#that’s like super consistent across the entire system

[nightswatchdisbandmentera]

Need asoiaf fans to be disabused from the notion that anyone “deserves” the Iron Throne. Not a single person deserves it, doesn’t matter how good they are. And I’d take it a step further and say that no one deserves to be king or queen or lord. We shouldn’t be equating kingship/queenship with a happy ending. This series does so much to criticize this awful system so it’s particularly jarring that people will go “I want my fave to get their happy ending and sit on the iron throne”. That’s…kind of antithetical to what the series has shown us so far I think.

#asoiaf #valyrianscrolls #people if there’s one thing you ought to take away from reading this series #it’s fEuDaLiSm bAd #that’s like super consistent across the entire system #it sounds reductive but like grrm has spent a lot of time showing us just how rotten this all is #the iron throne is pretty much a physical representation of this rotten system #and I also see people being like ~I want my fave to be the hero because that’s what they deserve and that’s a happy ending~ #as if grrm isn’t taking his sweet time deconstructing what it means and costs to be a hero #spoiler alert: it costs a lot!!! #being a hero isn’t going to be a walk in the park guys #my hot take is that part of the reason why people don’t like bran as king of the 7k is because they had thought the IT going to their #fav was the happy ending #so that’s why we get a lot of ~what’s bran’s tax policy~ #not to say that everyone asking that is asking it in bad faith #but so many people in this fandom think that certain roles are owed to their faves #gonna prepare a truck load of popcorn for when ADoS comes out because oooo the drama #btw this is not directed toward a particular fandom - because like half of the people who read this books think like that

[bizaar]

Cruel Summer - Part 18

First - Previous - Masterlist

pairings: Eddie Munson x fem!reader

summary: After breaking up, you and Eddie do your best to soldier on with your lives, but you slowly begin to discover that there is a stronger line of connection keeping you together than just history…

word count: 13.5k

warnings: slight angst, MAJOR fluff, semi-suggestive themes, swearing, medical descriptions, mentions of death/violence/slight gore

A.N.: wE MADE IT TO THE FINAL CHAPTER OF CRUEL SUMMER. A BIG thank you to @fracturedarkness @inarinine @reysorigins and everyone else who has been here from the beginning to see this monster come to a close.

Eddie’s never felt so awful in all his life.     

To say that every single part of his body hurts would be an understatement, simply because what he is feeling is beyond pain.

Almost like he’s transcended it, skipped over the feeling in leaps and bounds, and come to settle in the quiet limbo of something he cannot quite place.    

His head is pounding, he can’t help but get the sense that his ribs have been smashed and splintered into oblivion, and he’s burning all over like he’s been injected with liquid fire, slowly making its way through his veins and central nervous system.   

The pounding, aching, burning of his insides, however, is nothing to say about the state of his skin, if he even has any left – he’d dreamt he’d lay there helplessly while every inch of his body was peeled back and stripped away, leaving him a bloody mess of muscles, tendons, and sinew – flayed is the word that comes to mind.

He feels more like the anatomical suggestion of Eddie Munson, rather than the real thing, and if he were to look in the mirror, he is half afraid he would not recognize the gory visage staring back at him.  

Worse than any of that, however, is the heaviness in his chest. He can’t seem to catch his breath, can barely even take a breath, almost as if someone were sitting on him, bearing down with all their weight in an effort to smother him.     

He feels bad in a way that cannot be so simply explained, but if he had to describe it, and he’s not entirely sure he can, Eddie would say that he feels like he’s died.

Like he’s been chewed up, spat out, and forced back into the shape of something only vaguely human… but it’s not entirely unbearable, because those arduous expanses of agony are regularly punctuated with intermittent moments of feeling almost okay.     

More than okay. For as awful as he feels, Eddie actually feels pretty great.     

In those brief intervals, he finds that he can just about catch his breath, and laying there, breathing deep, his head goes fat and heavy, and his body gets all tingly and warm in an exceedingly lazy way.     

It’s like a really good high… or maybe more like the empty seconds of absolutely nothing in the wake of a super intense orgasm, when his body is blown out of focus, fuzzy and shapeless before his brain kickstarts into working action again.    

It gives him the strangest sensation of simultaneously floating and sinking as if his body has suddenly taken on the consistency of wet sand, and if he tries to sit up, he’ll break apart into a hundred pieces and melt away with the tide.  

Maybe he is dead, and this is just what dead feels like. If that’s the case, then it’s not so bad, being dead.    

Regardless of the state of his being, he’s awake now and growing restless and laying there for an indiscernible amount of eternity has started to give him a cramp in his leg, so he moves.   

Eddie breathes deeply as he stirs, chasing the apparent high of death and filling his lungs without realizing that he’s standing on the other side of the border of that lovely little limbo of fat heads and buzzing limbs. As a result, he feels every inch of the pull of fresh stitches across his body and the scream of his expanding ribs, creaking and groaning like the hull of a splintering ship.    

Suddenly, dead is not as much fun as it was before, and all he feels is pain.

Pain like fire in your veins, like salt in the wound, like the pull of hundreds of tiny teeth eating him alive – and if he’s being eaten alive, that certainly must mean he’s not dead... right?  

Then again, maybe not, because didn’t he already go through all that? Isn’t that what killed him in the first place?  

Eddie’s lungs spasm as he struggles to fill them and he chokes, breaking into a violent fit of coughing and seizing that lights up another dozen different points of pain in his body that he didn’t know existed.

It’s just about unbearable for half a second before he crosses the threshold and is once again swaddled in the blanket of that wonderfully conflicting sensation of cold and warm, easing his cramping muscles, opening his lungs, and numbing the pain with a dreamy sigh.    

And there he goes feeling great again, floating along the high orgasmic nothing until suddenly there is something.    

A hand on his forehead, knuckles gently gracing his cheek. A straw guided to his lips, urging him to drink deep the gathering gloom.

He does as he’s told because, in his state, Eddie can only obey – the soothing rush of water eases the tight rawness of his throat and floods his mouth with the stale tang of blood.     

With it comes the cool rush of relief, he sinks back into the pillowy softness of the bed with a stuttering sigh and goes back to being dead again.   

Good. He’s happier that way – only his heart is pumping blood now, breathing life back into him and stirring his heavy limbs with pins and needles. There is sweat beading on his brow from the exertion of the previous moment, and now that he is awake, there is no stopping the world from rushing back in.   

Oh well, death was good while it lasted.  

Eddie gradually becomes aware of the sounds of the room, the gentle mechanical beep and whir of machinery — a soft chirping playing along with the steady thrum of his heartbeat. He fists his hands in the sheets and very slowly crickets his legs feeling the pull of skin on skin, coarse hairs snarling against each other and snagging.      

He’s lying in a bed somewhere, and wherever that somewhere happens to be, he’s got no pants on, which in and of itself is a mighty sobering realization.     

Slowly, carefully, Eddie dares to open his eyes. They roll heavily in his sockets like billiard balls as he does his best to take in his surroundings beyond the dark fluorescent bulbs and water-stained ceiling tiles waiting to greet him.    

There's not much to see in the dimly lit room. It’s all blurry shapes and shadows melting together, the odd burst of muted color from a flashing light, though it occurs to him that that could very well be a result of his own physical state.    

His eyes, chief among all his other currently muted senses, aren’t working so well.   

Eddie blinks sluggishly and waits for his vision to adjust against the dark and the sandpaper of his lids … and waits... and waits... and waits... and feels an odd pang of confusion stirring in his midsection as he fails to recognize his surroundings.   

He wracks his brain in an attempt to make sense of the room and its furnishings, but trying to muster any coherent thought is currently an effort in trudging through wet cement.

Eventually, something clicks over and there are shapes, images, and sensations all slowly coming together to paint an almost familiar picture of a cold black sky and a perpetual crimson lightning storm illuminating the trees and the bizarro version of his neighborhood, and he realizes it’s got a name, this terrible place...     

The Upsidedown.   

The thought of it is enough to send Eddie’s heart into gentle palpitations, because he may not know where he is now, but he remembers that place all too well.

Back there, he was hurt, he was scared, he was dying, and yet here he finds himself, lying in a bed staring at the monochrome grays and sickly greens of the room’s pallet.  

He’s not there, he's back on the other side, the right side of the world, as if there ought to be such a thing, and something is telling him over and over that he’s safe.

He’s not certain he believes it, but he doesn’t have the fortitude to disagree right at the moment, so he doesn’t fight it. He's too tired to keep fighting... 

Fluorescent lights creep in from the distant hallway to hurt his eyes and set his brain throbbing lazily in his skull. He hears the not-so-distant monitor keeping careful beeping time with the throbbing of his heartbeat, feels the scratchy, clinical bedsheets clinging to his skin, and eventually, one word manages to make it through the soupy mire of his thoughts and to the front of his mind: hospital.    

Hawkins General, Eddie might have realized if his brain was not sloshing so thickly in his skull with all the consistency of oatmeal.   

So, if he’s on the right side of the world, and if he’s in the hospital, it probably means that he’s not dead, and that there is a very good chance that the gently euphoric feeling he’s currently experiencing is just drugs.     

Awesome.    

The atmosphere is sharp with a stark, clinical air – the tang of medicinal balms and ointments fills his nose and burns his throat and only thinly masks the acrid, metallic smell of something like copper and meat, lingering heavily on the back of his tongue. Eddie doesn’t need the use of his faculties to recognize that the odor is blood.    

His blood.

He may be lost in the reeds of everything else, but he remembers the blood, spurting, gushing, spilling out of him with every panicked beat of his heart, faster than he can put pressure on the wound to try and stop it.    

No, not him, he was just lying there bleeding, you were the one doing all the work – you and your babysitter’s knowledge of basic first aid, way in over your head, doing anything and everything you could to try and save his life.   

Eddie supposes you must have succeeded in that endeavor, considering where he currently finds himself. Thankfully, all your blood sweat, and tears — so much blood and so many, many tears — didn’t go to waste, and there you went, just saving him again and again like it paid your goddamn bills.    

But how could he expect anything else?    

All along the way, in the boathouse, in the woods, in the field, in the quiet of his bedroom, and even back there, in that terrible place, you’d promised him again and again that he was going to be okay, and the thing about you – that funny little thing that he has loved from the start – is that you always keep your promises, for better or worse.    

Somehow, you got his ass up off of the pavement and out of that cold, dark place, and by some twist of fate, Eddie is alive.    

Whether or not he is going to thank you for that is, however, still up in the air.    

He gradually becomes aware of the press of fingers on the inside of his wrist and realizes with a sluggish start that he’s not alone in this room.

It would be frightening if he had the fortitude to feel anything but the effect of whatever it is they are steadily pumping into his veins, but all it does is make him sluggishly curious.      

Turning his head is almost impossible. Beyond the strange sensation of some kind of thick brace keeping his shoulders squared and his head facing strictly forward, Eddie’s neck is unbearably tight – even the most subtle of movements stretches the torn muscles there in a terribly uncomfortable way.    

It’s not quite pain, thanks to the brace and the drugs, but he has to move his shoulders to even make an attempt at turning his head, and to move his shoulders, he’s got to twist at the waist.

All that does is pull at the tenderness over his midsection and belly, where there is evidently nothing in place to stop him from making that sort of movement, nothing but the bright burst of agony that lights up along his ribs, warning him sharply to stop what he’s doing with a very strong hint of “or else.”    

Or else what?   

Or else hundreds of sharp little teeth will keep digging into him, rending his flesh, eating and eating and eating and tearing him into little, tiny pieces until there’s nothing left—    

Eddie inhales sharply as he turns and tenses his muscles against the pain it causes, which only sends him around and around in a vicious cycle of pain and tensing and gasping against the pain.  

This is all starting to feel like the worst idea he’s ever had, and “or else” is suddenly ringing in his ears loud and clear.

He silently begs himself to lie still and go back to being dead again, but with the lingering effect of that weird floating feeling he’s still dealing with – thanks again to the drugs – now that he’s started moving, he can’t stop.

So, he turns and turns and turns, hurting the whole way, and just as he expects his head to turn all the way around to the other side and snap his neck, he finds you sitting there.    

You’re positively divine, sitting tucked into a chair far removed from his bedside with one leg pulled up to your chest and looking about as rough as he currently feels, in your own hospital gown with your own bruises and your own bandages.    

It might have just been the drugs, but Eddie thinks you’re the prettiest thing he’s ever seen, sitting there looking like you’d gone through hell and traffic just to make sure you’d be here to meet him when he woke up.

And because you’re just so wonderful, part of him thinks that maybe you had.     

It makes his chest swell with something indiscernible from guilt and pride, and it hurts so bad, but he can’t help the dopey smile from spreading across his face — God his face hurts, too — one of those Stupid Cupid hearts in his eyes smiles you’ve always managed to pull out of him, from the very beginning.  

It’s like he’s seeing you for the first time, and it leaves him feeling like he’s dreaming – he’s got to be, because how else would either of you be here, after everything that happened?  

He doesn’t really care – he’s never been so happy to see anyone in his stupid, goddamn life.   

Then, just as he’s about to try and say your name, a monolith of shadow slides across his vision, blocking you from view and startling Eddie with enough force that he hears the sound of his heart monitor spiking.    

He recoils away from the shadow as best he can and feels all those points of pain go hot again. Through the fog of his drug-addled mind, Eddie forgets where he is. He can no longer discern what is real and what is merely a panicked hallucination, and suddenly, the room goes dark as he is thrust back into the Upsidedown.

Hundreds of little leathery bodies are crawling over every inch of the trailer, spilling out of the ceiling in his bedroom, flapping wings and slashing claws and teeth teeth teeth, blocking out the light, swarming him – swarming you, wrenching you out of his grasp and snatching you away from him.    

Eddie opens his mouth in an attempt at making some kind of a sound – maybe even a scream – but his throat is packed with cotton and no amount of exerting effort brings anything but sharp, sticky pain jumping up from his esophagus.

That copper flavor is flecking up at the back of his throat again, and in place of your name, a panicked whimper bubbles up from his throat like blood and spills past his lips to dribble down over his chin. He imagines it slopping down his front in a thick, crimson tide, staining his bandages and the hospital gown, pooling thickly in his lap.

Eddie shifts in the bed, frantically trying to push up and get away from the blood, to get away from the shadow and the bats and the Upsidedown, but his limbs have gone numb and heavy, and he can barely move.   

That horrible sound comes up out of him again, louder this time, and some part of his subconscious thinks that it must be his best attempt at a pained cry after having his throat cut – he imagines his vocal cords, severed and useless, failing to scream as the monsters descend and swallow him whole.  

In his panic, Eddie is only vaguely aware of a flurry of frantic sounds and movements breaking out around him as he sinks further and further into the dark. It’s all shrill monitors beeping and gruff voices admonishing him for existing, Hawkins closing in on him to finally stamp him out for good and rid themselves of their boogeyman.    

He is drowning, powerless to resist the crushing pressure on his shoulders, forcing him back down into the sucking pull of the bed like quicksand, and for half a terrifying moment, he is dreaming again in his waking death.   

He remembers you were holding him in the dark, and something else was there with you, something he could not see, trying to take him from you. At the time, Eddie hadn’t had the presence of mind to be afraid of it, considering how warm and loving it seemed as it peeled back your fingers and gently worked to coax him away with all the right words, promises of relief from the pain and rest eternal.

He realizes now that it had been true death calling him home, and that he may have been inclined to follow it down into the dark if it had not been for you.   

He remembers now that you called his name, and he fought like hell to stay awake, stay alive, stay a little longer in your arms, simply because you’d asked him not to go – if there is one thing that has always been true, it's that Eddie would do anything for you, including but apparently not limited to dying and coming back from the grave.   

“Eddie. Look at me, Eddie.” a voice he knows better than anything in this world says gently, a hand plunging down into the dark to seize him and pull him up, “It’s okay – you’re okay,”    

That’s what you’d told him back in the other place where he’d lay dying, and it had been easy to delude himself into believing you then. Laying here now, living, it’s not such a stretch to do the same, especially as the familiar press of fingers scrabble across the back of his hand and squeeze as tightly as they dare over his knuckles, swathed in bandages as they are.    

“I'm here, Eds. I’m right here.”    

He hadn’t been aware of the way he’d been trying again and again to say your name, to make the sound eke out of his throat until you answered him.   

Blindly, Eddie grips your hand and tries to make himself breathe as you tell him again and again what he’s not sure he’d really known until that very moment.   

He’s okay. He’s safe. He’s alive.   

When he finally feels calm enough to open his eyes again, he is almost relieved to find that the monolith of shadow separating you from him is not some terrible force from beyond. The room is the same grey-green as it was moments ago, and there are no bats or otherworldly wizards hell-bent on destroying the world.   

There is only you and the night nurse.    

A titan of a woman who Eddie thinks he knows, if only vaguely through fleeting moments of lucidity, taking vitals, scribbling on charts, and muttering nasty, damning things to the patient she thinks cannot hear her speak.   

Eddie’s nurse does not like him. That much he can tell from the way she manhandles him as she futzes around and pushes him back into the bed when he tries to sit up again — more of a Hulk Hogan than a Florence Nightingale type.

He wonders stupidly if he’d actually done anything to earn that opinion or if it is just one of those residual feelings left over from a run-in with the deplorable Al Munson.  

The world may never know.       

Regardless, Eddie gives himself as much of a cursory looking over as he can manage without moving when she turns her back and is relieved to find that he is not slicked down with blood the way he’d imagined, and that you are still holding his hand as tightly as you dare from your chair at the side of his bed.   

Thank God for that.  

He'll have to wait for the nurse to leave before checking on the state of his vocal cords – he doesn’t dare make a sound until she’s gone on the off chance that she takes some bizarre offense to it and decides to do something nasty.  

There’s a long moment more of checking vitals, checking charts, checking checking checking, all the while you speak soothing, inaudible niceties to Eddie in a way that feels almost absent-minded, like you’ve been doing it for so long that it has become second nature.

He wonders, not for the first time, just how long he’s been lying there in that bed.   

