#realizing he has the exact same issues as me

[asexualastarion]

N Pokémon for the meme?

Love of my life. He is literally everything to me. Cannot shut up about him.

#nothing will ever top ten year old me playing black for the first time #realizing he has the exact same issues as me #and then immediately falling in love with him for the rest of my life #I put the ‘deeper than they seem’ one bc although he is very popular there is a part of the pokemon fanbase that thinks he’s overrrated #and completely writes him off without even getting to know his character #like my best friend has been a pokemon fan even longer than me and one time when we were in high school I was talking to him about n #and I mentioned how impactful seeing a character whose father abused them was for me at the time bc I felt very isolated bc of my abuse #and he said ‘he was abused? wow I never thought of him that way’ and like I could not comprehend #and I have seen some shit takes about his character #he is so incredibly complex and only some people get it but no one gets it more than me <3 #anyway. thank you Rhys ily #asks #svengorsen

[spideyjimin]

wrong time | jjk

⤷ part of the timing series 

⏤ pairing: jungkook x female reader

⏤ genre: parent au, exes to lovers, ceo au, angst, fluff, and smut

⏤ rating: 18+

⏤ warnings: dilf!jungkook, tattooed!jungkook, swearing, mention of breakup, mention of jk being a fuckboy, broken hearts, nervousness, communication issues, mention of going through a dark period, oc wasn’t really nice, mention of sickness, mention of the hard side of parenthood, jk and oc are workalcoholics, the closure conversation, mention of sex, mention of death, mention of grief, mention of cheating,  sexual tension, dom!jungkook, big cock!jungkook, nipple play, pet names, penetrative sex, protected sex, rough sex, and creampie

⏤ words: 13,986

⏤ summary: meeting ten years later the girl he deeply fell in love with is something Jungkook never thought would happen. But here you are, standing before his eyes with a bright smile on your face as you walk through the massive lobby of his company. At that exact moment, he realizes that the two of you fell in love at the wrong time but is now the right time?  

⏤ author’s note: wrong time is finally all yours! i actually can’t believe it’s finally posted after almost a year of work! but it also makes me incredibly happy to release it. the past year has been a crazy year and this fic is a reflection of all that. most of the things mentioned in the fic are things that i experienced so this makes wrong time even more special to my heart 💞 i really want to thank my nikki @xpeachesncream​ for her support, i know i couldn’t have done it without her! 💞 enjoy the fic & let me know what you thought of it!💞 

MASTERLIST

A bright smile spreads across Jungkook’s face as he stares down at his five years old daughter, Arya. In the past ten years, he has made quite a lot of mistakes but Arya will forever remain his best mistake.

“Have a wonderful day, my little queenie,” he says while kneeling down at his daughter’s level.

His smile grows wider when his eyes linger a little longer on the small human being that he adores with his entire soul. She looks extremely tiny in her navy blue dress and with her massive backpack. Arya doesn’t get to choose what she wears when she goes to school, she has her uniform. So outside school, her father lets her pick whatever she wants to dress.

“You too, dadda,” she says before throwing her minuscule body into Jungkook’s arms.

Having his daughter in his arms is what truly brings warmth and happiness to his broken soul. For this, he’d sell his soul to the devil, and for her, he’d fight every battle. Well, honestly speaking, he has been battling his own demons since the moment he found out he’d become a father. He never wanted her daughter to have an absent or mentally sick father. He wanted to be present for her from the beginning.

“Tonight mommy will pick you up, and you’ll stay with her for the week, okay?”

Jungkook is the CEO of Jeon Industries, the company he built from ashes seven years ago. Due to his extremely busy schedule, he only gets to spend the weekends with his daughter. Every monday morning, he drops her at school before passing by her mother’s house to drop her things off, and then, he goes to work.

“Yes, dadda, I know,” she says with a nod.

The only thing he deeply regrets is offering this family dynamic to his daughter. She always lives in between two houses, and only spends the weekdays with her mother and the weekends with her father. He wished to give her the same family he grew up in, but despite that, he knows that his little baby is very happy which is the most important for him.

“If anything happens, you ask mommy to call me, okay princess?”

The little girl nods once more before newly squeezing her father in her arms.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be with mama,” she simply replies.  

Eunji, Arya’s mother has become a great friend of Jungkook, and he knows that she’ll take good care of his tiny princess. But he’s always scared something might happen to her. A life without her is something he doesn’t want to imagine. A little over six years ago, he wouldn’t even be able to imagine himself becoming a father but today, it is the other way around. This little girl has brought so much light into his life. A light he never thought he’d find.

“Bye, dadda,” she says before pressing a gentle kiss on his cheek.

A small smile appears on his face while he turns around and stands up to look at his little girl walking to the school’s entrance. His eyes don’t leave her tiny figure until she reaches her school and disappears from his field of vision. At that moment, he feels a little twinge in his heart. He’ll deeply miss Arya for the next few days, but that’s the way it is.

The only way to spend every single day with her is to get into a relationship with her mother, but ever since he met her, he has never loved her. There’s only one woman he ever loved. It’s the one that got away. You. Even after those past ten years, he’s still not over you. And to be honest, he doesn’t think he’ll ever get over you. The void you left inside his heart is tremendous and nobody, except you, will ever be able to fill it.  

After a couple of minutes of standing in front of his daughter’s school, he walks to his car with his hands in his suit pants’ pockets. With his head down, he tries to wipe away the fact that he already misses his daughter and that he still misses you after all this time. Some years ago, he believed that by now he would have had his life together but he’s still as lost as he was after the breakup.

Things are for sure different because he has Arya and he’s used to living with this sadness. He has also become the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the country. He has also stopped being a fuckboy, he tries to find someone that’ll want to spend the rest of their life with him but it’s not easy when he compares all the girls to his old lover. None of them actually stand a chance.

His phone rings, causing him to remove it from his pocket. The name of his assistant is appearing on the screen, and without thinking, he picks up the call. It’s always important when Davy calls him.

“Hey Davy,” he says as he answers the call.

“Hello, Mr. Jeon,” the man on the other side of the call says, “Mr. Kim is here and wants to speak with you urgently.”

A deep sight leaves his lips. Kim Taehyung is his best scientist. Without this man, Jeon Industries wouldn’t have grown as much as it has over the past three years. So if he wants to speak with him urgently, it must be extremely important.

“I’m on my way,” he simply answers.

Today, he was planning on taking the morning off to rest a bit. The past few months have been extremely crazy with the expansion of Jeon Industries but when you’re a CEO, you actually never get to rest. There’s always something.

The call directly ends and Jungkook doesn’t waste one more minute before rushing to his car to get to his company as soon as possible. A million ideas run through his mind as he drives to his office. There are a lot of possible urgent matters to discuss.

However, he doesn’t want to start imagining the worst-case scenario so he turns the music up. Music is his getaway, the way he found to escape how empty he feels every day, the way he found to cheer himself up to find the courage to hide from everyone how broken he truly is. Usually, being with Arya also helps him to feel better.

Work is also his escapism but lately, he’s been trying to live more and work less. He’s been also considering trying to find a new arrangement with Eunji in order to spend a day with Arya during the week. Or to even completely change the arrangement. Spending more time with his little girl is his top priority, he just needs to figure out things first. Plus, changing the arrangement would completely turn Arya’s life upside down, and he doesn’t want to do that before being sure that his busy schedule can be rearranged.

In less than twenty minutes, Jungkook reaches the massive building sheltering Jeon Industries. He parks his car in the company’s underground parking before quickly jumping out of the car and walking to the elevator. This first elevator only goes to the first floor which is the main entrance of his company. Then, he’ll have to walk a bit to reach the other elevator that will bring him to his office.

Once he reaches the first floor, he crosses it, his eyes scanning the people in the room. As usual, it is crowded with workers. While looking at every face, he recognizes a familiar one. A face he wished he had forgotten. A face that has been haunting him night and day for the past ten years. A face that made his heart beat faster. Well, in fact, his heart is actually going completely crazy right now.

Jungkook halts to take a proper look at that face he never thought he would ever see again. That face is yours, the lover he lost years ago. He rubs his eyes, wanting to make sure that he’s not dreaming. Tiredness can make him imagine things, especially when it comes to you. But after rubbing his eyes, you’re still there, talking to a person next to you and smiling.

Meeting ten years later the girl he deeply fell in love with is something Jungkook never thought would happen. But here you are, standing before his eyes with a bright smile on your face as you walk through the massive lobby of his company.

His heart breaks a little because it is so unfortunate that he gets to see you here and now. Since he has to rush to his office to discuss whatever he has to with Taehyung, he won’t have the time to at least say hi to you. Something he would like to do. His eyes follow you as you disappear into the lobby with that person.

He wishes he was the reason behind your smile.

The past month has been an incredible one for you.  

You joined Jeon Industries as a scientist which is more than an honor for you. This company is one of the biggest at the moment, and for sure, it’s a privilege to be working amongst the most talented scientists in the country. Being there for the past month has been rewarding.

But outside that, you’ve been feeling extremely proud of Jungkook. He has built this entire empire from ashes and he did it so well. The company is well known in South Korea and very slowly, it is getting known worldwide. People are fighting to get a job here, you’ve seen it when you were applying for your current job. This is bigger than what he ever dreamed of or at least, bigger than what he told you about.

You still remember how he used to talk about his project of creating his little company. He’d spent hours imagining how it would be to start a business, how it would be to find the first employee, how it’d be to do experiences, and also, how it would simply feel to run a firm. His head was full of dreams that he would constantly share with you. You assume that he must feel like he has achieved everything in life.

A little smile appears on your face as you remember the old times. It isn’t always all rainbows and sunshine but there wasn’t any doubt that you both loved each other. Falling in love with him was absolutely wonderful. You’d fall in love all over again just to experience that strong feeling again.

For sure, since Jungkook, you got other boyfriends and you even got engaged. However, falling for them was never as close as falling for Jungkook. It was even far from that but it doesn’t change that it was still beautiful. Love is an incredible life experience, something you’d fight for every single day of your life. You even got a tattoo of the word “love” in japanese on your shoulder.

Right now, you’re walking to a meeting room with your team. Kim Taehyung, the director of your department, wants to have a little meeting. Probably to discuss the new project or probably to discuss the last project’s results.

Soon enough, everyone enters the meeting room. To your surprise, Taehyung is already there, patiently waiting for the team to arrive. But what really surprises you is the person sitting next to Taehyung. Jeon Jungkook. They are both talking, a little smile on the big boss’ face.

Instantly, your heart starts hammering in your chest, ready to burst at any moment. Although you hoped never to meet him here, you knew it was in vain. This is his fucking company. This is all his, including you. There was no way you’d never see him.

As you get closer to both men, you take in the man you once loved with all your soul. To say that he hasn’t changed would be a complete lie. He still looks the same but he’s a very different man. Slowly, his face turns to meet you. Unlike you, he doesn’t seem surprised to see you entering the meeting room.

When your eyes meet, you feel like it becomes obvious to everyone that your heart is about to explode while Jungkook’s expression becomes more serious. It is almost as if he’s becoming cold but you can’t really tell because in ten years a person can change a lot. So maybe he’s simply normal right now.

As you look at him, it feels like time has completely stopped. Your heart is beating way too strongly in your chest, your hands are getting sweaty, and you purse your lips. Right now, as you’re standing in front of Jungkook, you’re starting to regret working here. For sure, it’s very prestigious but the CEO is your damn ex. Having to face him will for sure be extremely hard.

“Hey everyone,” Taehyung says with a little smile appearing on his face.

With those words, your eyes move from Jungkook to Taehyung. Your thoughts are focused again on work, not the man who owns this company.

“Thanks, everyone for coming,” he pursues.  

The director keeps on talking, explaining the last project you all worked on and its results. Your heart swells with pride when he explains the results and shows the good work of your team. As you deeply listen to your superior, you completely forget that Jungkook is even here. Work has always been your safe place. For sure, it shouldn’t be but it is what has helped you to get yourself together and to overcome your devastating breakup. A breakup that you caused.

Truth be told, you never wanted to end things with Jungkook but you needed it. This relationship brought so much crap to the surface, and you were in a very dark place. To be honest, you didn’t want to deal with your ex because everything was so overwhelming so you pushed him away. You never wanted to hurt him but in the end, that’s exactly what you did. Before even ending things, you were already pushing him away, you were always finding an excuse to not spend time with him. Back then, you discovered that you were good at finding excuses.

But you did wrong.

For sure, you could have talked with him. You could have communicated what was going on with him and even today, you know that he would have helped you. He would have remained by your side until you felt better. But you didn’t want that because you knew he deserved better. Well, that’s what you have been repeating yourself for the past years. But was it really the truth? Was he really better off without you?

Honestly, that’s something you’ll never know because you chose to walk away. You chose to be the one that got away. You didn’t choose to stay and fight your inner demons with him by your side. You chose to do it on your own, and eventually, you tried to replace the void he created in your heart with other guys. Only, it never worked because you were damaged, deeply damaged.

It only got better when you decided to work on yourself and make things work for yourself. For the past six years, you’ve been doing tremendous work on yourself. It’s never easy but you’ve found peace within yourself. Even if you’d like to credit yourself for that bravery, it was actually your ex-fiancé who opened your eyes.

Kangdae entered your life when everything was only chaos. You never thought it would work between you two but through that chaos, he was the light at the end of the tunnel. He showed you how broken you were and that you could get some help, that there wouldn’t be any shame to do so. He held your hand when you were completely shattered. Not once did he give up on you. Not once did he accept that you would break up with him.

Eventually, with time, you started healing with Kang by your side. After three years of relationship, he proposed to you but it was obvious that you had some more healing to do. Neither of you wanted to rush the marriage. So you took your time.

However, you never got married to him.

As you started healing fully, things slowly fell apart. The love between you and Kang didn’t die but it changed into something different. It wasn’t romantic love anymore, it was more a friendship love. So you both agreed to cancel the wedding but Kang stayed in your life. He’s your friend now.

He’s also the reason why you’re sitting in this meeting room at Jeon Industries. Even though you really wanted to apply, you were very insecure because you knew the chances to meet Jungkook were high. Kang encouraged you to still take the risk since it will be such an asset for you and your career to work at your ex’s company.

For a brief moment, your eyes move from Taehyung to Jungkook. It feels unreal to be standing in front of him so many years later. Never have you thought you’d see him again because of the way you broke his heart. Nobody deserves to be hurt that way. Your heart aches as your eyes quickly gaze at your ex, the overwhelming pain causes you to look away.

The entire meeting goes well, both Taehyung and Jungkook are extremely proud of your team’s achievement. You’re also extremely proud of your hard work, it has definitely paid off. Nothing makes you happier than your superior and the big boss complimenting your effort.

Once the meeting is over, everybody stands up and gets ready to leave the room.

“Miss y/l/n, would you please stay?” The deep voice of Jungkook resonates in the small room.

You turn around to look at the man who just spoke. Your hands start shaking, your heart suddenly beats fast. You simply nod while your eyes scan the room, watching all your coworkers leave the room. Taehyung closes the door after looking at the two of you. He wonders what the CEO would want to discuss with you. To his knowledge, Jungkook wasn’t aware of your existence until an hour ago.

For a solid minute, none of you says a thing. You avoid looking at him while he takes the time to admire the woman you have become. There’s absolutely no doubt that you have changed. You’re a lot more frail than you were back then, and to be honest, Jungkook prefers the way you looked before. But he’s aware that things have changed and a lot of time passed.

“Mr. Jeon…” you start saying but he cuts you off.

“Jungkook, please,” he says.

There’s no way he’s letting you call him Mr. Jeon.

“Jungkook,” you correct yourself, “how can I help you?”

His eyes move to the massive screen hanging on the wall to his right. Now, yours are looking at him. Jungkook has changed considerably. The black tight suit he’s wearing is very different from the blue jeans and sweater he used to wear. Under that black suit jacket, he’s wearing a grey shirt. By the looks of it, he also seems to be a lot more muscular. His strong arm lifts up to run his fingers through his hair.

That is a clear sign that he’s nervous, an old habit he didn’t lose. A deep sigh leaves his lips, and you can’t help but smile. Even though he looks different, some of his old habits haven’t changed.

“Since we weren’t alone during this meeting, I just wanted to take the time to say ‘hi’ to you in person,” he nervously says.

Your heart gets warmer as you hear his words. This comes as a total surprise to you. You were expecting Jungkook to ignore you and even to treat you like shit but right now, he’s being extremely nice.

“Thanks Jungkook,” you say, “hi to you as well,” a little smile appears on your face.

Although Jungkook was kind of a fuckboy when you met him long ago, he had the biggest heart you’d ever met. The simple fact that he wanted to say hi to you shows that his heart is still as big or maybe even bigger.

“It’s weird to have you as one of my employees but I promise that I’ll try not to make things awkward,” he adds.

“I’ll try as well,” you reply.

The man in front of you finally looks at you. A smile appears on his face.

“Thanks,” he says.

You simply nod, a weird smile displaying on your face. Even though you don’t feel awkward, it still feels weird to be in this meeting room alone with your ex. The one whose heart you broke.

“I have to go,” he adds, “it was a pleasure to see you.”

The CEO of the company leaves the meeting room in silence. You take a moment to get yourself together before doing the same. Today was definitely an emotionally intense day but hopefully, things will only get easier from now on.

But you couldn’t be more wrong.

“So you’ve seen Jk?” your best friend Lux says.

Lux has been your best friend since you were 18. She actually appeared in your life at the same time as Jungkook, she was in the front row when you were flirting and when you started dating a couple of months later. She’s been a very important person in your life, she’s been there through the very dark periods. Without her support, you’re not sure you would have made it.

“It’s Jungkook,” you correct her.

Jk is too personal, there’s no way that you’ll call him that way. Plus, he’s your boss now so it’s preferable to keep things professional.

“And yes, I’ve seen him and I even spoke with him,” you add.

She definitely looks surprised because she never thought you’d speak again. Lux remained in contact with Jungkook following the breakup, they were friends as well and she knows how broken he has been since then. She thought that he wouldn’t speak to you at all after what happened.

“We had a meeting about the project I worked on,” you simply say.

For a moment, you consider not telling her that he said ‘hi’ but it’s not a good idea to lie or keep secrets to your best friend. Eventually, she’ll find out about it so it’s preferable to tell her everything right now.

“And afterward, he asked me to stay to simply say ‘hi’,” you continue.

She actually cannot believe what she’s hearing.

“Jk said hi to you?” she surprisingly asks.

“Yeah, I can’t believe it as well but that’s exactly what happened,” you reply.

The two of you keep talking about that for a little while but the conversation quickly changes to something different. Honestly, you don’t really want to talk about the past and the biggest mistake you probably did. Lux got it without you having to say it, and you’re thankful she understands it. Also talking again about Jungkook would be torture for her as well. After the breakup, she was the one being there for you, she was the one picking up every single shattered piece of your heart and trying to mend it with her love.

