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sailorshadzter · 3 years

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Prompt: Joffrey reveals himself to be a monster to her towards the start of the stay at Winterfell .Knowing that her parents cant reject the match between herself and the Crown Prince without repercussions,she stages a kidnapping and slips herself into the group heading to the Wall. Maybe she cuts off her hair/dyes her hair/steals some of Brans clothes.Kinda like a Mulan AU I guess?

OOOOOH WOW

this is one of those asks that i have to scroll for a minute to get to!!! but i got to it!!! IM SORRY ITS TAKEN ME SO VERY LONG but inspiration strikes when it strikes. anyways, i might come out with a part 2 / dont tempt me to make this into another au i never finish but man the idea is GOOD.

anyways

i hope it was worth the wait.

As the night begins to dawn, Sansa Stark finds it hard to keep both feet on the ground.

She's lovestruck, falling hard for the golden haired Baratheon prince that's been put before her. With his charming good looks and regal posture, he's enough to make any maiden's heart flutter. In truth, even now with Joffrey and his parents, the King and Queen of the Iron Throne there in her own home, she's finding it hard to believe that she, she, of all people, will be the one to marry the prince. That someday she might be a queen as beautiful as his mother, Cersei Lannister, who smiles so sweetly whenever they meet, who speaks so tenderly, who upon after the betrothal was made official, calls her daughter, as if she so truly were.

"Come my lady, let us take one last walk." It's Joffrey now, bending over his arm in a bow as he approaches where she sits among the other young ladies of Winterfell. They erupt in giggles around her as she blushes to the roots of her hair but nods all the same, reaching out her hand to take his, allowing him to help her up onto her feet. Though she glances towards her mother, who sits engaged in conversation with her father and the King himself, Joffrey tugs on her hand and she can do nothing else besides follow after him. She knows it's inappropriate for her and the prince to sneak off alone like this, but she can't help but to excitedly wonder if he means only to steal her away for a private kiss. Besides, they are to be married in only a few short weeks, so what harm would it do?

They walk together out into the moonlit night, a surprising chill to the air that sends a shiver down her spine. If Joffrey notices, he does not speak on it, rather he continues to lead her through the courtyard where only a handful of guards and nobility mingle. It was astonishing just how many people came along with the King and his family and Sansa isn't certain there would ever be a way to remember all of their names. Along the back, they step into the gardens, the darkening sky pierced by the soft white light of the moon. "I will miss the moonlight of the North," she says as they fall to a stop before the brimming fountain, her lips curving with a smile. "But I suppose I will love it all the more whenever we return."

At her words, Joffrey turns, his expression not one she's seen before. It's not confusion, but rather, it looks like anger. No, it is something far beyond anger, and it frightens her down to her very core. Startled, Sansa begins to stammer an apology, but Joffrey silences her with a wave of his hand. "Return?" He scoffs, looking from her back towards Winterfell and back again. "We'll not be returning here once we leave," he goes on, shaking his head with a scathing sort of laugh that is far more chilling than the wind had been.

"Y-your pardon, I only meant... When we visit..."

"Did you not hear me, my lady... Once we leave here in two days, we shall not be returning. Not you and certainly not me. You will be my queen and you will stay South, where you belong." A strange feeling is creeping up within her; it's cold, it's deep, and it's so very dark. There is something about the way Joffrey says this that she knows it to be true. She realizes then, quite suddenly, that if she leaves with him as intended, she will never again return to Winterfell. She swallows. This isn't right, she thinks, he musn't mean it.

"I know the North is not entirely to your pleasure, but it is my home... I can't imagine never returning," she smiles, hoping her easy going tone is not lost to the shaking of her voice. "You may even grow to enjoy it here, if you give it a chance..." To her horror, Joffrey's hands shoot up and for a single instance, she thinks he means to strike her, but rather he takes hold of her by the upper arms, his grip like a vice. "M-my lord, you're h-hurting me," she whimpers, staring up into Joffrey's blazing eyes.

He leans in close to her, as close as he might have done for the kiss she had once hoped he'd bestow upon her, and breathes a simple reply. "Bid your home farewell, sweetheart, for we ride south in the morning." His grip lessens and then, he lets go entirely, taking a single step back from where she stands. The morning? She thinks, these words sinking in, realizing now that though she'd been told it would be another day before leaving... Evidently, someone had decided that there was no need to stay another night and no one had chosen to tell her. She wonders if this is cruelty on Joffrey's part or kindness of her parents, hoping to spare her the pain of knowing it was her last night home. Either way, it matters not, because she knows there's no way she can go South.

Not ever.

[ x x x ]

As she lays in bed, Sansa can do little else but stare at the ceiling above her bed and wish to be someone else. If she were anybody else, she would not be marrying the prince, and she would not be leaving home. Sansa had tried to explain her feelings to her mother, who had merely laughed and said it was nervous jitters. I had them, too, before I married your father, Cat Stark had said as she brushed out her daughter's hair for bed one last time. The next time she brushed this head of hair, it would be for her wedding day. The longer she spent with her mother that evening, the more Sansa realized she could not simply back out of this wedding. Sansa was not a stupid girl, though Arya might have argued differently, and she knew of the trouble brewing between the families. Between the kingdoms. She's overheard enough whispers and listened to enough speculation between her brothers to know that war was a very real possibility- some said only the good friendship between the Baratheon king and their father was what kept them safe. Sansa also knows, even just from the words spoken during their betrothal, that her marriage with Joffrey solidified the peace between them.

And yet...

The longer she thinks about it, the more she knows that despite it all, she cannot ride South. She knows of the stories, the ones of what happens to Stark men that go to King's Landing... What was stopping something terrible from happening to her as well? There had to be a way, there just had to be a way to free her from this wedding and ultimately, the prison King's Landing was certain to be.

It's just as she's resigning herself to her misery that something comes to her.

One of the stories she had read as a young girl, a story of a princess taken in the dead of night by an evil lord. Said princess was to be rescued by her true love, a shining knight of virtue that rides in on his white horse. And more is coming- it's not just her that is to leave on the morrow- but Jon, as well. Jon, her bastard brother, was being sent to the wall to join the Knight's Watch. He certainly would not be her knight, but if she could somehow slip in among him and the others heading out... Yes, it might possibly work.

But if it's going to work, she must work fast, as she knows the men are set to leave before morning light. And so she leaps from her bed and pulls on her dressing robe. It is late into the night, hours still from the morning call, but there is always the fear of a guard or even her father discovering her out of bed at such an hour. But she says a silent prayer to the Old Gods and then tiptoes from her room.

[ x x x ]

When the morning call comes, she's already gone, a single note hastily scratched in writing she hopes looks entirely unlike her own penmanship.

She's been gone well over an hour by then, for just as she had planned, she manages to slip away among those leaving for the Knight's Watch. With an old cloak draped over her shoulders, she keeps the hood up, shielding from those around her the red hair she's so well known for. Before leaving, she managed to snag some old breeches and shirt from the laundry, and she's braided her hair and tucked it up as much as she could. Luckily for her, she's mostly ignored by the other men, aside from one man who growls at her when she bumps into him halfway into the morning that first day.

The group walks for hours; far longer than she's certainly ever walked at one time. She's tired and she's hungry and she hurts in places she's never hurt before. But, there is a strange sense of warmth comes over her as she settles into a place of her own, away from the others, nearer to the river that runs through the forest. With no knowledge of how to build a fire, Sansa is thankful for the warmth of the summer night and hungry as she is, realizes she's far more tired than anything else. After a sleepless night and endless walking, she will forgo food if only it means she can sleep.

And so she wanders closer to the water's edge, where there beneath the canopy of darkness, she finally lowers her hood.

From where he watches, Jon finds himself intrigued by what he sees.

He can't really say what draws him to follow the hooded figure out to the river beyond simple curioisity. But now as he watches, he sees hands pulling what certainly must be pins from hair and to his shock, long hair comes tumbling down. Now he's really curious.

And just then, a cloud above them shifts and the moonlight illuminates her.

The red hair is vibrant, the pale moonlight weaving between the strands like ribbons. He's stunned, but his foot snaps a twig all the same. When she whips around, it's steel blue eyes he finds himself staring into and Jon wonders, despite sixteen years beneath the same roof as her, he's never noticed that look within her eyes. "Sansa..." Her name is on his lips before he can stop it and he realizes now that she is quite like a deer in the crosshairs, a creature torn between fight and flight.

She can't believe this.

Her fleeting sense of safety has fled, vanished into the night the moment those Stark gray eyes settled upon her. Of course, she can't now understand how she ever expected to avoid Jon forever, but she had hoped to at least be further out than this when they did meet. "Jon," she greets, taking a step away from the river and closer to where he stands. The moonlight is bright and it illuminates Jon in a way that makes her blink, makes her think. "Please..." It's the only plea she can offer, the only words that in this moment, seem right to say.

Jon studies her for a long moment; all things considered, she must have had a good reason to come. Sansa Stark wasn't the type to just... Throw it all away without a reason. Her dream of marriage to a prince was to come true, after all. Her golden haired Prince Joffrey had arrived in Winterfell only days before; a smug, ugly sort of kid that had grown tall, taller than even Robb, but one that had stolen Sansa's heart all the same. Jon wonders what could have made her do what she'd done. "I won't," he promises suddenly, earnestly.

Her face relaxes, she smiles.

She feels safe once again and it is far warmer than it was before.

#jonsa #actuallyjonsa #ask box prompts #i really could write more for this #my writing

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creacherkeeper · 3 years

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ooh if ur up for elaborating ur hcs would u be down to expand on kristen's 'unit of cptsd w freckles'? also in the neurodivergence sector she adaine and fig all give me major adhd energy 👀 the bad kids....adhd autistic solidarity incarnate

i LOVE neurodivergence headcanons!! for me personally i hc adaine, riz, and gorgug as autistic, and fig and fabian as adhd (a friend said she sees her tourettes in gorgug which i think is valid too!!!). might type all that up formally at some point

kristen is just ... like yes all the bad kids for sure have gone through trauma, but i think kristens is pretty different in how it took shape. like she does have shitty, unaccepting parents, and the whole queer realization in a homophobic environment, but she also has the religious trauma at having been raised as the chosen one of a cult?? and i think that all just adds up. so for me its hard to get a read on her as autistic or adhd or anything like that because i think the cptsd just really forms a lot of things. like not everyone would agree, but as a long-time disability advocate who literally does this for a living (as a disability coach) i COMPLETELY see cptsd as a form of neurodivergence and think it can be just as influential on someones personality and behavior as anything else

like a lot of things i think you can read in a meta way about how ally plays her in freshman vs sophomore year or dice rolls and things like that, but im trying to just look at what we get in the story

like just looking at some of the categories of diagnosis of cptsd (and keeping in mind that symptoms of trauma frequently show up AFTER the victim is in a safe space and not while theyre still experiencing it):

affect and emotional regulation - shes FAR more outwardly emotional in s2, but also isnt very consistent about how those emotions present. like compare her super chill calm and detached demeanor in the mirror!riz fight versus her completely flipping out and sobbing and needing comfort after seeing kalina for the first time. like they definitely know a lot more by then but i think kalina is way less scary than a literal horror monster demon version of your friend?? also compare her behavior in s1 (mostly controlled and thoughtful with some occasional emotional outbursts) vs her in s2 seeming to have a much harder time with words, organizing her thoughts, communicating, reading other peoples emotions, responding ‘appropriately’, etc (some of which you can read as cognitive/executive functioning issues too)

attachment - has to actively figure her way out around boundaries (with tracker, sandra lynn, jawbone, the other bad kids) in a way that is a little more intensive than a healthy 17 year old

behavioral control - swings from being VERY self controlled and regulated (more than is healthy) to VERY loose with sexual activity (to the point of being inappropriate around others, even adults) and uses drugs, alcohol, and gets tattoos. definitely has some problems with impulse control (like okay the ribbon dancing out of a building was FUNNY but also. kristen ....,, and there are a lot more examples of this too)

self concept - i mean her whole religious journey in s2 kind of reflects this, but i think the best example is her spirit guardians. like the spirit guardians are a reflection of HER OWN ideology and beliefs and yet like?? theyre very critical and dismissive, even of kristen’s own person and choices? and tend to be very emotionally checked out of everything and encourage her to be as well. like a lot of the “sitting back sipping a cortado” persona tends to be reflective of the spirit guardians, but also the “trust nothing believe in nothing” which is indicative of a lot of self doubt and trust issues. and then like, with cassandra, there’s the LITERAL embracing of a lack of identity, of undefined personhood, and a lot of very risky choices in order to embrace doubt and unknowing (i think cassandra’s whole thing is pretty cool but i think it can come from a healthy or unhealthy place depending on the person, not saying which it was for kristen)

i think her not being able to tell where her cleric powers come from, something that like ??? is VERY inherent in the basic basic concept of what clerics are, could definitely be put under the “self concept” category but also may point to some sort of dissociative or depersonalization tendencies

anyway 8) did anyone ask for me to ramble for this long?? is this what yall wanted? woe, cpstd headcanons be upon ye

#fantasy high #dimension 20 #kristen applebees #nd headcanons #HI I TALKED FOR A LONG TIME #sdggsdj yall cant just tell me to TALK about disability stuff because THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN #no i do love it though #i will talk about disability headcanons all day every day #as ...... evidenced here ......#i might have to type up other bad kid nd headcanons tomorrow #appleciders

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dropoutparty · 3 years

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ngc ramblings part 3- chapter 5

here we are at part 3!!! sorry this one took so long, i originally was gonna make this post include entropy and extus (along with finally talking about face in depth) but it was so fuckin long that im splitting it into 2 different posts! the next part isnt done yet but im like almost halfway done so it shouldnt be too much longer until its out! also before we get into this one:

tw for: death, animal death, and suicide. pls take care of urself and don't read this if those things are triggering for u <3

ok lets get on with the post

at the start of entropy zach doesnt waste any time getting right to the point. this place is bigger than the other planets so far, and zach says the music this time around is a melody that “started out normal but then got distorted” played by a violin sounding instrument. even tho i do sometimes forget that this is supposed to be a creepypasta im not surprised that he said it made him feel depressed and unnerved lmao. anyways, this planet has all new level types in it!! no reused ones!! ok now this is epic. the bosses this time around are megalon, battra, and mechagodzilla, but itll be a good while before we get to those guys because this chapter is long as hell holy shit?? buckle up babez <33 now, before i get into the meat of things as usual im gonna talk abt the planet name! entropy basically means “a lack of order/predictability or a gradual decline into disorder” and that's very accurate to this part of the story. at this point, red is pissed off and is getting desperate, which means from here on out things are going to be getting more intense and more unstable. this world is the turning point in the overall story, basically.

now with that out of the way, zach first goes to the worlds quiz level as usual! this time something was different. usually, in the quiz levels there would be goofy ass music playin in the bg (specifically the GH1D0RA cheat music, if you wanna like listen to it ig?) but from here on out its been replaced by the music from the games password screen, which zach called creepy earlier on in the pasta. im gonna glaze over the quiz again this time, but when we get to the next planet ill talk about all of the quizzes in depth all at once. basically all you need to know for now abt what happens here is face asks “do you like mothra?” and when zach picks no (after going on a tangent abt how mothra sucks lmao,, bro i swear im good at the game my controllers just messed up /s), face enters bastard mode and goes “TOO BAD!” and boom now zach cant play as anyone but mothra. zach is pissed for now but little does he know this is just going to become an even more epic gamer bc of this,, youll never get better at something if you never try and all that.

