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#people who can eat whatever they want without consequences. what is that like
lazylittledragon · 3 months
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i have absolutely no right to complain about my chronic digestive issues when i go around eating platefuls of cheese like nothing bad has ever happened from doing that
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𝙎𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙧𝙢...
Read part 2 here - Soup...
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*vision bored doesn't describe readers' looks it describes the vibes of the story*
screencaps: @din-jarring they are amazing, the best most amazing person. I definitely recommend you check them out 🫶🏻
Pairing: dark!Raider!Joel Miller x fem!virgin!reader
Summary: Seven years after the outbreak and with two days of starvation looming, desperation drives you to attempt stealing from your own assailant. But in this dire bid for survival, what unforeseen consequences await?
Warnings/tags: MDNI 18+, DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT, BLOOD, VIRGIN READER, breaking and entering, bondage (belt), groping, spit, fear, non/dub-con, guns, toxic people, degradation, praise, (maybe kind of), fingering kinda, biting, male moaning, breeding kink, kissing, kidnapping, mean joel, daze, kinda inexperienced reader, UNprotected sex wrap it before you tap it, kids. THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONTENT YOU CONSUME
WC: 2.5K
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Your pulse quickened as a looming silhouette tore through the door of your family's cabin, a formidable rifle in hand. The once serene sanctuary of your family retreat had morphed into something ominous during the seven years since the outbreak. Time had shrouded the cabin in secrecy, but now it felt like it held more secrets than safety. With no one around to offer aid and your provisions dwindling, a sense of foreboding gripped you. Who was this intruder, and what did they want?
Huddled behind the worn fabric of the couch, you trembled, trying to decipher the intruder's intentions. The eerie silence of the cabin was only broken by the sound of your racing heartbeat and the slam of the empty cupboards. The emptiness of the cupboards, devoid of sustenance for two long days, added to the dread coiling in your stomach.
Your father's departure had cast the first shadow of unease. Taking the only means of protection—a small pistol—he left behind a void filled with questions and fear. When days stretched into weeks without his return, your mother embarked on a desperate quest to find him, leaving you alone to wrestle with gnawing uncertainty.
Peering cautiously from your hiding place, you observed the intruder ransacking the kitchen. Panic surged as you spotted the cabin door ajar, a white van parked conspicuously outside. Desperation prompted a daring idea – if there was nothing left to steal, why not take whatever the intruder possessed? With knowledge of the terrain on your side, you calculated a plan to hide in the woods until the coast was clear.
You watched the intruder's every move, hoping for the perfect moment to act. When he cautiously ventured into the bathroom, likely searching for supplies you lacked, you seized the chance to make your move. With a deep breath to steady your nerves, you slipped out the door and tiptoed toward the van, determined to reclaim control of the situation.
Peering into the dim interior, you scanned for any signs of danger before cautiously stepping inside. The van's interior was a jumble of crates and boxes, their contents obscured by shadows. Time was of the essence, so you swiftly lifted the tarp covering the crates, revealing precious bottles of water. With careful precision, you gathered as many as you could carry, ensuring not to drop any or create any disturbance.
Exiting the van, you concealed the bottles in a nearby bush, intending to wait there until the intruder departed. Once the water was safely stashed, you returned to the van, continuing your search. As you reached for a few cans of canned food, you suddenly found yourself confronted by a terrifying sight: a tall, muscular man with a rifle pointed directly at your face.
The sound of the cans dropping from your hands seemed to fade away as you stood there frozen in fear, unable to move or even think. The man had a heavy, muscular build, with dark hair and an incoming beard that made him look even more menacing. It was clear that he had been watching you, and that he had no intention of letting you leave without a fight.
As you struggled to comprehend the situation unfolding before you, the man's voice shattered the eerie silence, causing a shiver to run down your spine. "Caught red-handed, are we? Thought you could just waltz in and help yourself to my supplies?" His words were like a cold slap in the face, jolting you into a state of panic.
Before you could utter a word in response, he roughly pushed you onto your back, the barrel of the gun pressing into your chest. Fear gripped you tightly as you found yourself unable to move, your mind racing with thoughts of imminent danger.
"Please, I didn't mean any harm. I'll put everything back, just please don't hurt me," you pleaded, your voice quivering with desperation. But your words seemed to fall on deaf ears as he grabbed your arm with force, pushing your chest against the center console. Your heart sank as the cold metal of the gun dug into your back, a sense of hopelessness washing over you.
In that moment of vulnerability, you couldn't help but curse yourself for choosing to wear a dress today. The fabric rode up your thighs, leaving you feeling exposed and defenseless. It served as a harsh reminder of how unready you were for the predicament unfolding before you. While you weren't naive, you'd had discussions before, even received "the talk" about the delicate subject of virginity. But contemplating the act itself was a realm you never envisioned venturing into, especially not now. The weight of such responsibilities loomed heavy on your mind, intertwining with the immediate danger at hand, creating a tangled web of fear and uncertainty.
He knelt behind you, his rough, calloused hand replacing the gun at your back. "You want to leave here in one piece? Then you better be prepared to compensate me for what you were trying to steal," he demanded, his grip firm as he lifted the hem of your dress.
As panic surged through you, you attempted to break free, but his hold only tightened. He swiftly changed tactics, his unfamiliar touch gripping your waist just above where your panties ended. With a rough tug, he pulled down your panties, his words and actions leaving you feeling exposed and vulnerable.
"Now that's a pretty lookin' pussy," he taunted, his fingers tracing over your folds. You squirmed uncomfortably under his touch, his chuckle sending shivers down your spine.
Feeling trapped and afraid, you remained frozen, unable to escape his looming presence.
He started to palm your bare clit, making sure to rub the wet spit onto your pussy. You were starting to become wet at his actions, he rubbed his middle finger around your damp pussy teasing you, making you squirm again. “I like it when you squirm. Makes things more interesting," he chuckled, his words sending a shiver down your spine. In a desperate attempt to escape his unsettling presence, you jolted forward, scrambling towards the front of the van, hoping to create some distance between yourself and the menacing figure behind you. He pulled you back and firmly grasped your shoulders, preventing you from escaping further. Then, he cupped your face with his hands, his touch possessive yet tender, his eyebrows lifting in a silent question as his husky voice filled the space between you.
"I'm never—" he began, his lips pressing against yours briefly before he lowered his voice, his gaze locking onto yours, "gonna let you go." His thumb traced gentle circles on your temple, a stark contrast to the intensity of his words.
But then his touch shifted, his lips leaving yours to trail along the curve of your neck and shoulders, igniting a tingling sensation that sent shivers down your spine. It was as if he was trying to seduce you, drawing you in with each caress.
Returning to your lips, he initiated another kiss, and you found yourself torn between conflicting emotions. Part of you felt trapped and scared, but another part couldn't deny the thrill coursing through you. As he deepened the kiss, you found yourself responding, losing yourself in the moment.
Finally pulling back, a small smile played on his lips as he shook his head in disbelief. His voice dropped to a whisper as he repeated his vow, "Never."
As one of his hands traveled down your stomach, a shiver ran down your spine, and he began planting kisses along your neck. For a moment, you closed your eyes, lost in the sensation, feeling a sense of serenity wash over you. But reality crashed back down as he suddenly shoved you forcefully onto the center console. Your head collided with something hard, causing a sharp pain to shoot through you, and blood began to gush from your nose.
Shocked and a little dizzy from the sudden impact, you struggled to gather your bearings, your head throbbing as blood continued to trickle from your nose. Blinking rapidly, you tried to focus, but the dizziness made it difficult to think clearly. Panic began to rise within you as you realized the severity of the situation, your heart pounding in your chest.
One of his hands held you down harshly against the console keeping you trapped once again sanity has left you, his other hand swiftly unbuckled his belt, the sounds of his movements echoing in the tense silence of the van you felt hopeless and dazed as you felt his dick rub against your pussy still wet from the desire of his kiss.
He leaned closer to you, his entire body weight pressing down on yours, his chest now firmly against your back as he roughly pushed his dick into you. he was big you let out a loud shriek as a burning sensation cascaded through your body, causing your eyes to squeeze shut in pain. Desperately, you reached for his thighs, trying to push him off you.
"Quiet." He groans as he pushes deeper into your cunt you felt his pubes brush against your clit, he was so big so overwhelming you could feel him in your stomach even as he was still. He gripped your hands and grabbed his belt from beside him before tying your hands together behind your back. you could feel every movement making you let out small sounds of discomfort as his dick rested inside of you.
"Suckin' me right in." He lifted your dress higher taking a moment to stand and bask in the view of his dick being swallowed by your pussy. he started groping your ass taking his time as he started he's penetrating your soul. he began to thrust setting a slow but harsh pace. "You're gonna be achin' for days.” you let out a few broken moans at his movements your daze and confusion were replaced with a sense of pleasure and warmth as he continued thrusting in and out of you.
He shifted his hands to grip the makeshift restraints around your wrists, then began pushing you towards him so that you met his thrusts. As the new sensation overwhelmed you, you started to squirm again, unable to contain the mix of pleasure and discomfort. "I said squirming makes it interesting, I didn't say be difficult," he murmured, his voice low and filled with amusement. With a swift movement, he hooked you up so you were pressed against him, your struggles futile against his strength. He noticed the blood from your nose and chuckled, the sound sending a shiver down your spine as you whimpered in fear.
He started to thrust up into you harder. more primal for his desire, he moved one of his hands to play with your breast. you let out a loud moan as one of his thrusts hit just where it was needed for his movements to feel like he was heaven. He pushed you back onto the console, this time skillfully avoiding the sharp object, sparing you from any further facial damage.
His weight presses you down onto your back again, forcing you to stay still as he pounds deep into you over and over again. His power and speed never slow down as he bites down hard on your shoulder to muffle his moans, he hits that sweet spot inside of you with every thrust making it impossible to hide your obvious pleasure from his actions making sure to move your hips back to meet him every time it makes you feel so dirty, "You tried to take from me, but now you're learning your place. Beneath me, where you belong, like a whore".He stopped biting your shoulder and whispered, letting out a soft moan
"Don't call me that," you manage to mumble, your voice trembling with a mixture of fear and defiance, though you still push back into him, your back arching involuntarily making you press into his chest. "I-I can call you whatever I want when... when..." Your words falter as you struggle to find your voice, the pleasure taking over you. As he continues to pound into you.
But he cuts you off sharply, he pinched your side hard, causing you to whimper in pain. "Shut the fuck up," he commands, his voice harsh and threatening. "I'm tired of your mouth. Keep it up, and I'll find another way to shut you up."
His thrusts grew more erratic, his grip tightening as he abandoned any pretense of restraint, his small moans and grunts escaping him freely. "Shit, I'm gonna need Viagra or something to keep up with this pussy," he muttered, his words punctuated by the force of his pistoning movements. "Gosh... feels like you're gonna swallow me whole."
Suddenly, he stopped hitting that spot that had pleased you, and a sense of disappointment washed over you. As his thrusts became sloppy, you ceased meeting him halfway, hoping he would find that sweet spot again. But he didn't.