You had the toughest conversations with her, she was the one putting you in front of what you did and she never spared you. As she was still in contact with Jungkook she knew how he was but she never said anything to you. There was no point in telling you how devastated he was. She just made sure you understood how big of a mess you made.

But even if you broke Jungkook’s heart, you knew ⏤ and still know ⏤ that it was the best decision to end things. You did what you thought was the best for you back then. People can call you selfish but in the end, it was better that way. God only knows what you could have done if you stayed. Probably you would have broken Jungkook’s heart even more by staying.

However, karma is a bitch. Eventually, Jungkook later broke your heart as well. The day that it happened was the day when Lux told you that he was going to become a father. That day, you wanted to reach him and try to save things. Imagining him becoming the father of that child that wasn’t yours was devastating. It brought you back to all the moments when you discussed having children, what would be the name of your first girl or first boy, what they would possibly look like physically, or even their personalities.  

Then, the second heartbreak was the day his daughter was born. Her name was Arya, the name you had chosen together for your daughter. That moment, you deeply regretted every single decision you took from the moment Jungkook came into your life.

Although Lux saw how broken you were when you found out about Arya, she found it absolutely beautiful that he chose that name for his baby girl. She was the living proof that he was still in love with you, that you were still on his mind. She believed that he was completely crazy to give that little girl the name he chose with his ex. Luckily, he wasn’t dating the mother otherwise she would have all the reasons to leave him.

Lux slips a sheet of paper on the table. While taking it, you frown with confusion. It seems a bit sneaky but for sure, if she’s doing it, it’s something important. You read what’s written on the paper. There’s an address but you don’t know where it is or what could be there.

“What is this?” you question her.

“It’s Jk’s address,” she responds.  

Although she hasn’t remained super friends with your ex, she has been at his place, and he has been part of her life. You’re aware of it, she never hid anything from you because there’s no point. She’s been in between even though she stayed more your friend than his. She’s deeply sorry about how things ended because things were great when you were together.

“He already took the first step and talked to you,” she starts explaining. “Now, it’s your turn to gather your courage and have the conversation you were supposed to have years ago.”

Well, after your breakup, you avoided at all costs talking to him when he was begging to have a conversation. The famous closure conversation. But you denied him that right for the past ten years which wasn’t cool of you. He didn’t deserve that, you were a real bitch but you were hurt. Hurt people hurt others. You were convinced things would be a hundred times better if you wouldn’t speak and see each other.

“Tell him everything, explain yourself so both of you can move on and have a great professional relationship,” she adds.

Slowly your hands start shaking as you read the address in the paper you’re holding. The thought of having a real and deep conversation with him scares you but Lux is right. More than anything else, Jungkook deserves it. He deserves to know the full truth, to know what led you to hurt him the way you did.

Of course, you contemplated so many times talking to him but you never found the courage within yourself to do it. But maybe now is the time.

“I’ll think about it,” you tell her.

For sure, you need some time to think about everything. You can’t knock at his door tomorrow and start venting about the reasons you broke up ten years ago. It’s not fair for him nor to yourself. You need to think and consider how to formulate every thought that has been on your mind for the past years.

You fold the paper to put it in your bag. There’s no doubt that for the next couple of days and probably even weeks, you’ll keep staring at it thinking about the right thing to do.

“How’s your little man doing?” you ask your best friend to completely change the topic of conversation.

Lux became the mother of John four months ago. She’s half-korean and half-english, and a couple of years ago, while on holiday in England, she met Henry. They started a long-distance relationship, and she considered moving to England because she was madly in love with him, but in the end, he decided to move to South Korea. They moved in together, and shortly after, she got pregnant. They decided to keep the baby and to make you the godmother. Little John has been a blessing in your life.

“I think he’s getting sick, he’s a little bit warmer today but Henry is staying with him right now so if anything happens, he’ll call me,” she says.

“Why didn’t you say that earlier?” you ask with surprise. “Go home, right now, Lux, or I kick you in the ass!” you almost yell.

How can that woman be here talking with you when she believes her little boy is sick.

“It’s okay,” she says, “Henry has everything under control, he’s also his father, and I could use some time out of home with you.”  

You frown, wondering if your best friend is doing well. Becoming a parent is something huge, but Lux has been handling things great so far, even though she never hid that it’s hard.

“I’m okay,” she adds when she notices your expression, “but I just want to breathe a bit.”

You nod, partially understanding what she means. You don’t have a kid so you can’t exactly understand what she’s feeling however you can imagine how it feels. You’ve seen how she’s been doing since your little godson arrived. She’s been extremely tired although very happy. It’s obviously very hard for her and most of the time, you don’t know how to help her.

Of course, you sometimes take care of John so she can rest a bit more or spend some time with Henry. Sometimes, you surprisingly appear at her place to help her out with whatever she needs. You can’t do much but you try to be there. That’s pretty much all you can do.

“If you need me to help you out with John…”

Her phone starts ringing, cutting you off. That’s Henry. But he doesn’t come with great news. He had taken John to the hospital because his condition was getting worse.

Lux immediately stands up, waves you goodbye, and rushes to her car to join her men. Since you were on a terrace, you paid for both your orders before leaving the place.

It was good to talk to her today, especially after seeing Jungkook at work some days ago. It has been on your mind since you’ve seen him. It was weird to see him and even have a little chat with him. But now, you’re even more sure that it wouldn’t be a one-time thing. You’ll for sure speak with him once more which is probably going to cause more sleepless nights because all you can think about is Jungkook. Hopefully, once you’ll talk, you’ll be able to sleep better and move on from all this.  

Once again, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Jungkook has spent the last month not sleeping properly. His ex ⏤ you ⏤ has been haunting him even more than usual so he’s been a total mess. His brain is on fire, he can’t even think correctly. Arya has been his escape because work couldn’t be anymore. He’s been working more from home, avoiding coming to the office as much as possible. Exceptionally, Eunji has agreed to let her daughter spend more time with Jungkook.

Today is no exception, he worked from home. He just arrived home with Arya, he picked her up. Eunji enjoyed the fact that Jungkook has been more with her daughter to take some holidays. So now and for the next week, Arya will spend all her time with her daddy. She couldn’t be happier.

Arya and her father are currently eating pancakes that they prepared together. All this time with his daughter has been filling his heart. In a way, seeing you again has brought something so special to him. A lot of time with his baby. However, he’s totally aware that one day, he’ll have to physically go back to work. But only when he’ll sleep a bit more.

His eyes never cease to watch his little girl. He’s very lucky to have her, she brings so much happiness into his life. For sure, he would trade anything for moments like these.

“Daddy,” Arya starts saying. “My friends have a mommy and a daddy in the same house. Why you and mommy are not in the same house?”

He has a twinge in his heart. This is such a heartbreaking question but he knew that one day, this question would come. Probably, throughout the years, his daughter will raise questions about the fact that he’s not dating or even married to Eunji. But what concerns him, even more, is when he’ll start his life with someone else. One day, he’ll date someone. A person important enough that he’ll introduce to his daughter. There’s even a possibility that he’ll have children with that person. What would happen then with Arya? Would she be jealous of her siblings because they would have both their parents in a relationship while her parents don’t love each other in a romantic way?

“You know, baby,” he starts saying while thinking about the right words to use. “Usually when a mommy and a daddy live in the same house, it’s because they are in love like they are a girlfriend and a boyfriend but your mommy and I are not in love that way. I like your mommy but not in the way to be her boyfriend.”

The only person he has ever loved that way is you, but he totally lost you when you ran away like a thief. Eunji is somebody that he deeply cherishes but he’ll never be in love with her.

“Oh, it makes sense,” she says with a smile on her face. “But you not want mommy to be your girlfriend?”

Now, he’s the one having a little smile on his face. She’s definitely trying to understand the situation at a very young age, but that doesn’t mean she wants her parents to be like every other parent. Jungkook’s mom has already told him a million times that he doesn’t have to be worried about all this. The normal for Arya is having her parents in 2 different houses and not being in a relationship. For the moment, she’s just very young but she feels safe in this situation because he always made sure with Eunji that everything works well and that she feels loved all the time.

“No, baby,” he answers.

She nods, and he knows that she understands everything. It’s such a relief that she was just asking to understand.

“When mommy is back?” She asks.

“Next week and until there, you’ll always be with me,” he replies.

“Mommy will call us?” She questions.

Eunji has been calling every day to see her little girl. Even though she’s enjoying her holidays with her boyfriend ⏤ a boyfriend Arya isn’t aware of ⏤, she misses her baby every second of the day. She’s her mother, she carried her for nine months before bringing her to the world.

“Of course, she will,” he answers, “and if we don’t get a call before you go to bed, we’ll call her, okay?”

She nods before eating a bit of her Minnie Mouse-shaped pancake. She loves shaped pancakes and Jungkook always does them in the way she wants. If she wants regular pancakes, that’s definitely a sign to get worried.

The two of them keep eating pancakes while discussing all the interesting things Arya did at school today. She always speaks with such enthusiasm about what she did, she adores going to school and learning new things. Both Jungkook and Eunji believe she’s precocious. She’s extremely smart for her age but they try to not force her into anything. She does whatever she wants and they support her no matter what she decides. The most important thing is her happiness.

Once they are done eating, she goes to her little room to play with her little toys. Jungkook goes back to the desk that was set up in one of the empty rooms of his massive mansion. He turns on his computer and quickly checks the last unread emails he received. There are quite a few but that’s totally normal.

After a couple of minutes, his bodyguard knocks at the door.

“There’s a certain y/n at the door,” he says.

Jungkook’s heart stops and his entire body freezes. What on earth are you doing here? And how did you find out where he lives? This is honestly something he didn’t expect to arrive. He’s been avoiding being at work to not see you in person, however, he’s been checking every email you sent and he’s been also following very closely your progress at work. His mind has been even more flooded than usual by you.

“Thanks, Jin,” he adds before standing up.

The CEO of Jeon Industries rearranges his shirt and takes a quick glance at the mirror. He swapped his usual costume for a white t-shirt and jeans. When he’s at home, he just likes to feel comfortable like anyone else. There’s no need to put expensive clothes on to simply stay at home.

As he nervously walks to the entrance door, he thinks about all the possible reasons that would explain your presence here. Nothing really comes up to his mind which makes him even more nervous. Once in front of the door, he takes a deep breath and opens it.

You’re right there, standing in front of the door. Since he has seen you again, Jungkook has noticed that you now wear makeup. It wasn’t the case before, you used to prefer the natural look and he was kind of a fan of it. He used to find you astonishingly courageous for not using any makeup when most people wouldn’t dare go out without at least foundation on their face.

But as he’s watching you, he realizes once more how the two of you have changed since the last time you saw each other. A lot of time has passed since you both broke up. It even felt that it was a lifetime ago that he was part of your history.

“Hi, y/n,” he says with a little smile appearing on his face.

“Hello Jungkook,” you say.

None of you says anything which creates a little awkward tension.

“Sorry for coming out of nowhere, I just wanted to talk with you if it’s possible,” you explain.

Jungkook simply nods before opening the door wider to let you in. After a second of hesitation, you enter the massive mansion that he owes. This man has for sure achieved all of his dreams, there are absolutely no doubts about it. The two of you walk to his cozy living room, it looks smaller than what you imagined but it’s still pretty huge for a living room.

“Do you want to drink or eat something?” he asks.

“No, thanks,” you simply answer.

Well, you only came here to finally have that deep conversation with him. It took you one long month to decide to come but you’re finally here. You only want to go straight to the point. As you look around, you notice a lot of pictures of him with a little girl. That must be Arya, you think. Damn, you had forgotten about her. What if she’s here? For sure, you don’t want her to hear your conversation. You ignore totally how it will go. Maybe you’ll start yelling or crying. You don’t want her to find her father in such a state.

“Is your daughter here?” you question.

Your ex only nods.

“Maybe, I shouldn’t have come,” you respond. “Your time with your daughter is precious.”

Jungkook couldn’t agree more but having a conversation with you is probably something he’ll only get once in his life. His daughter, he’ll get to see her right after and then for the rest of his life. Right now, speaking with you seems more important than anything else. He’s been waiting for so long to have a conversation with you and tell you what he’s been feeling.

“I was working,” he immediately tells you, “she’s playing in her little room.”

A little smile appears on your face as you imagine the little girl in the pictures playing. She definitely looks adorable based on what you can see in the living room, and she must look even more adorable in person. You never got to see pictures of her since Lux told you that Jungkook became a father because you didn’t want to see the baby of your ex.

“We can speak,” he adds.

Well, if he says that you can speak, then you have no other choice than to do it. You nod and he invites you to take a seat on the couch. As you sit down, you feel your body slowly trembling. To say that you’re nervous is an understatement. You’re going to have a conversation with your ex, a conversation you were supposed to have ten years ago.

But what scares you the most is that this discussion will bring up all the things that broke you years ago. It’s true that throughout that time, you got to see a therapist and work through everything but it’s still different. You’re going to tell your ex why you left him.

“How did you find out where I was living?”

“Lux gave me your address,” you tell him, “she’s the one who pushed me to come talk to you.”

In the end, she was right. Jungkook took the first step and talked to you in the meeting room so now it’s your turn to make the second step. The past month, you’ve been thinking about it a lot and he deserves to know everything, even if it’s ten years later.

“So we’re lucky to have her in our lives,” he simply responds.

For sure, you’re more than lucky to have her. She’s your rock. However, you totally ignore what she represents to him because she doesn’t really talk about the relationship she has with him. Something that you have been really thankful for.

“Indeed,” you say while nodding.

Your eyes quickly scan the man sitting in front of you. A part of his tattooed sleeve is noticeable as he’s wearing a white t-shirt. This is something completely new to you. Back when you were dating, Jungkook only had one tattoo, his first. The part of his tattooed arm that you can see looks actually very good, it definitely suits him very well. But what really captivates all your attention is how broader he has become. You can perfectly see his toned figure. There’s no doubt that he has been working out a lot for the past years.

“I first wanted to apologize for everything, including how I treated you before we broke up and following the breakup,” you start saying.

Jungkook nods with a very serious look on his face. “I appreciate it,” he says. He bites his lower lip, holding back what he really wants to say but then, he remembers that there’s absolutely no point in holding back what he’s been dreaming to tell you since the breakup. “But a simple apology ten years later can’t brush away all the pain you put me through.”

At his words, your heart breaks even more. It’s one thing to imagine and believe that you deeply hurt him but it’s totally another thing to hear him say it. But you deserve to hear that. Before you weren’t strong enough to hear it but now you are. Well, it’s definitely going to hurt but you’ll be able to handle it better.

“I know but you still deserve an apology for everything I did to you,” you answer. “You didn’t deserve any of this and I’m sincerely and deeply sorry.”

This is something you truly mean. You’re perfectly aware that you did things completely wrong so before anything else, he deserves to hear that you’re sorry.

Jungkook runs his fingers through his hair while closing for a brief moment his eyes. He never thought that he’d hear those words one day and he definitely never thought he’d need to hear them. His life moved on even though he didn’t get to have your apology. Right now, it feels like he’s being violently pushed back in the past but he definitely needs this moment. He needs to understand what happened ten years ago.

Even though he loves Lux with his entire soul, he refused to put her in an awkward position and never asked her anything. Of course, he’s aware that she knows everything but it wouldn’t have been nice of him to ask her anything about you. The person who needed to explain what happened was you. Nobody else but you.  

“You broke me, yn,” he says with a shaky voice. “You broke me in a way nobody else did before and in a way nobody else ever did after you.”

Although you broke him, he still feels safe near you to tell you the full truth. You’re the only person that has ever made him feel that way and he knows he’ll never find this with anyone else.

Your eyes roam at his face, he’s definitely devastated. He can’t fool anyone, it’s written in his eyes. That definitely destroys you even more. This conversation will for sure leave his print in you. There’s no way that after this your life will be the same.

“My daughter is living proof of how much you destroyed me,” his eyes stare deep into yours. “I wanted to forget my own pain and the only way I could was to fuck any girl who would want it. I don’t even remember the day Arya was made because I was completely blinded by my heartache.”

The fact that he can’t remember the day his daughter was conceived made him cry a lot of times. In those moments, he deeply hates you because if you had never broken him that way, he would remember. But then he rationalizes. Without the breakup and the pain, his daughter wouldn’t even exist.  

“Even today the ache is still unbearable but I got used to it,” he finishes.

Well, it’s the same for you. There’s been so much pain in your life for more than ten years but with time, you got used to it. There were also people that eased it in some way but it has never left you.

“I’m so sorry for everything,” you say once again, “but I was in so much pain back then, and I thought it was best to push you away.”

Jungkook’s heart breaks a little because he knows a bit about what happened. Well, he actually knows the thing that tormented you but he also doesn’t have the full picture.

“My sister‘s death devastated me,” you start saying.

At your words, his heart breaks a little more. Jungkook had the opportunity to meet your sister, he got to be around her and create memories with her. She was a beautiful person, she was funny, full of life and always smiling. Tragically, she lost her life in a terrible car accident with her boyfriend. He still remembers when you got the news, he was the one holding you when you fell on the floor, when your world fell apart. After that moment, you never were the same. To say that it broke you is more than an understatement. A part of you stopped shining as before following the passing of your sister.

“My heart was violently ripped from my chest,” tears start forming in your eyes. “I didn’t know who I was without her, I didn’t know how to keep living without her. Going home without her being there anymore was heartbreaking, I’d fall apart every single time.”

Remembering that very dark period is hard for the two of you. Mourning your sister has been a very long process, it took you years before you were able to speak about her without falling apart. Exceptionally, being with Jungkook makes you vulnerable and it’s making it hard to remember that time of your life.

“Although you were there, I wanted to do my grieving on my own because it was mine,” you tell him. “It was overwhelming but it was my pain, not yours so I was the one who needed to learn to live with it because nobody could do that for me.”

Even if you loved him with your entire soul and knew he’d always be by your side, this was something you needed to do by yourself. Having Jungkook by your side was just distracting you, it was making you forget the pain but you weren’t allowing yourself to feel which was what you needed.

“So I started pushing you back because with you around me, I would just think about you and how you were feeling, I wasn’t focusing on myself.”

Despite the fact that it hurts him that you pushed him away a few months after the tragic death of your sister, today he gets why you did it. He wanted to be there and help you when you needed it the most but he’s understanding that it was your grief and you needed to figure out on your own how to deal with it.  

“Around that time, I don’t know if you recall but I kissed a guy at a party,” you tell him.

Jungkook nods. That kiss was what really crushed your relationship. Things weren’t the same after you confessed you had kissed a guy. It was a guy you had a crush on before you met Jungkook, you deeply wanted to date him but things never happened because he was in a relationship with a girl. Back when it happened, he was having a hard time with his ex. You were such at a low point in your life, you were completely drunk and he was there, being nice to you.

