his head as he tongued your cunt, of how he wanted to mark them up with his teeth, his hands, his nails. So you wore pants next, only for him to admire the way they hugged your ass, and oh, he sees, you’re showing off for Yuji now, ya know he’s an ass man, is that what this is? The want the brat to fuck you instead of him, a real man, a man that can make you cry and moan and cream on his cock with little to no effort?

If your shirt happened to be a bit tight that day around your breasts, you could bet your life and win that Sukuna was gonna tell you ten different ways that he would fuck them, eventually. He’d describe it in vivid detail; how your tits would look squeezed around his cock, how he’d cover them in his cum (don’t worry, he’d be considerate enough to lick it off of you, as long as you didn’t squirm too much when he latched onto your pretty nipples), how they’d bounce when he’d fuck you—and don’t make that face, he knows you like what he’s saying. You don’t? Then let Yuji reach in your panties and see if you’re wet or not. No? It’s fine, he knows you are, just too shy and prudish to admit it.

You’re careful eating consuming certain foods and drinks around him, but when he made a remark about how greedily you gulped down your water after a morning run, wondering aloud if you ‘guzzle cum down just as eagerly’, you chose to forfeit your basic human needs in his presence altogether.

It seemed like you couldn’t do anything around Yuji without it being turned into something perverse, and after much contemplation, you decided to just avoid him all together. It took a lot of detours and changes of your schedule to ensure you wouldn’t run into him, along with skipping out on hanging with your other friends because he’d be there, but you managed. It was incredibly boring and dull, and you found yourself lazing around your room more often than not, but you figured this was better than listening to the many ways Sukuna wanted to fuck you.

You’re in your room now, fingers massaging a new moisturizer into your cheeks as you only halfway pay attention to the show that’s playing on the tv. You had just gotten out of the shower, dressed in a baggy sweater that you couldn’t remember who you had snagged from, and was nearly ready to retire for the night.

A knock at your door draws your attention away from the tv, and thinking it’s more than likely Nobara come to once again lament about how pissed she is that you took a rain check on yet another outing with them (the trio had ventured out into the city earlier) you move to open it without thinking.

“If you’re here to scream at me for staying in tonight, I’m gonna need you to make it quick. My show is…” Your words die on your tongue when your eye finally clash against red ones, and there’s a lurch in your chest when Sukuna steps into your room, lips twisted into a grin as he invades your space. “…Yu—!”

You help when his hand shoots out to snag ahold of your jaw, fingers pushing into your cheeks as he quirks a brow. “I know you’re not stupid enough to call me by another man’s name, right?” Your hand is still gripping the door knob, and it tightens as you jerkily nod, eyes wide and unblinking as the gravity of the situation takes its time weighing on your shoulders.

He smushes your cheeks together, a hum leaving him as he turns your head side to side, and you can’t help the feeling that he’s appraising you, ogling you, judging you, just as he had been when he wasn’t in control, and all the things he had said suddenly come rushing back to the front of your mind.

A choked noise manages to escape you, and his grin widens, his free hand pushing yours away from the door so he can push it closed. “Wonderin’ what I’m gonna do to you?” He guesses, and you make another noise, your hands itching to do something. You are a sorcerer, not the strongest but definitely not the weakest, but this is Sukuna standing in front of you, what could you possibly do against him?

He takes another step forward, and the cologne that Yuji frequently wears wraps around you and makes your head spin. “I was wondering the same thing on my way over.” His front presses flush to yours, and you jump when something firm and big pushes into your hip, the hand that had been on your face dropping to rest against the side of your neck, thumb positioning itself underneath your chin so he can tilt your head up. “What to use first… your mouth,” he eyes your lips, and a shaky breath leaves them at that moment, “these tits,” his free hand gropes you through your sweater, and you yelp and jump in his hold, protests stuttered out as he kneads and squeezes at the flesh.

“S-Sukuna, you can’t—”

“Or this fat little cunt you’ve got.” The hand that had been on your chest dips low, and you both make a sound when his fingers are met with a sticky, clear fluid. He snarks out a laugh, and you furiously shake your head as your skin burns. “You’re fucking wet.”

“I’m not!” He pushes a finger up against your clit through the cotton of your panties, and you cross your ankles in an attempt to keep him from rubbing against you, but it doesn’t deter him in the slightest. He presses against you harder, and your teeth sink into your bottom lip as you weakly push at his forearm. There’s the fleeting thought that Yuji is somewhere in there seeing this, and it’s almost enough to have you melting into an embarrassed puddle of goo, but then Sukuna is saying something about being on ‘borrowed time’ while lowering himself to his knees in front of you.

You gape down at him, hurriedly trying to scramble back, but his hands come up to grip the backs of your thighs, the look he gives you making you stay put. Once he sees you’re not going anywhere, he loosens his grip on your legs, hands venturing up until he’s roughly gripping at the fat of your ass, gaze fixed on your face as you fight to keep it somewhat expressionless… although by the pleased look on his face you’re sure that you’re failing.

“You should revel in the knowledge that I’ve never kneeled before anyone else.”

With a harsh tug your underwear is pooled around your ankles, and Sukuna is roughly pushing up the material of your sweater, his head moving in until you can feel his breath fanning over the curly hairs covering your cunt. A misplaced stroke of insecurity covers you as he takes in the sight, and you don’t want to ponder about why you seem to care if he prefers a full shave or not, because you shouldn’t.

You should kick him away, king of curses be damned. He could cut you into a million pieces with a swipe of his finger, but still! You should do something other than just stand here and allow him to—

He buries his nose into your mound, a deep groan sounding as you hear him breathe in your scent, and your breath catches in your throat as your knees wobble, hands flying to his shoulders as you steady yourself.

You sweater covers his head as he lets it go to instead spread apart your lips, and you can’t help the gasp that comes out when he immediately begins to lap at your cunt, tongue moving from your clit to your hole and back again.

It’s too much too soon, and noises that you’d be horrified at making later tumble out of your mouth as Sukuna messily eats you out, one hand harshly gripping at your ass. His tongue feels as if it’s everywhere all at once, and you can feel yourself teetering on the edge in no time, hips unconsciously rocking against his mouth, calves tensed as you stretch your on your toes, fingers curling into the material of his hoodie.

“Suh…Su-kuna,” a broken cry of his name falls from your lips as you come, his tongue pushing impossibly deep into you as his hand tugs you closer. The sound of him slurping at your slick is loud in the room, and the bruising grip on your ass trades in for a caress, the harsh sucking at your cunt switching to slow, languid licks that threaten to throw you into overstimulation,

When the fog clears, you stiffen, face screwing up and eyes widening as you look down at the lump in your sweater. Before any thoughts can come, he’s pulling back, pink hair coming into view as your sweater falls away from him, and you think you may just die on the spot when take note of the lack of black markings marring his face.

“…Yuji?”

#sukuna x reader #yuji x reader #jjk smut #jjk x reader

[evilminji]

You think the Zone has its version of Comic Con?

Like? Think about it. You have literally all of time to work on it, your Magnum Opus, your life's work. That DREAM comic. All the supplies you could ever wish for. Endless paper. Endless ink. You can practice and practice for CENTURIES until it's JUST right.

Wouldn't you want to share it?

There are definitely Ghosts who have Obsessions that make them collect.

And two people meeting would lead to a group. Lead to a bigger group. Lead to a large group. A gathering. A crowd even. Eventually you need a Lair to meet IN. It becomes An Event.

People hear about it.

Want to bring other art mediums. Food stalls. Report on it. It grows. Shoot offs start happening. Niche meet ups.

But like?

Unlike comic con? It's all FREE. Sure, you might have fork over the ecto to make your copy. And yeah, weaker ghosts can only do that so many times. Will have to prioritize. But? They can come back after leaving for a nap. Ask a buddy to come with. There ARE work arounds.

Just? Imagine the unbelievable HIPE? Danny would feel? But be unable to TELL anyone about? Zone Con happens several times a year! Cause so many people wanna come. The Zone being infinite, after all.

Problem 1? They're using THEIR standard of a "year". Which is actual 5 earth years. So it's only happens every year and a half for him. And Problem 2? He can't even TALK about how excited he is about Z Con with anyone (outside his friends and family) because they haven't heard of it and might Ask Questions.

It's ALSO held in a part of the Zone that's like? Three days of flying away from the portal. And no amount of begging is gonna get any of his loved ones to camp in the Speeder for around six-ish days just to go to a Con.

So you can imagine his DELIGHT. His utter JOY and *Target Spotted* "!!!" Noise, when? In the crowd? He spots A HUMAN! Hi fellow human!!! Omg, wanna be Con Besties? *doesn't even wait for an answer*

So now? This sad, blonde, deeply lost and kinda alarmed, trench coat dude? Is Danny's new Z Con Going Bestie! You got a map yet, bestie? No? That's cool, he has one. By the way, he has human food in the Speeder if you nee-

YES!