Then, the night nurse says something Eddie can’t make out and something you don’t seem to hear, he’s not entirely sure who she is even speaking to, and when neither of you responds, she turns sharply on her heel and thrusts a thick finger at you – the object of her tirade – speaking again through that garbled filter of dialogue, like something half submerged in water.  

She’s clearly angry about something – possibly just your proximity to that no-good Munson boy – somehow Eddie can’t help but get the sense that this is just her natural state.

It takes him what feels like a very long time to untangle her string of snarling words through the sluggish processor of his mind.   

“...so if I come back in twenty minutes and you’re still here, there’s gonna be hell to pay,” She warns you. 

Eddie would be filled with a righteous indignation on your behalf if he wasn’t so busy fighting the way he is still sinking down into the drowning-deep of his mattress as a result of the nurse’s aggressive shoving.    

Distantly, you turn a sheepish gaze down to your fidgeting fingers and submit to the authoritative disdain of her gravelly tone.     

“Yes, Nurse,” you mumble, and when the monolith of a woman turns her back, you stick your tongue out at her in an act of juvenile defiance.   

Eddie holds his breath as she lumbers past him with the great, squeaking steps of sensible rubber-soled shoes moving across polished linoleum, and in the half minute it takes her to reach the door, his lungs have already begun to burn.

Thankfully, with her work seemingly done for the time being, the nurse vacates the room, taking all of the tension of the previous moment with her.    

“Good,” Eddie exhales once he is sure the coast is clear, “Got you all to m’self,”    

His vocal cords are thankfully more or less intact, but talking is no easier than anything else he has attempted to do over the last several waking minutes.

Jesus Fuck, talking hurts worse than his lack of skin or his broken ribs or his pounding head, but he’s never been the kind of person who knows when to quit, and he’s not about to start getting wise now. 

Eddie’s not even entirely sure he’d said anything halfway intelligible until your head snaps back over to him and your eyes go bright and wide.    

“Hey!” you gasp quietly, gliding forward to close any gap of distance left between you and reaching out with both hands to curl all ten of your fingers around the hand you’re already holding, “Hey … hi, Eddie,”   

Your voice is thick with emotion — relief, maybe? — and it sends a pang of something sharp lancing through Eddie’s chest.

His vision has not fully cleared just yet, and as a result, you’re little more than the fuzzy impression of his girlfriend, perched at his bedside. He can’t help but feel that were he able to see you, your eyes would be bright and brimming with tears.    

He knows he shouldn’t, but he’s already talking again before he can stop himself.     

“Aww… don’t be sad, Sweetness.”     

The words come slowly, slurring together into one long stream of dialogue that sends the metallic tang of old blood flecking up over the back of his tongue as he tries to remember how to do this very basic human function.     

You shake your head and quickly dismiss the notion.   

“I’m not.” You assure him, “I’m not sad. I’m happy. I’m so, so happy.”   

It takes some work, but Eddie manages to give you his closest approximation to a nod, braced as he is.    

“Tha’s good.”    

You sniffle, despite your previous insistence, and clear your throat before speaking again.   

“How are you? How do you feel, Baby?”    

Damn right, I'm your baby... is what he would have said if he had any sort of control over his responses, maybe to save you from having to know the true state of his being, but without his higher faculties, all Eddie can do is be honest with you.  

“Mmmmbad.”     

You make a quiet, distressed sound in the back of your throat and hesitate before speaking again. 

“Oh... should I...? Do you want me to call the nurse back?”  

Absolutely fucking not.  

Eddie thinks he hears you say something about Wayne that he absolutely intends to address, but all thoughts of his uncle or anyone else he might have been eager to see before that moment are cast to oblivion as he tests the waters of shaking his head and feels his brain slosh back and forth in his skull when he does.   

All he has thoughts for are you, and the gentle point of contact where he realizes he can feel the faint fluttering of your heart, beating in his hand. 

“Jus’ gimme some sugar, Sugar,” he says.  

You breathe a sigh of laughter through your nose that sounds somewhere almost halfway contented, and Eddie feels his heart throb behind his ragged, broken ribs when you press a kiss to the back of his hand.   

Oh, yes, that’s what he’s been waiting for — the really good shit. He makes a pleased sound of thanks in the hollow of his throat and tries to lift your hand and bring it to rest against his chest, the way he likes to do, but he’s hardly got the strength left to curl his fingers around yours.  

His blinking is growing gradually more sluggish and with every passing moment, it’s getting harder and harder to keep his eyes open.   

“Poor Eddie,” You hum somewhere to the right of him, lacing your fingers with his as you turn your head to press your cheek to his marred flesh.  

You ask him a question that he doesn’t quite catch, only the tail end of the sound reaches him and it’s too faint to understand, but, all the same, Eddie nods.

It’s an instinctual reaction that he gets a little more than lost in, the drunken up and down of his head going on forever and ever, lulling him into a stupor that has his eyes sliding shut for good this time.   

Christ, he's suddenly so tired, or perhaps more accurately, he is so… fucking… high.    

Somehow, despite his ruined state, he hears the next question you posit.    

“…how’s that morphine drip?”     

Oh, Morphine, huh? The good good shit.     

It takes Eddie a very long time to answer, long enough that even he begins to wonder if he’s fallen asleep, particularly with the way his head rocks back into the pillow.     

“So… good.” He slurs.     

Eddie hears the musical lilt of your gentle laughter somewhere in the room, but the sound is floating around like a summer breeze, and he can’t decide where he thinks you are anymore, despite the way he can feel you turn his hand over to begin tracing the lines in his palm.     

He doesn’t hear what you are saying until you prompt him again with a gentle murmur of his name.    

“...you okay?” You ask him, sounding suddenly very far away.  

“…m’sleepy…” Eddie sighs, fading fast, already dreaming ...drifting.   

“…try to stay with me, Eddie… just a little longer,” You murmur, a gentle request that gradually grows frantic, panicked – crimson lightning flashes overhead illuminating the terrible dark of that place as Eddie’s body goes slack, eyes falling open, clouded and unseeing as you shake him ferociously.    

“No - NO! Don’t go, Eddie – stay with me!” You scream. 

The sound startles him into waking, out of the memory of the place that had killed him and back into the muted grey-green hospital room, heart monitor beeping steadily in a gentle contrast to how he can feel the muscle beating itself senseless against his ribs – somehow a little less tender than they had been a moment ago.   

Adrenaline stings him down to the very tips of his fingers and toes, and he is suddenly wide awake.    

Eddie can’t tell how long it’s been since he dozed, the room is just the same as it had been moments before, but that’s not a solid indicator of anything.   

His palm is empty when he flexes his fingers and curls them shut – hadn't you been holding his hand before?

The sudden lack of your touch is startling, and Eddie goes looking for you without realizing how he is about to meet the consequences of trying to move like that.  

At some point during his dozing, someone evidently went and removed his neck brace, and in the absence of it, he suddenly has full range of movement where he didn’t before. It’s a learning curve he did not expect to have to tackle, and Eddie grits his teeth against the tenderness in his neck as he turns a tad too sharply toward the place at his bedside where he’d last seen you.

Something pops, there is a momentary tightness, but Eddie’s head does not go rolling off his shoulders, so he doesn’t give himself the time to worry about that, not with you sitting there at his bedside.    

Thankfully, you’re not gone as he had feared, though you have also not been spared the evident changes that have taken place in the room in the mere seconds it's been since he last closed his eyes.   

You’re out of the hospital gown you’d been wearing before, and dressed in an old, oversized t-shirt – the kind that grandmas wear to the beach, with the exaggerated drawing of a super curvy body on the front, big cartoon tits spilling out of an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot – great, now I'm gonna have that song stuck in my head.    

Your hair is wet and neatly slicked back out of your face, and even with his newly retained faculties, Eddie can’t help but feel slightly disappointed at the notion that you showered without him, he would have really liked to join you.      

Unhelpfully, his subconscious drums up a host of images, bombarding Eddie with what he knows you look like standing beneath the rush of hot, steaming water, with hands wandering across the expanse of your bare body – his and yours.    

It makes something stir halfheartedly in the pit of his stomach, and Eddie silently chastises himself for having such a thought – Get your mind out of the gutter, Munson. Not the time, or the place.

Still, a guy can dream, can't he?

Evidently not, as the sentiment is lost, taking the image of your unexpected nudity with it as he realizes he has no idea how long it’s been since last he was awake to see you sitting in that same spot.    

Under any other circumstance, losing time like that might be ever so slightly jarring, but once again Eddie doesn’t care about it, because he’s just so incandescently happy that you’re still here.   

You haven’t noticed his attention just yet, you’re far too entrenched in whatever it is you’ve got perched in your lap.    

It takes him half a moment too long to realize it’s a book, and that you’re reading aloud to him. It makes his chest swell, and he can’t tell if it hurts a little less than last time, or if the pain is sharper – Eddie doesn’t presently have the faculties to decide how he feels just yet as he settles back into the pillow and watches you pour over the text.       

“If he had simply imagined the Elder Folk, he could go back to the caves, and sleep, and never give a thought to the mysterious sword again.” You narrate in an even, unhurried voice, “But he knew he would think about it. And Ruadh, who would never be free unless he, Coll, killed the Wolf King with the sword that was never cast.”   

The gentle, steady rhythm of your reading is soothing, almost enough to lull him back to sleep, but he fights with what little strength he has to keep his eyes open between sluggish blinks.

He watches your lips move and feels the first tickle of a cough stirring deep in the hollow of his chest cavity. Eddie does his best to stifle it.    

“Slowly, he walked back to the tarn, where the caracle still waited, and paddled back to the opposite shore. He no longer felt afraid of the open moor – more desolate than ever now in the blinding snow – just weary and indifferent. The first gray of dawn began to lighten the night sky as he clumped up to the mouth of the cave near the waterfall…”    

Eddie tries to clear his throat as subtly as he can in an attempt to diminish the pesky cough, which has since crawled up into his throat.

He hates to interrupt your flow, but his efforts to banish the cough only pulls at his stitches and forces him to draw a sharp intake of breath, which he promptly chokes on.  

Your eyes flit up, ending your gentle narration and the moment with it. Just like that, Eddie Munson exists again, a hacking and coughing image of the person who has been disrupting the flow of your life for years now.    

If it bothers you – if it has ever bothered you – you make no show of it.    

Your brows pinch and you twist in your seat to pour from the plastic water pitcher Eddie hadn’t seen sitting on the tabletop just beyond his field of vision.    

He accepts the cup when you offer it, foregoing the bendy straw in favor of gulping greedily at the cool water.

The plastic edge bites into the cracked and tender flesh of his chapped lips, but he remains undeterred by the sensation and the way it dribbles out from the corners of his mouth and over his chin, leaking down into the bandages that have since replaced his neck brace.

The wetness is a cooling balm against his raw skin as it saturates the thick gauze and cotton.      

“Hey,” you say gently, taking the empty cup when he’s done and setting it back on the still-hidden bedside table.    

“Hey yourself,” he croaks, slightly dismayed to find that the state of his vocal cords has not improved since last he tried his hand at talking.    

The light is an unknowably cold and muted fluorescent hue spilling in from the drawn curtains of the room’s inner windows and under the crack in the door. With the blinds drawn, there is no telling what time of day it is, let alone what time of year.

If it weren’t for the lingering battered state of your being, the yellow-green bruise ringing your left eye and the half-healed stitches splitting your brow from the blow Jason Carver dealt you back on the rocky shores of Lover’s Lake, it could be Christmastime for all Eddie knows about how long he’s been in and out.    

Mostly out.    

“You were talking in your sleep,” You tell him.   

“Was I?” Eddie mumbles, for lack of anything better to say rather than out of genuine curiosity.    

You nod.   

“What were you dreaming about?”   

He's not sure he's ready to tell, considering he is fairly certain it was not a dream, but a memory you’d been listening to him talk through.

Eddie might lie and say he didn't remember if it weren’t for the way your scream is still echoing in his subconscious. He can’t imagine what must have happened for you to make a sound like that.

Like the hollow crack of Chrissy’s bones twisting up out of shape or the emptiness that hung in the air between him and Wayne after the accident when he asked when he could see his mother again, the way you’d screamed back on the other side of the world is going to haunt Eddie for the rest of his life, and he hopes he never has to hear something so terrible ever again.   

“Eddie?” You say, drawing him back out from the cloying mire of his thoughts.   

“I was dreaming about you…” He says, and it’s not a lie, despite the quick decision he makes to spare you the gory details for his own sake as much as yours, and shrugs as best as he can manage – it hurts. “...Naked in the shower…”    

You snort undaintily but beyond that, remain wholly unaffected by the answer – a genuine Eddie Munson response.    

“Good dream.”    

“Sure,” Eddie mumbles, feeling strangely shot through with holes, “… what time is it?”   

He squints against the unpleasant throbbing of his frontal lobe in the too-little light and watches as you fold his tattered copy of Ann Turnbull’s The Wolf King neatly in your lap with the kind of reverence a well-loved book deserves – he wonders if that means you’ve been back to the trailer.    

Then, you check your wrist reflexively for the watch that isn’t there, and your face pinches briefly into a mask of annoyance as you twist again in your seat, looking for the clock on the wall.

You stare at it for what feels like a very long time before finally twisting back around.   

“Half past two.” You yawn, stretching your arms above your head until it causes your body to seize in little micro-spasms.    

Eddie opens his mouth to ask if that was an AM or PM deal, but you slump back down into your seat and turn your gaze up to look at him with hazy, wistful eyes that turn him suddenly shy and shut him up before he can work himself up to it.

You’re so pretty, even battered and bruised as you are, dressed in something he imagines you rifled out of a lost and found box, it makes his tongue go fat and clumsy in his mouth.    

“You should go back to sleep,” You tell him, sleepily folding your hands over the guard rail at his bedside and resting your chin atop them.     

Not a chance in hell, he wants to tell you, not with what is lurking in his subconscious – tragically not you, naked in the shower – but he’s too busy noticing how exhausted you suddenly look to think about that anymore.     

You look about as much as he feels – bone tired, right down to the marrow, like after everything you’ve been through, no amount of sleep is ever going to make you feel normal again.   

“When’s the last time you slept, Sweetheart?” Eddie asks you softly as he watches your eyes droop.   

You shake your head.   

“I’m okay.” You breathe out dreamily.    

He would point out that that wasn’t what he asked you, but the notion is smothered by the creeping realization that if he sends you off to catch a few hours of sleep somewhere, it would mean sending you away because he's not about to let you sleep upright in a chair. Some recessed part of Eddie's mind is still deeply worried that the second he takes his eyes off of you, you’re going to disappear.

Eddie will keep you as near as he possibly can if he has any say in it – he'd bring you up into this bed if he thought that was an option.

Still, you’ve taken such good care of him that he can’t help but try and return the favor.     

“You look tired.” He tells you, and you roll your shoulders in a good-natured shrug.   

“I am tired.”    

“Then you should go and get some sleep.”    

You wrinkle your nose in that specific way he loves so much and breathe a burst of soft and airy laughter through your nose.  

“But I don’t want to stop looking at you,” you whine, which is almost funny considering how your eyes have already slid shut.    

The feeling is mutual, and even after all the time he’s loved you, it’s still so weird how you’ve got that uncanny ability to read his mind in little moments like this.   

Eddie winces as his brows jump up toward his hairline, where the fresh stitches in his forehead happily remind him of their presence.  

His reaction is not lost on you as your eyes flit open again in time to regard him sleepily.    

“… that one looks like it hurts…” You hum, reaching out to brush your fingers oh-so-gently across the stitches in Eddie’s forehead, “You know, you were pretty out of it last time we talked… are you feeling any better?”   

Eddie scoffs in a “funny you should ask” sort of way. 

“Not really. I kind of feel like I died,”    

The statement is enough to banish all traces of drowsy whimsy from your features and, suddenly, you’re wide awake. Of course, he’d only said it in a fatalistic attempt at twisting the truth for some kind of wry humor – something like trying to claw his way back to feeling normal – but your reaction has him regretting it instantly.

You stare at him, wide-eyed and with the faintest hint of something Eddie might almost call fear, brows tweaking up and inching toward one another to form the beginnings of the deep crease of worry he knows so well.

You don’t respond, not right away, despite the strange sound that stirs in the hollow of your throat, something that might have been an attempt at a laugh if it hadn’t fallen flat on its face.

The ambiguity of that sound paired with the look you’re giving him leaves a sinking feeling in the pit of Eddie’s stomach, and he watches carefully as you sit up straight, chewing the inside of your lip like you’re trying to decide whether or not to tell him something.

He has to muster his courage to work himself up to ask you what's on your mind, though some minuscule part of him is already fairly sure he knows what’s got you spooked.  

“Why are you looking at me like that?” He asks cautiously. 

You worry your lower lip and hesitate, long enough that Eddie is starting to get nervous.  

“Well,” You start after a very long moment, dropping your voice to a nearly inaudible tenor, “You gave it your best shot.”    

Eddie feels himself go hot, then cold, and hot again, and suddenly he feels like he’s swaying in his seat. He grips the sheets for stability and swallows hard against the cobwebs blooming in his throat.    

“What do you mean?” Eddie asks, despite his better judgment, because deep down he knows exactly what you mean.   

“...You stopped breathing, Eds…” you tell him, and he’s not sure he would have heard you had the room not been so quiet.   

Despite how unsurprised he is to hear it, the news is sobering, like a sucker punch to the gut and suddenly, Eddie can hear you screaming again, echoing out from somewhere in the furthest reaches of his subconscious.  

He stopped breathing. Which is to say he died.  

Right there in your arms, if he had to guess, just like in his dream.   

Boy, he hates being right all the time.    

Eddie barely hears a word of your explanation as you wade cautiously into the tide-pool of events that happened after he lost consciousness.

He lost a lot of blood – that much he already knows – but as you explain it, he’s got Steve to thank for his return ticket from the river Styx. 

He supposes it makes sense that Harrington would know CPR; man is about as close to being a Boy Scout as you can get without wearing the uniform. Steve got him breathing again – he certainly broke a few of Eddie’s ribs in the process, but he got him breathing all the same, and at the end of the day, that’s all that really matters.

He guesses in some sense of karmic justice that he and Steve are even now, the burden of saving his life has been sloughed off of his unwilling shoulders, the scales are balanced, and all is right in the world.  