Instantly, you regretted what you did. Jungkook was a sweetheart with you, always there by your side even when you were pushing him away. He loved you with his entire heart and you were destroying everything. But most importantly, you were hurting the person you loved the most.  

“I felt even worse after cheating on you,” you add.

Your ex doesn’t say anything, he’d like to say over again that he never considered that kiss as cheating. He still doesn’t because cheating to him goes further than a kiss. Cheating is seeing someone, talking to that person regularly, flirting with them, and having sex with them. For him, a simple kiss isn’t cheating. But that wasn’t your opinion. You saw that as cheating.

“I started hating myself for what I did to you, I wasn’t able to look at myself in the mirror and I wasn’t able to be with you, pretending like nothing happened,” a tear starts running down your face. “That little voice in my head was telling me over and over again that I wasn’t worthy of your love, that I actually never was.”

Things start to make a little more sense to Jungkook. You were at a very low point in your life, you were making a mess and you were not feeling lovable anymore.

“I had forgiven you for the kiss, I told you over again that to me, it wasn’t cheating what you did,” he explains again with a visible ache in his eyes. “It was a simple kiss and I don’t consider that as cheating.”

You look away, tears running down your face. Life was tough back then and you’re ashamed of everything you did back then. Pushing Jungkook away was for sure the best decision you took back then. There’s no doubt you would have hurt him way more and he wouldn’t deserve it.

“I never deserved your love, Jungkook,” you confess. “I knew you’d forgive me and I was not deserving of that forgiveness at that time. I was hurting you over and over again and you didn’t deserve that, you were worthy of all the love in the world which I wasn’t able to give you back then.”

For sure, he understands your reasons but man, he would have preferred you told him all this ten years ago. Probably, it wouldn’t have avoided the breakup but maybe, things would have been completely different.

“I was so disgusted by myself,” you add.

Jungkook gets closer to you, his hand grabs your chin before slowly and carefully turning your face to look at him. Hearing how hard you were on yourself saddens him more than you can imagine. There’s no need in being disgusted by yourself. What you did was wrong, he did feel disrespected but he thinks that you’re being a bit too harsh on yourself.

“At some point, I even felt like I did that to be a ‘good’ girl for my parents,” your eyes look deep into his.

It was no secret that your parents weren’t supporters of your relationship. They were nice to him but they never believed he was the right one for you and they also didn’t like him that much. They were always saying that he wasn’t treating you right when at the very end, you were the one not treating him right. But they accepted him because you were staying with him and defending him whenever they would say something negative about him. Clearly after 2 years of relationship, they didn’t have much choice than accept it. However, after your sister’s passing, they started being less hard on him because he was there for all of you.  

“Your parents never liked me,” a little smile appears on his face. “But it was understandable, I was kind of a fuckboy before meeting you and I was still looking like one during our relationship.”

That is true but it wasn’t right the way they treated him. You weren’t asking them to actually like him but to accept him and respect him. Being with him was your choice and they had to respect that. If he wasn’t the right person for you, it’d be up to you to understand it, not them.

“That was not an excuse though,” you answer.

The man in front of you nods, his thumb caressing your chin. It’s definitely strange for the two of you to feel his fingers touching your skin. It seems like it was a lifetime ago since you last touched each other.  

“This is what…”

Before you can finish your sentence, Jungkook’s eyes look to the right when you both hear little footsteps. As he looks to the right, you turn your face in the same direction. A little girl, wearing a large yellow t-shirt with matching shorts, is staring at the two of you with visible confusion. She’s holding in her little hands a drawing. Her father immediately stands up to reach her.

“Daddy, who is her?” she asks her father.

Jungkook gets down on his knees to be at her level. His hands gently caress her little shoulders in a way to try to comfort her.

“She’s an old friend of mine,” he starts saying to Arya. “We were friends a very long time ago and she visited me today.”

She nods, her little eyes looking at you. You give her a little smile. She’s absolutely adorable. There’s absolutely no doubt she’s Jungkook’s daughter but she isn’t a mini copy of him. She’s still a lot different than him, at least that’s what you think.

“Would you go say ‘hello’ to her?” he tells his daughter.

Once more, she nods before slowly walking to you. Seeing this little girl reminds you of how deeply you want a child of your own. However, it feels like it’s not going to happen any time soon. You still need to find a man who you’ll fall in love with and whom you'd like to start a family with. But at this pace, you won't have children until you're 40.

“Hello, I am Arya,” she says with a little smile. “My daddy is Jangkoo.”

The way she pronounces her father’s name makes you smile and makes your heart melt. She’s so cute, that’s something she definitely inherited from her father. Your ex smiles as well when he hears his little girl speaking.

“Hey, Arya,” you say with a big smile. “It’s a pleasure meeting you. My name is Yn.”

Jungkook watches the two of you interact together. That’s for sure something he never thought he’d witness in his life. Technically, if his daughter wouldn’t have come up to the living room, the chance of meeting her would be actually very low.

“Is that a drawing you’re holding in your hands?” You ask her.

She nods before showing you with pride her drawing.

“This is dadda,” she tells you while showing you an apparent man.

“It definitely looks a lot like him, you’re very talented Arya,” you tell her.

She instantly smiles brightly at you, she spent a lot of time drawing her father so she’s super proud to hear that. Of course, outside the colors of his outfit and the ‘dadda’ written on top of his head, it’s hard to tell that it’s him but the most important is her intention.

“Dadda is at home with me and we are eating pancakes,” she explains while showing her representation of eating pancakes with her father.

This definitely melts your heart. Now, you’re a hundred percent sure that Jungkook is the best father to this little girl. She won the lottery with him, and she definitely knows it, you can tell it. She speaks with so much pride about her father, he’s her superhero.

While speaking with his little girl, you totally forget the rest. It’s like there’s just you and her. Even Jungkook disappeared although you were here in the first place to talk to him. But this girl is absolutely adorable and she doesn’t seem shy at all.

Jungkook watches with marvell the two of you interacting together. He has never seen Arya behaving this way around anybody else. That convinces him even more that you’re the one. It can’t be anybody else but you. There’s for sure a lot more that needs to be discussed between the two of you but as he’s watching you with his daughter, he can’t keep but wondering if ten years ago, he fell in love with you at the wrong time. Would today be the right time to try again?

For the past week, you and Jungkook have been occasionally talking by messages. After meeting his daughter, you exchanged numbers before leaving his place. It was weird but you’ve been happier than ever talking with him. Of course, it has been making you nervous and anxious because it has brought back a lot of the pain you felt around the time you broke up.

But you’ve been trying to just go with the flow. This is hard for the two of you, you’re very aware of it. Everything is different but at the same time, still the same.

Outside the talking through messages, you haven’t spoken to or seen him which you believe has been helpful. Being around him would have made you even more nervous. For sure, there’s more to talk about since you were interrupted by his daughter but you need more time to prepare yourself for the rest of the conversation.

Today is saturday. You’re chilling at home, watching ‘The Cown’ on Netflix. Although you adore going out with friends, you also enjoy staying at home to rest, especially after a tough week at work like this past week was. You’re drinking a cappuccino that you prepared a couple of minutes ago.

The doorbell rings which surprises you a lot. You’re definitely not expecting anyone today. The plan is to absolutely avoid seeing people but to enjoy your own company. It's a self-care day. You put your cappuccino on the coffee table before standing up to open the door.    

To your surprise, as you open the door, Jungkook appears before your eyes. Your eyes open wide as you see him, to say that it’s a surprise is an understatement. He was the last person you’d expect to see here because he doesn’t know where you live. Well, at least, that’s what you thought.

“Hi,” you finally say.

A little smile appears on his face when he sees you. He’s happy to see you, he’s been avoiding you at all costs because he was more than scared to finish the conversation you started at his place.

“Hi, Yn,” he says to you.

Hearing his voice instantly appeases you. That’s the superpower of Jungkook. Well, that’s one amongst others. That deep voice of his always had a comforting effect on you, but a hug in his strong arms would always be even more comforting. All your worries would disappear instantly and it would warm your heart in a way that you can’t even describe.

“Come on in,” you answer as you invite him inside.

The best is that no one that works with you sees your boss in front of your place. That would cause a lot of unnecessary drama at work. Something that you want to avoid. It’s already not easy to have your ex as your boss. Jungkook enters your little apartment, his eyes looking around him.  

“How did you get my address?”

This question brings you back to when you appear at his place.

“You’re my employee, it’s easy to find all your personal data,” he simply answers.

Well, in fact, in 2 clicks, he found your address. That’s the perk of being the CEO of the company and having you as his employee.

“Right,” you say with a little smile. “Take a seat on the couch,” you invite him to sit down. “Would you like to drink or eat something?” you propose.

“No, thanks,” he replies.

Jungkook sits down on your couch, and you take a place next to him but you both face each other. As you quickly look at him, you can’t help but notice the way his eyes are glomming. He’s different, something has definitely changed.

“Listen,” Jungkook doesn’t waste a minute. “Talking to you last week was very good and helpful.”

You nod, your heart beating a little faster in your chest and your hands getting sweatier. The nervousness is increasing like crazy, your place is getting hotter but you need to listen to what he has to say.

“Talking to you got me to understand how you were feeling and I’m very thankful for that,” he adds.

You can sense that there is a ‘but’ coming. He wouldn’t come to just thank you for everything you said a week ago. There are 10 years of pain inside his heart and that can’t be erased with a simple ‘thank you’.  

“But that was a conversation we were supposed to have years ago, not now.”

He’s totally right, this is something you should have talked about right after the breakup. This almost feels like it’s too late. Back then, you were in no state to have this conversation. It wouldn’t have been constructive, it would have only been you accusing him of small things that he did throughout your relationship. That wouldn’t have helped any of you and Jungkook would have ended up hating you more. More pain wasn’t necessary.

“I was convinced you were the one, even during the past ten years, I was still convinced about it,” he adds. “Nobody could ever make me feel half of the way you made me feel. I spent the last years looking for you in every girl I could find. I’d sleep and date a lot of girls but it’d be heartbreaking when I realized what I was doing with those girls.”

It breaks your heart even more. You were never worthy of his love, and maybe, you’ll never be. However, you still love him. You never stopped loving him and you never will because he is the love of your life. There’s no doubt about it. You’re ready to wait all the time that he needs. Even if you have to wait ten years.

“I also believe that you’re the love of my life,” you shyly reply.

Jungkook’s heart starts racing crazily in his chest. This isn’t something he was expecting to hear but he would be lying if he said that he isn’t happy to hear those words. For the past years, he was convinced that you simply stopped loving him although he was still thinking that you were the one. Call him crazy but it was a gut feeling. You can’t really ignore that kind of feeling.

The man next to you gets closer, both your hearts beating extremely fast. Something is building in the air, you both can feel it. It’s the little tension that you were so used to feeling when you were together but that has gone missing for the past ten years. So it is extremely weird and none of you knows what to do.

As a consequence, you bite your lower lip while he runs his fingers through his hair, trying to avoid looking down at your low-necked shirt. He knows that if he does look, it’ll be the end of him. But for sure, when the two of you are alone in a closed-door room, the chances that you don’t end up having sex are very low. It happened all the time during your relationship and also the day after the breakup.

However, as much as he tried looking away, your natural scent is something that has always brought him to his knees. He always adored the way you smell and it hasn’t changed since the last time he saw you. His eyes glare down at your chest, noticing instantly that you’re not using any bra. Your breast is almost fully displayed before his clearly hungry eyes. Your ex takes a deep breath.

While your eyes glance at his face, you notice the way his stare looks down on your body. It instantly excites you, and you can sense your panties getting wetter. No man has been able to cause an instant reaction like this, only Jungkook can. Your body always reacts to whatever he does. Without noticing it, both of you lick and bite your lips. The tension is making the two of you very very hungry, there’s absolutely no way you’ll resist any of this.

His fingers finally touch the skin of your chest, causing you to sigh with pleasure. They slowly but surely start tracing their way to your left breast, your eyes closing at the burning sensation of his fingers caressing your skin. Slowly, he pushes your low-cut shirt to the left, exposing your breast to his greedy eyes. Without any hesitation, he brings his mouth to your nipple to vigorously suck it. A whine instantly leaves your lips because damn, that feels beyond good.

As he sucks your nipple, he also nibbles it, causing you to moan a bit louder. His actions lead to the growing wetness inside your panties. This is fucking good. And it’s just the beginning. The torture this man will put you through for the upcoming minutes or hours will drive you completely insane. He’ll bring you down to your knees in seconds.

After a little while that felt like an eternity to you, he presses gentle kisses in between your breasts, slowly approaching your right nipple to give it the same treatment as the left one. Your hands find their way to his dark hair, tugging it while he abuses your right breast. Right now, you’re in complete ecstasy.

Before you can even comprehend what is happening, Jungkook is undressing you, leaving you completely naked on the couch. In no time, he’s naked as well with a condom on his hands. Your eyes inevitably look down at his cock. His massive cock. To be honest, you had forgotten how big it was but damn, you absolutely don’t want to wait to feel it inside you. He quickly put the condom on before placing himself in between your legs.

Jungkook touches your intimate area to feel how wet you are.

“Damn, you’re so wet,” he whispers.

Even if you’re extremely wet, he knows that wouldn’t be enough before penetrating you. It’ll still hurt you if he just goes and he definitely doesn’t want to cause any pain to you. He wants this moment to only bring tremendous pleasure to both of you. So he decides to tease you with his cock, rubbing it against your inner lips. Moans flow from your mouth as you feel the overwhelming pleasure growing inside your body. Right now, it seems like you haven’t been touched properly in years. And even if Jungkook has already made love to you millions of times when you were together, everything feels extremely different.

“Shit, I want to fuck you so bad, yn,” he whines.

“Me too, Jungkook,” you reply.

With everything happening at the moment, it’s almost impossible for you to form a proper sentence. All you know is that you’re desperate to have sex with this man. Your moans are the actual proof of it.  

After what appears like an eternity for you, he buries his thick cock inside your soaked core, stretching your velvety walls. His large hands find their way to your waist, caressing your soft skin while his doe eyes filled with lust look into yours. Both of you groan as he slowly pushes his long and thick cock inside you.  

“So fucking good,” you mumble as your eyes roll back.

The feeling of having him inside you and filling you up to the brim is something you did miss a lot. Although you had sex with a lot of different guys over the past years, Jungkook does it very differently but in a very good way. And it’s just the beginning. But honestly, you have a crazily immense sexual drive. You haven’t really been a saint since you last saw your ex, that is currently on top of you. All men that flirted with you and ended up in your bed have actually loved your wild sexual appetite.

Your ex leans closer, pushing his cock a bit deeper inside you and snatching a loud moan out of you.    

“You’re absolutely sexy, baby,” he whispers in your ear, sending shivers down your spine. “So sexy that I want to fuck you all day long,” his deep voice groans in your ear.

His teeth bite your earlobe before his tongue licks your ear. A deep moan leaves your lips while you feel yourself grow even wetter. This man knows exactly how to bring you down on your knees for him. And you don’t even want to start on the effect of his filthy words said with his deep voice on you.

“Then do it,” you dare to say as you want to push him to go absolutely wild today.

Jungkook is a man. Usually, men adore being pushed and they’ll fuck you just the way you want. Today, you want him to be rough with you. You want him to fuck you until all you know is to scream his name. You want all the neighbors to know how good your ex makes you feel. You want him to come inside the condom again and again until none of you can handle it anymore.

“I already plan to do it, princess,” he pulls back a bit to look you in the eyes, and a smirk arises on his face. “Tomorrow you won’t even be able to walk at all.”

You desire nothing more than this. To be completely sore and swollen down there.

“You have absolutely no idea of all the things I desire to do to you,” he presses a gentle kiss on your cheek. “You’ll beg me to never stop,” he adds.  

Jungkook slowly pushes back, only leaving the tip of his cock inside you. His eyes never leave your figure, watching you moan under him. That’s a sound he loves, and he missed it a lot. He dreamed of this a lot since the last time you had sex.

“Then, show me no mercy, Jungkook,” you answer.

A smirk appears on his face, satisfied to hear you say those words. Damn, he wants nothing more than to drive you completely crazy.

Brutally, he pushes his cock fully inside you, and a loud moan leaves your lips. For a little while, he doesn't move, hovering over you and watching you with delight. His eyes look down on your body. For sure, your body is different than it was ten years ago but you’re still absolutely stunning. Your skin is still very soft like he remember it was.

For the two of you, this seems like something totally new while being something very familiar. It’s quite odd but it feels good. Sex usually feels good, the two of you can say it out of experience. Jungkook groans as he watches himself buried deep inside you.

“Your cunt still takes me so fucking well, princess.”

You close your eyes, completely enjoying having him fully inside you. What you like the most about shutting down your eyes during intercourse is how you connect more to your body. With your eyes closed, you can deeply experience everything that is going on. However, it can also be extremely overwhelming, especially when the man you’re having sex with is awfully good in bed.  

Once Jungkook sees that you’re ready to take more, he brutally pulls back before slamming himself back into you. The couch under you squeaks while a very deep moan escapes your lips. If he does it again, the sofa’s back is going to hit the wall and even probably destroy it. However, right now, you absolutely don’t give a shit.  

Jungkook once again stops when he’s fully inside you, torturing you just to hear you begging him to fuck you. He hasn’t heard you beg for anything in years so it’s just legitimate he craves it deeply at this precise moment.

“Please,” you say grumbling, “fuck me.”

Jungkook leans closer again. “I love to hear you begging, princess,” he whispers before licking the spot just under your ear.

He pushes his cock back before slamming into you with both hands on your hips, pulling you back to meet his thrusts. The slick sound of your pussy soaking his cock as well as your moans are filling the room. All those sounds remind you that you’re doing something completely nasty with your ex but damn, this is beyond amazing.  

“Shit,” you gasp while he thrusts into you with no mercy, “you feel so good.”

You’re completely drunk in the feeling of his cock filling you up, his hips hitting against yours with every thrust he makes. This all causes sparks of pleasure to shoot throughout your body, your arousal dripping from your core and creaming the condom on his cock. Jungkook smirks as he notices the sticky mess you’re slowly causing. His cock is buried deep inside you, brushing against your walls that causes you to moan even louder each time. You grip the couch as hard as possible to steady yourself from Jungkook’s hard thrusts, but it definitely is an impossible mission.

“You’re so fucking wet, baby girl,” he hisses before biting his lower lip. His hands press harder into your skin when he feels your walls tighten around him. “And making such a mess on my cock.”

Every time he pushes his hips back, he watches with delight the way the condom is completely covered with your arousal. Nothing drives him crazier than seeing this, you can see it in his eyes.

“You love it, don’t you?” You ask him. His doe eyes look up at you, and they are filled with lust, making you shiver as they look at you.

Jungkook bends down, pressing a sloppy kiss on your lips while his thrusts slow down. A desperate whine gushes from you, a sound that he instantly swallows. His hands move up on your body, grabbing your breasts and squeezing them to make you moan with desire before his fingers start playing with your nipples. Moans flood out of your mouth as your ex keeps torturing your body at a slow pace. Your hands irresistibly grab his hair, tugging it as much as possible.