after that, zach moves on to the first level type- the forest. immediately zach gets an eerie feeling from this level bc he has some kinda fear involving forests at night (i can think of a reason why but ill have to talk abt that later just to be sure). hes also not feelin great about being forced to play as mothra, so the pressure of it all is def starting to get to him by now. the music in the forest is woodwinds followed by slow, rhythmic drums and chiming bells. must have been some ominous woodwinds and bells bc it made him feel like he was intruding somewhere he shouldnt be (oh rlly?? u dont say,, everything up until now has been fine /s). getting into the level itself, eventually zach comes across some weird deer-like monsters just vibing and scares them away when he gets close. later in the level he finds more of these weird deer along with a sloth-like creature on some of the trees and some raptor dudes killing some of the deer. zach shoots one of the raptors but thats about it. nothing really happened in this level but zach noted that he didnt feel like he was playing a video game, but instead it felt more like he was exploring a forest in another dimension. thats interesting for reasons ill ~get to later~ (yall must be so tired of hearing that by now omg,, i know im tired of saying it at least. i was gonna wait until after replay to talk about things but i severely underestimated how long this whole project would be, so i might make a post for the “more on that later” stuff before i get into replay. let me know what u think i should do).

anyways, the next thing zach checks out is the first tv screen level so far. these levels just play an animation with some music in the background, and theres a different animation per level. this time around the animation is of a kid with a beaver(?) head licking a lollipop and the music is the GH1D0RA music that the quiz levels used to use. the only thing of note here is that zach says he had a shirt that looked just like that when he was a kid. after that, were off to some of the weirdest fuckin levels in this whole thing imo- the hourglass levels. these levels have an entirely brown color palette, with grandfather clocks standing in the background (the level appears to be in like a hallway or something) and various time measuring things floating in the air. the music is the same as the board (ig cosby just didnt feel like thinking of what theme this place would have lol). after a little bit zach was rlly happy to see actual enemies from the normal game show up! these are basically like aircraft, tanks, etc. thats not the main attraction here tho, bc this level has its own unique mechanic! this mechanic is the colored hourglass items you can pick up. there are three of them, a blue one that slows time down and makes enemies from the past appear, a red one that speeds up time and makes enemies from the future appear, and a green one that made the time flow normally and spawned enemies from the normal game. zach found the blue one first, which caused a bunch of prehistoric enemies based on real animals to show up. after that he found a green one and fought normal enemies again, and then he found a red hourglass. the future enemies here look like aliens to me, and zach says that one enemy reminds him of something he saw in a book once. eventually, a special future creature showed up and zach was suddenly in a boss battle! or a mini boss battle? that description is probably more accurate. this guy doesnt have a face, and he can only attack by shooting a beam from his face, it sure does look cool! after zach beat it tho, he was off to the next level type, which is basically a toxic waste dump.

zach called it grungy and inhospitable, with the music being a synth ambient loop that made him feel dizzy while he listened to it. this is important because this is the first instance of the game making zach feel something *physically*, not just psychologically. all of the enemies here are mutated to some degree, with him first seeing green mummies with bird skulls coming out from vats of toxic slutch and a brownish cow skeleton monster with spider legs. later zach comes across a deer from the woods, drinking some toxic slutch (delinchous). zach got close to it to try making it stopped but suddenly some enemies came out of nowhere and scared it into running right off a ledge and into the slutch. rip :pensive:. after that zach found more mutated enemies (i.e some things with tentacles and some other deformed thing with human teeth) before he finally gets to the end of the level, where theres another miniboss waiting for him!! this ones a toxic sludge monster with a whale skull who attacks with a mouth projectile and by charging into you. the monster sank into the slutch and thats all for this level babeyy!

the next level is another forest, but this time its winter! its still at night, but this time zach doesnt feel off put, which he mostly attributes to the music. he describes it as a gentle, calm song that almost sounded romantic. the entire first segment of this level had no enemies in it, but dw this level is interesting i swear. the next segment starts out just as empty as the last one, but this time its silent. that is, until the music from “unforgiving cold” starts playing. yaa you remember that place!! i think i said it was less interesting than i remembered but its interesting again now bc it was foreshadowing these levels!! anyways soon after the music started up, zach started to come across tons of frozen bodies of the deer from earlier. some were mutilated, some werent, but they were all frozen and covered in snow. eventually zach does come across something living though, a sloth creature from earlier! its just vibing when suddenly the winter versions of the raptors from earlier rush in and fuckin obliterate the sloth thing. those things just blindly try killing everything in sight, and even start fighting themselves before zach finally gets to the last part of the level.

now this is where shit starts to get crayzay. this part opens up to a big empty field with a full moon and the nice music from earlier back. despite the nice music tho, zach immediately starts feeling dread and eventually he finds a lake. the lake comes down from the sky and starts to crack like an egg, a humanoid figure curled up in the fetus position dropping into the lake below and the moon halves disintegrated. this spawned the moon beast, the hardest challenge zachs had to deal with so far. after he finally defeats it, the screen goes to black and the name “melissa” is on screen, written in red. after that, the screen then says kys. the word kill then fills up the screen, layering over itself until it forms a picture of reds face. its now that we finally get to hear abt the whole melissa thing (which makes it sound like shes been mentioned in the pasta before this but thats not what i mean lmao). to summarize, zach had a middle school gf named melissa (also bro middle school?? wadda hell) who often went into “episodes” where she would stare off, expressionless, before trembling and putting her face in her hands. she and zach hung out in a field at night a lot but one night she just stared at the moon the whole time before running into traffic and dying.

NOW its finally later!!! were not done with entropy yet, but this is the end of part one of entropy so i wanna just take a little break to talk about things so far. this planet is FULL of symbolism and foreshadowing. to start off, i think a lot of the questions face asks at the beginning foreshadow things that happen. some examples are “is time slipping though your fingers?” which could allude to the time levels, “do you have any regrets?” which i think obviously foreshadows the whole melissa thing, “is it safe to go out at night?” and “do you find it hard to sleep at night?” both follow the same kinda theme, which i think relates to how the melissa incident happened at night, specifically out at night. i dont think the forest levels have anything too important in them, other than to introduce the presence of an innocent, harmless creature that doesnt deserve what happens to it later (aka the deer things) which might symbolize melissa. more evidence for this symbolizing melissa comes from the encounter with the deer in the toxic dump and the winter forest, where in the former zach tries to stop it from hurting itself but is too late, being forced to watch it die, and in the latter the same innocent thing from earlier is found dead close to where the real incident took place. the two big themes to keep in mind here are death and time, more specifically the past. most of the enemies here are either made from bones or kill other enemies, there's a dedicated time level referencing things that zach remembers seeing at one point (aka that one alien zach recognized), the beaver head had the same shirt as child zach did, it all connects to zachs past and the death of melissa. as for the moon beast, its the most obvious reference for reasons ive already explained. i dont really know what the moon cracking open and dropping a curled up human into the lake could mean other than some other thing melissa related, but i *do* think that the fact that the moon beast is the most difficult thing zach has faced so far is symbolic of the fact that the trauma from this event has followed him throughout his entire life, and its something he struggles with daily. it could even be the reason why he said no when face asked if he could sleep easily at night. the moon beast also has some black fur around its neck, which i think is meant to represent a tire track, referencing and/or mocking the way melissa died.

its so cool how this entire part of the story builds up to and foreshadows the bomb it drops at the end of the part, giving people something to look back on. a lot of ppl say that as soon as the melissa stuff gets introduced the story goes down in quality, and i do somewhat agree with that sentiment, especially if they want the story to actually be scary, but i think the direction the story goes from this point on is so unique and cool. it does follow the whole “theres a ghost in the game” troupe (even tho it was probably seen as a spin on that originally) but it doesnt do the same cliches as so many other gaming creepypastas do and it really takes the concept and makes it its own. i just think its neat,,,

anyways im done gushing abt this story, lets get on with part 2 of extus!! basically zach has a fuckin panic attack and, after taking a few minutes to calm himself down when its over, he decides that he has to finish the game now because if he doesnt its just going to haunt him for the rest of his life. zach has now realized that the game is “alive” and can somehow see his thoughts and memories, so understandably hes pretty freaked out by it at this point. when he keeps playing, the first thing he does is check out another tv screen level. this time, the animation is of a fish dude just kinda standing there with his mouth flapping open and closed and the music is the neptune board music from the original game. the only reason i can think of for why this is here is maybe the game is mocking zach for the panic attack he just had (bc when u have a panic attack you feel like you can barely breathe, if ur lucky enough to have never had one before and u dont know) but thats abt it. its probably just a random goofy thing cosby threw in there.

anyways, the next actual level is the first labyrinth level. this time around, its a gold labyrinth specifically. the music in these levels is a slow, ominous drum beat with female vocals occasionally coming in and (basically from here on out) the monster zach plays as is now half the size it used to be. i think this shows how zachs feeling at this point, like this whole thing isnt just being a big strong monster and beating up enemies any more, he feels small and scared and helpless in the face of something potentially dangerous that he doesnt understand maybe his confusion about the game is the reason *why* theres so many labyrinth levels here in the first place. anyways im getting ahead of myself. personally, i think the aesthetic of the gold labyrinth is very similar to the green temples back on trance. while trance had a more circular and soft theme to it's architecture and sculpture, entropys is much more square or rectangle oriented. despite this, i think that the golden mazes at least are another religious kind of building, and the architecture is just different because theyre two different cultures who just happen to worship the same spiritual figure (aka melissa. did i say that earlier? i think i did,, if i didnt well the religions worship melissa, not knowing she's a dead human or anything. probably).

moving on, zach notes how the gold labyrinth would probably have been impossible to navigate as any of the other monsters, so turns out face being an asshole was a blessing in disguise after all huh? anyways this place is full of weird gold monsters, lava/fire traps, and stone faces (both in more of an easter island head style and in the regular feminine headshot weve seen so far). zach comes across two feminine heads, one that is more adult looking and pure gold, and another one that looks much younger and whos eyes have red irises and blue scleras. this statue apparently looks a lot like melissa did on the night she died, so zach leaves it pretty quickly. i *think* this is the first time we see the color blue associated with melissa? if it isnt sorry abt that, its been a couple days since i worked on ngcr so ive forgotten some of the smaller or more subtle things by now. GOD i keep getting side tracked ANYWAYS eventually zach finds a non-gold enemy and sees it get picked up by like an arcade crane claw. hes curious so he follows the claw, only to see the monster be put in a big gold cauldron and walk out the side of it as a gold monster.

gonna be honest, no idea what the hell this could mean. like? theres been no themes of corruption or good things becoming evil so far so this just kinda. exists,, yea idk lol. im not part of like any discord servers or anything so all this theorizing and analysis has just been me, maybe getting some small ideas from like random youtube comments or something, so if something ive said so far has been unanimously disagreed with somewhere i dont know about it. thats also why this isnt really a definitive or comprehensive analysis (even tho im trying to be as comprehensive as i can).

anyways zach finds the exit soon after and hes on to the next level type (there's so fucking many of them ik dont worry weve almost gotten to all of them now), the indigo cliffs. the background of these levels is similar to the blue mountains from trance, but now the moon and clouds from the toxic dump background is also here (and colored indigo to match). the music here is just a deep rumbling noise. the first “enemies” he sees here are just a bunch of multicolored little guys coming out of a hole in the ground and jumping off a cliff. were continuing the death theme yall!! anyways zach continues, flying over some more weird creatures (tho some of them just look like dinosaurs lol) before he sees a bunch more of the multicolored guys out and about but this time theyre getting grabbed by birds!! wadda heel!!! zach comments on how the multicolored dudes seem eager to die and thinks maybe the moon has something to do with it (like melissa dude wat!!!! that's crazy /s). at the end of the level there were some more multicolored dudes just walking into a creatures mouth so zach attacked the thing and killed it and the levels over yay!

now its time for the bosses babeyy!!! first zach fights battra (basically an evil moth kaiju), the music is varans theme. battra starts off in his larvae form, where he basically just fought by running into you and shooting stuff at you. while fighting this form, zach noticed that the game buffed mothra because his gamer skillz were too cringe lmaoo. he beats the larvae form and battra goes into his second form, where hes basically a stronger clone of mothra (misogyny). zach fights battra and has fun doing it (for once,, good for him) and he wins yay! next hes fighting megalon (a big beetle/bug kaiju), whos music was gigans theme. im tired when im writing this so ill just give you zachs description of how he fought: “strong, persistent, but dumb”. after this, zach checks out the last tv screen of entropy. this time, it shows a big buff guy with a sack over his head hit a womans head with a sledgehammer while shes tied to a table or something. the music for it was the password theme. i think this is probably here because red is getting angrier? like this guy is still here after i triggered his ptsd?? what the hell!!!

anyways before we get to the last boss we have one last level type to get through- the shadow labyrinth. at this point, zach starts to feel drained because no shit sherlock you just had a panic attack and youve been playing this game for fuckin several hours at this point of course youre fuckin drained. anyways zach enters the shadow labyrinth, which is a black recolor of the gold labyrinth. the music is “evil ambience” similar to unforgiving colds music but distinctly different apparently. there werent any enemies so zach just kinda wandered for a while until the lights turned off, darkening the whole screen and (secretly) spawning tons of spooky enemies thatll chase and hit mothra in the dark. eventually the lights came back on and zach started scrambling to the exit. when the lights turned back off, zach was able to find one of the melissa looking statues and stood next to it. it warded off the monsters while the lights were off, so zach was safe. i think this shows 2 things: 1) its a little more validation for my “religion in this world worships melissa” theory and 2) it foreshadows the way melissa wants to protect zach at the end of the game. zach beat the shadow labyrinth a lot faster than the gold one so were done with all the stages now!! now theres only the last boss and red and were done with entropy!

the last boss is mechagodzilla, but when zach starts the level, normal godzilla is there instead!! its whatever tho bc soon the disguise is gone and its just pretty much the normal mechagodzilla fight (but now hes got a gay beam). at about half health tho, mechagodzillas sprite breaks into pieces like gezoras did way back on earth and reforms into not-mechagodzilla. even tho it looks uncanny (and the usage of the face statue on the front is probably there to further mock zach bc melissa) zach beats it p easily and now its time for the chase. ba dum ba dum thats the sound of a chase.

as usual tho, before i get to the red chase its time to talk about entropy as a planet!! i think the best way to describe the layout is “a big forest with a toxic waste dump in it takes up half the planet while the other half is a large religious temple/labyrinth with a dangerous underbelly”. there doesnt seem to be any intelligent life there now (its all dead by now probably) but there was at some point at least because imean the huge labyrinth is there dude!!! i dont have much to say for this section tbh bc i feel like i've already said everything i wanted to, so its time for the chase ig!!

basically the chase with red here takes place in a labyrinth level bc of course it does. this labyrinth, however, seems to be made of some kind of organic matter. is it flesh? organs? nondescript viscera? idk but it's pulsating and bloody. also this time red has wings too!! anyways, basically zach avoids red throughout the maze, red breaks through one of the walls with his big alien tongue, and zach gets to the end of the maze. nothing crazy happens at the end of this chapter (i think it was crazy enough as is) so thats the end of that and now its time for the penultimate planet- extus.

#ngc ramblings #nes godzilla creepypasta #godzilla nes creepypasta #godzilla nes

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twinvictim · 3 years

Note

your opinions on each of the post team silent games and a rating out of 10. hand 'em over

YEAHHHHHH FINALLY CATERING TO ME!!!

Uh really long post oops. for reference, my rating for the first 4 sh's are as follows

Sh1: 9/10 Sh2: 7/10 Sh3: 9/10 Sh4: 9.5/10

Silent Hill 0/Origins

overall score: 7/10

Alot of the games issues can of course be attributed to it being a psp game, and while i won't excuse everything bc of that, j have to be honest and say I think it had so much potential as a (very) late ps2 game. Not to mention, the game ON THE PSP functions as it should. (The ps2 port does fucking not tho..oops) ans you'll see that this is...a rarity post team silent.