Cause, see, here's the THING. John? Lost to the Realms Infinte. Or Infinte Realms. Translation was iffy... and on fire... like the rest of the building. It was him or the kids those psychos had kidnapped, for what fucked "ritual" the voices in their heads, that THEY thought were demons but frankly he's pretty sure was just feedback from-

Look, doesn't matter, he had to choose. He always knew someday he'd have too. That even twisting Luck and talking fast wouldn't quite be enough. And he had to decide, in that moment, which outcome mattered more to him. They get out safe, or he does.

Wasn't much of a question, was it?

So, there he is. Staring down oblivion and all those debts unpaid. 'Bout to see who's gonna come for him this time, and take what left of wretched soul. When? He bleeds on the FUCKIN two-bit crap circle they squiggled in God only knows what. Remembers that "oh YEAH, set dressings!" Sometimes when you focus too hard on insuring a Good Outcome?

You weird weird as shit byproducts happening on the side to balance it all out.

Or BAD ones.

He wakes up someone fucking green and crowded. For the life of him can't tell you which one it is. And THAT was of course, bout two days ago.

Biggest and most immediate problem? He... does NOT recognize what flavor of magical fuckery this is. Doesn't seem Fae. And doesn't smell like Hell. There are... there are honest to God BOOTH BABES hanging around. Hunks too. The view is LOVELY.

And nerdy.

Very, very nerdy.

But he isn't THAT out of touch. So he should recognize SOMETHING. Or at least the languages. But nope! It's like aliens and magic had a nerd baby and dipped it in GREEN. And the worst thing? Is there is food everywhere, but it all glows and John's not stupid enough to eat it.

Then? Sweet merciful fuck. Salvation! Some teeny bopper Barely No Longer Teen fresh faced INFANT of a Hero kid. With a SHIP. Who has FOOD and a clear idea of where they are. Hello~ John's new BEST FRIEND. Yes. Absolutely. Con Buddies, whatever.

Just feed me, kid.

Only? Once he inhales like 5 "Fenton rations"? He only gets half way through introducing himself before getting interrupted. Kid hears "magic" and "occult Detective" and just? Goes "oh! So you wanna check out the magic Ally with me? Sam wanted me to pick up some witchy stuff!"

..............how magic?

(In Which? Constantine becomes Danny's interdimensional Con buddy)

@the-witchhunter @hypewinter @hdgnj @mutable-manifestation @lolottes @nerdpoe

#dpxdc #dp x dc #dc x dp #dcxdp #dc x dp prompt #danny phantom

[contact-guy]

lol THIS ENDED UP BEING SO LONG but it's such a cute story opening that I had to draw Watson roasting Holmes's messiness for the newspaper and Holmes skillfully maneuvering his way out of having to do chores. It's all canon, even the indoor sharpshooting, except for the bit about the cold bath.

canon text under the cut:

An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places. But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner. One winter’s night, as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to suggest to him that, as he had finished pasting extracts into his common-place book, he might employ the next two hours in making our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom, from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him. This he placed in the middle of the floor and, squatting down upon a stool in front of it, he threw back the lid. I could see that it was already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red tape into separate packages.

“There are cases enough here, Watson,” said he, looking at me with mischievous eyes. “I think that if you knew all that I had in this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting others in.”

“These are the records of your early work, then?” I asked. “I have often wished that I had notes of those cases.”

“Yes, my boy, these were all done prematurely before my biographer had come to glorify me.” He lifted bundle after bundle in a tender, caressing sort of way. “They are not all successes, Watson,” said he. “But there are some pretty little problems among them. Here’s the record of the Tarleton murders, and the case of Vamberry, the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminium crutch, as well as a full account of Ricoletti of the club-foot, and his abominable wife. And here—ah, now, this really is something a little recherchè.”

He dived his arm down to the bottom of the chest, and brought up a small wooden box with a sliding lid, such as children’s toys are kept in. From within he produced a crumpled piece of paper, and old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old disks of metal.

“Well, my boy, what do you make of this lot?” he asked, smiling at my expression.

“It is a curious collection.”

“Very curious, and the story that hangs round it will strike you as being more curious still.”

“These relics have a history then?”

“So much so that they are history.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Sherlock Holmes picked them up one by one, and laid them along the edge of the table. Then he reseated himself in his chair and looked them over with a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.

“These,” said he, “are all that I have left to remind me of the adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.”

I had heard him mention the case more than once, though I had never been able to gather the details. “I should be so glad,” said I, “if you would give me an account of it.”

“And leave the litter as it is?” he cried, mischievously. “Your tidiness won’t bear much strain after all, Watson. But I should be glad that you should add this case to your annals, for there are points in it which make it quite unique in the criminal records of this or, I believe, of any other country. A collection of my trifling achievements would certainly be incomplete which contained no account of this very singular business.

-The Memories of Sherlock Holmes: The Musgrave Ritual

#they are so married #also watson describing himself as bohemian #i know what you are #sherlock holmes #acd holmes #acd canon #john watson #my art #musgrave ritual

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

#ao3 #ao3 stats #psa #my words #fandom #I doubt anyone is even going to read this but I needed to get it out of my system and at least try to stop this from spreading #if you know me #you know I get Big Mad about misinformation #don't take anything at face value #do your own research

[sttoru]

toji x nympho reader 🤭

⟣ tags. dom!toji fushiguro x female reader. smut. overstimulation, creampies, cunnilingus, exhibitionism, daddy kink, slight slapping, cum play, blowjobs, thigh riding, fingering, positions mentioned; cowgirl, doggy. he’s mean sometimes teehee. reader gets called ‘doll & princess’. separate headcanons + small drabbles under cut.

𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈 was sure of it; no woman could ever keep up with his stamina or libido. he was surprisingly proven wrong when he met you—your sexual desires were almost too much to keep up with. that last statement goes for the average man, at least.

𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈 was no regular man at all. in many ways. and especially when it comes to sex and all that it comes with. with all his experience, he knew just the right techniques to satisfy a woman and keep her entertained for a long time. plus, his stamina and size were no joke due to his constant training and bulky physique.

𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈 never misses on the opportunity of satisfying your needs. you could wake him up at 3 a.m with the question if he could help with you with a certain ‘problem’ and he’ll grunt—surely—but doesn’t hesitate to roll over on his back and let you pull his boxers down whilst encouraging you to ride him in an exhausted manner.

“c’mon, weren’t you the one asking if you could fuck y’rself on my cock? ya either do it right or get off.” mean as always. but somehow, it increased the pleasure you were feeling already—that hoarse, raspy morning voice of toji’s echoes in your ear with each sentence uttered. it was even hotter when he’d grunt or groan under his breath. toji had one hand on your ass, squeezing or lazily spanking it whenever your hips slammed down on his. his other arm was draped over his eyes, keeping them closed since he was in the mood to continue sleeping—basically half-asleep, in contrast to your energy filled body which was riding his cock continuously. “mhmm, jus’ like that. fuck y’rself dumb on my dick, princess.”

𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈 knows you get turned on very easily just from him doing the most simplest of things. what really gets you going is his body—the way his big, masculine hands knead at the flesh on your waist whenever he hugs you from behind, the veins running through them making your pussy tingle. . or when he stretches and warms up in your bedroom before going on a mission—that makes you rub your thighs together. and you make it known that you’re turned on by him just by looking at him with those seductive eyes.

and 𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈 can’t deny that your horniness awakens his.

ass up, face down—your body was getting pounded into the bed by none other than toji, who was fed up with the constant lustful looks you gave him whilst he worked out. it made him lose all concentration, which wasn’t good, since he needed to prepare for a bounty he was going to take on that night. thus, toji took out his frustrations on you and your greedy cunt; “ya hear that? y’re fuckin’ dripping for this cock to fill ya up—yeah? wan’ me to fuck some of my cum into y’r cunt before i go?” you whine and nod whilst your noises were muffled by the pillow. your body ached for toji and you were desperate to get anything from him, any sensual touches would do—your pussy was sensitive and needed its release. toji knew that you wouldn’t be satisfied with just one round, however, so he was determined to go make it a challenge: fuck you until you’re leaking his cum from all your holes and passed out from exhaustion.

𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈 loves it when you shamelessly or shyly beg him to suck his dick. you do it most of the time when he’s manspreading on the couch, just chilling and looking bored whilst watching a dumb show on the television. next thing he knows your head appears between his legs and his fingers are tangled in your hair, pushing your head down on him. sometimes it even happens in public; he’ll be sitting there on a chair or bench, a protective hand on your waist and your eyes would be directly on his crotch. he doesn’t even have to be hard—there’s always that massive bulge hiding under his pants, reminding you of what he’s packing down there.