“It feels so good,” you whine, “fuck, Kook.”

The nickname surprises both of you but it left your lips in the heat of the moment. For sure, it’ll be the only time you’ll say it, at least for now. But it warms his heart to hear you call him by this nickname.

His thrusts are slow and harsh again, and his fingers on your nipples are just too much for you. They are extremely sensitive but it’s absolutely normal. Once someone starts playing with them, they just get sensitive and it just brings a lot of delight to you.  

Gradually, Jungkook begins to thrust hard into you again, and you moan at the feeling of his brutal thrust. Your walls suck his cock as he slams his hips into you with more force. His fingers keep playing with your very sensitive nipples, pushing you closer and closer to the edge. It’s clear that he knows how to drive somebody crazy.

His eyes look at you, completely contorted with pleasure as it slowly builds within you. Your moans are getting louder, you’re not one to hold back or stifle your groans because that’s for sure an indicator to Jungkook of how good he’s making you feel and if he’s doing things well.

“Moan louder, baby,” he says as he goes deeper and harder to make you scream with pleasure. He loves it so damn much.  

His hands can feel the way your body quivers with each thrust. The way he’s torturing your body is only making you lose yourself further but damn, you haven’t been fucked this way ever in your life. This is magical, your entire body has completely surrendered to this man.  

“Fuck,” he groans when he feels the warmth of your walls wrapping tighter around him. “Your cunt is clenching so hard, baby.”

The sweat is dampening his body, sticking his long hair to his face. That vision alone can make you come undone right now. As you stare at him, you can’t help but think how lucky you are to be doing this right now. His eyes stare down at you with passion and lust as his tongue licks his lower lips. He keeps growling your name, thrusting into you with more urgency each time.

“Fuck,” you say as you move your hips to meet his thrust.

Jungkook leans forward, pressing another sloppy kiss on your lips. He’s been enjoying sensing your lips on his, even if the kiss is a disaster. Currently, all he craves is you, and in any way. Your eyes never cease to look at him, he’s mesmerizing and incredibly hot. Man, he’s even hotter than he was years ago. You bite your bottom lip as you admire him.

“Gonna be a good girl and cum for me?” He asks, and you nod.

All you want right now is to do as he wishes and you’re also very close to exploding due to all the pleasure he’s causing. But Jungkook wants to hear you begging to come, he wants to know how badly you want to come.

“Use your words, baby girl.”

His fingers pinch your nipples harder, making the wave of pleasure grow bigger inside you. A loud moan escapes your lips.

“I want to come,” you manage to say, “I wanna come so-so bad.”

Jungkook feels his cock twitching inside of you, a low groan rumbling in his throat as you practically beg him to let you come. He smirks like he has won the award for the best fuck of the year. One of his hands slowly goes down on your body, passing your stomach, and landing on your throbbing clit. His fingers start to rub your sensitive spot as his cock keeps hitting your sensitive walls.

“Beg for it, baby girl,” he says.

His fingers show no mercy on your clit, and you’re not even sure if you’ll be able to beg for anything before coming. You’re a complete mess right now, and you’ve completely surrendered to the overwhelming sensations you’re experiencing.

“Please, Kook,” you manage to say.

With the way he’s torturing you, you can’t even form a proper sentence. You actually can’t even think at all, outside the fact that you love what Jungkook is doing to you.  

“Tell me, baby girl,” he keeps teasing you with a smirk on his face.

For sure, he would have loved to experience other positions with you for more pleasure. But this is just the beginning. He’ll let you come now and later, he’ll torture you with other sex positions. He won’t leave you alone today, that he’s sure about.

“Let me come.”

His smirk grows bigger on his face, happy to have you begging him to come. Teasing you is something that he’s enjoying a lot. The wave of pleasure inside you is growing bigger and bigger, becoming way too overwhelming. You’re moaning like a mess, but at this stage, you couldn’t care less.      

“Do it, princess, come for me.”

Those words are what you needed to hear to let go of everything. Instantly, the wave of pleasure that was growing inside of you violently hits you, making you come hard around him. Your arousal totally covers the condom on his cock and your walls squeeze him over and over again.

While you’re completely euphoric from your orgasm, he speeds up the pace of his hips slamming into you, wanting to chase his own high. He’s aware that in a matter of seconds, he’ll burst into the condom. Breathy whines escape his pretty lips as he looks down at the mess you made. His eyes are completely hypnotized where your bodies meet.

It doesn’t take him too long to be hit by his own orgasm, desperate moans leaving his mouth when it happens. His eyes roll back with pleasure as his body tenses up and releases his load inside the condom, loud cries of euphoria leaving his lips.

You move a bit on the couch to leave him some room to lie down. There’s not a lot of place for the two of you on the couch next to each other.

“Maybe you can rest on top of me,” he suggests as he removes the condom from his cock.

You simply nod while standing up to let him rest how ever he wants on the couch. The second he’s well installed, you rest on top of him, your head against his chest. His beating heart rocks you, his strong arms holding you tight against him. For a little while, none of you speaks. His hands caress your body which soothes you after this wild moment.

“Once we really calm down from this ecstatic sex, would you like to go on a date with me?” Jungkook asks.

#bts #bts imagine #bts imagines #jeon jungkook #jungkook #jungkook imagine #bts angst #jungkook angst #bts fluff #jungkook fluff #bts smut #jungkook smut #bts x reader #jungkook x reader #wrong time #timing series #spideyjimin

[ghost-proofbaby]

when you know, you know. (e.m.)

summary: air hockey has never been so romantic.

warnings: it's alluded to that reader is wearing red lipstick. not edited.

pairing: eddie munson x reader

wc: 1.8k+

a/n: a very late valentine's day gift for you all (and eddie). also, the fact i've never written proper mechanic eddie... what a shame.

“Yes!” 

If any of the nearby children flinched, you didn’t notice. You were too wrapped up in your victory, going as far as to partake in a terribly embarrassing dance on your end of the air hockey table as Eddie shakes his head slowly. 

“You definitely cheated,” he deadpans, a twitch of a smile nearly giving him away as he leans down to pick the puck out of the slot below on his end, “There’s no way you’re about to beat me in under five minutes, again.” 

You smile, lips painted red under the lowlights of the arcade as you lean over the table and taunt him, “Or maybe it’s just a skill issue. I wouldn’t keep beating you if you were actually a professional in air hockey like you’d claimed, Munson.” 

Three dates – tonight makes four – and you still hadn’t quite worked out how you’d managed to capture the attention of the boy before you. When he’d originally asked you out to coffee, you’d swallowed down all your excessive excitement just to answer him. The local mechanic that you’d been making heart eyes at every few months when you’d go in for an oil check, the one who hadn’t allowed the others at the shop to oversell you on a damn thing when you’d get your tires rotated. Who always smiled shyly as he’d bring you back your keys.

You’d figured the coffee date would last an hour if you were lucky. The two of you would spend more than five minutes in the same room together, he’d realize how overbearing you were, and that would be the end of it. Ridiculous crush effectively squashed. 

But it hadn’t. 

It had lasted hours, plural. Coffees finished and second lattes nursed until they’d gone cold, the outcome had been the exact opposite of your expectations. Your conversation had flowed effortlessly, common ground and common interests found with ease, and suddenly, Eddie was more than just some cute mechanic for your friends to tease you over. 

The first date had only ended due to his shift at the shop that afternoon. 

The subsequent sushi dinner date, and then the movie night the next week, had also lasted hours. 

“For someone who works on cars, you should be a lot better with your hands,” you poke gentle fun at him as he makes the first hit against the puck this time, far more careful than you had been when serving. 

“Or maybe I’m just determined to keep letting my pretty date win.” 

“And why would you ever do that?” 

Another hit from your mallet, the sharp tapping of your aggressive push ringing out over the sound of nearby machines. You don’t dare to glance in the direction of the ruckus, but you’re pretty sure someone has just won an exciting amount of tickets based on the squeals of glee. 

“I dunno,” Eddie pauses to shrug after he hits the puck once more, his guard dropping. You’re ruthless as you take the opportunity to shoot the puck straight into ‘goal’ on his side of the table. A straight shot, far too easy for your liking, but you still celebrate the victory with another embarrassing dance, “Maybe it’s because I’m into that ridiculous dance they keep doing whenever they score.” 

You immediately stop your little jumps, eyes widening, a rush of embarrassment heating you up from the inside out as Eddie’s eyes stay glued on you. The table powers down as he makes his way around it, feet bringing him right to you. 

You’d always thought Eddie would find you weird, or odd, or unappealing after that coffee date, but the outcome had been better than you could have possibly conceived.

He was an absolute weirdo as well. 

Fondness overtakes his features just like it had on that coffee date when you’d accidentally snorted at one of his jokes, and your heart flutters eagerly. You can’t believe there had been a time you’d only watch him from behind glass, trying to not get caught as you would blatantly stare at him as he’d work on your car. A time when you’d only see his curls up in loose buns rather than framing his face as they were now, a time when you couldn’t even shake his hand due to it being covered in oil. 

That had all only been a month ago, but you already couldn’t imagine your life without Eddie Munson in it. 

“Don’t go shy on me now,” he chuckles as he stops in front of you, smirk deepening the dimples you’d only noticed on your second date with him. He’d been too bashful the first date, ducking whenever his grin would grow too wide on you, biting his tongue on half the flirtatious remarks you wished he would have said. “You won, fair and square, so what’s your prize gonna be, valentine?” 

He also waited until the second date to kiss you. That had nearly killed you. 

“It’s not very fair if you let me win,” you whisper, unable to look away from his eyes. They’re a soft brown, a smooth honey, a nice sight for sore eyes. You kind of like the crinkles beside them, too. Kind of wonder what it would be like to wake up beside him, roll over, and kiss them – all before the sun ever rose. 

He reaches out and gingerly grabs your hand, calloused fingertips brushing your knuckles before he entangles your fingers with his. “Psh, who said I let you win? Maybe I just really suck at air hockey.”

“You just-”

You never get to finish your argument. He’s quick to swoop down, capturing your lips in his. The rudest of interruptions, and it still manages to weaken your knees. 

Each kiss only grows sweeter. And more confident, more sure. The first one had been timid, exchanged on your doorstep with boyish hesitation and meek desperation. But now, several kisses experienced since that night, all apprehension has melted. He lets his lips meld to yours, captures your bottom lip just tightly enough to give it a brief tug when he pulls away. Still soft, ever so sweet, and leaving you wanting for more. 

Four dates. All it took was four dates for him to make you a goner. 

“Now, that wasn’t fair,” you breathe out, betrayed by the smile that you wear. Your chest feels shaken up, impending explosion of mushiness and flowers and hearts and every single cliche the love songs on the radio could squeeze out.

“It was your prize.”

“I never said I wanted a kiss for my prize.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he puts a dramatic hand up to his chest, leaning back so dramatically that your hand instinctively reaches out to loop a finger in his jean pocket to keep him upright, “Would you like me to take it back, my fair maiden?” 

Four dates, and he makes it impossible to not imagine a future of this. Of silly banter, of gentle mornings spent kissing away crows feet, of cutting one another off with the most infuriating of methods. You’re starting to believe you’re just a hopeless romantic, and he’d spotted that from a mile away – he knew every single button to press to have you putty in his hands, and he was taking full advantage of it. 

You giggle, an honest to God giggle, as you say, “Hm, I’m not sure. I heard the return policies on those are a bit wonky.” 

If your friends thought you were insufferable when he was some stranger you just had a crush on, they would be vomiting at the sight of this. 

He leans into your space, close enough to smell his faint cologne and mint on his breath, “Are they? Well, lucky for you, I’m friends with the shop owner. Can definitely accept the return without a receipt. It won’t be a problem, ma’am. I swear it.”

He’s weird. He’s goofier than you could have imagined, snarkier than you could have dreamed, and more romantic than you had yet to uncover. He’s kind of perfect, but you wouldn’t dare say that to his face. Not yet, at least. 

You’re glad you had said yes when he’d asked days prior for you to be his Valentine. And you’re glad he hadn’t gone the boring route, showing up with just chocolates and flowers and calling it a day, but had instead dragged you out to this arcade for a night of adventures as he claimed. 

“And how would one go about returning a kiss, kind sir?” 

He answers wordlessly, bringing up a finger to tap on his lips. He goes as far as pouting them dramatically. 

He wants you to kiss him. 

Lucky for him, you want to kiss him, too. 

Your kiss is more chaste. Teasing as you lift up onto your tippy toes and only press your lips to his for a brief second before falling back. You leave him wanting more – it’s written all over his face, along with a blush that races right over the bridge of his nose. 

He’s cute. He’s cute, and he’s weird, and you really fucking like him. 

“Now that that’s over with,” you have to change the topic, move right along before your heart truly bursts from your chest, “I know what I want my prize to be.” 

He takes a moment to recover, pupils almost resembling hearts as he stares down at you. Eventually he pulls himself from your trance, shaking his head as he asks, “And what would that be?”

You’re the one taking his hand this time. If he gave you the time, you’d like to learn each callous and scar by heart. Trace over them in the middle of night, when it’s just you and him in the darkness beneath your sheets. Memorize the way they feel as he explores every curvature of your body and figure out which of the roughest patches would brush against your most sensitive bits in a way that would make you arch your back right into him. 

The two of you haven’t even discussed if that’s where the night might lead, but you’re sort of hoping the luck in the air doesn’t run out. 

“There’s an awfully pretty ring in the case up at the ticket counter,” you muse, knowing damn well the ring was the ugliest thing either of you had ever seen in your lives, “Think you’ve got the tickets to spare?” 

His hand gives you a squeeze. Something not too tight, something perfectly comfortable. It’s only the fourth date, it’s only the first month – it’s only the beginning. 

“Anything for you, sweetheart,” he says, more earnestly than you’d expected, as he steals another kiss. 

You let him. You have this aching feeling in your chest that you’ll probably let him steal an endless amount from you for the rest of your life. 

When you know, you know. Or whatever the poets say.

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#my writing #ghost's stories #eddie munson #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson fanfic #i want eddie to win me an ugly arcade ring thanks #also reader falling in love within a month of properly knowing eddie is so real #me too baby me fuckin too #on one tonight idk #let's gooo <3

[ncteez]

✤ Losing It. (masterpost) ✤ // HIATUS

A series of having virginities given to you. Sometimes they throw said virginity at you with full force, other times, they lovingly hold your hand, bat their lashes, and say some of the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard a man say in regards to getting laid for the first time.  ✤ or the one where you go through a list of the seventeen members and learn how they'd lose their virginity to you.

COMPLETED CHAPTERS ― 1/13

SERIES STATUS: actively writing as of march of 2024!

NOTE― All chapters can be read stand alone and do not tie into the others. Each reader and storyline is different! 

SERIES WARNING―There are a variety of different scenarios here involving both very normal and loving sex, to some stories that may contain: sub/dom dynamics, religion kink, obsession, desperate behavior, and purchasing of sex work.

If any of these things make you uncomfortable, I urge you to scroll on and not put yourself in a position of discomfort. I did not write these fics to harm anyone. 

✤ this series is afab!reader. ✤ Warnings, tags, word counts, etc. can be found attached to each chapter. ✤ Disclaimer: some storylines and member order may be prone to change upon writing them. ✤ TAG LIST OPEN!! send me an ask off anon to be on the tag list for this series. you will be tagged for every chapter, not just the specific members you choose.

✤ Chapter One: Cherry Boy[l.c.]

A new relationship is always difficult to navigate, for Chan, it appears to be even more difficult. For you? You’re just left confused as to why your new boyfriend of a month and a half hasn’t made a move on you despite your very obvious attempts to invite him into your personal space. 

You soon realize that your boyfriend is a virgin, and that’s why he’s always running away with his hands covering his bits, even through a simple goodnight kiss. 

STATUS ― virginity loss: success WORD COUNT ― 10k

✤ Chapter Two: Thirst Trappers LIE. [k.sy.]

You find your very innocent best friend’s secret thirst trap account. To your surprise, the “I’m not ready yet” Soonyoung, who literally sleeps with at least seven different plushies, consistently swings his dick at onlookers online. Grey sweatpants, no boxers, thigh flexing, moaning and whimpering audios. 

Maybe he’s not so innocent after all. 

And just maybe you’re right about that, because what he meant by “I’m not ready to have sex yet” really just meant “please have practice sex with me because four thousand people are trying to pull up and i don’t want to be bad at it but i didn’t know how to ask you.” 

STATUS ― v card is actively blocking and reporting everyone who sends a dm EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Three: Scoring One. [s.c.]

The second best hockey player on campus has a secret. Not that he cheats on his exams, or that he had a crush on the lunch lady growing up, it’s that he’s shamefully a virgin, despite his jersey sporting the big bold numbers of a six and a nine.

Thankfully, Soonyoung found out about his dirty little secret and provides him with a number and a promise that the girl on the other line has a thing for desperate dudes. What he didn’t know? He was just about to pay not only the number one party girl on campus to take care of his little issue, but his own little sister’s best friend.

STATUS ― v card is currently tucked in his pocket behind a picture of his little sister. CONTEXT NOTE― this fic does not include an age gap of more than two years. EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Four: One unsolicited dick pic later. [l.sm.]

Never mind why he hasn’t managed to get laid, it’s not like he hasn’t laid in his room for years at night wondering the exact same thing. The current issue is the fact that his friends keep watching porn on the loudspeakers in the living room, he’s drunk, and he got the sudden confidence to send you a dick pic after not speaking to you since he wished you a happy birthday last year.

What he didn’t know though, is that you’ve had a crush on him since that time in third grade he punched Seungkwan for cheating off of his spelling test.

STATUS ― v card is currently sitting in your inbox unread alongside his raging hard-on. EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Five: LOST DOG: FOUND [k.m.]

Mingyu had the chance to lose his virginity right around the time all of his friends did but, well, there were some mishaps. Unfortunately, years later, he is still lying about the loss of it and pretends that he definitely has sex on the regular. He probably would too, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s grown incredibly insecure about his body and what it actually means to sleep with someone.  

Now though, the 26 year old man lives on the floor above you and is known as the pet-sitter of the building. Which is kind of great because it’s far too expensive to board your dog for weekend trips every month. You approach him for the first time with the offer of a hundred bucks to watch your dog, and of course he accepts. 

The issue upon returning home? He lost your 70 pound dog. Like, the whole thing, he lost it. 

STATUS ― v card being handed to you with the leash your dog was supposed to be on. EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Six: LOSER. [j.ww.]

After adding some anonymous dude you found on your city’s subreddit looking for gaming friends, you find yourself confused when he suddenly ghosts you after trying to hold a non-gaming conversation.

Through his friends, you learn that he got cold feet because he’s never been with a woman before, and you decide that you’re just gonna have to show him that a man and a woman can be friends without the assumption that either of you want to fuck each other.