The story has alot of potential, Travis as a character is interesting and sympathetic and j think his dynamic with alessa js super fascinating to dig into, both of them being abused children and there was alot of intrigue regarding his powers, the game feels like a smaller more watered down she, and for that I can't fault it too much. The weapons system isn't my favorite but the combat itself is reminiscent of 1 and 2 and I really like a good chunk of the monster design, there was clearly thought and care put into it, nurses and strughtjackets/lying figures be dammed. The unlockables are pretty cool though and alot of the environments look pretty cool for a psp game, hell i LOVE the theater level its super unique, I would love to see it in (actually functional) better graphics. I also think the puzzles are pretty solid, not hair pulling like sh1 even if they're not quite as clever as say sh3.

My biggest criticisms come from the reuse of sh1 characters (just alessa and Travis would've been fine, maybe dahlia and some more org characters would've been better) the bad ending being straight up bad writing. Not to mention they did the sh3 thing of "kill too many monsters and get the bad ending" which is...stupid. The foreshadowing of the butcher being? He's just kinda there, I like the lead up but it would be more interesting if the butcher represented something from those years between Travis' father dying and him being an adult. And while there's more replayability imo than sh2, it doesn't have difficulty sliders and that makes it kinda hard to come back to quite as often. Not to mention unlike sh1, 3or sh4 there's not as much horror focus and random events.

Overall, solid game its fun to play, very silent Hill and if you're willing to look past a few continuity errors and accept its a little different and slightly derrivitive at the same time, I like to say I had alot of fun with it and still do. (Maybe I just like Travis alot...idk)

Silent Hill: Homecoming

Overall score: 6/10

Once again most of the issues here are gonna be corporate fuck ups, but I'm also not gonna beat around the bush, this game isn't like...good. its bad actually. "But you gave it a 6/10?" Yeah bc its not NEARLY as bad as some other games I've.. experienced.

The negatives here are, many and vast, so let's run them down. Firstly the games performance is janky on console (ps3 at least) and abysmal/unplayable on PC, what with framerate issues that are detrimental to game play on pc and make the third boss impossible. That said on console it is completable and not even too terrible...usually. Scarletts boss fight however is terribly unbalanced and broken on all skews so :/. The combat is...functional but not anyone's favorite, it's difficult to use any actually strong weapon and you can pretty much strong arm ur ways through shit with just the knife (except scarletts first form..don't try it, it won't work) for some people this will be borening (not my opinion but w/e). Most of The puzzles...leave alot to be desired. I hate sliding block puzzles. Also no run button? At all?? No easy mode? Ok... also what is this.. wheel design for the inventory...im accidentally using my serum..what is serum also? And why is the item pickup noise like...bass boosted.

The character models look awful most of the time, and comically unfinished other times, some human models are just grotesque, (judge halloway, Adam shepherd, mayor Bartlett. .you get it) and yes...there are sexy nurses. Bc of course there are. (Whole ass out???) They did straight up have some terrible endings for this game (ph ending for one, the way you get the ufo? Hell the ufo ending is kinda boring. I like the in water ending here too but. Yeah.) the story has some, problems. To say the least.

However, while the performance is bad its not the worst I've played (on the ps3 once again..unplayable on pc) and I hardly noticed the framerate when I was just running around, I personally found the combat kinda fun, between trying to dodge accurately and still attack and not use all my health items (bc those and ammo are actually rare! Unlike some games...) it is kind of a challenge and reminds me of a much worse sh4. And hey, the health items both heal an understandable amount of health that i can easily read with a bar (unlike 1-3) and they're not a complete joke (unlike sh4...) i find the exploration really fun and sure the characters look shit but the environments are Fucking great. The church is one of my fav sections, short as jt might be and yes it stole the confessional scene but its pretty well written and acted I think. The monster design is pretty fucking rad too honestly, I like the schism, siam, I like the DESIGN of the needlers even if they make me so mad to fight, and hey the nurses and ph don't show up that much to be too aggregious. The boss monsters are also fantastic design wise, very unsettling and the boss rooms are interesting as well.

The story has problems but it also has alot of potential, the concept of people sacrificing ther children for silent Hill and being overcome by their own pain and guilt is pretty fucking cool, and alex is a good character they did a good job of giving him personality, ppl bitch about him being a soldier but a) he's not and b) soldiers are people too, and a sh game that could tackle toxic masculinity, be critical of the military, and also tackle abusive religeious parents is pretty intriguing, not to mentions themes of brotherly love that's complicated bc of how they clearly favored Josh . Sure, it misses the mark, but I like taking the potential and thinking about it bc its compelling to me. And like I said, i like alex alot.

Overall, bad game yes, but not the worst as it has enough good for me to honestly really enjoy it, besides it is pretty funny when it is bad. Don't play the pc port tho

Silent Hill Shattered Memories

Overall Score: 8/10

Unpopular opinion im sure but honestly? I find this game ALMOST on par with the team silent games. Its really that good, yes its a wii game, so this is my score taking into account the motion controls BTW.

For the good, man where do i start. Its BEAUTIFUL for a wii game and esp for a post team silent game, the graphics are nice and Constsitent, the environments are pretty and it has a pretty nice cold color pallet to contrast the warmer tones the series tends to skew towards. The acting and intrgrige are all on point and the WRITING is fantastic, its one of those games you play the first time not knowing the twist and play the second time picking up more and more clues and things that strengthen that twist so much more. Like sh2 its a simple story told in such a clever and interesting way that you'll probably be too invested to put it down, I beat it in one sitting in 6 hours bc i was so engrossed in the narrative. And the Puzzles man! The puzzles are phenomenal and fun to accomplish and there's even a little bit of variety in a few places on repeat playthroughs. The level of detail in this game is insane really, the things that change with the different psychology answers are pretty cool too and tho it all plays out relatively the same its still fun to see the different things you can get to happen. The gimmicks like the phone as an object, taking pictures, sneaking and zooming in, they're not too intrusive as to take away from the exploration or other game play but not completely useless and have some pretty fun Easter eggs too. The game plays sort of like a worse outlast with good puzzles and for that I do have to commend it. Oh and the fucking MUSIC is INCREDIBLE idk something ab this soundtrack has alot of heart put into it clearly.

Now, it's not perfect. The thing is, it is a WORSE outlast type game, in the running and hiding sense but well, the hiding is completely useless, its a run away game, which is ok, but I understand that people aren't gonna be a big fan of that when silent Hill has always balanced combat ad puzzles and exploration. The running segments are..aggravating, mostly bc its hard to figure out where to go, not to mention using motion controls that don't like to work half the time to fight the monsters off of you. Also, the monsters are not scarey in the slightest and the raw shock scream is actually enragaging if you've died one to many times, there's also...not really any penalty for dying. And once you're out for these running segments,there's no danger, no monsters, nothing to hide from despite having a hiding mechanic. Its not really a horror game more of a psycological thriller and I understand that the fact that its not horror can be disappointing. The psychology things might be a bit overhyped And yeah fine, the wii foreplay scene...well yeah its weird but it IS also funny as fuck.

That said, there's still alot thats good and alot thas unfair criticism lobbed at this game. Harry didn't have much of a personality in sh1 bc he's a ps1 character and sm really fleshed him out well, not to mention giving cybil some nice characterization, and they did some interesting things with dahlia and kaufmann. And Lisa.. well I'm gonna be honest I never found Lisa all that interesting in sh1..so it doesn't bother me that she's the way she is in this game. I know people hate the "horny" aspect of it but to be completely fair, YOU choose to make the game that way, don't answer in a sexual manner or look at boobs or anything else and you won't have an overly sexual game, its...literally that easy. Its given as an option for the play id they want to go for what is arguably another joke ending. (You cannot tell me sleeze and sirens is meant to be a real serious ending to the game. Cmon) and you can complain about the innacuuracies if you want but its a spin off, a retelling of the original game. Its not canon, and it didn't change the original game. It just took the ideas presented there and made them more human and lest fantastical, there's some supernatural elements but it takes a backseat to the human moments. And its honestly really cool.

Overall, great game, i reccomend it if you don't mind some slight jank with the motion controls and honestly? Look up directions on where to go for the running segments and you'll have a pretty good time overall.

Silent Hill Downpour

Overall score (so far): 7.5/10 *to be noted i haven't finished actually playing it yet but I know the basic plot and some of the details so I doubt it'll change

And so for the final silent Hill Game, I have to say, i don't think it deserves NEARLY the hatred it gets, there's alot about it that i find really cool and even fun and I think its a solid entry, a little better than origins in some parts and its downsides are both unfortunate and once again, mostly Konami's fault . That said, I'm also not gonna kid and say its a good game, just that I like it alot and we should be nicer to the last silent Hill game were probably ever gonna get.

Downpour has a pretty good, original story overall, there's alot to it, alot of intricacies and intrigue to it that honestly make it a pretty sold silent Hill game. Its different enough from the others to stand out but not super far removed from its themes and messages. I like that it doesn't try and lean into the cult aspect and tries to do something else with it, it doesn't try to explain silent Hill, but just use it to torment the characters, as it should be. There's tragedy ad human feelings here and some of them aren't the most...sensitive but they are pretty reasonable reactions id say. Playing as someone who's odds are stacked against him from the beginning as he's a prisoner is a cool way to open the game, someone convicted and you must discover if he is a good person or not. Themes of revenge explored more than in sh3 which is pretty cool. The environments look pretty nice, and i like the look of the otherworld, once again being unique with its cooler color pallet, but without the ice so it really feels like its own thing. The EXPLORATION is awesome with an actual open world which I think works well, there's alot to do in town (unlike sh1 and 0 on limiting hardware and 2 which just pretends you can explore to town but you cant) there's alot for cool little stories and sidequests to do, my favorite so far being the cinema (which has a section of ACTUAL fixed cameras like old Resident evils which is smth SH has never done and its super fucking cool!) And all the sidequess help strengthen murphy as a cheacter and argue for his innocence or complexites. The weapons system is pretty cool, picking up items and attacking with whatever you might find, finding cool Easter eggs with exploration and having fun noticing things. And it does honestly have the strongest side characters outside of SM. The puzzles are pretty solid and fun to figure out with some cool mechanics and the seperate difficulties is a great thing to bring back (actually done well like sh3) I also kind of like the method of triggering the night world/rain/monsters, and silent Hill really feels likes its constantly punishing Murphy, as it should. The music might not be Akira but its still pretty damn good, and fuck yall I like the Korn song, and you CAN press start and skip it yknow. (Thx tomm hewlit)

The negtitives tho, well they are there. For one it has the worst performance of any sh game outside of pc homecoming and like...the hd collection, the framerate like to shit itself alot lmao, its not usually detrimental bc I've played re2r with similar framerates but, yeah its not great. Not to mention while the models look better than hc they don't animate well or often at all, and the game has trouble loading in the models as fast as they should. The sound mixing could use...some work too, poor murph sounds like he's eating the mic. While I find the games exploration really fun, murphy also has the issue of not running very fast so it can be a little annoying to get back to a place you want to be when you can't run that fast, not to mention the loading times. The monster design is def the worst in the series, maybe on par w SM. Which is disappointing bc there's some pretty good moments here and there, but not nearly enough to make it scary and there's so much you can do with monsters with this premise. Also, the running sections in the otherworld are better than SM ad even more engaging than the brief ones in 2 and 3, but still, I'd prefer to do puzzles or fight a boss or smth. I will also say, the endings are, iffy while the main 2 endings are really good and Anne's bad ending as well as the joke ending are great, murphys bad endings are weird and ooc for the muphy you come to know in the game (even more so than Origins) plus, idk that the writers knew all that much about prison andbprison culture, nobody in a real prison would be mad ab Murphy killing a pedo (there's some racist implications here and there too which is. Unfortunate and disappointing. I like Howard and Robbie but they are a bit tropey, esp Howard) that said Anne is a compelling albeit unlikable character and thas pretty cool to see pulled off.

Overall, while it has downsides, I don't think Downpour is worthy of all the scorn it gets, this can have problems and you can point them out without disregarding the good parts and while it is unfortunate it doesn't run better and have some extras and didn't handle some things great, I still think its worth a playthrough, esp if you go out of your way to do the sidequests.

Bonus round

Book of memories is not a game I intend to play bc I don't wanna get a vita and can't imagine I'm missing much. It doesn't look bad pwr say but I'm not interested tbh

Fuck PT. :)

#entries #silent hill #long post #thank u thank you #ill try tk put a cut in here at some poitn hold on srry

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bush-viper-cutie · 3 years

Text

“The Grim Attacks” || YEAR 3 – Ch.35 (HP au)

Chapter List

<-- Last Chapter Next Chapter -->

Day posted: 12/15/2020

Word count: 3, 393

Relationship: EVENTUAL severus X oc (slow burn)

Rating: E for everyone

Warnings: none

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A/N: This is my first fan fic I’m writing mainly as a way to practice. This is a retelling of the hp books with an inserted character. Although most every character will be written about, this is mostly for the pro snape fandom. Please do not fear, although this is a severus x oc story, it is an incredibly slow burn as I do not intend for them to get together at all until after the final book events. Chapters will be posted twice a week.

This derivative work follows the events of the Harry Potter books by Jk Rowling and is intended as a fun way to practice my writing. Thank you for reading :D

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Hagrid started pushing them away from the window and towards his back door. “Yeh gotta go! They mustn’ find yeh here – out the back, out the back.”

Heather threw the cloak over everyone as Hagrid pushed them out the door into his back garden. Buckbeak looked up at Hagrid from the center of the pumpkin patch and chirped.

“Good Beaky… I’ll be righ’ back… I promise,” Hagrid’s voice broke and he cleared his throat. “Now get goin’ yeh four.”

Harry pulled the cloak over his head. “We can’t leave. . .”

Ron stuck his head out too. “We can tell them what really happened. They can’t kill him – it’s not fair.”

Hagrid sniffed and pulled the cloak back over their heads. “Nothin’ no one can do now. Don’t worry, alrigh’? Beaky knows how much yeh four care about ‘im – I’ll tell ‘im again. Don’t yeh worry no more. Now go,” Hagrid said fiercely. “No point in you lot gettin’ in trouble fer this too.” He stepped back into his hut and shooed them away with his hand.

They turned and shuffled out around the left of his hut as Professor Dumbledore, Fudge, and the executioner, Macnair, knocked on Hagrid’s door on the opposite side. They waited until they heard the front door open and close with a snap before setting off back to the castle in a slow silent trance. Even Scabbers kept still in Ron’s pocket as they climbed over the sloping lawn.

They stopped at the highest hill and looked down at Hagrid’s small shack. Only a single large pumpkin was visible over the curve of the hut’s roof from their distance. Hermione was sniffling as the last of the sun reflected off something shiny in Hagrid’s back garden. The shiny object lifted higher, and dipped back down behind the roof in a fast swoop.

A thick thud echoed over the grounds.

“No,” Heather sobbed and hugged Harry tight.

He hugged her back and pressed his eyes into her shoulder. Macnair’s axe had undoubtedly cut clean and swiftly. Heather pulled back and placed a hand on Hermione, who was clinging onto Ron, sobbing hard.

There was a howl in the distance. Poor Fang must be so upset to lose a friend, and to see Hagrid in such a sad state as well… Heather wanted to burst into loud uncontrollable cries but held herself together, clinging onto Harry’s arm.

Ron wiped his tears and grumbled. “Scabbers – stop moving! Ow – Someone’ll hear you.” Ron pushed Hermione away and wrestled with his pocket.

“We’ve got to go,” said Hermione, wiping away a tear. “Dumbledore’ll be out any minute to walk Fudge and Macnair off the grounds.”

Ron shook his head. “Well he – won’t – stay – down – ”

Heather couldn’t keep her eyes off the hut as the sun finally dipped below the trees, and the deep purple set over the whole of Hogwarts. As Ron struggled with a clearly terrified Scabbers, Harry pulled on Heather’s sweater sleeve.

She looked over at him, and saw, in the reflection of his glasses, the wide yellow eyes of Crookshanks, slinking out from the shadows of a nearby bush, slowly approaching the high pitched squeals of Ron’s rat.