“fuck. . doll—y’re gnna make me cum before i get a taste of that pretty pussy.” toji grumbles quietly, half closed eyes staring down at your kneeling form. you were sucking and drooling all over his cock, sometimes gagging when the tip hit the far back of your throat, though that only spurred the man before you on. his hips buck up into your mouth, your hands automatically clenching into fists, putting your thumb under your other fingers to stop your gag reflex from activating—desperate to give toji that pleasure he longed for. the man was surely enjoying every second of it. he kept you quiet (except for the faint wet, slurping sounds from your warm mouth as his cock slid in and out of it), his lips curled into an amused smirk, “tha’s my girl—taking all of it in her mouth. what a good little thing.” toji made sure to whisper those words, not caring if somebody heard what was happening from outside the department store’s bathroom stall, but still wanting to avoid any unnecessary trouble. he was actually holding himself back from ravaging your cunt instead—though he settles for shooting ropes of cum down your throat.

𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈, who gets off from eating you out. he loves to have your cunt full out on his face—adores the way you squirm when he’s pushing your thighs and hips down on his face to get a proper taste of your slick—enjoys when he’s just relaxing with his mouth and nose stuffed between your folds, giving absent licks whilst simply enjoying your scent. he especially loves eating your cunt out when you’re begging for his cock instead. he always shows you just what he can do with that tongue of his—bringing you a different type of pleasure than his dick could do.

one moment you were reading something on your phone, and in the other your man’s face was buried into your wet cunt. you were moaning and writhing on the bed sheets, trying to grind against his mouth. toji was taking his sweet time with you, “mmnh, so fuckin’ good. give me one more, yeah? one more orgasm f’me, princess.” that was what he said minutes ago and you were already on your third climax. you loved this—absolutely relinquished in the feeling of his tongue lapping your juices up, his lips that sucked on your clit every couple seconds, nose buried between your folds. “nghhh,, wan’ you so bad, daddy! wan’ you to fuck me, please!” toji chuckles drlyly, the vibrations hitting your cunt. two slaps were brought down upon your thighs; “i’ll fuck y’r needy self when i wanna, ya hear? now cum on my tongue or i’ll force it outta ya, princess.”

𝐓𝐎𝐉𝐈, who loves to finger you or let you ride his thigh when he’s busy but still wants to keep you satisfied. you’d be whining for his attention, pouting and slightly frustrated when all you want toji’s attention. and his touch, naturally. sometimes you’d go as far as stroking yourself in front of him to show your desperation— which he finds to be the hottest thing ever; you being so needy that you’ll thrust a few fingers inside your cunt and moan for him to come fuck you properly. works every time. but when toji’s a bit too busy to do anything (or too tired / lazy), he gets you off with his thigh or fingers.

“i need to call shiu for info on that one bounty. .” toji recalls and grabs his phone, one hand on his mobile whilst the other was slowly cupping your pussy, thumb drawing lazy circles on your clit, index rubbing your labia. you whine as his hand there disappears, “gimme a minute, sweet thing.” toji licks his index finger whilst pressing some buttons on his phone, head leaning against the headboard of the bed as he watches you impatiently grind against his muscular thigh. he lets you do as you please and watches your ass and hips as they move in front of him. toji tenses the muscles in his leg whenever your clothed pussy slides alongside his skin, bouncing his thigh whenever you’d rest and take a break from grinding—keeping the stimulation going— “giving me a good show, huh? keep at it. might reward ya after my phone call.”

#sttoru writes. #jjk smut #jjk x reader #toji smut #toji fushiguro smut #toji x reader #toji fushiguro x reader #jjk x you #toji x you

[burnyouwithacigarettelighter]

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT ─── cillian murphy ✧𖦹

ೃ⁀➷ “I am turned inside out by the ache in your voice, the taste of your tongue." — ‘Afternoon Masala: Poems’, Vandana Khanna

pairing. cillian murphy x actor!reader

summary. you and your co-star, cillian, are having a hard time performing a sex scene for your movie. they do say, however, practice makes perfect.

warnings. swearing, thigh-riding, creampie, p in v, unprotected sex, mentioned/implied age gap, probably inaccurate depictions of actor-life, mirror sex, slight breeding kink, kinda innocent reader(?), AU cillian murphy (not married/no kids), SMUT UNDER THE CUT! 

word count. 4.5k

a/n. this is not in any way meant to disrespect cillians wife😭 i js made this a not married AU to be convenient!

i.

“Cut - cut, cut!” The director repeated, his increasing irritation colouring his voice completely. “Now, I said it earlier, but—“

You scrubbed your face with a sigh, getting up off of Cillian and the desk, who was propping himself up by the elbows. “It’s not passionate enough,” you finished flatly for your director, who nodded earnestly. 

“I promise, this is as tiring for me as it is for you. Remember,” the director continued, the script half curled in his hands and making a thin flapping noise, “it’s the culmination of six months of pining. Six months of taboo, unrelenting, electric tension. Nothing more than stares in class and brief touches- you are supposed to be bordering feral for one another.”

You, and your co-star, Cillian, were currently filming the first sex scene of a movie portraying the forbidden, toxic love affair between a barely 18 teenage student and her much older teacher. Well, not exactly filming- you weren’t getting far with the scene, for the two of you just couldn’t get it right. Or, as the director liked to say, passionate enough. 

The role was already incredibly taxing, even without the added stress of the sex scene: it was 20 hour work days, living on set in a trailer far from home, having to devote at least half of those hours to filming this very sex scene, and had a perfectionist director like yours. 

The problem was that it was long, and the director wanted it done in one take. Brilliant man, he was, and had a love for this project you wished every director had for theirs, but he was adamant on it being done perfectly. He said it was intended to be the “primary and most iconic” scene of the entire film, for it was the crux of the story; the point of no return for the characters. 

“With all due respect, I’ve never imagined such a scenario, much less had experience. Just how can you expect me to portray a student-teacher romance accurately?“

“That’s your job: to imagine and perform.” The director demanded, obviously up to his ears in frustration.

Just before you retorted irately, Cillian cut in smoothly. “I think what she means,” he said, watching the veins in the director’s forehead nearly burst, “is that it’s hard to perform because it’s not common. S’easy to act in love because there’s love all around, yeah? We don’t have much to go off of, visually.”

The director’s gaze rapidly flitted between you and Cillian for a moment, before letting go of his anger and sighing wearily. “You’ve never even thought about a superior that way? Someone older than you?” he pressed, obviously joking and trying to lighten the set’s mood. 

You paused, and tried not to look at Cillian, your blatantly gorgeous forty-something co-star who was chosen for this role firstly, because of his stellar acting and secondly, because of how fucking attractive he was. 

His character was a total fucking creep, and you knew casting Cillian had been a calculated choice; all in the name of making the audience’s guard come down to be smacked in the face by his immorality later. He was meant to be charming, handsome, and terribly, totally, off-limits: the object of completely forbidden desire, the line your character was desperate to cross. 

It seemed the same in real life, too: the young inexperienced actress wanting to ignore those societal niceties and pine wholeheartedly over the middle-aged actor with decades of knowledge under his belt. 

You weren’t, like, in love or anything, but you certainly reveled in his presence: he was patient, kind, and completely understanding of your lack of experience, always guiding you through all the steps an actor takes during filming like when to take off hair and makeup, what best to say to family and friends prying for details- all the things, he said, he wished someone told him when he was first starting out. 

You were afraid you two had unknowingly fallen into a mentor-mentee dynamic, but there were always those spare moments, between hearty fits of laughter and silly conversation that you’d never expected to come from such an intimidating man as Cillian, where his rough hands would brush past your waist, gaze dragging up and down your body, sounding sensual and provocative despite nothing dirty leaving his mouth at all. 

He made your insides pulse, especially when your more intimate scenes came about, and you could only have a lusting woman’s pipedream that he felt the same. 

You still remember the first sequence you’d done with him: in the movie, your characters met after-class to make up for a missed exam, and it was the start of their corrupt attraction. Cillian had been pressed against your back, leaning over you to pressuringly peer at the test, large hand gripping your shoulder. The air felt steamy then, his body warm, low voice making you feel lightheaded as he recited his lines. 

You shivered at the remembrance of the moment, coming back to reality, and you answered the director’s question with a vehement shake of the head. 

The director let out a (strained) laugh, and smacked his palm lightly with the script, shoulders slumping. “Okay. Okay, we’ll - we’ll break for today. Take this extra time to imagine, research, anything- just practice the scene, alright? Practice makes perfect.” 

You and Cillian nodded simultaneously, giving eachother a look that just screamed “he’s ridiculous” before tearing away from each other's stare to return to your trailers. 

Later, you were getting ready to go to bed, peeling your freshly showered hair out of a small towel, when there was a knock at your trailer door. 

“One second,” you called out, pulling on your silk sleep shorts. You vaguely registered how awkward it might be to be seen in your pajamas if the director or one of your fellow actors came about, but you were way too tired to care. 