With a final, desperate thrust, he let out a guttural groan, his body shuddering as he reached his climax. As he withdrew, leaving you feeling empty and unsatisfied, a wave of sadness and confusion washed over you.
Your walls were slick, not with your arousal, but with his, milky ropes of his release making an obscene set of sounds as he pulled out of you. Still restrained, you watched silently as he got dressed and exited the van, leaving you feeling abandoned and exposed.
Minutes passed, the silence heavy and suffocating, before he returned with a few papers and items you recognized from your cabin. "Hey, those are mine!" you protested, your voice tinged with a mix of anger and desperation.
He ignored your protest, tossing the items into a bag without a second glance. "They're mine now," he replied coldly, his tone leaving no room for argument.
As he released you from your restraints, you felt a surge of defiance rising within you. "You can't just take everything!" you exclaimed, trying to assert some semblance of control over the situation.
But his gaze was icy as he looked at you, his expression unreadable. "Watch me," he muttered, before turning and striding away, leaving you feeling small and powerless once again.
"Get comfortable," he called over his shoulder as he headed towards the driver's seat, his voice devoid of any warmth or compassion.
You watched him go, a sinking feeling settling in the pit of your stomach. As you sat alone in the van, surrounded by the remnants of your life that he had taken from you, the reality of your situation began to sink in.
He wasn't just taking your belongings. He was taking you.
With a heavy heart, you realized that you were now at his mercy, trapped in a situation you couldn't escape. And as he started the engine and pulled away from the cabin, leaving everything you knew behind, he turned to you with a chilling smile.
"You're mine now," he said quietly, his words sending a shiver down your spine. "And you're not going anywhere."
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wandasaura · 5 months
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— LITTLE DOVE DYNAMICS
summary — a few bullet points describing the relationship you have with your girlfriends
warnings — alludes to elements of ageplay, very brief mention of smut, literally only a sentence
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♥️⊹ ˚ . 18+, men/minors dni ⁺ 𓈒 ꒰💌꒱ ♡ ・ mommy maximoff ✧
ꕤ wanda is definitely the authoritarian within your dynamic. unlike natasha who will let you get away with whatever you want, within reason of course, wanda upholds the expectation that you should act as their good little dove and abide by the rules without her having to remind you.
ꕤ for the most part, you don’t need to be reminded about bedtime or using your inside voice, but on the days that you want to test her patience, she always starts out soft. it’s a gentle reminder at first, rough fingers beneath your chin, tilting your head back until you meet her eye, softly asking you to listen to mommy before she smiles goofily and kisses your waiting lips that have always formed a pout by this point. if she had to ask again, she wasn’t as nice, and for the post part, you never let her get to three. for the most part. there are some days you wake up just wanting to rile her up, get beneath her skin, and giggle with your daddy at her expense. when she got to three on those days, her eyes flashed red and whatever misbehavior you’d been taunting her with, became a second thought as you sniffled at her disappointed face.
ꕤ natasha always thought it was hilarious to see you fall so far so fast, and how you tearfully mumbled out apologies as your mommy rambled about actions and consequences. her amusement had gotten her in trouble with the scary witch more times than she’d like to admit, and while most of wanda’s wrath wasn’t shown to her the way it was to you in this headspace, there were a handful of times when she found herself right alongside you at the kitchen counter, writing lines until her hand felt raw and her eyes burned daggers into wanda’s head when she was sure you weren’t looking.
ꕤ that being said, natasha wasn’t all fun and games either. especially not when you found yourself beneath her in the bedroom, desperate for your release that she had spent hours building up and pulling away. wanda would laugh cynically at your side, squeezing your hand when you would inevitably reach out for her and pout. it was a healthy balance, but at the end of the day, you knew that both of them were a safe space to sink into
ꕤ when wanda’s having a hard day, they usually fall close to her birthday or the death anniversaries of her family members, she’s not herself in the slightest. you can always tell when her grief becomes allconsuming. she’ll pull away from you and natasha, find a reason to stay later at work or lock herself away in a spare bedroom claiming she’s doing mission reports and needs to focus, but you know that she’s crying as quietly as she can, struggling to find a reason to keep going when everything hurts so much. you’re her motivation at that point — when she feels like she just can’t go on in so much pain anymore. she loves you and natasha equally, but she doesn’t want to be the one to traumatize you. natasha’s lost handfuls of people, she understands the way wanda feels, but you’re their innocent little dove, and the thought of hurting you like that… she would never. so eventually she’ll come out to find you, and she’ll braid your hair, and cuddle you close, and forgive the fact that bedtime was an hour ago in favor of finding ice cream buried in the freezer and eating it while she watches your favorite show/movie. you make sure to love on her extra hard, and natasha doesn’t mind the favoritism as she watches you snuggle close to wanda and follow her around like a shadow, not wanting to leave her alone.
ꕤ when natashas having a bad day, usually triggered by a mission that reminded her of the conditions of the red room/her time under cover in ohio, she’s the opposite. she knows what she lives for, and she makes sure to express her gratitude for you and wanda in anyway she can. whether it’s spontaneous hugs and kisses throughout the days, cooking your favorite meal for dinner even if she hates the long and tedious process of making some of wanda’s favorite foods, or preparing a bubble bath for the three of you to sink into at the end of the day complete with candles and bubbles, she’s going the extra mile to make sure you feel loved. she’s painfully aware of how short and unpredictable life is, and she wants to make sure if anything happens to her, neither of you question for a second if you were loved.
ꕤ your favorite days though, are the days when you have them all to yourself. you’ll pile up on the couch and spend the entire day eating absolute junk, cuddling close to them and laughing about old memories and childhood stories, you bake sweet treats and just enjoy each others company. ans at the end of the night, you fall into bed between them with a smile on your face, knowing that just before you can’t keep your eyes open anymore, wanda’s gonna lean in close and kiss your forehead, and natasha’s going to squeeze your waist and whisper, “goodnight, little dove” in your ear
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gallusrostromegalus · 7 months
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So how much are you willing to talk about Ulquiorra?
I will talk so much about him. There are so many things wrong with that man, but to make a brief list of his most notable features:
He's dumb as hell.
I say that with tremendous sympathetic affection. Ulquiorra barely thinks. It's easy for him to do nothing and go nowhere. He eats chocolate in the middle of the night in the dark. When he gets access to a garden, he often just stands around in it. He's often waiting for things to happen.
He just LOOKS smart compared to nearly everyone else in the fic because he doesn't have much to say, so he's not constantly opening his mouth to jam his foot down it.
Consequently, Ulquiorra starts off having little to no initiative of his own. Stuff just happens to him. Some of that is because he is colossally depressed, but he's depressed because the idea that he has control over his circumstances has straight up not occured to him.
The first person he meets that shows him that "You can just do whatever you want, forever" and the boundless joy it is to be a creature of free will is, unfortunately, Aizen. And Aizen left off the key corollary "-EVERYONE is allowed to do whatever they want, forever. We are all equal in God's dead, empty eye sockets."
So Ulquiorra wanders around trying out this "doing stuff" thing without any concept of ethics.
I realize I am infantilizing this character, but I am doing so in a twilight zone "hey, wouldn't it be fucked up to watch a fully anatomically functional person who is able to speak and blow stuff up with his mind go through the emotional development steps of a toddler?", because I think that's a fun high-concept premise to explore with him. Yeah, what if a toddler could speak articulately and also destroy you? How would he act? How does he feel, learning to have feelings?
It'd probably suck for him and everyone around him, and make him very easy to manipulate, for one thing.
So I don't think Ulquiorra is evil, because evil takes intent. He is dangerous to be in the general proximity of, though
Like a horse
lose
in a hospital!
I love that sketch as much as the next person but if an IRL horse got loose in a hospital it would be bedlam, but the horse would be mostly confused and probably willing to follow around the first person who looked like they knew what they were doing.
You know, like how Ulquiorra follows Aizen around because that's the first guy he's met who THINKS he knows what he's doing, and is good at convincing others he knows what he's doing!
So Ulquiorra's entire first character arc is being exposed to more and more people and realizing he does have control over his life, and that he can take actions, and that those actions have consequences.
Like being emotionally devastated by a teenage girl because he was an asshole to her and she's willing to scream at him about it.
Hm.
Consequences hurt.
He lives through the Las Noches arc, and decides to follow his own star!
He follows it right through a portal that was not meant for him and now he's sort of trapped in somewhere he's really, really, really, really, REALLY not supposed to be.
But it's a beautiful place
And nobody is forcing him to do anything.
And for a long time, he just stands out in the garden, waiting for something.
But then
Ulquiorra experiences a novel pair of emotions that he's recently learned from his new...
Orihime is too mad at him for him to call her a friend.
-but he did learn the names and therefore the experience of two new emotions from her: boredom, and it's natural remedy: curiosity.
So Ulquiorra's second character arc is him learning how to be himself without anyone telling him who he is and what he ought to be.
He's travelling up Maslow's hierarchy with the inscrutable but unstoppable instinctual drive of a salmon returning to its spawning ground.
This has lead to an important discovery on my part: Ulquiorra is terrific for comedy because he is the ULTIMATE straight man to everyone else's nonsense, because he's immune to nearly all nonsense.
He doesn't have societal taboos to be hung up on, nor any sense of what is "normal", so the sole thing he geta hung up on is a lack of internal consistency in others, meaning he can slip between straight man to the absurdist at the drop of a single scathing observation. Yet, he retains a sort of understated dignity that compels people to try to earn his respect.
Hence, I'm having fun turning him loose on the most absurd, internally inconsistent and frankly, insane batch of characters in the series:
The Royal Guard.
:)
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artbyblastweave · 1 year
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Thinkin’ about The Siberian
I was sitting on a draft that said something to the effect of “Worm AU where Manton pulls an NBC Hannibal and moonlights as The Siberian on top of being a globally respected parahuman studies researcher. Is this anything.”
Then I thought about this a little more and realized that this might not be far off from what actually happened. There’s a throughline in Manton’s interests, in his trajectory through life, where he’s trying to figure out what you can use powers to get away with doing to people- about identifying constraints and overcoming them. 
He’s the guy who somehow credibly catalogued, and got his name associated with, the fact that powers generally can’t be used to pop people like balloons, and he did so reasonably early in the timeline, in the nineties at the latest. That’s.... an interesting direction to take your research! When people are just coming to terms with the fact that parahumans are real he’s out there taking careful note of whether they can manifest their powers inside people to instantly kill them. How did he test that? What capes did he collaborate with to test that? What did those conversations look like? Did the IRB at a minimum issue any revise-and-resubmits?
And then, of course, he gets picked up by Cauldron (also known as the infinite untraceable victim depot) to work on improving the vials- gaining a sufficiently in-depth understanding of what they are, how they’re made, and what they can do to people that when Cauldron told Legend that Manton had gone rogue and was the one creating C53s, he found this plausible. You’ve got the guy who’d later become the backbone of the Slaughterhouse 9 basically systemically cataloging every conceivable way a power could violate someone’s physiology- first from without, and then, at Cauldron, from within.