“Oh, Crookshanks!” Hermione gasped. “No, no, get out of here. Not now!”

Ron fought harder to keep Scabbers down in his pocket, but it was too late. Crookshanks jumped onto the cloak, knocking them all down.

“Ow! He bit me!” Ron screamed. “Scabbers – NO !”

The rat had wriggled free in all the commotion, and was now bounding away as fast as possible while Hermione held onto Crookshanks tightly. Before Harry or Heather could stop him, Ron had thrown the invisibility cloak off himself and bolted after Scabbers into the darkening night.

“Ron!” they all yelled after him.

Crookshanks vaulted after its prey. Harry threw the cloak off of them and the three of them ran after them, wands lit. They could hear the clacks of rocks hitting against other rocks as they tumbled on the path ahead and the distant shouts at Crookshanks.

“Stay away! Leave him alone! – Get – Scabbers this way!”

They ran onto a grassy part, following Ron’s shouts and heard a thud.

“Gotcha! Get away before I kick you!”

They slowed as their wand lights illuminated a grass-stained Ron clutching Scabbers to his chest and kicking madly at Crookshanks.

Heather panted. “Ron, get up – We need to get back to the cloak before – ”

Hermione screamed and pointed at a dark mass hurdling towards them with inch-long teeth bright and bared up to the gums. “The Grim!” she shouted.

They ran towards Ron but jumped back as the giant jet-black dog leapt between them and growled ferociously, saliva pooling under it.

Heather aimed her wand, “Alarte Ascendare!”

The hound jumped out of the way as the purple flames shot out of Heather’s wand and hit Crooshanks, sending him ten feet into the air. The massive hound sprang towards Heather, mouth aimed at her wand.

“Flipendo!” she panicked.

Sparks erupted and the dog was knocked back behind Ron and howled as Crookshanks landed claws down onto it.

Harry ran forwards and grabbed Ron’s arms, trying to pull him up before the dog could get its bearings back. The hound shook its head and clamped onto Ron’s leg, dragging him back quickly.

“Ron!” Heather and Hermione grabbed hold of Harry’s waist and pulled, but it was Ron who let go of Harry hand.

“AHH!” Ron let himself be dragged back, the pain in his leg too great to have held onto Harry for much longer.

They ran to keep up with Ron, but he was being pulled away too fast to keep up with, as if he weighed nothing more than a few lumps of feathers. Harry dove forward to catch Ron’s outstretched hands and missed by an inch.

“Harry!” Ron whimpered as he was dragged down towards the base of a large trunk, down between a gap in its enormous roots, into a hole.

Harry looked up as the Whomping Willow curled its thick branches ready to smash him into the ground.

Heather and Hermione grabbed hold of each of Harry’s legs and pulled him back seconds before the tree pounded the ground with all its strength.

Harry stood and fixed his glasses. “Ron!”

No answer.

Heather shined her wand brighter at the hole they hadn’t ever noticed before. No one ever dared go near the tree – they were probably the only to have ever gotten so close to the Whomping Willow, except for last year when they had crashed into it. No one would risk getting pummeled to death.

“Harry,” Heather breathed. “This is – the – Fred and George mentioned the Whomping Willow was planted over one of the secret passages.”

“What does that mean!” Hermione cried. “That Ron’s being dragged out of Hogwarts?! Where does it go! I told you three – I told you to hand the map over to – !”

“We don’t have time!” Harry hissed. He stepped forward, trying to spot an opening between the pounding branches.

Heather pulled him back before he could dash forward. “Harry! Are you mad?”

Hermione was anxiously dancing around. “Think! Think!”

Crookshanks, who had been sitting next to Hermione swishing its tail, trotted towards a big knot on the willow’s trunk and pressed it in. The tree immediately stopped moving and held its branches frozen in place.

Hermione gasped. “How did – ”

“They’re friends. They walk the grounds together.” Harry glared at Hermione, as if further accusing her of owning a monster of a cat.

Crookshanks slithered between the roots and slid down the gap. They covered the distance within seconds and crawled into the hole. First Harry, then Hermione, and Heather last, keeping her wand in hand, just in case.

Eventually the tunnel became large enough to stand in, and they did, holding their wands out and ready. They walked on fast but silently, listening intently to every sound of the cave.

It felt like the first time Harry and her had gone into the witch’s tunnel. The same eeriness of what lurked in the shadows made Heather’s throat tight as her heart pounded like crazy in her ears. The dog, Sirius Black, Ron… It could be anything waiting for them just beyond.

“W-what if this is how Sirius Black lures us to him?” Heather’s voice trembled. “What if that’s his dog and – and Ron’s the bait?”

Hermione sniffed.

“Then we get Ron back and – and you two take him to the castle.”

“And you’ll what, Harry? Fight him alone? Kill him yourself?” Hermione sobbed. “He’ll hurt you and then it won’t just be Ron who we need to worry about.”

Heather nodded, though no one could see her. “Harry, we’re not leaving you. So don’t make us stay any longer than we have to.”

They stayed silent the rest of the way. The tunnel felt longer than the one to Hogsmeade, and Heather wondered if they would pop up around there, and in which shop – if it was a shop at all – or . . . or the home of Voldemort, brought back by his most devoted servant. Heather shook her head, remembering what Professor Lupin had said.

Harry’s footsteps picked up, and they were now sprinting down the tunnel as it sloped up. They stopped below what was dim light seeping out from a wooden square. They caught their breath and together pushed the wooden board up. They pulled themselves out of the opening and rolled onto the dust-covered floorboards of a long-abandoned room.

The room was greyed from all the dust, and the furniture was all smashed to pieces – though none looked newly-broken. Cobwebs covered the ceiling and weaved between the cracked railings of stairs across the room.

“Could this be – ”

“The Shrieking Shack,” Heather cut Hermione off.

“Nowhere but out or up,” Harry pointed at the boarded up door and broken stairs.

“Up,” Hermione whispered.

They held their wands up and made their way to the stairs, wincing at every creak and groan of the steps. They heard thumps coming from one of the rooms, and a loud groan.

“Knox.”

“Knox,” Heather and Hermione followed Harry’s lead.

The hallway went dark, and a deep creaking echoed throughout. The two closed door in the hallway groaned while the one at the far end swung ajar and back closed as the wind seeping through the old wood of the house and swept through the rooms. They crept forward and stopped, listening to a loud purring coming from beyond the last door. They exchanged a last look and nodded together, ready with wands up and pointed.

Harry took a deep breath and kicked the door open. They all jumped in and saw Crookshanks lying on a large king-sized bed with moth-eaten hangings and beside him, on the ground, sat Ron gritting his teeth and clutching his bloody leg.

“Ron!” Heather screamed.

They dashed across to him and Harry pulled back his hand to assess the damage.

“We need to get you to Pomphrey – where’s the dog?”

Ron winced and opened his eyes. “H-he’s the dog – He’s an Animagus!”

There was a creak behind them and they turned, standing quickly, as Sirius Black stepped into the room and closed the door with a push of his finger on the doorknob.

His eyes looked sunken in and dark grey circles surrounded his eyes. His wax-pale skin was pulled tight around his face as he smiled, showing brown-stained teeth. His elbow-length black hair was matted and ridden with twigs and leaves and dirt, matching the filthy striped uniform he wore that draped off him much worse than Professor Lupin’s clothes ever did. He was a walking, breathing husk of the man they’d seen on the cover of the Daily Prophet.

“Expelliarmus!” Sirius Black croaked, pointing Ron’s wand at them with a jittery hand.

Heather’s wand shot out of her hand along with Harry’s and Hermione’s. Her heart dropped as she watched their wands land in Sirius Black’s. His skeletal fingers wrapped around them.

“Figured you’d come running in to save your friend, Harry.” Sirius Black’s voice was hoarse and scratchy, like a vintage battery-drained radio recently brought out of storage. “James… would have done the same for me… Brave of you to not run for a teacher. Everything will go much more smoothly like this.”

Heather felt a tear drip off her chin. He’d said the name so easily… Her fists clenched and she saw Harry stiffen with a boiling hate, so hot it radiated off him. Hermione put her hands on both their shoulders, ready to stop them from acting on Black’s taunt.

“I-if you want to kill Harry – ” Ron gripped a bed post and hauled himself up, gritting his teeth through the pain in his leg. “T-then you’ll have to go through us.”

“You shouldn’t be on that,” he whispered. Sirius Black’s eyes drifted down to the bloody mangled mess that was Ron’s ankle.

“Did you hear him? If you want to kill Harry – ”

Sirius Black barked a sharp laugh, interrupting Hermione and making them all take a step back.

“There will only be one murder here tonight.” Sirius Black focused his crazed eyes at Ron, and grinned.

“No there won’t.” Heather said firmly and held on to Harry’s arm as he stepped towards Black.

“No. He’s right,” spat Harry, struggling against Heather and Hermione. “There’ll only be one murder… AND IT’LL BE YOU!” Harry broke free and lunged at Black, knocking him over onto the ground.

Heather gasped and ran forward, clawing for their wands as Harry held Black’s arm down with one hand while his other attempted to smack the man’s face but was held back by the man’s thin boney hand. Heather ripped the wands from Black’s grip and looped her arm under Harry’s dragging him back with her as he kicked and screamed.

Hermione helped drag him back and they all grabbed their wands, pointing them directly at Black’s chest. Harry’s lips began to move when –

“Crookshanks! No!” Hermione hissed.

Crookshanks had jumped onto Sirius Black’s chest and curled up, claws stuck onto his black and white shirt.

“Wingardium Leviosa,” Hermione whispered, and her cat began to levitate.

Black plucked his shirt off the floating cat’s nails and crawled towards the wall and sat up. A deep purple bruise was beginning to form on his chin, where Harry had kicked him.

Harry stepped forward, wand pointed at the very center of his chest. “You murdered them. Our parents trusted you and you betrayed them, and murdered dozens of innocent muggles and Pettigrew…”

Heather saw a twinkle in Harry’s eyes. A spark of hatred so deep it sparkled on the tip of his wand. “Harry,” she whispered.

Black saw it too, and his grin widened. “Going to kill me, are you Harry? You don’t even have the right story.”

Harry stood over him with a steady hand. “You killed our parents.”

“I don’t deny that…” Black stared up at him from behind his sunken eyes, and then turned to Heather. “But if you heard the whole story – ”

“What whole story?”

“Don’t listen to him, Heather.” Harry turned back. “The murders were all over the news. You gave them up to Voldemort. That’s the whole story.”

There was a creak from the floor below.

“No – You’ve got to listen,” Black said, dropping his grin and sat up urgently. “You’ll regret it – You need to understand – ”

“I understand plenty!” Harry choked.

“Harry!” Heather screamed. Her breaths were coming out as huffs and her wand hand trembled as she pointed it at the crumpled man before Harry’s feet. He was going to do it. He was going to murder Sirius Black right in front of them, with his own wand. No – he wouldn’t – he couldn’t. That wasn’t Harry – Harry would never… Heather waited for Harry to step back, to turn away.

Harry’s grip on his wand strengthened, turning his knuckles white. Crookshanks, levitated high above their heads, cried out as Black closed his eyes. Harry breathed, held it… and let out a sob. He stepped back and droped his arm. Heather’s grip on her own wand strengthened and she stepped forward as Harry turned his back to Sirius Black and walked back to them with tears streaming down his face.

She stood over Black and watched him scan her face. If he made any move at her, at Harry, at an escape… she’d make him wish he hadn’t. Although she knew she couldn’t avenge their parents the way Harry wanted, she wasn’t going to let him run off again. He was going right back to Azkaban to rot away the rest of the years he had left. After tonight, the next time she saw him was going to be when he’d finally withered away into an old sad skeleton.

Footsteps thundered up the stairs, and before Harry could finish wiping his tears, the door to the room burst open in a flurry of red sparks. Professor Lupin charged through and took in the scene. Ron was sickly white gripping his bloody leg, Hermione had fallen to the floor in the commotion, Harry was in the corner drying tears, Crookshanks clawing at the air, and Heather threatening a crumpled and bruised Sirius Black.

Hermione sat up quickly. “Someone needs to alert the Dementors!”

“Expelliarmus!” Professor Lupin yelled, and caught the four wands in his hand.

Heather gasped and stepped away from Sirius Black, joining Harry and Hermione as Professor Lupin took her place over Black.

He raised his wand at him, and for a second they just looked at each other. “Sirius… Where is he?” he spoke in a pained, quivery whisper.

Sirius Black looked at Ron and pointed. Professor Lupin turned to look at Ron along with Heather and Harry. Ron looked bewildered.

Professor Lupin turned back to Black. “Why hadn’t he shown himself? Why – Unless… You switched with... You didn’t tell me,” he whispered, and dropped his arm.

“What are you doing?” Why was he dropping his guard? Heather looked at Black, who had started to get up.

The heat inside Heather’s body flared as she watched, open-mouthed, as Professor Lupin clasped Black by his arm and pulled him up to his feet, holding him as he wobbled. She watched Professor Lupin embraced him like a long lost brother leaving her empty and dizzy. All the heat drained from her body as the realization set in.

“YOU’RE WORKING WITH HIM?” Hermione screamed. She was pointing with a wild look of betrayal in her eyes.

Lupin turned to them and raised his hands. “Now, kids – listen – ”

“No! I’ve been keeping your secret – covering up for you! And you’ve been helping him.”

Lupin shook his head and stepped forward. “Hermione, let me explain – ”

“Don’t get any closer!” Harry yelled, shaking. His tears had dried now, and his fists were clenched down to his sides. “We trusted you! – I TRUSTED YOU! And all this time… you’ve been his friend.”

Lupin shook his head furiously. “Trust me Harry. I’ve been the farthest thing from a friend to Sirius – but I am now and if you’ll just let me explain – ”

Heather turned to Harry, unable to keep watching as he defended a murderer, blocking Sirius from them as if THEY were the dangerous ones. “Don’t trust him… He’s a werewolf.” She spat the word out like a thorn.

The room went quiet. It was plainly obvious neither Harry nor Ron had suspected a thing, not even after Snape’s essay. Ron moved farther back, with a terrified look on his face. Harry’s mouth hung open in shock. He had easily spent the most time with Lupin, at least once a week for several hours until he had produced a good enough Patronus, and the whole time he’d had no clue.

Heather glanced at Lupin. She should have told everyone the second she’d found out. That’s what Snape had wanted and tried to do with the essay. He’d wanted everyone to know, for their safety. If she or Hermione had told, then Lupin would have been taken away and Sirius Black wouldn’t have had all these chances to attack Harry.

Lupin met her eyes and she could see a pained fear in them and in the way he hesitated standing before them. He wanted to run.

~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~ * ~~~

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 4 years

Text

Eccentricity [Chapter 5: I’ve Lived The Life And Paid For Every Crime]

Series Summary: Joe Mazzello is a nice guy with a weird family. A VERY weird family. They have a secret, and you have a choice to make. Potentially a better love story than Twilight.

Chapter Title Is A Lyric From: Some Kind Of Disaster by All Time Low.

Chapter Warnings: Language, references to drugs and violence.

Other Chapters (And All My Writing) Available: HERE

Tagging: @queen-turtle-boiii @bramblesforbreakfast @writerxinthedark @maggieroseevans @culturefiendtrashqueen @imnotvibingveryguccimrstark @escabell @im-an-adult-ish @someforeigntragedy @imtheinvisiblequeen @deacyblues @tensecondvacation @brianssixpence @seven-seas-of-ham-on-rhye @some-major-ishues @haileymorelikestupid @loveandbeloved29

Please yell at me if I forget to tag you! 💜

Easy Questions, Evasive Answers

“So it was nothing,” Archer said, glancing up from where he was tinkering around beneath the hood of my 1999 Honda Accord, checking hoses and belts and dipsticks. “This is pathetic, by the way. That you can’t change your own windshield wiper fluid. Dishonor on you. Dishonor on your cow.”