You did care, however, self-consciously crossing your arms and covering your thinly-clothed chest, when you opened the door and there on the steps stood your co-star, Cillian.

Before speaking, he looked you up and down, icy blue eyes gleaming behind an unfamiliar pair of tortoise shell frames. “You goin’ to bed?” he finally asked, tone husky. 

His gaze lingered on the bare skin of your legs for a few seconds longer and you shifted uncomfortably, crossing your ankles together in a poor attempt to hide yourself. 

“What do you need?” you asked briskly, more sharp than you meant it to be. 

“Sorry,” he corrected himself, shaking his head and finally looking you in the eye. “I meant’a come by earlier… got caught up. I know this, ah, sex scene is tripping us up, so…” he trailed off, lifting up the white script he’d been holding behind his back. “Y’up for some practice?”

You blinked rapidly at the simple, innocent request. Mere rehearsal, not some lecherous late-night escapade you’d been dreaming up in your mind. “Oh… yes, of course,” you nodded numbly, moving out of the way to let him step in. 

Only moments later, when he’d perched onto the edge of your vanity — looking uniquely casual in what you assumed was his version of pajamas: baggy gray sweatpants and a fitted, well-worn black t-shirt — did you realize the connotations of rehearsing your sex scene. 

Sure, it was all pre-determined, every word you’d say and every action you’d perform, but still. Saying- and doing, such suggestive things after-hours? That was beyond your dirtiest fantasies.

However, you shook yourself internally: Cillian had come to rehearse the scene with professional intentions. Honestly, he’d probably done so because he was tired of you messing up the scene. He could do his own part masterfully, and you knew that if it’d been a better, more experienced actress by his side, filming would’ve moved on ages ago. 

You took shaky, tentative steps near him, settling on your bed, watching him flip through the script— when he looked up and frowned. 

“What’re you doing? Come here,” he gestured for you to come closer, almost a command. “We don’t have a desk, so we can use your vanity.”

You nodded, biting your lip and nervously complying with his words. “So, we’ll start from the beginning?” you asked, your voice -- and legs -- suddenly feeling terribly weak.

His eyes were still trained on the paper as he answered. “Not necessarily. The sex part s’really the only thing we’re having trouble with, yeah?” 

You gulped, throat dry. “Yeah, I guess so.” 

With that, he chanced one last look at the script, before diving into the scene. His actions were ones you were extremely familiar with, having attempted this scene everyday for at least a week now. 

His body turned to yours, hands coming up to your jaw, and pressing your back onto the table slightly. He held you tightly, and made you look at him, while delivering his lines softly, memorable Irish accent replaced by his character’s generic American one.

Jiltedly, you did the same, poorly remembering what you needed to say and dragging through it like some amateur. “Fuck, sorry,” you cursed suddenly, tearing away from his touch and sighing. 

He gave you a small, careful smile, immediately breaking out of character and taking a step away from the vanity. “No need t’be nervous. Practice makes perfect, right?” 

You snorted at his quoting of the director. “I just… I don’t know what he means by passionate. I’m trying to be professional about this but - but I’ve seriously never been in some steamy love-affair.”

“Can’t really expect that of you, can we? You’re too young, too much’ve a good girl for that kinda ‘ting.” He said, hand coming up to your shoulder, the one where your silk tanktop’s spaghetti strap had slipped off, rubbing it soothingly. 

You practically melted into a puddle at both the pet name and how the rough pads of his fingers brushed against your sensitive skin. You were so entranced you almost whined when he stopped and pulled up your fallen strap, but instead you wordlessly snatched the script that was dropped onto the table and found one of the lines, inhaling sharply and readying yourself. 

Your hand came up to tug on the sleeve of Cillian’s shirt, as dictated by the script. “Sir, please,” you whispered out in your character’s high pitched voice, “I - I… want you to touch me.”

“This is -- wrong. I’m your teacher, and I…” Cillian responded, swiftly back in character, the back of his palm grazing your cheek. “I gotta break your heart, darling.”

You looked up at Cillian, summoning crocodile tears to fill your gaze. “Please. I need you.” Then, one of your clammy hands ran down Cillian’s chest as you spoke, like it did back on set. “I think of you, at night. I soaked through my shorts the day you scolded me.”

You heard Cillian’s breath hitch- his character, you reminded yourself. “Fucking hell… I think of you in class, sweetheart,” he growled out perfectly. 

So far, so good, you thought. It wasn’t awkward, and was already miles better than the lackluster performances you’d given previously. You continued by leaning into Cillian’s touch, making him sit on the vanity— the part of the scene you’d gotten to this morning, before the director called cut.

This time, however, Cillian’s actions differed from the ones he was supposed to perform: instead of petting the crown of your head, his fingers trailed down your hips, sending shivers down your spine.

“I’ll be good for you, sir,” you recited, face growing hot as his hand inched closer to the curve of your ass. “You can do whatever you want to me.”

Cillian’s gaze had darkened now, flitting over your features. He didn’t say his line - or, had at least missed the timing, and you removed your hands from his body worriedly. “Are you alright—“

Before you could finish your sentence, Cillian had grabbed you by the ass, switching your places and setting you down on the edge of the vanity. 

“Cillian!“ you squeaked out, the only thing you could really say as you processed what exactly just happened. Your mind was swimming with confusion — and anticipation — as he stood before you, legs pressing on either side of your knees and trapping you on the vanity. 

“Improv,” he promised quietly in his telltale Irish accent, a sly wink appearing on his sharp features. 

You bit your lip, nodded, and repeated your line. You trusted him to guide you — and the rehearsal — because, as mentioned before, he did these kinds of things often. If he thought you’d act better if you sat on the vanity, you’d sit on the vanity. 

His hand then pet your hair, the other hand coming up to your chin and making you look up at him. “Whatever I want?” he murmured, back on track with the script. 

You bat your lashes at him. “Everything. I’m yours.”

Now, this is where you thought Cillian would stop— because after your line came the kissing and the touching and the heavy petting: all things you thus far hadn’t filmed at all, because you couldn’t even get the dialogue out right. 

Instead, he leaned down and began to press hungry kisses down your neck, making you gasp.

“What are you—“

“Shh,” he demanded softly, “it's all part of the scene, remember?”

You blinked dumbly, mouth opening and closing, unable to register a coherent thought or word. He said it was part of the scene but you’d read that script, and his teeth nipping lightly at your skin was not written anywhere within it.

But, you gulped down your thoughts, and belted out several more of your lines in tandem to his own. With his other hand gripping your thigh so tight you thought it might bruise, you were starting to think that maybe this was one of those lecherous late-night escapades you were dreaming of. 

All you’d been doing was acting, like he’d asked, but still, you could see clear as day how that’d affect him— how easily it could be to succumb. After all, you were just barely restraining yourself from jumping his bones: how could you not, with his gorgeous face just inches away from yours?

Well, acting or not, you’d enjoy every minute of this.

When one of his hands began playing with the waistband of your shorts as he suckled on your pulse, that just right spot on your neck, you couldn’t help the whimper that left your mouth. 

However, the noise seemed to startle him; jumpshock him back to reality, and your suspicions became completely confirmed when he pulled away from you roughly. 

“Fuck, I’m—“ a pained grimace washed over his features, looking you up and down like he just realized what he’d been doing. “I don’t know what came over me, I— shouldn’t… I shouldn’t have come here tonight.”

You stared at him, body disappointed at the lack of touch, watching him press his pink lips into a conflicted white line. “What - what d’you mean?”

His gaze coursed over your every feature, so intently you thought he was admiring your face. “I can’t— we can’t happen. Y’too young, you’re, you’re too…”

“Then we can stop. If that’s what you want,” you murmured coyly, hand coming up to pick a piece of thread off his thin shirt. “But only if you ask. C’mon, say it: I don’t want you and I want this to stop.”

He groaned, biting his lip. “Don’t do that. I can’t do that.”

“Do what?” You tilted your head to the side. 

“Tease. Because you know I won’t tell you to stop. ‘Cause I won’t be able to fucking control m’self,” he grumbled, before pressing a desperate, deep kiss to your lips, pulling you off the vanity and continuing down your chest.

“Then don’t. Take me for everything I have,” you whined, following his every move and manhandling touch. 

He breathed heavily between kisses. “Saying those kinds’a words with that pretty voice of yours… fuck, you’re doing things to me.” 

Your hands were trailing all over his body, and then you tugged his shirt off, desperate to feel him. He had similar thoughts, fingers dipping into your silk shorts and petting your hot mound. 

“Need you,” you panted, and, at your words, he suddenly tore off your silk shorts and panties in one clean go, making you shiver.

He then sat down on your vanity chair and roughly grabbed you by the hips to place yourself onto one of his thighs. The thick fabric of his sweatpants, taking in your wetness like a sponge, made you wince.

“Go on then,” he demanded darkly, “get y’self off on my fucking thigh. Show me how bad you need me.”