Then, when he pulls the trigger and gives himself powers, the resultant ability is essentially a distilled refutation of the Manton Effect- a minion that can obliterate anything, eat anything, delete any material from existence, viscerally dismember people in a unity of conventional and esoteric, power-enabled violence. And he’s insulated from the consequences of his actions on two levels- in terms of Siberian’s invulnerability, but also in the discrepancy between his form and that of his minion. He mixed the vial that gave him that power himself.
Essentially- I don’t think Siberian is something that just happened after a psychological break following a messy divorce. I think Manton basically pre-committed to becoming something like The Siberian, spent most of his career working towards some form of transcendence through superpowers, and the messy divorce was downstream of the cracks starting to show as he got closer and closer to what he’d been chasing.
Now to segue into a complication that’s more directly supported in the text- it’s Worm, it’s always complicated- Master powers spring from loneliness. My theory is that while Manton wanted apotheosis, and while he’d probably been gearing up for a rampage for a while, he genuinely didn’t want to do it alone; he wanted a sidekick. Hence why he bothered pursuing a family in the first place, hence why he fed his daughter a vial, hence why his own projection ended up looking like his daughter after he accidently made her explode or whatever with the bad vial- a monkey’s paw restoration, giving him back a facsimile of the person he wanted to take along for the ride, and making his capacity for violence inseparable from her presence.
This is why he joined up with the Nine rather than remaining a solo act; it’s why he engages in a bad imitation of the Parent/Child relationship with Bonesaw; and it’s why he seeks out Bitch as a candidate. His interest in her candidacy parses to me as genuine- Even moreso than Bonesaw, even moreso than Jack, Bitch has arrived at a no-frills fuck-you-I-do-what-I-want outlook that’s very appealing to Manton. He wants to have a murderer-daughter relationship!
But Rachel got where she is the hard way, by having a life that sucked a lot, by getting near-constantly kicked around! She has a clear reason to be so angry! Even if all my postulations about Manton having a long game are complete bullshit, there are several stages at which Manton had to actively opt in to the same lifestyle and reputation that Bitch was forced to adopt as a basic survival tactic. He didn’t have to start eating people! He’s a tourist! His “freedom” is inseparable from his distance, his disguise. Rachel’s “freedom” is just the freedom of having nothing left to lose.
All of this to say- In an interlude in which Bitch has an extended internal monologue about how people with families have the opportunities to be assholes and monsters to a captive audience, it is absolutely not a coincidence that she’s scouted by a would-be parental figure who proceeds to be an asshole and a monster in front of a captive audience, before trying to buy her affection with a puppy. In rejecting Manton, Rachel dodged an esoterically-packaged but ultimately very familiar bullet.
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ghostinthegallery · 8 months
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So a thing I’ve noticed about necron books…
I do not think it is controversial to say that Robert Rath and Nate Crowley really defined how a lot of us (especially me) view necrons in modern 40k lore. They did so much heavy lifting to take the faction that was literally just Terminator ripoff (aka Tyranids but worse) and make them into characters.
But they did it in such different and almost contradictory ways. And I think it boils down to this:
Rath's necrons are gods who were once mortal. Crowley's necrons are mortals forced to become gods.
(disclaimer: I don't think one author is "more correct" or whatever. Different characters experience the universe in different ways, embrace a little subjectivity does objective truth even exist?)
Let's start with Crowley. In both Severed and Twice Dead King, memories and bodies are defining features of their narratives. Oltyx can and does revisit his memories at will (not without consequence get your pins out and put em in). He is haunted by disphorakh, this feeling that he should have an organic body but does not and that this disconnect is actually killing him. The flayed ones' whole existence is steeped (literally) in flesh and blood and disphoria.
On the slightly less extreme end, in Severed Obyron remembers the flesh times vividly: the battles, the people, who and what he's lost. They are fighting the manifestation of what Obyron fears becoming: a mindless machine, “severed” from his past experiences. And the ultimate stakes in a Crowley book? Loss of memory. Loss of self. Obyron and Oltyx pay this price throughout their stories, and it eats away at them. Necrodermis makes their physical selves immortal, but their minds? Just as mortal as ever. If not even more so. The people they are were formed in flesh times, and all immortality does is wear away at them as they desperately try to cope.
Robert Rath's necrons? Not so much. Sure, Trazyn and Orikan angst about their loss of memory, but the memories of flesh for them are so distant and unreliable that they could not build their personalities around them even if they wanted to. Trazyn's link to the past is external: objects he has collected. Orikan... what memories he has of his past are fuzzy and in some cases straight up manipulated. That's distressing, but not enough to totally rock his sense of self. That’s a stark contrast to how Crowley’s necrons operate.
We all know the iconic Old Man Fight from Infinite and the Divine. Where Rath describes Trazyn and Orikan fighting and points out how stupid it would be back in the flesh times? Just two nerds hitting each other with canes. Well the flip side of that is that what is actually happening is NOT two nerds slapping each other but two immortals with incomprehensible power battling on a scale mortals cannot process.
Rath’s necrons operate on scales mortals barely understand. Oh, the Greek gods destroyed one city? Troy took em ten years? Trazyn and Orikan wiped out a planet's population by accident. And they are both so divorced from mortality that they don't care. Sheesh, Trazyn is so alienated from the idea of a body that in War in the Museum he informs a woman that he’s filled her up with her own dead sisters organs and I legit believe he thought this would make her feel better.
I adore both approaches! The differences in character and perspective, how they relate to the world and themselves. Yes, it creates contradictions in the lore (like why doesn’t Trazyn lose his shit knowing people like Zahndrekh or Oltyx just…remember necrontyr society perfectly clearly) but I aggressively do not care. I love the varying explorations or power, the nature of the self, the truth that none of these people have survived immortality “in tact.” Those are exactly the things that make necrons my favorite 40k faction. Hell, one of my favorite sci if aliens ever. Because both approaches are haunting and hilarious and poignant and so damn cool.
So…uh…thanks guys. Yeah.
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degreedummy · 5 months
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Leo/Cancer 12H + 12H Sun/Moon
Getting too comfortable in your current conditions or refusing to acknowledge how your needs have developed out of fear of looking selfish will make following your desires almost completely impossible.
For Leo 12H/12H Sun, I think you have a habit of only allowing your confidence to extend as far as people validate it, refusing to set yourself up to be the punchline of a joke you have a habit of seeing yourself as. With your ego being cast into the shadows, the only time you allow your confidence to breathe is when someone passes by with a torch. You've become accustomed to cherishing your talents in the dark so much so that you've never taken the time to explore practicing them freely.
For Cancer 12H/12H Moon, you have a habit of saying yes to every demand in a panicked attempt to avoid any conflict. Putting your needs on the back burner, you tend to only focus on making sure everyone around you succeeds no matter what, even if that means moving past you. You have a habit of being prepared for abandonment, finding your role in society to be one of an unpaid psychologist, traveling the world trying to survive off of the wished-for reciprocation that you never actually ask for.
You find no shame in second place because you know how to turn it into a platform to embolden the winner, setting your pride aside to allow them to have their day, but I think the comfort of never having the light shone on you has become detrimental to your cause. I think you find pride in being able to let pain go easily, but there tends to be a twisted past behind this habit, most usually a refusal for your original comforts to be met by people who promised you more than they were ever actually willing to give you.
You call victim to false promises, to a point that it almost feels like you intentionally fulfill your half to hear whatever pretty words they have prepared for you, completely submitting to the comfort while ignoring the backhanded disloyalty being slid in under it. There isn't anything you won't do for somebody you love, except for letting them go and allowing them to face the consequences of their own actions. You have a habit of stepping in between your friends and their fate.
You put no second thought into sacrificing whatever you have left to make sure the rest of the village eats for the night, even if that means going on hunger strike for the fifth night this week, and you need to learn when to stop. You're naturally altruistic, wanting nothing more than to see the people you love succeed, but you need to become more comfortable in questioning what that love is built on before trying to polish a rock like it's a statue. You don't need people as much as they convince you, they only recognize what they're losing without you, and you can't take it away if you're not aware of it. You're not aware of your power because you use it to apologize for not being even better.
I think part of you knows that you can let go at any time, refusing to answer the phone and accepting whatever reputation comes with it, but that's exactly why it bothers you. You never want to be known as the person who didn't help.
You never want to be known as the person who became everything they hated in the people they promised to be better than. You never want that one wrong interaction to be the career-defining moment that means nothing else you do will be taken seriously. At some point, you need to recognize your reputation isn't as fragile as the relationships people love to entrap you in. You are not either good or bad, you do not have irredeemable qualities, your willingness to try harder is all you need.
No matter how slanderous someone can be, the collective will be able to see the quality of your character through the veil of lies your own friends warn you against to keep you around. You are not helpless, people who benefit from your intentionally limited potential find comfort in enforcing your helplessness, and you need to be able to recognize the cause of the cycle if you truly want to break it.
You can't find comfort in consolation prizes and participation trophies, especially when you know the votes were intentionally mishandled to steal the win for someone else. You are not selfish for expecting, and enforcing, payment for your services. Stop working for free to make up for not working in advance, because none of the work being done is advancing you in life. Break away from people who see no value in you past what you can do for them.
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panlight · 5 months
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Breaking Dawn has always read like a fanfiction to me. I'm aware this has probably to do with the fact, that Forever Dawn was written before New Moon and Eclipse, and SMeyer just rewrote some pieces of it.
But this made me think - most fans probably have an idea of how they would have liked the story of Bella and Edward to end and those endings might all be a little, or even very different. What would your perfect ending for the Saga look like? You can place it after any point of the story - just after the first book, in the middle of New Moon, around the end of Eclipse, wherever you want.
It really does have a lot of fanfic-y tropes. The big wedding. The over-the-top tropical honeymoon. This is an 18-year-old middle class girl getting married here. Sure the Cullens are rich but she's not an actual princess or something, this always felt hugely over the top to me in a fanfic-y way. And then the baby, of course. It does tick a lot of boxes of the sort of fanfic that imagines what happens after the book/movie/show where the main couple get married and have a kid.
For me, vampirism without consequences is just completely uninteresting. Bella getting to have her cake and eat it too not only undermines all the themes in the earlier books and makes Edward's brooding about being a vampire seem like unnecessary whining, it's also just boring.
So my ideal ending is an actual follow up to Eclipse. Bella and Edward follow through on their compromise plan: wedding, sex, and vampirism in that order. There's no baby; Bella is turned on Isle Esme and spends a few months there on a secluded island with no people (the groundskeepers are given time off FFS Edward can clean the house) eating wildlife and adjusting to vampirism.
But she actually has to like, adjust. It IS has hard as people told her it was. She can still do well at it, but with struggle. I mean, Carlisle never killed anyone either but he did it by banishing himself to the woods and starving to the point that he unthinkingly attacked some deer. I believe it was hard and he struggled and so his triumph feels earned. Bella can still control herself better than average but I wanna see her struggle with it, versus like, one tense afternoon with Charlie and then totally being fine around humans and going to see lawyers in a sexy outfit, no problem. That felt anticlimactic.
Also there should be some fallout with Jake, and she should probably have to cut ties with Charlie and Renee. She MADE this choice to become a vampire knowing she was giving these things up, so for Breaking Dawn to be like "Nevermind! Haha!" about it was deeply unsatisfying. It killed the conflict and tension for Jacob and Charlie to still be part of her life and accepting of the weirdness of it.