“I never had my own car in Phoenix!” I objected around a mouthful of a Starbucks pumpkin muffin, my first of the season. And that was true: Renee and I couldn’t afford one. “I didn’t have to learn about car things!”

“No, it’s great, I love it, I have a customer for life.”

“It was totally nothing,” I told him. Meaning the photograph in the newspaper article from 1979. Meaning my paranoia surrounding beautiful, brooding, certifiably lethal Benjamin Lee.

Not Lee, I reminded myself. Benjamin August Hardy, born November 3rd 1893.

“Was it really?” Archer asked, skeptical.

“Uhhh, you were the one who was making fun of me for thinking he might be a time traveler. Or a bigfoot.” Or a vampire.

“Yeah, okay, true...” He let the hood of the Honda fall shut with a bang, then wiped the muddy streaks of motor oil from his hands with a stained rag. “But you were freaked out. Like super freaked out.”

“I was, yeah. But it wasn’t him in the photo. I took another look, there were freckles and, uh, like, uh, some other things that didn’t match up.”

“Huh.” Archer watched me with an expression I couldn’t read. “I didn’t notice that.”

“Ben laughed about it. Probably thinks I’m an idiot. A stalker and an idiot.”

Archer smirked slyly. “He must not have held it against you too much. I’ve never seen that guy laugh in my life.”

I took a moody bite of my muffin, rolled my eyes, feigned shallow schoolgirl angst. “Trust me, he’s not my biggest fan.”

“Ohhhh, and this bothers you?” Archer sauntered over and stole a crumbling hunk out of the pumpkin muffin. “Does someone have a little crush on the gorgeous, grouchiest Lee?”

“Definitely not.” I sipped my chai latte, contemplative, debating telling him more.

“Uh oh. There’s something else, I can see it. Spill the tea, you walking college-chick-who’s-obsessed-with-fall stereotype.”

“I’m so excited! I’m going to get to see changing leaves this year!” Cacti are majestic, ancient, intrepid, and they remind me of home; but they never change. They’re like desert earth that way, like the ocean. Like vampires, actually.

“We’ll have to do all the Instagram-worthy stuff. Pumpkin patches. Hay mazes. Apple picking...you can even bring that Ben guy if you want to. If he promises not to murder me with his mysterious time-travelling demon powers.”

Oh, kid, you have no idea. “So...I am kind of into a Lee guy. But it’s not Ben.”

Archer gasped, inhaled pumpkin muffin morsels, bent over as he hacked them out of his lungs. “Who?!” he rasped, scandalized, and then coughed again.

I couldn’t help but smile as his name spilled out: “Joe.”

“Which one is that? The Middle Eastern Men’s Vogue model one?”

I laughed, shaking my head. “No, not Rami. He has a girlfriend, by the way.” And has for the past half a century.

Archer wiggled his eyebrows. “Just because there’s a goalie doesn’t mean you can’t score.”

“Oh my god, please never say that phrase again.”

“Joe is the...” He closed his eyes as he drummed his fingers against the metal workbench, trying to remember.

“The Italian one,” I finished for him.

“Ahhh. The annoying one.”

“He is not annoying! Why do people keep saying he’s annoying?! He’s hilarious, and sweet, and lowkey wicked smart, and, and, and...”

Archer whistled, grinning, his dark eyes sparkling. “Damn, girl. You do like him. You really like him.”

I sighed in defeat. “Okay. I really, really like him.”

“Like him as in would swipe right on Tinder, or like him as in you want to get married and honeymoon in Hawaii and have twelve pasty, angular babies?”

“Oh wow.” And for the first time, I was confronted with the singular enigma that was a future with Joe. Vampires had relationships with other vampires, obviously, even marriages; but that didn’t mean the same rules applied to humans. Did he like me? Could he like me? What would that even look like? How would it end? And it would have to end, of course, eventually. Unless somehow I stopped aging too. “More than just a right swipe. We’ll see about the twelve kids.”

“Just make sure he wraps it before he taps it. I’m too young to be an uncle.”

“Stop,” I pleaded, gulping down my latte, averting my gaze across Archer’s small garage filled with customers’ vehicles, pretending not to be intrigued and yearning and petrified. I couldn’t imagine hooking up with someone as faultless and—presumably—experienced as Joe and being anything but a disappointment. I’ve never hooked up with anyone. At all. Ever.

“What?” he asked, concerned, thieving another piece of my pumpkin muffin. Powdered sugar dusted his fingers like the snow I’ve only seen two or three times in my life.

“Nothing. I just really wish you went to Calawah too.”

“And give up all this easy money from clueless suburbs people like you?” Archer beamed, wily and proud and affectionate. “Not a fucking chance.”

No More Sad Spaghetti

Joe gawked in horror, chomping noisily on his Big League Chew bubblegum, as I unwrapped the peanut butter sandwich I’d packed for lunch. It was mostly cloudy in the early September sky overhead, but he was still wearing sunglasses. He had traded in his ubiquitous U Chicago apparel for a Cubs t-shirt. Squirrels scurried through the bigleaf maple trees that dotted the campus, snatching up acorns with tiny clawed paws, wriggling whiskered noses in our direction.

“What’s your problem?” I asked, taking a bite. “It’s not sad spaghetti.”

He blew a small pink bubble, then popped it with his teeth. “Yeah, but it’s...like...mangled.”

“It got trapped between my textbooks!” I protested. Admittedly, the accordion-shaped peanut butter sandwich—my vegetarian alternative to fishstick Thursday—kind of sucked.

“You can’t eat that. Oh my god. It’s making me so sad. Give it to the squirrels.” Joe pulled out his iPhone. “What’s your preferred pizza topping?”

“I can’t tell you,” I replied, tossing my sandwich towards the nearest tree. A hoard of squirrels immediately descended upon it and proceeded to battle for dominance, emitting shrill, peanut-butter-crazed shrieks.

His brow furrowed. “Why can’t you tell me?”

“Because you might not like me anymore.”

“Why would I not like you because of pizza...?” And then he knew. “Oh no, oh god, please don’t say pineapple.”

“I’m a pineapple pizza person.”

“Baby Swan,” Joe said, deadly serious, pressing his palms together. “That is straight up sacrilegious. You can’t put tropical fruit on a pizza. You realize I’m Italian, like an actual Italian. I’m so Italian I’ve killed other Italians for being the wrong kind of Italian. That’s how Italian I am.”

“I feel like maybe I shouldn’t socialize with literal mobsters. It’s unsavory.”

“Settle down, I’m ordering the half-pineapple pizza, you freaking barbarian.”

I watched Joe as he tapped his thumbs against the screen, humming to himself, amused, perpetually buoyant. And I couldn’t picture him as a monster, as a killer: pulling triggers, slitting throats, digging blades into soft vulnerable love handles, feeling for the mortal puncture of a lung or kidney. I asked him, my voice quiet, hesitant, almost lost in the autumn wind: “Did you actually hurt people?”

“Nah. I didn’t have the stomach for it, even back then. I was on the deal-making side of things. The business side. I was a people person, a smooth talker, astronomically charming.”

I smiled, mischievous. “That’s difficult to imagine.”

“Okay, so no cheesy breadsticks for you.”

“I’m sorry, mob guy. Please order the breadsticks. You’re so charming I can’t stand it. My jeans are unzipping all by themselves.”

He raised an eyebrow and grinned. “So you’ll sacrifice your dignity for breadsticks. Good to know.” He finished typing and laid his iPhone on the grass. “Alright, next question.”

“Does your hair grow?” Joe’s hair—I couldn’t help but notice—seemed longer than it was the day I met him a week and a half ago, disorderly and auburn-tinted, ruffling in the breeze.

“It does, yeah. Hair and nails still grow. So you have to shave, but you can’t get razor burn. And any nicks close right up.”

“Very cool. How often do you need to eat? You know...actually eat.”

“It varies, but generally twice a week.”

“And what kind of animal has the tastiest blood? Besides...well...” I gestured towards myself. “The upright two-legged kind with opposable thumbs and a partiality for pineapple pizza.”

He blew another bubble, then leaned in towards me. And I realized, for the first time, that he had his own inherent, exclusive, totally Bath-And-Body-Works-worthy scent as well; Dr. Gwilym Lee was sandalwood and campfires and log cabins, Mercy was roses and vanilla...and Joe was pine trees, peppermint, cold night air, like all of that eternally youthful magic of Christmas Eve sieved into a bottle. I popped the sheer pink bubble with the cap of my blue pen. Joe asked: “Do humans like chocolate or vanilla ice cream? Coffee or tea? Baseball or something hella lame?”

“Depends on the human.”

“Exactly. Same deal for vampires. I prefer bears, especially grizzlies. Lucy and Mercy like deer, elk, moose, animals like that. Ones with hooves. Weirdly, Rami’s favorite is crocodile, I think because it was the first thing he ever tried in Egypt. He doesn’t get it very often, but has been known to buy them on the black market on occasion. Scarlett likes mountain lions. Also domestic cats, but you didn’t hear that from me. Gwil is a wolf guy, but he won’t kill the endangered kinds. Such a gentleman.”

“How about Ben?”

“Ben’s still coming around to the whole eating animals thing. I don’t think he has a favorite yet.”

Joe isn’t a killer, and he never was; I could believe that. But Ben... “Why is he so different than the rest of you?”

“That’s...kind of a long story,” Joe replied carefully.

“It wouldn’t be such a long story if people stopped talking about how it’s a long story and actually told it to me.”

He flashed a grin, revealing white canine teeth filed into points; they were subtle, yes, but they were there. Fangs. I envisioned pressing a fingerprint against them and feeling the flesh split in two, the blood dripping down onto his tongue like Washington rain. And unlike Joe’s skin, mine wouldn’t knit back together on its own. “But then I wouldn’t have the pleasure of tormenting you with the prospect of incredibly juicy yet confidential information!”

I rolled my eyes, sipped my can of Diet Coke, returned my attention to our lunch plans. “So garlic doesn’t repel you. That part of the lore is completely made up.”

“Yup. Thank god. Eternal life would be worthless without pizza.”

“Can you do drugs? Get drunk?”

“We can’t overdose, but we can get the effects of anything we consume. It’s not a good habit to get into though. If you’re nodding on heroin for like four days at a time, it’s pretty easy for some other vampire to find and murder you.”

“So a vampire can be killed by another vampire.”

“Absolutely. Next question.”

I consulted my mental list. “Do you sleep?”

“Yeah. Well, kind of. We nap for a few hours a day.”

“What happens if you don’t?”

“We get bitchy. Really bitchy. We essentially turn into Ben.”

I laughed, chewing absentmindedly on the end of my pen. “So that’s his problem. He hasn’t napped in a century. Now it all makes sense.”

“Something like that,” Joe said. “You gonna come over tonight?”

“I don’t know. I’m supposed to present The Walruses And Me tomorrow and I still haven’t started the book.”

“What do you know, I can tell you all about The Walruses And Me!”

“Seriously? You’ve read it?”

“No, but I can enthusiastically narrate the Wikipedia article to you while you pet Mercy’s alpacas.”

“That sounds like a terrible idea.”

“Terrible for your grade in Marine Mammals. Good for your development as an interesting and happy human.”

“Nice try, but I’m already both of those things.”

Joe reached out suddenly, jarringly, and ran the back of his hand across my cheek. My favorite Lee, I thought, thoroughly transfixed but trying to hide it. Oh no. “Interesting, definitely. But I have this gnawing, distressing suspicion that you’re still working on the happy part.”

“I miss the desert,” I confessed. That wasn’t quite all of the problem, but it was accurate: I missed the heat, the sun, the parched prehistoric air I had always called home. Although I was beginning to find reasons to like Forks, Charlie and Archer and the promise of a Pacific Northwestern autumn; and then one big reason in particular. A very old, pale, chatty, Italian reason.

“A bit of a quandary for a future marine biologist,” he replied gently, perhaps apprehensively.

“I always figured I’d live somewhere like San Diego or Los Angeles or Galveston. Someplace on the ocean, but also sunny and hot and with palm trees. The best of both worlds. But you couldn’t go there with me, could you?”

Oh no.

Oh NO.

Oh fuck, this is definitely a crushing-on-Lee-boys zone.

Joe stared at me through his sunglasses, chomping on his Big League Chew, the corners of his mouth turned up and etching lines like parentheses into his face, pleased and nodding slowly and triumphant somehow. Then he struck out his hand again, this time with his pinky raised like a flagpole. “No more pathetic depressing lunches.”

“You got it. No more sad spaghetti. No more sad peanut butter sandwiches. You have my solemn, human vow.”

He smiled as his pinky entwined with mine. “No more sad anything.”

“So this vampire thing sounds like a pretty sweet gig. No dying, no consequences for a hellacious diet or wild condomless orgies, literal superpowers, perfect hair...why doesn’t everyone get to live that way?”

He shrugged; and there was an unfamiliar, meditative tension in his face. Almost sorrow. “It’s not all pizza and orgies and heroin. We have weaknesses too.”

“Like what?”

“Hey, look!” Joe piped cheerfully, twisting around towards the parking lot. “I think our GrubHub guy is here.”

Bad Blood

I was definitely regretting that fourth slice of pineapple pizza as I waddled into Chemistry, navigating sluggishly around the hulking frat boys and giggling sorority girls and mousy bookish types who lugged around colossal backpacks that were always threatening to knock an unsuspecting passerby off their feet at each unthinking turn. But while I was arriving in the classroom—physically, anyway; emotionally I was standing in an empty field somewhere screaming I cannot be falling in love with a hundred-year-old mobster vampire!! into the void—Ben was a countercurrent darting through the crowds and towards the hallway door.

“Where are you rushing off to, old guy?” I asked him. “Bingo? To renew your AARP membership? To walk vigorously around the inside of a mall?”

Ben responded in that deep, low, humorless voice. “They’re doing some kind of blood typing experiment today. I probably shouldn’t be around for that.”

“Oh.” I glanced over at Professor Belvin, who was indeed hunched over the table at the front of the classroom and laying out rows of Q-tips and rectangular paper cards and alcohol swabs and bottles of clear liquid, whistling what sounded like Time Of The Season.

Ben sighed irritably, rubbing his crinkled forehead. “I already used up all my absences. I’m gonna have to make up a compelling last-minute tragedy. Tell Professor Belvin my grandma died or something.”

“I mean, technically, she did at some point.”

“Ugh,” Ben replied, not consoled at all.

“Wait, I got this.”

I gripped my belly, sank into the nearest chair, and groaned dramatically. It really didn’t require all that much acting. Ben watched with huge green eyes, confounded.

“Miss Swan!” Professor Belvin cried, rushing over. He was wearing khaki pants, a white shirt, and suspenders and a matching bowtie patterned with bubbling multicolored test tubes. Belvin had been Charlie’s classmate from kindergarten through high school, and still palled around with him over Bud Lights and low-quality nachos on bowling league nights. Bowling was, evidently, the sport of choice for middle-aged Forks dads. Also for Welsh vampire pseudo-dads born in the 1400s.

I whimpered in reply.

“Are you alright, Miss Swan?” Professor Belvin asked worriedly. A few students had begun to congregate around the scene. I felt a pang of genuine nausea as perspiration beaded at my temples. You better appreciate this, Mr. Hardy.

“I’m okay,” I said, in my most pained and martyrish voice. “I don’t want to miss...today’s lesson...it looks so fascinating...but I didn’t wash my kale thoroughly last night and then I had a salad for dinner and now I might have food poisoning.”

“You poor thing!” Belvin exclaimed, shaking his head. “Don’t worry about class. You can just answer some textbook questions or something, no problem. Please go get checked out to make sure you’re alright.”

“Could someone...maybe...help me get to the campus clinic...?” My eyes listed towards Ben. “Maybe...my lab partner?”

“That’s a good idea.” Professor Belvin turned to Ben. “Mr. Lee, would you be willing to escort Miss Swan to the clinic? You can do an alternative assignment as well. If you don’t mind missing the blood typing lab.”