Or so it ought to be, somehow, Eddie can’t seem to bring himself around to that line of thinking.    

“After that, you were in surgery,” you explain, adopting a droning sort of monotony to your tone like you’re reciting something deeply uninteresting that you’d spent hours and hours memorizing, “...and we were all just waiting around to see what would happen… for a minute there we didn’t know if you were gonna make it – you were…” You pause as your voice hitches and threatens to break, “It was – God, Eddie – it was so scary. I was so scared you weren’t gonna…”  

Weren’t gonna survive?

Well, it's like you said, he went and gave it his best shot, didn't he? Eddie suppresses a shudder as he is bathed in the memory of lying there in your arms, gripped in fear for his own impending death … he’d been so afraid of dying… 

You do your best to perk up then, sniffling and blinking back any sort of wetness attempting to collect at the corners of your lashes.  

“Well, it doesn’t matter…” You say, shoulders jumping in feigned nonchalance.  

Eddie has to bite his tongue to keep from shouting.  

“It does matter,” he says instantly, a little too loud for the confines of the room.  

Eddie rethinks his tone when he sees how his timbre causes you to flinch, but he won’t apologize. He’d come so close to losing this, losing you and the quiet comfort of just sharing your space, and he can’t stand hearing how hard you are trying to seem like his near-death hasn’t affected you, like it’s just one of those things.  

For what ... for his sake? He’s the one who died, he doesn’t need you protecting him from that. 

Still, he supposes that this is entirely new territory for both of you, and you’re only trying to do what you think is best – what happened to him happened to you too. He can’t forget that. 

Eddie reaches for your hand so that you will know he isn’t angry, and you give it to him so quickly that the room rings out with a hard clap of dry skin on skin. 

“It matters to me, Sweetheart.” He whispers, and you nod. 

“You’re right...” You say softly, “It does matter... it matters that you almost died. And it matters that I thought I was going to lose you again – after I just got you back?" You make an indignant sound that presents itself as something a lot closer to a sob than a scoff, "How is that fair? I didn't know how I was going to live with that... I didn’t want to live with it, without you... and I don’t care if it’s selfish to say, but I'm so glad I don’t have to... I'm so glad you came back to me...”  

As if he even had a choice – you’d told him once that given a choice between him and anything else, you would always choose him, and Eddie suddenly can’t stop thinking about how relieved he is to see you, how sitting here together feels strangely so much like that moment he’d whipped open the door back in Rick’s boathouse and, against all odds, found you – beautiful, wonderful, inimitable you – standing there … because you chose him, you always choose him, so of course he would choose you, without question. 

How’d you find me? He’d tried to ask you then, stumbling and stammering and choking on his own inexorable relief … what was it you said to him?  

Eddie has to clear his throat to try and keep his voice from wavering, and even then, there is the faintest hint of a lilt when he speaks.   

“Heard you calling,” He says in a clipped tone, “Came running.”    

It doesn’t have nearly the same effect coming from him – you’ve always been so much cooler than he is – but even with his failed attempt at being a smooth talker, it still garners the best response possible. 

You laugh – a high, watery thing that wrenches itself out of you with enough force to startle you and make you laugh all over again. Even Eddie feels its effects, biting the inside of his lip to try and keep himself from smiling too wide because of a faint and lingering memory of how that had hurt the last time he’d tried to smile at you.

You sit there, giggling and sniffling and wiping your eyes, and it makes his insides ache.  

It feels like it’s been years since he’s seen that smile.   

It takes some time for you to compose yourself, caught in the throes of exhaustive giggles as you are, though once you finally manage to calm down, you stick Eddie to the spot with a pointed look of feigned annoyance. The effect is more or less lost with how you can’t keep a straight face, grinning at him the way you are.  

“You keep using my lines like that and I’m gonna have to start charging you, Munson,” You tease.  

“Put it on my tab,” He says, reaching for you with both hands so that he might pull you close and hug you tight. 

The motion is stopped short with a harsh jerk and a deafening clank that rings loudly through the room, drawing his attention to the polished silver cuff fastened to his forgotten wrist.   

The sight of the angry gleaming metal keeping him firmly tethered to the guard rail furthest from you causes Eddie to break into a cold sweat.  

He's handcuffed to the goddamn bed.   

“…And then there’s that…” You mutter.    

He gives you an incredulous, bleary-eyed look and feels himself go hot, then cold.

Somehow Eddie had thought they would be done with this, that he’d already been through the worst of it – out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to speak,  running from the police only to find himself swamped in the rushing tide of all this paranormal otherworldly bullshit –  but when has he ever been lucky enough to be let off the hook for something like that?

Chrissy is still dead, after all.

Suddenly, he feels like he could be sick. It doesn’t seem fair that he should have endured everything he did on the other side only to come back to find all the problems of the real world waiting in the wings. 

“Hey,” You say then, drawing his attention back and doing your best to quiet the rushing tide of his mind working itself into a tizzy with worry, “One thing at a time, okay? Right now, let's just focus on getting better, and then we’ll worry about the rest of it…”   

Eddie nods, and despite the shackles, he tries again to reach for you, attempting to pick up where he left off despite how this latest development has rattled him – his movement is jerked short again with another one of those hard, metallic clangs, and Eddie’s sudden and violent need to touch you is only amplified by his hampered movement.  

Desperation wells dangerously in his chest, and Eddie curls his fingers into fists to stop himself from trying for you for a third time.   

“What about you, though?” He rasps, desperate to think about anything beyond the fact that after all is said and done, he’s still probably going to go down for Chrissy’s murder. 

He can’t think about that, he can’t think about her, so he forces himself to think about what is right in front of him.  

You furrow your brow. 

“What about me?” 

“I mean are you okay? Last time I saw you, you were…” He trails off as he is assaulted with the image of his own trembling hands slick with blood down in the dark.

Yours or his, he can’t be sure, but Eddie shuts his eyes against it and grits his teeth. 

He gets the faintest hint that he’s slipping again, sinking back into the bed and headed straight for the wrong side of the world, the dark and the dank and the perpetual lightning storm. 

Before the world can close in on him, however, you snatch him back with a gentle hand closing around his fingers. 

“I’m okay.” You tell him with a quiet assurance, “Everybody’s okay. A little worse for wear, but everybody’s breathing… and that’s what counts, right?”     

Normally, Eddie might have said something dismissive about that – fuck everybody else – but that wouldn’t be fair of him, not after all the work Steve and Dustin and the others put in to pull his ass out of the fire, but he’s too busy trying to compartmentalize everything to think about anything beyond what is currently right in front of him – you. And you’re telling him that everything is alright, so he supposes that’s good enough for him, at least for now.  

“Right…” Eddie hums, clinging to the warm sense of calm radiating out from you and bleeding into him from your point of blessed contact, “Okay... good.”    

He fidgets with his fingers, gently tucked into the palms of your hands, and can’t help but notice that something feels off.

It's not a sense of something wrong so much as a lack of weight, and a cursory inspection reveals to Eddie with a sickening start that his rings are missing. He doesn’t know why, but it sends a sharp pang of grief stabbing through his chest, and suddenly, his eyes are growing frustratingly wet and blurry.   

He tries in vain to swallow the lump forming in his throat. He can feel you watching him, and he begins to wonder with no small amount of embarrassment whether he’s really about to start crying over something so trivial as his rings.

It’s not like they were special, like a family heirloom or a physical holdover from some cherished instance, they were just something that had caught his eye in a pawn shop a few years ago. He doesn’t know why he’s getting so upset over their loss, except that they were his, and he doesn’t have a lot of things that are expressly his. 

He suddenly feels like that flayed Eddie-shaped thing again, like he’s been stripped away, picked clean down to the bone, and ravaged over by scavengers – it’s not enough that he only went and fucking died, the world is not going to be satisfied until it takes everything from him, his van, Sweetheart, you – even those goddamn rings.  

It’s not fair. It’s just not fucking fair.  

And it’s not the rings so much as how he’s been teetering on the edge of this precipice for days – the rings, Eddie supposes, are just his breaking point.  

Which is fucking stupid, if you ask him.  

And then, as if you could read his thoughts and were privy to the idle distress bubbling up in Eddie’s chest, you rock backward in your seat and fish a wadded-up bundle of damp tissues from a hidden pocket at your hip.  

“Here,” You say. 

He watches as you carefully unwrap the bundle in the palm of your hand and reveal the jumble of burnished silver there.

A pig’s head, a skull, and an iron cross, not lost or stolen but safely tucked away, and Eddie chokes on the sound that rises in his throat – something caught halfway between a laugh and a sigh of unabashed relief.    

“Where did you –?” he starts to ask but cuts himself off with a slow, uneven breath.   

Calm down, Munson. Just calm the fuck down, will you?   

“I took them when they put you in the ambulance,” You admit, “They were all full of blood, and I didn’t want you to have to see them like that… so I cleaned them off and held on to them until I could give them back to you,”  

What you don’t say, however, is why you really took them – not for safekeeping, but for souvenirs, so you would have something of his on the off chance that Eddie didn’t pull through.  

It’s a sobering thought that settles in the pit of his stomach like a stone – he can’t even be mad about that, for as morbid as it is, because he would have wanted you to have them. He would have wanted you to have anything you wanted to keep him close in case he couldn’t find his way back to you, he only hates that there was ever a moment that you thought you needed something like that.  

Eddie watches you staring at the jumble of rings sitting in your hand, staring without really seeing them, he thinks, and then you tilt your head over to press your shoulder to your ear and give him a wry look. 

“Your piggy friend gave me the worst trouble, there. All those wrinkles…? Took me about an hour to get him clean – I guess that’s why they call it being pig-headed...”    

Eddie startles himself then with a burst of watery laughter, almost a mirror image of the way you’d laughed before, and you bite the inside of your lip to try and stifle the way you’re giggling right along with him as he reaches out to trace the cold silver lines of his beloved trinkets with trembling, reverent fingers.  

You catch his hand with feline grace and, one by one, slide the rings back into place over his battered fingers. Once they are settled snugly where they belong, you give him an easy, contented smile. 

“There.” You tell him, “Now you’re perfect,”  

Eddie hums out his thanks because it’s all he can do to keep himself level with the emotion welling up inside of him over that gentle act of reverence. He’s not going to break down into a blubbering mess of sloppy tears over it, but the danger is ever present, so Eddie cautions himself to tread carefully.   

He wants to tell you he loves you, but he’s fairly certain he’s exhausted the phrase over the last… eventually he’s going to stop trying to drum up some random interval of time, he doesn’t know what day it is, and he doesn’t know how long it’s been since you all stood together in the kitchenette of his trailer and made your own individual suicide plans.  

He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he told you… maybe he ought to say it, just to cover all his bases… 

“What’s the matter?” You ask him suddenly.  

“Nothing…” He says quickly, and it’s the truth, despite the way he can tell you don’t believe him.  

You love him, just like you’d told him back in the woods and in every meaningless little gesture since the day you’d met, he might argue. He can’t believe he ever doubted that for a second.    

You love him, and he loves you. Circle of life.     

The sound rumbles thickly in the hollow of Eddie’s chest as he does his best to hum through the ravenous need welling up in him.

He feels like he is fraying at the seams, and in the event that he comes apart, goes scattering to the wind and every corner of this room, you’re the only thing that is going to be able to hold him together.

He needs you so badly, in his arms, at his side – the familiar press of your body stretched out along his and the gentle thrumming of your heart, beating in tandem with his is the only cure for what ails him, always has been, always will be.  

For the sake of his own self-preservation, he sighs out a throaty chuckle and shakes his head as much as he dares. The wound in his neck does not thank him for it.  

“What’s the matter, Eds?” you ask again. 

“It’s stupid.”  

“Tell me anyway.”  

He hesitates, and presses his lips into a tight, flat line in the hopes that what he’s about to say isn’t too cheesy, too much to ask. 

“I just… I reeaallly wish I wasn’t handcuffed to this bed…” he hums, stretching the word comfortably and feeling like something only vaguely Eddie Munson shaped, “Could really use a cuddle right about now…”  

The corners of your lips curl ever so slightly, and you stick him to the spot with wry, hooded eyes.  

“That so?” You hum.   

Eddie nods, glancing up from his rings to gaze at you through his lashes. He feels the distance between you in the marrow of his bones, a deep and wretched aching propped up by the hospital bed and the handcuffs and his injuries and everything he knows he shouldn’t ask for right here and now, in this place. 

“You’re so far away,” He admits, feeling frighteningly vulnerable, “Feels like if I don’t reach out and touch you, you’re gonna disappear,”  

You pull a face that is more sympathetic than anything else he might have normally expected.   

“I’m right here, Eddie.” you insist, curling your hands around his and pressing a chaste kiss to the ridge of his battered knuckles – it makes the lump in his throat swell, “I’m right here.”  

“Yeah…” he hums, sniffs, then hums again, “... yeah…”  

Dark eyes flit back down to the dull burnished silver of his rings, glinting under the dimmed florescents, and Eddie feels the heat of your gaze on the side of his face more intensely than the press of your fingertips. He knows the look you’re giving him, the same one you always adopt when he gets vulnerable, shares something unsavory about his childhood or a hard lesson he’d been forced to learn in some scandalizing way.

He pictures the deep crease of concern that forms between your brows, tweaking up at the inner corners, and imagines smoothing it away with the pad of his thumb. He thinks about all the ways he’s hurt you and wishes he could take everything back, every harsh word, every clumsy faux pas.  

If wishes were horses, or whatever that dumb saying is…  

The sound of your movement draws his attention, and when he looks up again, you’re twisted around to glance over your shoulder. Eddie follows your gaze and stares at the empty glass set into the wooden door.

Beyond, there is the gentle din of activity, the shadow of movement muffled by the swing hinge barrier – freedom, just out of reach and held at bay by the clutch of stupid, silver handcuffs.  

When you turn back around to face him, you’ve got a mischievous glint in your eye instead of that strained, melancholy look he’d expected to see, and it stirs his chest with a familiar giddy feeling. 

“Okay, so,” you begin, “I’ve got a pretty stupid idea if you’re up for it.” 

Intrigue breathes a bit of levity into Eddie’s bloodstream, and he tilts his head as far over to the side as he can go before he begins to feel the tightness in the muscles there – it’s not very far.  

“I love your stupid ideas.” He says, face splitting up into a smirk as you lean forward over your knees and drop your voice to a low, rumbling timbre.  

“If you promise to behave yourself…” You begin slowly, and Eddie feels the stitches in his forehead bite at him again when his eyebrows jump.

Suddenly, the air is thick with possibility, and he tilts forward to meet you, hanging on your every word, “...I’ll climb up into that bed with you and give you a cuddle. How’s that for a stupid idea?” 

He’s nodding before you can even finish speaking and already doing his best to shift over and make room for you on the creaky twin mattress. 

“The nurse isn’t gonna like that,” He tells you as he fidgets with all his tubes – IVs, monitors, oxygen, he’s really more machine than man right now – gathering and adjusting and moving them out of the way so that you can be cleared for landing without bringing Nurse Ratched running by accidentally ripping the IV out of his arm. 

“Fuck the nurse,” you say with no small amount of indignation as you fiddle with something at your side.  

There is the hard metallic sound of something clicking into place and you sit up again, bracing your hands on the bizarrely curved arms of your chair that suddenly and strangely look a lot like wheels.  

Eddie pays no mind to the apparent Avante Guard construction of the hospital furniture and is practically giddy as he admonishes you for such course language. He loves it when you curse.  

“D’you kiss your mother with that mouth?” He taunts, pushing the boundaries of the unbearable stiffness in his midsection by sitting as far forward as he dares. 

You give him another one of those wry looks and push up from your chair to bend over the side of the bed and meet him in the middle. 

“Nope, just you.” 

And then you close the gap and seal your lips against his in a firm press – which, he’s not going to lie, definitely hurts – but leaves Eddie grinning like a loon and more than a little lightheaded when you pull away with a loud, wet smack.  

His eyes slip shut dreamily and he hums contentedly, licking his lips in search of the sweet, sweet honey of your taste.  

“Hmnurse?” Eddie slurs, half drunk on your affection, “Could use a little more of that medicine, if y’don’t mind...”  

Somewhere to his right, you snort out a breathy laugh and mumble something about “fucking the nurse, alright,”. Eddie opens his mouth to tell you not to tempt him because he’s supposed to be behaving himself – it would be so, so easy for you to swing those pretty legs of yours over his waist and straddle him right here on the bed, he’s got no pants on, after all – and pries his eyes open just in time to see you taking a measured step away from your chair – scratch that, wheelchair.  

The words die on his tongue.  

You’re in a wheelchair … what the hell are you doing in a– Eddie’s heart seizes with momentary panic as the rest of it comes rushing back to hit him like a brick to the face.  

He remembers the van. The gut-wrenching terror that clawed at him as he stood frozen, listening over the radio as it rolled down the embankment with you inside, pumping liquid fire in his veins as he made the jaunt out to the road and pulled you out of the deathtrap he’d sent you to, turning his fingers to stone and as he’d fumbled with his belt to tie a tourniquet around your leg.  

He sent you out to the van … he did that to you.  

“Oh, God…” Eddie rasps, suddenly breathless “Oh, Christ, Sweetheart…”  

You seize his hand before he can get any further down the path of blaming himself for something that he might have been able to see was arguably out of his control, had he been able to see anything from behind the spots splashed across his vision.  

Blessedly, you bring him back to Earth by squeezing his hand until he feels his metacarpals creak. He zeroes in on the pain and makes himself look at you.   

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” you tell him. “They just don’t want me putting pressure on it until the stitches can heal… anyway, you ought to see the other guy,”  

It doesn’t make him feel any better because Eddie saw the other guy — it was the crushed and mangled carcass of the van, bent impossibly out of shape, windows blown out on all sides. He’s the reason you were there in the first place – this is all his fault.  

And now you’re just gonna climb up into the bed like it’s no big deal? You were right, this is a stupid idea. 

Only you don’t seem to care about any sort of mobility issues you may or may not have as you brace your hands on the guardrail and slowly — so, so carefully — ease up onto the mattress.  