For me, the whole point was Bella was sacrificing a lot to be with Edward. That is where the romance and angst lies. Getting to be beautiful and immortal and rich and powerful AND with the person you love AND keep your father and best friend AND get a perfect baby who never cries and sleeps through the night AND conquer the bloodlust in like 2 seconds was just . . . boring. All the stuff I had been interested in seeing how it would resolve was resolved in just the easiest, least interesting way possible. A perfect example: the wedding. We're told that Renee is going to freak out about this early marriage and even THAT relatively unimportant conflict is just instantly resolved with "actually, Renee's totally on board!!!!" Snore!
So yeah. Bella is turned on the honeymoon. It's hard. She cuts off ties with Charlie; maybe she fakes her death, maybe she just disappears. Jacob refuses to talk to her, but Sam is like "whatever she made her choice we're not going to start a war over this." And in this way Bella is actually cut off from her human life and has to start over with the new family and new life she chose. We probably have to resolve the Volturi situation somehow; maybe a trip to Volterra to prove she's been turned and some conflict with the Volturi comes into play.
But ultimately I just want an epilogue where she comes back to Forks with Edward to check in on Charlie and Jacob from a distance. She watches Charlie with Sue (or someone else) playing with step-grandbabies, she sees Jacob, who has stopped phasing and is aging and married with kids of his own, and it's hard. It's sad to see them going on without her. And Edward looks at her like he's about to apologize for the 239470242th time for robbing her of a human life and she's like, "No, the life I have with you is worth it," because THAT's the vibe! That's where the romance is! Her being happy in BD means nothing because it was all so easy for her! Her being happy despite the downsides of vampirism is where the romance lies!
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hideousvoid · 1 year
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Can you do yandere Malleus headcanon?
Possessive Fae
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Reader: gender neutral
warnings: isolating, stalking mentions, slight mention of violence and manipulating behavior.
You won the dragon's heart, the future king of the Fae's, it's amazing right? It's up to you to take it as sarcasm or not, he has many good qualities as bad ones. From now one you can't go anywhere without him or Sebek, Lilia or Silver.
At first you noticed how people started to avoid you, isolate like you weren't there. Your friends slowly disappearing and never talking to you again. What was happening? It was horrible, you didn't have anyone there for you leading to stay in your room most of the time to try feeling better. The only student that still talked to you was Malleus, rarely Sebek but only to mention his master and Lilia doing the same. One day, tired and sick of all the things that were happening you wrapped your arms around the dragon Fae crying on his shirt. You told him everything keeping him the closest to yourself, you needed love so much. He softly caressed your hair whispering gentle words to make you feel better, it was all his plan and you as a poor lamb was falling in his trap.
"Don't worry child of man, I will be here for you from now on, forever"
Everywhere you go or stay, you can feel a pair of eyes looking at you, never knowing who's those are. Could be Lilia, Sebek or even Silver, ready to tell Malleus everything. Sometimes the gaze is different, cold and harsh, as if that person is going to devour you any moment. Every little movement, breath or word is caught by him, you are his precious human and he needs to know about you. If you try to talk to him about it you are getting nothing else than the silence, looking at you unbothered. It's not like he is going to stop, as a spoiled kid he does whatever he wants and gets what he wishes. He could wake up tomorrow and choose to bite you to taste your blood, leaving a mark so everyone knows that you are his. What are you going to do about it? Nothing, because you can't and words doesn't work with him.
"you look so cute in your pajama, you know? I could just eat you up"
Then you are going to stay in his room, can't return to your old one anymore. All your stuff is there, your clothes in his wardrobe in a side just for you. You can only leave the room with the company of his familiars or him, then you'll immediately return to his room no matter what. You are only his and his alone, this is why he hugs you in his sleep tight as he is going to lose you any moment. Lilia deliveries the lunch and dinner that Sebek cooks, Malleus doesn't wish for you to eat the bat's almost poisoning cooking. Don't hope in those three, if you try to escape they will catch you and immediately warn the Fae. Neither talking with them will work, Malleus gave permission only to Lilia to chat with you. Obviously the conversation is about Malleus and you, he won't mention anything else. You do your homeworks with the dorm leader, you wash with him and you have a very little privacy.
"Did you seriously attempt to escape, (y/n)? I'm giving you all my love and attention, why are you doing such a cruel thing to me? You are hurting me so much.."
Naive as he is, he won't care much about the consequences of his punishment. In fact he will take you in his arms and shower you of his love, whispering how he did it for both and that you will feel better soon. You won't stop loving him, at least he thinks, you are too desperate and without him you can't survive. Malleus makes you find your room full of gifts everyday, name one thing you desire and you'll be immediately satisfied. Your body is full of bites mark made by him, his scent over you while you can only wear his clothes when you aren't at school. You won't leave him, neither death will, you are going to be with Malleus forever with no way to escape.
"your body, mind and soul are completely mine. Our souls are becoming one soon, you won't imagine of running away from me no more. Bear it with me, my jewel"
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hanrinz · 1 year
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midnights with them
includes — dabi and hawks
content warning — angst for dabi, fluff for hawks.
notes: i wrote this again with a spark of inspiration. finally writing for hawks?? paying tribute for a fluffy keigo. not proofread. more below cut.
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# 𝐃𝐀𝐁𝐈
midnights have been a terror for dabi in his younger years and he has grown to live with it, to wake up every night heavy breathing, drench in cold sweat, but never tears. it's been so long since his tear ducts have been burned off and no matter how much he tries, it just burns his eyes more. dabi have learned to live with it.
and when you walk into his life, it becomes bearable. he never told you what those nightmares were and how much it haunts him. how difficult it is to calm himself, to stop the shaking and he hates it. it was years ago and it still comes back to him.
you were patient, you were understanding and it made his heart so full and he can't explain it, he wants to cry, he wants to be vulnerable, he wants to tell you how much he loves you, but he can't. and you understand yet again, because when he clings to you like you were going to disappear, when he holds you just to feel like you were there, just to feel that you were real and not a figment of his imagination, that you were never going to leave, you understand.
you would tread your hands through his hair and kiss him on his head, with your comforting presence. suddenly, he feels like he's home, his safe haven, his sanctuary. and he doesn't understand, how he deserves all of your affections and love. how you can be with someone like him? he was selfish, how can you stay with him? why can't you be with someone who can walk out in daylight without being wanted? and he knows the answer.
with you, he can be himself, he can be selfish, he never knew that love could be so calm, so enchanting and serene. like the sun streams in the morning. he can love you without being afraid. afraid — of whatever consequences come to loving you, that anytime you could just be taken away from his grasp. And he can't bear to think of it. he can't bring himself to ever imagine you gone, without him by your side. but in the end, he knows the truth
he knows
he knows and yet he can't help himself to be strong enough to let go, to let go of the one good thing in his life.
he's selfish and he knows that, he's always been the first one to leave.
# 𝐇𝐀𝐖𝐊𝐒
midnights have become a sacred routine for the two of you, the only time you're alone. being the no. 2 hero have its own cons and that includes not being able to see you at day time. with him being occupied saving people and over working himself, the only time given for you was midnight. you were worried for his health, this unhealthy cycle of him working until he can't move anymore, it does his body more damage than any villain will.
even, mirko and endeavor was concerned for his health. it pains you so much to see him like this, so whenever it clocks midnight, with him staggering to the balcony, you were immediately to his side, helping him. you can almost feel the exhaustion coming off of his body, you can try to get mad at him but his tired face and eyes threatening to fall was keeping you from it. you would always be there to greet him.
"welcome home, keigo", with a soft smile and he would give you a small smile too. like every burden from his shoulders are finally lifted. you would get him to eat his favorite meal and make him go to shower before he crashes the bed.
if you're lucky, he would be coming home earlier. you and him could just sit in the living room and watch movies, you can cuddle in the bed for the rest of the day.
but your favorite time is whenever you were at the kitchen dancing to a silent melody. those times, where keigo felt like he was at peace. like everything just slows down and tunes out, only your heartbeats at sync.
he's sorry for all the time he missed because of his job and he whispers his love to you and it was endless. he didn't know he was capable of loving someone so much, that it hurts. it hurts a lot. that he wants to give you the world, he wants to fly so high he could just fall and be at peace about it.
and whenever he's apart from you, he just pulls out a picture of you in his jacket, that was enough to get him through the day. he did promise that he would always be coming back home to you.
and every time he flies on that balcony of yours, you're grateful. you are finally able to breathe normally. you would give him a tight hug and just sigh contently.
because all you want, is for him to come home to you
— ♡
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bonny-kookoo · 11 months
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Jungkook
𝓜𝓮𝓪𝓷𝓽 𝓽𝓸 𝓫𝓮 : 𝐌𝐲 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐲, 𝐌𝐲 𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐲
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Some things just aren't meant to be.
Tags/Warnings: Angst, hurt & Comfort, Idol!Jungkook, Hybrid!Reader, Cat Hybrid!Reader, mentions of depression and depressive thoughts, heartbreak, homelessness, it's a bit heavy sorry, mentions of mental abuse and manipulation, betrayal, slow burn, eventual smut, dead dove do not eat
Dead Dove do not eat: warning for potentially triggering content that can't be tagged without spoiling the story.
Length: 2.4k Words.
-> Masterlist
~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~;~✿~
"I'll take the left side, you look in the parking lots outside." Yoongi instructs, leaving Jungkook on his own- and he's stuck in place for a moment.
In an odd way, he knows where you could be hiding- because you've hidden here before, when you'd accidentally followed him outside, but got confused where to go since you haven't lived with him for even just a week yet. He remembers how you cowered in a corner at one of the spots where the bikes are put, little roof over it protecting them from rain- and also providing good shelter for you the entire day. He knows, right now, you probably do the same thing.
But his biggest problem is that he doesn't know what to do if he even finds you.
What's he supposed to do then? Sweep you off your feet like prince charming and take you home like nothing happened? It doesn't work like that, the problems from back then still exist today after all. You're clearly not well off at Hanako's, making it evident in the fact that you willingly ran away. And he can understand it.
But you also can't go into the hybrid care system due to his own company making sure you won't 'talk' to anyone who might ever adopt you. No one wants an older hybrid loaded with problems and legally binding NDA's at the end of the day, so your chances at ever really being adopted into a new home are pretty much zero. And if you are- there's a high chance those people will end up using you for higher gain. To defame him or his company, possibly.
And you can't go back with him, even if you wanted to.
Because with him, you'll have to go through all the harassments and forever continuing problems that Jin's now wife had to go through as well- probably even worse, considering you're not a human, but a hybrid of all things. He himself couldn't care less about the things people will probably say about him. They'll call him a fetishist, a pervert, whatever- it won't change what he's achieved in the past, the life he'd been able to life up until this point. But you don't deserve that. You don't deserve any of that hate you'll surely receive.
He should've thought about that before. But he didn't.
So in a way, he hopes for a while that he doesn't find you. That he's wrong, that you've escaped everyone, that you'll start a new life somewhere else maybe, far away from him and the consequences of his actions. But he's not that lucky. He never is, isn't he?