“I’d be delighted to help,” Ben responded, still puzzled. I offered him my hand, and Ben took it, grimacing as he led me out into the hallway. As soon as we were alone, he dropped my hand and opened up several feet of space between us.

“Thanks so much, Miss Swan, you are a lifesaver,” I said, imitating his morose, rumbling British accent. “Oh, you’re very welcome, Ben. You can repay me in basic courteous conversation and Starbucks gift cards and by maybe not killing me.”

“So you’re totally fine?” Ben asked flatly.

“Of course. Nobody with taste eats raw kale.”

Frowning, frustrated, he started puffing on his vape pen. “You need to stop doing nice things for me. It’s extremely disorienting.”

“This may be difficult for you to come to terms with, but you, Ben Hardy, are worth being the recipient of nice things.”

“No, you still don’t get it,” he snapped, grabbing my wrist, spinning me around to face him in the empty hallway. “That’s all I’ve ever done. Kill people like you.”

The Fire

“Who is the cutest little alpaca I’ve ever seen?!” I cooed in a squeaky falsetto, scratching her wooly brown chin. “Who’s going to come home and live with me and Charlie forever?!”

“That’s illegal, ma’am.” Joe was watching me, arms crossed over his Chicago Cubs t-shirt, smiling wistfully.

“It is not!”

“It actually is,” Rami added. He was lying on the grass and gazing up into the roiling, grey, late-afternoon clouds with his fingers laced behind his black hair. None of the Lees were wearing sunglasses now. “A house has to be zoned as farmland to have alpacas, which ours is. Yours, tragically, is not.”

“What are you, a lawyer?” I shot back.

Rami grinned. “I was once. And I will be again, in approximately...let me count...five years.”

“That’s what you want to do with your boundless time and energy? Be a corporate shill?”

Joe cackled. “He tried that already. It lasted about five minutes.”

“Manhattan in the 1980s,” Rami reminisced dreamily. “Hundred-hour workweeks. Cocaine everywhere. What a time to be alive. And I hardly ever left the office, so the sunlight thing wasn’t a problem.”

“Okay, so you’re not in it for the Maseratis or the drugs...”

“I’m going to be an immigration attorney,” Rami told me. “Help refugees apply for asylum to come to the United States. Arabic-speaking refugees, in particular.”

“Wow. I stand corrected. That’s wonderful, Rami. I now feel like a total tool for only aspiring to save sea turtles.” But it made sense, of course. What would any good person spend eternity doing? Making the world just a tiny bit better. I glanced at Joe, teasing him. “And you just study how to get rich, huh?”

“I’m a venture capitalist,” he said brightly. “I invest in small businesses, counsel them, encourage them, connect them with other people in the industry, help them grow. And I don’t need the money, so I take a practically microscopic equity stake. I’m basically a professional charitable donor.”

“And you get to put all of those charming mob-guy skills to use.”

Joe winked. “Exactly.”

“Doesn’t it get old?” I asked both of them. “Being college students?”

Rami shrugged. “No really. The world changes, schools of thought evolve, our own interests fluctuate. Every few decades we circle back and go for another round, fresh degrees, maybe new professions entirely. You learn something new every time.”

“And I’ve been waiting for all my old professors to die so I could go back to U Chicago for fifty years!” Joe shouted. “I’m fucking pumped!”

“But...don’t you already know everything...?”

Joe chuckled. “We’re vampires, Baby Swan, we’re not prodigies. We’re sharper than the average person, sure. But it still takes effort to learn. And we all have things we suck at.”

“Like not being obnoxious,” Rami said, nodding to Joe.

“Like not minding our own fucking business,” Joe hurled back.

“I cannot control the fact that I’m a literal mind reader—”

“You boys behave yourselves,” Mercy called in her relaxed, drawling Southern accent, swinging a basket of carrots and zucchinis and cabbages that she’d dug out of her garden, wearing a long flowing yellow dress and her hair tied up in a scarf. She plodded over in her bare feet, handed me a few carrots, then pointed to the chocolate-colored alpaca I was petting. “That lady there is Athens. And the black and white one by Joe is Augusta. Then there’s Norcross, and Alpharetta, and Savannah...and that real chubby grey one heading into the barn is Marietta.”

“I adore them,” I replied, beaming. Mercy had sheep and pigs and a couple of cows too, all ambling contently around the emerald green field as the first threads of fiery, rust-hued sunset were lighting up the horizon.

“We used to have ducks, too,” Mercy mused. “But they disappeared recently...”

Rami passed Joe a knowing smirk. Joe mouthed back menacingly: Do not.

“Hey mom,” Rami piped.

Joe jabbed an index finger at him. “No, don’t you dare, don’t you fucking dare—”

“Joe ate the ducks.”

“You bitch!” Joe cried.

“Oh, Joseph,” Mercy sighed mournfully, lifting a brush out of her basket and dragging it down Athens’ fuzzy back.

“I’m sorry! It was one time! I was weak!”

“I’m not angry, sweetheart,” Mercy said. “I’m just disappointed.”

“Mom, that’s worse!”

Rami climbed to his feet and swatted grass and leaves off his cardigan sweater. “Alright folks. My work here is done. Peace out.”

“Oh no, you don’t get to do a hit and run like that, hey, Rami, hey, hey, come back here!”

Joe trotted after him, shouting a litany of insults, as Rami laughed hysterically and careened into the house. Lucy and Gwil were in the kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies; Scarlett was in the garage changing the brakes on Ben’s Vantage; Ben was noticeably absent from the Lee household and presumably out hunting. It was remarkably easy to picture his fingers closing around bloodied flesh, a wolf’s or a bear’s or an elk’s, lowering his fangs to a pulsing jugular.

“So you’re really into this whole farming thing,” I said to Mercy, looking out over the field rimmed by towering western hemlock trees. I didn’t know exactly how many acres of land the Lees owned, but it was a lot. Mercy adopted rescue animals, donated vegetables from the garden to local food pantries, and occasionally rented out the barn as a wedding venue.

“I’ve always loved it. I had a farm, you know. Before I met Gwil.”

Before she died.

“I didn’t know that,” I murmured, wanting to learn more, afraid to ask, never meaning to pry or offend. “I remember you mentioned the Civil War, and a barn...being...well...being trapped in it. When it burned down.”

Mercy nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that’s the polite version of the story, isn’t it?” She set down her basket in the tall grass, tugged distractedly at a dark strand of hair that had escaped her scarf, stared glassily out into the sunset muted with cloud cover as Athens moseyed away. “Do you want to know what happened? I’ll tell you if you do. But I don’t want to upset you, dear.”

My voice was barely a whisper. “I’d like to know.”

“We had a little farm out in the middle of nowhere,” Mercy explained. “My husband Arthur and I.”

And it felt so outlandish to hear her say those words. Husband. She had a husband before Gwil. She had a whole life before this one.

“He had a bullet in one leg and a limp from a hunting accident when he was a boy, so he was never called up to enlist. It was a rich man’s war, but it was the poor men they sent to die in it. That’s how it always goes, I expect. And how it always will. We had two daughters, twelve and fifteen. I won’t tell you their names. Don’t take that personally, dear. I haven’t spoken their names in a hundred and fifty years.”

She turned her murky eyes—like homemade bread crust or coffee or the wood walls of a log cabin—to me.

“When the Union Army came through, they were beasts. Men like that...men who have been killing and looting and burning their way across hundreds of miles...all they want to do is get blood on their hands. That’s all they remember how to do. So that’s exactly what they did. They slaughtered our cattle for meat. They burned the house down. And then they took me and my girls, and they...they...well, you know what they did. What men do when they’re monsters. And when Arthur tried to stop them, they shot him in the chest and spit mouthfuls of chewing tobacco on him as he bled out in the dirt. Called him a coward and a deserter. Told him everything they were planning to do to me and my girls. And when they were done doing all of those things, they locked the three of us in the barn and set it ablaze. I was the only one still alive when Gwilym got there. And believe me, I didn’t want to be.”

“I’m so sorry,” I breathed, my throat burning for Mercy, for her family, for this divinely kind and benign and tender woman.

She patted my cheek fondly. “It’s alright, sweetheart. It’s not your fault. I got a second chance. Gwilym gave me a second chance. That’s what he does, you know. He finds broken people, fixes them, loves them fiercely. He gave me forever. Two more daughters. And three sons.”

Three sons, I thought. Rami and Joe and Ben. She counted Ben.

“Does someone have to be dying?” I asked her softly. “You know. To become like you.”

“No, honey. That’s just how Gwil does things.”

“But...why? What’s the possible downside? Why not change anyone who wants it?” Why not change someone like me?

And Mercy peered over at me, contemplative, curious, like tiptoeing gingerly over rotted floorboards, like weaving through a minefield. Like she was trying to figure out what I’d already been told.

“Hey Baby Swan,” Joe said, startling me. I whirled to see him waiting with a patient smile and his hands buried in his pockets. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

He led me upstairs to Gwil’s 1960s-style office, where Dr. Lee had cleaned and stitched the tiny gash in my forehead after my misadventure with Ben in the woods outside Calawah University, where the wall above the sturdy oak desk was adorned with a massive painting filled with gorgeous, unfamiliar, inhuman faces. Joe took a deep breath, and then he began.

“This,” he announced, introducing the painting, “is the vampire version of the mob. They can trace their existence back to before the Roman Empire. They find people who they think have potential, have talents. They turn them. And then they offer them a hundred-year contract. You sign it, or they murder you. When your term is up, you get to decide whether to renew or leave. But almost no one ever leaves. After a century of taking orders and guarding and killing, what else do you know how to do?” He pointed to the terrifying woman with long white hair and red eyes. “That’s Liesl. She’s literally Satan, only blonder. The chick with the tattoos is Akari. She can meet a human and tell what powers they’ll have once they’re changed. Very useful, obviously. The dude who looks like Idris Elba is Cato, and he’s actually an okay guy, he’s the one currently assigned to keep tabs on Gwil’s coven...”

I soaked the names in like rain into dark, lush Washington earth as Joe relayed them to me, strange and beautiful names: Aruna, Phelan, Morana, Adair, Zora, Araminta, Honora, Victorien, Rigel, Sahel.

“Who’s that?” I asked, gesturing to the young man standing at the center of the painting, the one with black hair and eyes so light and luminous a brown they were almost gold and a sinister, unmistakable magnetism.

“Very good question,” Joe complimented. “That’s their Al Capone. That’s Larkin.”

“And what’s his vampire superpower?” He has to have one. I know he does.

“How do I even put that into words? It’s more than charisma. It’s slightly less than mind reading. He can see through people, what they want most, what they fear. And he can make them do things.”

I gazed into those omniscient glowing eyes, feeling myself getting caught there, feeling some primal dread swelling in the capillary beds of my heart and lungs and bone marrow. “Joe, I’m thoroughly enjoying this captivating backstory, really, but...why are you telling me all of this now?”

“Because you asked why Ben is so different than the rest of us. This is why.” Joe waved broadly at the painting, at the closest thing his world had to a mafia, to unrepentant killers, to actual demons. “This is where he came from.”

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rowaning · 3 years

Conversation

The Complete Fiction of HP Lovecraft rated by me, someone who read them all* but has a terrible memory

The Beast in The Cave: uh a guy goes on a cave tour and finds a creature that was like a human that got lost and adapted to its surroundings. 0/10 just because im pretty sure there was another one with this exact premise and neither of them were memorable at all.

The Alchemist: dude achieves immortality and lives in the narrators basement and has pledged to murder his entire lineage or something. 4/10 the alchemy stuff was actually kind of interesting

The Tomb: im pretty sure this is the one where a guy starts hanging out in a tomb and like travels back in time/becomes one of his ancestors? 5/10 if its the one im thinking of i did enjoy reading it

Dagon: guy lands on a mysterious island with signs of a long dead civilization. 1/10 i do not remember what happened in it

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson: 0/10 i have no memory of this

Polaris: also 0/10 i forgot all about it

Beyond the Wall of Sleep: could be any of the dream focused ones. if its the one about the dude sailing into the void or whatever than 4/10 not too bad

Memory: ironically, i dont remember it. 0/10

Old Bugs: 1/10 for the title god i wish i remembered this one

The Transition of Juan Romero: i got nothing. 0/10

The White Ship: this might also be the one about the dude sailing into the void? i liked that one he lived in a lighthouse and boarded a dream ship and just fucking left it was fun. 4/10

The Street: uh i think really steep street that didnt actually exist. 3/10

The Doom that Came to Sarnath: i wanna say another one of the dream centered ones where a town discovers some old relics and blatantly disrespects them and gets exactly whats coming to it. 5/10 they deserved what they got

The Statement of Randolph Carter: ok this dude shows up several times. i think this one is about how he returns to his childhood home then travels back in time and creates a time loop paradox thing. 1/10 meh

The Terrible Old Man: uh some thieves harrass a weird old guy and get got. 5/10

The Cats of Ulthar: someone is mean to a cat in a dream city, all of the rest of the cats get revenge and are revered for the rest of time. 2/10 (-3 because lovecraft has a specific name he gives to apparently every fictional and real cat he encounters and wow i wish he hadn't)

The Tree: i feel like this is something to do with a person becoming a tree but i cant actually remember. 0/10

Celephais: yeah no i got nothing 0/10

The Picture in the House: also nothing 0/10

The Temple: nope 0/10

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family: is this the one where the dude's great grandfather married an ape? i dont think so but im not sure. 0/10, -5/10 if it is that one cause that one was especially shitty

From Beyond: nope 0/10

Nyarlathotep: charismatic dude shows up and is like get in bitches we're going to the void. i love nyarlathotep cause hes the one who directly interacts with humanity and like wears a human suit or whatever so hes just some dude whos like hey im gonna feed you to azathoth 5/0

The Quest of Iranon: got nothing 0/10

The Music of Erich Zann: narrator makes friends with an old musician whos being hunted by supernatural forces. 2/10 because i remember it but it was just ok

Ex Oblivione: 1/10 for the title but i have no clue what it was about

Sweet Ermengarde: lovecraft's sole attempt at comedy. not to my taste like at all 0/10

The Nameless city: nope 0/10

The Outsider: also nope 0/10

The Moon-Bog: sounds cool, dont remember it. 0/10

The Other Gods: dude tries to find the gods of humanity where they live on a big mountain, actually finds them, is immediately smited by the Other Gods who protect the gods of humanity. 3/10 he deserved it

Azathoth: dont recall, 0/10

Herbert West- Reanimator: Arkham man Herbert West and his assistant ressurect the dead with little thought to the consequences, then get murdered by a band of said resurrected dead. 5/10

Hypnos: nope 0/10

What the Moon Brings: also nope 0/10

The Hound: still nope 0/10

The Lurking Fear: again, nope 0/10

The Rats in the Walls: dude returns to his ancestral home, hears rats, excavates the basement and finds out that his ancestors ate human flesh, eats his friend. 1/10 it was an interesting read but can lovecraft please stop calling cats that.

The Unnameable: no clue 0/10

The Festival: nope 0/10

*Under the Pyramids: ok im pretty sure this is the one with houdini which is the only one i could not read. i went into this mentally prepared for lovecraft's bigotry but i was not mentally prepared for him dropping harry houdini, avid skeptic who absolutely would have beat the shit out of him for this, into the middle of his super racist paranormal horror. -1000/10

The Shunned House: nope 0/10

The Horror at Red Hook: also nope 0/10

He: cool title, no memory of the story. 0/10

In the Vault: wow im bad at this. 0/10

Cool Air: still no 0/10

The Call of Cthulhu: kind of all over the place, there was a thing about artists and then a thing about a cop investigating a cult. 3/10 meh but ill give it a bonus for being a staple of horror fiction.