Eddie watches you tentatively shift your weight, favoring your good leg and working carefully to avoid putting any sort of pressure on the bad one. The moist pink tip of your tongue pokes its way out from the corner of your mouth, your face scrunched in careful concentration as you move, and once you’re satisfied, you lift up and over with no small amount of effort and knock his knee with your hip as you come down to land and crawl up to meet him.

The mattress sags beneath your combined weight, and Eddie reaches for you, despite the hard clang of the handcuff reminding him of his predicament. Locked rubber wheels creak as you crawl up to meet him, slotting yourself in where you belong, tucked in at his side in the crook of his arm and perfectly beneath his chin. 

“How’s that?” You ask, turning your face up toward him in search of guidance. 

Not great, but he’ll never tell.   

“Fine,” Eddie says immediately, despite the way even the slightest hint of pressure from your body pressed against him causes his ribs to creak painfully – whether it’s because of the uncanny ability you’ve always had to see clear through his bullshit, or just the face he’s making, you clearly don’t believe him. 

“Are you sure?” You ask, pushing up in an attempt to take some of the pressure of your weight off him, “I can move over… here, I’ll just–” 

He does his best to stifle the sharp intake of breath he has to take when you twist over onto your side and make the final adjustments to try and settle in comfortably against him. He lays a firm, free hand on you to hold you still and pull you snugly against him, and you immediately cease your fidgeting.  

“It’s fine, just like that, Sweetheart. You’re perfect.”  

You breathe in sharply, still giving him that tight, concerned look and searching his face for any hint of a lie. When you evidently come up empty, you breathe out a measured sigh and nod, and the room settles with you.  

Once all the little points of pain in Eddie’s body have stopped throbbing, he does his best to relax and takes his time looking you over.

He indulges himself in staring down the length of your body, at the oversized novelty t-shirt laying draped over the suggestion of your form and the barest hint of your shorts hidden carefully beneath its hem, at the stretch of your legs crooked neatly forward toward his beneath the blankets, and Eddie finds his ogling interrupted as he gets stuck staring at the bandage wrapped tightly around the meat of your upper thigh.

He tries not to think about the deep, ugly wound lurking beneath the cotton, or how he had been so certain he could see the ghoulish white of bone peering back at him from the split in your flesh as he fought with clumsy fingers to pull his belt tight.  

“Does it hurt?” Eddie asks, reaching out impulsively to trace the fraying edge of the bandage with the edge of his nail.   

“Some.” You say idly, shoulder jumping as you turn your eyes up on him, “What about you?” 

He gazes back at you and feels his heart throb behind his sore ribs – you could have been asking about any number of his injuries, as extensive as they are, but rather than asking for specificity, he just nods.  

“Some.” he says softly, “Better now that you’re here.” 

Your brows creep toward one another and suddenly your eyes are bright and brimming.   

He reaches up with his free hand to tuck a stray lock of your hair behind your ear and cup your cheek so that he might be prepared to catch any stray tears that are likely to fall.

The position is awkward, to say the least, but you dutifully lean into the touch.  

“That’s cheesy,” you sniff, and before Eddie can open his mouth to say something witty in response, you turn your face in to hide in the crook of his neck and breathe out a shuddering sigh that sends goosebumps crawling across the expanse of his body. 

“Don't ever scare me like that again,” you whisper, saying it like it’s a secret that is only safe to share in such proximity. 

“I won’t, Sweet Girl,” Eddie tells you, “I’m not going anywhere.” 

“You promise?” You ask, turning big wet eyes up at him and sounding painfully girlish. 

He does his best to give you one of his winning smiles and clicks his tongue at you for ever doubting it.  

“‘Course I do. Cross my heart and hope to–” 

You don’t let him finish.  

All Eddie manages is another one of those breathless bleats of laughter as you push up and kiss him again, harder this time. He leans into it, tilting forward to grind his forehead against yours (which hurts, because he forgot about those damn stitches again) and relishing the way he can feel every inch of you when you twist your body to curl your arms around his neck.

Eddie wishes he could hold you as tightly as he needs to, wrap you up in his arms, and squeeze until he feels your ribs creak and forces the air out of your lungs, but he’ll just have to settle for one arm.  

One is better than none, he supposes.       

The kissing subsides all too soon, giving over to needy little pecks you leave over every inch of his skin that you can reach, over and over and over until even the microsecond it takes to pull back before going in for another is too much distance. For a long moment, it’s all either of you can do but sit there with the sides of your noses pressed together, breathing in tandem, promising to never let the other go again.  

Eventually, it starts to hurt, laying like that, so you make an exception to the promises of the previous moment and shift down to accommodate something a little more bearable, with your ear pressed to the hollow of Eddie’s chest, and your hand resting comfortably over the space where his heart thrums gently beneath aching ribs.  

“Say something, Eddie.” You hum after a while. 

“Okay... what do you want me to say?” 

You shake your head.  

“Anything. I just want to hear your voice.”  

Eddie tilts his head down until he can press his lips to the crown of your skull and resists the urge to tease you about that. It’s just a little too touching to poke fun at.  

“You want me to tell you a story?” He murmurs into your hair, and you nod against him, “Alrighty – pass me the book, will you? Let the master show you how it’s done.”  

You shift over to fetch the tattered paperback from where you’d left it in your chair, holding on to Eddie by the wrist as you lean away, as if to tell him you’re not going far.

Once it passes between hands and you’re tucked safely back into place, he flips through the pages of a book he’s read so many times he practically has it memorized and clears his throat dramatically before he begins reading.

He has to adjust his tone early on into his narration as the damage to his throat will not allow for extended use of his favored Dungeon Master voice, but he soon falls into a familiar rhythm that feels enough like getting back to enough of a normal that Eddie almost forgets the circumstances under which he is laying there at you side, reading to you like he has done so many times before – you could be back home, lying in his bedroom, listening to the ambient sounds of the trailer park for all either of you knew. 

You make short comments here and there, like you always do, and he shushes you, like he always does, but after nearly an hour of flipping pages and struggling to keep characters separate with individual voices, Eddie can't help but notice that it’s been some time since your last snarky comment about a character’s name or motivations.    

“Still with me, Sweetheart?” Eddie calls, closing the book to gently card his fingers through the lingering dampness of your hair. 

The angle at which your head is pressed against his chest makes it difficult to see much of your features, just the slope of your brow shadowing your gently fluttering lashes, the line of your nose, and the faintest pout of your lips.

Gripped in a sudden, sneaking suspicion, Eddie holds his breath and watches you for any subtle sign of movement, and after a moment, he groks the gentle up and down of your deep and measured breathing. 

In and out. In and out – fast asleep, as you should be.  

He hums contentedly and settles back against the pillows, happy to rest his weakening voice and aching back, and just feel your heart beating against him as he curls his free arm around you.  

It’s right that you’re sleeping at this ungodly hour where only ghosts and lovers are awake to whisper back and forth to one another.  

How you must have worried yourself sick over him, watching him closely to make sure he was still breathing, comforting him during a nightmare, waiting for him to come back to you.

Eddie knows he ought to be sleeping too, just like you told him.

Maybe if he drifted off he could find you somewhere in dreamland and tell you everything he is too tired to say now, but all he can do is gaze fondly at you and follow the measured tide of your REM cycle, gradually being lulled to sleep by the rise and fall of your breathing.   

Suddenly, the world is not so complicated, and the future is not so uncertain. With you, asleep in his arms, Eddie can even believe that everything will be okay, and in time, everything might even go back to normal… well, maybe not normal – after everything that’s happened, nothing is going to be normal ever again.  

Still, right now, this moment pressed against one another in the gentle quiet of the muted green-grey room, is enough. Eddie tilts his head down until his cheek finds the top of your head, and he sighs, feeling the hard grind of your skulls knocking against one another.  

He nods to himself and relishes in the stinging itch of your stitches shaking hand with his, your bandages exchanging pleasantries. What a pair you make, vanquishing your own dragons and laying down your lives for one another like something out of an epic tale.

In another life, they would write stories about you, the Maiden and her Fool, and their journey to the end of the Earth. All the foes fought and vanquished, detailing every drop of blood spilled in the combined effort of laying down their lives for one another – your lives – hurdling toward a hard-won victory and everything else that led you to this moment, to the harmony of quiet breathing and thrumming life support machines, swaddled in a loving more intense than either of you has ever felt.  

And then, just as the long, gnarled fingers of sleep begin to creep up and wrap their fingers around Eddie’s consciousness, he feels that same old instinct rising in him – the powerfully aching need that will not be beaten back no matter how hard he fights.  

He fills his lungs deeply, carefully, and breathes out one last sigh of contented consciousness.  

“I love you, Sweetheart.” he mumbles. 

You stir briefly against him, nuzzling deeper into his chest before settling and humming out an incoherent response. 

“...love you too, Eds...” 

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #stranger things fic #eddie munson fanfic #cruel summer fic #joseph quinn eddie munson #i have the epilogue in the works as well as a little extra 'some time later' thing but I might take some time to just sit with this #can't believe we got this far #bless the eddie fandom and everyone who has stuck around #you are the real chads

[frecklystars]

im gonna start making doodles trying to reclaim my TF F/Os that i've lost, maybe once a week or once every two weeks... or once a month?? i dont know, i will try to keep some consistency but i really need to start slow on this. here's to hoping that drawing them every once in a while will make even just the smallest difference.

im so sick of associating these characters with my abuser and i'm so sick of the immediate fight or flight response that i get when just looking at pictures of TF characters or even the voice actors. i have tried just about everything... therapy, medication, exercise, watching a few clips from the shows, buying cameos, commissioning art/fics, talking to voice actors in person at conventions... nothing has helped me get better at all. i tried giving up on TF entirely, throwing out/giving away all of my TF merch, refusing to touch the franchise, but that has only made me more and more miserable as time has passed. it has been over a year since [insert the most horrific experiences ever here] happened to me and since i associated that with a long list of things, TF included. and im! sick! of feeling bad! so! if im gonna be miserable no matter what, then i might as well try to get better, right?? drawing my F/Os loving me has never failed me before, so here's to hoping it isn't gonna fail me now. i am quite the stubborn bitch and i refuse to allow my main coping mechanism i've used for 2 decades to remain tainted forever and ever 😤😤

these will be the shakiest, shittiest doodles imaginable, but i think drawing the robots i miss so much at least once a month can help me rewire my brain into believing they're safe again and they love me and i'm not in danger. i think the best thing that will help me is drawing my Ryan F/Os interacting with them as "proof" that they're safe to be around, that they've "approved of" them, will help me slowly reclaim them. fake it til you make it as they say. let's try this for maybe just a couple of months as a slow start and see how it goes :/

any TF doodles will be tagged as "reclaiming robots tag" and nothing else - free to blacklist it if you dont wanna see. i'll most likely be rarely posting these but jic //shrug

anyway. yay. attempts number one and two. i like to think barbie and ken stop by the starflower meadow every now and then because stsc summons them across the multiverse, asking them how i'm doing, if i'm safe, if i miss him at all. wow i am shaking so bad. ha ha haaa. these took about ten?? minutes?? so woohoo to ten minutes of drawing TF. im proud of myself for trying. even if i dont go through with this and end up not being able to draw TF ever again, at least i managed this one single post. if i keep this up, maybe a year from now, or two years or five years or whatever, i'll be able to handle it. i don't even expect to hyperfixate on TF ever again because my self shipping will never ever be the same w/ them -- i'll never interact with the fandom again, i'll never reblog fanart or gifsets or anything like that ever again, if i even somehow managed to feel good enough to actually throw myself back into the shows -- but i want to think i'll feel indifferent to it one day. to not have that fight or flight response. that is my goal. literally the bare fucking minimum <3

anyway. i'm super nauseous. this is so incredibly hard! holy shit!!! but that's why i have to do this. to quote pedro pascal, i am going to have a panic attack and i am going to leave 👍✨

(BTW I am still gonna stay offline for a few more days. I am back from vacation but I am SO burnt out I don't want to interact with dms/my inbox yet. I just wanted to post this just to get it out of my system and let it disappear into the void. But I will be back later this week bc I still have some commissions to finish and I wanna gush about my very exciting time meeting steve/tom/the brba cast. anyway... goodnight. i love you. smooch)

#reclaiming robots tag

[anthurak]

What a lot of Helluva Boss fans have in common with Blitzo...

Something I’ve realized recently is that there is this great, fascinating irony in this fixation that much of the Helluva Boss fandom has on the idea of some simple ‘wholesome’ family dynamic between Blitzo, Stolas, Loona and Octavia. Where Blitzo and Stolas are in some happy marriage and raising Loona and Octavia and everything is sweet and wholesome.

Because you know who ELSE is super-fixated on finding some idealized ‘wholesome family dynamic’?

Blitzo.

And after watching Seeing Stars, I think we can say pretty definitively that this very fixation is one of the biggest PROBLEMS with Blitzo and one of the main reasons his relationship with Loona is so dysfunctional.

Looking back in hindsight, it’s pretty clear that Bltizo’s decision to adopt a hellhound was driven by his desperate need for emotional connection to someone. Because that’s the crux of Blitzo’s entire character: Thanks to his metric shitton of childhood trauma and baggage, he is absolutely desperate for emotional connection and validation, while simultaneous being absolutely TERRIFIED of any kind of commitment or letting himself be vulnerable. It’s why he burned down his relationship with Verosika, it’s the source of his relationship problems with Stolas, it’s why he’s so obsessed with the M&Ms (because he’s desperate for what they have) and it’s why he’s such a dysfunctional father-figure to Loona.

Because looking at the flashback in Seeing Stars, we can easily infer that Blitzo wasn’t looking to adopt some disaffected, traumatized loner just about to age out of the adoption system like Loona, but rather an actual child. Instead, the entire reason he adopted Loona was because her situation and the words of the overseer positively smashed Blitzo’s sympathetic trauma button and caused him to adopt Loona right there and then. I mean, think of it this way: Adopting Loona was effectively an impulse buy from Blitzo.

Now, this alone isn’t necessarily a sign of bad parenting from Blitzo. The problem is that it’s pretty clear Blitzo never adjusted his expectations of what a daughter like Loona actually needs. Because he seems to have been so fixated on creating some wholesome father-daughter relationship that would solve all his perceived problems, he’s therefore fixated on treating Loona like she’s some troubled child or teenager, rather than a young woman in her early twenties, something Moxie pointed out as early as the pilot. We see this in basically all of Blitzo’s interactions with Loona, particularly in how overly protective, overly affectionate and generally ‘clingy’ Blitzo gets towards Loona.

And combined with how Blitzo’s approach towards fatherhood seems to consist entirely of ‘don’t be like MY dad’, this seeming unwillingness/inability to see Loona as an adult rather than a child looks to be one of the central reasons for Blitzo being such a disaster of a parent and his generally dysfunctional relationship with Loona. Which we in turn see play out across the show and is on full display at the beginning of Seeing Stars:

Blitzo seems to be working from the idea of ‘be everything my dad wasn’t’, so his approach to parenting seems to be little more than ‘shower Loona in praise and affection and give her anything and everything he thinks she wants’. Which happens to be just about the exact OPPOSITE parenting/help someone like Loona actually needs. Because all he’s doing is basically enabling all of Loona’s unhealthy, anti-social, hyper-defensive coping mechanisms for her own trauma.

Like I’ve seen a number of people take issue with how so-called ‘abusive’ Loona is towards Blitzo with how much she physically lashes out at him, such as when she gives him a nutshot at the end of Seeing Stars. But frankly, that behavior should NOT be surprising at all, given what we’ve seen of them: As we see with both Loona and the M&Ms, Blitzo has basically zero respect for or even concept of personal boundaries and has a tendency to get super clingy and overly-affectionate. So is it any wonder that someone like Loona who is extremely defensive both emotionally and physically, after what has clearly been a VERY traumatic childhood would almost reflexively respond the way she does?*

That’s not to say that Loona’s tendency to beat the crap out of Blitzo is a good thing, but rather it’s a symptom of both their dysfunctional relationship and how Blitzo clearly has NO IDEA how to be a functional parent. Blitzo’s overly-affectionate, protective, clingy nature keeps Loona retreating into her shell, and his unwillingness to set any kind of boundaries for her and give her anything she wants simply allows Loona to stay in her hyper-defensive comfort zone.

It’s why despite Loona being 22 years old, she generally acts not much older than Octavia, someone at least 4 years her junior. Because in many respects she’s likely still much the same as she was when Blitzo adopted her. Blitzo’s parenting has enabled all of her pre-existing issues and allowed her to simply stay as she was while growing and maturing very little.**

Which of course is not to say that Blitzo doesn’t love his daughter. Far from it, in fact. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the overarching narrative point of the problems both Blitzo and Stolas have with their respective daughters, and which Loona highlighted in Seeing Stars can be summed up as: It is entirely possible for one to both genuinely, unconditionally care for and love their child and want nothing but the best for them, AND be an utter DISASTER of a parent.

Which all ties back to the grand irony I opened with: How much of the fandom is fixated on Blitzo, Stolas, Loona and Octavia being some simple, wholesome, happy family while Blitzo’s obsessive fixation on having that exact sort of family dynamic with Loona is presented as one of his biggest FLAWS as a character.

Just compare Blitzo’s fixation on being a wholesome, doting father to a clearly unreceptive Loona to how much of the fandom seems to view Blitzo and Stolas as already being married and Loona and Octavia as already being sisters.

Or just as Blitzo seems unwilling/unable to view Loona as a young adult rather than a child, look at how much of the fandom seems to want to view Loona and especially Octavia as children being raised by their two dads, rather than the two young adults that the show clearly seems to be treating them as.

I’ve spoken before at length about my issues with the fandom’s fixation on Loona and Octavia having a ‘simple and wholesome family relationship’, both with each other and their fathers. And this might be the biggest reason I simply DON’T see the show going in this direction that a lot of the fandom is thinking/hoping it will.