Your reflecting eyes stare at him from the corner you're hiding in, wide open, staring at him- and he doesn't know what to do.
He hasn't seen you in a while. Have you lost weight? Hanako promised him you were eating your meals properly, but looking at you, he worries she might've lied to him to simply soothe his anger a little. Your bright white hybrid tail and ears are grey-ish, dirty, and you just look terrified. He's never seen you like this.
Has he turned you into this? If not with his own hands, then probably with his actions.
You're trembling, and he doesn't know what to do. Everything his mind comes up with is some sort of skinship, reassurance, but he can't lie and pretend like he can just hold you and everything will be fine. It won't- and he knows this.
"Its my fault, isn't it?" He says, just.. standing there, looking down at you while you're still cowering in your corner, trying not to let the rain get to you. It's stopped by now, only some faint drops still falling- but the water is everywhere at this point, and you don't want your shoes to soak it all up.
You've got no way to get them dry later.
"Its my fault." He says again. "I didn't.. think it trough. I thought-" he speaks mostly to himself it seems, gaze distant as he watches his own reflection in the puddle of water he's standing in. "I thought it would somehow all work out." He tells no one in particular, and you don't know what to say. You don't know if there even is anything to say.
"I was naive to think that.. you know, I could just play pretend for a while." He continues, taking a step away from you. "I was hoping I could work towards.. the world, the fans accepting the.. possibility of us one day.." he seems to break a little. "But then, when Seokjin announced his engagement, and all hell broke loose.. I felt like I couldn't put you through that too." He tears up. "I should've known. I should've.. expected that, but seeing it happen like this, it-" he shakes his head. "I had to do something. Anything to keep you safe." He softly speaks, like he's trying to make you understand.
Even though you do. You know why he did what he did, somewhat.
"I shouldn't have taken you with me in the first place." He says. "You.. even asked me. You were the more mature one back then- you.. tried to help, but I was stubborn. I still am." He shakes his head. "I didn't want to see what could happen. I wanted to believe." He says, before he suddenly leans down, knees hitting the wet puddle as he kneels down. "I ruined your life because of my own greed." He tells you, and you worry for him as you watch his pants soak up the cold water. "I ruined any future you could've had just because.. I wanted you." Jungkook tells you, before his hands dip into the shallow puddle in front of him, body folding over as he bows- instantly terrifying you. "Please forgive me." He says, and you instantly move to push against his shoulders.
It's not his fault. It's not- you could've done something too. You could've been born something else, someone else- someone he could've been able to love without having to choose between the life he wants and the life he chose. You could've never met him, could've turned away from him, could've never accepted his offer to so much as talk to you back at the carecenter.
It's not his fault. It can't be. Because if it is, he would admit that the love you both had had been a mistake too.
"No-!" You whine, as you push harder against his shoulders for him to sit back up, but he doesn't move. He's a strong guy after all, no match for you- but you still try.
"I'm sorry." He keeps ranting, and you get up now, uncaring of your soft fabric boots soaking up as you try and pull him up now.
But he won't move.
"No!" You shake your head, letting yourself fall onto the wet pavement as well, crying out of frustration as you hit his back. "No.." you whine, pitifully as your tears get the better of you, body aching for him to hold you. You're scared, you don't know what's to come now, what will happen- you don't want to be in this nightmare any longer, you've never wanted this in the first place. So your weak hits turn into nothing as you cry out his name, desperate for any kind of reaction. And only then does he sit up, giving you a chance of crawling into his lap, desperate for any kind of reassurance.
You don't care if he doesn't mean it. If he wants to push you off, you'll let him- but just for a split second, you want to be surrounded by him, pretend you're back at his apartment, back home where you'd been happy.
But he doesn't push you off, and maybe that's even worse.
He wraps his arms around you so much it hurts a little, but you couldn't feel more pain than at the sound of his sobs in your shoulder. He sounds distressed, like a child having lost its mother, like you did back when you were just a kitten having been told that your momma will never come back home. He sounds just like you that day, all confused, and scared, and nothing but upset.
About the world that moves on, uncaring of you both or the situation you find yourselves in.
"Jungkook.." a voice is heard behind him, a young man with an umbrella you recognize as Yoongi standing close but with a respectable distance, watching with a look on his face you can understand somewhat.
He probably doesn't know what to do either. Can't help, can't make it better.
No one can.
So you just close your eyes, and become a ghost, enjoying his warmth for one last time. That's all you can do for him, for you as well, at the end of the day.
Because some things just aren't meant to be.
"Jungkook- come on, let's get her-" Yoongi tries, but Jungkook slaps his hand away, holds you even tighter now, while the rapper can't do anything but watch.
"no.!" He pitifully shakes his head, burying it in your neck. "Don't.. take her yet." He begs, but Yoongi is now more concerned over you than the mental state of his friend. Your tail is unmoving, resting in muddy water behind you, while your arms hang limply at your sides, not holding onto the young man at all any longer. Something's not right- the pale inside of your cat ears, your unmoving state of being-
"Jungkook, please-" He asks again, trying to get closer, step by step, as if he's talking to a dangerous animal. Which- in a way, he is. "-We have to get her help, okay?" He asks, and only now do Jungkook's eyes snap open.
You're not holding onto him.
You're not doing anything, in fact.
His own blood runs cold at the way he spots your unmoving tail, drops from the metal roof dripping down on it, but it just won't move even an inch. And neither does the rest of you move. Have you always been this cold?
His breath quickens as he slowly moves his arms, holds you a bit further away from himself- and your head just flops down onto his shoulder, making him panic. You're so pale- you've got no color to your cheeks, nothing- what's happening to you?
"Jungkook, snap out of it!" Yoongi begs, trying to somehow get his friend to put you into the car so he can drive you to get medical attention- but Jungkook can't move.
He's frozen in place at the sight of you.
You're resting heavy against his body, and only now does he quite grasp the severity of the situation. He can hear Yoongi on the phone with someone, but he can't really make out the words, brain just not attempting to understand any of them as he moves his hands underneath your clothes. His hands are cold, he remembers you'd always jump away from him with a giggle, before he'd chase you around his apartment- but you do nothing. You're not even warm at all underneath all those layers.
This can't be happening.
"Yeah- hey, Jungkook, come on, lets bring her to the car, okay?" Yoongi coaxes him, and Jungkook nods after a moment, finally coming somewhat back into reality as he carries you to the opened trunk where Yoongi had put down the back seats so you'd have a lot of space to lay down on. When he puts you down, you still don't move. Why won't you move? Not even a flutter of your eyelashes- you're way too still.
"Yeah, I'm checking, but I don't know where it could be-" Yoongi talks into his phone tucked between his shoulder and ear, zipping open your coat to search for something it seems, while Jungkook can't do anything but watch. "I think I found it? Yeah, kind of, but it's all red, looks kind of like a bruise.." He explains, and Jungkook stares at the spot on the inside of your arm.
Hanako.
"Heat implant-" Jungkook stutters, looking at it. "I-it's a heat implant, Hanako said she's had it since the beginning of the year-" He rambles softly, eyes never leaving you, especially once he spots your chest rising and falling shallowly and quickly at the same time, while Yoongi repeats what he's said to whomever he's talking to.
"Yeah, we'll be on our way right now." He says, before he closes the trunk, and shoves Jungkook into the passenger seat before he gets in the car himself. "They're preparing for us right now- we'll bring her to the hospital right now." He offers, rushing as best as he can, before the large building comes into sight. "Jungkook."
"What-" The idol asks, having turned around the entire time to reach for your hand- even though it's cold, and you probably don't feel him holding it.
"The minute we arrive, there's a chance someone will take a picture, or a video, or anything." He reminds him with a serious expression. "You can either stay inside-"
"No." Jungkook shakes his head, holding your hand a bit tighter, looking back at you. "I'm done. I don't care anymore." He says.
"There's no coming back from this, Jungkook." Yoongi says again, parking near the emergency unit entrance where he can see several people already waiting for them, considering he'd called. They've put something like a tarp up, considering they know that Yoongi himself called- doing their best to shield anyone from potential media. But the chance still stands, and his words still hold weight.
But Jungkook doesn't answer- and instead gets out to open the trunk, carrying you into the emergency unit, where they take you from him for the last time.
Leaving him alone, with his thoughts, and a heavy heart that will probably never heal from this.
Taking your ghost with them, never to return.
Because down the line-
Some things just aren't meant to be.
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klorophile · 2 months
Text
Arcane and food
There is a subject that’s been turning and turning around my head for quite some time now and that I really wanted to analyze because it’s just a detail and yet it gives me Feels Of Beautiful *o*, and it is: food in Arcane. But bear with me because we’re going to take detours that might be unexpected? (I want to mention air jails and pomegranates)
So, I’m not gonna teach you anything when I say: food is important. In real life obviously, but in fiction too. What I have in mind here: in real life you can’t survive without food, so it’s something that you do everyday, so it is a very mundane and daily thing… which is precisely why, in fiction, it can be very absent (the heroes have to save the world/prove themselves/find their identity/solve a big mystery/… = better things to do than what we do in our daily lives because it is a story to get us out of our everyday lives) or on the contrary very meaningful (ex: In The Lion King, Simba is a carnivorous lion but he accepts to get used to eating bugs when he meets Timon and Pumbaa and decides to live with them, it’s a symbol of him leaving his lion life behind).
Also, in the classical tragedies, there is the rule of grandeur: the main characters have to be princesses and kings and never your common citizen. And princesses and kings will not be shown doing stuff like peeing or eating in this genre, because it is too down to earth for the beauty that’s being displayed.
So, eating = down to earth, concerns your everyday living people ; not eating = what people that are more akin to queens and deities will do, celestial. And that’s a distinction that I really feel in Arcane…
Vi
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Vi eats (like a pig) when she gets out of prison, and she very much says it: « we’re here because I’m hungry ». When she eats, she eats. She puts fuel into her stomach and that’s it, it’s a very earthy and mundane thing, it’s not a metaphor like tobacco can be (tobacco = power in the Undercity). Vi just eats like we all do and that’s it. 
…Or is it? Well, at least that’s what she says to Caitlyn. Caitlyn was following Vi in hope of being led to important clues, and she gets pissed when she sees Vi stopping for food, because that is definitely not what Caitlyn got into the Undercity for… Because Caitlyn, as a Topsider, is not hungry. She had breakfast this morning, she will have dinner tonight, it’s whatever, her needs are met and she doesn’t need to think about it, and the viewer doesn’t have to think about it. But Vi is the opposite: As a prisoner, her needs depended on the decisions of the people in charge of her prison. She most probably didn’t get to choose what when or how, and most probably got the minimum and a look of disdain with it. In my head, I really like to make this cute comparison: you know how pet owners take their animals, like a dog for exemple, and they lift them above the ground when they have been naughty, and it’s « no, you’re in air jail now ‘cause you’ve been a bad dog so as a consequence you’re not allowed to dog anymore for a fitting amount of time » and it’s not a slap and not a hug and not a game, and the dog is just up confused with her legs dangling straight like IIII° <oh no what now? and they can’t do anything because air is not their element, the ground is, proven by the fact that they have all of four legs which is a lot of legs when you think about it and all of them want to touch the earth, so quadrupeds are like very ground dependent I guess. So the idea of air jail is that the pet can’t do anything and all that’s left is thinking about their existence and the choices they made and how it led them into not being able to choose anything anymore, and to be at the total mercy of their air jailer who happen to have only two legs that need to touch the ground, and two damned other that can remove you from your daily fulfilling life. And I might put a little too much thoughts into what’s basically cute a meme, but I think that is what is behind the air jail, and that is why it is so funny and cute when you do that to your pet (I’ve only seen it done with love), but yeah here is the thing: that is exactly what Stillwater is, but without the funny and loving part.