Except, maybe you’re not the best example to prove that, because now you can’t stop flirting with him. Now, you’re growing fond of the way he gets all flustered and turned on at the slightest implication of meeting face to face.

STATUS ― v card is hidden deep within his steam library EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Seven: ISO: Anyone who wants me. [c.v.]

Vernon has never had a girlfriend and he wants one bad. Badder than bad. His group of friends get fed up with his consistent eye-rolls involving couples in public, them when they talk about their girlfriends or hook-ups, and ultimately decide to hold an auction at a campus-wide party.

He was feeling pretty ashamed about being announced as a virgin in need of some love, but the laughing didn’t bother him nearly as much when people actually start a bidding war. 

Apparently, these auctions happen once every few years  and it’s like, a whole thing or whatever. He just happened to be the lucky guy who suddenly has girls lining up for him with cash in hand. And you just happen to be the lucky girl to show him a good time.

STATUS ― v card is currently taped to his forehead EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Eight: To whom it may concern, My desk is sturdy. [l.jh]

The worst thing about spending the night at work to reach deadlines is the fact that the new intern likes to hang out with him. Or rather, distract him. It's insane, really, how he's always about doing things by the book. His whole life revolved around rules and regulations, until he met you. He wanted to wait until marriage, and marriage was not in his books anytime soon. So, with all the stress on his back and you sitting across from him trying to get him to live a little, he decides to live a little too much.

STATUS ― v card framed on his office desk EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Nine: How to be forgiven when you're (not) sorry. [h.j.]

Faith should be put into God, not the priest that consistently finds himself wanting to lead a pretty woman further from the union of God. He’s managed to hold off for most of his life from doing that, but all good things come to an end, he supposes. 

Marrying two sophisticated and loving members of the church was the easiest part of his night. The hardest part was pretending that their distant relative didn’t show up in inappropriate attire, with an even more inappropriate need to flirt with a celibate priest. For both him and his God, he finds himself praying more for his sanity than for the happy marriage of the two he just joined together. 

STATUS ― v card being used as a bookmark for his bible CONTEXT NOTE― this chapter contains inaccurate depictions of religious duties, sinning, blasphemy, questioning of god, and over all a blatant religion kink from yours truly. EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Ten: Paying it forward. [y.jh]

CAMPUS NEWS: RICH NEW STUDENT LOOKING FOR LEGS TO SPREAD.

Being born into a rich family is great and all, sure, when the family isn’t so strict that Jeonghan wasn’t even allowed to close his own bedroom door growing up. Dating was off the table for him too, junk food, trash tv, and even choosing his own career path wasn't something he got to experience in life...yet.

Thankfully, those strict reigns loosened when he got into a college far, far away from home. Now? Jeonghan is out for blood, and by blood, he means he is out to experience all those first-times he missed throughout his teen years. First up on the to-do list: get laid.

STATUS ― brought his v card but forgot his wallet EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Eleven: Friend Circles & Circle Jerks [b.sk.]

Seungkwan had his whole life planned out from the age of five. First, he would finish pre-school and get his diploma to become a doctor, mostly so he could buy a big mansion to live in with his family. Then, he would ask you, the neighbor kid next door, to marry him so that the two of you could stay up past seven in the evening. 

Well, it’s safe to say that the now twenty five year old Seungkwan did not become a doctor, nor did he ask you to marry him. To put it simply, you friend zoned him before he ever got the chance to tell you that he’s wanted to kiss you since he learned what kissing was. Still, he sticks around, picking up your little broken heart pieces from the ex that just dumped you. His hopes are high that, maybe, you’ll take notice of how he’s saved himself for you, and that maybe you’d really give him a chance. 

STATUS ― v card hidden behind his friendzone card EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Twelve: 48 Missed Calls. [w.jh.]

Junhui dated you for three weeks in highschool. However, It was a simple act of curiosity between the two of you and it ended fairly quickly due to, well, being teenagers. 

That’s how it was for you, at least. For Junhui? Maybe it was puberty, or maybe it’s just the puppy love he had for you but, he really couldn’t just let you go. He has brushed off any other person who offers interest towards him for years now because of you. You’re the only person he wants, and despite this obsession he has, you still manage to not notice it. 

Which is why he still holds the title of your best friend. A very, very, protective best friend. 

STATUS ― v card stuck in limbo just like his obsession with you CONTEXT NOTE― this chapter deals with instances of manipulation, obsession, and over all our boy here has some strange ass vibes (this chapter is not in any way dubcon or noncon). please be aware of this. EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤ Chapter Thirteen: Probably (not) a bad idea. [x.mh.]

When Minghao couldn't get a girlfriend throughout his younger years, his focus landed on none other than the world wide web. There, is where he decided how he intends to lose his virginity.  Several years and a very large porn addiction later, some lucky woman on one of the four different BSDM sites he signed up for will have the privilege of taking his virginity in more ways than one. He just knows he’s going to love every smothered, painful, wet, insulting second of it. 

STATUS ― v card is being used as a pickup line CONTEXT NOTE― this chapter has sub/dom dynamics in where minghao is an alt submissive man. there is ass-play in this. p.s.  it is not the greatest idea to lose your virginity to a stranger, especially if that stranger is found on a bdsm site. lower your moral standards for this one.  EST WORD COUNT ― 5k+

✤tag list: @aaniag @kissesfrmwonwoo @youronceupontequilas @kwanisms @sisterofsomeone @wonrangwoo @yawnkive @5xiang @mingyuonthemoon @listxn @sebongica @yawnkive @nishloves @sisterofsomeone @thepoopdokyeomtouched @ghostlycrystobalove @shiningnono @tomodachiii @porridgesblog @cheolctrl @notevenheretbh1 @jungkkoo @4cheezflatbred  @duchesskaren @flwrshwa @sexygrass @doljjongsmom @kpopcrazed @baalkoo @seonghwasprincess @pandoora-the-pink-goth @introdarling @ingloriousbasterdss @horanghaezone @starquokka @imprettyweird @kyeomray this is for tracking purposes, if you are on this list, you will be tagged to all fics in this series unless you state clearly that you would not like to be tagged in fics that contain darker content.

#seventeen smut #svt smut #losing it masterlist

[ordinaryschmuck]

Here's an interesting take about Fionna and Cake that I kind of love.

In Fionna and Cake's universe, now dulled by Simon's sane mind, everyone is totally fine living their dull and mundane life.

Gary might not be a rich prince and Marshal might night be a badass vampire, but they're content with the lives they have and the possible future plans they could share together.

Characters like Hunter, Ice Queen, Flame Prince, and several human reflections of the people in the Land of Aaa might not be as magical as they once were, but they have jobs that are perfectly fine for them and they have no issues living life as is.

And Ellis might be a trash hobo...but that's probably no different from his magical life if it's in anyway similar to LSP's.

The only people who have problems with their mundane life are Fionna and Cake. They're fine with their world and the friends they have in it (at least in Fionna's case), but they're both dreaming for MORE. It's as if, despite EVERYTHING changing, Fionna and Cake still maintained their thrill for adventure and lust for a magical life, which sounds so perfect. I mean, they were the protagonists of their own epic stories, only to now live a life where everything's the same and perfectly mundane. It's as if despite this massive, universe change, Fionna and Cake still has something deep inside them that reminds them exactly who they are and what they SHOULD be.

Also--And this just occurred to me--I love how Fionna and Cake are living the EXACT lives Simon wants and vice versa. As the Cheers theme song perfectly conveys, Simon wants to go to a place where everyone knows your name and the people are the same. Instead, he's forced into a magical world that he feels he doesn't belong in, despite there being people still in his life that gives it meaning. Simon doesn't want more, he wants LESS, acting as a perfect opposite towards Fionna and Cake.

This results in a dynamic of the three of them searching for what they want, only to realize that it's not what they NEED for a happy life. Simon NEEDS to learn that he can live a normal life despite its tragedy. Fionna and Cake NEED to learn that they don't need adventures and magic to be happy. It's only through each other and the adventures they go on that they can learn this, and if that's really where the show's going, I'm ALL in.

#adventure time #fionna and cake #fionna and cake spoilers #fionna campbell #cake the cat #simon petrikov

[yuurei20]

Idk if you've talked about it before, but have you seen the voice lines for Crowley's card? At the end people were saying he implies HE'S the one who brought the MC to Twisted Wonderland👀

Hello hello!! Thank you for this question! ^^

I am not sure that that is how I would interpret his line!

The original Japanese is 「貴方みたいな勤勉で優秀な生徒がいてくれて助かっています。これからも問題児を“監督”してくださいね」

The form of the verb "help" makes this difficult to put into English...literally translated it may be something close to, "It's proving helpful to have diligent, excellent students like you available. Please do continue to ‘supervise’ the troublemakers."?

A vaguer translation might be "It helps to have diligent, excellent students like you," and I can see how that could be interpreted into the implication that he arranged for students like the prefect to be on hand for assistance.

But given the form of "help," I don't think there is that much depth to read into! :> There is nothing to insinuate that he is glad he brought the prefect here, or that he was involved in their being here at all.

Of course there is a lot that is still unknown about Crowley, and the theory that he intentionally brought the prefect over to make something happen (or to keep something from happening 👀) is a popular one (and very fun to think about!).

But if I were attempting to champion that theory, I personally would not use this particular line as proof! It could, of course, be setting a foundation so that a future reveal does not blindside the players 👀 But the line by itself is vague, which is probably by design!

And there were two more Crowley lines that I found interesting!

「私の全力を知りたい？随分と怖いもの知らずですねえ……学園長として心配になってしまいます」

"You want to know my full power? You are quite audacious…as headmage, it is worrying."

Crowley is not the first character to comment on the audaciousness/fearlessness of the prefect: Malleus has a very similar line but their phrasing is different, with Crowley saying 怖いもの知らず, while Malleus says 恐れを知らない. Malleus repeats this same phrasing at least twice in the original game, though it it written in two different ways on EN.

Both Crowley and Malleus' phrasings are two ways of saying something that could be localized as the same thing in English, but subtle turns of phrase are proving to be very important in the original game.

For example, when you set Crowley to the homescreen he will say, "私をお呼びですか？"

And this is an interesting parallel to Malleus', "僕を呼んだ?"

Malleus’ phrase tends to be rewritten as various different expressions on EN such as “You called?,” “Was it you who called me?” and “Did you need something?”

But in the original game he always uses the exact same phrase, which is different from Crowley’s “私をお呼びですか？” while meaning the same thing.

While it would normally not be an issue for a localizer to take something that seems repetitive in one language and give it more flair in the other, it seems that this repetition was intentional and maybe should have been kept consistent to the original game?

Especially because English does not have things like different words for "I" like Japanese does (Crowley uses "watashi" while Malleus uses "boku") to help tell one person's phrasing apart from another's.

EN experienced a similarly unfortunate problem with Idia’s, “Leave it to your big bro,” with the phrase getting rewritten into "I'll get you trilling like a canary" and "I got this!" on EN, presumably before Aniplex USA realized that it was being repeated word-for-word for a reason.

Is it possible that the information that Aniplex USA receives in advance is limited, so they just do not know which of these phrases are safe to change and which need to be kept accurate to the original game?

With all the variations to Malleus' "You called for me?" on EN, Crowley has the potential to be localized with a phrase that is identical to at least one of Malleus' multiple English-language interpretations. In the original game, however, Malleus' phrasing is consistent, and completely different from the phrasing used by Crowley, while meaning the same thing! (and the "same but different" pattern has the potential to be very significant 👀)

#twstask #twisted wonderland

[sortaawkward]

I have read the PJO series many, many, many times over my life, and so objectively I knew the ways in which Percy and Luke were two sides of the same coin- even Percy himself recognized how easy it could have been for him to have ended up in Luke's place. But, I just watched an animatic on TikTok that kind of blew the lid off of it for me. The funny thing though? After watching the video, my first thought wasn't about Percy and Luke; my first thought after it looped was wow, I never realized how paralleled the lives of May Castellan and Sally Jackson are.

It doesn't require much delving into fandom content to come across any one of the myriad posts touching on Percy's "mama's boy" title because he is one- plain and simple. However, this particular TikTok had granted the title to Luke freaking Castellan- something I had never seen, or perhaps never cognized, before. Naturally it got me thinking: how would Percy react if May's fate had happened to Sally, instead?

Sally Jackson has true-sight; it's what led to her meeting Poseidon in the first place. And much like Hermes wanting to stay around/with May- Poseidon, too, wanted to keep Sally around. He went as far as offering to build her a castle on the sea floor for her to live in so he could come visit her.

I've struggled with Luke's anger towards Hermes about May's fate for a long time. I struggled because, while I knew that some of it was simply the irrationality of human emotions and the fact that Luke was a child, I couldn't get over the fact that Luke so blatantly chose to overlook the fact that Hermes was against May's attempt to take on the Oracle's spirit. Now, however, if we look at it from the perspective of "if it were Percy and Sally" I can understand that Percy would blame his father because by simply existing and being in her life he condemned her to this fate.

Perhaps Luke did know/understand that Hermes had tried to talk May out of her plan to become the oracle. Perhaps Luke just didn't care; what if his issue was with the existence of Hermes and the rest of the gods and the simple existence of their world? If the world of the gods and demigods and CHB had never come into contact with his mother's world- if the world of Olympus had never existed at all, then May Castellan would have been totally fine.

This might be nothing, or maybe everybody has already come to this realization and I'm just arriving late to the party. May Castellan was also born with the gift of prophecy whereas Sally was not- so it's not even like an exact parallel. I had just never looked at Luke under the scope of a boy who loved his mother the same way that Percy loves Sally, and it kind of blew my mind. Anywho, if anyone reads this sorry for subjecting you to my stream-of-consciousness; I just needed a sounding board (to write it out) in order to organize my thoughts.

#percy jackson #sally jackson #luke castellan #may castellan #hermes #poseidon #percy jackon and the olympians #pjo series #rick riordan #percy jackson series #spoilers

[mania-sama]

A Look into Mental Health: Jujutsu Kaisen Analysis

"Being a child is not a sin." (Nanami Kento, Jujutsu Kaisen)

With the release of Chapter 251, I've seen many horrible takes from dudebros saying that Megumi has "sold" the team. This makes me unreasonably angry because of course it does, so obviously my next plan of action is to take all of my hour-long rants about the mental health of JJK characters and put it here, where said dudebros will never see my (correct) analysis in their entire life. Oh well.

One thing Gege is really, really good at is creating believable, undeniably human, and complex characters. Every character has a different set of motivations, beliefs, ideals, and especially mental states. The constant theme of Jujutsu Kiasen has been "Strength vs Weakness". While the clearest interpretation can be seen through the physical attributes of the characters (Gojo being the strongest sorcerer of his time due to his abilities, and Miwa being one of the weakest, again, due to her abilities), it is also directly applied to the mental strength of characters. No two characters are able to withstand the same trauma and come out the exact same, just as no two real people can process the same trauma. Not only is it a result of nature, as people are genetically different and therefore process information differently, but a product of nurture - in other words, character motivation and environment.

This is where we come to the current state of the manga, Chapter 251. The fated Yuuji vs Megumi debate. I keep seeing people wildly misunderstanding these two, and why it's so important that Megumi isn't standing up to fight, why he isn't able to handle his trauma, when Yuuji can.

Gege writes phenomenal characters. And I want to express just how well done they are, making Jujutsu Kaisen actually kind of deserve its popularity, because some people only care about power scaling. I'm going to touch on Megumi last, because understanding all of the other characters' makes his visible struggle that much more impactful.

1. Geto Suguru

I want to start this mental health analysis with Geto. He is the best representation of depression I've ever seen in Shonen. It doesn't take a hundred chapters to showcase a character's downfall. It doesn't take a hundred significant events to cause a character to break down. Gege shows the best, realistic mental breakdown using only a handful of chapters, and still makes it slow and painful.

Depression can start because of a big event, but it doesn't take more for it to worsen. Untreated, depression runs a vicious course that eats a person through slowly but effectively. It isn't one screaming session, hands clutched over the head and cursing God and the world. It's everything piled onto each other. It's coming to the end of that pile and realizing that nothing will ever change.

This is Geto Suguru's story. He has a big event: the fight with Toji and the failure to save Riko. But his mental health journey was fated to decline, even without the fight and failure. The root issue of his depression came from his ability: Cursed Spirit Manipulation. As long as he kept devouring the embodiment of every vile, human emotion, the more he would lose himself to that vileness. He wasn't changing anything; he couldn't help but continue to swim in negativity because that's all he could do.

Gege wasn't making a commentary on Geto's ability. He was talking about people, as they are, and how staying in a bad situation will not always make you stronger. It can, and most likely will, make you worse. A direct comparison to the sixteen-year-old Geto would be a sixteen-year-old at school, surrounded by people who bully and pick on them with harsh words. The kid will eventually consume all of that bullying, all of that negativity, into their being, because there is simply nowhere else to go. School is mandatory; they can't just leave. They eventually feel isolated, with all that vileness piled on. Even if they have friends, those people could never understand what it's like to put up with humiliation and cruelty day after day.

It's not rational to push away a support system, but who said human beings are always rational? People make mistakes. They don't make the right decisions. Geto didn't. He saw someone offer him a chance at change, a possible light at the top of his pile and twisted it to match his overwhelming negativity. He left and swore to destroy the world that made him the way he is, just as that bullied child may turn away from school and society in whatever form that may take.

I want to touch on the physical aspects of Geto's depression, too. I noted this in a previous analysis I did on him (his character is just that amazing, what can I say?), but Gege knew that the mind can't be affected alone. Geto was drawn with deep eyebags, a nod to an inability to sleep or needing to sleep all the time. Depression makes you tired all the time. Everything becomes difficult. He sits with his back hunched, resting his weight on his knees, like sitting upright is too hard. When someone speaks to him, he blinks and takes a second too long to look over or respond, like speaking takes too much energy. To me, it even looked like he was becoming thinner. It's extremely difficult to maintain a schedule of exercise and mealtimes when your mind is fighting an active war against itself.

Again, a beautiful representation of depression. Geto means a lot to me in this aspect.

2. Gojo Satoru

In comparison to Geto, Gojo's horrible mental health is a lot subtler. Depression isn't the correct term, but you don't have to be depressed to be sad. Sadness is his stagnant state; he has moments of bliss, goals to work towards, a reason to keep going, to continue living, to continue chasing the sun over the horizon, but he does return to the same place he is always at when the lights turn off and he's painfully reminded of this one fact: he is isolated.

All of Gojo's problems start and end with isolation. From the moment he was born, everyone knew he was different. He knew he was different. Through glimpses of his childhood and honestly reading between the lines, it's obvious he never played with kids his age. People don't just develop a superiority complex with their only drive to be better than literally everyone else for no other reason than to get better. It comes from somewhere, and in Gojo's case, it's from his young childhood. It seriously messed him up; even now, he can't shake the lesson that "Strength is the only way to success and happiness".