Because it runs counter to what is looking to be a major aspect of Blitzo’s character arc as both a father and a person in general: Learning to stop chasing the nebulous, vaguely defined idealized relationships he’s been so obsessively fixated on, and realizing that he CAN have the close, happy, validating personal connections he’s so desperate for if he simply opens up emotionally to the people around him and recognize how much they DO actually care about him. Like how Moxie may not appreciate his clingy attempts at being a family, but clearly would be happy to have Blitzo as a close friend. Or how Loona isn’t and was never the young, innocent child Blitzo wanted her to be, but she still appreciates him as a father who has helped her.

As I detailed in another post; Helluva Boss seems to be a story all about showing characters in messy, dysfunctional, dare I say… problematic relationships, yet also showing those characters that do genuinely care about each other can still work through and overcome their problems to find genuine happiness and fulfillment with each other. Not in some idealized ‘perfect’ sense, but one that works nonetheless.

--

*Which becomes rather tragically ironic when we see that Loona does recognize and appreciate the fact that Blitzo cares about her. And even recognizes how dysfunctional their relationship is, given her ‘this kind of shit gets messy’ and ‘everybody’s got issues’ lines. But while Loona might recognize this, Blitzo clearly does NOT. And given how neither of the two are any good at meaningful communication, it gives the sense that Loona’s lashing out at Blitzo is in part kind of the only way she has to enforce personal boundaries around him.

**This actually makes it all the more ironic that when Loona and Octavia actually meet, Octavia’s mere presence seems to immediately encourage Loona to start acting more mature and insightful than we’ve ever seen her. Which in turn is why I think it’s pretty clear that a friendship between these two is so significant: Loona and Octavia each represent something the other desperately needs in her life, and a clear contrast from their complicated, dysfunctional relationships with their respective fathers.

#helluva boss #helluva boss analysis #helluva boss theory #character analysis #fandom analysis #blitzo #loona #something of a followup to my first HB analysis post

[understandingbimbos]

So. There's a few things I need to address. My documentation and study of bimbos began as a personal project. I only started a blog because I was putting a ridiculous amount of work and thought into this and figured it should be shared (and still, there's SO much I haven't shared yet...). And that's part of why this blog isn't so well managed, not consistent, and very informal. I write every post with the assumption whoever reading will have some familiarity with the fetish and that was kind of a mistake when dealing with subject matter as delicate as this and if I want to be able to attract literally any other audience. But the blog is here now so its kind of a moot point. I won't be rewriting posts. I want to kill myself every day, its astonishing I can write anything. Anyway, recently I discovered an adult performer named Celestina Blooms, in particular, this video:

We share a lot of the same thoughts. And her criticisms of BimboTok are a lot better articulated. Here are some of things she's said that stood out to me (paraphrased):

"As an actual political movement, the Gen Z bimbo isn't actually very helpful beyond being satire because there are contradictions."

"It makes no sense to be expected to have every single decision in your life, in every area of your life, be a form of activism."

"If you don't spend enough time watching all their videos to completely get the point it looks like they're satirizing the ideologies they're preaching."

"They're kind of taking this thing and being like 'Hey! This thing is leftist because I'm leftist and I said so!' when the thing is still something very tied to a lot of systems of oppression."

"I think there's an issue with saying that being feminine is feminist."

"Because there are so many minors on TikTok they'll come across this trend and see the cute aesthetic and cute clothes, and for good measure, the ideologies a lot of them agree with and be like 'Fuck yes! Sign me up!' and before you know it they're dressing like a bimbo, calling themselves a 'bimbo', and all this stuff while not even being aware of this whole other world of bimbofication as a fetish and unknowingly calling attention to themselves."

She also brings up Pink Bimbo Academy in this video (not by name, and if you somehow see this Celestina, sorry for blowing up your spot!). I bring this up because PBA actually reached out to me like two weeks ago. We had an extremely brief conversation. He lost all interest as soon as he realized my blog isn't primarily about real life bimbos and, like Celestina, I don't believe bimbos are really a real life thing. This is the reason for my last text post (now pinned).

Up until this point I didn't realize Pink Bimbo Academy was a guy, or extremely weird. He's one of those bimbo enthusiasts that genuinely believes every woman should be a bimbo, unless they're trans that is, because according to him a bimbo can't have a penis or possess any "masculine" qualities. He seems to view bimbofication less as a fetish and more of a means to an end. To him, bimbos are the peak of femininity and bimbofication only helps women to become more of who they're "biologically" meant to be. He has entire rants against feminism up on his website and aspires to create an actual real-life bimbo finishing school, like he's a super villain or some shit, like the antagonist of every school-set bimbofication story come to life. And unfortunately, he's basically the resource for bimbofication online. I have to assume not everyone that follows his guides reads all his posts and FAQ but its more than disappointing to have a transphobe be one of the main vanguards of this fetish today.

Anyway, I can't recommend Celestina's video enough. Its a bit long but all worth watching and has made the prospect of writing this book exciting again. I would suggest this video of hers too:

Post-script: After over an hour of writing all of this I realized I actually did something extremely stupid here. Celestina follows me on here, possibly one of the first people to follow me. I kept wondering why one of her icons looked so familiar and it took me until literally just now to figure it out. I hope she doesn't mind the plug, because you all should follow her too!

@celestinablooms Twitter Instagram

#understandingbimbos #bimbotxt #bimb0fication #bimboization #b1mbo #bimboism #bimbohood #bimboification #bimtheory #bimbo theory #bimbification #bimboz #bimbofied #bimbocore #bimbo experience #plastic surgery fetishism #bimbo life #bimbo girl #Youtube #pink bimbo academy #celestina blooms

[beannary]

hey abt your tags on the DID survey

I would say we were a little thrown off by them? The tone just came across as talking about systems like theyre some weird misunderstood creature that needs to be experimented on, and not you know, people with thoughts and feelings.

Being interested and having an open mind is good! I'm not saying it isn't, and I know this probably comes off as being very policing

Its just important to be careful how you talk about other people, especially when we have a history of being the "other"

We're genuinely not mad because I'm pretty sure this came from a super good place, I just thought I'd let you know!

Thank you!!

Thank you for sending me this! I did not consider how the tone of my comments could come across but I also think you are misunderstanding what an anthropology study would be but also

1. that is super understandable because anthropology is not super well understood by non anthropologists

2. anthropology has such a bad history when it comes to studying marginalized communities

3. i am so entrenched in the anthropology community so i definitely did not consider how what i said would come across to people who dont have the same set of knowledge that i do and

4.i did not like proofread my comments so i totally get that i may have written my thoughts in a way that was othering which I really didn't intend! so I am sorry for that

im including like a bunch of information about my like thought process and like a further explanation of what i mean under the cut my thoughts just ended up getting super long so i didnt want to like clog up peoples dashes

TLDR: I totally understand how the term anthropology study comes across as othering and seems as if i am reducing people with DID to some sort of oddity that needs to be studied, and I am sorry for that, I should have considered how it would be understood. What an actual anthropology study would entail (or at least a good anthropology study) is just asking people with DID questions about their lives and whatever other topics they want to talk about with the end goal of giving the people who were apart of the research as much control and say over the research questions and study itself if that makes sense.

when i say anthropology study i mean that in the sense that anthropology is the study of communities and culture. anthropology has been used in the past as a tool to oppress people of color, women, people with mental illnesses, and pretty much every other community that is not straight and white and male, but that is slowly but surely changing!

I'm currently doing a masters degree in anthropology so I have read a lot of academic anthropology literature and I have read studies on people with mental illnesses and psychiatric disorders but I haven't read anything about people with DID and so i think that is an area of research that could be expanded on

when i say it would be interesting to do an anthropology study on people with DID what I sort of have in mind is basically it would just consist of asking people with DID questions about literally whatever. anthropology is meant to be a study that at the end of the day helps the study group in whatever way they want or need, it isn't (or at least it shouldn't) be entirely motivated for academic achievements if that makes sense

if I were to do a hypothetical anthropology study on people with DID my first step to begin that research would be to reach out to people who have DID and 1. ask if they want me to do a study at all (if they don't then there's no point in me pushing for it because the end goal of my study should be to help them in whatever way they want), 2. explain to them the ways anthropology could help them if they want a study to be done at all and figure out if what they want is compatible with the discipline of anthropology

just thinking of some like research topics off the top of my head (and mind you this is just me spitballing without going through the actual research process which would be much more intensive and would involve me you know actually talking with people with DID to figure out what they want specifically so this actual research question would not be applied in an actual study but im just giving you this as a rough example of what I mean) but a research question could be how are people with DID living in the modern 21st century world? I would then ask them questions about how they live their life, what they feel about the way they live their lives, what struggles they face, what would make life easier for them, and essentially literally whatever else they want to talk about.

I literally cannot stress enough how whatever research I would hypothetically do would be entirely up to the people I'm interviewing they would literally be entirely in control of the entire thing. And also any hypothetical research would only be conducted if people with DID wanted me to, it would be entirely dependent on their wants and needs, my job as the anthropologist would just be to document what they are saying and helping them navigate the world of academia to help them achieve whatever goals they want

If you do end up reading all of this I hope this was all understandable and straightforward! If it isn't then that's on me and I will rewrite it to be easier to understand. But I really do hope this makes sense and if you have any more questions for me or really anything else to say to me about things I could have said better or with more consideration my ask box is always open and also im pretty sure my dms are open too so you can always message me there!

#bean babbles #answered asks #anonymous asks #i really hope this makes sense #i dont have to spoons to look over it because im in so much pain rn #but also if it doesnt make sense please let me know and i will do a better job explaining and also apologizing

[fubureaders]

ready or not | conner kent

summary: little blurb about introducing conner to more music than just 70s and 80s (thanks kory and gar), and you come across "ready or not" (bridgit mendler version for this) on your playlist. and, in case you forget how it goes, the "i can be your kryptonite" lyric comes up

also includes platonic!rachel roth because she needs to have happiness too, and that's baby sis for real

masterlist

song: ready or not by bridgit mendler (will try to connect the song to the post when spotify quits acting crazy)

"i don't understand. i thought the 70s were the best era of music"

you roll your eyes affectionately, knowing his first experiences with "modern" pop culture were only from genetic memory, kori, and gar. "conner, the 70s set the groundwork for most of what you hear today. but what you hear today? it created an entire generation, it set the groundwork for meme culture, for a connection that could not be attained back then. it offers its own beauty, and... you know what, kryptonian, just listen to this okay?" he laughs at your passion, and nods to say he'll give it a chance. like there was another option, you just got a new bluetooth speaker and learned how to connect it to the intercomms system within titans tower.

you tell conner to look through your spotify playlists and pick which one he'd like to try today, and as he hands your phone back to you, you nearly bounce on the balls of your feet because you see he picked a playlist ripe with peak early-mid 2010s pop and r&b -- the time of vine, the beginning of tumblr fandom crazes, the last time disney had consistently good content... oh you're about to have a party. you immediately press play and "wings" by little mix begins to play as you try to remember the dance moves from the music video and harmonize with the british girl group. conner seems to be pretty neutral, but you get him up on his feet anyway because you're going to enjoy this time either way.

at hearing the 2010s pop beats, rachel comes out of her room, and a smile graces her usually worried face as she starts to sing and dance with you. it's good to see rachel acting her age, enjoying herself after going through so much in a short number of months. the three of you dance along to little mix, amanda seyfried's crooning on the mamma mia soundtrack, and even a one direction song, enjoying the lighthearted nature of the moment. you hear the beginning "hey-ey, hey-ey" of one of your favorite songs from the era, and your eyes widen as you prep yourself to give a once-in-a-lifetime performance of bridgit mendler's iconic cover song. while conner's confused, he doesn't push it as he knows you're just starting to get into it.

I'm the kinda girl who doesn't say a word you sing/scream into the makeshift banana microphone Who sits at the curb and waits for the world But I'm about to break out, about to break out I'm like a crook tonight you laugh at the irony of saying that in a tower built for young heroes I caught you staring at me and I was thinking clearly Now I'm like a bee and I'm huntin' for the honey And I'm kinda shy but, you're super fly, yeah I could be your kryptonite

you hear rachel begin to laugh as the "oh"s come in, and you turn with your head tilted to see conner looking at you and your phone with shock and confusion, maybe slight offense, but overall amusement. that face alone makes you realize you just sang about being someone's kryptonite

in front of the resident kryptonian, mr superboy himself

"well it looks like bridgit mendler's probably a fan then. maybe she'll take a break from her studies and give a private concert," you shrug and continue to sing and dance along as rachel continues laughing at the coincidence

conner just continues to wonder why bridgit mendler would really want to be something so dangerous and weakening to her crush she's singing about. especially since you make him feel so safe and even stronger.

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

he's been acting real luthor-like lately in s4, but we love our bald-headed baddie. this fic however, is mostly based inbetween s3 and s4 before he meets luthor cuz... i mean unless you're into that, love that for you and therefore you imagine whatever you wish darling

also we love dr bridgit mendler, our studious disney channel star

#conner kent #superboy #dc titans #titans hbo max #joshua orpin #conner kent x black reader #conner kent x black!reader #reader gender not specified #fubu readers #fubu fandom #fubu writings #conner kent x reader #dc titans imagine #conner kent imagine

[chthonicgodling]

(April’s)Huevember - Day 11!

featuring: Charon!

[in which I’ve made my very own #Huevember wheel this year (that you can use too! Pls tag me I’d LOVE to see!) - unabridged version continues, including a wide array of Elysium’verse characters across the rainbow!]

FIRST OF ALL TODAYS MY BIRTHDAYYY🤩✨✨ CONGRATULATIONSSS to Charon for being the lucky feature on mmYY BIRTHDAYYY YAAYYY - another obscure face who pops up in all my greens! NOTES!

Charon - yes THE Charon, ferryman extraordinaire - made his entrance into Elysium when Prince Tory recently upgraded the Styx ferry system and added fleets of many boats, allowing Charon to go on break for the first time in all eternity

due to spending his entire existence ferrying shades across a river 24/7 Charon is super shy & social awkward lmao but very very sweet 🥹

This drawing is - he ended up getting a whole double sleeve tattoo of moths and lanterns after some time in the palace, due to his fondness for all the little moths that would cluster around the light on his boat 🥺 I…….. hate drawing tattoos itdfkFGKFK it’s haRDDDD here he is with inspo moth instead aGHH,, tattoos of course done by Meno who I posted yesterday!

i am constantly giving this cloak to Charon in art (all four times I’ve drawn him) bc I. Just feel like he should have it

Charon’s best claim to fame within the palace is the casual throuple he’s a part of made up of Hecate, & Loki’s son Fenris which is mostly consisted of Charon following both of them around with heart eyes. kyoot idk

Finally beginning to advance beyond green zone into teals tomorrow with another very obscure character that absolutely no one will recognize!! HOPE YOU REMEMBERED THAT NAME I MENTIONED A FEW DAYS AGO HINT HINT…… 👀🐟

Charon belongs to @fenixethekid - click the link up above to see the whole Huevember wheel - feel free to use the tag AceprilHuevember if u want to play too - and my tag this year can be found here!!

#AceprilHuevember #AceprilHuevember 2023 #Huevember #Huevember 2023 #Huevember23 #my art

[x-authorship-x]

a spy/sugar daddy au? 👀 I'm super curious what you came up with when anon asked abt Jiraiya/Shisui....

Oh god I'm about to write Shisui/Jiraiya oh god someone stop meeeeee

(/jk, anon)

So the spy/sugar daddy tag is actually accurate for this as a description-

Shisui is an Uchiha.

And to be an Uchiha is to be a master of deceit.

You'd think a spy network that consisted purely of family would be laughably easy to destroy; just folllow the birth records, right? Mother to son and son to sister, onwards and onwards like a web that only needs one string pulled before unravelling.

It was assumptions like that which made the Uchiha so dangerous.

(Shisui's grandfather, Kagami, had been intentionally put into the foster system to infiltrate the Senju, not that they'd been aware of it. Senju Tobirama, no doubt, had worked a few pieces out but the whole picture? Never.)

So, there Shisui was, one of a small army of butlers that kept the Shimura's household working like a well-oiled machine, when one of the greatest opportunities in the entire career of the Uchiha Clan presented itself. Even better than tearing down a rival crime lord - masquerading as a business tycoon, but it was basically the same thing, semantics - from the inside out, and the chance almost fell into his lap!

Or, rather, Shisui fell into it's.

"Oof!"

Large hands reflexively settled around Shisui's hips, warmth searing through layers of satin waistcoat and ironed shirt and straight through to his skin. He jolted, squirming, but there was nothing to salvage the reality that Shisui had tripped over a discarded bottle and fallen right into the Sannin Jiraiya's lap.

"I'm-!"

Was Shisui artfully mussed? Ebony curls a halo around his sculpted face, his eyes - his best feature, spies had to know all strengths - lined with tiny flicks and his lips reddened with (lipstain) worry?

Jiraiya's mouth stretched into a large grin, handsome enough for the leer to work for him. The immoral bastard, not that Shisui had much defence. "Sensei, you shouldn't have!"

His grip only tightened and Shisui, with some practice, managed to yelp convincingly. The grin widened again. Shisui prayed that Jiraiya wouldn't be suspicious of a butler with this much muscle definition hidden under their uniform. Even workers used the gym, right?

Sarutobi Hiruzen passed a hand over his eyes and reached for one of the cigars Shisui had been bringing him, now scattered across the low table but undamaged. "The boy tripped over your mess, Jiraiya. If anything, it's your fault. An accident."

It hadn't been but sure.

"A thousand apologies-"

Sarutobi kept speaking as if Shisui didn't exist. Then again, the staff very much didn't to these types.

"Please focus on the annual reports- and let the boy go."

Jiraiya did no such thing. From the way he'd been focusing on the sake and the food over business, Shisui had been a perfectly timed distraction.

Literally.

"I think I'll be keeping him, actually," Jiraiya chuckled, dragging his eyes appreciatively over Shisui's features and then down to the lean legs stretched over his own. "If he doesn't object?"

The payout for infiltrating the Legendary Sannin mercenaries would've been worth it, regardless.

But, in actual fact, Shisui didn't mind either.