All of that detour to say that when Vi was in prison, she was basically in air jail. She wasn’t ‘just imprisoned’, she was removed from existence, and that aspect is accentuated by the fact that a) the prison is called “still water”, as in ‘you’re not allowed to move anymore’, b) it’s on an island that’s removed from both Piltover and the Undercity, and also: c) the time-skip.
The time-skip is very meaningful, because it makes us feel like everything was stopped and stuck from the moment Marcus took Vi away to the moment Caitlyn found an interested reason to get Vi out. We don’t get to see Vi in prison because it is literally a time out. It’s not her life she’s living during this time skip, it’s just her being removed for years and having no control over it.
When she gets out, she eats because it’s an earthy thing, and she was in the air all this time. She reclaims, not even her life, but just a life. This is why it is very important that we see her eat, because it shows us how she feels like she can finally move around and have an impact on the world. She is back.
At first she says to Caitlyn that she brought them here simply so that she could eat, basically to express to her that she is not going to just be used yet again by a Piltie, no, she’s here to reclaim something too and Caitlyn doesn’t have a choice in letting her have that or not, because Vi, as someone who grew up in the Undercity, is more adequate for this quest. 
And then she gets the tip from Jericho.
Food is connection, both to the place and the people. Vi eats because that’s what you do when you get home.
And she does it like a pig because she knows that’s not what a Piltie does, and she’s definitely not here to please Pilties.
Silco
Silco does not eat. He is a “kingpin”, he is very close to a classical tragedy figure (I mean… Agamemnon and Iphigenia… That’s his conflict). But he also has a mug painted by Jinx on his desk, with a lid and all, for coffee and stuff. But we don’t see him use it (sadly). He only drinks alcohol, which is akin to tobacco: not necessary to live, on the contrary, especially for tobacco which feels the lungs with noxious smoke when there is already so much suffocating people in the Undercity; when a character takes to it, it’s a symbol of being rich and/or powerful in the Undercity. 
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So, with the painted by Jinx mug, the earthy thing is here, but Silco decides to not be seen using it. It’s here and not here. And that’s because it’s precisely Silco’s story: It’s him trying to be all but a deity, the founder of Zaun, and fatherhood creeping up on him whether he wants it or not, to the point of him choosing to be a dad with a child instead of a divinity at the head of a city. He doesn’t want to be earthy, because to bring a city towards its independence you probably need to be more than human, but he is earthy and human in the end.
Jayce (and Powder)
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In episode 1, Jayce had left two sandwiches on his desk next to his dangerous forbidden work. It has tomatoes and lettuce, it's fresh. It’s a sign of how easy he has it at this time, because he can just leave food around his work, food is not precious, he doesn’t need to eat it right away. Then Powder comes into the room, and she’s starving, so her eyes light up to what is a random sandwich to Jayce, but an out of ordinary meal for her. 
And Powder eats, because at this time of the story she is just a child playing around. She is being earthy. She is not concerned by all the stakes yet, she lives the life of a human (we can't exactly say the same about Jinx, who is more akin to a spirit).
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There is also very much a thing to say about how Jayce puts his stuff on his desk, and then Powder/Jinx takes it for herself. She did the same with Hextech. (Though, I note that Powder took a bite from the sandwich and didn’t say anything to the others, she didn’t share. While we can argue that her stealing Hextech is helping Zaun, she’s kind of sharing the power with her community. And I’m just here wondering…: Why didn’t Powder share the food? What does this mean about her? Was this done intentionally to say that she’s always been on the selfish side?)
Caitlyn
Caitlyn is nicknamed “Cupcake”. We don’t see her eat, but we see her being called the food. I see it as a way to make us feel how rich and privileged she is, and how Vi feels that and tries to make Caitlyn feels that too. I mean, of course “Cupcake” is a sweet nickname, and the most important meaning is that Vi likes Caitlyn (and also that it can be a reference to one of Caitlyn’s abilities in LoL), but still, a cupcake is a cupcake: a frivolous pastry. A cupcake is not food you get to survive, it’s something you can go without but you get it because it’s yummy. It’s superfluous, but someone from Piltover can afford them regularly. And Caitlyn is beyond that, she is the cupcake. She is a symbol of being rich. And people in the Undercity would want to eat her, but also Vi wants her for other reasons now…
Powder 2
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In the « Enemy » clip, Powder plays with her food but does not eat it. She is distracted, and to me it feels like another sign of her being meant to turn into Jinx, a character straight from a tragedy. Something more akin to a deity or spirit of rebellion rather than a little sister. (The clip is all about the seeds of Jinx in Powder, which is why I feel like it is relevant to analyze that scene as one too.)
*big sigh*... Jinx
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In the last episode, Jinx brings a cupcake to the table, with the gemstone she stole on top of it. And omg does it bear meanings.
First of all, there is the fact that there is only one cupcake when she invited 3 guests (Vi, Caitlyn, Silco), along with her two brothers who are always with her, maybe we can even count Vander since she did put a plate for him, and herself. With seven people and only one cupcake, we have to wonder: who is going to have the cake? This brings so much tension to the scene: all the people around the table, and only one prize that they have to fight over… And the twist is that no one wants the same thing (Vi wants Powder, Silco wants Jinx, Caitlyn wants the gemstone), and yet they can’t share anything.
Second, the fact that it is a cupcake. Of course it’s a cupcake. Because Vi calls Caitlyn "Cupcake", and it’s all about Jinx wanting Vi to choose her, her zaunite little sister, over her shining new topsider enforcer of a girlfriend. To Jinx, Caitlyn “Cupcake” is a big problem, and that is why she is going to put it on the table.
Third, she put the gemstone on top of the icing. And, visually, that’s what immediately tells us that the stakes are very high, and that we’re very much talking about both the past (the gemstone that killed Jinx and Vi's family) and the future (the key to 'progress' stolen on Progress Day), what we can keep from before and what’s going to have to happen next from that. Also, it feels very irreverent that Jinx puts the symbol of progress on a cute pastry. She is not scared of dirtying what is both a treasure, leverage, power, a weapon, … The gemstone is so much, and Jinx puts it into cream because she can. Because she wants to question it. Because she wants to be the one who decides what is going to happen with the gem. She makes a display of how this moment is a turning point, and how she is the one who is going to decide where we’re going from here. Basically, what is so scary about that episode is how much power Jinx has into her hands, next to how emotional and affected she is by every single word and eye twitch she gets from her guests.
Also, I might be seeing too much into it, maybe, but I still think that the reference is relevant: the cupcake with a gemstone on it is a pomegranate.
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It does look like it: the gemstone is visually akin to a blue pomegranate berry, and it is on a cupcake that serves as the husk of an actual pomegranate that holds its berries. With the differences that in Jinx’s tea party the cupcake is the less important because it’s edible while the stakes are less about who is going to get food and more about who is going to leave with the gem of power, while in the pomegranate mythology it’s straight about whether you eat it or not, so the berries are the most important because they are edible (Persephone). 
Also, in ancient Greek mythology, the pomegranate is related to death. It’s “the fruit of the dead”. And for Jinx, those magical stones are definitely all about death, since that is what she killed all her family with, whole family that she invited at her table. There is just this vibe around her gemstone crowned cupcake that I feel is the same around the pomegranates in mythology. It’s all about death, choosing to eat, staying underground (Persephone spending time in the underworld, Jinx shooting to make the Undercity an independent Zaun, Vi choosing Topside if we refer to her LoL affiliation). It's all very much about choosing underground/aboveground, and staying with the dead or not.
And the gemstone is only one berry while there are always several in the pomegranate, but I would say that that’s precisely because what is at stake with the tea party is choosing a person over another (Vi choosing between Jinx and Caitlyn, Jinx choosing between Silco and Vi, Jinx choosing to be Jinx or Powder) in a case where one choice has to exclude the other. So it’s a pomegranate with only one grain, and that is what makes us go even more « oh no… », because it's all about choosing, and we know that the ending cannot not be a tragedy for at least one character (joke’s on us, it ends up being a tragedy for absolutely everyone ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ).
TLDR: Arcane is a tragedy, Vi tries to get out of it by eating greasy food with her fingers while Silco says he’d never do that while doing that, and then Jinx puts one single pomegranate cupcake on a table with seven people around it and waits for them to fight for it, but they all bicker about other stuff than the food she baked herself, so she judges that no one is deserving of it and she destroys the world as a logic consequence. Arcane is all about how easy yet complicated it is to eat.
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tricoufamily · 9 months
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🔪rogues gallery legacy challenge 🔪
i'm misleading you most of them aren't even criminals
ok!!! so i made this challenge for myself because i can't commit to any save, but i'll definitely want to play with these sims it's got autism sprinkled all over it. some of you might also like it as well so i'll share it!
this is a ten generation legacy challenge, with every generation loosely based on a different batman villain, but you don't have to be a batman fan to do it.
general rules
start with the default amount of money you get straight out of cas. no money cheats!
heirs can be any gender with any appearance. i think it'd be fun to dress them inspired by the character, but you don't have to. you probably don't want to make the actual character, honestly (what, ivy marries harley, then a few generations later there's just another harley? no)
choose your own succession laws
if you don’t have the pack for the requirement, replace it with whatever is a logical replacement. or just do something else instead, i’m not gonna come through your computer
i have provided alternate requirements when necessary for people who don’t want to play with occult sims
when stated that the sim goes to university, i recommend turning off aging until they graduate. sims without a university requirement can still attend!
if you end up doing this, please tag me in your posts 💜 or at least tell me how it's going in an ask lol
1: poison ivy 🌱
people say you’re a bit intense about the environment, but you say people are too stupid to see what’s right in front of them. the world clearly needs your help, but no one understands you. people quickly disappoint you when you get close to them. they voted against the clean energy production n.a.p.—why shouldn’t their spouse find out about that secret date you had?
stats:
traits: green fiend, hot-headed, loves outdoors aspiration: villainous valentine career: gardener (botanist branch) max skills: gardening, herbalism, flower arranging
requirements:
live in any world but strangerville (it doesn’t have an eco footprint!). make every neighborhood in the world have a green eco footprint—this means you’ll have to live in all of them at some point. big worlds recommended.
get the super green thumb bonus trait from the aspiration rewards store.
leave someone at the altar.
eventually end up with your best friend who’s already in a relationship.
have 3 cowplants. if one of them dies, remove 1000 simoleons as punishment and replace it. what you do with them is your business.