This is what made Geto so important. Geto was somebody who could share the burden of being the strongest. Geto was someone his age who understood him in a way Shoko could not, though they both were able to see Gojo beyond his capabilities as a Jujutsu sorcerer. Gojo then had somebody to base his moral principles on. Because he couldn't connect with anybody else, he had no basis other than strength. Geto taught him why it was important for the strong to protect the weak.

Then everything went wrong. Gojo became isolated again in his strength and lost the only person who could plausibly stand with him. "Are you the strongest because you're Gojo Satoru, or are you Gojo Satoru because you're the strongest?" Gojo was young, then, and fresh-faced into his newfound godhood. He didn't kill Geto in that moment because he wanted to deny the claim that he is nothing without his strength, that he isn't as shallow as he was raised to be.

But he knew better. He grew older, he killed his best friend, and he realized that he was nothing without his strength. He never got over Geto. In order to cope with the guilt of being unable to save him when he left, he adopted a whole kid, thinking that if he wasn't strong enough to save Geto, maybe he could save Megumi. But there it is all over again - he never broke from the cycle of strength defining his worth. Saving Megumi would define his strength, right? It would prove Geto wrong, right? He raised Megumi under the same logic (that the only way to save his sister is to be strong), only ridding the boy of the crushing isolation.

In this way, Gojo isn't mentally weak. He didn't abandon society and everyone who loved him, instead choosing to hone the trauma of his isolated childhood into a weapon and teach the next generation to be better than himself. He isn't depressed, but he isn't happy. You can't be happy if you're alone all of the time. He hoped Megumi could be someone to stand by him, but in the end, he failed to save Megumi. His strength couldn't save him, just as it couldn't save Geto.

He isn't mentally strong. He isn't weak, either. He is horribly, painfully average. He's not weak enough to be saved, but not strong enough to save others. His childhood plagues him, but not to the point where it prevents him from living. He killed Geto but was unable to bury the body. Gojo is everything he never wanted to be.

As it turns out, strength can't buy you happiness. Gojo may have understood that, but he couldn't abandon it, even to the bitter end. Just as a human struggles to shed their conditioning. Not everyone can break the cycle, but we are always trying our best to work with what we've been dealt.

3. Okkotsu Yuuta

I'm putting Yuuta in between Gojo & Geto and Itadori & Megumi because he is, in a way, a bridge between the two. Geto and Gojo have lived their lives; their stories are complete and ended in tragedy. Itadori and Megumi's are not. They are still actively struggling and fighting their physical and mental battles; their stories have yet to be completed.

Yuuta's story isn't technically completed (ignoring everything that happened in the recent chapter with him for the sake of MY mental health), he is still a success story. He is the average protagonist who started from the bottom and ended up at the top. Only he, as Gege has done time and time again, has a slightly stronger focus on mental health than most other Shonen. He is success where Gojo & Geto failed, and the success that Itadori & Megumi are narratively striving for.

At the beginning, Yuuta was depressed and suicidal. He was bullied at school and involuntarily hurting others. Instead of becoming resentful of the world, he pushed all of the vileness inward. His guilt caused him to try to take his life, presumably multiple times, but Rika stopped him before he could succeed. His life was effectively out of his hands; he felt powerless with all of the bodies stacking around him, and he couldn't atone for "his" actions.

His mental health, as it was, was in shambles. Gojo then offered him a way forward. Yuuta's mental health did not improve overnight. It was when he made friends at Jujutsu High, and developed a support system, that he was able to relieve his anxiety and realize that life is not so bad after all. That all of this pain and suffering and loss - it will pass.

The most important thing to acknowledge when it comes to Yuuta is the sheer fact that he was not alone, nor did he allow himself to be alone. Unlike Gojo, who still had Shoko and Nanami after Geto left but refused to connect with them, Yuuta allowed himself to get close to those around him. They didn't know the suffering he'd undergone for so many years. They didn't know what it was like to be him, but that was okay. He knew that they had empathy, that even though they could never experience his life, they could still be there for him now when he falls.

When given the opportunity to surrender, Yuuta stands in the face of one Geto Suguru and swears to protect his friends and fight with Rika. He's so far removed from the boy who tried to kill himself at the beginning of the manga, and that's because he let himself be changed. He did not succumb. He had friends, he knew. People that would miss him if he left, and people whom he would regret leaving.

This stays consistent with his character. He doesn't let himself become isolated in his strength or his experiences. He's much stronger than everyone else in the room, he's a special grade and he knows that, but he still treats everyone like they are equals. Like they are his friends, like they are people who could share this burden of existence with him. This is something that Gojo couldn't accomplish, which lends to the fact that Gojo had a very off-hand teaching method when it came to mentoring Yuuta. Instead of influencing him under this idea of strength conquers all, he let Yuuta develop far away from the ideals of the Japanese Jujutsu Society.

And, in the end, the fact of him being physically strong - a special-grade sorcerer from the get-go - never helped him in his mental health. In fact, it made him miserable until he learned to get a handle on Rika. His winning or losing that fight with Geto wasn't the point of his character, it was reckoning with the fact that he is okay now. That he can embrace the ugly part of him with dignity instead of guilt.

4. Itadori Yuuji

Itadori's entire character is that he has an unbreakable spirit. As the only one who can bear the soul of Sukuna, he started off like Yuuta, only on the opposite end of the mental health spectrum. When we first see him, he's happy, spending his afternoons with the Occult Club and watching movies.

... What happened?

Like Geto, everything piled on very slowly. So slow that I'm not even sure he felt the true effects of everything he experienced up until the fall of Shibuya. It starts with the death of grandfather, whose parting words "Just save as many people as you can" haunt him even now during the final fight with Sukuna. He was never given time to properly grieve his grandfather, just as he never had time to grieve the brother curses, Junpei, Nanami, Nobara, Gojo, Higurama. At the end of it all, when the fighting is over, I have to wonder what will become of the boy that realizes he's lost most of the people he loved.

The one time he did try to process it, when he realized that he couldn't control Sukuna, was when he broke down in Shibuya. Sukuna leveled an entire city. For the boy who never wanted to kill another human being for fear of devaluing life, the weight of his weakness killing thousands was crushing. Then Nanami died. Nobara died (still hanging onto that unknown status but I digress). Both are right in front of him, and powerless to prevent Mahito from disintegrating their bodies. So, obviously, Itadori broke down. The boy with the unshakeable spirit, the only person who could contain the King of Curses, has his psyche completely shattered.

He laid on the ground, and he wouldn't have gotten back up if there wasn't somebody to help him, to be there with him. Todo pulled him back together, stitched back up the broken into somebody who has allies and people to fight for. Itadori has the success that Yuuta had, only Itadori did not come out of it with better mental health.

After the breakdown, his unshakeable spirit was nothing more than the will to keep fighting. He cares little for himself, and he tries to distance himself from people to prevent them from dying from his cursed hands. He is jumping, quickly, down the same rabbit hole that Geto fell down. One big event, and they realize just how tall the pile already is, and that it will never stop growing. Unlike Geto, however, he continues to get overbearing support from those around him. Against his will. He can't push them away, for they refuse to leave his side. Yuuta, Choso, Megumi, even Higurama. They won't let him fall. This makes him better off than someone alone, in a sense. He can withstand his trauma when others may not.

Even so, even so, there is only so much support, the lack of self-isolation, can do when the traumas keep actively repeating. When he says that he will gladly die to defeat Sukuna, it is not said with the same tone that another Shonen protagonist would say it. Take Naruto for example. If he were to go into a battle to protect, say, Sasuke, he would scream, "I'll die to protect him." We understand that his willpower is stronger than his self-preservation, but we don't get the idea that he actively wants to die. He'll die if he has to. Now, Itadori says the same thing, but about saving Megumi. He says, "I'll gladly die." There is something different. His willpower is leaps and bounds stronger than his self-preservation, but that's not only it. There is an undercurrent of severe suicidal ideation prevalent in Itadori's tone. It's not that he will die to win, it's that a part of him wants for this to be his final fight. For it all to be over. To save Megumi, then atone for the sin of being too weak to save Shibuya, or being unable to stop the Culling Games, or letting Megumi get hurt when all he wanted was to keep him safe.

I'd call it more along the lines of passive suicidal ideation. He doesn't plan to kill himself, but what would it mean for him to go into dangerous situations without protection? What would it mean for him to succumb to his wounds after he wakes Megumi's soul and kills Sukuna? To not even try to seek medical attention? He's guilty. He believes everything that happened in Shibuya and after is his fault. When faced with the executioner's sword, he was ready to die for his sins, if not for the goal of ending the Games. There is a fine line between willing to die for those you love versus wanting to die for those you love.

Right now, Itadori is fighting to save one person, like his grandfather said. He is not fighting to survive. And that's what people fail to understand about Itadori when they compare him to the other members of the cast. These power-scaling dudebros don't understand that their favorite OP main character has fallen apart at the seams, that his unshakeable spirit to save people doesn't include himself.

5. Fushiguro Megumi

Here we finally come to the question: Why can Itadori take it when Megumi can't? There is a very similar quote that you probably think of whenever you hear this question asked. It's from The Outsiders: "Dally is tougher than I am. Why can I take it when Dally can't?" The answer to this question that Ponyboy gives is the same we can attribute to Megumi. "And then I knew. Johnny was the only thing Dally loved. And now Johnny was gone."

The entire reason Megumi became a Jujutsu sorcerer was to protect his sister. When he was five years old and probably too young to understand most of the words Gojo said, he accepted the offer of training to become a sorcerer in exchange for Tsumiki's happiness. Every day, he fought to protect her. He only had one goal in entering the Culling Games: to prevent Tsumiki from having to participate.

It's easy to attribute Megumi's constant attempts at summoning Mahoraga to a lack of will to live - suicidal ideation, the same that Itadori now experiences. On one hand, I do understand that he has a fundamental lack of care for his own life, but on the other, I don't think that he intends to throw it all away every single time. He just didn't know any better. Ignorance can lead to death as easily as intentionally seeking it out. That's why he changes his habit after Gojo gives him a lesson in risking death versus dying to win; Megumi still has someone to live for, after all.

Megumi's mental health was already rocky from the start. Not that it was in shambles like Yuuta, but he wasn't fully stable. Like a lot of teenagers, he's moody, somewhat reclusive, and only really likes one or two people maximum. Teenagers aren't known for their sunshine mental health anyway.

Megumi was given time to grieve Itadori after he first died. This trauma of losing him in front of his eyes stuck with him, but he was allowed a grace period of two months to grieve with Nobara. He experienced Shibuya, too, but he still had that one important person to protect. His mental health was alright at this point, all things considered. As long as his sister was alive, he would be fine.

Sukuna knew this. So Sukuna killed Tsumiki using only the Ten Shadows Teqchnique. The one person Megumi spent his whole life dedicated to, was killed by his own cursed technique, his own failure to suppress Sukuna.

In the void of his soul, Megumi was alone. Truly, utterly alone. The only person nearby was Sukuna, the murderer of his sister, the murderer of thousands upon thousands of people. He drowned in the ceremonial bath of crushed curses to hold his soul down in the depths of despair, literally drenched in all of the vileness the world has to offer. Sukuna killed Gojo using Mahoraga's adaption ability, and before that, Megumi was forced to take several of Gojo's mind-altering domain expansions.

Already, he had given up. He gave up when his sister died, but the rest ground a pointed spur into his neck. When Itadori shakes his soul, Megumi is repeating, "That's enough." He was at the end of his rope a long time ago. What more is there to keep living for? He doesn't want to live with the blood of his sister, the blood of the man who practically raised him, and the blood of countless others drenching his hands.

Sukuna killed all of these people, not Megumi. But then, Sukuna killed of those people in Shibuya, not Itadori. Why can Itadori take it? Why can he keep fighting when Megumi lays broken on the ground? Itadori wasn't alone. And Megumi has never been known for his unshakeable spirit. That is the one thing that Itadori can hold over everybody else, the one trait that everyone admires. He was born to shoulder the burden of the world. Megumi wasn't. Megumi wants to die. He is not passively suicidal, for he has no goals left to complete, a plan to die within the body no longer inhabited alone. He is suicidal. He would drive a stake through his heart if it meant relieving his pain. He doesn't want to do it anymore. He's had enough.

And Itadori was in this position once, too? Perhaps not as directly, but he was there. Here is the moment that the protagonist gives the motivating speech to will someone to keep fighting, that life is worth living. I realized today that this is not something Itadori has done yet. He hasn't had a grand speech that's not been about his own willpower. He's never encouraged someone else to keep living in the way that you would expect from the main character. This is his moment, I suppose. He needs to be the person for Megumi that Todo was for him. He has to show Megumi that he isn't alone.

He needs to save Megumi when, all those years ago, Gojo couldn't save Geto.

I don't think some of this fanbase understands how horrible Gege has to be at writing if he just. Let Megumi get up to fight in Chapter 251. All this time, he has shown how Megumi has been defeated. He showed him crumbled on the ground, unmoving. It shouldn't be a surprise that all of the measures Sukuna took to ensnare Megumi's soul worked. Megumi is suicidal after the people he loves have all died because of his technique. God forbid a sixteen-year-old is unable to cope with his trauma alone.

Honorable Mentions:

There are a lot more characters in this story that represent/show mental illness that I didn't go into depth on but are worth mentioning. It was easier to only talk about the major characters since we spend so much time with them and I can fully flesh out everything that should/can be said about them. Anyway, here are a few more that are notably well-written in their mental struggles:

Yoshino Junpei. His story arc follows very similarly to Geto, except he is the bullied student I was making a reference to. Depressed, alone with a mother whose habits he can't stand, he turned to someone he thought could provide him a better life. Interestingly, he is a good representation of the type of children that tend to be groomed. That's surely what happened to him. Mahito used him, then discarded him for his own gains.

Ieiri Shoko. Her main struggle can be seen through her smoking habits. She's been through a lot, lost so many people, and has to keep healing sorcerers only for them to die. Eventually, she was able to come to terms with this. She kicked her smoking habit at the same time she kicked the vicious mental cycle of caring too much about the patient on her table. It's no wonder she picked up a cigarette, for the first time in a while, when Geto led the phantom parade.

Zenin Maki. She works as a very good contrast to Megumi. They both lost their sisters, the people they loved the most, but she turned all of her grief to killing the Zenin clan and gaining Heavenly Restriction. But this, this is because she could do so. There is simply nothing Megumi can do as a soul trapped in his own body. Her grief made her stronger, while for most, it made them weaker.

Inumaki Toge. He isn't seen a lot, but his story is ultimately quite compelling. A boy who hurt many when he was young. He turned his guilt into kindness, a will to protect. He tends a garden to raise plants healthily, for God's sake. He's one of the examples that shows Yuuta that your past actions don't define you, but instead, what you choose to do going forward.

I am not proofreading any of this before I post it. Sorry if it is borderline unreadable with spelling / grammatical errors.

#jjk #jujutsu kaisen #jujutsu kaisen rant #jjk gojo #jjk geto #jjk yuuta #jjk itadori #jjk yuuji #jjk megumi #jjk fushiguro #jjk satoru #jjk suguru #jjk okkotsu #itafushi undertones i won't lie #but it's not about them sigh #friends or not everything still applies #jjk analysis #jujutsu kaisen analysis #jjk character analysis #jujutsu kaisen character analysis #jjk 251 #jjk chapter 251 #jujutsu kaisen 251

[strangertheories]

It is my biggest pet peeve when (mostly) straight people try to make queer people feel guilty for shipping two same gender characters together or say it's problematic to ship them, so I've made a little list debunking their ideas. I'll be talking a lot about Byler but this also applies to Elmax, Ronance, Steddie and queer ships in general.

"Why can't people be friends anymore?" Why can't a guy and a girl be friends either? Why aren't you saying this about Chrissy and Eddie shippers? Unless the issue is that they're gay.

"You're assuming Will is gay based on stereotypes!" Of course, the horrible stereotype that gay guys like men but not women, how problematic of me.

"You're fetishizing children!" No one says this about M*leven shippers. The fact that you view a queer relationship as inherently sexual and adult is sexualising young people much more than shipping Will and Mike does.

"Men will be scared to be affectionate to their friends in real life in case people think that they're gay!" First of all, I doubt some straight guy is going to stop hanging out with his friend because some random person on the internet drew Steddie fanart. And second of all, why are we treating straight men's fear of being perceived as gay as a perfectly valid and normal fear? (I elaborate a bit on this point in the reblogs)

"Why is it okay to say Mike Wheeler is gay but not say Robin is straight? You're erasing his sexuality!" First of all, when did Mike say he's straight? Sure he said he loves Eleven (which I doubt he does anyways) but bi people exist. Plus, there are so many straight characters and ships out there. Straight people don't look up lists of shows with canonical queer representation or watch a show because it has a straight girl in it. Lesbians like myself look up to characters like Robin and they are meaningful to them. No straight person feels seen in their heterosexuality because of Mike Wheeler. The only exception in my opinion is when people headcanon straight characters who are dating trans people as bi like Tao from Heartstopper because that comes off as transphobic.

"They're too young to know that they're gay and you're forcing a sexuality on them." I've known I'm gay since I was eleven or twelve which is the age they are in S1. And yet again, why aren't you saying this about straight people! Everyone accepted that Dustin and Lucas liked Max in S2. Yet Will is too young to know who he likes... Interesting.

"Grown adults wanting two young boys to kiss each other is pretty weird." The issue with this is again the hypocrisy. Adult M*leven shippers don't get told this. Mike kissed Eleven in S1 and it was completely cute and non-sexual because they are children so of course it isn't sexual. Hell they even made out when they were 13 and no one complained. Why would that be any different if he kissed Mike instead of Will? Yet again, people view queer people as being inherently sexual but queer people get cute little crushes or want to kiss people sometimes too. It's not a sexual thing. It's the exact same as a straight person doing it.

Anyways that's my rant done. It just annoys me when half of their arguements saying why it's wrong to ship these characters are just masked homophobia, even if the person saying it doesn't realize. Feel free to add more to this in the reblogs, this is just what I've seen.

#stranger things #byler #byeler #will byers #mike wheeler #steddie #ronance #elmax #jargyle

[silvery-orchid]

my vices are slow and steady.

neuvillete let you make your choice once. and now you are standing in front of him again after your divorce. you should be glad his patience takes on a special shape when with you.

possessive! neuvillete x gn! reader. (a small gift to thank the neuvillette lovers from my inbox.)

his office rings with an all familiar sound. it is two o'clock in the afternoon. four years ago when he bought this clock, you said you hated the sound it made.