#WHY DID I DO THIS #SOMEONE PUNCH ME #Torship talks #torship #ask #anon #shisui shipping #drabble #jiraiya #shisui x Jiraiya #spy/sugar daddy AU #shisui #shisui (planting his foot directly on top of a bottle) gee i hope i dont fall and get picked up as a sugar baby by this pathological flirt

[mst3kproject]

Future Force

I'm so glad Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II had David Carradine in it.  It opens up such a spectrum of terrible 80s and 90s movies for inclusion in my blog.  This one also features Robert Tessier (Thor in Starcrash) and was produced by David Winters, of Space Mutiny fame.  There is gonna be so much hair in this movie.

It's the Dystopian Future, and Justice as we know it has ceased to exist. The police have been disbanded and replaced by bounty hunters working for COPS – Civilian-Operated Policing Services.  One of these hunters is John Tucker, whose secret weapon is a robo-gauntlet that shoots lasers as well as giving the wearer super-strength.  He is the first to capture news anchor Marion Simms, who has an especially large bounty on her head after an accusation of treason, but competition is fierce and he's soon on the run with her as every hunter in the state tries to take his prize.  Obviously, he's gonna end up kissing her and helping her overthrow the evil CEO of COPS... I mean, this is a movie, after all.

There are a great many things in this movie that Jonah and the bots would have had an absolute field day with.  There's the curious fact that the director likes to introduce characters, both men and women, by showing us their feet.  There's the dude who is definitely leaning out of the helicopter that is in the air, and not sitting in a different one that's still on the ground with a black curtain behind it.  There's the desperate car chase set to a feel-good love ballad.  The way every punch produces the exact same sound effect.  That all the bounty hunters wear jean jackets and look like a shitty metal band, or perhaps a more denim-y version of the cyborgs from Future War.

The thing I suspect they'd focus on most, however, is the fact that none of the men in this movie look like they have ever worn deodorant in their lives, even the ones who are supposed to be rich and privileged.  I can smell them through my computer screen and the ones who don't just smell like Unwashed Dude smell like the gallons of cologne they would have to wear to cover it up.  The least smelly-looking guy in this movie is literally the basement-dwelling nerd.

What's mostly wrong with Future Force, however, is the absolutely egregious writing.  Yet again we seem to have a film made by people who knew what an action movie is supposed to consist of, but not why those parts are present or what they mean.  Important things are not established.  Things that are established are not paid off.  And the film has nothing to say about the tropes it employs, it merely parades them across the screen one at a time and then forgets about them – like the Budweiser truck that interrupts the 'Drive into the Sunset' finale with an abrupt product placement.

Much like The Vindicator, which I watched a while back, Future Force is attempting to cash in on 1987's Robocop. Unlike The Vindicator, it doesn't understand any of that movie's themes.  Robocop was about police brutality and society's obsession with depicting it in film.  Murphy eventually rejects this role as a mindless killing machine and finds ways around his programming to do the right thing – only for the sequels to totally discard that character development so they could make more gory sci-fi action movies.  The Vindicator wasn't interested in the police violence thing, but Future Force is.  Its entire premise is that law enforcement had become so corrupt that it had to be disbanded.

Did this produce a safer society?  Probably not, since we still have a lot of armed assholes wandering around shooting anybody accused of a crime, the only difference being that they're wearing denim instead of police uniforms.  The system is infinitely exploitable, too, as illustrated by the CEO of COPS, an entirely nondescript 80s villain named Adams, putting out a hit on Simms when she announces her intention to expose his own crimes.  Simms' news broadcast promises to examine the effect the new system has had on society and the problems with it, but of course we never see the subsequent episodes because she has to go on the run.  When she meets Tucker, she calls him an 'animal' and complains about the constant violence on the streets.

But none of this ever goes anywhere.  We later learn that Adams' anger with Simms is actually completely misdirected.  He's literally killing the messenger, because Simms isn't the one who was investigating him.  She's just the anchorwoman, who sits in front of the camera and reads the script she's given, and hadn't even watched the video tape Adams so desperately wants back.  This could lead into something where Tucker and Simms have to find the people who are actually in the know and enlist their help, but it doesn't.  Instead, the whole thing is thrown away.  It was never anything more than an excuse for the movie to happen.  Adams never even finds out that Simms isn't his real enemy.

The opening narration and the news broadcast both try to make the point that the new system isn't justice.  We see criminals and people who have been labelled criminals summarily executed without any evidence of due process.  A couple of people mention things like judges, but we never see one, and they seem mostly irrelevant.  This makes us expect that we will see a restoration of justice.  At the beginning of the movie we saw Adams murder the previous CEO of COPS in order to take his place... presumably it's something related to that on the video tape, but as I said, we never find out.  In a movie about justice, we therefore ought to see Adams' crimes exposed and him found guilty by a judge, the very person he sought to bypass.

That's not what happens, though.  Instead, Tucker has his pet hacker tell the main COPS computer that there's a bounty out on Adams, and the other hunters gun him down.  This is supposed to be ironic, as it's Adams' own methods turned against him, and I guess it is, but it certainly doesn't feel like a victory of good over evil.  It's just violence begetting more violence again, and there's not even a hint of anybody intending to overhaul the system so that justice can actually be done and people can feel safer.  It ends the movie, but not in a remotely satisfying way.

The other instance of just plain terrible writing here is the fact that Tucker and Simms are saved by a deus ex machina not once, but twice. The first time is when a woman named Roxanne, who also works for COPS, appears out of nowhere to shoot a guy who was about to kill them.  She tells Tucker she did it because she has a crush on him and lets him go... and then another dude pops out of nowhere to kill her, so that this incident really has no plot consequences.  Roxanne could have been a new ally, a double-agent, or a complication to the romantic subplot, but no, she's just a lazy way to move the characters on to the next chase scene.

This is the one where they're fired on by the man who is totally looking down on them from a real helicopter... and he nearly gets them, but then a man with a grudge against Adams materializes at the side of the roaf, pulls a rocket launcher out of his ass, and blows up the helicopter! This, too, goes nowhere.  We've only seen this dude once before, and we will never see him again.  How did he even know any of this was going on?  We have no idea.

The only time Future Force really pays something off in a satisfying manner is the robo-gauntlet.  For the most part this device is criminally under-used.  Tucker keeps it in the boot of his car, so he can't get at it during the chase scenes when it would have been very useful. Early in the movie, however, the nerdy guy places the gun on the mantelpiece by telling Tucker he really ought to try using the robo-gauntlet's remote control sometime.  I therefore spent three quarters of the run time eagerly awaiting the reveal and hoping the gauntlet would fly despite the movie having apparently spent what should have been the effects budget on strippers.

And as it turned out, the film-makers were at least slightly smarter than I thought they were, because it does fly!  Not only that, but it beats the shit out of one of Adams' lackeys in a scene that is almost (though not quite) funny enough to make the rest of the movie worth it.  Honestly, every appearance of the gauntlet is fairly amusing, as its abilities do not even try to look like they obey the laws of physics, but the remote control scene is far and away the most entertaining thing in the whole film.

Sadly, it's not quite enough to redeem the rest of Future Force. The movie set out to be a lazy cash-in and never makes any attempt to rise above that.  The result is so miserably bad it's almost unwatchable, which of course means it would have made for some stellar MST3K.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #future force #80s

[radikylie]

Journal entry 5 million years later

Wow. It’s been well over a year and a half since I posted anything super personal and probably close to two years since being active on here. It has been a rollercoaster. In November 2021, I accepted a job at a university in the state where my love lived. After my graduate assistantship ended in 2020, it took me a year and a half to find a full-time job because of Covid. I applied to nearly 100 jobs and only heard back from maybe 10% of those jobs. And then I had exactly 3 and a half weeks to move my entire life across the country and move into an apartment with my then long-distance girlfriend when I was offered a job at a mid-size university.

Sometimes my life still doesn’t feel real. I’ve been so happy to be with my Emily and our quirky little sweet cat, but navigating life as an adult in this clown world has been extremely hard. I still can’t believe I live in fucking North Dakota. Our first two winters here have been the most brutal I have ever experienced. Boy, I thought I had SAD when I lived on the east coast but it sure is worse here. We hate living in a red state, but at least we live in the biggest city that is the most progressive.

My job as an admission counselor has been rewarding, difficult, draining, fun, and now mixed with frustration and disappointment. Our education system is a complete dumpster fire. Our incoming students and current students are having mental health crises every fucking day. It tears me apart sometimes to think that I am promising students a future I can’t guarantee with how the world is right now and where it’s going. In a week of traveling, I can drive over a thousand miles and spend over 30 hours in a car. There are high expectations and pressure to bring in first-year students because they are the true cash cows and there’s been a national decrease in enrollment across all institutions. The people I work with have been genuinely great people and are the best parts of the job sometimes. But the pay is absolute shit, and that coupled with rising greedflation and my outrageous private student loan debt feels like it’s crushing me. I don’t know how much longer I can take.

I recently applied for another job within my office that pays 10k more, and I know deserve something insanely better, but it would have been a good transition point and actually allow me to save money to move, and to get an EdTech job that is remote. I was denied this new job, the other candidate had “years of direct marketing experience” where I didn’t, but I had almost 2 years of experience in my office. I’ve shown them consistently that I have strong project management skills and organization for handling all of the texting/calling campaigns we do for students which was another part of this new job. It was handling all of the communications for print/emails (project management) and the job description didn’t even place a strong emphasis on design or marketing. But that’s what they went for in the other candidate. A white man. He wore a fucking flannel to the interview. If he didn’t have an awesome portfolio to present and he doesn’t bring the “wow” factor to this job, I’m going to be even more pissed.

And you know what also makes me mad. Last year around this time, we were actively hiring for another admission counselor position, and I was on that search committee. We were down to two choices, someone with 14 years of experience, and another person who interviewed so strongly but only had previous tour guide experience in terms of higher ed experience. We asked our supervisor if we could choose the person with less experience and she said that she would support that. We offered the position to the person with less experience but they eventually declined because the salary was so low (which we did advertise the salary??). So for this position I wanted, why would they not elevate another person in their office who has worked so fucking hard and has gone above and beyond for this position, and knows this office and best practices. So why does years of direct of experience matter now?

I cried for like the whole day. People in my office were rooting for me to have this job. The woman who previously had this job, she came from my position before that and didn’t even have a master’s. I cried because I felt trapped in this job, mainly due to capitalism. I cried because I felt so betrayed and underestimated. My direct supervisor was the chair for the search committee, and I know she doesn’t want to lose me as a counselor. Our director told me that my supervisor “adores” me, and that I consistently come up in their conversations about how I do great work and I get shit done. My director said she was excited that I applied and hoped they chose me, so I went into my final interview feeling very confident because she had already met the other two candidates before me.

When my supervisor called me to tell me the news (she was a at a conference), she started out saying that she appreciated me so much and that the other candidate would let them go in another direction that they didn’t even know they could go. I couldn’t speak. My voice cracked and I said thank you for letting me know and we ended the conversation. She followed up with a message on Microsoft Teams saying she appreciated me again and would like to help me build my skills to get me a job in EdTech, which is what I ultimately want. And I wonder if this response is because I low-key indicated to my director (because she flat out asked me) if I would leave if I didn’t get this job and I said yes. I don’t think my supervisor realizes how immediate I want (more like need) to leave.

I went home early crying after spending the entire week, waiting for the call, with extreme brain pain (psychophysiological disorder) symptoms and upset stomach to where I couldn’t eat because I was so stressed. Essentially, my nervous system thinks I’m in “danger” when thinking about travel season so it sends me unpleasant physical symptoms, like nerve pain in my face and muscle aches and nausea to where it gets debilitating at times. And travel season is both Fall and Spring. This past spring, I had to drive on icy back roads to rural parts of ND where my phone service does not work at times and once my tire starting leaking because it had a screw in it. I had a lowkey panic attack because I didn’t know what to do and needed to go to small town (population of 207) to get it patched. I was raped on a back road in a car with a man I thought I could trust when I was 20 so being out in the middle of nowhere gives me so much fucking anxiety. I’m stressed at the thought of college fairs starting in less than 2 months.

Stressed because I can’t do this fucking job anymore. The thought of being in this job for another travel season, like 6 weeks or more on and off of traveling start mid-September through November. And what’s worse is that we get “reimbursed” for our meals that we are out on the road but because North Dakota is North Dakota, I only get reimbursed up to $35 dollars a day meanwhile my coworkers traveling within MN can get up to $70 per day. So, when I travel, I have to be as frugal as possible and still lose money because I only get $6.50 for breakfast (unless I’m at a hotel and they have breakfast), 10.50 for lunch, and 17.50 for dinner. It was fine when I first started out but because of greedflation, it’s so much harder.

My student loan payments are like $700 dollars a month, and even though I have three fucking degrees, I’m stuck at an entry level pay despite having an MS degree. The pay across campus is abysmal. The pay for people with advance degrees is absolute shit. They advertised a mental health counselor position here which required a master’s or above and a license in counseling or social work for 43k. Like WHAT. That is what was offered to me when I started. I can’t save money long-term to get out of this fucking state, and we can’t even pay to go on a mini-vacation for a weekend trip. I had to tell my best friend from high school that I couldn’t go to her very fancy wedding on Cape Cod because there’s no way I can even save for myself. And I don’t think she will ever understand what its like to financially struggle and it feels like she lowkey resents me for it, and it makes me feel alone knowing she could never understand since both her and her husband come from a family with money. I worry she thinks I am just dumb as hell and not responsible with money but I can’t save for fucking anything. 

And my god, it could be so much worse. I know this, and am grateful for what we do have but it feels like we have very little to look forward to, and we pretty much can only spend what we need and not for things we want long-term. My family was exactly middle-class and moved into upper-middle class by the time I was in late high school, so it’s brought me more perspective. We are what they call “new poor” - we are one unexpected medical bill/car repair bill away from financial insecurity. I never had to worry about things like this before, I grew up blessed, and I know this. I try to give what I can when I can to my community and family and friends in need.

I tried to pick up a second job at really, really cool brewery but the shifts are so long (6-8 hours) and I sprained my knee on the job which led to my entire back seizing up two days before my birthday a few months ago. The worst birthday I’ve ever experienced. When my back spasmed, I couldn’t walk for three days. I cried the entire time almost. The first day it happened I screamed in pain with every little movement, like so much so Emily worried the cops would be called. Emily had to do everything for me – help me shower, eat, go the bathroom and she cared for me so well. I am so blessed and lucky to have her. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I had to go back to physical therapy and that was expensive also because health insurance is a fucking scam. It took me about a month to get to 60% okay.

I couldn’t work at the brewery for months and the money from there was so good because it’s an insanely huge operation so now I’m back in the same position now, and don’t know if I can physically keep up with the work. They work their employees so hard, not in a bad way necessarily, it’s just the nature of it because it’s in the top 10 breweries on untapped or whatever. I don’t think I can physically handle more than one or two shifts a month, but I’m afraid to work a whole shift again.

My health is not great. My desk job already has me gaining weight paired with PCOS that feels like it’s out of control, and my body hurts from sitting all day. My face is constantly breaking out from hormonal acne, I’m sure it’s been from all the stress I’ve been under too, but also because everything in this fucking world is harmful to us in one way or another. I’m not at the highest weight I’ve ever been but close to 20 pounds extra since I moved here. Its just so hard to find time and energy to workout because I have so little of both. Especially when I’m traveling, and it’s harder because the cheapest food when I’m out on the road is fast food so there’s not a lot of options to be healthy, especially in fucking ND. I think the only healthy/salad bowl kind of place is in the city we are in and the capital of ND and that’s it lol and its also more expensive. Driving for hours and hours is so exhausting. So. my mental health and self-image have been suffering from all of that too.  

But it feels like we are stuck in this city that is filled with terrible drivers and roads, and these brutal winters. The winters wouldn’t be so bad if the city actually maintained the roads better but every other week it feels like we are risking our lives to go to fucking work. I’ve had to drive through blizzards when I’ve never had any winter driving experience before. I’ve had an entire panic attack/mental breakdown on the interstate here that was completely iced over for 75 miles and I needed to get to the other side of the state for a fucking career fair for work. There were cars in ditches, and another fucking blizzard on the way after receiving well over a foot of snow in some parts of ND. If we weren’t visiting Em’s parents in the same town, and if she didn’t take over and drive on the icy parts for me, we would have never made it. I would have been paralyzed in fear at a truck stop without her, and she really showed up for me that day.

Spring and Fall both lasted maybe 3 weeks before it was either hot or cold season which seems to be all that ND has. Spring used to be my favorite season, but here the flowers don’t bloom until late May and its just mud and rain. Its depressing as hell. At least the summers have been mild in comparison to the disgustingly humid summers MD/VA have. When we do get a few really humid/hot days everyone complains so much and its funny to me because that’s basically any day in the summer on the east coast. It wouldn’t be so bad if our apartment ac unit actually fucking cooled our apartment below 72 degrees on a consistent basis. When its extremely hot and humid here, our apartment has gone up to 79 degrees if we do any sort of cooking or baking. It takes days to cool down, even with extra fans.

The city we live in does have a cool community and lots awesome local businesses. That’s been a saving grace. They do a lot of farmer’s markets, vintage markets, community/mutual aid events. If the world ever completely collapsed (which I feel is inevitable), I would feel pretty safe here and secure knowing the community is full of genuine and resourceful people. It’s a very safe and cheap city to live in because nobody wants to live in these winters. But we have no real friends here. We have our work friends who are just that, and it’s incredibly disappointing. We are both introverts but crave deeper connections with others, even if its only a few. One of the hardest lessons I have ever had to learn, and still learning, are that friends are like the seasons – they come and go.

I miss my family. I miss those summer days where I would wake up late, and my brother’s family would come over to swim. The dogs would be playing, and my niece and nephew being silly. My dad would grill and my mom would make a bunch of sides and we’d eat outside on the deck together. No plans except to go play a silly little video game by myself or with some people later that night after going for a walk or a run in my neighborhood in the woods. I miss sitting out in my driveway under the stars and trees with a good playlist, smoking a bowl, and reading about aliens. I miss my niece and nephew coming over every Tuesday and the house being so crazy with them but never a dull moment. I didn’t think I would miss that so much. My brothers can be assholes (my older brother more so), but it was nice when we were all getting along.