You bit your lip, face burning with shame at the order. But there was an aching need in your gut, and the way he crossed his arms, watching and waiting for you to get the hell on with it, had you clenching around his thigh.

Your hands gripped onto his shoulders, and you began slowly rutting against him, the soft fabric of his pants doing poor work for pleasuring your core. You pressed your face into his shoulder, screwed up at the lack of friction. 

“Can’t do it,” you whined, “Please.” 

He rolled his eyes. “You said you needed me. You’ve got me,” he gestured to his thigh, “so get to work.” Then, he suddenly flexed, making an unwarranted mewl leave your mouth.

You wanted nothing more than his fucking cock, but here you were, pathetically pleasuring yourself on his thigh until he allowed otherwise. You nodded resignedly, and dug your fingernails into his shoulders, starting to set a steady pace of grinding down on him, slowly building up the heat within your insides. 

You were moaning now, vigorously dragging your hips against him harder, needier, feeling the pressure in your cunt grow hotter and more rampant. 

“Y’hear that?” He asked, one of his fingers tilting your chin back up to face him. “D’you even realize how fucking delicious you sound, all needy f’me?”

You nodded, but weren’t really paying attention: you were closer than ever, just moments away from falling off the edge— when Cillian stopped you. 

“Stop,” he spoke, voice filled with sheer lust, and you whimpered at the abrupt loss of momentum. Then, he got up, holding you against him by the waist, looking down at his sweatpants. “You made such a mess… soaked all over m’pants.”

You didn’t — no, couldn’t respond to his musings, pressing your thighs together in an attempt to return friction to your needy pussy, biting down on your lip to muffle your breathy pants. 

He noticed this, however, smirking and quickly pressing you stomach down onto the vanity. You caught a glimpse of yourself for the first time since your shower, and you flushed with shame: your eyes were heavy-lidded and dilated, lips pink and slick with drool, your brows in a perpetual knit.

You looked fucking filthy, and when you felt Cillian press his thick head to your entrance, something you hadn’t noticed he’d pulled out, too enraptured in your dirty expression, you shut your eyes. 

You were suddenly so much more aware of the situation: you’d fucked yourself silly on your co-stars thigh, the co-star who was twice your age. He now knew you weren’t a talented aspiring actress, no, you were just a desperate little thing begging to be fucked. 

“Hey, hey,” He tutted in mock-disappointment, “open your eyes, and fucking watch yourself. It’ll be good for our scene.”

You whimpered helplessly, obeying him and fluttering your eyes open, as he pushed his cock past your dripping folds inch by inch. 

“Oh my god,” you cried out when he finally pressed all the way in. You felt so full, stretched to the brim with his hardened cock, so deep his balls touched your sticky clit.

“So fucking wet,” he commented, chuckling darkly behind you. You were totally slick, helping him enter you faster, but his cock was still a foreign intrusion to your inexperienced cunt: you were young, and had never been the type to “get around” — at least not with the intentions of getting fucked so much you could take any length of dick easily. 

You clenched around him, a groan leaving his mouth at the increased pressure around his cock, and he snapped into you, making you bounce forward as your lips parted with a sweet moan. 

You’d been focussed on his face, in the mirror, but Cillian’s hand suddenly tangled through your hair, grabbing a fistful of it and lifting your head to face yourself. “I told you to fucking watch yourself,” he spat, gripping your hair tightly. “you’re the reason we can’t wrap up, so do your job and fuckin’ practice.”

With that, Cillian started pounding into you, digging the rough pads of his fingers into your hip, and you would’ve protested such a fast progression — having been given barely any time to get used to his long cock — but your expression was even worse than before, if that was even possible. 

Your mouth was open, tongue out and panting like a fucking dog, your lustfully sticky spit spilling down your chin to your chest, and your eyes were rolling into the back of your head with each hearty thrust Cillian delivered you. The sounds you were making weren’t helping your embarrassment either, all unintelligible mewls and needy whines for his cock. 

“You’ve wanted me for so long, haven’t you? I always knew what a filthy desperate girl you were, pressing up against me during shooting… those naughty hands on my thighs,” he snickered. 

“Needed you in me so bad,” you whimpered, nodding enthusiastically, barely able to register what you were doing now with the pleasure washing over you and clouding your senses. Your back was arching into him, sucking in his cock and never wanting him to leave despite the mind-breaking ecstasy that was coming from his pounding. 

“Just look at your dirty fuckin’ face… so pathetic.” he murmured, leaning down to press a kiss to your cheek; sweet and lovely, a stark juxtaposition to his unrelenting rutting and degrading words. 

You whined at his words, but you knew they were true: you’d never seen yourself get fucked, always too busy with, well, getting fucked, but seeing yourself in the mirror like this had you unexpectedly hotter than before. There was just something about it, your face unabashedly contorting around the pleasure, Cillian’s hands snaking up your body as he rammed into you in the background. 

Kind of like your own personal porno, you thought offhandedly, and you wondered how it’d affect you if you filmed yourself. Hopefully, with Cillian. 

His other hand then came up to your folds, spreading them apart so he could see himself disappear into your hole. “Fuck, your cunt’s so perfect,” he growled, his head falling back, losing himself in the pleasure. 

The orgasm building in your gut wasn’t like the one when you’d been grinding down on his thick thigh, no, it came faster, making you sweat and your knees shake. You wanted more, and you gasped out “faster,” and “harder,” to Cillian, needing him in the stick spongy spot deep in your cunt. 

“Please,” you begged without any expectation of a real answer or action, “please, Cillian, please.”

He did go faster, though, to your apparent shock, both hands coming to your thighs to steady himself. “So needy,” he grumbled, pushing himself deeper and more swiftly into you, feeling how deliciously your fleshy walls tightened around his new pace. 

With that, your high came just as quick, hitting you like a fucking freight train and making you scream out his name. Your orgasm wrecked you, made your vision go white and your thoughts stutter to a complete halt, and you vaguely made out Cillian’s proud hum, whispering “Good girl,” in your ear. 

When you came to, your head was hanging low, your eyes blown out, lips puffy. Cillian was still thrusting into your worn-out pussy, but it was more jilted, shaky and needy. 

“Come in me,” you pleaded suddenly, gripping the vanity to keep your trembling legs up, “fill me up, please, make your come spill out of me.”

“Good god, girl,” he groaned, pounding one last thrust into you before letting go, his cock pulsing around your wet core. He was pressed up to you so deep you could feel him shoot his load right into your cervix, and you grinned weakly, a sweet image of you: knocked up with his kid, your cunt so young and fertile you’d get pregnant from just about anything from him, entering your mind. 

After a moment, he slipped his softening cock out of your filthy cunt and picked you up by the waist to set you down on the vanity and keep you from falling onto the floor. 

“Thank you,” you mumbled, looking up at him through your lashes. You then bit your lip, feeling his thick load of creamy come ooze out of your used hole onto your vanity. 

He noticed too, letting out a satisfied groan, spreading your legs lightly, before collecting himself on his finger and pushing his come back into your cunt. “Such a good girl,” he reiterated, going back to being sweet and petting your hair, doting on your weak form, looking deep into your eyes. 

You swooned at his delicate actions. “Is this a good time to say I like you?” 

He laughed, all adoringly. “It’s as good a time as any. I like you, too, if it’s any consolation.” 

“But you, y’know… you said I was too young,” you reminded him, frowning slightly. 

He sighed, gaze drifting away nervously for a moment before coming back to you. “That I did, but, well… if you wanna take this old man for a ride before I keel over,” he shrugged.

You couldn’t help the laugh that belted out of you, his words so ridiculous and completely not based in reality. “Oh, sure,” you said, shaking your head, lips still in an amused tilt, “you’re mine, old man.”

Before he could speak, probably say another stupid joke, your hands wrapped around his neck and you pulled him toward you, pressing a soft kiss to his plump lips. 

“I like you like you, okay?” You whispered, sounding incredibly juvenile but twice as heartfelt, your tone wavering and self-conscious. You were bearing your heart on your sleeve here, okay, acknowledging feelings you thought should never come to light. 

His hands came up to your face, gently holding you. “Good thing I like you like you, too.”

ii.

“Cut!” The director called, and you swore you felt your heart drop to the floor. Fuck, you thought, mind racing, what went wrong this time? Was it the kissing, or the hands in the hair?

However, the director came up to you and Cillian and let out an uncharacteristic shriek of delight. “Perfection,” he said simply, bordering on catatonic with how content he was. 

Your shoulders slumped with relief, and you leaned into Cillian, who was subtly dancing his fingers across your thigh. “It’s finished?” you asked, breathless with excitement.

The director nodded. “That was electric, needy, tense, delicious, passionate, so, so passionate,” he continued with a gasp, hands clasping together tightly.  “You are two of the most amazing actors I have ever worked with— you are incredibly talented, so convincing I’d have thought you did sleep together.” 