2: scarecrow 👻
between moving constantly, being terrified of the man-eating plants outside your window, and your parent's reputation preceding them, you fantasize about the control you’ve lacked your whole life. you loved creating monstrosities with your chemistry set as a child, and when you finally escape your town for college, your mind leads you to dark places. you evade consequences until your scheming backfires, and you’re haunted for the rest of your life by a terrifying specter your family can’t see.
stats:
traits: paranoid, genius, ambitious aspiration: purveyor of potions (non-occult alternative: academic) career: education (professor branch)/scientist (for non-occult route) max skills: mental skill, mixology skill, cooking skill
requirements:
gain and conquer every adult fear.
go to the university of britechester and major in psychology. join a secret society.
become a spellcaster. feed hexed potions to 5 sims and use negative spells on 10 sims. non-occult alternative: instead of becoming a professor, join the scientist career, and with the sim ray, use the mind control: panic upgrade on all coworkers.
after college, move to another world than where your parent lives.
become cursed with the curse of the night wraith (you may cheat for it if you can’t get it). live 3 days with it then you can de-curse yourself, but not before adding the night wraith to your household (requires cheats). obviously you can’t stop your family from interacting with it autonomously, but never initiate an interaction yourself while playing as another family member. non-occult alternative: use a ghost instead and you can pretend it’s just a figment of your sim’s imagination.
3: riddler 🧩
with your parent who hasn’t slept in days claiming your house is cursed, you drown it out with the internet and video games. your social skills might not be up to par because of it, but you’re a genius the likes of which has never been seen before. according to you, at least. you aren’t easy to get along with, but neither is one of your exes, whose path you just can’t stop crossing. try as you might, you can’t stay away from each other for very long.
stats:
traits: geek, socially awkward, self-absorbed aspiration: chief of mischief career: tech guru (start-up entrepreneur branch) max skills: mischief, robotics, logic
requirements:
as a teen, be in the streamer part-time career. have at least 500 followers on social media.
have a sim you’re dating die.
your “forever partner” has the hot-headed and mean trait. break up and get back together with them 4 times.
successfully hack supercomputer 3 times.
woohoo a servo. at least once
4: harley quinn ♦
you might never be a fully mature person, but that’s okay! you’re a free spirit—a bit unpredictable and fickle, but you’re fun! your parent’s dream is for you to go to foxbury, but one night out drinking with your roommates, you fall head over heels for a mysterious, charismatic stranger at the bar. you very quickly decide to follow them to the city, only to realize that they aren’t who you thought they were, and maybe you’re not who you thought you were, either. you end the relationship and truly find yourself.
stats:
traits: goofball, childish, romantic aspiration: leader of the pack career: doctor max skills: mischief, comedy
requirements:
start a club with your two best friends.
have an equal number of friends and enemies
briefly live on the foxbury campus, majoring in biology. fall in love with a criminal sim with all negative traits, drop out of college, and move in with them in a needs tlc apartment.
work a number of odd jobs and part-time careers while your relationship deteriorates.
break up with your partner, move out on your own, and go back to college. do not live on campus this time—continue working a part-time job while living at home. become a doctor.
5: clayface 🎭
your parent never took life very seriously, but you couldn’t be more different. not only are you fiercely competitive, you have to be liked by everyone. you’re a social chameleon who dreams of the stage. you’re only a high-maintenance, jealous, hothead—fame certainly won’t go to your head…
stats:
traits: high-maintenance, hot-headed, jealous aspiration: master actor career: actor max skills: acting, charisma
requirements:
live in del sol valley.
have a good reputation until becoming a proper celebrity, then earn a bad reputation.
marry and divorce (at least) 2 actors.
fist-fight 5 costars.
after completing the master actor aspiration, gradually lose all fame.
6: penguin ☂
there’s a lot you can say about your childhood, but you can’t say it wasn’t comfortable. with all the trust fund and nepotism you could ask for, what’s there to lose? oh. oh, wait, this trust fund isn’t bottomless, actually. uh oh. better pick up a couple side hustles to keep the lights on.
stats:
traits: snob, mean, materialistic aspiration: mansion baron career: business career (investor branch) max skills: nectar making, fishing
requirements:
never work a job until young adulthood.
spend all or almost all of your inheritance immediately after moving out (have <1500 simoleons).
start selling nectar and fish on the side.
adopt or have 1 solo science baby. be enemies with all of your neighbors but have a max relationship with your child.
have 5 on-and-off woohoo partners but never a real relationship. once you reach mid-adulthood (not young adulthood), you may marry one of your woohoo partners who’s always secretly been in love with you.
7: mr. freeze 🧊
your eccentric parent doted on you, but school was miserable. at least you had one friend, your best friend. as you got older, you got shy about your developing feelings for them—little did you know, they in love with you too. you got married and everything was perfect. and then they died. you’ll dedicate your entire life to bringing them back, no matter the cost.
stats:
traits: gloomy, perfectionist, family-oriented aspiration: soulmate career: scientist max skills: all skills associated with making ambrosia
requirements:
be disliked by at least 3 classmates as a child/teen and have only 1 friend.
become soulmates with the friend, get married, and move to mt. komorebi. when at least 1 of your children ages up into a child, your spouse dies.
you quit your job to focus solely on making ambrosia to bring your spouse back. you can rejoin the scientist career when this is complete. if you need money, start selling household items.
you become increasingly distant with your child(ren), too focused on your goal. your relationship with them suffers greatly.
you cannot have any romantic relationship with another sim ever. even if your revived spouse can’t forgive you…
8: joker 🤡
when you watch your parent sob while baking ten cakes in a row, saying it’ll bring your other parent back from the dead, the best way to cope is turning it into a stand-up routine, right? you’ve used comedy to mask the darkness in you your whole life. might as well try to profit off it. also, your vampire obsession is kind of off-putting.
stats:
traits: goofball, evil, hates children aspiration: joke star career: entertainer (comedian branch) max skills: comedy, mischief, vampire lore
requirements:
as a child, get a’s in school and be in the drama club. have a forgotten birthday when becoming a teen, the final straw. quit the drama club, become disliked/enemies with all of your friends, and become a d student.
move to san myshuno.
reach a two-star celebrity level from comedy.
never marry and have an accidental child with a fan. all children you have must be accidental. like your parent before you, you cannot connect with your children and have a difficult dynamic with all of them.
have a -100 relationship with a vampire. have a negative interaction at least once a week. non-occult alternative: make it a human goth sim. lmao.
9: two-face 🌗
despite absent parenting, you were voted most likely to succeed in high school and graduated at the top of your class. your goals are simple and attainable: become leader of the free world. but your promising political career is nipped in the bud when your entire life is ruined. disgraced, secluded, and battling two sides of yourself, you turn to other career options.
stats:
traits: self-assured, erratic, overachiever aspiration: goal oriented, public enemy career: politics (politician branch), criminal career (boss branch) max skills: charisma, research & debate
requirements:
as a child, receive a future cube as a gift from a parent. every major decision you make besides the requirements have to be made with the future cube. no takesies backsies.
make all a’s in elementary and high school and win prom royalty.
marry your teenage sweetheart straight out of high school. have only 1 child.
reach level 5 of the politics career, then your sim is turned into either a werewolf or vampire (player’s choice—or flip a coin!) against their will (you’ll have to pretend). non-occult alternative: you’re caught in a cheating scandal that ruins your career.
you’re forced to quit your job, get divorced, move to a non-city world with your child, and join the criminal career.
10: catwoman 🐈
your parent was not an easy person to live with. they may have not minded your habit of stealing from school, but you couldn’t take it anymore. you return to the city with a plan to get rich quick, but you’re no crime boss. you’re doing this on your own terms, playing for nobody’s team but your own. even if someone keeps trying to poke their nose in your family’s business.
stats:
traits: kleptomaniac, cat lover, adventurous aspiration: fabulously wealthy career: retail employee, thief max skills: rock climbing, knitting
requirements:
your non-criminal parent dies before you reach teenhood.
have a gloomy childhood friend you lose touch with in your teen years. as young adults, the friend has become a secret agent investigating your family. they are enemies with your criminal parent. you and the friend also become enemies.
you’re working as a retail employee, but where you’re really getting your money is robbery. initiate 2 romantic relationships with rich sims to rob their house.
eventually become lovers with your friend-turned-enemy.
adopt 3 stray cats.
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fansids · 1 year
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Alright, I gotta lotta thoughts on s4, but this is the main thing I'm not particularly happy with.
It's not very organized, I'm writing as I'm thinking so I apologize beforehand.
Spoilers obvi.
I really don't appreciate how Sun Wukong's character has been treated up until this point.
Look, I don't mind the "perfect, heroic mentor is actually not always so perfect and heroic and made mistakes that are still effecting the world now" like fine. Fine. But the way the show goes about it makes SWK look like a worse and worse person. It crosses the line of him making mistakes, to just being generally careless and not learning.
I mean: leaving Xiaotian in s2 and inadvertently neglecting him in the process, keeping the 4th ring a secret in s3 until it's too late, being the reason there was a fourth ring to begin with, the whole Macaque thing that the show seems to be leaning more towards SWK being in the wrong for, and his whole deal with his sworn brothers in s4.
It was already irritating in season 3, especially when he's shown to get yelled at by Xiaotian & Zhu Dachu then continues his usual way, often being unhelpful. I get that Xiaotian is the mc, but like c'mon. SWK is depowered, there are like a million ways to sideline him without doing that.
Season 4 is especially egregious as someone who's read jttw because the Lion, Elephant, and Peng are all terrible villains who spent a good amount of their time eating innocent people. I'm not sure why the show especially seems to be insistent on making the Azure Lion sympathetic and one that feels bad for trapping SWK...then again Macaque exists. You know what no, I don't see why they are insistent on doing that when Macaque exists. He may be one too many times, but once was enough.
Jttw aside, if in Azure Lion's point of view SWK willingly betrayed them and all the "good" they stood for, then trapped his other brothers for thousands of years, and before that was happy to join heaven's courts for like 20-30 years, then I don't know why he'd ever show that level of concern for him. If that happened to me, it would be monkey season, straight up.
(also the fact that he said he'd let SWK go when they completed what they wanted to, I call absolute bullshit. Even if he did feel bad, releasing SWK at any point in time would be a god awful idea)
From what s4 has shown, I think what the show writers wanted to do was build a parallel between Xiaotian and SWK, both having made mistakes that endangered the world and their loved ones as well as Xiaotian learning that his hero is just as human (for lack of a better term) as him. But the execution is lacking as a lot of Xiaotian's mistakes are not really his fault.
DBK taking his staff? It's not like he handed it to him.
Spider Queen using his hair? Is he supposed to stop shedding?
Red Son getting the skeleton key? Again, it's not as if he handed it to him. Also, wouldn't that make it the Bull family's fault, since they opened the coffin?
It wasn't him being careless it was him losing 2 fights and a bit of his hair. Whereas with SWK, it's implied these things happened because he didn't think about the consequences of his actions. They don't really seem comparable.
Also, if you've read jttw (and even if you haven't, but I think the context makes it worse), then lmk SWK is a very miserable character right off the bat. As we can see, he never became a Buddha, his friends are heavily implied to be dead, there are no monkey yaoguai on the mountain, or even a nation anymore, implying that his subjects left, died, or both, and in the midst of all of this he has no support system. Nor does he ever seem to obtain one in the show.