Pickman's Model: uh artist sees some wild shit and draws it and then it eats him. 2/10 i forget the details

The Strange High House in the Mist: if this is the one im thinking of, dude does a dangerous climb to find a mysterious house and meet the inhabitant who is kind of interdimensional and also being hunted by interdimensional things. also maybe the house eats people? 2/10

The Silver Key: another Randolph Carter one, and i think this is actually the one about him travelling back in time so idk what the other one was. 3/10

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: randolph carter goes on a quest in the dream world to find the gods of humanity and ask why they wont let him check out this cool city he can see from his window. lots of action and very wordy and went a lot of different places. 4/10 good read but extremely xenophobic

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: guy investigates his ancestor who looks disturbingly like him, ancestor comes back to life and kills him and takes his place and a bunch of other stuff happens. mostly a dramatized genealogical study. 3/10 not bad, very suspenseful

The Colour Out Of Space: meteor lands on a farm, scientists get weirded out by it, everything in the area gets weird then dead, alien thing gets enough power from draining nearby life-forms to escape earth. fun twist ending. 4/10 bonus for being one of the better ones, detraction for writing out a 'rural accent'

The Descendant: nope, 0/10

The Very Old Folk: nope again, 0/10

History of the Necronomicon: very dry. fake history of lovecraft's fake book thats super important to a lot of the stories. 0/10

The Dunwich Horror: isolated witchy family has a kid who no one likes that grows up real fast. graphic descriptions of renovation. a horror gets unleashed on the area and the local folklore scholars have to deal with it. 1/10 nothing good enough to counter the xenophobia

Ibid: i remember this one. no idea what it's deal was. pseudo-bibliography? it was weird. 0/10

The Whisperer in Darkness: guy has a correspondance with another guy about local folk legends based on evil crab things. other guy gets straight up replaced by an evil crab thing and first guy doesnt even notice. imagine if you followed up on a scam email and didnt realize anything was up until you saw that the face of the dude you were talking to in person was a mask. 4/10 for the comedy this guy would not last in the internet age at all

At The Mountains of Madness: guy whines about penguins and how awful it would be if there were civilizations that predated humanity. also commits grave desecration. i get hit by the realization that if lovecraft was less of a racist coward he wouldve made a great speculative sci fi author. 3/10 i would love to watch that old asshole get absolutely torn to shreds by the monster fucker community

The Shadow over Innsmouth: Fish People! Leave Them Alone! Or Else! 5/10 the protagonist gets to live the dream by escaping human society and becoming an immortal fish person

The Dreams in the Witch House: dude rents an objectively haunted room, doesnt listen to people trying to help him, gets murdered by a weird rat. later they find a shit ton of bones in the attic. 2/10 meh

Through The Gates of the Silver Key: Randolph Carter transcends time and space, then de-transcends time and space and immediately gets stuck on another planet in the distant past, makes a long and difficult journey back to earth to find that his estate is being divided amongst his heirs. the comedy potential of a man stuck in an alien body dealing with a legal system that has declared him dead is not examined. 2/10

The Thing on the Doorstep: narrator's good friend marries a fish person witch who steals his body. thats basically it. 3/10. at this point im like wow these narrators really refuse to believe the heavily foreshadowed supernatural explanations that turn out to be correct huh.

The Evil Clergyman: dude is in a room. some ghosts (?) show up. dude has a UV light for some reason. Gets his face stolen i guess and just has to live with it. 5/10 for being absolutely buck wild and refusing to explain anything

The Book: nope 0/10

The Shadow Out Of Time: dude gets his body stolen by ancient scholar species. agonizes about it for a while. finds archaeological evidence of said species. finds a book he wrote while living with said species. almost gets eaten by something. 3/10 more cool speculative sci fi but lame protagonist

The Haunter of the Dark: you'd think id remember it bc this was the last one and i read it last night. oh wait, nvm i do remember it. dude finds an old box in a run down culty church and unleashes a horror that then comes and fucks him up. 1/10 meh.

#tw lovecraft #i have forgotten more than i can remember #which is on par for me

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daggery · 3 years

Note

Your tags on the Narnia post (about the Evie & Susan and Carlos & Edmund associations) have me thinking about Carvie finding a doorway to Narnia in Cruella's closet jkdjalgjklsgjk. I don't know what this AU is but it exists in my mind now. It's a thing and I must share it.

fun fact! when you sent me this ask i went and wrote an 800 word response in one sitting, and then i just. didn't post it which is exactly what i'm doing rn with your writing prompt sdjflksjdfl. i definitely will post it though. this is still long unfortunately so don't feel obligated to read this! i know you're not really invested in narnia, i'm just dumping these thoughts out at this ask's feet and letting the wind carry them away like dead leaves etc etc

narnia au!!! i love the moment when lucy discovers narnia, especially the look of wonder on her face when she steps out into the snow in the movies. but it made me think of the differences between lucy discovering narnia through the wardrobe and carlos discovering narnia through cruella's closet? the wardrobe is this grand old mysterious thing standing alone in some dusty room with a bunch of old coats. whereas cruella's closet is like.. very different. your rat fic is the definitive depiction of the setting of cruella's closet for me rn, i'm thinking about the nightmare scene specifically. so i guess i'm just talking about the image of carlos pushing through the darkness, through cruella's fur coats and into the closet until he finally steps out into Some Other Curious Unknown Place that's bright, open, beautiful and he has that soft wonder about him. it'd definitely hit different. (although it brings forward the question of why he'd walk through the furs in the first place. honestly my first thought is that he's looking for a place to hide.) anyways - yup he'd tell evie about narnia first

and personally for me what appeals to me about a narnia au is more the feel of narnia and not plot or anything. i love the way narnia feels Old and Full of Magic and Fairytale-like. that d2 quote where mal asks rhetorically "does an ogre like cheese puffs?" to tell ben how much she likes the motorcycle gift? the quote by itself is weird and hilarious, but for some reason what this made me think of like.. you know how winnie the pooh capitalizes certain words sometimes and it makes it Feel So Kindly? narnia only really capitalizes the names of talking species, such as Horses or Dryads or Fauns, but it still feels?? kindly to me?? to put it badly??? capitalization has that old children's tales vibe. basically the ogre quote made me think of mal hanging out and having a tea party with Giants or something lmfao

like actually it's just that straight up i would love to read a rotten four fic that's written in a style of a children's fantasy series. the core four are all like 12 and bffs and spend their days organizing a little feast for their friends and chatting with Creatures and playing chess with their solid gold chess set that this little old woman in the forest gifted them after they battled and chased away some monsters for her, and such - that they are kids and they are wielding swords and shit is never questioned bc this is a kids story. just fun fluffy things and all. this has nothing to do with a narnia au but alsdjfmgmsks anyways. there is actually a core four narnia au on ao3 but it's a very short wip from like 2018.

OH and also i once had this weird narnia-inspired idea where one of the core four goes into a closet to hide and ends up in auradon. i got nowhere beyond that idea

aand one last little thing, i mostly associate susan and evie bc they're kinda mom friends, their stories have a big thing to do with how they're perceived by others as really beautiful and ladylike and such, are smart and practical, better with people. but they're quite different in a lot of other ways, me using associate is probably a bit strong. im feeling the edmund and carlos thing though. constantly thinking type people. on the quieter side and sharp, witty, intelligent. bit bookish though that might be more of a hc idk. mean sometimes. i think they would be buds. like they'd just chitchat and talk shit and philosophy or smth

#aaa this got so long though tyvm for the ask <3 #[walking in circles talking to myself emotion]#i just found in my notes app this note from nov 2019 #that just some jotted down notes for a descendants fic about magic in the descendants universe #and one of the sentences in it is 'the wya to get out is as magic as narnia' and? i have no clue what that means #note is timestamped 7 am so i was probably not awake. and also in school #hersilentlanguage #answered #descendants fandom

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freshouttaparsnips · 3 years

Photo

Leo had been progressing well; at least, Edge thought so. He was no longer hoarding food in the garage rafters, he was well on his way to learning fully how to read, and he’d gotten the last possible achievement on his farming game.

He’d come to Edge, proudly showing the switch with the game brought up, the little achievement icon glowing.

“That’s very good!” Edge had praised, Leo grinning from ear to ear as he took off to mess around on the game for a while longer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

woooo more Leo and the Fell bros :D theres some new tags for this, mostly that im adding in Edgelord Supreme! as always, Leo belongs to @thelordtypos

read chapter 4 on Ao3

or read it below!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He’d come to Edge, proudly showing the switch with the game brought up, the little achievement icon glowing.

“That’s very good!” Edge had praised, Leo grinning from ear to ear as he took off to mess around on the game for a while longer.

Red had been saving up to get him a few new games he could play, one of them involving little monsters you could collect, and another that was about as simple as they could find of a light horror game.

Leo was a bit on the scaredy side, but he still enjoyed watching thrillers and mysteries with Red on the nights he didn’t work, curled up next to him with a bucket of popcorn in Red’s lap. Edge encouraged his brother to warm up to their new charge, but really he hadn’t had to push all that hard.

Red had fully cemented himself as the laid back uncle who let Leo do what he wanted, but rained hell on anyone who dared to hurt him. Edge felt a similar sentiment, but he felt more like a father figure than anything.

Which was why it got on his nerves a little when he was called into work a series of times that led to bad experiences at home. Leo didn’t do well being left home alone for longer periods of time.

He’d tear something out of nervous energy, pace the house and be crying silent tears by the time Edge or Red returned, which was definitely not what either of them wanted to see. They cared about him, the damn neko, and there while there was nothing to be done about required overtime, certainly they could find someone to keep him company until they were able to return home?

The first thought was Papyrus or Blue, but neither of them had all that much free time. Sans was out, as well as Stretch, since while both of them technically worked from home, Sans was dealing with his own shit, and Stretch was still not allowed over on his own.

That left the least likely to fully get along with their kid, but it was either trust Razz and Slim to actually behave honorably, or leave Leo alone…

The main issue was that Razz and Slim hadn’t even met Leo yet, only learning about his presence in Edge and Red’s life through pictures and messages in their group chat.

Still, they were his only option. Razz could be trusted with important things for the most part, and Slim knew what it was like to be an anxious mess.

So in the end, it wasn’t that hard of a decision. Edge phoned Razz after a week of overtime leaving Leo lonely and distressed, his tone clipped.

“Hello? This is Razz Serif.”

Edge rolled his eyes. The bastard had caller ID.

“Its Edge, I have a rather large request but it is very important to me and you will be well compensated.”

There was silence on the other end for a moment, Razz seemingly taking in what he’d said carefully. “What is the request?”

Edge carefully explained what he needed; Leo needed a companion during the hours that Edge and Red were both working, depending on how long they’d be gone.

“It will be varying hours, but I am willing to pay double the going rate for you to do this.”

Silence again. “Isn’t he a grown skeleton? Can he not take care of himself for a few hours?”

The insinuation made Edge’s hackles rise. “Yes, Leo is a grown skeleton who is perfectly capable with his own free will.” Razz started to talk, but Edge continued. “That said, he can become very anxious when left alone, and I will not have him traumatized over something that cannot be controlled. Will you do it or not.”

Razz snorted on the other end of the line, Edge scowling as he waited.

“Yes, I will do it. But my pay will be groceries, not money.”

A strange stipulation, but perhaps one that made sense given how Razz and Slim lived Underground. A food shortage made things difficult, even after you no longer had to worry about it.

“Agreed. I’ll let you know what time to come over tomorrow. Goodbye.” And with that he hung up, not willing to talk to the little fucker any longer than necessary. Turning in his chair, he glanced down at the floor next to him, Leo sitting with his legs balanced up against his desk, his back against the floor, switch in his hands as he concentrated on his game.

“Leo, do you remember when I told you about Razz and Slim?” Edge asked, waiting for Leo to drag his attention from the screen and look up at him with dilated eyelights.

“Yeah? They’re the hungry ones, yeah?”

That was one way to put it; Red had regaled Leo with stories about their cookouts and how much food the Serif brothers could put back.

Chuckling, Edge nodded. “They will be “hanging out” with you when Red and I are at work tomorrow. If they behave and you like them enough, they’ll be doing it from now on. Does that sound acceptable?”

Leo squinted, but nodded. “Sure. Just tell them to bring their own snacks, I don’t want them to eat my oreos.”

Edge shook his head, amused, but nodded as he went back to his desk, Leo turning back to his game.

The sounds of clicking buttons filled the room once more, Edge grabbing his phone and sending a text off to Razz about the snacks, before sending another to his brother confirming that he’d found someone to keep an eye on Leo.

Sighing, he sat back in his chair, listening as Leo purred his contentment, tail thumping against the desk.

It’d go well. He would raise hell if it didn’t.

#fresh writes #undertale #fontcest #edgelord supreme #fluff #hurt/comfort #dad edge #uncle red

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lunatic-fandom-space · 3 years

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Comparing RWBY and YGO DM: The Handling and Evolution of Themes

Hey! Its been a hot minute since I last posted anything RWBY-related but Im laying in my bed right now and Im sick and bored so I guess we're doing this. Today I will do my best to analyze what I percieve to be the main themes and messages of both of these shows, or more specifically, how theyre handled narratively. Im mostly focusing on that part because, while these series do have similar themes and messaging, they are still a few things in which they are wildly different. And with that, lets start with this essay-post-thing!

1. Theres something we need to adress first

Okay so, before we can really talk about this, theres something I feel the need to clarify here: Neither of these stories was "planned from the beginning".

Now, I dont think a story being planned from the beginning or not nesscessarily makes the story any better or worse by default, however, it is still important to acknowledge because the way the story is planned is going to affect every facet of it. Things are not going to be foreshadowed properly, things are gonna be set up only for nothing to come of it, the story might drastically change directions, characters might act differently, etc, etc.

And, this is bit off-topic but, it's much better to just admit that the story was not planned than trying to pretend that it was. Like, there are a lot of reasons why I tend to be so forgiving towards YGO even though its not very good, but one of them is definitely the fact that, as far as Im aware atleast, the guy who wrote it isnt pretending to have had this big master plan all along and neither is the fandom. With RWBY on the other hand... yeaaaah, its kinda the opposite. From what Ive seen of RWBYs fandom, there seems to be this pretty popular narrative that everything was planned even though it clearly wasnt. Thats pretty bad and honestly lowers my opinion of the writers so much more than if they would just admit to not having a proper plan.

Like, I initially consumed YGO like this: Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters, Yu-Gi-Oh (aka Season 0), like, a quarter of the Yu-Gi-Oh manga (I still havent finished it)

In all three of these we have the character of Yami Yuugi, or just Yami. Broadly speaking, he is an ancient egyptian gamer spirit who lives in a magical puzzle that has not been solved for 3000 years until this highschooler named Yuugi Mutou comes along and solves it, thus setting him free and allowing him to possess Yuugi and have access to the vague magical powers of the puzzle.

In Duel Monsters he's perfectly fine most of time, morally speaking. There is an instance of him almost murdering a guy and its a bit unclear what exactly happens to those he mindcrushes but overall he's very much a pretty good guy. In Season 0 most of what he does is set up these games for bad people, where they will go insane no matter what they do. From how I understand this whole Shadow Game, Penalty Game stuff, if you lose a Shadow Game, you get violent and intense hallucinations and you will always cuz yknow, gamer spirit. But if you try to cheat, which most of the bad people do in this show, you get violent and intense hallucinations as a punishment.

Since the two anime are generally considered two different continuities, its perfectly fine that Yamis characterization is wildly different in both of them. But in the manga both of these characterizations appear, basically one after the other with no real arc or consequences, for that matter. Why is that? Simply put, someone thought it was a good idea to try to turn an episodic, very slice of life-y light-horror manga into a more traditional, more plot-driven battle shounen. From what Ive heard, it was apparently largely because of network interference or something, but the point is, it changed directions incredibly drastically with little planning and everyone knows this and I can understand that for the most part.