My relationship with my parents has gotten better as I’ve gotten older but they still can’t give me the emotional support that I need. Emily’s mom has been more emotionally supportive. My parents never ask me how I’m doing, just what I’m doing. I wish they would come visit me but I don’t think they ever will. They wouldn’t even fly me or Emily out for Christmas even though they have more than enough money to do so. They’ve been going on 10-day vacations in Jamaica at fucking Sandals, and doing weekend trips all over the east coast. But seeing me is not enough of a reason to fly here. 

They keep telling me how much they miss me and want me to move back but then don’t do anything to help me do that. They said they would help us move if I got a job on the east coast but don’t care that I’m drowning in student debt.  They disappoint me still and it feels like I have to grieve my relationship with them of what I need versus what they give me. It’s been that way my entire life. I know that they will never apologize for the things that they did while growing up. It’s a sad thing to come to terms with.

Another thing I have had to come to terms with is my purpose in this world, I guess. When I was 18, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to help people in some capacity. When I was 21, I had this grandiose idea and plans for how I could do that and save the world. When I was 24, I wanted to be a recreational therapist and create a holistic community center. When I was 25, I had started a master’s degree in Higher Education because I wanted to be a graduate assistant to a unique women’s college program within my university, which I worked hard to desperately create a safe space for young women, but the university didn’t give an actual shit about it. I didn’t think I would end up in higher education but here I am.

This is not where I expected myself to be at all, but I really did enjoy working with my students. So, I stayed in it. I finished my degree. And now I feel “stuck” in an education system that is very much a fucking dumpster fire. I’m feeling burnt out, I guess. It’s wrecking my mental and physical health. My nervous system is on high alert all the time, I think. I feel like I can never get enough time to actually rest and recover.

I’ve also had to re-evaluate my “purpose”. I’m an extremely spiritual person and have very much moved away from New Age completely but very interested in paganism or Mother Earth spirituality. I used to think that I had to have this grandiose purpose to change the world, but I recognize that the most important change comes from the self and extending that out to your community. Small acts of kindness can go a long way and encourage others to do the same, creating a chain reaction. But where exactly does that leave me?

Part of me wants to go to another university because of the “prestige” around it, but every institution has its own problems and is still within America’s education system that is a fucking shit show. I’m so concerned about how others see me sometimes, especially in professional sense. I felt like I was a late bloomer in all things because it took me 6 years to get my bachelor’s, but I also had a complete thyroidectomy after struggling with severe symptoms from it, and then being raped 3 months after the surgery. I was academically suspended for a year after my surgery and SA because my GPA was so low. There are so many people from that period of time who wrote me off as a dumb stoner and had no idea I was abusing weed because of trauma. Even my ex-girlfriend and her friends just thought I was a dumb stoner.

So, I guess I feel the need to “prove” that I am more than what they assumed me to be. I thought that I needed to be so career-driven to change the world and I am starting to understand that having that mindset is not a healthy way to live and will lead to self-destruction and burnout. I never thought I would hate my current job as much as I do. And I’m realizing that I don’t necessarily hate the work, but rather the expectations and circumstances surrounding it. I could stick out this job longer if I was paid more but it feels like I am running out of time to find something different before travel season starts again.

I’ve essentially quiet quit at this point. I feel like I have to detach myself from everyone because it hurts that I’m going to have to leave some of the people in my office, and I would go to bat for them at any time. I’ll be doing just above the bare minimum, and will not be volunteering as often to do extra things any more. A coworker of mine just got placed into her dream job and I’m so excited for her, but her leaving also gives us more work to cover. Another reason why I need to leave. And if I can leave before travel season, I feel a little guilty leaving during an important peak time, but they put me in this position. 

I can’t do it. I won’t if I don’t have to. And if September comes, and I am still searching for a job, I will do the college fairs with the goal of leaving before October. They could have given me the other position and I would have grown into it, and worked extremely hard to exceed their expectations and they could have arranged to have a new admission counselor in my position by the time college fair season started. But they made their choice. I need to make mine now.

But now I feel like I have to redefine what work means to me. Fuck the system. I can make my own path. I can change the world without a grandiose career. Its okay to just show up to work and then live your life. And so, I hope that my next job is in EdTech (and remote) that can give me financial freedom and security because that’s what it really all comes down to. I want a “lazy girl” job. A job that I feel good about and is not as emotionally/physically demanding so that I have the money to help others and do what I want. I just want to live a comfortable life, and one where I am not always worrying about money.

So, in order to get that, I think I need to release all of this. It’s been holding me back. I deserve a job that pays me well, and lets me live the life I want. A job that lets me help my friends and families, and give back to my community. I don’t have to bear the burden of being in a career that is glorified for how much you give and destroy yourself for it. I can’t imagine what k-12 teachers feel every day.

I think the next piece is letting go. Doing a trust fall for Mother Goddess to catch me and deliver me to my next opportunity. Trusting that the perfect job is on its way to me, and I won’t miss out on something that is for me. I deserve a job that gives me a better work-life balance. That I don’t feel like I am killing myself to survive. I have the money to live how I want, and all of the time and energy I have for other things is abundant.

I get so caught up worrying about making the right or wrong choice, or missing out on a job posting. I get caught up thinking that I’m not quite enough – I don’t have quite enough experience or direct experience or the right degrees. I get caught up with thinking about the cost of living in other states and what I can’t do or where we can’t move to. What if I’m meant to focus on the good, and all of the possibilities and different lives of Kylie. The possible exciting adventures in store for me.

Its reminiscent to how I felt when I couldn’t find a job after my graduate assistantship. I was stressing over every little thing. And then I finally just surrendered. That’s what it felt like after my huge disappointment with Bryn Mawr College and they decided not to hire me but not long after that I was offered my current job. And how I felt after running into my ex at a grocery store and having a panic attack and obsessing over how I’m going to meet my love and what I do or don’t do that could lead me to missing that connection. I eventually had to acknowledge and say that I surrender to the wonderful mystery that is the Universe. About two weeks of recognizing my need to let go of control, I met my Emily.

The catalyst this time is not getting this position within my office. It was a devastating disappointment. I’m still trying to reconcile that. But it has also opened me up to the fact that I do deserve something insanely better - better pay, better benefits, better work-life balance. I know my worth. And while I feel betrayed that I wasn’t picked for this position, I don’t need to punish myself or the people in my office for it. I do still feel a hint of resentment towards my supervisor, but she’ll understand the choice she made when I get offered my next job.

At first, I wanted to sulk. I wanted to quiet quit as loudly as possible. But now I see that I need to cherish my time with everyone. I want them to miss having me. I want to leave the office on good terms. But I want people to know that they lost my loyalty as well. I want people to think that they wish I was still there because of all the light and humor I brought. So. I will not be jumping at every opportunity to volunteer extra time and energy towards things. I will not be half-assing this job completely, but I will not be going above and beyond as often anymore either.

I am still incredibly sad and frustrated at this disappointment, but I see it was necessary and its time for me to move on, as scary as it seems. I will miss these people so much. So now I need to let go. Trust fall. Mother Goddess, A-team, I trust that the perfect job will find its way to me and will bring about the most exciting and best chapters of my life. Thank you for this.

#personal #holy shit this is by far the longest journal entry i have ever written on here #i have not been active in well over a year and a half p much #dont know if i will be again but i needed to post this for my own sanity #so hey if you remember me hi hope ur doing well #are people still really active on this idk i left bc the radfem community drama and life #anyway i wrote this at work otherwise i was going to lose my damn mind and according to word it is 4474 words and 6 pages so

[evas-apartment]

hi it's doomfax, was wondering about your thoughts on Super Mario 64! did you enjoy it overall? would love to hear what you liked or disliked, what worked for you or didn't

I love that game, I've played it so much that I can't even really enjoy it any more tbh, but also if you hated it I'd still love to hear your thoughts on it if you feel like talking about it

Oh, man I've got a lot to say. I hope this is like... readable. EDIT: I just finished writing this, and figured I'd just put all of it behind a readmore, so I don't at all feel bad about how much I write. Also it's my blog. so.. whatever i suppose.

In short, I really liked it! I played the 3D All-Stars Switch version specifically, and I think it holds up pretty well! I liked how..punchy? It is? Most levels are really short, it doesn't take that long to beat, I 100%'ed it, but each star only takes like five minutes each, and I like that. The music is great, all the characters are stylized enough that even through the blocky-ass visuals, things look cute. Some of the locations are nice to look at, but a lot of them look kinda ugly tbh, like it just looks like blocks. I think a location needs a lot of set pieces to be visually interesting, otherwise it just looks bland. Most of DDD, most of WDW, all of RR, most of HMC look really boring, but there's some cool ideas in there. Whereas basically everyone of the first couple levels are more visually striking and interesting, with SOMETHING to remember about them.

The game controls are frankly awesome. It feels like they cemented that first, and built the entire game around it. If Mario controlled just a bit worse, this game wouldn't be nearly as well-remembered cause this is SUCH a true platforming game. Not very many stars rely on anything else other than how well you can control Mario. The only thing that bugs me are more quirks of the physics engine than anything else, and playing Sunshine right after kinda cements my opinions more, in that... the game is just a bit too unforgiving, coming back to it, having never really played it thoroughly before. It's hard to wall-jump, and you HAVE to get good at it. If you don't land on a platform, or the edge of one, you just bonk your head on the side and fall, and probably die. You slide off slopes really easily, it's hard to climb hills, and basically all of these things were fixed in Sunshine, but I can also understand people growing up with 64 and thinking that the movement might be too... easy? robust? something, in Sunshine. Which I don't feel rings as true because I find the "secret" levels in Sunshine to be challenging, but it's also in part to how sparse the level design is in those segments. You're confined just to floating blocks and that's it, but I'm talking about Sunshine here, so I'll digress.

I like the consistency of the level design. Each level has Exactly 7 stars, and one 100 coin star. Each world has 8 red-coins, and you'll get them eventually. If there's something to climb, there's probably a star at the top. If there's a weird new creature in this level, you'll have to interact with it in a weird new way to get a star (penguins, ukikis, eels, you get it). It makes each level feel like extensions of the same world, with the same rules across, which makes the whole game just make more sense, I appreciate that.

The camera is weird. I love the idea of you having a Lakitu cameraperson, but in execution it's hit or miss. I like that there's three different camera options, a platforming game in 1996 didn't have to have that kinda foresight, but it did. But it's like... the Lakitu camera can't rotate, only lock a certain way, the over the shoulder camera follows too closely and it's very easy to get disoriented (for me at least), and locking the camera in place can be great but it's completely locked, and doesn't move at all. I'll say I died a bunch cause the camera didn't do what I wanted it to do, but whatever, it's not unusable, I at least understand the system in place (although in no video game should the camera ever be stuck behind any solid object in the level), and it isn't like SM64 is hard, and lives are pretty generous, and I never even game over'd once in the while 100% playthrough. (a lot more casually generous than SMS)

Overall, I'm glad I played it. I do think it's a very good game, and a hallmark of what gaming could be at a pivotal time in its existence. I can't say if I myself would go back and play it all that much, having completed it, but that isn't to say it has no replay value, I've just had my fill. It was fun. Had some quirks from being a game from back then, but an overall pleasant experience. Some frustrations in the camera, missing some jumps cause of silly reasons, dying on a 100 coin star 80 coins in, falling down a vertical platforming segment and having to come back up, the only consequence being my fucking time being wasted, but that's all part of the game, and nothing ruining, y'know? I could go into even more detail, on any specific points, if you'd like, I love chatting with friends like this. And I appreciate every ask I get (within reason lol)

Thank you for sending this! I love giving my opinions on things like this lol, feel free to ask more stuff!

[razieltwelve]

Escort (Final Rose)

"How do you like your escort, kid?” Fluffy asked.

Karin glanced over at the Minister of Settlement. The uplifted cat was wearing clothing that was modified for his feline form. Like many uplifted animals, he didn’t usually bother, but uplifted animals were a rarity in the Milky Way Galaxy. It was better he distinguish himself in some way, rather than get confused with a regular cat.

“It might be a bit excessive,” she murmured.

Fluffy smirked. His tail swished lazily through the air as he hopped off one of the consoles on the bridge and settled into her lap. “Well, you are a princess, and you are technically second in line for the throne. I’d be worried you’d lost your mother’s favour if she sent anything less.”

Karin’s lips twitched. “I do suppose that this is mother’s way of looking out for me while I’m in another galaxy.”

Both she and Fluffy were aboard the super dreadnought Claw of the Yun, and they were accompanied by a full battle group that consisted of carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. It was, bluntly speaking, more than enough to subjugate the entire Systems Alliance.

Her mother had told her in no uncertain terms that wherever she went, this battle group would follow. Fluffy had later added, privately of course, that the whole battle group was under orders to sacrifice themselves to ensure her escape if necessary. In fact, he was under orders to do the same although it was unclear what exactly an uplifted cat could do if they came across a foe strong enough to fight its way through an entire battle group.

She even had her own honour guard who were to go with her whenever she left the ship. Lord Spikeborough and Nessa were both familiar with the members of that guard, and they both spoke very highly of the people her mother had dispatched to see to her safety. Her hedgehog had been particularly pleased by the deployment of Lord Quillingbast, a hedgehog who had come third behind his father and Lord Spikebatten in the quest to become her mother’s hedgehog.

“Heh.” Fluffy closed his eyes and nudged her hand until she gave him a scratch behind his ears. “Things like this have meaning, kid. The escort you get is a sign of your mother’s opinion of you. If you’d gotten a crappy escort, it would mean that your mother is mad at you. An escort of this size and with these sorts of people in it is a clear demonstration of her favour.” He chortled. “Just wait until we get to Systems Alliance territory. You’re going to be inundated with people trying to get friendly.”

Karin’s nose wrinkled, and both her hedgehog and her maid exchanged grins. “Please, don’t remind me. That is one part I’m not looking forward to.”

As thrilling as it was to visit another galaxy and get an opportunity to demonstrate her abilities, the thought of dealing with people desperate to get at her mother through her was less than pleasing. She dealt with it enough in the Empire, but her position in the Department of Settlement kept it to a minimum.

Simply put, Fluffy did not put up with crap like that, and anyone who tried was likely to get clawed. However, since she was also here as a diplomat, a certain level of that kind of behaviour was unavoidable. It was completely understandable too.

Those who had forged links with the Empire and Alliance had prospered mightily since the downfall of the Reapers. Her Dia-Farron tutor had used the case of Jane Shepard as an example. Shepard had partnered with the Dia-Farron on several initiatives, using her influence in the Systems Alliance to help her relatives do what they did best.

As a result, Shepard was quietly one of the wealthiest people within the Systems Alliance, and she could call upon any number of favours as a result of her influence. Perhaps most importantly, she had been designated by the Dia-Farron as a person whose success they were personally invested in. As a result, if Shepard came under attack, they would move to defend her.

Indeed, her tutor had been quite amused when explaining to her how Shepard’s children had been given access to Dia-Farron tutors of their own. Shepard had, apparently, not realised how big a deal that was, seeing it as a purely friendly gesture from the Dia-Farrons. However, it was far more than that. It was a public statement by the Dia-Farron to others from the Remnant Galaxy.

Shepard was one of theirs, so anyone who wanted to come after her or her family needed to think long and hard about it.

“Have you given thought to the matter your mother entrusted to you?” Nessa asked.

“I have.” Karin’s brows furrowed. “I do think it’s worth investigating.”

The Systems Alliance was a democracy. Much like the Federation this came with both strengths and weaknesses. They had solid intelligence that there would be a change of administration soon, largely due to the retirement of several prominent figures within the Systems Alliance.

This would open the way for a changing of the guard. Her mother had asked her to take the measure of several potential leaders. She wanted to know which were likely to be most favourable toward the Empire and which were likely to adopt a more isolated approach. She had no doubt that her mother would be relying on information from many other sources before deciding which candidates they would support, but it was nice to know her mother wanted to know what she thought.

“I’ll have plenty of opportunities. We’ll be meeting most of them in the course of my duties here, and I’m sure we could arrange meetings with the others.”

Lord Spikeborough chuffed and nodded toward the holographic display. They had arrived at the Sol System, home to Earth.

On her lap, Fluffy got up and straightened his clothing.

“Time to look awesome,” the cat said.

#final effect #fanfiction #fluffy fe #karin #nessa #lord spikeborough

[fattestwriting]

YOU, yes YOU, the mun of this blog, with a blobby body bigger than the sun, and the hunger of a black hole, and the desire to turn everything around you into an endless ocean of your own piss, shit, and cum~

"Huh? What? This ask is absurd. Do people really not realize this stuff isn't real?"

Without a second thought, R-

"What the fuck was that!"

She turned around fervently, trying to find where the voice was coming from, only to realize-

"No, no way! I am not being narrated right now, that stuff isn't real! I must be drea-"

But Roxy's words had been cut off, as the ask took effect upon her body. She suddenly felt the pounds gaining on her body, pouring onto her like a bowl of lard. She quickly burst out of the home she had lived in, expanding rapidly.

The trans girl's body used to be small. She was 6'1", much to her shagreen, and she sported a pot belly that stuck out an inch or so from her chubby body with a muffin top that did the same around her sides. She had had small bingo arms, a blobby pelvis, chair filling thighs, a tights busting ass, chubby cheeks, and an average gock, but that was all gone, replaced with a much more cosmic version of herself.

She was now bigger than the sun, with all of her ever-churning balls, plump adipose riddled ass cheeks, and perky pear shaped tits each being the size of the gas ball. Her stomach had ballooned massively, with her blobby form being over 20 times the Suns size, without even accounting for her 10x the sun sized neck and solar system spanning cock.

"Oh FUCK me this feels so good,,,"

The lowly Tumblr writer had forgotten all about the voice in her head, about the absurdity of the situation, about anything other than her sheer size and the sexual pleasure she got from it. Her cock was harder than it had ever been, reaching light years in size, in both girth and length. Her pre soaked every galaxy she was facing before she even had a chance to think about cumming... Or her now very hungry stomach. It growled ferociously, informing her she needed to eat, now. She started with the Earth, if for no reason than sentimental value, but as she approached she felt small bumps hitting her jiggly fat.