'for such an extravagant clock, it doesn't sound cute at all.' neuvillette did not understand what you meant until two years later. the chimes of this clock sounded like the bells that were in your wedding. and he had to agree with you that it was a horrible sound.

neuvillette always thought that patience was one of his virtues but while he was sitting there (in the middle of the row because sitting up front would have been dangerous), he finally realized that it was a vice when applied to you.

he was too patient; too lenient some would say. he held you in such a high light that when you started dating the foolish man, he thought it was a simple phase. extending you his grace and waiting for you to come to your senses seemed like the best option. and sometimes he considers the rest a blur. while he was busy dealing with fontaine's court and the underground rebellion, that foolish man worth less than the dust on his shelves slipped a ring on your finger.

neuvillete voiced with resounding reason to try and get you to reconsider. he was your dear friend after all. tough love has never been a stranger to your conversations with him. because of it, he felt no issue saying that you should break it off.

'i asked you for your opinion about my happiness, but it seems you consider me incapable of choosing.' were your exact words. thinking of it now, you said them to him while this same clock was chiming away. he remembers the way you walked out and the wedding invite he got only a few days later. you attached a small note next to it. - i asked you once and you said what you had to say. allow me to prove that this is not a mistake. -

he still has that same note in his desk on the very bottom. he threw out the invite as soon as your wedding was over but would showing you the note now be far too cruel?

neuvillette did not consider his patience to be a waste however. deciding that he was too patient only made him realize he had to continue with it a bit more until you came around.

oh, and after only 2 years of a shaky marriage, he can hear your footsteps on the tiles in front of his office hallway.

truly, your choice was utterly idiotic. it was bound to fail. marrying a simple toy maker? really? you needed someone far better than that. and now you were coming back to him. he knows those footsteps belong to you. the click-clack of your shoes is unmistakable to his heart. the slower third step you take makes his chest heave. he reminds himself that this is relief and that anger existed when your steps were echoing on the way to the isle.

he decides not to show you the note; he decides not to be angry. as long as you are walking in his direction, he can find it in himself to forgive your foolishness. but he can feel his patience has hit a limit as your hand turn the doorknob.

he has waited long enough for you too be back here; long enough until your dumb decision expired. would he speak first or would you? he did visit you a few times after you got married but he hadn't seen you for half a year now. he takes a deep breath as you take the first step inside the room of chessboard tiles. he refuses to take any other role in your life from now on. no rooks or bishops or knights - he will be your king. and he is afraid this is the one decision you cannot make because he knows better.

he straightens up, makes sure it seems like he is writing his signature down. only you are allowed to enter his office without knocking but why should you know that? you have no right to know all of the exceptions he gives you.

'i see you still have that ugly clock in here.' typical, of course you would lead with that. it causes his face to relax as a small smile shows. 'if i said it reminds me of you, would you hold it against me'

you are halfway through his office. you halt on the white tile. your arms are halfway outstretched. they make it clear you had the intention of embracing him. when they fall back down as you stop, he has to keep it in himself not to tsk. instead, he puts down the pen and gets up.

'would i hold it against you that you said i remind you of an ugly clock?'

neuvillette is already in front of you, he makes sure to take up all your visual space. he stands on the black tile as he continues what you failed to do. he puts one hand on your back, holds your waist with the other as he brings you in for a hug. he can feel his line of patience start to diminish once your bodies are so close to one another. he was right to wait, from now on he will ensure you two become even closer.

your body warmth and your scent should all belong to him. he breaks the embrace once he realizes the ugly truth he hated to imagine; you were even closer with another man. neuvillette can feel copper in his throat at the images that flood his mind. for a second while moving away, his gloved fingers hold onto your hip with some roughness but it is immediately gone once he takes a deep breath.

it isn't anything that cannot be fixed.

'how could i hold it against you when you were the reason i managed to get those divorce papers and hearings approved so fast?'

you truly have no idea how lucky you are to have him. wait, no; you had no idea how lucky you were to have him. but now you do and he will make sure to use it to his advantage.

'i am glad you sent me a letter asking for my help when you did. it is unfortunate that our laws and procedures change so fast that even those like you, who abandoned our service, have trouble navigating them.'

lying comes easy to him now. it was an oh so fortunate thing that brought you right back here. he can see his words sting and make your shoulders tense up but you have to be reminded of your mistake. he said he was patient, he never said he wouldn't hold it against you with remarks like these.

until you live, neuvillette will keep reminding you of your failure; of the idiotic man you choose and how you went against his advice.

you bite your lower lip for a second. it is on the left side. the left corner means you want to ask a question. the right corner means you are hesitating with a remark. of course he knows your patterns.

'neu...did you perhaps know what would happen? and that is why you were against me marrying him?'

he has to hold back his laughter deep inside. you look so cute asking him a question like that. it doesn't really matter what he knew about that man. all that matters is that he knew no other man would be good for you. his vices always had a way of slowly growing. there is no need for you to know the lengths he went to to keep his patience up. take the new legislation he introduced to ensure only certain toy makers would be kept afloat. or, take that bar worker that your ex-husband cheated on you with. he spent 5 hours choosing the perfect candidate based on the stack of papers with the name and image of foolish choice.

'have i ever had anything besides your best interests in my mind? come, we shouldn't be late to the magic show. lynette and lyney have improved drastically since the last time you saw them.'

perhaps it is another vice of his. but he refuses to have you come back to him only to speak of another. there is a time and a place for everything and neuvillette is patient enough to wait for the right moments to use your weaknesses against you.

#genshin neuvillette #genshin yandere #yandere neuvillette #neuvillette x reader #genshin x reader #yan genshin #genshin impact #genshin imagines

[thmles]

| You're Losing Me. (2)

- I can't find a pulse, my heart won't start anymore.

[pairing: miguel o'hara x spider-person!reader]

[warnings: sweet to angst, mentions of physical fight, blood, bruises, mention of deaths]

[a/n: this has been a long time coming!! i've tried to write these past few days but never really finished writing this but i was feeling a lil sad tonight so i managed to focus my motivation on writing this! i also went through some theories on reddit and twitter about miguel's canon theory bc i honestly question it?? anyway i hope i did the first 'you're losing me' fic justice with this, since i tried my best writing this. hope y'all enjoy 🫶🏻]

You were smart enough to leave the watch that was issued to every member of the Spider Society at your apartment. Miguel had been tracking your location only to see ‘you’ in your apartment. He blocked you from creating portals and tracking the location of him, Jess, and Ben. It was for your own good, anyway. He was looming over Brooklyn on a rooftop as rain lightly poured over the city. He looks down at his hand, the very same you returned your promise ring he had given you a year prior. Miguel figured that he’d talk to you after he brings in Miles, that he’ll try to make you understand his side. Miles was a kid, he doesn’t know better. He doesn’t understand how astronomical the consequence of letting his father live. With the help of his suit, Miguel is able to store the ring on the right side of his hip. The hunt for Miles had just begun.

-

You on the other hand managed to get to Gwen’s dimension. A somehow colorful yet gloomy version of Brooklyn. With a few taps on your (much better) watch, you located the apartment complex where Gwen lives. The watch even gave you the exact number of their apartment. Brooklyn was glowing in the dark of the night as you swung through the city. It reminded you of your Brooklyn. A beautiful city that never sleeps.

You approached the rooftop of the apartment and gracefully landed on it. After a quick change (which really just consisted of you taking off your mask and slipping on a jacket you managed to grab before you left your apartment), you slowly descended the stairs from the rooftop to their apartment.

A knock on the door pulled Gwen’s and his father’s attention. It was a long time coming, talking about their feelings, the truth, and being Spider-Woman. “Captain Stacy? I’m uh, a friend of Gwen,” The voice called out. Gwen smiled knowingly at her dad as he stared back at her in confusion. “She said she’s coming back home today and she left something in my house.” The voice continued.

Gwen let out a laugh and quickly opened the door before her dad could do it.

“You came.” Gwen beamed at you. You returned a smile and pulled her in a hug.

“You really think I’d leave you by yourself?” You mumbled in her ear.

She hugged you tighter before pulling away. Her dad looked surprised as Gwen seemed to forget she was in her Spider-Woman attire. Gwen looked between you and her father before exclaiming, “Oh, dad! This is my friend! They have been uhm, a really good friend of mine!” Her dad motioned at her attire. Gwen laughed as you waved at her dad. “Don’t worry, dad. They know.”

-

After a quick goodbye, you gave Gwen the watch you had made similar to the ones issued by the Spider Society. After a few dimension hopping, you managed to assemble a team of Spider-People who hoped to help Miles as Gwen looked for the latter. Gwen detected that Miguel, Jess, and Ben were at Earth-1610 to search for Miles but Miles wasn’t in the dimension. After a quick talk with the team (consisting of Margo, Spider-Noir, Peni, Pav, Peter B. and Mayday, Peter Porker, and Hobie) you were quick to realize that Miles was sent to Earth-42. The group agreed that they should rendezvous with Gwen, but were reluctant at your decision to go to Earth-1610 as a distraction for Miguel.

“What do you think Miguel’s going to say after seeing you’re going against him?” Peter B. asks as you both stand before a portal to Earth-1610. The night sky was cold and you were jealous of Peter’s robe. Your eyes softened as you looked at Mayday looking up at you curiously. You booped her nose and it made her giggle.

“Well, I’m about to find out.”

-

It wasn’t hard to find Miguel. Looming across Miles’ house, scanning if Miles made it home. Silently landing behind him, your heart ached as you stared at his back. It doesn’t even feel like it’s your Miguel anymore. It’s almost as if he’s out of your reach, that no matter what you’ll say will go right through him.

Shakily you called out, “You know he’s not here.” You approached him slowly until there was a reasonable distance between the two of you. The rain pattered on your body as you crossed your arms in front of your chest. You were shaking from nervousness, sadness, and the cold rain.

“I know. I was waiting for you.” Miguel turned to face you. His mask came off, his eyes bore into yours and you swear you could feel your heart drop to your stomach. You took your mask off and threw it in front of him. He looked at your discarded mask before looking at you in confusion.

“I’m sorry it had to end this way, Miguel.” Your voice softly said, getting in a fighting stance. You knew you had to help Miles. You would do anything to help if it were anyone in that situation. You owe it to your own father to help save everyone, to help save someone’s father. Growing up without one was one of the hardest things you ever went through. You didn’t want that for anyone else.

“So, you’re ending everything we went through for a kid?” He scoffed as he approached you, You were quick to back up to maintain the distance you guys had.

“Miguel, that is the point! He is just a kid!” You exclaimed. Miguel rolled his eyes and replied, “A kid who knows nothing about the damage he is causing!”

“It was your fault! You didn’t have to create the Spider-Society or replace someone’s identity! Isn’t that the very reason that universe collapsed!?” You yelled, leaning towards him as he looked at you in shock. “That you willingly replaced someone, and continued to do so? That your actions were the very reason that everyone died in that universe?” Miguel could only look at you as his eyes turned scarlet. You knew he was seething with anger.

“And that you, Jess, and Ben, of all people,” You scoffed as you glared at him. “Have the nerve to tell Miles that he doesn’t belong. When the three of you were never bit, right?” You finished. “Oh and your ‘canon theory’ is bullshit. What if that Spider-Person isn’t close to a police captain or doesn’t have an uncle who needs to die? What then?” Honestly, you were shocked at how much you had told him. Truth be told, the things you said were things you kept to yourself for months.

Miguel didn’t know what to say, but he knew you were right. His supposed theory was only based off of most Spider-People, but it doesn’t guarantee that those events happen to every single one. To him, it felt like an attack on him and his ego. That you questioned his every move despite those actions were done to protect you. Because he can’t risk losing you.

-

The next thing you knew, Miguel launched at you. Thankfully, you had your ‘spidey-senses’ and were quick to dodge him. Before you knew Miguel would rather die than hurt you himself. But when he saw your bruised and bloodied body on the rooftop, he finally realized that he let the anger get the best of him.

“You lost me, Miguel.” Those were your final words before you slipped into unconsciousness. He brought you back to the Spider-Society to get you proper medical attention before he had to leave to hunt Miles. Miguel took your left hand and slipped on the promise ring on your ring finger. He gave the back of your hand a kiss.

“I hope you forgive me, mi amor. I’m sorry.”

#spiderman: across the spiderverse #miguel o'hara x reader #miles morales x reader #miguel o'hara x you #miguel o'hara #miguel o'hara x y/n #miguel o'hara angst #into the spider verse

[thestrangestthing89]

It's not an apology, it's a clarification. He very directly says "you misconstrued what I said" a thing multiple people around here have been trying to say for months. He said this exact same thing in an Instagram post he made a few months ago but people lack the reading comprehension skills to follow something like that. So he said it in a TikTok video again only some people are still not understanding. And it's because they don't want to. (He has recently taken his Instagram post down, I'm guessing because he is getting relentlessly harassed.) The truth of the matter is that many people didn't take the time to understand basic facts about this situation (like what the word Zionism actually means) and the result was that a lot of misinformation spread because people were desperate to make sure their followers knew they were The Most Progressive and The Most Anti-Racist. They did not talk about this issue in a way that was culturally sensitive. They made assumptions about Noah based on anti-Semitic stereotypes and I don't even think they realize they are doing it because, again, they aren't well-informed. But every time someone twists the word Zionism to mean "pro-genocide" and makes the flying leap that anyone using that word is laughing at people dying they are falling into the stereotype that Jews are bloodthirsty. Anytime people say that any Jewish person has the wrong information in this situation and needs to education themselves about their own culture, they are believing that Jews can't be trusted. They did all of these things to Noah and they did it very easily because they are ignorant. These people essentially turned into an angry mob. I can't even count the amount of comments I saw that were basically "I hate Noah too!!! Wait, what did he do? Someone tell me!" They piled on because their peers were doing it and not because they had any clue what the problem was. It was the cool and trendy thing to do so they did it. And they deluded themselves into thinking they were saving Palestinians in the process when they actually didn't do shit for anyone. The only problem is that the people who did this didn't take the time to inform themselves before piling on. Noah didn't apologize to them because he doesn't have to. They owe him an apology though and I think the ones with larger followings are responsible for a lot of this and imo are lucky they didn't get sued for defamation. He didn't do any of the things they are accusing him. They decided for themselves what he thought and believed based on very little information and they have no right to do this to anyone. They seriously think Noah is responsible for single-handedly killing people. He's not in the military or a politician. He didn't even endorse anyone who did. This whole situation is the stupidest fucking thing in the world. They are more outraged over the bullshit they made up about him the actual political situation and it's because they don't actually care. They are using Palestinians as an excuse to say hateful things, but they aren't helping them at all. I don't think Gen Z-ers are realizing that everyone older than them is getting increasingly more concerned about the way they go about their political activism. It's a serious problem and this current political situation only highlighted problems with them that had been occurring for a while now. Relentlessly harassing any Jewish person online for not speaking exactly to your liking isn't activism. Threatening to kill people who disagree with you isn't activism. Trying to ruin someone's career because they didn't act like your parasocial bestie isn't activism. Spamming the comments of everyone's posts with Free Palestine isn't activism and it sure as hell isn't what spreading awareness looks like. That requires being well informed first. Not to mention learning how to have difficult conversations without screaming hysterically at people and shouting that they must be pro-genocide/racist/misogynist/homophobic every damn second just because they said something you didn't take the time to understand.

They need to learn to ask for a clarification before assuming the absolute worst about people. They do this to people in the fandom constantly and it's why no one decent posts here regularly anymore. They are ignorant, plain and simple. But they are so desperate for peer approval and for people to think they are the best activists ever that they don't realize how much damage they do when they behave this way.

The people still pissed at Noah were always going to be. They were always going to pick him apart because they are anti-Semitic and they made that very clear. All he is saying is that people need to understand that both Jews and Palestinians are human and stop taking sides. A thing that anyone with a shred of human decency has been saying for months. The people who haven't been saying this tend to be very young (teens and early 20s) and it's because they fell for a lot of unverified information on TikTok - something that is concerning a lot of people given that it is an election year in the US. All anyone had to do here was listen and they didn't. They are too busy trying to be morally superior to anyone to bother having an actual conversation. They still aren't listening. There was nothing wrong with what Noah said here either. But people are determined to believe that he was laughing at people dying when he wasn't. This literally never happened. They just heard a word they weren't familiar with a jumped to awful conclusions. It's not their place to educate anyone on anything. They are not qualified to do so. And I wish people were smarter about who they were reblogging and weren't so desperate to get more followers by jumping on the bandwagon. They cause so much drama in the fandom constantly by acting like this. This is just the latest example.

The people who think it's now suddenly ok to be violent and homophobic towards someone just because they perceived that person to do something they didn't like, were waiting for an opportunity. They wanted to be horrible and they think they got a reason. They didn't and there is never a reason to behave like this. But it did reveal just how many people in this fandom are horrible human beings. The people who weren't saying this directly were still agreeing with those people and were not better than them. It should have set alarm bells off in their heads that the only people who agreed with them were being vile. That should have been the first clue they were on the wrong side. I wish people learned to think for themselves better. They were clearly jumping on the bandwagon and didn't understand what was going on. And I stand by my comment from a few months ago, we would not be dealing with relentless drama in the fandom if the show had a higher rating. And I do think they need to focus more on their original adult audience again. Most of us do not feel comfortable posting regularly in this fandom when it got taken over by kids who don't understand any of the things they are upset about, but they are upset with everyone and everything constantly. No one came here to babysit.

#social media seriously needs to do more about cyber bullying and the spread of misinformation #the people who did this to him owe him an apology #it used to be if you spread a rumor about someone you got sent to the principal and were forced to write a letter of apology #but kids are gently parented now and they can't handle being told they did something seriously wrong #they can't accept wrongdoing and they can't figure out how to fix it #so they just double down and act like even worse assholes than they've been acting #and everyone is fucking tired of it #no one wants to deal with this behavior anymore #gen z is increasingly becoming a group of people no one can trust #stranger things #noah schnapp

[soulfireblue]

i have so many thoughts about phil and sunny and tubbo and this is going under a read more because it got really long lol

disclaimer that i don't watch phil super often! i watch qsmp with a crow friend who keeps me updated on his streams, so he's probably one of the characters i'm most familiar with outside of tubbo, but that's obviously not quite the same as me directly watching his streams. also this is only my interpretation and understanding of the characters, of course!

Phil is a bit of a hermit and doesn't know the other eggs that well; Chayanne and Tallulah are actually more social than their dad is. There are very few people on this island that Phil is actually close to, and Tubbo is one of them. That's kind of a double-edged sword when it comes to Phil's relationship with Sunny.

Phil kind of tends to extrapolate his relationship with Tubbo onto Sunny, because he doesn't know her well enough to realize that what works for him and Tubbo is not going to work for him and Sunny. It becomes a cycle, because Phil unknowingly does or says something that hurts Sunny, and then Sunny avoids being alone with him, so he doesn't get to know her well enough to realize that the way he treats Tubbo is not how Sunny wants or needs to be treated.