You preened at his praise, but not without looking up at Cillian, meeting his gaze and barely keeping your expression happy and neutral and not at all warm at the thought of the other night's events. 

As the director went off rambling about the utter masterpiece the movie was to be, Cillian trailed behind you off the set, murmuring lowly in your ear, “I guess practice does make perfect.”

#cillian murphy x reader #cillian murphy #cillian murphy smut #cillian murphy rpf #cillian murphy x reader smut

[grippingbeskar]

small favours

— joel miller x fem!reader

— warnings: explicit content minors dni, smutttt, dirty talk, very minimal plot sorry not sorry, swearing, needles, mention of injuries/cuts

— a/n: happy tlou release week!! this is set in jackson between the first and second game, i wrote the first part before i saw the show but just imagine with me okay. and it’s literally just bc i saw joel in that denim shirt and went yeah… i wanna fuck him in that. lmao. also dedicated to @everybirdfellsilent because we have been waiting for this show for so long and it’s finally here and oaoxosoxosox. wow.

You hadn’t asked for much.

It was a simple fix, you were sure of it. Yes, you don’t know anything about how to fix hinges, nor do you have any clue about how you broke it in the first place. Either way, it’s just a few screws and a metal piece, so was it really that hard to find five minutes to fix it?

Leading another one of the horses into the stable, you pointedly step over the gate that now lays on the floor, too heavy for you to move it. The horse tramples it, of course, which is why you had asked for someone to come and fix it before the horses were brought back in from patrol. Clearly, no one gave a shit about your question, but you know they’d all be the first to complain if it was their horse that got out through a broken gate.

It was late now, anyways. Too late for you to get anyone out, and even with the safety of Jackson’s walls keeping you blocked off from the outside world, being out at night still freaked you. When you finally got the horse in your hand settled and fed, you promptly sat yourself on the floor of the stable. Without the front gate, it wasn’t safe to leave the horses alone. With your luck, they’d get spooked and run all the way through town, and the last thing you needed was more reason for the people in here to look at you.

It wasn’t that you weren’t liked— you just kept to yourself. This life was hard enough as it is, and you didn’t see the point in making friends when in five years this place would probably be full of strangers. People die every day out here, you knew that too well. You wanted to save yourself the heartache wherever you could.

All that anti social behaviour certainly didn’t win you any favours though— hence the still broken door. You loved it— you were good with horses, having lived in a farm before the outbreak, so you decided to volunteer to help in the stables, but it was hard work sometimes. It kept you busy enough, though, and horses never wanted to make conversation, so… win-win.

There was only one problem with working in here. Truthfully, it wasn’t so much as a problem and more of a chronic condition. At least, that’s the way it felt every time Joel Miller made some kind of appearance. Most people just left the horses tied up out front for you to take care of, but Joel seemed to enjoy the peace the stable provided— that and you never talked much, which seemed to work for him. On the days he’d come back from patrol, the two of you would share a few hushed conversations as you worked and he hid from the rest of Jackson, and then you’d fall into a comfortable silence, sometimes for hours at a time.

Weeks had passed like this, and every single day you got a little bit more interested in who the man really was, other than his clear infatuation with his horse. Right when he came in would be the time you talked the most, after about forty minutes it would get too busy and you’d work until the sun set. But those forty minutes started to stretch a little longer, and he seemed to gain interest in you, too. Maybe you were grasping at straws, but hearing Joel’s low voice rumble a few more words every time he spoke to you was doing wonders for your self esteem, and even you couldn’t deny the way your face warmed when he smiled at you.

“Hey, you still— damn. What happened here?” Joel calls from the gaping hole that is the stable door, and only because it’s his voice calling you do you look up.

“It’s been broken all day. I asked someone to fix it, but…” You shrug, sighing and leaning your head back on the small gate that was the only thing holding the horse behind you from leaping out down the main street. “I guess they had other shit to do. I can’t move it on my own.”

Joel considers you for a second, how your frame is backed against the gate, conveniently placed at the closest point to the open door. Then, he looks back to the door on the ground, and back up to you. He smirks.

“So you were plannin’ on sitting in here all night?” The weight of the day makes your shoulders slump forward, and for the first time you really consider your plan. “You gonna body check a horse when he makes a run for it?”

“Okay, it was a dumb plan. But, it’s that or let them all out and get stuck cleaning up the bar floor or something.” He smiles again, the setting sun behind him washing over his shoulders in a pretty orange colour. A tilt of his head in your direction has you standing up, taking the lead of his horse that he offers to you.

“You take him, I’ll go get my tools. Fix it up before sun down.” Before you can protest or tell him he doesn’t have to, he’s walking off to the right up the hill where his house sits.

You���d always been a bit jealous of the spot his house is. It’s far away enough from everyone that you get some real privacy, but close to the stables if you need a quick exit. He had a porch, too. One you spent a little too much of your time staring at during your work hours, when he spent his off days strumming a guitar right in your line of sight. He was just… peaceful to observe. He brought a calm to you that no one else seemed to be able to do, almost enough that you could forget about the world outside and just exist in that little bubble for a while.

You lead Joel’s horse inside, hearing it trample the door again, and hang up his saddle next to the stable. Joels horse is much like him— quiet unless provoked. You found it out the hard way when you first led it in with a routinely aggressive horse, thinking it’s demeanour would calm him down. The next morning you woke up to two very angry horses and a half bent gate of steel.

“Saved you your favourite spot.” You say to his horse, Old Beardy. You never asked how Joel picked the name, but for some reason it worked so well— at least, he was definitely older than most. “See? He’s right up there.”

The stable at the back was angled just right so that the small window at the height of a horses head pointed directly towards Joel’s porch. Not close enough to see anything other than the outside, but enough that you know it’s there. You don’t come in here often, Joel always taking his own horse in, but when you do you can’t help but notice the instant calming effect it has on Beardy— you might have more in common with this horse than half the people in Jackson.

When you find your way back to the front, Joel’s footsteps are trudging back down the hill. You’ll be fairly useless as anything other than company while he fixes the door, but you can’t seem to stop your heart from racing a million miles a minute as he gets closer and closer. Yes, he makes you forget about everything on the outside, but that’s mainly due to how insane he drives you. All those conversations in the stables and too long looks in town are just all too consuming, and now, when you see him come into sight, you have to put some physical difference between him and you.

“You don’t have to, Joel. Really, I’m sure someone’ll—“

“No, they won’t. Knowin’ the people around here, you’ll be sleepin’ on the floor till next year.” He bends down, and you drop yourself back to the floor and stare in some kind of mesmerised silence as he runs his hands over the broken hinges of the door.

In a few passing thoughts you’d never admit to yourself, you have an obsession with his hands. He was just so…capable. He could do so many things so easily— and some kind of backward wire in your brain fizzled with electricity at the sight of him in his element. He starts fiddling with tools, first starting to remove the broken hinge, muscles flexing as he tears off the old bolts.

“What happened?” He says, the words muffled by the screwdriver in his mouth.

“I have no clue. When I woke up this morning it was blown in. I spent a good hour trying to move it but it’s so—“ With one arm, he pulls it up to stand vertical, a fist wrapping around the edge of the gate. It doesn’t even look like he tried. “—heavy.”

“Come ‘ere and hold it straight.” He says, keeping one arm out in front of him, the other still holding the door up. “I won’t let it fall. Come on.”

“Like this?” You say, staring down at him as you finally reach the door and take a little bit of the weight. He flicks his eyes up, nodding and shifting on his knees to get a better angle on the door.

“Perfect.” He says softly, looking up at you for another split second before clearing his throat and screwing on a new hinge.

“You really didn’t have to do this, but thank-you.” Joel shakes his head, his fingers fiddling with a latch.

“Least I can do. Everyone should be up here helpin’ you anyways.” He stands up, and with only a barrier the width of a gated door, you can feel his body heat keeping you warm when he towers over you. “Keep holding it still.”

“Yeah.” You manage, eyes fluttering closed. “People help, though.”

“Oh, I bet.” He says, sarcasm dripping off his words as he laughs dryly.

“They do! Sometimes… I mean, it’s not their fault. I’m kind of a hermit up here. I don’t really make an effort, so I can’t blame them.” He stops working, his knuckles white over the railing of the gate, and looks to you.

“You’ve trained all these new horses to track better than those guys ever could. They’d die out there without ‘em. Carl doesn’t know his left from right— he got lost eight times last patrol. It’s cause of your horses he got back safe.” Joel’s face is more serious, his eyes sharp but still with a hint of softness that he often looks at you with. “Doesn’t matter if you ain’t makin’ friends. This ain’t middle school, and people should be helpin’ you no matter what. Least of all fixing a door.”

“That’s why I keep you around, Joel.” You smile lightly, his voice getting lower the angrier he gets.

“Good. You tell me next time, and I’ll come round and help. Avoid the whole town all together.” You hum, letting go of the gate as he hauls it up in the air and shuffled backward, setting it against the hinges. “How do you know so much about horses?”