"Aw, how cute! They've achieved world peace, by teaming together to launch every nuke at me! Not like that'll save them~"

And so, she finally beg- Hey! Hey what are you- You can't be in here! Uh, yes I can? It's my Tumblr blog. Get the fuck outta here guy, or I'll add you to the menu. Jesus, the gaul of some people. BBWWWUUUAAARRRPPP. Anyways, I finally began to eat the Earth, which consisted of a single slurp, which also happened to suck in the moon. As they continued to bombard my belly with nuclear missiles, I couldn't help but get a lil bloated! So-

*PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHBBBBBBB*

I let loose a cosmic wave of flatulence that destroyed the entire galaxy! Which sucked ass, because I was still super hungry, but was just the most arousing shit imaginable, so I came! And as the cum filled the entire universe, it eventually came to me, all of the mass in the universe being taken straight to me by my own tidal wave of cum. So, naturally, I drank all of it, putting all of my own cum and every piece of matter in the universe into my belly. Over the next couple minutes, I finished off any scraps until it was finally just me against the edge of the universe.

Literally, it was pressing up against me, with my dick stretching it out noticeably, literally warping reality around it's immensity. But all that cum and all that mass had made me really need to go to the bathroom... So I did! I began spewing shit across the wall of the universe, as remnants of the universe was sticking out of my shit. At the same time, I released a tidal wave of piss that was yellow as the sun and reeked just as bad as my shit. Within seconds, I was surrounded by nothing but the warm blanket of an infinite amount of my own shit and piss, a feeling so damn hot that I came on the spot, stopping my piss flow so I could shoot out an entire universe worth of cum, which, naturally, finally broke the universal barrier.

As soon as I was in the multi verse, I realized something... Every character I'd ever read or written breaking the barriers of a universe was here. All of them. And they were fat as ever~ And so, I did as anyone would do in my situation... I got to work eating every universe and universe puncturing character (and sometimes IRL friend), shitting out the extra as I went. By the time I was done, it was once again me pressing up against the edge of the universe surrounded by my own shit, but unlike last time, I was still full. So I pushed. I pushed and released the biggest log of shit yet, one bigger than my entire body, the one which finally broke the multiversal barrier... Only to realize. This process was infinite.

And so I ate again, shat again, and kept going. Forever. I'm reaching you from there now. I've broken through over a trillion barriers, and I can't even begin to imagine how big I am in comparison to whatever universe gets this. The characters had stopped showing up a while ago, because I truly never dreamed this big, but I did notice a blob the same size as me in the distance, also covered in their own shit... I wonder.

#fwstory #fwfavs

[themoomoorn]

LA SAGA DE BAGUETTE PART TROIS: JE SUIS UNE PETITE FILLE TRES TRISTE

...Sigh...

...when we last left our little ingenue, he stumbled across a bizarre bracelet that was spit out of a nebulous void called the "Dee-Ell-Cee," and apparently it had three entire Emblems inside of it. These three Emblems are quite infamous in the sense that one of them doesn't really qualify as what FEE defines as an "Emblem."

The definition in this case is a "Hero of Yore."

─.─||

Emblème, engager...whoo...Dieu aide moi...

We get off the wrong foot immediately, because even when the Fodlan games and spinoffs asserted that these three would be great together, they show the exact opposite...sort of. The two guys are distant at worst and get along well enough at best, while the five-head elephant in the room looks down on both of them and ignores them. So in that sense, Edelgard is correct in her statement involving appearances.

Case in point: "Claude, you have the intelligence of a cockroach." Seriously, other than their bogus alliance in Hopes, when has she ever spoken politely to him?

And what's more, while 3H's graphics are pretty bad, the models for these Emblems, even compared to the others, are downright ugly.

Koei: "We would've done another soft reboot for Fodlan to make you like Edelgard more, but IntSys didn't want us in the developer's room this time ლಠ益ಠ)ლ"

The Engaged color palettes for all of the DLC units bar Tiki are much darker compared to the canon Emblems, and no matter which of the House Lords is up front, the Engaged unit will be wearing an Officer's Academy uniform. While this Emblem bracelet is probably better in terms of utility compared to a few of the ring Emblems, I've found the 3H bracelet to be pretty poor in the mid-to late game - for one, the swap gimmick doesn't even pan out since you need to fully upgrade the Bond ranking in order to even access Areadbhar and Failnaught (even if Dimitri or Claude are leading, you're stuck with Aymr as the Emblem's main weapon until you reach said ranks, and this version of Aymr operates like a Great weapon, which are very piddling weapons overall unless an Armored unit is using it), and you can just freely pick one of their Gambits no matter who's leading anyway. Their combined attack is okay, but it's otherwise a basic super attack that doesn't even move you elsewhere (Sigurd, Celica) and it can't be done at a distance (Lyn).

As far as their actual inheritable skills...other than Lineage (it's extremely cheap to inherit - 200 SP - and accelerated EXP growth is always welcome in a game that encourages early promotion/reclassing), they suck.

Man ;_;

In one of several instances of Fodlan's canon being wibbly, Alear-Baguette calls Claude by a title he doesn't obtain until Part II.

Everything about Fodlan is very malleable...except, ironically, with Byleth, who has a very meshed out personality not only like they do in Heroes, but it's consistent!

Le sigh...

With some Skirmishes, grinding, and smithing out of the way, we make our way across the border and into Brodia, the austere, autumnal kingdom that sure does love its strength. The economy boons in the face of strength! Not in a darwinistic kinda way, but more in a Spartan kinda way. They're ambishus and want to expand dong territory...

and yet they're somehow remarkably less shitty about it than Almyra.

...I either am going to like you enough, or not like you at all.

This is Alcryst, the second prince of Brodia. After threatening Al and Baggy with self-defense-mediated murder for broaching the border, Baggy flashes his divine creds, leading to the events of the image above this statement. I am honestly shocked that Alcryst doesn't have a crop to self-flagellate himself with at all times.

Alcryst giving off A-1 off model vibes in this image.

The two ladies are his retainers (Citrinne and Lapis). They're among the game's better characters, but also wind up as victims of its very weird balancing system.

The weird "system" in question is that in Engage, the majority of units you recruit in succession will almost always be objectively better than the ones you began with, with very few exceptions. Even factoring in the low growths across the board, multiple units that come after Chapter 10 or so not only maintain higher bases with good EXP scaling, but the Personal Skills they come with are, again, objectively better than those who came before you.

For example, Clanne and Framme's synchronicity of their personal skills works well in the early game (they get specific buffs if they're adjacent to Alear), but they ultimately pale in comparison to the likes of the free range debuffing abilities that the retainers of the Elusian princesses carry with them. Clanne and Framme also have very odd growths that require reclassing in order to tinker with (Clanne makes for a poor mage despite starting off as one, but also has a poor Strength growth).

As we cross the bridge to meet with the king, we discover that the vaguely "Satanic" winter kingdom of Elusia is mounting an invasion - excuse me, a counter-invasion, as Brodia had attempted to invade Elusia in the past due to their "barbarism" of...worshipping the Fell Dragon.

I have some issues with this little nugget besides the fact that it goes about thirty feet before stopping, but that's for another post.

This little cotton candy clown with all the model clipping is Hortensia, the second princess of Elusia, and the childish and bratty one amongst the nobles in this game. She scores some points for A.) Actually acknowledging how odd Alear's looks are, and 2.) Having a little spat with Alcryst that actually bothers to go steps beyond the tepid "ideals" spiel that 3H forces at us (Dimitri's actual logic on CF 17 notwithstanding).

Yes, the spat is "Brodia invaded us and is hurting civvies" vs. "You're barbarians who worship a giant snake that destroys everything and little more," but it goes a step beyond if we consider that the Jesus figure in this world is an actual, living person walking among them! Alear is the child of God slated to become God, you know!

After a fairly okay map of gunning down fliers galore, we see Hortensia call a retreat to...her retainers, and no one else. I will give 3H credit in that the addition of battalions and larger armies does add meat in terms of battle scaling.

Veyle-Waif is here again, seemingly unable to remember how she got here. How Very Mysterious(tm). In any case, here's her casually dropping a plot twist.

Alear is her brother, in case you haven't played an FE game ever.

And now's the moment we've all been waiting for!

DIAMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANT I LOVE HIM

If Alear weren't our main character, I'd love for Diamant to have been our Lord! He fits the classic archetype with a few fun twists wedged in. He's handsome, he's an adult, he's perfectly simple and complex, both language voices fit him beautifully, and his design is fantastic (all of the Brodians have decent designs, actually, although Alcryst's random barrette is dumb). His combat utility is decent enough - it has some issues, but further into the game he doesn't drop off like a boulder the way the Firene units (bar Alfred) do. Speaking of Alfred, these two are fun to see together too.

Diamant, being Brodia's responsible Crown Prince, isn't 100% on board with razing Elusia and their not-Satanists, but Elusia's invading and since their king wants the Fell Snek back in action and the Fell Snek eats babies, they're kind of in a corner. What's more, our very own Jesus-Bagel is explicitly on a holy mission to collect all the nations' Emblem Rings because they're the key to stopping Snekky, and that unfortunately includes Elusia's. As Brodia is allied, albeit distantly, with Firene, they opt into helping Baguetty-Spaghetti on his quest.

Despite being responsible for causing a lot of trouble for Elusia, King Morion is actually a good father to his two sons, which is why Alcryst's self-esteem problems can come off as...uh...well. As we will see later on, he is unfortunately not the sharpest tool in the shed, and this lovely little interaction combined with that fact points to all signs that he's a goner.

Brodia seems to only have one Emblem Ring, and it's Roy's. He throws it to his son like a dog playing fetch.

"I bet you don't wanna watch Cocomelon with me later, huh?"

With our objective at hand, Elusia rears its head once again. While the next map's primary objective is to defeat a boss, it's also a defense map, which is a nice change of pace. It is also here that we are introduced to...

...the sensual woobie of the cast (and Crown Princess of Elusia), Ivy. She's a stone cold, magic-casting wyvern flier who's dutiful and driven to server her father, King Hyacinth. It's nothing personnell, kid, she just wants the Emblem Rings.

She also somehow hasn't stabbed herself in the neck with the kind of jewelry she wears, is somehow able to see past the giant fascinator on her head, has no thigh chafing despite her concept art clearly emphasizing that she's going commando underneath that dress, and is able to ride sidesaddle on a wyvern without falling off. The suspension of disbelief set by Claude being able to pull a Parthian shot/stand upright on the saddle/do backflips on his white wyvern has some serious competition.

(I actually do like Ivy as a character...but her design is silly even by this game's standards. Same for Hortensia. I'm also just tired of the specific trope Ivy falls under in FE as a whole).

One of Diamant's retainers, Amber, talking like a toddler for some reason (his other retainer, Jade, will be introduced in the following Chapter). One of the funny things about Amber is that his English voice sounds like...

uh

V*c Mog*ana

But in a slightly lower pitch.

ANYWAY -

-Ow, now that's the edge!

With the castle successfully protected and rings/bracelets in hand, we prepare to march on Elusia. Despite the foreshadowing striking us with the force of someone being flung out of the windshield after a car crash, this moment is surprisingly touching. It's something more FE parents ought to think about, ya know.

Unfortunately, King Morion hears none of it, and is anticipating Alear going all manakete once they succeed in wiping out the Snekkists.

...man. And I'm actually enjoying this guy's vibe. Shame it's gonna end soon ;_;

(This moment is also another underrated one, because Alear has a mini-crisis where he asks himself, "wait, can I turn into a dragon??? Help???")

Next time on ManaketeBall Grand Tour, we march on Elusia, where bad things will definitely, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, happen. But first, some odds and ends!

Alfred is the first character I got a gold wax seal on. These share hobbies, talents and backgrounds, and comes with a very soft picture of the unit in elegant costume.

This is also the first hint about his health.

ಥ﹏ಥ

Brodia's favored edible fare include meats and starch. The princes both like haggis, which is a dish originating in Scotland whose real life equivalent closely matches the description shown above.

This is more me being salty towards my IRL coworkers in regards to cuisine.

Out of all the inexplicable traits that doesn't seem to really show through, Citrinne having Resting Bitch Face is in the Top 5 for this game.

Damn, Diamant doesn't like horse manure either.

'Till next time.

#fire emblem engage #fe disengage #alear fire emblem #moomoorn plays viddie games #moomoo's dumb opinions #long post #diamant fire emblem

[jcmarchi]

Four Ways Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Gets The Genre Right

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Four Ways Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Gets The Genre Right

The revival of this long-dormant franchise moves into the gear-and-power-gated family of games colloquially termed Metroidvanias, thanks to its similarity to early classics like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It’s a genre that has been gaining traction in recent years, but Ubisoft’s return to the Prince of Persia franchise is one of the best we’ve seen in a long time. It’s even managed to make a spot for itself on our list of the Best Metroidvania Games you should make a point to play. 

The Lost Crown is also notable for the way it advances this game style with novel ideas and mechanics. While not everything on this list is brand new, these features combine to make Ubisoft’s new adventure one of the most rewarding, approachable, and satisfying releases in the genre, and an early standout release at the beginning of 2024.

All About The Map

Early games like Super Metroid offered a large map for exploration, but much of it was unavailable until you had additional capabilities. That defining feature of the genre is present in The Lost Crown, but it allows clever players to leverage several in-game systems to reduce aimless wandering and instead keep the focus on interesting encounters and puzzles.

The most significant way it does that is through Memory Shards, which let players capture a screenshot of a specific location they’re standing in, and that screen then appears on the main map, viewable just by scrolling over it. It’s a simple but extremely helpful tool that resembles common jigsaw puzzle techniques. When you find a puzzle piece with an unusual or notable shape or image, you set it aside and wait to find its match. Here, you locate a particular insurmountable obstacle and set it aside until you have the matching power to surmount it.

On top of that, The Lost Crown’s map supports thoughtful and customizable navigation, such as distinct markers a player can put down to indicate different targets, as well as a choice between exploration and guided mode. The latter lets players see where the subsequent major story-progressing sequences are but doesn’t tell you how to get to them; the fun of discovery is still there, but it’s not as aimless or as dependent on in-world clues as exploration mode. 

The game also adds a simple but surprisingly helpful tool around save points. In many games of this style, a wrong turn can mean that you miss a critical save point by turning left when that desperately needed save point was to the right. In Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a clearly identifiable golden wind appears in nearby chambers that lead to a save point, helping ensure you don’t miss it. It’s a meaningful aid and takes away an element of frustration and difficulty that was never really an enjoyable aspect of the genre.

A Consistent And Uniting Theme

Prince of Persia games have always been about the concept of time in one way or another, but The Lost Crown takes that focus to a new level. By making the entire game – from storytelling to mechanics – focus on the nature of time, the totality feels united and compelling.

Sargon’s journey across Mount Qaf sees time constantly in flux, with story elements suggesting that time is both mutable and can change based on our perception of it. But rather than just discussing that concept in the storytelling, the entire game revolves around time. Your powers are all about the manipulation of time and space. Distinct areas across the map play with unusual twists on time – from day and night cycles to dramatic frozen moments. Even combat and traversal rely heavily on careful observation and timing to find any measure of success.

The result is a game that feels like it’s communicating a cohesive theme across all its facets.

Focus on Precision

Exploring a vast open map, backtracking to earlier locations, and solving navigation challenges are all concepts that appeal to a mindset of careful observation and thinking. So why would a game like this also veer into imprecise and wild approaches to action? Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown keeps precision play a staple across all elements of gameplay.

Combat in the game is always about watching your enemy and reacting intelligently to their attacks. Mastery of parries, dodges, dashes, and jumps is as crucial as any sword or bow attacks you might wield. The combat provides a refreshing and challenging approach, with regular injections of new attack and defense options, an increasingly complex array of enemies to parse, and bosses that demand careful use of available powers.

Likewise, traversal sequences are often about extremely precise button presses to avoid Mount Qaf’s many traps and dangers. After decades of playing games, it’s rare that a puzzle or navigation area feels genuinely new or surprising to me. But Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown frequently provides that sensation, with tricky moments that left me smiling at the clever structures.

From a design perspective, the game also uses its play spaces with precision. If a room is large and open, there’s often a reason for it, encouraging players to attempt to reach its furthest and highest corners. If a combat chamber is tight and constrained, it forces the player to leverage every ability to confront an enemy’s capabilities.

The insistence on precision increases the sense you’re playing a game that demands attention and observation at every turn – there’s little in the way of boring moments since every action, reaction, and direction you move has a purpose and the threat of danger.

Accessible to All

Increased attention on accessibility for all players has been a big focus for game developers in recent years. It’s been incredible to see game makers working hard to make their games playable and enjoyable by the largest percentage of players. In this arena, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown leads the genre of Metroidvania titles in many ways.

High-contrast visual mode options ensure aid for players with specific color blindness and other low vision needs; The map tracking and memory shard feature helps players with visual memory issues; A platforming assist option lets players jump past the most complicated traversal sequences with a unique portal system; Combat difficulty can be fully tweaked to make timing windows more generous, add additional aim assist, and more; Controls are globally remappable; Subtitles have numerous adjustable options for those with hearing issues. With these and other features, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown keeps the game rewarding for a broad swath of potential players.

Importantly, these accessibility features are entirely optional and changeable at your desire. Beyond the inherent value of opening up the game to the players who need these options, everyone should feel good about these types of inclusions, especially as they make their way into genres (like these types of Metroid-inspired games) that have sometimes not featured the options. More players of a good game helps developers and publishers find success. In turn, those additional paying customers make it more likely that good games and developers will continue to make more games. It’s a win-win-win.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a return to a venerable franchise, but the game’s shift into a new style invigorates the series and makes it feel new again. Not only is it a great game, but it also sets some high bars for several innovative elements, which other developers within the space would be wise to emulate. If you haven’t already put the game on your radar as an early play in 2024, it deserves serious consideration.

#2024 #Accessibility #approach #attention #Backtracking #blindness #Capture #change #Color #defense #Design #developers #direction #Featured #Features #game #games #Gear #hearing #how #how to #Ideas #issues #it #Jigsaw #list #manipulation #map #measure #mechanics