This sets up a really interesting conflict and character dynamic here, especially because Tubbo is also extrapolating his own relationship with Phil onto Sunny. He doesn't really understand that Sunny has issues with Phil, because when he and Sunny are with Phil, he's usually focused more on his own interactions with Phil and the godkids' than Sunny's. Plus it's not like Tubbo and Sunny are often with Phil alone; usually Chayanne and Tallulah are there too, and there's not much reason for Sunny to be needing to interact with Phil one-on-one.

And while Sunny has told Tubbo a little bit about how they feel with Phil, he's also observed them having issues with Tallulah, Leo, and even Richas now, and he's also watched those issues clear up. There's no reason for Tubbo to assume that her issues with Phil are any different. The nature of Tubbo's role as a buffer between Sunny and Phil means that he hasn't been able to observe the interactions that caused the problem. If Tubbo's there, Tubbo's the one they're both interacting with more just due to the fact that he's more present in both of their lives.

But here's the thing with Phil being a hermit. The issue isn't just his relationship with Tubbo; it's also that his children always come first. We've seen that even before we met Sunny. He was completely convinced that he had to win Purgatory because no one would be looking out for his kids except himself, not realizing that the leader of Soulfire was trying to get back the exact same eggs. For Phil, it's extremely black and white.

And so when he's alone with Sunny, when he's looking at her as an egg rather than as Tubbo's daughter, he puts his kids first. He's happy to do whatever he can to help. He collected items for cookies for all of the eggs on the island for a reason! He cares a lot about the eggs, even from a distance. He's just not the type of person to wait to feed his kids until the other kids are fed too, because his first priority has to be Chayanne and Tallulah.

But his limit is anything that could put his own family at risk. Which is understandable! He has two kids to look out for. But Phil is extremely pragmatic, and so he tells Sunny exactly the truth. She can stay with him, but his kids come first. Tallulah has been hurt, so her feelings come first. He's very good at making sure his kids are taken care of, and he's very good at weighing the risks, and he's honest about it once he has.

Which would maybe be perfectly fine for some other eggs, but the thing is, Phil doesn't know Sunny. He's treating her the exact opposite of the way she needs to be treated, but he doesn't know her well enough to realize it. He's spent a lot of time around her without actually getting to know her, because there's always that Tubbo and Chayanne buffer. So he doesn't realize that they don't need to be treated the way he treats Tubbo. She needs to be treated the way he treats Tallulah. They need to be told that it's okay to feel scared and abandoned, and that they are loved, and that someone will always be there for them.

(Chayanne does realize that. He's a very good godbrother.)

I hope someday Phil will get to know Sunny better and realize better ways to communicate with her, though I do understand that there will always be the issue of his kids coming first, while Sunny desperately needs people who put her first. (And gosh, how awful must it have been for them to lose Creation, who called them rank one, and told them they were loved, and then left them just like everybody else.) They'll never have the relationship Tubbo has with Phil's kids, and that's okay. But I hope that Sunny can one day look at Phil and know that she is loved, even if it's not exactly the kind of love she's been searching for.

#qsmp #tubbo #qsmp tubbo #qsmp sunnysideup #sunnysideup #qsmp sunny #qsmp philza #qsmp ph1lza #philza #ph1lza #this is not meant as neg to any of the characters btw it's just character analysis #thus why i've put it in the tags #i love all of these characters and i'm happy to discuss them in further depth :D

[brigdh]

Okay. My thoughts on the Our Flag Means Death finale. Obviously I'm not very happy with the ending, though I'm also not as upset as some people are. I would say I'm discontent. Unsatisfied. Too aware of how it could have been improved, and a bit bitter that we didn't get a better version, but I also don't hate what we did get.

I know a lot of meta has attributed the problems to a shorter season, and absolutely I would have loved to get 10 episodes instead. I would have loved 22 episodes! Why don't we do that anymore? But I don't think the 8 episode length was the ultimate problem. A) The showrunner and writers knew they had only 8 episodes, so they needed to choose a story that fit into that length, but even more importantly, B) my problem is not that they had too much story for too little time, but actually that they had plenty of time and chose to fill it with too little story.

As I've sat with it over the last few days and thought more about the season's arc, it feels to me like we got eight episodes of filler. Filler episodes can be great! Filler episodes can have some of the funniest lines, the greatest scenes, the most intriguing ideas. But filler episodes do not progress character arcs or major themes, and that's exactly the problem this season had.

The only characters who got arcs this season are Izzy, and to a lesser and more rushed extent, Lucius. Which sure is a choice.

Ed and Stede and their relationship did not meaningfully change from S1. (Okay, yes, they had sex, they said I Love You – but these are external changes, not internal. They don't represent character growth. Stede realized he loved Ed and was telling everyone back in 1x10. Ed clearly would have slept with him in S1 if they'd had a little more time.) Ed and Stede in 2x08 are not different from who they are in 2x01. If Ed had asked Stede to be innkeepers in 2x01, does anyone think Stede wouldn't have immediately agreed? One of the big moments in 2x08 is Ed reading a letter that Stede wrote in 2x01! Stede's exact words from the very beginning of the season! What better way to underline that none of the subsequent seven episodes had important growth or changes?

Another one of 2x08's big shippy moments is Ed and Stede running to each other across a beach – deliberately paralleling the dream Stede had in 2x01. What are we supposed to take from this parallel? My original thought was that we're supposed to see how different the real version is from the dream, but there's honestly not many differences. Neither one has a beard, now? The dream mocked how Stede knew they needed to have a conversation about their relationship that he wanted to avoid, but they don't have a conversation in the "real" version either. They exchange about two sentences (which includes Ed's I Love You, yes, which is a big deal but still isn't a conversation) and then they charge right back into the fight, without discussing anything like Ed abruptly dumping Stede to go be a fisherman, Stede killing Ned Low when Ed asked him not to, their differences of opinion on being pirates, if having sex was a mistake or if that's only a thing Ed said because he was panicking, etc etc. They have just as many issues to address as they did in the dream, but just like the dream they act like everything is magically okay without talking about it!

So I think we're meant to take the beach-run parallels as "here's what Stede's been wanting, and after waiting for so long he finally gets it". Which is fine, a very sweet take-away for a finale. But it underlines what I'm saying is the problem of the season: Stede has just been waiting for eight episodes for his dream to come true. Not changing. Not growing. Not doing anything to bring the dream about, other than trying to get himself and Ed into the same physical location. Just... waiting.

This is an extra surprising development, because the show was really good at giving Ed and Stede character arcs in S1! Ed and Stede in 1x10 are significantly different than they were in their first introductions. Also, just to preempt some criticism, by 'progressing' I do not mean 'wrap up literally every loose end and make a firm final ending' – S1's finale is an excellent example of both moving the characters forward and leaving a ton of room for future stories. I wasn't expecting for 2x08 to show us a Stede and Ed who were perfectly on the same page and would never again have a problem. I was expecting them to be somewhat different than they were in 2x01, and I just don't see that.

Instead of arcs, we got little pieces of single-episode growth here and there that never added up to an overall whole. The season brought up a ton of potential arcs for Ed – violence, piracy, guilt, suicide, daddy issues, self-loathing, apologies, redemption, his tendency to idealize escaping into a different life – but didn't do anything with any of these options. Stede had nothing resembling a season arc at all.

Stede works to improve as a captain! Stede kills someone and has regrets! Stede confronts Ed's dark side! <- All potential arcs, but none of which lasted for more than an episode or had consequences. We don't even know what the ending means for Stede: does he want to be an innkeeper because he failed as a pirate in 2x07? Because piracy was always just a displaced search for love, and now that he has love, he doesn't need piracy? What does the crew of the Revenge leaving mean to him? Stede's understanding of their new arrangement literally happens off-screen and we're left to fumble at guesses for its significance to him as an individual.

Ed and Stede's last big conversation in the season is their break-up fight in 2x07, which is a shocking way to send off your main couple in a rom-com. Yes, there's the I Love You on the beach (again: two sentences) and the brief 'let's try to be innkeepers' conversation at the very end, but that's it for them in 2x08, except for their inclusion in some brief large group conversations about their fighting skills and the plan for escaping the British. How can you end your rom-com with the main couple exchanging only a paragraph's worth of dialogue in the finale? None of the stuff was brought up in the fishing fight in 2x07 is ever addressed at all!

Again, I don't think this is solely a matter of time crunch. Instead of using the eight episodes to progress the two main characters, we got a bunch of filler episodes that used the time in amusing side tangents instead of forward progress. I don't think that's the inevitable result of having to work with eight episodes.

Look, I can come up with a better Ed/Stede relationship arc without needing more episodes, and despite only thinking about this for a couple days and not having an entire writing room to work with:

(Note: this only addresses the Ed/Stede relationship. It doesn't fix Stede completely lacking an independent character arc and Ed having about ten thousand of them, none of which went anywhere.)

In 2x05 to 2x07, I would make Ed's motivations in their relationship very clearly that he's pushing Stede away so he doesn't get hurt again. Basically play up Ed's comment about "I was all in" in 2x04, and make him determined not to get 'all in' this time around. This aligns the "let's take it slow" conversation in 2x05, the "sex was a mistake" in 2x06, and Ed running away to be a fisherman in 2x07 into a single arc. He wants Stede, but he's afraid of what that wanting will do to him. He's trying to find a way to have a relationship without making himself vulnerable. He keeps pushing off commitment and openness.

Then, in 2x08, I'd make it more explicit that Ed thinks/fears Stede is dead when he sees the pirate ships burning. I think it's subtext in the episode as-is, but give him a line or two to make it really clear. Ed and Stede still see each other on the beach, have their dramatic run to each other, and Ed says, "I love you". Now this moment is Ed acknowledging his love, exactly what he's been avoiding for the last three episodes.

Near the end of the episode, Ed and Stede have a conversation where Ed says something like, "I didn't want to get hurt again, I was afraid of the risk of falling in love and you leaving again, but thinking you were dead made me realize that never loving you would be worse" (but better written, ha, this is a tumblr post that's already too long). (Also possibly you could tie in Izzy's death here to underline both Ed and Stede not wanting to lose another person they care about, if we must have that plot point for some reason.) We actually get to see Ed asking Stede to come be innkeepers with him, paralleling asking him to run away to China (and paralleling NOT asking Stede to a fisherman), Stede voices some of his worries (paralleling him keeping them inside in 1x09, but also giving him a chance to explain what piracy and love mean to him and why he'd give up one for the other), but ultimately they agree that they at least want to try.

This both puts them into a much clearer place for a happy ending, has clear growth from S1 and the beginning of this season, but also leaves open a ton of room for S3, because welp, it turns out trying to have a relationship entails all sorts of problems! Especially with these two. It also would make me feel like they'd at least addressed some of the issues between them.

Right now I feel like S3 will have to spend at least the first few episodes running through exactly the same "don't talk – break up – get back together dramatically" arc that Stede and Ed have already done twice but have never discussed and never learned from. I liked it, but I don't need to see it yet again. That will – ironically – feel like yet more wasted time, more episodes that are just churning through beats without moving the characters forward. I wanted them to have new, different fights in S3, but now I don't even feel like they've made enough progress to have a fresh set of problems.

#ofmd meta #our flag means death #ofmd 2x08 #ofmd season 2 #ofmd critical #(I guess)

[celaenaeiln]

I feel like Dick is good at making everyone view him as an equal, even when it’s not in his best interest. It’s not because he can’t reach their level or bring them up to his ofc (it’s one of his strengths!), but it leaves people looking for him in roles he shouldn’t necessarily be in. For instance, Bruce relied on a literal child to balance out his weaknesses because Dick went out of his way to be seen as a partner and friend, someone he could open up to, and that got in the way of his own needs. Then people like Deathstroke and other criminals look for him as an accomplice because he knows how to appear sympathetic while simultaneously making his skill set appeal to them, and while having their potential interest can be advantageous (like making team ups, deals, and truces easier), it’s also proven to be a pain with how their villainous disputes get personal. Obviously they’re already on opposing sides, but Dick doing what he set out to do suddenly stings if he doesn’t make the move to smooth things over. Making himself into an equal is a VERY good quality of his that I adore, but I thought it’d be fun to share some of the repercussions to it and make you think!

og post in reference

Anon, sorry for the wait, but you had me speechless.

This is such a brilliantly written speech about Dick's relationships and the impacts that I was frankly stunned by the beauty of it.

As you said, everyone relies on Dick to do everything for them. As Robin, it was mainly Bruce, the Titans, and a little Slade.

But a negative side effect of a child forced to become the equal to genius adults and metas is it results in massive insecurities and frustrations when those adults take away those responsibilities. The reason Dick wanted to quit being Robin in his later years is because he felt overwhelmingly like Bruce was treating him like a child. He had spent a decade by Bruce's side doing the exact same things. At 15 he was driving a batplane by himself while Bruce was canoodling in the back with someone. It's not even just meeting expectations, he was talking a guardianship role and responsibilities.

"Then people like Deathstroke and other criminals look for him as an accomplice because he knows how to appear sympathetic while simultaneously making his skill set appeal to them, and while having their potential interest can be advantageous (like making team ups, deals, and truces easier), it’s also proven to be a pain with how their villainous disputes get personal."

fantastic

Robin: Year One Issue #4

Because that is exactly what Dick does. He runs away from Bruce and goes undercover in Shrike's academy, an League of Assassins Instructor and he becomes the star pupil.

Robin: Year One Issue #4

The betrayal Shrike feels, it enrages him. He would've paved the entire way for him, praised him to the heavens, done everything for his pupil because he was so amazed, impressed, with Dick. He's never had another student like him.

But Dick was never really on his side

Robin: Year One Issue #4

The crying boy is Boone, the next Shrike and the one who gets defeated easily time and time again by Dick as Nightwing.

But putting his aside, the original Shrike feels the same was as Deathstroke does.

Dick's skillset is so good he easily impresses meta being and assassins but on top of which he has the emotional range to play them like a fiddle. When the villains finally realize, they're hurt and betrayed and outrages because they fell so hard for his charms and talents they never saw the betrayal coming.

Just like Slade never thought Dick would turn Rose on him.

He just has a special kind of talent that lets him do that. That's why like you said all his fights are so personal. Because his enemies know him but he knows them too and they both know what he did.

Obviously they’re already on opposing sides, but Dick doing what he set out to do suddenly stings if he doesn’t make the move to smooth things over.

That's right because betrayal isn't betrayal if they were always on your side. So when he doesn't reach out, it hurts and angers them because they fell for him and he didn't fall for them and for egotistical maniacs and people at the top of their game who don't believe in someone greater, that's unacceptable.

#dick grayson #robin dick grayson #nightwing #bruce wayne #batman #slade wilson #deathstroke #the shrike #cl anon asks #thanks for the ask!

[emblazons]

So (because I cannot go three seconds without noticing new little things that tell the wider story in this show):

Let’s talk about how the music that plays during the S3 Byler fight is the exact same music that plays during the S4 conversation Mike & Dustin have with Lucas as they walk to class after the pep rally—

—and how that parallel gives us insight not only into how Mike (and his devotion to Will) has evolved between seasons 3 and 4….but also how The Duffers are evolving Mike as a character in the wake of the "conflict" of forced conformity they introduced in S3.

To start: here are snippets of both scenes where “Not Kids Anymore” plays, both in Season 3 and Season 4.

Now, even though Mike is present in both scenes, it’s not entirely obvious why these things would be parallels, given the radical difference in tone. That said: when we look at these scenes in their wider contexts, we see that they are both exploring the exact same issue, only with Mike on opposite sides of the convo each time—

—namely, whether or not its worth it for Mike to embrace conformity, given that there are behaviors/roles he is meant to fill when trying to keep up with being normal/growing up...and "society" says that DnD / nerdiness (and a refusal / lack of desire to participate in performative relationships) stands entirely apart from that.

Let me see if I can explain.

First: these things are parallels because they are asking us to compare the Mikes in each situation—to notice how he took Will’s words to heart, and decided on some level that Will was right, not him. How do we know? Because in the time between these two convos (aka the rain fight and then the first few episodes of S4), we learn that Mike has made a point to address and rectify all criticisms Will had of him & his behavior during the rain fight.

As of the very first episode of S4, we are shown that Mike is 1) paying attention to both the party/DnD the way Will criticized him for not doing (to the point of calling out Lucas for not prioritizing it the way he now wants to)—

—2) he is focusing on keeping closeness with Dustin (even to the point of judging Lucas for not doing the same), because Will accused him of ignoring Dustin as readily as he ignored him—

—and 3) he has entirely stopped "swapping spit" with El (to the point of removing her from a hug at the airport, kissing her on the forehead...and then never kissing her again lmao) while letting his relationship fall apart without much of a fight…right before apologizing to Will for letting El get in the way of their time spent together in the first place.

Basically: even though he is still struggling in many ways to defend himself from being bullied/being an outcast by hiding behind his relationship with El (the same way Lucas is with “being popular” and basketball), we can see that Mike has made clear strides towards embracing the sides of him that aren’t conformist, which is reflected in all of his decision-making in Will's absence.

Though Mike is getting older and the party “aren’t kids anymore,” them paralleling these scenes is showing us that Mike, at least on some level, has realized that growing up is not at odds with embracing the things he enjoys & his various identities, whether that be through playing DnD—

—wearing clothes he chose on his own—

—or willingly choosing closeness with Will over the performance of relationships with girls (the same way Will already had in Season 3, and Dustin reflected as well).

Now...this isn't to say that he's entirely succeeded at the task, given how many times we see him fumble through actually implementing these changes/revelations in himself, whether with clothes (hello 'shitty knockoff'), embracing his actual interests, or even letting himself want to admit he wants to be with/around Will and not El—

—on top of the fact that I've already talked (many, many times) about how the journey of "feeling like you lost" the Duffers took us on had Mike ending up in a position where "conformity" temporarily wins, how that plays into his relationship with El versus Will, and why it matters for his character even outside of his queerness.

Still: I think this parallel in particular is important to understanding his character because it rules out any idea that Mike is somehow oblivious rather than intentionally working through to the changes happening in himself, whether they be in regards to him re-choosing DnD, making decisions about his clothing for himself...or wanting to be closer to Will / not participate in "liking girls," which is what he gets projection-mad at Will about during the rain fight.

tl;dr: Mike has realized on some level that he wants to be more like / closer to Will than his S3 "conformity" self—and the war we see on his face throughout the season in conversations with Will has a lot to do with that, among other things.

This musical parallel in particular draws attention to the fact that there have been changes happening within Mike that he sees and recognizes—he just "lost" like every other character this season, aka failed at walking into a more secure sense of self / out of his "conformist" relationship in its entirety...which we'll resolve in S5. :)

#byler #anti mlvn #mike wheeler #will byers #mike wheeler core #this could have gotten SO MUCH LONGER and I know I'm gonna do a companion piece on lucas right after this but lmao I had to START SOMEWHERE #like? one day I'm just gonna have to write a fucking book on mike wheeler because I have SO MUCH TO SAY LMAO #my st commentary #st parallels #stranger things #st music analysis