“I lived on a farm, way back when. Besides, they’re easy to navigate once you get to know them.” Joel puts the screwdriver back in his mouth, and you can’t help but stare at him. The small scars on his face, peppered around his cheeks. Some are older, worn and faded, while the one across his nose is new. It’s not even scarred yet, still fresh

“You okay?” He says softly, tilting his head.

“Your face.” His eyebrows furrow, and you shake your head. “Sorry. You… did something happen on patrol? You have a cut—“

“Just a few clickers. Real old, hauled up in a caravan out west. Nothing we couldn’t handle.” The door drops into place, and he swings it out towards him. It sounds less squeaky than it usually did. “Good as new.”

“You should clean it.” You say, worry edging in your voice. “If it was clickers.”

“I’m fine.” He shrugs it off.

“Come on. It’s the least I can do. I have a first aid kit in the back, and then we can call it even.” He relents, locking the door behind him and stepping further into the stables. “Sit. I’ll get the kit.”

“Yes, ma’am.” You can hear a small smirk on his voice, and you roll your eyes, turning around to find the kit. “Why you got a first aid kit in here anyways?”

“You’re using it now, aren’t you?” You turn around, raising your eyebrows. “You’d be surprised how many people come here before going to medical. I started to stock up a little, do what I can. It’s not much, but I can clean it off and do some botched stitches until they see a real doctor.”

“And none of those guys came up to fix the god damn door?” He was getting angry again, and you tried to ignore the shiver that went up your spine when he spoke like that.

He was sitting on a small stool, putting him about waist height. When you stepped closer, shuffling your feet on the floor, he tilted his head up. His open legs invited you closer, nearly drawing you in with a magnetic field he was completely unaware of.

Armed with a cotton ball and disinfectant, your fingers were light enough to breeze along his jaw to hold him in place. He stares up at you, watching your eyes as they flit between the cut on his nose and his wandering gaze. His face is warm when you work up the courage to place your palm on his cheek, thumb gently smoothing over the salt and pepper flecks of his beard. He doesn’t flinch away when you press the cotton ball to his face, swiping across the bridge of his nose.

“Does it hurt?” You whisper, feeling the need to keep your voice low.

“No.” He does the same, the heat of his body making you shuffle slightly closer. His hands are in fists on his knees, like he’s straining to keep himself still. “Told you it was fine.”

“And I told you I wanted to help.” When you’re satisfied with the results, you take a fresh cotton pad and dry it up. “You might need stitches. It’s deep.”

“Go on.” He says, and you lean back, eyes wide.

“You want me to stitch your face together?”

“Good practise, and I trust you.” The simple words have your heart slamming against your rib cage, but instead of showing it you kneel in between his legs and search the contents of the kit for a needle.

“If I mess up your face, you knew what you signed up for.” When you find what you’re looking for, you straighten, Joel’s face is right in front of you. It takes you a second to realise just how close he is, and the position isn’t lost on him either. It’s probably the most emotive you’ve seen him, his jaw going tight from how hard he’s biting down.

“It’s already messed up. You’re fine.” He manages, his voice strained.

“Hold still.” Whispering the words, you lean closer and bring the needle to his skin. His eyes close, and it’s when you press the point into his nose that his hands shoot out in front of him, holding your hips gently.

“Sorry. Shit—“

“It’s fine. Are you okay?” He grunts in a way you think is affirming, so you keep threading the needle. You only need one stitch for a spot this small. “Your face isn’t messed up.”

“Huh?”

“It’s not. Messed up.” You feel his thumbs stroke along the bone of your hip just once before he stills again. You tie off the stitch, and his eyes open. “There. You’re pretty again.”

Your breathing was rapid even though you didn’t have a true reason for it, but neither of you moved. His hands— strong and so fucking capable, holding you still on your knees in front of him. His eyes were pools, inviting you in with a gleam of something shiny, and where you were nearly gasping he was calm and collected. In his element, like he was right where he should be.

The whole stable was a dull orange now, the colours dusting through the strands of Joel’s hair. It’s never really sitting right, wind whipping it out of control on patrol, but you have the urge to run your hands through it anyway. You let yourself explore one small piece of him, like he has to you, and your fingertips run back over the shell of his ear, tangling in his hair. He sucks in a short breath, leaning into the hold of your hand.

“Joel.” You say, voice so soft he would of never heard you if you weren’t so close, but you call for him and he leans closer. Your foreheads nearly touch, and his hands tighten their hold on you.

“Thank you, darlin’.” You sigh deeply, unable to keep yourself upright at the nickname. It rings through you, his accent strong and adding an entire other layer to why he’s so easy to fall into. You don’t even really notice how dark it’s gotten— you usually have sprinted home by now. But Joel’s here, and with him this close, you can’t think of anything else. He leans closer, and your eyes flutter closed.

“Can I kiss you?” He says, the brush of his lips against yours sending a tidal wave of need from your head to your feet.

“Only if you hurry up.” You answer helplessly, voice cracking, and he smiles against you and finally brings his mouth to yours.

It’s anything but calm. That peaceful energy of the stables is completely shattered and sorted into something electrical and sizzling. He yanks you forward, bodies pressing together as you use the leverage of your hand fisted in his hair to kiss him harder and deeper. It doesn’t take long before his tongue is swiping along your bottom lip, seeking permission.

You let him in— you’d let him do whatever he asked for if he kept pouring himself into you like this. He tasted good, which should be impossible but when you’ve been starved of something for this long it doesn’t matter what he does it’s just that he’s giving it to you. He moves his hands to the small of your back, pressing your hips right in the middle of his open legs, his other hand on the back of your head.

You feel him groan when you press together, the sound waking up parts of you that had been dormant for far too long. It was like he had access to each nerve in your body, and every little sound or touch had them blaring red and sparking.

“Fuck, darlin’. Come closer.” He groans into your mouth before kissing you again. You smile for a moment, not entirely sure how you could get any closer, and then it’s wiped off when he hauls you upward, hooking your legs around his waist on the stool. “Yeah. Right here.”

Your arms cling around his neck, his own searching up and down your body. Your shirt rides up with the movements and you moan every time he grazed along your skin. There’s something equally hard and soft about his hands— rough from years of work but soft with the way they hold you up, how they’re careful not to dip too low or high. You arch your back, giving him wordless permission, and he groans into your mouth again.

At some point you have to breath— both of you gasping for air in the quiet of the darkened stables. He brings his hands to your face, holding you against his forehead so he can look into your eyes. He was smiling too— like actually smiling, not that half smirk you’ve seen so often.

“What are we doin’?” He laughs, kissing you again.

“I don’t know, but can we keep going somewhere that doesn’t smell like horse shit?” You whisper and he laughs again. It’s sounds so good— like the sound of the beginning of your favourite song. It makes your heart sing, melting you into the tune. “Please, Joel. I really want…”

“Tell me, baby.” He moves, angles your head with swift moves of his fingers so he can kiss you lower. Under your jaw, and then he drags his mouth down, along your neck, teeth nipping softly… “Fuck knows I wanna hear you say it.”

“You. I really want you.” He hums against your skin, one arm hooking under your ass as he stands easily. You squeal, muffling the sound in the mop of hair on his head. As you walk outside, there’s only a few people still mulling around, and they turn their heads towards you when they hear your soft laughter mixed with Joel’s— two sounds that seem to alarm them more than clickers.

For the first time since you’d been here, you really don’t care if people are looking at you, or what they’re saying. When Joel locks the gate behind you and slides you down his chest to let your feet touch the floor, you are reminded once again of his ability to remove every single thought from your mind except him. Just him, and his hands on your hips, spinning you around and leading you up the hill towards his house. How every so often he’ll bend down, pressing his lips lightly to the back of your neck, and how you can feel his smile on your skin.

He guides you easily, your body on auto pilot to his small gestures, and when you finally rush up the few steps of his porch— one you’ve spent way too much time staring at from afar, you’re both attached to each others face like horny teenagers. He fumbles with the doors lock, jamming keys with aggressive force while his other hand stays soft and sweet on your waist, holding you against him. When the door gives out behind you he never lets you stumble, taking you in his stride with practised precision. You’ve seen the inside of his house, but never the layout, so as he guides you blindly through the hallway, your shut eyes and occupied mouth never see it coming when you fall backwards onto a bed.

“Let me take this off.” He mumbles against your lips, tugging at your shirt and jacket. In a tangle of limbs you both shove at the material, finally hooking it over your head. He presses you flat against the mattress again, hanging over you and running his hands up and down your sides in long, soothing strokes. “God damn gorgeous.”

“Your turn.” The blaze in his eyes dulls slightly at your comment, and he just bends to kiss you again. He links your hands in his own, pulling you away from where they were tugging at his shirt. “Joel.”