In RWBY we have the character of Blake Belladonna, who, in the first 3 volumes/seasons atleast, was this aloof, more toned down loner-type character with a pretty strong sense of justice. She's an in-universe marginilized racial minority and she clearly cares about racial injustice. The way its initially framed makes it seem like she had a very hard life and no stable support system, which is what eventually pushed her to join a Civil Rights group/Terrorist organization (good god, the Faunus subplot is so awful, I could write a whole essay about it but Im already de-railing rn so I'll just save that for later).

Then, in volumes 4-5 it turns out her father is actually like, the mayor or chief of this island-place called Menagerie and she grew up in this big mansion with multiple guards/servants. Oh and also, apparently "space is a commodity" on there, so theres that. She still retains large parts of her personality but she's kinda like, worse somehow I think. I cant really describe it in a meaningful way but I hope you get what Im saying anyway. Then in Volume 6 she confronted her emotional abuser Adam (sorry for not mentioning him sooner but yeah, he was like, her abusive boyfriend, which is something that a lot of people disagree with but I wont really say anything about it either way because I dont really feel any specific way) with her friend, Yang, and ended up killing him.

After all that, she pretty much lost the rest of her personality, as well as her arc about all the Faunus stuff. She just kinda became the meek, generically nice, recovering abuse victim. Why? Well, the actual reason is that they didnt plan out shit and are just kinda flying by the seat of their oversized clown-pants and if they and the fandom just admitted it, I would have less of an issue. I still wouldnt be as forgiving towards RWBY as I am towards YGO because the crux of the issue, for me, is just that I dont particulary like RWBY but also like. Do you really expect me to take MKEK seriously as writers after admitting to not have a timeline because iT wOuLd CaUsE pLoThOlEs?

However, since they want us to believe that everything was planned out from the beginning, the explaination would be.... Idk, they deliberately butchered one of their main characters?? Because.. they hate her?? Maybe????

So yeah, that was quite a detour however, I would like you to keep this mind going forward.

2. Themes of the Early Series'

First, what do mean by 'Early Series' for both of these shows respectively? Well, for YGO that would have to be Season 0 or if youre reading the manga, everything pre-Duelist Kingdom. Basically, the part of the series thats a episodic, very slice of life-y light-horror series.

For RWBY that would be the first three Volumes, also known as the Poser-Era. Back then it was just kinda an action series that took place at Anime Warrior Academy (also known as Beacon) with some pretty bare minimum worldbuilding, character-driven plots and developments but now its more of an epic high-fantasy story with more of an emphasis on plot as opposed to just action.

The themes and messages in Early YGO are kinda vague, very confusing to me and if you were to follow any of it literally that would be pretty bad. For now Im just gonna say the main themes are Friendship and Identity and mostly focus on the Identity aspect.

Now, it took me a little while to figure out RWBYs deal but I think the main themes for Volumes 1-3 are also Friendship and Heroism. Once again, I'll mostly focus on Heroism and touch on Friendship more briefly later.

I dont have much more to add to YGOs themes right now, so I'll briefly go over Heroism in RWBY.

In RWBYs setting there are these man-eating monsters called Grimm that have basically infected the planet. In order to deal with that, they have people called huntsmen and huntresses that kill them and protect people. Theyre trained at special academies like Beacon and go on missions there and stuff like that. Our four main characters, Ruby, Weiss, Blake and Yang, are training to become huntresses and one day they go on this mission to clean up a grimm infested city block with one of their teachers. Obviously, that takes a long time so they have to camp out in one of the empty houses. Weiss, Blake and Yang cant sleep because theyve been thinking about this question that their teacher asked them when they were fighting grimm: "Why do you want to become a huntress?"

They have a heart to heart and we find out about their motivations; Weiss wants to bring honour back to her family, Blake want to distance herself from the White Fang (that terrorist organization I mentioned earlier) and as an extension from Adam, Yang wants to have a life of adventure. They also talk about why Ruby wants to be a huntress and it turns out that she judt wants to help people. Unlike the others, she has no motivation besides that. We're meant to listen to that and look at her as a sort-of personification of Heroism: kind, but not naive, strong and most of all, selfless. The others on her team are not portayed as bad for not being like Ruby by any means but we are clearly meant to admire her the most out of all of them.

Okay, now comes the part Ive been looking forward to the most:

3. How did these themes evolve in the Modern Series'?

Alright, before we can really delve into the way they evolved in YGO I'll have to give you a brief summary of the character progression. At the start of DM, during the Duelist Kingdom arc, Yami Yuugi is just that; A darker Yuugi. Hes more confident, bolder, his voice is deeper, hes somehow taller, more ruthless, all that good stuff. Notably, he doesnt actually seem more skilled than Yuugi even at the start of this story, but he's still dependent on Yami. Yami on the other hand, has no identity of his own or even hints at one at this point. He's just The Other Yuugi.

Then during the Battle City arc, they find out that Yami was actually a pharao prior to being sealed in the puzzle, he just didnt know because of amnesia, I guess. So now they need to find out his real name and then send him to the afterlife because hes meant to be dead, but not before saving the world from being swallowed by darkness, which is also a thing they have to do now.

Then we finally get to the Memory World arc, where Yami, Yuugi and the rest of the gang astralproject to ancient egypt via puzzle magic. Yami is trying to figure out what the hell is going on and who all these familiar people are, while Yuugi & Co are trying their best to help him. Then some weird shit happens and it turns out that all of that is not just Yamis sealed away memories, but also a giant D&D Shadow Game that will destroy the world if Yami loses. So now theres Pharao!Yami who is still clueless on the metaphorical and literal playing field and Player!Yami, who is kinda controlling himself now? I guess?? Yamis opponent, The Spirit of The Ring, has something similar to that going on where hes both controlling and properly participating in the game. So Player!Yami is now fighting against Player!TSoTR, Pharao!Yami is now fighting against Thief King Bakura (who is like, the human, ancient egyptian version of the Ring Spirit) and Yuugi is now fighting against Yami Bakura (who is like, the human, modern japanese version of the Ring Spirit). Yuugi gets Yamis real name, he and the gang go over to Pharao!Yami and tell him his name, meanwhile Player!Yami is also somehow helping as well and they defeat the Ring Spirit, thus saving the world. Then they travel to modern Egypt, the Ceremonial Duel happens and Yuugi wins, sending Yami to the Afterlife where he can finally rest and that was the series!

I originally wanted to recount the stuff that was going on with the Ring Spirit and his host as well because they parallel eachother, but this summary is already far too long and I think youll get the point without me needing to explain any more.

My point here is, that the story went from being vaguely about Identity, maybe? to being very clearly about Self-Discovery and Learning to Be Independent. I think this is a very good way to evolve the messaging of your story. How does RWBY track on that?

Well, uh... its not great. I will acknowledge that they have tried to introduce new themes and ideas since, even though I wont really be talking about them in this post. But yeah, the whole Heroism thing really regressed.

Like, I didnt explicitly say it when I was explaining grimm earlier, but theyre not going away. The grimm have always been there and people who sign up to become huntsmen and huntresses are effectively signing up for a job that will never truly be done, no matter what they do. Characters like Ruby and even more minor ones like Phyrrah have shown us that that doesnt matter when youre a hero. No life isnt worth saving, no grimm isnt worth killing, no criminal isnt worth arresting. Then, in volume 6 they find out about Salem. Salem is the Big Bad of the show, shes immortal, controls the grimm and is supposed to be very powerful.

What do our heroes do? They give up. Sike! They were just mindcontrolled by monsters or some shit, of course they didnt give up their mission (which is to bring an Important Macguffin to a city called Atlas, sorry I didnt mention it)!

But then they arrive in Atlas (which is llike, a city thats floating over another city called Mantle) and yknow, they do some plot stuff thats not really important right now until the city gets invaded by Salem and this big grimm army she has.

What do our heroes do? Well, Ruby, Weiss, Blake and some side characters are chilling, drinking tea in a mansion and Yang and the B Team were actually trying to do something, but even those efforts seem incredibly minimal.

Oh wait, I also forgot to mention that Ironwood (a fairly minor, vaguely antagonistic character up until now) wanted to lift Atlas even higher to save Atleasian civilians from danger while leaving Mantle vulnerable to Salems invasion.

What would be the most heroic thing to do?

A) Let Ironwood lift Atlas, get as much support as they can down to Mantle and save as many Mantle civilians as they can from the invasion

B) Prevent Ironwood from lifting Atlas but then split up in order to protect both Atlas and Mantle civilians

C) Prevent Ironwood from lifting Atlas and then dont do anything else

Congrats! If you choose C, you think exactly like the writers!

And I just

This is so mindboggling to me, I feel like I shouldnt even have explain how this is bad. And like, it wouldve been so easy to actually make them seem herokc through their actions, to make it seem like they did try but no.

I have never seen a central theme be this botched, how in the world did they do that? Why did they think it was a good idea for Ruby "The Embodiment of Heroism" Rose to sit in a mansion doing nothing, no planning, no organizing just ..... God, how are they this bad? Like, this doesnt even have anything to do with it being planned in any way, this is just straight up incompetence

4. Very briefly touching on friendship

The friendship is awful and its not solely because they all have the same opinions. They barely interact with eachother outside their designated pairs which leads to it all feeling incredibly hollow. Theyre also practically indistingushable from one another now, which is a shame because it wasnt always like that. Like, I dont think the characters were that well-developed in earlier volumes but they were very well-characterized. But now we've gotten to a point where you can literally copy and paste one characters dialogue onto another and literally nothing changes, it really sucks.

5. Some closing words

Damn, this took way longer than I thought it would and now Im pretty exhausted. I have no idea how yall always write these but props to you! I feel like this ended up a bit rambly but overall, Im pretty proud.

Please let me know what you think of the points I brought up! Id also really appreciate some tips on how to get better at these longer posts because I am planning on writing more in the future (not the near future, probably but yknow).

Thats all I have to say for now, thanks for reading!

#rwde #rwby critism #anti mkek #yu gi oh #ygo duel monsters #yu gi oh analasis

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tomatograter · 5 years

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do you have any thoughts on trans girl jake? i thought their narrative and character arc on being specialized by the others, and being comfortable about themself will wrap up nicely with them ending up as a transgirl!! it defies what people expects of them, and breaks them out of the traditional idealized reoccurring masculinity theme (which jake was obviously uncomfortable with)

(what follows is my personal thoughts, i’m not laying down the word of God, i just have Thots on Jake English ALSO THIS IS A PRETTY LONG POST? IM SORRY. i promise i will include pics.)

Jake English is a gender mimic. He’s the ‘raised by wolves’ trope, except instead of literally being raised by dog like Grandpa Harley he had a few years with Jade and then mostly nothing but the monsters at lusii island and a crap-ton of escapist media. He’s used to having a full playing field where he can indulge in unquestioned fantasy, and that comes in the form of his Indiana + Croft sexy 2000′s hero persona that is comfortable for him (and its worthy of note how one is Peak masculinity and the other is Peak femme fatale) until he has to really interact with real people with Expectations and Biases.

This is where i need to talk about the alphas. It’s nearly impossible to talk about Jake without talking about how he adapts around other people, specially the ones that he truly gives a shit about. Jake selectively picks the opinions that matter to him, and these are mostly what the other alphas think. (Compare to how he speaks over Erisol, jesters around Caliborn, and mostly pumps his own self pity with Tavrosprite for compliments- If you don’t want to count the epilogues scene he has with Davekat which mostly boils down to “you might have a point, but i’m loyal to jane, so you’ll have to really convince me of politics.”)

What holds him back from dating Dirk is Jane’s opinion, and What Jane Could Think (which is in no way jane’s fault, just his overthinking) because unlike dirk’s high octane masculinity, she’s the pillar of sitcom normalcy in his life. She lives in the real world, mostly removed from the bullshit the rest of the alphas are in, and she’s written to be the ideal generic romcom youth living a perfectly picture worthy life. The disastrous conversation where Jane denies her feelings is prompted by Jake finding confirmation she’s into him via Roxy- and he immediately grows nervous of that meaning she wouldn’t “approve” him going any other way, or that it’d be weird for a boy like him. And he needs to be sure before anything else- and also every step of the way, which will eventually exhaust her because its a load of bullshit and not her responsibility. It’s not that he doesn’t want to, it’s more that he’s afraid what others will think if he wants.

But he’s never direct about it. He just brings things up and lets people get their own opinions from it- because he’s REALLY passive about conflict and he’d rather solve things with the least amount of struggle possible, always. He just needs confirmation. And then comes this bit:

I read this bit of text in 2 ways: 1) Jake realizing pretty soon that his attractions aren’t limited to gender. & 2) Jake realizing pretty soon that gender is just a big ole scam, and that he couldn’t care less if it weren’t for outside perception of him. It’s just another performance!

Jake’s ongoing theme is that he hates being perceived (be it sexually, mentally, personally, in the sense that he abhors judgement and objectification and is afraid of being known) just as much as he gets by freely by allowing others to project whatever they want onto him- and he’s not bound to complying unless it’s shit he enjoys. He’s an indulgence chamber. He doesn’t want to be bound by rules or expectations partly because he’s sort of a lukewarm coward and partly because he thrives in contradiction. And all that sounds pretty dandy, but it doesn’t means he’s exempt from anxiety of what others think of him every step of the way and what that means to his projected image. Brain Ghost Dirk is part dirk splinter, part jake constantly asking himself ‘what would dirk do?’ because he thinks he’s not capable on his own.

and its where we get my favorite line:

“i dont WANNA be a man and i dont WANNA punch her in the face!” Maybe 2000′s action heroes who shoot first and ask questions later are, generally, sort of pretty stupid? And his fantasy can only go so far before it becomes something all too real he doesn’t want to be a part of? THIS is the line. I’ve already written about this bit before, in how Jake’s sexuality and the denial of his agency over it are traditionally a feminine narrative applied to a character desperately trying to be the quirky male lead of an adventure story. He really wants to be both. He doesn’t want to be forced to choose or to subscribe to one extreme. He wants his cake and he’s going to fucking eat it, too.

The crockertier Jane/Jake scene encapsulates everything jake wants to project, Indiana & Croft, and spins it on its head: he would rather die than be the big man hero and hurt jane (and he does die for it, later) & becoming the femme fatale means giving up what little agency he has for other people’s eyecandy benefits. and maybe that really fucking sucks? He loves these concepts but he also really hates the reality of them? That’s the concept of Jake.

But despite all that, he’s generally comfortable with his masculinity to the point of neutrality unless somebody else brings up The Norms and how he’s betraying them by not being the definition of a cishet dude. All the alphas have a very tricky relationship with gender performance, and they rely on notions of eachother. ( https ://twitter. com/hulknaps/ status/1133205821024800769?s=20 ) But Jake relies on the alphas to define him based on the moment. He adapts to different people in different ways. he switches often, because the persona he’s constructed is not solidly him, just one of many detachable masks of convenience. the aspect of transformation or characters with chameleon features is all over his intro page too, even if it starts as a red herring that he might be lord english.

Just count how many references you can make to alter-egos, transformations, ‘avatars’, multiple personalities or forms in this one page. i’ll make some of them easy: Mystique, Ghost rider, Hulk, his beloved Avatar, all rely on the concept of having fluid forms. Two of them are also blue ladies! did you know there’s a blue hulk and he’s a goofy jock? i’m going offtopic, but you grasp the idea.

I’m utterly subscribed to the idea of Jake being GNC/nonbinary/genderfluid or simply slapping a big ‘agender’ on it. I give dirk shit for always running from the gay label out of fear, but jake sort of does this too, relying strongly on not being defined and doing whatever feels best at the moment. It also fits his aspect and denizen, but those are more abstract references.

and since i dont know how to better end this bit of meta, here’s a little section of Mystique, blue lady extraordinary and one of his beloved characters. make of it what you will.

#homestuck #jake english #meta #i love talking about gender in homestuck i go absolutely rabid #also i love comics. did you know. i think its showing?

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