And I think some of these issues could be remedied if he was given the opportunity to tell his side of the story. Everything wrong he does is seen told through the perspective of another person. Not to say they shouldn't be upset, but the fact that SWK just absorbs whatever blame is put on him, never really giving any fair defense doesn't sit right with me. It wouldn't change any of the things he's done, but it would make him a lot more understandable as a character, instead of him consistently being some form of a fuck up.
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beelmons · 1 year
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A/N: A little something i whipped out for the lovely @ssahotchnerr , i wish you can find comfort in this after a long day! A/N 2: this fic is not meant to tell any of y'all to actually quit your jobs BUT if that's your jam then yassss. and a lil aaron gif because he's that handsome.
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A fucking break. That's what you needed. One. Fucking. Break. And maybe, just maybe, you could survive the week. Your office had been chaos, problem after problem dropping on your shoulders, weight that shouldn't even be put on you was laid without care or purpose by careless employees trying to avoid the consequences of a work sloppily done.
You weren't sure when you turned into the firm's escapegoat, but everyday your coworkers found a way to make your endless patience actually reach a limit you believed unknown. Daily, your sole motivation to get through the day was getting home to your loving, attentive, and ridiculously attractive boyfriend. Hence why this week, with him stuck in a no-name-town in the middle of nowehere, mind you the cell service being non-existant, was proving particularly trying.
The frustration was building past a level you could handle, and yet you refused to allow the people who had caused it to see you break. You excused yourself and headed to the bathroom, hands shaking from a mixture of anger and desperation. You attempted to wash your face in order to calm down, and it helped to a point, but it wasn't going to fix it. There wasn't much that could fix it, honestly.
Your lunch break was coming to an end, and you couldn't spend it feeling sorry for yourself by the toilets, so you decided to head back and actually eat the food you'd brought. On your way out, you had just the fortune to run into the worst of the omens: your immediate superior. "Hey, you look sick." they said without care.
Just what you needed, sarcastic observations about your appearance. "Just stressed out. Lots to do." you replied without a particular tone.
"Go home and rest." they mentioned again.
You had to take a second to double check your ears. "Pardon?" you tried to seek for confirmation.
"Before I change my mind, gather your things, I will see you tomorrow." without even waiting for an answer, they were out of your sight. You weren't in a position to hesitate, so you headed back, gathered your belongings in a hurry, and bolted out of the building like a frog into a pond. You were going to figure out what God had taken pity on you later.
Without looking back, and certainly not minding the pile of files that someone else was going to begrudgingly have to finish, you made your way to the entrance doors. To be honest, you weren't big on fairytales, and rom-coms were just, well, fantasy. But there were a few good men out there, few that would do whatever they could to make your cheesiest dreams come true.
Aaron Hotchner was one of them, and the way he stood there, suit still on, your favorite flowers in his hand, reminded you princes did exist, and God was merciful enough to save the best one for you. You believed to be dreaming for a moment, but the way his smile shined reminded you no dream could ever be so beautiful.
Your attire didn't quite allowed you to sprint, but you directed yourself to him as fast as you could, your body practically swinging into his. His arms welcomed you oh with so much familiarity. He could make a hellish place feel like home with a mere hug.
"What are you doing here?" you asked while pulling back to look at his face, your hands refusing to leave the sides of his torso.
"Wrapped up the case early. I've missed you." he leaned down to press a gentle peck to your lips. He had noticed prying eyes from behind the glass doors before, and so, for your sake, he didn't want to make a scene.
"I missed you, too, baby, you have no idea how much." you melted in his arms to engulf the smell of his cologne. He had applied it fresh for you in the car, something you would notice later. However, a strange idea hit you in the middle of enjoying your boyfriend's presence. "Hold on. How did you know I was going to go out early?" you inquired, and he smiled mischeviously at the question.
"I wanted to take you to lunch, so I had a little talk with your boss and convinced them to let you free a bit earlier." he explained.
"Convinced?" there was disbelief in your questioning.
"Mhm." he hummed "Turns out people do whatever you want when you give them a hundred dollars." he let out a cocky chuckle.
"Aaron!" you hit his chest as you laughed. Whatever. The gossip that would run around the next day was a low price to pay to see his handsome face again.
He guided you gently to the car, and the entire ride to the restaurant was filled with domestic chat, things you needed to buy, funny things the pets had done, the ruckus the team had caused, the two new frown lines that had appeared on his forehead because of it. He surprised you by taking you to your favorite place, and he even went as far as to reserve a private area, where the two of you could be alone.
You ate accompanied by further small talk. From time to time, when the table got quiet, you would simply stare in awe at the delight that was him. You were lucky, oh, so lucky. So, then, what was the pressing rage that you seemed to hold within you whenever he smiled a little too bright?
"Hey," you broke the silence in one of moments "is there anything you envy me for?"
Your question was oddly formulated, and the intention behind it seemed a mystery to him. His eyebrows furrowed together, his chin slightly raised as his eyes scanned you over, your face, the shape of your shoulders, the fall of your chest.
"Okay, stop, get that profiler face off my sight" you said jokingly, and he chuckled along, a little embarrassed of having been so transparent.
"Then, care to elaborate?" he answered as his expression relaxed once again.
"I'm envious of you." you admitted "I can only wonder what it feels doing what you love, in a place that you love; to feel so driven to do what you are convinced is best for you"
"I thought you liked your job?" Aaron dropped his utensils by his plate, his attention turning to you.
"What I do, yeah, but that place. It just feels like little by little it's crushing parts of my soul I didn't know were there." you dropped your sight with melancoly.
"Then quit." his eyes fixed on you, his sight stern.
"What?" you raised your vision again with surprise.
"If you're unhappy, leave that place. I can handle the bills until you find somewhere you can truly feel comfortable working at." he reassured.
"And you won't be disappointed?" Bottom line was that your boyfriend was always so clear about what he wanted, what he did, and why he did it, that you couldn't help but feel like a failure from time to time for having so many doubts and struggles. You didn't want to let him down. He worked hard for you, for the family that you were aspiring to form.
"Sweetheart." his hand slipped forward, palm inviting yours to land into it, which you allowed. He gave you a light squeeze, and his eyes once again landed on yours "Leaving the comfort of a steady paycheck to embark on a journey to find happiness can be terrifying, and to do so, or even ponder so, requires great bravery. How could I be anything but proud?"
There he went again, making everything feel like a Drew Barrymore movie. You swallowed back a knot in your throat to prevent the tears from falling down, in return you squeezed the fingers that remained by yours.
"I love you infinitely, Aaron Hotchner, don't you ever forget that." was all you could let out.
He drew a gentle smile on his face, soft, adoring eyes admiring your expression from his seat. After a couple of seconds, he leaned back to be able to cut his food back up. "Your quick wit." Aaron said out of the blue, and you raised your eyebrows questioningly. "You have a wit and a capacity to create that I have yet to encounter in someone else. The ability to see beauty and joy in places no one would even think to look at. You bring laughter and fun to those around you, and you do it without expecting anything in return." he took a second to catch his breath "The vilest of horrors I see on the daily turn to a summer field when seen through your eyes. That's the only reason I can keep doing what I do."
You felt like he was giving you too much credit, but for once you let yourself drown in the adoration of his words. He made you feel safe, confident, powerful. Angels, princes, knights, who cared about any of them? When you have Aaron, you have it all.
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anaalnathrakhs · 10 months
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oh god ed reddit is having the “uwu anorexia isn’t rooted in fatphobia my mental illness is not abt you” talk again please god help me
fatphobia doesn’t mean “being a meanie to fat ppl” i’m begging you to use critical thinking skills for five seconds and apply what you know about literally any other form of oppression to this situation.
people’s point isn’t that you having anorexia makes them feel bad and therefore you’re a bad fatphobic person.
they’re pointing out how the deeply ingrained fatphobia our society upholds, from misconceptions about health to moralization of looks and weight, including yes being jerks to fat ppl’s faces bc they’re fat, is affecting what you think about your own looks, weight, health, body, clothes, eating habits, etc.
the logic isn’t “you became anorexic because you hate fat people so much you never wanted to be fat yourself (and that makes you a bad person)” it’s “fatphobia is a prism that transforms the root cause of your ed into disordered thoughts, behaviors, and patterns (and unlearning fatphobia will help you with recovery and harm-reduction)”
like. it’s not for no reason that anorexia is a disorder that disproportionatedly affects women. it’s not for no reason that there’s sky high comorbidity rates for eds and ocd. it’s not for no reason that people who need control in their lives so badly that they develop a mental disorder abt it get obssessed with being skinny and not with being a sumo. it’s not for no reason that ppl who feel the need to retract to childhood due to trauma envy things like being skinny light and frail, instead of being a tubby baby. it’s not for no reason that there is an incredibly common anorexic thought pattern (internal and self-directed, don’t make me say what i didn’t say) that associaties restriction and weight loss with moral goodness.
for each of these there IS a number of exceptions, but you can see case by case how the root cause (trauma, need for control, for self-destruction, growing up poor, whatever you think is “unrelated to fatphobia” basically) is processed through the prism of the fatphobic culture we’ve all been raised in. some people just, voluntarily or not, deal with those root causes in different way, which might or might not be healthy. but it’s a consequence of ambiant fatphobia that “i should starve and be skinny about it” is a statistically pretty common response to this distress.
the point isn’t “it’s fatphobic that you don’t deal with your neuroses in a body positive way uwu” the point is that no matter how cool you are with fat people on like, a personal level, you’ve been (like the rest of us) bombarded with fatphobic thought patterns your entire life basically, both directly fatphobic things and reactions to this fatphobia. maybe spoken to you directly, maybe not. maybe about you maybe about other people. you live in a society that places moral values into looks and health, and also pushes some deeply rooted falsehoods about how those things tie into each other. you have a disorder defined by obsessive behaviors. maybe, just maybe, deconstructing the logic that those obsessives behaviors are based upon will help you deal with this disorder. and recover or reduce harm.
basically, anorexia isn’t “getting skinny disorder” it’s “obsession disorder”, obsession with looking attractive, or pleasing your family, or going back to being a kid, or being healthy, or being fit, or being driven and capable, or being worth saving, or having your suffering known, or having control over something, or whatever. the fatphobia that is omnipresent (and i repeat, omnipresent, nobody is singling you out as a bad fatphobic meanie, or even talking about your behavior towards other people around you) in our society picks the direction in which many many people will express that disorder.
of course if you live in a society that tells you “being fat is morally bad” at every turn, when you start developping an obssessive pathological need to control things, without another factor weighting in, most people’s default reaction will be anorexia. food is a regular fixture of everybody’s life, everyone wants to be morally good, and even if we know/understand/believe to an extent the flaws of that “fat = bad” logic we know the world around us still believes it, and nobody wants to be treated like shit. we can think it’s stupid and fight against fatphobia and work to treat fat ppl better in our lives and support body positivity, but in any case, one always judges oneself on different metrics than they judge others, cuz we control our self-improvement. that’s natural. just it doesn’t mesh well with a pathologically obssessive need for control above self-preservation.
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