“Nothin’ there you wanna see, baby. Just let me look at you.” As sweet as his voice sounds, and as much as you want him to continue, you pull away from his greedy mouth.

“Please take your fucking shirt off.” You say harshly, biting at his bottom lip hard enough for his eyes to open again. He looks over you, taking in the sight of you under him with your arms pinned above your head, back arched towards him. He’s clearly contemplating how difficult it would be to ignore you, smirking a little when he looks up at your hands again.

“Or what? You gonna make me stop?” He kisses under your jaw, his free hand skating along your side, only stopping when his fingers reach the hem of your jeans. When he hears you gasp as his hand disappears under the fabric, he laughs. “Nah, you won’t make me stop. Want it just as bad as I do, don’t you?”

“But I want—“

“Shh, shh. I’ll give you what you want.” His mouth his dizzying— words and movements hot against your skin as his hand bypasses your underwear and drags slow circles against your clit, immediately drawing his name from your lips again. “There you go, darlin’. Feels good?”

“God— yeah, faster. Please.” Your chest was rising and falling so fast, trying to pull the air he was punching out of your lungs with every quick movement of his fingers. He hums at the praise, and you feel him shift above you, sitting up so he could slip one finger inside of you. “Fuck, Joel!”

“I know, baby.” He tilts his head up to kiss you again, tongue matching the fast and unpredictable pace of his hand. You can feel it building— pleasure rippling up your spine and fizzing low in your stomach, and your hands tug under Joel’s unrelenting grip.

He seems to forget he was meant to be holding you, his groans and concentration all focused on the way he was fucking you with his hand, so he lets you go, his hand going to hold your face. It makes you smile under him, but it quickly gets lost when you moan his name again, rolling your hips against him.

Now your hands are free, you have a moment of clarity when your eyes flutter open and see him staring at you; eyes flitting between your face and your chest. You want to have that— to see skin you’ve only thought about in the late hours of the night when you were alone, never admitting it to yourself when you woke the next day. You grab onto the hem of his shirt, ripping the denim up as far as you can, getting your hands on the bare skin of his back.

He doesn’t help you— too obsessed with the way you are writhing and moaning so loud the poeple down the street will know what your doing. Neither of you care about anything else than this, right here, and the fiery hot spark that’s lighting you up inside.

“Shirt, Joel.” You tug at the collar, then card your fingers through his hair and pull. He grumbles something, and then you whimper when his hand leaves you and he sits up on his knees. He was out of breath, towering over you and keeping you caged underneath him as he tore the shirt over his head and threw it behind him. When he leans back down, he doesn’t give you the time to admire him that you’d like, but you take what he gives you. He shoves your own jeans down, shaking them off you in one tug, and your eyes hardly have time to open before you feel the backs of your calves press against the flexing muscles of his bare shoulders.

“Perfect.” He says, speech almost slurred, and the look he gives you reminds you of the one he gave you in the barn. Before you can think enough on it, both of his hands hold your hips down and he gives you one last look before he buried his face in your pussy.

It doesn’t take much to have you screaming his name again, that sweet hot pleasure that was building so quickly comes rushing back with the wet heat of his mouth. He eats you out like he’s fucking hungry for it— pulling borderline shouts from deep in your chest, like something is bashing against your ribcage, only awoken by his complete and utter devotion. His tongue swirls and fingers curl, and you lose sense of direction, clawing at his hair and feeling his groan when you pull him into you.

There’s no where to go, stuck under his weight as he dives into your taste, at his mercy entirely. It was so different to see him undone— a sight you wouldn’t be able to forget next time he came into the stables all soft eyes and short words. No, here he was holding your eye contact, groaning your name as if you were the one doing this to him. He gave you no choice but to hurtle towards the edge of consciousness, knowing you wouldn’t be able to hold out under him much longer.

“Joel. Joel— fuck.” His lips wrap around your clit, sucking gently while his fingers curl inside you in a spot that has you seeing stars. “Oh, god—“

He doesn’t say anything when you cum, just groans into your pussy as he guides you through it. He sets pace and intensity, both of which are hard and almost unbearable, and he only drags himself away when you beg him to. Your legs shake, his hands smoothing over your thighs as his mouth presses wet kisses up your skin, over your stomach and chest, finally reaching your mouth with an overwhelming force.

You hum, tasting the combination of you and him together on his tongue, taking everything he needs to give you. He shuffles up, and you feel his cock pressing hard against your thigh, still straining in his jeans. You let him kiss you lazily, let him explore you this way while your hands busy themselves between your bodies, unzipping his jeans. When your palm brushes over his length still covered by his boxers, he hisses and his eyebrows furrow, like the pleasure is almost painful. You do it again and he shudders, pressing his forehead to yours.

“You’re so soft.” He murmurs past your ear when you slip your hand under the waistband. When your fingers wrap around him, you stay true to his word and stay light with your touch, not wanting him to finish just yet. You want to make it good for him— draw it out. Pay him back for everything he gave to you; not just tonight, but every night. “So fucking soft. Sweet.”

“You like that?” You ask innocently, stroking him again. Your thumb brushes over his tip and he shudders again, nearly shivering. “I can be gentle. Want you inside me, though.”

“Whatever you want. Fuck— anything you want to do to me. Please, baby. Not gonna last long if you keep doing that.” A single please was enough to grant him a thousand wishes, but you’ll settle for giving him just one.

He helps rid himself of the rest of his clothes, no insecurity in sight with the lower half of his body. There was no need to be… he was big. It made sense— he was a big guy, but it wasn’t just that. He was just… perfect.

“Eyes on me.” He says, pulling your gaze away from where your bodies are about to meet. “I want to see your face when I…”

He trails off when his tip lines up with your entrance. You bite your lip in anticipation, feeling the soaked pleasure coating him as he finally slides himself further and further. You both sigh, like a weight is being lifted from both of you. As if this was the way you were both meant to be.

He bottoms out, head buried in the crook of your neck as he chokes out your name. You feel full— the weight and stretch holding you to the bed, your arms strung lazily around his neck. Your fingers wander down his spine, keeping that soft lilt to your touch that he seems to thrive under. For all his hardness and strength, it’s the lightest touches that seem to crumble him the most.

“Fuck, baby. Feel so good around me.” Joel never speaks for the fun of it, but he says these things like he needs to. Strained and focused, like it’s a compulsion to tell you how good it feels. “Needed to fuck you for so long. You gonna let me make you feel good, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Joel. Please, I need— need you to move.” You whine like a spoilt child, and you are now that you’ve had a taste. He laughs once, a breathless sound, and then pulls out nearly all the way, only to slide back in with that same trained pace.

“Good girl.” He groans, and then picks up the pace.

It’s devastating. It’s the only way to describe it. He fucks you hard and slow, slowly etching himself into parts of your being you aren’t entirely sure he didn’t just create himself. Like he’s forged apart of you just for him, something low and hot, and he hits it with every, perfectly timed thrust. The bed rocks under him, but he doesn’t seem to care. Its creaks and groans are drowned out by his words and both of your moans.

You are incoherent— overcome by pleasure that shocks even the nerves in your fingers and toes, but it seems to have the opposite effect on Joel. He doesn’t fucking shut up— and it’s about the hottest thing you’ve ever experienced.

“So fucking tight around me.”

“God, you feel good.”

“You are so beautiful.”

“Gonna fuck you for days.” Is the last one you hear before his groans turn to borderline whimpers, his pace stuttering as you feel the coil in your stomach tighten and snap all at once. “Oh, fuck that’s it. Cum again for me. Jesus Christ—“

“Joel.” You can only whisper now— voice so strained that nothing could come out but his name. Your eyes roll back and you feel him fuck into you one or two more times, and then he pulls out and replaces himself with his hand. You ride out your pleasure on his skilled fingers, another wave of heat numbing you when you feel him spill onto your stomach, your back arching off the bed.

The room is suddenly dead quiet, nothing but panting breaths filling the silent house. He is still hanging over you, you can feel both of his forearms next to your head as he leans down to kiss you again. The warmth of his body is lifted just enough for him to use something soft to clean you off, and then he collapses beside you, tugging you onto his chest.

He runs his hand through your hair, stopping at your jaw to tilt you up. He kisses you again, the lack of oxygen making you giddy and dizzy, and you break the kiss only because your smiling so wide.

“What’s so funny?” He says, trying to be serious, but even in the dark you can see his matching grin.

“Just happy. Can I be happy?” It’s meant to be light hearted, but you feel him stop for a second, and then he tugs you a little closer.

“Yeah. Yeah, you can be.” He tucks you under his chin, sighing deeply as the rest of your body turns into him and tangles itself with him. “I am.”

You open your eyes a final time, seeing the pitch black dark outside. If it was light, you’d be able to see the stable from here, but it’s black out there. Usually it would make you uneasy, but tucked up under Joel’s safe arms, there’s nothing in the world that could make you feel more at peace.

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